finis: H. P. Grice, "Cum finis est licitus, etiam media
sunt licita" -- "Der Zweck und die Mittel.” Grice: “means-end
rationality is a must” -- finitum -- telos, ancient Grecian term meaning ‘end’
or ‘purpose’. Telos is a key concept not only in Grecian ethics but also in
Grecian science. The purpose of a human being is a good life, and human
activities are evaluated according to whether they lead to or manifest this
telos. Plants, animals, and even inanimate objects were also thought to have a
telos through which their activities and relations could be understood and
evaluated. Though a telos could be something that transcends human activities
and sensible things, as Plato thought, it need not be anything apart from
nature. Aristotle, e.g., identified the telos of a sensible thing with its
immanent form. It follows that the purpose of the thing is simply to be what it
is and that, in general, a thing pursues its purpose when it endeavors to
preserve itself. Aristotle’s view shows that ‘purpose in nature’ need not mean
a higher purpose beyond nature. Yet, his immanent purpose does not exclude
“higher” purposes, and Aristotelian teleology was pressed into service by
medieval thinkers as a framework for understanding God’s agency through nature.
Thinkers in the modern period argued against the prominent role accorded to
telos by ancient telepathy telos 906
906 and medieval thinkers, and they replaced it with analyses in terms
of mechanism and law. teleology, the philosophical doctrine that all of nature,
or at least intentional agents, are goaldirected or functionally organized.
Plato first suggested that the organization of the natural world can be
understood by comparing it to the behavior of an intentional agent external teleology. For example, human beings
can anticipate the future and behave in ways calculated to realize their
telekinesis teleology 905 905
intentions. Aristotle invested nature itself with goals internal teleology. Each kind has its own
final cause, and entities are so constructed that they tend to realize this
goal. Heavenly bodies travel as nearly as they are able in perfect circles
because that is their nature, while horses give rise to other horses because
that is their nature. Natural theologians combined these two teleological
perspectives to explain all phenomena by reference to the intentions of a
beneficent, omniscient, all-powerful God. God so constructed the world that
each entity is invested with the tendency to fulfill its own God-given nature.
Darwin explained the teleological character of the living world
non-teleologically. The evolutionary process is not itself teleological, but it
gives rise to functionally organized systems and intentional agents.
Present-day philosophers acknowledge intentional behavior and functional
organization but attempt to explain both without reference to a supernatural
agent or internal natures of the more metaphysical sort. Instead, they define
‘function’ cybernetically, in terms of persistence toward a goal state under
varying conditions, or etiologically, in terms of the contribution that a
structure or action makes to the realization of a goal state. These definitions
confront a battery of counterexamples designed to show that the condition
mentioned is either not necessary, not sufficient, or both; e.g., missing goal
objects, too many goals, or functional equivalents. The trend has been to
decrease the scope of teleological explanations from all of nature, to the
organization of those entities that arise through natural selection, to their
final refuge in the behavior of human beings. Behaviorists have attempted to
eliminate this last vestige of teleology. Just as natural selection makes the
attribution of goals for biological species redundant, the selection of
behavior in terms of its consequences is designed to make any reference to
intentions on the part of human beings unnecessary. Kant, in
fact, for reasons not unlike these, sought to show the validity of a different
but fairly closely related Technical Imperative by just such a method. The form
which he selects is one which, in my terms, would be represented by "It is
fully acceptable, given let it be that B, that let it be that A" or
"It is necessary, given let it be that B, that let it be that A".
