finis: H. P. Grice, "Cum finis est licitus, etiam media
sunt licita" -- "Der Zweck und die Mittel.” Grice: “means-end
rationality is a must” -- finitum -- telos, ancient Grecian term meaning ‘end’
or ‘purpose’. Telos is a key concept not only in Grecian ethics but also in
Grecian science. The purpose of a human being is a good life, and human
activities are evaluated according to whether they lead to or manifest this
telos. Plants, animals, and even inanimate objects were also thought to have a
telos through which their activities and relations could be understood and
evaluated. Though a telos could be something that transcends human activities
and sensible things, as Plato thought, it need not be anything apart from
nature. Aristotle, e.g., identified the telos of a sensible thing with its
immanent form. It follows that the purpose of the thing is simply to be what it
is and that, in general, a thing pursues its purpose when it endeavors to
preserve itself. Aristotle’s view shows that ‘purpose in nature’ need not mean
a higher purpose beyond nature. Yet, his immanent purpose does not exclude
“higher” purposes, and Aristotelian teleology was pressed into service by
medieval thinkers as a framework for understanding God’s agency through nature.
Thinkers in the modern period argued against the prominent role accorded to
telos by ancient telepathy telos 906
906 and medieval thinkers, and they replaced it with analyses in terms
of mechanism and law. teleology, the philosophical doctrine that all of nature,
or at least intentional agents, are goaldirected or functionally organized.
Plato first suggested that the organization of the natural world can be
understood by comparing it to the behavior of an intentional agent external teleology. For example, human beings
can anticipate the future and behave in ways calculated to realize their
telekinesis teleology 905 905
intentions. Aristotle invested nature itself with goals internal teleology. Each kind has its own
final cause, and entities are so constructed that they tend to realize this
goal. Heavenly bodies travel as nearly as they are able in perfect circles
because that is their nature, while horses give rise to other horses because
that is their nature. Natural theologians combined these two teleological
perspectives to explain all phenomena by reference to the intentions of a
beneficent, omniscient, all-powerful God. God so constructed the world that
each entity is invested with the tendency to fulfill its own God-given nature.
Darwin explained the teleological character of the living world
non-teleologically. The evolutionary process is not itself teleological, but it
gives rise to functionally organized systems and intentional agents.
Present-day philosophers acknowledge intentional behavior and functional
organization but attempt to explain both without reference to a supernatural
agent or internal natures of the more metaphysical sort. Instead, they define
‘function’ cybernetically, in terms of persistence toward a goal state under
varying conditions, or etiologically, in terms of the contribution that a
structure or action makes to the realization of a goal state. These definitions
confront a battery of counterexamples designed to show that the condition
mentioned is either not necessary, not sufficient, or both; e.g., missing goal
objects, too many goals, or functional equivalents. The trend has been to
decrease the scope of teleological explanations from all of nature, to the
organization of those entities that arise through natural selection, to their
final refuge in the behavior of human beings. Behaviorists have attempted to
eliminate this last vestige of teleology. Just as natural selection makes the
attribution of goals for biological species redundant, the selection of
behavior in terms of its consequences is designed to make any reference to
intentions on the part of human beings unnecessary. Kant, in
fact, for reasons not unlike these, sought to show the validity of a different
but fairly closely related Technical Imperative by just such a method. The form
which he selects is one which, in my terms, would be represented by "It is
fully acceptable, given let it be that B, that let it be that A" or
"It is necessary, given let it be that B, that let it be that A".
Applying this to the one fully stated technical imperative given in
Grundlegung, we get "It is necessary, given let it be that one bisect a
line on an unerring principle, that let it be that I draw from its extremities
two intersecting arcs". Call this statement, (α). Though he does not express
himself very clearly, I am certain that his claim is that this imperative is
validated in virtue of the fact that it is, analytically, a consequence of an
indicative statement which is true and, in the present context, unproblematic,
namely, the statement vouched for by geometry, that if one bisects a line on an
unerring principle, then one does so only as a result of having drawn from its
extremities two intersecting arcs. Call this statement, (β). His argument seems
to be expressible as follows. (1) It is analytic that he who wills the end (so
far as reason decides his conduct), wills the indispensable means thereto. (2)
So it is analytic that (so far as one is rational) if one wills that A, and
judges that if A, then A as a result of B, then one wills that B. end p.93 (3)
So it is analytic that (so far as one is rational) if one judges that if A,
then A as a result of B, then if one wills that A then one wills that B. (4) So
it is analytic that, if it is true that if A, then A as a result of B, then if
let it be that A, then it must be that let it be that B. From which, by
substitution, we derive (5): it is analytic that if β then α. Now it seems to
me to be meritorious, on Kant's part, first that he saw a need to justify
hypothetical imperatives of this sort, which it is only too easy to take for
granted, and second that he invoked the principle that "he who wills the
end, wills the means"; intuitively, this invocation seems right.
Unfortunately, however, the step from (3) to (4) seems open to dispute on two
different counts. (1) It looks as if an unwarranted 'must' has appeared in the
consequent of the conditional which is claimed, in (4), as analytic; the most
that, to all appearances, could be claimed as being true of the antecedent is
that 'if let it be that A then let it be that B'. (2) (Perhaps more serious.)
It is by no means clear by what right the psychological verbs 'judge' and
'will', which appear in (3), are omitted in (4); how does an (alleged) analytic
connection between (i) judging that if A, A as a result of B and (ii) its being
the case that if one wills that A then one wills that B yield an analytic
connection between (i) it's being the case that if A, A as a result of B and
(ii) the 'proposition' that if let it be that A then let it be that B? Can the
presence in (3) of the phrase "in so far as one is rational"
legitimize this step? I do not know what remedy to propose for the first of
these two difficulties; but I will attempt a reconstruction of Kant's line of
argument which might provide relief from the second. It might, indeed, even be an expansion of Kant's actual thinking; but
whether or not this is so, I am a very long way from being confident in its
adequacy. (1) Let us suppose it to be a fundamental psychological law that,
ceteris paribus, for any creature x (of a sufficiently developed kind), no
matter what A and B are, if x wills A and judges that if A, A only as a result
of B, then x wills B. This I take to be a proper representation of "he who
wills the end, wills the indispensable means"; and in calling it a
fundamental law I mean that it is the end p.94 law, or one of the laws, from
which 'willing' and 'judging' derive their sense as names of concepts which
explain behaviour. So, I assume, to reject it would be to deprive these words
of their sense. If x is a rational creature, since in this case his attitudes
of acceptance are at least to some degree under his control (volitive or
judicative assent can be withheld or refused), this law will hold for him only
if the following is true: (2) x wills (it is x's will) that (for any A, B) if x
wills that A and judges that if A, A only as a result of B, then x is to will
that B. In so far as x proceeds rationally, x should will as specified in (2)
only if x judges that if it is satisfactory to will that A and also
satisfactory to judge that if A, A only as a result of B, then it is
satisfactory to will that B; otherwise, in willing as specified in (2), he will
be willing to run the risk of passing from satisfactory attitudes to
unsatisfactory ones. So, given that x wills as specified in (2): (3) x should
(qua rational) judge that (for any A, B) if it is satisfactory to will that A
and also satisfactory to judge that if A, A only as a result of B, then it is
satisfactory to will that B. Since the satisfactoriness of attitudes of
acceptance resolves itself into the satisfactoriness (in the sense
distinguished in the previous chapter) of the contents of those attitudes
(marked by the appropriate mode-markers), if x judges as specified in (3) then:
(4) x should (qua rational) judge that (for any A, B) if it is satisfactory
that ! A and also satisfactory that if it is the case that A, A only as a
result of B, then it is satisfactory that ! B. And, if x judges as in (4), then
(because (A & B → C) yields A → (B → C)): (5) x should judge that (for any
A, B) if it is satisfactory that if A, A only because B, then it is
satisfactory that, if let it be that A, then let it be that B. But if x judges
that satisfactoriness is, for any A, B, transmitted in this particular way,
then: (6) x should judge that (for any A, B) if A, A only because B, yields if
let it be that A, then let it be that B. end p.95 But if any rational being
should (qua rational) judge that (for any A, B) the first 'propositional' form
yields the second, then the first propositional form does yield the second; so:
(7) (For any A, B) if A, A only because B yields if let it be that A, then let
it be that B. (A special apology for the particularly violent disregard of 'use
and mention'; my usual reason is offered.) Fig. 4 summarizes the steps of the
argument. I. Kant's Steps α = It is necessary, given let it be that one bisect
a line on an unerring principle, that let it be that I draw from its
extremities two intersecting arcs. β = If one bisects a line on an unerring
principle, then one does so only as a result of having drawn from its
extremities two intersecting arcs. (1) It is analytic that (so far as he is
rational) he who wills the end wills the means. (2) It is analytic that (so far
as one is rational) if one wills that A, and judges that if A, then A only as a
result of B, then one wills that B. (3) It is analytic that (so far as one is
rational) if one judges that if A, A as a result of B, then if one wills that A
one wills that B. (4) It is analytic that if, if A, then A as a result of B,
then, if let it be that A, then it must be that let it be that B. (5) It is
analytic that if β, then α. Grice goes on to provide some Reconstruction Steps (1) Fundamental law that
(ceteris paribus) for any creature x (for any A, B), if x wills A and judges
that if A, then A as a result of B; then x wills B. (2) x wills that (for any
A, B) if x wills A and judges that if A, A as a result of B, then x is to will
that B. (3) x should (qua rational) judge that (for any A, B) if it is
satisfactory to will that A and also satisfactory to judge that if A, A only as
a result of B, then it is satisfactory to will that B. (4) x should (qua
rational) judge that (for any A, B) if it is satisfactory that ! A and also
satisfactory that if ⊢A, then ⊢A only as a result of B, then it is satisfactory that ! B.
(5) x should (q.r.) judge that (for any A, B) if it is satisfactory that if ⊢A, ⊢A only because B, then it is
satisfactory that, if let it be that A, then let it be that B. (6) x should
(q.r.) judge that (for any A, B) if A, A only because B, yields if let it be
that A, then let it be that B. (7) (For any A, B) if A, A only because B yields
if let it be that A, then let it be that B. Fig. 4. Validation of Technical
Acceptabilities end p.96 Prudential Acceptability It will be convenient to
initiate the discussion of this topic by again referring to Kant. Kant thought
that there is a special sub-class of Hypothetical Imperatives (which he called
"counsels of prudence") which were like his class of Technical
Imperatives, except in that the end specified in a full statement of the
imperative is the special end of Happiness (one's happiness). To translate into
my terminology, this seems to amount to the thesis that there is a special
subclass of, for example, singular practical acceptability conditionals which
exemplifies the structure "it is acceptable, given that let a (an
individual) be happy, that let a be (do) G"; an additional indicative
sub-antecedent ("that it is the case that a is F") might be sometimes
needed, and could be added without difficulty. There would, presumably, be a
corresponding special subclass of acceptability generalizations. The main
characteristics which Kant would attribute to such prudential acceptability
conditionals would, I think, be the following. (1) The foundation for such
conditionals is exactly the same as that for technical imperatives; they would
be treated as being, in principle, analytically consequences of indicative
statements to the effect that so-and-so is a (the) means to such-and-such. The
relation between my doing philosophy now and my being happy would be a causal
relation not significantly different from the relation between my taking an
aspirin and my being relieved of my headache. (2) However, though the relation
would be the same, the question whether in fact my doing philosophy now will
promote my happiness is insoluble; to solve it, I should have to be omniscient,
since I should have to determine that my doing philosophy now would lead to
"a maximum of welfare in my present and all future circumstances".
(3) The special end (happiness) of specific prudential acceptability
conditionals is one which we know that, as a matter of "natural
necessity", every human being has; so, unlike technical imperatives, their
applicability to himself cannot be disclaimed by any human being. end p.97 (4)
Before we bring in the demands of morality (which will prescribe concern for
our own happiness as a derivative duty), the only positive evaluation of a
desire for one's happiness is an alethic evaluation; one ought to, or must,
desire one's own happiness only in the sense that, whoever one may be, it is
acceptable that it is the case that one desire one's own happiness; the 'ought'
or 'must' is non-practical. (This position seems to me akin to a Humean appeal
to 'natural dispositions', in place of justification.) I would wish to disagree
with Kant in two, or possibly three, ways.(1) Kant, I think, did not devote a
great deal of thought to the nature of happiness, no doubt because he regarded
it as being of little importance to the philosophical foundations of morality.
So it is not clear whether he regarded happiness as a distinct end from the
variety of ends which one might pursue with a view to happiness, rather than as
a complex end which includes (in some sense of 'include') some of such ends. If
he did regard it as a distinct end, then I think he was wrong. (2) I think he
was certainly wrong in thinking of something's being conducive to happiness as being
on all fours with, say, something's being conducive to the relief of a
headache; as, perhaps, a matter (in both cases) of causal relationship. (3) I
would like to think him wrong in thinking that (morality apart) there is no
practical interpretation of 'ought' in which one ought to pursue (desire, aim
at) one's own happiness. We have, then, three not unconnected questions which
demand some attention. (A) What is the nature of happiness? (B) In what sense
(if any) (and why) should I desire, or aim at, my own happiness? (C) What is
the nature of the connection between things which are conducive to happiness
and happiness? (What, specifically, is implied by 'conducive'?) Though it is
fiendishly difficult, I shall take up question (C) first. I trust that I will
be forgiven if I do not present a full and coherent answer. Let us take a brief
look at Aristotle. Aristotle was, I think, more sophisticated in this area. end
p.98 (1) Though it is by no means beyond dispute, I am disposed to think that
he did regard Happiness (eudaemonia) as a complex end 'containing' (in some
sense) the ends which are constitutive of happiness; to use the jargon of
recent commentators, I suspect he regarded it as an 'inclusive' and not a
'dominant' end. (2) He certainly thought that one should (practical 'should')
aim at one's own happiness. (3) (The matter directly relevant to my present
purpose.) I strongly suspect that he did not think that the relationship
between, say, my doing philosophy and my happiness was a straightforward causal
relationship. The passage which I have in mind is Nicomachean Ethics VI. 12,
13, where he distinguishes between wisdom ("practical wisdom") and
cleverness (or, one might say, resourcefulness). He there makes the following
statements: (a) that wisdom is not the same as cleverness, though like it, (b)
that wisdom does not exist without cleverness, (c) that wisdom is always
laudable (to be wise one must be virtuous), but cleverness is not always
laudable, for example, in rogues, (d) that the relation between wisdom and
cleverness is analogous to the relation between 'natural' virtue and virtue
proper (he says this in the same place as he says (a)). Faced with these not
exactly voluminous remarks, some commentators have been led (not I think
without reluctance) to interpret Aristotle as holding that the only difference
between wisdom and cleverness is that the former does, and the latter does not,
require the presence of virtue; to be wise is simply to be clever in good
causes. Apart from the fact that additional difficulties are generated thereby,
with respect to the interpretation of Nicomachean Ethics VI, to attribute this
view to Aristotle does not seem to indicate a very high respect for his wisdom,
particularly as the text does not seem to demand such an interpretation.
Following an idea once given me, long ago, by Austin, I would prefer to think
of Aristotle as distinguishing between the characteristic manifestation of
wisdom, namely, the ability to determine what one should do (what should be
done), and the characteristic manifestation of cleverness, which is the ability
to determine how to do what it is that should be done. On this interpretation
cleverness would plainly be in a certain sense subordinate to wisdom, since
opportunity for cleverness (and associated qualities) will only end p.99 arise
after there has been some determination of what it is that is to be done. It
may also be helpful (suggestive) to think of wisdom as being (or being
assimilable to) administrative ability, with cleverness being comparable with
executive ability. I would also like to connect cleverness, initially, with the
ability to recognize (devise) technical acceptabilities (though its scope might
be larger than this), while wisdom is shown primarily in other directions. On such
assumptions, expansion of the still obscureAristotelian distinction is plainly
a way of pursuing question (C), or questions closely related to it; for we will
be asking what other kinds of acceptabilities (beyond 'technical'
acceptabilities) we need in order to engage (or engage effectively) in
practical reasoning. I fear my contribution here will be sketchy and not very
systematic. We might start by exploring a little further the 'administrative/
executive' distinction, a distinction which, I must admit, is extremely hazy
and also not at all hard and fast (lines might be drawn, in different cases, in
quite different places). A boss tells his secretary that he will be travelling
on business to suchand-such places, next week, and asks her to arrange travel
and accommodation for him. I suspect that there is nothing peculiar about that.
But suppose, instead of giving her those instructions, he had said to her that
he wanted to travel on business somewhere or other, next week, and asked her to
arrange destinations, matters to be negotiated, firms to negotiate with, and
brief him about what to say to those whom he would visit. That would be a
little more unusual, and the secretary might reply angrily, "I am paid to
be your secretary, not to run your business for you, let alone run you."
What (philosophically) differentiates the two cases? Let us call a desire or
intention D which a man has at t "terminal for him at t" if there is
no desire or intention which he has at t, which is more specific than D; if,
for example, a man wanted at t a car, but it was also true of him that he
wanted a Mercedes, then his desire for a car would not be terminal. Now I think
we can (roughly) distinguish (at least) three ways in which a terminal desire
may be non-specific. (1) D may be finitely non-specific; for example, a man may
want a large, fierce dog (to guard his house) and not care at all what kind of
large, fierce dog he acquired; any kind will do (at least within end p.100 some
normal range). Furthermore, he does not envisage his attitude, that any kind
will do, being changed when action-time comes; he will of course get some
particular kind of dog, but what kind will simply depend on such things as
availability. (2) D may be indeterminately non-specific: that is to say the desirer
may recognize, and intend, that before he acts the desire or intention D should
be made more specific than it is; he has decided, say, that he wants a large,
fierce dog, but has not yet decided what kind he wants. It seems to me that an
indeterminately non-specific desire or intention differs from a finitely
non-specific desire in a way which is relevant to the application of the
concept of 'meanstaking'. If the man with the finitely non-specific desire for
a large, fierce dog decides on a mastiff, that would be (or at least could be)
a case of choosing a mastiff as a means to having a large, fierce dog, but not
something of which getting a large, fierce dog would be an effect. But, if the
man with the indeterminate desire for a large, fierce dog decides that he wants
a mastiff (as a further determination of that indeterminate desire), that is
not a case of meanspicking at all. (3) There is a further kind of
non-specificity which I mention only with a view to completeness: a desire D
may be vaguely, or indefinitely, non-specific; a man may have decided that he
wants a large, fierce dog, but it may not be very well defined what could count
as a large, fierce dog; a mastiff would count, and a Pekinese would not, but
what about a red setter? In such cases the desire or intention needs to be
interpreted, but not to be further specified. With regard to the first two
kinds of non-specificity, there are some remarks to be made. (1) We do not
usually (if we are sensible) make our desires more determinate than the
occasion demands; if getting a dog is not a present prospect, a man who decides
exactly what kind of dog he would like is engaging in fantasy. (2) The final
stage of determination may be left to the occasion of action; if I want to buy
some fancy curtains, I may leave the full determination of the kind until I see
them in the store. (3) Circumstances may change the status of a desire; a man
may have a finitely non-specific desire for a dog until he talks to end p.101
his wife, who changes things for him (making his desire indeterminately
non-specific). (4) Indeterminately non-specific desires may of course be
founded (and well founded) on reasons, and so may be not merely desires one
does have but also desires which one should have.We may now return to the boss
and his secretary. It seems to me that what the 'normally' behaved boss does
(assuming that he has a very new and inexperienced secretary) is to reach a
finitely non-specific desire or intention (or a set of such), communicate these
to his secretary, and leave to her the implementation of this (these)
intention(s); he presumes that nothing which she will do, and no problem which
she will encounter, will disturb his intention (for, within reasonable limits,
he does not care what she does), even though her execution of her tasks may
well involve considerable skill and diplomacy (deinotes). If she is more
senior, then he may well not himself reach a finitely, but only an
indeterminately, non-specific intention, leaving it to her to complete the
determination and trusting her to do so more or less as he would himself. If
she reaches a position in which she is empowered to make determinate his
intentions not as she thinks he would think best, but as she thinks best, then
I would say that she has ceased to be a secretary and has become an
administrative assistant. This might be a convenient place to refer briefly to
a distinction which is of some importance in practical thinking which is not
just a matter of finding a means, of one sort or another, to an already fixed
goal, and which is fairly closely related to the process of determination which
I have been describing. This is the distinction between non-propositional ends,
like power, wealth, skill at chess, gardening; and propositional or objective
ends, like to get the Dean to agree with my proposal, or that my uncle should
go to jail for his peculations of the family money. Non-propositional ends are
in my view universals, the kind of items to be named by mass-terms or abstract
nouns. I should like to regard their non-propositional appearance as genuine; I
would like them to be not only things which we can be said to pursue, but also
things which we can be said to care about; and I would not want to reduce
'caring about' to 'caring that', though of course there is an intimate end
p.102 connection between these kinds of caring. I would like to make the
following points. (1) Non-propositional ends enter into the most primitive
kinds of psychological explanation; the behaviour of lower animals is to be
explained in terms of their wanting food, not of their wanting (say) to eat an
apple. (2) Non-propositional ends are characteristically variable in degree,
and the degrees are valuationally ordered; for one who wants wealth, a greater
degree of wealth is (normally) preferable to a lesser degree. (3) They are the
type, I think, to which ultimate ends which are constitutive of happiness
belong; and not without reason, since their non-propositional, and often
non-temporal, character renders them fit members of an enduring system which is
designed to guide conduct in particular cases. (4) The process of determination
applies to them, indeed, starts with them; desire for power is (say) rendered
more determinate as desire for political power; and objectives (to get the position
of Prime Minister) may be reached by determination applied to non-propositional
ends. (5) Though it is clear to me that the distinction exists, and that a
number of particular items can be placed on one side or another of the barrier,
there is a host of uncertain examples, and the distinction is not easy to
apply. Let us now look at things from her (the secretary's) angle. First, many
(indeed most) of the things she does, though perhaps cases of means-finding,
will not be cases of finding means of the kind which philosophers usually focus
on, namely, causal means. She gets him an air-ticket, which enables, but does
not cause, him to travel to Kalamazoo, Michigan; she arranges by telephone for
him to stay at the Hotel Goosepimple; his being booked in there is not an
effect but an intended outcome of her conversation on the telephone; and his
being booked in at that hotel is not a cause of his being booked at a hotel,
but a way in which that situation or circumstance is realized. Second, if
during her operations she discovers that there is an epidemic of yellow fever
at Kalamazoo, she does not (unless she wishes to be fired) go blindly ahead and
book him in; she consults him, because something has now happened end p.103
which will (if he knows of it) disturb his finitely non-specific intention;
indeed may confront the boss with a plurality of conflicting (or apparently
conflicting) ends or desiderata; a situation which is next in line for
consideration. Before turning to it, however, I think I should remark that the
kind of featureswhich have shown up in this interpersonal transaction are also
characteristic of solitary deliberation, when the deliberator executes his own
decisions. We are now, we suppose, at a stage at which the secretary has come
back to the boss to announce that if she executes the task given her
(implements the decision about what to do which he has reached), there is
such-and-such a snag; that is, the decision can be implemented only at the cost
of a consequence which will (or which she suspects may) dispromote some further
end which he wants to promote, or promote some "counter-end" which he
wants to dispromote. (1) We may remark that this kind of problem is not
something which only arises after a finitely non-specific intention has been
formed; exactly parallel problems are frequently, though not invariably,
encountered on the way towards a finitely non-specific intention or desire.
This prompts a further comment on Aristotle's remark that, though wisdom is not
identical with cleverness, wisdom does not exist without cleverness. This
dictum covers two distinct truths; first, that if a man were good at deciding
what to do, but terrible at executing it (he makes a hash of working out train
times, he is tactless with customs officials, he irritates hotel clerks into
non-cooperation), one might hesitate to confer upon him the title 'wise'; at
least a modicum of cleverness is required. Second, and more interestingly,
cleverness is liable to be manifested at all stages of deliberation; every time
a snag arises in connection with a tentative determination of one's will,
provided that the snag is not blatantly obvious, some degree of cleverness is
manifested in seeing that, if one does such-and-such (as one contemplates
doing), then there will be the undesirable result that so-and-so. (2) The boss
may now have to determine how 'deep' the snag is, how radically his plan will
have to be altered to surmount it. To lay things out a bit, the boss might (in
some sense of 'might'), in his deliberation, have formed successively a series
of indeterminately non-specific intentions (I i , I ii , I iii , . . . I n ),
where each end p.104 member is a more specific determination of its
predecessor, and I n represents the final decision which he imparted to the secretary.
He now (the idea is) goes back to this sequence to find the most general (least
specific) member which is such that if he has that intention, then he is
saddled with the unwanted consequences. He then knows where modification is
required. Of course, in practice he may very well not have constructed such a
convenient sequence; if he has not, then he has partially to construct one on
receipt of the bad news from the secretary, to construct one (that is) which is
just sufficiently well filled in to enable him to be confident that a
particular element in it is the most generic intention of those he has, which
generates the undesirable consequence. Having now decided which desire or
intention to remove, how does he decide what to put in its place? How, in
effect, does he 'compound' his surviving end or ends with the new desideratum,
the attainment of the end (or the avoidance of the counter-end) which has been
brought to light by the snag? Now I have to confess that in connection with
this kind of problem, I used to entertain a certain kind of picture. Let us
label (for simplicity) initially just two ends E1 and E2, with degrees of
"objective desirability" d 1 and d 2 . For any action a 1 which might
realize E1, or E2, there will be a certain probability p 1 that it will realize
E1, a certain probability p 2 that it will realize E2, and a probability p 12
(a function of p 1 and p 2 ) that it will realize both. If E1 and E2 are
inconsistent (again, for simplicity, let us suppose they are) p 12 will be
zero. We can now, in principle, characterize the desirability of the action a 1
, relative to each end (E1 and E2), and to each combination of ends (here just
E1 and E2), as a function of the desirability of the end and the probability
that the action a 1 will realize that end, or combination of ends. If we
envisage a range of possible actions, which includes a 1 together with other
actions, we can imagine that each such action has a certain degree of
desirability relative to each end (E1 and (or) E2) and to their combination. If
we suppose that, for each possible action, these desirabilities can be
compounded (perhaps added), then we can suppose that one particular possible
action scored higher (in actiondesirability relative to these ends) than any
alternative possible action; and that this is the action which wins out; that
is, is the action which is, or at least should, end p.105 be performed. (The
computation would in fact be more complex than I have described, once account
is taken of the fact that the ends involved are often not definite
(determinate) states of affairs(like becoming President), but are variable in
respect of the degree to which they might be realized (if one's end is to make
a profit from a deal, that profit might be of a varying magnitude); so one
would have to consider not merely the likelihood of a particular action's
realizing the end of making a profit, but also the likelihood of its realizing
that end to this or that degree; and this would considerably complicate the
computational problem.) No doubt most readers are far too sensible ever to have
entertained any picture even remotely resembling the "Crazy-Bayesy"
one I have just described. I was not, of course, so foolish as to suppose that
such a picture represents the manner in which anybody actually decides what to
do, though I did (at one point) consider the possibility that it might mirror,
or reflect, a process actually taking place in the physiological underpinnings
of psychological states (desires and beliefs), a process in the 'animal
spirits', so to speak. I rather thought that it might represent an ideal, a
procedure which is certainly unrealized in fact, and quite possibly one which
is in principle unrealizable in fact, but still something to which the
procedures we actually use might be thought of as approximations, something for
which they are substitutes; with the additional thought that the closer the
approximation the better the procedure. The inspirational source of such
pictures as this seems to me to be the very pervasive conception of a
mechanical model for the operations of the soul; desires are like forces to
which we are subject; and their influence on us, in combination, is like the
vectoring of forces. I am not at all sure that I regard this as a good model;
the strength of its appeal may depend considerably on the fact that some model
is needed, and that, if this one is not chosen, it is not clear what
alternative model is available. If we are not to make use of any variant of my
one-time picture, how are we to give a general representation of the treatment
of conflicting or competing ends? It seems to me that, for example, the
accountant with the injured wife in Boise might, in the first instance, try to
keep everything, to fulfil all relevant ends; he might think of telephoning
Redwood City to see if his firm could postpone for a week the preparation of
their accounts. If this is end p.106 ineffective, then he would operate on some
system of priorities. Looking after his wife plainly takes precedence over
attention to his firm's accounting, and over visiting his mother. But having
settled on measures which provide adequately for his wife's needs, he then
makes whatever adjustments he can to provide for the ends which have lost the
day. What he does not do, as a rule, is to compromise; even with regard to his
previous decision involving the conflict between the claims of his firm and his
mother, substantially he adopted a plan which would satisfy the claims of the
firm, incorporating therein a weekend with mother as a way of doing what he
could for her, having given priority to the claims of the firm. Such systems of
priorities seem to me to have, among their significant features, the following.
(1) They may be quite complex, and involve sub-systems of priorities within a single
main level of priority. It may be that, for me, family concerns have priority
over business concerns; and also that, within the area of family concerns,
matters affecting my children have priority over matters concerning Aunt
Jemima, whs been living with us all these years. (2) There is a distinction
between a standing, relatively long-term system of priorities, and its
application to particular occasions, with what might be thought of as
divergences between the two. Even though my relations with my children have, in
general, priority over my relations with Aunt Jemima, on a particular occasion
I may accord priority to spending time with Aunt Jemima to get her out of one
of her tantrums over taking my son to the zoo to see the hippopotami. It seems to
me that a further important feature of practical thinking, which plays its part
in simplifying the handling of problems with which such thinking is concerned,
is what I might call its 'revisionist' character (in a non-practical sense of
that term). Our desires, and ascriptions of desirability, may be relative in
more than one way. They may be 'desire-relative' in that my desiring A, or my
regarding A as desirable, may be dependent on my desiring, or regarding as
desirable, B; the desire for, or the desirability of, A may be parasitic on a
desire for, or the desirability of, B. This is the familiar case of A's being
desired, or desirable for the sake of B. But desires and desirabilities may be
relative in another slightly less banal way, which end p.107 (initially) one
might think of as 'fact-relativity'. They may be relative to some actual or
supposed prevailing situation; and, relative to such prevailing situations,
things may be desired or thought desirablewhich would not normally be so
regarded. A man who has been sentenced to be hanged, drawn, and quartered may
be relieved and even delighted when he hears that the sentence has been changed
to beheading; and a man whose wealth runs into hundreds of millions may be
considerably upset if he loses a million or so on a particular transaction.
Indeed, sometimes, one is led to suspect that the richer one is, the more one
is liable to mind such decrements; witness the story, no doubt apocryphal, that
Paul Getty had pay-telephones installed in his house for the use of his guests.
The phenomenon of 'fact-relativity' seems to reach at least to some extent into
the area of moral desirabilities. It can be used, I think, to provide a natural
way of disposing of the Good Samaritan paradox; and if one recalls the parable
of the Prodigal Son, one may reflect that what incensed the for so long
blameless son was that there should be all that junketing about a fact-relative
desirability manifested by his errant brother; why should one get a party for
that? It perhaps fits in very well with these reflections that our practical
thinking, or a great part of it, should be revisionist or incremental in
character; that what very frequently happens is that we find something in the
prevailing situation (or the situation anticipated as prevailing) which could
do with improvement or remove a blemish. We do not, normally, set to work to
construct a minor Utopia. It is notable that aversions play a particularly
important role in incremental deliberations; and it is perhaps just that (up to
a point) the removal of objects of aversion should take precedence over the
installation of objects of desire. If I have to do without something which I
desire, the desired object is not (unless the desire is extreme) constantly
present in imagination to remind me that I am doing without it; but if I have
to do or have something which I dislike, the object of aversion is present in
reality, and so difficult to escape. This revisionist kind of thinking seems to
me to extend from the loftiest problems (how to plan my life, which becomes how
to improve on the pattern which prevails) to the smallest (how to arrange the
furniture); and it extends also, at the next move so to speak, to the projected
improvements which I entertain in thought; I seek to improve on them; a master
chess-player, end p.108 it is said, sees at once what would be a good move for
him to make; all his thought is devoted to trying to find a better one. When
one looks at the matter a little more closely, one sees that 'fact-relative'
desirability is really desirability relative to an anticipated, expected, or
feared temporal extension of the actual state of affairs which prevails (an
extension which is not necessarily identical with what prevails, but which will
come about unless something is done about it). And looked at a little more
closely still, such desires or desirabilities are seen to be essentially
comparative; what we try for is thought of as better than the anticipated state
which prompts us to try for it. This raises the large and difficult question,
how far is desirability of its nature comparative? Is it just that the pundits
have not yet given us a non-comparative concept of desirability, or is there
something in the nature of desire, or in the use we want to make of the concept
of desirability, which is a good reason why we cannot have, or should not have,
a noncomparative concept? Or, perhaps, we do have one, which operates only in
limited regions? Certainly we do not have to think in narrowly incremental
ways, as is attested by those who seek to comfort us (or discomfort us) by
getting us to count our blessings (or the reverse); by, for example, pointing
out that being beheaded is not really so hot, or that, if you have 200 million
left after a bad deal, you are not doing so badly. Are such comforters
abandoning comparative desirability, or are they merely shifting the term of
comparison? Do we find non-comparative desirability (perhaps among other
regions) in moral regions? If we say that a man is honest, we are likely to
mean that he is at least not less honest than the average; but we do not expect
a man, who wants or tries to be honest, just to want or try to be averagely
honest. Nor do we expect him to aspire to supreme or perfect honesty (that
might be a trifle presumptuous). We do expect, perhaps, that he try to be as
honest as he can, which may mean that we don't expect him to form aspirations
with regard to a lifetime record of any sort for honesty, but we do expect him
to try on each occasion, or limited bunch of occasions, to be impeccably honest
on those occasions, even though we know (and he knows) that on some occasions
at some times there will or may be lapses. If something like this
interpretation be correct, it may correspond to a general feature of universals
(non-propositional ends) of which one cannot have end p.109 too much, a type of
which certain moral universals are specimens; desirabilities in the case of
such universals are, perhaps, not comparative. But these are unworked-out
speculations.To summarize briefly this rambling, hopefully somewhat diagnostic,
and certainly unsystematic discussion. I have suggested, in a preliminary
enquiry into practical acceptability which is other than technical
acceptability: (1) that practical thinking, which is not just means-end
thinking, includes the determination or sharpening of antecedently
indeterminate desires and intentions; (2) that means-end thinking is involved
in the process of such determination; (3) that a certain sort of computational
model may not be suitable; (4) that systems of priorities, both general and
tailored to occasions, are central; (5) that much, though not perhaps all, of
practical thinking is revisionist and comparative in character. I turn now to a
brief consideration of questions (A) and (B) which I distinguished earlier, and
left on one side. These questions are: (A) What is the nature of happiness? (B)
In what sense, and why, should I desire or aim at my own happiness? I shall
take them together. First, question (B) seems to me to divide, on closer
examination, into three further questions. (1) Is there justification for the
supposition that one should, other things being equal, voluntarily continue
one's existence, rather than end it? (2) (Given that the answer to (1) is
'yes'.) Is there justification for the idea that one should desire or seek to
be happy? (3) (Given that the answer to (2) is 'yes'.) Is there a way of
justifying (evaluating favourably) the acceptance of some particular set of
ends (as distinct from all other such sets) as constitutive of happiness (or of
my happiness)? end p.110 The second and third questions, particularly the
third, are closely related to, and likely to be dependent on, the account of
happiness provided in answer to question (A); indeed, such an account might wholly
or partly provide an answer to question (3), since "happiness" might
turn out to be a valueparadigmatic term, the meaning of which dictates that to
be happy is to have a combination of ends which (the combination) is valuable
with respect to some particular purpose or point of view. I shall say nothing
about the first two questions; one or both of these would, I suspect, require a
careful treatment of the idea of Final Causes, which so far I have not even
mentioned. I will discuss the third question and question (A) in the next
chapter. end p.111 5 Some Reflections About Ends and Happiness I The topic
which I have chosen is one which eminently deserves a thorough, systematic, and
fully theoretical treatment; such an approach would involve, I suspect, a careful
analysis of the often subtly different kinds of state which may be denoted by
the word 'want', together with a comprehensive examination of the role which
different sorts of wanting play in the psychological equipment of rational (and
non-rational) creatures. While I hope to touch on matters of this sort, I do
not feel myself to be quite in a position to attempt an analysis of this kind,
which would in any case be a very lengthy undertaking. So, to give direction to
my discussion, and to keep it within tolerable limits, I shall relate it to
some questions arising out of Aristotle's handling of this topic in the
Nicomachean Ethics; such a procedure on my part may have the additional
advantage of emphasizing the idea, in which I believe, that the proper habitat
for such great works of the past as the Nicomachean Ethics is not the museums
but the marketplaces of philosophy. My initial Aristotelian question concerns
two conditions which Aristotle supposes to have to be satisfied by whatever is
to be recognized as being the good for man. At the beginning of Nicomachean
Ethics I. 4, Aristotle notes that there is general agreement that the good for
man is to be identified with eudaemonia (which may or may not be well rendered
as 'happiness'), and that this in turn is to be identified with living well and
with doing well; but remarks that there is large-scale disagreement with
respect to any further and more informative specification of eudaemonia. In I.
7 he seeksend p.112 to confirm the identification of the good for man with
eudaemonia by specifying two features, maximal finality (unqualified finality)
and self-sufficiency, which, supposedly, both are required of anything which is
to qualify as the good for man, and are also satisfied by eudaemonia. 'Maximal finality'
is defined as follows: "Now we call that which is in itself worthy of
pursuit more final than that which is worthy of pursuit for the sake of
something else, and that which is never desirable for the sake of something
else more final than the things which are desirable both in themselves and for
the sake of that other thing, and therefore we call final without qualification
that which is always desirable in itself and never for the sake of something
else." Eudaemonia seems (intuitively) to satisfy this condition; such
things as honour, pleasure, reason, and virtue (the most popular candidates for
identification with the good for man and with eudaemonia) are chosen indeed for
themselves (they would be worthy of choice even if nothing resulted from them);
but they are also chosen for the sake of eudaemonia, since "we judge that
by means of them we shall be happy". Eudaemonia, however, is never chosen
for the sake of anything other than itself. After some preliminaries, the
relevant sense of 'self-sufficiency' is defined thus: "The selfsufficient
we now define as that which when isolated makes life desirable and lacking in
nothing." Eudaemonia, again, appears to satisfy this condition too; and
Aristotle adds the possibly important comment that eudaemonia is thought to be
"the most desirable of all things, without being counted as one good thing
among others". This remark might be taken to suggest that, in Aristotle's
view, it is not merely true that the possession of eudaemonia cannot be improved
upon by the addition of any other good, but it is true because eudaemonia is a
special kind of good, one which it would be inappropriate to rank alongside
other goods. This passage in Nicomachean Ethics raises in my mindseveral
queries: (1) It is, I suspect, normally assumed by commentators that Aristotle
thinks of eudaemonia as being the only item which satisfies the condition of
maximal finality. This uniqueness claim is not, however, explicitly made in the
passage (nor, so far as I can recollect, elsewhere); nor is it clear to me that
if it were made it end p.113 would be correct. Might it not be that, for
example, lazing in the sun is desired, and is desirable, for its own sake, and
yet is not something which is also desirable for the sake of something else, not
even for the sake of happiness? If it should turn out that there is a
distinction, within the class of things desirable for their own sake
(I-desirables), between those which are also desirable for the sake of
eudaemonia (H-desirables) and those which are not, then the further question
arises whether there is any common feature which distinguishes items which are
(directly) H-desirable, and, if so, what it is. This question will reappear
later. (2) Aristotle claims that honour, reason, pleasure, and virtue are all
both I-desirable and Hdesirable. But, at this stage in the Nicomachean Ethics,
these are uneliminated candidates for identification with eudaemonia; and,
indeed, Aristotle himself later identifies, at least in a sort of way, a
special version of one of them (metaphysical contemplation) with eudaemonia.
Suppose that it were to be established that one of these candidates (say,
honour) is successful. Would not Aristotle then be committed to holding that
honour is both desirable for its own sake, and also desirable for the sake of
something other than honour, namely, eudaemonia, that is, honour? It is not
clear, moreover, that this prima facie inconsistency can be eliminated by an
appeal to the non-extensionality of the context "——is desirable". For
while the argument-pattern 'α is desirable for the sake of β, β is identical
with γ; so, α is desirable for the sake of γ' may be invalid, it is by no means
clear that the argument-pattern 'α is desirable for the sake of β, necessarily
β is identical with γ; so, α is desirable for the sake of γ' is invalid. And,
if it were true that eudaemonia is to be identified with honour, this would
presumably be a non-contingent truth. (3) Suppose the following: (a) playing
golf and playing tennis are each I-desirables, (b) each is conducive to
physical fitness, which is itself I-desirable, (c) that a daily round of golf
and a daily couple of hours of tennis are each sufficient for peak physical
fitness, and (if you like, for simplicity), (d) that there is no third route to
physical fitness. Now, X and Y accept all these suppositions; X plays golf
daily, and Y plays both golf and tennis daily. It seems difficult to deny,
first, that it is quite conceivable that allof the sporting activities of these
gentlemen are undertaken both for their own sake and also for the sake of
physical fitness, and, second, that (pro end p.114 tanto) the life of Y is more
desirable than the life of X, since Y has the value of playing tennis while X
does not. The fact that in Y's life physical fitness is overdetermined does not
seem to be a ground for denying that he pursues both golf and tennis for the
sake of physical fitness; if we wished to deny this, it looks as if we could,
in certain circumstances, be faced with the unanswerable question, "If he
doesn't pursue each for the sake of physical fitness, then which one does he
pursue for physical fitness?" Let us now consider how close an analogy to
this example we can construct if we search for one which replaces references to
physical fitness by references to eudaemonia. We might suppose that X and Y
have it in common that they have distinguished academic lives, satisfying
family situations, and are healthy and prosperous; that they value, and rightly
value, these aspects of their existences for their own sakes and also regard
them as contributing to their eudaemonia. Each regards himself as a thoroughly
happy man. But Y, unlike X, also composes poetry, an activity which he cares
about and which he also thinks of as something which contributes to his
eudaemonia; the time which Y devotes to poetic endeavour is spent by X
pottering about the house doing nothing in particular. We now raise the
question whether or not Y's life is more desirable than X's, on the grounds
that it contains an I-desirable element, poetic composition, which X's life
does not contain, and that there is no counterbalancing element present in X's
life but absent in Y's. One conceivable answer would be that Y's life is indeed
more desirable than X's, since it contains an additional value, but that this
fact is consistent with their being equal in respect of eudaemonia, in line
with the supposition that each regards himself as thoroughly happy. If we give
this answer we, in effect, reject the Aristotelian idea that eudaemonia is, in the
appropriate sense, self-sufficient. There seems to me, however, to be good
reason not to give this answer. Commentators have disagreed about the precise
interpretation of the word "eudaemonia", but none, so far as I know,
has suggested what I think of as much the most plausible conjecture; namely,
that "eudaemonia" is to be understood as the name for that state or
condition which one's good daemon would (if he could) ensure for one; and my
good daemon is a being motivated, with respect to me, solely by concern for my
well-being or happiness. end p.115 To change the idiom, "eudaemonia"
is the general characterization of what a full-time and unhampered fairy
godmother would secure for you. The identifications regarded by Aristotle as
unexcitingly correct, of eudaemonia with doing well and with living well, now
begin to look like necessary truths. If this interpretation of
"eudaemonia" is correct (as I shall brazenly assume) then it would be
quite impossible for Y's life to be more desirable than X's, though X and Y are
equal in respect of eudaemonia; for this would amount to Y's being better off
than X, though both are equally well-off. Various other possible answers
remain. It might be held that not only is Y's life more desirable than X's, but
Y is more eudaemon (better off) than X. This idea preserves the proposed
conceptual connection between eudaemonia and being well-off, and relies on the
not wholly implausible principle that the addition of a value to a life
enhances the value of that life (whatever, perhaps, the liver may think). One
might think of such a principle, when more fully stated, as laying down or
implying that any increase in the combined value of the H-desirable elements
realized in a particular life is reflected, in a constant proportion, in an
increase in the degree of happiness or well-being exemplified by that life; or,
more cautiously, that the increase in happiness is not determined by a constant
proportion, but rather in some manner analogous to the phenomenon of
diminishing marginal utility. I am inclined to see the argument of this chapter
as leading towards a discreet erosion of the idea that the degree of a
particular person's happiness is the value of a function the arguments of which
are measures of the particular Hdesirables realized in that person's life, no
matter what function is suggested; but at the present moment it will be
sufficient to cast doubt on the acceptability of any of the crudest versions of
this idea. To revert to the case of X and Y: it seems to me that when we speak
of the desirability of X's life or of Y's life, the desirability of which we
are speaking is the desirability of that life from the point of view of the
person whose life it is; and that it is therefore counterintuitive to suppose
that, for example, X who thinks of himself as "perfectly happy" and
so not to be made either better off or more happy (though perhaps more
accomplished) by an injection of poetry composition, should be making a
misassessment of what his stateof well-being would be if the composition of
poetry were added to his occupation. Furthermore, if the pursuit end p.116 of
happiness is to be the proper end, or even a proper end, of living, to suppose
that the added realization of a further H-desirable to a life automatically
increases the happiness or well-being of the possessor of that life will
involve a commitment to an ethical position which I, for one, find somewhat
unattractive; one would be committed to advocating too unbridled an eudaemonic
expansionism. A more attractive position would be to suppose that we should
invoke, with respect to the example under consideration, an analogue not of
diminishing marginal utility, but of what might be called vanishing marginal
utility; to suppose, that is, that X and Y are, or at least may be, equally
well-off and equally happy even though Y's life contains an H-desirable element
which is lacking in X's life; that at a certain point, so to speak, the bucket
of happiness is filled, and no further inpouring of realized Hdesirables has
any effect on its contents. This position would be analogous to the view I
adopted earlier with respect to the possible overdetermination of physical
fitness. Even should this position be correct, it must be recognized that the
really interesting work still remains to be done; that would consist in the
characterization of the conditions which determine whether the realization of a
particular set of Hdesirables is sufficient to fill the bucket. The main
result, then, of the discussion has been to raise two matters for exploration;
first, the possibility of a distinction between items which are merely
I-desirable and items which are not only Idesirable but also H-desirable; and,
second, the possibility that the degree of happiness exemplified by a life may
be overdetermined by the set of H-desirables realized in that life, together
with the need to characterize the conditions which govern such
overdetermination. (4) Let us move in a different direction. I have already
remarked that, with respect to the desirability-status of happiness and of the
means thereto, Aristotle subscribed to two theses, with which I have no quarrel
(or, at least, shall voice no quarrel). (A) That some things are both
I-desirable and H-desirable (are both ends in themselves and also means to happiness).
(B) That happiness, while desirable in itself, is not desirable for the sake of
any further end. end p.117 I have suggested the possibility that a further
thesis might be true (though I have not claimed that it is true), namely: (C)
That some things are I-desirable without being H-desirable (and, one might add,
perhaps without being desirable for the sake of any further end, in which case
happiness will not be the only item which is not desirable for the sake of any
further end). But there are two further as yet unmentioned theses which I am
inclined to regard as being not only true, but also important: first, (D) Any
item which is directly H-desirable must be I-desirable. And second, (E)
Happiness is attainable only via the realization of items which are I-desirable
(and also of course H-desirable). Thesis (D) would allow that an item could be
indirectly H-desirable without being I-desirable; engaging in morning press-ups
could be such an item, but only if it were desirable for the sake of (let us say)
playing cricket well, which would plainly be itself an item which was both
I-desirable and Hdesirable. A thesis related to (D), namely, (D′). (An item can
be directly conducive to the happiness of an individual x only if it is
regarded by x as being I-desirable) seems to me very likely to be true; the
question whether not only (D′) but (D) are true would depend on whether a man
who misconceives (if that be possible) certain items as being I-desirable could
properly be said to achieve happiness through the realization of those items.
To take an extreme case, could a wicked man who pervertedly regards cheating
others in an ingenious way as being I-desirable, and who delights in so doing,
properly be said to be (pro tanto) achieving happiness? I think Aristotle would
answer negatively, and I am rather inclined to side with him; but I recognize
that there is much to debate. A consequence of thesis (D), if true, would be
that there cannot be a happiness-pill (a pill the taking of which leads
directly tohappiness); there could be (and maybe there is) a pill which leads
directly to "feeling good" or to euphoria; but these states would
have to be distinguishable from happiness. Thesis (E) would imply that
happiness is essentially a dependent state; happiness cannot just happen; its
realization is conditional end p.118 upon the realization of one or more items
which give rise to it. Happiness should be thought of adverbially; to be happy
is, for some x, to x happily or with happiness. And reflection on the interchangeability
or near-interchangeability of the ideas of happiness and of well-being would
suggest that the adverbial in question is an evaluation adverbial. The
importance, for present purposes, of the two latest theses is to my mind that
questions are now engendered about the idea that items which are chosen (or
desirable) for the sake of happiness can be thought of as items which are
chosen (or desirable) as means to happiness, at least if the means-end relation
is conceived as it seems very frequently to be conceived in contemporary
philosophy; if, that is, x is a means to y just in case the doing or producing
of x designedly causes (generates, has as an effect) the occurrence of y. For,
if items the realization of which give rise to happiness were items which could
be, in the above sense, means to happiness, (a) it should be conceptually
possible for happiness to arise otherwise than as a consequence of the
occurrence of any such items, and (b) it seems too difficult to suppose that so
non-scientific a condition as the possession of intrinsic desirability should
be a necessary condition of an item's giving rise to happiness. In other words,
theses (D) and (E) seem to preclude the idea that what directly gives rise to
happiness can be, in the currently favoured sense, a means to happiness. The
issue which I have just raised is closely related to a scholarly issue which
has recently divided Aristotelian commentators; battles have raged over the
question whether Aristotle conceived of eudaemonia as a 'dominant' or as an
'inclusive' end. The terminology derives, I believe, from W. F. R. Hardie; but
I cite a definition of the question which is given by Ackrill in a recent
paper: "By 'an inclusive end' might be meant any end combining or
including two or more values or activities or goods . . . By 'a dominant end'
might be meant a monolithic end, an end consisting of just one valued activity
or good."1 One's initial reaction to this formulation may fall short of
overwhelming enlightenment, among other things, perhaps, because the verb
'include' appears within end p.119 the characterization of an inclusive end. I
suspect, however, that this deficiency could be properly remedied only by a
logicometaphysical enquiry into the nature of the 'inclusion relation' (or,
rather, the family of inclusion relations), which would go far beyond the
limits of my present undertaking. But, to be less ambitious, let us, initially
and provisionally, think of an inclusive end as being a set of ends. If
happiness is in this sense an inclusive end, then we can account for some of
the features displayed in the previous section. Happiness will be dependent on
the realization of subordinate ends, provided that the set of ends constituting
happiness may not be the empty set (a reasonable, if optimistic, assumption).
Since the "happiness set" has as its elements I-desirables, what is
desirable directly for the sake of happiness must be I-desirable. And if it
should turn out to be the case, contrary perhaps to the direction of my
argument in the last section, that the happiness set includes all I-desirables,
then we should have difficulty in finding any end for the sake of which
happiness would be desirable. So far so good, perhaps; but so far may not
really be very far at all. Some reservation about the treatment of eudaemonia
as an inclusive end is hinted at by Ackrill: It is not necessary to claim that
Aristotle has made quite clear how there may be 'components' in the best life
or how they may be interrelated. The very idea of constructing a compound end
out of two or more independent ends may arouse suspicion. Is the compound to be
thought of as a mere aggregate or as an organized system? If the former, the
move to eudaemonia seems trivial—nor is it obvious that goods can be just added
together. If the latter, if there is supposed to be a unifying plan, what is
it?2 From these very pertinent questions, Ackrill detaches himself, on the
grounds that his primary concern is with the exposition and not with the
justification of Aristotle's thought. But we cannot avail ourselves of this
rain check, and so the difficulties which Ackrill touches on must receive
further exposure.Let us suppose a next-to-impossible world W, in which there
are just three I-desirables, which are also H-desirables, A, B, and C. If you
like, you may think of these as being identical, respectively, with honour,
wealth, and virtue. If, in general, happiness is end p.120 to be an inclusive
end, happiness-in-W will have as its components A, B, and C, and no others. Now
one might be tempted to suppose that, since it is difficult or impossible to
deny that to achieve happiness-in-W it is necessary and also sufficient to
realize A, to realize B, and to realize C, anyone who wanted to realize A,
wanted to realize B, and wanted to realize C would ipso facto be someone who
wanted to achieve happiness-in-W. But there seems to me to be a good case for
regarding such an inference as invalid. To want to achieve happiness-in-W might
be equivalent to wanting to realize A and to realize B and to realize C, or
indeed to wanting A and B and C; but there are relatively familiar reasons for
allowing that, with respect to a considerable range of psychological verbs
(represented by 'ψ'), one cannot derive from a statement of the form 'x ψ's
(that) A and x ψ's (that) B' a statement of the form 'x ψ's (that) A and B'.
For instance, it seems to me a plausible thesis that there are circumstances in
which we should want to say of someone that he believed that p and that he
believed that q, without being willing to allow that he believed that both p
and q. The most obvious cases for the application of the distinction would
perhaps be cases in which p and q are inconsistent; we can perhaps imagine
someone of whom we should wish to say that he believed that he was a grotesquely
incompetent creature, and that he also believed that he was a world-beater,
without wishing to say of him that he believed that he was both grotesquely
incompetent and a world-beater. Inconsistent beliefs are not, or are not
necessarily, beliefs in inconsistencies. Whatever reasons there may be for
allowing that a man may believe that p and believe that q without believing
that p and q would, I suspect, be mirrored in reasons for allowing that a man
may want A and want B without wanting both A and B; if I want a holiday in
Rome, and also want some headache pills, it does not seem to me that ipso facto
I want a holiday in Rome and some headache pills. Moreover, even if we were to
sanction the disputed inference, it would not, I think, be correct to make the
further supposition that a man who wants A and B (simply as a consequence of
wanting A and wanting B) would, or even could, want A (or want B) for the sake
of, or with a view to, realizing A and B. So even if, in world W, a man could
be said to want A and B and C, on the strength of wanting each one of them,
some further condition would end p.121 have to be fulfilled before we could say
of him that he wanted each of them for the sake of realizing A and B and C,
that is, for the sake of achieving happiness-in-W. In an attempt to do justice
to the idea that happiness should be treated as being an 'inclusive' end, let
me put forward a modest proposal; not, perhaps, the only possible proposal, but
one which may seem reasonably intuitive. Let us categorize, for present
purposes, the I-desirables in world W as 'universals'. I propose that to want,
severally, each of these I-desirables should be regarded as equivalent to
wanting the set whose members are just those I-desirables, with the
understanding that a set of universals is not itself a universal. So to want A,
want B, and want C is equivalent to wanting the set whose members are A, B, and
C ('the happinessin-W set'). To want happiness-in-W requires satisfaction of
the stronger condition of wanting A and B and C, which in turn is equivalent to
wanting something which is a universal, namely, a compound universal in which
are included just those universals which are elements of the happiness-inW set.
I shall not attempt to present a necessary and sufficient condition for the
fulfilment of the stronger rather than merely of the weaker condition; but I
shall suggest an important sufficient condition for this state of affairs. The
condition is the following: for x to want the conjunction of the members of a set,
rather than merely for him to want, severally, each member of the set, it is
sufficient that his wanting, severally, each member of the set should be
explained by (have as one of its explanations) the fact that there is an 'open'
feature F which is believed by x to be exemplified by the set, and the
realization of which is desired by x. By an open feature I mean a feature the
specification of which does not require the complete enumeration of the items
which exemplify it. To illustrate, a certain Oxford don at one time desired to
secure for himself the teaching, in his subject, at the colleges of Somerville,
St Hugh's, St Hilda's, Lady Margaret Hall, and St Anne's. (He failed, by two
colleges.) This compound desire was based on the fact that the named colleges
constituted the totality of women's colleges in Oxford, and he desired the
realization of the open feature consisting in his teaching, in his subject, at
all the women's colleges in Oxford. This sufficient condition is important in that it
is, I think, fulfilled with respect to all compound desires which are rational,
as distinct from end p.122 arbitrary or crazy. There can be, of course,
genuinely compound desires which are non-rational, and I shall not attempt to
specify the condition which distinguishes them; but perhaps I do not need to,
since I think we may take it as a postulate that, if a desire for happiness is
a compound desire, it is a rational compound desire. The proposal which I have
made does, I think, conform to acceptable general principles for metaphysical
construction. For it provides for the addition to an initially given category
of items ('universals') of a special sub-category ('compound universals') which
are counterparts of certain items which are not universals but rather sets of
universals. It involves, so to speak, the conversion of certain non-universals
into 'new' universals, and it seems reasonable to suppose that the purpose of
this conversion is to bring these non-universals, in a simple and relatively
elegant way, within the scope of laws which apply to universals. It must be
understood that by 'laws' I am referring to theoretical generalities which
belong to any of a variety of kinds of theory, including psychological,
practical, and moral theories; so among such laws will be laws of various kinds
relating to desires for ends and for means to ends. If happiness is an
inclusive end, and if, for it to be an inclusive end the desire for which is
rational, there must be an open feature which is exemplified by the set of components
of happiness, our next task is plainly to attempt to identify this feature. To
further this venture I shall now examine, within the varieties of means-end
relation, what is to my mind a particularly suggestive kind of case. II At the
start of this section I shall offer a brief sketch of the varieties, or of some
of the varieties, of means-end relation; this is a matter which is interesting
in itself, which is largely neglected in contemporary philosophy, and which I
am inclined to regard as an important bit of background in the present enquiry.
I shall then consider a particular class of cases in our ordinary thinking
about means and ends, which might be called cases of 'end-fixing', and which
might provide an important modification to our consideration of the idea that
happiness is an inclusive end. end p.123 I shall introduce the term 'is
contributive to' as a general expression for what I have been calling
'means-end' relation, and I shall use the phrase 'is contributive in way w to'
to refer, in a general way, to this or that particular specific form of the
contributiveness relation. I shall, for convenience, assume that anyone who
thinks of some state of affairs or action as being contributive to the
realization of a certain universal would have in mind that specific form of
contributiveness which would be appropriate to the particular case. We may now
say, quite unstartlingly, that x wants to do A for the sake of B just in case x
wants to do A because (1) x regards his doing A as something which would be
contributive in way w to the realization of B, and (2) x wants B. That leaves
us the only interesting task, namely, that of giving the range of specific
relations one element in which will be picked out by the phrase 'contributive
in way w', once A and B are specified. The most obvious mode of
contributiveness, indeed one which has too often been attended to to the
exclusion of all others, is that of causal antecedence; x's contributing to y
here consists in x's being the (or a) causal origin of y. But even within this
mode there may be more complexity than meets the eye. The causal origin may be
an initiating cause, which triggers the effect in the way in which flipping a
switch sets off illumination in a light bulb; or it may be a sustaining cause,
the continuation of which is required in order to maintain the effect in being.
In either case, the effect may be either positive or negative; I may initiate a
period of non-talking in Jones by knocking him cold, or sustain one by keeping
my hand over his mouth. A further dimension, in respect of which examples of
each variety of causal contributiveness may vary, is that of conditionality.
Doing A may be desired as something which will, given the circumstances which
obtain, unconditionally originate the realization of B, or as something which
will do so provided that a certain possibility is fulfilled. A specially
important subclass of cases of conditional causal contributiveness is the class
of cases in which the relevant possibility consists in the desire or will of
some agent, either the means-taker or someone else, that B should be realized;
these arecases in which x wants to do A in order to enable, or to make it
possible for, himself (or someone else) to achieve the realization of B; as
when, for example, x puts a corkscrew in his pocket to enable him later, should
be wish to do so, to open a bottle of wine. end p.124 But, for present
purposes, the more interesting modes of contributiveness may well be those
other than that of causal contributiveness. These include the following types.
(1) Specificatory contributiveness. To do A would, in the prevailing
circumstances, be a specification of, or a way of, realizing B; it being
understood that, for this mode of contributiveness, B is not to be a causal
property, a property consisting in being such as to cause the realization of C,
where C is some further property. A host's seating someone at his right-hand
side at dinner may be a specification of treating him with respect; waving a
Union Jack might be a way of showing loyalty to the Crown. In these cases, the
particular action which exemplifies A is the same as the item which exemplifies
B. Two further modes involve relations of inclusion, of one or another of the
types to which such relations may belong. (2) To do A may contribute to the
realization of B by including an item which realizes B. I may want to take a
certain advertised cruise because it includes a visit to Naples. (3) To do A
may contribute to the realization of B by being included in an item which
realizes B. Here we may distinguish more than one kind of case. A and B may be
identical; I may, for example, be hospitable to someone today because I want to
be hospitable to him throughout his visit to my town. In such a case the
exemplification of B (hospitality) by the whole (my behaviour to him during the
week) will depend on a certain distribution of exemplifications of B among the
parts, such as my behaviour on particular days. We might call this kind of
dependence "componentdependence". In other cases A and B are
distinct, and in some of these (perhaps all) B cannot, if it is exemplified by
the whole, also be exemplified by any part. These further cases subdivide in
ways which are interesting but not germane to the present enquiry. We are now
in a position to handle, not quite as Aristotle did, a 'paradox' about
happiness raised by Aristotle, which involves Solon's dictum "Call no man
happy till he is dead". I give a simplified, but I hope not distorted,
version of the 'paradoxical' line of argument. If we start by suggesting that
happiness is the end for man, we shall have to modify this suggestion,
replacing "happiness" by "happiness in a complete life".
(Aristotle himself end p.125 applies the qualification "in a complete
life" not to happiness, but to what he gives as constituted of happiness,
namely, activity of soul in accordance with excellence). For, plainly, a life
which as a whole exemplifies happiness is preferable to one which does not. But
since lifelong happiness can only be exemplified by a whole life,
non-predictive knowledge that the end for man is realized with respect to a
particular person is attainable only at the end of the person's life, and so
not (except possibly at the time of his dying gasp) by the person himself. But
this is paradoxical, since the end for man should be such that non-predictive
knowledge of its realization is available to those who achieve its realization.
I suggest that we need to distinguish non-propositional, attributive ends, such
as happiness, and propositional ends or objectives, such as that my life, as a
whole, should be happy. Now it is not in fact clear that people do, or even
should, desire lifelong happiness; it may be quite in order not to think about
this as an objective. And, even if one should desire lifelong happiness, it is
not clear that one should aim at it, that one should desire, and do, things for
the sake of it. But let us waive these objections. The attainment of lifelong
happiness, an objective, consists in the realization, in a whole life, of the
attributive end happiness. This realization is component-dependent; it depends
on a certain distribution of realizations of that same end in episodes or
phases of that life. But these realizations are certainly nonpredictively
knowable by the person whose life it is. So, if we insist that to specify the
end for man is to specify an attributive end and not an objective, then the
'paradox' disappears. The special class of cases to which one might be tempted
to apply the term 'end-fixing' may be approached in the following way. For any
given mode of contributiveness, say causal contributiveness, the same final
position, that x wants (intends, does) A as contributive to the realization of
B, may be reached through more than one process of thought. In line with the
canonical Aristotelian model, x maydesire to realize B, then enquire what would
lead to B, decide that doing A would lead to B, and so come to want, and to do,
A. Alternatively, the possibility of doing A may come to his mind, he then
enquires what doing A would lead to, sees that it would lead to B, which he
wants, and so he comes to want, and perhaps do, A. I now ask whether there are
cases in which the following end p.126 conditions are met: (1) doing A is fixed
or decided, not merely entertained as a possibility, in advance of the
recognition of it as desirable with a view to B, and (2) that B is selected as
an end, or as an end to be pursued on this occasion, at least partly because it
is something which doing A will help to realize. A variety of candidates, not
necessarily good ones, come to mind. (1) A man who is wrecked on a desert
island decides to use his stay there to pursue what is a new end for him,
namely, the study of the local flora and fauna. Here doing A (spending time on
the island) is fixed but not chosen; and the specific performances, which some
might think were more properly regarded as means to the pursuit of this study,
are not fixed in advance of the adoption of the end. (2) A man wants (without
having a reason for so wanting) to move to a certain town; he is uncomfortable
with irrational desires (or at least with this irrational desire), and so comes
to want to make this move because the town has a specially salubrious climate.
Here, it seems, the movement of thought cannot be fully conscious; we might say
that the reason why he wants to move to a specially good climate is that such a
desire would justify the desire or intention, which he already has, to move to
the town in question; but one would baulk at describing this as being his
reason for wanting to move to a good climate. The example which interests me is
the following. A tyrant has become severely displeased with one of his
ministers, and to humiliate him assigns him to the task of organizing the
disposal of the palace garbage, making clear that only a high degree of
efficiency will save him from a more savage fate. The minister at first strives
for efficiency merely in order to escape disaster; but later, seeing that
thereby he can preserve his self-respect and frustrate the tyrant's plan to
humiliate him, he begins to take pride in the efficient discharge of his
duties, and so to be concerned about it for its own sake. Even so, when the
tyrant is overthrown and the minister is relieved of his menial duties, he leaves
them without regret in spite of having been intrinsically concerned about their
discharge. One might say of the minister that he efficiently discharged his
office for its own sake in order to frustrate the tyrant; and this is clearly
inadequately represented as his being interested in the efficient discharge of
his office both for its own sake and for the end p.127 sake of frustrating the
tyrant, since he hoped to achieve the latter goal by an intrinsic concern with
his office. It seems clear that higher-order desires are involved; the minister
wants, for its own sake, to discharge his office efficiently, and he wants to
want this because he wants, by so wanting, to frustrate the tyrant. Indeed,
wanting to do A for the sake of B can plausibly be represented as having two
interpretations. The first interpretation is invoked if we say that a man who
does A for the sake of B (1) does A because he wants to do A and (2) wants to
do A for the sake of B. Here wanting A for the sake of B involves thinking that
A will lead to B. But we can conceive of wanting A for the sake of B
(analogously with doing A for the sake of B) as something which is accounted
for by wanting to want A for the sake of B; if so, we have the second
interpretation, one which implies not thinking that A will help to realize B,
but rather thinking that wanting A will help to realize B. The impact of this
discussion, on the question of the kind of end which happiness should be taken
to be, will be that, if happiness is to be regarded as an inclusive end, the
components may be not the realizations of certain ends, but rather the desires
for those realizations. Wanting A for the sake of happiness should be given the
second mode of interpretation specified above, one which involves thinking that
wanting A is one of a set of items which collectively exhibit the open feature
associated with happiness. III My enquiry has, I hope, so far given some
grounds for the favourable consideration of three theses: (1) happiness is an
end for the sake of which certain I-desirables are desirable, but is to
beregarded as an inclusive rather than a dominant end; (2) for happiness to be
a rational inclusive end, the set of its components must exemplify some
particular open feature, yet to be determined; and (3) the components of
happiness may well be not universals or states of affairs the realization of
which is desired for its own sake, end p.128 but rather the desires for such
universals or states of affairs, in which case a desire for happiness will be a
higher-order desire, a desire to have, and satisfy, a set of desires which
exemplifies the relevant open feature. At this point, we might be faced with a
radical assault, which would run as follows. "Your whole line of enquiry
consists in assuming that, when some item is desired, or desirable, for the
sake of happiness, it is desired, or desirable, as a means to happiness, and in
then raising, as the crucial question, what kind of an end happiness is, or
what kind of means-end relation is involved. But the initial assumption is a
mistake. To say of an item that it is desired for the sake of happiness should
not be understood as implying that that item is desired as any kind of a means
to anything. It should be understood rather as claiming that the item is
desired (for its own sake) in a certain sort of way: 'for the sake of
happiness' should be treated as a unitary adverbial, better heard, perhaps, as
'happinesswise'. To desire something happiness-wise is to take the desire for
it seriously in a certain sort of way, in particular to take the desire
seriously as a guide for living, to have incorporated it in one's overall plan
or system for the conduct of life. If one looks at the matter this way, one can
see at once that it is conceivable that these should be I-desirables which are
not H-desirables; for the question whether something which is desirable is
intrinsically desirable, or whether its desirability derives from the
desirability of something else, is plainly a different question from the
question whether or not the desire for it is to be taken seriously in the
planning and direction of one's life, that is, whether the item is H-desirable.
One can, moreover, do justice to two further considerations which you have, so
far, been ignoring: first, that what goes to make up happiness is relative to
the individual whose happiness it is, a truth which is easily seen when it is
recognized that what x desires (or should desire) happiness-wise may be quite
different from what y so desires; and, second, that intuition is sympathetic to
the admittedly vague idea that the decision that certain items are constitutive
of one's happiness is not so much a matter of judgement or belief as a matter
of will. One's happiness consists in what one makes it consist in, an idea
which will be easily accommodated if 'for the sake of happiness' is understood
in the way which I propose." end p.129 There is much in this (spirited yet
thoughtful) oration towards which I am sympathetic and which I am prepared to
regard as important; in particular, the idea of linking H-desirability with
desires or concerns which enter into a system for the direction of one's life,
and the suggestion that the acceptance of a system of ends as constituting
happiness, or one's own happiness, is less a matter of belief or judgement than
of will. But, despite these attractive features, and despite its air of
simplifying iconoclasm, the position which is propounded can hardly be regarded
as tenable. When looked at more closely, it can be seen to be just another form
of subjectivism: what are ostensibly beliefs that particular items are
conducive to happiness are represented as being in fact psychological states or
attitudes, other than beliefs, with regard to these items; and it is vulnerable
to variants of stock objections to subjectivist manœuvres. That in common
speech and thought we have application for, and so need a philosophical account
of, not only the idea of desiring things for the sake of happiness but, also,
that of being happy (or well-off), is passed over; and should it turn out that
the position under consideration has no account to offer of the latter idea,
that would be not only paradoxical but also, quite likely, theoretically
disastrous. For it would seem to be the case that the construction or adoption
of a system of ends for the direction of life is something which can be done
well or badly, or better or less well; that being so, there will be a demand
for the specification of the criteria governing this area of evaluation; and it
will be difficult to avoid the idea that the conditions characteristic of a
good system of ends will be determined by the fact that the adoption of a
system conforming to those conditions will lead, or is likely to lead, or other
things being equal will lead, to the realization of happiness; to something,
that is, which the approach under consideration might well not be able to
accommodate. So it begins to look as if we may be back where we were before the
start of this latest discussion. But perhaps not quite; for, perhaps, something
can be done with the notion of a set or system of endswhich is suitable for the
direction of life. The leading idea would be of a system which is maximally
stable, one whose employment for the direction of life would be maximally
conducive end p.130 to its continued employment for that purpose, which would
be maximally self-perpetuating. To put the matter another way, a system of ends
would be stable to the extent to which, though not constitutionally immune from
modification, it could accommodate changes of circumstances or vicissitudes
which would impose modification upon other less stable systems. We might need
to supplement the idea of stability by the idea of flexibility; a system will
be flexible in so far as, should modifications be demanded, they are achievable
by easy adjustment and evolution; flounderings, crises, and revolutions will be
excluded or at a minimum. A succession of systems of ends within a person's
consciousness could then be regarded as stages in the development of a single
life-scheme, rather than as the replacement of one life-scheme by another. We
might find it desirable also to incorporate into the working-out of these ideas
a distinction, already foreshadowed, between happiness-in-general and
happiness-for-an-individual. We might hope that it would be possible to present
happiness-in-general as a system of possible ends which would be specified in
highly general terms (since the specification must be arrived at in abstraction
from the idiosyncrasies of particular persons and their circumstances), a
system which would be determined either by its stability relative to stock
vicissitudes in the human condition, or (as I suspect) in some other way; and
we might further hope that happiness for an individual might lie in the
possession, and operation for the guidance of life, of a system of ends which
(a) would be a specific and personalized derivative, determined by that
individual's character, abilities, and situations in the world, of the system
constitutive of happiness in general; and (b) the adoption of which would be
stable for that individual in his circumstances. The idea that happiness might
be fully, or at least partially, characterized in something like this kind of
way would receive some support if we could show reason to suppose that features
which could plausibly be regarded, or which indeed actually have been regarded,
as characteristic of happiness, or at least of a satisfactory system for the
guidance of life, are also features which are conducive to stability. Refs.: H.
P. Grice, “Means-end rationality.”
floridi: essential Italian philosopher. He
has explored aspects of Grice’s use of the expression ‘inform,’ ‘mis-inform,’
in terms of ‘factivity.’ Refs.: Luigi Speranza, "Informazione ed
implicatura: Grice e Floridi," per Il Club Anglo-Italiano, The
Swimming-Pool Library, Villa Grice, Liguria, Italia.
fludd: r. English
physician and writer. Influenced by Paracelsus, hermetism, and the cabala,
Fludd defended a Neoplatonic worldview on the eve of its supersession by the
new mechanistic philosophy. He produced improvements in the manufacture of
steel and invented a thermometer, though he also used magnets to cure disease
and devised a salve to be applied to a weapon to cure the wound it had
inflicted. He held that science got its ideas from Scripture allegorically
interpreted, when they were of any value. His works combine theology with an
occult, Neoplatonic reading of the Bible, and contain numerous fine diagrams
illustrating the mutual sympathy of human beings, the natural world, and the
supernatural world, each reflecting the others in parallel harmonic structures.
In controversy with Kepler, Fludd claimed to uncover essential natural
processes rooted in natural sympathies and the operation of God’s light, rather
than merely describing the external movements of the heavens. Creation is the
extension of divine light into matter. Evil arises from a darkness in God, his
failure to will. Matter is uncreated, but this poses no problem for orthodoxy,
since matter is nothing, a mere possibility without the least actuality, not
something Filmer, Robert Fludd, Robert 311
311 coeternal with the Creator.
Grice’s
folksy psychology:
Grice loved Ramsey, “But Ramsey was born before folk-psychology, so his
‘Theories’ is very dense.”” one sense, a putative network of principles
constituting a commonsense theory that allegedly underlies everyday
explanations of human behavior; the theory assigns a central role to mental
states like belief, desire, and intention. Consider an example of an everyday
commonsense psychological explanation: Jane went to the refrigerator because
she wanted a beer and she believed there was beer in the refrigerator. Like
many such explanations, this adverts to a so-called propositional attitude a mental state, expressed by a verb ‘believe’
plus a that-clause, whose intentional content is propositional. It also adverts
to a mental state, expressed by a verb ‘want’ plus a direct-object phrase,
whose intentional content appears not to be propositional. In another, related
sense, folk psychology is a network of social practices that includes ascribing
such mental states to ourselves and others, and proffering explanations of
human behavior that advert to these states. The two senses need distinguishing
because some philosophers who acknowledge the existence of folk psychology in
the second sense hold that commonsense psychological explanations do not employ
empirical generalizations, and hence that there is no such theory as folk
psychology. Henceforth, ‘FP’ will abbreviate ‘folk psychology’ in the first
sense; the unabbreviated phrase will be used in the second sense. Eliminativism
in philosophy of mind asserts that FP is an empirical theory; that FP is
therefore subject to potential scientific falsification; and that mature
science very probably will establish that FP is so radically false that humans
simply do not undergo mental states like beliefs, desires, and intentions. One
kind of eliminativist argument first sets forth certain methodological
strictures about how FP would have to integrate with mature science in order to
be true e.g., being smoothly reducible to neuroscience, or being absorbed into
mature cognitive science, and then contends that these strictures are unlikely
to be met. Another kind of argument first claims that FP embodies certain
strong empirical commitments e.g., to mental representations with languagelike
syntactic structure, and then contends that such empirical presuppositions are
likely to turn out false. One influential version of folk psychological realism
largely agrees with eliminativism about what is required to vindicate folk psychology,
but also holds that mature science is likely to provide such vindication.
Realists of this persuasion typically argue, for instance, that mature
cognitive science will very likely incorporate FP, and also will very likely
treat beliefs, desires, and other propositional attitudes as states with
languagelike syntactic structure. Other versions of folkpsychological realism
take issue, in one way or another, with either i the eliminativists’ claims
about FP’s empirical commitments, or ii the eliminativists’ strictures about
how FP must mesh with mature science in order to be true, or both. Concerning
i, for instance, some philosophers maintain that FP per se is not committed to
the existence of languagelike mental representations. If mature cognitive science
turns out not to posit a “language of thought,” they contend, this would not
necessarily show that FP is radically false; instead it might only show that
propositional attitudes are subserved in some other way than via languagelike
representational structures. Concerning ii, some philosophers hold that FP can
be true without being as tightly connected to mature scientific theories as the
eliminativists require. For instance, the demand that the special sciences be
smoothly reducible to the fundamental natural sciences is widely considered an
excessively stringent criterion of intertheoretic compatibility; so perhaps FP
could be true without being smoothly reducible to neuroscience. Similarly, the
demand that FP be directly absorbable into empirical cognitive science is
sometimes considered too stringent as a criterion either of FP’s truth, or of
the soundness of its ontology of beliefs, desires, and other propositional
attitudes, or of the legitimacy of FP-based explanations of behavior. Perhaps
FP is a true theory, and explanatorily legitimate, even if it is not destined
to become a part of science. Even if FP’s ontological categories are not
scientific natural kinds, perhaps its generalizations are like generalizations
about clothing: true, explanatorily usable, and ontologically sound. No one
doubts the existence of hats, coats, or scarves. No one doubts the truth or
explanatory utility of generalizations like ‘Coats made of heavy material tend
to keep the body warm in cold weather’, even though these generalizations are
not laws of any science. Yet another approach to folk psychology, often wedded
to realism about beliefs and desires although sometimes wedded to
instrumentalism, maintains that folk psychology does not employ empirical
generalizations, and hence is not a theory at all. One variant denies that folk
psychology employs any generalizations, empirical or otherwise. Another variant
concedes that there are folk-psychological generalizations, but denies that
they are empirical; instead they are held to be analytic truths, or norms of
rationality, or both at once. Advocates of non-theory views typically regard
folk psychology as a hermeneutic, or interpretive, enterprise. They often claim
too that the attribution of propositional attitudes, and also the proffering
and grasping of folk-psychological explanations, is a matter of imaginatively
projecting oneself into another person’s situation, and then experiencing a
kind of empathic understanding, or Verstehen, of the person’s actions and the
motives behind them. A more recent, hi-tech, formulation of this idea is that
the interpreter “runs a cognitive simulation” of the person whose actions are
to be explained. Philosophers who defend folk-psychological realism, in one or
another of the ways just canvassed, also sometimes employ arguments based on
the allegedly self-stultifying nature of eliminativism. One such argument
begins from the premise that the notion of action is folk-psychological that a behavioral event counts as an action
only if it is caused by propositional attitudes that rationalize it under some
suitable actdescription. If so, and if humans never really undergo
propositional attitudes, then they never really act either. In particular, they
never really assert anything, or argue for anything since asserting and arguing
are species of action. So if eliminativism is true, the argument concludes,
then eliminativists can neither assert it nor argue for it an allegedly intolerable pragmatic paradox.
Eliminativists generally react to such arguments with breathtaking equanimity.
A typical reply is that although our present concept of action might well be
folk-psychological, this does not preclude the possibility of a future
successor concept, purged of any commitment to beliefs and desires, that could
inherit much of the role of our current, folk-psychologically tainted, concept
of action.
fondazione Giovanni
Gentile per gli studi filosofici. The foundation was founded [sic] after
Gentile was murdered. Gentile dedicated his life to philosophy. His interests
were broad: from Roman philosophy to idealism, through Leopardi’s poetics.
fontanelle: writer who
heralded the age of the philosophes. A product of Jesuit education, he was a
versatile freethinker with skeptical inclinations. Dialogues of the Dead 1683
showed off his analytical mind and elegant style. In 1699, he was appointed
secretary of the Academy of Sciences. He composed famous eulogies of
scientists; defended the superiority of modern science over tradition in
Digression on Ancients and Moderns 1688; popularized Copernican astronomy in
Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds 1686
famous for postulating the inhabitation of planets; stigmatized
superstition and credulity in History of Oracles 1687 and The Origin of Fables
1724; promoted Cartesian physics in The Theory of Cartesian Vortices 1752; and
wrote Elements of Infinitesimal Calculus 1727 in the wake of Newton and
Leibniz. J.-L.S. Foot, Philippa b.0, British philosopher who exerted a lasting
influence on the development of moral philosophy in the second half of the
twentieth century. Her persisting, intertwined themes are opposition to all
forms of subjectivism in ethics, the significance of the virtues and vices, and
the connection between morality and rationality. In her earlier papers,
particularly “Moral Beliefs” 8 and “Goodness and Choice” 1, reprinted in
Virtues and Vices 8, she undermines the subjectivist accounts of moral
“judgment” derived from C. L. Stevenson and Hare by arguing for many logical or
conceptual connections between evaluations and the factual statements on which
they must be based. Lately she has developed this kind of thought into the
naturalistic claim that moral evaluations are determined by facts about our
life and our nature, as evaluations of features of plants and animals as good
or defective specimens of their kind are determined by facts about their nature
and their life. Foot’s opposition to subjectivism has remained constant, but
her views on the virtues in relation to rationality have undergone several
changes. In “Moral Beliefs” she relates them to self-interest, maintaining that
a virtue must benefit its possessor; in the subsequently repudiated “Morality
as a System of Hypothetical Imperatives” 2 she went as far as to deny that
there was necessarily anything contrary to reason in being uncharitable or
unjust. In “Does Moral Subjectivism Rest on a Mistake?” Oxford Journal of Legal
Studies, 5 the virtues themselves appear as forms of practical rationality. Her
most recent work, soon to be published as The Grammar of Goodness, preserves
and develops the latter claim and reinstates ancient connections between
virtue, rationality, and happiness.
forcing: a method
introduced by Paul J. Cohen see his Set
Theory and the Continuum Hypothesis 6 to
prove independence results in Zermelo-Fraenkel set theory ZF. Cohen proved the
independence of the axiom of choice AC from ZF, and of the continuum hypothesis
CH from ZF ! AC. The consistency of AC with ZF and of CH with ZF ! AC had
previously been proved by Gödel by the method of constructible sets. A model of
ZF consists of layers, with the elements of a set at one layer always belonging
to lower layers. Starting with a model M, Cohen’s method produces an “outer
model” N with no more levels but with more sets at each level whereas Gödel’s
method produces an ‘inner model’ L: much of what will become true in N can be
“forced” from within M. The method is applicable only to hypotheses in the more
“abstract” branches of mathematics infinitary combinatorics, general topology,
measure theory, universal algebra, model theory, etc.; but there it is
ubiquitous. Applications include the proof by Robert M. Solovay of the
consistency of the measurability of all sets of all projective sets with ZF
with ZF ! AC; also the proof by Solovay and Donald A. Martin of the consistency
of Martin’s axiom MA plus the negation of the continuum hypothesis -CH with ZF
! AC. CH implies MA; and of known consequences of CH about half are implied by
MA, about half refutable by MA ! -CH. Numerous simplifications, extensions, and
variants e.g. Boolean-valued models of Cohen’s method have been introduced.
fordyce: d., philosopher
and educational theorist whose writings were influential in the eighteenth
century. His lectures formed the basis of his Elements of Moral Philosophy,
written originally for The Preceptor 1748, later tr. into G. and , and abridged
for the articles on moral philosophy in the first Encylopaedia Britannica 1771.
Fordyce combines the preacher’s appeal to the heart in the advocacy of virtue
with a moral “scientist’s” appraisal of human psychology. He claims to derive
our duties experimentally from a study of the prerequisites of human
happiness..
Materia-forma
distinction, the: forma: form, in metaphysics, especially Plato’s and
Aristotle’s, the structure or essence of a thing as contrasted with its matter.
Plato’s theory of Forms is a realistic ontology of universals. In his elenchus,
Socrates sought what is common to, e.g., all chairs. Plato believed there must
be an essence or Form common to everything falling under one
concept, which makes anything what it is. A chair is a chair because it
“participates in” the Form of Chair. The Forms are ideal “patterns,”
unchanging, timeless, and perfect. They exist in a world of their own cf. the
Kantian noumenal realm. Plato speaks of them as self-predicating: the Form of
Beauty is perfectly beautiful. This led, as he realized, to the Third Man
argument that there must be an infinite number of Forms. The only true
understanding is of the Forms. This we attain through anamnesis,
“recollection.” 2 Aristotle agreed that forms are closely tied to
intelligibility, but denied their separate existence. Aristotle explains change
and generation through a distinction between the form and matter of substances.
