IMPLICATVRA, in 12 volumes; vol. XI

propositional opacity, failure of a clause to express any particular proposition especially due to the occurrence of pronouns or demonstratives. If having a belief about an individual involves a relation to a proposition, and if a part of the proposition is a way of representing the individual, then belief characterizations that do not indicate the believer’s way of representing the individual could be called propositionally opaque. They do not show all of the propositional elements. For example, ‘My son’s clarinet teacher believes that he should try the bass drum’ would be propositionally opaque because ‘he’ does not indicate how my son John’s teacher represents John, e.g. as his student, as my son, as the boy now playing, etc. This characterization of the example is not appropriate if propositions are as Russell conceived them, sometimes containing the individuals themselves as constituents, because then the propositional constituent John has been referred to. Generally, a characterization of a propositional    754 attitude is propositionally opaque if the expressions in the embedded clause do not refer to the propositional constituents. It is propositionally transparent if the expressions in the embedded clause do so refer. As a rule, referentially opaque contexts are used in propositionally transparent attributions if the referent of a term is distinct from the corresponding propositional constituent. 

proprietates terminorum Latin, ‘properties of terms’, in medieval logic from the twelfth century on, a cluster of semantic properties possessed by categorematic terms. For most authors, these properties apply only when the terms occur in the context of a proposition. The list of such properties and the theory governing them vary from author to author, but always include 1 suppositio. Some authors add 2 appellatio ‘appellating’, ‘naming’, ‘calling’, often not sharply distinguishing from suppositio, the property whereby a term in a certain proposition names or is truly predicable of things, or in some authors of presently existing things. Thus ‘philosophers’ in ‘Some philosophers are wise’ appellates philosophers alive today. 3 Ampliatio ‘ampliation’, ‘broadening’, whereby a term refers to past or future or merely possible things. The reference of ‘philosophers’ is ampliated in ‘Some philosophers were wise’. 4 Restrictio ‘restriction’, ‘narrowing’, whereby the reference of a term is restricted to presently existing things ‘philosophers’ is so restricted in ‘Some philosophers are wise’, or otherwise narrowed from its normal range ‘philosophers’ in ‘Some Grecian philosophers were wise’. 5 Copulatio ‘copulation’, ‘coupling’, which is the type of reference adjectives have ‘wise’ in ‘Some philosophers are wise’, or alternatively the semantic function of the copula. Other meanings too are sometimes given to these terms, depending on the author. Appellatio especially was given a wide variety of interpretations. In particular, for Buridan and other fourteenth-century Continental authors, appellatio means ‘connotation’. Restrictio and copulatio tended to drop out of the literature, or be treated only perfunctorily, after the thirteenth century. 

proprium: idion. See Nicholas White's "The Origin of Aristotle's Essentialism," Review of Metaphysics ~6. (September 1972): ... vice versa. The proprium is a necessary, but non-essential, property. ... Alan Code pointed this out to me. ' Does Aristotle ... The proprium is defined by the fact that it only holds of a particular subject or ... Of the appropriate answers some are more specific or distinctive (idion) and are in ... and property possession comes close to what Alan Code in a seminal paper ...  but "substance of" is what is "co-extensive (idion) with each thing" (1038b9); so ... by an alternative name or definition, and by a proprium) and the third which is ... Woods's idea (recently nicknamed "Izzing before Having" by Code and Grice) . As my chairmanship was winding down, I suggested to Paul Grice on one of his ... in Aristotle's technical sense of an idion (Latin proprium), i.e., a characteristic or feature ... Code, which, arguably, is part of the theory of Izzing and Having: D. Keyt. a proprium, since proprium belongs to the genus of accident. ... Similarly, Code claims (10): 'In its other uses the predicate “being'' signifies either “what ... Grice adds a few steps to show that the plurality of universals signified correspond ... Aristotle elsewhere calls an idion.353 If one predicates the genus in the absence of. has described it by a paronymous form, nor as a property (idion), nor ... terminology of Code and Grice.152 Thus there is no indication that they are ... (14,20-31) 'Genus' and 'proprium' (ἰδίου) are said homonymously in ten ways, as are. Ackrill replies to this line of argument (75) as follows: [I]t is perfectly clear that Aristotle’s fourfold classification is a classification of things and not names, and that what is ‘said of’ something as subject is itself a thing (a species or genus) and not a name. Sometimes, indeed, Aristotle will speak of ‘saying’ or ‘predicating’ a name of a subject; but it is not linguistic items but the things they signify which are ‘said of a subject’… Thus at 2a19 ff. Aristotle sharply distinguishes things said of subjects from the names of those things. This last argument seems persuasive on textual grounds. After all, τὰ καθ᾽ ὑποκειμένου λεγόμενα ‘have’ definitions and names (τῶν καθ᾽ υποκειμένου λεγομένων… τοὔνομα καὶ τὸν λὸγον, 2a19-21): it is not the case that they ‘are’ definitions and names, to adapt the terminology of Code and Grice.152 See A. Code, ‘Aristotle: Essence and Accident’, in Grandy and Warner (eds.), Philosophical Grounds of Rationality (Oxford, 1986), 411-39: particulars have their predicables, but Forms are their predicables. Thus there is no indication that they are linguistic terms in their own right.proprium, one of Porphyry’s five predicables, often tr. as ‘property’ or ‘attribute’; but this should not be confused with the broad modern sense in which any feature of a thing may be said to be a property of it. A proprium is a nonessential peculiarity of a species. There are no propria of individuals or genera generalissima, although they may have other uniquely identifying features. A proprium necessarily holds of all members of its species and of nothing else. It is not mentioned in a real definition of the species, and so is not essential to it. Yet it somehow follows from the essence or nature expressed in the real definition. The standard example is risibility the ability to laugh as a proprium of the species man. The real definition of ‘man’ is ‘rational animal’. There is no mention of any ability to laugh. Nevertheless anything that can laugh has both the biological apparatus to produce the sounds and so is an animal and also a certain wit and insight into humor and so is rational. Conversely, any rational animal will have both the vocal chords and diaphragm required for laughing since it is an animal, although the inference may seem too quick and also the mental wherewithal to see the point of a joke since it is rational. Thus any rational animal has what it takes to laugh. In short, every man is risible, and conversely, but risibility is not an essential feature of man. 

Prosona – Grice’s favoured spelling for ‘person’ – “seeing that it means a mask to improve sonorisation’ personalism, a Christian socialism stressing social activism and personal responsibility, the theoretical basis for the Christian workers’ Esprit movement begun in the 0s by Emmanuel Mounier 550, a Christian philosopher and activist. Influenced by both the religious existentialism of Kierkegaard and the radical social action called for by Marx and in part taking direction from the earlier work of Charles Péguy, the movement strongly opposed fascism and called for worker solidarity during the 0s and 0s. It also urged a more humane treatment of France’s colonies. Personalism allowed for a Christian socialism independent of both more conservative Christian groups and the Communist labor unions and party. Its most important single book is Mounier’s Personalism. The quarterly journal Esprit has regularly published contributions of leading  and international thinkers. Such well-known Christian philosophers as Henry Duméry, Marcel, Maritain, and Ricoeur were attracted to the movement. 

protocol statement, one of the statements that constitute the foundations of empirical knowledge. The term was introduced by proponents of foundationalism, who were convinced that in order to avoid the most radical skepticism, one must countenance beliefs that are justified but not as a result of an inference. If all justified beliefs are inferentially justified, then to be justified in believing one proposition P on the basis of another, E, one would have to be justified in believing both E and that E confirms P. But if all justification were inferential, then to be justified in believing E one would need to infer it from some other proposition one justifiably believes, and so on ad infinitum. The only way to avoid this regress is to find some statement knowable without inferring it from some other truth. Philosophers who agree that empirical knowledge has foundations do not necessarily agree on what those foundations are. The British empiricists restrict the class of contingent protocol statements to propositions describing the contents of mind sensations, beliefs, fears, desires, and the like. And even here a statement describing a mental state would be a protocol statement only for the person in that state. Other philosophers, however, would take protocol statements to include at least some assertions about the immediate physical environment. The plausibility of a given candidate for a protocol statement depends on how one analyzes non-inferential justification. Some philosophers rely on the idea of acquaintance. One is non-inferentially justified in believing something when one is directly acquainted with what makes it true. Other philosophers rely on the idea of a state that is in some sense self-presenting. Still others want to understand the notion in terms of the inconceivability of error. The main difficulty in trying to defend a coherent conception of non-inferential justification is to find an account of protocol statements that gives them enough conceptual content to serve as the premises of arguments, while avoiding the charge that the application of concepts always brings with it the possibility of error and the necessity of inference. 

prototype theory, a theory according to which human cognition involves the deployment of “categories” organized around stereotypical exemplars. Prototype theory differs from traditional theories that take the concepts with which we think to be individuated by means of boundary-specifying necessary and sufficient conditions. Advocates of prototypes hold that our concept of bird, for instance, consists in an indefinitely bounded conceptual “space” in which robins and sparrows are central, and chickens and penguins are peripheral  though the category may be differently organized in different cultures or groups. Rather than being all-ornothing, category membership is a matter of degree. This conception of categories was originally inspired by the notion, developed in a different context by Vitters, of family resemblance. Prototypes were first discussed in detail and given empirical credibility in the work of Eleanor Rosch see, e.g., “On the Internal Structure of Perceptual and Semantic Categories,” 3. 

Proudhon, Pierre-Joseph 180965,  socialist theorist and father of anarchism. He became well known following the publication of What Is Property? 1840, the work containing his main ideas. He argued that the owner of the means of production deprives the workers of a part of their labor: “property is theft.” In order to enable each worker to dispose of his labor, capital and largescale property must be limited. The need to abolish large-scale private property surpassed the immediate need for a state as a controlling agent over chaotic social relationships. To this end he stressed the need for serious reforms in the exchange system. Since the economy and society largely depended on the credit system, Proudhon advocated establishing popular banks that would approve interest-free loans to the poor. Such a mutualism would start the transformation of the actual into a just and nonexploited society of free individuals. Without class antagonism and political authorities, such a society would tend toward an association of communal and industrial collectivities. It would move toward a flexible world federation based on self-management. The main task of social science, then, is to make manifest this immanent logic of social processes. Proudhon’s ideas influenced anarchists, populists Bakunin, Herzen, and syndicalists Jaurès. His conception of self-management was an important inspiration for the later concept of soviets councils. He criticized the inequalities of the contemporary society from the viewpoint of small producers and peasants. Although eclectic and theoretically rather naive, his work attracted the serious attention of his contemporaries and led to a strong attack by Marx in The Holy Family and The Poverty of Philosophy.

prudens: practical reason: In “Epilogue” Grice states that the principle of conversational rationality is a sub-principle of the principle of rationality, simpliciter, which is not involved with ‘communication’ per se. This is an application of Occam’s razor: Rationalities are not to be multiplied beyond necessity.” This motto underlies his aequi-vocality thesis: one reason: desiderative side, judicative side. Literally, ‘practical reason’ is the buletic part of the soul (psyche) that deals with praxis, where the weighing is central. We dont need means-end rationality, we need value-oriented rationality. We dont need the rationality of the means – this is obvious --. We want the rationality of the ends. The end may justify the means. But Grice is looking for what justifies the end. The topic of freedom fascinated Grice, because it merged the practical with the theoretical. Grice sees the conception of freedom as crucial in his elucidation of a rational being. Conditions of freedom are necessary for the very idea, as Kant was well aware. A thief who is forced to steal is just a thief. Grice would engage in a bit of language botany, when exploring the ways the adjective free is used, freely, in ordinary language: free fall, alcohol-free, sugar-free, and his favourite: implicaturum-free. Grices more systematic reflections deal with Pology, or creature construction. A vegetals, for example is less free than an animal, but more free than a stone! And Humans are more free than non-human. Grice wants to deal with some of the paradoxes identified by Kant about freedom, and he succeeds in solving some of them. There is a section on freedom in Action and events for PPQ  where he expands on eleutheria and notes the idiocy of a phrase like free fall. Grice was irritated by the fact that his friend Hart wrote an essay on liberty and not on freedom, cf. praxis. Refs.: essays on ‘practical reason,’ and “Aspects,” in BANC.

ψ-transmissum. Or ‘soul-to-soul transfer’ “Before we study ‘psi’-transmission we should study ‘transmission’ simpliciter. It is cognate with ‘emission.’ So the emissor is a transmissor. And the emissee is a transemissee.  Grice would never have thougth that he had to lecture on what conversation is all about! He would never have lectured on this to his tutees at St. John’s – but at Brighton is all different. So, to communicate, for an emissor is to intend his recipient to be in a state with content “p.” The modality of the ‘state’ – desiderative or creditative – is not important. In a one-off predicament, the emissor draws a skull to indicate that there is danger. So his belief and desire were successfully transmitted. A good way to formulate the point of communication. Note that Grice is never sure about analsans and analysandum: Emissor communicates THAT P iff Emissor M-INTENDS THAT addressee is to psi- that P. Which seems otiose. “It is raining” can be INFORMATIVE, but it is surely INDICATIVE first. So it’s moke like the emissor intends his addressee to believe that he, the utterer believes that p (the belief itself NOT being part of what is meant, of course). So, there is psi-transmission not necessarily when the utterer convinces his addressee, but just when he gets his addressee to BELIEF that he, the utterer, psi-s that p. So the psi HAS BEEN TRANSMITTED. Surely when the Beatles say “HELP” they don’t expect that their addressee will need help. They intend their addressee to HELP them! Used by Grice in WoW: 287, and emphasised by J. Baker. The gist of communication. trans-mitto or trāmitto , mīsi, missum, 3, v. a. I. To send, carry, or convey across, over, or through; to send off, despatch, transmit from one place or person to another (syn.: transfero, traicio, traduco). A. Lit.: “mihi illam ut tramittas: argentum accipias,” Plaut. Ep. 3, 4, 27: “illam sibi,” id. ib. 1, 2, 52: “exercitus equitatusque celeriter transmittitur (i. e. trans flumen),” are conveyed across, Caes. B. G. 7, 61: “legiones,” Vell. 2, 51, 1: “cohortem Usipiorum in Britanniam,” Tac. Agr. 28: “classem in Euboeam ad urbem Oreum,” Liv. 28, 5, 18: “magnam classem in Siciliam,” id. 28, 41, 17: “unde auxilia in Italiam transmissurus erat,” id. 23, 32, 5; 27, 15, 7: transmissum per viam tigillum, thrown over or across, id. 1, 26, 10: “ponte transmisso,” Suet. Calig. 22 fin.: in partem campi pecora et armenta, Tac. A. 13, 55: “materiam in formas,” Col. 7, 8, 6.— 2. To cause to pass through: “per corium, per viscera Perque os elephanto bracchium transmitteres,” you would have thrust through, penetrated, Plaut. Mil. 1, 30; so, “ensem per latus,” Sen. Herc. Oet. 1165: “facem telo per pectus,” id. Thyest. 1089: “per medium amnem transmittit equum,” rides, Liv. 8, 24, 13: “(Gallorum reguli) exercitum per fines suos transmiserunt,” suffered to pass through, id. 21, 24, 5: “abies folio pinnato densa, ut imbres non transmittat,” Plin. 16, 10, 19, § 48: “Favonios,” Plin. Ep. 2, 17, 19; Tac. A. 13, 15: “ut vehem faeni large onustam transmitteret,” Plin. 36, 15, 24, § 108.— B. Trop. 1. To carry over, transfer, etc.: “bellum in Italiam,” Liv. 21, 20, 4; so, “bellum,” Tac. A. 2, 6: “vitia cum opibus suis Romam (Asia),” Just. 36, 4, 12: vim in aliquem, to send against, i. e. employ against, Tac. A. 2, 38.— 2. To hand over, transmit, commit: “et quisquam dubitabit, quin huic hoc tantum bellum transmittendum sit, qui, etc.,” should be intrusted, Cic. Imp. Pomp. 14, 42: “alicui signa et summam belli,” Sil. 7, 383: “hereditas transmittenda alicui,” to be made over, Plin. Ep. 8, 18, 7; and with inf.: “et longo transmisit habere nepoti,” Stat. S. 3, 3, 78 (analog. to dat habere, Verg. A. 9, 362; “and, donat habere,” id. ib. 5, 262); “for which: me famulo famulamque Heleno transmisit habendam,” id. ib. 3, 329: “omne meum tempus amicorum temporibus transmittendum putavi,” should be devoted, Cic. Imp. Pomp. 1, 1: “poma intacta ore servis,” Tac. A. 4, 54.— 3. To let go: animo transmittente quicquid acceperat, letting pass through, i. e. forgetting, Sen. Ep. 99, 6: “mox Caesarem vergente jam senectā munia imperii facilius tramissurum,” would let go, resign, Tac. A. 4, 41: “Junium mensem transmissum,” passed over, omitted, id. ib. 16, 12 fin.: “Gangen amnem et quae ultra essent,” to leave unconquered, Curt. 9, 4, 17: “leo imbelles vitulos Transmittit,” Stat. Th. 8, 596.— II. To go or pass over or across, to cross over; to cross, pass, go through, traverse, etc. A. Lit. 1. In gen. (α). Act.: “grues cum maria transmittant,” Cic. N. D. 2, 49, 125: “cur ipse tot maria transmisit,” id. Fin. 5, 29, 87; so, “maria,” id. Rep. 1, 3, 6: “satis constante famā jam Iberum Poenos transmisisse,” Liv. 21, 20, 9 (al. transisse): “quem (Euphratem) ponte,” Tac. A. 15, 7: “fluvium nando,” Stat. Th. 9, 239: “lacum nando,” Sil. 4, 347: “murales fossas saltu,” id. 8, 554: “equites medios tramittunt campos,” ride through, Lucr. 2, 330; cf.: “cursu campos (cervi),” run through, Verg. A. 4, 154: quantum Balearica torto Funda potest plumbo medii transmittere caeli, can send with its hurled bullet, i. e. can send its bullet, Ov. M. 4, 710: “tectum lapide vel missile,” to fling over, Plin. 28, 4, 6, § 33; cf.: “flumina disco,” Stat. Th. 6, 677.—In pass.: “duo sinus fuerunt, quos tramitti oporteret: utrumque pedibus aequis tramisimus,” Cic. Att. 16, 6, 1: “transmissus amnis,” Tac. A. 12, 13: “flumen ponte transmittitur,” Plin. Ep. 8, 8, 5.— (β). Neutr.: “ab eo loco conscendi ut transmitterem,” Cic. Phil. 1, 3, 7: “cum exercitus vestri numquam a Brundisio nisi summā hieme transmiserint,” id. Imp. Pomp. 12, 32: “cum a Leucopetrā profectus (inde enim tramittebam) stadia circiter CCC. processissem, etc.,” id. Att. 16, 7, 1; 8, 13, 1; 8, 11, 5: “ex Corsicā subactā Cicereius in Sardiniam transmisit,” Liv. 42, 7, 2; 32, 9, 6: “ab Lilybaeo Uticam,” id. 25, 31, 12: “ad vastandam Italiae oram,” id. 21, 51, 4; 23, 38, 11; 24, 36, 7: “centum onerariae naves in Africam transmiserunt,” id. 30, 24, 5; Suet. Caes. 58: “Cyprum transmisit,” Curt. 4, 1, 27. — Pass. impers.: “in Ebusum insulam transmissum est,” Liv. 22, 20, 7.—* 2. In partic., to go over, desert to a party: “Domitius transmisit ad Caesa rem,” Vell. 2, 84 fin. (syn. transfugio).— B. Trop. (post-Aug.). 1. In gen., to pass over, leave untouched or disregarded (syn praetermitto): “haud fas, Bacche, tuos taci tum tramittere honores,” Sil. 7, 162; cf.: “sententiam silentio, deinde oblivio,” Tac. H. 4, 9 fin.: “nihil silentio,” id. ib. 1, 13; “4, 31: aliquid dissimulatione,” id. A. 13, 39: “quae ipse pateretur,” Suet. Calig. 10; id. Vesp. 15. — 2. In partic., of time, to pass, spend (syn. ago): “tempus quiete,” Plin. Ep. 9, 6, 1: so, “vitam per obscurum,” Sen. Ep. 19, 2: steriles annos, Stat. S. 4, 2, 12: “aevum,” id. ib. 1, 4, 124: “quattuor menses hiemis inedia,” Plin. 8, 25, 38, § 94: “vigiles noctes,” Stat. Th. 3, 278 et saep. — Transf.: “febrium ardorem,” i. e. to undergo, endure, Plin. Ep. 1, 22, 7; cf. “discrimen,” id. ib. 8, 11, 2: “secessus, voluptates, etc.,” id. ib. 6, 4, 2.

pseudo-hallucination, a non-deceptive hallucination. An ordinary hallucination might be thought to comprise two components: i a sensory component, whereby one experiences an image or sensory episode similar in many respects to a veridical perceiving except in being non-veridical; and ii a cognitive component, whereby one takes or is disposed to take the image or sensory episode to be veridical. A pseudohallucination resembles a hallucination, but lacks this second component. In experiencing a pseudohallucination, one appreciates that one is not perceiving veridically. The source of the term seems to be the painter Wassily Kandinsky, who employed it in 5 to characterize a series of apparently drug-induced images experienced and pondered by a friend who recognized them, at the very time they were occurring, not to be veridical. Kandinsky’s account is discussed by Jaspers in his General Psychopathology, 6, and thereby entered the clinical lore. Pseudohallucinations may be brought on by the sorts of pathological condition that give rise to hallucinations, or by simple fatigue, emotional adversity, or loneliness. Thus, a driver, late at night, may react to non-existent objects or figures on the road, and immediately recognize his error. 

psycholinguistics, an interdisciplinary research area that uses theoretical descriptions of language taken from linguistics to investigate psychological processes underlying language production, perception, and learning. There is considerable disagreement as to the appropriate characterization of the field and the major problems. Philosophers discussed many of the problems now studied in psycholinguistics before either psychology or linguistics were spawned, but the self-consciously interdisciplinary field combining psychology and linguistics emerged not long after the birth of the two disciplines. Meringer used the adjective ‘psycholingisch-linguistische’ in an 5 book. Various national traditions of psycholinguistics continued at a steady but fairly low level of activity through the 0s and declined somewhat during the 0s and 0s because of the antimentalist attitudes in both linguistics and psychology. Psycholinguistic researchers in the USSR, mostly inspired by L. S. Vygotsky Thought and Language, 4, were more active during this period in spite of official suppression. Numerous quasi-independent sources contributed to the rebirth of psycholinguistics in the 0s; the most significant was a seminar held at a  during the summer of 3 that led to the publication of Psycholinguistics: A Survey of Theory and Research Problems 4, edited by C. E. Osgood and T. A. Sebeok  a truly interdisciplinary book jointly written by more than a dozen authors. The contributors attempted to analyze and reconcile three disparate approaches: learning theory from psychology, descriptive linguistics, and information theory which came mainly from engineering. The book had a wide impact and led to many further investigations, but the nature of the field changed rapidly soon after its publication with the Chomskyan revolution in linguistics and the cognitive turn in psychology. The two were not unrelated: Chomsky’s positive contribution, Syntactic Structures, was less broadly influential than his negative review Language, 9 of B. F. Skinner’s Verbal Behavior. Against the empiricist-behaviorist view of language understanding and production, in which language is merely the exhibition of a more complex form of behavior, Chomsky argued the avowedly rationalist position that the ability to learn and use language is innate and unique to humans. He emphasized the creative aspect of language, that almost all sentences one hears or produces are novel. One of his premises was the alleged infinity of sentences in natural languages, but a less controversial argument can be given: there are tens of millions of five-word sentences in English, all of which are readily understood by speakers who have never heard them. Chomsky’s work promised the possibility of uncovering a very special characteristic of the human mind. But the promise was qualified by the disclaimer that linguistic theory describes only the competence of the ideal speaker. Many psycholinguists spent countless hours during the 0s and 0s seeking the traces of underlying competence beneath the untidy performances of actual speakers. During the 0s, as Chomsky frequently revised his theories of syntax and semantics in significant ways, and numerous alternative linguistic models were under consideration, psychologists generated a range of productive research problems that are increasingly remote from the Chomskyan beginnings. Contemporary psycholinguistics addresses phonetic, phonological, syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic influences on language processing. Few clear conclusions of philosophical import have been established. For example, several decades of animal research have shown that other species can use significant portions of human language, but controversy abounds over how central those portions are to language. Studies now clearly indicate the importance of word frequency and coarticulation, the dependency of a hearer’s identification of a sound as a particular phoneme, or of a visual pattern as a particular letter, not only on the physical features of the pattern but on the properties of other patterns not necessarily adjacent. Physically identical patterns may be heard as a d in one context and a t in another. It is also accepted that at least some of the human lignuistic abilities, particularly those involved in reading and speech perception, are relatively isolated from other cognitive processes. Infant studies show that children as young as eight months learn statistically important patterns characteristic of their natural language  suggesting a complex set of mechanisms that are automatic and invisible to us. 

Pufendorf, S., G. historian and theorist of natural law. Pufendorf was influenced by both Grotius and Hobbes. He portrayed people as contentious and quarrelsome, yet as needing one another’s company and assistance. Natural law shows how people can live with one another while pursuing their own conflicting projects. To minimize religious disputes about morals, Pufendorf sought a way of deriving laws of nature from observable facts alone. Yet he thought divine activity essential to morality. He opened his massive Latin treatise On the Law of Nature and of Nations 1672 with a voluntarist account of God’s creation of the essence of mankind: given that we have the nature God gave us, certain laws must be valid for us, but only God’s will determined our nature. As a result, our nature indicates God’s will for us. Hence observable facts about ourselves show us what laws God commands us to obey. Because we so obviously need one another’s assistance, the first law is to increase our sociability, i.e. our willingness to live together. All other laws indicate acts that would bring about this end. In the course of expounding the laws he thought important for the development of social life to the high cultural level our complex nature points us toward, Pufendorf analyzed all the main points that a full legal system must cover. He presented the rudiments of laws of marriage, property, inheritance, contract, and international relations in both war and peace. He also developed the Grotian theory of personal rights, asserting for the first time that rights are pointless unless for each right there are correlative duties binding on others. Taking obligation as his fundamental concept, he developed an important distinction between perfect and imperfect duties and rights. And in working out a theory of property he suggested the first outlines of a historical sociology of wealth later developed by Adam Smith. Pufendorf’s works on natural law were textbooks for all of Europe for over a century and were far more widely read than any other treatments of the subject. 

pulchrum -- beauty, an aesthetic property commonly thought of as a species of aesthetic value. As such, it has been variously thought to be 1 a simple, indefinable property that cannot be defined in terms of any other properties; 2 a property or set of properties of an object that makes the object capable of producing a certain sort of pleasurable experience in any suitable perceiver; or 3 whatever produces a particular sort of pleasurable experience, even though what produces the experience may vary from individual to individual. It is in this last sense that beauty is thought to be “in the eye of the beholder.” If beauty is a simple, indefinable property, as in 1, then it cannot be defined conceptually and has to be apprehended by intuition or taste. Beauty, on this account, would be a particular sort of aesthetic property. If beauty is an object’s Bayle, Pierre beauty 75   75 capacity to produce a special sort of pleasurable experience, as in 2, then it is necessary to say what properties provide it with this capacity. The most favored candidates for these have been formal or structural properties, such as order, symmetry, and proportion. In the Philebus Plato argues that the form or essence of beauty is knowable, exact, rational, and measurable. He also holds that simple geometrical shapes, simple colors, and musical notes all have “intrinsic beauty,” which arouses a pure, “unmixed” pleasure in the perceiver and is unaffected by context. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries many treatises were written on individual art forms, each allegedly governed by its own rules. In the eighteenth century, Hutcheson held that ‘beauty’ refers to an “idea raised in us,” and that any object that excites this idea is beautiful. He thought that the property of the object that excites this idea is “uniformity in variety.” Kant explained the nature of beauty by analyzing judgments that something is beautiful. Such judgments refer to an experience of the perceiver. But they are not merely expressions of personal experience; we claim that others should also have the same experience, and that they should make the same judgment i.e., judgments that something is beautiful have “universal validity”. Such judgments are disinterested  determined not by any needs or wants on the part of the perceiver, but just by contemplating the mere appearance of the object. These are judgments about an object’s free beauty, and making them requires using only those mental capacities that all humans have by virtue of their ability to communicate with one another. Hence the pleasures experienced in response to such beauty can in principle be shared by anyone. Some have held, as in 3, that we apply the term ‘beautiful’ to things because of the pleasure they give us, and not on the basis of any specific qualities an object has. Archibald Alison held that it is impossible to find any properties common to all those things we call beautiful. Santayana believed beauty is “pleasure regarded as a quality of a thing,” and made no pretense that certain qualities ought to produce that pleasure. The Grecian term to kalon, which is often tr. as ‘beauty’, did not refer to a thing’s autonomous aesthetic value, but rather to its “excellence,” which is connected with its moral worth and/or usefulness. This concept is closer to Kant’s notion of dependent beauty, possessed by an object judged as a particular kind of thing such as a beautiful cat or a beautiful horse, than it is to free beauty, possessed by an object judged simply on the basis of its appearance and not in terms of any concept of use

punishment, a distinctive form of legal sanction, distinguished first by its painful or unpleasant nature to the offender, and second by the ground on which the sanction is imposed, which must be because the offender offended against the norms of a society. None of these three attributes is a strictly necessary condition for proper use of the word ‘punishment’. There may be unpleasant consequences visited by nature upon an offender such that he might be said to have been “punished enough”; the consequences in a given case may not be unpleasant to a particular offender, as in the punishment of a masochist with his favorite form of self-abuse; and punishment may be imposed for reasons other than offense against society’s norms, as is the case with punishment inflicted in order to deter others from like acts. The “definitional stop” argument in discussions of punishment seeks to tie punishment analytically to retributivism. Retributivism is the theory that punishment is justified by the moral desert of the offender; on this view, a person who culpably does a wrongful action deserves punishment, and this desert is a sufficient as well as a necessary condition of just punishment. Punishment of the deserving, on this view, is an intrinsic good that does not need to be justified by any other good consequences such punishment may achieve, such as the prevention of crime. Retributivism is not to be confused with the view that punishment satisfies the feelings of vengeful citizens nor with the view that punishment preempts such citizens from taking the law into their own hands by vigilante action  these latter views being utilitarian. Retributivism is also not the view sometimes called “weak” or “negative” retributivism that only the deserving are to be punished, for desert on such a view typically operates only as a limiting and not as a justifying condition of punishment. The thesis known as the “definitional stop” says that punishment must be retributive in its justification if it is to be punishment at all. Bad treatment inflicted in order to prevent future crime is not punishment but deserves another name, usually ‘telishment’. The dominant justification of non-retributive punishment or telishment is deterrence. The good in whose name the bad of punishing is justified, on this view, is prevention of future criminal acts. If punishment is inflicted to prevent the offender from committing future criminal acts, it is styled “specific” or “special” deterrence; if punishment is inflicted to prevent others from committing future criminal acts, it is styled “general” deterrence. In either case, punishment of an action is justified by the future effect of that punishment in deterring future actors from committing crimes. There is some vagueness in the notion of deterrence because of the different mechanisms by which potential criminals are influenced not to be criminals by the example of punishment: such punishment may achieve its effects through fear or by more benignly educating those would-be criminals out of their criminal desires.

Putnam, Hilary b.6,  philosopher who has made significant contributions to the philosophies of language, science, and mind, and to mathematical logic and metaphysics. He completed his Ph.D. in 1 at the  of California Los Angeles and has taught at Northwestern, Princeton, MIT, and Harvard. In the late 0s he contributed with Martin Davis and Julia Robinson to a proof of the unsolvability of Hilbert’s tenth problem completed in 0 by Yuri Matiyasevich. Rejecting both Platonism and conventionalism in mathematics, he explored the concepts of mathematical truth and logical necessity on the assumption that logic is not entirely immune from empirical revision  e.g., quantum mechanics may require a rejection of classical logic. In the 0s and 0s he advanced functionalism, an original theory of mind in which human beings are conceived as Turing machines computers and mental states are functional or    759 computational states. While this theory is presupposed by much contemporary research in cognitive science, Putnam himself in Representation and Reality, 8 abandoned the view, arguing that genuine intentionality cannot be reduced to computational states because the content of beliefs is a determined by facts external to the individual and b individuatable only by interpreting our belief system as a whole meaning holism. Putnam’s criticism of functionalism relies on the “new theory of reference”  sometimes called the “causal” or “direct” theory  that he and Kripke working independently developed during the late 0s and early 0s and that is today embraced by many philosophers and scientists. In “The Meaning of ‘Meaning’ ” 5 Putnam claims that the reference of natural kind terms like ‘water’ is determined by facts about the world  the microphysical structure of water H2O and the linguistic practices of speakers  and not by the internal mental states of speakers. Early in his career, Putnam championed scientific realism, rejecting conventionalism and arguing that without a realist commitment to theoretical entities e.g., electrons the success of science would be a “miracle.” In 6 he famously abandoned metaphysical realism in favor of “internal realism,” which gives up commitment to mind-independent objects and relativizes ontology to conceptual schemes. In a series of model-theoretic arguments, Putnam challenged the metaphysical realist assumption that an epistemically ideal theory might be false, claiming that it requires an implausibly “magical” theory of reference. To the same end, he sought to demonstrate tha

t we are not “brains in a vat” and that radical skepticism is incoherent Reason, Truth and History, 1. More recently, he has emphasized conceptual relativity in his attack on metaphysical realism’s commitment to “one true theory” and, in his Dewey Lectures 4, has defended direct perceptual realism, showing his allegiance to everyday “realism.” There is growing appreciation of the underlying unity in Putnam’s work that helps correct his reputation for “changing his mind.” He has consistently sought to do justice both to the “real world” of common sense and science and to distinctly human ways of representing that world. In the 0s his energies were increasingly directed to our “moral image of the world.” Leading a revival of  pragmatism, he has attacked the factvalue dichotomy, articulating a moral view that resists both relativism and authoritarianism. Putnam’s influence now extends beyond philosophers and scientists, to literary theorists, cognitive linguists, and theologians. 

Pyrrho of Elis, Grecian philosopher, regarded as the founder of Skepticism. Like Socrates, he wrote nothing, but impressed many with provocative ideas and calm demeanor. His equanimity was admired by Epicurus; his attitude of indifference influenced early Stoicism; his attack on knowledge was taken over by the skeptical Academy; and two centuries later, a revival of Skepticism adopted his name. Many of his ideas were anticipated by earlier thinkers, notably Democritus. But in denying the veracity of all sensations and beliefs, Pyrrho carried doubt to new and radical extremes. According to ancient anecdote, which presents him as highly eccentric, he paid so little heed to normal sensibilities that friends often had to rescue him from grave danger; some nonetheless insisted he lived into his nineties. He is also said to have emulated the “naked teachers” as the Hindu Brahmans were called by Grecians whom he met while traveling in the entourage of Alexander the Great. Pyrrho’s chief exponent and publicist was Timon of Phlius c.325c.235 B.C.. His bestpreserved work, the Silloi “Lampoons”, is a parody in Homeric epic verse that mocks the pretensions of numerous philosophers on an imaginary visit to the underworld. According to Timon, Pyrrho was a “negative dogmatist” who affirmed that knowledge is impossible, not because our cognitive apparatus is flawed, but because the world is fundamentally indeterminate: things themselves are “no more” cold than hot, or good than bad. But Timon makes clear that the key to Pyrrho’s Skepticism, and a major source of his impact, was the ethical goal he sought to achieve: by training himself to disregard all perception and values, he hoped to attain mental tranquility. 

Pythagoras, the most famous of the pre-Socratic Grecian philosophers. He emigrated from the island of Samos off Asia Minor to Croton southern Italy in 530. There he founded societies based on a strict way of life. They had great political impact in southern Italy and aroused opposition that resulted in the burning of their meeting houses and, ultimately, in the societies’ disappearance in the fourth century B.C. Pythagoras’s fame grew exponentially with the pasage of time. Plato’s immediate successors in the Academy saw true philosophy as an unfolding of the original insight of Pythagoras. By the time of Iamblichus late third century A.D., Pythagoreanism and Platonism had become virtually identified. Spurious writings ascribed both to Pythagoras and to other Pythagoreans arose beginning in the third century B.C. Eventually any thinker who saw the natural world as ordered according to pleasing mathematical relations e.g., Kepler came to be called a Pythagorean. Modern scholarship has shown that Pythagoras was not a scientist, mathematician, or systematic philosopher. He apparently wrote nothing. The early evidence shows that he was famous for introducing the doctrine of metempsychosis, according to which the soul is immortal and is reborn in both human and animal incarnations. Rules were established to purify the soul including the prohibition against eating beans and the emphasis on training of the memory. General reflections on the natural world such as “number is the wisest thing” and “the most beautiful, harmony” were preserved orally. A belief in the mystical power of number is also visible in the veneration for the tetractys tetrad: the numbers 14, which add up to the sacred number 10. The doctrine of the harmony of the spheres  that the heavens move in accord with number and produce music  may go back to Pythagoras. It is often assumed that there must be more to Pythagoras’s thought than this, given his fame in the later tradition. However, Plato refers to him only as the founder of a way of life Republic 600a9. In his account of pre-Socratic philosophy, Aristotle refers not to Pythagoras himself, but to the “so-called Pythagoreans” whom he dates in the fifth century. 

quale: a property of a mental state or event, in particular of a sensation and a perceptual state, which determine “what it is like” to have them. Sometimes ‘phenomenal properties’ and ‘qualitative features’ are used with the same meaning. The felt difference between pains and itches is said to reside in differences in their “qualitative character,” i.e., their qualia. For those who accept an “actobject” conception of perceptual experience, qualia may include such properties as “phenomenal redness” and “phenomenal roundness,” thought of as properties of sense-data, “phenomenal objects,” or portions of the visual field. But those who reject this conception do not thereby reject qualia; a proponent of the adverbial analysis of perceptual experience can hold that an experience of “sensing redly” is so in virtue of, in part, what qualia it has, while denying that there is any sense in which the experience itself is red. Qualia are thought of as non-intentional, i.e., non-representational, features of the states that have them. So in a case of “spectrum inversion,” where one person’s experiences of green are “qualitatively” just like another person’s experiences of red, and vice versa, the visual experiences the two have when viewing a ripe tomato would be alike in their intentional features both would be of a red, round, bulgy surface, but would have different qualia. Critics of physicalist and functionalist accounts of mind have argued from the possibility of spectrum inversion and other kinds of “qualia inversion,” and from such facts as that no physical or functional description will tell one “what it is like” to smell coffee, that such accounts cannot accommodate qualia. Defenders of such accounts are divided between those who claim that their accounts can accommodate qualia and those who claim that qualia are a philosophical myth and thus that there are none to accommodate. 

qualitative predicate, a kind of predicate postulated in some attempts to solve the grue paradox. 1 On the syntactic view, a qualitative predicate is a syntactically more or less simple predicate. Such simplicity, however, is relative to the choice of primitives in a language. In English, ‘green’ and ‘blue’ are primitive, while ‘grue’ and ‘bleen’ must be introduced by definitions ‘green and first examined before T, or blue otherwise’, ‘blue and first examined before T, or green otherwise’, respectively. In other languages, ‘grue’ and ‘bleen’ may be primitive and hence “simple,” while ‘green’ and ‘blue’ must be introduced by definitions ‘grue and first examined before T, or bleen otherwise’, ‘bleen and first examined before T, or grue otherwise’, respectively. 2 On the semantic view, a qualitative predicate is a predicate to which there corresponds a property that is “natural” to us or of easy semantic access. The quality of greenness is easy and natural; the quality of grueness is strained. 3 On the ontological view, a qualitative predicate is a predicate to which there corresponds a property that is woven into the causal or modal structure of reality in a way that gruesome properties are not. 

qualities, properties or characteristics. There are three specific philosophical senses. 1 Qualities are physical properties, logical constructions of physical properties, or dispositions. Physical properties, such as mass, shape, and electrical charge, are properties in virtue of which objects can enter into causal relations. Logical constructions of physical properties include conjunctions and disjunctions of them; being 10 # .02 cm long is a disjunctive property. A disposition of an object is a potential for the object to enter into a causal interaction of some specific kind under some specific condition; e.g., an object is soluble in water if and only if it would dissolve were it in enough pure water. Locke held a very complex theory of powers. On Locke’s theory, the dispositions of objects are a kind of power and the human will is a kind of power. However, the human will is not part of the modern notion of disposition. So, predicating a disposition of an object implies a subjunctive conditional of the form: if such-and-such were to happen to the object, then so-and-so would happen to it; that my vase is fragile implies that if my vase were to be hit sufficiently hard then it would break. Whether physical properties are distinct from dispositions is disputed. Three sorts of qualities are often distinguished. Primary qualities are physical properties or logical constructions from physical properties. Secondary qualities are dispositions to produce sensory experiences of certain phenomenal sorts under appropriate conditions. The predication of a secondary quality, Q, to an object implies that if the object were to be perceived under normal conditions then the object would appear to be Q to the perceivers: if redness is a secondary quality, then that your coat is red implies that if your coat were to be seen under normal conditions, it would look red. Locke held that the following are secondary qualities: colors, tastes, smells, sounds, and warmth or cold. Tertiary qualities are dispositions that are not secondary qualities, e.g. fragility. Contrary to Locke, the color realist holds that colors are either primary or tertiary qualities; so that x is yellow is logically independent of the fact that x looks yellow under normal conditions. Since different spectral reflectances appear to be the same shade of yellow, some color realists hold that any shade of yellow is a disjunctive property whose components are spectral reflectances. 2 Assuming a representative theory of perception, as Locke did, qualities have two characteristics: qualities are powers or dispositions of objects to produce sensory experiences sensedata on some theories in humans; and, in sensory experience, qualities are represented as intrinsic properties of objects. Instrinsic properties of objects are properties that objects have independently of their environment. Hence an exact duplicate of an object has all the intrinsic properties of the original, and an intrinsic property of x never has the form, x-stands-in-suchand-such-a-relation-to-y. Locke held that the primary qualities are extension size, figure shape, motion or rest, solidity impenetrability, and number; the primary qualities are correctly represented in perception as intrinsic features of objects, and the secondary qualities listed in 1 are incorrectly represented in perception as intrinsic features of objects. Locke seems to have been mistaken in holding that number is a quality of objects. Positional qualities are qualities defined in terms of the relative positions of points in objects and their surrounding: shape, size, and motion and rest. Since most of Locke’s primary qualities are positional, some non-positional quality is needed to occupy positions. On Locke’s account, solidity fulfills this role, although some have argued Hume that solidity is not a primary quality. 3 Primary qualities are properties common to and inseparable from all matter; secondary qualities are not really qualities in objects, but only powers of objects to produce sensory effects in us by means of their primary qualities. This is another use of ‘quality’ by Locke, where ‘primary’ functions much like ‘real’ and real properties are given by the metaphysical assumptions of the science of Locke’s time. Qualities are distinct from representations of them in predications. Sometimes the same quality is represented in different ways by different predications: ‘That is water’ and ‘That is H2O’. The distinction between qualities and the way they are represented in predications opens up the Lockean possibility that some qualities are incorrectly represented in some predications. Features of predications are sometimes used to define a quality; dispositions are sometimes defined in terms of subjunctive conditionals see definition of ‘secondary qualities’ in 1, and disjunctive properties are defined in terms of disjunctive predications. Features of predications are also used in the following definition of ‘independent qualities’: two qualities, P and Q, are independent if and only if, for any object x, the predication of P and of Q to x are logically independent i.e., that x is P and that x is Q are logically independent; circularity and redness are independent, circularity and triangularity are dependent. If two determinate qualities, e.g., circularity and triangularity, belong to the same determinable, say shape, then they are dependent, but if two determinate qualities, e.g., squareness and redness, belong to different determinables, say shape and color, they are independent.

Quantification: H. P. Grice, “Every nice girl loves a sailor.” -- the application of one or more quantifiers e.g., ‘for all x’, ‘for some y’ to an open formula. A quantification or quantified sentence results from first forming an open formula from a sentence by replacing expressions belonging to a certain class of expressions in the sentences by variables whose substituends are the expressions of that class and then prefixing the formula with quantifiers using those variables. For example, from ‘Bill hates Mary’ we form ‘x hates y’, to which we prefix the quantifiers ‘for all x’ and ‘for some y’, getting the quantification sentence ‘for all x, for some y, x hates y’ ‘Everyone hates someone’. In referential quantification only terms of reference may be replaced by variables. The replaceable terms of reference are the substituends of the variables. The values of the variables are all those objects to which reference could be made by a term of reference of the type that the variables may replace. Thus the previous example ‘for all x, for some y, x hates y’ is a referential quantification. Terms standing for people ‘Bill’, ‘Mary’, e.g. are the substituends of the variables ‘x’ and ‘y’. And people are the values of the variables. In substitutional quantification any type of term may be replaced by variables. A variable replacing a term has as its substituends all terms of the type of the replaced term. For example, from ‘Bill married Mary’ we may form ‘Bill R Mary’, to which we prefix the quantifier ‘for some R’, getting the substitutional quantification ‘for some R, Bill R Mary’. This is not a referential quantification, since the substituends of ‘R’ are binary predicates such as ‘marries’, which are not terms of reference. Referential quantification is a species of objectual quantification. The truth conditions of quantification sentences objectually construed are understood in terms of the values of the variable bound by the quantifier. Thus, ‘for all v, fv’ is true provided ‘fv’ is true for all values of the variable ‘v’; ‘for some v, fv’ is true provided ‘fv’ is true for some value of the variable ‘v’. The truth or falsity of a substitutional quantification turns instead on the truth or falsity of the sentences that result from the quantified formula by replacing variables by their substituends. For example, ‘for some R, Bill R Mary’ is true provided some sentence of the form ‘Bill R Mary’ is true. In classical logic the universal quantifier ‘for all’ is definable in terms of negation and the existential quantifier ‘for some’: ‘for all x’ is short for ‘not for some x not’. The existential quantifier is similarly definable in terms of negation and the universal quantifier. In intuitionistic logic, this does not hold. Both quantifiers are regarded as primitive.

quantifying in, use of a quantifier outside of an opaque construction to attempt to bind a variable within it, a procedure whose legitimacy was first questioned by Quine. An opaque construction is one that resists substitutivity of identity. Among others, the constructions of quotation, the verbs of propositional attitude, and the logical modalities can give rise to opacity. For example, the position of ‘six’ in: 1 ‘six’ contains exactly three letters is opaque, since the substitution for ‘six’ by its codesignate ‘immediate successor of five’ renders a truth into a falsehood: 1H ‘the immediate successor of five’ contains exactly three letters. Similarly, the position of ‘the earth’ in: 2 Tom believes that the earth is habitable is opaque, if the substitution of ‘the earth’ by its codesignate ‘the third planet from the sun’ renders a sentence that Tom would affirm into one that he would deny: 2H Tom believes that the third planet from the sun is habitable. Finally, the position of ‘9’ and of ‘7’ in: 3 Necessarily 9  7 is opaque, since the substitution of ‘the number of major planets’ for its codesignate ‘9’ renders a truth into a falsehood: 3H Necessarily the number of major planets  7. Quine argues that since the positions within opaque constructions resist substitutivity of identity, they cannot meaningfully be quantified. Accordingly, the following three quantified sentences are meaningless: 1I Ex ‘x’  7, 2I Ex Tom believes that x is habitable, 3I Ex necessarily x  7. 1I, 2I, and 3I are meaningless, since the second occurrence of ‘x’ in each of them does not function as a variable in the ordinary nonessentialist quantificational way. The second occurrence of ‘x’ in 1I functions as a name that names the twenty-fourth letter of the alphabet. The second occurrences of ‘x’ in 2I and in 3I do not function as variables, since they do not allow all codesignative terms as substituends without change of truth-value. Thus, they may take objects as values but only objects designated in certain ways, e.g., in terms of their intensional or essential properties. So, short of acquiescing in an intensionalist or essentialist metaphysics, Quine argues, we cannot in general quantify into opaque contexts. 

quantum logic, the logic of which the models are certain non-Boolean algebras derived from the mathematical representation of quantum mechanical systems. The models of classical logic are, formally, Boolean algebras. This is the central notion of quantum logic in the literature, although the term covers a variety of modal logics, dialogics, and operational logics proposed to elucidate the structure of quantum mechanics and its relation to classical mechanics. The dynamical quantities of a classical mechanical system position, momentum, energy, etc. form a commutative algebra, and the dynamical properties of the system e.g., the property that the position lies in a specified range, or the property that the momentum is greater than zero, etc. form a Boolean algebra. The transition from classical to quantum mechanics involves the transition from a commutative algebra of dynamical quantities to a noncommutative algebra of so-called observables. One way of understanding the conceptual revolution from classical to quantum mechanics is in terms of a shift from the class of Boolean algebras to a class of non-Boolean algebras as the appropriate relational structures for the dynamical properties of mechanical systems, hence from a Boolean classical logic to a non-Boolean quantum logic as the logic applicable to the fundamental physical processes of our universe. This conception of quantum logic was developed formally in a classic 6 paper by G. Birkhoff and J. von Neumann although von Neumann first proposed the idea in 7. The features that distinguish quantum logic from classical logic vary with the formulation. In the Birkhoffvon Neumann logic, the distributive law of classical logic fails, but this is by no means a feature of all versions of quantum logic. It follows from Gleason’s theorem 7 that the non-Boolean models do not admit two-valued homomorphisms in the general case, i.e., there is no partition of the dynamical properties of a quantum mechanical system into those possessed by the system and those not possessed by the system that preserves algebraic structure, and equivalently no assignment of values to the observables of the system that preserves algebraic structure. This result was proved independently for finite sets of observables by S. Kochen and E. P. Specker 7. It follows that the probabilities specified by the Born interpretation of the state function of a quantum mechanical system for the results of measurements of observables cannot be derived from a probability distribution over the different possible sets of dynamical properties of the system, or the different possible sets of values assignable to the observables of which one set is presumed to be actual, determined by hidden variables in addition to the state function, if these sets of properties or values are required to preserve algebraic structure. While Bell’s theorem 4 excludes hidden variables satisfying a certain locality condition, the Kochen-Specker theorem relates the non-Booleanity of quantum logic to the impossibility of hidden variable extensions of quantum mechanics, in which value assignments to the observables satisfy constraints imposed by the algebraic structure of the observables.

quantum mechanics, also called quantum theory, the science governing objects of atomic and subatomic dimensions. Developed independently by Werner Heisenberg as matrix mechanics, 5 and Erwin Schrödinger as wave mechanics, 6, quantum mechanics breaks with classical treatments of the motions and interactions of bodies by introducing probability and acts of measurement in seemingly irreducible ways. In the widely used Schrödinger version, quantum mechanics associates with each physical system a time-dependent function, called the state function alternatively, the state vector or Y function. The evolution of the system is represented by the temporal transformation of the state function in accord with a master equation, known as the Schrödinger equation. Also associated with a system are “observables”: in principle measurable quantities, such as position, momentum, and energy, including some with no good classical analogue, such as spin. According to the Born interpretation 6, the state function is understood instrumentally: it enables one to calculate, for any possible value of an observable, the probability that a measurement of that observable would find that particular value. The formal properties of observables and state functions imply that certain pairs of observables such as linear momentum in a given direction, and position in the same direction are incompatible in the sense that no state function assigns probability 1 to the simultaneous determination of exact values for both observables. This is a qualitative statement of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle alternatively, the indeterminacy principle, or just the uncertainty principle. Quantitatively, that principle places a precise limit on the accuracy with which one may simultaneously measure a pair of incompatible observables. There is no corresponding limit, however, on the accuracy with which a single observable say, position alone, or momentum alone may be measured. The uncertainty principle is sometimes understood in terms of complementarity, a general perspective proposed by Niels Bohr according to which the connection between quantum phenomena and observation forces our classical concepts to split into mutually exclusive packages, both of which are required for a complete understanding but only one of which is applicable under any particular experimental conditions. Some take this to imply an ontology in which quantum objects do not actually possess simultaneous values for incompatible observables; e.g., do not have simultaneous position and momentum. Others would hold, e.g., that measuring the position of an object causes an uncontrollable change in its momentum, in accord with the limits on simultaneous accuracy built into the uncertainty principle. These ways of treating the principle are not uncontroversial. Philosophical interest arises in part from where the quantum theory breaks with classical physics: namely, from the apparent breakdown of determinism or causality that seems to result from the irreducibly statistical nature of the theory, and from the apparent breakdown of observer-independence or realism that seems to result from the fundamental role of measurement in the theory. Both features relate to the interpretation of the state function as providing only a summary of the probabilities for various measurement outcomes. Einstein, in particular, criticized the theory on these grounds, and in 5 suggested a striking thought experiment to show that, assuming no action-at-a-distance, one would have to consider the state function as an incomplete description of the real physical state for an individual system, and therefore quantum mechanics as merely a provisional theory. Einstein’s example involved a pair of systems that interact briefly and then separate, but in such a way that the outcomes of various measurements performed on each system, separately, show an uncanny correlation. In 1 the physicist David Bohm simplified Einstein’s example, and later 7 indicated that it may be realizable experimentally. The physicist John S. Bell then formulated a locality assumption 4, similar to Einstein’s, that constrains factors which might be used in describing the state of an individual system, so-called hidden variables. Locality requires that in the EinsteinBohm experiment hidden variables not allow the measurement performed on one system in a correlated pair immediately to influence the outcome obtained in measuring the other, spatially separated system. Bell demonstrated that locality in conjunction with other assumptions about hidden variables restricts the probabilities for measurement outcomes according to a system of inequalities known as the Bell inequalities, and that the probabilities of certain quantum systems violate these inequalities. This is Bell’s theorem. Subsequently several experiments of the Einstein-Bohm type have been performed to test the Bell inequalities. Although the results have not been univocal, the consensus is that the experimental data support the quantum theory and violate the inequalities. Current research is trying to evaluate the implications of these results, including the extent to which they rule out local hidden variables. See J. Cushing and E. McMullin, eds., Philosophical Consequences of Quantum Theory, 9. The descriptive incompleteness with which Einstein charged the theory suggests other problems. A particularly dramatic one arose in correspondence between Schrödinger and Einstein; namely, the “gruesome” Schrödinger cat paradox. Here a cat is confined in a closed chamber containing a radioactive atom with a fifty-fifty chance of decaying in the next hour. If the atom decays it triggers a relay that causes a hammer to fall and smash a glass vial holding a quantity of    766 prussic acid sufficient to kill the cat. According to the Schrödinger equation, after an hour the state function for the entire atom ! relay ! hammer ! glass vial ! cat system is such that if we observe the cat the probability for finding it alive dead is 50 percent. However, this evolved state function is one for which there is no definite result; according to it, the cat is neither alive nor dead. How then does any definite fact of the matter arise, and when? Is the act of observation itself instrumental in bringing about the observed result, does that result come about by virtue of some special random process, or is there some other account compatible with definite results of measurements? This is the so-called quantum measurement problem and it too is an active area of research. 

quasi-demonstratum: The use of ‘quasi-‘ is implicatural. Grice is implicating this is NOT a demonstratum. By a demonstratum he is having in mind a Kaplanian ‘dthis’ or ‘dthat.’ Grice was obsessed with this or that. An abstractum (such as “philosopher”) needs to be attached in a communicatum by what Grice calls a ‘quasi-demonstrative,’ and for which he uses “φ.” Consider, Grice says, an utterance, out of the blue, such as ‘The philosopher in the garden seems bored,’ involving two iota-operators. As there may be more that a philosopher in a garden in the great big world, the utterer intends his addressee to treat the utterance as expandable into ‘The A which is φ is B,’ where “φ” is a quasi-demonstrative epithet to be identified in a particular context of utterance. The utterer intends that, to identify  the denotatum of “φ” for a particular utterance of ‘The philosopher in the garden seems bored,’ the addressee wil proceed via the identification of a particular philosopher, say Grice, as being a good candidate for being the philosopher meant. The addressee is also intended to identify the candidate for a denotatum of φ by finding in the candidate a feature, e. g., that of being the garden at St. John’s, which is intended to be used to yield a composite epithet (‘philosopher in St. John’s garden’), which in turn fills the bill of being the epithet which the utterer believes is being uniquely satisfied by the philosopher selected as the candidate. Determining the denotatum of “φ” standardly involve determining what feature the utterer believes is uniquely instantiated by the predicate “philosopher.” This in turn involves satisfying oneself that some particular feature is in fact uniquely satisfied by a particular actual item, viz. a particular philosopher such as Grice seeming bored in the garden of St. John’s.

quasi-indicator, Castañeda’s term for an expression used to ascribe indexical reference to a speaker or thinker. If John says “I am hungry” it is incorrect to report what he said with ‘John claims that I am hungry’, since ‘I’, being an indexical, expresses speaker’s reference, not John’s. However, ‘John claims that John is hungry’ fails to represent the indexical element of his assertion. Instead, we use ‘John claims that he himself is hungry’, where ‘he himself’ is a quasiindicator depicting John’s reference to himself qua self. Because of its subjective and perspectival character, we cannot grasp the exact content of another’s indexical reference, yet quasi-indexical representations are possible since we confront the world through generically the same indexical modes of presentation. If these modes are irreducible, then quasi-indicators are indispensable for describing the thoughts and experiences of others. As such, they are not equivalent to or replaceable by any antecedents occurring outside the scope of psychological verbs to which they are subordinated. 

Quineianism: corners, also called corner quotes, quasi-quotes, a notational device ] ^ introduced by Quine Mathematical Logic, 0 to provide a conveniently brief way of speaking generally about unspecified expressions of such and such kind. For example, a logician might want a conveniently brief way of saying in the metalanguage that the result of writing a wedge ‘7’ the dyadic logical connective for a truth-functional use of ‘or’ between any two well-formed formulas wffs in the object language is itself a wff. Supposing the Grecian letters ‘f’ and ‘y’ available in the metalanguage as variables ranging over wffs in the object language, it is tempting to think that the formation rule stated above can be succinctly expressed simply by saying that if f and y are wffs, then ‘f 7 y’ is a wff. But this will not do, for ‘f 7 y’ is not a wff. Rather, it is a hybrid expression of two variables of the metalanguage and a dyadic logical connective of the object language. The problem is that putting quotation marks around the Grecian letters merely results in designating those letters themselves, not, as desired, in designating the context of the unspecified wffs. Quine’s device of corners allows one to transcend this limitation of straight quotation since quasi-quotation, e.g., ]f 7 y^, amounts to quoting the constant contextual background, ‘# 7 #’, and imagining the unspecified expressions f and y written in the blanks.  Quine, Willard Van Orman – see Quine, “Reply to H. P. Grice,” --  philosopher and logician, renowned for his rejection of the analyticsynthetic distinction and for his advocacy of extensionalism, naturalism, physicalism, empiricism, and holism. Quine took his doctorate in philosophy at Harvard in 2. After four years of postdoctoral fellowships, he was appointed to the philosophy faculty at Harvard in 6. There he remained until he retired from teaching in 8. During six decades Quine published scores of journal articles and more than twenty books. His writings touch a number of areas, including logic, philosophy of logic, set theory, philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, philosophy of science, metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics. Among his most influential articles and books are “New Foundations for Mathematical Logic” 6, “Two Dogmas of Empiricism” 1, “Epistemology Naturalized” 9, and Word and Object 0. In “New Foundations” he develops a set theory that avoids Russell’s paradox without relying on Russell’s theory of types. Rather, following Ernst Zermelo, Quine drops the presumption that every membership condition determines a set. The system of “New Foundations” continues to be widely discussed by mathematicians. “Two Dogmas” sets out to repudiate what he sees as two dogmas of logical empiricism. The first is the so-called analyticsynthetic distinction; the second is a weak form of reductionism to the effect that each synthetic statement has associated with it a unique set of confirming experiences and a unique set of infirming experiences. Against the first dogma, Quine argues that none of the then-current attempts to characterize analyticity e.g., “a statement is analytic if and only if it is true solely in virtue of its meaning” do so with sufficient clarity, and that any similar characterization is likewise doomed to fail. Against the second dogma, Quine argues that a more accurate account of the relation between the statements of a theory and experience is holistic rather than reductionistic, that is, only as a corporate body do the statements of a theory face the tribunal of experience. Quine concludes that the effects of rejecting these two dogmas of empiricism are 1 a blurring of the supposed boundary between speculative metaphysics and natural science and 2 a shift toward pragmatism. In “Epistemology Naturalized” Quine argues in favor of naturalizing epistemology: old-time epistemology first philosophy has failed in its attempt to ground science on something firmer than science and should, therefore, be replaced by a scientific account of how we acquire our overall theory of the world and why it works so well. In Word and Object, Quine’s most famous book, he argues in favor of 1 naturalizing epistemology, 2 physicalism as against phenomenalism and mindbody dualism, and 3 extensionality as against intensionality. He also 4 develops a behavioristic conception of sentence-meaning, 5 theorizes about language learning, 6 speculates on the ontogenesis of reference, 7 explains various forms of ambiguity and vagueness, 8 recommends measures for regimenting language so as to eliminate ambiguity and vagueness as well as to make a theory’s logic and ontic commitments perspicuous “to be is to be the value of a bound variable”, 9 argues against quantified modal logic and the essentialism it presupposes, 10 argues for Platonic realism in mathematics, 11 argues for scientific realism and against instrumentalism, 12 develops a view of philosophical analysis as explication, 13 argues against analyticity and for holism, 14 argues against countenancing propositions, and 15 argues that the meanings of theoretical sentences are indeterminate and that the reference of terms is inscrutable. Quine’s subsequent writings have largely been devoted to summing up, clarifying, and expanding on themes found in Word and Object. 