Applying this to the one fully stated technical imperative given in
Grundlegung, we get "It is necessary, given let it be that one bisect a
line on an unerring principle, that let it be that I draw from its extremities
two intersecting arcs". Call this statement, (α). Though he does not
express himself very clearly, I am certain that his claim is that this
imperative is validated in virtue of the fact that it is, analytically, a
consequence of an indicative statement which is true and, in the present
context, unproblematic, namely, the statement vouched for by geometry, that if
one bisects a line on an unerring principle, then one does so only as a result
of having drawn from its extremities two intersecting arcs. Call this
statement, (β). His argument seems to be expressible as follows. (1) It is
analytic that he who wills the end (so far as reason decides his conduct),
wills the indispensable means thereto. (2) So it is analytic that (so far as
one is rational) if one wills that A, and judges that if A, then A as a result
of B, then one wills that B. end p.93 (3) So it is analytic that (so far as one
is rational) if one judges that if A, then A as a result of B, then if one wills
that A then one wills that B. (4) So it is analytic that, if it is true that if
A, then A as a result of B, then if let it be that A, then it must be that let
it be that B. From which, by substitution, we derive (5): it is analytic that
if β then α. Now it seems to me to be meritorious, on Kant's part, first that
he saw a need to justify hypothetical imperatives of this sort, which it is
only too easy to take for granted, and second that he invoked the principle
that "he who wills the end, wills the means"; intuitively, this
invocation seems right. Unfortunately, however, the step from (3) to (4) seems
open to dispute on two different counts. (1) It looks as if an unwarranted
'must' has appeared in the consequent of the conditional which is claimed, in
(4), as analytic; the most that, to all appearances, could be claimed as being
true of the antecedent is that 'if let it be that A then let it be that B'. (2)
(Perhaps more serious.) It is by no means clear by what right the psychological
verbs 'judge' and 'will', which appear in (3), are omitted in (4); how does an
(alleged) analytic connection between (i) judging that if A, A as a result of B
and (ii) its being the case that if one wills that A then one wills that B
yield an analytic connection between (i) it's being the case that if A, A as a
result of B and (ii) the 'proposition' that if let it be that A then let it be
that B? Can the presence in (3) of the phrase "in so far as one is
rational" legitimize this step? I do not know what remedy to propose for
the first of these two difficulties; but I will attempt a reconstruction of
Kant's line of argument which might provide relief from the second. It might,
indeed, even be an expansion of Kant's
actual thinking; but whether or not this is so, I am a very long way from being
confident in its adequacy. (1) Let us suppose it to be a fundamental
psychological law that, ceteris paribus, for any creature x (of a sufficiently
developed kind), no matter what A and B are, if x wills A and judges that if A,
A only as a result of B, then x wills B. This I take to be a proper
representation of "he who wills the end, wills the indispensable
means"; and in calling it a fundamental law I mean that it is the end p.94
law, or one of the laws, from which 'willing' and 'judging' derive their sense
as names of concepts which explain behaviour. So, I assume, to reject it would
be to deprive these words of their sense. If x is a rational creature, since in
this case his attitudes of acceptance are at least to some degree under his
control (volitive or judicative assent can be withheld or refused), this law
will hold for him only if the following is true: (2) x wills (it is x's will)
that (for any A, B) if x wills that A and judges that if A, A only as a result
of B, then x is to will that B. In so far as x proceeds rationally, x should
will as specified in (2) only if x judges that if it is satisfactory to will
that A and also satisfactory to judge that if A, A only as a result of B, then
it is satisfactory to will that B; otherwise, in willing as specified in (2),
he will be willing to run the risk of passing from satisfactory attitudes to
unsatisfactory ones. So, given that x wills as specified in (2): (3) x should
(qua rational) judge that (for any A, B) if it is satisfactory to will that A
and also satisfactory to judge that if A, A only as a result of B, then it is
satisfactory to will that B. Since the satisfactoriness of attitudes of
acceptance resolves itself into the satisfactoriness (in the sense
distinguished in the previous chapter) of the contents of those attitudes
(marked by the appropriate mode-markers), if x judges as specified in (3) then:
(4) x should (qua rational) judge that (for any A, B) if it is satisfactory
that ! A and also satisfactory that if it is the case that A, A only as a
result of B, then it is satisfactory that ! B. And, if x judges as in (4), then
(because (A & B → C) yields A → (B → C)): (5) x should judge that (for any
A, B) if it is satisfactory that if A, A only because B, then it is
satisfactory that, if let it be that A, then let it be that B. But if x judges
that satisfactoriness is, for any A, B, transmitted in this particular way,
then: (6) x should judge that (for any A, B) if A, A only because B, yields if
let it be that A, then let it be that B. end p.95 But if any rational being
should (qua rational) judge that (for any A, B) the first 'propositional' form
yields the second, then the first propositional form does yield the second; so:
(7) (For any A, B) if A, A only because B yields if let it be that A, then let
it be that B. (A special apology for the particularly violent disregard of 'use
and mention'; my usual reason is offered.) Fig. 4 summarizes the steps of the
argument. I. Kant's Steps α = It is necessary, given let it be that one bisect
a line on an unerring principle, that let it be that I draw from its
extremities two intersecting arcs. β = If one bisects a line on an unerring
principle, then one does so only as a result of having drawn from its
extremities two intersecting arcs. (1) It is analytic that (so far as he is
rational) he who wills the end wills the means. (2) It is analytic that (so far
as one is rational) if one wills that A, and judges that if A, then A only as a
result of B, then one wills that B. (3) It is analytic that (so far as one is
rational) if one judges that if A, A as a result of B, then if one wills that A
one wills that B. (4) It is analytic that if, if A, then A as a result of B,
then, if let it be that A, then it must be that let it be that B. (5) It is
analytic that if β, then α. Grice goes on to provide some Reconstruction Steps (1) Fundamental law that
(ceteris paribus) for any creature x (for any A, B), if x wills A and judges
that if A, then A as a result of B; then x wills B. (2) x wills that (for any
A, B) if x wills A and judges that if A, A as a result of B, then x is to will
that B. (3) x should (qua rational) judge that (for any A, B) if it is
satisfactory to will that A and also satisfactory to judge that if A, A only as
a result of B, then it is satisfactory to will that B. (4) x should (qua
rational) judge that (for any A, B) if it is satisfactory that ! A and also
satisfactory that if ⊢A, then ⊢A only as a result of B, then it is satisfactory that ! B.