A lump of bronze matter becomes a statue through its being molded into a
certain shape form. In his earlier metaphysics, Aristotle identified primary
substance with the composite of matter and form, e.g. Socrates. Later, he
suggests that primary substance is form
what makes Socrates what he is the form here is his soul. This notion of
forms as essences has obvious similarities with the Platonic view. They became
the “substantial forms” of Scholasticism, accepted until the seventeenth
century. Kant saw form as the a priori aspect of experience. We are presented
with phenomenological “matter,” which has no meaning until the mind imposes
some form upon it. Grice finds the ‘logical’ in ‘logical form’ otiose. “Unless
we contrast it with logical matter.” Refs.: Grice, “Form: logical and other.” A
formal fallacy is an invalid inference pattern that is described in terms of a
formal logic. There are three main cases: 1 an invalid or otherwise
unacceptable argument identified solely by its form or structure, with no
reference to the content of the premises and conclusion such as equivocation or
to other features, generally of a pragmatic character, of the argumentative
discourse such as unsuitability of the argument for the purposes for which it
is given, failure to satisfy inductive standards for acceptable argument, etc.;
the latter conditions of argument evaluation fall into the purview of informal
fallacy; 2 a formal rule of inference, or an argument form, that is not valid
in the logical system on which the evaluation is made, instances of which are
sufficiently frequent, familiar, or deceptive to merit giving a name to the
rule or form; ad 3 an argument that is an instance of a fallacious rule of
inference or of a fallacious argument form and that is not itself valid. The
criterion of satisfactory argument typically taken as relevant in discussing formal
fallacies is validity. In this regard, it is important to observe that rules of
inference and argument forms that are not valid may have instances which may be
another rule or argument form, or may be a specific argument that are valid.
Thus, whereas the argument form i P, Q; therefore R a form that every argument,
including every valid argument, consisting of two premises shares is not valid,
the argument form ii, obtained from i by substituting P&Q for R, is a valid
instance of i: ii P, Q; therefore P&Q. Since ii is not invalid, ii is not a
formal fallacy though it is an instance of i. Thus, some instances of formally
fallacious rules of inference or argument-forms may be valid and therefore not
be formal fallacies. Examples of formal fallacies follow below, presented
according to the system of logic appropriate to the level of description of the
fallacy. There are no standard names for some of the fallacies listed below.
Fallacies of sentential propositional logic. Affirming the consequent: If p then
q; q / , p. ‘If Richard had his nephews murdered, then Richard was an evil man;
Richard was an evil man. Therefore, Richard had his nephews murdered.’ Denying
the antecedent: If p then q; not-p / , not-q. ‘If North was found guilty by the
courts, then North committed the crimes charged of him; North was not found
guilty by the courts. Therefore, North did not commit the crimes charged of
him.’ Commutation of conditionals: If p then q / , If q then p. ‘If Reagan was
a great leader, then so was Thatcher. Therefore, if Thatcher was a great
leader, then so was Reagan.” Improper transposition: If p then q / , If not-p
then not-q. ‘If the nations of the Middle East disarm, there will be peace in
the region. Therefore, if the nations of the Middle East do not disarm, there
will not be peace in the region.’ Improper disjunctive syllogism affirming one
disjunct: p or q; p / ,, not-q. ‘Either John is an alderman or a ward
committeeman; John is an alderman. Therefore, John is not a ward committeeman.’
This rule of inference would be valid if ‘or’ were interpreted exclusively,
where ‘p or EXq’ is true if exactly one constituent is true and is false
otherwise. In standard systems of logic, however, ‘or’ is interpreted
inclusively. Fallacies of syllogistic logic. Fallacies of distribution where M
is the middle term, P is the major term, and S is the minor term. Undistributed
middle term: the middle term is not distributed in either premise roughly,
nothing is said of all members of the class it designates, as in form, grammatical
formal fallacy 316 316 Some P are M
‘Some politicians are crooks. Some M are S Some crooks are thieves. ,Some S are
P. ,Some politicians are thieves.’ Illicit major undistributed major term: the
major term is distributed in the conclusion but not in the major premise, as in
All M are P ‘All radicals are communists. No S are M No socialists are
radicals. ,Some S are ,Some socialists are not not P. communists.’ Illicit
minor undistributed minor term: the minor term is distributed in the conclusion
but not in the minor premise, as in All P are M ‘All neo-Nazis are radicals.
All M are S All radicals are terrorists. ,All S are P. ,All terrorists are
neoNazis.’ Fallacies of negation. Two negative premises exclusive premises: the
syllogism has two negative premises, as in No M are P ‘No racist is just. Some
M are not S Some racists are not police. ,Some S are not P. ,Some police are
not just. Illicit negative/affirmative: the syllogism has a negative premise
conclusion but no negative conclusion premise, as in All M are P ‘All liars are
deceivers. Some M are not S Some liars are not aldermen. ,Some S are P. ,Some
aldermen are deceivers.’ and All P are M ‘All vampires are monsters. All M are
S All monsters are creatures. ,Some S are not P. ,Some creatures are not
vampires.’ Fallacy of existential import: the syllogism has two universal
premises and a particular conclusion, as in All P are M ‘All horses are
animals. No S are M No unicorns are animals. ,Some S are not P. ,Some unicorns
are not horses.’ A syllogism can commit more than one fallacy. For example, the
syllogism Some P are M Some M are S ,No S are P commits the fallacies of
undistributed middle, illicit minor, illicit major, and illicit
negative/affirmative. Fallacies of predicate logic. Illicit quantifier shift:
inferring from a universally quantified existential proposition to an
existentially quantified universal proposition, as in Ex Dy Fxy / , Dy Ex Fxy
‘Everyone is irrational at some time or other /, At some time, everyone is
irrational.’ Some are/some are not unwarranted contrast: inferring from ‘Some S
are P’ that ‘Some S are not P’ or inferring from ‘Some S are not P’ that ‘Some
S are P’, as in Dx Sx & Px / , Dx Sx & -Px ‘Some people are left-handed
/ , Some people are not left-handed.’ Illicit substitution of identicals: where
f is an opaque oblique context and a and b are singular terms, to infer from
fa; a = b / , fb, as in ‘The Inspector believes Hyde is Hyde; Hyde is Jekyll /
, The Inspector believes Hyde is Jekyll.’
Forma gives rise to formalism (or the formalists), which Grice contrasts
with Ryle and Strawson’s informalism (the informalists). Formalism is described
by Grice as the the view that mathematics concerns manipulations of symbols
according to prescribed structural rules. It is cousin to nominalism, the older
and more general metaphysical view that denies the existence of all abstract
objects and is often contrasted with Platonism, which takes mathematics to be
the study of a special class of non-linguistic, non-mental objects, and
intuitionism, which takes it to be the study of certain mental constructions.
In sophisticated versions, mathematical activity can comprise the study of
possible formal manipulations within a system as well as the manipulations
themselves, and the “symbols” need not be regarded as either linguistic or
concrete. Formalism is often associated with the mathematician formalism
formalism 317 317 David Hilbert. But
Hilbert held that the “finitary” part of mathematics, including, for example,
simple truths of arithmetic, describes indubitable facts about real objects and
that the “ideal” objects that feature elsewhere in mathematics are introduced
to facilitate research about the real objects. Hilbert’s formalism is the view
that the foundations of mathematics can be secured by proving the consistency
of formal systems to which mathematical theories are reduced. Gödel’s two
incompleteness theorems establish important limitations on the success of such
a project. And then there’s “formalization,” an abstract representation of a
theory that must satisfy requirements sharper than those imposed on the
structure of theories by the axiomatic-deductive method. That method can be
traced back to Euclid’s Elements. The crucial additional requirement is the
regimentation of inferential steps in proofs: not only do axioms have to be
given in advance, but the rules representing argumentative steps must also be
taken from a predetermined list. To avoid a regress in the definition of proof
and to achieve intersubjectivity on a minimal basis, the rules are to be
“formal” or “mechanical” and must take into account only the form of
statements. Thus, to exclude any ambiguity, a precise and effectively described
language is needed to formalize particular theories. The general kind of requirements
was clear to Aristotle and explicit in Leibniz; but it was only Frege who, in
his Begriffsschrift 1879, presented, in addition to an expressively rich
language with relations and quantifiers, an adequate logical calculus. Indeed,
Frege’s calculus, when restricted to the language of predicate logic, turned
out to be semantically complete. He provided for the first time the means to
formalize mathematical proofs. Frege pursued a clear philosophical aim, namely,
to recognize the “epistemological nature” of theorems. In the introduction to
his Grundgesetze der Arithmetik 3, Frege wrote: “By insisting that the chains
of inference do not have any gaps we succeed in bringing to light every axiom,
assumption, hypothesis or whatever else you want to call it on which a proof
rests; in this way we obtain a basis for judging the epistemological nature of
the theorem.” The Fregean frame was used in the later development of
mathematical logic, in particular, in proof theory. Gödel established through
his incompleteness theorems fundamental limits of formalizations of particular
theories, like the system of Principia Mathematica or axiomatic set theories.
The general notion of formal theory emerged from the subsequent investigations
of Church and Turing clarifying the concept of ‘mechanical procedure’ or
‘algorithm.’ Only then was it possible to state and prove the incompleteness
theorems for all formal theories satisfying certain very basic representability
and derivability conditions. Gödel emphasized repeatedly that these results do
not establish “any bounds for the powers of human reason, but rather for the
potentialities of pure formalism in mathematics.” As Grice notes, to ormalize: narrowly
construed, to formulate a subject as a theory in first-order predicate logic;
broadly construed, to describe the essentials of the subject in some formal
language for which a notion of consequence is defined. For Hilbert, formalizing
mathematics requires at least that there be finite means of checking purported
proofs. The formalists speak of a
‘formal’ language, “but is it a language?” – Grice. formal language: H. P.
Grice, “Bergmann on ideal language versus ordinary language,” a language in
which an expression’s grammaticality and interpretation if any are determined by
precisely defined rules that appeal only to the form or shape of the symbols
that constitute it rather than, for example, to the intention of the speaker.
It is usually understood that the rules are finite and effective so that there
is an algorithm for determining whether an expression is a formula and that the
grammatical expressions are uniquely readable, i.e., they are generated by the
rules in only one way. A paradigm example is the language of firstorder
predicate logic, deriving principally from the Begriffsschrift of Frege. The
grammatical formulas of this language can be delineated by an inductive
definition: 1 a capital letter ‘F’, ‘G’, or ‘H’, with or without a numerical
subscript, folformalism, aesthetic formal language 318 318 lowed by a string of lowercase letters
‘a’, ‘b’, or ‘c’, with or without numerical subscripts, is a formula; 2 if A is
a formula, so is -A; 3 if A and B are formulas, so are A & B, A P B, and A
7 B; 4 if A is a formula and v is a lowercase letter ‘x’, ‘y’, or ‘z’, with or
without numerical subscripts, then DvA' and EvA' are formulas where A' is
obtained by replacing one or more occurrences of some lowercase letter in A
together with its subscripts if any by v; 5 nothing is a formula unless it can
be shown to be one by finitely many applications of the clauses 14. The
definition uses the device of metalinguistic variables: clauses with ‘A’ and
‘B’ are to be regarded as abbreviations of all the clauses that would result by
replacing these letters uniformly by names of expressions. It also uses several
naming conventions: a string of symbols is named by enclosing it within single
quotes and also by replacing each symbol in the string by its name; the symbols
‘7’, ‘‘,’’, ‘&’, ‘P’, ‘-’ are considered names of themselves. The interpretation
of predicate logic is spelled out by a similar inductive definition of truth in
a model. With appropriate conventions and stipulations, alternative definitions
of formulas can be given that make expressions like ‘P 7 Q’ the names of
formulas rather than formulas themselves. On this approach, formulas need not
be written symbols at all and form cannot be identified with shape in any
narrow sense. For Tarski, Carnap, and others a formal language also included
rules of “transformation” specifying when one expression can be regarded as a
consequence of others. Today it is more common to view the language and its
consequence relation as distinct. Formal languages are often contrasted with
natural languages, like English or Swahili. Richard Montague, however, has
tried to show that English is itself a formal language, whose rules of grammar
and interpretation are similar to though
much more complex than predicate
logic. Then there’s formal learnability
theory, the study of human language learning through explicit formal models
typically employing artifical languages and simplified learning strategies. The
fundamental problem is how a learner is able to arrive at a grammar of a
language on the basis of a finite sample of presented sentences and perhaps
other kinds of information as well. The seminal work is by E. Gold 7, who
showed, roughly, that learnability of certain types of grammars from the
Chomsky hierarchy by an unbiased learner required the presentation of
ungrammatical strings, identified as such, along with grammatical strings.
Recent studies have concentrated on other types of grammar e.g., generative
transformational grammars, modes of presentation, and assumptions about
learning strategies in an attempt to approximate the actual situation more
closely. If Strawson and Ryle are into ‘informal logic,’ Hilbert isn’t. Formal
logic, versus ‘material logic,’ is the science of correct reasoning, going back
to Aristotle’s Prior Analytics, based upon the premise that the validity of an
argument is a function of its structure or logical form. The modern embodiment
of formal logic is symbolic mathematical logic. This is the study of valid
inference in artificial, precisely formulated languages, the grammatical
structure of whose sentences or well-formed formulas is intended to mirror, or
be a regimentation of, the logical forms of their natural language
counterparts. These formal languages can thus be viewed as mathematical models
of fragments of natural language. Like models generally, these models are
idealizations, typically leaving out of account such phenomena as vagueness,
ambiguity, and tense. But the idea underlying symbolic logic is that to the
extent that they reflect certain structural features of natural language
arguments, the study of valid inference in formal languages can yield insight
into the workings of those arguments. The standard course of study for anyone
interested in symbolic logic begins with the classical propositional calculus
sentential calculus, or PC. Here one constructs a theory of valid inference for
a formal language built up from a stock of propositional variables sentence
letters and an expressively complete set of connectives. In the propositional
calculus, one is therefore concerned with arguments whose validity turns upon
the presence of two-valued truth-functional sentence-forming operators on
sentences such as classical negation, conjunction, disjunction, and the like.
The next step is the predicate calculus lower functional calculus, first-order
logic, elementary quantification theory, the study of valid inference in
first-order languages. These are languages built up from an expressively
complete set of connectives, first-order universal or existential quantifiers,
individual variables, names, predicates relational symbols, and perhaps
function symbols. Further, and more specialized, work in symbolic logic might
involve looking at fragments of the language of the propositional or predicate
calculus, changing the semantics that the language is standardly given e.g., by
allowing truth-value gaps or more than two truth-values, further embellishing
the language e.g., by adding modal or other non-truth-functional connectives,
or higher-order quantifiers, or liberalizing the grammar or syntax of the
language e.g., by permitting infinitely long well-formed formulas. In some of
these cases, of course, symbolic logic remains only marginally connected with
natural language arguments as the interest shades off into one in formal
languages for their own sake, a mark of the most advanced work being done in
formal logic today. Some philosophers (“me
included” – Grice) speak of “formal semantics,” as opposed to Austin’s informal
linguistic botanising -- the study of the interpretations of formal languages.
A formal language can be defined apart from any interpretation of it. This is
done by specifying a set of its symbols and a set of formation rules that
determine which strings of symbols are grammatical or well formed. When rules
of inference transformation rules are added and/or certain sentences are
designated as axioms a logical system also known as a logistic system is
formed. An interpretation of a formal language is roughly an assignment of
meanings to its symbols and truth conditions to its sentences. Typically a
distinction is made between a standard interpretation of a formal language and
a non-standard interpretation. Consider a formal language in which arithmetic
is formulable. In addition to the symbols of logic variables, quantifiers,
brackets, and connectives, this language will contain ‘0’, ‘!’, ‘•’, and ‘s’. A
standard interpretation of it assigns the set of natural numbers as the domain
of discourse, zero to ‘0’, addition to ‘!’, multiplication to ‘•’, and the
successor function to ‘s’. Other standard interpretations are isomorphic to the
one just given. In particular, standard interpretations are numeral-complete in
that they correlate the numerals one-to-one with the domain elements. A result
due to Gödel and Rosser is that there are universal quantifications xAx that
are not deducible from the Peano axioms if those axioms are consistent even
though each An is provable. The Peano axioms if consistent are true on each
standard interpretation. Thus each An is true on such an interpretation. Thus
xAx is true on such an interpretation since a standard interpretation is
numeral-complete. However, there are non-standard interpretations that do not
correlate the numerals one-to-one with domain elements. On some of these
interpretations each An is true but xAx is false. In constructing and
interpreting a formal language we use a language already known to us, say,
English. English then becomes our metalanguage, which we use to talk about the
formal language, which is our object language. Theorems proven within the
object language must be distinguished from those proven in the metalanguage.
The latter are metatheorems. One goal of a semantical theory of a formal
language is to characterize the consequence relation as expressed in that
language and prove semantical metatheorems about that relation. A sentence S is
said to be a consequence of a set of sentences K provided S is true on every
interpretation on which each sentence in K is true. This notion has to be kept
distinct from the notion of deduction. The latter concept can be defined only
by reference to a logical system associated with a formal language.
Consequence, however, can be characterized independently of a logical system,
as was just done.
foucault: m., philosopher
and historian of thought. Foucault’s earliest writings e.g., Maladie mentale et
personnalité [“Mental Illness and Personality”], 4 focused on psychology and
developed within the frameworks of Marxism and existential phenomenology. He soon
moved beyond these frameworks, in directions suggested by two fundamental
influences: formal mode Foucault, Michel 320
320 history and philosophy of science, as practiced by Bachelard and
especially Canguilhem, and the modernist literature of, e.g., Raymond Roussel,
Bataille, and Maurice Blanchot. In studies of psychiatry Histoire de la folie
[“History of Madness in the Classical Age”], 1, clinical medicine The Birth of
the Clinic, 3, and the social sciences The Order of Things, 6, Foucault
developed an approach to intellectual history, “the archaeology of knowledge,”
that treated systems of thought as “discursive formations” independent of the
beliefs and intentions of individual thinkers. Like Canguilhem’s history of
science and like modernist literature, Foucault’s archaeology displaced the
human subject from the central role it played in the humanism dominant in our
culture since Kant. He reflected on the historical and philosophical
significance of his archaeological method in The Archaeology of Knowledge 9.
Foucault recognized that archaeology provided no account of transitions from
one system to another. Accordingly, he introduced a “genealogical” approach,
which does not replace archaeology but goes beyond it to explain changes in
systems of discourse by connecting them to changes in the non-discursive
practices of social power structures. Foucault’s genealogy admitted the
standard economic, social, and political causes but, in a non-standard,
Nietzschean vein, refused any unified teleological explanatory scheme e.g.,
Whig or Marxist histories. New systems of thought are seen as contingent
products of many small, unrelated causes, not fulfillments of grand historical
designs. Foucault’s geneaological studies emphasize the essential connection of
knowledge and power. Bodies of knowledge are not autonomous intellectual
structures that happen to be employed as Baconian instruments of power. Rather,
precisely as bodies of knowledge, they are tied but not reducible to systems of
social control. This essential connection of power and knowledge reflects
Foucault’s later view that power is not merely repressive but a creative, if
always dangerous, source of positive values. Discipline and Punish 5 showed how
prisons constitute criminals as objects of disciplinary knowledge. The first
volume of the History of Sexuality 6 sketched a project for seeing how, through
modern biological and psychological sciences of sexuality, individuals are
controlled by their own knowledge as self-scrutinizing and self-forming subjects.
The second volume was projected as a study of the origins of the modern notion
of a subject in practices of Christian confession. Foucault wrote such a study
The Confessions of the Flesh but did not publish it because he decided that a
proper understanding of the Christian development required a comparison with
ancient conceptions of the ethical self. This led to two volumes 4 on Grecian
and Roman sexuality: The Use of Pleasure and The Care of the Self. These final
writings make explicit the ethical project that in fact informs all of
Foucault’s work: the liberation of human beings from contingent conceptual
constraints masked as unsurpassable a priori limits and the adumbration of
alternative forms of existence.
Fondatum
-- Grice’s foundationalism: the view that knowledge and epistemic
knowledge-relevant justification have a two-tier structure: some instances of
knowledge and justification are non-inferential, or foundational; and all other
instances thereof are inferential, or non-foundational, in that they derive
ultimately from foundational knowledge or justification. This structural view
originates in Aristotle’s Posterior Analytics at least regarding knowledge,
receives an extreme formulation in Descartes’s Meditations, and flourishes,
with varying details, in the works of such twentieth-century philosophers as
Russell, C. I. Lewis, and Chisholm. Versions of foundationalism differ on two
main projects: a the precise explanation of the nature of non-inferential, or
foundational, knowledge and justification, and b the specific explanation of
how foundational knowledge and justification can be transmitted to
non-foundational beliefs. Foundationalism allows for differences on these
projects, since it is essentially a view about the structure of knowledge and
epistemic justification. The question whether knowledge has foundations is
essentially the question whether the sort of justification pertinent to
knowledge has a twotier structure. Some philosophers have construed the former
question as asking whether knowledge depends on beliefs that are certain in
some sense e.g., indubitable or infallible. This construal bears, however, on
only one species of foundationalism: radical foundationalism. Such
foundationalism, represented primarily by Descartes, requires that foundational
beliefs be certain and able to guarantee the certainty of the non-foundational
beliefs they support. Radical foundationalism is currently unpopular for two
main reasons. First, very few, if any, of our perceptual beliefs are certain i.e.,
indubitable; and, second, those of our beliefs that might be candidates for
certainty e.g., the belief that I am thinking lack sufficient substance to
guarantee the certainty of our rich, highly inferential knowledge of the
external world e.g., our knowledge of physics, chemistry, and biology.
Contemporary foundationalists typically endorse modest foundationalism, the
view that non-inferentially justified, foundational beliefs need not possess or
provide certainty and need not deductively support justified non-foundational
beliefs. Foundational beliefs or statements are often called basic beliefs or
statements, but the precise understanding of ‘basic’ here is controversial
among foundationalists. Foundationalists agree, however, in their general understanding
of non-inferentially justified, foundational beliefs as beliefs whose
justification does not derive from other beliefs, although they leave open
whether the causal basis of foundational beliefs includes other beliefs.
Epistemic justification comes in degrees, but for simplicity we can restrict
discussion to justification sufficient for satisfaction of the justification
condition for knowledge; we can also restrict discussion to what it takes for a
belief to have justification, omitting issues of what it takes to show that a
belief has it. Three prominent accounts of non-inferential justification are
available to modest foundationalists: a self-justification, b justification by
non-belief, non-propositional experiences, and c justification by a non-belief
reliable origin of a belief. Proponents of self-justification including, at one
time, Ducasse and Chisholm contend that foundational beliefs can justify
themselves, with no evidential support elsewhere. Proponents of foundational
justification by non-belief experiences shun literal self-justification; they
hold, following C. I. Lewis, that foundational perceptual beliefs can be
justified by non-belief sensory or perceptual experiences e.g., seeming to see
a dictionary that make true, are best explained by, or otherwise support, those
beliefs e.g., the belief that there is, or at least appears to be, a dictionary
here. Proponents of foundational justification by reliable origins find the
basis of non-inferential justification in belief-forming processes e.g.,
perception, memory, introspection that are truth-conducive, i.e., that tend to
produce true rather than false beliefs. This view thus appeals to the
reliability of a belief’s nonbelief origin, whereas the previous view appeals
to the particular sensory or perceptual experiences that correspond to e.g.,
make true or are best explained by a foundational belief. Despite disagreements
over the basis of foundational justification, modest foundationalists typically
agree that foundational justification is characterized by defeasibility, i.e.,
can be defeated, undermined, or overridden by a certain sort of expansion of
one’s evidence or justified beliefs. For instance, your belief that there is a
blue dictionary before you could lose its justification e.g., the justification
from your current perceptual experiences if you acquired new evidence that
there is a blue light shining on the dictionary before you. Foundational
justification, therefore, can vary over time if accompanied by relevant changes
in one’s perceptual evidence. It does not follow, however, that foundational
justification positively depends, i.e., is based, on grounds for denying that
there are defeaters. The relevant dependence can be regarded as negative in
that there need only be an absence of genuine defeaters. Critics of
foundationalism sometimes neglect that latter distinction regarding epistemic
dependence. The second big task for foundationalists is to explain how
justification transmits from foundational beliefs to inferentially justified,
non-foundational beliefs. Radical foundationalists insist, for such
transmission, on entailment relations that guarantee the truth or the certainty
of nonfoundational beliefs. Modest foundationalists are more flexible, allowing
for merely probabilistic inferential connections that transmit justification.
For instance, a modest foundationalist can appeal to explanatory inferential
connections, as when a foundational belief e.g., I seem to feel wet is best
explained for a person by a particular physical-object belief e.g., the belief
that the air conditioner overhead is leaking on me. Various other forms of
probabilistic inference are available to modest foundationalists; and nothing
in principle requires that they restrict foundational beliefs to what one “seems”
to sense or to perceive. The traditional motivation for foundationalism comes
largely from an eliminative regress argument, outlined originally regarding
knowledge in Aristotle’s Posterior Analytics. The argument, in shortest form,
is that foundationalism is a correct account of the structure of justification
since the alternative accounts all fail. Inferential justification is
justification wherein one belief, B1, is justified on the basis of another
belief, B2. How, if at all, is B2, the supporting belief, itself justified?
Obviously, Aristotle suggests, we cannot have a circle here, where B2 is
justified by B1; nor can we allow the chain of support to extend endlessly,
with no ultimate basis for justification. We cannot, moreover, allow B2 to remain
unjustified, foundationalism foundationalism 322 322 lest it lack what it takes to support
B1. If this is right, the structure of justification does not involve circles,
endless regresses, or unjustified starter-beliefs. That is, this structure is
evidently foundationalist. This is, in skeletal form, the regress argument for
foundationalism. Given appropriate flesh, and due attention to skepticism about
justification, this argument poses a serious challenge to non-foundationalist
accounts of the structure of epistemic justification, such as epistemic
coherentism. More significantly, foundationalism will then show forth as one of
the most compelling accounts of the structure of knowledge and justification.
This explains, at least in part, why foundationalism has been very prominent
historically and is still widely held in contemporary epistemology.
fourier: f.-m.-c. social
theorist and radical critic, often called a utopian socialist. His main works
were The Theory of Universal Unity 1822 and The New Industrial and Societal
World 1829. He argued that since each person has, not an integral soul but only
a partial one, personal integrity is possible only in unity with others.
Fourier thought that all existing societies were antagonistic. Following
Edenism, he believed societies developed through stages of savagery,
patriarchalism, barbarianism, and civilization. He believed this antagonism
could be transcended only in Harmony. It would be based on twelve kinds of
passions. Five were sensual, four affective, and three distributive; and these
in turn encouraged the passion for unity. The basic social unit would be a
phalanx containing 300 400 families about 1,6001,800 people of scientifically
blended characters. As a place of production but also of maximal satisfaction
of the passions of every member, Harmony should make labor attractive and
pleasurable. The main occupations of its members should be gastronomy, opera,
and horticulture. It should also establish a new world of love a form of
polygamy where men and women would be equal in rights. Fourier believed that
phalanxes would attract members of all other social systems, even the less
civilized, and bring about this new world system. Fourier’s vision of Griceian cooperation
both in theory and experimental practice influenced some anarchists,
syndicalists, and the cooperationist movement. His radical social critique was
important for the development of political and social thought in France,
Europe, and North America. Refs.: C. Gide, Fourier, precurseur de la
co-operation, H. P. Grice, “Fourier’s cooperation, and mine.”
freges
sättigung.
Grice: “I doubt it, because he wasn’t really a philosopher – and neither was
Frege, but Waismann’s porosity may well be a pun on Frege’s saturation!” -- Frege’s
original Sinn. Fregeian saturation. Grice was once at the Bodleian assisting
Austin in his translation of Frege’s Grundlegung – and browsing through the
old-style library fiches, Grice exclaims: “All these essays in German journals
about Fregeian saturation can surely saturate one!’ Austin was not amused. Neben
mathematischen und physikalischen Vorlesungen sowie einer in Philosophie hat
Frege in Jena Vorlesungen in Chemie besucht und in diesem Fach auch an einem
einsemestrigen Praktikum teilgenommen. In seiner wohlbekannten Rede über
Bindung und Sättigung von Ausdrücken klingt davon noch etwas nach.Betrachten
wir nun die Konsequenzen der Fregeschen Auffassung der prädikativen Natur der
Begriffe. Hierfür ist es zunächst erforderlich, abschließend einige
Besonderheiten anzumerken, die daraus folgen, daß auch Begriffsausdrücke
bedeutungsvoll sein sollen. Zunächst hatten wir ja mit Hilfe der Analogie
festgestellt, daß in einem Satz dasjenige, was Begriffsausdrücke bedeuten,
denselben ontologischen Status haben muß wie das, was Eigennamen bedeuten.
Insofern scheinen sowohl Eigennamen als auch Begriffsausdrücke jeweils
bestimmte (wenn auch hinsichtlich ihrer Sättigung oder Bindungsfähigkeit
unterschiedene) Entitäten als Bedeutung zu haben. Und Frege erklärt auch
explizit „Begriff ist Bedeutung eines Prädikates“ [BG, 198]. Frege’s distinction between saturated
expressions and unsaturated expressions corresponds to the distinction between
objects and concepts. A saturated expression refers to an object or argument
and has a complete sense in itself, while an unsaturated expression refers to a
concept or function and does not have a complete sense. For example, in the
sentence “Socrates is the teacher of Plato,” “Socrates” and “Plato” are proper
names and are saturated, while “. . . is the teacher of . . .” is unsaturated,
for it has empty spaces that must be filled with saturated expressions before it
gains a complete sense. “Statements in general . . . can be imagined to be
split up into two parts; one complete in itself, and the other in need of
supplementation, or ‘unsaturated’.” Frege, “Function and Concept,”
Philosophical Writings of Gottlob Frege. -- frege, G.,
philosopher. A founder of modern mathematical logic, an advocate of logicism,
and a major source of twentieth-century analytic philosophy, he directly
influenced Russell, Vitters, and Carnap. Frege’s distinction between the sense
and the reference of linguistic expressions continues to be debated. His first
publication in logic was his strikingly original 1879 Begriffsschrift
Concept-notation. Here he devised a formal language whose central innovation is
the quantifier-variable notation to express generality; he set forth in this
language a version of second-order quantificational logic that he used to
develop a logical definition of the ancestral of a relation. Frege invented his
Begriffsschrift in order to circumvent drawbacks of the use of colloquial
language to state proofs. Colloquial language is irregular, unperspicuous, and
ambiguous in its expression of logical relationships. Moreover, logically
crucial features of the content of statements may remain tacit and unspoken. It
is thus impossible to determine exhaustively the premises on which the
conclusion of any proof conducted within ordinary language depends. Frege’s Begriffsschrift
is to force the explicit statement of the logically relevant features of any
assertion. Proofs in the system are limited to what can be obtained from a body
of evidently true logical axioms by means of a small number of truth-preserving
notational manipulations inference rules. Here is the first hallmark of Frege’s
view of logic: his formulation of logic as a formal system and the ideal of
explicitness and rigor that this presentation subserves. Although the formal
exactitude with which he formulates logic makes possible the metamathematical
investigation of formalized theories, he showed almost no interest in
metamathematical questions. He intended the Begriffsschrift to be used. How
though does Frege conceive of the subject matter of logic? His orientation in
logic is shaped by his anti-psychologism, his conviction that psychology has
nothing to do with logic. He took his notation to be a full-fledged language in
its own right. The logical axioms do not mention objects or properties whose investigation
pertains to some special science; and Frege’s quantifiers are unrestricted.
Laws of logic are, as he says, the laws of truth, and these are the most
general truths. He envisioned the supplementation of the logical vocabulary of
the Begriffsschrift with the basic vocabulary of the special sciences. In this
way the Begriffsschrift affords a framework for the completely rigorous
deductive development of any science whatsoever. This resolutely
nonpsychological universalist view of logic as the most general science is the
second hallmark of Frege’s view of logic. This universalist view distinguishes
his approach sharply from the coeval algebra of logic approach of George Boole
and Ernst Schröder. Vitters, both in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus 1 and
in later writings, is very critical of Frege’s universalist view. Logical
positivism most notably Carnap in The
Logical Syntax of Language 4 rejected it
as well. Frege’s universalist view is also distinct from more contemporary
views. With his view of quantifiers as intrinsically unrestricted, he saw
little point in talking of varying interpretations of a language, believing
that such talk is a confused way of getting at what is properly said by means
of second-order generalizations. In particular, the semantical conception of
logical consequences that becomes prominent in logic after Kurt Gödel’s and
Tarski’s work is foreign to Frege. Frege’s work in logic was prompted by an
inquiry after the ultimate foundation for arithmetic truths. He criticized J. S.
Mill’s empiricist attempt to ground knowledge of the arithmetic of the positive
integers inductively in our manipulations of small collections of things. He
also rejected crudely formalist views that take pure mathematics to be a sort
of notational game. In contrast to these views and Kant’s, he hoped to use his
Begriffsschrift to define explicitly the basic notions of arithmetic in logical
terms and to deduce the basic principles of arithmetic from logical axioms and
these definitions. The explicitness and rigor of his formulation of logic will
guarantee that there are no implicit extralogical premises on which the
arithmetical conclusions depend. Such proofs, he believed, would show
arithmetic to be analytic, not synthetic as Kant had claimed. However, Frege
redefined ‘analytic’ to mean ‘provable from
logical laws’ in his rather un-Kantian sense of ‘logic’ and definitions.
Frege’s strategy for these proofs rests on an analysis of the concept of
cardinal number that he presented in his nontechnical 4 book, The Foundations
of Arithmetic. Frege, attending to the use of numerals in statements like ‘Mars
has two moons’, argued that it contains an assertion about a concept, that it
asserts that there are exactly two things falling under the concept ‘Martian moon’.
He also noted that both numerals in these statements and those of pure
arithmetic play the logical role of singular terms, his proper names. He
concluded that numbers are objects so that a definition of the concept of
number must then specify what objects numbers are. He observed that 1 the
number of F % the number of G just in case there is a one-to-one correspondence
between the objects that are F and those that are G. The right-hand side of 1
is statable in purely logical terms. As Frege recognized, thanks to the
definition of the ancestral of a relation, 1 suffices in the second-order
setting of the Begriffsschrift for the derivation of elementary arithmetic. The
vindication of his logicism requires, however, the logical definition of the
expression ‘the number of’. He sharply criticized the use in mathematics of any
notion of set or collection that views a set as built up from its elements.
However, he assumed that, corresponding to each concept, there is an object,
the extension of the concept. He took the notion of an extension to be a
logical one, although one to which the notion of a concept is prior. He adopted
as a fundamental logical principle the ill-fated biconditional: the extension
of F % the extension of G just in case every F is G, and vice versa. If this
principle were valid, he could exploit the equivalence relation over concepts
that figures in the right-hand side of 1 to identify the number of F with a
certain extension and thus obtain 1 as a theorem. In The Basic Laws of
Arithmetic vol. 1, 3; vol. 2, 3 he formalized putative proofs of basic
arithmetical laws within a modified version of the Begriffsschrift that
included a generalization of the law of extensions. However, Frege’s law of
extensions, in the context of his logic, is inconsistent, leading to Russell’s
paradox, as Russell communicated to Frege in 2. Frege’s attempt to establish
logicism was thus, on its own terms, unsuccessful. In Begriffsschrift Frege
rejected the thesis that every uncompound sentence is logically segmented into
a subject and a predicate. Subsequently, he said that his approach in logic was
distinctive in starting not from the synthesis of concepts into judgments, but
with the notion of truth and that to which this notion is applicable, the
judgeable contents or thoughts that are expressed by statements. Although he
said that truth is the goal of logic, he did not think that we have a grasp of
the notion of truth that is independent of logic. He eschewed a correspondence
theory of truth, embracing instead a redundancy view of the truth-predicate.
For Frege, to call truth the goal of logic points toward logic’s concern with
inference, with the recognition-of-thetruth judging of one thought on the basis
of the recognition-of-the-truth of another. This recognition-of-the-truth-of is
not verbally expressed by a predicate, but rather in the assertive force with
which a sentence is uttered. The starting point for logic is then reflection on
elementary inference patterns that analyze thoughts and reveal a logical segmentation
in language. This starting point, and the fusion of logical and ontological
categories it engenders, is arguably what Frege is pointing toward by his
enigmatic context principle in Foundations: only in the context of a sentence
does a word have a meaning. He views sentences as having a function-argument
segmentation like that manifest in the terms of arithmetic, e.g., 3 $ 4 ! 2.
Truth-functional inference patterns, like modus ponens, isolate sentences as
logical units in compound sentences. Leibniz’s law the substitution of one name for another in a
sentence on the basis of an equation
isolates proper names. Proper names designate objects. Predicates,
obtainable by removing proper names from sentences, designate concepts. The
removal of a predicate from a sentence leaves a higher level predicate that
signifies a second-level concept under which first-level concepts fall. An
example is the universal quantifier over objects: it designates a second-level
concept under which a first-level concept falls, if every object falls under
it. Frege takes each first-level concept to be determinately true or false of
each object. Vague predicates, like ‘is bald’, thus fail to signify concepts.
This requirement of concept determinacy is a product of Frege’s construal of
quantification over objects as intrinsically unrestricted. Thus, concept
determinacy is simply a form of the law of the excluded middle: for any concept
F and any object x, either x is F or x is not F. Frege elaborates and modifies
his basic logical ideas in three seminal papers from , “Function and Concept,”
“On Concept and Frege, Gottlob Frege, Gottlob 329 329 Object,” and “On Sense and Meaning.” In
“Function and Concept,” Frege sharpens his conception of the function-argument
structure of language. He introduces the two truth-values, the True and the
False, and maintains that sentences are proper names of these objects. Concepts
become functions that map objects to either the True or the False. The
course-of-values of a function is introduced as a generalization of the notion
of an extension. Generally then, an object is anything that might be designated
by a proper name. There is nothing more basic to be said by way of elucidating
what an object is. Similarly, first-level functions are what are designated by
the expressions that result from removing names from compound proper names.
Frege calls functions unsaturated or incomplete, in contrast to objects, which
are saturated. Proper names and function names are not intersubstitutable so
that the distinction between objects and functions is a type-theoretic,
categorial distinction. No function is an object; no function name designates
an object; there are no quantifiers that simultaneously generalize over both
functions and concepts. Just here Frege’s exposition of his views, if not the
views themselves, encounter a difficulty. In explaining his views, he uses
proper names of the form ‘the concept F’ to talk about concepts; and in
contrasting unsaturated functions with saturated objects, apepars to generalize
over both with a single quantifier. Benno Kerry, a contemporary of Frege,
charged Frege’s views with inconsistency. Since the phrase ‘the concept horse’
is a proper name, it must designate an object. On Frege’s view, it follows that
the concept ‘horse’ is not a concept, but an object, an apparent inconsistency.
Frege responded to Kerry’s criticism in “On Concept and Object.” He embraced
Kerry’s paradox, denying that it represents a genuine inconsistency, while
admitting that his remarks about the functionobject distinction are, as the
result of an unavoidable awkwardness of language, misleading. Frege maintained
that the distinction between function and object is logically simple and so
cannot be properly defined. His remarks on the distinction are informal
handwaving designed to elucidate what is captured within the Begriffsschrift by
the difference between proper names and function names together with their
associated distinct quantifiers. Frege’s handling of the function object
distinction is a likely source for Vitters’s sayshow distinction in the
Tractatus. At the beginning of “On Sense and Meaning,” Frege distinguishes
between the reference or meaning Bedeutung of a proper name and its sense Sinn.
He observes that the sentence ‘The Morning Star is identical with the Morning
Star’ is a trivial instance of the principle of identity. In contrast, the
sentence ‘The Morning Star is identical with the Evening Star’ expresses a
substantive astronomical discovery. The two sentences thus differ in what Frege
called their cognitive value: someone who understood both might believe the
first and doubt the second. This difference cannot be explained in terms of any
difference in reference between names in these sentences. Frege explained it in
terms of a difference between the senses expressed by ‘the Morning Star’ and
‘the Evening Star’. In posthumously published writings, he indicated that the
sensereference distinction extends to function names as well. In this
distinction, Frege extends to names the notion of the judgeable content
expressed by a sentence: the sense of a name is the contribution that the name
makes to the thought expressed by sentences in which it occurs. Simultaneously,
in classifying sentences as proper names of truth-values, he applies to sentences
the notion of a name’s referring to something. Frege’s function-argument view
of logical segmentation constrains his view of both the meaning and the sense
of compound names: the substitution for any name occurring in a compound
expression of a name with the same reference sense yields a new compound
expression with the same reference sense as the original. Frege advances
several theses about sense that individually and collectively have been a
source of debate in philosophy of language. First, the sense of an expression
is what is grasped by anyone who understands it. Despite the connection between
understanding and sense, Frege provides no account of synonymy, no identity
criteria for senses. Second, the sense of an expression is not something psychological.
Senses are objective. They exist independently of anyone’s grasping them; their
availability to different thinkers is a presupposition for communication in
science. Third, the sense expressed by a name is a mode of presentation of the
name’s reference. Here Frege’s views contrast with Russell’s. Corresponding to
Frege’s thoughts are Russell’s propositions. In The Principles of Mathematics
3, Russell maintained that the meaningful words in a sentence designate things,
properties, and relations that are themselves constituents of the proposition
expressed by the sentence. For Frege, our access through judgment to objects
and functions is via Frege, Gottlob Frege, Gottlob 330 330 the senses that are expressed by names
that mean these items. These senses, not the items they present, occur in
thoughts. Names expressing different senses may refer to the same item; and
some names, while expressing a sense, refer to nothing. Any compound name
containing a name that has a sense, but lacks a reference, itself lacks a
meaning. A person may fully understand an expression without knowing whether it
means anything and without knowing whether it designates what another
understood name does. Fourth, the sense ordinarily expressed by a name is the
reference of the name, when the name occurs in indirect discourse. Although the
Morning Star is identical with the Evening Star, the inference from the
sentence ‘Smith believes that the Morning Star is a planet’ to ‘Smith believes
that the Evening Star is a planet’ is not sound. Frege, however, accepts
Leibniz’s law without restriction. He accordingly takes such seeming failures
of Leibniz’s law to expose a pervasive ambiguity in colloquial language: names
in indirect discourse do not designate what they designate outside of indirect
discourse. The fourth thesis is offered as an explanation of this
ambiguity.
liberum
arbitrium – Grice: “I would place the traditional proble of the freedom of the
will within the philosophy of action, of the type I engaged in only with two
Englishmen, both students at Christ Church, or ‘The House,’: J. F. Thomson, and
D. F. Pears. free: “ “Free” is one
of the trickiest adjectives in English. My favourite is ‘alcohol-free’. And
then there’s ‘free logic.”” Free logic, a system of quantification theory, with
or without identity, that allows for non-denoting singular terms. In classical
quantification theory, all singular terms free variables and individual
constants are assigned a denotation in all models. But this condition appears
counterintuitive when such systems are applied to natural language, where many
singular terms seem to be non-denoting ‘Pegasus’, ‘Sherlock Holmes’, and the
like. Various solutions of this problem have been proposed, ranging from
Frege’s chosen object theory assign an arbitrary denotation to each
non-denoting singular term to Russell’s description theory deny singular term status
to most expressions used as such in natural language, and eliminate them from
the “logical form” of that language to a weakening of the quantifiers’
“existential import,” which allows for denotations to be possible, but not
necessarily actual, objects. All these solutions preserve the structure of
classical quantification theory and make adjustments at the level of
application. Free logic is a more radical solution: it allows for legitimate
singular terms to be denotationless, maintains the quantifiers’ existential
import, but modifies both the proof theory and the semantics of first-order
logic. Within proof theory, the main modification consists of eliminating the
rule of existential generalization, which allows one to infer ‘There exists a
flying horse’ from ‘Pegasus is a flying horse’. Within semantics, the main
problem is giving truth conditions for sentences containing non-denoting
singular terms, and there are various ways of accomplishing this. Conventional
semantics assigns truth-values to atomic sentences containing non-denoting
singular terms by convention, and then determines the truth-values of complex
sentences as usual. Outer domain semantics divides the domain of interpretation
into an inner and an outer part, using the inner part as the range of
quantifiers and the outer part to provide for “denotations” for non-denoting
singular terms which are then not literally denotationless, but rather left
without an existing denotation. Supervaluational semantics, when considering a
sentence A, assigns all possible combinations of truth-values to the atomic
components of A containing non-denoting singular terms, evaluates A on the
basis of each of those combinations, and then assigns to A the logical product
of all such evaluations. Thus both ‘Pegasus flies’ and ‘Pegasus does not fly’
turn out truth-valueless, but ‘Pegasus flies or Pegasus does not fly’ turns out
true since whatever truth-value is assigned to its atomic component ‘Pegasus
flies’ the truth-value for the whole sentence is true. A free logic is
inclusive if it allows for the possibility that the range of quantifiers be
empty that there exists nothing at all; it is exclusive otherwise. Then there’s the free rider, a person who
benefits from a social arrangement without bearing an appropriate share of the
burdens of maintaining that arrangement, e.g. one who benefits from government
services without paying one’s taxes that support them. The arrangements from
which a free rider benefits may be either formal or informal. Cooperative
arrangements that permit free riders are likely to be unstable; parties to the
arrangement are unlikely to continue to bear the burdens of maintaining it if
others are able to benefit without doing their part. As a result, it is common
for cooperative arrangements to include mechanisms to discourage free riders,
e.g. legal punishment, or in cases of informal conventions the mere disapproval
of one’s peers. It is a matter of some controversy as to whether it is always
morally wrong to benefit from an arrangement without contributing to its
maintenance. Then there’s the free will problem, the problem of the nature of
free agency and its relation to the origins and conditions of responsible
behavior. For those who contrast ‘free’ with ‘determined’, a central question is
whether humans are free in what they do or determined by external events beyond
their control. A related concern is whether an agent’s responsibility for an
action requires that the agent, the act, or the relevant decision be free.
This, in turn, directs attention to action, motivation, deliberation, choice,
and intention, and to the exact sense, if any, in which our actions are under
our control. Use of ‘free will’ is a matter of traditional nomenclature; it is
debated whether freedom is properly ascribed to the will or the agent, or to
actions, choices, deliberations, etc. Controversy over conditions of
responsible behavior forms the predominant historical and conceptual background
of the free will problem. Most who ascribe moral responsibility acknowledge
some sense in which agents must be free in acting as they do; we are not
responsible for what we were forced to do or were unable to avoid no matter how
hard we tried. But there are differing accounts of moral responsibility and
disagreements about the nature and extent of such practical freedom a notion
also important in Kant. Accordingly, the free will problem centers on these
questions: Does moral responsibility require any sort of practical freedom? If
so, what sort? Are people practically free? Is practical freedom consistent
with the antecedent determination of actions, thoughts, and character? There is
vivid debate about this last question. Consider a woman deliberating about whom
to vote for. From her first-person perspective, she feels free to vote for any
candidate and is convinced that the selection is up to her regardless of prior
influences. But viewing her eventual behavior as a segment of larger natural
and historical processes, many would argue that there are underlying causes
determining her choice. With this contrast of intuitions, any attempt to decide
whether the voter is free depends on the precise meanings associated with terms
like ‘free’, ‘determine’, and ‘up to her’. One thing event, situation
determines another if the latter is a consequence of it, or necessitated by it,
e.g., the voter’s hand movements by her intention. As usually understood,
determinism holds that whatever happens is determined by antecedent conditions,
where determination is standardly conceived as causation by antecedent events
and circumstances. So construed, determinism implies that at any time the
future is already fixed and unique, with no possibility of alternative
development. Logical versions of determinism declare each future event to be
determined by what is already true, specifically, by the truth that it will
occur then. Typical theological variants accept the predestination of all
circumstances and events inasmuch as a divine being knows in advance or even
from eternity that they will obtain. Two elements are common to most
interpretations of ‘free’. First, freedom requires an absence of determination
or certain sorts of determination, and second, one acts and chooses freely only
if these endeavors are, properly speaking, one’s own. From here, accounts diverge.
Some take freedom liberty of indifference or the contingency of alternative
courses of action to be critical. Thus, for the woman deliberating about which
candidate to select, each choice is an open alternative inasmuch as it is
possible but not yet necessitated. Indifference is also construed as
motivational equilibrium, a condition some find essential to the idea that a
free choice must be rational. Others focus on freedom liberty of spontaneity,
where the voter is free if she votes as she chooses or desires, a reading that
reflects the popular equation of freedom with “doing what you want.” Associated
with both analyses is a third by which the woman acts freely if she exercises
her control, implying responsiveness to free rider free will problem 326 326 intent as well as both abilities to
perform an act and to refrain. A fourth view identifies freedom with autonomy,
the voter being autonomous to the extent that her selection is self-determined,
e.g., by her character, deeper self, higher values, or informed reason. Though
distinct, these conceptions are not incompatible, and many accounts of
practical freedom include elements of each. Determinism poses problems if
practical freedom requires contingency alternate possibilities of action.
Incompatibilism maintains that determinism precludes freedom, though
incompatibilists differ whether everything is determined. Those who accept
determinism thereby endorse hard determinism associated with eighteenthcentury
thinkers like d’Holbach and, recently, certain behaviorists, according to which
freedom is an illusion since behavior is brought about by environmental and
genetic factors. Some hard determinists also deny the existence of moral
responsibility. At the opposite extreme, metaphysical libertarianism asserts
that people are free and responsible and, a fortiori, that the past does not
determine a unique future a position
some find enhanced by developments in quantum physics. Among adherents of this
sort of incompatibilism are those who advocate a freedom of indifference by
describing responsible choices as those that are undetermined by antecedent
circumstances Epicureans. To rebut the charge that choices, so construed, are
random and not really one’s “own,” it has been suggested that several elements,
including an agent’s reasons, delimit the range of possibilities and influence
choices without necessitating them a view held by Leibniz and, recently, by
Robert Kane. Libertarians who espouse agency causation, on the other hand,
blend contingency with autonomy in characterizing a free choice as one that is
determined by the agent who, in turn, is not caused to make it a view found in
Carneades and Reid. Unwilling to abandon practical freedom yet unable to
understand how a lack of determination could be either necessary or desirable
for responsibility, many philosophers take practical freedom and responsibility
to be consistent with determinism, thereby endorsing compatibilism. Those who
also accept determinism advocate what James called soft determinism. Its
supporters include some who identify freedom with autonomy the Stoics, Spinoza
and others who champion freedom of spontaneity Hobbes, Locke, Hume. The latter
speak of liberty as the power of doing or refraining from an action according
to what one wills, so that by choosing otherwise one would have done otherwise.
An agent fails to have liberty when constrained, that is, when either prevented
from acting as one chooses or compelled to act in a manner contrary to what one
wills. Extending this model, liberty is also diminished when one is caused to
act in a way one would not otherwise prefer, either to avoid a greater danger
coercion or because there is deliberate interference with the envisioning of
alternatives manipulation. Compatibilists have shown considerable ingenuity in
responding to criticisms that they have ignored freedom of choice or the need
for open alternatives. Some apply the spontaneity, control, or autonomy models
to decisions, so that the voter chooses freely if her decision accords with her
desires, is under her control, or conforms to her higher values, deeper
character, or informed reason. Others challenge the idea that responsibility
requires alternative possibilities of action. The so-called Frankfurt-style
cases developed by Harry G. Frankfurt are situations where an agent acts in
accord with his desires and choices, but because of the presence of a
counterfactual intervener a mechanism
that would have prevented the agent from doing any alternative action had he
shown signs of acting differently the
agent could not have done otherwise. Frankfurt’s intuition is that the agent is
as responsible as he would have been if there were no intervener, and thus that
responsible action does not require alternative possibilities. Critics have
challenged the details of the Frankfurt-style cases in attempting to undermine
the appeal of the intuition. A different compatibilist tactic recognizes the
need for open alternatives and employs versions of the indifference model in
describing practical freedom. Choices are free if they are contingent relative
to certain subsets of circumstances, e.g. those the agent is or claims to be
cognizant of, with the openness of alternatives grounded in what one can choose
“for all one knows.” Opponents of compatibilism charge that since these
refinements leave agents subject to external determination, even by hidden
controllers, compatibilism continues to face an insurmountable challenge. Their
objections are sometimes summarized by the consequence argument so called by
Peter van Inwagen, who has prominently defended it: if everything were
determined by factors beyond one’s control, then one’s acts, choices, and
character would also be beyond one’s control, and consequently, agents would
never be free and there would be nothing free will problem free will problem
327 327 for which they are responsible.
Such reasoning usually employs principles asserting the closure of the
practical modalities ability, control, avoidability, inevitability, etc. under
consequence relations. However, there is a reason to suppose that the sort of
ability and control required by responsibility involve the agent’s sense of
what can be accomplished. Since cognitive states are typically not closed under
consequence, the closure principles underlying the consequence argument are
disputable. From liber (‘eleutheros) is also liberatum: liberum arbitrium – vide ‘arbitrium’ How can arbitrium
not be free? Oddly this concerns rationality. For Grice, as for almost
everyone, a rational agent is an autonomous agent. Freewill is proved
grammatically. The Romans had a ‘modus deliberativus’, and even a ‘modus
optativus’ (ortike ktesis) “in imitationem Graecis.”If you utter “Close the
door!” you rely on free will. It would be otiose for a language or system of
communication to have as its goal to inform/get informed, and influence/being
influenced if determinism and fatalism were true. freedom: Like identity, crucial in philosophy
in covering everything. E cannot communicate that p, unless E is FREE. An
amoeba cannot communicate thatp. End setting, unweighed rationality,
rationality about the ends, autonomy. Grice was especially concerned with Kants
having brought back the old Greek idea of eleutheria for philosophical
discussion. Refs.: the obvious keywords are “freedom” and “free,” but most of
the material is in “Actions and events,” in PPQ, and below under ‘kantianism’ –
The H. P. Grice Papers, BANC.Bratman, of Stanford, much influenced by Grice (at
Berkeley then) thanks to their Hands-Across-the-Bay programme, helps us to
understand this Pological progression towards the idea of strong autonomy or
freedom. Recall that Grices Ps combine Lockes very intelligent parrots with
Russells and Carnaps nonsensical Ps of which nothing we are told other than
they karulise elatically. Grices purpose is to give a little thought to a
question. What are the general principles exemplified, in
creature-construction, in progressing from one type of P to a higher type? What
kinds of steps are being made? The kinds of step with which Grice deals are
those which culminate in a licence to include, within the specification of the
content of the psychological state of this or that type of P, a range of
expressions which would be inappropriate with respect to this lower-type P.
Such expressions include this or that connective, this or that quantifier, this
or that temporal modifier, this or that mode indicator, this or that modal
operator, and (importantly) this or that expression to refer to this or that
souly state like … judges that … and …
will that … This or that expression, that is, the availability of which leads
to the structural enrichment of the specification of content. In general, these
steps will be ones by which this or that item or idea which has, initially, a
legitimate place outside the scope of this or that souly instantiable (or, if
you will, the expressions for which occur legitimately outside the scope of
this or that souly predicate) come to have a legitimate place within the scope
of such an instantiable, a step by which, one might say, this or that item or
ideas comes to be internalised. Grice is disposed to regard as prototypical the
sort of natural disposition or propension which Hume attributes to a person,
and which is very important to Hume, viz. the tendency of the soul to spread
itself upon objects, i.e. to project into the world items which, properly or
primitively considered, is a feature of this or that souly state. Grice sets
out in stages the application of aspects of the genitorial programme. We then start
with a zero-order, with a P equipped to satisfy unnested, or logically
amorphous, judging and willing, i.e. whose contents do not involve judging or
willing. We soon reach our first P, G1. It would be advantageous to
a P0 if it could have this or that judging and this or that
willing, which relate to its own judging or willing. Such G1 could
be equipped to control or regulate its own judgings and willings. It will
presumably be already constituted so as to conform to the law that, cæteris
paribus, if it wills that p and judge that ~p, if it can, it makes it the case
that p in its soul To give it some control over its judgings and willings, we
need only extend the application of this law to the Ps judging and willing. We
equip the P so that, cæteris paribus, if it wills that it is not the case that
it wills that p and it judges that they do will that p, if it can, it makes it
the case that it does not will that p. And we somehow ensure that sometimes it
can do this. It may be that the installation of this kind of control would go
hand in had with the installation of the capacity for evaluation. Now, unlike
it is the case with a G1, a G2s intentional effort depends on the motivational
strength of its considered desire at the time of action. There is a process by
which this or that conflicting considered desire motivates action as a broadly
causal process, a process that reveals motivational strength. But a G2 might
itself try to weigh considerations provided by such a conflicting desire B1 and
B2 in deliberation about this or that pro and this or that con of various
alternatives. In the simplest case, such weighing treats each of the things
desired as a prima facie justifying end. In the face of conflict, it weighs
this and that desired end, where the weights correspond to the motivational
strength of the associated considered desire. The outcome of such deliberation,
Aristotle’s prohairesis, matches the outcome of the causal motivational process
envisioned in the description of G2. But, since the weights it invokes
in such deliberation correspond to the motivational strength of this or that
relevant considered desire (though perhaps not to the motivational strength of
this or that relevant considered desire), the resultant activitiy matches those
of a corresponding G2 (each of whose desires, we are assuming,
are considered). To be more realistic, we might limit ourselves to saying that
a P2 has the capacity to make the transition from this or that
unconsidered desire to this or that considered desire, but does not always do
this. But it will keep the discussion more manageable to simplify and to
suppose that each desire is considered. We shall not want this G2 to depend, in
each will and act in ways that reveal the motivational strength of this or that
considered desire at the time of action, but for a G3 it will
also be the case that in this or that, though not each) case, it acts on the
basis of how it weights this or that end favoured by this or that conflicting
considered desire. This or that considered desire will concern matters that
cannot be achieved simply by action at a single time. E. g. G3 may want to
nurture a vegetable garden, or build a house. Such matters will require
organized and coordinated action that extends over time. What the G3 does now will
depend not only on what it now desires but also on what it now expects it will
do later given what it does now. It needs a way of settling now what it will do
later given what it does now. The point is even clearer when we remind
ourselves that G3 is not alone. It is, we may assume, one of some number of G3;
and in many cases it needs to coordinate what it does with what other G3 do so
as to achieve ends desired by all participants, itself included. These
costs are magnified for G4 whose various plans are interwoven so that a change
in one element can have significant ripple effects that will need to be
considered. Let us suppose that the general strategies G4 has for responding to
new information about its circumstances are sensitive to these kinds of costs.
Promoting in the long run the satisfaction of its considered desires and
preferences. G4 is a somewhat sophisticated planning agent but
it has a problem. It can expect that its desires and preferences may well
change over time and undermine its efforts at organizing and coordinating its
activities over time. Perhaps in many cases this is due to the kind of temporal
discounting. So for example G4 may have a plan to exercise every day but may
tend to prefer a sequence of not exercising on the present day but exercising
all days in the future, to a uniform sequence the present day included. At the
end of the day it returns to its earlier considered preference in favour of
exercising on each and every day. Though G4, unlike G3, has the
capacity to settle on prior plans or plaices concerning exercise, this capacity
does not yet help in such a case. A creature whose plans were stable in ways in
part shaped by such a no-regret principle would be more likely than G4 to
resist temporary temptations. So let us build such a principle into the
stability of the plans of a G5, whose plans and policies are not derived solely
from facts about its limits of time, attention, and the like. It is also
grounded in the central concerns of a planning agent with its own future, concerns
that lend special significance to anticipated future regret. So let us add to
G5 the capacity and disposition to arrive at such hierarchies of higher-order
desires concerning its will. This gives us creature G6. There is a problem
with G6, one that has been much discussed. It is not clear why a higher-order
desire ‒ even a higher-order desire that a certain desire be ones
will ‒ is not simply one more desire in the pool of desires
(Berkeley Gods will problem). Why does it have the authority to constitute or
ensure the agents (i. e. the creatures) endorsement or rejection of a
first-order desire? Applied to G6 this is the question of whether, by virtue
solely of its hierarchies of desires, it really does succeed in taking its own
stand of endorsement or rejection of various first-order desires. Since it was
the ability to take its own stand that we are trying to provide in the move to
P6, we need some response to this challenge. The basic point is that
G6 is not merely a time-slice agent. It is, rather, and
understands itself to be, a temporally persisting planning agent, one who
begins, and continues, and completes temporally extended projects. On a broadly
Lockean view, its persistence over time consists in relevant psychological
continuities (e.g., the persistence of attitudes of belief and intention) and
connections (e.g., memory of a past event, or the later intentional execution
of an intention formed earlier). Certain attitudes have as a primary role the
constitution and support of such Lockean continuities and connections. In
particular, policies that favour or reject various desires have it as their
role to constitute and support various continuities both of ordinary desires
and of the politicos themselves. For this reason such policies are not merely
additional wiggles in the psychic stew. Instead, these policies have a claim to
help determine where the agent ‒ i.e., the temporally persisting agent ‒
stands with respect to its desires, or so it seems to me reasonable to say. The
psychology of G7 continues to have the hierarchical structure of pro-attitudes
introduced with G6. The difference is that the higher-order pro-attitudes of G6
were simply characterized as desires in a broad, generic sense, and no appeal
was made to the distinctive species of pro-attitude constituted by plan-like
attitudes. That is the sense in which the psychology of G7 is an extension of
the psychology of G6. Let us then give G7 such higher-order policies with the
capacity to take a stand with respect to its desires by arriving at relevant
higher-order policies concerning the functioning of those desires over time. G7 exhibits
a merger of hierarchical and planning structures. Appealing to planning theory
and ground in connection to the temporally extended structure of agency to be
ones will. G7 has higher-order policies that favour or challenge motivational
roles of its considered desires. When G7 engages in deliberative weighing of
conflicting, desired ends it seems that the assigned weights should reflect the
policies that determine where it stands with respect to relevant desires. But
the policies we have so far appealed to ‒ policies concerning what desires are
to be ones will ‒ do not quite address this concern. The problem is that one
can in certain cases have policies concerning which desires are to motivate and
yet these not be policies that accord what those desires are for a
corresponding justifying role in deliberation. G8. A solution is to give our
creature, G8, the capacity to arrive at policies that express
its commitment to be motivated by a desire by way of its treatment of that
desire as providing, in deliberation, a justifying end for action. G8 has
policies for treating (or not treating) certain desires as providing justifying
ends, as, in this way, reason-providing, in motivationally effective
deliberation. Let us call such policies self-governing policies. We will
suppose that these policies are mutually compatible and do not challenge each
other. In this way G8 involves an extension of structures already present in
G7. The grounds on which G8 arrives at (and on occasion revises) such
self-governing policies will be many and varied. We can see these policies as
crystallizing complex pressures and concerns, some of which are grounded in
other policies or desires. These self-governing policies may be tentative and
will normally not be immune to change. If we ask what G8 values in this case,
the answer seems to be: what it values is constituted in part by its
higher-order self-governing policies. In particular, it values exercise over
nonexercise even right now, and even given that it has a considered, though
temporary, preference to the contrary. Unlike lower Ps, what P8 now
values is not simply a matter of its present, considered desires and
preferences. Now this model of P8 seems in relevant aspects to be a partial)
model of us, in our better moments, of course. So we arrive at the conjecture
that one important kind of valuing of which we are capable involves, in the
cited ways, both our first-order desires and our higher order self-governing
policies. In an important sub-class of cases our valuing involves reflexive
polices that are both first-order policies of action and higher-order policies
to treat the first-order policy as reason providing in motivationally effective
deliberation. This may seem odd. Valuing seems normally to be a first-order
attitude. One values honesty, say. The proposal is that an important kind of
valuing involves higher-order policies. Does this mean that, strictly speaking,
what one values (in this sense) is itself a desire ‒ not honesty, say, but a
desire for honesty? No, it does not. What I value in the present case is
honesty; but, on the theory, my valuing honesty in art consists in certain
higher-order self-governing policies. An agents reflective valuing involves a
kind of higher-order willing. Freud challenged the power structure of the soul
in Plato: it is the libido that takes control, not the logos. Grice takes up
this polemic. Aristotle takes up Platos challenge, each type of soul is united
to the next by the idea of life. The animal soul, between the vegetative and
the rational, is not detachable.
Grice’s
Freudian slip:
Grice thought that the idea of a Freudian slip was ‘ridiculous,’ – for Grice
‘mean’ is intentional, unless it is used metaphorically, for ‘dark clouds mean
rain.’ Since his interest is in ‘communicate,’ surely the ‘slipper’ (R. lapsus
linguae) cannot ‘communicate.’ “What bothers me most is Freudian convoluted
attempts to have this, as Lacan will, as the libido saying this or that!” -- Austrian
neurologist and psychologist, the founder of psychoanalysis. Starting with the
study of hysteria in late nineteenth-century Vienna, Freud developed a theory
of the mind that has come to dominate modern thought. His notions of the
unconscious, of a mind divided against itself, of the meaningfulness of
apparently meaningless activity, of the displacement and transference of
feelings, of stages of psychosexual development, of the pervasiveness and
importance of sexual motivation, as well as of much else, have helped shape
modern consciousness. His language and that of his translators, whether
specifying divisions of the mind e.g. id, ego, and superego, types of disorder
e.g. obsessional neurosis, or the structure of experience e.g. Oedipus complex,
narcissism, has become the language in which we describe and understand
ourselves and others. As the poet W. H. Auden wrote on the occasion of Freud’s
death, “if often he was wrong and, at times, absurd, / to us he is no more a
person / now but a whole climate of opinion / under whom we conduct our
different lives. . . .” Hysteria is a disorder involving organic symptoms with
no apparent organic cause. Following early work in neurophysiology, Freud in
collaboration with Josef Breuer came to the view that “hysterics suffer mainly
from reminiscences,” in particular buried memories of traumatic experiences,
the strangulated affect of which emerged in conversion hysteria in the
distorted form of physical symptoms. Treatment involved the recovery of the
repressed memories to allow the cathartic discharge or abreaction of the
previously displaced and strangulated affect. This provided the background for
Freud’s seduction theory, which traced hysterical symptoms to traumatic
prepubertal sexual assaults typically by fathers. But Freud later abandoned the
seduction theory because the energy assumptions were problematic e.g., if the
only energy involved was strangulated affect from long-past external trauma,
why didn’t the symptom successfully use up that energy and so clear itself up?
and because he came to see that fantasy could have the same effects as memory
of actual events: “psychical reality was of more importance than material
reality.” What was repressed was not memories, but desires. He came to see the
repetition of symptoms as fueled by internal, in particular sexual, energy.
While it is certainly true that Freud saw the Frege-Geach point Freud, Sigmund
331 331 working of sexuality almost everywhere,
it is not true that he explained everything in terms of sexuality alone.
Psychoanalysis is a theory of internal psychic conflict, and conflict requires
at least two parties. Despite developments and changes, Freud’s instinct theory
was determinedly dualistic from beginning to end at the beginning, libido versus ego or
self-preservative instincts, and at the end Eros versus Thanatos, life against
death. Freud’s instinct theory not to be confused with standard biological
notions of hereditary behavior patterns in animals places instincts on the
borderland between the mental and physical and insists that they are internally
complex. In particular, the sexual instinct must be understood as made up of
components that vary along a number of dimensions source, aim, and object.
Otherwise, as Freud argues in his Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality 5, it
would be difficult to understand how the various perversions are recognized as
“sexual” despite their distance from the “normal” conception of sexuality
heterosexual genital intercourse between adults. His broadened concept of
sexuality makes intelligible sexual preferences emphasizing different sources
erotogenic zones or bodily centers of arousal, aims acts, such as intercourse
and looking, designed to achieve pleasure and satisfaction, and objects whether
of the same or different gender, or even other than whole living persons. It
also allows for the recognition of infantile sexuality. Phenomena that might
not on the surface appear sexual e.g. childhood thumbsucking share essential
characteristics with obviously sexual activity infantile sensual sucking
involves pleasurable stimulation of the same erotogenic zone, the mouth,
stimulated in adult sexual activities such as kissing, and can be understood as
earlier stages in the development of the same underlying instinct that
expresses itself in such various forms in adult sexuality. The standard
developmental stages are oral, anal, phallic, and genital. Neuroses, which
Freud saw as “the negative of perversions” i.e., the same desires that might in
some lead to perverse activity, when repressed, result in neurosis, could often
be traced to struggles with the Oedipus complex: the “nucleus of the neuroses.”
The Oedipus complex, which in its positive form postulates sexual feelings
toward the parent of the opposite sex and ambivalently hostile feelings toward
the parent of the same sex, suggests that the universal shape of the human
condition is a triangle. The conflict reaches its peak between the ages of
three and five, during the phallic stage of psychosexual development. The
fundamental structuring of emotions has its roots in the prolonged dependency
of the human infant, leading to attachment
a primary form of love to the
primary caregiver, who partly for biological reasons such as lactation is most
often the mother, and the experience of others as rivals for the time,
attention, and concern of the primary caregiver. Freud’s views of the Oedipus
complex should not be oversimplified. The sexual desires involved, e.g., are
typically unconscious and necessarily infantile, and infantile sexuality and
its associated desires are not expressed in the same form as mature genital
sexuality. His efforts to explain the distinctive features of female
psychosexual development in particular led to some of his most controversial
views, including the postulation of penis envy to explain why girls but not
boys standardly experience a shift in gender of their primary love object both
starting with the mother as the object. Later love objects, including
psychoanalysts as the objects of transference feelings in the analytic setting,
the analyst functions as a blank screen onto which the patient projects
feelings, are the results of displacement or transference from earlier objects:
“The finding of an object is in fact a refinding of it.” Freud used the same
structure of explanation for symptoms and for more normal phenomena, such as
dreams, jokes, and slips of the tongue. All can be seen as compromise
formations between forces pressing for expression localized by Freud’s
structural theory in the id, understood as a reservoir of unconscious instinct
and forces of repression some also unconscious, seeking to meet the constraints
of morality and reality. On Freud’s underlying model, the fundamental process
of psychic functioning, the primary process, leads to the uninhibited discharge
of psychic energy. Such discharge is experienced as pleasurable, hence the
governing principle of the fundamental process is called the pleasure
principle. Increase of tension is experienced as unpleasure, and the psychic
apparatus aims at a state of equilibrium or constancy sometimes Freud writes as
if the state aimed at is one of zero tension, hence the Nirvana principle
associated with the death instinct in Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle
[0]. But since pleasure can in fact only be achieved under specific conditions,
which sometimes require arrangement, planning, and delay, individuals must
learn to inhibit discharge, and this secondary process thinking is governed by
what Freud came to call the reality principle. The aim is still satisfaction,
but the “exigencies of life” require attention, reasoning, and judgment to
avoid falling into the fantasy wishfulfillment of the primary process.
Sometimes defense mechanisms designed to avoid increased tension or unpleasure
can fail, leading to neurosis in general, under the theory, a neurosis is a
psychological disorder rooted in unconscious conflict particular neuroses being correlated with
particular phases of development and particular mechanisms of defense.
Repression, involving the confining of psychic representations to the
unconscious, is the most important of the defense mechanisms. It should be
understood that unlike preconscious ideas, which are merely descriptively
unconscious though one may not be aware of them at the moment, they are readily
accessible to consciousness, unconscious ideas in the strict sense are kept
from awareness by forces of repression, they are dynamically unconscious as evidenced by the resistance to making the
unconscious conscious in therapy. Freud’s deep division of the mind between
unconscious and conscious goes beyond neurotic symptoms to help make sense of
familiar forms of irrationality such as selfdeception, ambivalence, and
weakness of the will that are highly problematical on Cartesian models of an
indivisible unitary consciousness. Perhaps the best example of the primary
process thinking that characterizes the unconscious unconstrained by the
realities of time, contradiction, causation, etc. can be found in dreaming.
Freud regarded dreams as “the royal road to a knowledge of the unconscious.”
Dreams are the disguised fulfillment of unconscious wishes. In extracting the
meaning of dreams through a process of interpretation, Freud relied on a
central distinction between the manifest content the dream as dreamt or as
remembered on waking and the latent content the unconscious dreamthoughts.
Freud held that interpretation via association to particular elements of the
manifest content reversed the process of dream construction, the dream-work in
which various mechanisms of distortion operated on the day’s residues
perceptions and thoughts stemming from the day before the dream was dreamt and
the latent dream-thoughts to produce the manifest dream. Prominent among the
mechanisms are the condensation in which many meanings are represented by a
single idea and displacement in which there is a shift of affect from a
significant and intense idea to an associated but otherwise insignificant one
also typical of neurotic symptoms, as well as considerations of
representability and secondary revision more specific to dream formation.
Symbolism is less prominent in Freud’s theory of dreams than is often thought;
indeed, the section on symbols appeared only as a later addition to The
Interpretation of Dreams 0. Freud explicitly rejected the ancient “dream book”
mode of interpretation in terms of fixed symbols, and believed one had to
recover the hidden meaning of a dream through the dreamer’s not the
interpreter’s associations to particular elements. Such associations are a part
of the process of free association, in which a patient is obliged to report to
the analyst all thoughts without censorship of any kind. The process is crucial
to psychoanalysis, which is both a technique of psychotherapy and a method of
investigation of the workings of the mind. Freud used the results of his
investigations to speculate about the origins of morality, religion, and
political authority. He tended to find their historical and psychological roots
in early stages of the development of the individual. Morality in particular he
traced to the internalization as one part of the resolution of the Oedpius
complex of parental prohibitions and demands, producing a conscience or
superego which is also the locus of self-observation and the ego-ideal. Such
identification by incorporation
introjection plays an important
role in character formation in general. The instinctual renunciation demanded
by morality and often achieved by repression Freud regarded as essential to the
order society needs to conduct its business. Civilization gets the energy for
the achievements of art and science by sublimation of the same instinctual
drives. But the costs of society and civilization to the individual in
frustration, unhappiness, and neurosis can be too high. Freud’s individual
therapy was meant to lead to the liberation of repressed energies which would
not by itself guarantee happiness; he hoped it might also provide energy to
transform the world and moderate its excess demands for restraint. But just as
his individual psychology was founded on the inevitability of internal
conflict, in his social thought he saw some limits especially on
aggression the death instinct turned outward
as necessary and he remained pessimistic about the apparently endless struggle
reason must wage Civilization and Its Discontents, 0. Freudscher
Versprecher Zur Navigation springenZur Suche springen Ein Freudscher
Versprecher (nach Sigmund Freud), auch Lapsus Linguae genannt, ist eine sprachliche
Fehlleistung, bei der angeblich ein eigentlicher Gedanke oder eine Intention
des Sprechers unwillkürlich zutage tritt. Inhaltsverzeichnis 1Allgemeine
Beschreibung 2 Begründungen der Theorie 3 Akzeptanz und wissenschaftliche Abgrenzung
4 Beispiele 5 Literatur 6 Weblinks 7 Einzelnachweise Allgemeine Beschreibung
Bei der Bewertung eines scheinbar sinnvollen Versprechers als einer Freudschen
Fehlleistung wird davon ausgegangen, dass in der Bedeutungsabweichung, die
durch einen Versprecher entsteht, eine unbewusste Aussage zum Vorschein kommt.
Es wird also nicht angenommen, dass solchen Versprechern eine einfache,
(neuro-)physiologische oder auch assoziative Beeinflussung der Sprachproduktion
zugrunde liegt,[1][2] sondern behauptet, dass es v. a. eine psychische Ursache
dafür gibt. Bei den Freudschen Fehlleistungen würde somit anstelle des
eigentlich Gemeinten etwas gesagt werden, das dem Gedachten ggf. sogar besser
entspräche und in diesem Sinne interpretiert werden könnte. Die Existenz
eines solchen Phänomens wurde durch Freud (1900, 1904) in Zur Psychopathologie
des Alltagslebens behauptet. Seit dem allgemeinen Bekanntwerden der auf Freuds
Befunde gestützten Theorie der Fehlleistungen hat jemand, dem ein solcher
Versprecher unterläuft, einen schlechten Stand, seinem Publikum nachzuweisen,
dass es sich gar nicht um einen Lapsus der Freudschen Art handelt, wohingegen
vor Freuds Zeit solch ein Versprecher lediglich ein Anlass zur Heiterkeit
gewesen wäre, oder eventuell begleitet von völligem Unverständnis, auch
empörtem Getuschel. Ein Beispiel von Freud sei hier berichtet:[3]
„Ein Mann erzählt von irgendwelchen Vorgängen, die er beanstandet, und setzt
fort: Dann aber sind Tatsachen zum ‚Vorschwein‘ gekommen. ([…] Auf Anfrage
bestätigt er, dass er diese Vorgänge als ‚Schweinereien‘ bezeichnen wollte.)
‚Vorschein und Schweinerei‘ haben zusammen das sonderbare ‚Vorschwein‘
entstehen lassen.“ – Sigmund Freud[4] Diese Bewertung hatte also nicht
verbalisiert werden sollen, hatte sich aber Bahn verschafft, indem sie sich in
die aktuelle Äußerung als (Freudscher) Versprecher einschob. Aufgrund
spezifischer Motivation kann man erst dann, nämlich bei solchen, einen
Nebengedanken unterdrückenden Maßnahmen, von einer eigentlichen „Fehl“-Leistung
sprechen. Begründungen der Theorie Freudsche Versprecher sind solche, bei
denen eine psychische Motivation angenommen wird, ein „Sinn“, wie es bei Freud
heißt, um eine Abgrenzung gegen die Urteile „Zufall“ oder „physiologischer
Hintergrund“ als Ursache solcher (Fehl- oder richtigen) Leistungen vorzunehmen.
An dieser Bestimmung wird zugleich die Bandbreite des Problemfeldes deutlich:
Einerseits handelt es sich um ein Phänomen. Das heißt: Es ist für den Sprecher
mindestens potentiell erkennbar, dass seinen Zuhörern etwas zu Ohren kam, was
so nicht bewusst beabsichtigt gewesen war; Rosa Ferber hat allerdings
festgestellt, dass die meisten Versprecher gar nicht bemerkt werden, weder von
den Sendern noch von den Empfängern.[5] Andererseits handelt es sich bei Freuds
Aussage, es stecke allgemein ein „Sinn“ hinter allen sog. „Freudschen
Fehlleistungen“, um die wissenschaftliche Interpretation eines Phänomens: Unter
der Prämisse, dass der Versprecher einen unbewussten oder vorbewussten
Beweggrund zur Ursache habe – einen erkennbaren Sinn oder eine Struktur –
besteht die erste Aufgabe darin, zu untersuchen, welcher Beweggrund als der
wahrscheinlichste angenommen werden kann. Akzeptanz und wissenschaftliche
Abgrenzung Gegenüber dieser Vorgehensweise spaltet sich das wissenschaftliche
Lager in mindestens drei Teile auf: Die einen halten die Frage der
Motivierung überhaupt für verfehlt und falsch und wollen nur Untersuchungen
zulassen, die sich aus der Sicht der rein physiologischen Prozesse mit der
Sprachproduktion und den deren Ablauf störenden Versprechern befassen. Für
dieses Lager sind Versprecher wertvolle Fenster, die Einblicke u. a. in die
neurologisch gesteuerte Sprachproduktion gestatten. Michael Motley wäre dagegen
ein Vertreter des anderen Lagers, der in der Psycholinguistik die Motivierung
von Versprechern experimentell nachzuweisen versucht. Motley konnte, indem er
bei einem Schnelllesen-Experiment als Kontext sexuell oder neutral geprägte
Situationen anbot, zeigen, dass die Frequenz der Freud’schen Versprechern bei
sexuellen Kontext-Situationen im Vergleich zu neutralen zunimmt. Damit
bestätigte er experimentell die Freudsche Theorie, und Dilger/Bredenkamp
kombinieren beide Ansätze. Neurolinguistischen Untersuchungen zufolge
existieren organisch bedingte oder zufällig auftretende Störungen des
ordentlichen Sprachablaufs. Grund können beispielsweise Zerstörungen oder
Fehlbildungen von Arealen des Sprachzentrums im Gehirn sein. Daher ist es nicht
sinnvoll, hinter jeder Art von Versprechern eine Freudsche Fehlleistung zu
vermuten. Die Versprecherforschung im Rahmen der kognitiven Linguistik
untersucht den Zusammenhang zwischen sprachlichen Strukturen und auftretenden
Versprechertypen. Die hierbei gefundenen Erklärungen für unterschiedliche Arten
von Versprechern machen in vielen Fällen die Annahme einer psychischen Ursache
im Sinne der Freudschen Theorien überflüssig (siehe Linguistische
Versprecher-Theorien). Insbesondere aber ist die Frage der Motivierung
bei lexikalischen Versprechern nicht unangebracht. Je nachdem, welche Auffassung
man von den psychischen Vorgängen und der „Topologie des psychischen Apparates“
hat, wird man dem Unbewussten mehr oder weniger Wirkungskraft
zuschreiben. Beispiele Freud führt in der Psychopathologie des
Alltagslebens an: Der deutschnationale Abgeordnete Lattmann tritt 1908 im
Reichstag für eine Ergebenheitsadresse an Wilhelm II. ein, und wenn man das
tue, „[…] so wollen wir das auch rückgratlos tun.“ Nach, laut
Sitzungsprotokoll, minutenlanger stürmischer Heiterkeit erklärt der Redner, er
habe natürlich rückhaltlos gemeint. Otto Rank führt im Zentralblatt für
Psychoanalyse eine Stelle aus Shakespeares Der Kaufmann von Venedig an: Porzia
ist es eigentlich durch ein Gelübde verboten, Bassanio ihre Liebe zu gestehen,
sagt aber „Halb bin ich Euer, die andre Hälfte Euer – mein wollt ich sagen.“
Literatur Sven Staffeldt: Das Drängen der störenden Redeabsicht. Dieter Fladers
Kritik an Freuds Theorie der Versprecher, Kümmerle, Göppingen 2004. Sebastiano
Timpanaro: Il lapsus freudiano: Psicanalisi e critica testuale (Florenz: La
Nuova Italia 1974). Englische Übersetzung: The Freudian Slip: Psychoanalysis
and Textual Criticism. Transl. by Kate Soper (London, 1976). Weblinks Sabine
Stahl: "Wolker bis heitig" und andere Versprecher, SWR2 – „Wissen“ vom
3. April 2009 Einzelnachweise Nora Wiedenmann (1998): Versprecher.
Phänomene und Daten. Mit Materialien auf Diskette. Wien: Wissenschaftsverlag
Edition Praesens. Nora Wiedenmann (1997): Versprecher – Dissimilation und
Similation von Konsonanten. Sprachproduktion unter spatio-temporalem Aspekt.
Dissertation. Sprechwissenschaft und Psycholinguistik, Institut für Phonetik
und Sprachliche Kommunikation; Philosophische Fakultät für Sprach- und
Literaturwissenschaft II; Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München; = 1999: Versprecher:
Dissimilation von Konsonanten. Sprachproduktion unter spatio-temporalem Aspekt
(Linguistische Arbeiten, 404). Tübingen: Niemeyer. Hartmann Hinterhuber:
Sigmund Freud, Rudolf Meringer und Carl Mayer: Versprechen und Verlesen. In:
Neuropsychiatrie. Band 21, Nr. 4, 2007, S. 291–296. Sigmund Freud:
Gesammelte Werke. Band XI, 1916/1917, S. 35. R. Ferber: Fehlerlinguistik.
Eine Sprechfehlersammlung und ihre beschreibende Darstellung. In: Unpublished
MA thesis, University of Freiburg. 1986. Kategorien: PsychoanalyseMündliche
KommunikationSigmund Freud als NamensgeberFehlleistung. The Signorelli
parapraxis represents the first and best known example of a parapraxis and its
analysis in Freud's The Psychopathology of Everyday Life. The parapraxis
centers on a word-finding problem and the production of substitutes. Freud
could not recall the name (Signorelli) of the painter of the Orvieto frescos
and produced as substitutes the names of two painters Botticelli and
Boltraffio. Freud's analysis shows what associative processes had linked
Signorelli to Botticelli and Boltraffio. The analysis has been criticised by
linguists and others. Contents 1 Botticelli – Boltraffio – Trafoi 2 Trafoi in Kraepelin's dream 3 Sebastiano
Timpanaro 4 Swales' investigation 5 Freud neglected his own observation 6 See
also 7 References 8 Sources 9 Further reading Botticelli – Boltraffio – Trafoi
One important ingredient in Freud's analysis was the North-Italian village
Trafoi where he received the message of the suicide of one of his patients,
struggling with sexual problems. Without Trafoi the substitute Boltraffio
associated to it would be incomprehensible. Freud links Trafoi to the theme
death and sexuality, a theme preceding the word finding problem in a
conversation Freud had during a trip by train through Bosnia-Herzegovina.