A.M. Quinton’s Gedanke Experiment: from “Spaces and Times,” Philosophy.“hardly Thought Out” – Is this apriori or a posteriori? H. P. Grice. Space is ordinarily seen to be a unique individual. All real things are contained in one and the same space, and all spaces are part of the one space. In principle, every place can be reached from every other place by traveling through intermediate places. The spatial relation is symmetrical. Grice’s friend, A. M. Quinton devised a thought experiment to challenge this picture. Suppose that we have richly coherent and connected experience in our dreams just as we have in waking life, so that it becomes arbitrary to claim that our dream experience is not of an objectively existing world like the world of our waking experience. If the space of my waking world and my dream world are not mutually accessible, it is unlikely that we are justified in claiming to be living in a single spatially isolated world. Hence, space is not essentially singular. In assessing this account, we might distinguish between systematic and public physical space and fragmentary and private experiential space. The two-space myth raises questions about how we can justify moving from experiential space to objective space in the world as it is. “We can at least conceive circumstances in which we should have good reason to say that we know of real things located in two distinct spaces.” Quinton, “Spaces and Times,” Philosophy 37

Radix -- Radix -- Grice often talked about logical atomism and molecular propositions – and radix – which is an atomic metaphor -- Democritus, Grecian preSocratic philosopher. He was born at Abdera, in Thrace. Building on Leucippus and his atomism, he developed the atomic theory in The Little World-system and numerous other writings. In response to the Eleatics’ argument that the impossibility of not-being entailed that there is no change, the atomists posited the existence of a plurality of tiny indivisible beings  the atoms  and not-being  the void, or empty space. Atoms do not come into being or perish, but they do move in the void, making possible the existence of a world, and indeed of many worlds. For the void is infinite in extent, and filled with an infinite number of atoms that move and collide with one another. Under the right conditions a concentration of atoms can begin a vortex motion that draws in other atoms and forms a spherical heaven enclosing a world. In our world there is a flat earth surrounded by heavenly bodies carried by a vortex motion. Other worlds like ours are born, flourish, and die, but their astronomical configurations may be different from ours and they need not have living creatures in them. The atoms are solid bodies with countless shapes and sizes, apparently having weight or mass, and capable of motion. All other properties are in some way derivative of these basic properties. The cosmic vortex motion causes a sifting that tends to separate similar atoms as the sea arranges pebbles on the shore. For instance heavier atoms sink to the center of the vortex, and lighter atoms such as those of fire rise upward. Compound bodies can grow by the aggregations of atoms that become entangled with one another. Living things, including humans, originally emerged out of slime. Life is caused by fine, spherical soul atoms, and living things die when these atoms are lost. Human culture gradually evolved through chance discoveries and imitations of nature. Because the atoms are invisible and the only real properties are properties of atoms, we cannot have direct knowledge of anything. Tastes, temperatures, and colors we know only “by convention.” In general the senses cannot give us anything but “bastard” knowledge; but there is a “legitimate” knowledge based on reason, which takes over where the senses leave off  presumably demonstrating that there are atoms that the senses cannot testify of. Democritus offers a causal theory of perception  sometimes called the theory of effluxes  accounting for tastes in terms of certain shapes of atoms and for sight in terms of “effluences” or moving films of atoms that impinge on the eye. Drawing on both atomic theory and conventional wisdom, Democritus develops an ethics of moderation. The aim of life is equanimity euthumiê, a state of balance achieved by moderation and proportionate pleasures. Envy and ambition are incompatible with the good life. Although Democritus was one of the most prolific writers of antiquity, his works were all lost. Yet we can still identify his atomic theory as the most fully worked out of pre-Socratic philosophies. His theory of matter influenced Plato’s Timaeus, and his naturalist anthropology became the prototype for liberal social theories. Democritus had no immediate successors, but a century later Epicurus transformed his ethics into a philosophy of consolation founded on atomism. Epicureanism thus became the vehicle through which atomic theory was transmitted to the early modern period. 

ramseyified description. Grice enjoyed Ramsey’s Engish humour: if you can say it, you can’t whistle it either. Applied by Grice in “Method.”Agent A is in a D state just in case there is a predicate “D”  introduced via implicit definition by nomological generalisation L within theory θ, such L obtains, A instantiates D. Grice distinguishes the ‘descriptor’ from a more primitive ‘name.’ The reference is to Ramsey. The issue is technical and relates to the introduction of a predicate constant – something he would never have dared to at Oxford with Gilbert Ryle and D. F. Pears next to him! But in the New World, they loved a formalism! And of course Ramsey would not have anything to do with it! Ramsey: p. r. – cited by Grice, “The Ramseyfied description. Frank Plumpton 330, influential 769 R    769 British philosopher of logic and mathematics. His primary interests were in logic and philosophy, but decades after his untimely death two of his publications sparked new branches of economics, and in pure mathematics his combinatorial theorems gave rise to “Ramsey theory” Economic Journal 7, 8; Proc. London Math. Soc., 8. During his lifetime Ramsey’s philosophical reputation outside Cambridge was based largely on his architectural reparation of Whitehead and Russell’s Principia Mathematica, strengthening its claim to reduce mathematics to the new logic formulated in Volume 1  a reduction rounded out by Vitters’s assessment of logical truths as tautologous. Ramsey clarified this logicist picture of mathematics by radically simplifying Russell’s ramified theory of types, eliminating the need for the unarguable axiom of reducibility Proc. London Math. Soc., 5. His philosophical work was published mostly after his death. The canon, established by Richard Braithwaite The Foundations of Mathematics . . . , 1, remains generally intact in D. H. Mellor’s edition Philosophical Papers, 0. Further writings of varying importance appear in his Notes on Philosophy, Probability and Mathematics M. C. Galavotti, ed., 1 and On Truth Nicholas Rescher and Ulrich Majer, eds., 1. As an undergraduate Ramsey observed that the redundancy account of truth “enables us to rule out at once some theories of truth such as that ‘to be true’ means ‘to work’ or ‘to cohere’ since clearly ‘p works’ and ‘p coheres’ are not equivalent to ‘p’.” Later, in the canonical “Truth and Probability” 6, he readdressed to knowledge and belief the main questions ordinarily associated with truth, analyzing probability as a mode of judgment in the framework of a theory of choice under uncertainty. Reinvented and acknowledged by L. J. Savage Foundations of Statistics, 4, this forms the theoretical basis of the currently dominant “Bayesian” view of rational decision making. Ramsey cut his philosophical teeth on Vitters’s Tractatus LogicoPhilosophicus. His translation appeared in 2; a long critical notice of the work 3 was his first substantial philosophical publication. His later role in Vitters’s rejection of the Tractatus is acknowledged in the foreword to Philosophical Investigations 3. The posthumous canon has been a gold mine. An example: “Propositions” 9, reading the theoretical terms T, U, etc. of an axiomatized scientific theory as variables, sees the theory’s content as conveyed by a “Ramsey sentence” saying that for some T, U, etc., the theory’s axioms are true, a sentence in which all extralogical terms are observational. Another example: “General Propositions and Causality” 9, offering in a footnote the “Ramsey test” for acceptability of conditionals, i.e., add the if-clause to your ambient beliefs minimally modified to make the enlarged set self-consistent, and accept the conditional if the then-clause follows.  Refs: “Philosophical psychology,” in BANC. ‘

Ramus, Petrus, in , Pierre de La Ramée, philosopher who questioned the authority of Aristotle and influenced the methods and teaching of logic through the seventeenth century. In 1543 he published his Dialecticae institutiones libri XV, and in 1555 reworked it as Dialectique  the first philosophical work in . He was appointed by François I as the first Regius Professor of the  of Paris, where he taught until he was killed in the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre in 1572. Ramus doubted that we can apodictically intuit the major premises required for Aristotle’s rational syllogism. Turning instead to Plato, Ramus proposed that a “Socratizing” of logic would produce a more workable and fruitful result. As had Agricola and Sturm, he reworked the rhetorical and liberal arts traditions’ concepts of “invention, judgment, and practice,” placing “method” in the center of judgment. Proceeding in these stages, we can “read” nature’s “arguments,” because they are modeled on natural reasoning, which in turn can emulate the reasoning by which God creates. Often his results were depicted graphically in tables as in chapter IX of Hobbes’s Leviathan. When carefully done they would show both what is known and where gaps require further investigation; the process from invention to judgment is continuous. Ramus’s works saw some 750 editions in one century, fostering the “Ramist” movement in emerging Protestant universities and the  colonies. He influenced Bacon, Hobbes, Milton, Methodism, Cambridge Platonism, and Alsted in Europe, and Hooker and Congregationalism in Puritan America. Inconsistencies make him less than a major figure in the history of logic, but his many works and their rapid popularity led to philosophical and educational efforts to bring the world of learning to the “plain man” by using the vernacular, and by more closely correlating the rigor of philosophy with the memorable and persuasive powers of rhetoric; he saw this goal as Socratic.

Rashdall, Hastings 18584, English historian, theologian, and personal idealist. While acknowledging that Berkeley needed to be corrected by Kant, Rashdall defended Berkeley’s thesis that objects only exist for minds. From this he concluded that there is a divine mind that guarantees the existence of nature and the objectivity of morality. In his most important philosophical work, The Theory of Good and Evil 7, Rashdall argued that actions are right or wrong according to whether they produce well-being, in which pleasure as well as a virtuous disposition are constituents. Rashdall coined the name ‘ideal utilitarianism’ for this view.

rational choice: as oppose to irrational choice. V. choose. Grice, “Impicatures of ‘choosing’” “Hobson’s choice, or Hobson’s ‘choice’?” Pears on conversational implicaturum and choosing. That includes choosing in its meaning, and then it is easy to ac- cept the suggestion that choosing might be an S-factor, and that the hypothetical might be a Willkür: 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. Insofar as a philosopher explains and predicts the actum as consequences of a choice, which are themselves explained in terms of alleged reasons, it must depict agents as to some extent rational. Rationality, like reasons, involves evaluation, and just as one can assess the rationality of individual choices, so one can assess the rationality of social choices and examine how they are and ought to be related to the preferences and judgments of the actor. In addition, there are intricate questions concerning rationality in ‘strategic’ situations in which outcomes depend on the choices of multiple individuals. Since rationality is a central concept in branches of philosophy such as Grice’s pragmatics, action theory, epistemology, ethics, and philosophy of mind, studies of rationality frequently cross the boundaries various branches of philosophy. The barebones theory of rationality  takes an agent’s preferences, i. e. his rankings of states of affairs, to be rational if they are complete and transitive, and it takes the agent’s choice to be rational if the agent does not prefer any feasible alternative to the one he chooses. Such a theory of rationality is clearly too weak. It says nothing about belief or what rationality implies when the agent does not know (with certainty) everything relevant to his choice. It may also be too strong, since there is nothing irrational about having incomplete preferences in situations involving uncertainty. Sometimes it is rational to suspend judgment and to refuse to rank alternatives that are not well understood. On the other hand, transitivity is a plausible condition, and the so-called “money pump” argument demonstrates that if one’s preferences are intransitive and one is willing to make exchanges, then one can be exploited. Suppose an agent A prefers X to Y, Y to Z and Z to X, and that A will pay some small amount of money $P to exchange Y for X, Z for Y, and X for Z. That means that, starting with Z, A will pay $P for Y, then $P again for X, then $P again for Z and so on. An agent need not be this stupid. He will instead refuse to trade or adjust his preferences to eliminate the intransitivity. On the other hand, there is evidence that an agent’s preferences are not in fact transitive. Such evidence does not establish that transitivity is not a requirement of rationality. It may show instead that an agent may sometimes not be rational. In, e. g. the case of preference reversals,” it seems plausible that the agent in fact makes the ‘irrational choice.’ Evidence of persistent violations of transitivity is disquieting, since standards of rationality should not be impossibly high. A further difficulty with the barebones theory of rationality concerns the individuation of the objects of preference or choice. Consider e. g. data from a multi-stage ultimatum game. Suppose A can propose any division of $10 between A and B. B can accept or reject A’s proposal. If B rejects the proposal, the amount of money drops to $5, and B gets to offer a division of the $5 which A can accept or reject. If A rejects B’s offer, both players get nothing. Suppose that A proposes to divide the money with $7 for A and $3 for B. B declines and offers to split the $5 evenly, with $2.50 for each. Behaviour such as this is, in fact, common. Assuming that B prefers more money to less, these choices appear to be a violation of transitivity. B prefers $3 to $2.50, yet declines $3 for certain for $2.50 (with some slight chance of A declining and B getting nothing). But the objects of choice are not just quantities of money. B is turning down $3 as part of “a raw deal” in favour of $2.50 as part of a fair arrangement. If the objects of choice are defined in this way, there is no failure of transitivity. This plausible observation gives rise to a serious conceptual problem that Grice thinks he can solve. Unless there are constraints on how the objects of choice are individuated, conditions of rationality such as transitivity are empty. A’s choice of X over Y, Y over Z and Z over X does not violate transitivity if “X when the alternative is Y” is not the same object of choice as “X when the alternative is Z”. A further substantive principle of rationality isrequired to limit how alternatives are individuated or to require that agents be indifferent between alternatives such as “X when the alternative is Y” and “X when the alternative is Z.” To extend the theory of rationality to circumstances involving risk (where the objects of choice are lotteries with known probabilities) and uncertainty (where agents do not know the probabilities or even all the possible outcomes of their choices) requires a further principle of rationality, as well as a controversial technical simplification. Subjective Bayesians suppose that the agent in circumstances of uncertainty has well-defined subjective probabilities (degrees of belief) over all the payoffs and thus that the objects of choice can be modeled as lotteries, just as in circumstances involving risk, though with subjective probabilities in place of objective probabilities. The most important of the axioms needed for the theory of rational choice under conditions of risk and uncertainty is the independence condition. The preferences of a rational agent between two lotteries that differ in only one outcome should match his preferences between the differing outcomes. A considerable part of Grice’s rational choice theory is concerned with formalizations of conditions of rationality and investigation of their implications. When they are complete and transitive and satisfy a further continuity condition, the agent’s preferences can be represented by an ordinal utility function, i. e. it is then possible to define a function that represents an agent’s preferences so that U(X) > U(Y) iff if the agent prefers X to Y, and U(X) = U(Y) iff if the agent is indifferent between X and Y. This function represents the preference ranking, and contains no information beyond the ranking. When in addition they satisfy the independence condition, the agent’s preferences can be represented by an expected utility function (Ramsey 1926). Such a function has two important properties. First, the expected utility of a lottery is equal to the sum of the expected utilities of its prizes weighted by their probabilities. Second, expected utility functions are unique up to a positive affine transformation. If U and V are both expected utility functions representing the preferences of an agent, for all objects of preference, X, V(X) must be equal to aU(X) + b, where a and b are real numbers and a is positive. The axioms of rationality imply that the agent’s degrees of belief will satisfy the axioms of the probability calculus. A great deal of controversy surrounds Grice’s theory of rationality, and there have been many formal investigations into amendeding it. Although a conversational pair is very different from this agent and this other agent, the pair has a mechanism to evaluate alternatives and make a choice. The evaluation and the choice may be rational or irrational. Pace Grice’s fruitful seminars on rational helpfulness in cooperation, t is not, however, obvious, what principles of rationality should govern the choices and evaluations of the conversational dyad. Transitivity is one plausible condition. It seems that a conversational dyad that chooses X when faced with the alternatives X or Y, Y when faced with the alternatives Y or Z and Z when faced with the alternatives X or Z, the conversational dyad has had “a change of hearts” or is choosing ‘irrationally.’ Yet, purported irrationalities such as these can easily arise from a standard mechanism that aims to link a ‘conversational choice’ and individual preferences. Suppose there are two conversationalists in the dyad. Individual One ranks the alternatives X, Y, Z. Individual Two ranks them Y, Z, X. (An Individual Three if he comes by, may ranks them Z, X, Y). If decisions are made by pairwise majority voting, X will be chosen from the pair (X, Y), Y will be chosen from (Y, Z), and Z will be chosen from (X, Z). Clearly this is unsettling. But is a possible cycle in a ‘conversational choice’ “irrational”? Similar problems affect what one might call the logical coherence of a conversational judgment Suppose the dyad consists of two individuals who make the following judgments concerning the truth or falsity of the propositions P and Q and that “conversational” judgment follows the majority. P if P, Q Q Conversationalist A                                      true true true Conversationalist B false true false (Conversationalist C, if he passes by) true                         false false “Conversation” as an Institution: true true false. The judgment of each conversationalist is consistent with the principles of logic, while the “conversational co-operative” judgment violates the principles of logic. The “cooperative conversational,” “altruistic,” “joint judgment” need not be consistent with the principles of egoist logic. Although conversational choice theory bears on questions of conversational rationality, most work in conversational choice theory explores the consequences of principles of rationality coupled with this or that explicitly practical, or meta-ethical constraint. Grice does not use ‘moral,’ since he distinguishes what he calls a ‘conversational maxim’ from a ‘moral maxim’ of the type Kant universalizes. Arrow’s impossibility theorem assumes that an individual preference and a concerted, joint preference are complete and transitive and that the method of forming a conversational, concerted, joint preference (or making a conversational, concerted, choice) issues in some joint preference ranking or joint choice for any possible profile (or dossier, as Grice prefers) of each individual preference. Arrow’s impossibility theorem imposes a weak UNANIMITY (one-soul) condition. If A and B prefers X to Y, Y must not jointly preferred. Arrow’s impossibility theorem requires that there be no boss (call him Immanuel, the Genitor) whose preference determines a joint preference or choice irrespective of the preferences of anybody else. Arrow’s impossibility theorem imposes the condition that the joint concerted conversational preference between X and Y should depend on how A and B rank X and Y and on nothing else. Arrow’s impossibility theorem proves that no method of co-relating or linking conversational and a monogogic preference can satisfy all these conditions. If an monopreference and a mono-evaluations both satisfy the axioms of expected utility theory (with shared or objective probabilities) and that a duo-preference conform to the unanimous mono-preference, a duo- evaluation is determined by a weighted sum of individual utilities. A form of weighted futilitarianism, which prioritizes the interests of the recipient, rather than the emissor, uniquely satisfies a longer list of rational and practical constraints. When there are instead disagreements in probability assignments, there is an impossibility result. The unanimity (‘one-soul’) condition implies that for some profiles of individual preferences, a joint or duo-evaluation will not satisfy the axioms of expected utility theory. When outcomes depend on what at least two autonomous free agents do, one agent’s best choice may depend on what the other agent chooses. Although the principles of rationality governing mono-choice still apply, there is a further principle of conversational rationality governing the ‘expectation’ (to use Grice’s favourite term) of the action (or conversational move) of one’s co-conversationalist (and obviously, via the mutuality requirement of applicational universalizability) of the co-conversationalist’s ‘expectation’ concerning the conversationalist’s action and expectation, and so forth. Grice’s Conversational Game Theory plays a protagonist role within philosophy, and it is relevant to inquiries concerning conversational rationality and inquiries concerning conversational ethics. Rational choice -- Probability -- Dutch book, a bet or combination of bets whereby the bettor is bound to suffer a net loss regardless of the outcome. A simple example would be a bet on a proposition p at odds of 3 : 2 combined with a bet on not-p at the same odds, the total amount of money at stake in each bet being five dollars. Under this arrangement, if p turned out to be true one would win two dollars by the first bet but lose three dollars by the second, and if p turned out to be false one would win two dollars by the second bet but lose three dollars by the first. Hence, whatever happened, one would lose a dollar.  Dutch book argument, the argument that a rational person’s degrees of belief must conform to the axioms of the probability calculus, since otherwise, by the Dutch book theorem, he would be vulnerable to a Dutch book. R.Ke. Dutch book theorem, the proposition that anyone who a counts a bet on a proposition p as fair if the odds correspond to his degree of belief that p is true and who b is willing to make any combination of bets he would regard individually as fair will be vulnerable to a Dutch book provided his degrees of belief do not conform to the axioms of the probability calculus. Thus, anyone of whom a and b are true and whose degree of belief in a disjunction of two incompatible propositions is not equal to the sum of his degrees of belief in the two propositions taken individually would be vulnerable to a Dutch book.

rational decision theory -- decidability, as a property of sets, the existence of an effective procedure a “decision procedure” which, when applied to any object, determines whether or not the object belongs to the set. A theory or logic is decidable if and only if the set of its theorems is. Decidability is proved by describing a decision procedure and showing that it works. The truth table method, for example, establishes that classical propositional logic is decidable. To prove that something is not decidable requires a more precise characterization of the notion of effective procedure. Using one such characterization for which there is ample evidence, Church proved that classical predicate logic is not decidable. decision theory, the theory of rational decision, often called “rational choice theory” in political science and other social sciences. The basic idea probably Pascal’s was published at the end of Arnaud’s Port-Royal Logic 1662: “To judge what one must do to obtain a good or avoid an evil one must consider not only the good and the evil in itself but also the probability of its happening or not happening, and view geometrically the proportion that all these things have together.” Where goods and evils are monetary, Daniel Bernoulli 1738 spelled the idea out in terms of expected utilities as figures of merit for actions, holding that “in the absence of the unusual, the utility resulting from a fixed small increase in wealth will be inversely proportional to the quantity of goods previously possessed.” This was meant to solve the St. Petersburg paradox: Peter tosses a coin . . . until it should land “heads” [on toss n]. . . . He agrees to give Paul one ducat if he gets “heads” on the very first throw [and] with each additional throw the number of ducats he must pay is doubled. . . . Although the standard calculation shows that the value of Paul’s expectation [of gain] is infinitely great [i.e., the sum of all possible gains $ probabilities, 2n/2 $ ½n], it has . . . to be admitted that any fairly reasonable man would sell his chance, with great pleasure, for twenty ducats. In this case Paul’s expectation of utility is indeed finite on Bernoulli’s assumption of inverse proportionality; but as Karl Menger observed 4, Bernoulli’s solution fails if payoffs are so large that utilities are inversely proportional to probabilities; then only boundedness of utility scales resolves the paradox. Bernoulli’s idea of diminishing marginal utility of wealth survived in the neoclassical texts of W. S. Jevons 1871, Alfred Marshall 0, and A. C. Pigou 0, where personal utility judgment was understood to cause preference. But in the 0s, operationalistic arguments of John Hicks and R. G. D. Allen persuaded economists that on the contrary, 1 utility is no cause but a description, in which 2 the numbers indicate preference order but not intensity. In their Theory of Games and Economic Behavior 6, John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern undid 2 by pushing 1 further: ordinal preferences among risky prospects were now seen to be describable on “interval” scales of subjective utility like the Fahrenheit and Celsius scales for temperature, so that once utilities, e.g., 0 and 1, are assigned to any prospect and any preferred one, utilities of all prospects are determined by overall preferences among gambles, i.e., probability distributions over prospects. Thus, the utility midpoint between two prospects is marked by the distribution assigning probability ½ to each. In fact, Ramsey had done that and more in a little-noticed essay “Truth and Probability,” 1 teasing subjective probabilities as well as utilities out of ordinal preferences among gambles. In a form independently invented by L. J. Savage Foundations of Statistics, 4, this approach is now widely accepted as a basis for rational decision analysis. The 8 book of that title by Howard Raiffa became a theoretical centerpiece of M.B.A. curricula, whose graduates diffused it through industry, government, and the military in a simplified format for defensible decision making, namely, “costbenefit analyses,” substituting expected numbers of dollars, deaths, etc., for preference-based expected utilities. Social choice and group decision form the native ground of interpersonal comparison of personal utilities. Thus, John C. Harsanyi 5 proved that if 1 individual and social preferences all satisfy the von Neumann-Morgenstern axioms, and 2 society is indifferent between two prospects whenever all individuals are, and 3 society prefers one prospect to another whenever someone does and nobody has the opposite preference, then social utilities are expressible as sums of individual utilities on interval scales obtained by stretching or compressing the individual scales by amounts determined by the social preferences. Arguably, the theorem shows how to derive interpersonal comparisons of individual preference intensities from social preference orderings that are thought to treat individual preferences on a par. Somewhat earlier, Kenneth Arrow had written that “interpersonal comparison of utilities has no meaning and, in fact, there is no meaning relevant to welfare economics in the measurability of individual utility” Social Choice and Individual Values, 1  a position later abandoned P. Laslett and W. G. Runciman, eds., Philosophy, Politics and Society, 7. Arrow’s “impossibility theorem” is illustrated by cyclic preferences observed by Condorcet in 1785 among candidates A, B, C of voters 1, 2, 3, who rank them ABC, BCA, CAB, respectively, in decreasing order of preference, so that majority rule yields intransitive preferences for the group of three, of whom two 1, 3 prefer A to B and two 1, 2 prefer B to C but two 2, 3 prefer C to A. In general, the theorem denies existence of technically democratic schemes for forming social preferences from citizens’ preferences. A clause tendentiously called “independence of irrelevant alternatives” in the definition of ‘democratic’ rules out appeal to preferences among non-candidates as a way to form social preferences among candidates, thus ruling out the preferences among gambles used in Harsanyi’s theorem. See John Broome, Weighing Goods, 1, for further information and references. Savage derived the agent’s probabilities for states as well as utilities for consequences from preferences among abstract acts, represented by deterministic assignments of consequences to states. An act’s place in the preference ordering is then reflected by its expected utility, a probability-weighted average of the utilities of its consequences in the various states. Savage’s states and consequences formed distinct sets, with every assignment of consequences to states constituting an act. While Ramsey had also taken acts to be functions from states to consequences, he took consequences to be propositions sets of states, and assigned utilities to states, not consequences. A further step in that direction represents acts, too, by propositions see Ethan Bolker, Functions Resembling Quotients of Measures,  Microfilms, 5; and Richard Jeffrey, The Logic of Decision, 5, 0. Bolker’s representation theorem states conditions under which preferences between truth of propositions determine probabilities and utilities nearly enough to make the position of a proposition in one’s preference ranking reflect its “desirability,” i.e., one’s expectation of utility conditionally on it. decision theory decision theory 208   208 Alongside such basic properties as transitivity and connexity, a workhorse among Savage’s assumptions was the “sure-thing principle”: Preferences among acts having the same consequences in certain states are unaffected by arbitrary changes in those consequences. This implies that agents see states as probabilistically independent of acts, and therefore implies that an act cannot be preferred to one that dominates it in the sense that the dominant act’s consequences in each state have utilities at least as great as the other’s. Unlike the sure thing principle, the principle ‘Choose so as to maximize CEU conditional expectation of utility’ rationalizes action aiming to enhance probabilities of preferred states of nature, as in quitting cigarettes to increase life expectancy. But as Nozick pointed out in 9, there are problems in which choiceworthiness goes by dominance rather than CEU, as when the smoker like R. A. Fisher in 9 believes that the statistical association between smoking and lung cancer is due to a genetic allele, possessors of which are more likely than others to smoke and to contract lung cancer, although among them smokers are not especially likely to contract lung cancer. In such “Newcomb” problems choices are ineffectual signs of conditions that agents would promote or prevent if they could. Causal decision theories modify the CEU formula to obtain figures of merit distinguishing causal efficacy from evidentiary significance  e.g., replacing conditional probabilities by probabilities of counterfactual conditionals; or forming a weighted average of CEU’s under all hypotheses about causes, with agents’ unconditional probabilities of hypotheses as weights; etc. Mathematical statisticians leery of subjective probability have cultivated Abraham Wald’s Theory of Statistical Decision Functions 0, treating statistical estimation, experimental design, and hypothesis testing as zero-sum “games against nature.” For an account of the opposite assimilation, of game theory to probabilistic decision theory, see Skyrms, Dynamics of Rational Deliberation 0. The “preference logics” of Sören Halldén, The Logic of ‘Better’ 7, and G. H. von Wright, The Logic of Preference 3, sidestep probability. Thus, Halldén holds that when truth of p is preferred to truth of q, falsity of q must be preferred to falsity of p, and von Wright with Aristotle holds that “this is more choiceworthy than that if this is choiceworthy without that, but that is not choiceworthy without this” Topics III, 118a. Both principles fail in the absence of special probabilistic assumptions, e.g., equiprobability of p with q. Received wisdom counts decision theory clearly false as a description of human behavior, seeing its proper status as normative. But some, notably Davidson, see the theory as constitutive of the very concept of preference, so that, e.g., preferences can no more be intransitive than propositions can be at once true and false.  Rational decision: envelope paradox, an apparent paradox in decision theory that runs as follows. You are shown two envelopes, M and N, and are reliably informed that each contains some finite positive amount of money, that the amount in one unspecified envelope is twice the amount in the unspecified other, and that you may choose only one. Call the amount in M ‘m’ and that in N ‘n’. It might seem that: there is a half chance that m % 2n and a half chance that m = n/2, so that the “expected value” of m is ½2n ! ½n/2 % 1.25n, so that you should prefer envelope M. But by similar reasoning it might seem that the expected value of n is 1.25m, so that you should prefer envelope N. 

rationality – while Grice never used to employ ‘rationality’ he learned to! In “Retrospective epilogue” in fact he refers to the principle of conversational helpfulness as ‘promoting conversational rationality.’ Rationality as a faculty psychology, the view that the mind is a collection of departments responsible for distinct psychological functions. Related to faculty psychology is the doctrine of localization of function, wherein each faculty has a specific brain location. Faculty psychologies oppose theories of mind as a unity with one function e.g., those of Descartes and associationism or as a unity with various capabilities e.g., that of Ockham, and oppose the related holistic distributionist or mass-action theory of the brain. Faculty psychology began with Aristotle, who divided the human soul into five special senses, three inner senses common sense, imagination, memory and active and passive mind. In the Middle Ages e.g., Aquinas Aristotle’s three inner senses were subdivied, creating more elaborate lists of five to seven inward wits. Islamic physicianphilosophers such as Avicenna integrated Aristotelian faculty psychology with Galenic medicine by proposing brain locations for the faculties. Two important developments in faculty psychology occurred during the eighteenth century. First, Scottish philosophers led by Reid developed a version of faculty psychology opposed to the empiricist and associationist psychologies of Locke and Hume. The Scots proposed that humans were endowed by God with a set of faculties permitting knowledge of the world and morality. The Scottish system exerted considerable influence in the United States, where it was widely taught as a moral, character-building discipline, and in the nineteenth century this “Old Psychology” opposed the experimental “New Psychology.” Second, despite then being called a charlatan, Franz Joseph Gall 17581828 laid the foundation for modern neuropsychology in his work on localization of function. Gall rejected existing faculty psychologies as philosophical, unbiological, and incapable of accounting for everyday behavior. Gall proposed an innovative behavioral and biological list of faculties and brain localizations based on comparative anatomy, behavior study, and measurements of the human skull. Today, faculty psychology survives in trait and instinct theories of personality, Fodor’s theory that mental functions are implemented by neurologically “encapsulated” organs, and localizationist theories of the brain.

rationalism, the position that reason has precedence over other ways of acquiring knowledge, or, more strongly, that it is the unique path to knowledge. It is most often encountered as a view in epistemology, where it is traditionally contrasted with empiricism, the view that the senses are primary with respect to knowledge. It is important here to distinguish empiricism with respect to knowledge from empiricism with respect to ideas or concepts; whereas the former is opposed to rationalism, the latter is opposed to the doctrine of innate ideas. The term is also encountered in the philosophy of religion, where it may designate those who oppose the view that revelation is central to religious knowledge; and in ethics, where it may designate those who oppose the view that ethical principles are grounded in or derive from emotion, empathy, or some other non-rational foundation. The term ‘rationalism’ does not generally designate a single precise philosophical position; there are several ways in which reason can have precedence, and several accounts of knowledge to which it may be opposed. Furthermore, the very term ‘reason’ is not altogether clear. Often it designates a faculty of the soul, distinct from sensation, imagination, and memory, which is the ground of a priori knowledge. But there are other conceptions of reason, such as the narrower conception in which Pascal opposes reason to “knowledge of the heart” Pensées, section 110, or the computational conception of reason Hobbes advances in Leviathan I.5. The term might thus be applied to a number of philosophical positions from the ancients down to the present. Among the ancients, ‘rationalism’ and ‘empiricism’ especially denote two schools of medicine, the former relying primarily on a theoretical knowledge of the hidden workings of the human body, the latter relying on direct clinical experience. The term might also be used to characterize the views of Plato and later Neoplatonists, who argued that we have pure intellectual access to the Forms and general principles that govern reality, and rejected sensory knowledge of the imperfect realization of those Forms in the material world. In recent philosophical writing, the term ‘rationalism’ is most closely associated with the positions of a group of seventeenth-century philosophers, Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, and sometimes Malebranche. These thinkers are often referred to collectively as the Continental rationalists, and are generally opposed to the socalled British empiricists, Locke, Berkeley, and Hume. All of the former share the view that we have a non-empirical and rational access to the truth about the way the world is, and all privilege reason over knowledge derived from the senses. These philosophers are also attracted to mathematics as a model for knowledge in general. But these common views are developed in quite different ways. Descartes claims to take his inspiration from mathematics  not mathematics as commonly understood, but the analysis of the ancients. According to Descartes, we start from first principles known directly by reason the cogito ergo sum of the Meditations, what he calls intuition in his Rules for the Direction of the Mind; all other knowledge is deduced from there. A central aim of his Meditations is to show that this faculty of reason is trustworthy. The senses, on the other hand, are generally deceptive, leading us to mistake sensory qualities for real qualities of extended bodies, and leading us to the false philosophy of Aristotle and to Scholasticism. Descartes does not reject the senses altogether; in Meditation VI he argues that the senses are most often correct in circumstances concerning the preservation of life. Perhaps paradoxically, experiment is important to Descartes’s scientific work. However, his primary interest is in the theoretical account of the phenomena experiment reveals, and while his position is unclear, he may have considered experiment as an auxiliary to intuition and deduction, or as a second-best method that can be used with problems too complex for pure reason. Malebranche, following Descartes, takes similar views in his Search after Truth, though unlike Descartes, he emphasizes original sin as the cause of our tendency to trust the senses. Spinoza’s model for knowledge is Euclidean geometry, as realized in the geometrical form of the Ethics. Spinoza explicitly argues that we cannot have adequate ideas of the world through sensation Ethics II, propositions 1631. In the Ethics he does see a role for the senses in what he calls knowledge of the first and knowledge of the second kinds, and in the earlier Emendation of the Intellect, he suggests that the senses may be auxiliary aids to genuine knowledge. But the senses are imperfect and far less valuable, according to Spinoza, than intuition, i.e., knowledge of the third kind, from which sensory experience is excluded. Spinoza’s rationalism is implicit in a central proposition of the Ethics, in accordance with which “the order and connection of ideas is the same as the order and connection of things” Ethics II, proposition 7, allowing one to infer causal connections between bodies and states of the material world directly from the logical connections between ideas. Leibniz, too, emphasizes reason over the senses in a number of ways. In his youth he believed that it would be possible to calculate the truth-value of every sentence by constructing a logical language whose structure mirrors the structure of relations between concepts in the world. This view is reflected in his mature thought in the doctrine that in every truth, the concept of the predicate is contained in the concept of the subject, so that if one could take the God’s-eye view which, he concedes, we cannot, one could determine the truth or falsity of any proposition without appeal to experience Discourse on Metaphysics, section 8. Leibniz also argues that all truths are based on two basic principles, the law of non-contradiction for necessary truths, and the principle of sufficient reason for contingent truths Monadology, section 31, both of which can be known a priori. And so, at least in principle, the truth-values of all propositions can be determined a priori. This reflects his practice in physics, where he derives a number of laws of motion from the principle of the equality of cause and effect, which can be known a priori on the basis of the principle of sufficient reason. But, at the same time, referring to the empirical school of ancient medicine, Leibniz concedes that “we are all mere Empirics in three fourths of our actions” Monadology, section 28. Each of the so-called Continental rationalists does, in his own way, privilege reason over the senses. But the common designation ‘Continental rationalism’ arose only much later, probably in the nineteenth century. For their contemporaries, more impressed with their differences than their common doctrines, the Continental rationalists did not form a single homogeneous school of thought. 

rationality. In its primary sense, rationality is a normative concept that philosophers have generally tried to characterize in such a way that, for any action, belief, or desire, if it is rational we ought to choose it. No such positive characterization has achieved anything close to universal assent because, often, several competing actions, beliefs, or desires count as rational. Equating what is rational with what is rationally required eliminates the category of what is rationally allowed. Irrationality seems to be the more fundamental normative category; for although there are conflicting substantive accounts of irrationality, all agree that to say of an action, belief, or desire that it is irrational is to claim that it should always be avoided. Rationality is also a descriptive concept that refers to those intellectual capacities, usually involving the ability to use language, that distinguish persons from plants and most other animals. There is some dispute about whether some non-human animals, e.g., dolphins and chimpanzees, are rational in this sense. Theoretical rationality applies to beliefs. An irrational belief is one that obviously conflicts with what one should know. This characterization of an irrational belief is identical with the psychiatric characterization of a delusion. It is a personrelative concept, because what obviously conflicts with what should be known by one person need not obviously conflict with what should be known by another. On this account, any belief that is not irrational counts as rational. Many positive characterizations of rational beliefs have been proposed, e.g., 1 beliefs that are either self-evident or derived from self-evident beliefs by a reliable procedure and 2 beliefs that are consistent with the overwhelming majority of one’s beliefs; but all of these positive characterizations have encountered serious objections. Practical rationality applies to actions. For some philosophers it is identical to instrumental rationality. On this view, commonly called instrumentalism, acting rationally simply means acting in a way that is maximally efficient in achieving one’s goals. However, most philosophers realize that achieving one goal may conflict with achieving another, and therefore require that a rational action be one that best achieves one’s goals only when these goals are considered as forming a system. Others have added that all of these goals must be ones that would be chosen given complete knowledge and understanding of what it would be like to achieve these goals. On the latter account of rational action, the system of goals is chosen by all persons for themselves, and apart from consistency there is no external standpoint from which to evaluate rationally any such system. Thus, for a person with a certain system of goals it will be irrational to act morally. Another account of rational action is not at all person-relative. On this account, to act rationally is to act on universalizable principles, so that what is a reason for one person must be a reason for everyone. One point of such an account is to make it rationally required to act morally, thus making all immoral action irrational. However, if to call an action irrational is to claim that everyone would hold that it is always to be avoided, then it is neither irrational to act immorally in order to benefit oneself or one’s friends, nor irrational to act morally even when that goes against one’s system of goals. Only a negative characterization of what is rational as what is not irrational, which makes it rationally permissible to act either morally or in accordance with one’s own system of goals, as long as these goals meet some minimal objective standard, seems likely to be adequate. 

rationalization, 1 an apparent explanation of a person’s action or attitude by appeal to reasons that would justify or exculpate the person for it  if, contrary to fact, those reasons were to explain it; 2 an explanation or interpretation made from a rational perspective. In sense 1, rationalizations are pseudo-explanations, often motivated by a desire to exhibit an item in a favorable light. Such rationalizations sometimes involve self-deception. Depending on one’s view of justification, a rationalization might justify an action  by adducing excellent reasons for its performance  even if the agent, not having acted for those reasons, deserves no credit for so acting. In sense 2 a sense popularized in philosophy by Donald Davidson, rationalizations of intentional actions are genuine explanations in terms of agents’ reasons. In this sense, we provide a rationalization for  or “rationalize”  Robert’s shopping at Zed’s by identifying the reasons for which he does so: e.g., he wants to buy an excellent kitchen knife and believes that Zed’s sells the best cutlery in town. Also, the reasons for which an agent acts may themselves be said to rationalize the action. Beliefs, desires, and intentions may be similarly rationalized. In each case, a rationalization exhibits the rationalized item as, to some degree, rational from the standpoint of the person to whom it is attributed.

rational psychology, the a priori study of the mind. This was a large component of eighteenthand nineteenth-century psychology, and was contrasted by its exponents with empirical psychology, which is rooted in contingent experience. The term ‘rational psychology’ may also designate a mind, or form of mind, having the property of rationality. Current philosophy of mind includes much discussion of rational psychologies, but the notion is apparently ambiguous. On one hand, there is rationality as intelligibility. This is a minimal coherence, say of desires or inferences, that a mind must possess to be a mind. For instance, Donald Davidson, many functionalists, and some decision theorists believe there are principles of rationality of this sort that constrain the appropriate attribution of beliefs and desires to a person, so that a mind must meet such constraints if it is to have beliefs and desires. On another pole, there is rationality as justification. For someone’s psychology to have this property is for that psychology to be as reason requires it to be, say for that person’s inferences and desires to be supported by proper reasons given their proper weight, and hence to be justified. Rationality as justification is a normative property, which it would seem some minds lack. But despite the apparent differences between these two sorts of rationality, some important work in philosophy of mind implies either that these two senses in fact collapse, or at least that there are intervening and significant senses, so that things at least a lot like normative principles constrain what our psychologies are. 

rational reconstruction, also called logical reconstruction, translation of a discourse of a certain conceptual type into a discourse of another conceptual type with the aim of making it possible to say everything or everything important that is expressible in the former more clearly or perspicuously in the latter. The best-known example is one in Carnap’s Der Logische Aufbau der Welt. Carnap attempted to translate discourse concerning physical objects e.g., ‘There is a round brown table’ into discourse concerning immediate objects of sense experience ‘Color patches of such-and-such chromatic characteristics and shape appear in such-and-such a way’. He was motivated by the empiricist doctrine that immediate sense experience is conceptually prior to everything else, including our notion of a physical object. In addition to talk of immediate sense experience, Carnap relied on logic and set theory. Since their use is difficult to reconcile with strict empiricism, his translation would not have fully vindicated empiricism even if it had succeeded. 

Rationality -- reasons for action, considerations that call for or justify action. They may be subjective or objective. A subjective reason is a consideration an agent understands to support a course of action, whether or not it actually does. An objective reason is one that does support a course of action, regardless of whether the agent realizes it. What are cited as reasons may be matters either of fact or of value, but when facts are cited values are also relevant. Thus the fact that cigarette smoke contains nicotine is a reason for not smoking only because nicotine has undesirable effects. The most important evaluative reasons are normative reasons  i.e., considerations having e.g. ethical force. Facts become obligating reasons when, in conjunction with normative considerations, they give rise to an obligation. Thus in view of the obligation to help the needy, the fact that others are hungry is an obligating reason to see they are fed. Reasons for action enter practical thinking as the contents of beliefs, desires, and other mental states. But not all the reasons one has need motivate the corresponding behavior. Thus I may recognize an obligation to pay taxes, yet do so only for fear of punishment. If so, then only my fear is an explaining reason for my action. An overriding reason is one that takes precedence over all others. It is often claimed that moral reasons override all others objectively, and should do so subjectively as well. Finally, one may speak of an all-things-considered reason  one that after due consideration is taken as finally determinative of what shall be done.    reasons for belief, roughly, bases of belief. The word ‘belief’ is commonly used to designate both a particular sort of psychological state, a state of believing, and a particular intentional content or proposition believed. Reasons for belief exhibit an analogous duality. A proposition, p, might be said to provide a normative reason to believe a proposition, q, for instance, when p bears some appropriate warranting relation to q. And p might afford a perfectly good reason to believe q, even though no one, as a matter of fact, believes either p or q. In contrast, p is a reason that I have for believing q, if I believe p and p counts as a reason in the sense above to believe q. Undoubtedly, I have reason to believe countless propositions that I shall never, as it happens, come to believe. Suppose, however, that p is a reason for which I believe q. In that case, I must believe both p and q, and p must be a reason to believe q  or, at any rate, I must regard it as such. It may be that I must, in addition, believe q at least in part because I believe p. Reasons in these senses are inevitably epistemic; they turn on considerations of evidence, truth-conduciveness, and the like. But not all reasons for belief are of this sort. An explanatory reason, a reason why I believe p, may simply be an explanation for my having or coming to have this belief. Perhaps I believe p because I was brainwashed, or struck on the head, or because I have strong non-epistemic motives for this belief. I might, of course, hold the belief on the basis of unexceptionable epistemic grounds. When this is so, my believing p may both warrant and explain my believing q. Reflections of this sort can lead to questions concerning the overall or “all-things-considered” reasonableness of a given belief. Some philosophers e.g., Clifford argue that a belief’s reasonableness depends exclusively on its epistemic standing: my believing p is reasonable for me provided it is epistemically reasonable for me; where belief is concerned, epistemic reasons are overriding. Others, siding with James, have focused on the role of belief in our psychological economy, arguing that the reasonableness of my holding a given belief can be affected by a variety of non-epistemic considerations. Suppose I have some evidence that p is false, but that I stand to benefit in a significant way from coming to believe p. If that is so, and if the practical advantages of my holding p considerably outweigh the practical disadvantages, it might seem obvious that my holding p is reasonable for me in some all-embracing sense. 

Rawls, John b.1,  philosopher widely recognized as one of the leading political philosophers of the twentieth century. His A Theory of Justice 1 is one of the primary texts in political philosophy. Political Liberalism 3 revises Rawls’s theory to make his conception of justice compatible with liberal pluralism, but leaves the core of his conception intact. Drawing on the liberal and democratic social contract traditions of Locke, Rousseau, and Kant, Rawls argues that the most reasonable principles of justice are those everyone would accept and agree to from a fair position. Since these principles determine the justice of society’s political constitution, economy, and property rules its “basic structure”, Rawls takes a fair agreement situation to be one where everyone is impartially situated as equals. In this so-called original position everyone is equally situated by a hypothetical “veil of ignorance.” This veil requires individuals to set aside their knowledge of their particular differences, including knowledge of their talents, wealth, social position, religious and philosophical views, and particular conceptions of value. Rawls argues that in the hypothetical original position everyone would reject utilitarianism, perfectionism, and intuitionist views. Instead they would unanimously accept justice as fairness. This conception of justice consists mainly of two principles. The first principle says that certain liberties are basic and are to be equally provided to all: liberty of conscience, freedom of thought, freedom of association, equal political liberties, freedom and integrity of the person, and the liberties that maintain the rule of law. These are basic liberties, because they are necessary to exercise one’s “moral powers.” The two moral powers are, first, the capacity to be rational, to have a rational conception of one’s good; and second, the capacity for a sense of justice, to understand, apply, and act from requirements of justice. These powers constitute essential interests of free and equal moral persons since they enable each person to be a free and responsible agent taking part in social cooperation. Rawls’s second principle of justice, the difference principle, regulates permissible differences in rights, powers, and privileges. It defines the limits of inequalities in wealth, income, powers, and positions that may exist in a just society. It says, first, that social positions are to be open to all to compete for on terms of fair equality of opportunity. Second, inequalities in wealth, income, and social powers and positions are permissible only if they maximally benefit the least advantaged class in society. The difference principle implies that a just economic system distributes income and wealth so as to make the class of least advantaged persons better off than they would be under any alternative economic system. This principle is to be consistent with the “priority” of the first principle, which requires that equal basic liberties cannot be traded for other benefits. The least advantaged’s right to vote, for example, cannot be limited for the sake of improving their relative economic position. Instead, a basic liberty can be limited only for the sake of maintaining other basic liberties. Rawls contends that, taking the two principles of justice together, a just society maximizes the worth to the least advantaged of the basic liberties shared by all Theory, p. 205. The priority of basic liberty implies a liberal egalitarian society in which each person is ensured adequate resources to effectively exercise her basic liberties and become independent and self-governing. A just society is then governed by a liberal-democratic constitution that protects the basic liberties and provides citizens with equally effective rights to participate in electoral processes and influence legislation. Economically a just society incorporates a modified market system that extensively distributes income and wealth  either a “property-owning democracy” with widespread ownership of means of production, or liberal socialism. 

Ray, J. English naturalist whose work on the structure and habits of plants and animals led to important conclusions on the methodology of classification and gave a strong impetus to the design argument in natural theology. In an early paper he argued that the determining characteristics of a species are those transmitted by seed, since color, scent, size, etc., vary with climate and nutriment. Parallels from the animal kingdom suggested the correct basis for classification would be structural. But we have no knowledge of real essences. Our experience of nature is of a continuum, and for practical purposes kinships are best identified by a plurality of criteria. His mature theory is set out in Dissertatio Brevis 1696 and Methodus Emendata 1703. The Wisdom of God Manifested in the Works of the Creation 1691 and three revisions was a best-selling compendium of Ray’s own scientific learning and was imitated and quarried by many later exponents of the design argument. Philosophically, he relied on others, from Cicero to Cudworth, and was superseded by Paley.

Realism – causal realism -- direct realism, the theory that perceiving is epistemically direct, unmediated by conscious or unconscious inference. Direct realism is distinguished, on the one hand, from indirect, or representative, realism, the view that perceptual awareness of material objects is mediated by an awareness of sensory representations, and, on the other hand, from forms of phenomenalism that identify material objects with states of mind. It might be thought that direct realism is incompatible with causal theories of perception. Such theories invoke causal chains leading from objects perceived causes to perceptual states of perceivers effects. Since effects must be distinct from causes, the relation between an instance of perceiving and an object perceived, it would seem, cannot be direct. This, however, confuses epistemic directness with causal directness. A direct realist need only be committed to the former. In perceiving a tomato to be red, the content of my perceptual awareness is the tomato’s being red. I enter this state as a result of a complex causal process, perhaps. But my perception may be direct in the sense that it is unmediated by an awareness of a representational sensory state from which I am led to an awareness of the tomato. Perceptual error, and more particularly, hallucinations and illusions, are usually thought to pose special difficulties for direct realists. My hallucinating a red tomato, for instance, is not my being directly aware of a red tomato, since I may hallucinate the tomato even when none is present. Perhaps, then, my hallucinating a red tomato is partly a matter of my being directly aware of a round, red sensory representation. And if my awareness in this case is indistinguishable from my perception of an actual red tomato, why not suppose that I am aware of a sensory representation in the veridical case as well? A direct realist may respond by denying that hallucinations are in fact indistinguishable from veridical perceivings or by calling into question the claim that, if sensory representations are required to explain hallucinations, they need be postulated in the veridical case.  reality, in standard philosophical usage, how things actually are, in contrast with their mere appearance. Appearance has to do with how things seem to a particular perceiver or group of perceivers. Reality is sometimes said to be twoway-independent of appearance. This means that appearance does not determine reality. First, no matter how much agreement there is, based on appearance, about the nature of reality, it is always conceivable that reality differs from appearance. Secondly, appearances are in no way required for reality: reality can outstrip the range of all investigations that we are in a position to make. It may be that reality always brings with it the possibility of appearances, in the counterfactual sense that if there were observers suitably situated, then if conditions were not conducive to error, they would have experiences of such-and-such a kind. But the truth of such a counterfactual seems to be grounded in the facts of reality. Phenomenalism holds, to the contrary, that the facts of reality can be explained by such counterfactuals, but phenomenalists have failed to produce adequate non-circular analyses. The concept of reality on which it is two-wayindependent of experience is sometimes called objective reality. However, Descartes used this phrase differently, to effect a contrast with formal or actual reality. He held that there must be at least as much reality in the efficient and total cause of an effect as in the effect itself, and applied this principle as follows: “There must be at least as much actual or formal reality in the efficient and total cause of an idea as objective reality in the idea itself.” The objective reality of an idea seems to have to do with its having representational content, while actual or formal reality has to do with existence independent of the mind. Thus the quoted principle relates features of the cause of an idea to the representational content of the idea. Descartes’s main intended applications were to God and material objects. 

recursive function theory, a relatively recent area of mathematics that takes as its point of departure the study of an extremely limited class of arithmetic functions called the recursive functions. Strictly speaking, recursive function theory is a branch of higher arithmetic number theory, or the theory of natural numbers whose universe of discourse is restricted to the nonnegative integers: 0, 1, 2, etc. However, the techniques and results of the newer area do not resemble those traditionally associated with number theory. The class of recursive functions is defined in a way that makes evident that every recursive function can be computed or calculated. The hypothesis that every calculable function is recursive, which is known as Church’s thesis, is often taken as a kind of axiom in recursive function theory. This theory has played an important role in modern philosophy of mathematics, especially when epistemological issues are studied. 

redintegration, a psychological process, similar to or involving classical conditioning, in which one feature of a situation causes a person to recall, visualize, or recompose an entire original situation. On opening a pack of cigarettes, a person may visualize the entire process, including striking the match, lighting the cigarette, and puffing. Redintegration is used as a technique in behavior therapy, e.g. when someone trying to refrain from smoking is exposed to unpleasant odors and vivid pictures of lungs caked with cancer, and then permitted to smoke. If the unpleasantness of the odors and visualization outweighs the reinforcement of smoking, the person may resist smoking. Philosophically, redintegration is of interest for two reasons. First, the process may be critical in prudence. By bringing long-range consequences of behavior into focus in present deliberation, redintegration may help to protect long-range interests. Second, redintegration offers a role for visual images in producing behavior. Images figure in paradigmatic cases of redintegration. In recollecting pictures of cancerous lungs, the person may refrain from smoking. 

reductionism: The issue of reductionism is very much twentieth-century. There was Wisdom’s boring contribtions to Mind on ‘logical construction,’ Grice read the summary from Broad. One of the twelve –isms that Grice finds on his ascent to the City of Eternal Truth. He makes the reductive-reductionist distinction. Against J. M. Rountree. So, for Grice, the bad heathen vicious Reductionism can be defeated by the good Christian virtuous Reductivism. A reductivist tries to define, say, what an emissor communicates (that p) in terms of the content of that proposition that he intends to transmit to his recipient. Following Aristotle, Grice reduces the effect to a ‘pathemata psucheos,’ i. e. a passio of the anima, as Boethius translates. This can be desiderative (“Thou shalt not kill”) or creditativa (“The grass is green.”)

reductio ad absurdum. 1 The principles A / - A / -A and -A / A / A. 2 The argument forms ‘If A then B and not-B; therefore, not-A’ and ‘If not-A then B and not-B; therefore, A’ and arguments of these forms. Reasoning via such arguments is known as the method of indirect proof. 3 The rules of inference that permit i inferring not-A having derived a contradiction from A and ii inferring A having derived a contradiction from not-A. Both rules hold in classical logic and come to the same thing in any logic with the law of double negation. In intuitionist logic, however, i holds but ii does not. 

reduction, the replacement of one expression by a second expression that differs from the first in prima facie reference. So-called reductions have been meant in the sense of uniformly applicable explicit definitions, contextual definitions, or replacements suitable only in a limited range of contexts. Thus, authors have spoken of reductive conceptual analyses, especially in the early days of analytic philosophy. In particular, in the sensedatum theory talk of physical objects was supposed to be reduced to talk of sense-data by explicit definitions or other forms of conceptual analysis. Logical positivists talked of the reduction of theoretical vocabulary to an observational vocabulary, first by explicit definitions, and later by other devices, such as Carnap’s reduction sentences. These appealed to a test condition predicate, T e.g., ‘is placed in water’, and a display predicate, D e.g., ‘dissolves’, to introduce a dispositional or other “non-observational” term, S e.g., ‘is water-soluble’: Ex [Tx / Dx / Sx], with ‘/’ representing the material conditional. Negative reduction sentences for non-occurrence of S took the form Ex [NTx / NDx / - Sx]. For coinciding predicate pairs T and TD and -D and ND Carnap referred to bilateral reduction sentences: Ex [Tx / Dx S Sx]. Like so many other attempted reductions, reduction sentences did not achieve replacement of the “reduced” term, S, since they do not fix application of S when the test condition, T, fails to apply. In the philosophy of mathematics, logicism claimed that all of mathematics could be reduced to logic, i.e., all mathematical terms could be defined with the vocabulary of logic and all theorems of mathematics could be derived from the laws of logic supplemented by these definitions. Russell’s Principia Mathematica carried out much of such a program with a reductive base of something much more like what we now call set theory rather than logic, strictly conceived. Many now accept the reducibility of mathematics to set theory, but only in a sense in which reductions are not unique. For example, the natural numbers can equally well be modeled as classes of equinumerous sets or as von Neumann ordinals. This non-uniqueness creates serious difficulties, with suggestions that set-theoretic reductions can throw light on what numbers and other mathematical objects “really are.” In contrast, we take scientific theories to tell us, unequivocally, that water is H20 and that temperature is mean translational kinetic energy. Accounts of theory reduction in science attempt to analyze the circumstance in which a “reducing theory” appears to tell us the composition of objects or properties described by a “reduced theory.” The simplest accounts follow the general pattern of reduction: one provides “identity statements” or “bridge laws,” with at least the form of explicit definitions, for all terms in the reduced theory not already appearing in the reducing theory; and then one argues that the reduced theory can be deduced from the reducing theory augmented by the definitions. For example, the laws of thermodynamics are said to be deducible from those of statistical mechanics, together with statements such as ‘temperature is mean translational kinetic energy’ and ‘pressure is mean momentum transfer’. How should the identity statements or bridge laws be understood? It takes empirical investigation to confirm statements such as that temperature is mean translational kinetic energy. Consequently, some have argued, such statements at best constitute contingent correlations rather than strict identities. On the other hand, if the relevant terms and their extensions are not mediated by analytic definitions, the identity statements may be analogized to identities involving two names, such as ‘Cicero is Tully’, where it takes empirical investigation to establish that the two names happen to have the same referent. One can generalize the idea of theory reduction in a variety of ways. One may require the bridge laws to suffice for the deduction of the reduced from the reducing theory without requiring that the bridge laws take the form of explicit identity statements or biconditional correlations. Some authors have also focused on the fact that in practice a reducing theory T2 corrects or refines the reduced theory T1, so that it is really only a correction or refinement, T1*, that is deducible from T2 and the bridge laws. Some have consequently applied the term ‘reduction’ to any pair of theories where the second corrects and extends the first in ways that explain both why the first theory was as accurate as it was and why it made the errors that it did. In this extended sense, relativity is said to reduce Newtonian mechanics. Do the social sciences, especially psychology, in principle reduce to physics? This prospect would support the so-called identity theory of mind and body, in particular resolving important problems in the philosophy of mind, such as the mindbody problem and the problem of other minds. Many though by no means all are now skeptical about the prospects for identifying mental properties, and the properties of other special sciences, with complex physical properties. To illustrate with an example from economics adapted from Fodor, in the right circumstances just about any physical object could count as a piece of money. Thus prospects seem dim for finding a closed and finite statement of the form ‘being a piece of money is . . .’, with only predicates from physics appearing on the right though some would want to admit infinite definitions in providing reductions. Similarly, one suspects that attributes, such as pain, are at best functional properties with indefinitely many possible physical realizations. Believing that reductions by finitely stable definitions are thus out of reach, many authors have tried to express the view that mental properties are still somehow physical by saying that they nonetheless supervene on the physical properties of the organisms that have them. In fact, these same difficulties that affect mental properties affect the paradigm case of temperature, and probably all putative examples of theoretical reduction. Temperature is mean translational temperature only in gases, and only idealized ones at that. In other substances, quite different physical mechanisms realize temperature. Temperature is more accurately described as a functional property, having to do with the mechanism of heat transfer between bodies, where, in principle, the required mechanism could be physically realized in indefinitely many ways. In most and quite possibly all cases of putative theory reduction by strict identities, we have instead a relation of physical realization, constitution, or instantiation, nicely illustrated by the property of being a calculator example taken from Cummins. The property of being a calculator can be physically realized by an abacus, by devices with gears and levers, by ones with vacuum tubes or silicon chips, and, in the right circumstances, by indefinitely many other physical arrangements. Perhaps many who have used ‘reduction’, particularly in the sciences, have intended the term in this sense of physical realization rather than one of strict identity. Let us restrict attention to properties that reduce in the sense of having a physical realization, as in the cases of being a calculator, having a certain temperature, and being a piece of money. Whether or not an object counts as having properties such as these will depend, not only on the physical properties of that object, but on various circumstances of the context. Intensions of relevant language users constitute a plausible candidate for relevant circumstances. In at least many cases, dependence on context arises because the property constitutes a functional property, where the relevant functional system calculational practices, heat transfer, monetary systems are much larger than the propertybearing object in question. These examples raise the question of whether many and perhaps all mental properties depend ineliminably on relations to things outside the organisms that have the mental properties. 

reduction sentence, for a given predicate Q3 of space-time points in a first-order language, any universal sentence S1 of the form: x [Q1x / Q2x / Q3 x], provided that the predicates Q1 and Q2 are consistently applicable to the same space-time points. If S1 has the form given above and S2 is of the form x [Q4x / Q5 / - Q6] and either S1 is a reduction sentence for Q3 or S2 is a reduction sentence for -Q3, the pair {S1, S2} is a reduction pair for Q3. If Q1 % Q4 and Q2 % - Q5, the conjunction of S1 and S2 is equivalent to a bilateral reduction sentence for Q3 of the form x [Q1 / Q3 S Q2]. These concepts were introduced by Carnap in “Testability and Meaning,” Philosophy of Science 637, to modify the verifiability criterion of meaning to a confirmability condition where terms can be introduced into meaningful scientific discourse by chains of reduction pairs rather than by definitions. The incentive for this modification seems to have been to accommodate the use of disposition predicates in scientific discourse. Carnap proposed explicating a disposition predicate Q3 by bilateral reduction sentences for Q3. An important but controversial feature of Carnap’s approach is that it avoids appeal to nonextensional conditionals in explicating disposition predicates. 