(5) x should (q.r.) judge that (for any A, B) if it is satisfactory that if ⊢A, ⊢A only because B, then it is
satisfactory that, if let it be that A, then let it be that B. (6) x should
(q.r.) judge that (for any A, B) if A, A only because B, yields if let it be
that A, then let it be that B. (7) (For any A, B) if A, A only because B yields
if let it be that A, then let it be that B. Fig. 4. Validation of Technical
Acceptabilities end p.96 Prudential Acceptability It will be convenient to
initiate the discussion of this topic by again referring to Kant. Kant thought
that there is a special sub-class of Hypothetical Imperatives (which he called
"counsels of prudence") which were like his class of Technical
Imperatives, except in that the end specified in a full statement of the
imperative is the special end of Happiness (one's happiness). To translate into
my terminology, this seems to amount to the thesis that there is a special
subclass of, for example, singular practical acceptability conditionals which
exemplifies the structure "it is acceptable, given that let a (an
individual) be happy, that let a be (do) G"; an additional indicative
sub-antecedent ("that it is the case that a is F") might be sometimes
needed, and could be added without difficulty. There would, presumably, be a
corresponding special subclass of acceptability generalizations. The main
characteristics which Kant would attribute to such prudential acceptability
conditionals would, I think, be the following. (1) The foundation for such
conditionals is exactly the same as that for technical imperatives; they would
be treated as being, in principle, analytically consequences of indicative statements
to the effect that so-and-so is a (the) means to such-and-such. The relation
between my doing philosophy now and my being happy would be a causal relation
not significantly different from the relation between my taking an aspirin and
my being relieved of my headache. (2) However, though the relation would be the
same, the question whether in fact my doing philosophy now will promote my
happiness is insoluble; to solve it, I should have to be omniscient, since I
should have to determine that my doing philosophy now would lead to "a
maximum of welfare in my present and all future circumstances". (3) The
special end (happiness) of specific prudential acceptability conditionals is
one which we know that, as a matter of "natural necessity", every
human being has; so, unlike technical imperatives, their applicability to
himself cannot be disclaimed by any human being. end p.97 (4) Before we bring
in the demands of morality (which will prescribe concern for our own happiness
as a derivative duty), the only positive evaluation of a desire for one's
happiness is an alethic evaluation; one ought to, or must, desire one's own
happiness only in the sense that, whoever one may be, it is acceptable that it
is the case that one desire one's own happiness; the 'ought' or 'must' is
non-practical. (This position seems to me akin to a Humean appeal to 'natural
dispositions', in place of justification.) I would wish to disagree with Kant
in two, or possibly three, ways.(1) Kant, I think, did not devote a great deal
of thought to the nature of happiness, no doubt because he regarded it as being
of little importance to the philosophical foundations of morality. So it is not
clear whether he regarded happiness as a distinct end from the variety of ends
which one might pursue with a view to happiness, rather than as a complex end
which includes (in some sense of 'include') some of such ends. If he did regard
it as a distinct end, then I think he was wrong. (2) I think he was certainly
wrong in thinking of something's being conducive to happiness as being on all
fours with, say, something's being conducive to the relief of a headache; as,
perhaps, a matter (in both cases) of causal relationship. (3) I would like to
think him wrong in thinking that (morality apart) there is no practical
interpretation of 'ought' in which one ought to pursue (desire, aim at) one's
own happiness. We have, then, three not unconnected questions which demand some
attention. (A) What is the nature of happiness? (B) In what sense (if any) (and
why) should I desire, or aim at, my own happiness? (C) What is the nature of
the connection between things which are conducive to happiness and happiness?