The second important ingredient in Freud's analysis is the extraction of an
Italian word signor from the forgotten name Signorelli. Herr, the German
counterpart of Signor, is then linked to (Her)zegovina and the word Herr
occurring, as Freud tells us, in the conversation. That country's Turks, he
recalled, valued sexual pleasure a lot, and he was told by a colleague that a
patient once said to him: "For you know, sir (Herr) if that ceases, life
no longer has any charm". Moreover, Freud argued that (Bo)snia linked
(Bo)tticelli with (Bo)ltraffio and Trafoi. He concludes by saying: "We
shall represent this state of affairs carefully enough if we assert that beside
the simple forgetting of proper names there is another forgetting which is
motivated by repression".[1] Freud denies the relevance of the
content of the frescos. Nevertheless, psychoanalysts have pursued their
investigations particularly into this direction, finding however no new explanation
of the parapraxis. Jacques Lacan suggested that the parapraxis may be an act of
self-forgetting. Trafoi in Kraepelin's dream The first critique to Freud
came from Emil Kraepelin, who in a postscript to his 1906 monograph on language
disturbances in dreams, relates a dream involving Trafoi. The dream centers
around a neologism Trafei, which Kraepelin links to Trafoi. The dream may be
seen as an implicit critique on Freud's analysis. Italian trofei is associated
to Trafei in the same way as Trafoi (cf. van Ooijen, 1996) and clarifies
Kraepelin's dream. The meaning of trofei reads in German Siegeszeichen
(victory-signs) and this German word together with Latin signum clearly links
to Freud's first name (Engels, 2006, p. 22-24). Sebastiano Timpanaro In
The Freudian Slip Sebastiano Timpanaro discusses Freud's analysis in chapter 6
"Love and Death at Orvieto." (p. 63-81). He in fact doubts that the
name Boltraffio would have played a major role during the parapraxis, as he
states: "Boltraffio is a Schlimbesserung [that is a substitute worse than
another substitute]" and adds "the correction goes astray because of
incapacity to localize the fault."(p. 71). He calls Botticelli an
"involuntary banalization" and Boltraffio "a semi-conscious disimproved
correction."(p. 75). As to the Signor-element in Freud's analysis he puts:
"The immediate equivalence Signore= Herr is one thing, the extraction of
signor from Signorelli and of Her(r) from Herzegowina is another."
Swales' investigation Peter Swales (2003) investigated the historical data and
states that Freud probably visited an exposition of Italian masters in Bergamo
mid-September 1898, showing paintings of Signorelli, Botticelli and Boltraffio
one next to the other. In his view the paintings at the exposition were the source
of the substitute names in the parapraxis. Swales dwells largely on the three
paintings. The association of the name Boltraffio to the name Da Vinci, another
hypothesis formulated by Swales (because Freud might have seen the statue of
Boltraffio at the bottom of the Da Vinci monument on Piazza della Scala in
Milan some days before his visit to Bergamo), is not further pursued by Swales.
Although Freud visited Trafoi on the 8th of August 1898, Swales doubts whether
Freud received a message on the suicide of one of his patients. Freud
neglected his own observation Fresco of the Deeds of the Antichrist Freud
in his analysis did not use the fact that he remembered very well a picture of
the painter in the lower left corner of one of the frescos. The picture, sort
of a signature, was thus a third substitute to the forgotten name Signorelli.
The "signature" can be interpreted as a reference to the Latin verb
signare and this word, instead of Freud's signore, then leads to a simple
analysis of the Signorelli parapraxis (Engels, 2006, p. 66-69). There seems to
be no more need for the Bosnia-Herzegovina associations (Bo and Herr) Freud
himself introduced. In the alternative to Freud's analysis the suicide message
in Trafoi remains an important point to understand the parapraxis (this message
being a blow to Freud's self-esteem). The occurrence of the Signorelli
parapraxis during Freud's trip from Ragusa to Trebinje (in Herzegovina) is not
questioned, as was done by Swales.[citation needed] See also Dream speech
References Freud, S. The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, chapter 1,
"Forgetting of Proper Names". Sources Engels, Huub (2006). Emil
Kraepelins Traumsprache 1908-1926. ISBN 978-90-6464-060-5 Timpanaro, S. (1976).
The Freudian Slip: Psychoanalysis and Textual Criticism. London: NLB. Swales,
P. (2003). Freud, Death and Sexual Pleasures. On the Psychical Mechanism of Dr.
Sigm. Freud. Arc de Cercle, 1, 4-74. Further reading Molnar, M. (1994). Reading
the Look. In Sander, Gilman, Birmele, Geller & Greenberg (ed.): Reading
Freud's Reading. pp. 77–90. New York: Oxford. Ooijen, B. van. (1996). Vowel
mutability and lexical selection in English: Evidence from a word
reconstruction task. Memory & Cognition, 24, 573-583. Ooijen shows that in
word reconstruction tasks e.g. the non-word kebra is more readily substituted
by cobra than by zebra. This is what is meant by 'vowel mutability.' Owens,
M.E. (2004). Forgetting Signorelli: Monstruous Visions of the Resurrection of
the Dead. Muse: scholarly journals online. Categories: Psychoanalytic
terminologyFreudian psychology. Refs.:
H. P. Grice and D. F. Pears, “Motivated irrationality.”
Functum -- Functionalism: -- Grice: “With a capital ‘F,’ of course – one of my twelve
labours!” -- Grice’s functionalism: a response to the dualist challenge --
dualism, the view that reality consists of two disparate parts. The crux of
dualism is an apparently unbridgeable gap between two incommensurable orders of
being that must be reconciled if our assumption that there is a comprehensible
universe is to be justified. Dualism is exhibited in the pre-Socratic division
between appearance and reality; Plato’s realm of being containing eternal Ideas
and realm of becoming containing changing things; the medieval division between
finite man and infinite God; Descartes’s substance dualism of thinking mind and
extended matter; Hume’s separation of fact from value; Kant’s division between
empirical phenomena and transcendental noumena; the epistemological double-aspect
theory of James and Russell, who postulate a neutral substance that can be
understood in separate ways either as mind or brain; and Heidegger’s separation
of being and time that inspired Sartre’s contrast of being and nothingness. The
doctrine of two truths, the sacred and the profane or the religious and the
secular, is a dualistic response to the conflict between religion and science.
Descartes’s dualism is taken to be the source of the mindbody problem. If the
mind is active unextended thinking and the body is passive unthinking
extension, how can these essentially unlike and independently existing
substances interact causally, and how can mental ideas represent material
things? How, in other words, can the mind know and influence the body, and how
can the body affect the mind? Descartes said mind and body interact and that
ideas represent material things without resembling them, but dream argument
dualism 244 244 could not explain how,
and concluded merely that God makes these things happen. Proposed dualist
solutions to the mindbody problem are Malebranche’s occasionalism mind and body
do not interact but God makes them appear to; Leibniz’s preestablished harmony
among noninteracting monads; and Spinoza’s property dualism of mutually
exclusive but parallel attributes expressing the one substance God. Recent
mindbody dualists are Popper and John C. Eccles. Monistic alternatives to
dualism include Hobbes’s view that the mental is merely the epiphenomena of the
material; Berkeley’s view that material things are collections of mental ideas;
and the contemporary materialist view of Smart, Armstrong, and Paul and
Patricia Churchland that the mind is the brain. A classic treatment of these
matters is Arthur O. Lovejoy’s The Revolt Against Dualism. Dualism is related
to binary thinking, i.e., to systems of thought that are two-valued, such as
logic in which theorems are valid or invalid, epistemology in which knowledge
claims are true or false, and ethics in which individuals are good or bad and
their actions are right or wrong. In The Quest for Certainty, Dewey finds that
all modern problems of philosophy derive from dualistic oppositions,
particularly between spirit and nature. Like Hegel, he proposes a synthesis of
oppositions seen as theses versus antitheses. Recent attacks on the view that
dualistic divisions can be explicitly described or maintained have been made by
Vitters, who offers instead a classification scheme based on overlapping family
resemblances; by Quine, who casts doubt on the division between analytic or
formal truths based on meanings and synthetic or empirical truths based on
facts; and by Derrida, who challenges our ability to distinguish between the
subjective and the objective. But despite the extremely difficult problems
posed by ontological dualism, and despite the cogency of many arguments against
dualistic thinking, Western philosophy continues to be predominantly dualistic,
as witnessed by the indispensable use of two-valued matrixes in logic and
ethics and by the intractable problem of rendering mental intentions in terms
of material mechanisms or vice versa. functional
dependence, a relationship between variable magnitudes especially physical
magnitudes and certain properties or processes. In modern physical science
there are two types of laws stating such relationships. 1 There are numerical
laws stating concomitant variation of certain quantities, where a variation in
any one is accompanied by variations in the others. An example is the law for
ideal gases: pV % aT, where p is the pressure of the gas, V its volume, T its
absolute temperature, and a a constant derived from the mass and the nature of
the gas. Such laws say nothing about the temporal order of the variations, and
tests of the laws can involve variation of any of the relevant magnitudes.
Concomitant variation, not causal sequence, is what is tested for. 2 Other
numerical laws state variations of physical magnitudes correlated with times.
Galileo’s law of free fall asserts that the change in the unit time of a freely
falling body in a vacuum in the direction of the earth is equal to gt, where g
is a constant and t is the time of the fall, and where the rate of time changes
of g is correlative with the temporal interval t. The law is true of any body
in a state of free fall and for any duration. Such laws are also called
“dynamical” because they refer to temporal processes usually explained by the
postulation of forces acting on the objects in question. functionalism, the
view that mental states are defined by their causes and effects. As a
metaphysical thesis about the nature of mental states, functionalism holds that
what makes an inner state mental is not an intrinsic property of the state, but
rather its relations to sensory stimulation input, to other inner states, and
to behavior output. For example, what makes an inner state a pain is its being
a type of state typically caused by pinpricks, sunburns, and so on, a type that
causes other mental states e.g., worry, and a type that causes behavior e.g.,
saying “ouch”. Propositional attitudes also are identified with functional
states: an inner state is a desire for water partly in virtue of its causing a
person to pick up a glass and drink its contents when the person believes that
the glass contains water. The basic distinction needed for functionalism is
that between role in terms of which a type of mental state is defined and
occupant the particular thing that occupies a role. Functional states exhibit
multiple realizability: in different kinds of beings humans, computers,
Martians, a particular kind of causal role may have different occupants e.g., the causal role definitive of a belief
that p, say, may be occupied by a neural state in a human, but occupied perhaps
by a hydraulic state in a Martian. Functionalism, like behaviorism, thus
entails that mental states may be shared by physically dissimilar systems.
Although functionalism does not automatically rule out the existence of
immaterial souls, its motivation has been to provide a materialistic account of
mentality. The advent of the computer gave impetus to functionalism. First, the
distinction between software and hardware suggested the distinction between
role function and occupant structure. Second, since computers are automated,
they demonstrate how inner states can be causes of output in the absence of a
homunculus i.e., a “little person” intelligently directing output. Third, the
Turing machine provided a model for one of the earliest versions of
functionalism. A Turing machine is defined by a table that specifies
transitions from current state and input to next state or to output. According
to Turing machine functionalism, any being with pscychological states has a
unique best description, and each psychological state is identical to a machine
table state relative to that description. To be in mental state type M is to
instantiate or realize Turing machine T in state S. Turing machine
functionalism, developed largely by Putnam, has been criticized by Putnam, Ned
Block, and Fodor. To cite just one serious problem: two machine table
states and hence, according to Turing
machine functionalism, two psychological states
are distinct if they are followed by different states or by different
outputs. So, if a pinprick causes A to say “Ouch” and causes B to say “Oh,”
then, if Turing machine functionalism were true, A’s and B’s states of pain
would be different psychological states. But we do not individuate
psychological states so finely, nor should we: such fine-grained individuation
would be unsuitable for psychology. Moreover, if we assume that there is a path
from any state to any other state, Turing machine functionalism has the
unacceptable consequence that no two systems have any of their states in common
unless they have all their states in common. Perhaps the most prominent version
of functionalism is the causal theory of mind. Whereas Turing machine
functionalism is based on a technical computational or psychological theory,
the causal theory of mind relies on commonsense understanding: according to the
causal theory of mind, the concept of a mental state is the concept of a state
apt for bringing about certain kinds of behavior Armstrong. Mental state terms
are defined by the commonsense platitudes in which they appear David Lewis.
Philosophers can determine a priori what mental states are by conceptual
analysis or by definition. Then scientists determine what physical states
occupy the causal roles definitive of mental states. If it turned out that
there was no physical state that occupied the causal role of, say, pain i.e.,
was caused by pinpricks, etc., and caused worry, etc., it would follow, on the
causal theory, that pain does not exist. To be in mental state type M is to be
in a physical state N that occupies causal role R. A third version is
teleological or “homuncular” functionalism, associated with William G. Lycan
and early Dennett. According to homuncular functionalism, a human being is
analogous to a large corporation, made up of cooperating departments, each with
its own job to perform; these departments interpret stimuli and produce
behavioral responses. Each department at the highest subpersonal level is in
turn constituted by further units at a sub-subpersonal level and so on down
until the neurological level is reached. The roleoccupant distinction is thus
relativized to level: an occupant at one level is a role at the next level
down. On this view, to be in a mental state type M is to have a sub- . . .
subpersonal f-er that is in its characteristic state Sf. All versions of
functionalism face problems about the qualitative nature of mental states. The
difficulty is that functionalism individuates states in purely relational
terms, but the acrid odor of, say, a paper mill seems to have a non-relational,
qualitative character that functionalism misses altogether. If two people, on
seeing a ripe banana, are in states with the same causes and effects, then, by
functionalist definition, they are in the same mental state say, having a sensation of yellow. But it seems
possible that one has an “inverted spectrum” relative to the other, and hence
that their states are qualitatively different. Imagine that, on seeing the
banana, one of the two is in a state qualitatively indistinguishable from the
state that the other would be in on seeing a ripe tomato. Despite widespread
intuitions that such inverted spectra are possible, according to functionalism,
they are not. A related problem is that of “absent qualia.” The population of
China, or even the economy of Bolivia, could be functionally equivalent to a human
brain i.e., there could be a function
that mapped the relations between inputs, outputs, and internal states of the
population of China onto those of a human brain; yet the population of China,
no matter how its members interact with one another and with other nations,
intuitively does not have mental states. The status of these arguments remains
controversial.
fundamentum
divisionis:
a term in Scholastic logic and ontology for the ‘grounds for a distinction’.
Some distinctions categorize separately existing things, such as men and
beasts. This is a real distinction, and the fundamentum divisionis exists in
reality. Some distinctions categorize things that cannot exist separately but
can be distinguished mentally, such as the difference between being a human
being and having a sense of humor, or the difference between a soul and one of
its powers, say, the power of thinking. A mental distinction is also called a
formal distinction. Duns Scotus is well known for the idea of formalis
distinctio cum fundamento ex parte rei a formal distinction with a foundation
in the thing, primarily in order to handle logical problems with functionalism,
analytical fundamentum divisionis 335
335 the Christian concept of God. God is supposed to be absolutely
simple; i.e., there can be no multiplicity of composition in him. Yet,
according to traditional theology, many properties can be truly attributed to
him. He is wise, good, and powerful. In order to preserve the simplicity of
God, Duns Scotus claimed that the difference between wisdom, goodness, and
power was only formal but still had some foundation in God’s own being. Refs.:
H. P. Grice, “The fundamentum divisionis of all my divisions!”
futurum
contingens:
Grice knew that his obsession with action was an obsession with the uncertainty
of a contingent future, alla Aristotle. Futurum -- future contingents, singular
events or states of affairs that may come to pass, and also may not come to
pass, in the future. There are three traditional problems involving future contingents:
the question of universal validity of the principle of bivalence, the question
of free will and determinism, and the question of foreknowledge. The debate
about future contingents in modern philosophical logic was revived by
Lukasiewicz’s work on three-valued logic. He thought that in order to avoid
fatalistic consequences, we must admit that the principle of bivalence for any
proposition, p, either p is true or not-p is true does not hold good for
propositions about future contingents. Many authors have considered this view
confused. According to von Wright, e.g., when propositions are said to be true
or false and ‘is’ in ‘it is true that’ is tenseless or atemporal, the illusion
of determinism does not arise. It has its roots in a tacit oscillation between
a temporal and an atemporal reading of the phrase ‘it is true’. In a
temporalized reading, or in its tensed variants such as ‘it was/will be/is
already true’, one can substitute, for ‘true’, other words like ‘certain’,
‘fixed’, or ‘necessary’. Applying this diachronic necessity to atemporal
predications of truth yields the idea of logical determinism. In contemporary
discussions of tense and modality, future contingents are often treated with
the help of a model of time as a line that breaks up into branches as it moves
from left to right i.e., from past to future. Although the conception of truth
at a moment has been found philosophically problematic, the model of historical
modalities and branching time as such is much used in works on freedom and determination.
Aristotle’s On Interpretation IX contains a classic discussion of future
contingents with the famous example of tomorrow’s sea battle. Because of
various ambiguities in the text and in Aristotle’s modal conceptions in
general, the meaning of the passage is in dispute. In the Metaphysics VI.3 and
in the Niocmachean Ethics III.5, Aristotle tries to show that not all things
are predetermined. The Stoics represented a causally deterministic worldview;
an ancient example of logical determinism is Diodorus Cronus’s famous master
argument against contingency. Boethius thought that Aristotle’s view can be
formulated as follows: the principle of bivalence is universally valid, but
propositions about future contingents, unlike those about past and present
things, do not obey the stronger principle according to which each proposition
is either determinately true or determinately false. A proposition is
indeterminately true as long as the conditions that make it true are not yet
fixed. This was the standard Latin doctrine from Abelard to Aquinas. Similar
discussions occurred in Arabic commentaries on On Interpretation. In the
fourteenth century, many thinkers held that Aristotle abandoned bivalence for
future contingent propositions. This restriction was usually refuted, but it
found some adherents like Peter Aureoli. Duns Scotus and Ockham heavily
criticized the Boethian-Thomistic view that God can know future contingents
only because the flux of time is present to divine eternity. According to them,
God contingently foreknows free acts. Explaining this proved to be a very
cumbersome task. Luis de Molina 15351600 suggested that God knows what possible
creatures would do in any possible situation. This “middle knowledge” theory
about counterfactuals of freedom has remained a living theme in philosophy of
religion; analogous questions are treated in theories of subjunctive
reasoning.
futurum
indicativum:
The Grecians called it just ‘horistike klesis.’ The Romans transliterated as
modus definitivus, inclination anima affectations demonstrans.’ But they had
other terms, indicativus, finitus, finitivus, and pronuntiativus. f. H. P.
Grice and D. F. Pears, “Predicting and deciding.” The future is essentially
involved in “E communicates that p,” i. e. E, the emissor, intends that his
addressee, in a time later than t, will come to believe this or that. Grice is especially concerned with the future
for his analysis of the communicatum. “Close the door!” By uttering “Close the
door!,” U means that A is to close the door – in the future. So Grice spends
HOURS exploring how one can have justification to have an intention about a
future event. Grice is aware of the ‘shall.’ Grice uses ‘shall’ in the first
person to mean wha the calls ‘futurum indicativum.’ (He considers the case of
the ‘shall’ in the second and third persons in his analysis of mode). What are
the conditions for the use of “shall” in the first person. “I shall close the
door” may be predictable. It is in the indicative mode. “Thou shalt close the
door,” and “He shall close the door” are in the imperative mode, or rather they
correspond to the ‘futurum intentionale.’
Since Grice is an analytic
philosopher, he specifies the analysis in the third person (“U means that…”)
one has to be careful. For ‘futurum indicativum’ we have ‘shall’ in the first
person, and ‘will’ in the second and third persons. So for the first group, U
means that he will go. In the second group, U means that his addressee or a
third party shall go. Grice adopts a subscript variant, stick with ‘will,’ but
add the mode afterwards: so will-ind. will be ‘futurum indicativum,’ and
will-int. will be futurum intentionale. The OED has it as “shall,”
and defines as a Germanic preterite-present strong verb. In Old English,
it is “sceal,” and which the OED renders as “to owe (money,” 1425 Hoccleve Min.
Poems, The leeste ferthyng þat y men shal. To owe (allegiance); 1649 And by
that feyth I shal to god and yow; followed by an infinitive, without to. Except
for a few instances of shall will, shall may (mowe), "shall conne" in
the 15th c., the infinitive after shall is always either that of a principal
verb or of have or be; The present tense shall; in general statements of what
is right or becoming, = ought, superseded by the past subjunctive should; in
OE. the subjunctive present sometimes occurs in this use; 1460 Fortescue Abs.
and Lim. Mon. The king shall often times send his judges to punish rioters and
risers. 1562 Legh Armory; Whether are Roundells of all suche coloures, as ye
haue spoken of here before? or shall they be Namesd Roundelles of those
coloures? In OE. and occas. in Middle English used to express necessity of
various kinds. For the many shades of meaning in Old English see Bosworth and
Toller), = must, "must needs", "have to", "am
compelled to", etc.; in stating a necessary condition: = `will have to,
`must (if something else is to happen). 1596 Shaks. Merch. V. i. i. 116 You
shall seeke all day ere you finde them, & when you haue them they are
not worth the search. 1605 Shaks. Lear. He that parts vs, shall bring a Brand
from Heauen. c In hypothetical clause, accompanying the statement of a
necessary condition: = `is to. 1612 Bacon Ess., Greatn. Kingd., Neither must
they be too much broken of it, if they shall be preserued in vigor; ndicating
what is appointed or settled to take place = the mod. `is to, `am to, etc. 1600
Shaks. A.Y.L. What is he that shall buy his flocke and pasture? 1625 in Ellis
Orig. Lett. Ser. "Tomorrow His Majesty will be present to begin the Parliament which is thought
shall be removed to Oxford; in commands or instructions; n the second person,
“shall” is equivalent to an imperative. Chiefly in Biblical language, of divine
commandments, rendering the jussive future of the Hebrew and Vulgate. In Old
English the imperative mode is used in the ten commandments. 1382 Wyclif Exod.
Thow shalt not tak the Names of the Lord thi God in veyn. So Coverdale, etc. b)
In expositions: you shall understand, etc. (that). c) In the formula you shall
excuse (pardon) me. (now "must"). 1595 Shaks. John. Your Grace shall
pardon me, I will not backe. 1630 R. Johnsons Kingd. and Commw. 191 You shall
excuse me, for I eat no flesh on Fridayes; n the *third* person. 1744 in Atkyns
Chanc. Cases (1782) III. 166 The words shall and may in general acts of
parliament, or in private constitutions, are to be construed imperatively, they
must remove them; in the second and third persons, expressing the determination
by the Griceian utterer to bring about some action, event, or state of things
in the future, or (occasionally) to refrain from hindering what is otherwise
certain to take place, or is intended by another person; n the second person.
1891 J. S. Winter Lumley. If you would rather not stay then, you shall go down
to South Kensington Square then; in third person. 1591 Shaks. Two Gent. Verona
shall not hold thee. 1604 Shaks. Oth. If there be any cunning Crueltie, That
can torment him much, It shall be his. 1891 J. S. Winter Lumley xiv, `Oh, yes,
sir, she shall come back, said the nurse. `Ill take care of that. `I will come
back, said Vere; in special interrogative uses, a) in the *first* person, used
in questions to which the expected answer is a command, direction, or counsel,
or a resolve on the speakers own part. a) in questions introduced by an
interrogative pronoun (in oblique case), adverb, or adverbial phrase. 1600
Fairfax Tasso. What shall we doe? shall we be gouernd still, By this false
hand? 1865 Kingsley Herew. Where shall we stow the mare? b) in categorical
questions, often expressing indignant reprobation of a suggested course of
action, the implication (or implicaturum, or entailment) being that only a
negative (or, with negative question an affirmative) answer is conceivable.
1611 Shaks. Wint. T. Shall I draw the Curtaine? 1802 Wordsw. To the Cuckoo i, O
Cuckoo! shall I call thee Bird, Or but a wandering Voice? 1891 J. S. Winter
Lumley `Are you driving, or shall I call you a cab? `Oh, no; Im driving,
thanks. c) In *ironical* affirmative in exclamatory sentence, equivalent to the
above interrogative use, cf. Ger. soll. 1741 Richardson Pamela, A pretty thing
truly! Here I, a poor helpless Girl, raised from Poverty and Distress, shall put
on Lady-airs to a Gentlewoman born. d) to stand shall I, shall I (later shill
I, shall I: v. shilly-shally), to be at shall I, shall I (not): to be
vacillating, to shilly-shally. 1674 R. Godfrey Inj. and Ab. Physic Such
Medicines. that will not stand shall I? shall I? but will fall to work on the
Disease presently. b Similarly in the *third* person, where the Subjects
represents or includes the utterer, or when the utterer is placing himself at
anothers point of view. 1610 Shaks. Temp., Hast thou (which art but aire) a
touch, a feeling Of their afflictions, and shall not my selfe, One of their
kinde be kindlier moud then thou art? In the second and third person, where the
expected answer is a decision on the part of the utterer or of some person
OTHER than the Subjects. The question often serves as an impassioned
repudiation of a suggestion (or implicaturum) that something shall be
permitted. 1450 Merlin `What shal be his Names? `I will, quod she, `that it
haue Names after my fader. 1600 Shaks. A.Y.L.; What shall he haue that kild the
Deare? 1737 Alexander Pope, translating Horaces Epistle, And say, to which
shall our applause belong, this new court jargon, or the good old song? 1812
Crabbe Tales, Shall a wife complain? In indirect question. 1865 Kingsley Herew,
Let her say what shall be done with it; as a mere auxiliary, forming, with
present infinitive, the future, and (with perfect infinitive) the future
perfect tense. In Old English, the notion of the future tense is ordinarily
expressed by the present tense. To prevent ambiguity, wile (will) is not
unfrequently used as a future auxiliary, sometimes retaining no trace of its
initial usage, connected with the faculty of volition, and cognate indeed with
volition. On the other hand, sceal (shall), even when rendering a Latin future,
can hardly be said to have been ever a mere future tense-sign in Old English.
It always expressed something of its original notion of obligation or
necessity, so Hampshire is wrong in saying I shall climb Mt. Everest is predictable.
In Middle English, the present early ceases to be commonly employed in futural
usage, and the future is expressed by shall or will, the former being much
more common. The usage as to the choice between the two auxiliaries, shall and
will, has varied from time to time. Since the middle of the seventeenth
century, with Wallis, mere predictable futurity is expressed in the *first*
person by shall, in the second and third by will, and vice versa. In oratio
obliqua, usage allows either the retention of the auxiliary actually used by
the original utterer, or the substitution of that which is appropriate to the
point of view of the uttering reporting; in Old English, ‘sceal,; while
retaining its primary usage, serves as a tense-sign in announcing a future event
as fated or divinely decreed, cf. Those spots mean measle. Hence shall has
always been the auxiliary used, in all persons, for prophetic or oracular
announcements of the future, and for solemn assertions of the certainty of a
future event. 1577 in Allen Martyrdom Campion; The queene neither ever was, nor
is, nor ever shall be the head of the Church of England. 1601 Shaks. Jul. C.
Now do I Prophesie. A Curse shall light vpon the limbes of men. b In the first
person, "shall" has, from the early ME. period, been the normal
auxiliary for expressing mere futurity, without any adventitious notion. (a) Of
events conceived as independent of the volition of the utterer. To use will in
these cases is now a mark of, not public-school-educated Oxonian, but Scottish,
Irish, provincial, or extra-British idiom. 1595 in Cath. Rec. Soc. Publ. V. 357
My frend, yow and I shall play no more at Tables now. 1605 Shaks. Macb. When
shall we three meet againe? 1613 Shaks. Hen. VIII, Then wee shall haue em,
Talke vs to silence. 1852 Mrs. Stowe Uncle Toms C.; `But what if you dont hit?
`I shall hit, said George coolly; of voluntary action or its intended result.
Here I shall or we shall is always admissible except where the notion of a
present, as distinguished from a previous, decision or consent is to be
expressed, in which case ‘will’ shall be used. Further, I shall often expresses
a determination insisted on in spite of opposition. In the 16th c. and earlier,
I shall often occurs where I will would now be used. 1559 W. Cunningham Cosmogr.
Glasse, This now shall I alway kepe surely in memorye. 1601 Shaks. Alls Well;
Informe him so tis our will he should.-I shall my liege. 1885 Ruskin On Old
Road, note: Henceforward I shall continue to spell `Ryme without our wrongly
added h. c In the *second* person, shall as a mere future auxiliary appears
never to have been usual, but in categorical questions it is normal, e.g. Shall
you miss your train? I am afraid you will. d In the *third* person, superseded
by will, except when anothers statement or expectation respecting himself is
reported in the third person, e.g. He conveys that he shall not have time to
write. Even in this case will is still not uncommon, but in some contexts leads
to serious ambiguity. It might be therefore preferable, to some, to use ‘he
shall’ as the indirect rendering of ‘I shall.’ 1489 Caxton Sonnes of Aymon ii.
64 Yf your fader come agayn from the courte, he shall wyll yelde you to the
kynge Charlemayne. 1799 J. Robertson Agric. Perth, The effect of the statute
labour has always been, now is, and
probably shall continue to be, less productive than it might. Down to the
eighteenth century, shall, the auxiliary appropriate to the first person, is
sometimes used when the utterer refers to himself in the third person. Cf. the
formula: `And your petitioner shall ever pray. 1798 Kemble Let. in Pearsons
Catal. Mr. Kemble presents his respectful compliments to the Proprietors of the
`Monthly Mirror, and shall have great pleasure at being at all able to aid
them; in negative, or virtually negative, and interrogative use, shall often =
will be able to. 1600 Shaks. Sonn. lxv: How with this rage shall beautie hold a
plea. g) Used after a hypothetical clause or an imperative sentence in a
statementsof a result to be expected from some action or occurrence. Now (exc.
in the *first* person) usually replaced by will. But shall survives in literary
use. 1851 Dasent Jest and Earnest, Visit Rome and you shall find him [the Pope]
mere carrion. h) In clause expressing the object of a promise, or of an
expectation accompanied by hope or fear, now only where shall is the ordinary
future auxiliary, but down to the nineteenth century shall is often preferred
to will in the second and third persons. 1628 in Ellis Orig. Lett. Ser., He is
confident that the blood of Christ shall wash away his sins. 1654 E. Nicholas
in N. Papers, I hope neither your Cosen Wat. Montagu nor Walsingham shall be permitted to
discourse with the D. of Gloucester; in impersonal phrases,
"it shall be well, needful", etc. (to do so and so). (now
"will"). j) shall be, added to a future date in clauses measuring
time. 1617 Sir T. Wentworth in Fortescue Papers. To which purpose my late Lord
Chancelour gave his direction about the 3. of Decembre shallbe-two-yeares; in the
idiomatic use of the future to denote what ordinarily or occasionally occurs
under specified conditions, shall was formerly the usual auxiliary. In the
*second* and *third* persons, this is now somewhat formal or rhetorical.
Ordinary language substitutes will or may. Often in antithetic statements
coupled by an adversative conjunction or by and with adversative force. a in
the first person. 1712 Steele Spect. In spite of all my Care, I shall every now
and then have a saucy Rascal ride by reconnoitring under my Windows. b) in the *second* person.
1852 Spencer Ess. After knowing him for years, you shall suddenly discover that
your friends nose is slightly awry. c) in the *third* person. 1793 W. Roberts
Looker-On, One man shall approve the same thing that another man shall condemn.
1870 M. Arnold St. Paul and Prot. It may well happen that a man who lives and
thrives under a monarchy shall yet theoretically disapprove the principle of
monarchy. Usage No. 10: in hypothetical, relative, and temporal clauses
denoting a future contingency, the future auxiliary is shall for all persons
alike. Where no ambiguity results, however, the present tense is commonly used
for the future, and the perfect for the future-perfect. The use of shall, when
not required for clearness, is, Grice grants, apt to sound pedantic by non
Oxonians. Formerly sometimes used to express the sense of a present
subjunctive. a) in hypothetical clauses. (shall I = if I shall) 1680 New
Hampsh. Prov. Papers, If any Christian shall speak contempteously of the Holy
Scriptures, such person shall be
punished. b) in relative clauses, where the antecedent denotes an as yet
undetermined person or thing: 1811 Southey Let., The minister who shall first
become a believer in that book will
obtain a higher reputation than ever statesman did before him. 1874 R. Congreve
Ess. We extend our sympathies to the unborn generations which shall follow us
on this earth; in temporal clauses: 1830 Laws of Cricket in Nyren Yng.
Cricketers Tutor, If in striking, or at any other time, while the ball shall be
in play, both his feet be over the popping-crease; in clauses expressing the
purposed result of some action, or the object of a desire, intention, command,
or request, often admitting of being replaced by may. In Old English, and occasionally
as late as the seventeenth century, the present subjunctive was used exactly as
in Latin. a) in final clause usually introduced by that. In this use modern
idiom prefers should (22 a): see quot. 1611 below, and the appended remarks.
1879 M. Pattison Milton At the age of nine and twenty, Milton has already
determined that this lifework shall be an epic poem; in relative clause: 1599
Shaks. Hen. V, ii. iv. 40: As Gardeners doe with Ordure hide those Roots that
shall first spring. The choice between should and would follows the same as
shall and will as future auxiliaries, except that should must sometimes be
avoided on account of liability to be misinterpreted as = `ought to. In present
usage, should occurs mainly in the first person. In the other persons it
follows the use of shall. III Elliptical and quasi-elliptical uses. Usage No.
24: with ellipsis of verb of motion: = `shall go; he use is common in OHG. and
OS., and in later HG., LG., and Du. In the Scandinavian languages it is also
common, and instances occur in MSw.] 1596 Shaks. 1 Hen. IV, That with our small
coniunction we should on. 1598 Shaks. Merry W. If the bottome were as deepe as
hell, I shold down; n questions, what shall = `what shall (it) profit, `what
good shall (I) do. Usage No. 26: with the sense `is due, `is proper, `is to be
given or applied. Cf. G. soll. Usage No. 27: a) with ellipsis of active
infinitive to be supplied from the context. 1892 Mrs. H. Ward David Grieve,
`No, indeed, I havnt got all I want, said Lucy `I never shall, neither; if I
shall. Now dial. 1390 Gower Conf. II. 96: Doun knelende on mi kne I take leve,
and if I schal, I kisse hire. 1390 Gower Conf., II. 96: I wolde kisse hire
eftsones if I scholde. 1871 Earle Philol. Engl. Tongue 203: The familiar
proposal to carry a basket, I will if I shall, that is, I am willing if you
will command me; I will if so required. 1886 W. Somerset Word-bk. Ill warn our
Tomll do it vor ee, nif he shall-i.e. if you wish. c) with generalized ellipsis
in proverbial phrase: needs must that needs shall = `he must whom fate compels.
Usage No. 28: a) with ellipsis of do (not occurring in the context). 1477
Norton Ord. Alch., O King that shall These Workes! b) the place of the inf. is
sometimes supplied by that or so placed at the beginning of the sentence. The
construction may be regarded as an ellipsis of "do". It is distinct
from the use (belonging to 27) in which so has the sense of `thus, `likewise,
or `also. In the latter there is usually inversion, as so shall I. 1888 J. S.
Winter Bootles Childr. iv: I should like to see her now shes grown up. `So you
shall. Usage No. 29: with ellipsis of be or passive inf., or with so in place
of this (where the preceding context has is, was, etc.). 1615 J. Chamberlain in
Crt. And Times Jas.; He is not yet executed, nor I hear not when he shall.
Surely he may not will that he be executed.
futurum intentionale: Grice: “I’m obsessed with the future – unless most
Englishmen – hence my need to coin the ‘implicaturum,’ a future form!” -- Surely
intention has nothing to do with predictable truth. If Smith promises Jones a
job – he intends that Jones get a job. Then the world explodes, so Jones does
not get the job. Kant, Austin, or Grice, don’t care. A philosopher is not a
scientist. He is into ‘conceptual matters,’ about what is to have a good
intention, not whether the intention, in a future scenario, is realised or not.
If they are interested in ‘tense,’ as Prior was as Grice was with his
time-relative identity, it’s still because in the PRESENT, the emissor emits a
future-tense utterance. The future figures more prominently than anything
because in “Emissor communicates that p” there is the FUTURE ESSENTIAL. The
emissor intends that his addressee in a time later than the present will do
this or that. While Grice is always looking to cross the
credibility/desirability divide, there is a feature that is difficult to cross
in the bridge of asses. This is the shall vs. will. Grice is aware that ‘will,’
in the FIRST person, is not a matter of prediction. When Grice says “I will go
to Harborne,” that’s not a prediction. He firmly contrasts it with “I shall go
to Harborne” which is a perfect prediction in the indicative mode. “I will go
to Harborne” is in the ‘futurum intentionale.’ Grice is also aware that in the
SECOND and THIRD persons, ‘will’ reports something that the utterer must judge
unpredictable. An utterance like “Thou wilt go to London” and “He will go to
London” is in the ‘futurum indicativus.’ This is one nuance that Prichard
forgets in the analysis of ‘willing’ that Grice eventually adopts. Prichard
uses ‘will’ derivatively, and followed by a ‘that’-clause. Prichard quotes from
the New-World, where the dialect is slightly different. For William James had
said, “I will that the distant table slides over the floor toward me. And it
does not.” Since James is using ‘will’ in the first person, the utterance is
indeed NOT in the indicative, but the ‘intentional’ mode. In the case of the
‘communicatum,’ things get complicated, since U intends that A will believe that…
In which case, U’s intention (and thus will) is directed towards the ‘will’ of
his addressee, too, even if it is merely to adopt a ‘belief.’ So what would be
the primary uses of the ‘will.’ In the first person, “I will go to Harborne” is
in the futurum intentionale. It is used to report the utterer’s will. In the
second and third person – “Thou will go to Harborne” and “He will go to
Harborne,” the utterer uses the futurum indicativum and utters a statement
which is predictable. Since analytic
philosophers specify the analysis in the third person (“U means that…”) one has
to be careful. For ‘futurum intentionale’ we have ‘will’ in the first person,
and ‘shall’ in the second and third persons. So for the first group, U means
that he SHALL go. In the second group, U means that his addressee or a third
party WILL go. Grice adopts a subscript variant, stick with ‘will,’ but add the
mode afterwards: so will-ind. will be ‘futurum indicativum,’ and will-int. will
be futurum intentionale. Grice distinguishes the ‘futurum imperativum.’ This
may be seen as a sub-class of the ‘futurum intentionale,’ as applied to the
second and third persons, to avoid the idea that one can issue a
‘self-command.’ Grice has a futurum imperativum, in Latin ending in -tō(te),
used to request someone to do something, or if something else happens first.
“Sī quid acciderit, scrībitō. If anything happens, write to me' (Cicero). ‘Ubi
nōs lāverimus, lavātō.’ 'When*we* have finished washing, *you* get washed.’
(Terence). ‘Crūdam si edēs, in acētum intinguitō.’ ‘If you eat cabbage raw, dip
it in vinegar.’ (Cato). ‘Rīdētō multum quī tē, Sextille, cinaedum dīxerit et
digitum porrigitō medium.’ 'Laugh loudly at anyone who calls you camp,
Sextillus, and stick up your middle finger at him.' (Martial). In Latin, some verbs have only a futurum
imperativum, e. g., scītō 'know', mementō 'remember'. In Latin, there is also a
third person imperative also ending in -tō, plural -ntō exists. It is used in
very formal contexts such as laws. ‘Iūsta imperia suntō, īsque cīvēs pārentō.’
'Orders must be just, and citizens must obey them' (Cicero). Other ways of
expressing a command or request are made with expressions such as cūrā ut 'take
care to...', fac ut 'see to it that...' or cavē nē 'be careful that you
don't...' Cūrā ut valeās. 'Make sure you keep well' (Cicero). Oddly, in Roman,
the futurum indicativum can be used for a polite commands. ‘Pīliae salūtem dīcēs
et Atticae.’ 'Will you please give my
regards to Pilia and Attica?' (Cicero. The OED has will, would. It is traced to
Old English willan, pres.t. wille, willaþ, pa. t. wolde. Grice was especially
interested to check Jamess and Prichards use of willing that, Prichards shall
will and the will/shall distinction; the present tense will; transitive uses,
with simple obj. or obj. clause; occas. intr. 1 trans. with simple obj.:
desire, wish for, have a mind to, `want (something); sometimes implying also
`intend, purpose. 1601 Shaks. (title) Twelfe Night, Or what you will. 1654
Whitlock Zootomia 44 Will what befalleth, and befall what will. 1734 tr.
Rollins Anc. Hist. V. 31 He that can do what ever he will is in great danger of
willing what he ought not. b intr. with well or ill, or trans. with sbs. of
similar meaning (e.g. good, health), usually with dat. of person: Wish (or
intend) well or ill (to some one), feel or cherish good-will or ill-will. Obs.
(cf. will v.2 1 b). See also well-willing; to will well that: to be willing
that. 1483 Caxton Gold. Leg. I wyl wel that thou say, and yf thou say ony good,
thou shalt be pesybly herde. Usage No. 2: trans. with obj. clause (with vb. in
pres. subj., or in periphrastic form with should), or acc. and inf.: Desire,
wish; sometimes implying also `intend, purpose (that something be done or
happen). 1548 Hutten Sum of Diuinitie K viij, God wylle all men to be saued;
enoting expression (usually authoritative) of a wish or intention: Determine,
decree, ordain, enjoin, give order (that something be done). 1528 Cromwell in
Merriman Life and Lett. (1902) I. 320 His grace then wille that thellection of
a new Dean shalbe emonges them of the colledge; spec. in a direction or
instruction in ones will or testament; hence, to direct by will (that something
be done). 1820 Giffords Compl. Engl. Lawyer. I do hereby will and direct that
my executrix..do excuse and release the said sum of 100l. to him; figurative usage. of an abstract thing (e.g.
reason, law): Demands, requires. 1597 Shaks. 2 Hen. IV, Our Battaile is more
full of Namess then yours Then Reason will, our hearts should be as good. Usage
No. 4 transf. (from 2). Intends to express, means; affirms, maintains. 1602
Dolman La Primaud. Fr. Acad. Hee will that this authority should be for a
principle of demonstration. 2 With dependent infinitive (normally without
"to"); desire to, wish to, have a mind to (do something); often also
implying intention. 1697 Ctess DAunoys Trav. I will not write to you often,
because I will always have a stock of News to tell you, which..is pretty long
in picking up. 1704 Locke Hum. Und. The
great Encomiasts of the Chineses, do all to a man agree and will convince us
that the Sect of the Literati are Atheists. 6 In relation to anothers desire or
requirement, or to an obligation of some kind: Am (is, are) disposed or willing
to, consent to; †in early use sometimes = deign or condescend to.With the (rare
and obs.) imper. use, as in quot. 1490, cf. b and the corresponding negative
use in 12 b. 1921 Times Lit. Suppl. 10 Feb. 88/3 Literature thrives where
people will read what they do not agree with, if it is good. b In 2nd person,
interrog., or in a dependent clause after beg or the like, expressing a request
(usually courteous; with emphasis, impatient). 1599 Shaks. Hen. V, ii. i. 47
Will you shogge off? 1605 1878 Hardy Ret. Native v. iii, O, O, O,..O, will you
have done! Usage No. 7 Expressing voluntary action, or conscious intention
directed to the doing of what is expressed by the principal verb (without
temporal reference as in 11, and without emphasis as in 10): = choose to
(choose v. B. 3 a). The proper word for this idea, which cannot be so precisely
expressed by any other. 1685 Baxter Paraphr., When God will tell us we shall
know. Usage No. 8 Expressing natural disposition to do something, and hence
habitual action: Has the habit, or `a way, of --ing; is addicted or accustomed
to --ing; habitually does; sometimes connoting `may be expected to (cf. 15).
1865 Ruskin Sesame, Men, by their nature, are prone to fight; they will fight
for any cause, or for none; expressing potentiality, capacity, or sufficiency:
Can, may, is able to, is capable of --ing; is (large) enough or sufficient
to.†it will not be: it cannot be done or brought to pass; it is all in vain.
So, †will it not be? 1833 N. Arnott Physics, The heart will beat after removal
from the body. Usage No. 10 As a strengthening of sense 7, expressing
determination, persistence, and the like (without temporal reference as in 11);
purposes to, is determined to. 1539 Bible (Great) Isa. lxvi. 6, I heare ye
voyce of the Lorde, that wyll rewarde, etc; recompence his enemyes;
emphatically. Is fully determined to; insists on or persists in --ing:
sometimes with mixture of sense 8. (In 1st pers. with implication of futurity,
as a strengthening of sense 11 a. Also fig. = must inevitably, is sure to. 1892
E. Reeves Homeward Bound viii. 239, I have spent 6,000 francs to come here..and
I will see it! c In phr. of ironical or critical force referring to anothers
assertion or opinion. Now arch. exc. in will have it; 1591 Shaks. 1 Hen. VI,
This is a Riddling Merchant for the nonce, He will be here, and yet he is not
here. 1728 Chambers Cycl., Honey, Some naturalists will have honey to be of a
different quality, according to the difference of the flowers..the bees suck it
from. Also, as auxiliary of the future tense with implication (entailment
rather than cancellable implicaturum) of intention, thus distinguished from
‘shall,’ v. B. 8, where see note); in 1st person: sometimes in slightly
stronger sense = intend to, mean to. 1600 Shaks. A.Y.L., To morrow will we be
married. 1607 Shaks. Cor., Ile run away Till I am bigger, but then Ile fight.
1777 Clara Reeve Champion of Virtue, Never fear it..I will speak to Joseph
about it. b In 2nd and 3rd pers., in questions or indirect statements. 1839
Lane Arab. Nts., I will cure thee
without giving thee to drink any potion When King Yoonán heard his words,
he..said.., How wilt thou do this? c will do (with omission of "I"):
an expression of willingness to carry out a request. Cf. wilco. colloq. 1967 L.
White Crimshaw Memorandum, `And find out where the bastard was `Will do, Jim
said. 13 In 1st pers., expressing immediate intention: "I will" = `I
am now going to, `I proceed at once to. 1885 Mrs. Alexander At Bay, Very well;
I will wish you good-evening. b In 1st pers. pl., expressing a proposal: we
will (†wule we) = `let us. 1798 Coleridge Nightingale 4 Come, we will rest on
this old mossy bridge!, c figurative, as in It will rain, (in 3rd pers.) of a
thing: Is ready to, is on the point of --ing. 1225 Ancr. R. A treou þet wule
uallen, me underset hit mid on oðer treou. 14 In 2nd and 3rd pers., as
auxiliary expressing mere futurity, forming (with pres. inf.) the future, and
(with pf. inf.) the future pf. tense: corresponding to "shall" in the
1st pers. (see note s.v. shall v. B. 8). 1847 Tennyson Princess iii. 12 Rest,
rest, on mothers breast, Father will come to thee soon. b As auxiliary of
future substituted for the imper. in mild injunctions or requests. 1876 Ruskin
St. Marks Rest. That they should use their own balances, weights, and measures;
(not by any means false ones, you will please to observe). 15 As auxiliary of
future expressing a contingent event, or a result to be expected, in a supposed
case or under particular conditions (with the condition expressed by a
conditional, temporal, or imper. clause, or otherwise implied). 1861 M.
Pattison Ess. The lover of the
Elizabethan drama will readily recal many such allusions; b with pers.sSubjects
(usually 1st pers. sing.), expressing a voluntary act or choice in a supposed
case, or a conditional promise or undertaking: esp. in asseverations, e.g. I
will die sooner than, I’ll be hanged if, etc.). 1898 H. S. Merriman Rodens
Corner. But I will be hanged if I see what it all means, now; xpressing a
determinate or necessary consequence (without the notion of futurity). 1887
Fowler Deductive Logic, From what has been said it will be seen that I do not
agree with Mr. Mill. Mod. If, in a syllogism, the middle term be not distributed
in either premiss, there will be no conclusion; ith the notion of futurity
obscured or lost: = will prove or turn out to, will be found on inquiry to; may
be supposed to, presumably does. Hence (chiefly Sc. and north. dial.) in
estimates of amount, or in uncertain or approximate statements, the future
becoming equivalent to a present with qualification: e.g. it will be = `I think
it is or `it is about; what will that be? = `what do you think that is? 1584
Hornby Priory in Craven Gloss. Where on 40 Acres there will be xiij.s. iv.d.
per acre yerely for rent. 1791 Grose Olio (1792) 106, I believe he will be an
Irishman. 1791 Grose Olio. C. How far is it to Dumfries? W. It will be twenty
miles. 1812 Brackenridge Views Louisiana, The agriculture of this territory
will be very similar to that of Kentucky. 1876 Whitby Gloss. sThis word we have
only once heard, and that will be twenty years ago. 16 Used where
"shall" is now the normal auxiliary, chiefly in expressing mere
futurity: since 17th c. almost exclusively in Scottish, Irish, provincial, or
extra-British use (see shall. 1602 Shaks. Ham. I will win for him if I can: if
not, Ile gaine nothing but my shame, and the odde hits. 1825 Scott in Lockhart
Ballantyne-humbug. I expect we will have some good singing. 1875 E. H. Dering
Sherborne. `Will I start, sir? asked the Irish groom. Usage No. 3 Elliptical
and quasi-elliptical uses; n absol. use, or with ellipsis of obj. clause as in
2: in meaning corresponding to senses 5-7.if you will is sometimes used
parenthetically to qualify a word or phrase: = `if you wish it to be so called,
`if you choose or prefer to call it so. 1696 Whiston The. Earth. Gravity
depends entirely on the constant and efficacious, and, if you will, the
supernatural and miraculous Influence of Almighty God. 1876 Ruskin St. Marks
Rest. Very savage! monstrous! if you will. b In parenthetic phr. if God will
(†also will God, rarely God will), God willing: if it be the will of God,
`D.V.In OE. Gode willi&asg.ende (will v.2) = L. Deo volente. 1716 Strype
in Thoresbys Lett. Next week, God willing, I take my journey to my Rectory in
Sussex; fig. Demands, requires (absol. or ellipt. use of 3 c). 1511 Reg. Privy
Seal Scot. That na seculare personis have intrometting with thaim uther wais
than law will; I will well: I assent, `I should think so indeed. (Cf. F. je
veux bien.) Usage No. 18: with ellipsis of a vb. of motion. 1885 Bridges Eros
and Psyche Aug. I will to thee oer the stream afloat. Usage No. 19: with
ellipsis of active inf. to be supplied from the context. 1836 Dickens Sk. Boz,
Steam Excurs., `Will you go on deck? `No, I will not. This was said with a most
determined air. 1853 Dickens Bleak Ho. lii, I cant believe it. Its not that I
dont or I wont. I cant! 1885 Mrs. Alexander Valeries Fate vi, `Do you know that
all the people in the house will think it very shocking of me to walk with
you?.. `The deuce they will!; With generalized ellipsis, esp. in proverbial
saying (now usually as in quot. 1562, with will for would). 1639 J. Clarke
Paroem. 237 He that may and will not, when he would he shall not. c With so or
that substituted for the omitted inf. phr.: now usually placed at the beginning
of the sentence. 1596 Shaks. Tam. Shr. Hor. I promist we would beare his charge
of wooing Gremio. And so we wil. d Idiomatically used in a qualifying phr. with
relative, equivalent to a phr. with indef. relative in -ever; often with a
thing as subj., becoming a mere synonym of may: e.g. shout as loud as you will
= `however loud you (choose to) shout; come what will = `whatever may come; be
that as it will = `however that may be. 1732 Pope Mor. Ess. The ruling Passion,
be it what it will, The ruling Passion conquers Reason still. 20 With ellipsis
of pass. inf. A. 1774 Goldsm. Surv. Exp. Philos. The airs force is compounded
of its swiftness and density, and as these are encreased, so will the force of
the wind; in const. where the ellipsis may be either of an obj. clause or of an
inf. a In a disjunctive qualifying clause or phr. usually parenthetic, as
whether he will or no, will he or not, (with pron. omitted) will or no, (with
or omitted) will he will he not, will he nill he (see VI. below and
willy-nilly), etc.In quot. 1592 vaguely = `one way or another, `in any case.
For the distinction between should and would, v. note s.v. shall; in a
noun-clause expressing the object of desire, advice, or request, usually with a
person as subj., implying voluntary action as the desired end: thus
distinguished from should, which may be used when the persons will is not in
view. Also (almost always after wish) with a thing as Subjects, in which case
should can never be substituted because it would suggest the idea of command or
compulsion instead of mere desire. Cf. shall; will; willest; willeth; wills;
willed (wIld); also: willian, willi, wyll, wille, wil, will, willode, will,
wyllede, wylled, willyd, ied, -it, -id, willed; wijld, wilde, wild, willid,
-yd, wylled,willet, willed; willd(e, wild., OE. willian wk. vb. = German
“willen.” f. will sb.1, 1 trans. to wish, desire; sometimes with implication of
intention: = will. 1400 Lat. and Eng. Prov. He þt a lytul me 3euyth to me
wyllyth optat longe lyffe. 1548 Udall, etc. Erasm. Par. Matt. v. 21-24 Who so
euer hath gotten to hymselfe the charitie of the gospell, whyche wylleth wel to
them that wylleth yll. 1581 A. Hall Iliad, By Mineruas helpe, who willes you
all the ill she may. A. 1875 Tennyson Q. Mary i. iv, A great party in the state
Wills me to wed her; To assert, affirm: = will v.1 B. 4. 1614 Selden Titles
Hon. None of this excludes Vnction before, but only wils him the first
annointed by the Pope. 2 a to direct by ones will or testament (that something
be done, or something to be done); to dispose of by will; to bequeath or
devise; to determine by the will; to attempt to cause, aim at effecting by
exercise of will; to set the mind with conscious intention to the performance
or occurrence of something; to choose or decide to do something, or that
something shall be done or happen. Const. with simple obj., acc. and inf.,
simple inf. (now always with to), or obj. clause; also absol. or intr. (with as
or so). Nearly coinciding in meaning with will v.1 7, but with more explicit
reference to the mental process of volition. 1630 Prynne Anti-Armin. 119 He had
onely a power, not to fall into sinne vnlesse he willed it. 1667 Milton P.L. So
absolute she seems..that what she wills to do or say, Seems wisest. 1710 J.
Clarke tr. Rohaults Nat. Philos. If I will to move my Arm, it is presently
moved. 1712 Berkeley Pass. Obed. He that willeth the end, doth will the
necessary means conducive to that end. 1837 Carlyle Fr. Rev. All shall be as
God wills. 1880 Meredith Tragic Com. So great, heroical, giant-like, that what
he wills must be. 1896 Housman Shropsh. Lad xxx, Others, I am not the first,
Have willed more mischief than they durst; intr. to exercise the will; to
perform the mental act of volition. 1594 Hooker Eccl. Pol. To will, is to bend
our soules to the hauing or doing of that which they see to be good. 1830
Mackintosh Eth. Philos. Wks.. But what could induce such a being to will or to
act? 1867 A. P. Forbes Explan. Is this infinitely powerful and intelligent
Being free? wills He? loves He? c trans. To bring or get (into, out of, etc.)
by exercise of will. 1850 L. Hunt Table-t. (1882) 184 Victims of opium have
been known to be unable to will themselves out of the chair in which they were
sitting. d To control (another person), or induce (another) to do something, by
the mere exercise of ones will, as in hypnotism. 1882 Proc. Soc. Psych.
Research I. The one to be `willed would go to the other end of the house, if
desired, whilst we agreed upon the thing to be done. 1886 19th Cent. They are
what is called `willed to do certain things desired by the ladies or gentlemen
who have hold of them. 1897 A. Lang Dreams & Ghosts iii. 59 A young
lady, who believed that she could play the `willing game successfully without
touching the person `willed; to express or communicate ones will or wish with
regard to something, with various shades of meaning, cf. will, v.1 3.,
specifically: a to enjoin, order; to decree, ordain, a) with personal obj.,
usually with inf. or clause. 1481 Cov. Leet Bk. 496 We desire and also will you
that vnto oure seid seruaunt ye yeue your aid. 1547 Edw. VI in Rymer Foedera,
We Wyll and Commaunde yowe to Procede in the seid Matters. 1568 Grafton Chron.,
Their sute was smally regarded, and shortly after they were willed to silence.
1588 Lambarde Eiren. If a man do lie in awaite to rob me, and (drawing his
sword upon me) he willeth me to deliver my money. 1591 Shaks. 1 Hen. VI We doe
no otherwise then wee are willd. 1596 Nashe Saffron Walden P 4, Vp he was had
and.willed to deliuer vp his weapon. 1656 Hales Gold. Rem. The King in the
Gospel, that made a Feast, and..willed his servants to go out to the high-ways
side. 1799 Nelson in Nicolas Disp., Willing and requiring all Officers and men
to obey you; 1565 Cooper Thesaurus s.v. Classicum, By sounde of trumpet to will
scilence. 1612 Bacon Ess., Of Empire. It is common with Princes (saith Tacitus)
to will contradictories. 1697 Dryden Æneis i. 112 Tis yours, O Queen! to will
The Work, which Duty binds me to fulfil. 1877 Tennyson Harold vi. i, Get thou
into thy cloister as the king Willd it.; to pray, request, entreat; = desire v.
6. 1454 Paston Lett. Suppl. As for the questyon that ye wylled me to aske my
lord, I fond hym yet at no good leyser. 1564 Haward tr. Eutropius. The Romaines
sent ambassadoures to him, to wyll him to cease from battayle. 1581 A. Hall
Iliad, His errand done, as he was willde, he toke his flight from thence. 1631
[Mabbe] Celestina. Did I not will you I should not be wakened? 1690 Dryden
Amphitryon i. i, He has sent me to will and require you to make a swinging long
Night for him; fig. of a thing, to require, demand; also, to induce, persuade a
person to do something. 1445 in Anglia. Constaunce willeth also that thou doo
noughte with weyke corage. Cable and Baugh note that one important s. of
prescriptions that now form part of all our grammars -- that governing the use
of will and shall -- has its origin in this period. Previous to 1622 no grammar
recognized any distinction between will and shall. In 1653 Wallis in his
Grammatica Linguae Anglicanae states in Latin and for the benefit of Europeans
that Subjectsive intention is expressed by will in the first person, by shall
in the second and third, while simple factual indicative predictable futurity
is expressed by shall in the first person, by will in the second and third. It
is not until the second half of the eighteenth century that the use in
questions and subordinate clauses is explicitly defined. In 1755 Johnson, in
his Dictionary, states the rule for questions, and in 1765 William Ward, in his
Grammar, draws up for the first time the full set of prescriptions that
underlies, with individual variations, the rules found in later tracts. Wards
pronouncements are not followed generally by other grammarians until Lindley
Murray gives them greater currency in 1795. Since about 1825 they have often
been repeated in grammars, v. Fries, The periphrastic future with will and
shall. Will qua modal auxiliary never had an s. The absence of conjugation is a
very old common Germanic phenomenon. OE 3rd person present indicative of willan
(and of the preterite-present verbs) is not distinct from the 1st person
present indicative. That dates back at least to CGmc, or further if one looks
just as the forms and ignore tense and/or mood). Re: Prichard: "Prichard
wills that he go to London. This is Prichards example, admired by Grice
("but I expect not pleasing to Maucaulays ears"). The -s is
introduced to indicate a difference between the modal and main verb use (as in
Prichard and Grice) of will. In fact, will, qua modal, has never been used with
a to-infinitive. OE uses present-tense forms to refer to future events as well
as willan and sculan. willan would give a volitional nuance; sculan, an
obligational nuance. Its difficult to find an example of weorthan used to
express the future, but that doesnt mean it didnt happen. In insensitive
utterers, will has very little of volition about it, unless one follows Walliss
observation for for I will vs. I shall. Most probably use ll, or be going
to for the future.
fuzzy implicaturum. Grice loved ‘fuzzy,’ “if only because it’s one of the few
non-Graeco-Roman philosophical terms!” -- fuzzy set, a set in which membership is a
matter of degree. In classical set theory, for every set S and thing x, either
x is a member of S or x is not. In fuzzy set theory, things x can be members of
sets S to any degree between 0 and 1, inclusive. Degree 1 corresponds to ‘is a
member of’ and 0 corresponds to ‘is not’; the intermediate degrees are degrees
of vagueness or uncertainty. Example: Let S be the set of men who are bald at
age forty. L. A. Zadeh developed a logic of fuzzy sets as the basis for a logic
of vague predicates. A fuzzy set can be represented mathematically as a
function from a given universe into the interval [0, 1]. Zadeh tried to interpret Grice alla fuzzy in
“Pragmatics”
G
gadamer: philosopher, the
leading proponent of hermeneutics in the second half of the twentieth century.
He studied at Marburg in the 0s with Natorp and Heidegger. His first book,
Plato’s Dialectical Ethics 1, bears their imprint and reflects his abiding
interest in Grecian philosophy. Truth and Method 0 established Gadamer as an
original thinker and had an impact on a variety of disciplines outside
philosophy, including theology, legal theory, and literary criticism. The three
parts of Truth and Method combine to displace the scientific conceptions of
truth and method as the model for understanding in the human sciences. In the
first part, which presents itself as a critique of the abstraction inherent in
aesthetic consciousness, Gadamer argues that artworks make a claim to truth.
Later Gadamer draws on the play of art in the experience of the beautiful to
offer an analogy to how a text draws its readers into the event of truth by
making a claim on them. In the central portion of the book Gadamer presents
tradition as a condition of understanding. Tradition is not for him an object
of historical knowledge, but part of one’s very being. The final section of
Truth and Method is concerned with language as the site of tradition. Gadamer
sought to shift the focus of hermeneutics from the problems of obscurity and
misunderstanding to the community of understanding that the participants in a
dialogue share through language. Gadamer was involved in three debates that
define his philosophical contribution. The first was an ongoing debate with
Heidegger reflected throughout Gadamer’s corpus. Gadamer did not accept all of
the innovations that Heidegger introduced into his thinking in the 0s,
particularly his reconstruction of the history of philosophy as the history of
being. Gadamer also rejected Heidegger’s elevation of Hölderlin to the status
of an authority. Gadamer’s greater accessibility led Habermas to characterize
Gadamer’s contribution as that of having “urbanized the Heideggerian province.”
The second debate was with Habermas himself. Habermas criticized Gadamer’s
rejection of the Enlightenment’s “prejudice against prejudice.” Whereas
Habermas objected to the conservatism inherent in Gadamer’s rehabilitation of
prejudice, Gadamer explained that he was only setting out the conditions for
understanding, conditions that did not exclude the possibility of radical
change. The third debate, which formed the basis of Dialogue and Deconstruction
9, was with Derrida. Derridean deconstruction is indebted to Heidegger’s later
philosophy and so this debate was in part about the direction philosophy should
take after Heidegger. However, many observers concluded that there was no real
engagement between Gadamer and Derrida. To some it seemed that Derrida, by
refusing to accept the terms on which Gadamer insisted dialogue should take
place, had exposed the limits imposed by hermeneutics. To others it was
confirmation that any attempt to circumvent the conditions of dialogue
specified by Gadamerian hermeneutics is selfdefeating.
galen: philosopher, he traveled
extensively in the Greco-Roman world before settling in Rome and becoming court
physician to Marcus Aurelius. His philosophical interests lay mainly in the
philosophy of science On the Therapeutic Method and nature On the Function of
Parts, and in logic Introduction to Logic, in which he develops a crude but
pioneering treatment of the logic of relations. Galen espoused an extreme form
of directed teleology in natural explanation, and sought to develop a
syncretist picture of cause and explanation drawing on Plato, Aristotle, the
Stoics, and preceding medical writers, notably Hippocrates, whose views he
attempted to harmonize with those of Plato On the Doctrines of Hippocrates and
Plato. He wrote on philosophical psychology On the Passions and Errors of the
Soul; his materialist account of mind Mental Characteristics Are Caused by
Bodily Conditions is notable for its caution in approaching issues such as the
actual nature of the substance of the soul and the age and structure of the
universe that he regarded as undecidable. In physiology, he adopted a version
of the four-humor theory, that health consists in an appropriate balance of
four basic bodily constituents blood, black bile, yellow bile, and phlegm, and
disease in a corresponding imbalance a view owed ultimately to Hippocrates. He
sided with the rationalist physicians against the empiricists, holding that it
was possible to elaborate and to support theories concerning the fundamentals
of the human body; but he stressed the importance of observation and
experiment, in particular in anatomy he discovered the function of the
recurrent laryngeal nerve by dissection and ligation. Via the Arabic tradition,
Galen became the most influential doctor of the ancient world; his influence
persisted, in spite of the discoveries of the seventeenth century, until the
end of the nineteenth century. He also wrote extensively on semantics, but
these texts are lost.
galileo
galilei:
Grice: “His father was, like mine, a musician.” -- philosopher. His Dialogue
concerning the Two Chief World Systems defends Copernicus by arguing against
the major tenets of the Aristotelian cosmology. On his view, one kind of motion
replaces the multiple distinct celestial and terrestrial motions of Aristotle;
mathematics is applicable to the real world; and explanation of natural events
appeals to efficient causes alone, not to hypothesized natural ends. Galileo
was called before the Inquisition, was made to recant his Copernican views, and
spent the last years of his life under house arrest. Discourse concerning Two
New Sciences 1638 created the modern science of mechanics: it proved the laws
of free fall, thus making it possible to study accelerated motions; asserted
the principle of the independence of forces; and proposed a theory of parabolic
ballistics. His work was developed by Huygens and Newton. Galileo’s scientific
and technological achievements were prodigious. He invented an air thermoscope,
a device for raising water, and a computer for calculating quantities in
geometry and ballistics. His discoveries in pure science included the
isochronism of the pendulum and the hydrostatic balance. His telescopic
observations led to the discovery of four of Jupiter’s satellites the Medicean
Stars, the moon’s mountains, sunspots, the moon’s libration, and the nature of
the Milky Way. In methodology Galileo accepted the ancient Grecian ideal of
demonstrative science, and employed the method of retroductive inference,
whereby the phenomena under investigation are attributed to remote causes. Much
of his work utilizes the hypothetico-deductive method.
Galluppi: essential
Italian philosopher. Refs.: Luigi Speranza, "Grice e Galluppi," per
Il Club Anglo-Italiano,The Swimming-Pool Library, Villa Grice, Liguria, Italia.
gambler’s
fallacy:
also called Monte Carlo fallacy, the fallacy of supposing, of a sequence of
independent events, that the probabilities of later outcomes must increase or
decrease to “compensate” for earlier outcomes. For example, since by
Bernoulli’s theorem in a long run of tosses of a fair coin it is very probable
that the coin will come up heads roughly half the time, one might think that a
coin that has not come up heads recently must be “due” to come up heads must have a probability greater than one-half
of doing so. But this is a misunderstanding of the law of large numbers, which
requires no such compensating tendencies of the coin. The probability of heads
remains one-half for each toss despite the preponderance, so far, of tails. In
the sufficiently long run what “compensates” for the presence of improbably
long subsequences in which, say, tails strongly predominate, is simply that
such subsequences occur rarely and therefore have only a slight effect on the
statistical character of the whole.
conversational
game theory:
Grice: “It was Austin who made me see the philosophy of football!” -- Grice for
‘homo ludens’. In “Logic and conversation,” Grice uses the phrases, “the game
of conversation,” “conversational game,” “conversational move,” “the
conversational rules,” – so he knew he was echoing Neumann and Morgenstern. J.
Hintikka, “Grice and game theory.” the theory of the structure of, and the
rational procedures (or strategies) for performing in, games or game-like human
interactions. Although there are forerunners, game theory is virtually invented
by Neumann and Morgenstern. Its most striking feature is its compact
representation of interactions of at least two players; e. g. two players may
face two choices each, and in combination these choices produce four possible
outcomes. Actual choices are of strategies, not of outcomes, although it is
assessments of outcomes that recommend this or that procedure, maxim,
imperative, or strategy. To do well in a game, even for each player to do well,
as is often possible, generally requires taking the other player’s position, interest,
and goal, into account. Hence, to evaluate an imperative or rule or strategiy directly,
without reference to the outcomes they might produce in interaction with
others, is conspicuously perverse. It is not surprising, therefore, that in
meta-ethics, game theory has been preeminently applied to utilitarianianism. As
the numbers of players and rational procedure, guideline or strategies rise,
the complexity of the game of conversation increases geometrically. If players
have *2* strategies each and each ranks the four possible outcomes without
ties, there are already *78* strategically distinct conversations. Even minor
real-life interactions may have astronomically greater complexity. Grice once
complained to Hintikka that this makes game theory ‘useless,’ or ‘otiose.’ Alternatively,
one can note that this makes it realistic and helps us understand why real-life
choices are at least as complex as they sometimes seem. To complicate matters
further, conversationalists can choose over probabilistic combinations of their
pure rational guidelines or strategies. Hence, the original 4 outcomes in a
simple 2 $ 2 game define a continuum of potential outcomes. After noting the
structure of the game of conversation, one might then be struck by an immediate
implication of this mere description. A rational agent may be supposed to
attempt to maximize his potential or expected outcome in the game of
conversation. But as there are at least two players in the game of
conversation, in general conversationalists cannot all maximize simultaneously
over their expected outcomes while assuming that all others are doing likewise.
This is an analytical principle. In general, we cannot maximize over two
functions simultaneously. The general notion of the greatest good of the
greatest number, e. g., is incoherent. Hence, in inter-active choice contexts,
the simple notion of economic rationality is incoherent. Virtually all of early
game theory was dedicated to finding an alternative principle for resolving
conversational game interactions. There are now many of what Grice calls a
“solution theory,” most of which are about this or that outcome rather than this
or that rational guideline or strategy they stipulate which outcomes or range
of outcomes is game-theoretically “rational.” There is little consensus on how
to generalize from the ordinary rationality of merely choosing more rather than
less and of displaying consistent preferences to the general choice of
strategies in games. A pay-off in early game theory is almost always
represented in a cardinal, transferable utility. A transferable utility is an
odd notion that is evidently introduced to avoid the disdain with which
philosophers then treated interpersonal comparisons of utility. It seems to be
analogous to money. One could say that the theory is one of wealth
maximization. In the early theory, the “rationality” conditions are as follows.In
general, if the sums of the pay-offs to each players in various outcomes
differ, it is assumed that a rational player will manage to divide the largest possible
payoff with the other player. 2 No rational agent will accept a payoff below
the “security level” obtainable even if all the other player or players really form
a coalition against the individual. Sometimes it is also assumed that no group
of players will rationally accept less than it could get as its group security
level but in some games, no outcome can
meet this condition. This is an odd combination of elements. The collective
elements are plausibly thought of as merely predictive. If we individually wish
to do well, we should combine efforts to help us do best AS A CONVERSATIONAL
DYAD. But what we want is a theory that converts two individual preferences
into one collective result – Grice’s conversational shared goal of influencing
and being influenced by others. Unfortunately, to put a move doing just this in
the foundations of the theory is question-begging. Our fundamental burden is to
determine whether a theory of subjective rationality MAY produce an
inter-subjectively good result, not to stipulate that it must. In the theory
with cardinal, additive payoffs, we can divide games. There is the constant-sum
game, in which the sum of all players’ payoffs in each outcome is a constant,
and variable sum games. A zero-sum games is a special case of a constant sum
game. Two-player constant sum games are games of pure conversational
‘conflict.’ Each player’s gain is the other’s loss. In constant sum games with
more than two players and in all variable sum games, there is generally reason
for coalition formation to improve payoffs to members of the coalition. A game
without transferable utility, such as a games in which players have only
ordinal preferences, may be characterized as a game of pure conflict or of pure
co-ordination (or co-operation) when players’ preference orderings over
outcomes are, respectively, opposite or identical, or as games of mixed motive
when their orderings are partly the same and partly reversed. Grice’s nalysis
of such games is evidently less tractable than that of games with cardinal,
additive utility, and their theory is only beginning to be extensively
developed by Griceians. Despite the apparent circularity of the rationality
assumptions of early game theory, it is the game theorists’ prisoner’s dilemma
that makes clear that compelling subjectivistic principles of choice can
produce an inter-subjective deficient outcome. This game given its catchy but
inapt name. If they play it in isolation from any other interaction between
them, two players in this game can each do what seems individually best and
reach an outcome that both consider inferior to the outcome that results from
making opposite strategy choices. Even with the knowledge that this is the
problem they face, the players still have incentive to choose the strategies
that jointly produce the inferior outcome. The prisoner’s dilemma involves both
coordination (or co-operation) and conflict. It has played a central role in
discussions of Griceian conversational pragmatics. Games that predominantly
involve coordination (or cooperation), such as when we coordinate in all
driving on the right or all on the left, have a similarly central role. The
understanding of both classes of games has been read into the philosophy of
Hobbes and Hume and into “mutual advantage” theories of justice.
gassendi: philosopher who
advocates a via media to scientific knowledge about the empirically observable
material world that avoids both the dogmatism of Cartesians, who claimed to
have certain knowledge, and the skepticism of Montaigne and Charron, who
doubted that we have knowledge about anything. Gassendi presented Epicurean
atomism as a model for explaining how bodies are structured and interact. He
advanced a hypothetico-deductive method by proposing that experiments should be
used to test mechanistic hypotheses. Like the ancient Pyrrhonian Skeptics, he
did not challenge the immediate reports of our senses; but unlike them he
argued that while we cannot have knowledge of the inner essences of things, we
can develop a reliable science of the world of appearances. In this he
exemplified the mitigated skepticism of modern science that is always open to
revision on the basis of empirical evidence. Gassendi’s first book,
Exercitationes Paradoxicae Adversis Aristoteleos 1624, is an attack on
Aristotle. He is best known as the author of the fifth set of objections to
Descartes’s Meditations1641, in which Gassendi proposed that even clear and
distinct ideas may represent no objects outside our minds, a possibility that
Descartes called the objection of objections, but dismissed as destructive of
all reason. Gassendi’s Syntagma Philosophiae Epicuri 1649 contains his
development of Epicurean philosophy and science. His elaboration of the
mechanistic atomic model and his advocacy of experimental testing of hypotheses
were crucially important in the rise of modern science. Gassendi’s career as a
Catholic priest, Epicurean atomist, mitigated skeptic, and mechanistic
scientist presents a puzzle as do the
careers of several other philosopher-priests in the seventeenth century concerning his true beliefs. On the one hand,
he professed faith and set aside Christian doctrine as not open to challenge.
On the other hand, he utilized an arsenal of skeptical arguments that was beginning
to undermine and would eventually destroy the rational foundations of the
church. Gassendi thus appears to be of a type almost unknown today, a thinker
indifferent to the apparent discrepancy between his belief in Christian
doctrine and his advocacy of materialist science.
gay: j. philosopher Grice read quite a
lot, who tried to reconcile divine command theory and utilitarianism. The son
of a minister, Gay was elected a fellow of Sidney Sussex , Cambridge, where he
taught Grecian philosophy. His essay, “Dissertation Concerning the Fundamental
Principle of Virtue or Morality” argues that obligation is founded on the will
of God, which, because people are destined to be happy, directs us to act to
promote the general happiness. Gay offers an associationist psychology
according to which we pursue objects that have come to be associated with
happiness e.g. money, regardless of whether they now make us happy, and argues,
contra Hutcheson, that our moral sense is conditioned rather than natural.
Gay’s blend of utilitarianism with associationist psychology gave David Hartley
the basis for his moral psychology, which later influenced Bentham in his
formulation of classical utilitarianism.
burlæus: born in
Burley-in-Whaferdale, Yorkshire. Burleigh’s donkey – Grice preferred the
spelling “Gualterus Burlaeus.” “One would hardly realise it’s Irish to the
backbone!” – Grice. Geach’s donkey: geach, Peter b.6, English philosopher and
logician whose main work has been in logic and philosophy of language. A great
admirer of McTaggart, he has published a sympathetic exposition of the latter’s
work Truth, Love and Immortality, 9, and has always aimed to emulate what he
sees as the clarity and rigor of the Scottish idealist’s thought. Greatly
influenced by Frege and Vitters, Geach is particularly noted for his powerful
use of what he calls “the Frege point,” better called “the Frege-Geach point,”
that the same thought may occur as asserted or unasserted and yet retain the
same truth-value. The point has been used by Geach to refute ascriptivist
theories of responsibility, and can be employed against noncognitivist theories
of ethics, which are said to face the Frege-Geach problem of accounting for the
sense of moral ascriptions in contexts like ‘If he did wrong, he will be
punished’. He is also noted for helping to bring Frege to the English-speaking
world, through co-translations with Max Black 9 88. In logic he is known for
proving, independently of Quine, a contradiction in Frege’s way out of
Russell’s paradox Mind, 6, and for his defense of modern Fregean-Russellian
logic against traditional Aristotelian-Scholastic logic. He also has a deep
admiration for the Polish logicians. In metaphysics, Geach is known for his
defense of relative identity, the thesis that an object a can be the same F
where F is a kind-term as an object b while not being the same G, even though a
and b are both G’s. His spirited defense of the thesis has been met by equally
vigorous attacks, and it has not received wide acceptance. An obvious
application of the thesis is to the defense of the doctrine of the Trinity
e.g., the Father is the same god as the Son but not the same person, which has
caught the attention of some philosophers of religion. Geach’s main works
include Mental Acts 8, which attacks dispositional theories of mind, Reference
and Generality 2, which contains much important work on logic, and the
collection Logic Matters 2. A notable defender of Catholicism despite his animadversions
against Scholastic logic, his religious views find their greatest exposure in
God and the Soul 9, Providence and Evil 7, and The Virtues 7. He is married to
the philosopher Elizabeth Anscombe.
Grice’s
genitorial programme
– A type of ideal observer theory -- demiurge from Grecian demiourgos,
‘artisan’, ‘craftsman’, a deity who shapes the material world from the
preexisting chaos. Plato introduces the demiurge in his Timaeus. Because he is
perfectly good, the demiurge wishes to communicate his own goodness. Using the
Forms as a model, he shapes the initial chaos into the best possible image of
these eternal and immutable archetypes. The visible world is the result.
Although the demiurge is the highest god and the best of causes, he should not
be identified with the God of theism. His ontological and axiological status is
lower than that of the Forms, especially the Form of the Good. He is also
limited. The material he employs is not created by him. Furthermore, it is
disorderly and indeterminate, and thus partially resists his rational ordering.
In gnosticism, the demiurge is the ignorant, weak, and evil or else morally
limited cause of the cosmos. In the modern era the term has occasionally been
used for a deity who is limited in power or knowledge. Its first occurrence in
this sense appears to be in J. S. Mill’s Theism 1874.
gedanke experiment – Grice: “Oddly, Turing’s Gedanke
experiment’ is about the meaning of ‘gedanke’!” -- used by Grice, first, in his
“Some remarks about the senses.” His Gedanke experiment involves a Martian who
comes and conquers the earth. He has four eyes in his face, with two of them he
x-s, with the other tow he y-s. Tthought experiment, a technique for testing a
hypothesis by imagining a situation and what would be said about it or more
rarely, happen in it. This technique is often used by philosophers to argue for
or against a hypothesis about the meaning or applicability of a concept. For
example, Locke imagined a switch of minds between a prince and a cobbler as a
way to argue that personal identity is based on continuity of memory, not
continuity of the body. To argue for the relativity of simultaneity, Einstein
imagined two observers one on a train,
the other beside it who observed
lightning bolts. And according to some scholars, Galileo only imagined the
experiment of tying two five-pound weights together with a fine string in order
to argue that heavier bodies do not fall faster. Thought experiments of this
last type are rare because they can be used only when one is thoroughly
familiar with the outcome of the imagined situation. J.A.K. Thrasymachus fl.
427 B.C., Grecian Sophist from Bithynia who is known mainly as a character in
Book I of Plato’s Republic. He traveled and taught extensively throughout the
Grecian world, and was well known in Athens as a teacher and as the author of
treatises on rhetoric. Innovative in his style, he was credited with inventing
the “middle style” of rhetoric. The only surviving fragment of a speech by
Thrasymachus was written for delivery by an Athenian citizen in the assembly,
at a time when Athens was not faring well in the Peloponnesian War; it shows
him concerned with the efficiency of government, pleading with the Athenians to
recognize their common interests and give up their factionalism. Our only other
source for his views on political matters is Plato’s Republic, which most
scholars accept as presenting at least a half-truth about Thrasymachus. There,
Thrasymachus is represented as a foil to Socrates, claiming that justice is
only what benefits the stronger, i.e., the rulers. From the point of view of
those who are ruled, then, justice always serves the interest of someone else,
and rulers who seek their own advantage are unjust. Refs.: H. P. Grice, “Some remarks
about the senses,” in WoW – Coady, “The senses of the Martians.”
gentile: g. idealist
philosopher. He taught philosophy at Pisa. Gentile rejects Hegel’s dialectics
as the process of an objectified thought. Gentile’s actualism or actual
idealism claims that only the pure act of thinking or the transcendental subject
can undergo a dialectical process. All reality, such as nature, God, good, and
evil, is immanent in the dialectics of the transcendental subject, which is
distinct from the empirical subject. Among his major works are “La teoria
generale dello spirito come atto puro” and “Sistema di logica come teoria del
conoscere.” Gentile sees conversation is a concerted act that overcomes the apparent
difficulties of inter-subjectivity and realizes a unity within two transcendental
subjects. Actualism was pretty influential. With Croce’s historicism, it
influenced two Oxonian idealists discussed by H. P. Grice: Bernard Bosanquet
and R. G. Collingwood (vide: H. P. Grice, “Metaphysics,” in D. F. Pears, The
Nature of Metaphysics, London, Macmillan). Refs.: Luigi Speranza, The
Swimming-Pool Library, Villa Grice – Conversation and inter-subjectivity.
genus:
gender.
H. P. Grice calls Austin an artless sexist when referring to the trouser word.
We see how after Austin’s death, Grice more and more loses his reverential
attitude towards the ‘school master’ and shows Austin for what he is! Gender implicaturum
– Most languages have three genders: masculine, feminine, and neuter (or
epicene, or common). feminist epistemology, epistemology from a feminist
perspective. It investigates the relevance that the gender of the
inquirer/knower has to epistemic practices, including the theoretical practice
of epistemology. It is typified both by themes that are exclusively feminist in
that they could arise only from a critical attention to gender, and by themes
that are non-exclusively feminist in that they might arise from other
politicizing theoretical perspectives besides feminism. A central, exclusively
feminist theme is the relation between philosophical conceptions of reason and
cultural conceptions of masculinity. Here a historicist stance must be adopted,
so that philosophy is conceived as the product of historically and culturally
situated hence gendered authors. This stance brings certain patterns of
intellectual association into view
patterns, perhaps, of alignment between philosophical conceptions of
reason as contrasted with emotion or intuition, and cultural conceptions of
masculinity as contrasted with femininity. A central, non-exclusively feminist
theme might be called “social-ism” in epistemology. It has two main
tributaries: political philosophy, in the form of Marx’s historical materialism;
and philosophy of science, in the form of either Quinean naturalism or Kuhnian
historicism. The first has resulted in feminist standpoint theory, which adapts
and develops the Marxian idea that different social groups have different
epistemic standpoints, where the material positioning of one of the groups is
said to bestow an epistemic privilege. The second has resulted in feminist work
in philosophy of science which tries to show that not only epistemic values but
also non-epistemic e.g. gendered values are of necessity sometimes an influence
in the generation of scientific theories. If this can be shown, then an
important feminist project suggests itself: to work out a rationale for
regulating the influence of these values so that science may be more self-transparent
and more responsible. By attempting to reveal the epistemological implications
of the fact that knowers are diversely situated in social relations of identity
and power, feminist epistemology represents a radicalizing innovation in the
analytic tradition, which has typically assumed an asocial conception of the
epistemic subject, and of the philosopher. -- feminist philosophy, a discussion
of philosophical concerns that refuses to identify the human experience with
the male experience. Writing from a variety of perspectives, feminist
philosophers challenge several areas of traditional philosophy on the grounds
that they fail 1 to take seriously women’s interests, identities, and issues;
and 2 to recognize women’s ways of being, thinking, and doing as valuable as
those of men. Feminist philosophers fault traditional metaphysics for splitting
the self from the other and the mind from the body; for wondering whether
“other minds” exist and whether personal identity depends more on memories or
on physical characteristics. Because feminist philosophers reject all forms of
ontological dualism, they stress the ways in which individuals interpenetrate
each other’s psyches through empathy, and the ways in which the mind and body
coconstitute each other. Because Western culture has associated rationality
with “masculinity” and emotionality with “femininity,” traditional
epistemologists have often concluded that women are less human than men. For
this reason, feminist philosophers argue that reason and emotion are
symbiotically related, coequal sources of knowledge. Feminist philosophers also
argue that Cartesian knowledge, for all its certainty and clarity, is very limited.
People want to know more than that they exist; they want to know what other
people are thinking and feeling. Feminist philosophers also observe that
traditional philosophy of science is not as objective as it claims to be.