RELATUM -- referentially transparent. An occurrence of a singular term t in a sentence ‘. . . t . . .’ is referentially transparent or purely referential if and only if the truth-value of ‘. . . t . . .’ depends on whether the referent of t satisfies the open sentence ‘. . . x . . .’; the satisfaction of ‘. . . x . . .’ by the referent of t would guarantee the truth of ‘. . . t . . .’, and failure of this individual to satisfy ‘. . . x . . .’ would guarantee that ‘. . . t . . .’ was not true. ‘Boston is a city’ is true if and only if the referent of ‘Boston’ satisfies the open sentence ‘x is a city’, so the occurrence of ‘Boston’ is referentially transparent. But in ‘The expression “Boston” has six letters’, the length of the word within the quotes, not the features of the city Boston, determines the truth-value of the sentence, so the occurrence is not referentially transparent. According to a Fregean theory of meaning, the reference of any complex expression that is a meaningful unit is a function of the referents of its parts. Within this context, an occurrence of a referential term t in a meaningful expression ‘. . . t . . .’ is referentially transparent or purely referential if and only if t contributes its referent to the reference of ‘. . . t . . .’. The expression ‘the area around Boston’ refers to the particular area it does because of the referent of ‘Boston’ and the reference or extension of the function expressed by ‘the area around x’. An occurrence of a referential term t in a meaningful expression ‘. . . t . . .’ is referentially opaque if and only if it is not referentially transparent. Thus, if t has a referentially opaque occurrence in a sentence ‘. . . t . . .’, then the truth-value of ‘. . . t . . .’ depends on something reduction, phenomenological referentially transparent 780    780 other than whether the referent of t satisfies ‘. . . x . . .’. Although these definitions apply to occurrences of referential terms, the terms ‘referentially opaque’ and ‘referentially transparent’ are used primarily to classify linguistic contexts for terms as referentially opaque contexts. If t occurs purely referentially in S but not in CS, then C   is a referentially opaque context. But we must qualify this: C  is a referentially opaque context for that occurrence of t in S. It would not follow without further argument that C  is a referentially opaque context for other occurrences of terms in sentences that could be placed into C . Contexts of quotation, propositional attitude, and modality have been widely noted for their potential to produce referential opacity. Consider: 1 John believes that the number of planets is less than eight. 2 John believes that nine is less than eight. If 1 is true but 2 is not, then either ‘the number of planets’ or ‘nine’ has an occurrence that is not purely referential, because the sentences would differ in truth-value even though the expressions are co-referential. But within the sentences: 3 The number of planets is less than eight. 4 Nine is less than eight. the expressions appear to have purely referential occurrence. In 3 and 4, the truth-value of the sentence as a whole depends on whether the referent of ‘The number of planets’ and ‘Nine’ satisfies ‘x is less than eight’. Because the occurrences in 3 and 4 are purely referential but those in 1 and 2 are not, the context ‘John believes that  ’ is a referentially opaque context for the relevant occurrence of at least one of the two singular terms. Some argue that the occurrence of ‘nine’ in 2 is purely referential because the truth-value of the sentence as a whole depends on whether the referent, nine, satisfies the open sentence ‘John believes that x is less than eight’. Saying so requires that we make sense of the concept of satisfaction for such sentences belief sentences and others and that we show that the concept of satisfaction applies in this way in the case at hand sentence 2. There is controversy about whether these things can be done. In 1, on the other hand, the truth-value is not determined by whether nine the referent of ‘the number of planets’ satisfies the open sentence, so that occurrence is not purely referential. Modal contexts raise similar questions. 5 Necessarily, nine is odd. 6 Necessarily, the number of planets is odd. If 5 is true but 6 is not, then at least one of the expressions does not have a purely referential occurrence, even though both appear to be purely referential in the non-modal sentence that appears in the context ‘Necessarily, ———’. Thus the context is referentially opaque for the occurrence of at least one of these terms. On an alternative approach, genuinely singular terms always occur referentially, and ‘the number of planets’ is not a genuinely singular term. Russell’s theory of definite descriptions, e.g., provides an alternative semantic analysis for sentences involving definite descriptions. This would enable us to say that even simple sentences like 3 and 4 differ considerably in syntactic and semantic structure, so that the similarity that suggests the problem, the seemingly similar occurrences of co-referential terms, is merely apparent. 

Mise-en-abyme-- reflection principles, two varieties of internal statements related to correctness in formal axiomatic systems. 1 Proof-theoretic reflection principles are formulated for effectively presented systems S that contain a modicum of elementary number theory sufficient to arithmetize their own syntactic notions, as done by Kurt Gödel in his 1 work on incompleteness. Let ProvS x express that x is the Gödel number of a statement provable in S, and let nA be the number of A, for any statement A of S. The weakest reflection principle considered for S is the collection RfnS of all statements of the form ProvS nA P A, which express that if A is provable from S then A is true. The proposition ConS expressing the consistency of S is a consequence of RfnS obtained by taking A to be a disprovable statement. Thus, by Gödel’s second incompleteness theorem, RfnS is stronger than S if S is consistent. Reflection principles are used in the construction of ordinal logics as a systematic means of overcoming incompleteness. 2 Set-theoretic reflection principles are formulated for systems S of axiomatic set theory, such as ZF Zermelo-Fraenkel. In the simplest form they express that any property A in the language of S that holds of the universe of “all” sets, already holds of a portion of that universe coextensive with some set x. This takes the form A P DxAx where in Ax all quantifiers of A are relativized to x. In contrast to proof-theoretic reflection principles, these may be established as theorems of ZF. 

reflective equilibrium, as usually conceived, a coherence method for justifying evaluative principles and theories. The method was first described by Goodman, who proposed it be used to justify deductive and inductive principles. According to Goodman Fact, Fiction and Forecast, 5, a particular deductive inference is justified by its conforming with deductive principles, but these principles are justified in their turn by conforming with accepted deductive practice. The idea, then, is that justified inferences and principles are those that emerge from a process of mutual adjustment, with principles being revised when they sanction inferences we cannot bring ourselves to accept, and particular inferences being rejected when they conflict with rules we are unwilling to revise. Thus, neither principles nor particular inferences are epistemically privileged. At least in principle, everything is liable to revision. Rawls further articulated the method of reflective equilibrium and applied it in ethics. According to Rawls A Theory of Justice, 1, inquiry begins with considered moral judgments, i.e., judgments about which we are confident and which are free from common sources of error, e.g., ignorance of facts, insufficient reflection, or emotional agitation. According to narrow reflective equilibrium, ethical principles are justified by bringing them into coherence with our considered moral judgments through a process of mutual adjustment. Rawls, however, pursues a wide reflective equilibrium. Wide equilibrium is attained by proceeding to consider alternatives to the moral conception accepted in narrow equilibrium, along with philosophical arguments that might decide among these conceptions. The principles and considered judgments accepted in narrow equilibrium are then adjusted as seems appropriate. One way to conceive of wide reflective equilibrium is as an effort to construct a coherent system of belief by a process of mutual adjustment to considered moral judgments and moral principles as in narrow equilibrium along with the background philosophical, social scientific, and any other relevant beliefs that might figure in the arguments for and against alternative moral conceptions, e.g., metaphysical views regarding the nature of persons. As in Goodman’s original proposal, none of the judgments, principles, or theories involved is privileged: all are open to revision. 

Griceian renaissance – after J. L. Austin’s death -- Erasmus, D., philosopher who played an important role in Renaissance humanism. Like his  forerunners Petrarch, Coluccio Salutati, Lorenzo Valla, Leonardo Bruni, and others, Erasmus stressed within philosophy and theology the function of philological precision, grammatical correctness, and rhetorical elegance. But for Erasmus the virtues of bonae literarae which are cultivated by the study of authors of Latin and Grecian antiquity must be decisively linked with Christian spirituality. Erasmus has been called by Huizinga the first modern intellectual because he tried to influence and reform the mentality of society by working within the shadow of ecclesiastical and political leaders. He epistemology, evolutionary Erasmus, Desiderius 278   278 became one of the first humanists to make efficient use of the then new medium of printing. His writings embrace various forms, including diatribe, oration, locution, comment, dialogue, and letter. After studying in Christian schools and living for a time in the monastery of Steyn near Gouda in the Netherlands, Erasmus worked for different patrons. He gained a post as secretary to the bishop of Kamerijk, during which time he wrote his first published book, the Adagia first edition 1500, a collection of annotated Latin adages. Erasmus was an adviser to the Emperor Charles V, to whom he dedicated his Institutio principii christiani 1516. After studies at the  of Paris, where he attended lectures by the humanist Faber Stapulensis, Erasmus was put in touch by his patron Lord Mountjoy with the British humanists John Colet and Thomas More. Erasmus led a restless life, residing in several European cities including London, Louvain, Basel, Freiburg, Bologna, Turin where he was awarded a doctorate of theology in 1506, and Rome. By using the means of modern philology, which led to the ideal of the bonae literarae, Erasmus tried to reform the Christian-influenced mentality of his times. Inspired by Valla’s Annotationes to the New Testament, he completed a new Latin translation of the New Testament, edited the writings of the early church fathers, especially St. Hieronymus, and wrote several commentaries on psalms. He tried to regenerate the spirit of early Christianity by laying bare its original sense against the background of scholastic interpretation. In his view, the rituals of the existing church blocked the development of an authentic Christian spirituality. Though Erasmus shared with Luther a critical approach toward the existing church, he did not side with the Reformation. His Diatribe de libero arbitrio 1524, in which he pleaded for the free will of man, was answered by Luther’s De servo arbitrio. The historically most influential books of Erasmus were Enchirion militis christiani 1503, in which he attacked hirelings and soldiers; the Encomium moriae id est Laus stultitiae 1511, a satire on modern life and the ecclesiastical pillars of society; and the sketches of human life, the Colloquia first published in 1518, often enlarged until 1553. In the small book Querela pacis 1517, he rejected the ideology of justified wars propounded by Augustine and Aquinas. Against the madness of war Erasmus appealed to the virtues of tolerance, friendliness, and gentleness. All these virtues were for him the essence of Christianity. 

regression analysis, a part of statistical theory concerned with the analysis of data with the aim of inferring a linear functional relationship between assumed independent “regressor” variables and a dependent “response” variable. A typical example involves the dependence of crop yield on the application of fertilizer. For the most part, higher amounts of fertilizer are associated with higher yields. But typically, if crop yield is plotted vertically on a graph with the horizontal axis representing amount of fertilizer applied, the resulting points will not fall in a straight line. This can be due either to random “stochastic” fluctuations involving measurement errors, irreproducible conditions, or physical indeterminism or to failure to take into account other relevant independent variables such as amount of rainfall. In any case, from any resulting “scatter diagram,” it is possible mathematically to infer a “best-fitting” line. One method is, roughly, to find the line that minimizes the average absolute distance between a line and the data points collected. More commonly, the average of the squares of these distances is minimized this is the “least squares” method. If more than one independent variable is suspected, the theory of multiple regression, which takes into account multiple regressors, can be applied: this can help to minimize an “error term” involved in regression. Computers must be used for the complex computations typically encountered. Care must be taken in connection with the possibility that a lawlike, causal dependence is not really linear even approximately over all ranges of the regressor variables e.g., in certain ranges of amounts of application, more fertilizer is good for a plant, but too much is bad. 

Reichenbach, Hans 13, G. philosopher of science and a major leader of the movement known as logical empiricism. Born in Hamburg, he studied engineering for a brief time, then turned to mathematics, philosophy, and physics, which he pursued at the universities of Berlin, Munich, and Göttingen. He took his doctorate in philosophy at Erlangen 5 with a dissertation on mathematical and philosophical aspects of probability, and a degree in mathematics and physics by state examination at Göttingen 6. In 3, with Hitler’s rise to power, he fled to Istanbul, then to the  of California at Los Angeles, where he remained until his death. Prior to his departure from G.y he was professor of philosophy of science at the  of Berlin, leader of the Berlin Group of logical empiricists, and a close associate of Einstein. With Carnap he founded Erkenntnis, the major journal of scientific philosophy before World War II. After a short period early in his career as a follower of Kant, Reichenbach rejected the synthetic a priori, chiefly because of considerations arising out of Einstein’s general theory of relativity. He remained thereafter champion of empiricism, adhering to a probabilistic version of the verifiability theory of cognitive meaning. Never, however, did he embrace the logical positivism of the Vienna Circle; indeed, he explicitly described his principal epistemological work, Experience and Prediction 8, as his refutation of logical positivism. In particular, his logical empiricism consisted in rejecting phenomenalism in favor of physicalism; he rejected phenomenalism both in embracing scientific realism and in insisting on a thoroughgoing probabilistic analysis of scientific meaning and scientific knowledge. His main works span a wide range. In Probability and Induction he advocated the frequency interpretation of probability and offered a pragmatic justification of induction. In his philosophy of space and time he defended conventionality of geometry and of simultaneity. In foundations of quantum mechanics he adopted a three-valued logic to deal with causal anomalies. He wrote major works on epistemology, logic, laws of nature, counterfactuals, and modalities. At the time of his death he had almost completed The Direction of Time, which was published posthumously 6. 

Reid, Thomas 171096, Scottish philosopher, a defender of common sense and critic of the theory of impressions and ideas articulated by Hume. Reid was born exactly one year before Hume, in Strachan, Scotland. A bright lad, he went to Marischal  in Aberdeen at the age of twelve, studying there with Thomas Blackwell and George Turnbull. The latter apparently had great influence on Reid. Turnbull contended that knowledge of the facts of sense and introspection may not be overturned by reasoning and that volition is the only active power known from experience. Turnbull defended common sense under the cloak of Berkeley. Reid threw off that cloak with considerable panache, but he took over the defense of common sense from Turnbull. Reid moved to a position of regent and lecturer at King’s  in Aberdeen in 1751. There he formed, with John Gregory, the Aberdeen Philosophical Society, which met fortnightly, often to discuss Hume. Reid published his Inquiry into the Human Mind on the Principles of Common Sense in 1764, and, in the same year, succeeded Adam Smith in the chair of moral philosophy at Old  in Glasgow. After 1780 he no longer lectured but devoted himself to his later works, Essays on the Intellectual Powers 1785 and Essays on the Active Powers 1788. He was highly influential in Scotland and on the Continent in the eighteenth century and, from time to time, in England and the United States thereafter. Reid thought that one of his major contributions was the refutation of Hume’s theory of impressions and ideas. Reid probably was convinced in his teens of the truth of Berkeley’s doctrine that what the mind is immediately aware of is always some idea, but his later study of Hume’s Treatise convinced him that, contrary to Berkeley, it was impossible to reconcile this doctrine, the theory of ideas, with common sense. Hume had rigorously developed the theory, Reid said, and drew forth the conclusions. These, Reid averred, were absurd. They included the denial of our knowledge of body and mind, and, even more strikingly, of our conceptions of these things. The reason Reid thought that Hume’s theory of ideas led to these conclusions was that for Hume, ideas were faded impressions of sense, hence, sensations. No sensation is like a quality of a material thing, let alone like the object that has the quality. Consider movement. Movement is a quality of an object wherein the object changes from one place to another, but the visual sensation that arises in us is not the change of place of an object, it is an activity of mind. No two things could, in fact, be more unalike. If what is before the mind is always some sensation, whether vivacious or faded, we should never obtain the conception of something other than a sensation. Hence, we could never even conceive of material objects and their qualities. Even worse, we could not conceive of our own minds, for they are not sensations either, and only sensations are immediately before the mind, according to the theory of ideas. Finally, and even more absurdly, we could not conceive of past sensations or anything that does not now exist. For all that is immediately before the mind is sensations that exist presently. Thus, we could not even conceive of qualities, bodies, minds, and things that do not now exist. But this is absurd, since it is obvious that we do think of all these things and even of things that have never existed. The solution, Reid suggested, is to abandon the theory of ideas and seek a better one. Many have thought Reid was unfair to Hume and misinterpreted him. Reid’s Inquiry was presented to Hume by Dr. Blair in manuscript form, however, and in reply Hume does not at all suggest that he has been misinterpreted or handled unfairly. Whatever the merits of Reid’s criticism of Hume, it was the study of the consequences of Hume’s philosophy that accounts for Reid’s central doctrine of the human faculties and their first principles. Faculties are innate powers, among them the powers of conception and conviction. Reid’s strategy in reply to Hume is to build a nativist theory of conception on the failure of Hume’s theory of ideas. Where the theory of ideas, the doctrine of impressions and ideas, fails to account for our conception of something, of qualities, bodies, minds, past things, nonexistent things, Reid hypothesizes that our conceptions originate from a faculty of the mind, i.e., from an innate power of conception. This line of argument reflects Reid’s respect for Hume, whom he calls the greatest metaphysician of the age, because Hume drew forth the consequences of a theory of conception, which we might call associationism, according to which all our conceptions result from associating sensations. Where the associationism of Hume failed, Reid hypothesized that conceptions arise from innate powers of conception that manifest themselves in accordance with original first principles of the mind. The resulting hypotheses were not treated as a priori necessities but as empirical hypotheses. Reid notes, therefore, that there are marks by which we can discern the operation of an innate first principle, which include the early appearance of the operation, its universality in mankind, and its irresistibility. The operations of the mind that yield our conceptions of qualities, bodies, and minds all bear these marks, Reid contends, and that warrants the conclusion that they manifest first principles. It should be noted that Reid conjectured that nature would be frugal in the implantation of innate powers, supplying us with no more than necessary to produce the conceptions we manifest. Reid is, consequently, a parsimonious empiricist in the development of his nativist psychology. Reid developed his theory of perception in great detail and his development led, surprisingly, to his articulation of non-Euclidean geometry. Indeed, while Kant was erroneously postulating the a priori necessity of Euclidean space, Reid was developing non-Euclidean geometry to account for the empirical features of visual space. Reid’s theory of perception is an example of his empiricism. In the Inquiry, he says that sensations, which are operations of the mind, and impressions on the organs of sense, which are material, produce our conceptions of primary and secondary qualities. Sensations produce our original conceptions of secondary qualities as the causes of those sensations. They are signs that suggest the existence of the qualities. A sensation of smell suggests the existence of a quality in the object that causes the sensation, though the character of the cause is otherwise unknown. Thus, our original conception of secondary qualities is a relative conception of some unknown cause of a sensation. Our conception of primary qualities differs not, as Locke suggested, because of some resemblance between the sensation and the quality for, as Berkeley noted, there is no resemblance between a sensation and quality, but because our original conceptions of primary qualities are clear and distinct. The sensation is a sign that suggests a definite conception of the primary quality, e.g. a definite conception of the movement of the object, rather than a mere conception of something, we know not what, that gives rise to the sensation. These conceptions of qualities signified by sensations result from the operations of principles of our natural constitution. These signs, which suggest the conception of qualities, also suggest a conception of some object that has them. This conception of the object is also relative, in that it is simply a conception of a subject of the qualities. In the case of physical qualities, the conception of the object is a conception of a material object. Though sensations, which are activities of the mind, suggest the existence of qualities, they are not the only signs of sense perception. Some impressions on the organs of sense, the latter being material, also give rise to conceptions of qualities, especially to our conception of visual figure, the seen shape of the object. But Reid can discern no sensation of shape. There are, of course, sensations of color, but he is convinced from the experience of those who have cataracts and see color but not shape that the sensations of color are insufficient to suggest our conceptions of visual figure. His detailed account of vision and especially of the seeing of visual figure leads him to one of his most brilliant moments. He asks what sort of data do we receive upon the eye and answers that the data must be received at the round surface of the eyeball and processed within. Thus, visual space is a projection in three dimensions of the information received on the round surface of the eye, and the geometry of this space is a non-Euclidean geometry of curved space. Reid goes on to derive the properties of the space quite correctly, e.g., in concluding that the angles of a triangle will sum to a figure greater than 180 degrees and thereby violate the parallels postulate. Thus Reid discovered that a non-Euclidean geometry was satisfiable and, indeed, insisted that it accurately described the space of vision not, however, the space of touch, which he thought was Euclidean. From the standpoint of his theory of perceptual signs, the example of visual figure helps to clarify his doctrine of the signs of perception. We do not perceive signs and infer what they signify. This inference, Reid was convinced by Hume, would lack the support of reasoning, and Reid concluded that reasoning was, in this case, superfluous. The information received on the surface of the eye produces our conceptions of visual figure immediately. Indeed, these signs pass unnoticed as they give rise to the conception of visual figure in the mind. The relation of sensory signs to the external things they signify originally is effected by a first principle of the mind without the use of reason. The first principles that yield our conceptions of qualities and objects yield convictions of the existence of these things at the same time. A question naturally arises as to the evidence of these convictions. First principles yield the convictions along with the conceptions, but do we have evidence of the existence of the qualities and objects we are convinced exist? We have the evidence of our senses, of our natural faculties, and that is all the evidence possible here. Reid’s point is that the convictions in questions resulting from the original principles of our faculties are immediately justified. Our faculties are, however, all fallible, so the justification that our original convictions possess may be refuted. We can now better understand Reid’s reply to Hume. To account for our convictions of the existence of body, we must abandon Hume’s theory of ideas, which cannot supply even the conception of body. We must discover both the original first principles that yield the conception and conviction of objects and their qualities, and first principles to account for our convictions of the past, of other thinking beings, and of morals. Just as there are first principles of perception that yield convictions of the existence of presently existing objects, so there are first principles of memory that yield the convictions of the existence of past things, principles of testimony that yield the convictions of the thoughts of others, and principles of morals that yield convictions of our obligations. Reid’s defense of a moral faculty alongside the faculties of perception and memory is striking. The moral faculty yields conceptions of the justice and injustice of an action in response to our conception of that action. Reid shrewdly notes that different people may conceive of the same action in different ways. I may conceive of giving some money as an action of gratitude, while you may consider it squandering money. How we conceive of an action depends on our moral education, but the response of our moral faculty to an action conceived in a specific way is original and the same in all who have the faculty. Hence differences in moral judgment are due, not to principles of the moral faculty, but to differences in how we conceive of our actions. This doctrine of a moral faculty again provides a counterpoint to the moral philosophy of Hume, for, according Reid, Thomas Reid, Thomas 785    785 to Reid, judgments of justice and injustice pertaining to all matters, including promises, contracts, and property, arise from our natural faculties and do not depend on anything artificial. Reid’s strategy for defending common sense is clear enough. He thinks that Hume showed that we cannot arrive at our convictions of external objects, of past events, of the thoughts of others, of morals, or, for that matter, of our own minds, from reasoning about impressions and ideas. Since those convictions are a fact, philosophy must account for them in the only way that remains, by the hypothesis of innate faculties that yield them. But do we have any evidence for these convictions? Evidence, Reid says, is the ground of belief, and our evidence is that of our faculties. Might our faculties deceive us? Reid answers that it is a first principle of our faculties that they are not fallacious. Why should we assume that our faculties are not fallacious? First, the belief is irresistible. However we wage war with first principles, the principles of common sense, they prevail in daily life. There we trust our faculties whether we choose to or not. Second, all philosophy depends on the assumption that our faculties are not fallacious. Here Reid employs an ad hominem argument against Hume, but one with philosophical force. Reid says that, in response to a total skeptic who decides to trust none of his faculties, he puts his hand over his mouth in silence. But Hume trusted reason and consciousness, and therefore is guilty of pragmatic inconsistency in calling the other faculties into doubt. They come from the same shop, Reid says, and he who calls one into doubt has no right to trust the others. All our faculties are fallible, and, therefore, we must, to avoid arbitrary favoritism, trust them all at the outset or trust none. The first principles of our faculties are trustworthy. They not only account for our convictions, but are the ground and evidence of those convictions. This nativism is the original engine of justification. Reid’s theory of original perceptions is supplemented by a theory of acquired perceptions, those which incorporate the effects of habit and association, such as the perception of a passing coach. He distinguishes acquired perceptions from effects of reasoning. The most important way our original perceptions must be supplemented is by general conceptions. These result from a process whereby our attention is directed to some individual quality, e.g., the whiteness of a piece of paper, which he calls abstraction, and a further process of generalizing from the individual quality to the general conception of the universal whiteness shared by many individuals. Reid is a sophisticated nominalist; he says that the only things that exist are individual, but he includes individual qualities as well as individual objects. The reason is that individual qualities obviously exist and are needed as the basis of generalization. To generalize from an individual we must have some conception of what it is like, and this conception cannot be general, on pain of circularity or regress, but must be a conception of an individual quality, e.g., the whiteness of this paper, which it uniquely possesses. Universals, though predicated of objects to articulate our knowledge, do not exist. We can think of universals, just as we can think of centaurs, but though they are the objects of thought and predicated of individuals that exist, they do not themselves exist. Generalization is not driven by ontology but by utility. It is we and not nature that sort things into kinds in ways that are useful to us. This leads to a division-of-labor theory of meaning because general conceptions are the meanings of general words. Thus, in those domains in which there are experts, in science or the law, we defer to the experts concerning the general conceptions that are the most useful in the area in question. Reid’s theory of the intellectual powers, summarized briefly above, is supplemented by his theory of our active powers, those that lead to actions. His theory of the active powers includes a theory of the principles of actions. These include animal principles that operate without understanding, but the most salient and philosophically important part of Reid’s theory of the active powers is his theory of the rational principles of action, which involve understanding and the will. These rational principles are those in which we have a conception of the action to be performed and will its performance. Action thus involves an act of will or volition, but volitions as Reid conceived of them are not the esoteric inventions of philosophy but, instead, the commonplace activities of deciding and resolving to act. Reid is a libertarian and maintains that our liberty or freedom refutes the principle of necessity or determinism. Freedom requires the power to will the action and also the power not to will it. The principle of necessity tells us that our action was necessitated and, therefore, that it was not in our power not to have willed as we did. It is not sufficient for freedom, as Hume suggested, that we act as we will. We must also have the Reid, Thomas Reid, Thomas 786    786 power to determine what we will. The reason is that willing is the means to the end of action, and he who lacks power over the means lacks power over the end. This doctrine of the active power over the determinations of our will is founded on the central principle of Reid’s theory of the active powers, the principle of agent causation. The doctrine of acts of the will or volitions does not lead to a regress, as critics allege, because my act of will is an exercise of the most basic kind of causality, the efficient causality of an agent. I am the efficient cause of my acts of will. My act of will need not be caused by an antecedent act of will because my act of will is the result of my exercise of my causal power. This fact also refutes an objection to the doctrine of liberty  that if my action is not necessitated, then it is fortuitous. My free actions are caused, not fortuitous, though they are not necessitated, because they are caused by me. How, one might inquire, do we know that we are free? The doubt that we are free is like other skeptical doubts, and receives a similar reply, namely, that the conviction of our freedom is a natural and original conviction arising from our faculties. It occurs prior to instruction and it is irresistible in practical life. Any person with two identical coins usable to pay for some item must be convinced that she can pay with the one or the other; and, unlike the ass of Buridan, she readily exercises her power to will the one or the other. The conviction of freedom is an original one, not the invention of philosophy, and it arises from the first principles of our natural faculties, which are trustworthy and not fallacious. The first principles of our faculties hang together like links in a chain, and one must either raise up the whole or the links prove useless. Together, they are the foundation of true philosophy, science, and practical life, and without them we shall lead ourselves into the coalpit of skepticism and despair. 

Reimarus, Hermann Samuel 16941768, G. philosopher, born in Hamburg and educated in philosophy and theology at Jena. For most of his life he taught Oriental languages at a high school in Hamburg. The most important writings he published were a treatise on natural religion, Abhandlungen von den vornehmsten Wahrheiten der natürlichen Religion 1754; a textbook on logic, Vernunftlehre 1756; and an interesting work on instincts in animals, Allgemeine Betrachtungen über die Triebe der Tiere 1760. However, he is today best known for his Apologie oder Schutzschrift für die vernünftigen Verehrer Gottes “Apology for or Defense of the Rational Worshipers of God”, posthumously published in 177477. In it, Reimarus reversed his stance on natural theology and openly advocated a deism in the British tradition. The controversy created by its publication had a profound impact on the further development of G. theology. Though Reimarus always remained basically a follower of Wolff, he was often quite critical of Wolffian rationalism in his discussion of logic and psychology. 

Reinhold, Karl Leonhard 17431819, Austrian philosopher who was both a popularizer and a critic of Kant. He was the first occupant of the chair of critical philosophy established at the  of Jena in 1787. His Briefe über die Kantische Philosophie 1786/87 helped to popularize Kantianism. Reinhold also proclaimed the need for a more “scientific” presentation of the critical philosophy, in the form of a rigorously deductive system in which everything is derivable from a single first principle “the principle of consciousness”. He tried to satisfy this need with Elementarphilosophie “Elementary Philosophy” or “Philosophy of the Elements”, expounded in his Versuch einer neuen Theorie des menschlichen Vorstellungsvermögens “Attempt at a New Theory of the Human Faculty of Representation,” 1789, Beyträge zur Berichtigung bisheriger Missverständnisse der Philosophen I “Contributions to the Correction of the Prevailing Misunderstandings of Philosophers,” 1790, and Ueber das Fundament des philosophischen Wissens “On the Foundation of Philosophical Knowledge,” 1791. His criticism of the duality of Kant’s starting point and of the ad hoc character of his deductions contributed to the demand for a more coherent exposition of transcendental idealism, while his strategy for accomplishing this task stimulated others above all, Fichte to seek an even more “fundamental” first principle for philosophy. Reinhold later became an enthusiastic adherent, first of Fichte’s Wissenschaftslehre and then of Bardili’s “rational realism,” before finally adopting a novel “linguistic” approach to philosophical problems. 

reism, also called concretism, the theory that the basic entities are concrete objects. Reism differs from nominalism in that the problem of universals is not its only motivation and often not the principal motivation for the theory. Three types of reism can be distinguished. 1 Brentano held that every object is a concrete or individual thing. He said that substances, aggregates of substances, parts of substances, and individual properties of substances are the only things that exist. There is no such thing as the existence or being of an object; and there are no non-existent objects. One consequence of this doctrine is that the object of thought what the thought is about is always an individual object and not a proposition. For example, the thought that this paper is white is about this paper and not about the proposition that this paper is white. Meinong attacked Brentano’s concretism and argued that thoughts are about “objectives,” not objects. 2 Kotarbigski, who coined the term ‘reism’, holds as a basic principle that only concrete objects exist. Although things may be hard or soft, red or blue, there is no such thing as hardness, softness, redness, or blueness. Sentences that contain abstract words are either strictly meaningless or can be paraphrased into sentences that do not contain any abstract words. Kotarbinski is both a nominalist and a materialist. Brentano was a nominalist and a dualist. 3 Thomas Garrigue Masaryk’s concretism is quite different from the first two. For him, concretism is the theory that all of a person’s cognitive faculties participate in every instance of knowing: reason, senses, emotion, and will. 

relation, a two-or-more-place property e.g., loves or between, or the extension of such a property. In set theory, a relation is any set of ordered pairs or triplets, etc., but these are reducible to pairs. For simplicity, the formal exposition here uses the language of set theory, although an intensional property-theoretic view is later assumed. The terms of a relation R are the members of the pairs constituting R, the items that R relates. The collection D of all first terms of pairs in R is the domain of R; any collection with D as a subcollection may also be so called. Similarly, the second terms of these pairs make up or are a subcollection of the range counterdomain or converse domain of R. One usually works within a set U such that R is a subset of the Cartesian product U$U the set of all ordered pairs on U. Relations can be: 1 reflexive or exhibit reflexivity: for all a, aRa. That is, a reflexive relation is one that, like identity, each thing bears to itself. Examples: a weighs as much as b; or the universal relation, i.e., the relation R such that for all a and b, aRb. 2 symmetrical or exhibit symmetry: for all a and b, aRb P bRa. In a symmetrical relation, the order of the terms is reversible. Examples: a is a sibling of b; a and b have a common divisor. Also symmetrical is the null relation, under which no object is related to anything. 3 transitive or exhibit transitivity: for all a, b, and c, aRb & bRc P aRc. Transitive relations carry across a middle term. Examples: a is less than b; a is an ancestor of b. Thus, if a is less than b and b is less than c, a is less than c: less than has carried across the middle term, b. 4 antisymmetrical: for all a and b, aRb & bRa P a % b. 5 trichotomous, connected, or total trichotomy: for all a and b, aRb 7 bRa 7 a % b. 6 asymmetrical: aRb & bRa holds for no a and b. 7 functional: for all a, b, and c, aRb & aRc P b % c. In a functional relation which may also be called a function, each first term uniquely determines a second term. R is non-reflexive if it is not reflexive, i.e., if the condition 1 fails for at least one object a. R is non-symmetric if 2 fails for at least one pair of objects a, b. Analogously for non-transitive. R is irreflexive aliorelative if 1 holds for no object a and intransitive if 3 holds for no objects a, b, and c. Thus understands is non-reflexive since some things do not understand themselves, but not irreflexive, since some things do; loves is nonsymmetric but not asymmetrical; and being a cousin of is non-transitive but not intransitive, as being mother of is. 13 define an equivalence relation e.g., the identity relation among numbers or the relation of being the same age as among people. A class of objects bearing an equivalence relation R to each other is an equivalence class under R. 1, 3, and 4 define a partial order; 3, 5, and 6 a linear order. Similar properties define other important classifications, such as lattice and Boolean algebra. The converse of a relation R is the set of all pairs b, a such that aRb; the comreism relation 788    788 plement of R is the set of all pairs a, b such that aRb i.e. aRb does not hold. A more complex example will show the power of a relational vocabulary. The ancestral of R is the set of all a, b such that either aRb or there are finitely many cI , c2, c3, . . . , cn such that aRcI and c1Rc2 and c2Rc3 and . . . and cnRb. Frege introduced the ancestral in his theory of number: the natural numbers are exactly those objects bearing the ancestral of the successor-of relation to zero. Equivalently, they are the intersection of all sets that contain zero and are closed under the successor relation. This is formalizable in second-order logic. Frege’s idea has many applications. E.g., assume a set U, relation R on U, and property F. An element a of U is hereditarily F with respect to R if a is F and any object b which bears the ancestral of R to a is also F. Hence F is here said to be a hereditary property, and the set a is hereditarily finite with respect to the membership relation if a is finite, its members are, as are the members of its members, etc. The hereditarily finite sets or the sets hereditarily of cardinality ‹ k for any inaccessible k are an important subuniverse of the universe of sets. Philosophical discussions of relations typically involve relations as special cases of properties or sets. Thus nominalists and Platonists disagree over the reality of relations, since they disagree about properties in general. Similarly, one important connection is to formal semantics, where relations are customarily taken as the denotations of relational predicates. Disputes about the notion of essence are also pertinent. One says that a bears an internal relation, R, to b provided a’s standing in R to b is an essential property of a; otherwise a bears an external relation to b. If the essentialaccidental distinction is accepted, then a thing’s essential properties will seem to include certain of its relations to other things, so that we must admit internal relations. Consider a point in space, which has no identity apart from its place in a certain system. Similarly for a number. Or consider my hand, which would perhaps not be the same object if it had not developed as part of my body. If it is true that I could not have had other parents  that possible persons similar to me but with distinct parents would not really be me  then I, too, am internally related to other things, namely my parents. Similar arguments would generate numerous internal relations for organisms, artifacts, and natural objects in general. Internal relations will also seem to exist among properties and relations themselves. Roundness is essentially a kind of shape, and the relation larger than is essentially the converse of the relation smaller than. In like usage, a relation between a and b is intrinsic if it depends just on how a and b are; extrinsic if they have it in virtue of their relation to other things. Thus, higher-than intrinsically relates the Alps to the Appalachians. That I prefer viewing the former to the latter establishes an extrinsic relation between the mountain ranges. Note that this distinction is obscure as is internal-external. One could argue that the Alps are higher than the Appalachians only in virtue of the relation of each to something further, such as space, light rays, or measuring rods. Another issue specific to the theory of relations is whether relations are real, given that properties do exist. That is, someone might reject nominalism only to the extent of admitting one-place properties. Although such doctrines have some historical importance in, e.g., Plato and Bradley, they have disappeared. Since relations are indispensable to modern logic and semantics, their inferiority to one-place properties can no longer be seriously entertained. Hence relations now have little independent significance in philosophy. 

relational logic, the formal study of the properties of and operations on binary relations that was initiated by Peirce between 1870 and 2. Thus, in relational logic, one might examine the formal properties of special kinds of relations, such as transitive relations, or asymmetrical ones, or orderings of certain types. Or the focus might be on various operations, such as that of forming the converse or relative product. Formal deductive systems used in such studies are generally known as calculi of relations. 

relativism, the denial that there are certain kinds of universal truths. There are two main types, cognitive and ethical. Cognitive relativism holds that there are no universal truths about the world: the world has no intrinsic characteristics, there are just different ways of interpreting it. The Grecian Sophist Protagoras, the first person on record to hold such a view, said, “Man is the measure of all things; of things that are that they are, and of things that are not that they are not.” Goodman, Putnam, and Rorty are contemporary philosophers who have held versions of relativism. Rorty says, e.g., that “ ‘objective truth’ is no more and no less than the best idea we currently have about how to explain what is going on.” Critics of cognitive relativism contend that it is self-referentially incoherent, since it presents its statements as universally true, rather than simply relatively so. Ethical relativism is the theory that there are no universally valid moral principles: all moral principles are valid relative to culture or individual choice. There are two subtypes: conventionalism, which holds that moral principles are valid relative to the conventions of a given culture or society; and subjectivism, which maintains that individual choices are what determine the validity of a moral principle. Its motto is, Morality lies in the eyes of the beholder. As Ernest Hemingway wrote, “So far, about morals, I know only that what is moral is what you feel good after and what is immoral is what you feel bad after.” Conventionalist ethical relativism consists of two theses: a diversity thesis, which specifies that what is considered morally right and wrong varies from society to society, so that there are no moral principles accepted by all societies; and a dependency thesis, which specifies that all moral principles derive their validity from cultural acceptance. From these two ideas relativists conclude that there are no universally valid moral principles applying everywhere and at all times. The first thesis, the diversity thesis, or what may simply be called cultural relativism, is anthropological; it registers the fact that moral rules differ from society to society. Although both ethical relativists and non-relativists typically accept cultural relativism, it is often confused with the normative thesis of ethical relativism. The opposite of ethical relativism is ethical objectivism, which asserts that although cultures may differ in their moral principles, some moral principles have universal validity. Even if, e.g., a culture does not recognize a duty to refrain from gratuitous harm, that principle is valid and the culture should adhere to it. There are two types of ethical objectivism, strong and weak. Strong objectivism, sometimes called absolutism, holds that there is one true moral system with specific moral rules. The ethics of ancient Israel in the Old Testament with its hundreds of laws exemplifies absolutism. Weak objectivism holds that there is a core morality, a determinate set of principles that are universally valid usually including prohibitions against killing the innocent, stealing, breaking of promises, and lying. But weak objectivism accepts an indeterminate area where relativism is legitimate, e.g., rules regarding sexual mores and regulations of property. Both types of objectivism recognize what might be called application relativism, the endeavor to apply moral rules where there is a conflict between rules or where rules can be applied in different ways. For example, the ancient Callactians ate their deceased parents but eschewed the impersonal practice of burying them as disrespectful, whereas contemporary society has the opposite attitudes about the care of dead relatives; but both practices exemplify the same principle of the respect for the dead. According to objectivism, cultures or forms of life can fail to exemplify an adequate moral community in at least three ways: 1 the people are insufficiently intelligent to put constitutive principles in order; 2 they are under considerable stress so that it becomes too burdensome to live by moral principles; and 3 a combination of 1 and 2. Ethical relativism is sometimes confused with ethical skepticism, the view that we cannot know whether there are any valid moral principles. Ethical nihilism holds that there are no valid moral principles. J. L. Mackie’s error theory is a version of this view. Mackie held that while we all believe some moral principles to be true, there are compelling arguments to the contrary. Ethical objectivism must be distinguished from moral realism, the view that valid moral principles are true, independently of human choice. Objectivism may be a form of ethical constructivism, typified by Rawls, whereby objective principles are simply those that impartial human beings would choose behind the veil of ignorance. That is, the principles are not truly independent of hypothetical human choices, but are constructs from those choices. 

relativity, a term applied to Einstein’s theories of electrodynamics special relativity, 5 and gravitation general relativity, 6 because both hold that certain physical quantities, formerly considered objective, are actually “relative to” the state of motion of the observer. They are called “special” and “general” because, in special relativity, electrodynamical laws determine a restricted class of kinematical reference frames, the “inertial frames”; in general relativity, the very distinction between inertial frames and others becomes a relative distinction. Special relativity. Classical mechanics makes no distinction between uniform motion and rest: not velocity, but acceleration is physically detectable, and so different states of uniform motion are physically equivalent. But classical electrodynamics describes light as wave motion with a constant velocity through a medium, the “ether.” It follows that the measured velocity of light should depend on the motion of the observer relative to the medium. When interferometer experiments suggested that the velocity of light is independent of the motion of the source, H. A. Lorentz proposed that objects in motion contract in the direction of motion through the ether while their local time “dilates”, and that this effect masks the difference in the velocity of light. Einstein, however, associated the interferometry results with many other indications that the theoretical distinction between uniform motion and rest in the ether lacks empirical content. He therefore postulated that, in electrodynamics as in mechanics, all states of uniform motion are equivalent. To explain the apparent paradox that observers with different velocities can agree on the velocity of light, he criticized the idea of an “absolute” or frame-independent measure of simultaneity: simultaneity of distant events can only be established by some kind of signaling, but experiment suggested that light is the only signal with an invariant velocity, and observers in relative motion who determine simultaneity with light signals obtain different results. Furthermore, since objective measurement of time and length presupposes absolute simultaneity, observers in relative motion will also disagree on time and length. So Lorentz’s contraction and dilatation are not physical effects, but consequences of the relativity of simultaneity, length, and time, to the motion of the observer. But this relativity follows from the invariance of the laws of electrodynamics, and the invariant content of the theory is expressed geometrically in Minkowski spacetime. Logical empiricists took the theory as an illustration of how epistemological analysis of a concept time could eliminate empirically superfluous notions absolute simultaneity. General relativity. Special relativity made the velocity of light a limit for all causal processes and required revision of Newton’s theory of gravity as an instantaneous action at a distance. General relativity incorporates gravity into the geometry of space-time: instead of acting directly on one another, masses induce curvature in space-time. Thus the paths of falling bodies represent not forced deviations from the straight paths of a flat space-time, but “straightest” paths in a curved space-time. While space-time is “locally” Minkowskian, its global structure depends on mass-energy distribution. The insight behind this theory is the equivalence of gravitational and inertial mass: since a given gravitational field affects all bodies equally, weight is indistinguishable from the inertial force of acceleration; freefall motion is indistinguishable from inertial motion. This suggests that the Newtonian decomposition of free fall into inertial and accelerated components is arbitrary, and that the freefall path itself is the invariant basis for the structure of space-time. A philosophical motive for the general theory was to extend the relativity of motion. Einstein saw special relativity’s restricted class of equivalent reference frames as an “epistemological defect,” and he sought laws that would apply to any frame. His inspiration was Mach’s criticism of the Newtonian distinction between “absolute” rotation and rotation relative to observable bodies like the “fixed stars.” Einstein formulated Mach’s criticism as a fundamental principle: since only relative motions are observable, local inertial effects should be explained by the cosmic distribution of masses and by motion relative to them. Thus not only velocity and rest, but motion in general would be relative. Einstein hoped to effect this generalization by eliminating the distinction between inertial frames and freely falling frames. Because free fall remains a privileged state of motion, however, non-gravitational acceleration remains detectable, and absolute rotation remains distinct from relative rotation. Einstein also thought that relativity of motion would result from the general covariance coordinate-independence of his theory  i.e., that general equivalence of coordinate systems meant general equivalence relativism, scientific relativity 791    791 of states of motion. It is now clear, however, that general covariance is a mathematical property of physical theories without direct implications about motion. So general relativity does not “generalize” the relativity of motion as Einstein intended. Its great accomplishments are the unification of gravity and geometry and the generalization of special relativity to space-times of arbitrary curvature, which has made possible the modern investigation of cosmological structure. 

relevance logic, any of a range of logics and philosophies of logic united by their insistence that the premises of a valid inference must be relevant to the conclusion. Standard, or classical, logic contains inferences that break this requirement, e.g., the spread law, that from a contradiction any proposition whatsoever follows. Relevance logic had its genesis in a system of strenge Implikation published by Wilhelm Ackermann in 6. Ackermann’s idea for rejecting irrelevance was taken up and developed by Alan Anderson and Nuel Belnap in a series of papers between 9 and Anderson’s death in 4. The first main summaries of these researches appeared under their names, and those of many collaborators, in Entailment: The Logic of Relevance and Necessity vol. 1, 5; vol. 2, 2. By the time of Anderson’s death, a substantial research effort into relevance logic was under way, and it has continued. Besides the rather vague unity of the idea of relevance between premises and conclusion, there is a technical criterion often used to mark out relevance logic, introduced by Belnap in 0, and applicable really only to propositional logics the main focus of concern to date: a necessary condition of relevance is that premises and conclusion should share a propositional variable. Early attention was focused on systems E of entailment and T of ticket entailment. Both are subsystems of C. I. Lewis’s system S4 of strict implication and of classical truth-functional logic i.e., consequences in E and T in ‘P’ are consequences in S4 in ‘ ’ and in classical logic in ‘/’. Besides rejection of the spread law, probably the most notorious inference that is rejected is disjunctive syllogism DS for extensional disjunction which is equivalent to detachment for material implication: A 7 B,ÝA , B. The reason is immediate, given acceptance of Simplification and Addition: Simplification takes us from A & ÝA to each conjunct, and Addition turns the first conjunct into A 7 B. Unless DS were rejected, the spread law would follow. Since the late 0s, attention has shifted to the system R of relevant implication, which adds permutation to E, to mingle systems which extend E and R by the mingle law A P A P A, and to contraction-free logics, which additionally reject contraction, in one form reading A P A P B P A P B. R minus contraction RW differs from linear logic, much studied recently in computer science, only by accepting the distribution of ‘&’ over ‘7’, which the latter rejects. Like linear logic, relevance logic contains both truth-functional and non-truth-functional connectives. Unlike linear logic, however, R, E, and T are undecidable unusual among propositional logics. This result was obtained only in 4. In the early 0s, relevance logics were given possible-worlds semantics by several authors working independently. They also have axiomatic, natural deduction, and sequent or consecution formulations. One technical result that has attracted attention has been the demonstration that, although relevance logics reject DS, they all accept Ackermann’s rule Gamma: that if A 7 B and ÝA are theses, so is B. A recent result occasioning much surprise was that relevant arithmetic consisting of Peano’s postulates on the base of quantified R does not admit Gamma. 

reliabilism, a type of theory in epistemology that holds that what qualifies a belief as knowledge or as epistemically justified is its reliable linkage to the truth. David Armstrong motivates reliabilism with an analogy between a thermometer that reliably indicates the temperature and a belief that reliably indicates the truth. A belief qualifies as knowledge, he says, if there is a lawlike connection in nature that guarantees that the belief is true. A cousin of the nomic sufficiency account is the counterfactual approach, proposed by Dretske, Goldman, and Nozick. A typical formulation of this approach says that a belief qualifies relativity, general reliabilism 792    792 as knowledge if the belief is true and the cognizer has reasons for believing it that would not obtain unless it were true. For example, someone knows that the telephone is ringing if he believes this, it is true, and he has a specific auditory experience that would not occur unless the telephone were ringing. In a slightly different formulation, someone knows a proposition if he believes it, it is true, and if it were not true he would not believe it. In the example, if the telephone were not ringing, he would not believe that it is, because he would not have the same auditory experience. These accounts are guided by the idea that to know a proposition it is not sufficient that the belief be “accidentally” true. Rather, the belief, or its mode of acquisition, must “track,” “hook up with,” or “indicate” the truth. Unlike knowledge, justified belief need not guarantee or be “hooked up” with the truth, for a justified belief need not itself be true. Nonetheless, reliabilists insist that the concept of justified belief also has a connection with truth acquisition. According to Goldman’s reliable process account, a belief’s justificational status depends on the psychological processes that produce or sustain it. Justified beliefs are produced by appropriate psychological processes, unjustified beliefs by inappropriate processes. For example, beliefs produced or preserved by perception, memory, introspection, and “good” reasoning are justified, whereas beliefs produced by hunch, wishful thinking, or “bad” reasoning are unjustified. Why are the first group of processes appropriate and the second inappropriate? The difference appears to lie in their reliability. Among the beliefs produced by perception, introspection, or “good” reasoning, a high proportion are true; but only a low proportion of beliefs produced by hunch, wishful thinking, or “bad” reasoning are true. Thus, what qualifies a belief as justified is its being the outcome of a sequence of reliable belief-forming processes. Reliabilism is a species of epistemological externalism, because it makes knowledge or justification depend on factors such as truth connections or truth ratios that are outside the cognizer’s mind and not necessarily accessible to him. Yet reliabilism typically emphasizes internal factors as well, e.g., the cognitive processes responsible for a belief. Process reliabilism is a form of naturalistic epistemology because it centers on cognitive operations and thereby paves the way for cognitive psychology to play a role in epistemology.

Renouvier, Charles 18153,  philosopher influenced by Kant and Comte, the latter being one of his teachers. Renouvier rejected many of the views of both these philosophers, however, charting his own course. He emphasized the irreducible plurality and individuality of all things against the contemporary tendencies toward absolute idealism. Human individuality he associated with indeterminism and freedom. To the extent that agents are undetermined by other things and self-determining, they are unique individuals. Indeterminism also extends to the physical world and to knowledge. He rejected absolute certitude, but defended the universality of the laws of logic and mathematics. In politics and religion, he emphasized individual freedom and freedom of conscience. His emphasis on plurality, indeterminism, freedom, novelty, and process influenced James and, through James,  pragmatism. 

re-praesentatum: Grice plays with this as a philosophical semanticist, rather than a philosophical psychologist. But the re-praesentatum depends on the ‘praesentatum,’ which corresponds to Grice’s sub-perceptum (not the ‘conceptus’). cf. Grice on Peirce’s representamen (“You don’t want to go there,” – Grice to his tutees). It seems that in the one-off predicament, iconicy plays a role: the drawing of a skull to indicate danger, the drawing of an arrow at the fork of a road to indicate which way the emissor’s flowers, who were left behind, are supposed to take (Carruthers). Suppose Grice joins the Oxfordshire cricket club. He will represent Oxfordshire. He will do for Oxfordshire what Oxfordshire cannot do for herself. Similarly, by uttering “Smoke!,” the utterer means that there is fire somewhere. “Smoke!” is a communication-device if it does for smoke what smoke cannot do for itself, influence thoughts and behaviour. Or does it?! It MWheIGHT. But suppose that the fire is some distant from the addresse. And the utterer HAS LEARNED That there is fire in the distance. So he utters ‘Smoke!’ Where? Oh, you won’t see it. But I was told there is smoke on the outskirts. Thanks for warning me! rĕ-praesento , āvi, ātum, 1, v. a.  I. To bring before one, to bring back; to show, exhibit, display, manifest, represent (class.): “per quas (visiones) imagines rerum absentium ita repraesentantur animo, ut eas cernere oculis ac praesentes habere videamur,” Quint. 6, 2, 29: “memoriae vis repraesentat aliquid,” id. 11, 2, 1; cf. Plin. Ep. 9, 28, 3: “quod templum repraesentabat memoriam consulatūs mei,” Cic. Sest. 11, 26: si quis vultu torvo ferus simulet Catonem, Virtutemne repraesentet moresque Catonis? * Hor. Ep. 1, 19, 14: “imbecillitatem ingenii mei,” Val. Max. 2, 7, 6: “movendi ratio aut in repraesentandis est aut imitandis adfectibus,” Quint. 11, 3, 156: “urbis species repraesentabatur animis,” Curt. 3, 10, 7; cf.: “affectum patris amissi,” Plin. Ep. 4, 19, 1: “nam et vera esse et apte ad repraesentandam iram deūm ficta possunt,” Liv. 8, 6, 3 Weissenb. ad loc.: “volumina,” to recite, repeat, Plin. 7, 24, 24, § 89: “viridem saporem olivarum etiam post annum,” Col. 12, 47, 8: “faciem veri maris,” id. 8, 17, 6: “colorem constantius,” to show, exhibit, Plin. 37, 8, 33, § 112: “vicem olei,” i. e. to supply the place of, id. 28, 10, 45, § 160; cf. id. 18, 14, 36, § 134.— B. Of painters, sculptors, etc., to represent, portray, etc. (post-Aug. for adumbro): “Niceratus repraesentavit Alcibiadem,” Plin. 34, 8, 19, § 88.—With se, to present one's self, be present, Col. 1, 8, 11; 11, 1, 26; Dig. 48, 5, 15, § 3.— II. In partic., mercant. t. t., to pay immediately or on the spot; to pay in ready money: reliquae pecuniae vel usuram Silio pendemus, dum a Faberio vel ab aliquo qui Faberio debet, repraesentabimus, shall be enabled to pay immediately, Cic. Att. 12, 25, 1; 12, 29, 2: “summam,” Suet. Aug. 101: “legata,” id. Calig. 16: “mercedem,” id. Claud. 18; id. Oth. 5; Front. Strat. 1, 11, 2 Oud. N. cr.: “dies promissorum adest: quem etiam repraesentabo, si adveneris,” shall even anticipate, Cic. Fam. 16, 14, 2; cf. fideicommissum, to discharge immediately or in advance, Dig. 35, 1, 36.— B. Transf., in gen., to do, perform, or execute any act immediately, without delay, forthwith; hence, not to defer or put off; to hasten (good prose): se, quod in longiorem diem collaturus esset, repraesentaturum et proximā nocte castra moturum, * Caes. B. G. 1, 40: “festinasse se repraesentare consilium,” Curt. 6, 11, 33: “petis a me, ut id quod in diem suum dixeram debere differri, repraesentem,” Sen. Ep. 95, 1; and Front. Aquaed. 119 fin.: “neque exspectare temporis medicinam, quam repraesentare ratione possimus,” to apply it immediately, Cic. Fam. 5, 16, 6; so, “improbitatem suam,” to hurry on, id. Att. 16, 2, 3: “spectaculum,” Suet. Calig. 58: “tormenta poenasque,” id. Claud. 34: “poenam,” Phaedr. 3, 10, 32; Val. Max. 6, 5, ext. 4: “verbera et plagas,” Suet. Vit. 10: “vocem,” to sing immediately, id. Ner. 21 et saep.: “si repraesentari morte meā libertas civitatis potest,” can be immediately recovered, Cic. Phil. 2, 46, 118: “minas irasque caelestes,” to fulfil immediately, Liv. 2, 36, 6 Weissenb. ad loc.; cf. Suet. Claud. 38: “judicia repraesentata,” held on the spot, without preparation, Quint. 10, 7, 2.— C. To represent, stand in the place of (late Lat.): nostra per eum repraesentetur auctoritas, Greg. M. Ep. 1, 1.

Response: Chomsky hated it. Grice changed it to ‘effect.’ Or not. “Stimulus and response,” Skinner's behavioral theory was largely set forth in his first book, Behavior of Organisms (1938).[9] Here, he gives a systematic description of the manner in which environmental variables control behavior. He distinguished two sorts of behavior which are controlled in different ways:  Respondent behaviors are elicited by stimuli, and may be modified through respondent conditioning, often called classical (or pavlovian) conditioning, in which a neutral stimulus is paired with an eliciting stimulus. Such behaviors may be measured by their latency or strength. Operant behaviors are 'emitted,' meaning that initially they are not induced by any particular stimulus. They are strengthened through operant conditioning (aka instrumental conditioning), in which the occurrence of a response yields a reinforcer. Such behaviors may be measured by their rate. Both of these sorts of behavior had already been studied experimentally, most notably: respondents, by Ivan Pavlov;[25] and operants, by Edward Thorndike.[26] Skinner's account differed in some ways from earlier ones,[27] and was one of the first accounts to bring them under one roof.

rerum natura Latin, ‘the nature of things’, metaphysics. The phrase can also be used more narrowly to mean the nature of physical reality, and often it presupposes a naturalistic view of all reality. Lucretius’s epic poem De rerum natura is an Epicurean physics, designed to underpin the Epicurean morality.

Responsibility – cited by H. P. Grice in “The causal theory of perception” -- a condition that relates an agent to actions of, and consequences connected to, that agent, and is always necessary and sometimes sufficient for the appropriateness of certain kinds of appraisals of that agent. Responsibility has no single definition, but is several closely connected specific concepts. Role responsibility. Agents are identified by social roles that they occupy, say parent or professor. Typically duties are associated with such roles  to care for the needs of their children, to attend classes and publish research papers. A person in a social role is “responsible for” the execution of those duties. One who carries out such duties is “a responsible person” or “is behaving responsibly.” Causal responsibility. Events, including but not limited to human actions, cause other events. The cause is “responsible” for the effect. Causal responsibility does not imply consciousness; objects and natural phenomena may have causal responsibility. Liability responsibility. Practices of praise and blame include constraints on the mental stance that an agent must have toward an action or a consequence of action, in order for praise or blame to be appropriate. To meet such constraints is to meet a fundamental necessary condition for liability for praise or blame  hence the expression ‘liability responsibility’. These constraints include such factors as intention, knowledge, recklessness toward consequences, absence of mistake, accident, inevitability of choice. An agent with the capability for liability responsibility may lack it on some occasion  when mistaken, for example. Capacity responsibility. Practices of praise and blame assume a level of intellectual and emotional capability. The severely mentally disadvantaged or the very young, for example, do not have the capacity to meet the conditions for liability responsibility. They are not “responsible” in that they lack capacity responsibility. Both morality and law embody and respect these distinctions, though law institutionalizes and formalizes them. Final or “bottom-line” assignment of responsibility equivalent to indeed deserving praise or blame standardly requires each of the latter three specific kinds of responsibility. The first kind supplies some normative standards for praise or blame. 

resultance, a relation according to which one property the resultant property, sometimes called the consequential property is possessed by some object or event in virtue of and hence as a result of that object or event possessing some other property or set of properties. The idea is that properties of things can be ordered into connected levels, some being more basic than and giving rise to others, the latter resulting from the former. For instance, a figure possesses the property of being a triangle in virtue of its possessing a collection of properties, including being a plane figure, having three sides, and so on; the former resulting from the latter. An object is brittle has the property of being brittle in virtue of having a certain molecular structure. It is often claimed that moral properties like rightness and goodness are resultant properties: an action is right in virtue of its possessing other properties. These examples make it clear that the nature of the necessary connection holding between a resultant property and those base properties that ground it may differ from case to case. In the geometrical example, the very concept of being a triangle grounds the resultance relation in question, and while brittleness is nomologically related to the base properties from which it results, in the moral case, the resultance relation is arguably neither conceptual nor causal. 

Richard Rufus, also called Richard of Cornwall d. c.1260, English philosopher-theologian who wrote some of the earliest commentaries on Aristotle in the Latin West. His commentaries were not cursory summaries; they included sustained philosophical discussions. Richard was a master of arts at Paris, where he studied with Alexander of Hales; he was also deeply influenced by Robert Grosseteste. He left Paris and joined the Franciscan order in 1238; he was ordained in England. In 1256, he became regent master of the Franciscan studium at Oxford; according to Roger Bacon, he was the most influential philosophical theologian at Oxford in the second half of the thirteenth century. In addition to his Aristotle commentaries, Richard wrote two commentaries on Peter Lombard’s Sentences c.1250, c.1254. In the first of these he borrowed freely from Robert Grosseteste, Alexander of Hales, and Richard Fishacre; the second commentary was a critical condensation of the lectures of his younger contemporary, St. Bonaventure, presented in Paris. Richard Rufus was the first medieval proponent of the theory of impetus; his views on projectile motion were cited by Franciscus Meyronnes. He also advocated other arguments first presented by Johannes Philoponus. Against the eternity of the world, he argued: 1 past time is necessarily finite, since it has been traversed, and 2 the world is not eternal, since if the world had no beginning, no more time would transpire before tomorrow than before today. He also argued that if the world had not be

en created ex nihilo, the first cause would be mutable. Robert Grosseteste cited one of Richard’s arguments against the eternity of the world in his notes on Aristotle’s Physics. In theology, Richard denied the validity of Anselm’s ontological argument, but, anticipating Duns Scotus, he argued that the existence of an independent being could be inferred from its possibility. Like Duns Scotus, he employs the formal distinction as an explanatory tool; in presenting his own views, Duns Scotus cited Richard’s definition of the formal distinction. Richard stated his philosophical views briefly, even cryptically; his Latin prose style is sometimes eccentric, characterized by interjections in which he addresses questions to God, himself, and his readers. He was hesitant about the value of systematic theology for the theologian, deferring to biblical exposition as the primary forum for theological discussion. In systematic theology, he emphasized Aristotelian philosophy and logic. He was a well-known logician; some scholars believe he is the famous logician known as the Magister Abstractionum. Though he borrowed freely from his contemporaries, he was a profoundly original philosopher. 