Whereas traditional philosophers of science often associate scientific success
with scientists’ ability to control, rule, and otherwise dominate nature,
feminist philosophers of science associate scientific success with scientists’
ability to listen to nature’s self-revelations. Since it willingly yields
abstract theory to the testimony of concrete fact, a science that listens to
what nature says is probably more objective than one that does not. Feminist
philosophers also criticize traditional ethics and traditional social and
political philosophy. Rules and principles have dominated traditional ethics.
Whether agents seek to maximize utility for the aggregate or do their duty for
the sake of duty, they measure their conduct against a set of universal,
abstract, and impersonal norms. Feminist philosophers often call this
traditional view of ethics a “justice” perspective, contrasting it with a
“care” perspective that stresses responsibilities and relationships rather than
rights and rules, and that attends more to a moral situation’s particular
features than to its general implications. Feminist social and political philosophy
focus on the political institutions and social practices that perpetuate
women’s subordination. The goals of feminist social and political philosophy
are 1 to explain why women are suppressed, repressed, and/or oppressed in ways
that men are not; and 2 to suggest morally desirable and politically feasible
ways to give women the same justice, freedom, and equality that men have.
Liberal feminists believe that because women have the same rights as men do,
society must provide women with the same educational and occupational
opportunities that men have. Marxist feminists believe that women cannot be
men’s equals until women enter the work force en masse and domestic work and
child care are socialized. Radical feminists believe that the fundamental
causes of women’s oppression are sexual. It is women’s reproductive role and/or
their sexual role that causes their subordination. Unless women set their own
reproductive goals childlessness is a legitimate alternative to motherhood and
their own sexual agendas lesbianism, autoeroticism, and celibacy are
alternatives to heterosexuality, women will remain less than free.
Psychoanalytic feminists believe that women’s subordination is the result of
earlychildhood experiences that cause them to overdevelop their abilities to
relate to other people on the one hand and to underdevelop their abilities to
assert themselves as autonomous agents on the other. Women’s greatest strength,
a capacity for deep relationships, may also be their greatest weakness: a
tendency to be controlled by the needs and wants of others. Finally,
existentialist feminists claim that the ultimate cause of women’s subordination
is ontological. Women are the Other; men are the Self. Until women define
themselves in terms of themselves, they will continue to be defined in terms of
what they are not: men. Recently, socialist feminists have attempted to weave
these distinctive strands of feminist social and political thought into a
theoretical whole. They argue that women’s condition is overdetermined by the
structures of production, reproduction and sexuality, and the socialization of
children. Women’s status and function in all of these structures must change if
they are to achieve full liberation. Furthermore, women’s psyches must also be
transformed. Only then will women be liberated from the kind of patriarchal
thoughts that undermine their self-concept and make them always the Other.
Interestingly, the socialist feminist effort to establish a specifically
feminist standpoint that represents how women see the world has not gone
without challenge. Postmodern feminists regard this effort as an instantiation
of the kind of typically male thinking that tells only one story about reality,
truth, knowledge, ethics, and politics. For postmodern feminists, such a story
is neither feasible nor desirable. It is not feasible because women’s
experiences differ across class, racial, and cultural lines. It is not
desirable because the “One” and the “True” are philosophical myths that
traditional philosophy uses to silence the voices of the many. Feminist
philosophy must be many and not One because women are many and not One. The
more feminist thoughts, the better. By refusing to center, congeal, and cement
separate thoughts into a unified and inflexible truth, feminist philosophers
can avoid the pitfalls of traditional philosophy. As attractive as the
postmodern feminist approach to philosophy may be, some feminist philosophers
worry that an overemphasis on difference and a rejection of unity may lead to
intellectual as well as political disintegration. If feminist philosophy is to
be without any standpoint whatsoever, it becomes difficult to ground claims
about what is good for women in particufeminist philosophy feminist philosophy
306 306 lar and for human beings in
general. It is a major challenge to contemporary feminist philosophy,
therefore, to reconcile the pressures for diversity and difference with those
for integration and commonality.
genus
generalissimum:
“I love a superlative: good, gooder and goodest, my favourites!” a genus that
is not a species of some higher genus; a broadest natural kind. One of the ten
Aristotelian categories, it is also called summum
genus. For Aristotle and many of his followers, the ten categories (twelve
in Kant, four in Grice) are *not* species of some higher all-inclusive
genus say, being. Otherwise, that alleged
over-arching all-inclusive genus would wholly include the differences, say,
between conversational quality, conversational quantity, conversational
relation, and conversational mode, and would be universally predicable of
conversational quality, conversational quantity, conversational relation, and
conversational mode. But no genus is predicable of its differences in this
manner. Few authors explained this reasoning clearly, but Grice did: “If I
appeal to four conversational categories, I know what I am doing. The principle
of conversational benevolence cannot float in the air: it needs four categories
– informativeness, trustworthiness, connectedness and perspicuity – to make it
applicable to our conversational realities. Grice points out that if the
difference ‘rational’ just meant ‘rational animal’, to define ‘man’ as
‘rational animal’ would be to define him as ‘rational animal animal’, which
would infringe the conversational maxims ‘be brief,’ and ‘do not be repetitive’
– “On toop, man is a rational animal animal is ill formed.” So too generally:
no genus can include its differences in this way. Thus there is no all-inclusive
genus. Grice’s four conversational categories are the most general conversational
genera.
charlier: a. k. a. gerson,
j. de, philosopher. He studied in Paris, and succeeded the nominalist Pierre
d’Ailly as chancellor of the varsity. Both d’Ailly and Gerson played a
prominent part in the work of the Council of Constance. Much of Charlier’s
influence on later thinkers arose from his conciliarism, the view that the
church is a political society and that a general council, acting on behalf of
the church, has the power to depose a pope who fails to promote the church’s
welfare, for it seemed that similar arguments could apply to other forms of
political society. Gerson’s conciliarism was not constitutionalism in the
modern sense, for he appealed to corporate and hierarchical ideas of church
government, and did not rest his case on any principle of individual rights.
His main writings dealt with mystical theology, which, he thought, brings the
believer closer to the beatific vision of God than do other forms of theology.
He was influenced by St. Bonaventure and Albertus Magnus, but especially by
Pseudo-Dionysius, whom he saw as a disciple of St. Paul and not as a Platonist.
He was thus able to adopt an anti-Platonic position in his attacks on the
mystic Ruysbroeck and on contemporary followers of Duns Scotus, such as Jean de
Ripa. In dismissing Scotist realism, he made use of nominalist positions,
particularly those that emphasized divine freedom. He warned theologians
against being misled by pride into supposing that natural reason alone could
solve metaphysical problems; and he emphasized the importance of a priest’s
pastoral duties. Despite his early prominence, he spent the last years of his
life in relative obscurity.
get across – A more colloquial way for what Grice later will have as
‘soul-to-soul-transfer,’ used by Grice in Causal: Surely the truth or falsity
of Strawson having a beautiful handwriting has no bearing on the truth or
falsity of his being hopeless at philosophy (“provided that is what I intended
to get across,” implicating, ‘who cares,’ or ‘whatever’). His cavalier attitude
shows that Grice is never really concerned with the individuation of the
logical form of the implicaturum, just to note that whatever some philosopher
thought was part of the sense it ain’t! This is the Austinian in Grice. Austin
suggested that Grice analysed or consult with Holdcroft for all ‘forms of
indirect communication.’ Grice lists: mean, indicate, suggest, imply,
insinuate, hint – ‘get across’.
geulincx: a. philosopher.
Born in Antwerp, he was educated at Louvain and there became professor of
philosophy and dean. He was forced out of Louvain, perhaps for his Jansenist or
Cartesian tendencies, and in 1658 he moved to Leyden and became a Protestant.
Though he taught there until his death, he never attained a regular
professorship at the varsity. His main philosophical work is his “Ethica; or, De
virtute et primis ejus proprietatibus.” Other oeuvre includes “Questiones
quodlibeticae”; later editions published as “Saturnalia,” a “Logica” 1661, and
a “Methodus inveniendi argumenta,”.”Physica vera,” “Physica peripatetica,”
“Metaphysica vera,” “Metaphysica ad mentem peripateticam,” posthumous
commentaries on Descartes’s Principia Philosophiae. Geulincx was deeply
influenced by Descartes, and had many ideas that closely resemble those of the
later Cartesians as well as those of more independent thinkers like Spinoza and
Leibniz. Though his grounds were original, like many later Cartesians, Geulincx
upholds a version of occasionalism; he argued that someone or something can
only do what it knows how to do (in terms of strict physiological laws). From
this Geulincx infers (“fallaciously,” according to Grice) from that that he
(sc. Geulincx) cannot be the genuine cause of his own bodily movement. In
discussing the mind-body relation, Geulincx used a clock analogy similar to one
Leibniz used in connection with his preestablished harmony. Geulincx also held
a view of mental and material substance reminiscent of that of Spinoza.
Finally, he proposed a system of ethics grounded in the idea of a virtuous
will. As Grice notes: “Despite the evident similarities between Geulincx’s
views and the views of his more renowned contemporaries, it is very difficult
to determine exactly what influence Geulincx may have had on them, and they may
have had on him – but then who gives?”
genovesi: essential
Italian philosopher – Refs.: Luigi Speranza, "Grice e Genovesi," per
Il Club Anglo-Italiano, The Swimming-Pool Library, Villa Grice, Liguria,
Italia.
genua: essential Italian
philosopher. Refs.: Luigi Speranza, "Grice e Genua," per Il Club
Anglo-Italiano, The Swimming-Pool Library, Villa Grice, Liguria, Italia.
colonna
–
e. giles di roma, ome, original name, a member of the order of the Hermits of
St. Augustine, he studied arts at Augustinian house and theology at the varsity
in Paris 1260 72 but was censured by the theology faculty 1277 and denied a
license to teach as tutor. Owing to the intervention of Pope Honorius IV, he
later returned from Italy to Paris to teach theology, was appointed general of
his order, and became archbishop of Bourges. Colonna both defends and
criticizes views of Aquinas. He held that essence and existence are really
distinct in creatures, but described them as “things”; that prime matter cannot
exist without some substantial form; and, early in his career, that an
eternally created world is possible. He defended only one substantial form in
composites, including man. Grice adds: “Colonna supported Pope Boniface VIII in
his quarrel with Philip IV of France – and that was a bad choice.”
gilson: É., philosopher,
historian, cofounder of the Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, and a
major figure in Neo-Thomism. Gilson discovered medieval philosophy through his pioneering
work on Descartes’s scholastic background. Gilson argues that early modern
philosophy was incomprehensible without medieval thought, and that medieval
philosophy itself did not represent the unified theory of reality that some
Thomists had supposed. His studies of Duns Scotus, Augustine, Bernard, Aquinas,
Bonaventure, Dante, and Abelard and Héloïse explore this diversity. But in his
Gifford lectures 132, The Spirit of Medieval Philosophy, Gilson attempts a
broad synthesis of medieval teaching on philosophy, metaphysics, ethics, and
epistemology, and employed it in his critique of modern philosophy, The Unity
of Philosophical Experience 7. Most of all, Gilson attempted to reestablish
Aquinas’s distinction between essence and existence in created being, as in Being
and Some Philosophers 9.
Gioberti: essential Italian
philosopher, He was imprisoned and exiled for advocating unification, and became a central political
figure during the Risorgimento. His major political oeuvre, “Del primato morale
e civile degli italiani,” argues for a federation of the states. Gioberti’s philosophical theory,
ontologism, in contrast to Hegel’s idealism, identifies the dialectics of Being
with God’s creation. Gioberti condensed his theory in the formula: “Being
creates the existent.” “L’essere crea l’essistente.” The dialectics of Being,
which is the only necessary substance, is a “palingenesis,” or a return to its
origin, in which the existent first departs from and imitates its creator (“mimesis”)
and then returns to its creator (“methexis”). By intuition, the human mind
comes in contact with God and discovers truth by retracing the dialectics of
Being. However, knowledge of supernatural truths is given only by God’s
revelation. His oeuvre also includes “Teorica del soprannaturale” and “Introduzione
allo studio della filosofia.” Gioberti criticized modern philosophers such as
Descartes for their psychologism seeking
truth from the human subject instead of from Being itself and its revelation.
His thought is very influential in Italy. Refs.: Luigi
Speranza, "Grice e Gioberti," per Il Club Anglo-Italiano, The
Swimming-Pool Library, Villa Grice, Liguria, Italia
giudice: essential Italian philosopher – who
has studied in depth the origin of philosophy in the Eleatic school. Refs.: Luigi
Speranza, "Grice, del Giudice, e la filosofia greco-romana," per il
Club Anglo-Italiano, The Swimming-Pool Library, Villa Grice, Liguria, Italia.
datum: in epistemology,
the “brute fact” element to be found or postulated as a component of perceptual
experience. Some theorists who endorse the existence of a given element in
experience think that we can find this element by careful introspection of what
we experience Moore, H. H. Price. Such theorists generally distinguish between
those components of ordinary perceptual awareness that constitute what we
believe or know about the objects we perceive and those components that we
strictly perceive. For example, if we analyze introspectively what we are aware
of when we see an apple we find that what we believe of the apple is that it is
a three-dimensional object with a soft, white interior; what we see of it,
strictly speaking, is just a red-shaped expanse of one of its facing sides.
This latter is what is “given” in the intended sense. Other theorists treat the
given as postulated rather than introspectively found. For example, some
theorists treat cognition as an activity imposing form on some material given
in conscious experience. On this view, often attributed to Kant, the given and
the conceptual are interdefined and logically inseparable. Sometimes this
interdependence is seen as rendering a description of the given as impossible;
in this case the given is said to be ineffable C. I. Lewis, Mind and the World
Order. On some theories of knowledge foundationalism the first variant of the
given that which is “found” rather than
“postulated” provides the empirical
foundations of what we might know or justifiably believe. Thus, if I believe on
good evidence that there is a red apple in front of me, the evidence is the
non-cognitive part of my perceptual awareness of the red appleshaped expanse.
Epistemologies postulating the first kind of givenness thus require a single
entity-type to explain the sensorial nature of perception and to provide
immediate epistemic foundations for empirical knowledge. This requirement is
now widely regarded as impossible to satisfy; hence Wilfred Sellars describes the
discredited view as the myth of the given.
glanvill: English
philosopher who defended the Royal Society against scholasticism. Glanvill believes
that certainty is possible in the mathematical but not in the empirical realm.
In “The Vanity of Dogmatizing,” he claimed that the human corruption that
resulted from Adam’s fall precludes dogmatic knowledge of nature. Using
traditional sceptical arguments as well as an analysis of causality that
anticipate Hume, Glanvill argues that empirical belief is the probabilistic
variety acquired by piece-meal investigation. Despite his scepticism he argues
for the existence of witches in Witches and Witchcraft (“Probably he was
married to one,” Grice comments).
gnosticism:
a philosophical
movement, especially important under the leadership of Valentinus and
Basilides. They teach that matter was evil, the result of a cosmic disruption
in which an evil archon often associated with the god of the Old Testament,
Yahweh rebelled against the heavenly pleroma the complete spiritual world. In
the process divine sparks were unleashed from the pleroma and lodged in
material human bodies. Jesus was a high-ranking archon Logos sent to restore
those souls with divine sparks to the pleroma by imparting esoteric knowledge
gnosis to them. Gnosticism influenced and threatened the orthodox church from
within and without. NonChristian gnostic sects rivaled Christianity, and
Christian gnostics threatened orthodoxy by emphasizing salvation by knowledge
rather than by faith. Theologians like Clement of Alexandria and his pupil
Origen held that there were two roads to salvation, the way of faith for the
masses and the way of esoteric or mystical knowledge for the philosophers.
Gnosticism profoundly influenced the C. of E., causing it to define its
scriptural canon and to develop a set of creeds and an episcopal organization
(“My mother, Mabel Fenton Grice, was a bit of a gnostic, if I must say” –
Grice).
göckel: goclenius r.,
philosopher, after holding some minor posts elsewhere, he becomes professor at
Marburg. “Though he was well read and knowledgeable of later trends in these
disciplines,” Grice ntoes, “you could clearly see his basic sympathies
areAristotelian.” Goclenius was very well regarded by his contemporaries, who
called him “Plato marburgensis,” the Christian Aristotle, and “TheLight of
Europe,” among other things. Göckel published an unusually large number of
essays, including “Psychologia, hoc est de hominis perfection,” “Conciliator
philosophicus,” “Controversiae logicae et philosophicae,” and numerous other
works on logic, rhetoric, physics, metaphysics, and the Latin language. But his
most lasting work is his “Lexicon Philosophicum” – “very practical,” Grice
notes, “since the entries are alphabetically ordered.” -- together with its
companion, the “Lexicon Philosophicum Graecum” – “I gave a copy to Urmson,”
Grice recalls, “and the next day he was writing the “Greek Philosopical
Lexicon.” Göckel’s “Lexicon philosophicum” provides pretty obscure definitions
of the philosophical terminology of late Scholastic philosophy, and “they are
deemed so obscure that he is banned from quotation at some varsities.” – Grice.
gödel: cited by Grice.
His incompleteness theorems, two theorems formulated and proved by the Austrian
logician Kurt Gödel in his infamous “Über formal unentscheidbare Sätze der Whiteheads und Russells ‘Principia
Mathematica’ und vervandter Systeme I,” probably the most celebrated results in
the whole of logic. They are aptly referred to as “incompleteness” theorems since
each shows, for any member of a certain class of formal systems, that there is
a sentence formulable in its language that it cannot prove, but that it would
be desirable for it to prove. In the case of the first theorem G1, what cannot
be proved is a true sentence of the language of the given theory. G1 is thus a
disappointment to any theory constructor who wants his theory to tell the whole
truth about its subject. In the case of the second theorem G2, what cannot be
proved is a sentence of the theory that “expresses” its consistency. G2 is thus
a disappointment to those who desire a straightforward execution of Hilbert’s
Program. The proofs of the incompleteness theorems can be seen as based on
three main ideas. The first is that of a Gödel numbering, i.e., an assignment
of natural numbers to each of the various objects i.e., the terms, formulas,
axioms, proofs, etc. belonging to the various syntactical categories of the
given formal system T referred to here as the “represented theory” whose
metamathematics is under consideration. The second is that of a
representational scheme. This includes i the use of the Gödel numbering to
develop number-theoretic codifications of various of the metamathematical
properties pertaining to the represented theory, and ii the selection of a
theory S hereafter, the “representing theory” and a family of formulas from
that theory the “representing formulas” in terms of which to register as
theorems various of the facts concerning the metamathematical properties of the
represented theory thus encoded. The basic result of this representational
scheme is the weak representation of the set of Gödel numbers of theorems of T,
where a set L of numbers is said to be weakly represented in S by a formula
‘Lx’ of S just in case for every number n, n1 L if and only if ‘L[n]’ is a
theorem of S, where ‘[n]’ is the standard term of S that, under the intended
interpretation of S, designates the number n. Since the set of Gödel numbers of
theorems of the represented theory T will typically be recursively enumerable,
and the representing theory S must be capable of weakly representing this set,
the basic strength requirement on S is that it be capable of weakly
representing the recursively enumerable sets of natural numbers. Because basic
systems of arithmetic e.g. Robinson’s arithmetic and Peano arithmetic all have
this capacity, Gödel’s theorems are often stated using containment of a
fragment of arithmetic as the basic strength requirement governing the
capacities of the representing theory which, of course, is also often the
represented theory. More on this point below. The third main idea behind the
incompleteness theorems is that of a diagonal or fixed point construction
within S for the notion of unprovability-in-T; i.e., the formulation of a
sentence Gödel of S which, under the given Gödel numbering of T, the given
representation of T’s metamathematical notions in S, and the intended
interpretation of the language of S, says of itself that it is not
provable-in-T. Gödel is thus false if provable and unprovable if true. More
specifically, if ‘ProvTx’ is a formula of S that weakly represents the set of
Gödel numbers of theorems of T in S, then Gödel can be any formula of S that is
provably equivalent in S to the formula ‘- ProvT [Gödel]’. Given this
background, G1 can be stated as follows: If a the representing theory S is any
subtheory of the represented theory T up to and God Gödel’s incompleteness
theorems 347 347 including the
represented theory itself, b the representing theory S is consistent, c the
formula ‘ProvT x’ weakly represents the set of Gödel numbers of theorems of the
represented theory T in the representing theory S, and d Gödel is any sentence
provably equivalent in the representing theory S to ‘ProvT [Gödel]’, then neither
Gödel nor -Gödel is a theorem of the representing theory S. The proof proceeds
in two parts. In the first part it is shown that, for any representing theory S
up to and including the case where S % T , if S is consistent, then -Gödel is
not a theorem of S. To obtain this in its strongest form, we pick the strongest
subtheory S of T possible, namely S % T, and construct a reductio. Thus,
suppose that 1 -Gödel is a theorem of T. From 1 and d it follows that 2
‘ProvT[Gödel]’ is a theorem of T. And from 2 and c in the “if” direction it
follows that 3 Gödel is a theorem of T. But 1 and 3 together imply that the
representing theory T is inconsistent. Hence, if T is consistent, -Gödel cannot
be a theorem of T. In the second part of the proof it is argued that if the
representing theory S is consistent, then Gödel is not a theorem of it. Again,
to obtain the strongest result, we let S be the strongest subtheory of T
possible namely T itself and, as before, argue by reductio. Thus we suppose
that A Gödel is a theorem of S % T . From this assumption and condition d it
follows that B ‘-Provr [Gödel]’ is a theorem of S % T . By A and c in the “only
if” direction it follows that C ‘ProvT [Gödel]’ is a theorem of S % T . But
from B and C it follows that S % T is
inconsistent. Hence, Gödel is not provable in any consistent representing
theory S up to and including T itself. The above statement of G1 is, of course,
not the usual one. The usual statement suppresses the distinction stressed
above between the representing and represented theories and collaterally
replaces our condition c with a clause to the effect that T is a recursively
axiomatizable extension of some suitably weak system of arithmetic e.g.
Robinson’s arithmetic, primitive recursive arithmetic, or Peano arithmetic.
This puts into a single clause what, metamathematically speaking, are two
separate conditions one pertaining to
the representing theory, the other to the represented theory. The requirement
that T be an extension of the selected weak arithmetic addresses the question
of T’s adequacy as a representing theory, since the crucial fact about
extensions of the weak arithmetic chosen is that they are capable of weakly
representing all recursively enumerable sets. This constraint on T’s
capabilities as a representing theory is in partnership with the usual
requirement that, in its capacity as a represented theory, T be recursively
axiomatizable. For T’s recursive axiomatizability ensures under ordinary
choices of logic for T that its set of
theorems will be recursively enumerable
and hence weakly representable in the kind of representing theory that
it itself by virtue of its being an extension of the weak arithmetic specified
is. G1 can, however, be extended to certain theories whose sets of Gödel
numbers of theorems are not recursively enumerable. When this is done, the
basic capacity required of the representing theory is no longer merely that the
recursively enumerable sets of natural numbers be representable in it, but that
it also be capable of representing various non-recursively enumerable sets, and
hence that it go beyond the weak arithmetics mentioned earlier. G2 is a more
demanding result that G1 in that it puts significantly stronger demands on the
formula ‘ProvT x’ used to express the notion of provability for the represented
theory T. In proving G1 all that is required of ‘ProvT x’ is that it weakly
represent θ % the set of Gödel numbers of theorems of T; i.e., that it yield an
extensionally accurate registry of the theorems of the represented theory in
the representing theory. G2 places additional conditions on ‘ProvT x’;
conditions which result from the fact that, to prove G2, we must codify the
second part of the proof of G1 in T itself. To do this, ‘ProvT x’ must be a
provability predicate for T. That is, it must satisfy the following
constraints, commonly referred to as the Derivability Conditions for ‘ProvT x’:
I If A is a theorem of the represented theory, then ‘ProvT [A]’ must be a
theorem of the representing theory. II Every instance of the formula ‘ProvT [A
P B] P ProvT [A] P ProvT [B]’ must be a theorem of T. III Every instance of the
formula ‘ProvT [A] P ProvT [ProvT [A]]’ must be a theorem of T. I, of course,
is just part of the requirement that ‘ProvT [A]’ weakly represent T’s theoremset
in T. So it does not go beyond what is required for the proof of G1. II and
III, however, do. They make it possible to “formalize” the second part of the
proof of G1 in T itself. II captures, in terms of ‘ProvT X’, the modus ponens
inference by which B is derived from A, and III codiGödel’s incompleteness
theorems Gödel’s incompleteness theorems 348
348 fies in T the appeal to c used in deriving C from A. The result of
this “formalization” process is a proof within T of the formula ‘ConT P Gödel’
where ConT is a formula of the form ‘- ProvT [#]’, with ‘ProvT x’ a provability
predicate for T and ‘[#]’ the standard numeral denoting the Gödel number # of
some formula refutable in T . From this, and the proof of the second part of G1
itself in which the first Derivability Condition, which is just the “only if”
direction of c, figures prominently, we arrive at the following result, which
is a generalized form of G2: If S is any consistent representing theory up to
and including the represented theory T itself, ‘ProvT x’ any provability
predicate for T, and ConT any formula of T of the form ‘- ProvT [#]’, then ConT
is not a theorem of S. To the extent that, in being a provability predicate for
T, ‘ProvT x’ “expresses” the notion of provability of the represented theory T,
it seems fair to say that ConT expresses its consistency. And to the extent
that this is true, it is sensible to read G2 as saying that for any
representing theory S and any represented theory T extending S, if S is
consistent, then the consistency of T is not provable in S.
fontaines: g. philosopher.
He taught at Paris. Among his major writings are fifteen Quodlibetal Questions
and other disputations. He was strongly Aristotelian in philosophy, with
Neoplatonic influences in metaphysics. Fontaines defends the identity of
essence and existence in creatures against theories of their real or intentional
distinction, and argues for the possibility of demonstrating God’s existence
and of some quidditative knowledge of God. He admits divine ideas for species
but not for individuals within species. He makes wide applications (“and
misapplications,” Grice adds) of Aristotelian act-potency theory e.g., to the distinction between the soul and
its powers (this is discussed by Grice in “The power structure of the soul”),
to the explanation of intellection and volition, to the general theory of
substance and accident, and in unusual fashion to essence-existence
“composition” of creatures.
godwin: w. English
philosopher. “An Enquiry concerning Political Justice” arises heated debate.
Godwin argues for radical forms of determinism, anarchism, and utilitarianism. Godwin
thought that government corrupts everyone by encouraging stereotyped thinking
that prevents us from seeing each other as unique individuals. His “Caleb
Williams” portrays a good man corrupted by prejudice. Once we remove prejudice
and artificial inequality we will see that our acts are wholly determined. This
obviously makes punishment pointless. Only in a small anarchic society – such
as the one he observed outside Oxford -- can people see others as they really
are and thus come to feel a ‘sympathetic concern’ for his well-being. (In this
he influenced Edward Carpenter of “England Arise” infame). Only so can we be
virtuous, because being virtuous is acting from a ‘sympathetic’ (cf. Grice’s
principle of conversational sympathy) feeling to bring the greatest happiness
to the dyad affected. Godwin takes this principle (relabeled “the principle of
conversational sympathy” by Grice) quite literally, and accepts all its
consequences. Truthfulness has no claim on us other than the happiness it
brings. If keeping a promise causes less good than breaking it, there is no
reason (or duty) at all to keep it. If one must choose between saving the life
either of a major human benefactor or of one’s distant uncle, one must choose
the benefactor. We surely need no ‘rules’ in morals. An alleged ‘moral’ “rule”
would prevent us from seeing others properly, thereby impairing the sympathetic
feeling that constitutes virtue. Rights, too, are pointless. Sympathetic people
will act to help (or cooperate with) others. Later utilitarians like Bentham
had difficulty in separating their positions from Godwin’s notorious
views. Refs.: H. P. Grice, “Godwin and
the ethics of conversation.’
Kennst
du das Land, wo die Zitronen bluhn?: j.
w. v. Goethe, a ballad from Mignon that Goethe uses in Book II of his novel,
The apprentice. Grice was amused by Searle’s example – “even if it misses its
point!” An British soldier in the Second World War is captured by Italian
troops. The British soldier wishes to get the Italian troops to believe that he
is a *German* officer, in order to get them to release him. What he would like
to do is to tell them, in German, or Italian, that he is a German officer
(“Sono tedesco,” “Ich bin Deutsche”) but he does not know enough German, or
Italian, to do such a simple thing as that. So he, as it were, attempts to put
on a show of telling them that he is a German officer by reciting the only line
of German that he knows, a line he learned at Clifton, to wit: ‘Kennst du das
Land, wo die Zitronen bluhen?”. The British soldier intends to produce a
certain response in his Italian captors, viz. that they should believe him to
be a German officer. He intends to produce this response by means of the
Italian troops’s recognition of his intention to produce it. Nevertheless, it
would seem false that when the British soldier utters, "Kennst du das
Land, wo die Zitronen bluhen?” what he means or communicates is that he is a German officer. Searle thinks he can support
a claim that something is missing from Grice’s account of meaning. This would
(Grice think Searle thinks) be improved if it were supplemented as follows (Grice’s
conjecture): "U meant that p by x" means " U intended to produce
in A a certain effect by means of the recognition of U's intention to produce
that effect, and (if the utterance of x is the utterance of a sentence) U
intends A's recognition of U's intention (to produce the effect) to be achieved
by means of the recognition that the sentence uttered is conventionally used to
produce such an effect." Now even if Grice should be faced with a genuine
counterexample, he should be very reluctant to take the way out which Grice
suspects is being offered him. Grice finds it difficult to tell whether this is
what was being offered, since Searle is primarily concerned with the
characterization of something different, not with a general discussion of the
nature of meaning or communication. On top he is seems mainly concerned to
adapt Grice’s account of meaning to a dissimilar purpose, and hardly, as
Schiffer at least tried, to amend Grice’s analysis so as to be better suited to
its avowed end. Of course Grice would not want to deny that when the vehicle of
meaning is a sentence (or the utterance of a sentence, as in “Mary had a little
lamb” – uttered by a German officer in France to have the French believe that
he is an English officer) the utterer’s intentions are to be recognized, in the
normal case, by virtue of a knowledge of the conventional use of the sentence
(indeed Grice’s account of “conversational” or in general "non-conventional
implicaturum" depends, in some cases, on something like this idea). But
Grice treats meaning something by the utterance of a sentence as being only a
SPECIAL case of meaning or communicating that p by an utterance (in Grice’s
extended use of ‘utterance’ to include gestures and stuff), and to treat a
‘conventional’ co-relation between a sentence and a specific response as
providing only one of the ways (or modes) in which an utterance may be
correlated with a response. Is Searle’s “Kennst du das land, wo die Zitronen bluhen?”
however, a genuine counterexample? It seems to Grice that the imaginary
situation is under-described, and that there are perhaps three different cases
to be considered. First, the situation might be such that the only real chance
that the Italian soldiers would, on hearing the British soldier recite the line
from Goethe suppose him to be a German officer, would be if the Italians were
to, as they should not, argue as follows: "The British soldier has just
recited the first line from Goethe’s “Faust,” in a surprisingly authoritative
tone); He thinks we are silly enough to think he is, with the British uniform
and all, a German soldier.” If the situation was such that the Italian soldier
were likely to argue like that, and the British soldier knew that to be so, it
would be difficult to avoid attributing to him the intention, when he recited
the line from “Fuast”, that they should argue like that. One cannot in general
intend that some result should be achieved, if one knows that there is no
likelihood that it will be achieved. But if the British soldier’s intention is
as just described, he certainly would not, by Grice’s account, be meaning that he is a German soldier. For though
he would intend the Italian soldier to believe him to be a German soldier, he
would not be intending the Italian soldier to believe this on the basis of the
Italian soldier’s recognition of his intention. And it seems to Grice that though
this is not how Searle wishes the example to be taken, it would be much the
most likely situation to have obtained. Second, Grice thinks that Searle wants us
to suppose that the British soldier hopes that the Italian soldier will each a
belief that the English soldier is a German soldier via a belief that the line
from Goethe which he uttered means other than what it does, for why would they
NOT know the land where the lemon trees bloom? They are in it! It s not easy to
see how to build up the context of utterance so as to give the English soldier
any basis for his hope that the Italian soldier thinks that the English soldier
thinks that the Italian soldier knows where the lemon trees bloom – his native
land! Now it becomes doubtful whether, after all, it is right to say that the
English solidier did not mean (unsuccessfully communicate) that he is a German soldier. Communication is not factive. That
Geothe’s line translates as "Knowest thou the land where the lemon trees
bloom" is totally irrelevant. If the English soldier could be said to have
meant or communicated that he was a
German soldier, he would have meant that by saying the line, or by saying the
line in a particularly authoritative way. It makes a difference whether U
merely intends A to think that a particular sentence has a certain meaning
which it does not in fact have, or whether he also intends him to think of
himself as supposed to make use of his (mistaken) thought that, metabolically,
the expression has this ‘meaning’ in reaching a belief about U's intentions. If
A is intended to think that U expects A to understand the sentence spoken and
is intended to attribute to it, metabolically, a ‘meaning’ which U knows it
does not have, he utterer should not be described as meaning, by his utterance,
that p. Grice does not see the force of this contention, nor indeed does he find
it easy or conceptually clear to apply the distinction which it attempts to
make. The general point seems to be as follows. Characteristically, an utterer
intends his recipient to recognize (and to think himself intended to recognize)
some "crucial" feature F, and to think of F (and to think himself
intended to think of F) as co-related in a certain way or mode with some
response which the utterer intends the audience to produce. It does not matter
so far as the attribution of the utterer’s meaning is concerned, whether F is
thought by U to be *really* co-related in that way or mode with the response or
not; though of course in the normal case U will think F to be so co-related.
Suppose, however, we fill in the detail of the English soldier case, so as to
suppose he accompanies "Kennst du das Land, wo die Zitronen bluhen"
with gesticulations, chest-thumping, and so forth; he might then hope to succeed
in conveying to the Italian soldier that he intends them to understand what the
line ‘means’, to learn from the particular German sentence that the English
soldier intends them to think that he is a German officer (whereas really of
course the English soldier does not expect them to learn that way, but only by
assuming, on the basis of the situation and the character of the English
soldier’s performance, that he must be trying to communicate to them, against
all reasonable hopes, that he is a
German officer. Perhaps in that case, we should be disinclined to say that the
English soldier means or communicates that
he is a German officer, and ready to say only that the English soldier means,
naturally and metabolically, as it were, the Italian solider to think that he was a German officer. Grice goes on to suggest a revised
set of conditions for " U meant something by x" (Redefinition III,
Version A): Ranges of variables: A: audiences f: features of utterance r:
responses c: modes of correlation (for example, iconic, associative,
conventional) I63 H. P. GRICE (HA) (if) (3r) (ic): U uttered x intending (i) A
to think x possessesf (2) A to think U intends (i) (3) A to think off as
correlated in way c with the type to which r belongs (4) A to think U intends
(3) (5) A to think on the basis of the fulfillment of (i) and (3) that U
intends A to produce r (6) A, on the basis of fulfillment of (5), to produce r
(7) A to think U intends (6). In the case of the "little girl" there
is a single feature f (that of being an utterance of a particular French
sentence) with respect to which A has all the first four intentions. (The only
thing wrong is that this feature is not in fact correlated conventionally with
the intended responses, and this does not disqualify the utterance from being
one by which U means something.) In the English soldier case there is no such
single feature. The Italian soldier is intended (i) to recognize, and go by,
feature f1 (x's being a bit of German and being uttered with certain
gesticulations, and so. forth) but (2) to think that he is intended to
recognize x as havingf2 (as being a particular German sentence). So intention
(2) on our revised list is absent. And so we do not need the condition
previously added to eliminate this example. I think, however, that condition
(7) (the old condition [i]) is still needed, unless it can be replaced by a
general "anti-deception" clause. It may be that such replacement is
possible; it may be that the "backward-looking" subclauses (2), (4),
and (7) can be omitted, and replaced by the prohibitive clause which figures in
Redefinition II, Version B. We have then to consider the merits of Redefinition
III, Version B, the definiens of which will run as follows: (3A) (if) (3r)
(ic): (a) U uttered x intending (I) A to think x possessesf (2) A to thinkf
correlated in way c with the type to which r belongs (3) A to think, on the
basis of the fulfillment of (I) and (3) that U intends A to produce r (4) A, on
the basis of the fulfillment of (3) to produce r, and (b) there is no
inference-element E such that U intends both (I') A in his determination of r
to rely on E (2') A to think Uto intend (I') to be false. Grice would actually
often play and sing the ballad. G. writer often considered the leading cultural
figure of his age. He wrote lyric poetry, dramas, and fictional, essayistic,
and aphoristic prose as well as works in various natural sciences, including
anatomy, botany, and optics. A lawyer by training, for most of his life Goethe
was a government official at the provincial court of Saxony-Weimar. In his numerous
contributions to world literature, such as the novels The Sorrows of Young
Werther, Wilhelm Meister’s Years of Apprenticeship, Elective Affinities, and
Wilhelm Meister’s Years of Pilgrimage, and the two-part tragedy Faust, Goethe
represented the tensions between individual and society as well as between
culture and nature, with increased recognition of their tragic opposition and
the need to cultivate a resigned self-discipline in artistic and social
matters. In his poetic and scientific treatment of nature he was influenced by
Spinoza’s pantheist identification of nature and God and maintained that
everything in nature is animate and expressive of divine presence. In his
theory and practice of science he opposed the quantitative and experimental method
and insisted on a description of the phenomena that was to include the
intuitive grasp of the archetypal forms or shapes underlying all development in
nature.
tipperary: music-hall cited
by Grice. Grice liked the song and would often accompany himself at the piano
(“in Eb always”). He especially loved to recite the three verses (“Up to
mighty London came an Irishman one day,”
“Paddy wrote a letter to his Irish Molly-O,” and “Molly wrote a neat reply to
Irish Paddy-O”). Grice devises a possible counter-example to his account of
‘communication,’ or strictly the conditions that have to be met for the state
of affairs “Emisor E communicates that p” to hold. In Grice’s scenario, a
reminiscence shared by his father, at a musical soirée in 1912,
at Harborne, Grice’s grandfather sings "Tipperary” “in a
raucous voice” (those are Grice’s father’s words) with the intention of getting
his mother-in-law (whom he knew was never too keen on the music-hall) to leave
the drawing-room. Grice’s grandfather’s mother-in-law is supposed to recognise
(and to know that she is intended to recognise) that Grice’s grandfather wants
to get rid of his mother in law – “to put it bluntly,” as Grice’s father has
it. Grice’s grandfather, moreover, intends that his mother-in-law shall, in the
event, leave because she recognizes Grice’s grandfather’s intention that
she shall go. Grice’s grandfather’s
scheme is that his mother-in-law should, somewhat wrongly, think that Grice’s
grandfather intends his mother-in-law to think that he intends to get rid of
her by means of the recognition of his intention that she should go. In other
words, the mother-in-law is supposed to argue: "My son-in-law intends me
to *think* that he intends to get rid of me by the raucous singing of that
awful ditty complete with the three verses – starting with “Up to mighty London
came an Irishman one day” -- but of course he, rude as he is, really wants to
get rid of me by means of the recognition of his intention to get rid of me. I
am really intended to go because he wants me to go, not because I cannot stand
the singing – I suppose. I mean, I could possibly stand it, if tied up, or
something." The fact that the mother in law, while thinking she is seeing
through his son-in-law’s plans, is really *conforming* to them (a situation
that would not hold if she is known by her son-in-law to be
‘counter-suggestible’), is suggested as precluding Grice from deeming, here,
that his grandfather means by the singing in a raucuous voice the opening line
to “Tipperary” in a raucuous voice (“Up to mighty London came an Irishman one
day”) that his mother-in-law should go. However, it is clear to Grice that,
once one tries to fill in the detail of this description, the example becomes baffling
– “even if I myself designed it.” “For, how is my grandfather’s mother-in-law
sposed to reach the idea that my grandfather wants her to think that he intends
to get rid of her by singing in a raucuous voice “Up to mighty London came an
Irishman one day”?” “My father tells me that my grandfather sould sing in a *particular
nasal tone*, so common at the music-hall, which he knows *not* necessarily to
be displeasing to his mother in law (when put to use to a respectable
drawing-room ballad), though it is to most people that visit the Grices.”
Grice’s grandfather’s mother in law knows that Grice’s grandfather knows this
particular nasa tone not to be displeasing to her, but she thinks, rather
wrongly, that Grice’s grandfaather does not know that his mother-in-law knows
this (she would never display his tastes in public). The mother-in-law might
then be supposed to argue: "My son-in-law cannot want to drive me out of
the drawing-room by his singing, awful to most, since he knows that that
particularly nasal tone is not really displeasing to me. My son-in-law,
however, does not know that I know he knows this. Therefore, maybe my
son-in-law is does wantsme to think that he intends to drive me out, on the
ground of a mere cause, rather than a reason, *by* his singing." “At this
point,” Grice notes, “one would expect my grandfather’s mother-in-law to be completely
at a loss to explain my grandfather’s performance.” “I see no reason at all why
my grandfather’s mother in-law should then suppose that he *really* wants to
get rid of her in some other way.” Whether or not this example could be made to
work, its complexity is ennerving. “And the sad thing about it, is that any
attempt on my part to introduce yet further restrictions would involve more
ennerving complexities still.” “It is in general true that one cannot have
intentions to achieve results which one sees no chance of achieving; and the
success of intentions of the kind involved in communication requires he to whom
communications or near-communications is addressed to be capable in the
circumstances of having certain thoughts and drawing certain conclusions.” At
some early stage in the attempted regression the calculations required of my
grandfather’s mother-in-lawy by my grandfather will be impracticably difficult;
and I suspect the limit has now been reached (if not exceeded).” “So my
grandfather, is he is a Grice, cannot have the intentions – as reconstructed by
my father, this was way back in 1912 -- required of him in order to force the
addition of further restrictions. Not only are the calculations my grandfather
would be requiring of his mother-in-law too difficult, but it would be
impossible for him to find cues to indicate to her that the calculations should
be made, even if they were within his mother-in-law’s compass. So one is
tempted to conclude that no regress is involved.” But even should this
conclusion be correct, we seem to be left with an uncomfortable situation. For
though we may know that we do not need an infinite series of backward-looking sub-clauses,
we cannot say just how many such sub-clauses are required. “Indeed, it looks as
if the definitional expansion of "By uttering x emisor E communicates that p" might have to vary from
case to case, depending on such things as the nature of the intended response,
the circumstances in which the attempt to elicit the response is made (say, a
musical soirée at Harborne in mid-1912), and the intelligence of the utterer (in
this case my grandfather) and of the addressee (his mother in law).” It is
dubious whether such variation can be acceptable. However, Grice genially finds
out that this ennerving difficulty (of the type some of Grice’s tutees trying
to outshine him would display) is avoided if we could eliminate potential
counter-examples not by requiring the emisor to have certain additional,
backward-looking, intentions, but rather by requiring the emisor *not* to have
a certain sort of intention or complex of intentions. Potential counterexamples
of the kind involves the construction of a situation in which the emisor E
intends the sendee S, in the reflection process by which the sendee S is
supposed to reach his response, both to rely on some inference-element, i. e., ome
premise or some inferential step, E, and also to think that the emisor E
intends his sendee S not to rely on E. “What I propose, then, is to uproot such
potential counterexamples by a single clause which prohibits the emisor from
having this kind of complex intention.” We reach a redefinition: "the
emisor E means that p by uttering x" is true iff (for some sendee S and
for some response r): (a) the emisor U utters x intending (i) the sendee to
produce r (2) the sendee S to think the
emisor E to intend (i) (3) the sendee S’s fulfillment of (i) to be based on the
sendee S’s fulfillment of (2) (b) there is no inference-element E such that the
emsior E utters x intending both (i') that the sendee S’s determination of r
should rely on the inference element e and (2') that the sendee S should think
the emisor E to intend that (I') be false.”
bonum: good-making
characteristic, a characteristic that makes whatever is intrinsically or
inherently good, good. Hedonists hold that pleasure and conducing to pleasure
are the sole good-making characteristics. Pluralists hold that those characteristics
are only some among many other goodmaking characteristics, which include, for
instance, knowledge, friendship, beauty, and acting from a sense of duty.
Refs.: H. P. Grice, “E. F. Carritt on an alleged ambiguity of ‘good.’”
gorgias: Grecian Sophist –
“a sophist is never to be confused with a ‘philosopher,’ even if he is
oh-so-much cleverer than your average one!” – Grice. A teacher of rhetoric from
Leontini in Syracuse, Gorgias came to Athens as an ambassador from his city and
caused a sensation with his artful oratory. He is known through references and
short quotations in later writers, and through a few surviving texts two speeches and a philosophical treatise. He
taught a rhetorical style much imitated in antiquity, by delivering model speeches
to paying audiences. Unlike other Sophists he did not give formal instruction
in other topics, nor prepare a formal rhetorical manual. He was known to have
had views on language, on the nature of reality, and on virtue. Gorgias’s style
was remarkable for its use of poetic devices such as rhyme, meter, and elegant
words, as well as for its dependence on artificial parallelism and balanced
antithesis. His surviving speeches, defenses of Helen and Palamedes, display a
range of arguments that rely heavily on what the ancients called eikos
‘likelihood’ or ‘probability’. Gorgias maintained in his “Helen” that a speech
can compel its audience to action; elsewhere he remarked that in the theater it
is wiser to be deceived than not. Gorgias’s short book On Nature or On What Is
Not survives in two paraphrases, one by Sextus Empiricus and the other now
considered more reliable in an Aristotelian work, On Melissus, Xenophanes, and
Gorgias. Gorgias argued for three theses: that nothing exists; that even if it
did, it could not be known; and that even if it could be known, it could not be
communicated. Although this may be in part a parody, most scholars now take it
to be a serious philosophical argument in its own right. In ethics, Plato
reports that Gorgias thought there were different virtues for men and for
women, a thesis Aristotle defends in the Politics.
grammaticum: Grice: “strictly, I’m a grammarian, for I’m a B. A. and M.
A. in litterae humaniores, and litterae is nothing but a rought transliteration
of Grecian ‘grammatike tekhne’ -- Is there a ‘grammar’ of gestures? How loose
can an Oxonian use ‘grammar’? Sometimes geography, sometimes botany –
“Grammatica” the Romans never cared to translate. Although ‘literature’ is the
cognate. – For some reasons, the Greeks were obsessed with the alphabet – It
was a trivial ‘art’. Like ‘logic,’ and philosophy is NOT an art or ‘techne.’ A
philosopher is not a technician – and hardly an artist like William Morris (his
‘arts and crafts’ is a joke since it translates in Latin to ‘ars et ars,’ and
‘techne kai techne’). The sad thing is that at MIT, as Grice knew, Chomsky is
appointed professor of philosophy, and he mainly writes about ‘grammar’! Later,
Chomsky tries to get more philosophical, but chooses the wrong paradigm –
Cartesianism, the ghost in the machine, in Ryle’s parlance. Odly, Oxonians, who
rarely go to grammar schools, see ‘grammar’ as a divinity, and talk of the
logical grammar of a Ryleian agitation, say. It sounds high class because there
is the irony that an Oxonian philosopher is surely not a common-or-garden
grammarian, involved in the grammar of, say, “Die Deutsche Sprache.” The
Oxonian is into the logical grammar. It is more of a ‘linguistic turn’
expression than the duller ‘conceptual analysis,’ or ‘linguistic philosophy.’
cf. logical form, and Russell, “grammar is a pretty good guide to logical
form.” while philosophers would use grammar jocularly, Chomsky didnt. The
problem, as Grice notes, is that Chomsky never tells us where grammar ends (“or
begins for that matter.”) “Consider the P, karulising elatically.” When Carnap
introduces the P, he talks syntax, not grammar. But philosophers always took
semiotics more seriously than others. So Carnap is well aware of Morriss triad
of the syntactics, the semantics, and the pragmatics. Philosophers always
disliked grammar, because back in the days of Aelfric, philosophia was supposed
to embrace dialectica and grammatica, and rhetorica. “It is all part of
philosophy.” Truth-conditional semantics and implicatura. grammar, a system
of rules specifying a language. The term has often been used synonymously with
‘syntax’, the principles governing the construction of sentences from words
perhaps also including the systems of word derivation and inflection case markings, verbal tense markers, and the
like. In modern linguistic usage the term more often encompasses other
components of the language system such as phonology and semantics as well as
syntax. Traditional grammars that we may have encountered in our school days,
e.g., the grammars of Latin or English, were typically fragmentary and often
prescriptive basically a selective
catalog of forms and sentence patterns, together with constructions to be
avoided. Contemporary linguistic grammars, on the other hand, aim to be
descriptive, and even explanatory, i.e., embedded within a general theory that
offers principled reasons for why natural languages are the way they are. This
is in accord with the generally accepted view of linguistics as a science that
regards human language as a natural phenomenon to be understood, just as
physicists attempt to make sense of the world of physical objects. Since the
publication of Syntactic Structures 7 and Aspects of the Theory of Syntax 5 by
Noam Chomsky, grammars have been almost universally conceived of as generative
devices, i.e., precisely formulated deductive systems commonly called generative grammars specifying all and only the well-formed
sentences of a language together with a specification of their relevant
structural properties. On this view, a grammar of English has the character of
a theory of the English language, with the grammatical sentences and their
structures as its theorems and the grammar rules playing the role of the rules
of inference. Like any empirical theory, it is subject to disconfirmation if
its predictions do not agree with the facts
if, e.g., the grammar implies that ‘white or snow the is’ is a
wellformed sentence or that ‘The snow is white’ is not. The object of this
theory construction is to model the system of knowledge possessed by those who
are able to speak and understand an unlimited number of novel sentences of the
language specified. Thus, a grammar in this sense is a psychological
entity a component of the human
mind and the task of linguistics
avowedly a mentalistic discipline is to determine exactly of what this
knowledge consists. Like other mental phenomena, it is not observable directly
but only through its effects. Thus, underlying linguistic competence is to be
distinguished from actual linguistic performance, which forms part of the
evidence for the former but is not necessarily an accurate reflection of it,
containing, as it does, errors, false starts, etc. A central problem is how
this competence arises in the individual, i.e., how a grammar is inferred by a
child on the basis of a finite, variable, and imperfect sample of utterances
encountered in the course of normal development. Many sorts of observations
strongly suggest that grammars are not constructed de novo entirely on the basis
of experience, and the view is widely held that the child brings to the task a
significant, genetically determined predisposition to construct grammars
according to a well-defined pattern. If this is so, and since apparently no one
language has an advantage over any other in the learning process, this inborn
component of linguistic competence can be correctly termed a universal grammar.
It represents whatever the grammars of all natural languages, actual or
potential, necessarily have in common because of the innate linguistic
competence of human beings. The apparent diversity of natural languages has
often led to a serious underestimation of the scope of universal grammar. One
of the most influential proposals concerning the nature of universal grammar
was Chomsky’s theory of transformational grammar. In this framework the
syntactic structure of a sentence is given not by a single object e.g., a parse
tree, as in phrase structure grammar, but rather by a sequence of trees
connected by operations called transformations. The initial tree in such a
sequence is specified generated by a phrase structure grammar, together with a
lexicon, and is known as the deep structure. The final tree in the sequence,
the surface structure, contains the morphemes meaningful units of the sentence
in the order in which they are written or pronounced. For example, the English
sentences ‘John hit the ball’ and its passive counterpart ‘The ball was hit by
John’ might be derived from the same deep structure in this case a tree looking
very much like the surface structure for the active sentence except that the
optional transformational rule of passivization has been applied in the
derivation of the latter sentence. This rule rearranges the constituents of the
tree in such a way that, among other changes, the direct object ‘the ball’ in
deep structure becomes the surface-structure subject of the passive sentence.
It is thus an important feature of this theory that grammatical grammar grammar
352 352 relations such as subject,
object, etc., of a sentence are not absolute but are relative to the level of
structure. This accounts for the fact that many sentences that appear
superficially similar in structure e.g., ‘John is easy to please’, ‘John is
eager to please’ are nonetheless perceived as having different underlying
deep-structure grammatical relations. Indeed, it was argued that any theory of
grammar that failed to make a deep-structure/surface-structure distinction
could not be adequate. Contemporary linguistic theories have, nonetheless,
tended toward minimizing the importance of the transformational rules with
corresponding elaboration of the role of the lexicon and the principles that
govern the operation of grammars generally. Theories such as generalized
phrase-structure grammar and lexical function grammar postulate no
transformational rules at all and capture the relatedness of pairs such as
active and passive sentences in other ways. Chomsky’s principles and parameters
approach 1 reduces the transformational component to a single general movement
operation that is controlled by the simultaneous interaction of a number of
principles or subtheories: binding, government, control, etc. The universal
component of the grammar is thus enlarged and the contribution of languagespecific
rules is correspondingly diminished. Proponents point to the advantages this
would allow in language acquisition. Presumably a considerable portion of the
task of grammar construction would consist merely in setting the values of a
small number of parameters that could be readily determined on the basis of a
small number of instances of grammatical sentences. A rather different approach
that has been influential has arisen from the work of Richard Montague, who
applied to natural languages the same techniques of model theory developed for
logical languages such as the predicate calculus. This so-called Montague
grammar uses a categorial grammar as its syntactic component. In this form of
grammar, complex lexical and phrasal categories can be of the form A/B.
Typically such categories combine by a kind of “cancellation” rule: A/B ! B P A
something of category A/B combines with something of category B to yield
something of category A. In addition, there is a close correspondence between
the syntactic category of an expression and its semantic type; e.g., common
nouns such as ‘book’ and ‘girl’ are of type e/t, and their semantic values are
functions from individuals entities, or e-type things to truth-values T-type
things, or equivalently, sets of individuals. The result is an explicit,
interlocking syntax and semantics specifying not only the syntactic structure
of grammatical sentences but also their truth conditions. Montague’s work was
embedded in his own view of universal grammar, which has not, by and large,
proven persuasive to linguists. A great deal of attention has been given in
recent years to merging the undoubted virtues of Montague grammar with a
linguistically more palatable view of universal grammar. Refs.:
One source is an essay on ‘grammar’ in the H. P. Grice Papers, BANC.
gramsci: a. political
leader whose imprisonment by the Fascists for his involvement with the Communist
Party had the ironical result of sparing him from Stalinism and enabling him to
better articulate his distinctive political philosophy. Gramsci welcomes the
Bolshevik Revolution as a “revolution against Capital” rather than against
capitalism: as a revolution refuting the deterministic Marxism according to
which socialism could arise only by the gradual evolution of capitalism, and
confirming the possibility of the radical transformation of social
institutions. In 1 he supported creation of the
Communist Party; as its general secretary from 4, he tried to reorganize
it along more democratic lines. In 6 the Fascists outlawed all opposition
parties. Gramsci spent the rest of his life in various prisons, where he wrote
more than a thousand s of notes ranging from a few lines to chapterlength
essays. These Prison Notebooks pose a major interpretive challenge, but they
reveal a keen, insightful, and open mind grappling with important social and
political problems. The most common interpretation stems from Palmiro
Togliatti, Gramsci’s successor as leader of the
Communists. After the fall of Fascism and the end of World War II, Togliatti
read into Gramsci the so-called road to
socialism: a strategy for attaining the traditional Marxist goals of the
classless society and the nationalization of the means of production by
cultural means, such as education and persuasion. In contrast to Bolshevism,
one had to first conquer social institutions, and then their control would
yield the desired economic and political changes. This democratic theory of
Marxist revolution was long regarded by many as especially relevant to Western
industrial societies, and so for this and other reasons Gramsci is a key figure
of Western Marxism. The same theory is often called Gramsci’s theory of
hegemony, referring to a relationship between two political units where one
dominates the other with the consent of that other. This interpretation was a
political reconstruction, based primarily on Gramsci’s Communist involvement
and on highly selective passages from the Notebooks. It was also based on
exaggerating the influence on Gramsci of Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Gentile, and
minimizing influences like Croce, Mosca, Machiavelli, and Hegel. No new
consensus has emerged yet; it would have to be based on analytical and
historical spadework barely begun. One main interpretive issue is whether
Gramsci, besides questioning the means, was also led to question the ends of
traditional Marxism. In one view, his commitment to rational persuasion,
political realism, methodological fallibilism, democracy, and pluralism is much
deeper than his inclinations toward the classless society, the abolition of
private property, the bureaucratically centralized party, and the like; in
particular, his pluralism is an aspect of his commitment to the dialectic as a
way of thinking, a concept he adapted from Hegel through Croce.
green: t. h., Grice:
“The rather idiotic German philosopher at Oxford, Schiller, thought that
Dodgson meant Green when he said that the snark may be served with greens.” -- absolute idealist and social philosopher. The
son of a clergyman, Green studied and taught at Oxford. His central concern was
to resolve what he saw as the spiritual crisis of his age by analyzing
knowledge and morality in ways inspired by Kant and Hegel. In his lengthy
introduction to Hume’s Treatise, he argued that Hume had shown knowledge and
morality to be impossible on empiricist principles. In his major work, “Prolegomena
to Ethics,” Green contended that thought imposed relations on sensory feelings
and impulses whose source was an eternal consciousness to constitute objects of
knowledge and of desire. Furthermore, in acting on desires, rational agents
seek the satisfaction of a self that is realized through their own actions.
This requires rational agents to live in harmony among themselves and hence to
act morally. In Lectures on the Principles of Political Obligation Green
transformed classical liberalism by arguing that even though the state has no
intrinsic value, its intervention in society is necessary to provide the
conditions that enable rational beings to achieve self-satisfaction.
Gregorio
magno: Grice: “Poor Gregorio Magno had to fight with the Lonbards, and the sad
thing is he lost!” -- I, Saint, called Gregory the Great, a pope and Roman political leader. Born a
patrician, he was educated for public office and became prefect of Rome in 570.
In 579, he was appointed papal representative in Constantinople, returning to
Rome as counselor to Pope Pelagius II in 586. He was elected Pope Gregory I in
590. When the Lombards attacked Rome in 594, Gregory bought them off. Constantinople
would neither cede nor defend Italy, and Gregory stepped in as secular ruler of
what became the Papal States. He asserted the universal jurisdiction of the
bishop of Rome, and claimed patriarchy of the West. His writings include
important letters; the Moralia, an exposition of the Book of Job summarizing
Christian theology; Pastoral Care, which defined the duties of the clergy for
the Middle Ages; and Dialogues, which deals chiefly with the immortality of the
soul, holding it could enter heaven immediately without awaiting the Last
Judgment. His thought, largely Augustinian, is unoriginal, but was much quoted
in the Middle Ages. Grice takes inspiration on Shropshire’s argument for the
immortality of the soul from Gregorio Magno (Dialogo, IV).
gregory
of
Nyssa, Saint, Grecian theologian and mystic who tried to reconcile Platonism
with Christianity. As bishop of Cappadocia in eastern Asia Minor, he championed
orthodoxy and was prominent at the First Council of Constantinople. He related
the doctrine of the Trinity to Plato’s ideas of the One and the Many. He
followed Origen in believing that man’s material great chain of being Gregory
of Nyssa 354 354 nature was due to the
fall and in believing in the Apocatastasis, the universal restoration of all souls,
including Satan’s, in the kingdom of God.
Wodeham, adam. Obviously born at Wodeham,
or Woodham as the current spelling goes (“But I prefer the old, vide Occam” –
Grice). Like Gregorio da Rimini, obsessed with the complexe significabile,
“which has obvious connections with what I call the propositional complexus.”
rimini: gregorio di,
philosopher, he studied in Italy, England, and France, and taught at the
universities of Bologna, Padua, Perugia, and Paris before becoming prior
general of the Hermits of St. Augustine in his native city of Rimini, about
eighteen months before he died. Gregory earned the honorific title “the
Authentic Doctor” because he was considered by many of his contemporaries to be
a faithful interpreter of Augustine, and thus a defender of tradition, in the
midst of the scepticism of Occam and his disciples regarding what could be
known in natural philosophy and theology. Thus, in his commentary on Books I
and II of Peter Lombard’s Sentences, Gregory rejected the view that because of
God’s omnipotence he can do anything and is therefore unknowable in his nature
and his ways. Gregory also maintained that after Adam’s fall from
righteousness, men need, in conjunction with their free will, God’s help grace
to perform morally good actions. In non-religious matters Gregory is usually
associated with the theory of the complexe significabile, according to which
the object of knowledge acquired by scientific proof is neither an object
existing outside the mind, nor a word simplex or a proposition complexum, but
rather the complexe significabile, that which is totally and adequately
signified by the proposition expressed in the conclusion of the proof in
question.
grice: as a count noun –
“Lots of grice in the fields.” – One Scots to another -- count noun, a noun
that can occur syntactically a with quantifiers ‘each’, ‘every’, ‘many’, ‘few’,
‘several’, and numerals; b with the indefinite article, ‘an’; and c in the
plural form. The following are examples of count nouns CNs, paired with
semantically similar mass nouns MNs: ‘each dollar / silver’, ‘one composition /
music’, ‘a bed / furniture’, ‘instructions / advice’. MNs but not CNs can occur
with the quantifiers ‘much’ and ‘little’: ‘much poetry / poems’, ‘little bread
/ loaf’. Both CNs and MNs may occur with ‘all’, ‘most’, and ‘some’.
Semantically, CNs but not MNs refer distributively, providing a counting
criterion. It makes sense to ask how many CNs?: ‘How many coins / gold?’ MNs
but not CNs refer collectively. It makes sense to ask how much MN?: ‘How much
gold / coins?’ One problem is that these syntactic and semantic criteria yield
different classifications; another problem is to provide logical forms and
truth conditions for sentences containing mass nouns.
grice: English philosopher, born in
Harborne, “in the middle of nowhere,” as Strawson put it – (“He was from
London, Strawson was”) -- whose work concerns perception and philosophy of
language, and whose most influential contribution is the concept of a
conversational implicaturum and the associated theoretical machinery of
conversational ‘postulates.’ The concept of a conversational implicaturum is
first used in his ‘presentation’ on the causal theory of perception and
reference. Grice distinguishes between the ‘meaning’ of the words used in a
sentence and what is implied by the utterer’s choice of words. If someone says
“It looks as if there is a red pillar box in front of me,” the choice of words
implies that there is some doubt about the pillar box being red. But, Grice
argues, that is a matter of word choice and the sentence itself does not ‘impl’ that there is doubt. The term ‘conversational
implicaturum’ was introduced in Grice’s William James lectures published in 8
and used to defend the use of the material implication as a logical translation
of ‘if’. With Strawson “In Defence of Dogma”, Grice gives a spirited defense of
the analyticsynthetic distinction against Quine’s criticisms. In subsequent
systematic papers Grice attempts, among other things, to give a theoretical
grounding of the distinction. Grice’s oeuvre is part of the Oxford ordinary
language tradition, if formal and theoretical. He also explores metaphysics,
especially the concept of absolute value. There is the H. P. Grice Society –
Other organisations Grice-related are “The Grice Club,” “The Grice Circle,” and
“H. P. Grice’s Playgroup.”
Grice’s complexe significabile, plural: -- Grice used
to say jocularly that he wasn’t commited to propositions; only to propositional
complexes -- complexe significabilia, also called complexum significabile, in
medieval philosophy, what is signified only by a complexum a statement or
declarative sentence, by a that-clause, or by a dictum an accusative !
infinitive construction, as in: ‘I want him to go’. It is analogous to the
modern proposition. The doctrine seems to have originated with Adam de Wodeham
in the early fourteenth century, but is usually associated with Gregory of
Rimini slightly later. Complexe significabilia do not fall under any of the
Aristotelian categories, and so do not “exist” in the ordinary way. Still, they
are somehow real. For before creation nothing existed except God, but even then
God knew that the world was going to exist. The object of this knowledge cannot
have been God himself since God is necessary, but the world’s existence is
contingent, and yet did not “exist” before creation. Nevertheless, it was real
enough to be an object of knowledge. Some authors who maintained such a view
held that these entities were not only signifiable in a complex way by a
statement, but were themselves complex in their inner structure; the term
‘complexum significabile’ is unique to their theories. The theory of complexe
significabilia was vehemently criticized by late medieval nominalists. Refs.: The main reference is in ‘Reply to
Richards.’ But there is “Sentence semantics and propositional complexes,” c.
9-f. 12, BANC.
Grice’s
combinatory logic, a branch of logic
that deals with formal systems designed for the study of certain basic
operations for constructing and manipulating functions as rules, i.e. as rules
of calculation expressed by definitions. The notion of a function was
fundamental in the development of modern formal or mathematical logic that was
initiated by Frege, Peano, Russell, Hilbert, and others. Frege was the first to
introduce a generalization of the mathematical notion of a function to include
propositional functions, and he used the general notion for formally
representing logical notions such as those of a concept, object, relation,
generality, and judgment. Frege’s proposal to replace the traditional logical
notions of subject and predicate by argument and function, and thus to conceive
predication as functional application, marks a turning point in the history of
formal logic. In most modern logical systems, the notation used to express
functions, including propositional functions, is essentially that used in
ordinary mathematics. As in ordinary mathematics, certain basic notions are
taken for granted, such as the use of variables to indicate processes of
substitution. Like the original systems for modern formal logic, the systems of
combinatory logic were designed to give a foundation for mathematics. But
combinatory logic arose as an effort to carry the foundational aims further and
deeper. It undertook an analysis of notions taken for granted in the original
systems, in particular of the notions of substitution and of the use of
variables. In this respect combinatory logic was conceived by one of its
founders, H. B. Curry, to be concerned with the ultimate foundations and with
notions that constitute a “prelogic.” It was hoped that an analysis of this
prelogic would disclose the true source of the difficulties connected with the
logical paradoxes. The operation of applying a function to one of its
arguments, called application, is a primitive operation in all systems of
combinatory logic. If f is a function and x a possible argument, then the
result of the application operation is denoted fx. In mathematics this is
usually written fx, but the notation fx is more convenient in combinatory
logic. The G. logician M. Schönfinkel, who started combinatory logic in 4,
observed that it is not necessary to introduce color realism combinatory logic
functions of more than one variable, provided that the idea of a function is
enlarged so that functions can be arguments as well as values of other
functions. A function Fx,y is represented with the function f, which when
applied to the argument x has, as a value, the function fx, which, when applied
to y, yields Fx,y, i.e. fxy % Fx,y. It is therefore convenient to omit
parentheses with association to the left so that fx1 . . . xn is used for . . . fx1 . . . xn. Schönfinkel’s main result
was to show how to make the class of functions studied closed under explicit
definition by introducing two specific primitive functions, the combinators S
and K, with the rules Kxy % x, and Sxyz % xzyz. To illustrate the effect of S
in ordinary mathematical notation, let f and g be functions of two and one
arguments, respectively; then Sfg is the function such that Sfgx % fx,gx.
Generally, if ax1, . . . ,xn is an expression built up from constants and the
variables shown by means of the application operation, then there is a function
F constructed out of constants including the combinators S and K, such that Fx1
. . . xn % ax1, . . . , xn. This is essentially the meaning of the combinatory
completeness of the theory of combinators in the terminology of H. B. Curry and
R. Feys, Combinatory Logic 8; and H. B. Curry, J. R. Hindley, and J. P. Seldin,
Combinatory Logic, vol. II 2. The system of combinatory logic with S and K as
the only primitive functions is the simplest equation calculus that is
essentially undecidable. It is a type-free theory that allows the formation of
the term ff, i.e. self-application, which has given rise to problems of
interpretation. There are also type theories based on combinatory logic. The
systems obtained by extending the theory of combinators with functions
representing more familiar logical notions such as negation, implication, and
generality, or by adding a device for expressing inclusion in logical
categories, are studied in illative combinatory logic. The theory of
combinators exists in another, equivalent form, namely as the type-free
l-calculus created by Church in 2. Like the theory of combinators, it was
designed as a formalism for representing functions as rules of calculation, and
it was originally part of a more general system of functions intended as a
foundation for mathematics. The l-calculus has application as a primitive
operation, but instead of building up new functions from some primitive ones by
application, new functions are here obtained by functional abstraction. If ax
is an expression built up by means of application from constants and the
variable x, then ax is considered to define a function denoted lx.a x, whose
value for the argument b is ab, i.e. lx.a xb % ab. The function lx.ax is
obtained from ax by functional abstraction. The property of combinatory
completeness or closure under explicit definition is postulated in the form of
functional abstraction. The combinators can be defined using functional
abstraction i.e., K % lx.ly.x and S % lx.ly.lz.xzyz, and conversely, in the
theory of combinators, functional abstraction can be defined. A detailed
presentation of the l-calculus is found in H. Barendregt, The Lambda Calculus,
Its Syntax and Semantics 1. It is possible to represent the series of natural
numbers by a sequence of closed terms in the lcalculus. Certain expressions in
the l-calculus will then represent functions on the natural numbers, and these
l-definable functions are exactly the general recursive functions or the Turing
computable functions. The equivalence of l-definability and general
recursiveness was one of the arguments used by Church for what is known as
Church’s thesis, i.e., the identification of the effectively computable
functions and the recursive functions. The first problem about recursive
undecidability was expressed by Church as a problem about expressions in the l
calculus. The l-calculus thus played a historically important role in the
original development of recursion theory. Due to the emphasis in combinatory
logic on the computational aspect of functions, it is natural that its method
has been found useful in proof theory and in the development of systems of
constructive mathematics. For the same reason it has found several applications
in computer science in the construction and analysis of programming languages.
The techniques of combinatory logic have also been applied in theoretical
linguistics, e.g. in so-called Montague grammar. In recent decades combinatory
logic, like other domains of mathematical logic, has developed into a
specialized branch of mathematics, in which the original philosophical and
foundational aims and motives are of little and often no importance. One reason
for this is the discovery of the new technical applications, which were not
intended originally, and which have turned the interest toward several new
mathematical problems. Thus, the original motives are often felt to be less
urgent and only of historical significance. Another reason for the decline of the
original philosophical and foundational aims may be a growing awareness in the
philosophy of mathematics of the limitations of formal and mathematical methods
as tools for conceptual combinatory logic combinatory logic clarification, as
tools for reaching “ultimate foundations.”
Grice’s “The
Three-Year-Old’s Guide to Russell’s Theory of Types,” with an advice to parents
by P. F. Starwson -- type theory,
broadly, any theory according to which the things that exist fall into natural,
perhaps mutually exclusive, categories or types. In most modern discussions,
‘type theory’ refers to the theory of logical types first sketched by Russell
in The Principles of Mathematics 3. It is a theory of logical types insofar as
it purports only to classify things into the most general categories that must
be presupposed by an adequate logical theory. Russell proposed his theory in
response to his discovery of the now-famous paradox that bears his name. The
paradox is this. Common sense suggests that some classes are members of
themselves e.g., the class of all classes, while others are not e.g., the class
of philosophers. Let R be the class whose membership consists of exactly those
classes of the latter sort, i.e., those that are not members of themselves. Is
R a member of itself? If so, then it is a member of the class of all classes
that are not members of themselves, and hence is not a member of itself. If, on
the other hand, it is not a member of itself, then it satisfies its own
membership conditions, and hence is a member of itself after all. Either way
there is a contradiction. The source of the paradox, Russell suggested, is the
assumption that classes and their members form a single, homogeneous logical
type. To the contrary, he proposed that the logical universe is stratified into
a regimented hierarchy of types. Individuals constitute the lowest type in the
hierarchy, type 0. For purposes of exposition, individuals can be taken to be
ordinary objects like chairs and persons. Type 1 consists of classes of individuals,
type 2 of classes of classes of individuals, type 3 classes of classes of
classes of individuals, and so on. Unlike the homogeneous universe, then, in
the type hierarchy the members of a given class must all be drawn from a single
logical type n, and the class itself must reside in the next higher type n ! 1.
Russell’s sketch in the Principles differs from this account in certain
details. Russell’s paradox cannot arise in this conception of the universe of
classes. Because the members of a class must all be of the same logical type,
there is no such class as R, whose definition cuts across all types. Rather,
there is only, for each type n, the class Rn of all non-self-membered classes
of that type. Since Rn itself is of type n ! 1, the paradox breaks down: from
the assumption that Rn is not a member of itself as in fact it is not in the
type hierarchy, it no longer follows that it satisfies its own membership
conditions, since those conditions apply only to objects of type n. Most formal
type theories, including Russell’s own, enforce the class membership
restrictions of simple type theory syntactically such that a can be asserted to
be a member of b only if b is of the next higher type than a. In such theories,
the definition of R, hence the paradox itself, cannot even be expressed.
Numerous paradoxes remain unscathed by the simple type hierarchy. Of these, the
most prominent are the semantic paradoxes, so called because they explicitly
involve semantic notions like truth, as in the following version of the liar
paradox. Suppose Epimenides asserts that all the propositions he asserts today
are false; suppose also that that is the only proposition he asserts today. It
follows immediately that, under those conditions, the proposition he asserts is
true if and only if it is false. To address such paradoxes, Russell was led to
the more refined and substantially more complicated system known as ramified
type theory, developed in detail in his 8 paper “Mathematical Logic as Based on
the Theory of Types.” In the ramified theory, propositions and properties or
propositional functions, in Russell’s jargon come to play the central roles in
the type-theoretic universe. Propositions are best construed as the
metaphysical and semantical counterparts of sentences what sentences express and properties as the counterparts of “open
sentences” like ‘x is a philosopher’ that contain a variable ‘x’ in place of a
noun phrase. To distinguish linguistic expressions from their semantic counterparts,
the property expressed by, say, ‘x is a philosopher’, will be denoted by ‘x ^
is a philosopher’, and the proposition expressed by ‘Aristotle is a
philosopher’ will be denoted by ‘Aristotle is a philosopher’. A property . . .x
^ . . . is said to be true of an individual a if . . . a . . . is a true
proposition, and false of a if . . . a . . . is a false proposition where ‘. .
. a . . .’ is the result of replacing ‘x ^ ’ with ‘a’ in ‘. . . x ^ . . .’. So,
e.g., x ^ is a philosopher is true of Aristotle. The range of significance of a
property P is the collection of objects of which P is true or false. a is a
possible argument for P if it is in P’s range of significance. In the ramified
theory, the hierarchy of classes is supplanted by a hierarchy of properties:
first, properties of individuals i.e., properties whose range of significance
is restricted to individuals, then properties of properties of individuals, and
so on. Parallel to the simple theory, then, the type of a property must exceed
the type of its possible arguments by one. Thus, Russell’s paradox with R now
in the guise of the property x ^ is a property that is not true of itself is avoided along analogous lines. Following
the mathematician Henri Poincaré,
Russell traced the type theory type theory 935
935 source of the semantic paradoxes to a kind of illicit
self-reference. So, for example, in the liar paradox, Epimenides ostensibly
asserts a proposition p about all propositions, p itself among them, namely
that they are false if asserted by him today. p thus refers to itself in the
sense that it or more exactly, the
sentence that expresses it quantifies
over i.e., refers generally to all or some of the elements of a collection of
entities among which p itself is included. The source of semantic paradox thus
isolated, Russell formulated the vicious circle principle VCP, which proscribes
all such self-reference in properties and propositions generally. The liar
proposition p and its ilk were thus effectively banished from the realm of
legitimate propositions and so the semantic paradoxes could not arise. Wedded
to the restrictions of simple type theory, the VCP generates a ramified
hierarchy based on a more complicated form of typing. The key notion is that of
an object’s order. The order of an individual, like its type, is 0. However,
the order of a property must exceed the order not only of its possible
arguments, as in simple type theory, but also the orders of the things it
quantifies over. Thus, type 1 properties like x ^ is a philosopher and x ^ is
as wise as all other philosophers are first-order properties, since they are
true of and, in the second instance, quantify over, individuals only.
Properties like these whose order exceeds the order of their possible arguments
by one are called predicative, and are of the lowest possible order relative to
their range of significance. Consider, by contrast, the property call it Q x ^
has all the first-order properties of a great philosopher. Like those above, Q
also is a property of individuals. However, since Q quantifies over first-order
properties, by the VDP, it cannot be counted among them. Accordingly, in the
ramified hierarchy, Q is a second-order property of individuals, and hence
non-predicative or impredicative. Like Q, the property x ^ is a first-order
property of all great philosophers is also second-order, since its range of
significance consists of objects of order 1 and it quantifies only over objects
of order 0; but since it is a property of first-order properties, it is
predicative. In like manner it is possible to define third-order properties of
individuals, third-order properties of first-order properties, third-order
properties of second-order properties of individuals, third-order properties of
secondorder properties of first-order properties, and then, in the same
fashion, fourth-order properties, fifth-order properties, and so on ad
infinitum. A serious shortcoming of ramified type theory, from Russell’s
perspective, is that it is an inadequate foundation for classical mathematics.
The most prominent difficulty is that many classical theorems appeal to
definitions that, though consistent, violate the VCP. For instance, a wellknown
theorem of real analysis asserts that every bounded set of real numbers has a
least upper bound. In the ramified theory, real numbers are identified with
certain predicative properties of rationals. Under such an identification, the
usual procedure is to define the least upper bound of a bounded set S of reals
to be the property call it b some real number in S is true of x ^ , and then prove
that this property is itself a real number with the requisite characteristics.
However, b quantifies over the real numbers. Hence, by the VCP, b cannot itself
be taken to be a real number: although of the same type as the reals, and
although true of the right things, b must be assigned a higher order than the
reals. So, contrary to the classical theorem, S fails to have a least upper
bound. Russell introduced a special axiom to obviate this difficulty: the axiom
of reducibility. Reducibility says, in effect, that for any property P, there
is a predicative property Q that is true of exactly the same things as P.
Reducibility thus assures that there is a predicative property bH true of the
same rational numbers as b. Since the reals are predicative, hence of the same
order as bH, it turns out that bH is a real number, and hence that S has a
least upper bound after all, as required by the classical theorem. The general
role of reducibility is thus to undo the draconian mathematical effects of
ramification without undermining its capacity to fend off the semantic
paradoxes.
H. P.
Grice’s playgroup:
after the death of J. L. Austin, Grice kept the routine of the Saturday morning
with a few new rules. 1. Freedom. 2. Freedom, and 3. Freedom.
Grice’s theory-theory: Grice’s word for ‘first
philosophy.’ – ‘striking originality, eh?’
Grice’s personalism: Grice: “I finished
the thing and did not know what to title – my mother said, “Try ‘personal
identity.’ She was a personal trinitarian.” -- a version of personal idealism
that flourished in the United States principally at Boston from the late nineteenth century to the
mid-twentieth century. Its principal proponents were Borden Parker Bowne 1847 0
and three of his students: Albert Knudson 18733; Ralph Flewelling 18710, who
founded The Personalist; and, most importantly, Edgar Sheffield Brightman 43.
Their personalism was both idealistic and theistic and was influential in
philosophy and in theology. Personalism traced its philosophical lineage to
Berkeley and Leibniz, and had as its foundational insight the view that all
reality is ultimately personal. God is the transcendent person and the ground
or creator of all other persons; nature is a system of objects either for or in
the minds of persons. Both Bowne and Brightman considered themselves
empiricists in the tradition of Berkeley. Immediate experience is the starting
point, but this experience involves a fundamental knowledge of the self as a
personal being with changing states. Given this pluralism, the coherence,
order, and intelligibility of the universe are seen to derive from God, the
uncreated person. Bowne’s God is the eternal and omnipotent being of classical
theism, but Brightman argued that if God is a real person he must be construed as
both temporal and finite. Given the fact of evil, God is seen as gradually
gaining control over his created world, with regard to which his will is
intrinsically limited. Another version of personalism developed in France out
of the neo-Scholastic tradition. E. Mounier 550, Maritain, and Gilson
identified themselves as personalists, inasmuch as they viewed the infinite
person God and finite persons as the source and locus of intrinsic value. They
did not, however, view the natural order as intrinsically personal.
Grice’s personhood: Grice: “I finished the
thing and did not know how to title. My mother, a confessed personal
trinitarian, suggested, ‘personal identity.’’ -- the condition or property of
being a person, especially when this is considered to entail moral and/or
metaphysical importance. Personhood has been thought to involve various traits,
including moral agency; reason or rationality; language, or the cognitive
skills language may support such as intentionality and self-consciousness; and
ability to enter into suitable relations with other persons viewed as members
of a self-defining group. Buber emphasized the difference between the I-It
relationship holding between oneself and an object, and the IThou relationship,
which holds between oneself and another person who can be addressed. Dennett
has construed persons in terms of the “intentional stance,” which involves
explaining another’s behavior in terms of beliefs, desires, intentions, etc.
Questions about when personhood begins and when it ends have been central to
debates about abortion, infanticide, and euthanasia, since personhood has often
been viewed as the mark, if not the basis, of a being’s possession of special
moral status.
Griceian. Grice disliked
the spelling “Gricean” that some people in the New World use. “Surely my
grandmother was right when she said she had become a Griceian by marrying a
Grice!”
Brown, S. author of the
Dictionary of British Philosophers (“I first thought of writing a dictionary of
English philosophers, but then I thought that Russell would be out – he was
born in Wales!.”
grice: g. r. – Welsh
philosopher who taught at Norwich. Since H. P. Grice and G. R. Grice both wrote
on the contract and morality, one has to be careful.
gricese: While Grice presented Gricese as refutation of Vitters’s
idea of a private language “I soon found out that my wife and my two children
were speaking Gricese, as was my brother Derek!” -- english, being
English or the genius of the ordinary. H. P. Grice refers to “The English
tongue.” A refusal to rise above the facts of ordinary life is characteristic
of classical Eng. Phil. from
Ireland-born Berkeley to Scotland-born Hume, Scotland-born Reid, and very
English Jeremy Bentham and New-World Phil. , whether in transcendentalism
Emerson, Thoreau or in pragmatism from James to Rorty. But this orientation did
not become truly explicit until after the linguistic turn carried out by
Vienna-born Witters, translated by C. K. Ogden, very English Brighton-born
Ryle, and especially J. L. Austin and his best companion at the Play Group, H.
P. Grice, when it was radicalized and systematized under the name of a phrase
Grice lauged at: “‘ordinary’-language philosophy.” This preponderant recourse
to the ordinary seems inseparable from certain peculiar characteristics of the
English Midlanders such as H. P. Grice, such as the gerund that often make it
difficult if not impossible to translate. It is all the more important to
emphasize this paradox because English Midlander philosopher, such as H. P.
Grice, claims to be as simple as it is universal, and it established itself as
an important philosophical language in the second half of the twentieth
century, due mainly to the efforts of H. P. Grice. English, but especially
Oxonian Phil. has a specific
relationship to ‘ordinary’ language (even though for Grice, “Greek and Latin
were always more ordinary to me – and people who came to read Eng. at Oxford
were laughed at!”), as well as to the requirements of everyday life, that is
not limited to the theories of the Phil.
of language, in which an Eng. philosopher such as H. P. Grice appears as
a pioneer. It rejects the artificial linguistic constructions of philosophical
speculation that is, Met. and always prefers to return to its original home, as
Witters puts it: the natural environment of everyday words Philosophical
Investigations. Thus we can discern a continuity between the recourse to the
ordinary in Scots Hume, Irish Berkeley, Scots Reid, and very English Jeremy
Bentham and what will become in Irish London-born G. E. Moore and Witters after
he started using English, at least orally and then J. L. Austin’s and H. P.
Grice’s ‘ordinary’-language philosophy. This continuity can be seen in several
areas. First, in the exploitation of all the resources of the language, which
is considered as a source of information and is valid in itself. Second, in the
attention given to the specificities—and even the defects, or ‘implicatura,’ as
Grice calls them —of the vernacular --
which become so many philosophical characteristics from which one can
learn. Finally, in the affirmation of the naturalness of the distinctions made
in and by ordinary language, seeking to challenge the superiority of the
technical language of Philosophy —the former being the object of an agreement
deeper than the latter. Then there’s The Variety of Modes of Action. The
passive. There are several modes of agency, and these constitute both part of
the genius of the language and a main source of its problems in tr.. Agency is
a strange intersection of points of view that makes it possible to designate
the person who is acting while at the same time concealing the actor behind the
act—and thus locating agency in the passive subject itself v. AGENCY. A classic
difficulty is illustrated by the following sentence from J. Stuart Mill’s To
gauge the naturalness of the passive construction in English, it suffices to
examine a couple of newspaper headlines. “Killer’s Car Found” On a retrouvé la
voiture du tueur, “Kennedy Jr. Feared Dead.” On craint la mort du fils Kennedy;
or the titles of a philosophical essay, “Epistemology Naturalized,”
L’Épistémologie naturalisée; Tr. J.
Largeault as L’Épistémologie devenue naturelle; a famous article by Quine that
was the origin of the naturalistic turn in American Phil. and “Consciousness Explained” La conscience
expliquée by Daniel Dennett. We might then better understand why this PASSIVE
VOICE kind of construction—which seems so awkward in Fr. compared with the active voice— is perceived
by its Eng. users as a more direct and effective way of speaking. More
generally, the ellipsis of the agent seems to be a tendency of Eng. so profound
that one can maintain that the phenomenon Lucien Tesnière called diathèse
récessive the loss of the agent has become a characteristic of the Eng.
language itself, and not only of the passive. Thus, e. g. , a Fr. reader irresistibly gains the impression that
a reflexive pronoun is lacking in the following expressions. “This book reads
well.” ce livre se lit agréablement. “His poems do not translate well.” ses
poèmes se traduisent difficilement. “The door opens.” la porte s’ouvre. “The
man will hang.” l’homme sera pendu. In reality, here again, Eng. simply does
not need to mark by means of the reflexive pronoun se the presence of an active
agent. Do, make, have Eng. has several terms to translate the single Fr. word faire, which it can render by to do, to
make, or to have, depending on the type of agency required by the context.
Because of its attenuation of the meaning of action, its value as emphasis and
repetition, the verb “to do” has become omnipresent in English, and it plays a
particularly important role in philosophical texts. We can find a couple of
examples of tr. problems in the Oxonian seminars by J. L. Austin. In Sense and
Considerations on Representative Government: “I must not be understood to say
that” p. To translate such a passive construction, Fr. is forced to resort to the impersonal pronoun
on and to put it in the position of an observer of the “I” je as if it were
considered from the outside: On ne doit pas comprendre que je dis que p. But at
the same time, the network of relations internal to the sentence is modified,
and the meaning transformed. Necessity is no longer associated with the subject
of the sentence and the author; it is made impersonal. Philosophical language
also makes frequent use of the diverse characteristics of the passive. Here we
can mention the crucial turning point in the history of linguistics represented
by Chomsky’s discovery Syntactic Structures,
of the paradigm of the active/ passive relation, which proves the
necessity of the transformational component in grammar. A passive utterance is
not always a reversal of the active and only rarely describes an undergoing, as
is shown by the example She was offered a bunch of flowers. In particular,
language makes use of the fact that this kind of construction authorizes the
ellipsis of the agent as is shown by the common expression Eng. spoken. For a
philosopher, the passive is thus the privileged form of an action when its
agent is unknown, indeterminate, unimportant, or, inversely, too obvious. Thus
without making his prose too turgid, in Sense and Sensibilia Austin can use
five passives in less than a page, and these can be translated in Fr. only by on, an indeterminate subject defined
as differentiated from moi. “It is clearly implied, that “Now this, at least if
it is taken to mean The expression is here put forward We are given, as
examples, familiar objects The expression is not further defined On sous-entend
clairement que Quant à cela, du moins si on l’entend au sens de On avance ici
l’expression On nous donne, comme exemples, des objets familiers On
n’approfondit pas la définition de l’expression . . . 1 Langage, langue,
parole: A virtual distinction. Contrary to what is too often believed, the Eng.
language does not conflate under the term language what Fr. distinguishes following Saussure with the
terms langage, langue, and parole. In reality, Eng. also has a series of three
terms whose semantic distribution makes possible exactly the same trichotomy as
Fr. : First there’s Grice’s “tongue,”which serves to designate a specific
language by opposition to another; speech, which refers more specifically to
parole but which is often translated in Fr.
by discours; and language in the sense of faculté de langage.
Nonetheless, Fr. ’s set of systematic distinctions can only remain
fundamentally virtual in English, notably because the latter refuses to
radically detach langue from parole. Thus in Chrestomathia, Bentham uses
“tongue” (Bentham’s tongue – in Chrestomathia) and language interchangeably and
sometimes uses language in the sense of langue: “Of all known languages the
Grecian [Griceian] is assuredly, in its structure, the most plastic and most
manageable. Bentham even uses speech and language as equivalents, since he
speaks of parts of speech. But on the contrary, he sometimes emphasizes
differences that he ignores here. And he proceeds exactly like Hume in his
essay Of the Standard of Taste, where we find, e. g. , But it must also be
allowed, that some part of the seeming harmony in morals may be accounted for
from the very nature of language. The word, virtue, with its equivalent in
every tongue, implies praise; as that of vice does blame. REFS.: Bentham,
Jeremy. ChrestomathiEd. by M. J. Smith
and W. H. Burston. Oxford: Clarendon, . Hume, D. . Of the Standard of Taste. In
Four Dissertations. London: Thoemmes Continuum, . First published in 175
Saussure, F. de. Course in General Linguistics. Ed. by Bally and Sechehaye. Tr. R. Harris. LaSalle, IL: Open Court, . First
published in circulation among these forms. This formal continuity promotes a great
methodological inventiveness through the interplay among the various grammatical
entities that it enables. The gerund:
The form of -ing that is the most difficult to translate Eng. is a nominalizing
language. Any verb can be nominalized, and this ability gives the Eng.
philosophical language great creative power. “Nominalization,” as Grice calls
it, is in fact a substantivization without substantivization: the verb is not
substantivized in order to refer to action, to make it an object of discourse
which is possible in any language, notably in philosophical Fr. and G. , but rather to nominalize the verb
while at the same time preserving its quality as a verb, and even to nominalize
whole clauses. Fr. can, of course,
nominalize faire, toucher, and sentir le faire, le toucher, even le sentir, and
one can do the same, in a still more systematic manner, in G. . However, these
forms will not have the naturalness of the Eng. expressions: the making and
unmaking the doing and undoing, the feeling, the feeling Byzantine, the
meaning. Above all, in these languages it is hard to construct expressions
parallel to, e. g. , the making of, the making use of, my doing wrongly, “my
meaning this,” (SIGNIFICATUM, COMMUNICATUM), his feeling pain, etc., that is,
mixtures of noun and verb having—and this is the grammatical characteristic of
the gerund — the external distribution of a nominal expression and the internal
distribution of a verbal expression. These forms are so common that they
characterize, in addition to a large proportion of book titles e. g. , The
Making of the Eng. Working Class, by E. P. Thomson; or, in Phil. , The Taming
of Chance, or The taming of the true, by I. Hacking, the language of classical
Eng. Phil. . The gerund functions as a sort of general equivalent or exchanger
between grammatical forms. In that way, it not only makes the language dynamic
by introducing into it a permanent temporal flux, but also helps create, in the
language itself, a kind of indeterminacy in the way it is parsed, which the
translator finds awkward when he understands the message without being able to
retain its lightness. Thus, in A Treatise of Human Nature, Hume speaks,
regarding the idea, of the manner of its being conceived, which a Fr. translator might render as sa façon d’être
conçue or perhaps, la façon dont il lui appartient d’être conçue, which is not
quite the same thing. And we v. agency and the gerund connected in a language
like that of Bentham, who minimizes the gaps between subject and object, verb
and noun: much regret has been suggested at the thoughts of its never having
yet been brought within the reach of the Eng. reader ChrestomathiTranslators
often feel obliged to render the act expressed by a gerund by the expression le
fait de, but this has a meaning almost contrary to the English. With its
gerund, Eng. avoids the discourse of fact by retaining only the event and
arguing only on that basis. The inevitable confusion suggested by Fr. when it translates the Eng. gerund is all the
more unfortunate in this case because it becomes impossible to distinguish when
Eng. uses the fact or the case from when it uses the gerund. The importance of
the event, along with the distinction between trial, case, and event, on the
one hand and happening on the other, is Sensibilia, he has criticized the claim
that we never perceive objects directly and is preparing to criticize its
negation as well: I am not going to maintain that we ought to embrace the
doctrine that we do perceive material things. Je ne vais pas soutenir que nous
devons embrasser la doctrine selon laquelle nous percevons vraiment les choses
matérielles. Finally, let us recall Austin’s first example of the performative,
which plays simultaneously on the anaphoric value of do and on its sense of
action, a duality that v.ms to be at the origin of the theory of the
performative, I do take this woman to be my lawful wedded wife—as uttered in
the course of the marriage ceremony Oui à savoir: je prends cette femme pour
épouse’énoncé lors d’une cérémonie de mariage; How to Do Things with Words. On
the other hand, whereas faire is colored by a causative sense, Eng. uses to
make and to have—He made Mary open her bags il lui fit ouvrir sa valise; He had
Mary pour him a drink il se fit verser un verre—with this difference: that make
can indicate, as we v., coercion, whereas have presupposes that there is no
resistance, a difference that Fr. can
only leave implicit or explain by awkward periphrases. Twentieth-century Eng.
philosophers from Austin to Geach and Anscombe have examined these differences
and their philosophical implications very closely. Thus, in A Plea for Excuses,
Austin emphasizes the elusive meaning of the expression doing something, and
the correlative difficulty of determining the limits of the concept of
action—Is to sneeze to do an action? There is indeed a vague and comforting idea
that doing an action must come down to the making of physical movements.
Further, we need to ask what is the detail of the complicated internal
machinery we use in acting. Philosophical Papers No matter how partial they may
be, these opening remarks show that there is a specific, intimate relation
between ordinary language and philosophical language in English language Phil.
. This enables us to better understand why the most Oxonian philosophers are so
comfortable resorting to idiomatic expressions cf. H. Putnam and even to
clearly popular usage: “Meanings ain’t in the head.” It ain’t necessarily so.As
for the title of Manx-ancestry Quine’s famous book From a Logical Point of
View, which at first seems austere, it is taken from a calypso song: “From a logical
point of view, Always marry women uglier than you. The Operator -ing:
Properties and Antimetaphysical Consequences -ing: A multifunctional operator
Although grammarians think it important to distinguish among the forms of
-ing—present participles, adjectives, the progressive, and the gerund—what
strikes the reader of scientific and philosophical texts is first of all the
free in Phil. , You are v.ing something Austin, Sense and Sensibilia, regarding
a stick in water; I really am perceiving the familiar objects Ayer, Foundations
of Empirical Knowledge. The passage to the form be + verb + -ing indicates,
then, not the progressiveness of the action but rather the transition into the
metalanguage peculiar to the philosophical description of phenomena of perception.
The sole exception is, curiously, to know, which is practically never used in
the progressive: even if we explore the philosophical and epistemological
literature, we do not find “I am knowing” or he was knowing, as if knowledge
could not be conceived as a process. In English, there is a great variety of
what are customarily called aspects, through which the status of the action is
marked and differentiated in a more systematic way than in Fr. or G. , once again because of the -ing
ending: he is working / he works / he worked / he has been working. Unlike what
happens in Slavic languages, aspect is marked at the outset not by a duality of
verbal forms but instead by the use of the verb to be with a verb ending in
-ing imperfect or progressive, by opposition to the simple present or past
perfect. Moreover, Grice mixes several aspects in a single expression:
iterativity, progressivity, completion, as in it cannot fail to have been
noticed Austin, How to Do Things. These are nuances, or implicate, as Labov and
then Pinker recently observed, that are not peculiar to classical or written
Eng. but also exist in certain vernaculars that appear to be familiar or
allegedly ungrammatical. The vernacular seems particularly sophisticated on
this point, distinguishing “he be working” from “he working” —that is, between
having a regular job and being engaged in working at a particular moment,
standard usage being limited to “he is working” Pinker, Language Instinct.
Whether or not the notion of aspect is used, it seems clear that in Eng. there
is a particularly subtle distinction between the different degrees of
completion, of the iterativity or development of an action, that leads Oxonian
philosophers to pay more attention to these questions and even to surprising
inventions, such as that of ‘implicaturum,’ or ‘visum,’ or ‘disimplicaturum.’
The linguistic dissolution of the idea of substance Fictive entities Thus the verb + -ing
operation simply gives the verb the temporary status of a noun while at the
same time preserving some of its syntactic and semantic properties as a verb,
that is, by avoiding substantivization. It is no accident that the
substantiality of the I think asserted by Descartes was opposed by virtually
all the Eng. philosophers of the seventeenth century. If a personal identity
can be constituted by the making our distant perceptions influence each other,
and by giving us a present concern for our past or future pains or pleasures
Hume, Treatise of Human Nature, it does not require positing a substance: the
substantivization of making and giving meets the need. We can also consider the
way in which Russell Analysis of Matter, ch.27 makes his reader understand far
more easily than does Bachelard, and without having to resort to the category
of an epistemological obstacle, that one can perfectly well posit an atom as a
series of events without according it the status of a substance. crucial in
discussions of probability. The very definition of probability with which Bayes
operates in An Essay towards Solving a Problem, the first great treatise on
subjective probability, is based on this status of the happening, the event
conceived not in terms of its realization or accomplishment but in terms of its
expectation: The probability of any event is the ratio between the value at
which an expectation depending on the happening of the event ought to be
computed, and the value of the thing expected upon its happening. The progressive: Tense and aspect If we now
pass from the gerund to the progressive, another construction that uses -ing, a
new kind of problem appears: that of the aspect and temporality of actions. An
interesting case of tr. difficulty is, e. g. , the one posed by Austin
precisely when he attempts, in his presentation of performatives, to distinguish
between the sentence and the act of saying it, between statement and utterance:
there are utterances, such as the uttering of the sentence is, or is part of,
the doing of an action How to Do Things. The tr. difficulty here is caused by
the combination in the construction in -ing of the syntactical flexibility of
the gerund and a progressive meaning. Does the -ing construction indicate the
act, or the progressiveness of the act? Similarly, it is hard to choose to
translate “On Referring” P. F. Strawson as De la référence rather than as De
l’action de référer. Should one translate On Denoting Russell as De la
dénotation the usual tr. or as Du dénoter? The progressive in the strict
sense—be + verb + -ing— indicates an action at a specific moment, when it has
already begun but is not yet finished. A little farther on, Austin allows us to
gauge the ease of Eng. in the whole of these operations. “To utter the sentence
is not to describe my doing of what I should be said in so uttering to be
doing. The Fr. tr. gives, correctly:
Énoncer la phrase, ce n’est pas décrire ce qu’il faut bien reconnaître que je
suis en train de faire en parlant ainsi, but this remains unsatisfying at best,
because of the awkwardness of en train de. Moreover, in many cases, en train de
is simply not suitable insofar as the -ing does not indicate duration: e. g. ,
in At last I am v.ing . It is interesting to examine from this point of view
the famous category of verbs of perception, verbum percipiendi. It is
remarkable that these verbs v., hear can be in some cases used with the
construction be + verb + -ing, since it is generally said even in grammar books
that they can be used only in the present or simple past and not in the
progressive. This rule probably is thought to be connected with something like
the immediacy of perception, and it can be compared with the fact that the
verbs to know and to understand are also almost always in the present or the
simple past, as if the operations of the understanding could not be presented
in the progressive form and were by definition instantaneous; or as if, on the
contrary, they transcended the course of time. In reality, there are
counterexamples. “I don’t know if I’m understanding you correctly”; You are
hearing voices; and often Oxonian Phil. , which makes their tr. particularly
indigestible, especially in Fr. , where -ismes gives a very Scholastic feel to
the classifications translated. In addition to the famous term realism, which
has been the object of so many contradictory definitions and so many debates
over past decades that it has been almost emptied of meaning, we may mention
some common but particularly obscure for anyone not familiar with the
theoretical context terms: “cognitivism,” noncognitivism, coherentism,
eliminativism, consequentialism, connectionism, etSuch terms in which moral
Phil. is particularly fertile are in
general transposed into Fr. without
change in a sort of new, international philosophical language that has almost
forgone tr.. More generally, in Eng. as in G. , words can be composed by
joining two other words far more easily than in Fr. —without specifying the
logical connections between the terms: toothbrush, pickpocket, lowlife,
knownothing; or, for more philosophical terms: aspect-blind,
language-dependent, rule-following, meaning-holism, observer-relative, which
are translatable, of course, but not without considerable awkwardness. Oxonian philosophese. Oxonian Phil.
seems to establish a language that is stylistically neutral and appears
to be transparently translatable. Certain specific problems—the tr. of compound
words and constructions that are more flexible in Eng. and omnipresent in
current philosophical discourse, such as the thesis that la thèse selon
laquelle, the question whether la question de savoir si, and my saying that le
fait que je dise que—make Fr. tr.s of
contemporary Eng. philosophical texts very awkward, even when the author writes
in a neutral, commonplace style. Instead, these difficulties, along with the
ease of construction peculiar to English, tend to encourage non-Oxonian
analytical philosophers to write directly in Gricese, following the example of
many of their European colleagues, or else to make use of a technical
vernacular we have noted the -isms and compounds that is frequently heavy going
and not very inventive when transRomang terms which are usually transliterated.
This situation is certainly attributable to the paradoxical character of
Gricese, which established itself as a philosophical language in the second
half of the twentieth century: it is a language that is apparently simple and
accessible and that thus claims a kind of universality but that is structured,
both linguistically and philosophically, around major stumbling blocks to do,
-ing, etthat often make it untranslatable. It is paradoxically this
untranslatability, and not its pseudo-transparency, that plays a crucial role
in the process of universalization. . IThe Austinian Paradigm: Ordinary
Language and Phil. The proximity of
ordinary language and philosophical language, which is rooted in classical
English-language Phil. , was theorized in the twentieth century by Austin and
can be summed up in the expression “‘ordinary’-language philosophy”. Ordinary
language Phil. is interested This sort
of overall preeminence in Eng. of the verbal and the subjective over the
nominal and the objective is clear in the difference in the logic that governs
the discourse of affectivity in Fr. and
in English. How would something that one is correspond to something that one
has, as in the case of fear in Fr. avoir
peur? It follows that a Fr. man—who takes it for granted that fear is something
that one feels or senses—cannot feel at home with the difference that Eng.
naturally makes between something that has no objective correlative because it
concerns only feeling like fear; and what is available to sensation, implying
that what is felt through it has the status of an object. Thus in Eng.
something is immediately grasped that in Fr.
v.ms a strange paradox, viz. that passion, as Bentham notes in
Deontology, is a fictive entity. Thus what sounds in Fr. like a nominalist provocation is implicated
in the folds of the Eng. language. A symbolic theory of affectivity is thus
more easily undertaken in Eng. than in Fr. , and if an ontological conception
of affectivity had to be formulated in English, symmetrical difficulties would
be encountered. Reversible derivations
Another particularity of English, which is not without consequences in Phil. ,
is that its poverty from the point of view of inflectional morphology is
compensated for by the freedom and facility it offers for the construction of
all sorts of derivatives. Nominal derivatives based on adjectives and using
suffixes such as -ity, -hood, -ness, -y. The resulting compounds are very
difficult to differentiate in Fr. and to
translate in general, which has led, in contemporary Fr. tr.s, to various incoherent makeshifts. To
list the most common stumbling blocks: privacy privé-ité, innerness
intériorité, not in the same sense as interiority, vagueness caractère vague,
goodness bonté, in the sense of caractère bon, rightness justesse, “sameness,”
similarité, in the sense of mêmeté, ordinariness, “appropriateness,” caractère
ordinaire, approprié, unaccountability caractère de ce dont il est impossible
de rendre compte. Adjectival derivatives based on nouns, using numerous
suffixes: -ful, -ous, -y, -ic, -ish, -al e.g., meaningful, realistic, holistic,
attitudinal, behavioral. Verbal derivatives based on nouns or adjectives, with
the suffixes -ize, -ify, -ate naturalize, mentalize, falsify, and even without
suffixes when possible e.g., the title of an article “How Not to Russell
Carnap’s Aufbau,” i.e., how not to Russell Carnap’s Aufbau. d. Polycategorial
derivatives based on verbs, using suffixes such as -able, -er, -age,
-ismrefutable, truthmaker. The reversibility of these nominalizations and
verbalizations has the essential result of preventing the reification of
qualities or acts. The latter is more difficult to avoid in Fr. and G. , where nominalization hardens and
freezes notions compare intériorité and innerness, which designates more a
quality, or even, paradoxically, an effect, than an entity or a domain. But
this kind of ease in making compounds has its flip side: the proliferation of
-isms in liberties with the natural uses of the language. The philosophers ask,
e. g. , how they can know that there is a real object there, but the question
How do I know? can be asked in ordinary language only in certain contexts, that
is, where it is always possible, at least in theory, to eliminate doubt. The
doubt or question But is it a real one? has always must have a special basis,
there must be some reason for suggesting that it isn’t real, in the sense of
some specific way in which it is suggested that this experience or item may be
phoney. The wile of the metaphysician consists in asking Is it a real table? a
kind of object which has no obvious way of being phoney and not specifying or
limiting what may be wrong with it, so that I feel at a loss how to prove it is
a real one. It is the use of the word real in this manner that leads us on to
the supposition that real has a single meaning the real world, material
objects, and that a highly profound and puzzling one. Austin, Philosophical
Papers This analysis of real is taken up again in Sense and Sensibilia, where
Austin criticizes the notion of a sense datum and also a certain way of raising
problems supposedly on the basis of common opinion e. g. , the common opinion
that we really perceive things—but in reality on the basis of a pure
construction. To state the case in this way, Austin says, is simply to soften
up the plain man’s alleged views for the subsequent treatment; it is preparing
the way for, by practically attributing to him, the so-called philosophers’
view. Phil. ’s frequent recourse to the ordinary is characterized by a certain
condescension toward the common man. The error or deception consists in arguing
the philosopher’s position against the ordinary position, because if the in what
we should say when. It is, in other words, a Phil. of language, but on the condition that we
never forget that we are looking not merely at words or ‘meanings,’ whatever
they may be but also at the realities we use the words to talk about, as Austin
emphasizes A Plea for Excuses, in Philosophical Papers. During the twentieth
century or more precisely, between the 1940s and the s, there was a division of
the paradigms of the Phil. of language
between the logical clarification of ordinary language, on the one hand, and
the immanent examination of ordinary language, on the other. The question of
ordinary language and the type of treatment that it should be given—a normative
clarification or an internal examination—is present in and even constitutive of
the legacy of logical positivism. Wittgenstein’s work testifies to this through
the movement that it manifests and performs, from the first task of the
Phil. of language the creation of an
ideal or formal language to clarify everyday language to the second the concern
to examine the multiplicity of ordinary language’s uses. The break thus
accomplished is such that one can only agree with Rorty’s statement in his
preface to The Linguistic Turn that the only difference between Ideal Language
Philosophers and Ordinary Language Philosophers is a disagreement about which
language is ideal. In the renunciation of the idea of an ideal language, or a
norm outside language, there is a radical change in perspective that consists
in abandoning the idea of something beyond language: an idea that is
omnipresent in the whole philosophical tradition, and even in current
analytical Phil. . Critique of language and Phil. More generally, Austin criticizes traditional
Phil. for its perverse use of ordinary
language. He constantly denounces Phil. ’s abuse of ordinary language—not so
much that it forgets it, but rather that it exploits it by taking 2 A defect in
the Eng. language? Between according to Bentham Eng. philosophers are not very
inclined toward etymology—no doubt because it is often less traceable than it
is in G. or even in Fr. and discourages a certain kind of commentary.
There are, however, certain exceptions, like Jeremy Bentham’s analysis of the
words “in,” “or,” “between,” “and,” etc., -- cf. Grice on “to” and “or” – “Does
it make sense to speak of the ‘sense’ of ‘to’?” -- through which Eng.
constructs the kinds of space that belong to a very specific topiLet us take
the case of between, which Fr. can
render only by the word entre. Both the semantics and the etymology of entre
imply the number three in Fr. , since what is entre intervenes as a third term
between two others which it separates or brings closer in Lat., in-ter; in Fr.,
en tiers; as a third. This is not the case in English, which constructs between
in accord with the number two in conformity with the etymology of this word, by
tween, in pairs, to the point that it can imagine an ordering, even when it
involves three or more classes, only in the binary mode: comon between three?
relation between three?—the hue of selfcontradictoriness presents itself on the
very face of the phrase. By one of the words in it, the number of objects is
asserted to be three: by another, it is asserted to be no more than two. To the
use thus exclusively made of the word between, what could have given rise, but
a sort of general, howsoever indistinct, perception, that it is only one to one
that objects can, in any continued manner, be commodiously and effectually
compared. The Eng. language labours under a defect, which, when it is compared
in this particular with other European langues, may perhaps be found peculiar
to it. By the derivation, and thence by the inexcludible import, of the word
between i.e., by twain, the number of the objects, to which this operation is
represented as capable of being applied, is confined to two. By the Roman
inter—by its Fr. derivation entre—no
such limitation v.ms to be expressed. Chrestomathia REFS.: Bentham, Jeremy.
ChrestomathiEd. by M. J. Smith and W. H.
Burston. Oxford: Clarendon, To my mind, experience proves amply that we do come
to an agreement on what we should say when such and such a thing, though I
grant you it is often long and difficult. I should add that too often this is
what is missing in Phil. : a preliminary datum on which one might agree at the
outset. We do not claim in this way to discover all the truth that exists
regarding everything. We discover simply the facts that those who have been
using our language for centuries have taken the trouble to notice.
Performatif-Constatif Austinian agreement is possible for two reasons: Ordinary language cannot claim to have the
last word. Only remember, it is the first word Philosophical Papers. The
exploration of language is also an exploration of the inherited experience and
acumen of many generations of men ibid..
Ordinary language is a rich treasury of differences and embodies all the
distinctions men have found worth drawing, and the connections they have found
worth marking, in the lifetimes of many generations. These are certainly more
subtle and solid than any that you or I are likely to think up in our
arm-chairs of an afternoon ibid.. It is this ability to indicate differences
that makes language a common instrument adequate for speaking things in the
world. Who is we? Cavell’s question It is clear that analytical Phil. ,
especially as it has developed in the United States since the 1940s, has moved
away from the Austinian paradigm and has at the same time abandoned a certain
kind of philosophical writing and linguistic subtlety. But that only makes all
the more powerful and surprising the return to Austin advocated by Stanley
Cavell and the new sense of ordinary language Phil. that is emerging in his work and in
contemporary American Phil. . What right do we have to refer to our uses? And
who is this we so crucial for Austin that it constantly recurs in his work? All
we have, as we have said, is what we say and our linguistic agreements. We
determine the meaning of a given word by its uses, and for Austin, it is
nonsensical to ask the question of meaning for instance, in a general way or
looking for an entity; v. NONSENSE. The quest for agreement is founded on
something quite different from signification or the determination of the common
meaning. The agreement Austin is talking about has nothing to do with an
intersubjective consensus; it is not founded on a convention or on actual
agreements. It is an agreement that is as objective as possible and that bears
as much on language as on reality. But what is the precise nature of this
agreement? Where does it come from, and why should so much importance be
accorded to it? That is the question Cavell asks, first in Must We Mean What We
Say? and then in The Claim of Reason: what is it that allows Austin and Witters
to say what they say about what we say? A claim is certainly involved here.
That is what Witters means by our agreement in judgments, and in language it is
based only on itself, on the latter exists, it is not on the same level. The
philosopher introduces into the opinion of the common man particular entities,
in order then to reject, amend, or explain it. The method of ordinary language:
Be your size. Small Men. Austin’s immanent method comes down to examining our
ordinary use of ordinary words that have been confiscated by Phil. , such as
‘true’ and ‘real,’ in order to raise the question of truth: Fact that is a
phrase designed for use in situations where the distinction between a true
statement and the state of affairs about which it is a truth is neglected; as
it often is with advantage in ordinary life, though seldom in Phil. . So
speaking about the fact that is a compendious way of speaking about a situation
involving both words and world. Philosophical Papers We can, of course,
maintain along with a whole trend in analytical Phil. from Frege to Quine that these are
considerations too small and too trivial from which to draw any conclusions at
all. But it is this notion of fact that Austin relies on to determine the
nature of truth and thus to indicate the pertinence of ordinary language as a
relationship to the world. This is the nature of Austin’s approach: the foot of
the letter is the foot of the ladder ibid.. For Austin, ordinary words are part
of the world: we use words, and what makes words useful objects is their
complexity, their refinement as tools ibid.: We use words to inform ourselves
about the things we talk about when we use these words. Or, if that v.ms too
naïve: we use words as a way of better understanding the situation in which we
find ourselves led to make use of words. What makes this claim possible is the
proximity of dimension, of size, between words and ordinary objects. Thus
philosophers should, instead of asking whether truth is a substance, a quality,
or a relation, take something more nearly their own size to strain at ibid..
The Fr. translators render size by
mesure, which v.ms excessively theoretical; the reference is to size in the
material, ordinary sense. One cannot know everything, so why not try something
else? Advantages of slowness and cooperation. Be your size. Small Men.
Conversation cited by Urmson in A Symposium Austin emphasizes that this
technique of examining words which he ended up calling linguistic phenomenology
(and Grice linguistic botany) is not new and that it has existed since
Socrates, producing its slow successes. But Grice is the first to make a
systematic application of such a method, which is based, on the one hand, on
the manageability and familiarity of the objects concerned and, on the other
hand, on the common agreement at which it arrives in each of its stages. The
problem is how to agree on a starting point, that is, on a given. This given or
datum, for Grice, is Gricese, not as a corpus consisting of utterances or
words, but as the site of agreement about what we should say when. Austin
regards language as an empirical datum or experimental dat -- Bayes, T. . An
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Logic Ratiocinative and Inductive. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, .
Nedeljkovic, Maryvonne. D. Hume,
approche phénoménologique de l’action et théorie linguistique. : Presses
Universitaires de France, . Pinker, Steven. The Language Instinct: The New
Science of Language and Mind. London: Penguin, . Putnam, Hilary. Mind, Language
and Reality. Vol. 2 of Philosophical Papers. Cambridge: Cambridge , . . Realism
with a Human Face. Ed. by J.
Conant. , . Quine, Willard V. From a Logical
Point of View. , 195 . Word and Object.
, . Ricœur, Paul. Memory, History, Forgetting. Tr. K. Blamey and D. Pellauer. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, . Rorty, Richard, ed. The Linguistic Turn.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, . First published . Russell, Bertrand.
The Analysis of Matter. London: Allen and Unwin, 195 . An Inquiry into Meaning
and Truth. : Routledge, . First published in 1950. Tesnière, Lucien. Éléments
de syntaxe structural. : Klincksieck, . Urmson, J. O., W.V.O. Quine, and S.
Hampshire. A Symposium on Austin’s Method. In Symposium on J. L. Austin, ed. by K. T. Fann. London: Routledge and Kegan
Paul, . Wittgenstein, Ludwig. The Blue and the Brown Books. Ed. by R. Rhees. Oxford: Blackwell, . First
published in 195 . Philosophical Investigations. Tr. G.E.M. Anscombe. Oxford: Blackwell, 195 we,
as Cavell says in a passage that illustrates many of the difficulties of tr. we
have discussed up to this point: We learn and teach words in certain contexts,
and then we are expected, and expect others, to be able to project them into
further contexts. Nothing ensures that this projection will take place in
particular, not the grasping of universals nor the grasping of books of rules,
just as nothing ensures that we will make, and understand, the same
projections. That we do, on the whole, is a matter of our sharing routes of
interest and feeling, modes of response, senses of humor and ‑of significance
and of fulfillment, of what is outrageous, of what is similar to what else,
what a rebuke, what forgiveness, of when an utterance is an assertion, when an
appeal, when an explanation—all the whirl of organism Witterscalls forms of
life. Human speech and activity, sanity and community, rest upon nothing more,
but nothing less, than this. It is a vision as simple as it is and because it
is terrifying. Must We Mean What We Say?
The fact that our ordinary language is based only on itself is not only a
reason for concern regarding the validity of what we do and say, but also the
revelation of a truth about ourselves that we do not always want to recognize:
the fact that I am the only possible source of such a validity. That is a new
understanding of the fact that language is our form of life, precisely its
ordinary form. Cavell’s originality lies in his reinvention of the nature of
ordinary language in American thought and in the connection he
establishes—notably through his reference to Emerson and Thoreau, American
thinkers of the ordinary—between this nature of language and human nature,
finitude. It is also in this sense that the question of linguistic agreements
reformulates that of the ordinary human condition and that the acceptance of
the latter goes hand in hand with the recognition of the former. In Cavell’s
Americanization of ordinary language Phil.
there thus emerges a radical form of the return to the ordinary. But
isn’t this ordinary, e. g. , that of Emerson in his Essays, precisely the one
that the whole of Eng. Phil. has been
trying to find, or rather to feel or taste, since its origins? Thus we can
compare the writing of Emerson or James, in texts like Experience or Essays in
Radical Empiricism, with that of the British empiricists when they discuss
experience, the given, and the sensible. This is no doubt one of the principal
dimensions of philosophical writing in English: always to make the meaning more
available to the senses. J.-Pierre Cléro Sandra Laugier REFS.: Austin, J. L.
How to Do Things with Words. Oxford: Clarendon, . . Performatif-Constatif. In
La philosophie analytique, ed. by J.
Wahl and L. Beck. : Editions du Minuit, . Tr. in Performative-Constative. In
Phil. and Ordinary Language, ed. by E. Caton. Urbana: University of Illinois
Press, . . Philosophical Papers. Ed. by
J. O. Urmson and G. J. Warnock. Oxford: Clarendon, . . Sense and
SensibiliOxford: Clarendon, . Ayer, J. The Foundations of Empirical Knowledge.
London: Macmillan, 1940. ENTREPRENEUR 265 form the basis of the kingdom by
means of calculated plans; to the legal domain: someone who contravenes the
hierarchical order of the professions and subverts their rules; finally, to the
economic domain: someone who agrees, on the basis of a prior contract an
established price to execute a project collection of taxes, supply of an army,
a merchant expedition, construction, production, transaction, assuming the
hazards related to exchange and time. This last usage corresponds to practices
that became more and more socially prominent starting in the sixteenth century.
Let us focus on the term in economics. The engagement of the entrepreneur in
his project may be understood in various ways, and the noun entrepreneur
translated in various ways into English: by contractor if the stress is placed
on the engagement with regard to the client to execute the task according to
conditions negotiated in advance a certain time, a fixed price, firm price, tenant
farming; by undertaker now rare in this sense when we focus on the engagement
in the activity, taking charge of the project, its practical realization, the
setting in motion of the transaction; and by adventurer, enterpriser, and
projector, to emphasize the risks related to speculation. At the end of the
eighteenth century, the Fr. word
entreprise acquired the new meaning of an industrial establishment.
Entrepreneur accordingly acquired the sense of the head or direction of a
business of production superintendent, employer, manager. In France, at the
beginning of the eighteenth century, the noun entrepreneur had strong political
connotations, in particular in the abundant pamphlets containing mazarinades
denouncing the entrepreneurs of tax farming. The economist Pierre de
Boisguilbert wrote the Factum de la France, the largest trial ever conducted by
pen against the big financiers, entrepreneurs of the wealth of the kingdom, who
take advantage of its good administration its political economy in the name of
the entrepreneurs of commerce and industry, who contribute to the increase in
its wealth. Boisguilbert failed in his project of reforming the tax farm, or
tax business, and it was left to a clever financier, Richard Cantillon, to
create the economic concept of the entrepreneur. Chance in Business: Risk and
Uncertainty There is no trace of Boisguilbert’s moral indignation in
Cantillon’s Essai sur la nature du commerce en générale Essay on the nature of
commerce in general. Having shown that all the classes and all the men of a
State live or acquire wealth at the expense of the owners of the land bk. 1,
ch.12, he suggests that the circulation and barter of goods and merchandise,
like their production, are conducted in Europe by entrepreneurs and haphazardly
bk. 1, of ch.1 He then describes in detail what composes the uncertain aspect
of the action of an entrepreneur, in which he acts according to his ideas and
without being able to predict, in which he conceives and executes his plans
surrounded by the hazard of events. The uncertainty related to business profits
turns especially on the fact that it is dependent on the forms of consumption
of the owners, the only members of society who are independent—naturally
independent, Cantillon specified. Entrepreneurs are those who are capable of
breaking ÉNONCÉ Énoncé, from the Roman enuntiare to express, divulge; from ex
out and nuntiare to make known; a nuntius is a messenger, a nuncio, ranges over
the same type of entity as do proposition and phrase: it is a basic unit of
syntax, the relevant question being whether or not it is the bearer of truth
values. An examination of the differences among these entities, and the
networks they constitute in different languages especially in English:
sentence, statement, utterance, appears under PROPOSITION. V. also DICTUM and
LOGOS, both of which may be acceptably Tr.
énoncé. Cf. PRINCIPLE, SACHVERHALT, TRUTH, WORD especially WORD,
Box The essential feature of an énoncé
is that it is considered to be a singular occurrence and thus is paired with
its énonciation: v. SPEECH ACT; cf. ENGLISH, LANGUAGE, SENSE, SIGN,
SIGNIFIER/SIGNIFIED, WITTICISM. v.
DISCOURSE ENTREPRENEUR FR. ENG.
adventurer, contractor, employer, enterpriser, entrepreneur, manager,
projector, undertaker, superintendent v.
ACT, AGENCY, BERUF, ECONOMY, LIBERAL, OIKONOMIA, PRAXIS, UTILITY. Refs.:
G. J. Warnock, “English philosophy,” H. P. Grice, “Gricese,” BANC.
griceian casuistry: the case-analysis
approach to the interpretation of general moral rules. Casuistry starts with
paradigm cases of how and when a given general moral rule should be applied,
and then reasons by analogy to cases in which the proper application of the
rule is less obvious e.g., a case in
which lying is the only way for a priest not to betray a secret revealed in
confession. The point of considering the series of cases is to ascertain the
morally relevant similarities and differences between cases. Casuistry’s heyday
was the first half of the seventeenth century. Reacting against casuistry’s
popularity with the Jesuits and against its tendency to qualify general moral
rules, Pascal penned a polemic against casuistry from which the term never
recovered see his Provincial Letters, 1656. But the kind of reasoning to which
the term refers is flourishing in contemporary practical ethics.
Grice’s handwave. A sort of handwave can mean in a one-off act of
communication something. It’s the example he uses. By a sort of handwave, the
emissor communicates either that he knows the route or that he is about to
leave the addressee. Handwave signals. Code. Cfr. the Beatles’s HELP.
Explicatum: We need some body – Implicaturum: Not just Any Body. Why does this
matter to the philosopher? The thing is as follows. Grice was provoked by
Austin. To defeat Austin, Grice needs a ‘theory of communication.’ This theory
applies his early reflections on the intentional side to an act of
communication. This allows him to explain the explicatum versus the implicaturum.
By analysing each, Grice notes that there is no need to refer to linguistic
entities. So, the centrality of the handwave is an offshoot of his theory
designed to defeat Austin. Gice: “Blame Paget for my obsession with the hand.”
– Refs.: Paget, “Ta-ta: when the hands are full, use your mouth.” – H. P.
Grice, The utterer’s hand-wave.”
Grice’s
creatures: the pirots. The programme he
calls ‘creature construction.’ “I could have used the ‘grice,’ which was
extinct by the time I was born.”
Grice’s myth. Or Griceian myths – The Handbook of Griceian mythology. At
one point Grice suggests that his ‘genitorial programme’ a kind of
ideal-observer theory is meant as ‘didactic,’ and for expository purposes. It
seems easier, as , as Grice and Plato would agree, to answer a question
about the genitorial programme rather than use a first-person approach and
appeal to introspection. Grice refers to the social
contract as a ‘myth,’ which may still explain, as ‘meaning’ does. G. R. Grice
built his career on this myth. This is G. R. Grice, of the social-contract
fame. Cf. Strawson and Wiggins comparing Grice’s myth with Plato’s, and they
know what they are talking about.
Grice’s
Martian Chronicles -- Twin-Earth – as
opposed to Mars -- a fictitious planet first visited by Hilary Putnam in a
thought experiment inspired by H. P. Grice in “Some remarks about the senses”
-- designed to show, among other things, that “ ‘meanings’ just ain’t in the
head” “The Meaning of ‘Meaning’,” 5. Twin-Earth is exactly like Earth with one
notable exception: ponds, rivers, and ice trays on Twin-Earth contain, not H2O,
but XYZ, a liquid superficially indistinguishable from water but with a
different chemical constitution. According to Putnam, although some inhabitants
of Twin-Earth closely resemble inhabitants of Earth, ‘water’, when uttered by a
Twin-Earthling, does not mean water. Water is H2O, and, on Twin-Earth, the word
‘water’ designates a different substance, XYZ, Twin-water. The moral drawn by
Putnam is that the meanings of at least some of our words, and the significance
of some of our thoughts, depend, in part, on how things stand outside our
heads. Two “molecular duplicates,” two agents with qualitatively similar mental
lives, might mean very different things by their utterances and think very
different thoughts. Although Twin-Earth has become a popular stopping-off place
for philosophers en route to theories of meaning and mental content, others
regard Twin-Earth as hopelessly remote, doubting that useful conclusions can be
drawn about our Earthly circumstances from research conducted there. Suppose that long-awaited invasion of the
Martians takes place, that they turn out to be friendly creatures and teach us
their language. We get on all right, except that we find no verb in their
language which unquestionably corresponds to our verb “see.” Instead we find
two verbs which we decide to render as “x” and “y”: we find that (in their
tongue) they speak of themselves as x-ing, and also as y-ing, things to be of
this and that color, size, and shape. Further, in physical appearance they are
more or less like ourselves, except that in their heads they have, one above
the other, two pairs of organs, not perhaps exactly like one another, but each
pair more or less like our eyes: each pair of organs is found to be sensitive
to light waves. It turns out that for them x-ing is dependent on the operation
of the upper organs, and y-ing on that of the lower organs. The question which
it seems natural to ask is this: Are x-ing and y-ing both cases of seeing, the
difference between them being that x-ing is seeing with the upper organs, and
y-ing is seeing with the lower organs? Or alternatively, do one or both of
these accomplishments constitute the exercise of a new sense, other than that
of sight? If we adopt, to distinguish the senses, a combination of suggestion
(I) with one or both of suggestions (III) or (IV), the answer seems clear: both
x-ing and y-ing are seeing, with different pairs of organs. But is the question
really to be settled so easily? Would we not in fact want to ask whether x-ing
something to be round was like y-ing it to be round, or whether when something
x-ed blue to them this was like or unlike its y-ing blue to them? If in answer
to such questions as these they said, “Oh no, there’s all the difference in the
world!” then I think we should be inclined to say that either x-ing or y-ing
(if not both) must be something other than seeing: we might of course be quite
unable to decide which (if either) was seeing. (I am aware that here those
whose approach is more Wittgensteinian than my own might complain that unless
something more can be said about how the difference between x-ing and y-ing might
“come out” or show itself in publicly observable phenomena, then the claim by
the supposed Martians that x-ing and y-ing are different would be one of which
nothing could be made, which would leave one at a loss how to understand it.
First, I am not convinced of the need for “introspectible” differences to show
themselves in the way this approach demands (I shall not discuss this point
further); second, I think that if I have to meet this demand, I can. One can
suppose that one or more of these Martians acquired the use of the lower y-ing
organs at some comparatively late date in their careers, and that at the same
time (perhaps for experimental purposes) the operation of the upper x-ing
organs was inhibited. One might now be ready to allow that a difference between
Some Remarks about the Senses 47 x-ing and y-ing would have shown itself if in
such a situation the creatures using their y-ing organs for the first time were
unable straightaway, without any learning process, to use their “color”-words
fluently and correctly to describe what they detected through the use of those
organs.) It might be argued at this point that we have not yet disposed of the
idea that the senses can be distinguished by an amalgam of suggestions (I),
(III), and (IV); for it is not clear that in the example of the Martians the
condition imposed by suggestion (I) is fulfilled. The thesis, it might be said,
is only upset if x-ing and y-ing are accepted as being the exercise of
different senses; and if they are, then the Martians’ color-words could be said
to have a concealed ambiguity. Much as “sweet” in English may mean
“sweet-smelling” or “sweet-tasting,” so “blue” in Martian may mean “blue-x-ing”
or “blue-y-ing.” But if this is so, then the Martians after all do not detect
by x-ing just those properties of things which they detect by y-ing. To this
line of argument there are two replies: (1) The defender of the thesis is in no
position to use this argument; for he cannot start by making the question
whether x-ing and y-ing are exercises of the same sense turn on the question
(inter alia) whether or not a single group of characteristics is detected by
both, and then make the question of individuation of the group turn on the
question whether putative members of the group are detected by one, or by more
than one, sense. He would be saying in effect, “Whether, in x-ing and y-ing,
different senses are exercised depends (inter alia) on whether the same
properties are detected by x-ing as by y-ing; but whether a certain x-ed
property is the same as a certain y-ed property depends on whether x-ing and
y-ing are or are not the exercise of a single sense.” This reply seems fatal.
For the circularity could only be avoided by making the question whether “blue”
in Martian names a single property depend either on whether the kinds of
experience involved in x-ing and y-ing are different, which would be to
reintroduce suggestion (II), or on whether the mechanisms involved in x-ing and
y-ing are different (in this case whether the upper organs are importantly
unlike the lower organs): and to adopt this alternative would, I think, lead to
treating the differentiation of the senses as being solely a matter of their
mechanisms, thereby making suggestion (I) otiose. (2) Independently of its
legitimacy or illegitimacy in the present context, we must reject the idea that
if it is accepted that in x-ing and y-ing different senses are being exercised,
then Martian color-words will be ambiguous. For ex hypothesi there will be a
very close correlation between things x-ing blue and their y-ing blue, far
closer 48 H. P. Grice than that between things smelling sweet and their tasting
sweet. This being so, it is only to be expected that x-ing and y-ing should
share the position of arbiters concerning the color of things: that is, “blue”
would be the name of a single property, determinable equally by x-ing and
y-ing. After all, is this not just like the actual position with regard to
shape, which is doubly determinable, by sight and by touch? While I would not
wish to quarrel with the main terms of this second reply, I should like briefly
to indicate why I think that this final quite natural comparison with the case
of shape will not do. It is quite conceivable that the correlation between
x-ing and y-ing , in the case supposed, might be close enough to ensure that
Martian color-words designated doubly determinable properties, and yet that
this correlation should break down in a limited class of cases: for instance,
owing to some differences between the two pairs of organs, objects which
transmitted light of a particular wavelength might (in standard conditions) x
blue but y black. I suggest, then, that given the existence of an object which,
for the Martians, standardly x-ed blue but y-ed black (its real color being
undecidable), no conclusion could be drawn to the effect that other objects do,
or could as a matter of practiSome Remarks about the Senses 51 cal possibility
be made to, x one way and y another way either in respect of color or in
respect of some other feature within the joint province of x-ing and y-ing.
Refs.: H. P. Grice, “Some remarks about the senses,” in WoW --. Coady, “The
senses of the Martians.”
Grice’s
computatio sive logica --
computability, roughly, the possibility of computation on a Turing machine. The
first convincing general definition, A. N. Turing’s 6, has been proved
equivalent to the known plausible alternatives, so that the concept of
computability is generally recognized as an absolute one. Turing’s definition
referred to computations by imaginary tape-processing machines that we now know
to be capable of computing the same functions whether simple sums and products
or highly complex, esoteric functions that modern digital computing machines
could compute if provided with sufficient storage capacity. In the form ‘Any
function that is computable at all is computable on a Turing machine’, this
absoluteness claim is called Turing’s thesis. A comparable claim for Alonzo
Church’s 5 concept of lcomputability is called Church’s thesis. Similar theses
are enunciated for Markov algorithms, for S. C. Kleene’s notion of general
recursiveness, etc. It has been proved that the same functions are computable
in all of these ways. There is no hope of proving any of those theses, for such
a proof would require a definition of ‘computable’ a definition that would simply be a further
item in the list, the subject of a further thesis. But since computations of
new kinds might be recognizable as genuine in particular cases, Turing’s thesis
and its equivalents, if false, might be decisively refuted by discovery of a
particular function, a way of computing it, and a proof that no Turing machine
can compute it. The halting problem for say Turing machines is the problem of
devising a Turing machine that computes the function hm, n % 1 or 0 depending
on whether or not Turing machine number m ever halts, once started with the
number n on its tape. This problem is unsolvable, for a machine that computed h
could be modified to compute a function gn, which is undefined the machine goes
into an endless loop when hn, n % 1, and otherwise agrees with hn, n. But this
modified machine Turing machine number
k, say would have contradictory
properties: started with k on its tape, it would eventually halt if and only if
it does not. Turing proved unsolvability of the decision problem for logic the
problem of devising a Turing machine that, applied to argument number n in
logical notation, correctly classifies it as valid or invalid by reducing the
halting problem to the decision problem, i.e., showing how any solution to the
latter could be used to solve the former problem, which we know to be
unsolvable. computer theory, the theory
of the design, uses, powers, and limits of modern electronic digital computers.
It has important bearings on philosophy, as may be seen from the many
philosophical references herein. Modern computers are a radically new kind of
machine, for they are active physical realizations of formal languages of logic
and arithmetic. Computers employ sophisticated languages, and they have
reasoning powers many orders of magnitude greater than those of any prior
machines. Because they are far superior to humans in many important tasks, they
have produced a revolution in society that is as profound as the industrial revolution
and is advancing much more rapidly. Furthermore, computers themselves are
evolving rapidly. When a computer is augmented with devices for sensing and
acting, it becomes a powerful control system, or a robot. To understand the
implications of computers for philosophy, one should imagine a robot that has
basic goals and volitions built into it, including conflicting goals and
competing desires. This concept first appeared in Karel C v apek’s play
Rossum’s Universal Robots 0, where the word ‘robot’ originated. A computer has
two aspects, hardware and programming languages. The theory of each is relevant
to philosophy. The software and hardware aspects of a computer are somewhat
analogous to the human mind and body. This analogy is especially strong if we follow
Peirce and consider all information processing in nature and in human
organisms, not just the conscious use of language. Evolution has produced a
succession of levels of sign usage and information processing: self-copying
chemicals, self-reproducing cells, genetic programs directing the production of
organic forms, chemical and neuronal signals in organisms, unconscious human
information processing, ordinary languages, and technical languages. But each
level evolved gradually from its predecessors, so that the line between body
and mind is vague. The hardware of a computer is typically organized into three
general blocks: memory, processor arithmetic unit and control, and various
inputoutput devices for communication between machine and environment. The
memory stores the data to be processed as well as the program that directs the
processing. The processor has an arithmetic-logic unit for transforming data,
and a control for executing the program. Memory, processor, and input-output
communicate to each other through a fast switching system. The memory and
processor are constructed from registers, adders, switches, cables, and various
other building blocks. These in turn are composed of electronic components:
transistors, resistors, and wires. The input and output devices employ
mechanical and electromechanical technologies as well as electronics. Some
input-output devices also serve as auxiliary memories; floppy disks and
magnetic tapes are examples. For theoretical purposes it is useful to imagine
that the computer has an indefinitely expandable storage tape. So imagined, a
computer is a physical realization of a Turing machine. The idea of an
indefinitely expandable memory is similar to the logician’s concept of an
axiomatic formal language that has an unlimited number of proofs and theorems.
The software of a modern electronic computer is written in a hierarchy of
programming languages. The higher-level languages are designed for use by human
programmers, operators, and maintenance personnel. The “machine language” is
the basic hardware language, interpreted and executed by the control. Its words
are sequences of binary digits or bits. Programs written in intermediate-level
languages are used by the computer to translate the languages employed by human
users into the machine language for execution. A programming language has
instructional means for carrying out three kinds of operations: data operations
and transfers, transfers of control from one part of the program to the other,
and program self-modification. Von Neumann designed the first modern
programming language. A programming language is general purpose, and an
electronic computer that executes it can in principle carry out any algorithm
or effective procedure, including the simulation of any other computer. Thus
the modern electronic computer is a practical realization of the abstract
concept of a universal Turing machine. What can actually be computed in
practice depends, of course, on the state of computer technology and its
resources. It is common for computers at many different spatial locations to be
interconnected into complex networks by telephone, radio, and satellite
communication systems. Insofar as users in one part of the network can control
other parts, either legitimately or illegitimately e.g., by means of a
“computer virus”, a global network of computers is really a global computer.
Such vast computers greatly increase societal interdependence, a fact of
importance for social philosophy. The theory of computers has two branches, corresponding
to the hardware and software aspects of computers. The fundamental concept of
hardware theory is that of a finite automaton, which may be expressed either as
an idealized logical network of simple computer primitives, or as the
corresponding temporal system of input, output, and internal states. A finite
automaton may be specified as a logical net of truth-functional switches and
simple memory elements, connected to one another by computer theory computer
theory idealized wires. These elements function synchronously, each wire being
in a binary state 0 or 1 at each moment of time t % 0, 1, 2, . . . . Each
switching element or “gate” executes a simple truth-functional operation not,
or, and, nor, not-and, etc. and is imagined to operate instantaneously compare
the notions of sentential connective and truth table. A memory element
flip-flop, binary counter, unit delay line preserves its input bit for one or
more time-steps. A well-formed net of switches and memory elements may not have
cycles through switches only, but it typically has feedback cycles through
memory elements. The wires of a logical net are of three kinds: input,
internal, and output. Correspondingly, at each moment of time a logical net has
an input state, an internal state, and an output state. A logical net or
automaton need not have any input wires, in which case it is a closed system.
The complete history of a logical net is described by a deterministic law: at
each moment of time t, the input and internal states of the net determine its
output state and its next internal state. This leads to the second definition
of ‘finite automaton’: it is a deterministic finite-state system characterized
by two tables. The transition table gives the next internal state produced by
each pair of input and internal states. The output table gives the output state
produced by each input state and internal state. The state analysis approach to
computer hardware is of practical value only for systems with a few elements
e.g., a binary-coded decimal counter, because the number of states increases as
a power of the number of elements. Such a rapid rate of increase of complexity
with size is called the combinatorial explosion, and it applies to many
discrete systems. However, the state approach to finite automata does yield
abstract models of law-governed systems that are of interest to logic and
philosophy. A correctly operating digital computer is a finite automaton. Alan
Turing defined the finite part of what we now call a Turing machine in terms of
states. It seems doubtful that a human organism has more computing power than a
finite automaton. A closed finite automaton illustrates Nietzsche’s law of
eternal return. Since a finite automaton has a finite number of internal
states, at least one of its internal states must occur infinitely many times in
any infinite state history. And since a closed finite automaton is
deterministic and has no inputs, a repeated state must be followed by the same
sequence of states each time it occurs. Hence the history of a closed finite
automaton is periodic, as in the law of eternal return. Idealized neurons are
sometimes used as the primitive elements of logical nets, and it is plausible
that for any brain and central nervous system there is a logical network that
behaves the same and performs the same functions. This shows the close relation
of finite automata to the brain and central nervous system. The switches and
memory elements of a finite automaton may be made probabilistic, yielding a
probabilistic automaton. These automata are models of indeterministic systems.
Von Neumann showed how to extend deterministic logical nets to systems that
contain selfreproducing automata. This is a very basic logical design relevant
to the nature of life. The part of computer programming theory most relevant to
philosophy contains the answer to Leibniz’s conjecture concerning his
characteristica universalis and calculus ratiocinator. He held that “all our
reasoning is nothing but the joining and substitution of characters, whether
these characters be words or symbols or pictures.” He thought therefore that
one could construct a universal, arithmetic language with two properties of
great philosophical importance. First, every atomic concept would be
represented by a prime number. Second, the truth-value of any logically
true-or-false statement expressed in the characteristica universalis could be
calculated arithmetically, and so any rational dispute could be resolved by
calculation. Leibniz expected to do the computation by hand with the help of a
calculating machine; today we would do it on an electronic computer. However,
we know now that Leibniz’s proposed language cannot exist, for no computer or
computer program can calculate the truth-value of every logically true-orfalse
statement given to it. This fact follows from a logical theorem about the
limits of what computer programs can do. Let E be a modern electronic computer
with an indefinitely expandable memory, so that E has the power of a universal
Turing machine. And let L be any formal language in which every arithmetic
statement can be expressed, and which is consistent. Leibniz’s proposed
characteristica universalis would be such a language. Now a computer that is
operating correctly is an active formal language, carrying out the instructions
of its program deductively. Accordingly, Gödel’s incompleteness theorems for
formal arithmetic apply to computer E. It follows from these theorems that no
program can enable computer E to decide of an arbitrary statecomputer theory
computer theory 166 166 ment of L
whether or not that statement is true. More strongly, there cannot even be a
program that will enable E to enumerate the truths of language L one after
another. Therefore Leibniz’s characteristica universalis cannot exist.
Electronic computers are the first active or “live” mathematical systems. They
are the latest addition to a long historical series of mathematical tools for
inquiry: geometry, algebra, calculus and differential equations, probability
and statistics, and modern mathematics. The most effective use of computer
programs is to instruct computers in tasks for which they are superior to
humans. Computers are being designed and programmed to cooperate with humans so
that the calculation, storage, and judgment capabilities of the two are
synthesized. The powers of such humancomputer combines will increase at an
exponential rate as computers continue to become faster, more powerful, and
easier to use, while at the same time becoming smaller and cheaper. The social
implications of this are very important. The modern electronic computer is a
new tool for the logic of discovery Peirce’s abduction. An inquirer or
inquirers operating a computer interactively can use it as a universal
simulator, dynamically modeling systems that are too complex to study by
traditional mathematical methods, including non-linear systems. Simulation is
used to explain known empirical results, and also to develop new hypotheses to
be tested by observation. Computer models and simulations are unique in several
ways: complexity, dynamism, controllability, and visual presentability. These
properties make them important new tools for modeling and thereby relevant to
some important philosophical problems. A humancomputer combine is especially
suited for the study of complex holistic and hierarchical systems with feedback
cf. cybernetics, including adaptive goal-directed systems. A
hierarchical-feedback system is a dynamic structure organized into several
levels, with the compounds of one level being the atoms or building blocks of
the next higher level, and with cyclic paths of influence operating both on and
between levels. For example, a complex human institution has several levels,
and the people in it are themselves hierarchical organizations of selfcopying chemicals,
cells, organs, and such systems as the pulmonary and the central nervous
system. The behaviors of these systems are in general much more complex than,
e.g., the behaviors of traditional systems of mechanics. Contrast an organism,
society, or ecology with our planetary system as characterized by Kepler and
Newton. Simple formulas ellipses describe the orbits of the planets. More
basically, the planetary system is stable in the sense that a small
perturbation of it produces a relatively small variation in its subsequent
history. In contrast, a small change in the state of a holistic hierarchical
feedback system often amplifies into a very large difference in behavior, a
concern of chaos theory. For this reason it is helpful to model such systems on
a computer and run sample histories. The operator searches for representative
cases, interesting phenomena, and general principles of operation. The
humancomputer method of inquiry should be a useful tool for the study of
biological evolution, the actual historical development of complex adaptive
goal-directed systems. Evolution is a logical and communication process as well
as a physical and chemical process. But evolution is statistical rather than
deterministic, because a single temporal state of the system results in a
probabilistic distribution of histories, rather than in a single history. The
genetic operators of mutation and crossover, e.g., are probabilistic operators.
But though it is stochastic, evolution cannot be understood in terms of
limiting relative frequencies, for the important developments are the repeated
emergence of new phenomena, and there may be no evolutionary convergence toward
a final state or limit. Rather, to understand evolution the investigator must
simulate the statistical spectra of histories covering critical stages of the
process. Many important evolutionary phenomena should be studied by using
simulation along with observation and experiment. Evolution has produced a
succession of levels of organization: selfcopying chemicals, self-reproducing
cells, communities of cells, simple organisms, haploid sexual reproduction,
diploid sexuality with genetic dominance and recessiveness, organisms composed
of organs, societies of organisms, humans, and societies of humans. Most of
these systems are complex hierarchical feedback systems, and it is of interest
to understand how they emerged from earlier systems. Also, the interaction of
competition and cooperation at all stages of evolution is an important subject,
of relevance to social philosophy and ethics. Some basic epistemological and
metaphysical concepts enter into computer modeling. A model is a well-developed
concept of its object, representing characteristics like structure and
funccomputer theory computer theory 167
167 tion. A model is similar to its object in important respects, but
simpler; in mathematical terminology, a model is homomorphic to its object but
not isomorphic to it. However, it is often useful to think of a model as
isomorphic to an embedded subsystem of the system it models. For example, a gas
is a complicated system of microstates of particles, but these microstates can
be grouped into macrostates, each with a pressure, volume, and temperature
satisfying the gas law PV % kT. The derivation of this law from the detailed
mechanics of the gas is a reduction of the embedded subsystem to the underlying
system. In many cases it is adequate to work with the simpler embedded
subsystem, but in other cases one must work with the more complex but complete
underlying system. The law of an embedded subsystem may be different in kind
from the law of the underlying system. Consider, e.g., a machine tossing a coin
randomly. The sequence of tosses obeys a simple probability law, while the
complex underlying mechanical system is deterministic. The random sequence of
tosses is a probabilistic system embedded in a deterministic system, and a
mathematical account of this embedding relation constitutes a reduction of the
probabilistic system to a deterministic system. Compare the compatibilist’s
claim that free choice can be embedded in a deterministic system. Compare also
a pseudorandom sequence, which is a deterministic sequence with adequate
randomness for a given finite simulation. Note finally that the probabilistic
system of quantum mechanics underlies the deterministic system of mechanics.
The ways in which models are used by goaldirected systems to solve problems and
adapt to their environments are currently being modeled by humancomputer
combines. Since computer software can be converted into hardware, successful
simulations of adaptive uses of models could be incorporated into the design of
a robot. Human intentionality involves the use of a model of oneself in
relation to others and the environment. A problem-solving robot using such a
model would constitute an important step toward a robot with full human powers.
These considerations lead to the central thesis of the philosophy of logical
mechanism: a finite deterministic automaton can perform all human functions.
This seems plausible in principle and is treated in detail in Merrilee Salmon,
ed., The Philosophy of Logical Mechanism: Essays in Honor of Arthur W. Burks,0.
A digital computer has reasoning and memory powers. Robots have sensory inputs
for collecting information from the environment, and they have moving and
acting devices. To obtain a robot with human powers, one would need to put
these abilities under the direction of a system of desires, purposes, and
goals. Logical mechanism is a form of mechanism or materialism, but differs
from traditional forms of these doctrines in its reliance on the logical powers
of computers and the logical nature of evolution and its products. The modern
computer is a kind of complex hierarchical physical system, a system with
memory, processor, and control that employs a hierarchy of programming
languages. Humans are complex hierarchical systems designed by evolution with structural levels of chemicals, cells,
organs, and systems e.g., circulatory, neural, immune and linguistic levels of
genes, enzymes, neural signals, and immune recognition. Traditional
materialists did not have this model of a computer nor the contemporary
understanding of evolution, and never gave an adequate account of logic and
reasoning and such phenomena as goaldirectedness and self-modeling.
conatum: Aristotle
distinguishes three types of living beings: vegetables, φυτά, which possess
only the ability to nourish themselves τὸ θϱεπτιϰόν; animals, ζαῷ, which
possess the faculty of sensing τὸ αἰσθητιϰόν, which opens onto that of
desiring, τὸ ὀϱεϰτιϰόν, to orektikon, (desdideratum); and man and — he says—any
other similar or superior being, who possess in addition the ability to think,
“τὸ διανοητιϰόν τε ϰαὶ νοῦς.” -- De An., 414a 29-b.orme, the technical Stoic definition
of πάθος, viz. as a particular kind of conation, or impulse (ορμή). ... 4 ' This definition (amorem
ipsum conatum amicitiae
faeiendae ex ... emotion and moral self-management in Galen's philosophical psychology', ..cōnātum ,
i, usu. in plur.: cōnāta ,
ōrum, n., v. conor.. The term is used by an the
Wilde Reader at Oxford, that Grice once followed – until he became a
neo-Prichardian instead.(philosophy) The power or act which directs or
impels to effort of any kind, whether muscular or psychical. quotations 1899, George Frederick Stout, A
Manual of Psychology, page 234:Any pleasing sense-experience, when it has once taken
place, will, on subsequent occasions, give rise to a conation, when its conditions are only
partially repeated...
Grice’s four
conversational categories – the category of conversational mode: While Grice could
be jocular, in an English way, about the number of maxims within each category
– he surely would not like to joke as far as to be cavalier about the NUMBER of
categories: Four was the number of functions from which the twelve categories
rramify, Kant, or “Ariskant,” but Grice takes the function for the category --
four is for Ariskantian Grice. This is Aristotle’s hexis. This category posed a
special conceptual problem to Grice. Recall that his categories are invoked
only by their power to generate conversational implciata. But a conversational
implicaturum is non-detachable. That is, being based on universalistic
principles of general rationality, it cannot attach to an EXPRESSION, less so
to the ‘meaning’ of an EXPRESSION: “if” and “provided” are REALISATIONS of the
concept of the conditionality. Now, the conversational supra-maxim, ‘be
perspicuous’ [sic], is supposed to apply NOT to the content, or matter, but to
the FORM. (Strictly, quantitas and qualitas applies to matter, RELATIO applies
to the link between at least two matters). Grice tweaks things in such a way
that he is happy, and so am I. This is a pun on Aristkant’s Kategorie
(Ammonius, tropos, Boëthius, modus, Kant
Modalitat). Gesichtspuncte der Modalität in assertorische, apodiktische und
problematische hat sich aus der Aristotelischen Eintheilung hervorgebildet
(Anal. Dr. 1, 2): 7@ợc gócois atv n 100 incozy h kỹ kvayxns Úndozav û toù
{VJÉZEo fai Úndozev: Doch geht diese Aristotelische Stelle vielmehr auf die
analogen objectiven Verhältnisse, als auf den subjectiven Gewissheitsgrad. Der
Zusatz Svvatóv, įvsezóuevov, és åviyans, jedoch auch eine adverbiale Bestimmung
wie taméws in dem Satze ý σελήνη ταχέως αποκαθίσταται, heisst bei Ammonius
τρόπος (zu περί ερμ. Cap. 12) und bei Boëthius modus. Kant (Kritik der r. Vern.
§ 9-11; Prolegom. $ 21, Log. § 30) gründet die Eintheilung nach der Modalität
auf die modalen Kategorien: Möglichkeit und Unmöglichkeit, Dasein und
Nichtsein, Nothwendigkeit und Zufälligkeit, wobei jedoch die Zusammenstellung
der Unmöglichkeit, die eine negative Nothwendigkeit ist, mit der Möglichkeit,
und ebenso der Zufälligkeit, die das nicht als nothwendig erkannte Dasein
bezeichnet, mit der Nothwendigkeit eine Ungenauigkeit enthält: die Erkenntniss
der Unmöglichkeit ist nicht ein problematisches, sondern ein (negativ-)
apodiktisches Urtheil (was Kant in der Anwendung selbst anerkennt, indem er z.
B. Krit. der r. V. S. 191 die Formel: es ist unmöglich etc. als Ausdruck einer
apodiktischen Gewissheit betrachtet), und die Erkenntniss des Zufälligen ist
nicht ein apodiktisches, sondern ein assertorisches Urtheil. Ausserdem aber hat
Kant das subjective und objective Element in den Kategorien der Qualität und
Modalität nicht bestimmt genug unterschieden.
Grice’s four
conversational categories – the category of conversational quality: While Grice could
be cavalier about the number of maxims falling under the category of
conversational quality, he surely would not be cavalier about the number of
categories themselves. Four were the functions from which the twelve categories
ramify for Ariskant, and four were for Grice: he takes the function from Kant,
but the spirit from Aristotle. This is
Aristotle’s universal, poiotes. This was originally the desideratum of
conversational candour. At that point, there was no Kantian scheme of
categories in the horizon. Candour Grice arbitrarily contrasts with clarity –
and so the desideratum of conversational candour sometimes clashes with the
desideratum of conversational clarity. One may not be able to provide a less
convoluted utterance (“It is raining”) but use the less clear, but more candid,
“It might be raining, for all I know.” A pun on Aristkan’s Kategorie, poiotes,
qualitas, Qualitat. Expressions which
are in no way composite signify substance, quantity, quality, relation, place,
time, position, state, action, or affection. To sketch my meaning roughly,
examples of substance are 'man' or 'the horse', of quantity, such terms as 'two
cubits long' or 'three cubits long', of quality, such attributes as 'white',
'grammatical'.
Grice’s four
conversational categories – the category of conversational quantity: While Grice could
be cavalier about the number of maxims falling under quantity, he was not about
the number of categories itself. Four was the number of functions out of which
the twelve categories spring for Ariskant, and four was for Grice. He takes the
function (the letter) from Kant, but the spirit from Aristotle. This is Aristotle’s
universal, posotes. Grice would often use ‘a fortiori,’ and then it dawned on
him. “All I need is a principle of conversational fortitude. This will give the
Oxonians the Graeco-Roman pedigree they deserve.’ a pun on Ariskant’s Kategorie, posotes, quantitas,
Quantitat. Grice expands this as ‘quantity of information,’ or ‘informative
content’ – which then as he recognises overlaps with the category of
conversational quality, because ‘false information’ is a misnomer. Expressions
which are in no way composite signify substance, quantity, quality, relation,
place, time, position, state, action, or affection. To sketch my meaning
roughly, examples of substance are 'man' or 'the horse', of quantity, such
terms as 'two cubits long' or 'three cubits long'
Grice’s four
conversational categories – the category of conversational relation: While Grice could
be cavalier about the number of maxims under the category of relation, he was
not about the number of categories: four were the number of functions out of which
the twelve categories spring for Ariskant and four were for Grice: he takes the
letter (function) from Kant, and the spirit from Aristotle. This is Aristotle’s
‘pros ti.’ f there are categories of being, and categories of thought, and
categories of expression, surely there is room for the ‘conversational
category.’ A pun on Ariskant’s Kategorie (pros ti, ad aliquid, Relation).
Surely a move has to relate to the previous move, and should include a tag as
to what move will relate. Expressions which are in no way composite signify
substance, quantity, quality, relation, place, time, position, state, action,
or affection. To sketch my meaning roughly, examples of substance are 'man' or
'the horse', of quantity, such terms as 'two cubits long' or 'three cubits
long', of quality, such attributes as 'white', 'grammatical'. 'Double', 'half',
'greater', fall under the category of relation.
Grice’s predicament. S draws a pic- "one-off predicament"). ...
Clarendon, 1976); and Simon
Blackburn, Spreading the Word (Oxford: Clarendon, 1984) ... But
there is an obvious way of emending the account. Grice points out. ... Blackburn helpfully suggests that we can cut through
much of this complexity by ... The above account is intended to capture the
notion of one-off meaning. Walking in a
forest, having gone some way ahead of the rest of the party, I draw an arrow at
a fork of a path, meaning that those who are following me should go straight
on. Gricean considerations may be safely ignored. Only when
trying to communicate by nonconventional means ("one-off predicament," Blackburn, 1984, chap. Blackburn's mission
is to promote the philosophy of language as a pivotal enquiry ... and
dismissed; the Gricean model
might be suitable to explain one-off acts.
The Gricean mechanism
with its complex communicative intentions has a clear point in what Blackburn calls “a one-off predicament” - a
situation in which an ...
Grice’s shaggy-dog story: While Grice would like to say that it should be in the
range of a rational creature to refer and to predicate, what about the hand
wave? By his handwave, the emissor means that _HE_ (subject) is a knower of the
road (or roate), the predicate after the copula or that he, the emissor,
subject, is (the copula) about to leave his emissee – but there is nothing IN
THE MATTER (the handwave) that can be ‘de-composed’ like that. The FORM
attaches to the communicatum directly. This is strange, but not impossible, and
shows Grice’s programme. Because his idea is that a communicatum need not a
vehicile which is syntactically structured (as “Fido is shaggy”). This is the
story that Grice tells in his lecture. He uses a ‘shaggy-dog’ story to explain
TWO main notions: that of ‘reference’ or denotatio, and that of predicatio. He
had explored that earlier when discussing, giving an illustration “Smith is
happy”, the idea of ‘value,’ as correspondence, where he adds the terms for
‘denote’ and ‘predicatio,’ or actually, ‘designatio’ and ‘indicatio’, need to
be “explained within the theory.” In the utterance ‘Smith is happy,’ the
utterer DESIGNATES an item, Smith. The utterer also INDICATES some class,
‘being happy.’ Grice introduces a shorthand, ‘assign’, or ‘assignatio,’ previous
to the value-satisfaction, to involve both the ‘designatio’ and the
‘indicatio’. U assigns the item Smith to the class ‘being happy.’ U’s intention
involves A’s belief that U believes that “the item belongs to the class, or
that he ASSIGNS the item to the class. A predicate, such as
'shaggy,' in my shaggy-dog story, is a part of a bottom-up, or top-bottom, as I
prefer, analysis of this or that sentences, and a predicate, such as 'shaggy,'
is the only indispensable 'part,' or 'element,' as I prefer, since a
predicate is the only 'pars orationis,' to use the old phrase, that must
appear in every sentence. In a later lecture he ventures with ‘reference.’ Lewis
and Short have “rĕferre,” rendered as “to bear, carry, bring, draw, or give
back,” in a “transf.” usage, they render as “to make a reference, to refer
(class.),” asa in “de rebus et obscuris et incertis ad Apollinem censeo
referendum; “ad quem etiam Athenienses publice de majoribus rebus semper
rettulerunt,” Cic. Div. 1, 54, 122.” While Grice uses ‘Fido,’ he could have
used ‘Pegasus’ (Martin’s cat, as it happens) and apply Quine’s adage: we could
have appealed to the ex hypothesi unanalyzable, irreducible attribute of being
Pegasus, adopting, for its expression, the verb 'is-Pegasus', or 'pegasizes'. And
Grice could have played with ‘predicatio’ and ‘subjectio.’ Grice on subject.
Lewis and Short have “sūbĭcĭo,” (less correctly subjĭcĭo ; post-Aug.
sometimes sŭb- ), jēci, jectum, 3, v. a. sub-jacio. which they render as “to throw, lay, place,
or bring under or near (cf. subdo),” and in philosophy, “subjectum , i, n. (sc.
verbum), as “that which is spoken of, the foundation or subject of a
proposition;” “omne quicquid dicimus aut
subjectum est aut de subjecto aut in subjecto est. Subjectum est prima substantia,
quod ipsum nulli accidit alii inseparabiliter, etc.,” Mart. Cap. 4, § 361; App.
Dogm. Plat. 3, p. 34, 4 et saep.—.” Note that for Mart. Cap. the ‘subject,’
unlike the ‘predicate’ is not a ‘syntactical category.’ “Subjectum est prima
substantia,” The subject is a prote ousia. As for correlation, Grice ends up
with a reductive analysis. By uttering utterance-token V, the utterer U
correlates predicate P1 with (and only with) each member of P2 ≡ (∃R)(∃R') (1) U effects that (∀x)(R P1x ≡
x ∈ P1) and (2) U
intends (1), and (3) U intends that (∀y)(R'
P1y ≡ y ∈
P1), where R' P1 is an expression-type such that utterance-token V is a
sequence consisting of an expression-token p1 of expression-type P1 and an
expression-token p2 of expression-type P2, the R-co-relatum of which is a
set of which y is a member. And he is back with ‘denotare. Lewis and Short have
“dēnŏtare,” which they render as “to mark, set a mark on, with chalk, color,
etc.: “pedes venalium creta,”
It is interesting to trace Grice’s earliest investigations on this. Grice and
Strawson stage a number of joint seminars on topics related to the notions of
meaning, categories, and logical form. Grice and Strawson engage in systematic
and unsystematic philosophical exploration. From these discussions springs work
on predication and categories, one or two reflections of which are acknowledge
at two places (re: the reductive analysis of a ‘particular,’ “the tallest man
that did, does, or will exist” --) in Strawson’s “Particular and general” for
The Aristotelian Society – and “visible” as Grice puts it, but not
acknowledged, in Strawson’s “Individuals: an essay in descriptive
metaphysics.””
Grice’s theory-theory: “I am perhaps not too happy with the word ‘theory,’ as
applied to this, but that’s Ramsey for you” (WoW: 285). Grice’s theory-theory: A theory of mind concerning how we come to know
about the propositional attitudes of others. It tries to explain the nature of
ascribing certain thoughts, beliefs, or intentions to other persons in order to
explain their actions. The theory-theory holds that in ascribing beliefs to
others we are tacitly applying a theory that enables us to make inferences
about the beliefs behind the actions of others. The theory that is applied is a
set of rules embedded in folk psychology. Hence, to anticipate and predict the
behavior of others, one engages in an intellectual process moving by inference from one set of beliefs
to another. This position contrasts with another theory of mind, the simulation
theory, which holds that we need to make use of our own motivational and
emotional resources and capacities for practical reasoning in explaining
actions of others. “So called ‘theory-theorists’ maintain that the ability to
explain and predict behaviour is underpinned by a folk-psychological theory of
the structure and functioning of the mind – where the theory in question may be
innate and modularised, learned individually, or acquired through a process of
enculturation.” Carruthers and Smith (eds.), Theories of Theories of Mind. Grice
needs a theory. For those into implicatura and conversation as rational
cooperation, when introducing the implicaturum he mentions ‘pre-theoretical
adequacy’ of the model. So he is thinking of the conversational theory as a
theory in the strict sense, with ‘explanatory’ and not merely taxonomical
power. So one task is to examine in which way the conversational theory is a
theory that explains, rather than merely ad hoc ex post facto commentary. Not so much for his approach to mean. He
polemises with Rountree, of Somerville, that you dont need a thory to analyse
mean. Indeed, you cannot have a theory to analyse mean, because mean is a
matter of intuition, not a theoretical concept. But Grice appeals to theory,
when dealing with willing. He knows what willing means because he relies on a
concept of folk-science. In this folk-science, willing is a theoretical
concept. Grice arrived at this conclusion by avoiding the adjective souly, and
seeing that there is no word to describe willing other than by saying it is a
psychoLOGICAL concept, i.e. part of a law within that theory of folk-science.
That law will include, by way of ramsified naming or describing willing as a predicate-constant.
Now, this is related to metaphysics. His liberal or ecunmenical metaphysics is
best developed in terms of his ontological marxism presented just after he has
expanded on this idea of willing as a theoretical concept, within a law involving
willing (say, Grices Optimism-cum-Pesimism law), within the folk-science of
psychology that explains his behaviour. For Aristotle, a theoria, was quite a
different animal, but it had to do with contemplatio, hence the theoretical
(vita contemplativa) versus the practical (vita activa). Grices sticking to
Aristotle’srare use of theory inspires him to develop his fascinating theory of
the theory-theory. Grice realised that
there is no way to refer to things like intending except with psychological,
which he takes to mean, belonging to a pscyhological theory. Grice was keen to
theorise on theorising. He thought that Aristotle’s first philosophy
(prote philosophia) is best rendered as Theory-theory. Grice kept using Oxonian
English spelling, theorising, except when he did not! Grice calls himself
folksy: his theories, even if Subjects to various types of Ramseyfication, are
popular in kind! And ceteris paribus! Metaphysical construction is
disciplined and the best theorising the philosopher can hope for! The way
Grice conceives of his theory-theory is interesting to revisit. A route by
which Grice hopes to show the centrality of metaphysics (as prote philosophia)
involves taking seriously a few ideas. If any region of enquiry is to be
successful as a rational enterprise, its deliverance must be
expressable in the shape of one or another of the possibly different types of
theory. A characterisation of the nature and range of a possible kind of
theory θ is needed. Such a body of characterisation must itself
be the outcome of rational enquiry, and so must itself exemplify
whatever requirement it lays down for any theory θ in
general. The characterisation must itself be
expressible as a theory θ, to be called, if you like, Grice
politely puts it, theory-theory, or meta-theory, θ2. Now, the
specification and justification of the ideas and material presupposed
by any theory θ, whether such account falls within the bounds of
Theory-theory, θ2 would be properly called prote philosophia (first
philosophy) and may turn out to relate to what is generally accepted as
belonging to the Subjects matter of metaphysics. It might, for example,
turn out to be establishable that any theory θ has to relate to a
certain range of this or that Subjects item, has to attribute to each item this
or that predicate or attribute, which in turn has to fall within one or another
of the range of types or categories. In this way, the enquiry might lead
to recognised metaphysical topics, such as the nature of being, its range of
application, the nature of predication and a systematic account of
categories. Met. , philosophical eschatology, and Platos Republic,
Thrasymachus, social justice, Socrates, along with notes on Zeno, and topics
for pursuit, repr.in Part II, Explorations in semantics and metaphysics
to WOW , metaphysics, philosophical eschatology, Platos Republic, Socrates,
Thrasymachus, justice, moral right, legal right, Athenian dialectic.
Philosophical eschatology is a sub-discipline of metaphysics concerned with
what Grice calls a category shift. Grice, having applied such a technique to
Aristotle’s aporia on philos (friend) as alter ego, uses it now to tackle
Socratess view, against Thrasymachus, that right applies primarily to morality,
and secondarily to legality. Grice has a specific reason to include this in his
WOW Grices exegesis of Plato on justice displays Grices take on the fact that
metaphysics needs to be subdivided into ontology proper and what he calls
philosophical eschatology, for the study of things like category shift and other
construction routines. The exploration of Platos Politeia thus becomes an
application of Grices philosophically eschatological approach to the item just,
as used by Socrates (morally just) and Thrasymachus (legally just). Grice has
one specific essay on Aristotle in PPQ. So he thought Plato merited his own
essay, too! Grices focus is on Plato’s exploration of dike. Grice is concerned
with a neo-Socratic (versus neo-Thrasymachean) account of moral justice as
conceptually (or axiologically) prior to legal justice. In the proceeding, he
creates philosophical eschatology as the other branch to metaphysics, along
with good ol ontology. To say that just crosses a categorial barrier (from
the moral to the legal) is to make a metaphysical, strictly eschatological,
pronouncement. The Grice Papers locate the Plato essay in s. II, the Socrates essay in s. III, and the Thrasymachus essay, under social
justice, in s. V. Grice is well aware that in his account of fairness, Rawls
makes use of his ideas on personal identity. The philosophical elucidation of
fairness is of great concern for Grice. He had been in touch with such
explorations as Nozicks and Nagels along anti-Rawlsian lines. Grices ideas on
rationality guide his exploration of social justice. Grice keeps revising the
Socrates notes. The Plato essay he actually dates. As it happens, Grices most
extensive published account of Socrates is in this commentary on Platos
Republic: an eschatological commentary, as he puts it. In an entertaining
fashion, Grice has Socrates, and neo-Socrates, exploring the logic and grammar
of just against the attack by Thrasymachus and neo-Thrasymachus. Grices point
is that, while the legal just may be conceptually prior to the moral just, the
moral just is evaluationally or axiologically prior. Refs.: There is a specific
essay on ‘theorising’ in the Grice Papers, but there are scattered sources
elsewhere, such as “Method” (repr. in “Conception”), BANC.
Grice’s
three-year-old’s guide to Russell’s theory of types, with an advice to parents
by Strawson: Grice put
forward the empirical hypothesis that a three-year old CAN understand Russell’s
theory of types. “In more than one way.” This brought confusion in the
household, with some members saying they could not – “And I trust few of your
tutees do!” Russell’s influential solution to the problem of logical paradoxes.
The theory was developed in particular to overcome Russell’s paradox, which
seemed to destroy the possibility of Frege’s logicist program of deriving
mathematics from logic. Suppose we ask whether the set of all sets which are
not members of themselves is a member of itself. If it is, then it is not, but
if it is not, then it is. The theory of types suggests classifying objects,
properties, relations, and sets into a hierarchy of types. For example, a class
of type 0 has members that are ordinary objects; type 1 has members that are
properties of objects of type 0; type 2 has members that are properties of the
properties in type 1; and so on. What can be true or false of items of one type
can not significantly be said about those of another type and is simply
nonsense. If we observe the prohibitions against classes containing members of
different types, Russell’s paradox and similar paradoxes can be avoided. The
theory of types has two variants. The simple theory of types classifies
different objects and properties, while the ramified theory of types further
sorts types into levels and adds a hierarchy of levels to that of types. By
restricting predicates to those that relate to items of lower types or lower
levels within their own type, predicates giving rise to paradox are excluded.
The simple theory of types is sufficient for solving logical paradoxes, while
the ramified theory of type is introduced to solve semantic paradoxes, that is,
paradoxes depending on notions such as reference and truth. “Any expression
containing an apparent variable is of higher type than that variable. This is
the fundamental principles of the doctrines of types.” Russell, Logic and
Knowledge. Grice’s commentary in “In defense
of a dogma,” The H. P. Grice Papers, BANC.
Grice’s complementary class, the class of all things
not in a given class. For example, if C is the class of all red things, then
its complementary class is the class containing everything that is not red.