Ricoeur, P.  hermeneuticist and phenomenologist who has been a professor at several  universities as well as the  of Naples, Yale , and the  of Chicago. He has received major prizes from France, G.y, and Italy. He is the author of twenty-some volumes tr. in a variety of languages. Among his best-known books are Freedom and Nature: The Voluntary and the Involuntary; Freud and Philosophy: An Essay of Interpretation; The Conflict of Interpretations: Essay in Hermeneutics; The Role of the Metaphor: Multi-Disciplinary Studies of the Creation of Meaning in Language, Time and Narrative; and Oneself as Another. His early studies with the  existentialist Marcel resulted in a book-length study of Marcel’s work and later a series of published dialogues with him. Ricoeur’s philosophical enterprise is colored by a continuing tension between faith and reason. His long-standing commitments to both the significance of the individual and the Christian faith are reflected in his hermeneutical voyage, his commitment to the Esprit movement, and his interest in the writings of Emmanuel Mounier. This latter point is also seen in his claim of the inseparability of action and discourse in our quest for meaning. In our comprehension of both history and fiction one must turn to the text to understand its plot as guideline if we are to comprehend experience of any reflective sort. In the end there are no metaphysical or epistemological grounds by which meaning can be verified, and yet our nature is such that possibility must be present before us. Ricoeur attempts his explanation through a hermeneutic phenomenology. The very hermeneutics of existence that follows is itself limited by reason’s questioning of experience and its attempts to transcend the limit through the language of symbols and metaphors. Freedom and meaning come to be realized in the actualization of an ethics that arises out of the very act of existing and thus transcends the mere natural voluntary distinction of a formal ethic. It is clear from his later work that he rejects any form of foundationalism including phenomenology as well as nihilism and easy skepticism. Through a sort of interdependent dialectic that goes beyond the more mechanical models of Hegelianism or Marxism, the self understands itself and is understood by the other in terms of its suffering and its moral actions. 

rights, advantageous positions conferred on some possessor by law, morals, rules, or other norms. There is no agreement on the sense in which rights are advantages. Will theories hold that rights favor the will of the possessor over the conflicting will of some other party; interest theories maintain that rights serve to protect or promote the interests of the right-holder. Hohfeld identified four legal advantages: liberties, claims, powers, and immunities. The concept of a right arose in Roman jurisprudence and was extended to ethics via natural law theory. Just as positive law, the law posited by human lawmakers, confers legal rights, so the natural law confers natural rights. Rights are classified by their specific sources in different sorts of rules. Legal rights are advantageous positions under the law of a society. Other species of institutional rights are conferred by the rules of private organizations, of the moral code of a society, or even of some game. Those who identify natural law with the moral law often identify natural rights with moral rights, but some limit natural rights to our most fundamental rights and contrast them with ordinary moral rights. Others deny that moral rights are natural because they believe that they are conferred by the mores or positive morality of one’s society. One always possesses any specific right by virtue of possessing some status. Thus, rights are also classified by status. Civil rights are those one possesses as a citizen; human rights are possessed by virtue of being human. Presumably women’s rights, children’s rights, patients’ rights, and the rights of blacks as such are analogous. Human rights play very much the same role in ethics once played by natural rights. This is partly because ontological doubts about the existence of God undermine the acceptance of any natural law taken to consist in divine commands, and epistemological doubts about self-evident moral truths lead many to reject any natural law conceived of as the dictates of reason. Although the Thomistic view that natural rights are grounded on the nature of man is often advocated, most moral philosophers reject its teleological conception of human nature defined by essential human purposes. It seems simpler to appeal instead to fundamental rights that must be universal among human beings because they are possessed merely by virtue of one’s status as a human being. Human rights are still thought of as natural in the very broad sense of existing independently of any human action or institution. This explains how they can be used as an independent standard in terms of which to criticize the laws and policies of governments and other organizations. Since human rights are classified by status rather than source, there is another species of human rights that are institutional rather than natural. These are the human rights that have been incorporated into legal systems by international agreements such as the European Convention on Human Rights. It is sometimes said that while natural rights were conceived as purely negative rights, such as the right not to be arbitrarily imprisoned, human rights are conceived more broadly to include positive social and economic rights, such as the right to social security or to an adequate standard of living. But this is surely not true by definition. Traditional natural law theorists such as Grotius and Locke spoke of natural rights as powers and associated them with liberties, rather than with claims against interference. And while modern declarations of human rights typically include social and economic rights, they assume that these are rights in the same sense that traditional political rights are. Rights are often classified by their formal properties. For example, the right not to be battered is a negative right because it imposes a negative duty not to batter, while the creditor’s right to be repaid is a positive right because it imposes a positive duty to repay. The right to be repaid is also a passive right because its content is properly formulated in the passive voice, while the right to defend oneself is an active right because its content is best stated in the active voice. Again, a right in rem is a right that holds against all second parties; a right in personam is a right that holds against one or a few others. This is not quite Hart’s distinction between general and special rights, rights of everyone against everyone, such as the right to free speech, and rights arising from special relations, such as that between creditor and debtor or husband and wife. Rights are conceptually contrasted with duties because rights are advantages while duties are disadvantages. Still, many jurists and philosophers have held that rights and duties are logical correlatives. This does seem to be true of claim rights; thus, the creditor’s right to be repaid implies the debtor’s duty to repay and vice versa. But the logical correlative of a liberty right, such as one’s right to park in front of one’s house, is the absence of any duty for one not to do so. This contrast is indicated by D. D. Raphael’s distinction between rights of recipience and rights of action. Sometimes to say that one has a right to do something is to say merely that it is not wrong for one to act in this way. This has been called the weak sense of ‘a right’. More often to assert that one has a right to do something does not imply that exercising this right is right. Thus, I might have a right to refuse to do a favor for a friend even though it would be wrong for me to do so. Finally, many philosophers distinguish between absolute and prima facie rights. An absolute right always holds, i.e., disadvantages some second party, within its scope; a prima facie right is one that holds unless the ground of the right is outweighed by some stronger contrary reason. 

rigorism, the view that morality consists in that single set of simple or unqualified moral rules, discoverable by reason, which applies to all human beings at all times. It is often said that Kant’s doctrine of the categorical imperative is rigoristic. Two main objections to rigorism are 1 some moral rules do not apply universally  e.g., ‘Promises should be kept’ applies only where there is an institution of promising; and 2 some rules that could be universally kept are absurd  e.g., that everyone should stand on one leg while the sun rises. Recent interpreters of Kant defend him against these objections by arguing, e.g., that the “rules” he had in mind are general guidelines for living well, which are in fact universal and practically relevant, or that he was not a rigorist at all, seeing moral worth as issuing primarily from the agent’s character rather than adherence to rules.

ring of Gyges, a ring that gives its wearer invisibility, discussed in Plato’s Republic II, 359b 360d. Glaucon tells the story of a man who discovered the ring and used it to usurp the throne to defend the claim that those who behave justly do so only because they lack the power to act unjustly. If they could avoid paying the penalty of injustice, Glaucon argues, everyone would be unjust. 

Roman philosophy. Grice loved it. AENESIDEMUS: Academic philosopher, founder of a Pyrrhonist revival in Rome. ANAXAGORAS. pre-Socratic enquirer into the origin of the  cosmos -- ANDRONICUS. mid-first cent., Peripatetic; editor of Aristotle’s  works. -- ANTIOCHUS. early 1st. cent., Academic who reverted to Plato’s  dogmatism -- ANTIPATER, 1st. cent., Stoic, tutor to Cato  Uticensis. -- APOLLONIDES, mid-1st. cent., Stoic, adviser to Cato  Uticensis -- APOLLONIUS, 1st. cent. CE, Neo-pythagorean. -- APULEIUS. ca.125–180 CE, Platonic, author of "Metamorphoses". -- ARCESILAUS. mid-3rd.cent., Academic sceptic, head of the New Academy --- ARISTIPPUS. late-5th. cent., member of Socrates’s circle -- ARISTON. 3rd.  cent., Peripatetic and head of the Lyceum -- ARISTOTLE. 384–322, founder  of the Peripatetic school -- ARISTUS. early 1st. cent., head of the  Academy and teacher of Brutus -- ARIUS. 1st. cent., adviser to Augustus -- ARTEMIDORUS. 1st. cent. CE, Stoic, friend of Pliny the Younger and son-in-law of Musonius -- ATHENODORUS. mid-1st. cent., Stoic and adviser  to Cato Uticensis, in whose house he lived -- ATHENODORUS. mid-first  cent., Stoic and friend of Cicero -- ATTALUS. 1st. cent. CE, Stoic,  teacher of Seneca -- AUGUSTINE. 354–430 CE, Neo-platonist -- BION.  ca. 335–245, Cynic, popular teacher -- BOETHIUS ca. 480–524 CE,  philosopher with Stoic and Neoplatonist views, author of "The Consolation of  Philosophy" -- CARNEADES mid-2nd. cent., head of the New Academy, Sceptic  and star of the Athenian embassy to Rome in 155 -- CHAEREMON. mid-lst.  cent., CE, Stoic, tutor to Nero -- CHRYSIPPUS. ca. 280–206, head of the  Stoic school from 232 -- CICERO. 106–43, leading transmitter of  Hellenistic philosophy to Rome and Renaissance Europe, follower of the New  Academy and pupil of Philo of Larissa -- CLEANTHES. 331–232, Zeno’s  successor as head of the Stoic school from 262 -- CLITOMACHUS. late-2nd. cent., Sceptic and pupil of Carneades, head of  the New Academy from 127 -- CORNUTUS. 1st. cent. CE, Stoic, teacher and  friend of Persius and Lucan -- CRANTOR ca. 335–275, Academic, the first  commentator on Plato -- CRATES. ca.365–285, Cynic, follower of Diogenes  of Sinope and teacher of Zeno of Citium -- CRATIPPUS. mid-lst. cent.,  Peripatetic, friend of Cicero and Nigidius and teacher of Cicero’s son. -- CRITOLAUS. first half of 2nd. cent., head of the Peripatetic school and member  of the Athenian embassy to Rome in 155 -- DEMETRIUS. 1st. cent. CE,  friend of Seneca -- DEMETRIUS. mid-1st.cent., adviser of Cato  Uticensis -- DEMOCRITUS. second half of 5th. cent., pre-Socratic, founder  of atomism -- DICHAEARCHUS. late 4th. cent., Peripatetic, pupil of  Aristotle -- DIODOTUS. first of 1st.cent., Stoic, teacher and friend of  Cicero, in whose house he lived -- DIOGENES LAERTIUS. first half of 3rd.  cent. CE, author of "The Lives of the Philosophers" -- DIOGENES OF  APOLLONIA. 2nd half of 5th. cent., pre-Socratic philosopher and enquirer  into the natural world; a source for Seneca’s "Naturates Quaestiones" -- DIOGENES OF BABYLON. mid-2nd. cent., head of the Stoic school and member of the  Athenian embassy to Rome in 155, tutor to Panaetius -- DIOGENES OF  OENOANDA late 2nd. cent. CE, Epicurean and part-author of the inscription on the  stoa which he caused to be set up in Oenoanda --  DIOGENES OF SINOPE.  mid-4th.cent., founder of Cynicism --  EPICTETUS. ca. 50–120 CE, Stoic,  pupil of Musonius -- EPICURUS 341–271, principal source for Lucretius’s  poem -- EUPHRATES late-lst. cent. CE, Stoic, student of Musonius and  friend of Pliny the Younger -- FAVORINUS. ca. 85–155 CE, philosopher of  the Second Sophistic, friend of Plutarch and teacher of Fronto -- GALEN.  late-second cent. CE, physician to Marcus Aurelius, Platonist -- HECATO.  early 1st. cent., Stoic, pupil of Panaetius and member of circle of  Posidonius -- HERMARCHUS. 1st half of 3rd. cent., pupil of Epicurus  and his successor as head of the Epicurean school from 271, with Epicurus,  Metrodorus and Polyaenus, one of “The Four Men”, founders of the Epicurean  school -- HIEROCLES early 2nd. cent. CE, Stoic --  LAELIUS. ca.  190–125, consul in 140, friend of Scipio Aemilianus and Panaetius and called by  Cicero "the first Roman philosopher." -- LEUCIPPUS. second half of 5th.  cent., co-founder with Democritus of atomism -- LUCRETIUS. first half of  1st. cent., Epicurean, author of "De Rerum Natura" -- MANILIUS. ate-lst.  cent. BCE and early-lst. cent CE, Stoic author of "Astronomica" -- MARCUS  AURELIUS. 121–180 CE, Roman emperor (161–180) and Stoic, author of "To Himself",  a private diary -- MENIPPUS. first half of 3rd. cent., Cynic and  satirical author in prose and verse on philosophical subjects -- METRODORUS. ca. 331–278, friend of Epicurus and one “The Four Men”, founders of  Epicureanism -- MODERATUS. second half of 1st. cent. CE,  Neo-pythagorean -- MUSONIUS. second half of 1st. cent. CE, Roman of  Etruscan descent, Stoic, teacher of Epictetus -- NIGIDIUS. 1st. cent.,  Neo-pythagorean -- PANAETIUS. ca. 185–109, Stoic, head of the Stoic  school from 129, influential at Rome, friend of Scipio Aemilianus and major  source for Cicero’s "De Officiis" -- PARMENIDES. first half of 5th. cent., pre-Socratic, pioneer enquirer  into the nature of “what is” -- PATRON. first half of 1st. cent.,  friend of Cicero and successor of Phaedrus as head of the Epicurean  school -- PHAEDRUS. ca. 140–70, Epicurean, admired by Cicero. head of the Epicurean school in the last years of his life -- PHILO OF ALEXANDRIA.  first half of 1st. cent. CE, philosopher, sympathetic to Stoic ethics and  influential in the later development of Neo-platonism -- PHILO OF LARISSA  ca.159–84, head of the New Academy, 110–88, the most influential of Cicero’s  tutors -- PHILODEMUS. ca. 110–40, Epicurean philosopher, protegé of Piso Caesoninus and an influence on Virgil and Horace, many of his fragmentary  writings are preserved in the Herculaneum papyri -- PLATO ca. 429–347,  founder of the Academy and disciple and interpreter of Socrates -- PLOTINUS. 205–270 CE, Neo-platonist, resident in Rome and Campania -- PLUTARCH. ca. 50–120 CE, Platonist -- POLEMO. died 270,  Platonist and head of the Academy from 314. -- POLYAENUS. died before 271,  friend of Epicurus and one of “The Four Men,” founders of Epicureanism -- POSIDONIUS. ca. 135–50, Stoic, student of Panaetius and head of his own school  in Rhodes, where Cicero heard him. The dominant figure in middle Stoicism, whose  works encompassed the whole range of intellectual enquiry.--  PYRRHO. ca.  365–270, the founder of Scepticism, whose doctrines were revived in Rome by  Aenesidemus -- PYTHAGORAS OF SAMOS 6th. cent., head of a community at  Croton in S. Italy, emphasized the importance of number and proportion, his  doctrines included vegetarianism and the transmigration of souls, influenced  Plato, his philosophy was revived at Rome by Nigidius and the Sextii. -- RUSTICUS. consul in 133 and 162 CE, Stoic, friend and teacher of Marcus  Aurelius -- SENECA. 4 BCE–65 CE, Stoic, tutor, adviser and victim of  Nero, author of philosophical treatises, including "Dialogi" and "Epistulae  Morales" -- SEVERUS. consul in 146 CE, Stoic friend and teacher of Marcus  Aurelius, whose son married his daughter. -- SEXTIUS. mid-1st. cent.,  Neo-pythagorean, founder of the only genuinely Roman school of philosophy;  admired by Seneca for his disciplined Roman ethos -- SEXTUS EMPIRICUS.  late-2nd. cent. CE, Sceptic, author of philosophical and medical works and  critic of Stoicism, principal source for Pyrrhonism -- SIRO. 1st. cent.,  Epicurean, teacher in Campania of Virgil -- SOCRATES. 469–399, iconic  Athenian philosopher and one of the most influential figures in Greek  philosophy; he wrote nothing but is the central figure in Plato’s dialogues,  admired by non-Academics, including the Stoic Marcus Aurelius nearly six hundred  years after his death -- SOTION. 1st. cent. CE, Neopythagorean, teacher  of Seneca -- SPEUSIPPUS. ca. 407–339, Plato’s successor as head of the  Academy -- TELES. second half of 3rd. cent., Cynic, author of diatribes  on ethical subjects -- THEOPHRASTUS. 372–287, Peripatetic, successor to  Aristotle as head of the Lyceum from 322 -- VARRO, 116–27, Academic,  Roman polymath, author of works on language, agriculture, history and  philosophy, as well as satires, and principal speaker in the later version of  Cicero’s "Academica" -- XENOCRATES. died 314, head of the Academy from  339 --  ZENO OF CITIUM. 335–263, founder of Stoicism, originally a  follower of the Cynic Crates, taught at Athens in the Stoa Poikile, which gave  its name to his school -- ZENO OF SIDON. ca. 155–75, head of the  Epicurean school at Athens, where he taught Philodemus and was heard by Cicero.

Rorty, R. philosopher, notable for the breadth of his philosophical and cultural interests. He was educated at the  of Chicago and Yale and has taught at Wellesley, Princeton, Virginia, and Stanford. His early work was primarily in standard areas of analytic philosophy such as the philosophy of mind, where, for example, he developed an important defense of eliminative materialism. In 9, however, he published Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, which was both hailed and denounced as a fundamental critique of analytic philosophy. Both the praise and the abuse were often based on misconceptions, but there is no doubt that Rorty questioned fundamental presuppositions of many Anglo- philosophers and showed affinities for Continental alternatives to analytic philosophy. At root, however, Rorty’s position is neither analytic except in its stylistic clarity nor Continental except in its cultural breadth. His view is, rather, pragmatic, a contemporary incarnation of the distinctively  philosophizing of James, Peirce, and Dewey. On Rorty’s reading, pragmatism involves a rejection of the representationalism that has dominated modern philosophy from Descartes through logical positivism. According to representationalism, we have direct access only to ideas that represent the world, not to the world itself. Philosophy has the privileged role of determining the criteria for judging that our representations are adequate to reality. A main thrust of Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature is to discredit representationalism, first by showing how it has functioned as an unjustified presupposition in classical modern philosophers such as Descartes, Locke, and Kant, and second by showing how analytic philosophers such as Wilfrid Sellars and Quine have revealed the incoherence of representationalist assumptions in contemporary epistemology. Since, on Rorty’s view, representationalism defines the epistemological project of modern philosophy, its failure requires that we abandon this project and, with it, traditional pretensions to a privileged cognitive role for philosophy. Rorty sees no point in seeking a non-representationalist basis for the justification or the truth of our knowledge claims. It is enough to accept as justified beliefs those on which our epistemic community agrees and to use ‘true’ as an honorific term for beliefs that we see as “justified to the hilt.” Rorty characterizes his positive position as “liberal ironism.” His liberalism is of a standard sort, taking as its basic value the freedom of all individuals: first, their freedom from suffering, but then also freedom to form their lives with whatever values they find most compelling. Rorty distinguishes the “public sphere” in which we all share the liberal commitment to universal freedom from the “private spheres” in which we all work out our own specific conception of the good. His ironism reflects his realization that there is no grounding for public or private values other than our deep but contingent commitment to them and his appreciation of the multitude of private values that he does not himself happen to share. Rorty has emphasized the importance of literature and literary criticism  as opposed to traditional philosophy  for providing the citizens of a liberal society with appropriate sensitivities to the needs and values of others. 

Roscelin de Compiègne, philosopher and logician who became embroiled in theological controversy when he applied his logical teachings to the doctrine of the Trinity. Since almost nothing survives of his written work, we must rely on hostile accounts of his views by Anselm of Canterbury and Peter Abelard, both of whom openly opposed his positions. Perhaps the most notorious view Roscelin is said to have held is that universals are merely the puffs of air produced when a word is pronounced. On this point he opposed views current among many theologians that a universal has an existence independent of language, and somehow is what many different particulars are. Roscelin’s aversion to any proposal that different things can be some one thing is probably what led him in his thinking about the three persons of God to a position that sounded suspiciously like the heresy of tritheism. Roscelin also evidently held that the qualities of things are not entities distinct from the subjects that possess them. This indicates that Roscelin probably denied that terms in the Aristotelian categories other than substance signified anything distinct from substances. Abelard, the foremost logician of the twelfth century, studied under Roscelin around 1095 and was undoubtedly influenced by him on the question of universals. Roscelin’s view that universals are linguistic entities remained an important option in medieval thought. Otherwise his positions do not appear to have had much currency in the ensuing decades. 

Rosenzweig, F. G. philosopher and Jewish theologian known as one of the founders of religious existentialism. His early relation to Judaism was tenuous, and at one point he came close to converting to Christianity. A religious experience in a synagogue made him change his mind and return to Judaism. His chief philosophic works are a two-volume study, Hegel and the State 0, and his masterpiece, The Star of Redemption 1. Rosenzweig’s experience in World War I caused him to reject absolute idealism on the ground that it cannot account for the privacy and finality of death. Instead of looking for a unifying principle behind existence, Rosenzweig starts with three independent realities “given” in experience: God, the self, and the world. Calling his method “radical empiricism,” he explains how God, the self, and the world are connected by three primary relations: creation, revelation, and redemption. In revelation, God does not communicate verbal statements but merely a presence that calls for love and devotion from worshipers.

Rosmini-Serbati, Antonio, philosopher, Catholic priest, counselor to Pope Pius IX, and supporter of the supremacy of the church over civil government Neo-Guelphism. Rosmini had two major concerns: the objectivity of human knowledge and the synthesis of philosophical thought within the tradition of Catholic thought. In his Nuovo saggio sull’origine delle idee “New Essay on the Origin of Ideas,” 1830, he identifies the universal a priori intuitive component of all human knowledge with the idea of being that gives us the notion of a possible or ideal being. Everything in the world is known by intellectual perception, which is the synthesis of sensation and the idea of being. Except for the idea of being, which is directly given by God, all ideas derive from abstraction. The objectivity of human knowledge rests on its universal origin in the idea of being. The harmony between philosophy and religion comes from the fact that all human knowledge is the result of divine revelation. Rosmini’s thought was influenced by Augustine and Aquinas, and stimulated by the attempt to find a solution to the contrasting needs of rationalism and empiricism.

Ross: w. d. Aristotelian scholar and moral philosopher. Born in Edinburgh and educated at the  of Edinburgh and at Balliol , Oxford, he became a fellow of Merton , then a fellow, tutor, and eventually provost at Oriel . He was vice-chancellor of Oxford  144 and president of the British Academy 640. He was knighted in 8 in view of national service. Ross was a distinguished classical scholar: he edited the Oxford translations of Aristotle 831 and tr. the Metaphysics and the Ethics himself. His Aristotle 3 is a judicious exposition of Aristotle’s work as a whole. Kant’s Ethical Theory 4 is a commentary on Kant’s The Groundwork of Ethics. His major contribution to philosophy was in ethics: The Right and the Good 0 and Foundations of Ethics9. The view he expressed there was controversial in English-speaking countries for ten years or so. He held that ‘right’ and ‘good’ are empirically indefinable terms that name objective properties the presence of which is known intuitively by persons who are mature and educated. We first cognize them in particular instances, then arrive at general principles involving them by “intuitive induction.” He thought every ethical theory must admit at least one intuition. The knowledge of moral principles is thus rather like knowledge of the principles of geometry. ‘Right’ ‘dutiful’ applies to acts, in the sense of what an agent brings about and there is no duty to act from a good motive, and a right act can have a bad motive; ‘morally good’ applies primarily to the desires that bring about action. He castigated utilitarianism as absorbing all duties into enhancing the wellbeing of everyone affected, whereas in fact we have strong special obligations to keep promises, make reparation for injuries, repay services done, distribute happiness in accord with merit, benefit individuals generally and he concedes this is a weighty matter and ourselves only in respect of knowledge and virtue, and not injure others normally a stronger obligation than that to benefit. That we have these “prima facie” duties is self-evident, but they are only prima facie in the sense that they are actual duties only if there is no stronger conflicting prima facie duty; and when prima facie duties conflict, what one ought to do is what satisfies all of them best  although which this is is a matter of judgment, not self-evidence. He conceded, however, in contrast to his general critique of utilitarianism, that public support of these prima facie principles with their intuitive strength can be justified on utilitarian grounds. To meet various counterexamples Ross introduced complications, such as that a promise is not binding if discharge of it will not benefit the promisee providing this was an implicit understanding, and it is less binding if made long ago or in a casual manner. Only four states of affairs are good in themselves: desire to do one’s duty virtue, knowledge, pleasure, and the distribution of happiness in accordance with desert. Of these, virtue is more valuable than any amount of knowledge or pleasure. In Foundations of Ethics he held that virtue and pleasure are not good in the same sense: virtue is “admirable” but pleasure only a “worthy object of satisfaction” so ‘good’ does not name just one property. 

Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, philosopher, essayist, novelist, and musician, best known for his theories on social freedom and societal rights, education, and religion. Born in Geneva, he was largely self-educated and moved to France as a teenager. Throughout much of his life he moved between Paris and the provinces with several trips abroad including a Scottish stay with Hume and a return visit to Geneva, where he reconverted to Protestantism from his earlier conversion to Catholicism. For a time he was a friend of Diderot and other philosophes and was asked to contribute articles on music for the Encyclopedia. Rousseau’s work can be seen from at least three perspectives. As social contract theorist, he attempts to construct a hypothetical state of nature to explain the current human situation. This evolves a form of philosophical anthropology that gives us both a theory of human nature and a series of pragmatic claims concerning social organization. As a social commentator, he speaks of both practical and ideal forms of education and social organization. As a moralist, he continually attempts to unite the individual and the citizen through some form of universal political action or consent. In Discourse on the Origin and Foundation of Inequality Among Mankind 1755, Rousseau presents us with an almost idyllic view of humanity. In nature humans are first seen as little more than animals except for their special species sympathy. Later, through an explanation of the development of reason and language, he is able to suggest how humans, while retaining this sympathy, can, by distancing themselves from nature, understand their individual selves. This leads to natural community and the closest thing to what Rousseau considers humanity’s perfect moment. Private property quickly follows on the division of labor, and humans find themselves alienated from each other by the class divisions engendered by private property. Thus man, who was born in freedom, now finds himself in chains. The Social Contract or Principles of Political Right 1762 has a more ambitious goal. With an account of the practical role of the legislator and the introduction of the concept of the general will, Rousseau attempts to give us a foundation for good government by presenting a solution to the conflicts between the particular and the universal, the individual and the citizen, and the actual and the moral. Individuals, freely agreeing to a social pact and giving up their rights to the community, are assured of the liberties and equality of political citizenship found in the contract. It is only through being a citizen that the individual can fully realize his freedom and exercise his moral rights and duties. While the individual is naturally good, he must always guard against being dominated or dominating. Rousseau finds a solution to the problems of individual freedoms and interests in a superior form of moral/political action that he calls the general will. The individual as citizen substitutes “I must” for “I will,” which is also an “I shall” when it expresses assent to the general will. The general will is a universal force or statement and thus is more noble than any particular will. In willing his own interest, the citizen is at the same time willing what is communally good. The particular and the universal are united. The individual human participant realizes himself in realizing the good of all. As a practical political commentator Rousseau knew that the universal and the particular do not always coincide. For this he introduced the idea of the legislator, which allows the individual citizen to realize his fulfillment as social being and to exercise his individual rights through universal consent. In moments of difference between the majority will and the general will the legislator will instill the correct moral/political understanding. This will be represented in the laws. While sovereignty rests with the citizens, Rousseau does not require that political action be direct. Although all government should be democratic, various forms of government from representative democracy preferable in small societies to strong monarchies preferable in large nation-states may be acceptable. To shore up the unity and stability of individual societies, Rousseau suggests a sort of civic religion to which all citizens subscribe and in which all members participate. His earlier writings on education and his later practical treatises on the governments of Poland and Corsica reflect related concerns with natural and moral development and with historical and geographical considerations. 

Royce, J. philosopher best known for his pragmatic idealism, his ethics of loyalty, and his theory of community. Educated at Berkeley, at Johns Hopkins, and in G.y, he taught philosophy at Harvard from 2. Royce held that a concept of the absolute or eternal was needed to account for truth, ultimate meaning, and reality in the face of very real evil in human experience. Seeking to reconcile individuals with the Absolute, he postulated, in The World and the Individual 9,1, Absolute Will and Thought as an expression of the concrete and differentiated individuality of the world. Royce saw the individual self as both moral and sinful, developing through social interaction, community experience, and communal and self-interpretation. Self is constituted by a life plan, by loyalty to an ultimate goal. Yet selflimitation and egoism, two human sins, work against achievement of individual goals, perhaps rendering life a senseless failure. The self needs saving and this is the message of religion, argues Royce The Religious Aspects of Philosophy, 5; The Sources of Religious Insight, 2. For Royce, the instrument of salvation is the community. In The Philosophy of Loyalty 8, he develops an ethics of loyalty to loyalty, i.e., the extension of loyalty throughout the human community. In The Problem of Christianity 3, Royce presents a doctrine of community that overcomes the individualismcollectivism dilemma and allows a genuine blending of individual and social will. Community is built through interpretation, a mediative process that reconciles two ideas, goals, and persons, bringing common meaning and understanding. Interpretation involves respect for selves as dynamos of ideas and purposes, the will to interpret, dissatisfaction with partial meanings and narrowness of view, reciprocity, and mutuality. In this work, the Absolute is a “Community of Interpretation and Hope,” in which there is an endlessly accumulating series of interpretations and significant deeds. An individual contribution thus is not lost but becomes an indispensable element in the divine life. Among Royce’s influential students were C. I. Lewis, William Ernest Hocking, Norbert Wiener, Santayana, and T. S. Eliot.

rule of law, the largely formal or procedural properties of a well-ordered legal system. Commonly, these properties are thought to include: a prohibition of arbitrary power the lawgiver is also subject to the laws; laws that are general, prospective, clear, and consistent capable of guiding conduct; and tribunals courts that are reasonably accessible and fairly structured to hear and determine legal claims. Contemporary discussions of the rule of law focus on two major questions: 1 to what extent is conformity to the rule of law essential to the very idea of a legal system; and 2 what is the connection between the rule of law and the substantive moral value of a legal system? 

Russell, Bertrand Arthur William, philosopher, logician, social reformer, and man of letters, one of the founders of analytic philosophy. Born of Celtic Highland stock into an aristocratic family in Wales (then part of England), Russell always divided his interests between politics, philosophy, and the ladies (he married six times). Orphaned at four, he was brought up by his grandmother, who educated him at home with the help of “rather dull” tutors. He studied mathematics at Cambridge and then, as his grandmother says, ‘out of the blue,’ he turned to philosophy. At home he had absorbed J. S. Mill’s liberalism, but not his empiricism. At Cambridge he came under the influence of neo-Hegelianism, especially the idealism of McTaggart, Ward his tutor, and Bradley. His earliest logical views were influenced most by Bradley, especially Bradley’s rejection of psychologism. But, like Ward and McTaggart, he rejected Bradley’s metaphysical monism in favor of pluralism or monadism. Even as an idealist, he held that scientific knowledge was the best available and that philosophy should be built around it. Through many subsequent changes, this belief about science, his pluralism, and his anti-psychologism remained constant. In 5, he conceived the idea of an idealist encyclopedia of the sciences to be developed by the use of transcendental arguments to establish the conditions under which the special sciences are possible. Russell’s first philosophical book, An Essay on the Foundations of Geometry 7, was part of this project, as were other mostly unfinished and unpublished pieces on physics and arithmetic written at this time see his Collected Papers, vols. 12. Russell claimed, in contrast to Kant, to use transcendental arguments in a purely logical way compatible with his anti-psychologism. In this case, however, it should be both possible and preferable to replace them by purely deductive arguments. Another problem arose in connection with asymmetrical relations, which led to contradictions if treated as internal relations, but which were essential for any treatment of mathematics. Russell resolved both problems in 8 by abandoning idealism including internal relations and his Kantian methodology. He called this the one real revolution in his philosophy. With his Cambridge contemporary Moore, he adopted an extreme Platonic realism, fully stated in The Principles of Mathematics 3 though anticipated in A Critical Exposition of the Philosophy of Leibniz 0. Russell’s work on the sciences was by then concentrated on pure mathematics, but the new philosophy yielded little progress until, in 0, he discovered Peano’s symbolic logic, which offered hope that pure mathematics could be treated without Kantian intuitions or transcendental arguments. On this basis Russell propounded logicism, the claim that the whole of pure mathematics could be derived deductively from logical principles, a position he came to independently of Frege, who held a similar but more restricted view but whose work Russell discovered only later. Logicism was announced in The Principles of Mathematics; its development occupied Russell, in collaboration with Whitehead, for the next ten years. Their results were published in Principia Mathematica 013, 3 vols., in which detailed derivations were given for Cantor’s set theory, finite and transfinite arithmetic, and elementary parts of measure theory. As a demonstration of Russell’s logicism, Principia depends upon much prior arithmetization of mathematics, e.g. of analysis, which is not explicitly treated. Even with these allowances much is still left out: e.g., abstract algebra and statistics. Russell’s unpublished papers Papers, vols. 45, however, contain logical innovations not included in Principia, e.g., anticipations of Church’s lambda-calculus. On Russell’s extreme realism, everything that can be referred to is a term that has being though not necessarily existence. The combination of terms by means of a relation results in a complex term, which is a proposition. Terms are neither linguistic nor psychological. The first task of philosophy is the theoretical analysis of propositions into their constituents. The propositions of logic are unique in that they remain true when any of their terms apart from logical constants are replaced by any other terms. In 1 Russell discovered that this position fell prey to self-referential paradoxes. For example, if the combination of any number of terms is a new term, the combination of all terms is a term distinct from any term. The most famous such paradox is called Russell’s paradox. Russell’s solution was the theory of types, which banned self-reference by stratifying terms and expressions into complex hierarchies of disjoint subclasses. The expression ‘all terms’, e.g., is then meaningless unless restricted to terms of specified types, and the combination of terms of a given type is a term of different type. A simple version of the theory appeared in Principles of Mathematics appendix A, but did not eliminate all the paradoxes. Russell developed a more elaborate version that did, in “Mathematical Logic as Based on the Theory of Types” 8 and in Principia. From 3 to 8 Russell sought to preserve his earlier account of logic by finding other ways to avoid the paradoxes  including a well-developed substitutional theory of classes and relations posthumously published in Essays in Analysis, 4, and Papers, vol. 5. Other costs of type theory for Russell’s logicism included the vastly increased complexity of the resulting sysRussell, Bertrand Arthur William Russell, Bertrand Arthur William 802    802 tem and the admission of the problematic axiom of reducibility. Two other difficulties with Russell’s extreme realism had important consequences: 1 ‘I met Quine’ and ‘I met a man’ are different propositions, even when Quine is the man I met. In the Principles, the first proposition contains a man, while the second contains a denoting concept that denotes the man. Denoting concepts are like Fregean senses; they are meanings and have denotations. When one occurs in a proposition the proposition is not about the concept but its denotation. This theory requires that there be some way in which a denoting concept, rather than its denotation, can be denoted. After much effort, Russell concluded in “On Denoting” 5 that this was impossible and eliminated denoting concepts as intermediaries between denoting phrases and their denotations by means of his theory of descriptions. Using firstorder predicate logic, Russell showed in a broad, though not comprehensive range of cases how denoting phrases could be eliminated in favor of predicates and quantified variables, for which logically proper names could be substituted. These were names of objects of acquaintance  represented in ordinary language by ‘this’ and ‘that’. Most names, he thought, were disguised definite descriptions. Similar techniques were applied elsewhere to other kinds of expression e.g. class names resulting in the more general theory of incomplete symbols. One important consequence of this was that the ontological commitments of a theory could be reduced by reformulating the theory to remove expressions that apparently denoted problematic entities. 2 The theory of incomplete symbols also helped solve extreme realism’s epistemic problems, namely how to account for knowledge of terms that do not exist, and for the distinction between true and false propositions. First, the theory explained how knowledge of a wide range of items could be achieved by knowledge by acquaintance of a much narrower range. Second, propositional expressions were treated as incomplete symbols and eliminated in favor of their constituents and a propositional attitude by Russell’s multiple relation theory of judgment. These innovations marked the end of Russell’s extreme realism, though he remained a Platonist in that he included universals among the objects of acquaintance. Russell referred to all his philosophy after 8 as logical atomism, indicating thereby that certain categories of items were taken as basic and items in other categories were constructed from them by rigorous logical means. It depends therefore upon reduction, which became a key concept in early analytic philosophy. Logical atomism changed as Russell’s logic developed and as more philosophical consequences were drawn from its application, but the label is now most often applied to the modified realism Russell held from 5 to 9. Logic was central to Russell’s philosophy from 0 onward, and much of his fertility and importance as a philosopher came from his application of the new logic to old problems. In 0 Russell became a lecturer at Cambridge. There his interests turned to epistemology. In writing a popular book, Problems of Philosophy 2, he first came to appreciate the work of the British empiricists, especially Hume and Berkeley. He held that empirical knowledge is based on direct acquaintance with sense-data, and that matter itself, of which we have only knowledge by description, is postulated as the best explanation of sense-data. He soon became dissatisfied with this idea and proposed instead that matter be logically constructed out of sensedata and unsensed sensibilia, thereby obviating dubious inferences to material objects as the causes of sensations. This proposal was inspired by the successful constructions of mathematical concepts in Principia. He planned a large work, “Theory of Knowledge,” which was to use the multiple relation theory to extend his account from acquaintance to belief and inference Papers, vol. 7. However, the project was abandoned as incomplete in the face of Vitters’s attacks on the multiple relation theory, and Russell published only those portions dealing with acquaintance. The construction of matter, however, went ahead, at least in outline, in Our Knowledge of the External World 4, though the only detailed constructions were undertaken later by Carnap. On Russell’s account, material objects are those series of sensibilia that obey the laws of physics. Sensibilia of which a mind is aware sense-data provide the experiential basis for that mind’s knowledge of the physical world. This theory is similar, though not identical, to phenomenalism. Russell saw the theory as an application of Ockham’s razor, by which postulated entities were replaced by logical constructions. He devoted much time to understanding modern physics, including relativity and quantum theory, and in The Analysis of Matter 7 he incorporated the fundamental ideas of those theories into his construction of the physical world. In this book he abandoned sensibilia as fundamental constituents of the world in favor Russell, Bertrand Arthur William Russell, Bertrand Arthur William 803    803 of events, which were “neutral” because intrinsically neither physical nor mental. In 6 Russell was dismissed from Cambridge on political grounds and from that time on had to earn his living by writing and public lecturing. His popular lectures, “The Philosophy of Logical Atomism” 8, were a result of this. These lectures form an interim work, looking back on the logical achievements of 510 and emphasizing their importance for philosophy, while taking stock of the problems raised by Vitters’s criticisms of the multiple relation theory. In 9 Russell’s philosophy of mind underwent substantial changes, partly in response to those criticisms. The changes appeared in “On Propositions: What They Are and How They Mean” 9 and The Analysis of Mind 1, where the influence of contemporary trends in psychology, especially behaviorism, is evident. Russell gave up the view that minds are among the fundamental constituents of the world, and adopted neutral monism, already advocated by Mach, James, and the  New Realists. On Russell’s neutral monism, a mind is constituted by a set of events related by subjective temporal relations simultaneity, successiveness and by certain special “mnemic” causal laws. In this way he was able to explain the apparent fact that “Hume’s inability to perceive himself was not peculiar.” In place of the multiple relation theory Russell identified the contents of beliefs with images “imagepropositions” and words “word-propositions”, understood as certain sorts of events, and analyzed truth qua correspondence in terms of resemblance and causal relations. From 8 to 4 Russell lived in the United States, where he wrote An Inquiry into Meaning and Truth 0 and his popular A History of Western Philosophy 5. His philosophical attention turned from metaphysics to epistemology and he continued to work in this field after he returned in 4 to Cambridge, where he completed his last major philosophical work, Human Knowledge: Its Scope and Limits 8. The framework of Russell’s early epistemology consisted of an analysis of knowledge in terms of justified true belief though it has been suggested that he unintentionally anticipated Edmund Gettier’s objection to this analysis, and an analysis of epistemic justification that combined fallibilism with a weak empiricism and with a foundationalism that made room for coherence. This framework was retained in An Inquiry and Human Knowledge, but there were two sorts of changes that attenuated the foundationalist and empiricist elements and accentuated the fallibilist element. First, the scope of human knowledge was reduced. Russell had already replaced his earlier Moorean consequentialism about values with subjectivism. Contrast “The Elements of Ethics,” 0, with, e.g., Religion and Science, 5, or Human Society in Ethics and Politics, 4. Consequently, what had been construed as self-evident judgments of intrinsic value came to be regarded as non-cognitive expressions of desire. In addition, Russell now reversed his earlier belief that deductive inference can yield new knowledge. Second, the degree of justification attainable in human knowledge was reduced at all levels. Regarding the foundation of perceptual beliefs, Russell came to admit that the object-knowledge “acquaintance with a sensedatum” was replaced by “noticing a perceptive occurrence” in An Inquiry that provides the non-inferential justification for a perceptual belief is buried under layers of “interpretation” and unconscious inference in even the earliest stages of perceptual processes. Regarding the superstructure of inferentially justified beliefs, Russell concluded in Human Knowledge that unrestricted induction is not generally truthpreserving anticipating Goodman’s “new riddle of induction”. Consideration of the work of Reichenbach and Keynes on probability led him to the conclusion that certain “postulates” are needed “to provide the antecedent probabilities required to justify inductions,” and that the only possible justification for believing these postulates lies, not in their self-evidence, but in the resultant increase in the overall coherence of one’s total belief system. In the end, Russell’s desire for certainty went unsatisfied, as he felt himself forced to the conclusion that “all human knowledge is uncertain, inexact, and partial. To this doctrine we have not found any limitation whatever.” Russell’s strictly philosophical writings of 9 and later have generally been less influential than his earlier writings. His influence was eclipsed by that of logical positivism and ordinary language philosophy. He approved of the logical positivists’ respect for logic and science, though he disagreed with their metaphysical agnosticism. But his dislike of ordinary language philosophy was visceral. In My Philosophical Development 9, he accused its practitioners of abandoning the attempt to understand the world, “that grave and important task which philosophy throughout the ages has hitherto pursued.” 

Russian nihilism, a form of nihilism, a phenomenon mainly of Russia in the 1860s, which, in contrast to the general cultural nihilism that Nietzsche later criticized in the 0s as a “dead-end” devaluing of all values, was futureoriented and “instrumental,” exalting possibility over actuality. Russian nihilists urged the “annihilation”  figurative and literal  of the past and present, i.e., of realized social and cultural values and of such values in process of realization, in the name of the future, i.e., for the sake of social and cultural values yet to be realized. Bakunin, as early as 1842, had stated the basic nihilist theme: “the negation of what exists . . . for the benefit of the future which does not yet exist.” The bestknown literary exemplar of nihilism in Russia is the character Bazarov in Turgenev’s novel Fathers and Sons 1862. Its most articulate spokesman was Dmitri Pisarev 184068, who shared Bazarov’s cultural anti-Romanticism, philosophical anti-idealism, and unquestioned trust in the power of natural science to solve social and moral problems. Pisarev proclaimed, “It is precisely in the [spread-eagled, laboratory] frog that the salvation . . . of the Russian people is to be found.” And he formulated what may serve as the manifesto of Russian nihilism: “What can be broken should be broken; what will stand the blow is fit to live; what breaks into smithereens is rubbish; in any case, strike right and left, it will not and cannot do any harm.” 

Russian philosophy, the philosophy produced by Russian thinkers, both in Russia and in the countries to which they emigrated, from the mideighteenth century to the present. There was no Renaissance in Russia, but in the early eighteenth century Peter the Great, in opening a “window to the West,” opened Russia up to Western philosophical influences. The beginnings of Russian speculation date from that period, in the dialogues, fables, and poems of the anti-Enlightenment thinker Gregory Skovoroda 172294 and in the social tracts, metaphysical treatises, and poems of the Enlightenment thinker Alexander Radishchev 17491802. Until the last quarter of the nineteenth century the most original and forceful Russian thinkers stood outside the academy. Since then, both in Russia and in Western exile, a number of the most important Russian philosophers  including Berdyaev and Lev Shestov 1866 8  have been  professors. The nineteenth-century thinkers, though educated, lacked advanced degrees. The only  professor among them, Peter Lavrov 18230, taught mathematics and science rather than philosophy during the 1850s. If we compare Russian philosophy to G. philosophy of this period, with its galaxy of  professors  Wolff, Kant, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, Dilthey  the contrast is sharp. However, if we compare Russian philosophy to English or  philosophy, the contrast fades. No professors of philosophy appear in the line from Francis Bacon through Hobbes, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, Bentham, and J. S. Mill, to Spencer. And in France Montaigne, Descartes, Pascal, Rousseau, and Comte were all non-professors. True to their non-professional, even “amateur” status, Russian philosophers until the late nineteenth century paid little attention to the more technical disciplines: logic, epistemology, philosophy of language, and philosophy of science. They focused instead on philosophical anthropology, ethics, social and political philosophy, philosophy of history, and philosophy of religion. In Russia, more than in any other Western cultural tradition, speculation, fiction, and poetry have been linked. On the one hand, major novelists such as Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, and major poets such as Pasternak and Brodsky, have engaged in wide-ranging philosophical reflection. On the other hand, philosophers such as Skovoroda, Alexei Khomyakov 180460, and Vladimir Solovyov 18530 were gifted poets, while thinkers such as Herzen, Konstantin Leontyev 183, and the anti-Leninist Marxist Alexander Bogdanov 18738 made their literary mark with novels, short stories, and memoirs. Such Russian thinkers as Vasily Rozanov 18569 and Shestov, although they wrote no belles lettres, were celebrated in literary circles for their sparkling essayistic and aphoristic styles. Certain preoccupations of nineteenth-century Russian thinkers  especially Pyotr Chaadaev 17941856 during the 1820s and 1830s, the Slavophiles and Westernizers during the 1840s and 1850s, and the Populists during the 1860s and 1870s  might appear to be distinctive but in fact were not. The controversial questions of Russia’s relation to Western Europe and of Russell’s paradox Russian philosophy 805    805 Russia’s “special path” to modernity have their counterparts in the reflections of thinkers in Spain “Spain and Europe”, G.y the Sonderweg  a term of which the Russian osobyi put’ is a translation, and Poland “the Polish Question”. The content of Russian philosophy may be characterized in general terms as tending toward utopianism, maximalism, moralism, and soteriology. To take the last point first: Hegelianism was received in Russia in the 1830s not only as an allembracing philosophical system but also as a vehicle of secular salvation. In the 1860s Darwinism was similarly received, as was Marxism in the 0s. Utopianism appears at the historical and sociopolitical level in two of Solovyov’s characteristic doctrines: his early “free theocracy,” in which the spiritual authority of the Roman pope was to be united with the secular authority of the Russian tsar; and his later ecumenical project of reuniting the Eastern Russian Orthodox and Western Roman Catholic churches in a single “universal [vselenskaia] church” that would also incorporate the “Protestant principle” of free philosophical and theological inquiry. Maximalism appears at the individual and religious level in Shestov’s claim that God, for whom alone “all things are possible,” can cause what has happened not to have happened and, in particular, can restore irrecoverable human loss, such as that associated with disease, deformity, madness, and death. Maximalism and moralism are united at the cosmic and “scientific-technological” level in Nikolai Fyodorov’s 18293 insistence on the overriding moral obligation of all men “the sons” to join the common cause of restoring life to “the fathers,” those who gave them life rather than, as sanctioned by the “theory of progress,” pushing them, figuratively if not literally, into the grave. Certain doctrinal emphases and assumptions link Russian thinkers from widely separated points on the political and ideological spectrum: 1 Russian philosophers were nearly unanimous in dismissing the notorious CartesianHumean “problem of other minds” as a nonproblem. Their convictions about human community and conciliarity sobornost’, whether religious or secular, were too powerful to permit Russian thinkers to raise serious doubts as to whether their moaning and bleeding neighbor was “really” in pain. 2 Most Russian thinkers  the Westernizers were a partial exception  viewed key Western philosophical positions and formulations, from the Socratic “know thyself” to the Cartesian cogito, as overly individualistic and overly intellectualistic, as failing to take into account the wholeness of the human person. 3 Both such anti-Marxists as Herzen with his “philosophy of the act” and Fyodorov with his “projective” common task and the early Russian Marxists were in agreement about the unacceptability of the “Western” dichotomy between thought and action. But when they stressed the unity of theory and practice, a key question remained: Who is to shape this unity? And what is its form? The threadbare MarxistLeninist “philosophy” of the Stalin years paid lip service to the freedom involved in forging such a unity. Stalin in fact imposed crushing restraints upon both thought and action. Since 2, works by and about the previously abused or neglected religious and speculative thinkers of Russia’s past have been widely republished and eagerly discussed. This applies to Fyodorov, Solovyov, Leontyev, Rozanov, Berdyaev, Shestov, and the Husserlian Shpet, among others. 

Ryle, Gilbert, English analytic philosopher known especially for his contributions to the philosophy of mind and his attacks on Cartesianism. His best-known work is the masterpiece The Concept of Mind 9, an attack on what he calls “Cartesian dualism” and a defense of a type of logical behaviorism. This dualism he dubs “the dogma of the Ghost in the Machine,” the Machine being the body, which is physical and publicly observable, and the Ghost being the mind conceived as a private or secret arena in which episodes of sense perception, consciousness, and inner perception take place. A person, then, is a combination of such a mind and a body, with the mind operating the body through exercises of will called “volitions.” Ryle’s attack on this doctrine is both sharply focused and multifarious. He finds that it rests on a category mistake, namely, assimilating statements about mental processes to the same category as statements about physical processes. This is a mistake in the logic of mental statements and mental concepts and leads to the mistaken metaphysical theory that a person is composed of two separate and distinct though somehow related entities, a mind and a body. It is true that statements about the physical are statements about things and their changes. But statements about the mental are not, and in particular are not about a thing called “the mind.” These two types of statements do not belong to the same category. To show this, Ryle deploys a variety of arguments, including arguments alleging the impossibility of causal relations between mind and body and arguments alleging vicious infinite regresses. To develop his positive view on the nature of mind, Ryle studies the uses and hence the logic of mental terms and finds that mental statements tell us that the person performs observable actions in certain ways and has a disposition to perform other observable actions in specifiable circumstances. For example, to do something intelligently is to do something physical in a certain way and to adjust one’s behavior to the circumstances, not, as the dogma of the Ghost in the Machine would have it, to perform two actions, one of which is a mental action of thinking that eventually causes a separate physical action. Ryle buttresses this position with many acute and subtle analyses of the uses of mental terms. Much of Ryle’s other work concerns philosophical methodology, sustaining the thesis which is the backbone of The Concept of Mind that philosophical problems and doctrines often arise from conceptual confusion, i.e., from mistakes about the logic of language. Important writings in this vein include the influential article “Systematically Misleading Expressions” and the book Dilemmas 4. Ryle was also interested in Grecian philosophy throughout his life, and his last major work, Plato’s Progress, puts forward novel hypotheses about changes in Plato’s views, the role of the Academy, the purposes and uses of Plato’s dialogues, and Plato’s relations with the rulers of Syracuse. 

Saadiah Gaon 882942, Jewish exegete, philosopher, liturgist, grammarian, and lexicographer. Born in the Fayyum in Egypt, Saadiah wrote his first Hebrew dictionary by age twenty. He removed to Tiberias, probably fleeing the backlash of his polemic against the Karaite biblicist, anti-Talmudic sect. There he mastered the inductive techniques of semantic analysis pioneered by Muslim MuÅtazilites in defending their rationalistic monotheism and voluntaristic theodicy. He learned philologically from the Masoretes and liturgical poets, and philosophically from the MuÅtazilite-influenced Jewish metaphysician Daud al-Muqammif of Raqqa in Iraq, and Isaac Israeli of Qayrawan in Tunisia, a Neoplatonizing physician, with whom the young philosopher attempted a correspondence. But his sense of system, evidenced in his pioneering chronology, prayerbook, and scheme of tropes, and nurtured by Arabic versions of Plato but seemingly not much Aristotle, allowed him to outgrow and outshine his mentors. He came to prominence by successfully defending the traditional Hebrew calendar, using astronomical, mathematical, and rabbinic arguments. Called to Baghdad, he became Gaon Hebrew, ‘Eminence’ or head of the ancient Talmudic academy of Pumpedita, then nearly defunct. His commentaries on rabbinic property law and his letters to Jewish communities as far away as Spain refurbished the authority of the academy, but a controversy with the Exilarch, secular head of Mesopotamian Jewry, led to his deposition and six years in limbo, deprived of his judicial authority. He delved into scientific cosmology, tr. many biblical books into Arabic with philosophic commentaries and thematic introductions, and around 933 completed The Book of Critically Chosen Beliefs and Convictions, the first Jewish philosophical summa. Unusual among medieval works for a lengthy epistemological introduction, its ten Arabic treatises defend and define creation, monotheism, human obligation and virtue, theodicy, natural retribution, resurrection, immortality and recompense, Israel’s redemption, and the good life. Saadiah argues that no single good suffices for human happiness; each in isolation is destructive. The Torah prepares the optimal blend of the appetitive and erotic, procreative, civilizational, ascetic, political, intellectual, pious, and tranquil. Following al-Rhazi d. 925 or 932, Saadiah argues that since destruction always overcomes organization in this world, sufferings will always outweigh pleasures; therefore as in rabbinic and MuÅtazilite theodicy God must be assumed to right the balances in the hereafter. Indeed, justice is the object of creation  not simply that the righteous be rewarded but that all should earn their deserved requital: the very light that is sown for the righteous is the fire that torments the wicked. But if requital and even recompense must be earned, this life is much more than an anteroom. Authenticity becomes a value in itself: the innocent are not told directly that their sufferings are a trial, or their testing would be invalid. Only by enduring their sufferings without interference can they demonstrate the qualities that make them worthy of the highest reward. Movingly reconciled with the Exilarch, Saadiah ended his life as Gaon. His voluntarism, naturalism, and rationalism laid philosophical foundations for Maimonides, and his inductive exegesis became a cornerstone of critical hermeneutics. 

Saint Petersburg paradox, a puzzle about gambling that motivated the distinction between expected return and expected utility. Daniel Bernoulli published it in a St. Petersburg journal in 1738. It concerns a gamble like this: it pays $2 if heads appears on the first toss of a coin, $4 if heads does not appear until the second toss, $8 if heads does not appear until the third toss, and so on. The expected return from the gamble is ½2 ! ¼4 ! 1 /88 ! . . . , or 1 ! 1 ! 1 ! ..., i.e., it is infinite. But no one would pay much for the gamble. So it seems that expected returns do not govern rational preferences. Bernoulli argued that expected utilities govern rational preferences. He also held that the utility of wealth is proportional to the log of the amount of wealth. Given his assumptions, the gamble has finite 808 S    808 expected utility, and should not be preferred to large sums of money. However, a twentieth-century version of the paradox, attributed to Karl Menger, reconstructs the gamble, putting utility payoffs in place of monetary payoffs, so that the new gamble has infinite expected utility. Since no one would trade much utility for the new gamble, it also seems that expected utilities do not govern rational preferences. The resolution of the paradox is under debate. 

Saint-Simon, Comte de, title of Claude-Henri de Rouvroy 17601825,  social reformer. An aristocrat by birth, he initially joined the ranks of the enlightened and liberal bourgeoisie. His Newtonian Letters to an Inhabitant of Geneva 1803 and Introduction to Scientific Works of the Nineteenth Century 1808 championed Condorcet’s vision of scientific and technological progress. With Auguste Comte, he shared a positivistic philosophy of history: the triumph of science over metaphysics. Written in wartime, The Reorganization of European Society 1814 urged the creation of a European parliamentary system to secure peace and unity. Having moved from scientism to pacifism, Saint-Simon moved further to industrialism. In 1817, under the influence of two theocratic thinkers, de Maistre and Bonald, Saint-Simon turned away from classical economic liberalism and repudiated laissez-faire capitalism. The Industrial System 1820 drafts the program for a hierarchical state, a technocratic society, and a planned economy. The industrial society of the future is based on the principles of productivity and cooperation and led by a rational and efficient class, the industrialists artists, scientists, and technicians. He argued that the association of positivism with unselfishness, of techniques of rational production with social solidarity and interdependency, would remedy the plight of the poor. Industrialism prefigures socialism, and socialism paves the way for the rule of the law of love, the eschatological age of The New Christianity 1825. This utopian treatise, which reveals Saint-Simon’s alternative to reactionary Catholicism and Protestant individualism, became the Bible of the Saint-Simonians, a sectarian school of utopian socialists.                                              

Same -- Sameness -- Griceian – One of Grice’s favourite essays ever was Wiggins’s “Sameness and substance” -- Griceian différance, a  coinage deployed by Derrida in De la Grammatologie 7, where he defines it as “an economic concept designating the production of differing/deferring.” Différance is polysemic, but its key function is to name the prime condition for the functioning of all language and thought: differing, the differentiation of signs from each other that allows us to differentiate things from each other. Deferring is the process by which signs refer to each other, thus constituting the self-reference essential to language, without ever capturing the being or presence that is the transcendent entity toward which it is aimed. Without the concepts or idealities generated by the iteration of signs, we could never identify a dog as a dog, could not perceive a dog or any other thing as such. Perception presupposes language, which, in turn, presupposes the ideality generated by the repetition of signs. Thus there can be no perceptual origin for language; language depends upon an “original repetition,” a deliberate oxymoron that Derrida employs to signal the impossibility of conceiving an origin of language from within the linguistic framework in which we find ourselves. Différance is the condition for language, and language is the condition for experience: whatever meaning we may find in the world is attributed to the differing/ deferring play of signifiers. The notion of différance and the correlative thesis that meaning is language-dependent have been appropriated by radical thinkers in the attempt to demonstrate that political inequalities are grounded in nothing other than the conventions of sign systems governing differing cultures.

Sanches, F. c.15511623, Portuguese born philosopher and physician. Raised in southern France, he took his medical degree at the  of Montpellier. After a decade of medical practice he was professor of philosophy at the  of Toulouse and later professor of medicine there. His most important work, Quod nihil sciturThat Nothing Is Known, 1581, is a classic of skeptical argumentation. Written at the same time that his cousin, Montaigne, wrote the “Apology for Raimund Sebond,” it devastatingly criticized the Aristotelian theory of knowledge. He began by declaring that he did not even know if he knew nothing. Then he examined the Aristotelian view that science consists of certain knowledge gained by demonstrations from true definitions. First of all, we do not possess such definitions, since all our definitions are just arbitrary names of things. The Aristotelian theory of demonstration is useless, since in syllogistic reasoning the conclusion has to be part of the evidence for the premises. E.g., how can one know that all men are mortal unless one knows that Socrates is mortal? Also, anything can be proven by syllogistic reasoning if one chooses the right premises. This does not produce real knowledge. Further we cannot know anything through its causes, since one would have to know the causes of the causes, and the causes of these, ad infinitum. Sanches also attacked the Platonic theory of knowledge, since mathematical knowledge is about ideal rather than real objects. Mathematics is only hypothetical. Its relevance to experience is not known. True science would consist of perfect knowledge of a thing. Each particular would be understood in and by itself. Such knowledge can be attained only by God. We cannot study objects one by one, since they are all interrelated and interconnected. Our faculties are also not reliable enough. Hence genuine knowledge cannot be attained by humans. What we can do, using “scientific method” a term first used by Sanches, is gather careful empirical information and make cautious judgments about it. His views were well known in the seventeenth century, and may have inspired the “mitigated skepticism” of Gassendi and others. 

sanction, anything whose function is to penalize or reward. It is useful to distinguish between social sanctions, legal sanctions, internal sanctions, and religious sanctions. Social sanctions are extralegal pressures exerted upon the agent by others. For example, others might distrust us, ostracize us, or even physically attack us, if we behave in certain ways. Legal sanctions include corporal punishment, imprisonment, fines, withdrawal of the legal rights to run a business or to leave the area, and other penalties. Internal sanctions may include not only guilt feelings but also the sympathetic pleasures of helping others or the gratified conscience of doing right. Divine sanctions, if there are any, are rewards or punishments given to us by a god while we are alive or after we die. There are important philosophical questions concerning sanctions. Should law be defined as the rules the breaking of which elicits punishment by the state? Could there be a moral duty to behave in a given way if there were no social sanctions concerning such behavior? If not, then a conventionalist account of moral duty seems unavoidable. And, to what extent does the combined effect of external and internal sanctions make rational egoism or prudence or self-interest coincide with morality?