This latter class includes even non-colored things, like numbers and the class
C itself. Often, the context will determine a less inclusive complementary
class. If B 0 A, then the complement of B with respect to A is A B. For example, if A is the class of physical
objects, and B is the class of red physical objects, then the complement of B
with respect to A is the class of non-red physical objects.
villa grice: -- Kept by Luigi Speranza -- Grice kept a nice garden in
his cottage on Banbury Road, not far from St. John’s. It was more of a villa
than his town house at Harborne. While Grice loved Academia, he also loved
non-Academia. He would socialize at the Flag and Lamb, at the Bird and Baby,
and the cricket club, at the bridge club, etc. In this way, he goes back to
Plato’s idea of an ‘academy,’ established by Plato at his villa outside Athens near
the public park and gymnasium known by that name. Although it may not have
maintained a continuous tradition, the many and varied philosophers of the
Academy all considered themselves Plato’s successors, and all of them
celebrated and studied his work. The school survived in some form until A.D.
529, when it was dissolved, along with the other pagan schools, by the Eastern
Roman emperor Justinian I. The history of the Academy is divided by some
authorities into that of the Old Academy Plato, Speusippus, Xenocrates, and
their followers and the New Academy the Skeptical Academy of the third and
second centuries B.C.. Others speak of five phases in its history: Old as
before, Middle Arcesilaus, New Carneades, Fourth Philo of Larisa, and Fifth
Antiochus of Ascalon. For most of its history the Academy was devoted to
elucidating doctrines associated with Plato that were not entirely explicit in
the dialogues. These “unwritten doctrines” were apparently passed down to his
immediate successors and are known to us mainly through the work of Aristotle:
there are two opposed first principles, the One and the Indefinite Dyad Great
and Small; these generate Forms or Ideas which may be identified with numbers,
from which in turn come intermediate mathematicals and, at the lowest level,
perceptible things Aristotle, Metaphysics I.6. After Plato’s death, the Academy
passed to his nephew Speusippus, who led the school until his death. Although
his written works have perished, his views on certain main points, along with
some quotations, were recorded by surviving authors. Under the influence of
late Pythagoreans, Speusippus anticipated Plotinus by holding that the One
transcends being, goodness, and even Intellect, and that the Dyad which he
identifies with matter is the cause of all beings. To explain the gradations of
beings, he posited gradations of matter, and this gave rise to Aristotle’s
charge that Speusippus saw the universe as a series of disjointed episodes.
Speusippus abandoned the theory of Forms as ideal numbers, and gave heavier
emphasis than other Platonists to the mathematicals. Xenocrates who once went
with Plato to Sicily, succeeded Speusippus and led the Academy till his own
death. Although he was a prolific author, Xenocrates’ works have not survived,
and he is known only through the work of other authors. He was induced by
Aristotle’s objections to reject Speusippus’s views on some points, and he
developed theories that were a major influence on Middle Platonism, as well as
on Stoicism. In Xenocrates’ theory the One is Intellect, and the Forms are
ideas in the mind of this divine principle; the One is not transcendent, but it
resides in an intellectual space above the heavens. While the One is good, the
Dyad is evil, and the sublunary world is identified with Hades. Having taken
Forms to be mathematical entities, he had no use for intermediate mathematicals.
Forms he defined further as paradigmatic causes of regular natural phenomena,
and soul as self-moving number. Polemon led the Academy, and was chiefly known
for his fine character, which set an example of self-control for his students.
The Stoics probably derived their concept of oikeiosis an accommodation to
nature from his teaching. After Polemon’s death, his colleague Crates led the
Academy until the accession of Arcesilaus. The New Academy arose when
Arcesilaus became the leader of the school and turned the dialectical tradition
of Plato to the Skeptical aim of suspending belief. The debate between the New
Academy and Stoicism dominated philosophical discussion for the next century
and a half. On the Academic side the most prominent spokesman was Carneades. In
the early years of the first century B.C., Philo of Larisa attempted to
reconcile the Old and the New Academy. His pupil, the former Skeptic Antiochus
of Ascalon, was enraged by this and broke away to refound the Old Academy. This
was the beginning of Middle Platonism. Antiochus’s school was eclectic in
combining elements of Platonism, Stoicism, and Aristotelian philosophy, and is
known to us mainly through Cicero’s Academica. Middle Platonism revived the
main themes of Speusippus and Xenocrates, but often used Stoic or
neo-Pythagorean concepts to explain them. The influence of the Stoic Posidonius
was strongly felt on the Academy in this period, and Platonism flourished at
centers other than the Academy in Athens, most notably in Alexandria, with
Eudorus and Philo of Alexandria. After the death of Philo, the center of
interest returned to Athens, where Plutarch of Chaeronia studied with Ammonius
at the Academy, although Plutarch spent most of his career at his home in
nearby Boeotia. His many philosophical treatises, which are rich sources for
the history of philosophy, are gathered under the title Moralia; his interest
in ethics and moral education led him to write the Parallel Lives paired
biographies of famous Romans and Athenians, for which he is best known. After
this period, the Academy ceased to be the name for a species of Platonic
philosophy, although the school remained a center for Platonism, and was
especially prominent under the leadership of the Neoplatonist Proclus.
griceism. Gricese. At Oxford, it was usual to refer to Austin’s
idiolect as Austinese. In analogy with Grecism, we have a Gricism, a Griceian
cliché. Cf. a ‘grice’ and ‘griceful’ in ‘philosopher’s lexicon.’ Gricese is a
Latinism, from -ese, word-forming element, from Old French -eis (Modern French -ois, -ais), from Vulgar Latin, from Latin -ensem, -ensis "belonging
to" or "originating in."
grecianism: why was Grice obsessed with Socrates’s convesations? He
does not say. But he implicates it. For the Athenian dialecticians, it is all a
matter of ta legomena. Ditto for the Oxonian dialecticians. Ta legomena becomes
ordinary language. And the task of the philosopher is to provide reductive
analysis of this or that concept in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions.
Cf. Hospers. Grices review of the history of philosophy (Philosophy is but
footnotes to Zeno.). Grice enjoyed Zenos answer, What is a friend? Alter ego,
Allego. ("Only it was the other Zeno." Grice tried to apply the
Socratic method during his tutorials. "Nothing like a heartfelt dedication
to the Socratic art of mid-wifery, seeking to bring forth error and to strangle
it at birth.” μαιεύομαι (A.“μαῖα”), ‘to serve as a midwife, act a; “ἡ
Ἄρτεμις μ.” Luc. D Deor.26.2. 2. cause delivery to take place, “ἱκανὴ ἔκπληξις
μαιεύσασθαι πρὸ τῆς ὥρας” Philostr. VA1.5. 3. c. acc., bring to the birth,
Marin.Procl.6; ὄρνιθας μ. hatch chickens, Anon. ap. Suid.; αἰετὸν κάνθαρος
μαιεύσομαι, prov. of taking vengeance on a powerful enemy, Ar. Lys.695 (cf.
Sch.). 4. deliver a woman, esp. metaph. in Pl. of the Socratic method, Tht.
149b. II. Act., Poll. 4.208, Sch. OH.4.506. Pass., τὰ ὑπ᾽ ἐμοῦ μαιευθέντα
brought into the world by me, Pl. Tht. 150e, cf. Philostr.VA5.13. Refs.: the
obvious references are Grice’s allusions to Aristotle, Plato, Socrates, Zeno,
The H. P. Grice Papers, BANC.
grosseteste: Grice was a
member of the Grosseteste Society. Like Grice’s friend, G. J. Warnock,
Grosseteste was chancellor of Oxford. Only that by the time of Warnock, the
monarch is the chancellor by default, so “Warnock had to allow to be called
‘vice-chancelor’ to Elizabeth II.” “I would never have read Aristotle had it
not been by this great head that grosseteste (“Greathead” is a common surname
in Suffolk).” – H. P. Grice. English philosopher who began life on the bottom
rung of feudal society in Suffolk and became one of the most influential
figures in pre-Reformation England. He studied at Oxford, obtaining an “M. A.,”
like Grice. Sometime after this period he joined the household of William de
Vere, of Hereford. Grosseteste associated with the elite at Hereford, several
of whose members were part of an advanced philosophical tradition. It was a
centre for the study of liberal arts. This explains his interest in dialectics.
After a sojourn in Paris, he becomes the first chancellor of Oxford. He was a secular
lecturer in theology to the recently established Franciscan order at Oxford. It
was during his tenure with the Franciscans that he studied Grecian an unusual endeavour for an Oxonian schoolman
then. He later moved to Lincoln. As a
scholar, Grosseteste is an original thinker who used Aristotelian and
Augustinian theses as points of departure. Grosseteste (or “Greathead,” as he
was called by the town – if not the gown) believes, with Aristotle, that sense
is the basis of all knowledge, and that the basis for sense is our discovery of
the cause of what is experienced or revealed by experiment. He also believes,
with Augustine, that light plays an important role in creation. Thus he maintained
that God produced the world by first creating prime matter (“materia prima”) from
which issued a point of light lux, the first corporeal form or power, one of
whose manifestations is visible light. The diffusion of this light resulted in
extension or tri-dimensionality in the form of the nine concentric celestial
spheres and the four terrestrial spheres of fire, air, water, and earth.
According to Grosseteste, the diffusion of light takes place in accordance with
laws of mathematical proportionality geometry. Everything, therefore, is a
manifestation of light, and mathematics is consequently indispensable to
science and knowledge generally. The principles Grosseteste employs to support
his views are presented in, e.g., his commentary on Aristotle’s Posterior
Analytics, the De luce, and the De lineis, angulis et figuris. He worked in
areas as seemingly disparate as optics and angelology. Grosseteste is one of
the first to take an interest in and introduce into the Oxford curriculum newly
recovered Aristotelian texts, along with commentaries on them. His work and
interest in natural philosophy, mathematics, the Bible, and languages
profoundly influenced Roger Bacon, and the educational goals of the Franciscan
order. It also helped to stimulate work in these areas.
groot -- grotius, h., de
groot, philosopher, a founder of modern views of international law and a major
theorist of natural law. A lawyer and Latinist, Grotius developed a new view of
the law of nature in order to combat moral skepticism and to show how there
could be rational settlement of moral disputes despite religious disagreements.
He argued in The Law of War and Peace 1625 that humans are naturally both
competitive and sociable. The laws of nature show us how we can live together
despite our propensity to conflict. They can be derived from observation of our
nature and situation. These laws reflect the fact that each individual
possesses rights, which delimit the social space within which we are free to
pursue our own goals. Legitimate government arises when we give up some rights
in order to save or improve our lives. The obligations that the laws of nature
impose would bind us, Grotius notoriously said, even if God did not exist; but
he held that God does enforce the laws. They set the limits on the laws that
governments may legitimately impose. The laws of nature reflect our possession
of both precise perfect rights of justice, which can be protected by force, and
imperfect rights, which are not enforceable, nor even statable very precisely.
Grotius’s views on our combative but sociable nature, on the function of the
law of nature, and on perfect and imperfect rights were of central importance
in later discussions of morality and law.
Grice’s
grue and grellow, -- and bleen: H. P. Grice was fascinated by Goodman’s
‘grue’ paradox and kept looking for the crucial implicaturum. “The paradox is
believed to be mainly as arising within the theory of induction, but I’ve seen
Strawson struggling with gruesome consequences in his theory of deduction,
too.” According to Nelson Goodman, “a philosopher from the New World,” every
intuitively acceptable inductive argument, call it A, may be mimicked by
indefinitely many other inductive arguments
each seemingly quite analogous to A and therefore seemingly as
acceptable, yet each nonetheless intuitively *unacceptable*, and each yielding
a conclusion contradictory to that of A, given the assumption that sufficiently
many and varied of the sort of things induced upon exist as yet unexamined
which is the only circumstance in which A is of interest. “Goodman then asks us
to suppose an intuitively acceptable inductive argument.”A1 every hitherto
observed EMERALD is GREEN; therefore, every emerald is green. Now introduce the
totally unnatural colour predicate ‘grue’ – a portmanteau of blue and green –
as in Welsh ‘glas’ -- where for some given, as yet wholly future, temporal
interval T an object is ‘grue’ provided it has the property of being green and
first examined before T OR blue and NOT
first examined before T. Then consider the following inductive argument: A2 every
hitherto observed EMERALD is GRUE; therefore, every emerald is grue. The
premise is true, and A2 is formally analogous to A1. But A2 is intuitively
unacceptable. If there is an emerald UNexamined before T, he conclusion of A2
says that this emerald is blue, whereas the conclusion of A1 says that every
emerald is green! Granted, other counter-intuitive competing arguments could be
given, e.g.: A3. Every hitherto observed emerald is grellow; therefore, every
emeralds is grellow. where an object is ‘grellow’ provided it is green and
located on the earth or yellow otherwise. It would seem, therefore, that some
restriction on induction is required. “Goodman’s alleged of induction offers
two challenges. First, state the restriction
i.e., demarcate the intuitively acceptable inductions from the
unacceptable ones, in some general way, without constant appeal to intuition.”“Second,
justify our preference for the one group of inductions over the other.”“These
two parts of the paradox are, alas, often conflated.”But it is at least
conceivable that one might solve the analytical, demarcative part without
solving the justificatory part, and, perhaps, vice versa. It will not do to
rule out, a priori gruesome” variances in nature. H2O varies in its physical
state along the parameter of temperature. If so, why might not one emerald vary
in colour along the parameter of time of first examination? One approach to the
problem of restriction is to focus on the conclusions of inductive arguments
e.g., every emerald is green, every emerald is grue and to distinguish those
which may legitimately so serve called “projectible hypotheses” from those
which may not. The question then arises whether only non-gruesome hypotheses
those which do not contain gruesome predicates are projectible. Aside from the
task of defining ‘gruesome predicate’ which could be done structurally relative
to a preferred language, the answer is no. Consider the predicate ‘x is solid
and less than 0; C, or liquid and more than 0; C but less than 100; C, or
gaseous and more than 100; C.’This is gruesome on any plausible structural
account of gruesomeness. Note the similarity to the ‘grue’ equivalent: green
and first examined before T, or blue and not first examined before T.
Nevertheless, where nontransitional water is pure H2O at one atmosphere of
pressure save that which is in a transitional state, i.e., melting/freezing or
boiling/condensing, i.e., at 0°C or 100; C, we happily project the hypothesis
that all non-transitional water falls under the above gruesome predicate.
Perhaps this is because, if we rewrite the projection about non-transitional
water as a conjunction of non-gruesome hypotheses i water at less than 0; C is solid, ii water
at more than 0; C but less than 100; C is liquid, and iii water at more than
100; C is gaseous we note that iiii are
all supported there are known positive instances; whereas if we rewrite the
gruesome projection about the emerald as a conjunction of non-gruesome
hypotheses i* every emerald first
examined before T is green, and ii* every emerald NOT first examined before T
is blue we note that ii* is as yet
unsupported. It would seem that, whereas a non-gruesome hypothesis is projectible
provided it is unviolated and supported, a gruesome hypothesis is projectible
provided it is unviolated and equivalent to a conjunction of non-gruesome
hypotheses, each of which is supported.
grundnorm: Grice knows about
the ground and the common ground – and then there’s the ground norm -- also
called basic norm, in a legal system, the norm that determines the legal
validity of all other norms. The content of such an ultimate norm may provide,
e.g., that norms created by a legislature or by a court are legally valid. The
validity of such an ultimate norm cannot be established as a matter of social
fact such as the social fact that the norm is accepted by some group within a
society. Rather, the validity of the basic norm for any given legal system must
be presupposed by the validity of the norms that it legitimates as laws. The
idea of a basic norm is associated with the legal philosopher Hans Kelsen.
H
habermas: j. Habermas cites
Grice quite extensively,, “but as extensive as he is, the more wishy washy he
becomes” – A. M. Kemmerling. J. philosopher and social theorist, a leading
representative of the second generation of the Frankfurt School of critical
theory. His work has consistently returned to the problem of the normative
foundations of social criticism and critical social inquiry not supplied in
traditional Marxism and other forms of critical theory, such as postmodernism.
His habilitation, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere 1, is an
influential historical analysis of the emergence of the ideal of a public
sphere in the eighteenth century and its subsequent decline. Habermas turned
then to the problems of the foundations and methodology of the social sciences,
developing a criticism of positivism and his own interpretive explanatory
approach in The Logic of the Social Sciences 3 and his first major systematic
work, Knowledge and Human Interests 7. Rejecting the unity of method typical of
positivism, Habermas argues that social inquiry is guided by three distinct
interests: in control, in understanding, and in emancipation. He is especially
concerned to use emancipatory interest to overcome the limitations of the model
of inquiry based on understanding and argues against “universality of
hermeneutics” defended by hermeneuticists such as Gadamer and for the need to
supplement interpretations with explanations in the social sciences. As he came
to reject the psychoanalytic vocabulary in which he formulated the interest in
emancipation, he turned to finding the basis for understanding and social
inquiry in a theory of rationality more generally. In the next phase of his
career he developed a comprehensive social theory, culminating in his two-volume
The Theory of Communicative Action 2. The goal of this theory is to develop a
“critical theory of modernity,” on the basis of a comprehensive theory of
communicative as opposed to instrumental rationality. The first volume develops
a theory of communicative rationality based on “discourse,” or second-order
communication that takes place both in everyday interaction and in
institutionalized practices of argumentation in science, law, and criticism.
This theory of rationality emerges from a universal or “formal” pragmatics, a
speech act theory based on making explicit the rules and norms of the
competence to communicate in linguistic interaction. The second volume develops
a diagnosis of modern society as suffering from “onesided rationalization,”
leading to disruptions of the communicative lifeworld by “systems” such as
markets and bureaucracies. Finally, Habermas applies his conception of
rationality to issues of normative theory, including ethics, politics, and the
law. “Discourse Ethics: Notes on a Program of Moral Justification” 2 argues for
an intersubjective notion of practical reason and discursive procedure for the
justification of universal norms. This “discourse principle” provides a
dialogical version of Kant’s idea of universalization; a norm is justified if
and only if it can meet with the reasoned agreement of all those affected.
Between Facts and Norms 2 combines his social and normative theories to give a
systematic account of law and democracy. His contribution here is an account of
deliberative democracy appropriate to the complexity of modern society. His
work in all of these phases provides a systematic defense and critique of
modern institutions and a vindication of the universal claims of public
practical reason.
bradley’s
thatness: :The investing of
the content, which is in Bradleian language a `what', with self-existent reality or ‘that-ness'." Athenaeum 24 Dec. 1904’ If thought
asserted the existence of any content which was not an actual or possible
object of thought—certainly that assertion in my judgment would contradict
itself. But the Other which I maintain, is not any such content, nor is it
another separated “ what,” nor in any case do I suggest that it lies outside
intelligence. Everything, all will and feeling, is an object for thought, and
must be called intelligible. This is certain; but, if so, what becomes of the
Other? If we fall back on the mere “ that,” thatness itself seems a distinction
made by thought. And we have to face this difficulty: If the Other exists, it
must be something; and if it is nothing, it certainly does not exist. There is only one way to get rid
of contradiction, and that way is by dissolution. Instead of one subject
distracted, we get a larger subject with distinctions, and so the tension is
removed. We have at first A, which possesses the qualities c and b,
inconsistent adjectives which collide; and we go on to produce harmony by
making a distinction within this subject. That was really not mere A, but
either a complex within A, or (rather here) a wider whole in which A is
included. The real subject is A + D; and this subject contains the
contradiction made harmless by division, since A is c and D is b. This is the
general principle, and I will attempt here to apply it in particular. Let us
suppose the reality to be X (abcdefg . . .), and that we are able only to get
partial views of this reality. Let us first take such a view as “ X (ab) is b.”
This (rightly or wrongly) we should probably call a true view. For the content
b does plainly belong to the subject; and, further, the appearance also—in
other words, the separation of b in the predicate—can partly be explained. For,
answering to this separation, we postulate now another adjective in the
subject: let us call it *. The “ thatness,” the psychical existence of the
predicate, which at first was neglected, has now also itself been included in
the subject. We may hence write the subject as X (ab*); and in this way we seem
to avoid contradiction. Let us go further on the same line, and, having dealt
with a truth, pass next to an error. Take the subject once more as X (abcde . .
.), and let us now say “ X (ab) is d.” To be different from another is to have already transcended
one’s own being; and all finite existence is thus incurably relative and ideal.
Its quality falls, more or less, outside its particular “ thatness”; and,
whether as the same or again as diverse, it is equally made what it is by
community with others.
The
hic, the hæc, and the hoc – “Scotus was being clever. Since he wanted an
abstract noun, and abstract nouns are feminine in both Greek and Latin
(‘ippotes, eqquitas’), he chose the feminine ‘haec,’ to turn into a ‘thisness.’
But we should expand his rather sexist view to apply to ‘hic’ and ‘hoc,’ too.
In Anglo-Saxon, there is only ‘this,’ with ‘thisness’ first used by Pope
George. The OED first registers ‘thisness’ in 1643.” – cf. OED: "It is at its such-&-suchness,
at its
character -- in other words, at the
_universal_ in it -- that we have to
look. the first cite in the
OED for 'thisness' also features 'thatness': "thisness,” from
"this" + "-ness": rendering ‘haecceitas,’ the quality of
being 'this' (as distinct from anything else): = haecceity. First cite:
"It is evident that [...] THISness, and THATness belong[...] not to matter
by itself, but onely as [matter] is distinguished & individuated by the
form." The two further quotes for 'thisness' being: 1837 Whewell Hist
Induct Sc 1857 I 244: "Which his school called ‘HAECcceity’ – from the
feminine form of the demonstrative masculine ‘hic,’ in Roman, neutre ‘hoc’
(Scotus uses the femine because ‘-ity- is a feminine ending) -- or ‘thisness.’",
and 1895 Rashdall Universities II 532: "An individuating form called by
the later Scotists its ‘haecceitas’ or its `thisness'"). "The investing of the content, which is in Bradleian language a `what', with self-existent reality or ‘that-ness'." Athenaeum 24 Dec. 1904 868/2. -- OED, 'thatness'. Trudgill writes in _The Dialects of England_
(Oxford: Blackwell), that Grice would often consult (he was from Harborne and
had a special interest in this – “I seem to have lost my dialect when I moved
to Corpus.” The 'this'-'that' demonstrative system is a two-way system which
distinguishes between things which are distant and things which are near.
Interestingly, however, a number of traditional dialects in England (if not
Oxford) differ from this system in having what Grice called a Griceian _three_-way
distinction. The Yorkshire dialect, for example, has ‘this’ (sing., near),
‘thir’ (pl. near), ‘that’ (sing. Medial) ‘tho’ (plural, medial), thon (sing.
distal) and ‘thon’ (pl., distal). The Mercian Anglian dialect has ‘these’
(sing. near), ‘theys’ (plural, near), ‘that’ (sing. medial), ‘they’ (pl.,
medial), ‘thik’ (sing./pl., distal). “The northern dialect is better in that it
distinguishes between the singular and the plural form for the distal, unlike
the southern dialect which has ‘thik’ for either.” Grice. Still, Grice likes
the sound of ‘thik’ and quotes from his friend M. Wakelin, _The Southwest of England_.
"When I awoke one May day morn/I found an urge within me born/To see the
beauteous countryside/That's all round wher'I do bide./So I set out wi' dog
& stick,/ My head were just a trifle thick./But good ole' fresh air had his
say/& blowed thik trouble clean away." -- B. Green, in _The Dorset
Year Book_. Dorset: Society of Dorset Men. “Some like Russell, but Bradley’s MY
man.” – H. P. Grice: Grice: "Russell is
pretentious; Bradley, an English angel, is not!" "Bradley can use 'thatness' freely; Russell uses it after
Bradley and artificially."
all the rest of the
watery bulk : but return back those few drops from whence they were
taken, and the glass-full that even now had an individuation by itself,
loseth that, and groweth one and the same with the other main stock : yet
if you fill your glass again, wheresoever you take it up, so it be
of the same uniform bulk of water you had before, it is the same glassfuU
of water that you had. But as I said before, this example fitteth
entirely no more than the other did. In such abstracted speculations,
where we must consider matter without form, (which hath no actual being,)
we must not expect adequated examples in nature. But enough is said to
make a speculative man see, that if God should join the soul of a
lately dead man, (even whilst his dead corpse should lie en- tire in his
windingsheet here,) unto a body made of earth, taken from some mountain
in America; it were most true and certain, that the body he should then live
by, were the same identical body he lived with before his death, and
late resurrection. It is evident, that sameness, thisness, and
that- ness, belongeth not to matter by itself, (for a general
indiffer- ence runneth through it all,) but only as it is distinguished
and individuated by the form. Which in our case, whensoever the
same soul doth, it must be understood always to be the same matter and
body.” (Browne, 1643). Grice. Corbin says that English is such a
plastic language, “unlike Roman,” but then there’s haec, and hæcceitas -- Duns
Scotus, J., Scottish Franciscan metaphysician and philosophical theologian. He
lectured at Oxford, Paris, and Cologne, where he died and his remains are still
venerated. Modifying Avicenna’s conception of metaphysics as the science of
being qua being, but univocally conceived, Duns Scotus showed its goal was to
demonstrate God as the Infinite Being revealed to Moses as the “I am who am”,
whose creative will is the source of the world’s contingency. Out of love God
fashioned each creature with a unique “haecceity” or particularity formally
distinct from its individualized nature. Descriptively identical with others of
its kind, this nature, conceived in abstraction from haecceity, is both
objectively real and potentially universal, and provides the basis for
scientific knowledge that Peirce calls “Scotistic realism.” Duns Scotus brought
many of Augustine’s insights, treasured by his Franciscan predecessors, into
the mainstream of the Aristotelianism of his day. Their notion of the will’s
“supersufficient potentiality” for self-determination he showed can be
reconciled with Aristotle’s notion of an “active potency,” if one rejects the
controDuhem thesis Duns Scotus, John 247
247 versial principle that “whatever is moved is moved by another.”
Paradoxically, Aristotle’s criteria for rational and non-rational potencies
prove the rationality of the will, not the intellect, for he claimed that only
rational faculties are able to act in opposite ways and are thus the source of
creativity in the arts. If so, then intellect, with but one mode of acting
determined by objective evidence, is non-rational, and so is classed with
active potencies called collectively “nature.” Only the will, acting “with
reason,” is free to will or nill this or that. Thus “nature” and “will”
represent Duns Scotus’s primary division of active potencies, corresponding
roughly to Aristotle’s dichotomy of non-rational and rational. Original too is
his development of Anselm’s distinction of the will’s twofold inclination or “affection”:
one for the advantageous, the other for justice. The first endows the will with
an “intellectual appetite” for happiness and actualization of self or species;
the second supplies the will’s specific difference from other natural
appetites, giving it an innate desire to love goods objectively according to
their intrinsic worth. Guided by right reason, this “affection for justice”
inclines the will to act ethically, giving it a congenital freedom from the
need always to seek the advantageous. Both natural affections can be
supernaturalized, the “affection for justice” by charity, inclining us to love
God above all and for his own sake; the affection for the advantageous by the
virtue of hope, inclining us to love God as our ultimate good and future source
of beatitude. Another influential psychological theory is that of intuitive
intellectual cognition, or the simple, non-judgmental awareness of a
hereand-now existential situation. First developed as a necessary theological
condition for the face-toface vision of God in the next life, intellectual
intuition is needed to explain our certainty of primary contingent truths, such
as “I think,” “I choose,” etc., and our awareness of existence. Unlike Ockham,
Duns Scotus never made intellectual intuition the basis for his epistemology,
nor believed it puts one in direct contact with any extramental substance
material or spiritual, for in this life, at least, our intellect works through
the sensory imagination. Intellectual intuition seems to be that indistinct
peripheral aura associated with each direct sensory-intellectual cognition. We
know of it explicitly only in retrospect when we consider the necessary
conditions for intellectual memory. It continued to be a topic of discussion
and dispute down to the time of Calvin, who, influenced by the Scotist John
Major, used an auditory rather than a visual sense model of intellectual
intuition to explain our “experience of God.”
haecceity from Latin haec, ‘this’, 1 loosely, thisness; more
specifically, an irreducible category of being, the fundamental actuality of an
existent entity; or 2 an individual essence, a property an object has
necessarily, without which it would not be or would cease to exist as the
individual it is, and which, necessarily, no other object has. There are in the
history of philosophy two distinct concepts of haecceity. The idea originated
with the work of the thirteenthcentury philosopher Duns Scotus, and was
discussed in the same period by Aquinas, as a positive perfection that serves
as a primitive existence and individuation principle for concrete existents. In
the seventeenth century Leibniz transformed the concept of haecceity, which
Duns Scotus had explicitly denied to be a form or universal, into the notion of
an individual essence, a distinctive nature or set of necessary characteristics
uniquely identifying it under the principle of the identity of indiscernibles. Duns
Scotus’s haecceitas applies only to the being of contingently existent entities
in the actual world, but Leibniz extends the principle to individuate
particular things not only through the changes they may undergo in the actual
world, but in any alternative logically possible world. Leibniz admitted as a
consequence the controversial thesis that every object by virtue of its
haecceity has each of its properties essentially or necessarily, so that only
the counterparts of individuals can inhabit distinct logically possible worlds.
A further corollary since the possession
of particular parts in a particular arrangement is also a property and hence
involved in the individual essence of any complex object is the doctrine of mereological essentialism:
every composite is necessarily constituted by a particular configuration of particular
proper parts, and loses its self-identity if any parts are removed or replaced.
Grice was more familiar with the thatness than the thisness (“Having had to
read Bradley for my metaphysics paper!”).
haeckel: an impassioned adherent of Darwin’s
theory of evolution. His wrote “Die Welträtsel,” which became a best-seller and
was very influential in its time. Lenin is said to have admired it. Haeckel’s
philosophy, which he called monism, is characterized negatively by his
rejection of free will, immortality, and theism, as well as his criticisms of
the traditional forms of materialism and idealism. Positively it is
distinguished by passionate arguments for the fundamental unity of organic and
inorganic nature and a form of pantheism.
hales: from Alexander of
Halesowen, Salop (on the border with Worcs.).. Grice called William of Occam
“Occam,” William of Sherwood, “Shyrewood,” and Alexander of Hales “Hales,” –
why, I wish people would call me “Harborne,” and not Grice!” – Grice. English
Franciscan theologian, known as the Doctor Irrefragabilis. The first to teach
theology by lecturing on the Sentences of Peter Lombard, Alexander’s emphasis
on speculative theology initiated the golden age of Scholasticism. Alexander
wrote commentaries on the Psalms and the Gospels; his chief works include his Glossa
in quattuor libros sententiarum, Quaestiones disputatatae antequam esset
frater, and Quaestiones quodlibetales. Alexander did not complete the Summa
fratris Alexandri; Pope Alexander IV ordered the Franciscans to complete the
Summa Halesiana in 1255. Master of theology in 1222, Alexander played an
important role in the history of Paris, writing parts of Gregory IX’s Parens
scientiarum 1231. He also helped negotiate the peace between England and
France. He gave up his position as canon of Lichfield and archdeacon of
Coventry to become a Franciscan, the first Franciscan master of theology; his
was the original Franciscan chair of theology at Paris. Among the Franciscans,
his most prominent disciples include St. Bonaventure, Richard Rufus of
Cornwall, and John of La Rochelle, to whom he resigned his chair in theology
near the end of his life. Hales wrote commentaries on Aristotle’s metaphysics,
on the multiplicity of being, that Grice found fascinating. Vide “Summa
halensis.”
hamann: philosopher. Born
and educated in Königsberg, Hamann, known as the Magus of the North, was one of
the most important Christian thinkers in G.y during the second half of the
eighteenth century. Advocating an irrationalistic theory of faith inspired by
Hume, he opposed the prevailing Enlightenment philosophy. He was a mentor of
the Sturm und Drang literary movement and had a significant influence on
Jacobi, Hegel, and Kierkegaard. As a close acquaintance of Kant, he also had a
great impact on the development of Kant’s critical philosophy through his Hume
translations. Hamann’s most important works, criticized and admired for their
difficult and obscure style, were the Socratic Memorabilia 1759, “Aesthetica in
nuce” and several works on language. He suppressed his “metacritical” writings
out of respect for Kant. However, they were published after his death and now
constitute the bestknown part of his work.
hampshireism: His second wife was from the New World. His first wife
wasn’t. He married Renée Orde-Lees, the daughter of the very English Thomas
Orde-Lees, in 1961, and had two children, a son, Julian, and a daughter. To add
to the philosophers’ mistakes. There’s Austin (in “Plea for Excuses” and “Other
Minds”), Strawson (in “Truth” and “Introduction to Logical Theory,” and “On
referring”), Hart (in conversation, on ‘carefully,”), Hare (“To say ‘x is good’
is to recommend x”) and Hampshire (“Intention and certainty”). For Grice, the
certainty is merely implicated and on occasion, only. Cited by Grice as a member of the play group.
Hampshire would dine once a week with Grice. He would discuss and find very
amusing to discuss with Grice on post-war Oxford philosophy. Unlike Grice,
Hampshire attended Austin’s Thursday evening meetings at All Souls. Grice wrote
“Intention and uncertainty” in part as a response to Hampshire and Hart,
Intention and certainty. But Grice brought the issue back to an earlier
generation, to a polemic between Stout (who held a certainty-based view) and
Prichard.
hare: r. m. cited by H.
P. Grice, “Hare’s neustrics”. b.9, English philosopher who is one of the most
influential moral philosophers of the twentieth century and the developer of
prescriptivism in metaethics. Hare was educated at Rugby and Oxford, then
served in the British army during World War II and spent years as a prisoner of
war in Burma. In 7 he took a position at Balliol and was appointed White’s Professor of Moral
Philosophy at the of Oxford in 6. On
retirement from Oxford, he became Graduate Research Professor at the of Florida 393. His major books are Language
of Morals 3, Freedom and Reason 3, Moral Thinking 1, and Sorting Out Ethics 7.
Many collections of his essays have also appeared, and a collection of other
leading philosophers’ articles on his work was published in 8 Hare and Critics,
eds. Seanor and Fotion. According to Hare, a careful exploration of the nature
of our moral concepts reveals that nonironic judgments about what one morally
ought to do are expressions of the will, or commitments to act, that are
subject to certain logical constraints. Because moral judgments are
prescriptive, we cannot sincerely subscribe to them while refusing to comply
with them in the relevant circumstances. Because moral judgments are universal
prescriptions, we cannot sincerely subscribe to them unless we are willing for
them to be followed were we in other people’s positions with their preferences.
Hare later contended that vividly to imagine ourselves completely in other
people’s positions involves our acquiring preferences about what should happen
to us in those positions that mirror exactly what those people now want for
themselves. So, ideally, we decide on a universal prescription on the basis of
not only our existing preferences about the actual situation but also the new
preferences we would have if we were wholly in other people’s positions. What
we can prescribe universally is what maximizes net satisfaction of this
amalgamated set of preferences. Hence, Hare concluded that his theory of moral
judgment leads to preference-satisfaction act utilitarianism. However, like
most other utilitarians, he argued that the best way to maximize utility is to
have, and generally to act on, certain not directly utilitarian
dispositions such as dispositions not to
hurt others or steal, to keep promises and tell the truth, to take special
responsibility for one’s own family, and so on. Then there’s Hare’s
phrastic: It is convenient to take Grice mocking Hare in Prolegomena. “To say
‘x is good’ is to recommend x.’ An implicaturum: annullable: “x is good but I don’t recommend it.” Hare
was well aware of the implicaturum. Loving Grice’s account of ‘or,’ Hare gives
the example: “Post the letter: therefore; post the letter or burn it.” Grice
mainly quotes Hare’s duet, the phrastic and the neustic, and spends some time
exploring what the phrastic actually is. He seems to prefer ‘radix.’ But then
Hare also has then the ‘neustic,’ that Grice is not so concerned with since he
has his own terminology for it. And for Urmson’s festschrift, Hare comes up
with the tropic and the clistic. So each has a Griceian correlate. Then there’s Hareian supervenience: a dependence
relation between properties or facts of one type, and properties or facts of
another type. In the other place, G. E. Moore, for instance, holds that the
property intrinsic value is dependent in the relevant way on certain non-moral
properties. Moore did not employ the expression ‘supervenience’. As Moore puts
it, “if a given thing possesses any kind of intrinsic value in a certain
degree, not only must that same thing
possess it, under all circumstances, in the same degree, but also anything
exactly like it, must, under all circumstances, possess it in exactly the same
degree” (Philosophical Studies, 2). The concept of supervenience, as a relation
between properties, is essentially this: A poperties of type A is supervenient
(or better, as Grice prefesrs, supervenes) on a property of type B if and only
if two objects cannot differ with respect to their A-properties without also
differing with respect to their B-properties. Properties that allegedly are
supervenient on others are often called consequential properties, especially in
ethics; the idea is that if something instantiates a moral property, then it
does so in virtue of, i.e., as a non-causal consequence of, instantiating some
lower-level property on which the moral property supervenes. In another,
related sense, supervenience is a feature of discourse of one type, vis-à-vis
discourse of another type. ‘Supervenience’ is so used by Hare. “First, let us
take that characteristic of “good” which has been called its ‘supervenience.’”
Grice: “Hare has a good ear for the neologism: he loved my ‘implicature,’ and
used in an essay he submitted to “Mind,” way before I ventured to publish the
thing!” – “Suppose that we say, “St. Francis is a good man.” It is logically
impossible to say this and to maintain at the same time that there might have
been another man placed exactly in the same circumstances as St. Francis, and
who behaved in exactly the same way, but who differed from St. Francis in this
respect only, that it is NOT the case that this man is a good man.” (“The
Language of Morals”). Here the idea is that it would be a misuse of moral
language, a violation of the “logic of moral discourse,” to apply ‘good’ to one
thing but not to something else exactly similar in all pertinent non-moral
respects. Hare is a meta-ethical irrealist. He denies that there are moral
properties or facts. So for him, supervenience is a ‘category of expression,’ a
feature of discourse and judgment, not a relation between properties or facts
of two types. The notion of supervenience has come to be used quite widely in
metaphysics and philosophical philosophy, usually in the way explained above.
This use is heralded by Davidson in articulating a position about the relation
between a physical property and a property of the ‘soul,’ or statet-ypes, that
eschews the reducibility of mental properties to physical ones. “Although the
position I describe denies there are psycho-physical laws, it is consistent
with the view that mental characteristics are in some sense dependent, or
supervenient, or plainly supervene on physical characteristics. Such
supervenience might be taken to mean that there cannot be two events alike in
all physical respects but differing in some mental respects, or that an object
cannot alter in some mental respects without altering in some physical
respects. Dependence or supervenience of this kind does not entail reducibility
through law or definition. “Mental Events.” A variety of supervenience theses
have been propounded in metaphysics and philosophical psychology, usually
although not always in conjunction with attempts to formulate metaphysical
positions that are naturalistic, in some way, without being strongly
reductionistic, if reductive. E. g. it is often asserted that mental properties
and facts are supervenient on neurobiological properties, and/or on
physicochemical properties and facts. And it is often claimed, more generally,
that all properties and facts are supervenient on the properties and facts of
the kind described by physics. Much attention has been directed at how to
formulate the desired supervenience theses, and thus how to characterize
supervenience itself. A distinction has been drawn between weak supervenience,
asserting that in any single possible world w, any two individuals in w that
differ in their A-properties also differ in their B-properties; and strong
supervenience, asserting that for any two individuals i and j, either within a
single possible world or in two distinct ones, if i and j differ in A-properties
then they also differ in Bproperties. It is sometimes alleged that traditional
formulations of supervenience, like Moore’s or Hare’s, articulate only weak
supervenience, whereas strong supervenience is needed to express the relevant
kind of determination or dependence. It is sometimes replied, however, that the
traditional natural-language formulations do in fact express strong
supervenience and that formalizations
expressing mere weak supervenience are mistranslations. Questions about how
best to formulate supervenience theses also arise in connection with intrinsic
and non-intrinsic properties. For instance, the property being a bank,
instantiated by the brick building on Main Street, is not supervenient on
intrinsic physical properties of the building itself; rather, the building’s
having this social-institutional property depends on a considerably broader
range of facts and features, some of which are involved in subserving the
social practice of banking. The term ‘supervenience base’ is frequently used to
denote the range of entities and happenings whose lowerlevel properties and
relations jointly underlie the instantiation of some higher-level property like
being a bank by some individual like the brick building on Main Street.
Supervenience theses are sometimes formulated so as to smoothly accommodate
properties and facts with broad supervenience bases. For instance, the idea
that the physical facts determine all the facts is sometimes expressed as
global supervenience, which asserts that any two physically possible worlds
differing in some respect also differ in some physical respect. Or, sometimes
this idea is expressed as the stronger thesis of regional supervenience, which
asserts that for any two spatiotemporal regions r and s, either within a single
physically possible world or in two distinct ones, if r and s differ in some
intrinsic respect then they also differ in some intrinsic physical respect. H.
P. Grice, “Hare on supervenience.” H. P. Grice, “Supervenience in my method in
philosophical psychology: from the banal to the bizarre.” H. P. Grice,
“Supervenience and the devil of scientism.”
harris: philosopher of language – classical. Grice adored him, and
he was quite happy that few knew about Harris! Cf. Tooke. Cf. Priestley and
Hartley – all pre-Griceian philosohers of language that are somehow outside the
canon, when they shouldn’t. They are very Old World, and it’s the influence of
the New World that has made them sort of disappear! That’s what Grice said!
hart: h. l. a. – cited
by Grice, “Hare on ‘carefully.’ Philosopher of European ancestry born in
Yorkshire, principally responsible for the revival of legal and political
philosophy after World War II. After wartime work with military intelligence,
Hart gave up a flourishing law practice to join the Oxford faculty, where he
was a brilliant lecturer, a sympathetic and insightful critic, and a generous
mentor to many scholars. Like the earlier “legal positivists” Bentham and John
Austin, Hart accepted the “separation of law and morals”: moral standards can
deliberately be incorporated in law, but there is no automatic or necessary
connection between law and sound moral principles. In The Concept of Law 1 he
critiqued the Bentham-Austin notion that laws are orders backed by threats from
a political community’s “sovereign” some
person or persons who enjoy habitual obedience and are habitually obedient to
no other human and developed the more
complex idea that law is a “union of primary and secondary rules.” Hart agreed
that a legal system must contain some “obligation-imposing” “primary” rules,
restricting freedom. But he showed that law also includes independent
“power-conferring” rules that facilitate choice, and he demonstrated that a
legal system requires “secondary” rules that create public offices and
authorize official action, such as legislation and adjudication, as well as
“rules of recognition” that determine which other rules are valid in the
system. Hart held that rules of law are “open-textured,” with a core of
determinate meaning and a fringe of indeterminate meaning, and thus capable of
answering some but not all legal questions that can arise. He doubted courts’
claims to discover law’s meaning when reasonable competing interpretations are
available, and held that courts decide such “hard cases” by first performing
the important “legislative” function of filling gaps in the law. Hart’s first
book was an influential study with A. M. Honoré of Causation in the Law 9. His
inaugural lecture as Professor of Jurisprudence, “Definition and Theory in
Jurisprudence” 3, initiated a career-long study of rights, reflected also in
Essays on Bentham: Studies in Jurisprudence and Political Theory 2 and in
Essays in Jurisprudence and Philosophy 3. He defended liberal public policies.
In Law, Liberty and Morality 3 he refuted Lord Devlin’s contention that a
society justifiably enforces the code of its moral majority, whatever it might
be. In The Morality of the Criminal Law 5 and in Punishment and Responsibility
8, Hart contributed substantially to both analytic and normative theories of
crime and punishment.
Hartley, British philosopher. Although the
notion of association of ideas is ancient, he is generally regarded as the
founder of associationism as a self-sufficient psychology. Despite similarities
between his association psychology and Hume’s, Hartley developed his system
independently, acknowledging only the writings of clergyman John Gay 1699 1745.
Hartley was one of many Enlightenment thinkers aspiring to be “Newtons of the
mind,” in Peter Gay’s phrase. In Hartley, this took the form of uniting
association philosophy with physiology, a project later brought to fruition by
Bain. His major work, Observations on Man 1749, pictured mental events and
neural events as operating on parallel tracks in which neural events cause
mental events. On the mental side, Hartley distinguished like Hume between
sensation and idea. On the physiological side, Hartley adopted Newton’s
conception of nervous transmission by vibrations of a fine granular substance
within nerve-tubes. Vibrations within sensory nerves peripheral to the brain
corresponded to the sensations they caused, while small vibrations in the
brain, vibratiuncles, corresponded to ideas. Hartley proposed a single law of
association, contiguity modified by frequency, which took two forms, one for
the mental side and one for the neural: ideas, or vibratiuncles, occurring
together regularly become associated. Hartley distinguished between
simultaneous association, the link between ideas that occur at the same
harmony, preestablished Hartley, David 362
AM 362 moment, and successive
association, between ideas that closely succeed one another. Successive
associations occur only in a forward direction; there are no backward
associations, a thesis generating much controversy in the later experimental
study of memory.
Hartley, Joseph – philosopher. Hartmann: philosopher
who sought to synthesize the thought of Schelling, Hegel, and Schopenhauer. The
most important of his essays is “Philosophie des Unbewussten.” For Hartmann
both will and idea are interrelated and are expressions of an absolute
“thing-in-itself,” the unconscious. The unconscious is the active essence in
natural and psychic processes and is the teleological dynamic in organic life.
Paradoxically, he claimed that the teleology immanent in the world order and
the life process leads to insight into the irrationality of the “will-to-live.”
The maturation of rational consciousness would, he held, lead to the negation
of the total volitional process and the entire world process would cease. Ideas
indicate the “what” of existence and constitute, along with will and the
unconscious, the three modes of being. Despite its pessimism, this work enjoyed
considerable popularity. Hartmann was an unusual combination of speculative
idealist and philosopher of science defending vitalism and attacking
mechanistic materialism; his pessimistic ethics was part of a cosmic drama of
redemption. Some of his later works dealt with a critical form of Darwinism
that led him to adopt a positive evolutionary stance that undermined his
earlier pessimism. His general philosophical position was selfdescribed as
“transcendental realism.” His Philosophy of the Unconscious was tr. into
English by W. C. Coupland in three volumes in 4. There is little doubt that his
metaphysics of the unconscious prepared the way for Freud’s later theory of the
unconscious mind.
hartmann, n. philosopher (“Not to be
confused with Hartmann – but then neither am I to be confused with [G. R.]
Grice.” – Grice. He taught at the universities of Marburg, Cologne, Berlin, and
Göttingen, and wrote more than a dozen major works on the history of
philosophy, ontology, epistemology, ethics, and aesthetics. A realist in
epistemology and ontology, Hartmann held that cognition is the apprehension of
something independent of the act of apprehension or any other mental events. An
accurate phenomenology, such as Husserl’s, would acknowledge, according to him,
that we apprehend not only particular, spatiotemporal objects, but also “ideal
objects,” “essences,” which Hartmann explicitly identified with Platonic Forms.
Among these are ethical values and the objects of mathematics and logic. Our
apprehension of values is emotional in character, as Scheler had held. This
point is compatible with their objectivity and their mindindependence, since
the emotions are just another mode of apprehension. The point applies, however,
only to ethical values. Aesthetic values are essentially subjective; they exist
only for the subject experiencing them. The number of ethical values is far
greater than usually supposed, nor are they derivable from a single fundamental
value. At best we only glimpse some of them, and even these may not be
simultaneously realizable. This explains and to some extent justifies the
existence of moral disagreement, between persons as well as between whole
cultures. Hartmann was most obviously influenced by Plato, Husserl, and
Scheler. But he was a major, original philosopher in his own right. He has
received less recognition than he deserves probably because his views were
quite different from those dominant in recent Anglo- philosophy or in recent
Continental philosophy. What is perhaps his most important work, Ethics, was
published in G. in 6, one year before Heidegger’s Being and Time, and appeared
in English in 2.
hazzing: under conjunctum, we see that the terminology is varied.
There is the copulatum. But Grice prefers to restrict to use of the copulatum
to izzing and hazzing. Oddly Grice sees hazzing as a predicate which he
formalizes as Hxy. To be read x hazzes y, although sometimes he uses ‘x hazz
y.’ Vide ‘accidentia.’ For Grice the role of métier is basic since it shows
finality in nature. Homo sapiens, qua pirot, is to be rational.
hedonism, the view that
pleasure including the absence of pain is the sole intrinsic good in life. The
hedonist may hold that, questions of morality aside, persons inevitably do seek
pleasure psychological hedonism; that, questions of psychology aside, morally
we should seek pleasure ethical hedonism; or that we inevitably do, and ought
to, seek pleasure ethical and psychological hedonism combined. Psychological
hedonism itself admits of a variety of possible forms. One may hold, e.g., that
all motivation is based on the prospect of present or future pleasure. More
plausibly, some philosophers have held that all choices of future actions are
based on one’s presently taking greater pleasure in the thought of doing one
act rather than another. Still a third type of hedonism with roots in empirical psychology is that the attainment of pleasure is the
primary drive of a wide range of organisms including human beings and is
responsible, through some form of conditioning, for all acquired motivations.
Ethical hedonists may, but need not, appeal to some form of psychological
hedonism to buttress their case. For, at worst, the truth of some form of
psychological hedonism makes ethical hedonism empty or inescapable but not false. As a value theory a theory of
what is ultimately good, ethical hedonism has typically led to one or the other
of two conceptions of morally correct action. Both of these are expressions of
moral consequentialism in that they judge actions strictly by their
consequences. On standard formulations of utilitarianism, actions are judged by
the amount of pleasure they produce for all sentient beings; on some
formulations of egoist views, actions are judged by their consequences for
one’s own pleasure. Neither egoism nor utilitarianism, however, must be wedded
to a hedonistic value theory. A hedonistic value theory admits of a variety of
claims about the characteristic sources and types of pleasure. One contentious
issue has been what activities yield the greatest quantity of pleasure with prominent candidates including
philosophical and other forms of intellectual discourse, the contemplation of
beauty, and activities productive of “the pleasures of the senses.” Most
philosophical hedonists, despite the popular associations of the word, have not
espoused sensual pleasure. Another issue, famously raised by J. S. Mill, is
whether such different varieties of pleasure admit of differences of quality as
well as quantity. Even supposing them to be equal in quantity, can we say,
e.g., that the pleasures of intellectual activity are superior in quality to
those of watching sports on television? And if we do say such things, are we
departing from strict hedonism by introducing a value distinction not really
based on pleasure at all? Most philosophers have found hedonism both psychological and ethical exaggerated in its claims. One difficulty for
both sorts of hedonism is the hedonistic paradox, which may be put as follows.
Many of the deepest and best pleasures of life of love, of child rearing, of
work seem to come most often to those who are engaging in an activity for
reasons other than pleasure seeking. Hence, not only is it dubious that we
always in fact seek or value only pleasure, but also dubious that the best way
to achieve pleasure is to seek it. Another area of difficulty concerns
happiness and its relation to pleasure.
In the tradition of Aristotle, happiness is broadly understood as something
like well-being and has been viewed, not implausibly, as a kind of natural end
of all human activities. But ‘happiness’ in this sense is broader than
‘pleasure’, insofar as the latter designates a particular kind of feeling,
whereas ‘well-being’ does not. Attributions of happiness, moreover, appear to
be normative in a way in which attributions of pleasure are not. It is thought
that a truly happy person has achieved, is achieving, or stands to achieve, certain
things respecting the “truly important” concerns of human life. Of course, such
achievements will characteristically produce pleasant feelings; but, just as
characteristically, they will involve states of active enjoyment of activities where, as Aristotle first pointed out, there
are no distinctive feelings of pleasure apart from the doing of the activity
itself. In short, the Aristotelian thesis that happiness is the natural end of
all human activities, even if it is true, does not seem to lend much support to
hedonism psychological or ethical.
plathegel
and ariskant
– Hegel, “one of the most influential and systematic of the idealists” (Grice),
also well known for his philosophy of history and philosophy of religion. Life
and works. Hegel, the eldest of three children, was born in Stuttgart, the son
of a minor financial official in the court of the Duchy of Württemberg. His
mother died when he was eleven. At eighteen, he began attending the theology
seminary or Stift attached to the at
Tübingen; he studied theology and classical languages and literature and became
friendly with his future colleague and adversary, Schelling, as well as the
great genius of G. Romantic poetry, Hölderlin. In 1793, upon graduation, he
accepted a job as a tutor for a family in Bern, and moved to Frankfurt in 1797
for a similar post. In 1799 his father bequeathed him a modest income and the
freedom to resign his tutoring job, pursue his own work, and attempt to
establish himself in a position. In
1801, with the help of Schelling, he moved to the town of Jena, already widely known as the
home of Schiller, Fichte, and the Schlegel brothers. After lecturing for a few
years, he became a professor in 1805. Prior to the move to Jena, Hegel’s essays
had been chiefly concerned with problems in morality, the theory of culture,
and the philosophy of religion. Hegel shared with Rousseau and the G. Romantics
many doubts about the political and moral implications of the European
Enlightenment and modern philosophy in general, even while he still
enthusiastically championed what he termed the principle of modernity,
“absolute freedom.” Like many, he feared that the modern attack on feudal
political and religious authority would merely issue in the reformulation of
new internalized and still repressive forms of authority. And he was among that
legion of G. intellectuals infatuated with ancient Greece and the superiority
of their supposedly harmonious social life, compared with the authoritarian and
legalistic character of the Jewish and later Christian religions. At Jena,
however, he coedited a journal with Schelling, The Critical Journal of
Philosophy, and came to work much more on the philosophic issues created by the
critical philosophy or “transcendental idealism” of Kant, and its legacy in the
work of Rheinhold, Fichte, and Schelling. His written work became much more
influenced by these theoretical projects and their attempt to extend Kant’s
search for the basic categories necessary for experience to be discriminated
and evaluated, and for a theory of the subject that, in some non-empirical way,
was responsible for such categories. Problems concerning the completeness,
interrelation, and ontological status of such a categorial structure were quite
prominent, along with a continuing interest in the relation between a free,
self-determining agent and the supposed constraints of moral principles and
other agents. In his early years at Jena especially before Schelling left in
1803, he was particularly preoccupied with this problem of a systematic
philosophy, a way of accounting for the basic categories of the natural world
and for human practical activity that would ground all such categories on
commonly presupposed and logically interrelated, even interdeducible,
principles. In Hegel’s terms, this was the problem of the relation between a
“Logic” and a “Philosophy of Nature” and “Philosophy of Spirit.” After 1803,
however, while he was preparing his own systematic philosophy for publication,
what had been planned as a short introduction to this system took on a life of
its own and grew into one of Hegel’s most provocative and influential books.
Working at a furious pace, he finished hedonistic paradox Hegel, Georg Wilhelm
Friedrich 365 AM 365 what would be eventually called The
Phenomenology of Spirit in a period of great personal and political turmoil.
During the final writing of the book, he had learned that Christina Burkhard
would give birth to his illegitimate son. Ludwig was born in February 1807. And
he is supposed to have completed the text on October 13, 1807, the day
Napoleon’s armies captured Jena. It was certainly an unprecedented work. In
conception, it is about the human race itself as a developing, progressively
more self-conscious subject, but its content seems to take in a vast,
heterogeneous range of topics, from technical issues in empiricist epistemology
to the significance of burial rituals. Its range is so heterogeneous that there
is controversy to this day about whether it has any overall unity, or whether
it was pieced together at the last minute. Adding to the interpretive problem,
Hegel often invented his own striking language of “inverted worlds,” “struggles
to the death for recognition,” “unhappy consciousness,” “spiritual animal
kingdoms,” and “beautiful souls.” Continuing his career at Jena in those times looked out of
the question, so Hegel accepted a job at Bamberg editing a newspaper, and in
the following year began an eight-year stint 180816 as headmaster and
philosophy teacher at a Gymnasium or secondary school at Nürnberg. During this
period, at forty-one, he married the twenty-year-old Marie von Tucher. He also
wrote what is easily his most difficult work, and the one he often referred to
as his most important, a magisterial two-volume Science of Logic, which
attempts to be a philosophical account of the concepts necessary in all
possible kinds of account-givings. Finally, in 1816, Hegel was offered a chair
in philosophy at the of Heidelberg,
where he published the first of several versions of his Encyclopedia of the
Philosophical Sciences, his own systematic account of the relation between the
“logic” of human thought and the “real” expression of such interrelated
categories in our understanding of the natural world and in our understanding
and evaluation of our own activities. In 1818, he accepted the much more
prestigious post in philosophy at Berlin, where he remained until his death in
1831. Soon after his arrival in Berlin, he began to exert a powerful influence
over G. letters and intellectual life. In 1821, in the midst of a growing
political and nationalist crisis in Prussia, he published his controversial
book on political philosophy, The Philosophy of Right. His lectures at the were later published as his philosophy of
history, of aesthetics, and of religion, and as his history of philosophy.
Philosophy. Hegel’s most important ideas were formed gradually, in response to
a number of issues in philosophy and often in response to historical events.
Moreover, his language and approach were so heterodox that he has inspired as
much controversy about the meaning of his position as about its adequacy. Hence
any summary will be as much a summary of the controversies as of the basic
position. His dissatisfactions with the absence of a public realm, or any forms
of genuine social solidarity in the G. states and in modernity generally, and
his distaste with what he called the “positivity” of the orthodox religions of
the day their reliance on law, scripture, and abstract claims to authority, led
him to various attempts to make use of the Grecian polis and classical art, as
well as the early Christian understanding of love and a renewed “folk
religion,” as critical foils to such tendencies. For some time, he also
regarded much traditional and modern philosophy as itself a kind of lifeless
classifying that only contributed to contemporary fragmentation, myopia, and
confusion. These concerns remained with him throughout his life, and he is thus
rightly known as one of the first modern thinkers to argue that what had come
to be accepted as the central problem of modern social and political life, the
legitimacy of state power, had been too narrowly conceived. There are now all
sorts of circumstances, he argued, in which people might satisfy the modern
criterion of legitimacy and “consent” to the use of some power, but not fully
understand the terms within which such issues are posed, or assent in an
attenuated, resentful, manipulated, or confused way. In such cases they would
experience no connection between their individual will and the actual content
of the institutions they are supposed to have sanctioned. The modern problem is
as much alienation Entfremdung as sovereignty, an exercise of will in which the
product of one’s will appears “strange” or “alien,” “other,” and which results
in much of modern life, however chosen or willed, being fundamentally
unsatisfying. However, during the Jena years, his views on this issue changed.
Most importantly, philosophical issues moved closer to center stage in the
Hegelian drama. He no longer regarded philosophy as some sort of
self-undermining activity that merely prepared one for some leap into genuine
“speculation” roughly Schelling’s position and began to champion a unique kind
of comprehensive, very determinate reflection on the interrelations among all
the various classical alternatives in philosophy. Much more controversially, he
also attempted to understand the way in which such relations and transitions
were also reflected in the history of the art, politics, and religions of
various historical communities. He thus came to think that philosophy should be
some sort of recollection of its past history, a realization of the mere
partiality, rather than falsity, of its past attempts at a comprehensive
teaching, and an account of the centrality of these continuously developing
attempts in the development of other human practices.Through understanding the
“logic” of such a development, a reconciliation of sorts with the implications
of such a rational process in contemporary life, or at least with the
potentialities inherent in contemporary life, would be possible. In all such
influences and developments, one revolutionary aspect of Hegel’s position
became clearer. For while Hegel still frequently argued that the subject matter
of philosophy was “reason,” or “the Absolute,” the unconditioned presupposition
of all human account-giving and evaluation, and thereby an understanding of the
“whole” within which the natural world and human deeds were “parts,” he also
always construed this claim to mean that the subject matter of philosophy was
the history of human experience itself. Philosophy was about the real world of
human change and development, understood by Hegel to be the collective
self-education of the human species about itself. It could be this, and satisfy
the more traditional ideals because, in one of his most famous phrases, “what
is actual is rational,” or because some full account could be given of the
logic or teleological order, even the necessity, for the great conceptual and
political changes in human history. We could thereby finally reassure ourselves
that the way our species had come to conceptualize and evaluate is not finite
or contingent, but is “identical” with “what there is, in truth.” This identity
theory or Absolute Knowledgemeans that we will then be able to be “at home” in
the world and so will have understood what philosophers have always tried to
understand, “how things in the broadest possible sense of the term hang
together in the broadest possible sense of the term.” The way it all hangs
together is, finally, “due to us,” in some collective and historical and
“logical” sense. In a much disputed passage in his Philosophy of Religion
lectures, Hegel even suggested that with such an understanding, history itself
would be over. Several elements in this general position have inspired a good
deal of excitement and controversy. To advance claims such as these Hegel had
to argue against a powerful, deeply influential assumption in modern thought:
the priority of the individual, self-conscious subject. Such an assumption
means, for example, that almost all social relations, almost all our bonds to
other human beings, exist because and only because they are made, willed into
existence by individuals otherwise naturally unattached to each other. With
respect to knowledge claims, while there may be many beliefs in a common
tradition that we unreflectively share with others, such shared beliefs are
also taken primarily to be the result of individuals continuously affirming such
beliefs, however implicitly or unreflectively. Their being shared is simply a
consequence of their being simultaneously affirmed or assented to by
individuals. Hegel’s account requires a different picture, an insistence on the
priority of some kind of collective subject, which he called human “spirit” or
Geist. His general theory of conceptual and historical change requires the
assumption of such a collective subject, one that even can be said to be
“coming to self-consciousness” about itself, and this required that he argue
against the view that so much could be understood as the result of individual
will and reflection. Rather, he tried in many different ways to show that the
formation of what might appear to an individual to be his or her own particular
intention or desire or belief already reflected a complex social inheritance
that could itself be said to be evolving, even evolving progressively, with a
“logic” of its own. The completion of such collective attempts at
self-knowledge resulted in what Hegel called the realization of Absolute
Spirit, by which he either meant the absolute completion of the human attempt
to know itself, or the realization in human affairs of some sort of extrahuman
transcendence, or full expression of an infinite God. Hegel tried to advance
all such claims about social subjectivity without in some way hypostatizing or
reifying such a subject, as if it existed independently of the actions and
thoughts of individuals. This claim about the deep dependence of individuals on
one another even for their very identity, even while they maintain their
independence, is one of the best-known examples of Hegel’s attempt at a
dialectical resolution of many of the traditional oppositions and antinomies of
past thought. Hegel often argued that what appeared to be contraries in
philosophy, such as mind/body, freedom/determinism, idealism/materialism,
universal/particular, the state/the individual, or even God/man, appeared such
incompatible alternatives only because of the undeveloped and so incomplete
perspective within which the oppositions were formulated. So, in one of his
more famous attacks on such dualisms, human freedom according to Hegel could
not be understood coherently as some purely rational self-determination,
independent of heteronomous impulses, nor the human being as a perpetual
opposition between reason and sensibility. In his moral theory, Kant had argued
for the latter view and Hegel regularly returned to such Kantian claims about
the opposition of duty and inclination as deeply typical of modern dualism.
Hegel claimed that Kant’s version of a rational principle, the “categorical
imperative,” was so formal and devoid of content as not to be action-guiding it
could not coherently rule in or rule out the appropriate actions, and that the
“moral point of view” rigoristically demanded a pure or dutiful motivation to
which no human agent could conform. By contrast, Hegel claimed that the
dualisms of morality could be overcome in ethical life Sittlichkeit, those
modern social institutions which, it was claimed, provided the content or true
“objects” of a rational will. These institutions, the family, civil society,
and the state, did not require duties in potential conflict with our own
substantive ends, but were rather experienced as the “realization” of our
individual free will. It has remained controversial what for Hegel a truly
free, rational self-determination, continuous with, rather than constraining,
our desire for happiness and self-actualization, amounted to. Many commentators
have noted that, among modern philosophers, only Spinoza, whom Hegel greatly
admired, was as insistent on such a thoroughgoing compatibilism, and on a
refusal to adopt the Christian view of human beings as permanently divided
against themselves. In his most ambitious analysis of such oppositions Hegel
went so far as to claim that, not only could alternatives be shown to be
ultimately compatible when thought together within some higher-order “Notion”
Begriff that resolved or “sublated” the opposition, but that one term in such
opposition could actually be said to imply or require its contrary, that a
“positing” of such a notion would, to maintain consistency, require its own
“negating,” and that it was this sort of dialectical opposition that could be shown
to require a sublation, or Aufhebung a term of art in Hegel that simultaneously
means in G. ‘to cancel’, ‘to preserve’, and ‘to raise up’. This claim for a
dialectical development of our fundamental notions has been the most severely
criticized in Hegel’s philosophy. Many critics have doubted that so much basic
conceptual change can be accounted for by an internal critique, one that merely
develops the presuppositions inherent in the affirmation of some notion or
position or related practice. This issue has especially attracted critics of
Hegel’s Science of Logic, where he tries first to show that the attempt to
categorize anything that is, simply and immediately, as “Being,” is an attempt
that both “negates itself,” or ends up categorizing everything as “Nothing,”
and then that this self-negation requires a resolution in the higher-order
category of “Becoming.” This analysis continues into an extended argument that
purports to show that any attempt to categorize anything at all must ultimately
make use of the distinctions of “essence” and “appearance,” and elements of
syllogistic and finally Hegel’s own dialectical logic, and both the details and
the grand design of that project have been the subject of a good deal of
controversy. Unfortunately, much of this controversy has been greatly confused
by the popular association of the terms “thesis,” “antithesis,” and “synthesis”
with Hegel’s theory of dialectic. These crude, mechanical notions were invented
in 1837 by a less-than-sensitive Hegel expositor, Heinrich Moritz Chalybäus,
and were never used as terms of art by Hegel. Others have argued that the
tensions Hegel does identify in various positions and practices require a much
broader analysis of the historical, especially economic, context within which positions
are formulated and become important, or some more detailed attention to the
empirical discoveries or paradoxes that, at the very least, contribute to basic
conceptual change. Those worried about the latter problem have also raised
questions about the logical relation between universal and particular implied
in Hegel’s account. Hegel, following Fichte, radicalizes a Kantian claim about
the inaccessibility of pure particularity in sensations Kant had written that
“intuitions without concepts are blind”. Hegel charges that Kant did not draw
sufficiently radical conclusions from such an antiempiricist claim, that he
should have completely rethought the traditional distinction between “what was
given to the mind” and “what the mind did with the given.” By contrast Hegel is
confident that he has a theory of a “concrete universal,” concepts that cannot
be understood as pale generalizations or abstract representations of given
particulars, because they are required for particulars to Hegel, Georg Wilhelm
Friedrich Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 368
AM 368 be apprehended in the
first place. They are not originally dependent on an immediate acquaintance
with particulars; there is no such acquaintance. Critics wonder if Hegel has
much of a theory of particularity left, if he does not claim rather that
particulars, or whatever now corresponds to them, are only interrelations of
concepts, and in which the actual details of the organization of the natural
world and human history are deduced as conceptual necessities in Hegel’s
Encyclopedia. This interpretation of Hegel, that he believes all entities are
really the thoughts, expressions, or modes of a single underlying mental
substance, and that this mind develops and posits itself with some sort of
conceptual necessity, has been termed a panlogicism, a term of art coined by
Hermann Glockner, a Hegel commentator in the first half of the twentieth
century. It is a much-disputed reading. Such critics are especially concerned
with the implications of this issue in Hegel’s political theory, where the
great modern opposition between the state and the individual seems subjected to
this same logic, and the individual’s true individuality is said to reside in
and only in the political universal, the State. Thus, on the one hand, Hegel’s
political philosophy is often praised for its early identification and analysis
of a fundamental, new aspect of contemporary life the categorically distinct realm of political
life in modernity, or the independence of the “State” from the social world of
private individuals engaged in competition and private association “civil
society”. But, on the other hand, his attempt to argue for a completion of
these domains in the State, or that individuals could only be said to be free
in allegiance to a State, has been, at least since Marx, one of the most
criticized aspects of his philosophy. Finally, criticisms also frequently
target the underlying intention behind such claims: Hegel’s career-long
insistence on finding some basic unity among the many fragmented spheres of
modern thought and existence, and his demand that this unity be articulated in
a discursive account, that it not be merely felt, or gestured at, or celebrated
in edifying speculation. PostHegelian thinkers have tended to be suspicious of
any such intimations of a whole for modern experience, and have argued that,
with the destruction of the premodern world, we simply have to content
ourselves with the disconnected, autonomous spheres of modern interests. In his
lecture courses these basic themes are treated in wide-ranging accounts of the
basic institutions of cultural history. History itself is treated as
fundamentally political history, and, in typically Hegelian fashion, the major
epochs of political history are claimed to be as they were because of the
internal inadequacies of past epochs, all until some final political
semiconsciousness is achieved and realized. Art is treated equally
developmentally, evolving from symbolic, through “classical,” to the most
intensely self-conscious form of aesthetic subjectivity, romantic art. The
Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion embody these themes in some of the most
controversial ways, since Hegel often treats religion and its development as a
kind of picture or accessible “representation” of his own views about the
relation of thought to being, the proper understanding of human finitude and
“infinity,” and the essentially social or communal nature of religious life.
This has inspired a characteristic debate among Hegel scholars, with some arguing
that Hegel’s appropriation of religion shows that his own themes are
essentially religious if an odd, pantheistic version of Christianity, while
others argue that he has so Hegelianized religious issues that there is little
distinctively religious left. Influence. This last debate is typical of that
prominent in the post-Hegelian tradition. Although, in the decades following
his death, there was a great deal of work by self-described Hegelians on the
history of law, on political philosophy, and on aesthetics, most of the
prominent academic defenders of Hegel were interested in theology, and many of
these were interested in defending an interpretation of Hegel consistent with
traditional Christian views of a personal God and personal immortality. This began
to change with the work of “young Hegelians” such as D. F. Strauss 180874,
Feuerbach 180472, Bruno Bauer 180982, and Arnold Ruge 180380, who emphasized
the humanistic and historical dimensions of Hegel’s account of religion,
rejected the Old Hegelian tendencies toward a reconciliation with contemporary
political life, and began to reinterpret and expand Hegel’s account of the
productive activity of human spirit eventually focusing on labor rather than
intellectual and cultural life. Strauss himself characterized the fight as
between “left,” “center,” and “right” Hegelians, depending on whether one was
critical or conservative politically, or had a theistic or a humanistic view of
Hegelian Geist. The most famous young or left Hegelian was Marx, especially
during his days in Paris as coeditor, with Ruge, of the Deutsch-französischen
Jahrbücher 1844. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich
369 AM
369 In Great Britain, with its long skeptical, empiricist, and
utilitarian tradition, Hegel’s work had little influence until the latter part
of the nineteenth century, when philosophers such as Green and Caird took up
some of the holistic themes in Hegel and developed a neo-Hegelian reading of
issues in politics and religion that began to have influence in the academy.
The most prominent of the British neo-Hegelians of the next generation were
Bosanquet, McTaggart, and especially Bradley, all of whom were interested in
many of the metaphysical implications of Hegel’s idealism, what they took to be
a Hegelian claim for the “internally related” interconnection of all
particulars within one single, ideal or mental, substance. Moore and Russell
waged a hugely successful counterattack in the name of traditional empiricism
and what would be called “analytic philosophy” against such an enterprise and
in this tradition largely finished off the influence of Hegel or what was left
of the historical Hegel in these neo-Hegelian versions. In G.y, Hegel has
continued to influence a number of different schools of neo-Marxism, sometimes
itself simply called “Hegelian Marxism,” especially the Frankfurt School, or
“critical theory” group especially Adorno, Horkheimer, and Marcuse. And he has
been extremely influential in France, particularly thanks to the lectures of a
brilliant if idiosyncratic Russian émigré, Alexander Kojève, who taught Hegel
in the 0s at the École Pratique des Hautes Études to the likes of Merleau-Ponty
and Lacan. Kojève was as much influenced by Marx and Heidegger as Hegel, but
his lectures inspired many thinkers to turn again to Hegel’s account of human
selfdefinition in time and to the historicity of all institutions and practices
and so forged an unusual link between Hegel and postwar existentialism.
Hegelian themes continue to resurface in contemporary hermeneutics, in
“communitarianism” in ethics, and in the increasing attention given to
conceptual change and history in the philosophy of science. This has meant for
many that Hegel should now be regarded not only as the origin of a distinctive
tradition in European philosophy that emphasizes the historical and social
nature of human existence, but as a potential contributor to many new and often
interdisciplinary approaches to philosophy.
heideggerianism: heideggerian implicaturum of “Nothing noths.” Grice
thought Heidegger was the greatest philosopher that ever lived. Heideggerianism:
Arendt, h. tuteed by Heidegger and Jaspers; fled to France in 3; and emigrated
in 1 to the United States, where she taught at various universities. Her major
works are The Origins of Totalitarianism 1, The Human Condition 8, Between Past
and Future 1, On Revolution 3, Crises of the Republic 2, and The Life of the
Mind 8. In Arendt’s view, for reasons established by Kant and deepened by
Nietzsche, there is a breach between being and thinking, one that cannot be
closed by thought. Understood as philosophizing or contemplation, thinking is a
form of egoism that isolates us from one another and our world. Despite Kant,
modernity remains mired in egoism, a condition compounded by the emergence of a
“mass” that consists of bodies with needs temporarily met by producing and
consuming and which demands governments that minister to these needs. In place
of thinking, laboring, and the administration of things now called democracy,
all of which are instrumental but futile as responses to the “thrown” quality
of our condition, Arendt proposed to those capable of it a mode of being,
political action, that she found in pronounced form in pre-Socratic Greece and
briefly but gloriously at the founding of the Roman and republics. Political action is initiation,
the making of beginnings that can be explained neither causally nor
teleologically. It is done in the space of appearances constituted by the
presence of other political actors whose re-sponses the telling of equally unpredictable stories
concerning one another’s actions
determine what actions are taken and give character to the acting participants.
In addition to the refined discernments already implied, political action
requires the courage to initiate one knows not what. Its outcome is power; not
over other people or things but mutual empowerment to continue acting in
concert and thereby to overcome egoism and achieve positive freedom and
humanity. Heidegger, Martin: “the
greatest philosopher that ever lived” – H. P. Grice. G. philosopher whose early
works contributed to phenomenology and existentialism e.g., Sartre and whose
later works paved the way to hermeneutics Gadamer and post-structuralism
Derrida and Foucault. Born in Messkirch in the Black Forest region, Heidegger
first trained to be a Jesuit, but switched to mathematics and philosophy in 1.
As an instructor at Freiburg , he worked with the founder of phenomenology,
Husserl. His masterwork, Sein und Zeit Being and Time, 7, was published while
he was teaching at Marburg . This work, in opposition to the preoccupation with
epistemology dominant at the time, focused on the traditional question of
metaphysics: What is the being of entities in general? Rejecting abstract
theoretical approaches to this question, Heidegger drew on Kierkegaard’s
religious individualism and the influential movement called
life-philosophy Lebensphilosophie, then
identified with Nietzsche, Bergson, and Dilthey
to develop a highly original account of humans as embedded in concrete
situations of action. Heidegger accepted Husserl’s chair at Freiburg in 8; in
3, having been elected rector of the , he joined the Nazi party. Although he
stepped down as rector one year later, new evidence suggests complicity with
the Nazis until the end of the war. Starting in the late thirties, his writings
started to shift toward the “antihumanist” and “poetic” form of thinking
referred to as “later Heidegger.” Heidegger’s lifelong project was to answer
the “question of being” Seinsfrage. This question asks, concerning things in
general rocks, tools, people, etc., what is it to be an entity of these sorts?
It is the question of ontology first posed by ancient Grecian philosophers from
Anaximander to Aristotle. Heidegger holds, however, that philosophers starting
with Plato have gone astray in trying to answer this question because they have
tended to think of being as a property or essence enduringly present in things.
In other words, they have fallen into the “metaphysics of presence,” which
thinks of being as substance. What is overlooked in traditional metaphysics is
the background conditions that enable entities to show up as counting or
mattering in some specific way in the first place. In his early works,
Heidegger tries to bring this concealed dimension of things to light by
recasting the question of being: What is the meaning of being? Or, put
differently, how do entities come to show up as intelligible to us in some
determinate way? And this question calls for an analysis of the entity that has
some prior understanding of things: human existence or Dasein the G. word for
“existence” or “being-there,” used to refer to the structures of humans that
make possible an understanding of being. Heidegger’s claim is that Dasein’s
pretheoretical or “preontological” understanding of being, embodied in its
everyday practices, opens a “clearing” in which entities can show up as, say,
tools, protons, numbers, mental events, and so on. This historically unfolding clearing
is what the metaphysical tradition has overlooked. In order to clarify the
conditions that make possible an understanding of being, then, Being and Time
begins with an analytic of Dasein. But Heidegger notes that traditional
interpretations of human existence have been one-sided to the extent that they
concentrate on our ways of existing when we are engaged in theorizing and
detached reflection. It is this narrow focus on the spectator attitude that
leads to the picture, found in Descartes, of the self as a mind or subject
representing material objects the
so-called subjectobject model. In order to bypass this traditional picture,
Heidegger sets out to describe Dasein’s “average everydayness,” i.e., our ordinary,
prereflective agency when we are caught up in the midst of practical affairs.
The “phenomenology of everydayness” is supposed to lead us to see the totality
of human existence, including our moods, our capacity for authentic
individuality, and our full range of involvements with the world and with
others. The analytic of Dasein is also an ontological hermeneutics to the
extent that it provides an account of how understanding in general is possible.
The result of the analytic is a portrayal of human existence that is in accord
with what Heidegger regards as the earliest Grecian experience of being as an
emerging-into-presence physis: to be human is to be a temporal event of
self-manifestation that lets other sorts of entities first come to “emerge and
abide” in the world. From the standpoint of this description, the traditional
concept of substance whether mental or
physical simply has no role to play in
grasping humans. Heidegger’s brilliant diagnoses or “de-structurings” of the
tradition suggest that the idea of substance arises only when the conditions
making entities possible are forgotten or concealed. Heidegger holds that there
is no pregiven human essence. Instead, humans, as self-interpreting beings,
just are what they make of themselves in the course of their active lives.
Thus, as everyday agency, Dasein is not an object with properties, but is
rather the “happening” of a life course “stretched out between birth and
death.” Understood as the “historicity” of a temporal movement or “becoming,”
Dasein is found to have three main “existentials” or basic structures shared by
every “existentiell” i.e., specific and local way of living. First, Dasein
finds itself thrown into a world not of its choosing, already delivered over to
the task of living out its life in a concrete context. This “facticity” of our
lives is revealed in the moods that let things matter to us in some way or
other e.g., the burdensome feelings of
concern that accompany being a parent in our culture. Second, as projection,
Dasein is always already taking some stand on its life by acting in the world.
Understood as agency, human existence is “ahead of itself” in two senses: 1 our
competent dealings with familiar situations sketch out a range of possibilities
for how things may turn out in the future, and 2 each of our actions is
contributing to shaping our lives as people of specific sorts. Dasein is
futuredirected in the sense that the ongoing fulfillment of possibilities in
the course of one’s active life constitutes one’s identity or being. To say
that Dasein is “being-toward-death” is to say that the stands we take our
“understanding” define our being as a totality. Thus, my actual ways of
treating my children throughout my life define my being as a parent in the end,
regardless of what good intentions I might have. Finally, Dasein is discourse
in the sense that we are always articulating
or “addressing and discussing”
the entities that show up in our concernful absorption in current
situations. These three existentials define human existence as a temporal
unfolding. The unity of these dimensions
being already in a world, ahead of itself, and engaged with things Heidegger calls care. This is what it means
to say that humans are the entities whose being is at issue for them. Taking a
stand on our own being, we constitute our identity through what we do. The
formal structure of Dasein as temporality is made concrete through one’s
specific involvements in the world where ‘world’ is used in the life-world
sense in which we talk about the business world or the world of academia.
Dasein is the unitary phenomenon of being-in-the-world. A core component of
Heidegger’s early works is his description of how Dasein’s practical dealings
with equipment define the being of the entities that show up in the world. In
hammering in a workshop, e.g., what ordinarily shows up for us is not a
hammer-thing with properties, but rather a web of significance relations shaped
by our projects. Hammering is “in order to” join boards, which is “for”
building a bookcase, which is “for the sake of” being a person with a neat
study. The hammer is encountered in terms of its place in this holistic context
of functionality the “ready-to-hand.” In
other words, the being of the equipment
its “ontological definition”
consists of its relations to other equipment and its actual use within
the entire practical context. Seen from this standpoint, the brute, meaningless
objects assumed to be basic by the metaphysical tradition the “present-at-hand” can show up only when there is a breakdown in
our ordinary dealings with things, e.g., when the hammer breaks or is missing.
In this sense, the ready-to-hand is said to be more primordial than the
material objects treated as basic by the natural sciences. It follows, then,
that the being of entities in the world is constituted by the framework of
intelligibility or “disclosedness” opened by Dasein’s practices. This clearing
is truth in the original meaning of the Grecian word aletheia, which Heidegger
renders as ‘un-concealment’. But it would be wrong to think that what is
claimed here is that humans are initially just given, and that they then go on
to create a clearing. For, in Heidegger’s view, our own being as agents of
specific types is defined by the world into which we are thrown: in my
workshop, I can be a craftsman or an amateur, but not a samurai paying court to
a daimyo. Our identity as agents is made possible by the context of shared
forms of life and linguistic practices of a public life-world. For the most
part, we exist as the “they” das Man, participants in the historically
constituted “cohappening of a people” Volk. The embeddedness of our existence
in a cultural context explains our inveterate tendency toward inauthenticity.
As we become initiated into the practices of our community, we are inclined to drift
along with the crowd, doing what “one” does, enacting stereotyped roles, and
thereby losing our ability to seize on and define our own lives. Such falling
into public preoccupations Heidegger sees as a sign that we are fleeing from
the fact that we are finite beings who stand before death understood as the
culmination of our possibilities. When, through anxiety and hearing the call of
conscience, we face up to our being-toward-death, our lives can be transformed.
To be authentic is to clear-sightedly face up to one’s responsibility for what
one’s life is adding up to as a whole. And because our lives are inseparable
from our community’s existence, authenticity involves seizing on the
possibilities circulating in our shared “heritage” in order to realize a
communal “destiny.” Heidegger’s ideal of resolute “taking action” in the
current historical situation no doubt contributed to his leap into politics in
the 0s. According to his writings of that period, the ancient Grecians
inaugurated a “first beginning” for Western civilization, but centuries of
forgetfulness beginning with the Latinization of Grecian words have torn us
away from the primal experience of being rooted in that initial setting.
Heidegger hoped that, guided by the insights embodied in great works of art
especially Hölderlin’s poetry, National Socialism would help bring about a
world-rejuvenating “new beginning” comparable to the first beginning in ancient
Greece. Heidegger’s later writings attempt to fully escape the subjectivism he
sees dominating Western thought from its inception up to Nietzsche. “The Origin
of the Work of Art” 5, for example, shows how a great work of art such as a
Grecian temple, by shaping the world in which a people live, constitutes the
kinds of people that can live in that world. An Introduction to Metaphysics 5
tries to recover the Grecian experience of humans as beings whose activities of
gathering and naming logos are above all a response to what is more than human.
The later writings emphasize that which resists all human mastery and
comprehension. Such terms as ‘nothingness’, ‘earth’, and ‘mystery’ suggest that
what shows itself to us always depends on a background of what does not show
itself, what remains concealed. Language comes to be understood as the medium
through which anything, including the human, first becomes accessible and
intelligible. Because language is the source of all intelligibility, Heidegger
says that humans do not speak, but rather language speaks us an idea that became central to poststructuralist
theories. In his writings after the war, Heidegger replaces the notions of
resoluteness and political activism with a new ideal of letting-be or
releasement Gelassenheit, a stance characterized by meditative thinking,
thankfulness for the “gift” of being, and openness to the silent “call” of
language. The technological “enframing” Gestell of our age encountering everything as a standing reserve
on hand for our use is treated not as
something humans do, but instead as a manifestation of being itself. The
“anti-humanism” of these later works is seen in the description of technology
the mobilization of everything for the sole purpose of greater efficiency as an
epochal event in the “history of being,” a way things have come-into-their-own
Ereignis rather than as a human accomplishment. The history or “sending”
Geschick of being consists of epochs that have all gone increasingly astray
from the original beginning inaugurated by the pre-Socratics. Since human
willpower alone cannot bring about a new epoch, technology cannot be ended by
our efforts. But a non-technological way of encountering things is hinted at in
a description of a jug as a fourfold of earth, sky, mortals, and gods, and
Heidegger reflects on forms of poetry that point to a new, non-metaphysical way
of experiencing being. Through a transformed relation to language and art, and
by abandoning “onto-theology” the attempt to ground all entities in one supreme
entity, we might prepare ourselves for a transformed way of understanding
being.
Roamn
– “Hellenism is what happened to the Grecians after they became a Roman
province.” -- hellenistic
philosophy: “Once the Romans defeated Greece, at Oxford we stop talking of
‘Greek’ philosophy, but ‘Hellenistic’ philosophy instead – since most Greeks were
brought to Rome as slaves to teach philosophy to their children” – Grice. Vide
“Roman philosophy” – “Not everybody knows all these Roman philosophers, so
that’s a good thing.” – H. P. Grice. Hellenistic philosophy is the
philosophical systems of the Hellenistic age 32330 B.C., although 31187 B.C.
better defines it as a philosophical era, notably Epicureanism, Stoicism, and
Skepticism. These all emerged in the generation after Aristotle’s death 322
B.C., and dominated philosophical debate until the first century B.C., during
which there were revivals of traditional Platonism and of Aristotelianism. The
age was one in which much of the eastern Mediterranean world absorbed Grecian
culture was “Hellenized,” hence “Hellenistic”, and recruits to philosophy flocked
from this region to Athens, which remained the center of philosophical activity
until 87 B.C. Then the Roman sack of Athens drove many philosophers into exile,
and neither the schools nor the styles of philosophy that had grown up there
ever fully recovered. Very few philosophical writings survive intact from the
period. Our knowledge of Hellenistic philosophers depends mainly on later
doxography, on the Roman writers Lucretius and Cicero both mid-first century
B.C., and on what we learn from the schools’ critics in later centuries, e.g.
Sextus Empiricus and Plutarch. ’Skeptic’, a term not actually current before
the very end of the Hellenistic age, serves as a convenient label to
characterize two philosophical movements. The first is the New Academy: the
school founded by Plato, the Academy, became in this period a largely
dialectical one, conducting searching critiques of other schools’ doctrines
without declaring any of its own, beyond perhaps the assertion however guarded
that nothing could be known and the accompanying recommendation of “suspension
of judgment” epoche. The nature and vivacity of Stoicism owed much to its
prolonged debates with the New Academy. The founder of this Academic phase was
Arcesilaus school head c.268 c.241; its most revered and influential
protagonist was Carneades school head in the mid-second century; and its most
prestigious voice was that of Cicero 10643 B.C., whose highly influential
philosophical works were written mainly from a New Academic stance. But by the
early first century B.C. the Academy was drifting back to a more doctrinal
stance, and in the later part of the century it was largely eclipsed by a
second “skeptic” movement, Pyrrhonism. This was founded by Aenesidemus, a
pioneering skeptic despite his claim to be merely reviving the philosophy of
Pyrrho, a philosophical guru of the early Hellenistic period. His
neo-Pyrrhonism survives today mainly through the writings of Sextus Empiricus
second century A.D., an adherent of the school who, strictly speaking, represents
its post-Hellenistic phase. The Peripatos, Aristotle’s school, officially
survived throughout the era, but it is not regarded as a distinctively
“Hellenistic” movement. Despite the eminence of Aristotle’s first successor,
Theophrastus school head 322287, it thereafter fell from prominence, its
fortunes only reviving around the mid-first century B.C. It is disputed how far
the other Hellenistic philosophers were even aware of Aristotle’s treatises,
which should not in any case be regarded as a primary influence on them. Each
school had a location in Athens to which it could draw pupils. The Epicurean
school was a relatively private institution, its “Garden” outside the city
walls housing a close-knit philosophical community. The Stoics took their name from
the Stoa Poikile, the “Painted Colonnade” in central Athens where they
gathered. The Academics were based in the Academy, a public grove just outside
the city. Philosophers were public figures, a familiar sight around town. Each
school’s philosophical identity was further clarified by its absolute loyalty
to the name of its founder respectively
Epicurus, Zeno of Citium, and Plato and
by the polarities that developed in interschool debates. Epicureanism is
diametrically opposed on most issues to Stoicism. Academic Skepticism provides
another antithesis to Stoicism, not through any positions of its own it had
none, but through its unflagging critical campaign against every Stoic thesis.
It is often said that in this age the old Grecian political institution of the
city-state had broken down, and that the Hellenistic philosophies were an
answer to the resulting crisis of values. Whether or not there is any truth in
this, it remains clear that moral concerns were now much less confined to the
individual city-state than previously, and that at an extreme the boundaries
had been pushed back to include all mankind within the scope of an individual’s
moral obligations. Our “affinity” oikeiosis to all mankind is an originally
Stoic doctrine that acquired increasing currency with other schools. This
attitude partly reflects the weakening of national and cultural boundaries in
the Hellenistic period, as also in the Roman imperial period that followed it.
The three recognized divisions of philosophy were ethics, logic, and physics.
In ethics, the central objective was to state and defend an account of the
“end” telos, the moral goal to which all activity was subordinated: the
Epicureans named pleasure, the Stoics conformity with nature. Much debate
centered on the semimythical figure of the wise man, whose conduct in every
conceivable circumstance was debated by all schools. Logic in its modern sense
was primarily a Stoic concern, rejected as irrelevant by the Epicureans. But
Hellenistic logic included epistemology, where the primary focus of interest
was the “criterion of truth,” the ultimate yardstick against which all
judgments could be reliably tested. Empiricism was a surprisingly
uncontroversial feature of Hellenistic theories: there was little interest in
the Platonic-Aristotelian idea that knowledge in the strict sense is
non-sensory, and the debate between dogmatists and Skeptics was more concerned
with the question whether any proposed sensory criterion was adequate. Both
Stoics and Epicureans attached especial importance to prolepsis, the generic
notion of a thing, held to be either innate or naturally acquired in a way that
gave it a guaranteed veridical status. Physics saw an opposition between
Epicurean atomism, with its denial of divine providence, and the Stoic
world-continuum, imbued with divine rationality. The issue of determinism was
also placed on the philosophical map: Epicurean morality depends on the denial
of both physical and logical determinism, whereas Stoic morality is compatible
with, indeed actually requires, the deterministic causal nexus through which
providence operates.
helmholtz: philosopher known for groundbreaking work in the
philosophy of perception. Formally trained as a physician, he distinguished
himself in physics in 1848 as a codiscoverer of the law of conservation of
energy, and by the end of his life was perhaps the most influential figure in
G. physical research. Philosophically, his most important influence was on the
study of space. Intuitionist psychologists held that the geometrical structure
of three-dimensional space was given directly in sensation by innate
physiological mechanisms; Helmholtz brought this theory to severe empirical
trials and argued, on the contrary, that our knowledge of space consists of
inferences from accumulated experience. On the mathematical side, he attacked
Kant’s view that Euclidean geometry is the a priori form of outer intuition by
showing that it is possible to have visual experience of non-Euclidean space
“On the Origins and Meaning of Geometrical Axioms,” 1870. His crucial insight
was that empirical geometry depends on physical assumptions about the behavior
of measuring instruments. This inspired the view of Poincaré and logical
empiricism that the empirical content of geometry is fixed by physical
definitions, and made possible Einstein’s use of non-Euclidean geometry in
physics.
helvétius: philosopher
prominent in the formative phases of eighteenth-century materialism in France.
His De l’esprit 1758 was widely discussed internationally, but condemned by
the of Paris and burned by the
government. Helvétius attempted to clarify his doctrine in his posthumously
published De l’homme. Following Locke’s criticism of the innate ideas,
Helvétius stressed the function of experience in our acquisition of knowledge.
In accord with the doctrines of d’Holbach, Condillac, and La Mettrie, the
materialist Helvétius regarded the sensations as the basis of all our
knowledge. Only by comparison, abstraction, and combination of sensations do we
reach the level of concepts. Peculiar to Helvétius, however, is the stress on
the social determinations of our knowledge. Specific interests and passions are
the starting point of all our striving for knowledge. Egoism is the spring of
our desires and actions. The civil laws of the enlightened state enabled egoism
to be transformed into social competition and thereby diverted toward public
benefits. Like his materialist contemporary d’Holbach and later Condorcet,
Helvétius sharply criticized the social function of the church. Priests, he
claimed, provided society with wrong moral ideas. He demanded a thorough reform
of the educational system for the purpose of individual and social
emancipation. In contrast to the teachings of Rousseau, Helvétius praised the
further development of science, art, and industry as instruments for the
historical progress of mankind. The ideal society consists of enlightened
because well-educated citizens living in comfortable and even moderately
luxurious circumstances. All people should participate in the search for truth,
by means of public debates and discussions. Truth is equated with the moral
good. Helvétius had some influence on Marxist historical materialism.
hempel: eminent
philosopher of science associated with the Vienna Circle of logical empiricist
philosophers in the early 0s, before his emigration to the United States;
thereafter he became one of the most influential philosophers of science of his
time, largely through groundbreaking work on the logical analysis of the concepts
of confirmation and scientific explanation. Hempel received his doctorate under
Reichenbach at the of Berlin in 4 with a
dissertation on the logical analysis of probability. He studied with Carnap at
the of Vienna in 930, where he
participated in the “protocol-sentence debate” concerning the observational
basis of scientific knowledge raging within the Vienna Circle between Moritz
Schlick 26 and Otto Neurath 25. Hempel was attracted to the “radical
physicalism” articulated by Neurath and Carnap, which denied the foundational
role of immediate experience and asserted that all statements of the total
language of science including observation reports or protocol-sentences can be
revised as science progresses. This led to Hempel’s first major publication, “On
the Logical Positivists’ Theory of Truth” 5. He moved to the United States to
work with Carnap at the of Chicago in
738. He also taught at Queens and Yale
before his long career at Princeton 55. In the 0s he collaborated with his
friends Olaf Helmer and Paul Oppenheim on a celebrated series of papers, the
most influential of which are “Studies in the Logic of Confirmation” 5 and
“Studies in the Logic of Explanation” 8, coauthored with Oppenheim. The latter
paper articulated the deductive-nomological model, which characterizes
scientific explanations as deductively valid arguments proceeding from general
laws and initial conditions to the fact to be explained, and served as the
basis for all future work on the subject. Hempel’s papers on explanation and confirmation
and also related topics such as concept formation, criteria of meaningfulness,
and scientific theories were collected together in Aspects of Scientific
Explanation 5, one of the most important works in postwar philosophy of
science. He also published a more popular, but extremely influential
introduction to the field, Philosophy of Natural Science 6. Hempel and Kuhn
became colleagues at Princeton in the 0s. Another fruitful collaboration
ensued, as a result of which Hempel moved away from the Carnapian tradition of
logical analysis toward a more naturalistic and pragmatic conception of science
in his later work. As he himself explains, however, this later turn can also be
seen as a return to a similarly naturalistic conception Neurath had earlier
defended within the Vienna Circle.
Heno-theism, allegiance to one supreme
deity while conceding existence to others; also described as monolatry,
incipient monotheism, or practical monotheism. It occupies a middle ground
between polytheism and radical monotheism, which denies reality to all gods
save one. It has been claimed that early Judaism passed through a henotheistic
phase, acknowledging other Middle Eastern deities albeit condemning their
worship, en route to exclusive recognition of Yahweh. But the concept of
progress from polytheism through henotheism to monotheism is a rationalizing
construct, and cannot be supposed to capture the complex development of any
historical religion, including that of ancient Israel.
Ghent. “If William is called Occam, and
Henry is called Ghent, I should be called Harborne.” – Grice. philosopher.
After serving as a church official at Tournai and Brugge, he taught theology at
Paris from 1276. His major writings were “Summa quaestionum ordinariarum” and “Quodlibeta.”
He was the leading representative of the neoAugustinian movement at Paris in
the final quarter of the thirteenth century. His theory of knowledge combines
Aristotelian elements with Augustinian illuminationism. Heavily dependent on
Avicenna for his view of the reality enjoyed by essences of creatures esse
essentiae from eternity, he rejected both real distinction and real identity of
essence and existence in creatures, and defended their intentional distinction.
He also rejected a real distinction between the soul and its powers and
rejected the purely potential character of prime matter. He defended the
duality of substantial form in man, the unicity of form in other material
substances, and the primacy of will in the act of choice.
heraclitus fl. c.500 B.C., Grice
on Heraclitus: They told me,
Heraclitus, they told me you were dead,/They brought me bitter news to hear and
bitter tears to shed./I wept as I remembered how often you and I/Had tired the
sun with talking and sent him down the sky./And now that thou art lying, my
dear old Carian guest,/A handful of grey ashes, long, long ago at rest,/Still
are thy pleasant voices, thy nightingales, awake;/For Death, he taketh all
away, but them he cannot take. Grecian philosopher. A transition figure between the
Milesian philosophers and the later pluralists, Heraclitus stressed unity in
the world of change. He follows the Milesians in positing a series of cyclical
transformations of basic stuffs of the world; for instance, he holds that fire
changes to water and earth in turn. Moreover, he seems to endorse a single
source or arche of natural substances, namely fire. But he also observes that
natural transformations necessarily involve contraries such as hot and cold,
wet and dry. Indeed, without the one contrary the other would not exist, and
without contraries the cosmos would not exist. Hence strife is justice, and war
is the father and king of all. In the conflict of opposites there is a hidden
harmony that sustains the world, symbolized by the tension of a bow or the
attunement of a lyre. Scholars disagree about whether Heraclitus’s chief view
is that there is a one in the many or that process is reality. Clearly the
underlying unity of phenomena is important for him. But he also stresses the
transience of physical substances and the importance of processes and
qualities. Moreover, his underlying source of unity seems to be a law of
process and opposition; thus he seems to affirm both the unity of phenomena and
the reality of process. Criticizing his predecessors such as Pythagoras and
Xenophanes for doing research without insight, Heraclitus claims that we should
listen to the logos, which teaches that all things are one. The logos, a
principle of order and knowledge, is common to all, but the many remain
ignorant of it, like sleepwalkers unaware of the reality around them. All
things come to pass according to the logos; hence it is the law of change, or
at least its expression. Heraclitus wrote a single book, perhaps organized into
sections on cosmology, politics and ethics, and theology. Apparently, however,
he did not provide a continuous argument but a series of epigrammatic remarks
meant to reveal the nature of reality through oracular and riddling language.
Although he seems to have been a recluse without immediate disciples, he may
have stirred Parmenides to his reaction against contraries. In the late fifth
century B.C. Cratylus of Athens preached a radical Heraclitean doctrine
according to which everything is in flux and there is accordingly no knowledge
of the world. This version of Heracliteanism influenced Plato’s view of the
sensible world and caused Plato and Aristotle to attribute a radical doctrine
of flux to Heraclitus. Democritus imitated Heraclitus’s ethical sayings, and in
Hellenistic times the Stoics appealed to him for their basic principles.
herbart: philosopher who
significantly contributed to psychology and the theory of education. Rejecting
the idealism of Fichte and Hegel, he attempted to establish a form of psychology
founded on experience. The task of philosophy is the analysis of concepts given
in ordinary experience. Logic must clarify these concepts, Metaphysics should
correct them, while Aesthetics and Ethics are to complement them by an analysis
of values. Herbart advocated a form of determinism in psychology and ethics.
The laws that govern psychological processes are identical with those that
govern the heavens. He subordinated ethics to aesthetics, arguing that our
moral values originate from certain immediate and involuntary judgments of like
and dislike. The five basic ideas of morality are inner freedom, perfection,
benevolence, law, and justice or equity. Herbart’s view of education that it should aim at producing individuals
who possess inner freedom and strength of character was highly influential in nineteenth-century
Germany.
herder: philosopher, an
intellectual and literary figure central to the transition from the G.
Enlightenment to Romanticism. He was born in East Prussia and received an early
classical education. About 1762, while studying theology at the of Königsberg, he came under the influence of
Kant. He also began a lifelong friendship with Hamann, who especially
stimulated his interests in the interrelations among language, culture, and
history. After ordination as a Lutheran minister in 1765, he began his
association with the Berlin Academy, earning its prestigious “prize” for his
“Essay on the Origin of Language” 1772. In 1776 he was appointed
Generalsuperintendent of the Lutheran clergy at Weimar through the intercession
of Goethe. He was then able to focus his intellectual and literary powers on
most of the major issues of his time. Of particular note are his contributions
to psychology in Of the Cognition and Sensation of the Human Soul 1778; to the
philosophy of history and culture in Ideas for the Philosophy of the History of
Mankind 178491, perhaps his most influential work; and to philosophy in
Understanding and Experience 1799, which contains his extensive Metakritik of
Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. Herder was an intellectual maverick and
provocateur, writing when the Enlightenment conception of reason was in decline
but before its limited defense by Kant or its total rejection by Romanticism
had become entrenched in the G.-speaking world. Rejecting any rational system,
Herder’s thought is best viewed as a mosaic of certain ideas that reemerge in
various guises throughout his writings. Because of these features, Herder’s
thought has been compared with that of Rousseau. Herder’s philosophy can be
described as involving elements of naturalism, organicism, and vitalism. He
rejected philosophical explanations, appealing to the supernatural or divine,
such as the concept of the “immortal soul” in psychology, a “divine origin” of
language, or “providence” in history. He sought to discern an underlying
primordial force to account for the psychological unity of the various
“faculties.” He viewed this natural tendency toward “organic formation” as also
operative in language and culture, and as ultimately manifested in the dynamic
development of the various cultures in the form of a universal history.
Finally, he often wrote in a way that suggested the dynamic process of life
itself as the basic metaphor undergirding his thought. His influence can be
traced through Humboldt into later linguistics and through Schelling and Hegel
in the philosophy of history and later G. historicism. He anticipated elements
of vitalism in Schopenhauer and Bergson.
interpretatum:
h
“While ‘heremneia’ sounds poetic and sweet, ‘interpretatio’ sounds thomistic
and rough!” – H. P. Grice. “Plus ‘hermeneia is metaphorical.’ hermeneia: hermeneutics,
the art or theory of interpretation, as well as a type of philosophy that
starts with questions of interpretation. Originally concerned more narrowly
with interpreting sacred texts, the term acquired a much broader significance
in its historical development and finally became a philosophical position in
twentieth-century G. philosophy. There are two competing positions in
hermeneutics: whereas the first follows Dilthey and sees interpretation or
Verstehen as a method for the historical and human sciences, the second follows
Heidegger and sees it as an “ontological event,” an interaction between interpreter
and text that is part of the history of what is understood. Providing rules or
criteria for understanding what an author or native “really” meant is a typical
problem for the first approach. The interpretation of the law provides an
example for the second view, since the process of applying the law inevitably
transforms it. In general, hermeneutics is the analysis of this process and its
conditions of possibility. It has typically focused on the interpretation of
ancient texts and distant peoples, cases where the unproblematic everyday
understanding and communication cannot be assumed. Schleiermacher’s analysis of
understanding and expression related to texts and speech marks the beginning of
hermeneutics in the modern sense of a scientific methodology. This emphasis on
methodology continues in nineteenth-century historicism and culminates in
Dilthey’s attempt to ground the human sciences in a theory of interpretation,
understood as the imaginative but publicly verifiable reenactment of the subjective
experiences of others. Such a method of interpretation reveals the possibility
of an objective knowledge of human beings not accessible to empiricist inquiry
and thus of a distinct methodology for the human sciences. One result of the
analysis of interpretation in the nineteenth century was the recognition of
“the hermeneutic circle,” first developed by Schleiermacher. The circularity of
interpretation concerns the relation of parts to the whole: the interpretation
of each part is dependent on the interpretation of the whole. But
interpretation is circular in a stronger sense: if every interpretation is
itself based on interpretation, then the circle of interpretation, even if it
is not vicious, cannot be escaped. Twentieth-century hermeneutics advanced by
Heidegger and Gadamer radicalize this notion of the hermeneutic circle, seeing
it as a feature of all knowledge and activity. Hermeneutics is then no longer
the method of the human sciences but “universal,” and interpretation is part of
the finite and situated character of all human knowing. “Philosophical
hermeneutics” therefore criticizes Cartesian foundationalism in epistemology
and Enlightenment universalism in ethics, seeing science as a cultural practice
and prejudices or prejudgments as ineliminable in all judgments. Positively, it
emphasizes understanding as continuing a historical tradition, as well as
dialogical openness, in which prejudices are challenged and horizons
broadened.
hermetism, also hermeticism, a
philosophical theology whose basic impulse was the gnostic conviction that
human salvation depends on revealed knowledge gnosis of God and of the human
and natural creations. Texts ascribed to Hermes Trismegistus, a Greco-Egyptian
version of the Egyptian god Thoth, may have appeared as early as the fourth
century B.C., but the surviving Corpus Hermeticum in Grecian and Latin is a
product of the second and third centuries A.D. Fragments of the same literature
exist in Grecian, Armenian, and Coptic as well; the Coptic versions are part of
a discovery made at Nag Hammadi after World War II. All these Hermetica record
hermetism as just described. Other Hermetica traceable to the same period but
surviving in later Arabic or Latin versions deal with astrology, alchemy,
magic, and other kinds of occultism. Lactantius, Augustine, and other early
Christians cited Hermes but disagreed on his value; before Iamblichus, pagan
philosophers showed little interest. Muslims connected Hermes with a Koranic
figure, Idris, and thereby enlarged the medieval hermetic tradition, which had
its first large effects in the Latin West among the twelfth-century Platonists
of Chartres. The only ancient hermetic text then available in the West was the
Latin Asclepius, but in 1463 Ficino interrupted his epochal translation of
Plato to Latinize fourteen of the seventeen Grecian discourses in the main body
of the Corpus Hermeticum as distinct from the many Grecian fragments preserved
by Stobaeus but unknown to Ficino. Ficino was willing to move so quickly to
Hermes because he believed that this Egyptian deity stood at the head of the
“ancient theology” prisca theologia, a tradition of pagan revelation that ran
parallel to Christian scripture, culminated with Plato, and continued through
Plotinus and the later Neoplatonists. Ficino’s Hermes translation, which he
called the Pimander, shows no interest in the magic and astrology about which
he theorized later in his career. Trinitarian theology was his original
motivation. The Pimander was enormously influential in the later Renaissance,
when Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, Lodovico Lazzarelli, Jacques Lefèvre
d’Etaples, Symphorien Champier, Francesco Giorgi, Agostino Steuco, Francesco
Patrizi, and others enriched Western appreciation of Hermes. The first printed
Grecian Hermetica was the 1554 edition of Adrien Turnebus. The last before the
nineteenth century appeared in 1630, a textual hiatus that reflected a decline
in the reputation of Hermes after Isaac Casaubon proved philologically in 1614
that the Grecian Hermetica had to be post-Christian, not the remains of
primeval Egyptian wisdom. After Casaubon, hermetic ideas fell out of fashion
with most Western philosophers of the current canon, but the historiography of
the ancient theology remained influential for Newton and for lesser figures
even later. The content of the Hermetica was out of tune with the new science,
so Casaubon’s redating left Hermes to the theosophical heirs of Robert Fludd,
whose opponents Kepler, Mersenne, Gassendi turned away from the Hermetica and
similar fascinations of Renaissance humanist culture. By the nineteenth
century, only theosophists took Hermes seriously as a prophet of pagan wisdom,
but he was then rediscovered by G. students of Christianity and Hellenistic
religions, especially Richard Reitzenstein, who published his Poimandres in 4.
The ancient Hermetica are now read in the 654 edition of A. D. Nock and A. J.
Festugière.
Herzen: philosopher, he moved in his
philosophy of history from an early Hegelian rationalism to a “philosophy of
contingency,” stressing the “whirlwind of chances” in nature and in human life
and the “tousled improvisation” of the historical process. He rejected
determinism, emphasizing the “phenomenological fact” of the experienced “sense
of freedom.” Anticipating the Dostoevsky of the “Legend of the Grand
Inquisitor,” he offered an original analysis of the “escape from freedom” and
the cleaving to moral and political authority, and sketched a curiously
contemporary-sounding “emotivist” ethical theory. After 1848, disillusioned
with “bourgeois” Europe and its “selfenclosed individualism,” but equally
disillusioned with what he had come to see as the bourgeois ideal of many
European socialists, Herzen turned to the Russian peasant and the peasant
village commune as offering the best hope for a humane development of society.
In this “Russian socialism” he anticipated a central doctrine of the Russian
populists of the 1870s. Herzen stood alone in resisting the common tendency of
such otherwise different thinkers as Feuerbach, Marx, and J. S. Mill to
undervalue the historical present, to overvalue the historical future, and to
treat actual persons as means in the service of remote, merely possible
historical ends. Herzen’s own central emphasis fell powerfully and consistently
on the freedom, independence, and non-instrumentalizable value of living
persons. And he saw more clearly than any of his contemporaries that there are
no future persons, that it is only in the present that free human individuals
live and move and have their being.
heuristics, a rule or
solution adopted to reduce the complexity of computational tasks, thereby
reducing demands on resources such as time, memory, and attention. If an
algorithm is a procedure yielding a correct solution to a problem, then a
heuristic procedure may not reach a solution even if there is one, or may
provide an incorrect answer. The reliability of heuristics varies between
domains; the resulting biases are predictable, and provide information about
system design. Chess, for example, is a finite game with a finite number of
possible positions, but there is no known algorithm for finding the optimal
move. Computers and humans both employ heuristics in evaluating intermediate
moves, relying on a few significant cues to game quality, such as safety of the
king, material balance, and center control. The use of these criteria
simplifies the problem, making it computationally tractable. They are heuristic
guides, reliable but limited in success. There is no guarantee that the result
will be the best move or even good. They are nonetheless satisfactory for
competent chess. Work on human judgment indicates a similar moral. Examples of
judgmental infelicities support the view that human reasoning systematically
violates standards for statistical reasoning, ignoring base rates, sample size,
and correlations. Experimental results suggest that humans utilize judgmental
heuristics in gauging probabilities, such as representativeness, or the degree
to which an individual or event resembles a prototypical member of a category.
Such heuristics produce reasonable judgments in many cases, but are of limited
validity when measured by a Bayesian standard. Judgmental heuristics are biased
and subject to systemic errors. Experimental support for the importance of these
heuristics depends on cases in which subjects deviate from the normative
standard.
habitus:
hexis
Grecian, from hexo, ‘to have’, ‘to be disposed’, a good or bad condition,
disposition, or state. The traditional rendering, ‘habit’ Latin habitus, is
misleading, for it tends to suggest the idea of an involuntary and merely
repetitious pattern of behavior. A hexis is rather a state of character or of
mind that disposes us to deliberately choose to act or to think in a certain
way. The term acquired a quasi-technical status after Aristotle advanced the
view that hexis is the genus of virtue, both moral and intellectual. In the
Nicomachean Ethics he distinguishes hexeis from passions pathe and faculties
dunamis of the soul. If a man fighting in the front ranks feels afraid when he
sees the enemy approaching, he is undergoing an involuntary passion. His
capacity to be affected by fear on this or other occasions is part of his
makeup, one of his faculties. If he chooses to stay where his commanders placed
him, this is due to the hexis or state of character we call courage. Likewise,
one who is consistently good at identifying what is best for oneself can be
said to possess a hexis called prudence. Not all states and dispositions are
commendable. Cowardice and stupidity are also hexeis. Both in the sense of
‘state’ and of ‘possession’ hexis plays a role in Aristotle’s Categories.
Bradwardine, fellow of Merton.
tisberi -- Heytesbury: w. also
called Hentisberus, Hentisberi, Tisberi before 1313c.1372, English philosopher
and chancellor of Oxford . He wrote Sophismata “Sophisms”, Regulae solvendi
sophismata “Rules for Solving Sophisms”, and De sensu composito et diviso “On
the Composite and Divided Sense”. Other works are doubtfully attributed to him.
Heytesbury belonged to the generation immediately after Thomas Bradwardine and
Kilvington, and was among the most significant members of the Oxford
Calculators, important in the early developemnt of physics. Unlike Kilvington
but like Bradwardine, he appealed to mathematical calculations in addition to
logical and conceptual analysis in the treatment of change, motion,
acceleration, and other physical notions. His Regulae includes perhaps the most
influential treatment of the liar paradox in the Middle Ages. Heytesbury’s work
makes widespread use of “imaginary” thought experiments assuming physical
impossibilities that are yet logically consistent. His influence was especially
strong in Italy in the fifteenth century, where his works were studied widely
and commented on many times.
hierarchy, a division of mathematical
objects into subclasses in accordance with an ordering that reflects their
complexity. Around the turn of the century, analysts interested in the
“descriptive set theory” of the real numbers defined and studied two systems of
classification for sets of reals, the Borel (due to Emil Borel) and the G
hierarchies. In the 1940s, logicians interested in recursion and definability
(most importantly, Stephen Kleene) introduced and studied other hierarchies (the
arithmetic, the hyperarithmetic, and the analytical hierarchies) of reals
(identified with sets of natural numbers) and of sets of reals; the relations
between this work and the earlier work were made explicit in the 1950s by J.
Addison. Other sorts of hierarchies have been introduced in other corners of
logic. All these so-called hierarchies have at least this in common: they
divide a class of mathematical objects into subclasses subject to a natural
well-founded ordering (e.g., by subsethood) that reflects the complexity (in a
sense specific to the hierarchy under consideration) of the objects they
contain. What follows describes several hierarchies from the study of
definability. (For more historical and mathematical information see Descriptive
Set Theory by Y. Moschovakis, North-Holland Publishing Co., 1980.) (1)
Hierarchies of formulas. Consider a formal language L with quantifiers ‘E’ and
‘D’. Given a set B of formulas in L, we inductively define a hierarchy that
treats the members of B as “basic.” Set P0 % S0 % B. Suppose sets Pn and Sn of
formulas have been defined. Let Pn!1 % the set of all formulas of the form Q1u1
. . . Qmumw when u1, . . . , um are distinct variables, Q1, . . . , Qm are all
‘E’, m M 1, and w 1 Sn. Let Sn+1 % the set of all formulas of that form for Q1,
. . . , Qm all ‘D’, and w 1 Pn. Here are two such hierarchies for languages of
arithmetic. Take the logical constants to be truthfunctions, ‘E’ and ‘D’. (i)
Let L0 % the first-order language of arithmetic, based on ‘%’, a two-place
predicate-constant ‘‹’, an individual-constant for 0, functionconstants for
successor, addition, and multiplication; ‘first-order’ means that bound
variables are all first-order (ranging over individuals); we’ll allow free
second-order variables (ranging over properties or sets of individuals). Let B
% the set of bounded formulas, i.e. those formed from atomic formulas using
connectives and bounded quantification: if w is bounded so are Eu(u ‹ t / w)
and Du(u ‹ t & w). (ii) Let L1 % the second-order language of arithmetic
(formed from L0 by allowing bound second-order variables); let B % the set of
formulas in which no second-order variable is bound, and take all u1, . . . ,
um as above to be second-order variables. (2) Hierarchies of definable sets.
(i) The Arithmetic Hierarchy. For a set of natural numbers (call such a thing
‘a real’) A : A 1 P0 n [ or S0 n ] if and only if A is defined over the
standard model of arithmetic (i.e., with the constant for 0 assigned to 0,
etc., and with the first-order variables ranging over the natural numbers) by a
formula of L0 in Pn [respectively Sn] as described in (1.i). Set D0 n % P0 n
Thus: In fact, all these inclusions are proper. This hierarchy classifies the
reals simple enough to be defined by arithmetic formulas. Example: ‘Dy x % y !
y’ defines the set even of even natural numbers; the formula 1 S1, so even 1 S0
1; even is also defined by a formula in P1; so even 1 P0 1, giving even 1 D0 1.
In fact, S0 1 % the class of recursively enumerable reals, and D0 1 % the class
of recursive reals. The classification of reals under the arithmetic hierarchy
reflects complexity of defining formulas; it differs from classification in
terms of a notion of degree of unsolvability, that reflecting a notion of
comparative computational complexity; but there are connections between these
classifications. The Arithmetic Hierarchy extends to sets of reals (using a
free second-order variable in defining sentences). Example: ‘Dx (Xx & Dy y
% x ! x)’ 1 S1 and defines the set of those reals with an even number; so that
set 1 S0 1.The Analytical Hierarchy. Given a real A : A 1 P1 n [S1 1] if and
only if A is defined (over the standard model of arithmetic with second-order
variables ranging over all sets of natural numbers) by a formula of L1 in Pn
(respectively Sn) as described in (1.ii); D1 n % P1 n 3 S1 n. Similarly for a
set of reals. The inclusions pictured above carry over, replacing superscripted
0’s by 1’s. This classifies all reals and sets of reals simple enough to have
analytical (i.e., second-order arithmetic) definitions.The subscripted ‘n’ in
‘P0 n’, etc., ranged over natural numbers. But the Arithmetic Hierarchy is
extended “upward” into the transfinite by the ramified-analytical hierarchy.
Let R0 % the class of all arithmetical reals. For an ordinal a let Ra!1 % the
class of all sets of reals definable by formulas of L1 in which second-order
variables range only over reals in Ra – this constraint imposes ramification.
For a limit-ordinal l, let Rl % UaThe above hierarchies arise in arithmetic.
Similar hierarchies arise in pure set theory; e.g. by transferring the
“process” that produced the ramified analytical hierarchy to pure set theory we
obtain the constructible hierarchy, defined by Gödel in his 1939 monograph on
the continuum hypothesis.
Grice’s formalists: Hilbert, D. – G.
mathematician and philosopher of mathematics. Born in Königsberg, he also
studied and served on the faculty there, accepting Weber’s chair in mathematics
at Göttingen in 1895. He made important contributions to many different areas
of mathematics and was renowned for his grasp of the entire discipline. His
more philosophical work was divided into two parts. The focus of the first,
which occupied approximately ten years beginning in the early 1890s, was the
foundations of geometry and culminated in his celebrated Grundlagen der
Geometrie (1899). This is a rich and complex work that pursues a variety of
different projects simultaneously. Prominent among these is one whose aim is to
determine the role played in geometrical reasoning by principles of continuity.
Hilbert’s interest in this project was rooted in Kantian concerns, as is
confirmed by the inscription, in the Grundlagen, of Kant’s synopsis of his
critical philosophy: “Thus all human knowledge begins with intuition, goes from
there to concepts and ends with ideas.” Kant believed that the continuous could
not be represented in intuition and must therefore be regarded as an idea of
pure reason – i.e., as a device playing a purely regulative role in the development
of our geometrical knowledge (i.e., our knowledge of the spatial manifold of
sensory experience). Hilbert was deeply influenced by this view of Kant’s and
his work in the foundations of geometry can be seen, in large part, as an
attempt to test it by determining whether (or to what extent) pure geometry can
be developed without appeal to principles concerning the nature of the
continuous. To a considerable extent, Hilbert’s work confirmed Kant’s view –
showing, in a manner more precise than any Kant had managed, that appeals to
the continuous can indeed be eliminated from much of our geometrical reasoning.
The same basic Kantian orientation also governed the second phase of Hilbert’s
foundational work, where the focus was changed from geometry to arithmetic and
analysis. This is the phase during which Hilbert’s Program was developed. This
project began to take shape in the 1917 essay “Axiomatisches Denken.” (The 1904
paper “Über die Grundlagen der Logik und Arithmetik,” which turned away from
geometry and toward arithmetic, does not yet contain more than a glimmer of the
ideas that would later become central to Hilbert’s proof theory.) It reached
its philosophically most mature form in the 1925 essay “Über das Unendliche,”
the 1926 address “Die Grundlagen der Mathematik,” and the somewhat more popular
1930 paper “Naturerkennen und Logik.” (From a technical as opposed to a
philosophical vantage, the classical statement is probably the 1922 essay
“Neubegründung der Mathematik. Erste Mitteilung.”) The key elements of the
program are (i) a distinction between real and ideal propositions and methods
of proof or derivation; (ii) the idea that the so-called ideal methods, though,
again, playing the role of Kantian regulative devices (as Hilbert explicitly and
emphatically declared in the 1925 paper), are nonetheless indispensable for a
reasonably efficient development of our mathematical knowledge; and (iii) the
demand that the reliability of the ideal methods be established by real (or
finitary) means. As is well known, Hilbert’s Program soon came under heavy
attack from Gödel’s incompleteness theorems (especially the second), which have
commonly been regarded as showing that the third element of Hilbert’s Program
(i.e., the one calling for a finitary proof of the reliability of the ideal
systems of classical mathematics) cannot be carried out. Hilbert’s Program, a
proposal in the foundations of mathematics, named for its developer, the German
mathematician-philosopher David Hilbert, who first formulated it fully in the
1920s. Its aim was to justify classical mathematics (in particular, classical
analysis and set theory), though only as a Kantian regulative device and not as
descriptive science. The justification thus presupposed a division of classical
mathematics into two parts: the part (termed real mathematics by Hilbert) to be
regulated, and the part (termed ideal mathematics by Hilbert) serving as
regulator. Real mathematics was taken to consist of the meaningful, true
propositions of mathematics and their justifying proofs. These proofs –
commonly known as finitary proofs – were taken to be of an especially
elementary epistemic character, reducing, ultimately, to quasi-perceptual
intuitions concerning finite assemblages of perceptually intuitable signs regarded
from the point of view of their shapes and sequential arrangement. Ideal
mathematics, on the other hand, was taken to consist of sentences that do not
express genuine propositions and derivations that do not constitute genuine
proofs or justifications. The epistemic utility of ideal sentences (typically
referred to as ideal propositions, though, as noted above, they do not express
genuine propositions at all) and proofs was taken to derive not from their
meaning and/or evidentness, but rather from the role they play in some formal
algebraic or calculary scheme intended to identify or locate the real truths.
It is thus a metatheoretic function of the formal or algebraic properties
induced on those propositions and proofs by their positions in a larger derivational
scheme. Hilbert’s ideal mathematics was thus intended to bear the same relation
to his real mathematics as Kant’s faculty of pure reason was intended to bear
to his faculty of understanding. It was to be a regulative device whose proper
function is to guide and facilitate the development of our system of real
judgments. Indeed, in his 1925 essay “Über das Unendliche,” Hilbert made just
this point, noting that ideal elements do not correspond to anything in reality
but serve only as ideas “if, following Kant’s terminology, one understands as
an idea a concept of reason which transcends all experience and by means of
which the concrete is to be completed into a totality.” The structure of
Hilbert’s scheme, however, involves more than just the division of classical
mathematics into real and ideal propositions and proofs. It uses, in addition,
a subdivision of the real propositions into the problematic and the
unproblematic. Indeed, it is this subdivision of the reals that is at bottom
responsible for the introduction of the ideals. Unproblematic real
propositions, described by Hilbert as the basic equalities and inequalities of
arithmetic (e.g., ‘3 ( 2’, ‘2 ‹ 3’, ‘2 ! 3 % 3 ! 2’) together with their
sentential (and certain of their bounded quantificational) compounds, are the
evidentially most basic judgments of mathematics. They are immediately
intelligible and decidable by finitary intuition. More importantly, they can be
logically manipulated in all the ways that classical logic allows without leading
outside the class of real propositions. The characteristic feature of the
problematic reals, on the other hand, is that they cannot be so manipulated.
Hilbert gave two kinds of examples of problematic real propositions. One
consisted of universal generalizations like ‘for any non-negative integer a, a
! 1 % 1 ! a’, which Hilbert termed hypothetical judgments. Such propositions
are problematic because their denials do not bound the search for
counterexamples. Hence, the instance of the (classical) law of excluded middle
that is obtained by disjoining it with its denial is not itself a real
proposition. Consequently, it cannot be manipulated in all the ways permitted
by classical logic without going outside the class of real propositions.
Similarly for the other kind of problematic real discussed by Hilbert, which
was a bounded existential quantification. Every such sentence has as one of its
classical consequents an unbounded existential quantification of the same
matrix. Hence, since the latter is not a real proposition, the former is not a
real proposition that can be fully manipulated by classical logical means
without going outside the class of real propositions. It is therefore
“problematic.” The question why full classical logical manipulability should be
given such weight points up an important element in Hilbert’s thinking: namely,
that classical logic is regarded as the preferred logic of human thinking – the
logic of the optimally functioning human epistemic engine, the logic according
to which the human mind most naturally and efficiently conducts its inferential
affairs. It therefore has a special psychological status and it is because of
this that the right to its continued use must be preserved. As just indicated,
however, preservation of this right requires addition of ideal propositions and
proofs to their real counterparts, since applying classical logic to the truths
of real mathematics leads to a system that contains ideal as well as real
elements. Hilbert believed that to justify such an addition, all that was
necessary was to show it to be consistent with real mathematics (i.e., to show
that it proves no real proposition that is itself refutable by real means).
Moreover, Hilbert believed that this must be done by finitary means. The proof
of Gödel’s second incompleteness theorem in 1931 brought considerable pressure
to bear on this part of Hilbert’s Program even though it may not have
demonstrated its unattainability.
“what-is-hinted”
-- hint hinting. Don’t expect Cicero
used this. It’s Germanic and related to ‘hunt,’ to ‘seize.’ As if you throw
something in the air, and expect your recipient will seize it. Grice spends
quite a long section in “Retrospective epilogue” to elucidate “Emissor E
communicates that p via a hint,” versus “Emissor E communicates that p via a
suggestion.” Some level of explicitness (vide candour) is necessary. If it is
too obscure it cannot be held to have been ‘communicated’ in the first place!
Cf. Holdcroft, “Some forms of indirect communication” for the Journal of
Rhetoric. Grice had to do a bit of linguistic botany for his “E implicates that
p”: To do duty for ‘imply,’ suggest, indicate, hint, mean, -- “etc.” indirectly
or implicitly convey.
hippocrates, philosopher from Cos. Some
sixty treatises survive under his name, but it is doubtful whether he was the
author of any of them. The Hippocratic corpus contains material from a wide
variety of standpoints, ranging from an extreme empiricism that rejected all
grand theory (On Ancient Medicine) to highly speculative theoretical physiology
(On the Nature of Man, On Regimen). Many treatises were concerned with the
accurate observation and classification of diseases (Epidemics) rather than
treatment. Some texts (On the Art) defended the claims of medicine to
scientific status against those who pointed to its inaccuracies and conjectural
status; others (Oath, On Decorum) sketch a code of professional ethics. Almost
all his treatises were notable for their materialism and rejection of
supernatural “explanations”; their emphasis on observation; and their concern
with the isolation of causal factors. A large number of texts are devoted to
gynecology. The Hippocratic corpus became the standard against which later
doctors measured themselves; and, via Galen’s rehabilitation and extension of
Hippocratic method, it became the basis for Western medicine for two millennia.
Historia -- historicism, the doctrine that
knowledge of human affairs has an irreducibly historical character and that there
can be no ahistorical perspective for an understanding of human nature and
society. What is needed instead is a philosophical explication of historical
knowledge that will yield the rationale for all sound knowledge of human
activities. So construed, historicism is a philosophical doctrine originating
in the methodological and epistemological presuppositions of critical
historiography. In the mid-nineteenth century certain German thinkers (Dilthey
most centrally), reacting against positivist ideals of science and knowledge,
rejected scientistic models of knowledge, replacing them with historical ones.
They applied this not only to the discipline of history but to economics, law,
political theory, and large areas of philosophy. Initially concerned with methodological
issues in particular disciplines, historicism, as it developed, sought to work
out a common philosophical doctrine that would inform all these disciplines.
What is essential to achieve knowledge in the human sciences is to employ the
ways of understanding used in historical studies. There should in the human
sciences be no search for natural laws; knowledge there will be interpretive
and rooted in concrete historical occurrences. As such it will be inescapably
perspectival and contextual (contextualism). This raises the issue of whether
historicism is a form of historical relativism. Historicism appears to be
committed to the thesis that what for a given people is warrantedly assertible
is determined by the distinctive historical perspective in which they view life
and society. The stress on uniqueness and concrete specificity and the
rejection of any appeal to universal laws of human development reinforce that.
But the emphasis on cumulative development into larger contexts of our
historical knowledge puts in doubt an identification of historicism and
historical relativism. The above account of historicism is that of its main
proponents: Meinecke, Croce, Collingwood, Ortega y Gasset, and Mannheim. But in
the twentieth century, with Popper and Hayek, a very different conception of
historicism gained some currency. For them, to be a historicist is to believe
that there are “historical laws,” indeed even a “law of historical
development,” such that history has a pattern and even an end, that it is the
central task of social science to discover it, and that these laws should
determine the direction of political action and social policy. They attributed
(incorrectly) this doctrine to Marx but rightly denounced it as pseudo-science.
However, some later Marxists (Lukács, Korsch, and Gramsci) were historicists in
the original nonPopperian sense as was the critical theorist Adorno and hermeneuticists
such as Gadamer.
heterological: Grice and Thomson go heterological. Grice was
fascinated by Baron Russell’s remarks on heterological and its implicate. Grice
is particularly interested in Russell’s philosophy because of the usual Oxonian
antipathy towards his type of philosophising. Being an irreverent
conservative rationalist, Grice found in Russell a good point for
dissent! If paradoxes were always sets of propositions or arguments or
conclusions, they would always be meaningful. But some paradoxes are
semantically flawed and some have answers that are backed by a pseudo-argument
employing a defective lemma that lacks a truth-value. Grellings paradox,
for instance, opens with a distinction between autological and heterological
words. An autological word describes itself, e.g., polysyllabic is
polysllabic, English is English, noun is a noun, etc. A heterological word
does not describe itself, e.g., monosyllabic is not monosyllabic, Chinese is
not Chinese, verb is not a verb, etc. Now for the riddle: Is
heterological heterological or autological? If heterological is
heterological, since it describes itself, it is autological. But if
heterological is autological, since it is a word that does not describe itself,
it is heterological. The common solution to this puzzle is that
heterological, as defined by Grelling, is not what Grice a genuine
predicate ‒ Gricing is!In other words, Is heterological
heterological? is without meaning. That does not mean that an utterer, such as
Baron Russell, may implicate that he is being very witty by uttering the
Grelling paradox! There can be no predicate that applies to all and only those
predicates it does not apply to for the same reason that there can be no barber
who shaves all and only those people who do not shave themselves. Grice
seems to be relying on his friend at Christ Church, Thomson in On Some
Paradoxes, in the same volume where Grice published his Remarks about the
senses, Analytical Philosophy, Butler (ed.), Blackwell, Oxford,
104–119. Grice thought that Thomson was a genius, if ever there is one!
Plus, Grice thought that, after St. Johns, Christ Church was the second most
beautiful venue in the city of dreaming spires. On top, it is what makes Oxford
a city, and not, as villagers call it, a town. Refs.: the main source is
Grice’s essay on ‘heterologicality,’ but the keyword ‘paradox’ is useful, too,
especially as applied to Grice’s own paradox and to what, after Moore, Grice
refers to as the philosopher’s paradoxes. The H. P. Grice Papers, BANC.
Hobessian
implicatura -- hobbes:
“Hobbes is a Griceian” – Grice. Grice was a member of the Hobbes Society -- Thomas.
English philosopher whose writings, especially the English version of Leviathan
(1651), strongly influenced all of subsequent English moral and political
philosophy. He also wrote a trilogy comprising De Cive (1642; English version,
Philosophical Rudiments Concerning Government and Society, 1651), De Corpore
(On the Body, 1655), and De Homine (On Man, 1658). Together with Leviathan (the
revised Latin version of which was published in 1668), these are his major
philosophical works. However, an early draft of his thoughts, The Elements of
Law, Natural and Political(also known as Human Nature and De Corpore Politico),
was published without permission in 1650. Many of the misinterpretations of
Hobbes’s views on human nature come from mistaking this early work as
representing his mature views. Hobbes was influential not only in England, but
also on the Continent. He is the author of the third set of objections to
Descartes’s Meditations. Spinoza’s Tractatus Theologico-politicus was deeply influenced
by Hobbes, not only in its political views but also in the way it dealt with
Scripture. Hobbes was not merely a philosopher; he was mathematical tutor to
Charles II and also a classical scholar. His first published work was a
translation of Thucydides (1628), and among his latest, about a half-century
later, were translations of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey. Hobbes’s philosophical
views have a remarkably contemporary sound. In metaphysics, he holds a strong
materialist view, sometimes viewing mental phenomena as epiphenomenal, but
later moving toward a reductive or eliminative view. In epistemology he held a
sophisticated empiricism, which emphasized the importance of language for
knowledge. If not the originator of the contemporary compatibilist view of the
relationship between free will and determinism (see The Questions Concerning
Liberty, Necessity and Chance, 1656), he was one of the primary influences. He
also was one of the most important philosophers of language, explicitly noting
that language is used not only to describe the world but to express attitudes
and, performatively, to make promises and contracts. One of Hobbes’s
outstanding characteristics is his intellectual honesty. Though he may have
been timid (he himself claims that he was, explaining that his mother gave
birth to him because of fright over the coming of the Spanish Armada), his
writing shows no trace of it. During more than half his long lifetime he
engaged in many philosophical controversies, which required considerably more courage
in Hobbes’s day than at present. Both the Roman Catholic church and Oxford
University banned the reading of his books and there was talk not only of
burning his books but of burning Hobbes himself. An adequate interpretation of
Hobbes requires careful attention to his accounts of human nature, reason,
morality, and law. Although he was not completely consistent, his moral and
political philosophy is remarkably coherent. His political theory is often
thought to require an egoistic psychology, whereas it actually requires only
that most persons be concerned with their own self-interest, especially their
own preservation. It does not require that most not be concerned with other
persons as well. All that Hobbes denies is an undifferentiated natural benevolence:
“For if by nature one man should love another (that is) as man, there could no
reason be returned why every man should not equally love every man, as being
equally man.” His argument is that limited benevolence is not an adequate
foundation upon which to build a state. Hobbes’s political theory does not
require the denial of limited benevolence, he indeed includes benevolence in
his list of the passions in Leviathan: “Desire of good to another, BENEVOLENCE,
GOOD WILL, CHARITY. If to man generally, GOOD NATURE.” Psychological egoism not
only denies benevolent action, it also denies action done from a moral sense,
i.e., action done because one believes it is the morally right thing to do. But
Hobbes denies neither kind of action. But when the words [’just’ and ‘unjust’]
are applied to persons, to be just signifies as much as to be delighted in just
dealing, to study how to do righteousness, or to endeavor in all things to do
that which is just; and to be unjust is to neglect righteous dealing, or to think
it is to be measured not according to my contract, but some present benefit.
Hobbes’s pessimism about the number of just people is primarily due to his
awareness of the strength of the passions and his conviction that most people
have not been properly educated and disciplined. Hobbes is one of the few
philosophers to realize that to talk of that part of human nature which
involves the passions is to talk about human populations. He says, “though the
wicked were fewer than the righteous, yet because we cannot distinguish them,
there is a necessity of suspecting, heeding, anticipating, subjugating,
self-defending, ever incident to the most honest and fairest conditioned.”
Though we may be aware of small communities in which mutual trust and respect
make law enforcement unnecessary, this is never the case when we are dealing
with a large group of people. Hobbes’s point is that if a large group of people
are to live together, there must be a common power set up to enforce the rules
of the society. That there is not now, nor has there ever been, any large group
of people living together without such a common power is sufficient to
establish his point. Often overlooked is Hobbes’s distinction between people
considered as if they were simply animals, not modified in any way by education
or discipline, and civilized people. Though obviously an abstraction, people as
animals are fairly well exemplified by children. “Unless you give children all
they ask for, they are peevish, and cry, aye and strike their parents sometimes;
and all this they have from nature.” In the state of nature, people have no
education or training, so there is “continual fear, and danger of violent
death, and the life of man, [is] solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”
But real people have been brought up in families; they are, at least to some
degree, civilized persons, and how they will behave depends on how they are
brought up. Hobbes does not say that society is a collection of misfits and
that this is why we have all the trouble that we do – a position congenial to
the psychological egoist. But he does acknowledge that “many also (perhaps most
men) either through defect of mind, or want of education, remain unfit during
the whole course of their lives; yet have they, infants as well as those of
riper years, a human nature; wherefore man is made fit for society not by
nature, but by education.” Education and training may change people so that
they act out of genuine moral motives. That is why it is one of the most
important functions of the sovereign to provide for the proper training and
education of the citizens. In the current debate between nature and nurture, on
the question of behavior Hobbes would come down strongly on the side of
nurture. Hobbes’s concept of reason has more in common with the classical
philosophical tradition stemming from Plato and Aristotle, where reason sets
the ends of behavior, than with the modern tradition stemming from Hume where
the only function of reason is to discover the best means to ends set by the passions.
For Hobbes, reason is very complex; it has a goal, lasting selfpreservation,
and it seeks the way to this goal. It also discovers the means to ends set by
the passions, but it governs the passions, or tries to, so that its own goal is
not threatened. Since its goal is the same in all people, it is the source of
rules applying to all people. All of this is surprisingly close to the
generally accepted account of rationality. We generally agree that those who
follow their passions when they threaten their life are acting irrationally. We
also believe that everyone always ought to act rationally, though we know that
few always do so. Perhaps it was just the closeness of Hobbes’s account of
reason to the ordinary view of the matter that has led to its being so
completely overlooked. The failure to recognize that the avoidance of violent
death is the primary goal of reason has distorted almost all accounts of
Hobbes’s moral and political philosophy, yet it is a point on which Hobbes is
completely clear and consistent. He explicitly says that reason “teaches every
man to fly a contra-natural dissolution [mortem violentam] as the greatest
mischief that can arrive to nature.” He continually points out that it is a
dictate of right reason to seek peace when possible because people cannot
“expect any lasting preservation continuing thus in the state of nature, that
is, of war.” And he calls temperance and fortitude precepts of reason because
they tend to one’s preservation. It has not generally been recognized that
Hobbes regarded it as an end of reason to avoid violent death because he often
talks of the avoidance of death in a way that makes it seem merely an object of
a passion. But it is reason that dictates that one take all those measures
necessary for one’s preservation; peace if possible, if not, defense. Reason’s
dictates are categorical; it would be a travesty of Hobbes’s view to regard the
dictates of reason as hypothetical judgments addressed to those whose desire
for their own preservation happens to be greater than any conflicting desire.
He explicitly deplores the power of the irrational appetites and expressly
declares that it is a dictate of reason that one not scorn others because “most
men would rather lose their lives (that I say not, their peace) than suffer
slander.” He does not say if you would rather die than suffer slander, it is
rational to do so. Hobbes, following Aristotle, regards morality as concerned
with character traits or habits. Since morality is objective, it is only those
habits that are called good by reason that are moral virtues. “Reason declaring
peace to be good, it follows by the same reason, that all the necessary means
to peace be good also; and therefore that modesty, equity, trust, humanity,
mercy (which we have demonstrated to be necessary to peace), are good manners
or habits, that is, virtues.” Moral virtues are those habits of acting that the
reason of all people must praise. It is interesting to note that it is only in
De Homine that Hobbes explicitly acknowledges that on this account, prudence,
temperance, and courage are not moral virtues. In De Cive he distinguishes
temperance and fortitude from the other virtues and does not call them moral,
but he does not explicitly deny that they are moral virtues. But in De Homine,
he explicitly points out that one should not “demand that the courage and
prudence of the private man, if useful only to himself, be praised or held as a
virtue by states or by any other men whatsoever to whom these same are not
useful.” That morality is determined by reason and that reason has as its goal
self-preservation seems to lead to the conclusion that morality also has as its
goal self-preservation. But it is not the selfpreservation of an individual
person that is the goal of morality, but of people as citizens of a state. That
is, moral virtues are those habits of persons that make it rational for all
other people to praise them. These habits are not those that merely lead to an
individual’s own preservation, but to the preservation of all; i.e., to peace
and a stable society. Thus, “Good dispositions are those that are suitable for
entering into civil society; and good manners (that is, moral virtues) are
those whereby what was entered upon can be best preserved.” And in De Cive,
when talking of morality, he says, “The goodness of actions consist[s] in this,
that it [is] in order to peace, and the evil in this, that it [is] related to
discord.” The nature of morality is a complex and vexing question. If, like
Hobbes, we regard morality as applying primarily to those manners or habits
that lead to peace, then his view seems satisfactory. It yields, as he notes,
all of the moral virtues that are ordinarily considered such, and further, it
allows one to distinguish courage, prudence, and temperance from the moral
virtues. Perhaps most important, it provides, in almost self-evident fashion,
the justification of morality. For what is it to justify morality but to show
that reason favors it? Reason, seeking self-preservation, must favor morality,
which seeks peace and a stable society. For reason knows that peace and a
stable society are essential for lasting preservation. This simple and elegant
justification of morality does not reduce morality to prudence; rather it is an
attempt, in a great philosophical tradition stemming from Plato, to reconcile
reason or rational self-interest and morality. In the state of nature every
person is and ought to be governed only by their own reason. Reason dictates
that they seek peace, which yields the laws of nature, but it also allows them
to use any means they believe will best preserve themselves, which is what
Hobbes calls The Right of Nature. Hobbes’s insight is to see that, except when
one is in clear and present danger, in which case one has an inalienable right
to defend oneself, the best way to guarantee one’s longterm preservation is to
give up one’s right to act on one’s own decisions about what is the best way to
guarantee one’s long-term preservation and agree to act on the decisions of
that single person or group who is the sovereign. If all individuals and groups
are allowed to act on the decisions they regard as best, not accepting the
commands of the sovereign, i.e., the laws, as the overriding guide for their
actions, the result is anarchy and civil war. Except in rare and unusual cases,
uniformity of action following the decision of the sovereign is more likely to
lead to long-term preservation than diverse actions following diverse
decisions. And this is true even if each one of the diverse decisions, if
accepted by the sovereign as its decision, would have been more likely to lead
to long-term preservation than the actual decision that the sovereign made.
This argument explains why Hobbes holds that sovereigns cannot commit
injustice. Only injustice can properly be punished. Hobbes does not deny that
sovereigns can be immoral, but he does deny that the immorality of sovereigns
can properly be punished. This is important, for otherwise any immoral act by
the sovereign would serve as a pretext for punishing the sovereign, i.e., for
civil war. What is just and unjust is determined by the laws of the state, what
is moral and immoral is not. Morality is a wider concept than that of justice
and is determined by what leads to peace and stability. However, to let justice
be determined by what the reason of the people takes to lead to peace and
stability, rather than by what the reason of the sovereign decides, would be to
invite discord and civil war, which is contrary to the goal of morality: a
stable society and peace. One can create an air of paradox by saying that for
Hobbes it is immoral to attempt to punish some immoral acts, namely, those of
the sovereign. Hobbes is willing to accept this seeming paradox for he never
loses sight of the goal of morality, which is peace. To summarize Hobbes’s
system: people, insofar as they are rational, want to live out their natural
lives in peace and security. To do this, they must come together into cities or
states of sufficient size to deter attack by any group. But when people come
together in such a large group there will always be some that cannot be
trusted, and thus it is necessary to set up a government with the power to make
and enforce laws. This government, which gets both its right to govern and its
power to do so from the consent of the governed, has as its primary duty the
people’s safety. As long as the government provides this safety the citizens
are obliged to obey the laws of the state in all things. Thus, the rationality
of seeking lasting preservation requires seeking peace; this in turn requires
setting up a state with sufficient power to keep the peace. Anything that
threatens the stability of the state is to be avoided. As a practical matter,
Hobbes took God and religion very seriously, for he thought they provided some
of the strongest motives for action. Half of Leviathan is devoted to trying to
show that his moral and political views are supported by Scripture, and to
discredit those religious views that may lead to civil strife. But accepting
the sincerity of Hobbes’s religious views does not require holding that Hobbes
regarded God as the foundation of morality. He explicitly denies that atheists
and deists are subject to the commands of God, but he never denies that they
are subject to the laws of nature or of the civil state. Once one recognizes
that, for Hobbes, reason itself provides a guide to conduct to be followed by
all people, there is absolutely no need to bring in God. For in his moral and
political theory there is nothing that God can do that is not already done by
reason. Grice read most of Hobbes, both in Latin (for his Lit. Hum.) and in
English. When in “Meaning,” Grice says “this is what people are getting at with
their natural versus artificial signs” – he means Hobbes.
Hobson’s choice: willkür –
Hobson’s choice. One of Grice’s favourite words from Kant – “It’s so Kantish!”
I told Pears about this, and having found it’s cognate with English ‘choose,’
he immediately set to write an essay on the topic!” f., ‘option, discretion,
caprice,’ from MidHG. willekür,
f., ‘free choice, free will’; gee kiesen and Kur-kiesen, verb, ‘to select,’ from Middle High German kiesen, Old High German chiosan, ‘to test, try, taste for the
purpose of testing, test by tasting, select after strict examination.’
Gothic kiusan,
Anglo-Saxon ceósan,
English to choose.
Teutonic root kus (with
the change of s into r, kur in the participle erkoren, see also Kur, ‘choice’), from
pre-Teutonic gus, in
Latin gus-tus, gus-tare, Greek γεύω for γεύσω, Indian root juš, ‘to select, be fond of.’
Teutonic kausjun passed
as kusiti into
Slavonic. There is an oil portrait of Thomas Hobson, in the National Portrait
Gallery, London. He looks straight to the artist and is dressed in typical
Tudor dress, with a heavy coat, a ruff, and tie tails Thomas Hobson, a portrait
in the National Portrait Gallery, London. A Hobson's choice is a free choice in
which only one thing is offered. Because a person may refuse to accept what is
offered, the two options are taking it or taking nothing. In other words, one
may "take it or leave it". The
phrase is said to have originated with Thomas Hobson (1544–1631), a livery
stable owner in Cambridge, England, who offered customers the choice of either
taking the horse in his stall nearest to the door or taking none at all.
According to a plaque underneath a painting of Hobson donated to Cambridge
Guildhall, Hobson had an extensive stable of some 40 horses. This gave the
appearance to his customers that, upon entry, they would have their choice of
mounts, when in fact there was only one: Hobson required his customers to
choose the horse in the stall closest to the door. This was to prevent the best
horses from always being chosen, which would have caused those horses to become
overused.[1] Hobson's stable was located on land that is now owned by St
Catharine's College, Cambridge. Early
appearances in writing According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the first known
written usage of this phrase is in The rustick's alarm to the Rabbies, written
by Samuel Fisher in 1660:[3] If in this
Case there be no other (as the Proverb is) then Hobson's choice...which is,
chuse whether you will have this or none.
It also appears in Joseph Addison's paper The Spectator (No. 509 of 14
October 1712); and in Thomas Ward's 1688 poem "England's
Reformation", not published until after Ward's death. Ward wrote: Where to elect there is but one, 'Tis
Hobson's choice—take that, or none. The term "Hobson's choice" is
often used to mean an illusion of choice, but it is not a choice between two
equivalent options, which is a Morton's fork, nor is it a choice between two
undesirable options, which is a dilemma. Hobson's choice is one between
something or nothing. John Stuart Mill,
in his book Considerations on Representative Government, refers to Hobson's
choice: When the individuals composing
the majority would no longer be reduced to Hobson's choice, of either voting
for the person brought forward by their local leaders, or not voting at all. In
another of his books, The Subjection of Women, Mill discusses marriage: Those who attempt to force women into
marriage by closing all other doors against them, lay themselves open to a
similar retort. If they mean what they say, their opinion must evidently be,
that men do not render the married condition so desirable to women, as to
induce them to accept it for its own recommendations. It is not a sign of one's
thinking the boon one offers very attractive, when one allows only Hobson's
choice, 'that or none'.... And if men are determined that the law of marriage
shall be a law of despotism, they are quite right in point of mere policy, in
leaving to women only Hobson's choice. But, in that case, all that has been
done in the modern world to relax the chain on the minds of women, has been a
mistake. They should have never been allowed to receive a literary
education.[7] A Hobson's choice is
different from: Dilemma: a choice
between two or more options, none of which is attractive. False dilemma: only
certain choices are considered, when in fact there are others. Catch-22: a
logical paradox arising from a situation in which an individual needs something
that can only be acquired by not being in that very situation. Morton's fork,
and a double bind: choices yield equivalent, and often undesirable, results.
Blackmail and extortion: the choice between paying money (or some non-monetary
good or deed) or risk suffering an unpleasant action. A common error is to use
the phrase "Hobbesian choice" instead of "Hobson's choice",
confusing the philosopher Thomas Hobbes with the relatively obscure Thomas
Hobson (It's possible they may be
confusing "Hobson's choice" with "Hobbesian trap", which
refers to the trap into which a state falls when it attacks another out of
fear).[11] Notwithstanding that confused usage, the phrase "Hobbesian
choice" is historically incorrect. Common law In Immigration and
Naturalization Service v. Chadha (1983), Justice Byron White dissented and
classified the majority's decision to strike down the "one-house
veto" as unconstitutional as leaving Congress with a Hobson's choice.
Congress may choose between "refrain[ing] from delegating the necessary
authority, leaving itself with a hopeless task of writing laws with the
requisite specificity to cover endless special circumstances across the entire
policy landscape, or in the alternative, to abdicate its lawmaking function to
the executive branch and independent agency". In Philadelphia v. New Jersey, 437 U.S. 617
(1978),[15] the majority opinion ruled that a New Jersey law which prohibited
the importation of solid or liquid waste from other states into New Jersey was
unconstitutional based on the Commerce Clause. The majority reasoned that New
Jersey cannot discriminate between the intrastate waste and the interstate
waste with out due justification. In dissent, Justice Rehnquist stated: [According to the Court,] New Jersey must
either prohibit all landfill operations, leaving itself to cast about for a
presently nonexistent solution to the serious problem of disposing of the waste
generated within its own borders, or it must accept waste from every portion of
the United States, thereby multiplying the health and safety problems which would
result if it dealt only with such wastes generated within the State. Because
past precedents establish that the Commerce Clause does not present appellees
with such a Hobson's choice, I dissent.
In Monell v. Department of Social Services of the City of New York, 436
U.S. 658 (1978)[16] the judgement of the court was that [T]here was ample support for Blair's view
that the Sherman Amendment, by putting municipalities to the Hobson's choice of
keeping the peace or paying civil damages, attempted to impose obligations to
municipalities by indirection that could not be imposed directly, thereby
threatening to "destroy the government of the states". In the South African Constitutional Case MEC
for Education, Kwa-Zulu Natal and Others v Pillay, 2008 (1) SA 474 (CC)[17]
Chief Justice Langa for the majority of the Court (in Paragraph 62 of the
judgement) writes that: The traditional
basis for invalidating laws that prohibit the exercise of an obligatory
religious practice is that it confronts the adherents with a Hobson's choice
between observance of their faith and adherence to the law. There is however
more to the protection of religious and cultural practices than saving
believers from hard choices. As stated above, religious and cultural practices
are protected because they are central to human identity and hence to human
dignity which is in turn central to equality. Are voluntary practices any less
a part of a person's identity or do they affect human dignity any less
seriously because they are not mandatory?
In Epic Systems Corp. v. Lewis (2018), Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg
dissented and added in one of the footnotes that the petitioners "faced a
Hobson’s choice: accept arbitration on their employer’s terms or give up their
jobs". In Trump et al v. Mazars USA,
LLP, US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia No. 19-5142, 49 (D.C.
Cir. 11 October 2019) ("[w]orse still, the dissent’s novel approach would
now impose upon the courts the job of ordering the cessation of the legislative
function and putting Congress to the Hobson’s Choice of impeachment or
nothing."). Popular culture
Hobson's Choice is a full-length stage comedy written by Harold Brighouse in
1915. At the end of the play, the central character, Henry Horatio Hobson,
formerly a wealthy, self-made businessman but now a sick and broken man, faces
the unpalatable prospect of being looked after by his daughter Maggie and her
husband Will Mossop, who used to be one of Hobson's underlings. His other
daughters have refused to take him in, so he has no choice but to accept
Maggie's offer which comes with the condition that he must surrender control of
his entire business to her and her husband, Will. The play was adapted for film several times,
including versions from 1920 by Percy Nash, 1931 by Thomas Bentley, 1954 by
David Lean and a 1983 TV movie. Alfred
Bester's 1952 short story Hobson's Choice describes a world in which time
travel is possible, and the option is to travel or to stay in one's native
time. In the 1951 Robert Heinlein book
Between Planets, the main character Don Harvey incorrectly mentions he has a
Hobson's choice. While on a space station orbiting Earth, Don needs to get to
Mars, where his parents are. The only rockets available are back to Earth
(where he is not welcome) or on to Venus.
In The Grim Grotto by Lemony Snicket, the Baudelaire orphans and Fiona
are said to be faced with a Hobson's Choice when they are trapped by the
Medusoid Mycelium Mushrooms in the Gorgonian Grotto: "We can wait until
the mushrooms disappear, or we can find ourselves poisoned".In Bram
Stoker's short story "The Burial of Rats", the narrator advises he
has a case of Hobson's Choice while being chased by villains. The story was
written around 1874. The Terminal
Experiment, a 1995 science fiction novel by Robert J. Sawyer, was originally
serialised under the title Hobson's Choice.
Half-Life, a video game created in 1998 by Valve includes a Hobson's
Choice in the final chapter. A human-like entity, known only as the 'G-Man',
offers the protagonist Gordon Freeman a job, working under his control. If
Gordon were to refuse this offer, he would be killed in an unwinnable battle,
thus creating the 'illusion of free choice'.
In Early Edition, the lead character Gary Hobson is named after the
choices he regularly makes during his adventures. In an episode of Inspector George Gently, a
character claims her resignation was a Hobson's choice, prompting a debate
among other police officers as to who Hobson is. In "Cape May" (The Blacklist season
3, episode 19), Raymond Reddington describes having faced a Hobson's choice in
the previous episode where he was faced with the choice of saving Elizabeth
Keen's baby and losing Elizabeth Keen or losing them both. In his 1984 novel Job: A Comedy of Justice,
Robert A. Heinlein's protagonist is said to have Hobson's Choice when he has
the options of boarding the wrong cruise ship or staying on the island. Remarking about the 1909 Ford Model T, US
industrialist Henry Ford is credited as saying “Any customer can have a car
painted any color that he wants so long as it is black”[19] In 'The Jolly Boys' Outing', a 1989 Christmas
Special episode of Only Fools and Horses, Alan states they are left with
Hobson's Choice after their coach has blown up (due to a dodgy radio, supplied
by Del). There's a rail strike, the last bus has gone, and their coach is out
of action. They can't hitch-hike as there's 27 of them, and the replacement
coach doesn't come till the next morning, thus their only choice is to stay in
Margate for the night. See also
Buckley's Chance Buridan's ass Boulwarism Death and Taxes Locus of control
Morton's fork No-win situation Standard form contract Sophie's Choice Zugzwang
References Barrett, Grant.
"Hobson's Choice", A Way with Words
"Thomas Hobson: Hobson's Choice and Hobson's Conduit".
Historyworks. See Samuel Fisher.
"Rusticus ad academicos in exercitationibus expostulatoriis, apologeticis
quatuor the rustick's alarm to the rabbies or The country correcting the
university and clergy, and ... contesting for the truth ... : in four
apologeticall and expostulatory exercitations : wherein is contained, as well a
general account to all enquirers, as a general answer to all opposers of the
most truly catholike and most truly Christ-like Chistians called Quakers, and of
the true divinity of their doctrine : by way of entire entercourse held in
special with four of the clergies chieftanes, viz, John Owen ... Tho. Danson
... John Tombes ... Rich. Baxter ." Europeana. Retrieved 8 August 2014. See The Spectator with Notes and General
Index, the Twelve Volumes Comprised in Two. Philadelphia: J.J. Woodward. 1832.
p. 272. Retrieved 4 August 2014. via Google Books Ward, Thomas (1853). English Reformation, A
Poem. New York: D.& J. Sadlier & Co. p. 373. Retrieved 8 August 2014.
via Internet Archive See Mill, John
Stuart (1861). Considerations on Representative Government (1 ed.). London:
Parker, Son, & Bourn. p. 145. Retrieved 23 June 2014. via Google Books Mill, John Stuart (1869). The Subjection of
Women (1869 first ed.). London: Longmans, Green, Reader & Dyer. pp. 51–2.
Retrieved 28 July 2014. Hobbes, Thomas
(1982) [1651]. Leviathan, or the Matter, Form, and Power of a Commonwealth,
Ecclesiastical and Civil. New York: Viking Press. Martinich, A. P. (1999). Hobbes: A Biography.
Cambridge, UK; New York: Cambridge University Press. ISBN
978-0-521-49583-7. Martin, Gary.
"Hobson's Choice". The Phrase Finder. Archived from the original on 6
March 2009. Retrieved 7 August 2010.
"The Hobbesian Trap" (PDF). 21 September 2010. Retrieved 8
April 2012. "Sunday
Lexico-Neuroticism". boaltalk.blogspot.com. 27 July 2008. Retrieved 7
August 2010. Levy, Jacob (10 June 2003).
"The Volokh Conspiracy". volokh.com. Retrieved 7 August 2010. Oxford English Dictionary, Editor:
"Amazingly, some writers have confused the obscure Thomas Hobson with his
famous contemporary, the philosopher Thomas Hobbes. The resulting malapropism
is beautifully grotesque". Garner, Bryan (1995). A Dictionary of Modern
Legal Usage (2nd ed.). Oxford University Press. pp. 404–405.
https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/437/617/ "Monell v. Department of Soc. Svcs. -
436 U.S. 658 (1978)". justicia.com. US Supreme Court. 6 June 1978. 436
U.S. 658. Retrieved 19 February 2014.
"MEC for Education: Kwazulu-Natal and Others v Pillay (CCT 51/06)
[2007] ZACC 21; 2008 (1) SA 474 (CC); 2008 (2) BCLR 99 (CC) (5 October
2007)". www.saflii.org. Snicket,
Lemony (2004) The Grim Grotto, New York: HarperCollins Publishers p.145 - 147 Henry Ford in collaboration with Samuel
Crowther in My Life and Work. 1922. Page 72 External links Chisholm, Hugh, ed.
(1911). "Hobson's Choice" . Encyclopædia Britannica. 13 (11th ed.).
Cambridge University Press. p. 553. Categories: English-language idiomsFree
willMetaphors referring to peopleDilemmas. Refs.: H. P. Grice and D. F. Pears,
The philosophy of action, Pears, Choosing and deciding. The H. P. Grice Papers,
BANC.
hölderlin:
studied
at Tübingen, where he befriended Schelling and Hegel, and at Jena, where he met
Schiller and Fichte. Since Hölderlin never held an academic position or
published any of his philosophical writings, his influence on philosophy was
primarily through his personality, conversations, and letters. He is widely
viewed as the author of the so-called “Oldest System-Program of German
Idealism,” a fragment that culminates in an exaltation of poetry and a call for
a new “mythology of reason.” This theme is illustrated in the novel Hyperion
(1797/99), which criticizes the subjective heroism of ethical idealism,
emphasizes the sacred character of nature, and attempts to conflate religion
and art as “overseers of reason.” In his veneration of nature and objections to
Fichte’s treatment of the “Not-I,” Hölderlin echoed Schelling’s
Naturphilosophie. In his Hellenism and his critique of the “philosophy of
reflection” (see Ueber Sein und Urteil [“On Being and Judgment”]) he
anticipated and influenced Hegel. In Hölderlin’s exaltation of art as alone
capable of revealing the nature of reality, he betrayed a debt to Schiller and
anticipated Romanticism. However, his view of the poet possesses a tragic
dimension quite foreign to Schelling and the younger Romantics. The artist, as
the interpreter of divine nature, mediates between the gods and men, but for
this very reason is estranged from his fellows. This aspect of Hölderlin’s thought
influenced Heidegger.
Totum
– Those who are inclined to Grecianisms will use “holism,” but unlike
‘totum,’ ‘holos,’ being from EASTERN Europe, did not develop in Western Europe,
whereas ‘totum’ gives us plenty of cognates in Grice’s vernacular, via
Anglo-Norman, ‘totality,’ for example. From Grecian ‘holon,’ Latin ‘totum.’ “One
of Quine’s dogma of empiricism – the one I and Sir Peter had not the slightest
intereset in!” – Grice. Holism is one of a wide variety of theses that in one
way or another affirm the equal or greater reality or the explanatory necessity
of the whole of some system in relation to its parts. In philosophy, the issues
of holism (the word is more reasonably, but less often, spelled ‘wholism’) have
appeared Hohenheim, Theophrastus Bombastus von holism 390 4065h-l.qxd
08/02/1999 7:39 AM Page 390 traditionally in the philosophy of biology, of
psychology, and especially of the human sciences. In the context of
description, holism with respect to some system maintains that the whole has
some properties that its parts lack. This doctrine will ordinarily be trivially
true unless it is further held, in the thesis of descriptive emergentism, that
these properties of the whole cannot be defined by properties of the parts. The
view that all properties of the wholes in question can be so defined is
descriptive individualism. In the context of explanation, holism with respect
to some object or system maintains either (1) that the laws of the more complex
cases in it are not deducible by way of any composition laws or laws of
coexistence from the laws of the less complex cases (e.g., that the laws of the
behavior of people in groups are not deducible by composition laws or laws of
coexistence from the laws of solitary behavior), or (2) that all the variables
that constitute the system interact with each other. This denial of
deducibility is known also as metaphysical or methodological holism, whereas
affirming the deducibility is methodological individualism. In a special case
of explanatory holism that presupposes descriptive emergentism, holism is
sometimes understood as the thesis that with respect to some system the whole
has properties that interact “back” with the properties of its parts. In the
philosophy of biology, any of these forms of holism may be known as vitalism,
while in the philosophy of psychology they have been called Gestalt doctrine.
In the philosophy of the social sciences, where ‘holism’ has had its most
common use in philosophy, the many issues have often been reduced to that of
metaphysical holism versus methodological individualism. This terminology
reflected the positivists’ belief that holism was non-empirical in postulating
social “wholes” or the reality of society beyond individual persons and their
properties and relations (as in Durkheim and other, mostly Continental,
thinkers), while individualism was non-metaphysical (i.e., empirical) in
relying ultimately only on observable properties in describing and explaining
social phenomena. More recently, ‘holism’ has acquired additional uses in
philosophy, especially in epistemology and philosophy of language. Doxastic or
epistemic holism are theses about the “web of belief,” usually something to the
effect that a person’s beliefs are so connected that their change on any topic
may affect their content on any other topic or, perhaps, that the beliefs of a
rational person are so connected. Semantic or meaning holism have both been
used to denote either the thesis that the meanings of all terms (or sentences)
in a language are so connected that any change of meaning in one of them may
change any other meaning, or the thesis that changes of belief entail changes
of meaning. Cited by Grice, “In defense of a dogma” “My defense of the other dogma
must be left for another longer day” Duhem, Pierre-Maurice-Marie, physicist who
wrote extensively on the history and philosophy of science. Like Georg Helm,
Wilhelm Ostwald, and others, he was an energeticist, believing generalized
thermodynamics to be the foundation of all of physics and chemistry. Duhem
spent his whole scientific life advancing energetics, from his failed
dissertation in physics a version of which was accepted as a dissertation in
mathematics, published as Le potentiel thermodynamique 6, to his mature
treatise, Traité d’énergétique 1. His scientific legacy includes the
Gibbs-Duhem and DuhemMargules equations. Possibly because his work was
considered threatening by the Parisian scientific establishment or because of
his right-wing politics and fervent Catholicism, he never obtained the position
he merited in the intellectual world of Paris. He taught at the provincial
universities of Lille, Rennes, and, finally, Bordeaux. Duhem’s work in the
history and philosophy of science can be viewed as a defense of the aims and
methods of energetics; whatever Duhem’s initial motivation, his historical and
philosophical work took on a life of its own. Topics of interest to him
included the relation between history of science and philosophy of science, the
nature of conceptual change, the historical structure of scientific knowledge,
and the relation between science and religion. Duhem was an anti-atomist or
anti-Cartesian; in the contemporary debates about light and magnetism, Duhem’s
anti-atomist stance was also directed against the work of Maxwell. According to
Duhem, atomists resolve the bodies perceived by the senses into smaller,
imperceptible bodies. The explanation of observable phenomena is then referred
to these imperceptible bodies and their motions, suitably combined. Duhem’s
rejection of atomism was based on his instrumentalism or fictionalism: physical
theories are not explanations but representations; they do not reveal the true
nature of matter, but give general rules of which laws are particular cases;
theoretical propositions are not true or false, but convenient or inconvenient.
An important reason for treating physics as nonexplanatory was Duhem’s claim
that there is general consensus in physics and none in metaphysics thus his insistence on the autonomy of
physics from metaphysics. But he also thought that scientific representations
become more complete over time until they gain the status of a natural
classification. Accordingly, Duhem attacked the use of models by some
scientists, e.g. Faraday and Maxwell. Duhem’s rejection of atomism was coupled
with a rejection of inductivism, the doctrine that the only physical principles
are general laws known through induction, based on observation of facts.
Duhem’s rejection forms a series of theses collectively known as the Duhem
thesis: experiments in physics are observations of phenomena accompanied by
interpretations; physicists therefore do not submit single hypotheses, but
whole groups of them, to the control of experiment; thus, experimental evidence
alone cannot conclusively falsify hypotheses. For similar reasons, Duhem
rejected the possibility of a crucial experiment. In his historical studies,
Duhem argued that there were no abrupt discontinuities between medieval and
early modern science the so-called
continuity thesis; that religion played a positive role in the development of
science in the Latin West; and that the history of physics could be seen as a
cumulative whole, defining the direction in which progress could be expected.
Duhem’s philosophical works were discussed by the founders of twentieth-century
philosophy of science, including Mach, Poincaré, the members of the Vienna
Circle, and Popper. A revival of interest in Duhem’s philosophy began with
Quine’s reference in 3 to the Duhem thesis also known as the Duhem-Quine
thesis. As a result, Duhem’s philosophical works were tr. into English as The Aim and Structure of Physical Theory 4
and To Save the Phenomena 9. By contrast, few of Duhem’s extensive historical
works Les origines de la statique 2
vols., 608, Études sur Léonard de Vinci 3 vols., 613, and Système du monde 10
vols., 359, e.g. have been tr., with
five volumes of the Système du monde actually remaining in manuscript form until
459. Unlike his philosophical work, Duhem’s historical work was not
sympathetically received by his influential contemporaries, notably George
Sarton. His supposed main conclusions were rejected by the next generation of
historians of science, who presented modern science as discontinuous with that
of the Middle Ages. This view was echoed by historically oriented philosophers
of science who, from the early 0s, emphasized discontinuities as a recurrent
feature of change in science e.g. Kuhn
in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions 2.
hologram: the image of an
object in three dimensions created and reproduced by the use of lasers.
Holography is a method for recording and reproducing such images. Holograms are
remarkable in that, unlike normal photographs, every part of them contains the
complete image but in reduced detail. Thus a small square cut from a hologram
can still be laser-illuminated to reveal the whole scene originally
holographed, albeit with loss of resolution. This feature made the hologram
attractive to proponents of the thesis of distribution of function in the
brain, who argued that memories are like holograms, not being located in a
single precise engram – as claimed by advocates of localization of function –
but distributed across perhaps all of the cortex. Although intriguing, the
holographic model of memory storage failed to gain acceptance. Current views
favor D. O. Hebb’s “cell assembly” concept, in which memories are stored in the
connections between a group of neurons.
homœmerum:
an
adjective Grice adored, from Grecian homoiomeres, ‘of like parts’). Aristotle: “A lump of bronze differs
from a statue in being homoeo-merous. The lump of bronze is
divisible into at least two partial lumps of bronze, whereas the statue is not
divisible into statues.” Having parts, no matter how small, that share
the constitutive properties of the whole. The derivative abstract noun is
‘homœomeria’. The Grecian forms of the adjective and of its corresponding
privative ‘anhomoeomerous’ are used by Aristotle to distinguish between (a) non-uniform
parts of living things, e.g., limbs and organs, and (b) biological stuffs,
e.g., blood, bone, sap. In spite of being composed of the four elements, each
biological stuff, when taken individually and without admixtures, is
through-and-through F, where F represents the cluster of the constitutive
properties of that stuff. Thus, if a certain physical volume qualifies as
blood, all its mathematically possible sub-volumes, regardless of size, also
qualify as blood. Blood is thus homoeomerous. By contrast, a face or a stomach
or a leaf are an-homoeomerous: the parts of a face are not a face, etc. In Aristotle’s
system, the homœomeria of the biological stuff is tied to his doctrine of the
infinite divisibility of matter. The homœomerum-heterormerum distinction is prefigured
in Plato (Protagoras 329d). ‘Homœomerous’ is narrow in its application than ‘homogeneous’
and ‘uniform’. We speak of a homogeneous entity even if the properties at issue
are identically present only in samples that fall above a certain size. The colour
of the sea can be homogeneously or uniformly blue; but it is heteromerously
blue. “homoiomeres” and “homoiomereia” also occur –in the ancient sources for a
pre-Aristotelian philosopher, Anaxagoras of Clazomenae, with reference to the
constituent things (“chremata”) involved in his scheme of universal mixture.