Santayana, G., philosopher and writer. Born in Spain, he arrived in the United States as a child, received his education at Harvard, and rose to professor of philosophy there. He first came to prominence for his view, developed in The Sense of Beauty 6, that beauty is objectified pleasure. His The Life of Reason 5 vols., 5, a celebrated expression of his naturalistic vision, traces human creativity in ordinary life, society, art, religion, and science. He denied that his philosophy ever changed, but the mature expression of his thought, in Skepticism and Animal Faith 3 and The Realms of Being 4 vols., 740, is deliberately ontological and lacks the phenomenological emphasis of the earlier work. Human beings, according to Santayana, are animals in a material world contingent to the core. Reflection must take as its primary datum human action aimed at eating and fleeing. The philosophy of animal faith consists of disentangling the beliefs tacit in such actions and yields a realism concerning both the objects of immediate consciousness and the objects of belief. Knowledge is true belief rendered in symbolic terms. As symbolism, it constitutes the hauntingly beautiful worlds of the senses, poetry, and religion; as knowledge, it guides and is tested by successful action. Santayana had been taught by William James, and his insistence on the primacy of action suggests a close similarity to the views of Dewey. He is, nevertheless, not a pragmatist in any ordinary sense: he views nature as the fully formed arena of human activity and experience as a flow of isolated, private sentience in this alien world. His deepest sympathy is with Aristotle, though he agrees with Plato about the mind-independent existence of Forms and with Schopenhauer about the dimness of human prospects. His mature four-realm ontology turns on the distinction between essence and matter. Essences are forms of definiteness. They are infinite in number and encompass everything possible. Their eternity makes them causally inefficacious: as possibilities, they cannot accomplish their own actualization. Matter, a surd and formless force, generates the physical universe by selecting essences for embodiment. Truth is the realm of being created by the intersection of matter and form: it is the eternal record of essences that have been, are being, and will be given actuality in the history of the world. Spirit or consciousness cannot be reduced to the motions of the physical organism that give rise to it. It is constituted by a sequence of acts or intuitions whose objects are essences but whose time-spanning, synthetic nature renders them impotent. Organic selectivity is the source of values. Accordingly, the good of each organism is a function of its nature. Santayana simply accepts the fact that some of these goods are incommensurable and the tragic reality that they may be incompatible, as well. Under favorable circumstances, a life of reason or of maximal harmonized satisfactions is possible for a while. The finest achievement of human beings, however, is the spiritual life in which we overcome animal partiality and thus all valuation in order to enjoy the intuition of eternal essences. Santayana identifies such spirituality with the best that religion and sound philosophy can offer. It does not help us escape finitude and death, but enables us in this short life to transcend care and to intuit the eternal. Santayana’s exquisite vision has gained him many admirers but few followers. His system is a self-consistent and sophisticated synthesis of elements, such as materialism and Platonism, that have hitherto been thought impossible to reconcile. His masterful writing makes his books instructive and pleasurable, even if many of his characteristic views engender resistance among philosophers.

Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, broadly, the claim that one’s perception, thought, and behavior are influenced by one’s language. The hypothesis was named after Benjamin Lee Whorf 7 1 and his teacher Edward Sapir 4 9. We may discern different versions of this claim by distinguishing degrees of linguistic influence, the highest of which is complete and unalterable determination of the fundamental structures of perception, thought, and behavior. In the most radical form, the hypothesis says that one’s reality is constructed by one’s language and that differently structured languages give rise to different realities, which are incommensurable. 

Sartre, J.-P. philosopher and writer, the leading advocate of existentialism during the years following World War II. The heart of his philosophy was the precious notion of freedom and its concomitant sense of personal responsibility. He insisted, in an interview a few years before his death, that he never ceased to believe that “in the end one is always responsible for what is made of one,” only a slight revision of his earlier, bolder slogan, “man makes himself.” To be sure, as a student of Hegel, Marx, Husserl, and Heidegger  and because of his own physical frailty and the tragedies of the war  Sartre had to be well aware of the many constraints and obstacles to human freedom, but as a Cartesian, he never deviated from Descartes’s classical portrait of human consciousness as free and distinct from the physical universe it inhabits. One is never free of one’s “situation,” Sartre tells us, though one is always free to deny “negate” that situation and to try to change it. To be human, to be conscious, is to be free to imagine, free to choose, and responsible for one’s lot in life. As a student, Sartre was fascinated by Husserl’s new philosophical method, phenomenology. His first essays were direct responses to Husserl and applications of the phenomenological method. His essay on The Imagination in 6 established the groundwork for much of what was to follow: the celebration of our remarkable freedom to imagine the world other than it is and following Kant the way that this ability informs all of our experience. In The Transcendence of the Ego 7 he reconsidered Husserl’s central idea of a “phenomenological reduction” the idea of examining the essential structures of consciousness as such and argued following Heidegger that one cannot examine consciousness without at the same time recognizing the reality of actual objects in the world. In other words, there can be no such “reduction.” In his novel Nausea 8, Sartre made this point in a protracted example: his bored and often nauseated narrator confronts a gnarled chestnut tree in the park and recognizes with a visceral shock that its presence is simply given and utterly irreducible. In The Transcendence of the Ego Sartre also reconsiders the notion of the self, which Husserl and so many earlier philosophers had identified with consciousness. But the self, Sartre argues, is not “in” consciousness, much less identical to it. The self is out there “in the world, like the self of another.” In other words, the self is an ongoing project in the world with other people; it is not simply self-awareness or self-consciousness as such “I think, therefore I am”. This separation of self and consciousness and the rejection of the self as simply self-consciousness provide the framework for Sartre’s greatest philosophical treatise, L’être et le néant Being and Nothingness, 3. Its structure is unabashedly Cartesian, consciousness “being-for-itself” or pour soi on the one side, the existence of mere things “being-in-itself” or en soi on the other. The phraseology comes from Hegel. But Sartre does not fall into the Cartesian trap of designating these two types of being as separate “substances.” Instead, Sartre describes consciousness as “nothing’  “not a thing” but an activity, “a wind blowing from nowhere toward the world.” Sartre often resorts to visceral metaphors when developing this theme e.g., “a worm coiled in the heart of being”, but much of what he is arguing is familiar to philosophical readers in the more metaphor-free work of Kant, who also warned against the follies “paralogisms” of understanding consciousness as itself a possible object of consciousness rather than as the activity of constituting the objects of consciousness. As the lens of a camera can never see itself  and in a mirror only sees a reflection of itself  consciousness can never view itself as consciousness and is only aware of itself  “for itself”  through its experience of objects. Ontologically, one might think of “nothingness” as “no-thing-ness,” a much less outrageous suggestion than those that would make it an odd sort of a thing. It is through the nothingness of consciousness and its activities that negation comes into the world, our ability to imagine the world other than it is and the inescapable necessity of imagining ourselves other than we seem to be. And because consciousness is nothingness, it is not subject to the rules of causality. Central to the argument of L’être et le néant and Sartre’s insistence on the primacy of human freedom is his insistence that consciousness cannot be understood in causal terms. It is always self-determining and, as such, “it always is what it is not, and is not what it is”  a playful paradox that refers to the fact that we are always in the process of choosing. Consciousness is “nothing,” but the self is always on its way to being something. Throughout our lives we accumulate a body of facts that are true of us  our “facticity”  but during our lives we remain free to envision new possibilities, to reform ourselves and to reinterpret our facticity in the light of new projects and ambitions  our “transcendence.” This indeterminacy means that we can never be anything, and when we try to establish ourselves as something particular  whether a social role policeman, waiter or a certain character shy, intellectual, cowardly  we are in “bad faith.” Bad faith is erroneously viewing ourselves as something fixed and settled Sartre utterly rejects Freud and his theory of the unconscious determination of our personalities and behavior, but it is also bad faith to view oneself as a being of infinite possibilities and ignore the always restrictive facts and circumstances within which all choices must be made. On the one hand, we are always trying to define ourselves; on the other hand we are always free to break away from what we are, and always responsible for what we have made of ourselves. But there is no easy resolution or “balance” between facticity and freedom, rather a kind of dialectic or tension. The result is our frustrated desire to be God, to be both in-itself and for-itself. But this is not so much blasphemy as an expression of despair, a form of ontological original sin, the impossibility of being both free and what we want to be. Life for Sartre is yet more complicated. There is a third basic ontological category, on a par with the being-in-itself and being-for-itself and not derivative of them. He calls it “being-for-others.” To say that it is not derivative is to insist that our knowledge of others is not inferred, e.g. by some argument by analogy, from the behavior of others, and we ourselves are not wholly constituted by our self-determinations and the facts about us. Sartre gives us a brutal but familiar everyday example of our experience of being-for-others in what he calls “the look” le regard. Someone catches us “in the act” of doing something humiliating, and we find ourselves defining ourselves probably also resisting that definition in their terms. In his Saint Genet 3, Sartre describes such a conversion of the ten-year-old Jean Genet into a thief. So, too, we tend to “catch” one another in the judgments we make and define one another in terms that are often unflattering. But these judgments become an essential and ineluctible ingredient in our sense of ourselves, and they too lead to conflicts indeed, conflicts so basic and so frustrating that in his play Huis clos No Exit, 3 Sartre has one of his characters utter the famous line, “Hell is other people.” In his later works, notably his Critique of Dialectical Reason 859, Sartre turned increasingly to politics and, in particular, toward a defense of Marxism on existentialist principles. This entailed rejecting materialist determinism, but it also required a new sense of solidarity or what Sartre had wistfully called, following Heidegger, Mitsein or “being with others”. Thus in his later work he struggled to find a way of overcoming the conflict and insularity or the rather “bourgeois” consciousness he had described in Being and Nothingness. Not surprisingly given his constant political activities he found it in revolutionary engagement. Consonant with his rejection of bourgeois selfhood, Sartre turned down the 4 Nobel prize for literature. 

Satisfactoriness-condition, a state of affairs or “way things are,” most commonly referred to in relation to something that implies or is implied by it. Let p, q, and r be schematic letters for declarative sentences; and let P, Q, and R be corresponding nominalizations; e.g., if p is ‘snow is white’, then P would be ‘snow’s being white’. P can be a necessary or sufficient condition of Q in any of several senses. In the weakest sense P is a sufficient condition of Q iff if and only if: if p then q or if P is actual then Q is actual  where the conditional is to be read as “material,” as amounting merely to not-p & not-q. At the same time Q is a necessary condition of P iff: if not-q then not-p. It follows that P is a sufficient condition of Q iff Q is a necessary condition of P. Stronger senses of sufficiency and of necessity are definable, in terms of this basic sense, as follows: P is nomologically sufficient necessary for Q iff it follows from the laws of nature, but not without them, that if p then q that if q then p. P is alethically or metaphysically sufficient necessary for Q iff it is alethically or metaphysically necessary that if p then q that if q then p. However, it is perhaps most common of all to interpret conditions in terms of subjunctive conditionals, in such a way that P is a sufficient condition of Q iff P would not occur unless Q occurred, or: if P should occur, Q would; and P is a necessary condition of Q iff Q would not occur unless P occurred, or: if Q should occur, P would.  -- satisfaction, an auxiliary semantic notion introduced by Tarski in order to give a recursive definition of truth for languages containing quantifiers. Intuitively, the satisfaction relation holds between formulas containing free variables such as ‘Buildingx & Tallx’ and objects or sequences of objects such as the Empire State Building if and only if the formula “holds of” or “applies to” the objects. Thus, ‘Buildingx & Tallx’, is satisfied by all and only tall buildings, and ‘-Tallx1 & Tallerx1, x2’ is satisfied by any pair of objects in which the first object corresponding to ‘x1’ is not tall, but nonetheless taller than the second corresponding to ‘x2’. Satisfaction is needed when defining truth for languages with sentences built from formulas containing free variables, because the notions of truth and falsity do not apply to these “open” formulas. Thus, we cannot characterize the truth of the sentences ‘Dx Buildingx & Tallx’ ‘Some building is tall’ in terms of the truth or falsity of the open formula ‘Buildingx & Tallx’, since the latter is neither true nor false. But note that the sentence is true if and only if the formula is satisfied by some object. Since we can give a recursive definition of the notion of satisfaction for possibly open formulas, this enables us to use this auxiliary notion in defining truth.  -- satisfiable, having a common model, a structure in which all the sentences in the set are true; said of a set of sentences. In modern logic, satisfiability is the semantic analogue of the syntactic, proof-theoretic notion of consistency, the unprovability of any explicit contradiction. The completeness theorem for first-order logic, that all valid sentences are provable, can be formulated in terms of satisfiability: syntactic consistency implies satisfiability. This theorem does not necessarily hold for extensions of first-order logic. For any sound proof system for secondorder logic there will be an unsatisfiable set of sentences without there being a formal derivation of a contradiction from the set. This follows from Gödel’s incompleteness theorem. One of the central results of model theory for first-order logic concerns satisfiability: the compactness theorem, due to Gödel in 6, says that if every finite subset of a set of sentences is satisfiable the set itself is satisfiable. It follows immediately from his completeness theorem for first-order logic, and gives a powerful method to prove the consistency of a set of sentences. 

satisfice, to choose or do the good enough rather than the most or the best. ‘Satisfice’, an obsolete variant of ‘satisfy’, has been adopted by economist Herbert Simon and others to designate nonoptimizing choice or action. According to some economists, limitations of time or information may make it impossible or inadvisable for an individual, firm, or state body to attempt to maximize pleasure, profits, market share, revenues, or some other desired result, and satisficing with respect to such results is then said to be rational, albeit less than ideally rational. Although many orthodox economists think that choice can and always should be conceived in maximizing or optimizing terms, satisficing models have been proposed in economics, evolutionary biology, and philosophy. Biologists have sometimes conceived evolutionary change as largely consisting of “good enough” or satisficing adaptations to environmental pressures rather than as proceeding through optimal adjustments to such pressures, but in philosophy, the most frequent recent use of the idea of satisficing has been in ethics and rational choice theory. Economists typically regard satisficing as acceptable only where there are unwanted constraints on decision making; but it is also possible to see satisficing as entirely acceptable in itself, and in the field of ethics, it has recently been argued that there may be nothing remiss about moral satisficing, e.g., giving a good amount to charity, but less than one could give. It is possible to formulate satisficing forms of utilitarianism on which actions are morally right even if they contribute merely positively and/or in some large way, rather than maximally, to overall net human happiness. Bentham’s original formulation of the principle of utility and Popper’s negative utilitarianism are both examples of satisficing utilitarianism in this sense  and it should be noted that satisficing utilitarianism has the putative advantage over optimizing forms of allowing for supererogatory degrees of moral excellence. Moreover, any moral view that treats moral satisficing as permissible makes room for moral supererogation in cases where one optimally goes beyond the merely acceptable. But since moral satisficing is less than optimal moral behavior, but may be more meritorious than certain behavior that in the same circumstances would be merely permissible, some moral satisficing may actually count as supererogatory. In recent work on rational individual choice, some philosophers have argued that satisficing may often be acceptable in itself, rather than merely second-best. Even Simon allows that an entrepreneur may simply seek a satisfactory return on investment or share of the market, rather than a maximum under one of these headings. But a number of philosophers have made the further claim that we may sometimes, without irrationality, turn down the readily available better in the light of the goodness and sufficiency of what we already have or are enjoying. Independently of the costs of taking a second dessert, a person may be entirely satisfied with what she has eaten and, though willing to admit she would enjoy that extra dessert, turn it down, saying “I’m just fine as I am.” Whether such examples really involve an acceptable rejection of the momentarily better for the good enough has been disputed. However, some philosophers have gone on to say, even more strongly, that satisficing can sometimes be rationally required and optimizing rationally unacceptable. To keep on seeking pleasure from food or sex without ever being thoroughly satisfied with what one has enjoyed can seem compulsive and as such less than rational. If one is truly rational about such goods, one isn’t insatiable: at some point one has had enough and doesn’t want more, even though one could obtain further pleasure. The idea that satisficing is sometimes a requirement of practical reason is reminiscent of Aristotle’s view that moderation is inherently reasonable  rather than just a necessary means to later enjoyments and the avoidance of later pain or illness, which is the way the Epicureans conceived moderation. But perhaps the greatest advocate of satisficing is Plato, who argues in the Philebus that there must be measure or limit to our desire for pleasure in order for pleasure to count as a good thing for us. Insatiably to seek and obtain pleasure from a given source is to gain nothing good from it. And according to such a view, satisficing moderation is a necessary precondition of human good and flourishing, rather than merely being a rational restraint on the accumulation of independently conceived personal good or well-being.

Saussure, Ferdinand de, founder of structuralism. His work in semiotics is a major influence on the later development of  structuralist philosophy, as well as structural anthropology, structuralist literary criticism, and modern semiology. He pursued studies in linguistics largely under Georg Curtius at the  of Leipzig, along with such future Junggrammatiker neogrammarians as Leskien and Brugmann. Following the publication of his important Mémoire sur le système primitif des voyelles dans les langues indo-européenes 1879, Saussure left for Paris, where he associated himself with the Société Linguistique and taught comparative grammar. In 1, he returned to Switzerland to teach Sanskrit, comparative grammar, and general linguistics at the  of Geneva. His major work, the Course in General Linguistics 6, was assembled from students’ notes and his original lecture outlines after his death. The Course in General Linguistics argued against the prevalent historical and comparative philological approaches to language by advancing what Saussure termed a scientific model for linguistics, one borrowed in part from Durkheim. Such a model would take the “social fact” of language la langue as its object, and distinguish this from the variety of individual speech events la parole, as well as from the collectivity of speech events and grammatical rules that form the general historical body of language as such le langage. Thus, by separating out the unique and accidental elements of practiced speech, Saussure distinguished language la langue as the objective set of linguistic elements and rules that, taken as a system, governs the language use specific to a given community. It was the systematic coherency and generality of language, so conceived, that inclined Saussure to approach linguistics principally in terms of its static or synchronic dimension, rather than its historical or diachronic dimension. For Saussure, the system of language is a “treasury” or “depository” of signs, and the basic unit of the linguistic sign is itself two-sided, having both a phonemic component “the signifier” and a semantic component “the signified”. He terms the former the “acoustical” or “sound” image  which may, in turn, be represented graphically, in writing  and the latter the “concept” or “meaning.” Saussure construes the signifier to be a representation of linguistic sounds in the imagination or memory, i.e., a “psychological phenomenon,” one that corresponds to a specifiable range of material phonetic sounds. Its distinctive property consists in its being readily differentiated from other signifiers in the particular language. It is the function of each signifier, as a distinct entity, to convey a particular meaning  or “signified” concept  and this is fixed purely by conventional association. While the relation between the signifier and signified results in what Saussure terms the “positive” fact of the sign, the sign ultimately derives its linguistic value its precise descriptive determination from its position in the system of language as a whole, i.e., within the paradigmatic and syntagmatic relations that structurally and functionally differentiate it. Signifiers are differentially identified; signifiers are arbitrarily associated with their respective signified concepts; and signs assume the determination they do only through their configuration within the system of language as a whole: these facts enabled Saussure to claim that language is largely to be understood as a closed formal system of differences, and that the study of language would be principally governed by its autonomous structural determinations. So conceived, linguistics would be but a part of the study of social sign systems in general, namely, the broader science of what Saussure termed semiology. Saussure’s insights would be taken up by the subsequent Geneva, Prague, and Copenhagen schools of linguistics and by the Russian formalists, and would be further developed by the structuralists in France and elsewhere, as well as by recent semiological approaches to literary criticism, social anthropology, and psychoanalysis.

scepticism: For some reason, Grice was irritated by Wood’s sobriquet of Russell as a “passionate sceptic”: ‘an oxymoron.” The most specific essay by Grice on this is an essay he kept after many years, that he delivered back in the day at Oxford, entitled, “Scepticism and common sense.” Both were traditional topics at Oxford at the time. Typically, as in the Oxonian manner, he chose two authors, New-World’s Malcolm’s treatment of Old-World Moore, and brings in Austin’s ‘ordinary-language’ into the bargain. He also brings in his own obsession with what an emissor communicates. In this case, the “p” is the philosopher’s sceptical proposition, such as “That pillar box is red.” Grice thinks ‘dogmatic’ is the opposite of ‘sceptic,’ and he is right! Liddell and Scott have “δόγμα,” from “δοκέω,” and which they render as “that which seems to one, opinion or belief;” Pl.R.538c; “δ. πόλεως κοινόν;” esp. of philosophical doctrines, Epicur.Nat.14.7; “notion,” Pl.Tht.158d; “decision, judgement,” Pl. Lg.926d; (pl.); public decree, ordinance,  esp. of Roman Senatus-consulta, “δ. συγκλήτου”  “δ. τῆς βουλῆς” So note that there is nothing ‘dogmatic’ about ‘dogma,’ as it derives from ‘dokeo,’ and is rendered as ‘that which seems to one.’ So the keyword should be later Grecian, and in the adjectival ‘dogmatic.’ Liddell and Scott have “δογματικός,” which they render as “of or for doctrines, didactic, [διάλογοι] Quint.Inst.2.15.26, and “of persons, δ. ἰατροί,” “physicians who go by general principles,” opp. “ἐμπειρικοί and μεθοδικοί,” Dsc.Ther.Praef., Gal.1.65; in Philosophy, S.E.M.7.1, D.L.9.70, etc.; “δ. ὑπολήψεις” Id.9.83; “δ. φιλοσοφία” S.E. P.1.4. Adv. “-κῶς” D.L.9.74, S.E.P.1.197: Comp. “-κώτερον” Id.M. 6.4. Why is Grice interested in scepticism. His initial concern, the one that Austin would authorize, relates to ‘ordinary language.’ What if ‘ordinary language’ embraces scepticism? What if it doesn’t? Strawso notes that the world of ordinary language is a world of things, causes, and stuff. None of the good stuff for the sceptic. what is Grice’s answer to the sceptic’s implicaturum? The sceptic’s implicaturum is a topic that always fascinated Girce. While Grice groups two essays as dealing with one single theme, strictly, only this or that philosopher’s paradox (not all) may count as sceptical. This or that philosopher’s paradox may well not be sceptical at all but rather dogmatic. In fact, Grice defines philosophers paradox as anything repugnant to common sense, shocking, or extravagant ‒ to Malcolms ears, that is! While it is, strictly, slightly odd to quote this as a given date just because, by a stroke of the pen, Grice writes that date in the Harvard volume, we will follow his charming practice. This is vintage Grice. Grice always takes the sceptics challenge seriously, as any serious philosopher should. Grices takes both the sceptics explicatum and the scepticss implicaturum as self-defeating, as a very affront to our idea of rationality, conversational or other. V: Conversations with a sceptic: Can he be slightly more conversational helpful? Hume’ sceptical attack is partial, and targeted only towards practical reason, though.  Yet, for Grice, reason is one. You cannot really attack practical or buletic reason without attacking theoretical or doxastic reason. There is such thing as a general rational acceptance, to use Grice’s term, that the sceptic is getting at. Grice likes to play with the idea that ultimately every syllogism is buletic or practical. If, say, a syllogism by Eddington looks doxastic, that is because Eddington cares to omit the practical tail, as Grice puts it. And Eddington is not even a philosopher, they say. Grice is here concerned with a Cantabrigian topic popularised by Moore. As Grice recollects, Some like Witters, but Moore’s my man. Unlike Cambridge analysts such as Moore, Grice sees himself as a linguistic-turn Oxonian analyst. So it is only natural that Grice would connect time-honoured scepticism of Pyrrhos vintage, and common sense with ordinary language, so mis-called, the elephant in Grices room. Lewis and Short have “σκέψις,” f. σκέπτομαι, which they render as “viewing, perception by the senses, ἡ διὰ τῶν ὀμμάτων ςκέψις, Pl. Phd. 83a; observation of auguries; also as examination, speculation, consideration, τὸ εὕρημα πολλῆς σκέψιος; βραχείας ςκέψις; ϝέμειν ςκέψις take thought of a thing; ἐνθεὶς τῇ τέχνῃ ςκέψις; ςκέψις ποιεῖσθαι; ςκέψις προβέβληκας; ςκέψις λόγων; ςκέψις περί τινος inquiry into, speculation on a thing; περί τι Id. Lg. 636d;ἐπὶ σκέψιν τινὸς ἐλθεῖν; speculation, inquiry,ταῦτα ἐξωτερικωτέρας ἐστὶ σκέψεως; ἔξω τῆς νῦν ςκέψεως; οὐκ οἰκεῖα τῆς παρούσης ςκέψις; also hesitation, doubt, esp. of the Sceptic or Pyrthonic philosophers, AP 7. 576 (Jul.); the Sceptic philosophy, S. E. P. 1.5; οἱ ἀπὸ τῆς ςκέψεως, the Sceptics, ib. 229. in politics, resolution, decree, συνεδρίον Hdn. 4.3.9, cf. Poll. 6.178. If scepticism attacks common sense and fails, Grice seems to be implicating, that ordinary language philosophy is a good antidote to scepticism. Since what language other than ordinary language does common sense speak? Well, strictly, common sense doesnt speak. The man in the street does. Grice addresses this topic in a Mooreian way in a later essay, also repr. in Studies, Moore and philosophers paradoxes, repr. in Studies. As with his earlier Common sense and scepticism, Grice tackles Moores and Malcolms claim that ordinary language, so-called, solves a few of philosophers paradoxes. Philosopher is Grices witty way to generalise over your common-or-garden, any, philosopher, especially of the type he found eccentric, the sceptic included. Grice finds this or that problem in this overarching Cantabrigian manoeuvre, as over-simplifying a pretty convoluted terrain. While he cherishes Austins Some like Witters, but Moores MY man! Grice finds Moore too Cantabrigian to his taste. While an Oxonian thoroughbred, Grice is a bit like Austin, Some like Witters, but Moores my man, with this or that caveat. Again, as with his treatment of Descartes or Locke, Grice is hardly interested in finding out what Moore really means. He is a philosopher, not a historian of philosophy, and he knows it. While Grice agrees with Austins implicaturum that Moore goes well above Witters, if that is the expression (even if some like him), we should find the Oxonian equivalent to Moore. Grice would not Names Ryle, since he sees him, and his followers, almost every day. There is something apostolic about Moore that Grice enjoys, which is just as well, seeing that Moore is one of the twelve. Grice found it amusing that the members of The Conversazione Society would still be nickNamesd apostles when their number exceeded the initial 12. Grice spends some time exploring what Malcolm, a follower of Witters, which does not help, as it were, has to say about Moore in connection with that particularly Oxonian turn of phrase, such as ordinary language is. For Malcolms Moore, a paradox by philosopher [sic], including the sceptic, arises when philosopher [sic], including the sceptic, fails to abide by the dictates of ordinary language. It might merit some exploration if Moore’s defence of common sense is against: the sceptic may be one, but also the idealist. Moore the realist, armed with ordinary language attacks the idealists claim. The idealist is sceptical of the realists claim. But empiricist idealism (Bradley) has at Oxford as good pedigree as empiricist realism (Cook Wilson). Malcolm’s simplifications infuriate Grice, and ordinary language has little to offer in the defense of common sense realism against sceptical empiricist idealism. Surely the ordinary man says ridiculous, or silly, as Russell prefers, things, such as Smith is lucky, Departed spirits walk along this road on their way to Paradise, I know there are infinite stars, and I wish I were Napoleon, or I wish that I had been Napoleon, which does not mean that the utterer wishes that he were like Napoleon, but that he wishes that he had lived not in the his century but in the XVIIIth century. Grice is being specific about this. It is true that an ordinary use of language, as Malcolm suggests, cannot be self-contradictory unless the ordinary use of language is defined by stipulation as not self-contradictory, in which case an appeal to ordinary language becomes useless against this or that paradox by Philosopher. I wish that I had been Napoleon seems to involve nothing but an ordinary use of language by any standard but that of freedom from absurdity. I wish that I had been Napoleon is not, as far as Grice can see, philosophical, but something which may have been said and meant by numbers of ordinary people. Yet, I wish that I had been Napoleon is open to the suspicion of self-contradictoriness, absurdity, or some other kind of meaninglessness. And in this context suspicion is all Grice needs. By uttering I wish that I had been Napoleon U hardly means the same as he would if he uttered I wish I were like Napoleon. I wish that I had been Napoleon is suspiciously self-contradictory, absurd, or meaningless, if, as uttered by an utterer in a century other than the XVIIIth century, say, the utterer is understood as expressing the proposition that the utterer wishes that he had lived in the XVIIIth century, and not in his century, in which case he-1 wishes that he had not been him-1? But blame it on the buletic. That Moore himself is not too happy with Malcolms criticism can be witnessed by a cursory glimpse at hi reply to Malcolm. Grice is totally against this view that Malcolm ascribes to Moore as a view that is too broad to even claim to be true. Grices implicaturum is that Malcolm is appealing to Oxonian turns of phrase, such as ordinary language, but not taking proper Oxonian care in clarifying the nuances and stuff in dealing with, admittedly, a non-Oxonian philosopher such as Moore. When dealing with Moore, Grice is not necessarily concerned with scepticism. Time is unreal, e.g. is hardly a sceptic utterance. Yet Grice lists it as one of Philosophers paradoxes. So, there are various to consider here. Grice would start with common sense. That is what he does when he reprints this essay in WOW, with his attending note in both the preface and the Retrospective epilogue on how he organizes the themes and strands. Common sense is one keyword there, with its attending realism. Scepticism is another, with its attending empiricist idealism. It is intriguing that in the first two essays opening Grices explorations in semantics and metaphysics it seems its Malcolm, rather than the dryer Moore, who interests Grice most. While he would provide exegeses of this or that dictum by Moore, and indeed, Moore’s response to Malcolm, Grice seems to be more concerned with applications of his own views. Notably in Philosophers paradoxes. The fatal objection Grice finds for the paradox propounder (not necessarily a sceptic, although a sceptic may be one of the paradox propounders) significantly rests on Grices reductive analysis of meaning that  as ascribed to this or that utterer U. Grice elaborates on circumstances that hell later take up in the Retrospective epilogue. I find myself not understanding what I mean is dubiously acceptable. If meaning, Grice claims, is about an utterer U intending to get his addressee A to believe that U ψ-s that p, U must think there is a good chance that A will recognise what he is supposed to believe, by, perhaps, being aware of the Us practice or by a supplementary explanation which might come from U. In which case, U should not be meaning what Malcolm claims U might mean. No utterer should intend his addressee to believe what is conceptually impossible, or incoherent, or blatantly false (Charles Is decapitation willed Charles Is death.), unless you are Queen in Through the Looking Glass. I believe five impossible things before breakfast, and I hope youll soon get the proper training to follow suit. Cf. Tertulian, Credo, quia absurdum est. Admittedly, Grice edits the Philosophers paradoxes essay. It is only Grices final objection which is repr. in WOW, even if he provides a good detailed summary of the previous sections. Grice appeals to Moore on later occasions. In Causal theory, Grice lists, as a third philosophical mistake, the opinion by Malcolm that Moore did not know how to use knowin a sentence. Grice brings up the same example again in Prolegomena. The use of factive know of Moore may well be a misuse. While at Madison, Wisconsin, Moore lectures at a hall eccentrically-built with indirect lighting simulating sun rays, Moore infamously utters, I know that there is a window behind that curtain, when there is not. But it is not the factiveness Grice is aiming at, but the otiosity Malcolm misdescribes in the true, if baffling, I know that I have two hands. In Retrospective epilogue, Grice uses M to abbreviate Moore’s fairy godmother – along with G (Grice), A (Austin), R (Ryle) and Q (Quine)! One simple way to approach Grices quandary with Malcolm’s quandary with Moore is then to focus on know. How can Malcolm claim that Moore is guilty of misusing know? The most extensive exploration by Grice on know is in Grices third James lecture (but cf. his seminar on Knowledge and belief, and his remarks on some of our beliefs needing to be true, in Meaning revisited. The examinee knows that the battle of Waterloo was fought in 1815. Nothing odd about that, nor about Moores uttering I know that these are my hands. Grice is perhaps the only one of the Oxonian philosophers of Austins play group who took common sense realsim so seriously, if only to crticise Malcoms zeal with it. For Grice, common-sense realism = ordinary language, whereas for the typical Austinian, ordinary language = the language of the man in the street. Back at Oxford, Grice uses Malcolm to contest the usual criticism that Oxford ordinary-language philosophers defend common-sense realist assumptions just because the way non-common-sense realist philosopher’s talk is not ordinary language, and even at Oxford. Cf. Flews reference to Joness philosophical verbal rubbish in using self as a noun. Grice is infuriated by all this unclear chatter, and chooses Malcolms mistreatment of Moore as an example. Grice is possibly fearful to consider Austins claims directly! In later essays, such as ‘the learned’ and ‘the lay,’ Grice goes back to the topic criticising now the scientists jargon as an affront to the ordinary language of the layman that Grice qua philosopher defends. scepticism, in the most common sense, the refusal to grant that there is any knowledge or justification. Skepticism can be either partial or total, either practical or theoretical, and, if theoretical, either moderate or radical, and either of knowledge or of justification. Skepticism is partial iff if and only if it is restricted to particular fields of beliefs or propositions, and total iff not thus restricted. And if partial, it may be highly restricted, as is the skepticism for which religion is only opium, or much more general, as when not only is religion called opium, but also history bunk and metaphysics meaningless. Skepticism is practical iff it is an attitude of deliberately withholding both belief and disbelief, accompanied perhaps but not necessarily by commitment to a recommendation for people generally, that they do likewise. Practical skepticism can of course be either total or partial, and if partial it can be more or less general. Skepticism is theoretical iff it is a commitment to the belief that there is no knowledge justified belief of a certain kind or of certain kinds. Such theoretical skepticism comes in several varieties. It is moderate and total iff it holds that there is no certain superknowledge superjustified belief whatsoever, not even in logic or mathematics, nor through introspection of one’s present experience. It is radical and total iff it holds that there isn’t even any ordinary knowledge justified belief at all. It is moderate and partial, on the other hand, iff it holds that there is no certain superknowledge superjustified belief of a certain specific kind K or of certain specific kinds K1, . . . , Kn less than the totality of such kinds. It is radical and partial, finally, iff it holds that there isn’t even any ordinary knowledge justified belief at all of that kind K or of those kinds K1, . . . , Kn. Grecian skepticism can be traced back to Socrates’ epistemic modesty. Suppressed by the prolific theoretical virtuosity of Plato and Aristotle, such modesty reasserted itself in the skepticism of the Academy led by Arcesilaus and later by Carneades. In this period began a long controversy pitting Academic Skeptics against the Stoics Zeno and later Chrysippus, and their followers. Prolonged controversy, sometimes heated, softened the competing views, but before agreement congealed Anesidemus broke with the Academy and reclaimed the arguments and tradition of Pyrrho, who wrote nothing, but whose Skeptic teachings had been preserved by a student, Timon in the third century B.C.. After enduring more than two centuries, neoPyrrhonism was summarized, c.200 A.D., by Sextus Empiricus Outlines of Pyrrhonism and Adversus mathematicos. Skepticism thus ended as a school, but as a philosophical tradition it has been influential long after that, and is so even now. It has influenced strongly not only Cicero Academica and De natura deorum, St. Augustine Contra academicos, and Montaigne “Apology for Raimund Sebond”, but also the great historical philosophers of the Western tradition, from Descartes through Hegel. Both on the Continent and in the Anglophone sphere a new wave of skepticism has built for decades, with logical positivism, deconstructionism, historicism, neopragmatism, and relativism, and the writings of Foucault knowledge as a mask of power, Derrida deconstruction, Quine indeterminacy and eliminativism, Kuhn incommensurability, and Rorty solidarity over objectivity, edification over inquiry. At the same time a rising tide of books and articles continues other philosophical traditions in metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, etc. It is interesting to compare the cognitive disengagement recommended by practical skepticism with the affective disengagement dear to stoicism especially in light of the epistemological controversies that long divided Academic Skepticism from the Stoa, giving rise to a rivalry dominant in Hellenistic philosophy. If believing and favoring are positive, with disbelieving and disfavoring their respective negative counterparts, then the magnitude of our happiness positive or unhappiness negative over a given matter is determined by the product of our belief/disbelief and our favoring/disfavoring with regard to that same matter. The fear of unhappiness may lead one stoically to disengage from affective engagement, on either side of any matter that escapes one’s total control. And this is a kind of practical affective “skepticism.” Similarly, if believing and truth are positive, with disbelieving and falsity their respective negative counterparts, then the magnitude of our correctness positive or error negative over a given matter is determined by the product of our belief/disbelief and the truth/falsity with regard to that same matter where the positive or negative magnitude of the truth or falsity at issue may be determined by some measure of “theoretical importance,” though alternatively one could just assign all truths a value of !1 and all falsehoods a value of †1. The fear of error may lead one skeptically to disengage from cognitive engagement, on either side of any matter that involves risk of error. And this is “practical cognitive skepticism.” We wish to attain happiness and avoid unhappiness. This leads to the disengagement of the stoic. We wish to attain the truth and avoid error. This leads to the disengagement of the skeptic, the practical skeptic. Each opts for a conservative policy, but one that is surely optional, given just the reasoning indicated. For in avoiding unhappiness the stoic also forfeits a corresponding possibility of happiness. And in avoiding error the skeptic also forfeits a corresponding possibility to grasp a truth. These twin policies appeal to conservatism in our nature, and will reasonably prevail in the lives of those committed to avoiding risk as a paramount objective. For this very desire must then be given its due, if we judge it rational. Skepticism is instrumental in the birth of modern epistemology, and modern philosophy, at the hands of Descartes, whose skepticism is methodological but sophisticated and well informed by that of the ancients. Skepticism is also a main force, perhaps the main force, in the broad sweep of Western philosophy from Descartes through Hegel. Though preeminent in the history of our subject, skepticism since then has suffered decades of neglect, and only in recent years has reclaimed much attention and even applause. Some recent influential discussions go so far as to grant that we do not know we are not dreaming. But they also insist one can still know when there is a fire before one. The key is to analyze knowledge as a kind of appropriate responsiveness to its object truth: what is required is that the subject “track” through his belief the truth of what he believes. S tracks the truth of P iff: S would not believe P if P were false. Such an analysis of tracking, when conjoined with the view of knowledge as tracking, enables one to explain how one can know about the fire even if for all one knows it is just a dream. The crucial fact here is that even if P logically entails Q, one may still be able to track the truth of P though unable to track the truth of Q. Nozick, Philosophical Explanations, 1. Many problems arise in the literature on this approach. One that seems especially troubling is that though it enables us to understand how contingent knowledge of our surroundings is possible, the tracking account falls short of enabling an explanation of how such knowledge on our part is actual. To explain how one knows that there is a fire before one F, according to the tracking account one presumably would invoke one’s tracking the truth of F. But this leads deductively almost immediately to the claim that one is not dreaming: Not D. And this is not something one can know, according to the tracking account. So how is one to explain one’s justification for making that claim? Most troubling of all here is the fact that one is now cornered by the tracking account into making combinations of claims of the following form: I am quite sure that p, but I have no knowledge at all as to whether p. And this seems incoherent. A Cartesian dream argument that has had much play in recent discussions of skepticism is made explicit by Barry Stroud, The Significance of Philosophical Scepticism, 4 as follows. One knows that if one knows F then one is not dreaming, in which case if one really knows F then one must know one is not dreaming. However, one does not know one is not dreaming. So one does not know F. Q.E.D. And why does one fail to know one is not dreaming? Because in order to know it one would need to know that one has passed some test, some empirical procedure to determine whether one is dreaming. But any such supposed test  say, pinching oneself  could just be part of a dream, and dreaming one passes the test would not suffice to show one was not dreaming. However, might one not actually be witnessing the fire, and passing the test  and be doing this in wakeful life, not in a dream  and would that not be compatible with one’s knowing of the fire and of one’s wakefulness? Not so, according to the argument, since in order to know of the fire one needs prior knowledge of one’s wakefulness. But in order to know of one’s wakefulness one needs prior knowledge of the results of the test procedure. But this in turn requires prior knowledge that one is awake and not dreaming. And we have a vicious circle. We might well hold that it is possible to know one is not dreaming even in the absence of any positive test result, or at most in conjunction with coordinate not prior knowledge of such a positive indication. How in that case would one know of one’s wakefulness? Perhaps one would know it by believing it through the exercise of a reliable faculty. Perhaps one would know it through its coherence with the rest of one’s comprehensive and coherent body of beliefs. Perhaps both. But, it may be urged, if these are the ways one might know of one’s wakefulness, does not this answer commit us to a theory of the form of A below? A The proposition that p is something one knows believes justifiably if and only if one satisfies conditions C with respect to it. And if so, are we not caught in a vicious circle by the question as to how we know  what justifies us in believing  A itself? This is far from obvious, since the requirement that we must submit to some test procedure for wakefulness and know ourselves to test positively, before we can know ourselves to be awake, is itself a requirement that seems to lead equally to a principle such as A. At least it is not evident why the proposal of the externalist or of the coherentist as to how we know we are awake should be any more closely related to a general principle like A than is the foundationalist? notion that in order to know we are awake we need epistemically prior knowledge that we test positive in a way that does not presuppose already acquired knowledge of the external world. The problem of how to justify the likes of A is a descendant of the infamous “problem of the criterion,” reclaimed in the sixteenth century and again in this century by Chisholm, Theory of Knowledge, 6, 7, and 8 but much used already by the Skeptics of antiquity under the title of the diallelus. About explanations of our knowledge or justification in general of the form indicated by A, we are told that they are inadequate in a way revealed by examples like the following. Suppose we want to know how we know anything at all about the external world, and part of the answer is that we know the location of our neighbor by knowing the location of her car in her driveway. Surely this would be at best the beginning of an answer that might be satisfactory in the end if recursive, e.g., but as it stands it cannot be satisfactory without supplementation. The objection here is based on a comparison between two appeals: the appeal of a theorist of knowledge to a principle like A in the course of explaining our knowledge or justification in general, on one side; and the appeal to the car’s location in explaining our knowledge of facts about the external world, on the other side. This comparison is said to be fatal to the ambition to explain our knowledge or justification in general. But are the appeals relevantly analogous? One important difference is this. In the example of the car, we explain the presence, in some subject S, of a piece of knowledge of a certain kind of the external world by appeal to the presence in S of some other piece of knowledge of the very same kind. So there is an immediate problem if it is our aim to explain how any knowledge of the sort in question ever comes to be unless the explication is just beginning, and is to turn recursive in due course. Now of course A is theoretically ambitious, and in that respect the theorist who gives an answer of the form of A is doing something similar to what must be done by the protagonist in our car example, someone who is attempting to provide a general explanation of how any knowledge of a certain kind comes about. Nevertheless, there is also an important difference, namely that the theorist whose aim it is to give a general account of the form of A need not attribute any knowledge whatsoever to a subject S in explaining how that subject comes to have a piece of knowledge or justified belief. For there is no need to require that the conditions C appealed to by principle A must be conditions that include attribution of any knowledge at all to the subject in question. It is true that in claiming that A itself meets conditions C, and that it is this which explains how one knows A, we do perhaps take ourselves to know A or at least to be justified in believing it. But if so, this is the inevitable lot of anyone who seriously puts forward any explanation of anything. And it is quite different from a proposal that part of what explains how something is known or justifiably believed includes a claim to knowledge or justified belief of the very same sort. In sum, as in the case of one’s belief that one is awake, the belief in something of the form of A may be said to be known, and in so saying one does not commit oneself to adducing an ulterior reason in favor of A, or even to having such a reason in reserve. One is of course committed to being justified in believing A, perhaps even to having knowledge that A. But it is not at all clear that the only way to be justified in believing A is by way of adduced reasons in favor of A, or that one knows A only if one adduces strong enough reasons in its favor. For we often know things in the absence of such adduced reasons. Thus consider one’s knowledge through memory of which door one used to come into a room that has more than one open door. Returning finally to A, in its case the explanation of how one knows it may, once again, take the form of an appeal to the justifying power of intellectual virtues or of coherence  or both. Recent accounts of the nature of thought and representation undermine a tradition of wholesale doubt about nature, whose momentum is hard to stop, and threatens to leave the subject alone and restricted to a solipsism of the present moment. But there may be a way to stop skepticism early  by questioning the possibility of its being sensibly held, given what is required for meaningful language and thought. Consider our grasp of observable shape and color properties that objects around us might have. Such grasp seems partly constituted by our discriminatory abilities. When we discern a shape or a color we do so presumably in terms of a distinctive impact that such a shape or color has on us. We are put systematically into a certain distinctive state X when we are appropriately related, in good light, with our eyes open, etc., to the presence in our environment of that shape or color. What makes one’s distinctive state one of thinking of sphericity rather than something else, is said to be that it is a state tied by systematic causal relations to skepticism skepticism 849   849 the presence of sphericity in one’s normal environment. A light now flickers at the end of the skeptic’s tunnel. In doubt now is the coherence of traditional skeptical reflection. Indeed, our predecessors in earlier centuries may have moved in the wrong direction when they attempted a reduction of nature to the mind. For there is no way to make sense of one’s mind without its contents, and there is no way to make sense of how one’s mind can have such contents except by appeal to how one is causally related to one’s environment. If the very existence of that environment is put in doubt, that cuts the ground from under one’s ability reasonably to characterize one’s own mind, or to feel any confidence about its contents. Perhaps, then, one could not be a “brain in a vat.” Much contemporary thought about language and the requirements for meaningful language thus suggests that a lot of knowledge must already be in place for us to be able to think meaningfully about a surrounding reality, so as to be able to question its very existence. If so, then radical skepticism answers itself. For if we can so much as understand a radical skepticism about the existence of our surrounding reality, then we must already know a great deal about that reality.  Sceptics, those ancient thinkers who developed sets of arguments to show either that no knowledge is possible Academic Skepticism or that there is not sufficient or adequate evidence to tell if any knowledge is possible. If the latter is the case then these thinkers advocated suspending judgment on all question concerning knowledge Pyrrhonian Skepticism. Academic Skepticism gets its name from the fact that it was formulated in Plato’s Academy in the third century B.C., starting from Socrates’ statement, “All I know is that I know nothing.” It was developed by Arcesilaus c.268241 and Carneades c.213129, into a series of arguments, directed principally against the Stoics, purporting to show that nothing can be known. The Academics posed a series of problems to show that what we think we know by our senses may be unreliable, and that we cannot be sure about the reliability of our reasoning. We do not possess a guaranteed standard or criterion for ascertaining which of our judgments is true or false. Any purported knowledge claim contains some element that goes beyond immediate experience. If this claim constituted knowledge we would have to know something that could not possibly be false. The evidence for the claim would have to be based on our senses and our reason, both of which are to some degree unreliable. So the knowledge claim may be false or doubtful, and hence cannot constitute genuine knowledge. So, the Academics said that nothing is certain. The best we can attain is probable information. Carneades is supposed to have developed a form of verification theory and a kind of probabilism, similar in some ways to that of modern pragmatists and positivists. Academic Skepticism dominated the philosophizing of Plato’s Academy until the first century B.C. While Cicero was a student there, the Academy turned from Skepticism to a kind of eclectic philosophy. Its Skeptical arguments have been preserved in Cicero’s works, Academia and De natura deorum, in Augustine’s refutation in his Contra academicos, as well as in the summary presented by Diogenes Laertius in his lives of the Grecian philosophers. Skeptical thinking found another home in the school of the Pyrrhonian Skeptics, probably connected with the Methodic school of medicine in Alexandria. The Pyrrhonian movement traces its origins to Pyrrho of Elis c.360275 B.C. and his student Timon c.315225 B.C.. The stories about Pyrrho indicate that he was not a theoretician but a practical doubter who would not make any judgments that went beyond immediate experience. He is supposed to have refused to judge if what appeared to be chariots might strike him, and he was often rescued by his students because he would not make any commitments. His concerns were apparently ethical. He sought to avoid unhappiness that might result from accepting any value theory. If the theory was at all doubtful, accepting it might lead to mental anguish. The theoretical formulation of Pyrrhonian Skepticism is attributed to Aenesidemus c.100 40 B.C.. Pyrrhonists regarded dogmatic philosophers and Academic Skeptics as asserting too much, the former saying that something can be known and the latter that nothing can be known. The Pyrrhonists suspended judgments on all questions on which there was any conflicting evidence, including whether or not anything could be known. The Pyrrhonists used some of the same kinds of arguments developed by Arcesilaus and Carneades. Aenesidemus and those who followed after him organized the arguments into sets of “tropes” or ways of leading to suspense of judgment on various questions. Sets of ten, eight, five, and two tropes appear in the only surviving writing of the Pyrrhonists, the works of Sextus Empiricus, a third-century A.D. teacher of Pyrrhonism. Each set of tropes offers suggestions for suspending judgment about any knowledge claims that go beyond appearances. The tropes seek to show that for any claim, evidence for and evidence against it can be offered. The disagreements among human beings, the variety of human experiences, the fluctuation of human judgments under differing conditions, illness, drunkenness, etc., all point to the opposition of evidence for and against each knowledge claim. Any criterion we employ to sift and weigh the evidence can also be opposed by countercriterion claims. Given this situation, the Pyrrhonian Skeptics sought to avoid committing themselves concerning any kind of question. They would not even commit themselves as to whether the arguments they put forth were sound or not. For them Skepticism was not a statable theory, but rather an ability or mental attitude for opposing evidence for and against any knowledge claim that went beyond what was apparent, that dealt with the non-evident. This opposing produced an equipollence, a balancing of the opposing evidences, that would lead to suspending judgment on any question. Suspending judgment led to a state of mind called “ataraxia,” quietude, peace of mind, or unperturbedness. In such a state the Skeptic was no longer concerned or worried or disturbed about matters beyond appearances. The Pyrrhonians averred that Skepticism was a cure for a disease called “dogmatism” or rashness. The dogmatists made assertions about the non-evident, and then became disturbed about whether these assertions were true. The disturbance became a mental disease or disorder. The Pyrrhonians, who apparently were medical doctors, offered relief by showing the patient how and why he should suspend judgment instead of dogmatizing. Then the disease would disappear and the patient would be in a state of tranquillity, the peace of mind sought by Hellenistic dogmatic philosophers. The Pyrrhonists, unlike the Academic Skeptics, were not negative dogmatists. The Pyrrhonists said neither that knowledge is possible nor that it is impossible. They remained seekers, while allowing the Skeptical arguments and the equipollence of evidences to act as a purge of dogmatic assertions. The purge eliminates all dogmas as well as itself. After this the Pyrrhonist lives undogmatically, following natural inclinations, immediate experience, and the laws and customs of his society, without ever judging or committing himself to any view about them. In this state the Pyrrhonist would have no worries, and yet be able to function naturally and according to law and custom. The Pyrrhonian movement disappeared during the third century A.D., possibly because it was not considered an alternative to the powerful religious movements of the time. Only scant traces of it appear before the Renaissance, when the texts of Sextus and Cicero were rediscovered and used to formulate a modern skeptical view by such thinkers as Montaigne and Charron.  Refs.: The obvious source is the essay on scepticism in WoW, but there are allusions in “Prejudices and predilections, and elsewhere, in The H. P. Grice Papers, BANC

Scheler, M.: G. phenomenologist, social philosopher, and sociologist of knowledge. Born in Munich, he studied in Jena; when he returned to Munich in 7 he came in contact with phenomenology, especially the realist version of the early Husserl and his Munich School followers. Scheler’s first works were phenomenological studies in ethics leading to his ultimate theory of value: he described the moral feelings of sympathy and resentment and wrote a criticism of Kantian formalism and rationalism, Formalism in Ethics and a Non-Formal Ethics of Value 3. During the war, he was an ardent nationalist and wrote essays in support of the war that were also philosophical criticisms of modern culture, opposed to “Anglo-Saxon” naturalism and rational calculation. Although he later embraced a broader notion of community, such criticisms of modernity remained constant themes of his writings. His conversion to Catholicism after the war led him to apply phenomenological description to religious phenomena and feelings, and he later turned to themes of anthropology and natural science. The core of Scheler’s phenomenological method is his conception of the objectivity of essences, which, though contained in experience, are a priori and independent of the knower. For Scheler, values are such objective, though non-Platonic, essences. Their objectivity is intuitively accessible in immediate experience and feelings, as when we experience beauty in music and do not merely hear certain sounds. Scheler distinguished between valuations or value perspectives on the one hand, which are historically relative and variable, and values on the other, which are independent and invariant. There are four such values, the hierarchical organization of which could be both immediately intuited and established by various public criteria like duration and independence: pleasure, vitality, spirit, and religion. Corresponding to these values are various personalities who are not creators of value but their discoverers, historical disclosers, and exemplars: the “artist of consumption,” the hero, the genius, and the saint. A similar hierarchy of values applies to forms of society, the highest of which is the church, or a Christian community of solidarity and love. Scheler criticizes the leveling tendencies of liberalism for violating this hierarchy, leading to forms of resentment, individualism, and nationalism, all of which represent the false ordering of values.

Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph, philosopher whose metamorscalar implicaturum Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph 816    816 phoses encompass the entire history of G. idealism. A Schwabian, Schelling first studied at Tübingen, where he befriended Hölderlin and Hegel. The young Schelling was an enthusiastic exponent of Fichte’s Wissenschaftslehre and devoted several early essays to its exposition. After studying science and mathematics at Leipzig, he joined Fichte at Jena in 1798. Meanwhile, in such writings as Philosophische Briefe über Dogmatismus und Kritizismus “Philosophical Letters on Dogmatism and Criticism,” 1795, Schelling betrayed growing doubts concerning Fichte’s philosophy above all, its treatment of nature and a lively interest in Spinoza. He then turned to constructing a systematic Naturphilosophie philosophy of nature within the context of which nature would be treated more holistically than by either Newtonian science or transcendental idealism. Of his many publications on this topic, two of the more important are Ideen zu einer Philosophie der Natur “Ideas concerning a Philosophy of Nature,” 1797 and Von der Weltseele “On the World-Soul,” 1798. Whereas transcendental idealism attempts to derive objective experience from an initial act of free self-positing, Schelling’s philosophy of nature attempts to derive consciousness from objects. Beginning with “pure objectivity,” the Naturphilosophie purports to show how nature undergoes a process of unconscious self-development, culminating in the conditions for its own self-representation. The method of Naturphilosophie is fundamentally a priori: it begins with the concept of the unity of nature and accounts for its diversity by interpreting nature as a system of opposed forces or “polarities,” which manifest themselves in ever more complex levels of organization Potenzen. At Jena, Schelling came into contact with Tieck, Novalis, and the Schlegel brothers and became interested in art. This new interest is evident in his System des transzendentalen Idealismus 1800, which describes the path from pure subjectivity self-consciousness to objectivity the necessary positing of the Not-I, or of nature. The most innovative and influential portion of this treatise, which is otherwise closely modeled on Fichte’s Wissenschaftslehre, is its conclusion, which presents art as the concrete accomplishment of the philosophical task. In aesthetic experience the identity between the subjective and the objective, the ideal and the real, becomes an object to the experiencing I itself. For Schelling, transcendental idealism and Naturphilosophie are two complementary sides or subdivisions of a larger, more encompassing system, which he dubbed the System of Identity or Absolute Idealism and expounded in a series of publications, including the Darstellung meines Systems der Philosophie “Presentation of My System of Philosophy,” 1801, Bruno 1802, and Vorlesungen über die Methode des akademischen Studiums “Lectures on the Method of Academic Study,” 1803. The most distinctive feature of this system is that it begins with a bald assertion of the unity of thought and being, i.e., with the bare idea of the self-identical “Absolute,” which is described as the first presupposition of all knowledge. Since the identity with which this system commences transcends every conceivable difference, it is also described as the “point of indifference.” From this undifferentiated or “indifferent” starting point, Schelling proceeds to a description of reality as a whole, considered as a differentiated system within which unity is maintained by various synthetic relationships, such as substance and attribute, cause and effect, attraction and repulsion. Like his philosophy of nature, Schelling’s System of Identity utilizes the notion of various hierarchically related Potenzen as its basic organizing principle. The obvious question concerns the precise relationship between the “indifferent” Absolute and the real system of differentiated elements, a question that may be said to have set the agenda for Schelling’s subsequent philosophizing. From 1803 to 1841 Schelling was in Bavaria, where he continued to expound his System of Identity and to explore the philosophies of art and nature. The most distinctive feature of his thought during this period, however, was a new interest in religion and in the theosophical writings of Boehme, whose influence is prominent in the Philosophische Untersuchungen über das Wesen der menschlichen Freiheit “Philosophical Investigations concerning the Nature of Human Freedom,” 1809, a work often interpreted as anticipating existentialism. He also worked on a speculative interpretation of human history, Die Weltalter, which remained unpublished, and lectured regularly on the history of philosophy. In 1841 Schelling moved to Berlin, where he lectured on his new philosophy of revelation and mythology, which he now characterized as “positive philosophy,” in contradistinction to the purely “negative” philosophy of Kant, Fichte, and Hegel. Some scholars have interpreted these posthumously published lectures as representing the culmination both of Schelling’s own protracted philosophical development and of G. idealism as a whole. 

Schema (Latin ‘figura,’ as in Grice, ‘figure of speech’), also schema plural: schemata, a metalinguistic frame or template used to specify an infinite set of sentences, its instances, by finite means, often taken with a side condition on how its blanks or placeholders are to be filled. The sentence ‘Either Abe argues or it is not the case that Abe argues’ is an instance of the excluded middle scheme for English: ‘Either . . . or it is not the case that . . .’, where the two blanks are to be filled with one and the same well-formed declarative English sentence. Since first-order number theory cannot be finitely axiomatized, the mathematical induction scheme is used to effectively specify an infinite set of axioms: ‘If zero is such that . . . and the successor of every number such that . . . is also such that . . . , then every number is such that . . .’, where the four blanks are to be filled with one and the same arithmetic open sentence, such as ‘it precedes its own successor’ or ‘it is finite’. Among the best-known is Tarski’s scheme T: ‘. . . is a true sentence if and only if . . .’, where the second blank is filled with a sentence and the first blank by a name of the sentence. 

Schiller, Johann Christoph Friedrich von, G. poet, dramatist, and philosopher. Along with his colleagues Reinhold and Fichte, he participated in systematically revising Kant’s transcendental idealism. Though Schiller’s bestknown theoretical contributions were to aesthetics, his philosophical ambitions were more general, and he proposed a novel solution to the problem of the systematic unity, not merely of the critical philosophy, but of human nature. His most substantial philosophical work, Briefe über die äesthetische Erziehung des Menschen “Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man,” 1794/95, examines the relationship between natural necessity and practical freedom and addresses two problems raised by Kant: How can a creature governed by natural necessity and desire ever become aware of its own freedom and thus capable of autonomous moral action? And how can these two sides of human nature  the natural, sensuous side and the rational, supersensuous one  be reconciled? In contradistinction both to those who subordinate principles to feelings “savages” and to those who insist that one should strive to subordinate feelings to principles “barbarians”, Schiller posited an intermediary realm between the sphere of nature and that of freedom, as well as a third basic human drive capable of mediating between sensuous and rational impulses. This third impulse is dubbed the “play impulse,” and the intermediary sphere to which it pertains is that of art and beauty. By cultivating the play impulse i.e., via “aesthetic education” one is not only freed from bondage to sensuality and granted a first glimpse of one’s practical freedom, but one also becomes capable of reconciling the rational and sensuous sides of one’s own nature. This idea of a condition in which opposites are simultaneously cancelled and preserved, as well as the specific project of reconciling freedom and necessity, profoundly influenced subsequent thinkers such as Schelling and Hegel and contributed to the development of G. idealism. 

Schlegel, Friedrich von, G. literary critic and philosopher, one of the principal representatives of G. Romanticism. In On the Study of Grecian Poetry 1795, Schlegel laid the foundations for the distinction of classical and Romantic literature and a pronounced consciousness of literary modernity. Together with his brother August Wilhelm, he edited the Athenaeum 17981800, the main theoretical organ of G. Romanticism, famous for its collection of fragments as a new means of critical communication. Schlegel is the originator of the Romantic theory of irony, a non-dialectical form of philosophizing and literary writing that takes its inspiration from Socratic irony and combines it with Fichte’s thought process of affirmation and negation, “self-creation” and “self-annihilation.” Closely connected wih Schlegel’s theory of irony is his theory of language and understanding hermeneutics. Critical reflection on language promotes an ironic awareness of the “necessity and impossibility of complete communication” Critical Fragments, No. 108; critical reflection on understanding reveals the amount of incomprehensibility, of “positive not-understanding” involved in every act of understanding On Incomprehensibility, 1800. Schlegel’s writings were essential for the rise of historical consciousness in G. Romanticism. His On Ancient and Modern Literature 1812 is reputed to represent the first literary history in a modern and broadly comparative fashion. His Philosophy of History 1828, together with his Philosophy of Life 1828 schema Schlegel, Friedrich von 818    818 and Philosophy of Language 1829, confront Hegel’s philosophy from the point of view of a Christian and personalistic type of philosophizing. Schlegel converted to Catholicism in 1808. 

Schleiermacher, F. G. philosopher, a “critical realist” working among post-Kantian idealists. In philosophy and science he presupposed transcendental features, noted in his dialectic lectures, and advocated integrative but historically contingent, empirical functions. Both develop, but, contra Hegel, not logically. Schleiermacher was a creator of modern general hermeneutics; a father of modern theological and religious studies; an advocate of women’s rights; the cofounder, with Humboldt, of the  at Berlin 180810, where he taught until 1834; and the classic translator of Plato into G.. Schleiermacher has had an undeservedly minor place in histories of philosophy. Appointed chiefly to theology, he published less philosophy, though he regularly lectured, in tightly argued discourse, in Grecian philosophy, history of philosophy, dialectic, hermeneutics and criticism, philosophy of mind “psychology”, ethics, politics, aesthetics, and philosophy of education. From the 0s, his collected writings and large correspondence began to appear in a forty-volume critical edition and in the larger Schleiermacher Studies and Translations series. Brilliant, newly available pieces from his twenties on freedom, the highest good, and values, previously known only in fragments but essential for understanding his views fully, were among the first to appear. Much of his outlook was formed before he became prominent in the early Romantic circle 17961806, distinguishable by his markedly religious, consistently liberal views.

Scholasticism, a set of scholarly and instructional techniques developed in Western European schools of the late medieval period, including the use of commentary and disputed question. ‘Scholasticism’ is derived from Latin scholasticus, which in the twelfth century meant the master of a school. The Scholastic method is usually presented as beginning in the law schools  notably at Bologna  and as being then transported into theology and philosophy by a series of masters including Abelard and Peter Lombard. Within the new universities of the thirteenth century the standardization of the curriculum and the enormous prestige of Aristotle’s work despite the suspicion with which it was initially greeted contributed to the entrenchment of the method and it was not until the educational reforms of the beginning of the sixteenth century that it ceased to be dominant. There is, strictly speaking, no such thing as Scholasticism. As the term was originally used it presupposed that a single philosophy was taught in the universities of late medieval Europe, but there was no such philosophy. The philosophical movements working outside the universities in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries and the “neo-Scholastics” of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries all found such a presupposition useful, and their influence led scholars to assume it. At first this generated efforts to find a common core in the philosophies taught in the late medieval schools. More recently it has led to efforts to find methods characteristic of their teaching, and to an extension of the term to the schools of late antiquity and of Byzantium. Both among the opponents of the schools in the seventeenth century and among the “neoScholastics,” ‘Scholasticism’ was supposed to designate a doctrine whose core was the doctrine of substance and accidents. As portrayed by Descartes and Locke, the Scholastics accepted the view that among the components of a thing were a substantial form and a number of real accidental forms, many of which corresponded to perceptible properties of the thing  its color, shape, temperature. They were also supposed to have accepted a sharp distinction between natural and unnatural motion. 

Schopenhauer, Arthur, G. philosopher. Born in Danzig and schooled in G.y, France, and England during a welltraveled childhood, he became acquainted through his novelist mother with Goethe, Schlegel, and the brothers Grimm. He studied medicine at the  of Göttingen and philosophy at the  of Berlin; received the doctorate from the  of Jena in 1813; and lived much of his adult life in Frankfurt, where he died. Schopenhauer’s dissertation, On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason 1813, lays the groundwork for all of his later philosophical work. The world of representation equivalent to Kant’s phenomenal world is governed by “the principle of sufficient reason”: “every possible object . . . stands in a necessary relation to other objects, on the one hand as determined, on the other as determining” The World as Will and Representation. Thus, each object of consciousness can be explained in terms of its relations with other objects. The systematic statement of Schopenhauer’s philosophy appeared in The World as Will and Representation 1818. His other works are On Vision and Colors 1815, “On the Will in Nature” 1836, conjoined with “On the Foundation of Morality” in The Two Fundamental Problems of Ethics 1841; the second edition of The World as Will and Representation, which included a second volume of essays 1844; an enlarged and revised edition of On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason 1847; and Parerga and Paralipomena, a series of essays 1851. These are all consistent with the principal statement of his thought in The World as Will and Representation. The central postulate of Schopenhauer’s system is that the fundamental reality is will, which he equates with the Kantian thing-in-itself. Unlike Kant, Schopenhauer contends that one can immediately know the thing-in-itself through the experience of an inner, volitional reality within one’s own body. Every phenomenon, according to Schopenhauer, has a comparable inner reality. Consequently, the term ‘will’ can extend to the inner nature of all things. Moreover, because number pertains exclusively to the phenomenal world, the will, as thing-initself, is one. Nevertheless, different types of things manifest the will to different degrees. Schopenhauer accounts for these differences by invoking Plato’s Ideas or Forms. The Ideas are the universal prototypes for the various kinds of objects in the phenomenal world. Taken collectively, the Ideas constitute a hierarchy. We usually overlook them in everyday experience, focusing instead on particulars and their practical relationships to us. However, during aesthetic experience, we recognize the universal Idea within the particular; simultaneously, as aesthetic beholders, we become “the universal subject of knowledge.” Aesthetic experience also quiets the will within us. The complete silencing of the will is, for Schopenhauer, the ideal for human beings, though it is rarely attained. Because will is the fundamental metaphysical principle, our lives are dominated by willing  and, consequently, filled with struggle, conflict, and dissatisfaction. Inspired by Buddhism, Schopenhauer contends that all of life is suffering, which only an end to desire can permanently eliminate as opposed to the respite of aesthetic experience. This is achieved only by the saint, who rejects desire in an inner act termed “denial of the will to live.” The saint fully grasps that the same will motivates all phenomena and, recognizing that nothing is gained through struggle and competition, achieves “resignation.” Such a person achieves the ethical ideal of all religions  compassion toward all beings, resulting from the insight that all are, fundamentally, one. 

Schröder-Bernstein theorem, the theorem that mutually dominant sets are equinumerous. A set A is said to be dominated by a set B if and only if each element of A can be mapped to a unique element of B in such a way that no two elements of A are mapped to the same element of B possibly with some elements of B left over. Intuitively, if A is dominated by B, then B has at least as many members as A. Given this intuition, one would expect that if A is dominated by B and B is dominated by A, then A and B are equinumerous i.e., A can be mapped to B as described above with no elements of B left over. This is the Schröder-Bernstein theorem. Stated in terms of cardinal numbers, the theorem says that if k m l and l m k, then k % l. Despite the simplicity of the theorem’s statement, its proof is non-trivial. 

Schrödinger, Erwin, Austrian physicist best known for five papers published in 6, in which he discovered the Schrödinger wave equation and created modern wave mechanics. For this achievement, he was awarded the Nobel prize in physics shared with Paul Dirac in 3. Like Einstein, Schrödinger was a resolute but ultimately unsuccessful critic of the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics. Schrödinger defended the view which he derived from Boltzmann that theories should give a picture, continuous in space and time, of the real processes that produce observable phenomena. Schrödinger’s realistic philosophy of science played an important role in his discovery of wave mechanics. Although his physical interpretation of the psi function was soon abandoned, his approach to quantum mechanics survives in the theories of Louis de Broglie and David Bohm. 

.Schulze, Gottlob Ernst, G. philosopher today known mainly as an acute and influential early critic of Kant and Reinhold. He taught at Wittenberg, Helmstedt, and Göttingen; one of his most important students was Schopenhauer, whose view of Kant was definitely influenced by Schulze’s interpretation. Schulze’s most important work was his Aenesidemus, or “On the Elementary Philosophy Put Forward by Mr. Reinhold in Jena. Together with a Defense of Skepticism” 1792. It fundamentally changed the discussion of Kantian philosophy. Kant’s earliest critics had accused him of being a skeptic like Hume. Kantians, like Reinhold, had argued that critical philosophy was not only opposed to skepticism, but also contained the only possible refutation of skepticism. Schulze tried to show that Kantianism could not refute skepticism, construed as the doctrine that doubts the possibility of any knowledge concerning the existence or non-existence of “things-in-themselves,” and he argued that Kant and his followers begged the skeptic’s question by presupposing that such things exist and causally interact with us. Schulze’s Aenesidemus had a great impact on Fichte and Hegel, and it also influenced neoKantianism.

realism, the view that the subject matter of common sense or scientific research and scientific theories exists independently of our knowledge of it, and that the goal of science is the description and explanation of both observable and unobservable aspects of the world. Scientific realism is contrasted with logical empiricism and social constructivism. Early arguments for scientific realism simply stated that, in light of the impressive products and methods of science, realism is the only philosophy that does not make the success of science a miracle. Formulations of scientific realism focus on the objects of theoretical knowledge: theories, laws, and entities. One especially robust argument for scientific realism due to Putnam and Richard Boyd is that the instrumental reliability of scientific methodology in the mature sciences such as physics, chemistry, and some areas of biology can be explained adequately only if we suppose that theories in the mature sciences are at least approximately true and their central theoretical terms are at least partially referential Putnam no longer holds this view. More timid versions of scientific realism do not infer approximate truth of mature theories. For example, Ian Hacking’s “entity realism” 3 asserts that the instrumental manipulation of postulated entities to produce further effects gives us legitimate grounds for ontological commitment to theoretical entities, but not to laws or theories. Paul Humphreys’s “austere realism” 9 states that only theoretical commitment to unobserved structures or dispositions could explain the stability of observed outcomes of scientific inquiry. Distinctive versions of scientific realism can be found in works by Richard Boyd 3, Philip Kitcher 3, Richard Miller 7, William Newton-Smith 1, and J. D. Trout 8. Despite their differences, all of these versions of realism are distinguished  against logical empiricism  by their commitment that knowledge of unobservable phenomena is not only possible but actual. As well, all of the arguments for scientific realism are abductive; they argue that either the approximate truth of background theories or the existence of theoretical entities and laws provides the best explanation for some significant fact about the scientific theory or practice. Scientific realists address the difference between real entities and merely useful constructs, arguing that realism offers a better explanation for the success of science. In addition, scientific realism recruits evidence from the history and practice of science, and offers explanations for the success of science that are designed to honor the dynamic and uneven character of that evidence. Most arguments for scientific realism cohabit with versions of naturalism. Anti-realist opponents argue that the realist move from instrumental reliability to truth is question-begging. However, realists reply that such formal criticisms are irrelevant; the structure of explanationist arguments is inductive and their principles are a posteriori. 

scope, the “part” of the sentence or proposition to which a given term “applies” under a given interpretation of the sentence. If the sentence ‘Abe does not believe Ben died’ is interpreted as expressing the proposition that Abe believes that it is not the case that Ben died, the scope of ‘not’ is ‘Ben died’; interpreted as “It is not the case that Abe believes that Ben died,” the scope is the rest of the sentence, i.e., ‘Abe believes Ben died’. In the first case we have narrow scope, in the second wide scope. If ‘Every number is not even’ is interpreted with narrow scope, it expresses the false proposition that every number is non-even, which is logically equivalent to the proposition that no number is even. Taken with wide scope it expresses the truth that not every number is even, which is equivalent to the truth that some number is non-even. Under normal interpretations of the sentences, ‘hardened’ has narrow scope in ‘Carl is a hardened recidivist’, whereas ‘alleged’ has wide scope in ‘Dan is an alleged criminal’. Accordingly, ‘Carl is a hardened recidivist’ logically implies ‘Carl is a recidivist’, whereas ‘Dan is an alleged criminal’, being equivalent to ‘Allegedly, Dan is a criminal’, does not imply ‘Dan is a criminal’. Scope considerations are useful in analyzing structural ambiguity and in understanding the difference between the grammatical form of a sentence and the logical form of a proposition it expresses. In a logically perfect language grammatical form mirrors logical form, there is no scope ambiguity, and the scope of a given term is uniquely determined by its context. 

Scottish common sense philosophy, a comprehensive philosophical position developed by Reid in the latter part of the eighteenth century. Reid’s views were propagated by a succession of Scottish popularizers, of whom the most successful was Dugald Stewart. Through them common sense doctrine became nearly a philosophical orthodoxy in Great Britain during the first half of the nineteenth century. Brought to the United States through the s in Princeton and Philadelphia, common sensism continued to be widely taught until the later nineteenth century. The early Reidians Beattie and Oswald were, like Reid himself, read in G.y by Kant and others; and Reid’s views were widely taught in post-Napoleonic France. The archenemy for the common sense theorists was Hume. Reid saw in his skepticism the inevitable outcome of Descartes’s thesis, accepted by Locke, that we do not perceive external objects directly, but that the immediate object of perception is something in the mind. Against this he argued that perception involves both sensation and certain intuitively known general truths or principles that together yield knowledge of external objects. He also argued that there are many other intuitively known general principles, including moral principles, available to all normal humans. As a result he thought that whenever philosophical argument results in conclusions that run counter to common sense, the philosophy must be wrong. Stewart made some changes in Reid’s acute and original theory, but his main achievement was to propagate it through eloquent classes and widely used textbooks. Common sensism, defending the considered views of the ordinary man, was taken by many to provide a defense of the Christian religious and moral status quo. Reid had argued for free will, and presented a long list of self-evident moral axioms. If this might be plausibly presented as part of the common sense of his time, the same could not be said for some of the religious doctrines that Oswald thought equally self-evident. Reid had not given any rigorous tests for what might count as selfevident. The easy intuitionism of later common sensists was a natural target for those who, like J. S. Mill, thought that any appeal to self-evidence was simply a way of justifying vested interest. Whewell, in both his philosophy of science and his ethics, and Sidgwick, in his moral theory, acknowledged debts to Reid and tried to eliminate the abuses to which his method was open. But in doing so they transformed common sensism beyond the limits within which Reid and those shaped by him operated. 

Searle, John R. b.2,  philosopher of language and mind D. Phil., Oxford influenced by Frege, Vitters, and J. L. Austin; a founder of speech act theory and an important contributor to debates on intentionality, consciousness, and institutional facts. Language. In Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language 9, Searle brings together modified versions of Frege’s distinctions between the force F and content P of a sentence, and between singular reference and predication, Austin’s analysis of speech acts, and Grice’s analysis of speaker meaning. Searle explores the hypothesis that the semantics of a natural language can be regarded as a conventional realization of underlying constitutive rules and that illocutionary acts are acts performed in accordance with these rules. Expression and Meaning 9 extends this analysis to non-literal and indirect illocutionary acts, and attempts to explain Donnellan’s referential-attributive distinction in these terms and proposes an influential taxonomy of five basic types of illocutionary acts based on the illocutionary point or purpose of the act, and word-to-world versus world-toword direction of fit. Language and mind. Intentionality: An Essay in the Philosophy of Mind 3 forms the foundation for the earlier work on speech acts. Now the semantics of a natural language is seen as the result of the mind intrinsic intentionality imposing conditions of satisfaction or aboutness on objects expressions in a language, which have intentionality only derivatively. Perception and action rather than belief are taken as fundamental. Satisfaction conditions are essentially Fregean i.e. general versus singular and internal  meaning is in the head, relative to a background of non-intentional states, and relative to a network of other intentional states. The philosophy of language becomes a branch of the philosophy of mind. Mind. “Minds, Brains and Programs” 0 introduced the famous “Chin. room” argument against strong artificial intelligence  the view that appropriately programming a machine is sufficient for giving it intentional states. Suppose a monolingual English-speaker is working in a room producing Chin. answers to Chin. questions well enough to mimic a Chin.speaker, but by following an algorithm written in English. Such a person does not understand Chin. nor would a computer computing the same algorithm. This is true for any such algorithms because they are syntactically individuated and intentional states are semantically individuated. The Rediscovery of the Mind 2 continues the attack on the thesis that the brain is a digital computer, and develops a non-reductive “biological naturalism” on which intentionality, like the liquidity of water, is a high-level feature, which is caused by and realized in the brain. Society. The Construction of Social Reality 5 develops his realistic worldview, starting with an independent world of particles and forces, up through evolutionary biological systems capable of consciousness and intentionality, to institutions and social facts, which are created when persons impose status-features on things, which are collectively recognized and accepted. 

First-order predicate calculus with time-relative identity -- second-order logic, the logic of languages that contain, in addition to variables ranging over objects, variables ranging over properties, relations, functions, or classes of those objects. A model, or interpretation, of a formal language usually contains a domain of discourse. This domain is what the language is about, in the model in question. Variables that range over this domain are called first-order variables. If the language contains only first-order variables, it is called a first-order language, and it is within the purview of first-order logic. Some languages also contain variables that range over properties, relations, functions, or classes of members of the domain of discourse. These are second-order variables. A language that contains first-order and second-order variables, and no others, is a secondorder language. The sentence ‘There is a property shared by all and only prime numbers’ is straightforwardly rendered in a second-order language, because of the bound variable ranging over properties. There are also properties of properties, relations of properties, and the like. Consider, e.g., the property of properties expressed by ‘P has an infinite extension’ or the relation expressed by ‘P has a smaller extension than Q’. A language with variables ranging over such items is called thirdorder. This construction can be continued, producing fourth-order languages, etc. A language is called higher-order if it is at least second-order. Deductive systems for second-order languages are obtained from those for first-order languages by adding straightforward extensions of the axioms and rules concerning quantifiers that bind first-order variables. There may also be an axiom scheme of comprehension: DPExPx S Fx, one instance for each formula F that does not contain P free. The scheme “asserts” that every formula determines the extension of a property. If the language has variables ranging over functions, there may also be a version of the axiom of choice: ERExDyRxy P DfExRxfx. In standard semantics for second-order logic, a model of a given language is the same as a model for the corresponding first-order language. The relation variables range over every relation over the domain-of-discourse, the function variables range over every function from the domain to the domain, etc. In non-standard, or Henkin semantics, each model consists of a domain-ofdiscourse and a specified collection of relations, functions, etc., on the domain. The latter may not include every relation or function. The specified collections are the range of the second-order variables in the model in question. In effect, Henkin semantics regards second-order languages as multi-sorted, first-order languages. 

secundum quid, in a certain respect, or with a qualification. Fallacies can arise from confusing what is true only secundum quid with what is true simpliciter ‘without qualification’, ‘absolutely’, ‘on the whole’, or conversely. Thus a strawberry is red simpliciter on the whole. But it is black, not red, with respect to its seeds, secundum quid. By ignoring the distinction, one might mistakenly infer that the strawberry is both red and not red. Again, a certain thief is a good cook, secundum quid; but it does not follow that he is good simpliciter without qualification. Aristotle was the first to recognize the fallacy secundum quid et simpliciter explicitly, in his Sophistical Refutations. On the basis of some exceptionally enigmatic remarks in the same work, the liar paradox was often regarded in the Middle Ages as an instance of this fallacy. 

Auto-deception – D. F. Pears -- self-deception, 1 purposeful action to avoid unpleasant truths and painful topics about oneself or the world; 2 unintentional processes of denial, avoidance, or biased perception; 3 mental states resulting from such action or processes, such as ignorance, false belief, wishful thinking, unjustified opinions, or lack of clear awareness. Thus, parents tend to exaggerate the virtues of their children; lovers disregard clear signs of unreciprocated affection; overeaters rationalize away the need to diet; patients dying of cancer pretend to themselves that their health is improving. In some contexts ‘self-deception’ is neutral and implies no criticism. Deceiving oneself can even be desirable, generating a vital lie that promotes happiness or the ability to cope with difficulties. In other contexts ‘self-deception’ has negative connotations, suggesting bad faith, false consciousness, or what Joseph Butler called “inner hypocrisy”  the refusal to acknowledge our wrongdoing, character flaws, or onerous responsibilities. Existentialist philosophers, like Kierkegaard, Heidegger, and most notably Sartre Being and Nothingness, 3, denounced self-deception as an inauthentic dishonest, cowardly refusal to confront painful though significant truths, especially about freedom, responsibility, and death. Herbert Fingarette, however, argued that self-deception is morally ambiguous  neither clearly blameworthy nor clearly faultless  because of how it erodes capacities for acting rationally Self-Deception, 9. The idea of intentionally deceiving oneself seems paradoxical. In deceiving other people I usually know a truth that guides me as I state the opposite falsehood, intending thereby to mislead them into believing the falsehood. Five difficulties seem to prevent me from doing anything like that to myself. 1 With interpersonal deception, one person knows something that another person does not. Yet self-deceivers know the truth all along, and so it seems they cannot use it to make themselves ignorant. One solution is that self-deception occurs over time, with the initial knowledge becoming gradually eroded. Or perhaps selfdeceivers only suspect rather than know the truth, and then disregard relevant evidence. 2 If consciousness implies awareness of one’s own conscious acts, then a conscious intention to deceive myself would be self-defeating, for I would remain conscious of the truth I wish to flee. Sartre’s solution was to view self-deception as spontaneous and not explicitly reflected upon. Freud’s solution was to conceive of self-deception as unconscious repression. 3 It seems that self-deceivers believe a truth that they simultaneously get themselves not to believe, but how is that possible? Perhaps they keep one of two conflicting beliefs unconscious or not fully conscious. 4 Self-deception suggests willfully creating beliefs, but that seems impossible since beliefs cannot voluntarily be chosen. Perhaps beliefs can be indirectly manipulated by selectively ignoring and attending to evidence. 5 It seems that one part of a person the deceiver manipulates another part the victim, but such extreme splits suggest multiple personality disorders rather than self-deception. Perhaps we are composed of “subselves”  relatively unified clusters of elements in the personality. Or perhaps at this point we should jettison interpersonal deception as a model for understanding self-deception.  .

auto-determination -- self-determination, the autonomy possessed by a community when it is politically independent; in a strict sense, territorial sovereignty. Within international law, the principle of self-determination appears to grant every people a right to be self-determining, but there is controversy over its interpretation. Applied to established states, the principle calls for recognition of state sovereignty and non-intervention in internal affairs. By providing for the self-determination of subordinate communities, however, it can generate demands for secession that conflict with existing claims of sovereignty. Also, what non-self-governing groups qualify as beneficiaries? The national interpretation of the principle treats cultural or national units as the proper claimants, whereas the regional interpretation confers the right of self-determination upon the populations of well-defined regions regardless of cultural or national affiliations. This difference reflects the roots of the principle in the doctrines of nationalism and popular sovereignty, respectively, but complicates its application. 

self-evidence, the property of being self-evident. Only true propositions or truths are self-evident, though false propositions can appear to be self-evident. It is widely held that a true proposition is self-evident if and only if one would be justified in believing it if one adequately understood it. Some would also require that self-evident propositions are known if believed on the basis of such an understanding. Some self-evident propositions are obvious, such as the proposition that all stags are male, but others are not, since it may take considerable reflection to achieve an adequate understanding of them. That slavery is wrong and that there is no knowledge of falsehoods are perhaps examples of the latter. Not all obvious propositions are self-evident, e.g., it is obvious that a stone will fall if dropped, but adequate understanding of that claim does not by itself justify one in believing it. An obvious proposition is one that immediately seems true for anyone who adequately understands it, but its obviousness may rest on wellknown and commonly accepted empirical facts, not on understanding. All analytic propositions are self-evident but not all self-evident propositions are analytic. The propositions that if A is older than B, then B is younger than A, and that no object can be red and green all over at the same time and in the same respects, are arguably self-evident but not analytic. All self-evident propositions are necessary, for one could not be justified in believing a contingent proposition simply in virtue of understanding it. However, not all necessary propositions are self-evident, e.g., that water is H2O and that temperature is the measure of the molecular activity in substances are necessary but not self-evident. A proposition can appear to be selfevident even though it is not. For instance, the proposition that all unmarried adult males are bachelors will appear self-evident to many until they consider that the pope is such a male. A proposition may appear self-evident to some but not to others, even though it must either have or lack the property of being self-evident. Self-evident propositions are knowable non-empirically, or a priori, but some propositions knowable a priori are not self-evident, e.g., certain conclusions of long and difficult chains of mathematical reasoning. 

self-presenting, in the philosophy of Meinong, having the ability  common to all mental states  to be immediately present to our thought. In Meinong’s view, no mental state can be presented to our thought in any other way  e.g., indirectly, via a Lockean “idea of reflection.” The only way to apprehend a mental state is to experience or “live through” it. The experience involved in the apprehension of an external object has thus a double presentational function: 1 via its “content” it presents the object to our thought; 2 as its own “quasi-content” it presents itself immediately to our thought. In the contemporary era, Roderick Chisholm has based his account of empirical knowledge in part on a related concept of the self-presenting. In Chisholm’s sense  the definition of which we omit here  all self-presenting states are mental, but not conversely; for instance, being depressed because of the death of one’s spouse would not be self-presenting. In Chisholm’s epistemology, self-presenting states are a source of certainty in the following way: if F is a self-presenting state, then to be certain that one is in state F it is sufficient that one is, and believes oneself to be in state F. 

auto-phoric -- self-referential incoherence, an internal defect of an assertion or theory, which it possesses provided that a it establishes some requirement that must be met by assertions or theories, b it is itself subject to this requirement, and c it fails to meet the requirement. The most famous example is logical positivism’s meaning criterion, which requires that all meaningful assertions be either tautological or empirically verifiable, yet is itself neither. A possible early example is found in Hume, whose own writings might have been consigned to the flames had librarians followed his counsel to do so with volumes that contain neither “abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number” nor “experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence.” Bold defiance was shown by Vitters, who, realizing that the propositions of the Tractatus did not “picture” the world, advised the reader to “throw away the ladder after he has climbed up it.” An epistemological example is furnished by any foundationalist theory that establishes criteria for rational acceptability that the theory itself cannot meet. 

self-reproducing automaton, a formal model of self-reproduction of a kind introduced by von Neumann. He worked with an intuitive robot model and then with a well-defined cellular automaton model. Imagine a class of robotic automata made of robot parts and operating in an environment of such parts. There are computer parts switches, memory elements, wires, input-output parts sensing elements, display elements, action parts grasping and moving elements, joining and cutting elements, and straight bars to maintain structure and to employ in a storage tape. There are also energy sources that enable the robots to operate and move around. These five categories of parts are sufficient for the construction of robots that can make objects of various kinds, including other robots. These parts also clearly suffice for making a robot version of any finite automaton. Sensing and acting parts can then be added to this robot so that it can make an indefinitely expandable storage tape from straight bars. A “blank tape” consists of bars joined in sequence, and the robot stores information on this tape by attaching bars or not at the junctions. If its finite automaton part can execute programs and is sufficiently powerful, such a robot is a universal computing robot cf. a universal Turing machine. A universal computing robot can be augmented to form a universal constructing robot  a robot that can construct any robot, given its description. Let r be any robot with an indefinitely expandable tape, let Fr be the description of its finite part, and let Tr be the information on its tape. Now take a universal computing robot and augment it with sensing and acting devices and with programs so that when Fr followed by Tr is written on its tape, this augmented universal computer performs as follows. First, it reads the description Fr, finds the needed parts, and constructs the finite part of r. Second, it makes a blank tape, attaches it to the finite part of r, and then copies the information Tr from its own tape onto the new tape. This augmentation of a universal computing robot is a universal constructor. For when it starts with the information Fr,Tr written on its tape, it will construct a copy of r with Tr on its tape. Robot self-reproduction results from applying the universal constructor to itself. Modify the universal constructor slightly so that when only a description Fr is written on its tape, it constructs the finite part of r and then attaches a tape with Fr written on it. Call this version of the universal constructor Cu. Now place Cu’s description FCu on its own tape and start it up. Cu first reads this description and constructs a copy of the finite part of itself in an empty region of the cellular space. Then it adds a blank tape to the new construction and copies FCu onto it. Hence Cu with FCu on its tape has produced another copy of Cu with FCu on its tape. This is automaton self-reproduction. This robot model of self-reproduction is very general. To develop the logic of self-reproduction further, von Neumann first extended the concept of a finite automaton to that of an infinite cellular automaton consisting of an array or “space” of cells, each cell containing the same finite automaton. He chose an infinite checkerboard array for modeling self-reproduction, and he specified a particular twenty-nine-state automaton for each square cell. Each automaton is connected directly to its four contiguous neighbors, and communication between neighbors takes one or two time-steps. The twenty-nine states of a cell fall into three categories. There is a blank state to represent the passivity of an empty area. There are twelve states for switching, storage, and communication, from which any finite automaton can be constructed in a sufficiently large region of cells. And there are sixteen states for simulating the activities of construction and destruction. Von Neumann chose these twenty-nine states in such a way that an area of non-blank cells could compute and grow, i.e., activate a path of cells out to a blank region and convert the cells of that region into a cellular automaton. A specific cellular automaton is embedded in this space by the selection of the initial states of a finite area of cells, all other cells being left blank. A universal computer consists of a sufficiently powerful finite automaton with a tape. The tape is an indefinitely long row of cells in which bits are represented by two different cell states. The finite automaton accesses these cells by means of a construction arm that it extends back and forth in rows of cells contiguous to the tape. When activated, this finite automaton will execute programs stored on its tape. A universal constructor results from augmenting the universal computer cf. the robot model. Another construction arm is added, together with a finite automaton controller to operate it. The controller sends signals into the arm to extend it out to a blank region of the cellular space, to move around that region, and to change the states of cells in that region. After the universal constructor has converted the region into a cellular automaton, it directs the construction arm to activate the new automaton and then withdraw from it. Cellular automaton selfreproduction results from applying the universal constructor to itself, as in the robot model. Cellular automata are now studied extensively by humans working interactively with computers as abstract models of both physical and organic systems. See Arthur W. Burks, “Von Neumann’s Self-Reproducing Automata,” in Papers of John von Neumann on Computers and Computer Theory, edited by William Aspray and Arthur Burks, 7. The study of artificial life is an outgrowth of computer simulations of cellular automata and related automata. Cellular automata organizations are sometimes used in highly parallel computers. 

Sellars, W., philosopher, son of Roy Wood Sellars, and one of the great systematic philosophers of the century. His most influential and representative works are “Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind” 6 and “Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man” 0. The Sellarsian system may be outlined as follows. The myth of the given. Thesis 1: Classical empiricism foundationalism maintains that our belief in the commonsense, objective world of physical objects is ultimately justified only by the way that world presents itself in sense experience. Thesis 2: It also typically maintains that sense experience a is not part of that world and b is not a form of conceptual cognition like thinking or believing. Thesis 3: From 1 and 2a classical empiricism concludes that our knowledge of the physical world is inferred from sense experience. Thesis 4: Since inferences derive knowledge from knowledge, sense experience itself must be a form of knowledge. Theses 14 collectively are the doctrine of the given. Each thesis taken individually is plausible. However, Sellars argues that 2b and 4 are incompatible if, as he thinks, knowledge is a kind of conceptual cognition. Concluding that the doctrine of the given is false, he maintains that classical empiricism is a myth. The positive system. From an analysis of theoretical explanation in the physical sciences, Sellars concludes that postulating theoretical entities is justified only if theoretical laws  nomological generalizations referring to theoretical entities  are needed to explain particular observable phenomena for which explanation in terms of exceptionless observation laws is unavailable. While rejecting any classical empiricist interpretation of observation, Sellars agrees that some account of non-inferential knowledge is required to make sense of theoretical explanation thus conceived. He thinks that utterances made in direct response to sensory stimuli observational reports count as non-inferential knowledge when a they possess authority, i.e., occur in conditions ensuring that they reliably indicate some physical property say, shape in the environment and are accepted by the linguistic community as possessing this quality; and b the utterer has justified belief that they possess this authority. Sellars claims that some perceptual conditions induce ordinary people to make observation reports inconsistent with established explanatory principles of the commonsense framework. We thus might tend to report spontaneously that an object is green seen in daylight and blue seen indoors, and yet think it has not undergone any process that could change its color. Sellars sees in such conflicting tendencies vestiges of a primitive conceptual framework whose tensions have been partially resolved by introducing the concept of sense experiences. These experiences count as theoretical entities, since they are postulated to account for observational phenomena for which no exceptionless observation laws exist. This example may serve as a paradigm for a process of theoretical explanation occurring in the framework of commonsense beliefs that Sellars calls the manifest image, a process that itself is a model for his theory of the rational dynamics of conceptual change in both the manifest image and in science  the scientific image. Because the actual process of conceptual evolution in Homo sapiens may not fit this pattern of rational dynamics, Sellars treats these dynamics as occurring within certain hypothetical ideal histories myths of the way in which, from certain conceptually primitive beginnings, one might have come to postulate the requisite theoretical explanations. The manifest image, like the proto-theories from which it arose, is itself subject to various tensions ultimately resolved in the scientific image. Because this latter image contains a metaphysical theory of material objects and persons that is inconsistent with that of its predecessor framework, Sellars regards the manifest image as replaced by its successor. In terms of the Peircean conception of truth that Sellars endorses, the scientific image is the only true image. In this sense Sellars is a scientific realist. There is, however, also an important sense in which Sellars is not a scientific realist: despite discrediting classical empiricism, he thinks that the intrinsic nature of sense experience gives to conceptualization more than simply sensory stimulus yet less than the content of knowledge claims. Inspired by Kant, Sellars treats the manifest image as a Kantian phenomenal world, a world that exists as a cognitive construction which, though lacking ideal factual truth, is guided in part by intrinsic features of sense experience. This is not analytic phenomenalism, which Sellars rejects. Moreover, the special methodological role for sense experience has effects even within the scientific image itself. Theories of mind, perception, and semantics. Mind: In the manifest image thoughts are private episodes endowed with intentionality. Called inner speech, they are theoretical entities whose causal and intentional properties are modeled, respectively, on inferential and semantic properties of overt speech. They are introduced within a behaviorist proto-theory, the Rylean framework, to provide a theoretical explanation for behavior normally accompanied by linguistically overt reasons. Perception: In the manifest image sense experiences are sense impressions  states of persons modeled on two-dimensional, colored physical replicas and introduced in the theoretical language of the adverbial theory of perception to explain why it can look as if some perceptible quality is present when it is not. Semantics: The meaning of a simple predicate p in a language L is the role played in L by p defined in terms of three sets of linguistic rules: language entry rules, intralinguistic rules, and language departure rules. This account also supports a nominalist treatment of abstract entities. Identification of a role for a token of p in L can be effected demonstratively in the speaker’s language by saying that p in L is a member of the class of predicates playing the same role as a demonstrated predicate. Thus a speaker of English might say that ‘rot’ in G. plays the semantic role ‘red’ has in English. Sellars sees science and metaphysics as autonomous strands in a single web of philosophical inquiry. Sellarsianism thus presents an important alternative to the view that what is fundamentally real is determined by the logical structure of scientific language alone. Sellars also sees ordinary language as expressing a commonsense framework of beliefs constituting a kind of proto-theory with its own methods, metaphysics, and theoretical entities. Thus, he also presents an important alternative to the view that philosophy concerns not what is ultimately real, but what words like ‘real’ ultimately mean in ordinary language. 

semantics: Grice was careful with what he felt was an abuse of ‘semantic’ – v. Evans: “Meaning and truth: essayis in semantics.” “Well, that’s what ‘meaning’ means, right?” The semantics is more reated to the signatum than to the significatum. The Grecians did not have anything remotely similar to the significatum, which is all about the making (facere) of a sign (as in Grice’s example of the handwave). This is the meaning Grice gives to ‘semantics.’ There is no need for the handwave to be part of a system of communication, or have syntactic structure, or be ‘arbitrary.’ Still, one thing is communicated from the emissor to his recipient, and that is all count. “I know the route” is the message, or “I will leave you soon.” The handwave may be ambiguous. Grice is aware that formalists like Hilbert and Gentzen think that they can do without semantics – but as long as there is something ‘transmitted,’ or ‘messaged,’ it cannot. In the one-off predicament, Emissor E emits x and communicates that p. Since an intention with a content involving a psychological state is involved and attached, even in a one-off, to ‘x,’ we can legitimately say the scenario may be said to describe a ‘semantic’ phenomenon. Grice would freely use ‘semantic,’ and the root for ‘semantics,’ that Grice does use, involves the richest root of all Grecian roots: the ‘semion.’ Liddell and Scott have “τό σημεῖον,” Ion. σημήϊον , Dor. σα_μήϊον IG12(3).452 (Thera, iv B.C.), σα_μεῖον IPE12.352.25 (Chersonesus, ii B.C.), IG5(1).1390.16 (Andania, i B.C.), σα_μᾶον CIG5168 (Cyrene); = σῆμα in all senses, and more common in Prose, but never in Hom. or Hes.; and which they render as “mark by which a thing is known,” Hdt.2.38;” they also have “τό σῆμα,” Dor. σᾶμα Berl.Sitzb.1927.161 (Cyrene), etc.; which they render as “sign, mark, token,” “ Il.10.466, 23.326, Od.19.250, etc.” Grice lectured not only on Cat. But the next, De Int. As Arsitotle puts it, an expression is a symbol (symbolon) or sign (semeion) of an affections or impression (pathematon) of the soul (psyche). An affection of the soul, of which a word is  primarily a sign, are the same for the whole of mankind, as is also objects (pragmaton) of which the affections is a representation or likenes, image, or copiy (homoiomaton).  [De Int., 1.16a4]  while Grice is NOT concerned about the semantics of utterers meaning (how could he, when he analyses  means  in terms of  intends , he is about the semantics of  expression-meaning. Grices second stage (expression meaing) of his programme about meaning begins with specifications of means as applied to x, a token of X. He is having Tarski and Davidson in their elaborations of schemata like ‘p’ ‘means’ that p. ‘Snow is white’ ‘means’ that snow is white, and stuff! Grice was especially concerned with combinatories, for both unary and dyadic operators, and with multiple quantifications within a first-order predicate calculus with identity. Since in Grice’s initial elaboration on meaning he relies on Stevenson, it is worth exploring how ‘semantics’ and ‘semiotics’ were interpreted by Peirce and the emotivists. Stevenson’s main source is however in the other place, though, under Stevenson. Semantics – communication – H. P. Grice, “Implicaturum and Explicature: The basis of communication” – “Communication and Intention” -- philosophy of language, the philosophical study of natural language and its workings, particularly of linguistic meaning and the use of language. A natural language is any one of the thousands of various tongues that have developed historically among populations of human beings and have been used for everyday purposes  including English, , Swahili, and Latin  as opposed to the formal and other artificial “languages” invented by mathematicians, logicians, and computer scientists, such as arithmetic, the predicate calculus, and LISP or COBOL. There are intermediate cases, e.g., Esperanto, Pig Latin, and the sort of “philosophese” that mixes English words with logical symbols. Contemporary philosophy of language centers on the theory of meaning, but also includes the theory of reference, the theory of truth, philosophical pragmatics, and the philosophy of linguistics. The main question addressed by the theory of meaning is: In virtue of what are certain physical marks or noises meaningful linguistic expressions, and in virtue of what does any particular set of marks or noises have the distinctive meaning it does? A theory of meaning should also give a comprehensive account of the “meaning phenomena,” or general semantic properties of sentences: synonymy, ambiguity, entailment, and the like. Some theorists have thought to express these questions and issues in terms of languageneutral items called propositions: ‘In virtue of what does a particular set of marks or noises express the proposition it does?’; cf. ‘ “La neige est blanche” expresses the proposition that snow is white’, and ‘Synonymous sentences express the same proposition’. On this view, to understand a sentence is to “grasp” the proposition expressed by that sentence. But the explanatory role and even the existence of such entities are disputed. It has often been maintained that certain special sentences are true solely in virtue of their meanings and/or the meanings of their component expressions, without regard to what the nonlinguistic world is like ‘No bachelor is married’; ‘If a thing is blue it is colored’. Such vacuously true sentences are called analytic. However, Quine and others have disputed whether there really is such a thing as analyticity. Philosophers have offered a number of sharply competing hypotheses as to the nature of meaning, including: 1 the referential view that words mean by standing for things, and that a sentence means what it does because its parts correspond referentially to the elements of an actual or possible state of affairs in the world; 2 ideational or mentalist theories, according to which meanings are ideas or other psychological phenomena in people’s minds; 3 “use” theories, inspired by Vitters and to a lesser extent by J. L. Austin: a linguistic expression’s “meaning” is its conventionally assigned role as a game-piece-like token used in one or more existing social practices; 4 H. P. Grice’s hypothesis that a sentence’s or word’s meaning is a function of what audience response a typical utterer would intend to elicit in uttering it. 5 inferential role theories, as developed by Wilfrid Sellars out of Carnap’s and Vitters’s views: a sentence’s meaning is specified by the set of sentences from which it can correctly be inferred and the set of those which can be inferred from it Sellars himself provided for “language-entry” and “language-exit” moves as partly constitutive of meaning, in addition to inferences; 6 verificationism, the view that a sentence’s meaning is the set of possible experiences that would confirm it or provide evidence for its truth; 7 the truth-conditional theory: a sentence’s meaning is the distinctive condition under which it is true, the situation or state of affairs that, if it obtained, would make the sentence true; 8 the null hypothesis, or eliminativist view, that “meaning” is a myth and there is no such thing  a radical claim that can stem either from Quine’s doctrine of the indeterminacy of translation or from eliminative materialism in the philosophy of mind. Following the original work of Carnap, Alonzo Church, Hintikka, and Richard Montague in the 0s, the theory of meaning has made increasing use of “possible worlds”based intensional logic as an analytical apparatus. Propositions sentence meanings considered as entities, and truth conditions as in 7 above, are now commonly taken to be structured sets of possible worlds  e.g., the set of worlds in which Aristotle’s maternal grandmother hates broccoli. And the structure imposed on such a set, corresponding to the intuitive constituent structure of a proposition as the concepts ‘grandmother’ and ‘hate’ are constituents of the foregoing proposition, accounts for the meaning-properties of sentences that express the proposition. Theories of meaning can also be called semantics, as in “Gricean semantics” or “Verificationist semantics,” though the term is sometimes restricted to referential and/or truth-conditional theories, which posit meaning-constitutive relations between words and the nonlinguistic world. Semantics is often contrasted with syntax, the structure of grammatically permissible ordering relations between words and other words in well-formed sentences, and with pragmatics, the rules governing the use of meaningful expressions in particular speech contexts; but linguists have found that semantic phenomena cannot be kept purely separate either from syntactic or from pragmatic phenomena. In a still more specialized usage, linguistic semantics is the detailed study typically within the truth-conditional format of particular types of construction in particular natural languages, e.g., belief-clauses in English or adverbial phrases in Kwakiutl. Linguistic semantics in that sense is practiced by some philosophers of language, by some linguists, and occasionally by both working together. Montague grammar and situation semantics are common formats for such work, both based on intensional logic. The theory of referenceis pursued whether or not one accepts either the referential or the truthconditional theory of meaning. Its main question is: In virtue of what does a linguistic expression designate one or more things in the world? Prior to theorizing and defining of technical uses, ‘designate’, ‘denote’, and ‘refer’ are used interchangeably. Denoting expressions are divided into singular terms, which purport to designate particular individual things, and general terms, which can apply to more than one thing at once. Singular terms include proper names ‘Cindy’, ‘Bangladesh’, definite descriptions ‘my brother’, ‘the first baby born in the New World’, and singular pronouns of various types ‘this’, ‘you’, ‘she’. General terms include common nouns ‘horse’, ‘trash can’, mass terms ‘water’, ‘graphite’, and plural pronouns ‘they’, ‘those’. The twentieth century’s dominant theory of reference has been the description theory, the view that linguistic terms refer by expressing descriptive features or properties, the referent being the item or items that in fact possess those properties. For example, a definite description does that directly: ‘My brother’ denotes whatever person does have the property of being my brother. According to the description theory of proper names, defended most articulately by Russell, such names express identifying properties indirectly by abbreviating definite descriptions. A general term such as ‘horse’ was thought of as expressing a cluster of properties distinctive of horses; and so forth. But the description theory came under heavy attack in the late 0s, from Keith Donnellan, Kripke, and Putnam, and was generally abandoned on each of several grounds, in favor of the causal-historical theory of reference. The causal-historical idea is that a particular use of a linguistic expression denotes by being etiologically grounded in the thing or group that is its referent; a historical causal chain of a certain shape leads backward in time from the act of referring to the referents. More recently, problems with the causal-historical theory as originally formulated have led researchers to backpedal somewhat and incorporate some features of the description theory. Other views of reference have been advocated as well, particularly analogues of some of the theories of meaning listed above  chiefly 26 and 8. Modal and propositional-attitude contexts create special problems in the theory of reference, for referring expressions seem to alter their normal semantic behavior when they occur within such contexts. Much ink has been spilled over the question of why and how the substitution of a term for another term having exactly the same referent can change the truth-value of a containing modal or propositional-attitude sentence. Interestingly, the theory of truth historically predates articulate study of meaning or of reference, for philosophers have always sought the nature of truth. It has often been thought that a sentence is true in virtue of expressing a true belief, truth being primarily a property of beliefs rather than of linguistic entities; but the main theories of truth have also been applied to sentences directly. The correspondence theory maintains that a sentence is true in virtue of its elements’ mirroring a fact or actual state of affairs. The coherence theory instead identifies truth as a relation of the true sentence to other sentences, usually an epistemic relation. Pragmatic theories have it that truth is a matter either of practical utility or of idealized epistemic warrant. Deflationary views, such as the traditional redundancy theory and D. Grover, J. Camp, and N. D. Belnap’s prosentential theory, deny that truth comes to anything more important or substantive than what is already codified in a recursive Tarskian truth-definition for a language. Pragmatics studies the use of language in context, and the context-dependence of various aspects of linguistic interpretation. First, one and the same sentence can express different meanings or propositions from context to context, owing to ambiguity or to indexicality or both. An ambiguous sentence has more than one meaning, either because one of its component words has more than one meaning as ‘bank’ has or because the sentence admits of more than one possible syntactic analysis ‘Visiting doctors can be tedious’, ‘The mouse tore up the street’. An indexical sentence can change in truth-value from context to context owing to the presence of an element whose reference fluctuates, such as a demonstrative pronoun ‘She told him off yesterday’, ‘It’s time for that meeting now’. One branch of pragmatics investigates how context determines a single propositional meaning for a sentence on a particular occasion of that sentence’s use. Speech act theory is a second branch of pragmatics that presumes the propositional or “locutionary” meanings of utterances and studies what J. L. Austin called the illocutionary forces of those utterances, the distinctive types of linguistic act that are performed by the speaker in making them. E.g., in uttering ‘I will be there tonight’, a speaker might be issuing a warning, uttering a threat, making a promise, or merely offering a prediction, depending on conventional and other social features of the situation. A crude test of illocutionary force is the “hereby” criterion: one’s utterance has the force of, say, a warning, if it could fairly have been paraphrased by the corresponding “explicitly performative” sentence beginning ‘I hereby warn you that . . .’..Speech act theory interacts to some extent with semantics, especially in the case of explicit performatives, and it has some fairly dramatic syntactic effects as well. A third branch of pragmatics not altogether separate from the second is the theory of conversation or theory of implicaturum, founded by H. P. Grice. Grice notes that sentences, when uttered in particular contexts, often generate “implications” that are not logical consequences of those sentences ‘Is Jones a good philosopher?’  ’He has very neat handwriting’. Such implications can usually be identified as what the speaker meant in uttering her sentence; thus for that reason and others, what Grice calls utterer’s meaning can diverge sharply from sentence-meaning or “timeless” meaning. To explain those non-logical implications, Grice offered a now widely accepted theory of conversational implicaturum. Conversational implicaturums arise from the interaction of the sentence uttered with mutually shared background assumptions and certain principles of efficient and cooperative conversation. The philosophy of linguistics studies the academic discipline of linguistics, particularly theoretical linguistics considered as a science or purported science; it examines methodology and fundamental assumptions, and also tries to incorporate linguists’ findings into the rest of philosophy of language. Theoretical linguistics concentrates on syntax, and took its contemporary form in the 0s under Zellig Harris and Chomsky: it seeks to describe each natural language in terms of a generative grammar for that language, i.e., a set of recursive rules for combining words that will generate all and only the “well-formed strings” or grammatical sentences of that language. The set must be finite and the rules recursive because, while our informationprocessing resources for recognizing grammatical strings as such are necessarily finite being subagencies of our brains, there is no limit in any natural language either to the length of a single grammatical sentence or to the number of grammatical sentences; a small device must have infinite generative and parsing capacity. Many grammars work by generating simple “deep structures” a kind of tree diagram, and then producing multiple “surface structures” as variants of those deep structures, by means of rules that rearrange their parts. The surface structures are syntactic parsings of natural-language sentences, and the deep structures from which they derive encode both basic grammatical relations between the sentences’ major constituents and, on some theories, the sentences’ main semantic properties as well; thus, sentences that share a deep structure will share some fundamental grammatical properties and all or most of their semantics. As Paul Ziff and Davidson saw in the 0s, the foregoing syntactic problem and its solution had semantic analogues. From small resources, human speakers understand  compute the meanings of  arbitrarily long and novel sentences without limit, and almost instantaneously. This ability seems to require semantic compositionality, the thesis that the meaning of a sentence is a function of the meanings of its semantic primitives or smallest meaningful parts, built up by way of syntactic compounding. Compositionality also seems to be required by learnability, since a normal child can learn an infinitely complex dialect in at most two years, but must learn semantic primitives one at a time. A grammar for a natural language is commonly taken to be a piece of psychology, part of an explanation of speakers’ verbal abilities and behavior. As such, however, it is a considerable idealization: it is a theory of speakers’ linguistic “competence” rather than of their actual verbal performance. The latter distinction is required by the fact that speakers’ considered, reflective judgments of grammatical correctness do not line up very well with the class of expressions that actually are uttered and understood unreflectively by those same speakers. Some grammatical sentences are too hard for speakers to parse quickly; some are too long to finish parsing at all; speakers commonly utter what they know to be formally ungrammatical strings; and real speech is usually fragmentary, interspersed with vocalizations, false starts, and the like. Actual departures from formal grammaticality are ascribed by linguists to “performance limitations,” i.e., psychological factors such as memory failure, weak computational capacity, or heedlessness; thus, actual verbal behavior is to be explained as resulting from the perturbation of competence by performance limitations.  Refs.: The main sources are his lectures on language and reality – part of them repr. in WOW. The keywords under ‘communication,’ and ‘signification,’ that Grice occasionally uses ‘the total signification’ of a remark, above, BANC. -- semantic holism, a metaphysical thesis about the nature of representation on which the meaning of a symbol is relative to the entire system of representations containing it. Thus, a linguistic expression can have meaning only in the context of a language; a hypothesis can have significance only in the context of a theory; a concept can have intentionality only in the context of the belief system. Holism about content has profoundly influenced virtually every aspect of contemporary theorizing about language and mind, not only in philosophy, but in linguistics, literary theory, artificial intelligence, psychology, and cognitive science. Contemporary semantic holists include Davidson, Quine, Gilbert Harman, Hartry Field, and Searle. Because semantic holism is a metaphysical and not a semantic thesis, two theorists might agree about the semantic facts but disagree about semantic holism. So, e.g., nothing in Tarski’s writings determines whether the semantic facts expressed by the theorems of an absolute truth semantic atomism semantic holism 829    829 theory are holistic or not. Yet Davidson, a semantic holist, argued that the correct form for a semantic theory for a natural language L is an absolute truth theory for L. Semantic theories, like other theories, need not wear their metaphysical commitments on their sleeves. Holism has some startling consequences. Consider this. Franklin D. Roosevelt who died when the United States still had just forty-eight states did not believe there were fifty states, but I do; semantic holism says that what ‘state’ means in our mouths depends on the totality of our beliefs about states, including, therefore, our beliefs about how many states there are. It seems to follow that he and I must mean different things by ‘state’; hence, if he says “Alaska is not a state” and I say “Alaska is a state” we are not disagreeing. This line of argument leads to such surprising declarations as that natural langauges are not, in general, intertranslatable Quine, Saussure; that there may be no fact of the matter about the meanings of texts Putnam, Derrida; and that scientific theories that differ in their basic postulates are “empirically incommensurable” Paul Feyerabend, Kuhn. For those who find these consequences of semantic holism unpalatable, there are three mutually exclusive responses: semantic atomism, semantic molecularism, or semantic nihilism. Semantic atomists hold that the meaning of any representation linguistic, mental, or otherwise is not determined by the meaning of any other representation. Historically, Anglo- philosophers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries thought that an idea of an X was about X’s in virtue of this idea’s physically resembling X’s. Resemblance theories are no longer thought viable, but a number of contemporary semantic atomists still believe that the basic semantic relation is between a concept and the things to which it applies, and not one among concepts themselves. These philosophers include Dretske, Dennis Stampe, Fodor, and Ruth Millikan. Semantic molecularism, like semantic holism, holds that the meaning of a representation in a language L is determined by its relationships to the meanings of other expressions in L, but, unlike holism, not by its relationships to every other expression in L. Semantic molecularists are committed to the view, contrary to Quine, that for any expression e in a language L there is an in-principle way of distinguishing between those representations in L the meanings of which determine the meaning of e and those representations in L the meanings of which do not determine the meaning of e. Traditionally, this inprinciple delimitation is supported by an analytic/synthetic distinction. Those representations in L that are meaning-constituting of e are analytically connected to e and those that are not meaning-constituting are synthetically connected to e. Meaning molecularism seems to be the most common position among those philosophers who reject holism. Contemporary meaning molecularists include Michael Devitt, Dummett, Ned Block, and John Perry. Semantic nihilism is perhaps the most radical response to the consequences of holism. It is the view that, strictly speaking, there are no semantic properties. Strictly speaking, there are no mental states; words lack meanings. At least for scientific purposes and perhaps for other purposes as well we must abandon the notion that people are moral or rational agents and that they act out of their beliefs and desires. Semantic nihilists include among their ranks Patricia and Paul Churchland, Stephen Stich, Dennett, and, sometimes, Quine.  -- semantic paradoxes, a collection of paradoxes involving the semantic notions of truth, predication, and definability. The liar paradox is the oldest and most widely known of these, having been formulated by Eubulides as an objection to Aristotle’s correspondence theory of truth. In its simplest form, the liar paradox arises when we try to assess the truth of a sentence or proposition that asserts its own falsity, e.g.: A Sentence A is not true. It would seem that sentence A cannot be true, since it can be true only if what it says is the case, i.e., if it is not true. Thus sentence A is not true. But then, since this is precisely what it claims, it would seem to be true. Several alternative forms of the liar paradox have been given their own names. The postcard paradox, also known as a liar cycle, envisions a postcard with sentence B on one side and sentence C on the other: B The sentence on the other side of this card is true. semantic molecularism semantic paradoxes 830    830 C The sentence on the other side of this card is false. Here, no consistent assignment of truth-values to the pair of sentences is possible. In the preface paradox, it is imagined that a book begins with the claim that at least one sentence in the book is false. This claim is unproblematically true if some later sentence is false, but if the remainder of the book contains only truths, the initial sentence appears to be true if and only if false. The preface paradox is one of many examples of contingent liars, claims that can either have an unproblematic truth-value or be paradoxical, depending on the truth-values of various other claims in this case, the remaining sentences in the book. Related to the preface paradox is Epimenedes’ paradox: Epimenedes, himself from Crete, is said to have claimed that all Cretans are liars. This claim is paradoxical if interpreted to mean that Cretans always lie, or if interpreted to mean they sometimes lie and if no other claim made by Epimenedes was a lie. On the former interpretation, this is a simple variation of the liar paradox; on the latter, it is a form of contingent liar. Other semantic paradoxes include Berry’s paradox, Richard’s paradox, and Grelling’s paradox. The first two involve the notion of definability of numbers. Berry’s paradox begins by noting that names or descriptions of integers consist of finite sequences of syllables. Thus the three-syllable sequence ‘twenty-five’ names 25, and the seven-syllable sequence ‘the sum of three and seven’ names ten. Now consider the collection of all sequences of English syllables that are less than nineteen syllables long. Of these, many are nonsensical ‘bababa’ and some make sense but do not name integers ‘artichoke’, but some do ‘the sum of three and seven’. Since there are only finitely many English syllables, there are only finitely many of these sequences, and only finitely many integers named by them. Berry’s paradox arises when we consider the eighteen-syllable sequence ‘the smallest integer not nameable in less than nineteen syllables’. This phrase appears to be a perfectly well-defined description of an integer. But if the phrase names an integer n, then n is nameable in less than nineteen syllables, and hence is not described by the phrase. Richard’s paradox constructs a similarly paradoxical description using what is known as a diagonal construction. Imagine a list of all finite sequences of letters of the alphabet plus spaces and punctuation, ordered as in a dictionary. Prune this list so that it contains only English definitions of real numbers between 0 and 1. Then consider the definition: “Let r be the real number between 0 and 1 whose kth decimal place is  if the kth decimal place of the number named by the kth member of this list is 1, and 0 otherwise’. This description seems to define a real number that must be different from any number defined on the list. For example, r cannot be defined by the 237th member of the list, because r will differ from that number in at least its 237th decimal place. But if it indeed defines a real number between 0 and 1, then this description should itself be on the list. Yet clearly, it cannot define a number different from the number defined by itself. Apparently, the definition defines a real number between 0 and 1 if and only if it does not appear on the list of such definitions. Grelling’s paradox, also known as the paradox of heterologicality, involves two predicates defined as follows. Say that a predicate is “autological” if it applies to itself. Thus ‘polysyllabic’ and ‘short’ are autological, since ‘polysyllabic’ is polysyllabic, and ‘short’ is short. In contrast, a predicate is “heterological” if and only if it is not autological. The question is whether the predicate ‘heterological’ is heterological. If our answer is yes, then ‘heterological’ applies to itself  and so is autological, not heterological. But if our answer is no, then it does not apply to itself  and so is heterological, once again contradicting our answer. The semantic paradoxes have led to important work in both logic and the philosophy of language, most notably by Russell and Tarski. Russell developed the ramified theory of types as a unified treatment of all the semantic paradoxes. Russell’s theory of types avoids the paradoxes by introducing complex syntactic conditions on formulas and on the definition of new predicates. In the resulting language, definitions like those used in formulating Berry’s and Richard’s paradoxes turn out to be ill-formed, since they quantify over collections of expressions that include themselves, violating what Russell called the vicious circle principle. The theory of types also rules out, on syntactic grounds, predicates that apply to themselves, or to larger expressions containing those very same predicates. In this way, the liar paradox and Grelling’s paradox cannot be constructed within a language conforming to the theory of types. Tarski’s attention to the liar paradox made two fundamental contributions to logic: his development of semantic techniques for defining the truth predicate for formalized languages and his proof of Tarski’s theorem. Tarskian semantics avoids the liar paradox by starting with a formal language, call it L, in which no semantic notions are expressible, and hence in which the liar paradox cannot be formulated. Then using another language, known as the metalanguage, Tarski applies recursive techniques to define the predicate true-in-L, which applies to exactly the true sentences of the original language L. The liar paradox does not arise in the metalanguage, because the sentence D Sentence D is not true-in-L. is, if expressible in the metalanguage, simply true. It is true because D is not a sentence of L, and so a fortiori not a true sentence of L. A truth predicate for the metalanguage can then be defined in yet another language, the metametalanguage, and so forth, resulting in a sequence of consistent truth predicates. Tarski’s theorem uses the liar paradox to prove a significant result in logic. The theorem states that the truth predicate for the first-order language of arithmetic is not definable in arithmetic. That is, if we devise a systematic way of representing sentences of arithmetic by numbers, then it is impossible to define an arithmetical predicate that applies to all and only those numbers that represent true sentences of arithmetic. The theorem is proven by showing that if such a predicate were definable, we could construct a sentence of arithmetic that is true if and only if it is not true: an arithmetical version of sentence A, the liar paradox. Both Russell’s and Tarski’s solutions to the semantic paradoxes have left many philosophers dissatisfied, since the solutions are basically prescriptions for constructing languages in which the paradoxes do not arise. But the fact that paradoxes can be avoided in artificially constructed languages does not itself give a satisfying explanation of what is going wrong when the paradoxes are encountered in natural language, or in an artificial language in which they can be formulated. Most recent work on the liar paradox, following Kripke’s “Outline of a Theory of Truth” 5, looks at languages in which the paradox can be formulated, and tries to provide a consistent account of truth that preserves as much as possible of the intuitive notion.