Moreover, homœeomeria plays a significant role outside ancient Grecian (or
Griceian) philosophy, notably in twentieth-century accounts of the contrast
between mass terms and count terms or sortals, and the discussion was
introduced by Grice. ANAXAGORAS' THEORY OF
MATTER-I. 17 homoeomerous in Anaxagoras' system falls into one of
these three class. (I. 834), for example, says: 'When he ... by FM Cornford - 1930. Refs. Grice, “Cornford on Anaxagoras.”
homomorphism: cf. isomorphism
-- in Grice’s model theory of conversation, a structure-preserving mapping from
one structure to another: thus the demonstratum is isomorph with the implicaturum,
since every conversational implicaturum can be arrived via an argumentum. A
structure consists of a domain of objects together with a function specifying
interpretations, with respect to that domain, of the relation symbols, function
symbols, and individual symbols of a given calculus. Relations, functions, and
individuals in different structures for a system like System GHP correspond to
one another if they are interpretations of the same symbol of GHP. To call a
mapping “structure-preserving” is to say, first, that if objects in the first
structure bear a certain relation to one another, then their images in the
second structure (under the mapping) bear the corresponding relation to one
another; second, that the value of a function for a given object (or ntuple of
objects) in the first structure has as its image under the mapping the value of
the corresponding function for the image of the object (or n-tuple of images)
in the second structure; and third, that the image in the second structure of
an object in the first is the corresponding object. An isomorphism is a
homomorphism that is oneto-one and whose inverse is also a homomorphism.
co-substantia: homoousios.
Athanasius -- early Christian father, bishop, and a leading protagonist in the disputes
concerning Christ’s relationship to God. Through major works like On the
Incarnation, Against the Arians, and Letters on the Holy Spirit, Athanasius
contributed greatly to the classical doctrines of the Incarnation and the
Trinity. Opposing all forms of Arianism, which denies Christ’s divinity and
reduced him to what Grice would call a “creature,” Athanasius teaches, in the
language of the Nicene Creed, that Christ the Son, and likewise the Holy
Spirit, are of the same being as God the Father, cosubstantialis, “homoousios.”
Thus with terminology and concepts drawn from Grecian and Graeco-Roman
philosophy, Athanasius helps to forge the distinctly Christian and
un-Hellenistic doctrine of the eternal tri-une God (“credo quia absurdum est”) who
became enfleshed in time and matter and restored humanity to immortality,
forfeited through sin, by involvement in its condition of corruption and decay.
Homoousios (Greek, ‘of the same substance’), a concept central to the Christian
doctrine of the Trinity, enshrined in the Nicene Creed (Nicaea, “Holy, Holy,
Holy”). It attests that God the Son (and by extension the Spirit) is of one and
the same being or substance (ousia) as the Father. Reflecting the insistence of
Athanasius against Arianism that Christ is God’s eternal, co-equal Son and not
a “creature,” as Grice uses the term, the Nicene “homoousios” is also to be
differentiated from a rival formula, “homoiousios” (Grecian, ‘of SIMILAR substance’),
which affirms merely the Son’s LIKENESS in being to God. Though notoriously and
superficially an argument over one Greek iota, the issue was philosophically
profound and crucial whether or not Jesus of Nazareth incarnated God’s own
being, revealed God’s own truth, and mediated God’s own salvation. If x=x, x is
like x. A horse is like a horse. Grice on implicaturum. “There is only an implicaturum
to the effect that if a horse is a horse a horse is not like a horse.”
“Similarly for Christ and God.” Cicero saw this when he philosophised on ‘idem’
and ‘similis.’
homuncularism
-- Grice on the ‘fallacia homunculi’ Grice borrows ‘homunculus’ from St.
Augustine, for a miniature ‘homo’ held to inhabit the brain (or some other
organ) who perceives all the inputs to the sense organs and initiates all the
commands to the muscles. Any theory that posits such an internal agent risks an
infinite regress (what Grice, after Augustine, calls the ‘fallacia homunculi’) since
we can ask whether there is a little man in the little man’s head, responsible
for his perception and action, and so on. Many familiar views of the mind and
its activities seem to require a homunculus. E. g. models of visual perception
that posit an inner picture as its product apparently require a homunculus to
look at the picture, and models of action that treat intentions as commands to
the muscles apparently require a homunculus to issue the commands. It is never
an easy matter to determine whether a theory is committed to the existence of a
homunculus that vitiates the theory, and in some circumstances, a homunculus
can be legitimately posited at intermediate levels of theory. As Grice says, a
homunculus is, shall we say, a bogey-man (to use a New-World expression) only if
he duplicates entire the talents he is rung in to explain. If one can get a
relatively ignorant, narrow-minded, blind homunculus to produce the intelligent
behaviour of the whole, this is progress. Grice calls a theory (in philosophoical
psychology) that posit such a homunculus “homuncular functionalism.” Paracelsus is credited with the first mention of the
homunculus in De homunculis (c. 1529–1532),
and De natura rerum (1537).
Refs.: H. P. Grice, “Paracelsus.”
horkheimer: philosopher, the leading
theorist of the first generation of the Frankfurt School of critical theory.
Both as director of the Institute for Social Research and in his early
philosophical essays published in the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung,
Horkheimer set the agenda for the collaborative work of the Frankfurt School in
the social sciences, including analyses of the developments of state
capitalism, the family, modern culture, and fascism. His programmatic essays on
the relation of philosophy and the social sciences long provided the
philosophical basis for Frankfurt School social criticism and research and have
profoundly influenced Habermas’s reformulation of Frankfurt School critical
theory. In these essays, such as “The Present Situation of Social Philosophy
and the Tasks of an Institute for Social Research” (1931), Horkheimer
elaborated a cooperative relation between philosophy and the social sciences
through an interdisciplinary historical materialism. His “Traditional and
Critical Theory” (1937) develops the distinction between “critical” and
“traditional” theories in terms of basic goals: critical theories aim at
emancipating human beings rather than describing reality as it is now. In the
darkest days of World War II Horkheimer began collaborating with Adorno on The
Dialectic of Enlightenment (1941), in which they see the origins of modern
reason and autonomy in the domination of nature and the inner self. This
genealogy of modern reason argues that myth and enlightenment are inseparably
“entwined,” a view proposed primarily to explain the catastrophe in which
Europe found itself. While Horkheimer thought that a revised notion of Hegelian
dialectics might lead beyond this impasse, he never completed this positive
project. Instead, he further developed the critique of instrumental reason in
such works as Eclipse of Reason (1947), where he argues that modern
institutions, including democracy, are under the sway of formal and
instrumental rationality and the imperatives of self-preservation. While he did
little new work after this period, he turned at the end of his life to a
philosophical reinterpretation of religion and the content of religious
experience and concepts, developing a negative theology of the “completely
Other.” His most enduring influence is his clear formulation of the
epistemology of practical and critical social inquiry oriented to human
emancipation.
Umanesimo
rinascimentale -- humanism: Grice distinguishes between a human and a person –
so he is more of a personalist than a humanism. “But the distinction is
implicatural.” He was especially keen on Italian humanism. a set of presuppositions that assigns to human
beings a special position in the scheme of things. Not just a school of thought
or a collection of specific beliefs or doctrines, humanism is rather a general
perspective from which the world is viewed. That perspective received a gradual
yet persistent articulation during different historical periods and continues
to furnish a central leitmotif of Western civilization. It comes into focus
when it is compared with two competing positions. On the one hand, it can be
contrasted with the emphasis on the supernatural, transcendent domain, which
considers humanity to be radically dependent on divine order. On the other
hand, it resists the tendency to treat humanity scientifically as part of the
natural order, on a par with other living organisms. Occupying the middle
position, humanism discerns in human beings unique capacities and abilities, to
be cultivated and celebrated for their own sake. The word ‘humanism’ came into
general use only in the nineteenth century but was applied to intellectual and
cultural developments in previous eras. A teacher of classical languages and
literatures in Renaissance Italy was described as umanista (contrasted with
legista, teacher of law), and what we today call “the humanities,” in the
fifteenth century was called studia humanitatis, which stood for grammar,
rhetoric, history, literature, and moral philosophy. The inspiration for these
studies came from the rediscovery of ancient Greek and Latin texts; Plato’s
complete works were translated for the first time, and Aristotle’s philosophy
was studied in more accurate versions than those available during the Middle
Ages. The unashamedly humanistic flavor of classical writings had a tremendous
impact on Renaissance scholars. Here, one felt no weight of the supernatural
pressing on the human mind, demanding homage and allegiance. Humanity – with
all its distinct capacities, talents, worries, problems, possibilities – was
the center of interest. It has been said that medieval thinkers philosophized
on their knees, but, bolstered by the new studies, they dared to stand up and
to rise to full stature. Instead of devotional Church Latin, the medium of
expression was the people’s own language – Italian, French, German, English.
Poetical, lyrical self-expression gained momentum, affecting all areas of life.
New paintings showed great interest in human form. Even while depicting
religious scenes, Michelangelo celebrated the human body, investing it with
instrinsic value and dignity. The details of daily life – food, clothing,
musical instruments – as well as nature and landscape – domestic and exotic –
were lovingly examined in paintings and poetry. Imagination was stirred by
stories brought home by the discoverers of new lands and continents, enlarging
the scope of human possibilities as exhibited in the customs and the natural
environments of strange, remote peoples. The humanist mode of thinking deepened
and widened its tradition with the advent of eighteenth-century thinkers. They
included French philosophes like Voltaire, Diderot, and Rousseau, and other
European and American figures – Bentham, Hume, Lessing, Kant, Franklin, and
Jefferson. Not always agreeing with one another, these thinkers nevertheless
formed a family united in support of such values as freedom, equality,
tolerance, secularism, and cosmopolitanism. Although they championed
untrammeled use of the mind, they also wanted it to be applied in social and
political reform, encouraging individual creativity and exalting the active
over the contemplative life. They believed in the perfectibility of human nature,
the moral sense and responsibility, and the possibility of progress. The
optimistic motif of perfectibility endured in the thinking of nineteenth- and
twentiethcentury humanists, even though the accelerating pace of
industrialization, the growth of urban populations, and the rise in crime,
nationalistic squabbles, and ideological strife leading to largescale inhumane
warfare often put in question the efficacy of humanistic ideals. But even the
depressing run of human experience highlighted the appeal of those ideals,
reinforcing the humanistic faith in the values of endurance, nobility,
intelligence, moderation, flexibility, sympathy, and love. Humanists attribute
crucial importance to education, conceiving of it as an all-around development
of personality and individual talents, marrying science to poetry and culture
to democracy. They champion freedom of thought and opinion, the use of
intelligence and pragmatic research in science and technology, and social and
political systems governed by representative institutions. Believing that it is
possible to live confidently without metaphysical or religious certainty and
that all opinions are open to revision and correction, they see human
flourishing as dependent on open communication, discussion, criticism, and
unforced consensus. Refs.: H. P. Grice, “Italian humanism, Holofernes’s
Mantuan, from Petrarca to Valla.”
Natura
– natura humana -- human nature – Grice distinguishes very sharply
between a human and a person – a human becomes a person via transubstantiation,
a metaphysical routine – human nature is a quality or group of qualities,
belonging to all and only humans, that explains the kind of being we are. We
are all two-footed and featherless, but ‘featherless biped’ does not explain
our socially significant characteristics. We are also all both animals and
rational beings (at least potentially), and ‘rational animal’ might explain the
special features we have that other kinds of beings, such as angels, do not.
The belief that there is a human nature is part of the wider thesis that all
natural kinds have essences. Acceptance of this position is compatible with
many views about the specific qualities that constitute human nature. In
addition to rationality and embodiment, philosophers have said that it is part
of our nature to be wholly selfinterested, benevolent, envious, sociable,
fearful of others, able to speak and to laugh, and desirous of immortality.
Philosophers disagree about how we are to discover our nature. Some think
metaphysical insight into eternal forms or truths is required, others that we
can learn it from observation of biology or of behavior. Most have assumed that
only males display human nature fully, and that females, even at their best,
are imperfect or incomplete exemplars. Philosophers also disagree on whether
human nature determines morality. Some think that by noting our distinctive
features we can infer what God wills us to do. Others think that our nature
shows at most the limits of what morality can require, since it would plainly
be pointless to direct us to ways of living that our nature makes impossible.
Some philosophers have argued that human nature is plastic and can be shaped in
different ways. Others hold that it is not helpful to think in terms of human
nature. They think that although we share features as members of a biological
species, our other qualities are socially constructed. If the differences
between male and female reflect cultural patterns of child rearing, work, and
the distribution of power, our biologically common features do not explain our
important characteristics and so do not constitute a nature.
Grice
and the humboldts:
Born in Potsdam, Wilhelm, with his brother Alexander, was educated by private
tutors in the enlightened style thought suitable for a Prussian philosopher.This
included Grice’s stuff: philosophy and the two classical languages, with a bit
of ancient and modern history. After his university studies in law at Frankfurt
an der Oder and Göttingen, Humboldt’s career was divided among assorted posts,
philosophising on a broad range of topics, notably his first loves, like
Grice’s: philosophy and the classical languages. Humboldt’s broad-ranging works
reveal the important influences of Herder in his conception of history and
culture, Kant and Fichte in philosophy, and the French “Ideologues” in semiotics.
His most enduring work has proved to be the Introduction to his massive study
of language. Humboldt maintains that language, as a vital and dynamic
“organism,” is the key to understanding both the operations of the soul. A
language such as Latin possesses a distinctive inner form that shapes, in a way
reminiscent of Kant’s more general categories, the subjective experience, the
world-view, and ultimately the institutions of Rome. While all philosophers are
indebted to both his empirical studies and his theoretical insights on culture,
such philosophers as Dilthey and Cassirer acknowledge him as establishing the
Latin language as a central concern for the humanities. H. P. Grice, “Alexander
and all the Humboldts.”
husserl: philosopher and
founder of phenomenology. Born in Prossnits (now Proste v jov in the Czech
Republic), he studied science and philosophy at Leipzig, mathematics and
philosophy at Berlin, and philosophy and psychology at Vienna and Halle. He
taught at Halle, Göttingen, and Freiburg (1916–28). Husserl and Frege were the
founders of the two major twentiethcentury trends. Through his work and his
influence on Russell, Wittgenstein, and others, Frege inspired the movement
known as analytic philosophy, while Husserl, through his work and his influence
on Heidegger, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, and others, established the movement known
as phenomenology. Husserl began his academic life as a mathematician. He
studied at Berlin with Kronecker and Weierstrass and wrote a dissertation in
mathematics at Vienna. There, influenced by Brentano, his interests turned
toward philosohumors Husserl, Edmund 403 4065h-l.qxd 08/02/1999 7:39 AM Page
403 phy and psychology but remained related to mathematics. His habilitation,
written at Halle, was a psychological-philosophical study of the concept of
number and led to his first book, The Philosophy of Arithmetic (1891). Husserl
distinguishes between numbers given intuitively and those symbolically
intended. The former are given as the objective correlates of acts of counting;
when we count things set out before us, we constitute groups, and these groups
can be compared with each other as more and less. In this way the first few
numbers in the number series can be intuitively presented. Although most
numbers are only symbolically intended, their sense as numbers is derived from
those that are intuitively given. During 1890–1900 Husserl expanded his
philosophical concerns from mathematics to logic and the general theory of
knowledge, and his reflections culminated in his Logical Investigations
(1900–01). The work is made up of six investigations preceded by a volume of
prolegomena. The prolegomena are a sustained and effective critique of psychologism,
the doctrine that reduces logical entities, such as propositions, universals,
and numbers, to mental states or mental activities. Husserl insists on the
objectivity of such targets of consciousness and shows the incoherence of
reducing them to the activities of mind. The rest of the work examines signs
and words, abstraction, parts and wholes, logical grammar, the notion of
presentation, and truth and evidence. His earlier distinction between intuitive
presentation and symbolic intention is now expanded from our awareness of
numbers to the awareness of all sorts of objects of consciousness. The contrast
between empty intention and fulfillment or intuition is applied to perceptual
objects, and it is also applied to what he calls categorial objects: states of
affairs, relationships, causal connections, and the like. Husserl claims that
we can have an intellectual intuition of such things and he describes this
intuition; it occurs when we articulate an object as having certain features or
relationships. The formal structure of categorial objects is elegantly related
to the grammatical parts of language. As regards simple material objects,
Husserl observes that we can intend them either emptily or intuitively, but
even when they are intuitively given, they retain sides that are absent and
only cointended by us, so perception itself is a mixture of empty and filled
intentions. The term ‘intentionality’ refers to both empty and filled, or
signitive and intuitive, intentions. It names the relationship consciousness
has toward things, whether those things are directly given or meant only in
their absence. Husserl also shows that the identity of things is given to us
when we see that the object we once intended emptily is the same as what is
actually given to us now. Such identities are given even in perceptual
experience, as the various sides and aspects of things continue to present one
and the same object, but identities are given even more explicitly in
categorial intuition, when we recognize the partial identity between a thing
and its features, or when we directly focus on the identity a thing has with
itself. These phenomena are described under the general rubric of
identitysynthesis. A weakness in the first edition of Logical Investigations
was the fact that Husserl remained somewhat Kantian in it and distinguished
sharply between the thing as it is given to us and the thing-in-itself; he
claimed that in his phenomenology he described only the thing as it is given to
us. In the decade 1900–10, through deeper reflection on our experience of time,
on memory, and on the nature of philosophical thinking, he overcame this
Kantian distinction and claimed that the thing-in-itself can be intuitively
given to us as the identity presented in a manifold of appearances. His new
position was expressed in Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and
Phenomenological Philosophy (1913). The book was misinterpreted by many as
adopting a traditional idealism, and many thinkers who admired Husserl’s
earlier work distanced themselves from what he now taught. Husserl published
three more books. Formal and Transcendental Logic (1929) was written right
after his retirement; Cartesian Meditations (1931), which appeared in French
translation, was an elaboration of some lectures he gave in Paris. In addition,
some earlier manuscripts on the experience of time were assembled by Edith
Stein and edited by Heidegger in 1928 as Lectures on the Phenomenology of Inner
Time-Consciousness. Thus, Husserl published only six books, but he amassed a huge
amount of manuscripts, lecture notes, and working papers. He always retained
the spirit of a scientist and did his philosophical work in the manner of
tentative experiments. Many of his books can be seen as compilations of such
experiments rather than as systematic treatises. Because of its exploratory and
developmental character, his thinking does not lend itself to doctrinal
summary. Husserl was of Jewish ancestry, and after his death his papers were in
danger from the Nazi regime; they were covertly taken out of Germany by a
Belgian scholar, Herman Husserl, Edmund Husserl, Edmund 404 4065h-l.qxd
08/02/1999 7:39 AM Page 404 Leo Van Breda, who, after World War II, established
the Husserl Archives at Louvain. This institution, with centers at Cologne, Freiburg,
Paris, and New York, has since supervised the critical edition of many volumes
of Husserl’s writings in the series Husserliana. Husserl believes that things
are presented to us in various ways, and that philosophy should be engaged in
precise description of these appearances. It should avoid constructing
large-scale theories and defending ideologies. It should analyze, e.g., how
visual objects are perceived and how they depend on our cognitive activity of
seeing, focusing, moving about, on the correlation of seeing with touching and
grasping, and so on. Philosophy should describe the different ways in which
such “regions of being” as material objects, living things, other persons, and
cultural objects are given, how the past and the present are intended, how
speech, numbers, time and space, and our own bodies are given to us, and so on.
Husserl carries out many such analyses himself and in all of them distinguishes
between the object given and the subjective conscious activity we must perform
to let it be given. The phenomenological description of the object is called
noematic analysis and that of the subjective intentions is called noetic
analysis. The noema is the object as described phenomenologically, the noesis
is the corresponding mental activity, also as described by phenomenology. The
objective and the subjective are correlative but never reducible to one
another. In working out such descriptions we must get to the essential
structures of things. We do so not by just generalizing over instances we have
experienced, but by a process he calls “free variation” or “imaginative
variation.” We attempt in our imagination to remove various features from the
target of our analysis; the removal of some features would leave the object
intact, but the removal of other features would destroy the object; hence, when
we come upon the latter we know we have hit on something essential to the
thing. The method of imaginative variation thus leads to eidetic intuition, the
insight that this or that feature belongs to the eidos, the essence, of the
thing in question. Eidetic intuition is directed not only toward objects but
also toward the various forms of intentionality, as we try to determine the
essence of perception, memory, judging, and the like. Husserl thinks that the
eidetic analysis of intentionality and its objects yields apodictic truths,
truths that can be seen to be necessary. Examples might be that human beings
could not be without a past and future, and that each material perceptual
object has sides and aspects other than those presented at any moment. Husserl
admits that the objects of perceptual experience, material things, are not
given apodictically to perception because they contain parts that are only
emptily intended, but he insists that the phenomenological reflection on
perceptual experience, the reflection that yields the statement that perception
involves a mixture of empty and filled intentions, can be apodictic: we know
apodictically that perception must have a mixture of empty and filled intentions.
Husserl did admit in the 1920s that although phenomenological experience and
statements could be apodictic, they would never be adequate to what they
describe, i.e., further clarifications of what they signify could always be
carried out. This would mean, e.g., that we can be apodictically sure that
human beings could not be what they are if they did not have a sense of past
and future, but what it is to have a past and future always needs deeper
clarification. Husserl has much to say about philosophical thinking. He
distinguishes between the “natural attitude,” our straightforward involvement
with things and the world, and the “phenomenological attitude,” the reflective
point of view from which we carry out philosophical analysis of the intentions
exercised in the natural attitude and the objective correlates of these
intentions. When we enter the phenomenological attitude, we put out of action
or suspend all the intentions and convictions of the natural attitude; this
does not mean that we doubt or negate them, only that we take a distance from
them and contemplate their structure. Husserl calls this suspension the
phenomenological epoché. In our human life we begin, of course, in the natural
attitude, and the name for the processs by which we move to the
phenomenological attitude is called the phenomenological reduction, a “leading
back” from natural beliefs to the reflective consideration of intentions and
their objects. In the phenomenological attitude we look at the intentions that
we normally look through, those that function anonymously in our
straightforward involvement with the world. Throughout his career, Husserl
essayed various “ways to reduction” or arguments to establish philosophy. At
times he tried to model the argument on Descartes’s methodical doubt; at times
he tried to show that the world-directed sciences need the further supplement
of phenomenological reflection if they are to be truly scientific. One of the
special features of the natural attitude is that it simply accepts the world as
a background or horizon for all our more particular experiences and beliefs.
The world is not a large thing nor is it the sum total of things; it is the
horizon or matrix for all particular things and states of affairs. The world as
noema is correlated to our world-belief or world-doxa as noesis. In the
phenomenological attitude we take a distance even toward our natural being in
the world and we describe what it is to have a world. Husserl thinks that this
sort of radical reflection and radical questioning is necessary for beginning
philosophy and entering into what he calls pure or transcendental
phenomenology; so long as we fail to question our world-belief and the world as
such, we fail to reach philosophical purity and our analyses will in fact become
parts of worldly sciences (such as psychology) and will not be philosophical.
Husserl distinguishes between the apophantic and the ontological domains. The
apophantic is the domain of senses and propositions, while the ontological is
the domain of things, states of affairs, relations, and the like. Husserl calls
“apophantic analytics” the science that examines the formal, logical structures
of the apophantic domain and “formal ontology” the science that examines the
formal structures of the ontological domain. The movement between focusing on
the ontological domain and focusing on the apophantic domain occurs within the
natural attitude, but it is described from the phenomenological attitude. This
movement establishes the difference between propositions and states of affairs,
and it permits scientific verification; science is established in the zigzag
motion between focusing on things and focusing on propositions, which are then
verified or falsified when they are confirmed or disconfirmed by the way things
appear. Evidence is the activity of either having a thing in its direct
presence or experiencing the conformity or disconformity between an empty
intention and the intuition that is to fulfill it. There are degrees of
evidence; things can be given more or less fully and more or less distinctly.
Adequation occurs when an intuition fully satisfies an empty intention. Husserl
also makes a helpful distinction between the passive, thoughtless repetition of
words and the activity of explicit judging, in which we distinctly make
judgments on our own. Explicit thinking can itself fall back into passivity or
become “sedimented” as people take it for granted and go on to build further
thinking upon it. Such sedimented thought must be reactivated and its meanings revived.
Passive thinking may harbor contradictions and incoherences; the application of
formal logic presumes judgments that are distinctly executed. In our reflective
phenomenological analyses we describe various intentional acts, but we also
discover the ego as the owner or agent behind these acts. Husserl distinguishes
between the psychological ego, the ego taken as a part of the world, and the
transcendental ego, the ego taken as that which has a world and is engaged in
truth, and hence to some extent transcends the world. He often comments on the
remarkable ambiguity of the ego, which is both a part of the world (as a human
being) and yet transcends the world (as a cognitive center that possesses or
intends the world). The transcendental ego is not separable from individuals;
it is a dimension of every human being. We each have a transcendental ego,
since we are all intentional and rational beings. Husserl also devoted much
effort to analyzing intersubjectivity and tried to show how other egos and
other minds, other centers of conscious and rational awareness, can be
presented and intended. The role of the body, the role of speech and other
modes of communication, and the fact that we all share things and a world in
common are important elements in these analyses. The transcendental ego, the
source of all intentional acts, is constituted through time: it has its own
identity, which is different from that of the identity of things or states of
affairs. The identity of the ego is built up through the flow of experiences
and through memory and anticipation. One of Husserl’s major contributions is
his analysis of time-consciousness and its relation to the identity of the
self, a topic to which he often returns. He distinguishes among the objective
time of the world, the inner time of the flow of our experiences (such as acts
of perception, judgments, and memories), and a third, still deeper level that
he calls “the consciousness of inner time.” It is this third, deepest level,
the consciousness of inner time, that permits even our mental acts to be
experienced as temporal. This deepest level also provides the ultimate context
in which the identity of the ego is constituted. In one way, we achieve our
conscious identity through the memories that we store and recall, but these
memories themselves have to be stitched together by the deepest level of
temporality in order to be recoverable as belonging to one and the same self.
Husserl observes that on this deepest level of the consciousness of inner time,
we never have a simple atomic present: what we come to as ultimate is a moving
form Husserl, Edmund Husserl, Edmund 406 4065h-l.qxd 08/02/1999 7:39 AM Page
406 that has a retention of the immediate past, a protention of that which is
coming, and a central core. This form of inner time-consciousness, the form of
what Husserl calls “the living present,” is prior even to the ego and is a kind
of apex reached by his philosophical analysis. One of the important themes that
Husserl developed in the last decade of his work is that of the life-world or
Lebenswelt. He claims that scientific and mathematical abstraction has roots in
the prescientific world, the world in which we live. This world has its own
structures of appearance, identification, evidence, and truth, and the scientific
world is established on its basis. One of the tasks of phenomenology is to show
how the idealized entities of science draw their sense from the life-world.
Husserl claims, e.g., that geometrical forms have their roots in the activity
of measuring and in the idealization of the volumes, surfaces, edges, and
intersections we experience in the life-world. The sense of the scientific
world and its entities should not be placed in opposition to the life-world,
but should be shown, by phenomenological analysis, to be a development of
appearances found in it. In addition, the structures and evidences of the
lifeworld itself must be philosophically described. Husserl’s influence in
philosophy has been very great during the entire twentieth century, especially
in Continental Europe. His concept of intentionality is understood as a way of
overcoming the Cartesian dualism between mind and world, and his study of
signs, formal systems, and parts and wholes has been valuable in structuralism
and literary theory. His concept of the life-world has been used as a way of
integrating science with wider forms of human activity, and his concepts of
time and personal identity have been useful in psychoanalytic theory and
existentialism. He has inspired work in the social sciences and recently his
ideas have proved helpful to scholars in cognitive science and artificial
intelligence.
huygens: c., physicist and
astronomer who ranked among the leading experimental scientists of his time and
influenced many other thinkers, including Leibniz. He wrote on physics and
astronomy in Latin (Horologium Oscillatorium, 1673; De Vi Centrifuga, 1703) and
in French for the Journal des Scavans. He became a founding member of the
French Academy of Sciences. Huygens ground lenses, built telescopes, discovered
the rings of Saturn, and invented the pendulum clock. His most popular
composition, Cosmotheoros (1699), inspired by Fontenelle, praises a divine
architect and conjectures the possible existence of rational beings on other
planets.
Materia-forma
distinction, the: One
of Grice’s twelve labours is against Materialism -- Cicero’s translation of
hyle, ancient Greek term for matter. Aristotle brought the word into use in
philosophy by contrast with the term for form, and as designating one of the
four causes. By hyle Aristotle usually means ‘that out of which something has
been made’, but he can also mean by it ‘that which has form’. In Aristotelian
philosophy hyle is sometimes also identified with potentiality and with
substrate. Neoplatonists identified hyle with the receptacle of Plato. Materia-forma distinction, the forma:
Grice always found ‘logical form’ redundant (“Surely we are not into ‘matter’ –
that would be cheap!”) – “‘materia-forma’ is the unity, as the Grecians well
knew.”- hylomorphism, the doctrine, first taught by Aristotle, that concrete
substance consists of form in matter (hyle). The details of this theory are
explored in the central books of Aristotle’s Metaphysics (Zeta, Eta, and
Theta). Materia-forma
distinction, the. Then there’s hylozoism: from Greek hyle, ‘matter’, and zoe,
‘life’), the doctrine that matter is intrinsically alive, or that all bodies,
from the world as a whole down to the smallest corpuscle, have some degree or
some kind of life. It differs from panpsychism though the distinction is
sometimes blurred – in upholding the universal presence of life per se, rather
than of soul or of psychic attributes. Inasmuch as it may also hold that there
are no living entities not constituted of matter, hylozoism is often criticized
by theistic philosophers as a form of atheism. The term was introduced
polemically by Ralph Cudworth, the seventeenth-century Cambridge Platonist, to
help define a position that is significantly in contrast to soul–body dualism
(Pythagoras, Plato, Descartes), reductive materialism (Democritus, Hobbes), and
Aristotelian hylomorphism. So understood, hylozoism had many advocates in the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, among both scientists and naturalistically
minded philosophers. In the twentieth century, the term has come to be used,
rather unhelpfully, to characterize the animistic and naive-vitalist views of
the early Greek philosophers, especially Thales, Anaximenes, Heraclitus, and
Empedocles – who could hardly count as hylozoists in Cudworth’s sophisticated
sense.
substantia – hypostasis, the
process of regarding a concept or abstraction as an independent or real entity.
The verb forms ‘hypostatize’ and ‘reify’ designate the acts of positing objects
of a certain sort for the purposes of one’s theory. It is sometimes implied
that a fallacy is involved in so describing these processes or acts, as in
‘Plato was guilty of the reification of universals’. The issue turns largely on
criteria of ontological commitment. The exact Greek transliteration is “hypostasis”
Arianism, diverse but related teachings in early Christianity that subordinated
the Son to God the Father. In reaction the church developed its doctrine of the
Trinity, whereby the Son and Holy Spirit, though distinct persons hypostases,
share with the Father, as his ontological equals, the one being or substance
ousia of God. Arius taught in Alexandria, where, on the hierarchical model of
Middle Platonism, he sharply distinguished Scripture’s transcendent God from
the Logos or Son incarnate in Jesus. The latter, subject to suffering and
humanly obedient to God, is inferior to the immutable Creator, the object of
that obedience. God alone is eternal and ungenerated; the Son, divine not by
nature but by God’s choosing, is generated, with a beginning: the unique
creature, through whom all else is made. The Council of Nicea, in 325,
condemned Arius and favored his enemy Athanasius, affirming the Son’s
creatorhood and full deity, having the same being or substance homoousios as
the Father. Arianism still flourished, evolving into the extreme view that the
Son’s being was neither the same as the Father’s nor like it homoiousios, but
unlike it anomoios. This too was anathematized, by the Council of 381 at
Constantinople, which, ratifying what is commonly called the Nicene Creed,
sealed orthodox Trinitarianism and the equality of the three persons against
Arian subordinationism.
suppositum – Cicero for
‘hypothesis’, as in ‘hypothetico-deductive’ – a hypothetico-deductive method, a
method of testing hypotheses. Thought to be preferable to the method of
enumerative induction, whose limitations had been decisively demonstrated by
Hume, the hypothetico-deductive (H-D) method has been viewed by many as the
ideal scientific method. It is applied by introducing an explanatory hypothesis
resulting from earlier inductions, a guess, or an act of creative imagination.
The hypothesis is logically conjoined with a statement of initial conditions.
The purely deductive consequences of this conjunction are derived as
predictions, and the statements asserting them are subjected to experimental or
observational test. More formally, given (H • A) P O, H is the hypothesis, A a
statement of initial conditions, and O one of the testable consequences of (H •
A). If the hypothesis is ‘all lead is malleable’, and ‘this piece of lead is
now being hammered’ states the initial conditions, it follows deductively that
‘this piece of lead will change shape’. In deductive logic the schema is
formally invalid, committing the logical fallacy of affirming the consequent.
But repeated occurrences of O can be said to confirm the conjunction of H and
A, or to render it more probable. On the other hand, the schema is deductively
valid (the argument form modus tollens). For this reason, Karl Popper and his
followers think that the H-D method is best employed in seeking falsifications
of theoretical hypotheses. Criticisms of the method point out that infinitely
many hypotheses can explain, in the H-D mode, a given body of data, so that
successful predictions are not probative, and that (following Duhem) it is
impossible to test isolated singular hypotheses because they are always
contained in complex theories any one of whose parts is eliminable in the face
of negative evidence.
Campsall: a village in Yorkshire, Richard
– of Balliol, semantics. Cf. Ricardus de Campsalle obtained a MA from Balliol
and then became a Fellow of Merton.
Trutfetter
Affirmo-nego distinction, the: Grice:
“There is a delightful asymmetry in ‘affirmo’/’nego’ as yielding a square. For
the –o in affirmo is immaterial, whereas the ‘o’ in nego is not! Who was the
stupid monk who deviced this? Most importantly, ‘affirmo’ and ‘nego’ account
for the QUALITY, not the quantity. Surely the ‘a’ and ‘i’, but not the ‘o’ of
affirmo can stand for ‘affirmative’, and the ‘e’ and ‘o’ of nego can stand for
negative. But surely there is no correspondence to a and e being universal and
I and o being particular. Barbara
celarent darii ferio baralipton Celantes dabitis fapesmo frisesomorum; Cesare
campestres festino baroco; darapti Felapton disamis datisi bocardo
ferison. Vowels & particular
consonants have particular meaning. A –
universalis affirmativa (i.e. affirmo) E–
universalis negativa (i.e. nego) I – particularis affirmativa (i.e. affirmo) O
– particularis negativa (i.e. nego) S is for simplex in – conversio simplex.P
is ‘per accidens’ in conversio per
accidens. c – is contradiction in ‘reductio rad contradictionem m is for metathesis–(, conversio per
contrapositionem). “b” is for ‘barbara’
in – reductio ad Modus Barbara. C –is
for celarent in reductio ad Modus
Celarent. D is for darii in – reductio ad Modus Darii. F is for ferio in –
reductio ad Modus Ferio.I: particularis dedicativa.. See Grice, “Circling the
Square of Opposition Affirmo-nego
distinction, the: Grice: “There is a delightful asymmetry in ‘affirmo’/’nego’
as yielding a square. For the –o in affirmo is immaterial, whereas the ‘o’ in
nego is not! Who was the stupid monk who deviced this? Most importantly,
‘affirmo’ and ‘nego’ account for the QUALITY, not the quantity. Surely the ‘a’
and ‘i’, but not the ‘o’ of affirmo can stand for ‘affirmative’, and the ‘e’
and ‘o’ of nego can stand for negative. But surely there is no correspondence
to a and e being universal and I and o being particular. -- Albert the Great, Liber I Priorum Analyticorum, inOpera
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der Philosophie 84 (2):129-160. –––, 2004, “Arabic Logic”, in Dov M. Gabbay,
John Woods & Akihiro Kanamori (eds.), Handbook of the History of Logic
(Volume 1), Amsterdam: Elsevier 523-596. Thom, P., 1996, The Logic of
Essentialism: An Interpretation of Aristotle’s Modal Syllogistic, (Synthese
Historical Library 43), Dordrecht: Kluwer. –––, 2003, Medieval Modal Systems:
Problems and Concepts, Aldershot: Ashgate. –––, 2007, Logic and Ontology in the
Syllogistic of Robert Kilwardby, Leiden: Brill. Thomsen Thörnqvist, C., 2008,
Anicii Manlii Severini Boethii De syllogismo categorico: critical edition with Introduction,
Translation, Notes and Indexes, (Studia Graeca et Latina Gothoburgensia 68),
Gothenburg: University of Gothenburg. –––, 2010, “The Anonymous Aurelianensis
III and the Reception of Aristotle’s Prior Analytics in the Latin West,”
Cahiers de l'Institut du Moyen-Age grec et latin 79: 25-41. –––, 2013, “The
Anonymous Aurelianensis III and Robert Kilwardby on the Prior Analytics,” in
Jakob Leth Fink, Heine Hansen and Ana Maria Mora-Marquez (eds.) Logic and
Language in the Middle Ages: A Volume in Honour of Sten Ebbesen Leiden: Brill,
185-198. Uckelman, S, and Lagerlund, H., 2016, “The Logic in the Latin
Thirteenth Century,” in C. Duthil-Novaes and S. Read (ads.) The Cambridge
Companion to Medieval Logic, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 74-86. William
of Ockham, Summa Logicae, Ph. Boehner, G. Gál and S. Brown (eds.), Opera
Philosophica I, St. Bonaventure, NY: The Franciscan Institute, 1974. Zupko,
Jack, 2003, John Buridan: Portrait of a Fourteenth-Century Arts Master,
Publications in Medieval Studies, Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame
Press. I: particularis dedicativa.. See Grice, “Circling the
Square of Opposition
Necesse – Grice: “The archaic Romans had ‘necessum,’ which they turned
to ‘necessum.’ The etymology is not clear [perh. Sanscr. naç, obtain; Gr. root ἐνεκ-; cf. ἀνάγκη; v. Georg
Curtius Gr. Etym. 424]. ichthyological necessity: topic-neutral:
Originally, Ryle’s term for logical constants, such as “of ” “not,” “every.”
They are not endowed with special meanings, and are applicable to discourse
about any subject-matter. They do not refer to any external object but function
to organize meaningful discourse. J. J. C. Smart calls a term topic-neutral if
it is noncommittal about designating something mental or something physical.
Instead, it simply describes an event without judging the question of its
intrinsic nature. In his central-state theory of mind, Smart develops a
topic-neutral analysis of mental expressions and argues that it is possible to
account for the situations described by mental concepts in purely physical and
topic-neutral terms. “In this respect, statements like ‘I am thinking now’ are,
as J. J. C. Smart puts it, topic-neutral. They say that something is going on
within us, something apt for the causing of certain sorts of behaviour, but
they say nothing of the nature of this process.” D. Armstrong, A Materialist
Theory of the Mind
I
icon -- Would Ciero
prefer the spelling ‘eiconicus’ or ‘iconicus’? We know Pliny preferred ‘icon.’īcon ,
ŏnis, f., = εἰκών,I.an image, figure:
“fictae ceră icones,” Plin. 8, 54, 80, § 215.Iconicity -- depiction,
pictorial representation, also sometimes called “iconic representation.”
Linguistic representation is conventional: it is only by virtue of a convention
that the word ‘cats’ refers to cats. A picture of a cat, however, seems to
refer to cats by other than conventional means; for viewers can correctly
interpret pictures without special training, whereas people need special
training to learn languages. Though some philosophers, such as Goodman
Languages of Art, deny that depiction involves a non-conventional element, most
are concerned to give an account of what this non-conventional element consists
in. Some hold that it consists in resemblance: pictures refer to their objects
partly by resembling them. Objections to this are that anything resembles
anything else to some degree; and that resemblance is a symmetric and reflexive
relation, whereas depiction is not. Other philosophers avoid direct appeal to
resemblance: Richard Wollheim Painting as an Art argues that depiction holds by
virtue of the intentional deployment of the natural human capacity to see
objects in marked surfaces; and dependence, causal depiction Kendall Walton
Mimesis as Make-Believe argues that depiction holds by virtue of objects
serving as props in reasonably rich and vivid visual games of
make-believe.
materia-forma
distinction, the -- forma: ideatum – Cicero was a bit at a loss when trying to
translate the Greek eidos or idea. For ‘eidos’ he had forma, but the Romans
seemed to have liked the sound of ‘idea,’ and Martianus Capella even coined
‘ideal,’ which Kant and Grice later used. idea, in the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries, whatever is immediately before the mind when one thinks.
The notion of thinking was taken in a very broad sense; it included perception,
memory, and imagination, in addition to thinking narrowly construed. In
connection with perception, ideas were often (though not always – Berkeley is
the exception) held to be representational images, i.e., images of something.
In other contexts, ideas were taken to be concepts, such as the concept of a
horse or of an infinite quantity, though concepts of these sorts certainly do
not appear to be images. An innate idea was either a concept or a general
truth, such as ‘Equals added to equals yield equals’, that was allegedly not
learned but was in some sense always in the mind. Sometimes, as in Descartes,
innate ideas were taken to be cognitive capacities rather than concepts or
general truths, but these capacities, too, were held to be inborn. An
adventitious idea, either an image or a concept, was an idea accompanied by a
judgment concerning the non-mental cause of that idea. So, a visual image was
an adventitious idea provided one judged of that idea that it was caused by
something outside one’s mind, presumably by the object being seen. From Idea
Alston coined ‘ideationalism’ to refer to Grice’s theory. “Grice’s is an
ideationalist theory of meaning, drawn from Locke.”Alston calls Grice an ideationalist, and Grice takes it as a
term of abuse. Grice would occasionally use ‘mental.’ Short and Lewis have
"mens.” “terra corpus est, at mentis ignis est;” so too, “istic est de
sole sumptus; isque totus mentis est;” f. from the root ‘men,’ whence ‘memini,’ and ‘comminiscor.’ Lewis and Short render
‘mens’ as ‘the mind, disposition; the heart, soul.’ Lewis and Short have
‘commĭniscor,’ originally conminiscor ), mentus, from ‘miniscor,’ whence also ‘reminiscor,’
stem ‘men,’ whence ‘mens’ and ‘memini,’
cf. Varro, Lingua Latina 6, § 44. Lewis and Short render the verb as,
literally, ‘to ponder carefully, to reflect upon;’ ‘hence, as a result of
reflection; cf. 1. commentor, II.), to devise something by careful thought, to
contrive, invent, feign. Myro is perhaps unaware of the implicatura of ‘mental’
when he qualifies his -ism with ‘modest.’ Grice would seldom use mind (Grecian
nous) or mental (Grecian noetikos vs. æsthetikos). His sympathies go for more
over-arching Grecian terms like the very Aristotelian soul, the anima, i. e.
the psyche and the psychological. Grice discusses G. Myro’s essay, ‘In defence
of a modal mentalism,’ with attending commentary by R. Albritton and S. Cavell.
Grice himself would hardly use mental, mentalist, or mentalism himself, but
perhaps psychologism. Grice would use mental, on occasion, but his Grecianism
was deeply rooted, unlike Myro’s. At Clifton and under Hardie (let us recall he
came up to Oxford under a classics scholarship to enrol in the Lit. Hum.) he
knows that mental translates mentalis translates nous, only ONE part, one
third, actually, of the soul, and even then it may not include the ‘practical
rational’ one! Cf. below on ‘telementational.’ formalism: Cicero’s
translation for ‘idealism,’ or ideism -- the philosophical doctrine that
reality is somehow mind-correlative or mind-coordinated – that the real objects
constituting the “external world” are not independent of cognizing minds, but
exist only as in some way correlative to mental operations. The doctrine
centers on the conception that reality as we understand it reflects the
workings of mind. Perhaps its most radical version is the ancient Oriental
spiritualistic or panpsychistic idea, renewed in Christian Science, that minds
and their thoughts are all there is – that reality is simply the sum total of
the visions (or dreams?) of one or more minds. A dispute has long raged within
the idealist camp over whether “the mind” at issue in such idealistic formulas
was a mind emplaced outside of or behind nature (absolute idealism), or a
nature-pervasive power of rationality of some sort (cosmic idealism), or the
collective impersonal social mind of people in general (social idealism), or
simply the distributive collection of individual minds (personal idealism).
Over the years, the less grandiose versions of the theory came increasingly to
the fore, and in recent times virtually all idealists have construed “the
minds” at issue in their theory as separate individual minds equipped with
socially engendered resources. There are certainly versions of idealism short
of the spiritualistic position of an ontological idealism that (as Kant puts it
at Prolegomena, section 13, n. 2) holds that “there are none but thinking
beings.” Idealism need certainly not go so far as to affirm that mind makes or
constitutes matter; it is quite enough to maintain (e.g.) that all of the
characterizing properties of physical existents resemble phenomenal sensory
properties in representing dispositions to affect mind-endowed creatures in a
certain sort of way, so that these properties have no standing without
reference to minds. Weaker still is an explanatory idealism which merely holds
that an adequate explanation of the real always requires some recourse to the
operations of mind. Historically, positions of the generally idealistic type
have been espoused by numerous thinkers. For example, Berkeley maintained that
“to be [real] is to be perceived” (esse est percipi). And while this does not
seem particularly plausible because of its inherent commitment to omniscience,
it seems more sensible to adopt “to be is to be perceivable” (esse est
percipile esse). For Berkeley, of course, this was a distinction without a
difference: if something is perceivable at all, then God perceives it. But if
we forgo philosophical reliance on God, the matter looks different, and pivots
on the question of what is perceivable for perceivers who are physically
realizable in “the real world,” so that physical existence could be seen – not
so implausibly – as tantamount to observability-in-principle. The three
positions to the effect that real things just exactly are things as philosophy
or as science or as “common sense” takes them to be – positions generally
designated as Scholastic, scientific, and naive realism, respectively – are in
fact versions of epistemic idealism exactly because they see reals as
inherently knowable and do not contemplate mind-transcendence for the real.
Thus, the thesis of naive (“commonsense”) realism that ‘External things exist
exactly as we know them’ sounds realistic or idealistic according as one
stresses the first three words of the dictum or the last four. Any theory of
natural teleology that regards the real as explicable in terms of value could
to this extent be counted as idealistic, in that valuing is by nature a mental
process. To be sure, the good of a creature or species of creatures (e.g.,
their well-being or survival) need not be something mind-represented. But nevertheless,
goods count as such precisely because if the creatures at issue could think
about it, they would adopt them as purposes. It is this circumstance that
renders any sort of teleological explanation at least conceptually idealistic
in nature. Doctrines of this sort have been the stock-in-trade of philosophy
from the days of Plato (think of the Socrates of the Phaedo) to those of
Leibniz, with his insistence that the real world must be the best possible. And
this line of thought has recently surfaced once more in the controversial
“anthropic principle” espoused by some theoretical physicists. Then too it is
possible to contemplate a position along the lines envisioned in Fichte’s
Wissenschaftslehre (The Science of Knowledge), which sees the ideal as providing
the determining factor for the real. On such a view, the real is not
characterized by the science we actually have but by the ideal science that is
the telos of our scientific efforts. On this approach, which Wilhelm Wundt
characterized as “ideal-realism” (Idealrealismus; see his Logik, vol. 1, 2d
ed., 1895), the knowledge that achieves adequation to the real idea, clear and
distinct idealism (adaequatio ad rem) by adequately characterizing the true
facts in scientific matters is not the knowledge actually afforded by
present-day science, but only that of an ideal or perfected science. Over the
years, many objections to idealism have been advanced. Samuel Johnson thought
to refute Berkeley’s phenomenalism by kicking a stone. He conveniently forgot that
Berkeley goes to great lengths to provide for stones – even to the point of
invoking the aid of God on their behalf. Moore pointed to the human hand as an
undeniably mind-external material object. He overlooked that, gesticulate as he
would, he would do no more than induce people to accept the presence of a hand
on the basis of the handorientation of their experience. Peirce’s “Harvard
Experiment” of letting go of a stone held aloft was supposed to establish
Scholastic realism because his audience could not control their expectation of
the stone’s falling to earth. But an uncontrollable expectation is still an
expectation, and the realism at issue is no more than a realistic
thought-exposure. Kant’s famous “Refutation of Idealism” argues that our
conception of ourselves as mindendowed beings presupposes material objects
because we view our mind-endowed selves as existing in an objective temporal
order, and such an order requires the existence of periodic physical processes
(clocks, pendula, planetary regularities) for its establishment. At most,
however, this argument succeeds in showing that such physical processes have to
be assumed by minds, the issue of their actual mind-independent existence
remaining unaddressed. (Kantian realism is an intraexperiential “empirical”
realism.) It is sometimes said that idealism confuses objects with our
knowledge of them and conflates the real with our thought about it. But this
charge misses the point. The only reality with which we inquirers can have any
cognitive commerce is reality as we conceive it to be. Our only information
about reality is via the operation of mind – our only cognitive access to
reality is through the mediation of mind-devised models of it. Perhaps the most
common objection to idealism turns on the supposed mind-independence of the
real: “Surely things in nature would remain substantially unchanged if there
were no minds.” This is perfectly plausible in one sense, namely the causal one
– which is why causal idealism has its problems. But it is certainly not true
conceptually. The objector has to specify just exactly what would remain the
same. “Surely roses would smell just as sweet in a minddenuded world!” Well . .
. yes and no. To be sure, the absence of minds would not change roses. But
roses and rose fragrance and sweetness – and even the size of roses – are all
factors whose determination hinges on such mental operations as smelling,
scanning, measuring, and the like. Mind-requiring processes are needed for
something in the world to be discriminated as a rose and determined to bear
certain features. Identification, classification, property attribution are all
required and by their very nature are all mental operations. To be sure, the
role of mind is here hypothetical. (“If certain interactions with duly
constituted observers took place, then certain outcomes would be noted.”) But
the fact remains that nothing could be discriminated or characterized as a rose
in a context where the prospect of performing suitable mental operations
(measuring, smelling, etc.) is not presupposed. Perhaps the strongest argument
favoring idealism is that any characterization of the real that we can devise
is bound to be a mind-constructed one: our only access to information about
what the real is is through the mediation of mind. What seems right about
idealism is inherent in the fact that in investigating the real we are clearly
constrained to use our own concepts to address our own issues – that we can
learn about the real only in our own terms of reference. But what seems right
about realism is that the answers to the questions we put to the real are
provided by reality itself – whatever the answers may be, they are
substantially what they are because it is reality itself that determines them
to be that way. -- idealism, Critical.
ordinary
language
– There are two topics about ordinary language, as anyone who ever consulted a
philosophical dictionary will realise. Words like ‘know’ and words like
“transcendental deduction.” Is Austin promoting that we stick with ‘know’ and
that no technical terms are even allowed for their analysis. We don’t thnk so..
The phatic and the rhetic and the phemic and the illocution and the perlocution
are not ‘ordinary’. –as opposed to
‘ideal’ language -- ideal language, a system of notation that would correct
perceived deficiencies of ordinary language by requiring the structure of
expressions to mirror the structure of that which they represent. The notion
that conceptual errors can be corrected and philosophical problems solved (or
dissolved) by properly representing them in some such system figured
prominently in the writings of Leibniz, Carnap, Russell, Wittgenstein, and
Frege, among others. For Russell, the ideal, or “logically perfect,” language
is one in which grammatical form coincides with logical form, there are no vague
or ambiguous expres sions, and no proper names that fail to denote. Frege’s
Begriffsschrift is perhaps the most thorough and successful execution of the
ideal language project. Deductions represented within this system (or its
modern descendants) can be effectively checked for correctness.
Oxford
idealism:
Grice is a member of “The F. H. Bradley Society,” at Mansfield. -- ideal
market, a hypothetical market, used as a tool of economic analysis, in which
all relevant agents are perfectly informed of the price of the good in question
and the cost of its production, and all economic transactions can be undertaken
with no cost. A specific case is a market exemplifying perfect competition. The
term is sometimes extended to apply to an entire economy consisting of ideal
markets for every good. -- ideal
observer, a hypothetical being, possessed of various qualities and traits,
whose moral reactions (judgments or attitudes) to actions, persons, and states
of affairs figure centrally in certain theories of ethics. There are two main
versions of ideal observer theory: (a) those that take the reactions of ideal
observers as a standard of the correctness of moral judgments, and (b) those
that analyze the meanings of moral judgments in terms of the reactions of ideal
observers. Theories of the first sort – ideal observer theories of correctness
– hold, e.g., that judgments like ‘John’s lying to Brenda about her father’s
death was wrong (bad)’ are correct provided any ideal observer would have a
negative attitude toward John’s action. Similarly, ‘Alison’s refusal to divulge
confidential information about her patient was right (good)’ is correct
provided any ideal observer would have a positive attitude toward that action.
This version of the theory can be traced to Adam Smith, who is usually credited
with introducing the concept of an ideal observer into philosophy, though he
used the expression ‘impartial spectator’ to refer to the concept. Regarding
the correctness of moral judgments, Smith wrote: “That precise and distinct
measure can be found nowhere but in the sympathetic feelings of the impartial
and well-informed spectator” (A Theory of Moral Sentiments, 1759). Theories of
a second sort – ideal observer theories of meaning – take the concept of an
ideal observer as part of the very meaning of ordinary moral judgments. Thus,
according to Roderick Firth (“Ethical Absolutism and the Ideal Observer,”
Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 1952), moral judgments of the form ‘x
is good (bad)’, on this view, mean ‘All ideal observers would feel moral
approval (disapproval) toward x’, and similarly for other moral judgments
(where such approvals and disapprovals are characterized as felt desires having
a “demand quality”). Different conceptions of an ideal observer result from
variously specifying those qualities and traits that characterize such beings.
Smith’s characterization includes being well informed and impartial. However,
according to Firth, an ideal observer must be omniscient; omnipercipient, i.e.,
having the ability to imagine vividly any possible events or states of affairs,
including the experiences and subjective states of others; disinterested, i.e.,
having no interests or desires that involve essential reference to any
particular individuals or things; dispassionate; consistent; and otherwise a
“normal” human being. Both versions of the theory face a dilemma: on the one
hand, if ideal observers are richly characterized as impartial, disinterested,
and normal, then since these terms appear to be moral-evaluative terms, appeal
to the reactions of ideal observers (either as a standard of correctness or as
an analysis of meaning) is circular. On the other hand, if ideal observers
receive an impoverished characterization in purely non-evaluative terms, then
since there is no reason to suppose that such ideal observers will often all
agree in their reactions to actions, people, and states of affairs, most moral
judgments will turn out to be incorrect. Grice: “We have to distinguish between
idealism and hegelianism; but the English being as they are, they don’t! And
being English, I shouldn’t, either!” – “There is so-called ‘idealist’ logic; if
so, there is so called ‘idealist implicaturum’” “My favourite idealist
philosopher is Bosanquet.” “I like Bradley because Russell was once a
Bradleyian, when it was fashionable to be so! But surely Russell lacked the
spirit to understand, even, Bradley! It is so much easier to mock him!” --. Refs.: H. P. Grice, “Pre-war Oxford philosophy.” The
reference to mentalism in the essay on ‘modest mentalism,’ after Myro, in The
H. P. Grice Papers, BANC.
ideatum. Quite used by Grice. Cf. Conceptum. Sub-perceptual. Cognate
with ‘eidos,’ that Grice translates as ‘forma.’ Why is an ‘eidos’ an ‘idea’ and
in what sense is an idea a ‘form’? These are deep questions!
idem: a
key philosophical notion that encompasses linguistic, logic, and metaphysical
issues, and also epistemology. Possibly the central question in philosophy.
Vide the principle of ‘identity.’ amicus est tamquam alter idem,” a second self, Identicum. Grecian ‘tautotes.’ late L. identitās (Martianus
Capella, c425), peculiarly formed from ident(i)-, for L. idem ‘same’ + -tās,
-tātem: see -ty. Various suggestions have been offered as to the
formation. Need was evidently felt of a noun of condition or quality from
idem to express the notion of ‘sameness’, side by side with those of ‘likeness’
and ‘oneness’ expressed by similitās and ūnitās: hence the form of the
suffix. But idem had no combining stem. Some have thought that
ident(i)- was taken from the L. adv. "identidem" ‘over and over
again, repeatedly’, connexion with which appears to be suggested by Du Cange's
explanation of identitās as ‘quævis actio repetita’. Meyer-Lübke suggests
that in the formation there was present some association between idem and id
ens ‘that being’, whence "identitās" like "entitās." But
assimilation to "entitās" may have been merely to avoid the solecism
of *idemitās or *idemtās. sameness. However originated,
"ident(i)-" (either from adverb "identidem" or an
assimilation of "id ens," "id ens," that being, "id
entitas" "that entity") became the combining stem of idem, and
the series ūnitās, ūnicus, ūnificus, ūnificāre, was paralleled by identitās,
identicus, identificus, identificāre: see identic, identific, identify above.] to
OED 3rd: identity, n. Pronunciation: Brit./ʌɪˈdɛntᵻti/ , U.S.
/aɪˈdɛn(t)ədi/ Forms: 15 idemptitie, 15 ydemptyte, 15–16 identitie, 15–
identity, 16 idemptity. Etymology: < Middle French identité, ydemtité,
ydemptité, ydentité (French identité) quality or condition of being the same
(a1310; 1756 in sense ‘individuality, personality’, 1801 in sense ‘distinct
impression of a single person or thing presented to or perceived by others’)
and its etymon post-classical Latin identitat-, identitas quality of
being the same (4th cent.), condition or fact that a person or thing is itself
and not something else (8th cent. in a British source), fact of being the same
(from 12th cent. in British sources), continual sameness, lack of variety,
monotony (from 12th cent. in British sources; 14th cent. in a continental
source) < classical Latin idem same (see idem n.) + -tās (see -ty
suffix1) [sameness], after post-classical Latin essentitas ‘being’ (4th
cent.).The Latin word was formed to provide a translation equivalent for
ancient Greek ταὐτότης (tautotes) identity. identity: identity was a key
concept for Grice. Under identity, he views both identity simpliciter and
personal identity. Grice advocates psychological or soul criterianism.
Psychological or soul criterianism has been advocated, in one form or another,
by philosophers such as Locke, Butler, Duncan-Jones, Berkeley, Gallie, Grice,
Flew, Haugeland, Jones, Perry, Shoemaker and Parfit, and Quinton. What all
of these theories have in common is the idea that, even if it is the case that
some kind of physical states are necessary for being a person, it is the unity
of consciousness which is of decisive importance for personal identity over
time. In this sense, person is a term which picks out a psychological, or mental,
"thing". In claiming this, all Psychological Criterianists entail the
view that personal identity consists in the continuity of psychological
features. It is interesting that Flew has an earlier "Selves,"
earlier than his essay on Locke on personal identity. The first, for Mind,
criticising Jones, "The self in sensory cognition"; the second for
Philosophy. Surely under the tutelage of Grice. Cf. Jones, Selves: A reply to
Flew, Philosophy. The stronger thesis asserts that there is no
conceivable situation in which bodily identity would be necessary, some other
conditions being always both necessary and sufficient. Grice takes it that
Locke’s theory (II, 27) is an example of this latter type. To say
"Grice remembers that he heard a noise", without irony or
inverted commas, is to imply that Grice did hear a noise. In this respect
remember is like, know, a factive. It does not follow from this, nor is it
true, that each claim to remember, any more than each claim to know, is alethic
or veridical; or, not everything one seems to remember is something one really
remembers. So much is obvious, although Locke -- although admittedly
referring only to the memory of actions, section 13 -- is forced to invoke
the providence of God to deny the latter. These points have been emphasised by
Flew in his discussion of Locke’s views on personal identity. In formulating
Locke’ thesis, however, Flew makes a mistake; for he offers Lockes thesis in
the form if Grice can remember Hardies doing such-and-such, Grice and Hardie
are the same person. But this obviously will not do, even for Locke, for we
constantly say things like I remember my brother Derek joining the army without
implying that I and my brother are the same person. So if we are to formulate
such a criterion, it looks as though we have to say something like the
following. If Derek Grice remembers joining my, he is the person who did that
thing. But since remembers doing means remembers himself doing, this is
trivially tautologous, and moreover lends colour to Butlers famous objection
that memory, so far from constituting personal identity, presupposes
it. As Butler puts it, one should really think it self-evident that
consciousness of personal identity presupposes, and therefore cannot
constitute, personal identity; any more than knowledge, in any other case, can
constitute truth, which it presupposes. Butler then asserts that Locke’s
misstep stems from his methodology. This wonderful mistake may possibly have
arisen from hence; that to be endued with consciousness is inseparable from the
idea of a person, or intelligent being. For this might be expressed
inaccurately thus, that consciousness makes personality: and from hence it
might be concluded to make personal identity. One of the points that Locke
emphasizes—that persistence conditions are determined via defining kind
terms—is what, according to Butler, leads Locke astray. Butler
additionally makes the point that memory is not required for personal
persistence. But though present consciousness of what we at present do and feel
is necessary to our being the persons we now are; yet present consciousness of
past actions or feelings is not necessary to our being the same persons who
performed those actions, or had those feelings. This is a point that others
develop when they assert that Lockes view results in contradiction. Hence
the criterion should rather run as follows. If Derek Grice claims to remember
joining the army. We must then ask how such a criterion might be
used. Grices example is: I remember I smelled a smell. He needs two
experiences to use same. I heard a noise and I smelled a smell.The singular
defines the hearing of a noise is the object of some consciousness. The pair
defines, "The hearing of a noise and the smelling of a smell are objects
of the same -- cognate with self as in I hurt me self, -- consciousness. The
standard form of an identity question is Is this x the same x as that x
which E and in the simpler situation we are at least presented with just
the materials for constructing such a question; but in the more complicated
situation we are baffled even in asking the question, since both the
transformed persons are equally good candidates for being its Subjects, and the
question Are these two xs the same (x?) as the x which E is not a recognizable
form of identity question. Thus, it might be argued, the fact that we could not
speak of identity in the latter situation is no kind of proof that we could not
do so in the former. Certainly it is not a proof, as Strawson points out to
Grice. This is not to say that they are identical at all. The only case in
which identity and exact similarity could be distinguished, as we have just
seen, is that of the body, same body and exactly similar body really do mark a
difference. Thus one may claim that the omission of the body takes away all
content from the idea of personal identity, as Pears pointed out to
Grice. Leaving aside memory, which only partially applies to the case,
character and attainments are quite clearly general things. Joness character
is, in a sense, a particular; just because Jones’s character refers to the
instantiation of certain properties by a particular (and bodily) man, as
Strawson points out to Grice (Particular and general). If in ‘Negation and
privation,’ Grice tackles Aristotle, he now tackles Locke. Indeed, seeing that
Grice went years later to the topic as motivated by, of all people, Haugeland,
rather than perhaps the more academic milieu that Perry offers, Grice became
obsessed with Hume’s sceptical doubts! Hume writes in the Appendix that when he
turns his reflection on himself, Hume never can perceive this self without
some one or more perceptions. Nor can Hume ever perceive any
thing but the perceptions. It is the composition of these, therefore,
which forms the self, Hume thinks. Hume grants that one can conceive a thinking
being to have either many or few perceptions. Suppose, says Hume, the mind to
be reduced even below the life of an oyster. Suppose the oyster to have only
one perception, as of thirst or hunger. Consider the oyster in that situation.
Does the oyster conceive any thing but merely that perception? Has the oyster
any notion of, to use Gallies pretentious Aristotelian jargon, self or
substance? If not, the addition of this or other perception can never give
the oyster that notion. The annihilation, which this or that philosopher,
including Grices first post-war tutee, Flew, supposes to follow upon
death, and which entirely destroys the oysters self, is nothing but
an extinction of all particular perceptions; love and
hatred, pain and pleasure, thought and sensation. These therefore
must be the same with self; since the one cannot survive the other.
Is self the same with substance? If it be, how can that question have place, concerning
the subsistence of self, under a change of substance? If they be distinct,
what is the difference betwixt them? For his part, Hume claims, he has a notion
of neither, when conceived distinct from this or that particular
perception. However extraordinary Hume’s conclusion may
seem, it need not surprise us. Most philosophers, such as
Locke, seems inclined to think, that personal identity arises
from consciousness. But consciousness is nothing but a reflected
thought or perception, Hume suggests. This is Grices quandary about personal
identity and its implicatura. Some philosophers have taken Grice as trying to
provide an exegesis of Locke. However, their approaches surely differ. What
works for Grice may not work for Locke. For Grice it is analytically true that
it is not the case that Person1 and Person may have the
same experience. Grice explicitly states that he thinks that his
logical-construction theory is a modification of Locke’s theory. Grice does not
seem terribly interested to find why it may not, even if the York-based Locke
Society might! Rather than introjecting into Lockes shoes, Grices strategy
seems to dismiss Locke, shoes and all. Specifically, it not clear to Grice what
Lockes answer in the Essay would be to Grices question about this or that I utterance
that he sets his analysis with. Admittedly, Grice does quote, albeit briefly,
directly from Lockes Essay. As far as any intelligent being can repeat the idea
of any past action with the same consciousness it had of it at first, and with
the same consciousness it has of any present action, Locke claims, so far the
being is the same personal self. Grice tackles Lockes claim with four
objections. These are important to consider since Grice sees as improving on
Locke. A first objection concerns icircularity, with which Grice easily
disposes by following Hume and appealing to the experience of memory or
introspection. A second objection is Reid’s alleged counterexample about the
long-term memory of the admiral who cannot remember that he was flogged as a boy.
Grice dismisses this as involving too long-term of a memory. A third objection
concerns Locke’s vagueness about the aboutness of consciousness, a point
made by Hume in the Appendix. A fourth objection concerns again circularity,
this time in Locke’s use of same in the definiens ‒ cf. Wiggins, Sameness and
substance. It’s extraordinary that Wiggins is philosophising on anything
Griceian. Grice is concerned with the implicaturum involved in the use of the
first person singular. I will be fighting soon. Grice means in body and soul.
The utterance also indicates that this is Grices pre-war days at Oxford. No
wonder his choice of an example. What else could he have in his soul? The topic
of personal identity, which label Hume and Austin found pretentious, and
preferred to talk about the illocutionary force of I, has a special Oxonian
pedigree, perhaps as motivated by Humes challenge, that Grice has occasion to
study and explore for his M. A. Lit. Hum. with Locke’s Essay as mandatory
reading. Locke, a philosopher with whom Oxford identifies most, infamously
defends this memory-based account of I. Up in Scotland, Reid reads it and
concocts this alleged counter-example. Hume, or Home, if you must, enjoys it.
In fact, while in the Mind essay he is not too specific about Hume, Grice will,
due mainly to his joint investigations with Haugeland, approach, introjecting
into the shoes of Hume ‒ who is idolised in The New World ‒ in ways he does not
introject into Lockes. But Grices quandary is Hume’s quandary, too. In his own
approach to I, the Cartesian ego, made transcendental and apperceptive by Kant,
Grice updates the time-honoured empiricist mnemonic analysis by Locke. The
first update is in style. Grice embraces, as he does with negation, a logical
construction, alla Russell, via Broad, of this or that “I” (first-person) utterance,
ending up with an analysis of a “someone,” third-person, less informative,
utterance. Grices immediate source is Gallie’s essay on self and substance in
Mind. Mind is still a review of psychology and philosophy, so poor Grice has
not much choice. In fact, Grice is being heterodoxical or heretic enough to use
Broad’s taxonomy, straight from the other place of I utterances. The
logical-construction theory is a third proposal, next to the Bradleyian
idealist pure-ego theory and the misleading covert-description theory.
Grice deals with the Reids alleged counterexample of the brave
officer. Suppose, Reid says, and Grice quotes verbatim, a brave officer to
have been flogged when a boy at school, for robbing an orchard, to have taken a
standard from the enemy in his first campaign, and to have been made a general
in advanced life. Suppose also, which must be admitted to be possible, that
when he2 took the standard, he2 was conscious
of his having been flogged at school, and that, when made a general, he3 was
conscious of his2 taking the standard, but had absolutely lost
the consciousness of his1 flogging. These things being supposed, it follows,
from Lockes doctrine, that he1 who is flogged at school is the same person as
him2 who later takes the standard, and that he2 who
later takes the standard is the same person as him3 who is
still later made a general. When it follows, if there be any truth in logic,
that the general is the same person with him1 who is flogged at
school. But the general’s consciousness does emphatically not reach so far back
as his1 flogging. Therefore, according to Locke’s doctrine, he3 is
emphatically not the same person as him1 who is flogged. Therefore, we can say
about the general that he3 is, and at the same time, that he3 is
not the same person as him1 who was flogged at
school. Grice, wholl later add a temporal suffix to =t yielding, by
transitivity. The flogged boy =t1 the brave officer. And the
brave officer =t2 the admiral. But the admiral ≠t3 the
flogged boy. In Mind, Grice tackles the basic analysans, and comes up with a
rather elaborate analysans for a simple I or Someone statement. Grice just
turns to a generic affirmative variant of the utterance he had used in Negation.
It is now someone, viz. I, who hears that the bell tolls. It is the affirmative
counterpart of the focus of his earlier essay on negation, I do not hear that
the bell tolls. Grice dismisses what, in the other place, was referred to as
privileged-access, and the indexicality of I, an approach that will be made
popular by Perry, who however reprints Grices essay in his influential
collection for the University of California Press. By allowing for someone,
viz. I, Grice seems to be relying on a piece of reasoning which hell later, in
his first Locke lecture, refer to as too good. I hear that the bell tolls;
therefore, someone hears that the bell tolls. Grice attempts to reduce this or
that I utterance (Someone, viz. I, hears that the bell tolls) is in terms of a
chain or sequence of mnemonic states. It poses a few quandaries itself. While
quoting from this or that recent philosopher such as Gallie and Broad, it is a
good thing that Grice has occasion to go back to, or revisit, Locke and contest
this or that infamous and alleged counterexample presented by Reid and Hume.
Grice adds a methodological note to his proposed logical-construction theory of
personal identity. There is some intricacy of his reductive analysis, indeed
logical construction, for an apparently simple and harmless utterance (cf. his
earlier essay on I do not hear that the bell tolls). But this intricacy does
not prove the analysis wrong. Only that Grice is too subtle. If the reductive
analysis of not is in terms of each state which I am experiencing is
incompatible with phi), that should not be a minus, or drawback, but a plus,
and an advantage in terms of philosophical progress. The same holds here in
terms of the concept of a temporary state. Much later, Grice reconsiders,
or revisits, indeed, Broads remark and re-titles his approach as the (or a)
logical-construction theory of personal identity. And, with Haugeland, Grice
re-considers Humes own vagaries, or quandary, with personal identity. Unlike
the more conservative Locke that Grice favours in the pages of Mind,
eliminationist Hume sees ‘I’ as a conceptual muddle, indeed a metaphysical
chimæra. Hume presses the point for an empiricist verificationist account of I.
For, as Russell would rhetorically ask, ‘What can be more direct that the
experience of myself?’ The Hume Society should take notice of Grices
simplification of Hume’s implicaturum on I, if The Locke Society won’t. As a
matter of fact, Grice calls one of his metaphysical construction routines the
Humeian projection, so it is not too adventurous to think that Grice considers
I as an intuitive concept that needs to be metaphysically re-constructed
and be given a legitimate Fregeian sense. Why that label for a construction
routine? Grice calls this metaphysical construction routine Humeian projection,
since the mind (or soul) as it were, spreads over its objects. But, by mind,
Hume does not necessarily mean the I. Cf. The minds I. Grice is especially
concerned with the poverty and weaknesses of Humes criticism to Lockes account
of personal identity. Grice opts to revisit the Lockeian memory-based of this
or that someone, viz. I utterance that Hume rather regards as vague, and
confusing. Unlike Humes, neither Lockes nor Grices reductive analysis of
personal identity is reductionist and eliminationist. The
reductive-reductionist distinction Grice draws in Retrospective epilogue as he
responds to Rountree-Jack on this or that alleged wrong on meaning that. It is
only natural that Grice would be sympathetic to Locke. Grice explores these
issues with Haugeland mainly at seminars. One may wonder why Grice spends so
much time in a philosopher such as Hume, with whom he agreed almost on nothing!
The answer is Humes influence in the Third World that forced Grice to focus on
this or that philosopher. Surely Locke is less popular in the New World than
Hume is. One supposes Grice is trying to save Hume at the implicaturum level,
at least. The phrase or term of art, logical construction is Russells and
Broads, but Grice loved it. Rational reconstruction is not too dissimilar.
Grice prefers Russells and Broads more conservative label. This is more than a
terminological point. If Hume is right and there is NO intuitive concept behind
I, one cannot strictly re-construct it, only construct it. Ultimately, Grice
shows that, if only at the implicaturum level, we are able to provide an
analysandum for this or that someone, viz. I utterance without using I, by
implicating only this or that mnemonic concept, which belongs, naturally, as
his theory of negation does, in a theory of philosophical psychology, and again
a lower branch of it, dealing with memory. The topic of personal identity
unites various interests of Grice. The first is identity “=” simpliciter.
Instead of talking of the meaning of I, as, say, Anscombe would, Grice sticks
to the traditional category, or keyword, for this, i. e. the theory-laden, personal
identity, or even personal sameness. Personal identity is a type of identity,
but personal adds something to it. Surely Hume was stretching person a bit when
using the example of a soul with a life lower than an oyster. Since Grice
follows Aristotles De Anima, he enjoys Hume’s choice, though. It may be argued
that personal adds Locke’s consciousness, and rational agency. Grice plays with
the body-soul distinction. I, viz someone or somebody, fell from the stairs,
perhaps differs from I will be fighting soon. This or that someone, viz. I
utterance may be purely bodily. Grice would think that the idea that his soul
fell from the stairs sounds, as it would to Berkeley, harsh. But then theres
this or that one may be mixed utterance. Someone, viz. I, plays cricket, where
surely your bodily mechanisms require some sort of control by the soul.
Finally, this or that may be purely souly ‒ the one Grice ends up analysing,
Someone, viz. I, hear that the bell tolls. At the time of his Mind essay, Grice
may have been unaware of the complications that the concept of a person may
bring as attached in adjective form to identity. Ayer did, and Strawson and
Wiggins will, and Grice learns much from Strawson. Since Parfit, this has
become a common-place topic for analysis at Oxford. A person as a complexum of
a body-soul spatio-temporal continuant substance. Ultimately, Grice finds a
theoretical counterpart here. A P may become a human, which Grice understands
physiologically. That is not enough. A P must aspire, via meteousis, to become
a person. Thus, person becomes a technical term in Grices grand metaphysical
scheme of things. Someone, viz. I, hear that the bell is tolls is analysed
as ≡df, or if and only if, a hearing that the bell tolls is a
part of a total temporary tn souly state S1 which is
one in a s. such that any state Sn, given this or that
condition, contains as a part a memory Mn of the
experience of hearing that the bell tolls, which is a component in some
pre-sequent t1n item, or contains an experience of hearing
that the bell tolls a memory M of which would, given this or that
condition, occur as a component in some sub-sequent t2>tn item,
there being no sub-set of items which is independent of the rest. Grice
simplifies the reductive analysans. Someone, viz. I, hears that the bell tolls
iff a hearing that the bell tolls is a component in an item of an interlocking
s. with emphasis on lock, s. of this or that memorable and memorative
total temporary tn state S1. Is Grice’s Personal
identity ever referred to in the Oxonian philosophical literature? Indeeed.
Parfit mentions, which makes it especially memorable and memorative. P. Edwards
includes a reference to Grices Mind essay in the entry for Personal identity,
as a reference to Grice et al on Met. , is referenced in Edwardss encyclopædia
entry for metaphysics. Grice does not attribute privileged access or
incorrigibility to I or the first person. He always hastens to add that I can
always be substituted, salva veritate (if baffling your addressee A) by someone
or other, if not some-body or other, a colloquialism Grice especially detested.
Grices agency-based approach requires that. I am rational provided thou art,
too. If, by explicitly saying he is a Lockeian, Grice surely does not wish us
to see him as trying to be original, or the first to consider this or that
problem about I; i.e. someone. Still, Grice is the philosopher who explores
most deeply the reductive analysis of I, i.e. someone. Grice needs the
reductive analysis because human agency (philosophically, rather than
psychologically interpreted) is key for his approach to things. By uttering The
bell tolls, U means that someone, viz. himself, hears that the bell tolls, or
even, by uttering I, hear, viz. someone hears, that the bell tolls, U means that
the experience of a hearing that the bell tolls is a component in a total
temporary state which is a member of a s. such that each member would,
given certain conditions, contain as an component one memory of an
experience which is a component in a pre-sequent member, or contains as a
component some experience a memory of which would, given
certain conditions, occur as a component in a post-sequent member; there
being no sub-set of members which is independent of the rest. Thanks, the
addressee might reply. I didnt know that! The reductive bit to Grices analysis
needs to be emphasised. For Grice, a person, and consequently, a someone, viz.
I utterance, is, simpliciter, a logical construction out of this or that
Humeian experience. Whereas in Russell, as Broad notes, a logical
construction of this or that philosophical concept, in this case personal
identity, or cf. Grices earlier reductive analysis of not, is thought of as an
improved, rationally reconstructed conception. Neither Russell nor Broad need
maintain that the logical construction preserves the original meaning of the
analysandum someone, viz. I, hears that the bell tolls, or I do not hear that
the bell tolls ‒ hence their paradox of reductionist analysis. This change of
Subjects does not apply to Grice. Grice emphatically intends to be make
explicit, if rationally reconstructed (if that is not an improvement) through
reductive (if not reductionist) analysis, the concept Grice already claims to
have. One particular development to consider is within Grices play group, that
of Quinton. Grice and Quinton seem to have been the only two philosophers in
Austins play group who showed any interest on someone, viz. I. Or not. The fact
that Quinton entitles his thing “The soul” did not help. Note that Woozley was at
the time editing Reid on “Identity,” Cf. Duncan-Jones on mans mortality. Note
that Quintons immediate trigger is Shoemaker. Grice writes that he is not
“merely a series of perceptions,” for he is “conscious of a permanent self, an
I who experiences these perceptions and who is now identical with the I
who experienced perceptions yesterday.” So, leaving aside that he is using I
with the third person verb, but surely this is no use-mention fallacy, it is
this puzzle that provoked his thoughts on temporal-relative “=” later on. As
Grice notes, Butler argued that consciousness of experience can contribute to
identity but not define it. Grice will use Butler in his elaboration of
conversational benevolence versus conversational self-interest. Better than Quinton,
it is better to consider Flew in Philosophy, 96, on Locke and the problem of
personal identity, obviously suggested as a term paper by Grice! Wiggins cites
Flew. Flew actually notes that Berkeley saw Lockes problem earlier than Reid,
which concerns the transitiveness of =. Recall that Wigginss tutor at Oxford
was a tutee by Grice, Ackrill. identity, the relation each thing bears just to
itself. Formally, a % b Q EF(Fa P Fb); informally, the identity of a and b
implies and is implied by their sharing of all their properties. Read from left
to right, this biconditional asserts the indiscernibility of identicals; from
right to left, the identity of indiscernibles. The indiscernibility of
identicals is not to be confused with a metalinguistic principle to the effect
that if a and b are names of the same object, then each may be substituted for
the other in a sentence without change of truth-value: that may be false,
depending on the semantics of the language under discussion. Similarly, the
identity of indiscernibles is not the claim that if a and b can be exchanged in
all sentential contexts without affecting truth-value, then they name the same
object. For such intersubstitutability may arise when the language in question
simply lacks predicates that could discriminate between the referents of a and
b. In short, the identity of things is not a relation among names. Identity
proper is numerical identity, to be distinguished from exact similarity
(qualitative identity). Intuitively, two exactly similar objects are “copies”
of each other; still they are two, hence not identical. One way to express this
is via the notions of extrinsic and intrinsic properties: exactly similar
objects differ in respect of the former only. But we can best explain
‘instrinsic property’ by saying that a thing’s intrinsic properties are those
it shares with its copies. These notions appear virtually interdefinable. (Note
that the concept of an extrinsic property must be relativized to a class or
kind of things. Not being in San Francisco is an extrinsic property of persons
but arguably an intrinsic property of cities.) While qualitative identity is a
familiar notion, its theoretical utility is unclear. The absolute notion of
qualitative identity should, however, be distinguished from an unproblematic
relative notion: if some list of salient properties is fixed in a given context
(say, in mechanics or normative ethics), then the exactly similar things,
relative to that context, are those that agree on the properties listed. Both
the identity of indiscernibles and (less frequently) the indiscernibility of
identicals are sometimes called Leibniz’s law. Neither attribution is apt.
Although Leibniz would have accepted the former principle, his distinctive
claim was the impossibility of exactly similar objects: numerically distinct
individuals cannot even share all intrinsic properties. Moreover, this was not,
for him, simply a law of identity but rather an application of his principle of
sufficient reason. And the indiscernibility of identicals is part of a
universal understanding of identity. What distinguishes Leibniz is the
prominence of identity statements in his metaphysics and logical theory.
Although identity remains a clear and basic logical notion, identity questions
about problematic kinds of objects raise difficulties. One example is the
identification of properties, particularly in contexts involving reduction.
Although we know what identity is, the notion of a property is unclear enough
to pose systematic obstacles to the evaluation of theoretically significant
identity statements involving properties. Other difficulties involve personal
identity or the possible identification of numbers and sets in the foundations
of mathematics. In these cases, the identity questions simply inherit – and
provide vivid ways of formulating – the difficulties pertaining to such
concepts as person, property, or number; no rethinking of the identity concept
itself is indicated. But puzzles about the relation of an ordinary material
body to its constituent matter may suggest that the logician’s analysis of
identity does not cleanly capture our everyday notion(s). Consider a bronze
statue. Although the statue may seem to be nothing besides its matter,
reflection on change over time suggests a distinction. The statue may be melted
down, hence destroyed, while the bronze persists, perhaps simply as a mass or
perhaps as a new statue formed from the same bronze. Alternatively, the statue
may persist even as some of its bronze is dissolved in acid. So the statue
seems to be one thing and the bronze another. Yet what is the bronze besides a
statue? Surely we do not have two statues (or statuelike objects) in one place?
Some authors feel that variants of the identity relation may permit a
perspicuous description of the relation of statue and bronze: (1) tensed
identity: Assume a class of timebound properties – roughly, properties an
object can have at a time regardless of what properties it has at other times.
(E.g., a statue’s shape, location, or elegance.) Then a % t b provided a and b
share all timebound properties at time t. Thus, the statue and the bronze may
be identical at time t 1 but not at t 2. (2) relative identity: a and b may be
identical relative to one concept (or predicate) but not to another. Thus, the
statue may be held to be the same lump of matter as the bronze but not the same
object of art. identity identity 415 4065h-l.qxd 08/02/1999 7:39 AM Page 415 In
each case, only detailed study will show whether the variant notion can at once
offer a natural description of change and qualify as a viable identity concept.
(Strong doubts arise about (2).) But it seems likely that our everyday talk of
identity has a richness and ambiguity that escapes formal
characterization. identity, ‘is’ of. See
IS. identity, psychophysical. See PHYSICALISM. identity, theoretical. See
PHILOSOPHY OF MIND. identity of indiscernibles, any of a family of principles,
important members of which include the following: (1) If objects a and b have
all properties in common, then a and b are identical. (2) If objects a and b
have all their qualitative properties in common, then a and b are identical.
(3) If objects a and b have all their non-relational qualitative properties in
common, then a and b are identical. Two questions regarding these principles
are raised: Which, if any, are true? If any are true, are they necessarily
true? Discussions of the identity of indiscernibles typically restrict the
scope of the principle to concrete objects. Although the notions of qualitative
and non-relational properties play a prominent role in these discussions, they
are notoriously difficult to define. Intuitively, a qualitative property is one
that can be instantiated by more than one object and does not involve being
related to another particular object. It does not follow that all qualitative
properties are non-relational, since some relational properties, such as being
on top of a brown desk, do not involve being related to some particular object.
(1) is generally regarded as necessarily true but trivial, since if a and b
have all properties in common then a has the property of being identical with b
and b has the property of being identical with a. Hence, most discussions focus
on (2) and (3). (3) is generally regarded as, at best, a contingent truth since
it appears possible to conceive of two distinct red balls of the same size,
shade of color, and composition. Some have argued that elementary scientific
particles, such as electrons, are counterexamples to even the contingent truth
of (3). (2) appears defensible as a contingent truth since, in the actual
world, objects such as the red balls and the electrons differ in their
relational qualitative properties. It has been argued, however, that (2) is not
a necessary truth since it is possible to conceive of a world consisting of
only the two red balls. In such a world, any qualitative relational property
possessed by one ball is also possessed by the other. Defenders of the
necessary truth of (2) have argued that a careful examination of such counterexamples
reveals hidden qualitative properties that differentiate the objects. Grice
learned about idem, ipsum and simile via his High Church maternal grandfather.
“What an iota can do!” -- Refs.: The main references covering
identity simpliciter are in “Vacuous Names,” and his joint work on metaphysics
with G. Myro. The main references relating to the second group, of personal
identity, are his “Mind” essay, an essay on ‘the logical-construction theory of
personal identity,’ and a second set of essays on Hume’s quandary, The H. P.
Grice Papers, BANC.
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