Semeiotics: semiological: or is it semiotics? Cf. semiological, semotic. Since Grice uses ‘philosophical psychology’ and ‘philosopical biology,’ it may do to use ‘semiology,’ indeed ‘philosophical semiology,’ here.  Oxonian semiotics is unique. Holloway published his “Language and Intelligence” and everyone was excited. It is best to see this as Grices psychologism. Grice would rarely use ‘intelligent,’ less so the more pretentious, ‘intelligence,’ as a keyword. If he is doing it, it is because what he saw as the misuse of it by Ryle and Holloway. Holloway, a PPE, is a tutorial fellow in philosophy at All Souls. He acknowledges Ryle as his mentor. (Holloway also quotes from Austin). Grice was amused that J. N. Findlay, in his review of Holloway’s essay in “Mind,” compares Holloway to C. W. Morris, and cares to cite the two relevant essay by Morris: The Foundation in the theory of signs, and Signs, Language, and Behaviour. Enough for Grice to feel warmly justified in having chosen another New-World author, Peirce, for his earlier Oxford seminar. Morris studied under G. H. Mead. But is ‘intelligence’ part of The Griceian Lexicon?Well, Lewis and Short have ‘interlegere,’ to chose between. Lewis and Short have ‘interlĕgo , lēgi, lectum, 3, v. a., I’.which they render it as “to cull or pluck off here and there (poet. and postclass.).in tmesi) uncis Carpendae manibus frondes, interque legendae, Verg. G. 2, 366: “poma,” Pall. Febr. 25, 16; id. Jun. 5, 1.intellĕgo (less correctly intellĭgo), exi, ectum (intellexti for intellexisti, Ter. Eun. 4, 6, 30; Cic. Att. 13, 32, 3: I.“intellexes for intellexisses,” Plaut. Cist. 2, 3, 81; subj. perf.: “intellegerint,” Sall. H. Fragm. 1, 41, 23 Dietsch); “inter-lego,” “to see into, perceive, understand.” I. Lit. A. Lewis and Short render as “to perceive, understand, comprehend.” Cf. Grice on his handwriting being legible to few. And The child is an adult as being UNintelligible until the creature is produced. In “Aspects,” he mentions flat rationality, and certain other talents that are more difficult for the philosopher to conceptualise, such as nose (i.e. intuitiveness), acumen, tenacity, and such. Grices approach is Pological. If Locke had used intelligent to refer to Prince Maurices parrot, Grice wants to find criteria for intelligent as applied to his favourite type of P, rather (intelligent, indeed rational.). semiosis from Grecian semeiosis, ‘observation of signs’, the relation of signification involving the three relata of sign, object, and mind. Semiotic is the science or study of semiosis. The semiotic of John of Saint Thomas and of Peirce includes two distinct components: the relation of signification and the classification of signs. The relation of signification is genuinely triadic and cannot be reduced to the sum of its three subordinate dyads: sign-object, sign-mind, object-mind. A sign represents an object to a mind just as A gives a gift to B. Semiosis is not, as it is often taken to be, a mere compound of a sign-object dyad and a sign-mind dyad because these dyads lack the essential intentionality that unites mind with object; similarly, the gift relation involves not just A giving and B receiving but, crucially, the intention uniting A and B. In the Scholastic logic of John of Saint Thomas, the sign-object dyad is a categorial relation secundum esse, that is, an essential relation, falling in Aristotle’s category of relation, while the sign-mind dyad is a transcendental relation secundum dici, that is, a relation only in an analogical sense, in a manner of speaking; thus the formal rationale of semiosis is constituted by the sign-object dyad. By contrast, in Peirce’s logic, the sign-object dyad and the sign-mind dyad are each only potential semiosis: thus, the hieroglyphs of ancient Egypt were merely potential signs until the discovery of the Rosetta Stone, just as a road-marking was a merely potential sign to the driver who overlooked it. Classifications of signs typically follow from the logic of semiosis. Thus John of Saint Thomas divides signs according to their relations to their objects into natural signs smoke as a sign of fire, customary signs napkins on the table as a sign that dinner is imminent, and stipulated signs as when a neologism is coined; he also divides signs according to their relations to a mind. An instrumental sign must first be cognized as an object before it can signify e.g., a written word or a symptom; a formal sign, by contrast, directs the mind to its object without having first been cognized e.g., percepts and concepts. Formal signs are not that which we cognize but that by which we cognize. All instrumental signs presuppose the action of formal signs in the semiosis of cognition. Peirce similarly classified signs into three trichotomies according to their relations with 1 themselves, 2 their objects, and 3 their interpretants usually minds; and Charles Morris, who followed Peirce closely, called the relationship of signs to one another the syntactical dimension of semiosis, the relationship of signs to their objects the semantical dimension of semiosis, and the relationship of signs to their interpreters the pragmatic dimension of semiosis.  Refs.: The most specific essay is his lecture on Peirce, listed under ‘communication, above. A reference to ‘criteria of intelligence relates. The H. P. Grice Papers, BANC.

SENSUS -- sensationalism, the belief that all mental states  particularly cognitive states  are derived, by composition or association, from sensation. It is often joined to the view that sensations provide the only evidence for our beliefs, or more rarely to the view that statements about the world can be reduced, without loss, to statements about sensation. Hobbes was the first important sensationalist in modern times. “There is no conception in man’s mind,” he wrote, “which hath not at first, totally, or by parts, been begotten upon the organs of sense. The rest are derived from that original.” But the belief gained prominence in the eighteenth century, due largely to the influence of Locke. Locke himself was not a sensationalist, because he took the mind’s reflection on its own operations to be an independent source of ideas. But his distinction between simple and complex ideas was used by eighteenthcentury sensationalists such as Condillac and Hartley to explain how conceptions that seem distant from sense might nonetheless be derived from it. And to account for the particular ways in which simple ideas are in fact combined, Condillac and Hartley appealed to a second device described by Locke: the association of ideas. “Elementary” sensations  the building blocks of our mental life  were held by the sensationalists to be non-voluntary, independent of judgment, free of interpretation, discrete or atomic, and infallibly known. Nineteenth-century sensationalists tried to account for perception in terms of such building blocks; they struggled particularly with the perception of space and time. Late nineteenth-century critics such as Ward and James advanced powerful arguments against the reduction of perception to sensation. Perception, they claimed, involves more than the passive reception or recombination and association of discrete pellets of incorrigible information. They urged a change in perspective  to a functionalist viewpoint more closely allied with prevailing trends in biology  from which sensationalism never fully recovered.  sensibile: Austin, “Sense and sensibile,” as used by Russell, those entities that no one is at the moment perceptually aware of, but that are, in every other respect, just like the objects of perceptual awareness. If one is a direct realist and believes that the objects one is aware of in sense perception are ordinary physical objects, then sensibilia are, of course, just physical objects of which no one is at the moment aware. Assuming with common sense that ordinary objects continue to exist when no one is aware of them, it follows that sensibilia exist. If, however, one believes as Russell did that what one is aware of in ordinary sense perception is some kind of idea in the mind, a so-called sense-datum, then sensibilia have a problematic status. A sensibile then turns out to be an unsensed sense-datum. On some the usual conceptions of sense-data, this is like an unfelt pain, since a sense-datum’s existence not as a sense-datum, but as anything at all depends on our someone’s perception of it. To exist for such things is to be perceived see Berkeley’s “esse est percipii“. If, however, one extends the notion of sense-datum as Moore was inclined to do to whatever it is of which one is directly aware in sense perception, then sensibilia may or may not exist. It depends on what  physical objects or ideas in the mind  we are directly aware of in sense perception and, of course, on the empirical facts about whether objects continue to exist when they are not being perceived. If direct realists are right, horses and trees, when unobserved, are sensibilia. So are the front surfaces of horses and trees things Moore once considered to be sensedata. If the direct realists are wrong, and what we are perceptually aware of are “ideas in the mind,” then whether or not sensibilia exist depends on whether or not such ideas can exist apart from any mind.  sensorium, the seat and cause of sensation in the brain of humans and other animals. The term is not part of contemporary psychological parlance; it belongs to prebehavioral, prescientific psychology, especially of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Only creatures possessed of a sensorium were thought capable of bodily and perceptual sensations. Some thinkers believed that the sensorium, when excited, also produced muscular activity and motion. sensus communis, a cognitive faculty to which the five senses report. It was first argued for in Aristotle’s On the Soul II.12, though the term ‘common sense’ was first introduced in Scholastic thought. Aristotle refers to properties such as magnitude that are perceived by more than one sense as common sensibles. To recognize common sensibles, he claims, we must possess a single cognitive power to compare such qualities, received from the different senses, to one another. Augustine says the “inner sense” judges whether the senses are working properly, and perceives whether the animal perceives De libero arbitrio II.35. Aquinas In De anima II, 13.370 held that it is also by the common sense that we perceive we live. He says the common sense uses the external senses to know sensible forms, preparing the sensible species it receives for the operation of the cognitive power, which recognizes the real thing causing the sensible species.  sentential connective, also called sentential operator, propositional connective, propositional operator, a word or phrase, such as ‘and’, ‘or’, or ‘if . . . then’, that is used to construct compound sentences from atomic  i.e., non-compound  sentences. A sentential connective can be defined formally as an expression containing blanks, such that when the blanks are replaced with sentences the result is a compound sentence. Thus, ‘if ——— then ———’ and ‘——— or ———’ are sentential connectives, since we can replace the blanks with sentences to get the compound sentences ‘If the sky is clear then we can go swimming’ and ‘We can go swimming or we can stay home’. Classical logic makes use of truth-functional connectives only, for which the truth-value of the compound sentence can be determined uniquely by the truth-value of the sentences that replace the blanks. The standard truth-functional sensibilia sentential connective 834    834 connectives are ‘and’, ‘or’, ‘not’, ‘if . . . then’, and ‘if and only if’. There are many non-truth-functional connectives as well, such as ‘it is possible that ———’ and ‘——— because ———’.  sentimentalism, the theory, prominent in the eighteenth century, that epistemological or moral relations are derived from feelings. Although sentimentalism and sensationalism are both empiricist positions, the latter view has all knowledge built up from sensations, experiences impinging on the senses. Sentimentalists may allow that ideas derive from sensations, but hold that some relations between them are derived internally, that is, from sentiments arising upon reflection. Moral sentimentalists, such as Shaftesbury, Hutcheson, and Hume, argued that the virtue or vice of a character trait is established by approving or disapproving sentiments. Hume, the most thoroughgoing sentimentalist, also argued that all beliefs about the world depend on sentiments. On his analysis, when we form a belief, we rely on the mind’s causally connecting two experiences, e.g., fire and heat. But, he notes, such causal connections depend on the notion of necessity  that the two perceptions will always be so conjoined  and there is nothing in the perceptions themselves that supplies that notion. The idea of necessary connection is instead derived from a sentiment: our feeling of expectation of the one experience upon the other. Likewise, our notions of substance the unity of experiences in an object and of self the unity of experiences in a subject are sentimentbased. But whereas moral sentiments do not purport to represent the external world, these metaphysical notions of necessity, substance, and self are “fictions,” creations of the imagination purporting to represent something in the outside world.

sententia: For some reason, perhaps of his eccentricity, J. L. Austin was in love with Chomsky. He would read “Syntactic Structures” aloud to the Play Group. And Grice was listening. This stuck with Grice, who started to use ‘sentence,’ even in Polish, when translating Tarski. Hardie had taught him that ‘sententia’ was a Roman transliteration of ‘dia-noia,’ which helped. Since “Not when the the of dog” is NOT a sentence, not even an ‘ill-formed sentence,’ Grice concludes that like ‘reason,’ and ‘cabbage,’ sentence is a value-paradeigmatic concept. His favourite sentence was “Fido is shaggy,” uttered to communicate that Smith’s dog is hairy coated. One of Grice’s favourite sentences was Carnap’s “Pirots karulise elatically,” which Carnap borrowed from (but never returned to) Baron Russell. (“I later found out a ‘pirot’ is an extinct fish, which destroyed my whole implicaturum – talk of ichthyological necessity!” (Carnap contrasted, “Pirots karulise elatically,” with “The not not if not the dog the.”

shaggy-dog story, v. Grice’s shaggy-dog story

shared experience: WoW: 286.

                                                                                                              

set-theoretic paradoxes, a collection of paradoxes that reveal difficulties in certain central notions of set theory. The best-known of these are Russell’s paradox, Burali-Forti’s paradox, and Cantor’s paradox. Russell’s paradox, discovered in 1 by Bertrand Russell, is the simplest and so most problematic of the set-theoretic paradoxes. Using it, we can derive a contradiction directly from Cantor’s unrestricted comprehension schema. This schema asserts that for any formula Px containing x as a free variable, there is a set {x _ Px} whose members are exactly those objects that satisfy Px. To derive the contradiction, take Px to be the formula x 1 x, and let z be the set {x _ x 2 x} whose existence is guaranteed by the comprehension schema. Thus z is the set whose members are exactly those objects that are not members of themselves. We now ask whether z is, itself, a member of z. If the answer is yes, then we can conclude that z must satisfy the criterion of membership in z, i.e., z must not be a member of z. But if the answer is no, then since z is not a member of itself, it satisfies the criterion for membership in z, and so z is a member of z. All modern axiomatizations of set theory avoid Russell’s paradox by restricting the principles that assert the existence of sets. The simplest restriction replaces unrestricted comprehension with the separation schema. Separation asserts that, given any set A and formula Px, there is a set {x 1 A _ Px}, whose members are exactly those members of A that satisfy Px. If we now take Px to be the formula x 2 x, then separation guarantees the existence of a set zA % {x 1 A _ x 2 x}. We can then use Russell’s reasoning to prove the result that zA cannot be a member of the original set A. If it were a member of A, then we could prove that it is a member of itself if and only if it is not a member of itself. Hence it is not a member of A. But this result is not problematic, and so the paradox is avoided. The Burali-Forte paradox and Cantor’s paradox are sometimes known as paradoxes of size, since they show that some collections are too large to be considered sets. The Burali-Forte paradox, discovered by Cesare Burali-Forte, is concerned with the set of all ordinal numbers. In Cantor’s set theory, an ordinal number can be assigned to any well-ordered set. A set is wellordered if every subset of the set has a least element. But Cantor’s set theory also guarantees the existence of the set of all ordinals, again due to the unrestricted comprehension schema. This set of ordinals is well-ordered, and so can be associated with an ordinal number. But it can be shown that the associated ordinal is greater than any ordinal in the set, hence greater than any ordinal number. Cantor’s paradox involves the cardinality of the set of all sets. Cardinality is another notion of size used in set theory: a set A is said to have greater cardinality than a set B if and only if B can be mapped one-to-one onto a subset of A but A cannot be so mapped onto B or any of its subsets. One of Cantor’s fundamental results was that the set of all subsets of a set A known as the power set of A has greater cardinality than the set A. Applying this result to the set V of all sets, we can conclude that the power set of V has greater cardinality than V. But every set in the power set of V is also in V since V contains all sets, and so the power set of V cannot have greater cardinality than V. We thus have a contradiction. Like Russell’s paradox, both of these paradoxes result from the unrestricted comprehension schema, and are avoided by replacing it with weaker set-existence principles. Various principles stronger than the separation schema are needed to get a reasonable set theory, and many alternative axiomatizations have been proposed. But the lesson of these paradoxes is that no setexistence principle can entail the existence of the Russell set, the set of all ordinals, or the set of all sets, on pain of contradiction. 

set theory – “I distinguish between a class and a set, but Strawson does not.” – Grice --  the study of collections, ranging from familiar examples like a set of encyclopedias or a deck of cards to mathematical examples like the set of natural numbers or the set of points on a line or the set of functions from a set A to another set B. Sets can be specified in two basic ways: by a list e.g., {0, 2, 4, 6, 8} and as the extension of a property e.g., {x _ x is an even natural number less than 10}, where this is read ‘the set of all x such that x is an even natural number less than 10’. The most fundamental relation in set theory is membership, as in ‘2 is a member of the set of even natural numbers’ in symbols: 2 1 {x _ x is an even natural number}. Membership is determinate, i.e., any candidate for membership in a given set is either in the set or not in the set, with no room for vagueness or ambiguity. A set’s identity is completely determined by its members or elements i.e., sets are extensional rather than intensional. Thus {x _ x is human} is the same set as {x _ x is a featherless biped} because they have the same members. The smallest set possible is the empty or null set, the set with no members. There cannot be more than one empty set, by extensionality. It can be specified, e.g., as {x _ x & x}, but it is most often symbolized as / or { }. A set A is called a subset of a set B and B a superset of A if every member of A is also a member of B; in symbols, A 0 B. So, the set of even natural numbers is a subset of the set of all natural numbers, and any set is a superset of the empty set. The union of two sets A and B is the set whose members are the members of A and the members of B  in symbols, A 4 B % {x _ x 1 A or x 1 B}  so the union of the set of even natural numbers and the set of odd natural numbers is the set of all natural numbers. The intersection of two sets A and B is the set whose members are common to both A and B  in symbols, A 3 B % {x _ x 1 A and x 1 B}  so the intersection of the set of even natural numbers and the set of prime natural numbers is the singleton set {2}, whose only member is the number 2. Two sets whose intersection is empty are called disjoint, e.g., the set of even natural numbers and the set of odd natural numbers. Finally, the difference between a set A and a set B is the set whose members are members of A but not members of B  in symbols, A  B % {x _ x 1 A and x 2 B}  so the set of odd numbers between 5 and 20 minus the set of prime natural numbers is {9, 15}. By extensionality, the order in which the members of a set are listed is unimportant, i.e., {1, 2, 3} % {2, 3, 1}. To introduce the concept of ordering, we need the notion of the ordered pair of a and b  in symbols, a, b or . All that is essential to ordered pairs is that two of them are equal only when their first entries are equal and their second entries are equal. Various sets can be used to simulate this behavior, but the version most commonly used is the Kuratowski ordered pair: a, b is defined to be {{a}, {a, b}}. On this definition, it can indeed be proved that a, b % c, d if and only if a % c and b % d. The Cartesian product of two sets A and B is the set of all ordered pairs whose first entry is in A and whose second entry is B  in symbols, A $ B % {x _ x % a, b for some a 1 A and some b 1 B}. This set-theoretic reflection principles set theory 836    836 same technique can be used to form ordered triples  a, b, c % a, b, c; ordered fourtuples  a, b, c, d % a, b, c, d; and by extension, ordered n-tuples for all finite n. Using only these simple building blocks, substitutes for all the objects of classical mathematics can be constructed inside set theory. For example, a relation is defined as a set of ordered pairs  so the successor relation among natural numbers becomes {0, 1, 1, 2, 2, 3 . . . }  and a function is a relation containing no distinct ordered pairs of the form a, b and a, c  so the successor relation is a function. The natural numbers themselves can be identified with various sequences of sets, the most common of which are finite von Neumann ordinal numbers: /, {/}, {/, {/}, {/}, {/}, {/, {/}}}, . . . . On this definition, 0 % /, 1 % {/}, 2 % {/, {/}}, etc., each number n has n members, the successor of n is n 4 {n}, and n ‹ m if and only if n 1 m. Addition and multiplication can be defined for these numbers, and the Peano axioms proved from the axioms of set theory; see below. Negative, rational, real, and complex numbers, geometric spaces, and more esoteric mathematical objects can all be identified with sets, and the standard theorems about them proved. In this sense, set theory provides a foundation for mathematics. Historically, the theory of sets arose in the late nineteenth century. In his work on the foundations of arithmetic, Frege identified the natural numbers with the extensions of certain concepts; e.g., the number two is the set of all concepts C under which two things fall  in symbols, 2 % {x _ x is a concept, and there are distinct things a and b which fall under x, and anything that falls under x is either a or b}. Cantor was led to consider complex sets of points in the pursuit of a question in the theory of trigonometric series. To describe the properties of these sets, Cantor introduced infinite ordinal numbers after the finite ordinals described above. The first of these, w, is {0, 1, 2, . . .}, now understood in von Neumann’s terms as the set of all finite ordinals. After w, the successor function yields w ! 1 % w 4 {w} % {0, 1, 2, . . . n, n + 1, . . . , w}, then w ! 2 % w ! 1 ! 1 % {0, 1, 2, . . . , w , w ! 1}, w ! 3 % w ! 2 ! 1 % {0, 1, 2, . . . , w, w ! 1, w ! 2}, and so on; after all these comes w ! w % {0, 1, 2, . . . , w, w ! 1, w ! 2, . . . , w ! n, w ! n ! 1, . . .}, and the process begins again. The ordinal numbers are designed to label the positions in an ordering. Consider, e.g., a reordering of the natural numbers in which the odd numbers are placed after the evens: 0, 2, 4, 6, . . . 1, 3, 5, 7, . . . . The number 4 is in the third position of this sequence, and the number 5 is in the w + 2nd. But finite numbers also perform a cardinal function; they tell us how many so-andso’s there are. Here the infinite ordinals are less effective. The natural numbers in their usual order have the same structure as w, but when they are ordered as above, with the evens before the odds, they take on the structure of a much larger ordinal, w ! w. But the answer to the question, How many natural numbers are there? should be the same no matter how they are arranged. Thus, the transfinite ordinals do not provide a stable measure of the size of an infinite set. When are two infinite sets of the same size? On the one hand, the infinite set of even natural numbers seems clearly smaller than the set of all natural numbers; on the other hand, these two sets can be brought into one-to-one correspondence via the mapping that matches 0 to 0, 1 to 2, 2 to 4, 3 to 6, and in general, n to 2n. This puzzle had troubled mathematicians as far back as Galileo, but Cantor took the existence of a oneto-one correspondence between two sets A and B as the definition of ‘A is the same size as B’. This coincides with our usual understanding for finite sets, and it implies that the set of even natural numbers and the set of all natural numbers and w ! 1 and w! 2 and w ! w and w ! w and many more all have the same size. Such infinite sets are called countable, and the number of their elements, the first infinite cardinal number, is F0. Cantor also showed that the set of all subsets of a set A has a size larger than A itself, so there are infinite cardinals greater than F0, namely F1, F2, and so on. Unfortunately, the early set theories were prone to paradoxes. The most famous of these, Russell’s paradox, arises from consideration of the set R of all sets that are not members of themselves: is R 1 R? If it is, it isn’t, and if it isn’t, it is. The Burali-Forti paradox involves the set W of all ordinals: W itself qualifies as an ordinal, so W 1 W, i.e., W ‹ W. Similar difficulties surface with the set of all cardinal numbers and the set of all sets. At fault in all these cases is a seemingly innocuous principle of unlimited comprehension: for any property P, there is a set {x _ x has P}. Just after the turn of the century, Zermelo undertook to systematize set theory by codifying its practice in a series of axioms from which the known derivations of the paradoxes could not be carried out. He proposed the axioms of extensionality two sets with the same members are the same; pairing for any a and b, there is a set {a, b}; separation for any set A and property P, there is a set {x _ x 1 A and x has P}; power set for any set A, there is a set {x _ x0 A}; union for any set of sets F, there is a set {x _ x 1 A for some A 1 F}  this yields A 4 B, when F % {A, B} and {A, B} comes from A and B by pairing; infinity w exists; and choice for any set of non-empty sets, there is a set that contains exactly one member from each. The axiom of choice has a vast number of equivalents, including the well-ordering theorem  every set can be well-ordered  and Zorn’s lemma  if every chain in a partially ordered set has an upper bound, then the set has a maximal element. The axiom of separation limits that of unlimited comprehension by requiring a previously given set A from which members are separated by the property P; thus troublesome sets like Russell’s that attempt to collect absolutely all things with P cannot be formed. The most controversial of Zermelo’s axioms at the time was that of choice, because it posits the existence of a choice set  a set that “chooses” one from each of possibly infinitely many non-empty sets  without giving any rule for making the choices. For various philosophical and practical reasons, it is now accepted without much debate. Fraenkel and Skolem later formalized the axiom of replacement if A is a set, and every member a of A is replaced by some b, then there is a set containing all the b’s, and Skolem made both replacement and separation more precise by expressing them as schemata of first-order logic. The final axiom of the contemporary theory is foundation, which guarantees that sets are formed in a series of stages called the iterative hierarchy begin with some non-sets, then form all possible sets of these, then form all possible sets of the things formed so far, then form all possible sets of these, and so on. This iterative picture of sets built up in stages contrasts with the older notion of the extension of a concept; these are sometimes called the mathematical and the logical notions of collection, respectively. The early controversy over the paradoxes and the axiom of choice can be traced to the lack of a clear distinction between these at the time. Zermelo’s first five axioms all but choice plus foundation form a system usually called Z; ZC is Z with choice added. Z plus replacement is ZF, for Zermelo-Fraenkel, and adding choice makes ZFC, the theory of sets in most widespread use today. The consistency of ZFC cannot be proved by standard mathematical means, but decades of experience with the system and the strong intuitive picture provided by the iterative conception suggest that it is. Though ZFC is strong enough for all standard mathematics, it is not enough to answer some natural set-theoretic questions e.g., the continuum problem. This has led to a search for new axioms, such as large cardinal assumptions, but no consensus on these additional principles has yet been reached. 

Sextus Empiricus, the sixth son of Empiricus the Elder – “My five brothers were not philosophers” -- Grecian Skeptic philosopher whose writings are the chief source of our knowledge about the extreme Skeptic view, Pyrrhonism. Practically nothing is known about him as a person. He was apparently a medical doctor and a teacher in a Skeptical school, probably in Alexandria. What has survived are his Hypotoposes, Outlines of Pyrrhonism, and a series of Skeptical critiques, Against the Dogmatists, questioning the premises and conclusions in many disciplines, such as physics, mathematics, rhetoric, and ethics. In these works, Sextus summarized and organized the views of Skeptical arguers before him. The Outlines starts with an attempt to indicate what Skepticism is, to explain the terminology employed by the Skeptics, how Pyrrhonian Skepticism differs from other so-called Skeptical views, and how the usual answers to Skepticism are rebutted. Sextus points out that the main Hellenistic philosophies, Stoicism, Epicureanism, and Academic Skepticism which is presented as a negative dogmatism, claimed that they would bring the adherent peace of mind, ataraxia. Unfortunately the dogmatic adherent would only become more perturbed by seeing the Skeptical objections that could be brought against his or her view. Then, by suspending judgment, epoche, one would find the tranquillity being sought. Pyrrhonian Skepticism is a kind of mental hygiene or therapy that cures one of dogmatism or rashness. It is like a purge that cleans out foul matter as well as itself. To bring about this state of affairs there are sets of Skeptical arguments that should bring one to suspense of judgment. The first set are the ten tropes of the earlier Skeptic, Anesidemus. The next are the five tropes about causality. And lastly are the tropes about the criterion of knowledge. The ten tropes stress the variability of sense experience among men and animals, among men, and within one individual. The varying and conflicting experiences present conflicts about what the perceived object is like. Any attempt to judge beyond appearances, to ascertain that which is non-evident, requires some way of choosing what data to accept. This requires a criterion. Since there is disagreement about what criterion to employ, we need a criterion of a criterion, and so on. Either we accept an arbitrary criterion or we get into an infinite regress. Similarly if we try to prove anything, we need a criterion of what constitutes a proof. If we offer a proof of a theory of proof, this will be circular reasoning, or end up in another infinite regress. Sextus devotes most of his discussion to challenging Stoic logic, which claimed that evident signs could reveal what is non-evident. There might be signs that suggested what is temporarily non-evident, such as smoke indicating that there is a fire, but any supposed linkage between evident signs and what is non-evident can be challenged and questioned. Sextus then applies the groups of Skeptical arguments to various specific subjects  physics, mathematics, music, grammar, ethics  showing that one should suspend judgment on any knowledge claims in these areas. Sextus denies that he is saying any of this dogmatically: he is just stating how he feels at given moments. He hopes that dogmatists sick with a disease, rashness, will be cured and led to tranquillity no matter how good or bad the Skeptical arguments might be. 

Shaftesbury, Lord, in full, Third Earl of Shaftesbury, title of Anthony Ashley Cooper, English philosopher and politician who originated the moral sense theory. He was born at Wimborne St. Giles, Dorsetshire. As a Country Whig he served in the House of Commons for three years and later, as earl, monitored meetings of the House of Lords. Shaftesbury introduced into British moral philosophy the notion of a moral sense, a mental faculty unique to human beings, involving reflection and feeling and constituting their ability to discern right and wrong. He sometimes represents the moral sense as analogous to a purported aesthetic sense, a special capacity by which we perceive, through our emotions, the proportions and harmonies of which, on his Platonic view, beauty is composed. For Shaftesbury, every creature has a “private good or interest,” an end to which it is naturally disposed by its constitution. But there are other goods as well  notably, the public good and the good without qualification of a sentient being. An individual creature’s goodness is defined by the tendency of its “natural affections” to contribute to the “universal system” of nature of which it is a part  i.e., their tendency to promote the public good. Because human beings can reflect on actions and affections, including their own and others’, they experience emotional responses not only to physical stimuli but to these mental objects as well e.g., to the thought of one’s compassion or kindness. Thus, they are capable of perceiving  and acquiring through their actions  a particular species of goodness, namely, virtue. In the virtuous person, the person of integrity, natural appetites and affections are in harmony with each other wherein lies her private good and in harmony with the public interest. Shaftesbury’s attempted reconciliation of selflove and benevolence is in part a response to the egoism of Hobbes, who argued that everyone is in fact motivated by self-interest. His defining morality in terms of psychological and public harmony is also a reaction to the divine voluntarism of his former tutor, Locke, who held that the laws of nature and morality issue from the will of God. On Shaftesbury’s view, morality exists independently of religion, but belief in God serves to produce the highest degree of virtue by nurturing a love for the universal system. Shaftesbury’s theory led to a general refinement of eighteenth-century ideas about moral feelings; a theory of the moral sense emerged, whereby sentiments are  under certain conditions  perceptions of, or constitutive of, right and wrong. In addition to several essays collected in three volumes under the title Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times second edition, 1714, Shaftesbury also wrote stoical moral and religious meditations reminiscent of Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius. His ideas on moral sentiments exercised considerable influence on the ethical theories of Hutcheson and Hume, who later worked out in detail their own accounts of the moral sense. 

Sheffer stroke – see abdicatum, Grice, “Negation and privation” and “Lectures on negation” -- also called alternative denial, a binary truth-functor represented by the symbol ‘_’, the logical force of which can be expressed contextually in terms of ‘-’ and ‘&’ by the following definition: p_q % Df -p & q. The importance of the Sheffer stroke lies in the fact that it by itself can express any well-formed expression of truth-functional logic. Thus, since {-,7} forms an expressively complete set, defining -p as p_p and p 7 q as p_p _q_q provides for the possibility of a further reduction of primitive functors to one. This system of symbols is commonly called the stroke notation.

Shepherd, Mary d.1847, Scottish philosopher whose main philosophical works are An Essay on the Relation of Cause and Effect 1824 and Essays on the Perception of an External Universe 1827. The first addresses what she takes to be the skeptical consequences of Hume’s account of causation, but a second target is the use William Lawrence 17831867 made of Hume’s associative account of causation to argue that mental functions are reducible to physiological ones. The second work focuses on Hume’s alleged skepticism with regard to the existence of the external world, but she is also concerned to distinguish her position from Berkeley’s. Shepherd was drawn into a public controversy with John Fearn, who published some remarks she had sent him on a book of his, together with his extensive reply. Shepherd replied in an article in Fraser’s magazine 1832, “Lady Mary Shepherd’s Metaphysics,” which deftly refuted Fearn’s rather condescending attack. 

Shyreswood -- Sherwood, William, also called William Shyreswood, English logician who taught logic at Oxford and at Paris between 1235 and 1250. He was the earliest of the three great “summulist” writers, the other two whom he influenced strongly being Peter of Spain and Lambert of Auxerre. His main works are “Introductiones in Logicam,” “Syncategoremata,” “De insolubilibus,” and “Obligationes.” Some serious doubts have recently arisen about the authorship of the latter work. Since M. Grabmann published Sherwood’s Introductiones, philosophers have paid considerable attention to this seminal Griceian. While the first part of Introductiones offer the basic ideas of Aristotle’s Organon, and the latter part neatly lays out the Sophistical Refutations, the final tract expounds the doctrine of the four properties of a term. First, signification. Second, supposition. Third, conjunction, Fourth, appellation -- hence the label ‘terminist’ for this sort of logic. These logico-semantic discussions, together with the discussions of syncategorematic words, constitute the “logica moderna,” (Grice’s ‘mdoernism’) as opposed to the more strictly Aristotelian contents of the earlier logica vetus (Grice’s neo-traditionalism) and logica nova (“It took me quite a while to explain to Strawson the distinction between ‘logica nova’ and ‘logica moderna,’ only to have him tell me, “worry not, Grice – I’ll be into ‘logica vetus’ anyways!””. The doctrine of properties of terms and the analysis of syncategorematic terms, especially those of ‘all’ (or every) ‘no’ (or not or it is not the case) and ‘nothing’, ‘only’, ‘not’, ‘begins’ and ‘ceases (to eat iron) ‘necessarily’, ‘if’ (Latin ‘si,’ Grecian ‘ei’), ‘and’ (Latin ‘et’, Grecian ‘kai’) and ‘or’ (Latin ‘vel’)  may be said to constitute Sherwood’s or Shyrewood’s philosophy of logic. Shyrewood not only distinguishes categorematic descriptive and syncategorematic logical words but also shows how some terms are used categorematically in some contexts and syncategorematically in others – “he doesn’t explain which, and that’s one big map in his opus.”– Grice. He recognizes the importance of the order of words (hence Grice, ‘be orderly’) and of the scope of logical functors; he also anticipates the variety of composite and divided senses of propositions. Obligationes, if indeed his, attempts to state conditions under which a formal disputation may take place. De Insolubilibus deals with paradoxes of self-reference and with ways of solving them. Understanding Sherwood’s logic is important for understanding the later medieval developments of logica moderna down to Occam whom Grice laughed at (“modified Occam’s razor.”).  

ship of Theseus, the ship of the Grecian hero Theseus, which, according to Plutarch “Life of Theseus,” 23, the Athenians preserved by gradually replacing its timbers. A classic debate ensued concerning identity over time. Suppose a ship’s timbers are replaced one by one over a period of time; at what point, if any, does it cease to be the same ship? What if the ship’s timbers, on removal, are used to build a new ship, identical in structure with the first: which ship has the best claim to be the original ship?

Shpet, Gustav Gustavovich 18797, leading Russian phenomenologist and highly regarded student and friend of Husserl. He played a major role in the development of phenomenology in Russia prior to the revolution. Graduating from Kiev  in 6, Shpet accompanied his mentor Chelpanov to Moscow in 7, commencing graduate studies at Moscow  M.A., 0; Ph.D., 6. He attended Husserl’s seminars at Göttingen during 213, out of which developed a continuing friendship between the two, recorded in correspondence extending through 8. In 4 Shpet published a meditation, Iavlenie i smysl Appearance and Sense, inspired by Husserl’s Logical Investigations and, especially, Ideas I, which had appeared in 3. Between 4 and 7 he published six additional books on such disparate topics as the concept of history, Herzen, Russian philosophy, aesthetics, ethnic psychology, and language. He founded and edited the philosophical yearbook Mysl’ i slovo Thought and Word between 8 and 1, publishing an important article on skepticism in it. He was arrested in 5 and sentenced to internal exile. Under these conditions he completed a fine new translation of Hegel’s Phenomenology into Russian, which was published in 9. He was executed in November 7.  .

Sidgwick: h. English philosopher, economist, and educator. Best known for The Methods of Ethics1874, he also wrote the still valuable Outlines of the History of Ethics 6, as well as studies of economics, politics, literature, and alleged psychic phenomena. He was deeply involved in the founding of the first  for women at Cambridge , where he was a professor. In the Methods Sidgwick tried to assess the rationality of the main ways in which ordinary people go about making moral decisions. He thought that our common “methods of ethics” fall into three main patterns. One is articulated by the philosophical theory known as intuitionism. This is the view that we can just see straight off either what particular act is right or what binding rule or general principle we ought to follow. Another common method is spelled out by philosophical egoism, the view that we ought in each act to get as much good as we can for ourselves. The third widely used method is represented by utilitarianism, the view that we ought in each case to bring about as much good as possible for everyone affected. Can any or all of the methods prescribed by these views be rationally defended? And how are they related to one another? By framing his philosophical questions in these terms, Sidgwick made it centrally important to examine the chief philosophical theories of morality in the light of the commonsense morals of his time. He thought that no theory wildly at odds with commonsense morality would be acceptable. Intuitionism, a theory originating with Butler, transmitted by Reid, and most systematically expounded during the Victorian era by Whewell, was widely held to be the best available defense of Christian morals. Egoism was thought by many to be the clearest pattern of practical rationality and was frequently said to be compatible with Christianity. And J. S. Mill had argued that utilitarianism was both rational and in accord with common sense. But whatever their relation to ordinary morality, the theories seemed to be seriously at odds with one another. Examining all the chief commonsense precepts and rules of morality, such as that promises ought to be kept, Sidgwick argued that none is truly self-evident or intuitively certain. Each fails to guide us at certain points where we expect it to answer our practical questions. Utilitarianism, he found, could provide a complicated method for filling these gaps. But what ultimately justifies utilitarianism is certain very general axioms seen intuitively to be true. Among them are the principles that what is right in one case must be right in any similar case, and that we ought to aim at good generally, not just at some particular part of it. Thus intuitionism and utilitarianism can be reconciled. When taken together they yield a complete and justifiable method of ethics that is in accord with common sense. What then of egoism? It can provide as complete a method as utilitarianism, and it also involves a self-evident axiom. But its results often contradict those of utilitarianism. Hence there is a serious problem. The method that instructs us to act always for the good generally and the method that tells one to act solely for one’s own good are equally rational. Since the two methods give contradictory directions, while each method rests on self-evident axioms, it seems that practical reason is fundamentally incoherent. Sidgwick could see no way to solve the problem. Sidgwick’s bleak conclusion has not been generally accepted, but his Methods is widely viewed as one of the best works of moral philosophy ever written. His account of classical utilitarianism is unsurpassed. His discussions of the general status of morality and of particular moral concepts are enduring models of clarity and acumen. His insights about the relations between egoism and utilitarianism have stimulated much valuable research. And his way of framing moral problems, by asking about the relations between commonsense beliefs and the best available theories, has set much of the agenda for twentiethcentury ethics. 

Siger of Brabant, philosopher, an activist in the philosophical and political struggles both within the arts faculty and between arts and theology at Paris during the 1260s and 1270s. He is usually regarded as a leader of a “radical Aristotelianism” that owed much to Liber de causis, to Avicenna, and to Averroes. He taught that everything originates through a series of emanations from a first cause. The world and each species including the human species are eternal. Human beings share a single active intellect. There is no good reason to think that Siger advanced the view that there was a double truth, one in theology and another in natural philosophy. It is difficult to distinguish Siger’s own views from those he attributes to “the Philosophers” and thus to know the extent to which he held the heterodox views he taught as the best interpretation of the prescribed texts in the arts curriculum. In any case, Siger was summoned before the  Inquisition in 1276, but fled Paris. He was never convicted of heresy, but it seems that the condemnations at Paris in 1277 were partially directed at his teaching. He was stabbed to death by his clerk in Orvieto then the papal seat in 1284. .

signatum: Cf. “to sign” as a verb – from French. Grice uses designatum, too – but more specifically within the ‘propositio’ as a compound of a subjectum and a predicatum. The subject-item indicates a thing; and the predicate-item designates a property. As Grice notes, there is a distinction between Aristotle’s use, in De Int., of ‘sumbolon,’ for which Aristotle sometimes means ‘semeion,’ and their Roman counterparts, ‘signum’ sounds otiose enough. But ‘significo’ does not. There is this –fico thing that sounds obtrusive. The Romans, however, were able to distinguish between ‘make a sign,’ and just ‘signal.’ The point is important when Grice tries to apply the Graeco-Roman philosophical terminology to a lexeme which does not belong in there: “mean.” His example is someone in pain, uttering “Oh.” If he later gains voluntary control, by uttering “Oh” he means that he is in pain, and even at a later stage, provided he learns ‘lupe,’ he may utter the expression which is somewhat correlated in a non-iconic fashion with something which iconically is a vehicle for U to mean that he is in pain. In this way, in a communication-system, a communication-device, such as “Oh” does for the state of affairs something that the state of affairs cannot do for itself, govern the addresee’s thoughts and behaviour (very much as the Oxfordshire cricket team does for Oxfordshire what Oxfordshire cannot do for herself, viz. to engage in a game of cricket. There’s rae-presentatum, for you! Short and Lewis have ‘signare,’ from ‘signum,’ and which they render as ‘to set a mark upon, to mark, mark out, designate (syn.: noto, designo),’ Lit. A. In gen. (mostly poet. and in post-Aug. prose): discrimen non facit neque signat linea alba, Lucil. ap. Non. 405, 17: “signata sanguine pluma est,” Ov. M. 6, 670: “ne signare quidem aut partiri limite campum Fas erat,” Verg. G. 1, 126: “humum limite mensor,” Ov. M. 1, 136; id. Am. 3, 8, 42: “moenia aratro,” id. F. 4, 819: “pede certo humum,” to print, press, Hor. A. P. 159; cf.: “vestigia summo pulvere,” to mark, imprint, Verg. G. 3, 171: auratā cyclade humum, Prop. 4 (5), 7, 40. “haec nostro signabitur area curru,” Ov. A. A. 1, 39: “locum, ubi ea (cistella) excidit,” Plaut. Cist. 4, 2, 28: “caeli regionem in cortice signant,” mark, cut, Verg. G. 2, 269: “nomina saxo,” Ov. M. 8, 539: “rem stilo,” Vell. 1, 16, 1: “rem carmine,” Verg. A. 3, 287; “for which: carmine saxum,” Ov. M. 2, 326: “cubitum longis litteris,” Plaut. Rud. 5, 2, 7: “ceram figuris,” to imprint, Ov. M. 15, 169: “cruor signaverat herbam,” had stained, id. ib. 10, 210; cf. id. ib. 12, 125: “signatum sanguine pectus,” id. A. A. 2, 384: “dubiā lanugine malas,” id. M. 13, 754: “signata in stirpe cicatrix,” Verg. G. 2, 379: “manibus Procne pectus signata cruentis,” id. ib. 4, 15: “vocis infinitios sonos paucis notis,” Cic. Rep. 3, 2, 3: “visum objectum imprimet et quasi signabit in animo suam speciem,” id. Fat. 19, 43.— B. In partic. 1. To mark with a seal; to seal, seal up, affix a seal to a thing (usually obsignare): “accepi a te signatum libellum,” Cic. Att. 11, 1, 1: “volumina,” Hor. Ep. 1, 13, 2: locellum tibi signatum remisi, Caes. ap. Charis. p. 60 P.: “epistula,” Nep. Pel. 3, 2: “arcanas tabellas,” Ov. Am. 2, 15, 15: “signatis quicquam mandare tabellis,” Tib. 4, 7, 7: “lagenam (anulus),” Mart. 9, 88, 7: “testamentum,” Plin. Ep. 2, 20, 8 sq.; cf. Mart. 5, 39, 2: “nec nisi signata venumdabatur (terra),” Plin. 35, 4, 14, § 33.—Absol., Mart. 10, 70, 7; Quint. 5, 7, 32; Suet. Ner. 17.— 2. To mark with a stamp; hence, a. Of money, to stamp, to coin: “aes argentum aurumve publice signanto,” Cic. Leg. 3, 3, 6; cf.: “qui primus ex auro denarium signavit ... Servius rex primus signavit aes ... Signatum est nota pecudum, unde et pecunia appellata ... Argentum signatum est anno, etc.,” Plin. 33, 3, 13, § 44: “argentum signatum,” Cic. Verr. 2, 5, 25, § 63; Quint. 5, 10, 62; 5, 14, 26: “pecunia signata Illyriorum signo,” Liv. 44, 27, 9: “denarius signatus Victoriā,” Plin. 33, 3, 13, § 46: “sed cur navalis in aere Altera signata est,” Ov. F. 1, 230: “milia talentūm argenti non signati formā, sed rudi pondere,” Curt. 5, 2, 11.— Hence, b. Poet.: “signatum memori pectore nomen habe,” imprinted, impressed, Ov. H. 13, 66: “(filia) quae patriā signatur imagine vultus,” i. e. closely resembles her father, Mart. 6, 27, 3.— c. To stamp, i. e. to license, invest with official authority (late Lat.): “quidam per ampla spatia urbis ... equos velut publicos signatis, quod dicitur, calceis agitant,” Amm. 14, 6, 16.— 3. Pregn., to distinguish, adorn, decorate (poet.): “pater ipse suo superūm jam signat honore,” Verg. A. 6, 781 Heyne: caelum corona, Claud. Nupt. Hon. et Mar. 273. to point out, signify, indicate, designate, express (rare; more usually significo, designo; in Cic. only Or. 19, 64, where dignata is given by Non. 281, 10; “v. Meyer ad loc.): translatio plerumque signandis rebus ac sub oculos subiciendis reperta est,” Quint. 8, 6, 19: “quotiens suis verbis signare nostra voluerunt (Graeci),” id. 2, 14, 1; cf.: “appellatione signare,” id. 4, 1, 2: “utrius differentiam,” id. 6, 2, 20; cf. id. 9, 1, 4; 12, 10, 16: “nomen (Caieta) ossa signat,” Verg. A. 7, 4: “fama signata loco est,” Ov. M. 14, 433: “miratrixque sui signavit nomine terras,” designated, Luc. 4, 655; cf.: “(Earinus) Nomine qui signat tempora verna suo,” Mart. 9, 17, 4: “Turnus ut videt ... So signari oculis,” singled out, looked to, Verg. A. 12, 3: signare responsum, to give a definite or distinct answer, Sen. Ben. 7, 16, 1.—With rel.-clause: “memoria signat in quā regione quali adjutore legatoque fratre meo usus sit,” Vell. 2, 115.— B. To distinguish, recognize: “primi clipeos mentitaque tela Adgnoscunt, atque ora sono discordia signant,” Verg. A. 2, 423; cf.: “sonis homines dignoscere,” Quint. 11, 3, 31: “animo signa quodcumque in corpore mendum est,” Ov. R. Am. 417.— C. To seal, settle, establish, confirm, prescribe (mostly poet.): “signanda sunt jura,” Prop. 3 (4), 20, 15. “signata jura,” Luc. 3, 302: jura Suevis, Claud. ap. Eutr. 1, 380; cf.: “precati deos ut velint ea (vota) semper solvi semperque signari,” Plin. Ep. 10, 35 (44). To close, end: “qui prima novo signat quinquennia lustro,” Mart. 4, 45, 3.—Hence, A. signan-ter , adv. (acc. to II. A.), expressly, clearly, distinctly (late Lat. for the class. significanter): “signanter et breviter omnia indicare,” Aus. Grat. Act. 4: “signanter et proprie dixerat,” Hier. adv. Jovin. 1, 13 fin. signātus, a, um, P. a. 1. (Acc. to I. B. 1. sealed; hence) Shut up, guarded, preserved (mostly ante- and post-class.): signata sacra, Varr. ap. Non. 397, 32: limina. Prop. 4 (5), 1, 145. Chrysidem negat signatam reddere, i. e. unharmed, intact, pure, Lucil. ap. Non. 171, 6; cf.: “assume de viduis fide pulchram, aetate signatam,” Tert. Exhort. 12.— 2. (Acc. to II. A.) Plain, clear, manifest (post-class. for “significans” – a back formation!): “quid expressius atque signatius in hanc causam?” Tert. Res. Carn.Adv.: signātē , clearly, distinctly (post-class.): “qui (veteres) proprie atque signate locuti sunt,” Gell. 2, 6, 6; Macr. S. 6, 7 Comp.: “signatius explicare aliquid,” Amm. 23, 6, 1.

significatum: or better ‘signatum.’ Grice knew that in old Roman, signatum was intransitive, as originally ‘significatum’ was – “He is signifying,” i. e. making signs. In the Middle Ages it was applied to ‘utens’ of this or that expression, as was an actum, ‘agitur,’ Thus an expression was not said to ‘signify’ in the same way. Grice plays with the expression-communication distinction. When dealing with a lexeme that does NOT belong in the Graeco-Roman tradition, that of “mean,” he is never sure. His doubts were hightlighted in essays on “Grice without an audience.” While Grice explicitly says that a ‘word’ is not a sign, he would use ‘signify’ at a later stage, including the implicaturum as part of the significatum. There is indeed an entry for signĭfĭcātĭo, f. significare. L and S render it, unhelpfully, as “a pointing out, indicating, denoting, signifying; an expression, indication, mark, sign, token, = indicium, signum, ἐπισημασία, etc., freq. and class. As with Stevenson’s ‘communico,’ Grice goes sraight to ‘signĭfĭco,’ also dep. “signĭfĭcor,” f. ‘significare,’ from signum-facere, to make sign, signum-facio, I make sign, which L and S render as to signify, which is perhaps not too helpful. Grice, if not the Grecians, knew that. Strictly, L and S render significare as to show by signs; to show, point out, express, publish, make known, indicate; to intimate, notify, signify, etc. Note that the cognate signify almost comes last, but not least, if not first. Enough to want to coin a word to do duty for them all. Which is what Grice (and the Grecians) can, but the old Romans cannot, with mean. If that above were not enough, L and S go on, also, to betoken, prognosticate, foreshow, portend, mean (syn. praedico), as in to betoken a change of weather (post-Aug.): “ventus Africus tempestatem significat, etc.,”cf. Grice on those dark clouds mean a storm is coming.  Short and Lewis go on, to say that significare may be rendered as to call, name; to mean, import, signify. Hence, ‘signĭfĭcans,’ in rhet. lang., of speech, full of meaning, expressive, significant; graphic, distinct, clear: adv.: signĭfĭcanter, clearly, distinctly, expressly, significantly, graphically: “breviter ac significanter ordinem rei protulisse;” “rem indicare (with proprie),”  “dicere (with ornate),”  “apertius, significantius dignitatem alicujus defendere,” “narrare,”“disponere,” “appellare aliquid (with consignatius);” “dicere (with probabilius).” -- signifier, a vocal sound or a written symbol. The concept owes its modern formulation to the Swiss linguist Saussure. Rather than using the older conception of sign and referent, he divided the sign itself into two interrelated parts, a signifier and a signified. The signified is the concept and the signifier is either a vocal sound or writing. The relation between the two, according to Saussure, is entirely arbitrary, in that signifiers tend to vary with different languages. We can utter or write ‘vache’, ‘cow’, or ‘vaca’, depending on our native language, and still come up with the same signified i.e., concept. 

Simmel, Georg 18588, G. philosopher and one of the founders of sociology as a distinct discipline. Born and educated in Berlin, he was a popular lecturer at its university. But the unorthodoxy of his interests and unprofessional writing style probably kept him from being offered a regular professorship until 4, and then only at the provincial  of Strasbourg. He died four years later. His writings ranged from conventional philosophical topics  with books on ethics, philosophy of history, education, religion, and the philosophers Kant, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche  to books on Rembrandt, Goethe, and the philosophy of money. He wrote numerous essays on various artists and poets, on different cities, and on such themes as love, adventure, shame, and on being a stranger, as well as on many specifically sociological topics. Simmel was regarded as a Kulturphilosoph who meditated on his themes in an insightful and digressive rather than scholarly and systematic style. Though late in life he sketched a unifying Lebensphilosophie philosophy of life that considers all works and structures of culture as products of different forms of human experience, Simmel has remained of interest primarily for a multiplicity of insights into specific topics.

Simplicius sixth century A.D., Grecian Neoplatonist philosopher born in Cilicia on the southeast coast of modern Turkey. His surviving works are extensive commentaries on Aristotle’s On the Heavens, Physics, and Categories, and on the Encheiridion of Epictetus. The authenticity of the commentary on Aristotle’s On the Soul attributed to Simplicius has been disputed. He studied with Ammonius in Alexandria, and with Damascius, the last known head of the Platonist school in Athens. Justinian closed the school in 529. Two or three years later a group of philosophers, including Damascius and Simplicius, visited the court of the Sassanian king Khosrow I Chosroes but soon returned to the Byzantine Empire under a guarantee of their right to maintain their own beliefs. It is generally agreed that most, if not all, of Simplicius’s extant works date from the period after his stay with Khosrow. But there is no consensus about where Simplicius spent his last years both Athens and Harran have been proposed recently, or whether he resumed teaching philosophy; his commentaries, unlike most of the others that survive from that period, are scholarly treatises rather than classroom expositions. Simplicius’s Aristotle commentaries are the most valuable extant works in the genre. He is our source for many of the fragments of the preSocratic philosophers, and he frequently invokes material from now-lost commentaries and philosophical works. He is a deeply committed Neoplatonist, convinced that there is no serious conflict between the philosophies of Plato and Aristotle. The view of earlier scholars that his Encheiridion commentary embodies a more moderate Platonism associated with Alexandria is now generally rejected. Simplicius’s virulent defense of the eternity of the world in response to the attack of the Christian John Philoponus illustrates the intellectual vitality of paganism at a time when the Mediterranean world had been officially Christian for about three centuries. 

simulation theory, the view that one represents the mental activities and processes of others by mentally simulating them, i.e., generating similar activities and processes in oneself. By simulating them, one can anticipate their product or outcome; or, where this is already known, test hypotheses about their starting point. For example, one anticipates the product of another’s theoretical or practical inferences from given premises by making inferences from the same premises oneself; or, knowing what the product is, one retroduces the premises. In the case of practical reasoning, to reason from the same premises would typically require indexical adjustments, such as shifts in spatial, temporal, and personal “point of view,” to place oneself in the other’s physical and epistemic situation insofar as it differs from one’s own. One may also compensate for the other’s reasoning capacity and level of expertise, if possible, or modify one’s character and outlook as an actor might, to fit the other’s background. Such adjustments, even when insufficient for making decisions in the role of the other, allow one to discriminate between action options likely to be attractive or unattractive to the agent. One would be prepared for the former actions and surprised by the latter. The simulation theory is usually considered an alternative to an assumption sometimes called the “theory theory” that underlies much recent philosophy of mind: that our commonsense understanding of people rests on a speculative theory, a “folk psychology” that posits mental states, events, and processes as unobservables that explain behavior. Some hold that the simulation theory undercuts the debate between philosophers who consider folk psychology a respectable theory and those the eliminative materialists who reject it. Unlike earlier writing on empathic understanding and historical reenactment, discussions of the simulation theory often appeal to empirical findings, particularly experimental results in developmental psychology. They also theorize about the mechanism that would accomplish simulation: presumably one that calls up computational resources ordinarily used for engagement with the world, but runs them off-line, so that their output is not “endorsed” or acted upon and their inputs are not limited to those that would regulate one’s own behavior. Although simulation theorists agree that the ascription of mental states to others relies chiefly on simulation, they differ on the nature of selfascription. Some especially Robert Gordon and simple supposition simulation theory 845   845 Jane Heal, who independently proposed the theory give a non-introspectionist account, while others especially Goldman lean toward a more traditional introspectionist account. The simulation theory has affected developmental psychology as well as branches of philosophy outside the philosophy of mind, especially aesthetics and philosophy of the social sciences. Some philosophers believe it sheds light on traditional topics such as the problem of other minds, referential opacity, broad and narrow content, and the peculiarities of self-knowledge. 

singular term, an expression, such as ‘Zeus’, ‘the President’, or ‘my favorite chair’, that can be the grammatical subject of what is semantically a subject-predicate sentence. By contrast, a general term, such as ‘table’ or ‘swam’ is one that can serve in predicative position. It is also often said that a singular term is a word or phrase that could refer or ostensibly refer, on a given occasion of use, only to a single object, whereas a general term is predicable of more than one object. Singular terms are thus the expressions that replace, or are replaced by, individual variables in applications of such quantifier rules as universal instantiation and existential generalization or flank ‘%’ in identity statements. 

situation ethics, a kind of anti-theoretical, caseby-case applied ethics in vogue largely in some European and  religious circles for twenty years or so following World War II. It is characterized by the insistence that each moral choice must be determined by one’s particular context or situation  i.e., by a consideration of the outcomes that various possible courses of action might have, given one’s situation. To that degree, situation ethics has affinities to both act utilitarianism and traditional casuistry. But in contrast to utilitarianism, situation ethics rejects the idea that there are universal or even fixed moral principles beyond various indeterminate commitments or ideals e.g., to Christian love or humanism. In contrast to traditional casuistry, it rejects the effort to construct general guidelines from a case or to classify the salient features of a case so that it can be used as a precedent. The anti-theoretical stance of situation ethics is so thoroughgoing that writers identified with the position have not carefully described its connections to consequentialism, existentialism, intuitionism, personalism, pragmatism, relativism, or any other developed philosophical view to which it appears to have some affinity. 

st. john’s: st. john’s keeps a record of all of H. P. Grice’s tutees. It is fascinating that Strawson’s closest collaboration, as Plato with Socrates, and Aristotle with Plato, was with his tutee Strawson – whom Grice calls a ‘pupil,’ finding ‘tutee’ too French to his taste. G. J. Warnock recalls that, of all the venues that the play group held, their favourite one was the room overlooking the garden at st. john’s. “It’s one of the best gardens in England, you know. Very peripathetic.” In alphabetical order, some of his English ‘gentlemanly’ tutees include: London-born J. L. Ackrill, London-born David Bostock, London-born A. G. N. Flew, Leeds-born T. C. Potts, London-born P. F. Strawson. They were happy to have Grice as a tutorial fellow, since he, unlike Mabbot, was English, and did not instill on the tutees a vernacular furrin to the area.

Skolem, Thoralf 73, Norwegian mathematician. A pioneer of mathematical logic, he made fundamental contributions to recursion theory, set theory in particular, the proposal and formulation in 2 of the axiom of replacement, and model theory. His most important results for the philosophy of mathematics are the Downward Löwenheim-Skolem theorem 9, 2, whose first proof involved putting formulas into Skolem normal form; and a demonstration 334 of the existence of models of first-order arithmetic not isomorphic to the standard model. Both results exhibit the extreme non-categoricity that can occur with formulations of mathematical theories in firstorder logic, and caused Skolem to be skeptical about the use of formal systems, particularly for set theory, as a foundation for mathematics. The existence of non-standard models is actually a consequence of the completeness and first incompleteness theorems Gödel, 0, 1, for these together show that there must be sentences of arithmetic if consistent that are true in the standard model, but false in some other, nonisomorphic model. However, Skolem’s result describes a general technique for constructing such models. Skolem’s theorem is now more easily proved using the compactness theorem, an easy consequence of the completeness theorem. The Löwenheim-Skolem theorem produces a similar problem of characterization, the Skolem paradox, pointed out by Skolem in 2. Roughly, this says that if first-order set theory has a model, it must also have a countable model whose continuum is a countable set, and thus apparently non-standard. This does not contradict Cantor’s theorem, which merely demands that the countable model contain as an element no function that maps its natural numbers one-toone onto its continuum, although there must be such a function outside the model. Although usually seen as limiting first-order logic, this result is extremely fruitful technically, providing one basis of the proof of the independence of the continuum hypothesis from the usual axioms of set theory given by Gödel in 8 and Cohen in 3. This connection between independence results and the existence of countable models was partially foreseen by Skolem in 2. 

slippery slope argument, an argument that an action apparently unobjectionable in itself would set in motion a train of events leading ultimately to an undesirable outcome. The metaphor portrays one on the edge of a slippery slope, where taking the first step down will inevitably cause sliding to the bottom. For example, it is sometimes argued that voluntary euthanasia should not be legalized because this will lead to killing unwanted people, e.g. the handicapped or elderly, against their will. In some versions the argument aims to show that one should intervene to stop an ongoing train of events; e.g., it has been argued that suppressing a Communist revolution in one country was necessary to prevent the spread of Communism throughout a whole region via the so-called domino effect. Slippery slope arguments with dubious causal assumptions are often classed as fallacies under the general heading of the fallacy of the false cause. This argument is also sometimes called the wedge argument. There is some disagreement concerning the breadth of the category of slippery slope arguments. Some would restrict the term to arguments with evaluative conclusions, while others construe it more broadly so as to include other sorites arguments. 

Smart, John Jamieson Carswell b.0, British-born Australian philosopher whose name is associated with three doctrines in particular: the mindbody identity theory, scientific realism, and utilitarianism. A student of Ryle’s at Oxford, he rejected logical behaviorism in favor of what came to be known as Australian materialism. This is the view that mental processes  and, as Armstrong brought Smart to see, mental states  cannot be explained simply in terms of behavioristic dispositions. In order to make good sense of how the ordinary person talks of them we have to see them as brain processes  and states  under other names. Smart developed this identity theory of mind and brain, under the stimulus of his colleague, U. T. Place, in “Sensations and Brain Processes” Philosophical Review, 9. It became a mainstay of twentieth-century philosophy. Smart endorsed the materialist analysis of mind on the grounds that it gave a simple picture that was consistent with the findings of science. He took a realist view of the claims of science, rejecting phenomenalism, instrumentalism, and the like, and he argued that commonsense beliefs should be maintained only so far as they are plausible in the light of total science. Philosophy and Scientific Realism 3 gave forceful expression to this physicalist picture of the world, as did some later works. He attracted attention in particular for his argument that if we take science seriously then we have to endorse the four-dimensional picture of the universe and recognize as an illusion the experience of the passing of time. He published a number of defenses of utilitarianism, the best known being his contribution to J. J. C. Smart and Bernard Williams, Utilitarianism, For and Against 3. He gave new life to act utilitarianism at a time when utilitarians were few and most were attached to rule utilitarianism or other restricted forms of the doctrine. 

Smith, Adam 172390, Scottish economist and philosopher, a founder of modern political economy and a major contributor to ethics and the psychology of morals. His first published work was The Theory of Moral Sentiments 1759. This book immediately made him famous, and earned the praise of thinkers of the stature of Hume, Burke, and Kant. It sought to answer two questions: Wherein does virtue consist, and by means of what psychological principles do we determine this or that to be virtuous or the contrary? His answer to the first combined ancient Stoic and Aristotelian views of virtue with modern views derived from Hutcheson and others. His answer to the second built on Hume’s theory of sympathy  our ability to put ourselves imaginatively in the situation of another  as well as on the notion of the “impartial spectator.” Smith throughout is skeptical about metaphysical and theological views of virtue and of the psychology of morals. The self-understanding of reasonable moral actors ought to serve as the moral philosopher’s guide. Smith’s discussion ranges from the motivation of wealth to the psychological causes of religious and political fanaticism. Smith’s second published work, the immensely influential An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations 1776, attempts to explain why free economic, political, and religious markets are not only more efficient, when properly regulated, but also more in keeping with nature, more likely to win the approval of an impartial spectator, than monopolistic alternatives. Taken together, Smith’s two books attempt to show how virtue and liberty can complement each other. He shows full awareness of the potentially dehumanizing force of what was later called “capitalism,” and sought remedies in schemes for liberal education and properly organized religion. Smith did not live to complete his system, which was to include an analysis of “natural jurisprudence.” We possess student notes of his lectures on jurisprudence and on rhetoric, as well as several impressive essays on the evolution of the history of science and on the fine arts. 

social action, a subclass of human action involving the interaction among agents and their mutual orientation, or the action of groups. While all intelligible actions are in some sense social, social actions must be directed to others. Talcott Parsons 279 captured what is distinctive about social action in his concept of “double contingency,” and similar concepts have been developed by other philosophers and sociologists, including Weber, Mead, and Vitters. Whereas in monological action the agents’ fulfilling their purposes depends only on contingent facts about the world, the success of social action is also contingent on how other agents react to what the agent does and how that agent reacts to other agents, and so on. An agent successfully communicates, e.g., not merely by finding some appropriate expression in an existing symbol system, but also by understanding how other agents will understand him. Game theory describes and explains another type of double contingency in its analysis of the interdependency of choices and strategies among rational agents. Games are also significant in two other respects. First, they exemplify the cognitive requirements for social interaction, as in Mead’s analysis of agents’ perspective taking: as a subject “I”, I am an object for others “me”, and can take a third-person perspective along with others on the interaction itself “the generalized other”. Second, games are regulated by shared rules and mediated through symbolic meanings; Vitters’s private language argument establishes that rules cannot be followed “privately.” Some philosophers, such as Peter Winch, conclude from this argument that rule-following is a basic feature of distinctively social action. Some actions are social in the sense that they can only be done in groups. Individualists such as Weber, Jon Elster, and Raimo Tuomela believe that these can be analyzed as the sum of the actions of each individual. But holists such as Marx, Durkheim, and Margaret Gilbert reject this reduction and argue that in social actions agents must see themselves as members of a collective agent. Holism has stronger or weaker versions: strong holists, such as Durkheim and Hegel, see the collective subject as singular, the collective consciousness of a society. Weak holists, such as Gilbert and Habermas, believe that social actions have plural, rather than singular, collective subjects. Holists generally establish the plausibility of their view by referring to larger contexts and sequences of action, such as shared symbol systems or social institutions. Explanations of social actions thus refer not only to the mutual expectations of agents, but also to these larger causal contexts, shared meanings, and mechanisms of coordination. Theories of social action must then explain the emergence of social order, and proposals range from Hobbes’s coercive authority to Talcott Parsons’s value consensus about shared goals among the members of groups.  -- social biology, the understanding of social behavior, especially human social behavior, from a biological perspective; often connected with the political philosophy of social Darwinism. Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species highlighted the significance of social behavior in organic evolution, and in the Descent of Man, he showed how significant such behavior is for humans. He argued that it is a product of natural selection; but it was not until 4 that the English biologist William Hamilton showed precisely how such behavior could evolve, namely through “kin selection” as an aid to the biological wellbeing of close relatives. Since then, other models of explanation have been proposed, extending the theory to non-relatives. Best known is the self-describing “reciprocal altruism.” Social biology became notorious in 5 when Edward O. Wilson published a major treatise on the subject: Sociobiology: The New Synthesis. Accusations of sexism and racism were leveled because Wilson suggested that Western social systems are biologically innate, and that in some respects males are stronger, more aggressive, more naturally promiscuous than females. Critics argued that all social biology is in fact a manifestation of social Darwinism, a nineteenthcentury philosophy owing more to Herbert Spencer than to Charles Darwin, supposedly legitimating extreme laissez-faire economics and an unbridled societal struggle for existence. Such a charge is extremely serious, for as Moore pointed out in his Principia Ethica 3, Spencer surely commits the naturalistic fallacy, inasmuch as he is attempting to derive the way that the world ought to be from the way that it is. Naturally enough, defenders of social biology, or “sociobiology” as it is now better known, denied vehemently that their science is mere right-wing ideology by another name. They pointed to many who have drawn very different social conclusions on the basis of biology. Best known is the Russian anarchist Kropotkin, who argued that societies are properly based on a biological propensity to mutual aid. With respect to contemporary debate, it is perhaps fairest to say that sociobiology, particularly that pertaining to humans, did not always show sufficient sensitivity toward all societal groups  although certainly there was never the crude racism of the fascist regimes of the 0s. However, recent work is far more careful in these respects. Now, indeed, the study of social behavior from a biological perspective is one of the most exciting and forward-moving branches of the life sciences.  -- social choice theory, the theory of the rational action of a group of agents. Important social choices are typically made over alternative means of collectively providing goods. These might be goods for individual members of the group, or more characteristically, public goods, goods such that no one can be excluded from enjoying their benefits once they are available. Perhaps the most central aspect of social choice theory concerns rational individual choice in a social context. Since what is rational for one agent to do will often depend on what is rational for another to do and vice versa, these choices take on a strategic dimension. The prisoner’s dilemma illustrates how it can be very difficult to reconcile individual and collectively rational decisions, especially in non-dynamic contexts. There are many situations, particularly in the provision of public goods, however, where simple prisoner’s dilemmas can be avoided and more manageable coordination problems remain. In these cases, individuals may find it rational to contractually or conventionally bind themselves to courses of action that lead to the greater good of all even though they are not straightforwardly utility-maximizing for particular individuals. Establishing the rationality of these contracts or conventions is one of the leading problems of social choice theory, because coordination can collapse if a rational agent first agrees to cooperate and then reneges and becomes a free rider on the collective efforts of others. Other forms of uncooperative behaviors such as violating rules established by society or being deceptive about one’s preferences pose similar difficulties. Hobbes attempted to solve these problems by proposing that people would agree to submit to the authority of a sovereign whose punitive powers would make uncooperative behavior an unattractive option. It has also been argued that cooperation is rational if the concept of rationality is extended beyond utility-maximizing in the right way. Other arguments stress benefits beyond selfinterest that accrue to cooperators. Another major aspect of social choice theory concerns the rational action of a powerful central authority, or social planner, whose mission is to optimize the social good. Although the central planner may be instituted by rational individual choice, this part of the theory simply assumes the institution. The planner’s task of making a onetime allocation of resources to the production of various commodities is tractable if social good or social utility is known as a function of various commodities. When the planner must take into account dynamical considerations, the technical problems are more difficult. This economic growth theory raises important ethical questions about intergenerational conflict. The assumption of a social analogue of the individual utility functions is particularly worrisome. It can be shown formally that taking the results of majority votes can lead to intransitive social orderings of possible choices and it is, therefore, a generally unsuitable procedure for the planner to follow. Moreover, under very general conditions there is no way of aggregating individual preferences into a consistent social choice function of the kind needed by the planner.  -- social constructivism, also called social constructionism, any of a variety of views which claim that knowledge in some area is the product of our social practices and institutions, or of the interactions and negotiations between relevant social groups. Mild versions hold that social factors shape interpretations of the world. Stronger versions maintain that the world, or some significant portion of it, is somehow constituted by theories, practices, and institutions. Defenders often move from mild to stronger versions by insisting that the world is accessible to us only through our interpretations, and that the idea of an independent reality is at best an irrelevant abstraction and at worst incoherent. This philosophical position is distinct from, though distantly related to, a view of the same name in social and developmental psychology, associated with such figures as Piaget and Lev Vygotsky, which sees learning as a process in which subjects actively construct knowledge. Social constructivism has roots in Kant’s idealism, which claims that we cannot know things in themselves and that knowledge of the world is possible only by imposing pre-given categories of thought on otherwise inchoate experience. But where Kant believed that the categories with which we interpret and thus construct the world are given a priori, contemporary constructivists believe that the relevant concepts and associated practices vary from one group or historical period to another. Since there are no independent standards for evaluating conceptual schemes, social constructivism leads naturally to relativism. These views are generally thought to be present in Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, which argues that observation and methods in science are deeply theory-dependent and that scientists with fundamentally different assumptions or paradigms effectively live in different worlds. Kuhn thus offers a view of science in opposition to both scientific realism which holds that theory-dependent methods can give us knowledge of a theory-independent world and empiricism which draws a sharp line between theory and observation. Kuhn was reluctant to accept the apparently radical consequences of his views, but his work has influenced recent social studies of science, whose proponents frequently embrace both relativism and strong constructivism. Another influence is the principle of symmetry advocated by David Bloor and Barry Barnes, which holds that sociologists should explain the acceptance of scientific views in the same way whether they believe those views to be true or to be false. This approach is elaborated in the work of Harry Collins, Steve Woolgar, and others. Constructivist themes are also prominent in the work of feminist critics of science such as Sandra Harding and Donna Haraway, and in the complex views of Bruno Latour. Critics, such as Richard Boyd and Philip Kitcher, while applauding the detailed case studies produced by constructivists, claim that the positive arguments for constructivism are fallacious, that it fails to account satisfactorily for actual scientific practice, and that like other versions of idealism and relativism it is only dubiously coherent.  -- social contract, an agreement either between the people and their ruler, or among the people in a community. The idea of a social contract has been used in arguments that differ in what they aim to justify or explain e.g., the state, conceptions of justice, morality, what they take the problem of justification to be, and whether or not they presuppose a moral theory or purport to be a moral theory. Traditionally the term has been used in arguments that attempt to explain the nature of political obligation and/or the kind of responsibility that rulers have to their subjects. Philosophers such as Plato, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, and Kant argue that human beings would find life in a prepolitical “state of nature” a state that some argue is also presocietal so difficult that they would agree  either with one another or with a prospective ruler  to the creation of political institutions that each believes would improve his or her lot. Note that because the argument explains political or social cohesion as the product of an agreement among individuals, it makes these individuals conceptually prior to political or social units. Marx and other socialist and communitarian thinkers have argued against conceptualizing an individual’s relationship to her political and social community in this way. Have social contracts in political societies actually taken place? Hume ridicules the idea that they are real, and questions what value makebelieve agreements can have as explanations of actual political obligations. Although many social contract theorists admit that there is almost never an explicit act of agreement in a community, nonetheless they maintain that such an agreement is implicitly made when members of the society engage in certain acts through which they give their tacit consent to the ruling regime. It is controversial what actions constitute giving tacit consent: Plato and Locke maintain that the acceptance of benefits is sufficient to give such consent, but some have argued that it is wrong to feel obliged to those who foist upon us benefits for which we have not asked. It is also unclear how much of an obligation a person can be under if he gives only tacit consent to a regime. How are we to understand the terms of a social contract establishing a state? When the people agree to obey the ruler, do they surrender their own power to him, as Hobbes tried to argue? Or do they merely lend him that power, reserving the right to take it from him if and when they see fit, as Locke maintained? If power is merely on loan to the ruler, rebellion against him could be condoned if he violates the conditions of that loan. But if the people’s grant of power is a surrender, there are no such conditions, and the people could never be justified in taking back that power via revolution. Despite controversies surrounding their interpretation, social contract arguments have been important to the development of modern democratic states: the idea of the government as the creation of the people, which they can and should judge and which they have the right to overthrow if they find it wanting, contributed to the development of democratic forms of polity in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.  and  revolutionaries explicitly acknowledged their debts to social contract theorists such as Locke and Rousseau. In the twentieth century, the social contract idea has been used as a device for defining various moral conceptions e.g. theories of justice by those who find its focus on individuals useful in the development of theories that argue against views e.g. utilitarianism that allow individuals to be sacrificed for the benefit of the group -- social epistemology, the study of the social dimensions or determinants of knowledge, or the ways in which social factors promote or perturb the quest for knowledge. Some writers use the term ‘knowledge’ loosely, as designating mere belief. On their view social epistemology should simply describe how social factors influence beliefs, without concern for the rationality or truth of these beliefs. Many historians and sociologists of science, e.g., study scientific practices in the same spirit that anthropologists study native cultures, remaining neutral about the referential status of scientists’ constructs or the truth-values of their beliefs. Others try to show that social factors like political or professional interests are causally operative, and take such findings to debunk any objectivist pretensions of science. Still other writers retain a normative, critical dimension in social epistemology, but do not presume that social practices necessarily undermine objectivity. Even if knowledge is construed as true or rational belief, social practices might enhance knowledge acquisition. One social practice is trusting the opinions of authorities, a practice that can produce truth if the trusted authorities are genuinely authoritative. Such trust may also be perfectly rational in a complex world, where division of epistemic labor is required. Even a scientist’s pursuit of extra-epistemic interests such as professional rewards may not be antithetical to truth in favorable circumstances. Institutional provisions, e.g., judicial rules of evidence, provide another example of social factors. Exclusionary rules might actually serve the cause of truth or accuracy in judgment if the excluded evidence would tend to mislead or prejudice jurors.  -- social philosophy, broadly the philosophy of socisocial Darwinism social philosophy 856   856 ety, including the philosophy of social science and many of its components, e.g., economics and history, political philosophy, most of what we now think of as ethics, and philosophy of law. But we may distinguish two narrower senses. In one, it is the conceptual theory of society, including the theory of the study of society  the common part of all the philosophical studies mentioned. In the other, it is a normative study, the part of moral philosophy that concerns social action and individual involvement with society in general. The central job of social philosophy in the first of these narrower senses is to articulate the correct notion or concept of society. This would include formulating a suitable definition of ‘society’; the question is then which concepts are better for which purposes, and how they are related. Thus we may distinguish “thin” and “thick” conceptions of society. The former would identify the least that can be said before we cease talking about society at all  say, a number of people who interact, whose actions affect the behavior of their fellows. Thicker conceptions would then add such things as community rules, goals, customs, and ideals. An important empirical question is whether any interacting groups ever do lack such things and what if anything is common to the rules, etc., that actual societies have. Descriptive social philosophy will obviously border on, if not merge into, social science itself, e.g. into sociology, social psychology, or economics. And some outlooks in social philosophy will tend to ally with one social science as more distinctively typical than others  e.g., the individualist view looks to economics, the holist to sociology. A major methodological controversy concerns holism versus individualism. Holism maintains that at least some social groups must be studied as units, irreducible to their members: we cannot understand a society merely by understanding the actions and motivations of its members. Individualism denies that societies are “organisms,” and holds that we can understand society only in that way. Classic G. sociologists e.g., Weber distinguished between Gesellschaft, whose paradigm is the voluntary association, such as a chess club, whose activities are the coordinated actions of a number of people who intentionally join that group in order to pursue the purposes that identify it; and Gemeinschaft, whose members find their identities in that group. Thus, the  are not a group whose members teamed up with like-minded people to form  society. They were  before they had separate individual purposes. The holist views society as essentially a Gemeinschaft. Individualists agree that there are such groupings but deny that they require a separate kind of irreducibly collective explanation: to understand the  we must understand how typical  individuals behave  compared, say, with the G.s, and so on. The methods of Western economics typify the analytical tendencies of methodological individualism, showing how we can understand large-scale economic phenomena in terms of the rational actions of particular economic agents. Cf. Adam Smith’s invisible hand thesis: each economic agent seeks only his own good, yet the result is the macrophenomenal good of the whole. Another pervasive issue concerns the role of intentional characterizations and explanations in these fields. Ordinary people explain behavior by reference to its purposes, and they formulate these in terms that rely on public rules of language and doubtless many other rules. To understand society, we must hook onto the selfunderstanding of the people in that society this view is termed Verstehen. Recent work in philosophy of science raises the question whether intentional concepts can really be fundamental in explaining anything, and whether we must ultimately conceive people as in some sense material systems, e.g. as computer-like. Major questions for the program of replicating human intelligence in data-processing terms cf. artificial intelligence are raised by the symbolic aspects of interaction. Additionally, we should note the emergence of sociobiology as a potent source of explanations of social phenomena. Normative social philosophy, in turn, tends inevitably to merge into either politics or ethics, especially the part of ethics dealing with how people ought to treat others, especially in large groups, in relation to social institutions or social structures. This contrasts with ethics in the sense concerned with how individual people may attain the good life for themselves. All such theories allot major importance to social relations; but if one’s theory leaves the individual wide freedom of choice, then a theory of individually chosen goods will still have a distinctive subject matter. The normative involvements of social philosophy have paralleled the foregoing in important ways. Individualists have held that the good of a society must be analyzed in terms of the goods of its individual members. Of special importance has been the view that society must respect indisocial philosophy social philosophy 857   857 vidual rights, blocking certain actions alleged to promote social good as a whole. Organicist philosophers such as Hegel hold that it is the other way around: the state or nation is higher than the individual, who is rightly subordinated to it, and individuals have fundamental duties toward the groups of which they are members. Outrightly fascist versions of such views are unpopular today, but more benign versions continue in modified form, notably by communitarians. Socialism and especially communism, though focused originally on economic aspects of society, have characteristically been identified with the organicist outlook. Their extreme opposite is to be found in the libertarians, who hold that the right to individual liberty is fundamental in society, and that no institutions may override that right. Libertarians hold that society ought to be treated strictly as an association, a Gesellschaft, even though they might not deny that it is ontogenetically Gemeinschaft. They might agree that religious groups, e.g., cannot be wholly understood as separate individuals. Nevertheless, the libertarian holds that religious and cultural practices may not be interfered with or even supported by society. Libertarians are strong supporters of free-market economic methods, and opponents of any sort of state intervention into the affairs of individuals. Social Darwinism, advocating the “survival of the socially fittest,” has sometimes been associated with the libertarian view. Insofar as there is any kind of standard view on these matters, it combines elements of both individualism and holism. Typical social philosophers today accept that society has duties, not voluntary for individual members, to support education, health, and some degree of welfare for all. But they also agree that individual rights are to be respected, especially civil rights, such as freedom of speech and religion. How to combine these two apparently disparate sets of ideas into a coherent whole is the problem. John Rawls’s celebrated Theory of Justice, 1, is a contemporary classic that attempts to do just that. 

Socinianism, an unorthodox Christian religious movement originating in the sixteenth century from the work of  reformer Laelius Socinus “Sozzini” in ; 152562 and his nephew Faustus Socinus 15391603. Born in Siena of a patrician family, Laelius was widely read in theology. Influenced by the evangelical movement in Italy, he made contact with noted Protestant reformers, including Calvin and Melanchthon, some of whom questioned his orthodoxy. In response, he wrote a confession of faith one of a small number of his writings to have survived. After Laelius’s death, his work was carried on by his nephew, Faustus, whose writings including On the Authority of Scripture, 1570; On the Savior Jesus Christ, 1578; and On Predestination, 1578 expressed heterodox views. Faustus believed that Christ’s nature was entirely human, that souls did not possess immortality by nature though there would be selective resurrection for believers, that invocation of Christ in prayer was permissible but not required, and he argued against predestination. After publication of his 1578 writings, Faustus was invited to Transylvania and Poland to engage in a dispute within the Reformed churches there. He decided to make his permanent residence in Poland, which, through his tireless efforts, became the center of the Socinian movement. The most important document of this movement was the Racovian Catechism, published in 1605 shortly after Faustus’s death. The Minor church of Poland, centered at Racov, became the focal point of the movement. Its academy attracted hundreds of students and its publishing house produced books in many languages defending Socinian ideas. Socinianism, as represented by the Racovian Catechism and other writings collected by Faustus’s Polish disciples, involves the views of Laelius and especially Faustus Socinus, aligned with the anti-Trinitarian views of the Polish Minor church founded in 1556. It accepts Christ’s message as the definitive revelation of God, but regards Christ as human, not divine; rejects the natural immortality of the soul, but argues for the selective resurrection of the faithful; rejects the doctrine of the Trinity; emphasizes human free will against predestinationism; defends pacifism and the separation of church and state; and argues that reason  not creeds, dogmatic tradition, or church authority  must be the final interpreter of Scripture. Its view of God is temporalistic: God’s eternity is existence at all times, not timelessness, and God knows future free actions only when they occur. In these respects, the Socinian view of God anticipates aspects of modern process theology. Socinianism was suppressed in Poland in 1658, but it had already spread to other European social sciences, philosophy of the Socinianism 858   858 countries, including Holland where it appealed to followers of Arminius and England, where it influenced the Cambridge Platonists, Locke, and other philosophers, as well as scientists like Newton. In England, it also influenced and was closely associated with the development of Unitarianism. 

Socrates 469399 B.C., Grecian philosopher, the exemplar of the examined life, best known for his dictum that only such a life is worth living. Although he wrote nothing, his thoughts and way of life had a profound impact on many of his contemporaries, and, through Plato’s portrayal of him in his early writings, he became a major source of inspiration and ideas for later generations of philosophers. His daily occupation was adversarial public conversation with anyone willing to argue with him. A man of great intellectual brilliance, moral integrity, personal magnetism, and physical self-command, he challenged the moral complacency of his fellow citizens, and embarrassed them with their inability to answer such questions as What is virtue?  questions that he thought we must answer, if we are to know how best to live our lives. His ideas and personality won him a devoted following among the young, but he was far from universally admired. Formal charges were made against him for refusing to recognize the gods of the city, introducing other new divinities, and corrupting the youth. Tried on a single day before a large jury 500 was a typical size, he was found guilty by a small margin: had thirty jurors voted differently, he would have been acquitted. The punishment selected by the jury was death and was administered by means of poison, probably hemlock. Why was he brought to trial and convicted? Part of the answer lies in Plato’s Apology, which purports to be the defense Socrates gave at his trial. Here he says that he has for many years been falsely portrayed as someone whose scientific theories dethrone the traditional gods and put natural forces in their place, and as someone who charges a fee for offering private instruction on how to make a weak argument seem strong in the courtroom. This is the picture of Socrates drawn in a play of Aristophanes, the Clouds, first presented in 423. It is unlikely that Aristophanes intended his play as an accurate depiction of Socrates, and the unscrupulous buffoon found in the Clouds would never have won the devotion of so serious a moralist as Plato. Aristophanes drew together the assorted characteristics of various fifth-century thinkers and named this amalgam “Socrates” because the real Socrates was one of several controversial intellectuals of the period. Nonetheless, it is unlikely that the charges against Socrates or Aristophanes’ caricature were entirely without foundation. Both Xenophon’s Memorabilia and Plato’s Euthyphro say that Socrates aroused suspicion because he thought a certain divine sign or voice appeared to him and gave him useful instruction about how to act. By claiming a unique and private source of divine inspiration, Socrates may have been thought to challenge the city’s exclusive control over religious matters. His willingness to disobey the city is admitted in Plato’s Apology, where he says that he would have to disobey a hypothetical order to stop asking his philosophical questions, since he regards them as serving a religious purpose. In the Euthyphro he seeks a rational basis for making sacrifices and performing other services to the gods; but he finds none, and implies that no one else has one. Such a challenge to traditional religious practice could easily have aroused a suspicion of atheism and lent credibility to the formal charges against him. Furthermore, Socrates makes statements in Plato’s early dialogues and in Xenophon’s Memorabilia that could easily have offended the political sensibilities of his contemporaries. He holds that only those who have given special study to political matters should make decisions. For politics is a kind of craft, and in all other crafts only those who have shown their mastery are entrusted with public responsibilities. Athens was a democracy in which each citizen had an equal legal right to shape policy, and Socrates’ analogy between the role of an expert in politics and in other crafts may have been seen as a threat to this egalitarianism. Doubts about his political allegiance, though not mentioned in the formal charges against him, could easily have swayed some jurors to vote against him. Socrates is the subject not only of Plato’s early dialogues but also of Xenophon’s Memorabilia, Socinus, Faustus Socrates 859   859 and in many respects their portraits are consistent with each other. But there are also some important differences. In the Memorabilia, Socrates teaches whatever a gentleman needs to know for civic purposes. He is filled with platitudinous advice, and is never perplexed by the questions he raises; e.g., he knows what the virtues are, equating them with obedience to the law. His views are not threatening or controversial, and always receive the assent of his interlocutors. By contrast, Plato’s Socrates presents himself as a perplexed inquirer who knows only that he knows nothing about moral matters. His interlocutors are sometimes annoyed by his questions and threatened by their inability to answer them. And he is sometimes led by force of argument to controversial conclusions. Such a Socrates could easily have made enemies, whereas Xenophon’s Socrates is sometimes too “good” to be true. But it is important to bear in mind that it is only the early works of Plato that should be read as an accurate depiction of the historical Socrates. Plato’s own theories, as presented in his middle and late dialogues, enter into philosophical terrain that had not been explored by the historical Socrates  even though in the middle and some of the late dialogues a figure called Socrates remains the principal speaker. We are told by Aristotle that Socrates confined himself to ethical questions, and that he did not postulate a separate realm of imperceptible and eternal abstract objects called “Forms” or “Ideas.” Although the figure called Socrates affirms the existence of these objects in such Platonic dialogues as the Phaedo and the Republic, Aristotle takes this interlocutor to be a vehicle for Platonic philosophy, and attributes to Socrates only those positions that we find in Plato’s earlier writing, e.g. in the Apology, Charmides, Crito, Euthyphro, Hippias Minor, Hippias Major, Ion, Laches, Lysis, and Protagoras. Socrates focused on moral philosophy almost exclusively; Plato’s attention was also devoted to the study of metaphysics, epistemology, physical theory, mathematics, language, and political philosophy. When we distinguish the philosophies of Socrates and Plato in this way, we find continuities in their thought  for instance, the questions posed in the early dialogues receive answers in the Republic  but there are important differences. For Socrates, being virtuous is a purely intellectual matter: it simply involves knowing what is good for human beings; once we master this subject, we will act as we should. Because he equates virtue with knowledge, Socrates frequently draws analogies between being virtuous and having mastered any ordinary subject  cooking, building, or geometry, e.g. For mastery of these subjects does not involve a training of the emotions. By contrast, Plato affirms the existence of powerful emotional drives that can deflect us from our own good, if they are not disciplined by reason. He denies Socrates’ assumption that the emotions will not resist reason, once one comes to understand where one’s own good lies. Socrates says in Plato’s Apology that the only knowledge he has is that he knows nothing, but it would be a mistake to infer that he has no convictions about moral matters  convictions arrived at through a difficult process of reasoning. He holds that the unexamined life is not worth living, that it is better to be treated unjustly than to do injustice, that understanding of moral matters is the only unconditional good, that the virtues are all forms of knowledge and cannot be separated from each other, that death is not an evil, that a good person cannot be harmed, that the gods possess the wisdom human beings lack and never act immorally, and so on. He does not accept these propositions as articles of faith, but is prepared to defend any of them; for he can show his interlocutors that their beliefs ought to lead them to accept these conclusions, paradoxical though they may be. Since Socrates can defend his beliefs and has subjected them to intellectual scrutiny, why does he present himself as someone who has no knowledge  excepting the knowledge of his own ignorance? The answer lies in his assumption that it is only a fully accomplished expert in any field who can claim knowledge or wisdom of that field; someone has knowledge of navigational matters, e.g., only if he has mastered the art of sailing, can answer all inquiries about this subject, and can train others to do the same. Judged by this high epistemic standard, Socrates can hardly claim to be a moral expert, for he lacks answers to the questions he raises, and cannot teach others to be virtuous. Though he has examined his moral beliefs and can offer reasons for them  an accomplishment that gives him an overbearing sense of superiority to his contemporaries  he takes himself to be quite distant from the ideal of moral perfection, which would involve a thorough understanding of all moral matters. This keen sense of the moral and intellectual deficiency of all human beings accounts for a great deal of Socrates’ appeal, just as his arrogant disdain for his fellow citizens no doubt contributed to his demise. Socrates Socrates 860   860  -- Socratic intellectualism, the claim that moral goodness or virtue consists exclusively in a kind of knowledge, with the implication that if one knows what is good and evil, one cannot fail to be a good person and to act in a morally upright way. The claim and the term derive from Socrates; a corollary is another claim of Socrates: there is no moral weakness or akrasia  all wrong action is due to the agent’s ignorance. Socrates defends this view in Plato’s dialogue Protagoras. There are two ways to understand Socrates’ view that knowledge of the good is sufficient for right action. 1 All desires are rational, being focused on what is believed to be good; thus, an agent who knows what is good will have no desire to act contrary to that knowledge. 2 There are non-rational desires, but knowledge of the good has sufficient motivational power to overcome them. Socratic intellectualism was abandoned by Plato and Aristotle, both of whom held that emotional makeup is an essential part of moral character. However, they retained the Socratic idea that there is a kind of knowledge or wisdom that ensures right action  but this knowledge presupposes antecedent training and molding of the passions. Socratic intellectualism was later revived and enjoyed a long life as a key doctrine of the Stoics.  -- Socratic irony, a form of indirect communication frequently employed by Socrates in Plato’s early dialogues, chiefly to praise insincerely the abilities of his interlocutors while revealing their ignorance; or, to disparage his own abilities, e.g. by denying that he has knowledge. Interpreters disagree whether Socrates’ self-disparagement is insincere.  -- Socratic paradoxes, a collection of theses associated with Socrates that contradict opinions about moral or practical matters shared by most people. Although there is no consensus on the precise number of Socratic paradoxes, each of the following theses has been identified as one. 1 Because no one desires evil things, anyone who pursues evil things does so involuntarily. 2 Because virtue is knowledge, anyone who does something morally wrong does so involuntarily. 3 It is better to be unjustly treated than to do what is unjust. The first two theses are associated with weakness of will or akrasia. It is sometimes claimed that the topic of the first thesis is prudential weakness, whereas that of the second is moral weakness; the reference to “evil things” in 1 is not limited to things that are morally evil. Naturally, various competing interpretations of these theses have been offered. 

solipsism, the doctrine that there exists a firstperson perspective possessing privileged and irreducible characteristics, in virtue of which we stand in various kinds of isolation from any other persons or external things that may exist. This doctrine is associated with but distinct from egocentricism. On one variant of solipsism Thomas Nagel’s we are isolated from other sentient beings because we can never adequately understand their experience empathic solipsism. Another variant depends on the thesis that the meanings or referents of all words are mental entities uniquely accessible only to the language user semantic solipsism. A restricted variant, due to Vitters, asserts that first-person ascriptions of psychological states have a meaning fundamentally different from that of second- or thirdperson ascriptions psychological solipsism. In extreme forms semantic solipsism can lead to the view that the only things that can be meaningfully said to exist are ourselves or our mental states ontological solipsism. Skepticism about the existence of the world external to our minds is sometimes considered a form of epistemological solipsism, since it asserts that we stand in epistemological isolation from that world, partly as a result of the epistemic priority possessed by firstperson access to mental states. In addition to these substantive versions of solipsism, several variants go under the rubric methodological solipsism. The idea is that when we seek to explain why sentient beings behave in certain ways by looking to what they believe, desire, hope, and fear, we should identify these psychological states only with events that occur inside the mind or brain, not with external events, since the former alone are the proximate and sufficient causal explanations of bodily behavior. Socratic intellectualism solipsism 861   861 

Solovyov, Vladimir 18530, Russian philosopher, theologian, essayist, and poet. In addition to major treatises and dialogues in speculative philosophy, Solovyov wrote sensitive literary criticism and influential essays on current social, political, and ecclesiastical questions. His serious verse is subtle and delicate; his light verse is rich in comic invention. The mystical image of the “Divine Sophia,” which Solovyov articulated in theoretical concepts as well as poetic symbols, powerfully influenced the Russian symbolist poets of the early twentieth century. His stress on the human role in the “divine-human process” that creates both cosmic and historical being led to charges of heresy from Russian Orthodox traditionalists. Solovyov’s rationalistic “justification of the good” in history, society, and individual life was inspired by Plato, Spinoza, and especially Hegel. However, at the end of his life Solovyov offered in Three Conversations on War, Progress, and the End of History, 0 a contrasting apocalyptic vision of historical and cosmic disaster, including the appearance, in the twenty-first century, of the Antichrist. In ethics, social philosophy, philosophy of history, and theory of culture, Solovyov was both a vigorous ecumenist and a “good European” who affirmed the intrinsic value of both the “individual human person” Russian lichnost’ and the “individual nation or people” narodnost’, but he decisively repudiated the perversions of these values in egoism and nationalism, respectively. He contrasted the fruits of English narodnost’  the works of Shakespeare and Byron, Berkeley and Newton  with the fruits of English nationalism  the repressive and destructive expansion of the British Empire. In opposing ethnic, national, and religious exclusiveness and self-centeredness, Solovyov also, and quite consistently, opposed the growing xenophobia and antiSemitism of his own time. Since 8 long-suppressed works by and about Solovyov have been widely republished in Russia, and fresh interpretations of his philosophy and theology have begun to appear. 

sophisma, a sentenca illustrating a semantic or logical issue associated with the analysis of a syncategorematic term, or a term lacking independent signification. Typically a sophisma was used from the thirteenth century into the sixteenth century to analyze relations holding between logic or semantics and broader philosophical issues. For example, the syncategorematic term ‘besides’ praeter in ‘Socrates twice sees every man besides Plato’ is ambiguous, because it could mean ‘On two occasions Socrates sees every-man-but-Plato’ and also ‘Except for overlooking Plato once, on two occasions Socrates sees every man’. Roger Bacon used this sophisma to discuss the ambiguity of distribution, in this case, of the scope of the reference of ‘twice’ and ‘besides’. Sherwood used the sophisma to illustrate the applicability of his rule of the distribution of ambiguous syncategoremata, while Pseudo-Peter of Spain uses it to establish the truth of the rule, ‘If a proposition is in part false, it can be made true by means of an exception, but not if it is completely false’. In each case, the philosopher uses the ambiguous signification of the syncategorematic term to analyze broader logical problems. The sophisma ‘Every man is of necessity an animal’ has ambiguity through the syncategorematic ‘every’ that leads to broader philosophical problems. In the 1270s, Boethius of Dacia analyzed this sophisma in terms of its applicability when no man exists. Is the knowledge derived from understanding the proposition destroyed when the object known is destroyed? Does ‘man’ signify anything when there are no men? If we can correctly predicate a genus of a species, is the nature of the genus in that species something other than, or distinct from, what finally differentiates the species? In this case, the sophisma proves a useful approach to addressing metaphysical and epistemological problems central to Scholastic discourse. 

sophisma: any of a number of ancient Grecians, roughly contemporaneous with Socrates, who professed to teach, for a fee, rhetoric, philosophy, and how to succeed in life. They typically were itinerants, visiting much of the Grecian world, and gave public exhibitions at Olympia and Delphi. They were part of the general expansion of Grecian learning and of the changing culture in which the previous informal educational methods were inadequate. For example, the growing litigiousness of Athenian society demanded Solovyov, Vladimir Sophists 862   862 instruction in the art of speaking well, which the Sophists helped fulfill. The Sophists have been portrayed as intellectual charlatans hence the pejorative use of ‘sophism’, teaching their sophistical reasoning for money, and at the other extreme as Victorian moralists and educators. The truth is more complex. They were not a school, and shared no body of opinions. They were typically concerned with ethics unlike many earlier philosophers, who emphasized physical inquiries and about the relationship between laws and customs nomos and nature phusis. Protagoras of Abdera c.490c.420 B.C. was the most famous and perhaps the first Sophist. He visited Athens frequently, and became a friend of its leader, Pericles; he therefore was invited to draw up a legal code for the colony of Thurii 444. According to some late reports, he died in a shipwreck as he was leaving Athens, having been tried for and found guilty of impiety. He claimed that he knew nothing about the gods, because of human limitations and the difficulty of the question. We have only a few short quotations from his works. His “Truth” also known as the “Throws,” i.e., how to overthrow an opponent’s arguments begins with his most famous claim: “Humans are the measure of all things  of things that are, that they are, of things that are not, that they are not.” That is, there is no objective truth; the world is for each person as it appears to that person. Of what use, then, are skills? Skilled people can change others’ perceptions in useful ways. For example, a doctor can change a sick person’s perceptions so that she is healthy. Protagoras taught his students to “make the weaker argument the stronger,” i.e., to alter people’s perceptions about the value of arguments. Aristophanes satirizes Protagoras as one who would make unjust arguments defeat just arguments. This is true for ethical judgments, too: laws and customs are simply products of human agreement. But because laws and customs result from experiences of what is most useful, they should be followed rather than nature. No perception or judgment is more true than another, but some are more useful, and those that are more useful should be followed. Gorgias c.483376 was a student of Empedocles. His town, Leontini in Sicily, sent him as an ambassador to Athens in 427; his visit was a great success, and the Athenians were amazed at his rhetorical ability. Like other Sophists, he charged for instruction and gave speeches at religious festivals. Gorgias denied that he taught virtue; instead, he produced clever speakers. He insisted that different people have different virtues: for example, women’s virtue differs from men’s. Since there is no truth and if there were we couldn’t know it, we must rely on opinion, and so speakers who can change people’s opinions have great power  greater than the power produced by any other skill. In his “Encomium on Helen” he argues that if she left Menelaus and went with Paris because she was convinced by speech, she wasn’t responsible for her actions. Two paraphrases of Gorgias’s “About What Doesn’t Exist” survive; in this he argues that nothing exists, that even if something did, we couldn’t know it, and that even if we could know anything we couldn’t explain it to anyone. We can’t know anything, because some things we think of do not exist, and so we have no way of judging whether the things we think of exist. And we can’t express any knowledge we may have, because no two people can think of the same thing, since the same thing can’t be in two places, and because we use words in speech, not colors or shapes or objects. This may be merely a parody of Parmenides’ argument that only one thing exists. Antiphon the Sophist fifth century is probably although not certainly to be distinguished from Antiphon the orator d. 411, some of whose speeches we possess. We know nothing about his life if he is distinct from the orator. In addition to brief quotations in later authors, we have two papyrus fragments of his “On Truth.” In these he argues that we should follow laws and customs only if there are witnesses and so our action will affect our reputation; otherwise, we should follow nature, which is often inconsistent with following custom. Custom is established by human agreement, and so disobeying it is detrimental only if others know it is disobeyed, whereas nature’s demands unlike those of custom can’t be ignored with impunity. Antiphon assumes that rational actions are selfinterested, and that justice demands actions contrary to self-interest  a position Plato attacks in the Republic. Antiphon was also a materialist: the nature of a bed is wood, since if a buried bed could grow it would grow wood, not a bed. His view is one of Aristotle’s main concerns in the Physics, since Aristotle admits in the Categories that persistence through change is the best test for substance, but won’t admit that matter is substance. Hippias fifth century was from Elis, in the Peloponnesus, which used him as an ambasSophists Sophists 863   863 sador. He competed at the festival of Olympus with both prepared and extemporaneous speeches. He had a phenomenal memory. Since Plato repeatedly makes fun of him in the two dialogues that bear his name, he probably was selfimportant and serious. He was a polymath who claimed he could do anything, including making speeches and clothes; he wrote a work collecting what he regarded as the best things said by others. According to one report, he made a mathematical discovery the quadratrix, the first curve other than the circle known to the Grecians. In the Protagoras, Plato has Hippias contrast nature and custom, which often does violence to nature. Prodicus fifth century was from Ceos, in the Cyclades, which frequently employed him on diplomatic missions. He apparently demanded high fees, but had two versions of his lecture  one cost fifty drachmas, the other one drachma. Socrates jokes that if he could have afforded the fifty-drachma lecture, he would have learned the truth about the correctness of words, and Aristotle says that when Prodicus added something exciting to keep his audience’s attention he called it “slipping in the fifty-drachma lecture for them.” We have at least the content of one lecture of his, the “Choice of Heracles,” which consists of banal moralizing. Prodicus was praised by Socrates for his emphasis on the right use of words and on distinguishing between synonyms. He also had a naturalistic view of the origin of theology: useful things were regarded as gods.

Sorel: G. socialist activist and philosopher best known for his Reflections on Violence 6, which develops the notion of revolutionary syndicalism as seen through proletarian violence and the interpretation of myth. An early proponent of the quasiMarxist position of gradual democratic reformism, Sorel eventually developed a highly subjective interpretation of historical materialism that, while retaining a conception of proletarian revolution, now understood it through myth rather than reason. He was in large part reacting to the empiricism of the  Enlightenment and the statistical structuring of sociological studies. In contrast to Marx and Engels, who held that revolution would occur when the proletariat attained its own class consciousness through an understanding of its true relationship to the means of production in capitalist society, Sorel introduced myth rather than reason as the correct way to interpret social totality. Myth allows for the necessary reaction to bourgeois rationalism and permits the social theorist to negate the status quo through the authenticity of revolutionary violence. By acknowledging the irrationality of the status quo, myth permits the possibility of social understanding and its necessary reaction, human emancipation through proletarian revolution. Marxism is myth because it juxtaposes the irreducibility of capitalist organization to its negation  violent proletarian revolution. The intermediary stage in this development is radical syndicalism, which organizes workers into groups opposed to bourgeois authority, instills the myth of proletarian revolution in the workers, and allows them in postrevolutionary times to work toward a social arrangement of worker and peasant governance and collaboration. The vehicle through which all this is accomplished is the general strike, whose aim, through the justified violence of its ends, is to facilitate the downfall and ultimate elimination of the bourgeoisie. In doing so the proletariat will lead society to a classless and harmonious stage in history. By stressing the notion of spontaneity Sorel thought he had solved the vexing problems of party and future bureaucracy found in much of the revolutionary literature of his day. In his later years he was interested in the writings of both Lenin and Mussolini. 

sorites, an argument consisting of categorical propositions that can be represented as or decomposed into a sequence of categorical syllogisms such that the conclusion of each syllogism except the last one in the sequence is a premise of the next syllogism in the sequence. An example is ‘All cats are felines; all felines are mammals; all mammals are warm-blooded animals; therefore, all cats are warm-blooded animals’. This sorites may be viewed as composed of the two syllogisms ‘All cats are felines; all felines are mammals; therefore, all cats are mammals’ and ‘All cats are mammals; all mammals are warm-blooded animals; therefore, all cats are warm-blooded animals’. A sorites is valid if and only if each categorical syllogism into which it decomposes is valid. In the example, the sorites decomposes into two syllogisms in the mood Barbara; since any syllogism in Barbara is valid, the sorites is valid. 

sorites paradox from Grecian soros, ‘heap’, any of a number of paradoxes about heaps and their Sorel, Georges sorites paradox 864   864 elements, and more broadly about gradations. A single grain of sand cannot be arranged so as to form a heap. Moreover, it seems that given a number of grains insufficient to form a heap, adding just one more grain still does not make a heap. If a heap cannot be formed with one grain, it cannot be formed with two; if a heap cannot be formed with two, it cannot be formed with three; and so on. But this seems to lead to the absurdity that however large the number of grains, it is not large enough to form a heap. A similar paradox can be developed in the opposite direction. A million grains of sand can certainly be arranged so as to form a heap, and it is always possible to remove a grain from a heap in such a way that what is left is also a heap. This seems to lead to the absurdity that a heap can be formed even from just a single grain. These paradoxes about heaps were known in antiquity they are associated with Eubulides of Miletus, fourth century B.C., and have since given their name to a number of similar paradoxes. The loss of a single hair does not make a man bald, and a man with a million hairs is certainly not bald. This seems to lead to the absurd conclusion that even a man with no hairs at all is not bald. Or consider a long painted wall hundreds of yards or hundreds of miles long. The left-hand region is clearly painted red, but there is a subtle gradation of shades and the right-hand region is clearly yellow. A small double window exposes a small section of the wall at any one time. It is moved progressively rightward, in such a way that at each move after the initial position the left-hand segment of the window exposes just the area that was in the previous position exposed by the right-hand segment. The window is so small relative to the wall that in no position can you tell any difference in color between the exposed areas. When the window is at the extreme left, both exposed areas are certainly red. But as the window moves to the right, the area in the right segment looks just the same color as the area in the left, which you have already pronounced to be red. So it seems that one must call it red too. But then one is led to the absurdity of calling a clearly yellow area red. As some of these cases suggest, there is a connection with dynamic processes. A tadpole turns gradually into a frog. Yet if you analyze a motion picture of the process, it seems that there are no two adjacent frames of which you can say the earlier shows a tadpole, the later a frog. So it seems that you could argue: if something is a tadpole at a given moment, it must also be a tadpole and not a frog a millionth of a second later, and this seems to lead to the absurd conclusion that a tadpole can never turn into a frog. Most responses to this paradox attempt to deny the “major premise,” the one corresponding to the claim that if you cannot make a heap with n grains of sand then you cannot make a heap with n ! 1. The difficulty is that the negation of this premise is equivalent, in classical logic, to the proposition that there is a sharp cutoff: that, e.g., there is some number n of grains that are not enough to make a heap, where n ! 1 are enough to make a heap. The claim of a sharp cutoff may not be so very implausible for heaps perhaps for things like grains of sand, four is the smallest number which can be formed into a heap but is very implausible for colors and tadpoles. There are two main kinds of response to sorites paradoxes. One is to accept that there is in every such case a sharp cutoff, though typically we do not, and perhaps cannot, know where it is. Another kind of response is to evolve a non-classical logic within which one can refuse to accept the major premise without being committed to a sharp cutoff. At present, no such non-classical logic is entirely free of difficulties. So sorites paradoxes are still taken very seriously by contemporary philosophers. 

sortal predicate, roughly, a predicate whose application to an object says what kind of object it is and implies conditions for objects of that kind to be identical. Person, green apple, regular hexagon, and pile of coal would generally be regarded as sortal predicates, whereas tall, green thing, and coal would generally be regarded as non-sortal predicates. An explicit and precise definition of the distinction is hard to come by. Sortal predicates are sometimes said to be distinguished by the fact that they provide a criterion of counting or that they do not apply to the parts of the objects to which they apply, but there are difficulties with each of these characterizations. The notion figures in recent philosophical discussions on various topics. Robert Ackermann and others have suggested that any scientific law confirmable by observation might require the use of sortal predicates. Thus ‘all non-black things are non-ravens’, while logically equivalent to the putative scientific law ‘all ravens are black’, is not itself confirmable by observation because ‘non-black’ is not a sortal predicate. David Wiggins and others have discussed the sortal sortal predicate 865   865 idea that all identity claims are sortal-relative in the sense that an appropriate response to the claim a % b is always “the same what as b?” John Wallace has argued that there would be advantages in relativizing the quantifiers of predicate logic to sortals. ‘All humans are mortal’ would be rendered Ex[m]Dx, rather than ExMxPDx. Crispin Wright has suggested that the view that natural number is a sortal concept is central to Frege’s or any other number-theoretic platonism. The word ‘sortal’ as a technical term in philosophy apparently first occurs in Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Locke argues that the so-called essence of a genus or sort unlike the real essence of a thing is merely the abstract idea that the general or sortal name stands for. But ‘sortal’ has only one occurrence in Locke’s Essay. Its currency in contemporary philosophical idiom probably should be credited to P. F. Strawson’s Individuals. The general idea may be traced at least to the notion of second substance in Aristotle’s Categories. 

Soto, Domingo de 14941560,  Dominican theologian and philosopher. Born in Segovia, he studied in Alcalá de Henares and Paris, taught at Segovia and Salamanca, and was named official representative of the Holy Roman Empire at the Council of Trent by Charles V. Among Soto’s many works, his commentaries on Aristotle’s Physics and On the Soul stand out. He also wrote a book on the nature of grace and an important treatise on law. Soto was one of the early members of the school of  Thomism, but he did not always follow Aquinas. He rejected the doctrine of the real distinction between essence and existence and adopted Duns Scotus’s position that the primary object of human understanding is indeterminate being in general. Apart from metaphysics and theology, Soto’s philosophy of law and political theory are historically important. He maintained, contrary to his teacher Vitoria, that law originates in the understanding rather than in the will of the legislator. He also distinguished natural from positive law: the latter arises from the decision of legislators, whereas the former is based on nature. Soto was a founder of the general theory of international law. 

soul, -- cf. Grice on “soul-to-soul transfer” -- also called spirit, an entity supposed to be present only in living things, corresponding to the Grecian psyche and Latin anima. Since there seems to be no material difference between an organism in the last moments of its life and the organism’s newly dead body, many philosophers since the time of Plato have claimed that the soul is an immaterial component of an organism. Because only material things are observed to be subject to dissolution, Plato took the soul’s immateriality as grounds for its immortality. Neither Plato nor Aristotle thought that only persons had souls: Aristotle ascribed souls to animals and plants since they all exhibited some living functions. Unlike Plato, Aristotle denied the transmigration of souls from one species to another or from one body to another after death; he was also more skeptical about the soul’s capacity for disembodiment  roughly, survival and functioning without a body. Descartes argued that only persons had souls and that the soul’s immaterial nature made freedom possible even if the human body is subject to deterministic physical laws. As the subject of thought, memory, emotion, desire, and action, the soul has been supposed to be an entity that makes self-consciousness possible, that differentiates simultaneous experiences into experiences either of the same person or of different persons, and that accounts for personal identity or a person’s continued identity through time. Dualists argue that soul and body must be distinct in order to explain consciousness and the possibility of immortality. Materialists argue that consciousness is entirely the result of complex physical processes. 

soundness, 1 of an argument the property of being valid and having all true premises; 2 of a logic the property of being not too strong in a certain respect. A logic L has weak soundness provided every theorem of L is valid. And L has strong soundness if for every set G of sentences, every sentence deducible from G using L is a logical consequence of G.

space, an extended manifold of several dimensions, where the number of dimensions corresponds to the number of variable magnitudes Soto, Domingo de space 866   866 needed to specify a location in the manifold; in particular, the three-dimensional manifold in which physical objects are situated and with respect to which their mutual positions and distances are defined. Ancient Grecian atomism defined space as the infinite void in which atoms move; but whether space is finite or infinite, and whether void spaces exist, have remained in question. Aristotle described the universe as a finite plenum and reduced space to the aggregate of all places of physical things. His view was preeminent until Renaissance Neoplatonism, the Copernican revolution, and the revival of atomism reintroduced infinite, homogeneous space as a fundamental cosmological assumption. Further controversy concerned whether the space assumed by early modern astronomy should be thought of as an independently existing thing or as an abstraction from the spatial relations of physical bodies. Interest in the relativity of motion encouraged the latter view, but Newton pointed out that mechanics presupposes absolute distinctions among motions, and he concluded that absolute space must be postulated along with the basic laws of motion Principia, 1687. Leibniz argued for the relational view from the identity of indiscernibles: the parts of space are indistinguishable from one another and therefore cannot be independently existing things. Relativistic physics has defused the original controversy by revealing both space and spatial relations as merely observer-dependent manifestations of the structure of spacetime. Meanwhile, Kant shifted the metaphysical controversy to epistemological grounds by claiming that space, with its Euclidean structure, is neither a “thing-in-itself” nor a relation of thingsin-themselves, but the a priori form of outer intuition. His view was challenged by the elaboration of non-Euclidean geometries in the nineteenth century, by Helmholtz’s arguments that both intuitive and physical space are known through empirical investigation, and finally by the use of non-Euclidean geometry in the theory of relativity. Precisely what geometrical presuppositions are inherent in human spatial perception, and what must be learned from experience, remain subjects of psychological investigation. 

space-time, a four-dimensional continuum combining the three dimensions of space with time in order to represent motion geometrically. Each point is the location of an event, all of which together represent “the world” through time; paths in the continuum worldlines represent the dynamical histories of moving particles, so that straight worldlines correspond to uniform motions; three-dimensional sections of constant time value “spacelike hypersurfaces” or “simultaneity slices” represent all of space at a given time. The idea was foreshadowed when Kant represented “the phenomenal world” as a plane defined by space and time as perpendicular axes Inaugural Dissertation, 1770, and when Joseph Louis Lagrange 17361814 referred to mechanics as “the analytic geometry of four dimensions.” But classical mechanics assumes a universal standard of simultaneity, and so it can treat space and time separately. The concept of space-time was explicitly developed only when Einstein criticized absolute simultaneity and made the velocity of light a universal constant. The mathematician Hermann Minkowski showed in 8 that the observer-independent structure of special relativity could be represented by a metric space of four dimensions: observers in relative motion would disagree on intervals of length and time, but agree on a fourdimensional interval combining spatial and temporal measurements. Minkowski’s model then made possible the general theory of relativity, which describes gravity as a curvature of spacetime in the presence of mass and the paths of falling bodies as the straightest worldlines in curved space-time. 

spatio-temporal continuity, a property of the careers, or space-time paths, of well-behaved objects. Let a space-time path be a series of possible spatiotemporal positions, each represented in a selected coordinate system by an ordered pair consisting of a time its temporal component and a volume of space its spatial component. Such a path will be spatiotemporally continuous provided it is such that, relative to any inertial frame selected as coordinate system, space, absolute spatiotemporal continuity 867   867 1 for every segment of the series, the temporal components of the members of that segment form a continuous temporal interval; and 2 for any two members ‹ti, Vi and ‹tj, Vj of the series that differ in their temporal components ti and tj, if Vi and Vj the spatial components differ in either shape, size, or location, then between these members of the series there will be a member whose spatial component is more similar to Vi and Vj in these respects than these are to each other. This notion is of philosophical interest partly because of its connections with the notions of identity over time and causality. Putting aside such qualifications as quantum considerations may require, material objects at least macroscopic objects of familiar kinds apparently cannot undergo discontinuous change of place, and cannot have temporal gaps in their histories, and therefore the path through space-time traced by such an object must apparently be spatiotemporally continuous. More controversial is the claim that spatiotemporal continuity, together with some continuity with respect to other properties, is sufficient as well as necessary for the identity of such objects  e.g., that if a spatiotemporally continuous path is such that the spatial component of each member of the series is occupied by a table of a certain description at the time that is the temporal component of that member, then there is a single table of that description that traces that path. Those who deny this claim sometimes maintain that it is further required for the identity of material objects that there be causal and counterfactual dependence of later states on earlier ones ceteris paribus, if the table had been different yesterday, it would be correspondingly different now. Since it appears that chains of causality must trace spatiotemporally continuous paths, it may be that insofar as spatiotemporal continuity is required for transtemporal identity, this is because it is required for transtemporal causality. 

specious present, the supposed time between past and future. The term was first offered by E. R. Clay in The Alternative: A Study in Psychology 2, and was cited by James in Chapter XV of his Principles of Psychology 0. Clay challenges the assumption that the “present” as a “datum” is given as “present” to us in our experience. “The present to which the datum refers is really a part of the past  a recent past  delusively given as benign time that intervenes between the past and the future. Let it be named the specious present, and let the past that is given as being the past be known as the obvious past.” For James, this position is supportive of his contention that consciousness is a stream and can be divided into parts only by conceptual addition, i.e., only by our ascribing past, present, and future to what is, in our actual experience, a seamless flow. James holds that the “practically cognized present is no knife-edge but a saddleback,” a sort of “ducatum” which we experience as a whole, and only upon reflective attention do we “distinguish its beginning from its end.” Whereas Clay refers to the datum of the present as “delusive,” one might rather say that it is perpetually elusive, for as we have our experience, now, it is always bathed retrospectively and prospectively. Contrary to common wisdom, no single experience ever is had by our consciousness utterly alone, single and without relations, fore and aft. 

speculative philosophy, a form of theorizing that goes beyond verifiable observation; specifically, a philosophical approach informed by the impulse to construct a grand narrative of a worldview that encompasses the whole of reality. Speculative philosophy purports to bind together reflections on the existence and nature of the cosmos, the psyche, and God. It sets for its goal a unifying matrix and an overarching system wherespeaker’s meaning speculative philosophy 868   868 with to comprehend the considered judgments of cosmology, psychology, and theology. Hegel’s absolute idealism, particularly as developed in his later thought, paradigmatically illustrates the requirements for speculative philosophizing. His system of idealism offered a vision of the unity of the categories of human thought as they come to realization in and through their opposition to each other. Speculative thought tends to place a premium on universality, totality, and unity; and it tends to marginalize the concrete particularities of the natural and social world. In its aggressive use of the systematic principle, geared to a unification of human experience, speculative philosophy aspires to a comprehensive understanding and explanation of the structural interrelations of the culture spheres of science, morality, art, and religion. 

Austinianism -- speech act theory, the theory of language use, sometimes called pragmatics, as opposed to the theory of meaning, or semantics. Based on the meaninguse distinction, it categorizes systematically the sorts of things that can be done with words and explicates the ways these are determined, underdetermined, or undetermined by the meanings of the words used. Relying further on the distinction between speaker meaning and linguistic meaning, it aims to characterize the nature of communicative intentions and how they are expressed and recognized. Speech acts are a species of intentional action. In general, one and the same utterance may comprise a number of distinct though related acts, each corresponding to a different intention on the part of the speaker. Beyond intending to produce a certain sequence of sounds forming a sentence in English, a person who utters the sentence ‘The door is open’, e.g., is likely to be intending to perform, in the terminology of J. L. Austin How to Do Things with Words, 2, 1 the locutionary act of saying expressing the proposition that a certain door is open, 2 the illocutionary act of making the statement expressing the belief that it is open, and 3 the perlocutionary act of getting his listener to believe that it is open. In so doing, he may be performing the indirect speech act of requesting illocutionary the listener to close the door and of getting perlocutionary the hearer to close the door. The primary focus of speech act theory is on illocutionary acts, which may be classified in a variety of ways. Statements, predictions, and answers exemplify constatives; requests, commands and permissions are directives; promises, offers, and bets are commissives; greetings, apologies, and congratulations are acknowledgments. These are all communicative illocutionary acts, each distinguished by the type of psychological state expressed by the speaker. Successful communication consists in the audience’s recognition of the speaker’s intention to be expressing a certain psychological state with a certain content. Conventional illocutionary acts, on the other hand, effect or officially affect institutional states of affairs. Examples of the former are appointing, resigning, sentencing, and adjourning; examples of the latter are assessing, acquitting, certifying, and grading. See Kent Bach and Robert M. Harnish, Linguistic Communication and Speech Acts, 9. The type of act an utterance exemplifies determines its illocutionary force. In the example ‘The door is open’, the utterance has the force of both a statement and a request. The illocutionary force potential of a sentence is the force or forces with which it can be used literally, e.g., in the case of the sentence ‘The door is open’, as a statement but not as a request. The felicity conditions on an illocutionary act pertain not only to its communicative or institutional success but also to its sincerity, appropriateness, and effectiveness. An explicit performative utterance is an illocutionary act performed by uttering an indicative sentence in the simple present tense with a verb naming the type of act being performed, e.g., ‘I apologize for everything I did’ and ‘You are requested not to smoke’. The adverb ‘hereby’ may be used before the performative verb ‘apologize’ and ‘request’ in these examples to indicate that the very utterance being made is the vehicle of the performance of the illocutionary act in question. A good test for distinguishing illocutionary from perlocutionary acts is to determine whether a verb naming the act can be used performatively. Austin exploited the phenomenon of performative utterances to expose the common philosophical error of assuming that the primary use of language is to make statements. 

Spencer, Herbert 18203, English philosopher, social reformer, and editor of The Economist. In epistemology, Spencer adopted the ninespeculative reason Spencer, Herbert 869   869 teenth-century trend toward positivism: the only reliable knowledge of the universe is to be found in the sciences. His ethics were utilitarian, following Bentham and J. S. Mill: pleasure and pain are the criteria of value as signs of happiness or unhappiness in the individual. His Synthetic Philosophy, expounded in books written over many years, assumed both in biology and psychology the existence of Lamarckian evolution: given a characteristic environment, every animal possesses a disposition to make itself into what it will, failing maladaptive interventions, eventually become. The dispositions gain expression as inherited acquired habits. Spencer could not accept that species originate by chance variations and natural selection alone: direct adaptation to environmental constraints is mainly responsible for biological changes. Evolution also includes the progression of societies in the direction of a dynamical equilibrium of individuals: the human condition is perfectible because human faculties are completely adapted to life in society, implying that evil and immorality will eventually disappear. His ideas on evolution predated publication of the major works of Darwin; A. R. Wallace was influenced by his writings.