(What, specifically, is implied by 'conducive'?) Though it is fiendishly
difficult, I shall take up question (C) first. I trust that I will be forgiven
if I do not present a full and coherent answer. Let us take a brief look at
Aristotle. Aristotle was, I think, more sophisticated in this area. end p.98
(1) Though it is by no means beyond dispute, I am disposed to think that he did
regard Happiness (eudaemonia) as a complex end 'containing' (in some sense) the
ends which are constitutive of happiness; to use the jargon of recent
commentators, I suspect he regarded it as an 'inclusive' and not a 'dominant'
end. (2) He certainly thought that one should (practical 'should') aim at one's
own happiness. (3) (The matter directly relevant to my present purpose.) I
strongly suspect that he did not think that the relationship between, say, my
doing philosophy and my happiness was a straightforward causal relationship.
The passage which I have in mind is Nicomachean Ethics VI. 12, 13, where he
distinguishes between wisdom ("practical wisdom") and cleverness (or,
one might say, resourcefulness). He there makes the following statements: (a)
that wisdom is not the same as cleverness, though like it, (b) that wisdom does
not exist without cleverness, (c) that wisdom is always laudable (to be wise
one must be virtuous), but cleverness is not always laudable, for example, in
rogues, (d) that the relation between wisdom and cleverness is analogous to the
relation between 'natural' virtue and virtue proper (he says this in the same
place as he says (a)). Faced with these not exactly voluminous remarks, some
commentators have been led (not I think without reluctance) to interpret
Aristotle as holding that the only difference between wisdom and cleverness is
that the former does, and the latter does not, require the presence of virtue;
to be wise is simply to be clever in good causes. Apart from the fact that
additional difficulties are generated thereby, with respect to the
interpretation of Nicomachean Ethics VI, to attribute this view to Aristotle
does not seem to indicate a very high respect for his wisdom, particularly as
the text does not seem to demand such an interpretation. Following an idea once
given me, long ago, by Austin, I would prefer to think of Aristotle as
distinguishing between the characteristic manifestation of wisdom, namely, the
ability to determine what one should do (what should be done), and the
characteristic manifestation of cleverness, which is the ability to determine
how to do what it is that should be done. On this interpretation cleverness
would plainly be in a certain sense subordinate to wisdom, since opportunity
for cleverness (and associated qualities) will only end p.99 arise after there
has been some determination of what it is that is to be done. It may also be
helpful (suggestive) to think of wisdom as being (or being assimilable to)
administrative ability, with cleverness being comparable with executive
ability. I would also like to connect cleverness, initially, with the ability
to recognize (devise) technical acceptabilities (though its scope might be
larger than this), while wisdom is shown primarily in other directions. On such
assumptions, expansion of the still obscureAristotelian distinction is plainly
a way of pursuing question (C), or questions closely related to it; for we will
be asking what other kinds of acceptabilities (beyond 'technical' acceptabilities)
we need in order to engage (or engage effectively) in practical reasoning. I
fear my contribution here will be sketchy and not very systematic. We might
start by exploring a little further the 'administrative/ executive'
distinction, a distinction which, I must admit, is extremely hazy and also not
at all hard and fast (lines might be drawn, in different cases, in quite
different places). A boss tells his secretary that he will be travelling on
business to suchand-such places, next week, and asks her to arrange travel and
accommodation for him. I suspect that there is nothing peculiar about that. But
suppose, instead of giving her those instructions, he had said to her that he
wanted to travel on business somewhere or other, next week, and asked her to
arrange destinations, matters to be negotiated, firms to negotiate with, and
brief him about what to say to those whom he would visit. That would be a
little more unusual, and the secretary might reply angrily, "I am paid to
be your secretary, not to run your business for you, let alone run you."
What (philosophically) differentiates the two cases? Let us call a desire or
intention D which a man has at t "terminal for him at t" if there is
no desire or intention which he has at t, which is more specific than D; if,
for example, a man wanted at t a car, but it was also true of him that he
wanted a Mercedes, then his desire for a car would not be terminal. Now I think
we can (roughly) distinguish (at least) three ways in which a terminal desire
may be non-specific. (1) D may be finitely non-specific; for example, a man may
want a large, fierce dog (to guard his house) and not care at all what kind of
large, fierce dog he acquired; any kind will do (at least within end p.100 some
normal range). Furthermore, he does not envisage his attitude, that any kind
will do, being changed when action-time comes; he will of course get some
particular kind of dog, but what kind will simply depend on such things as
availability. (2) D may be indeterminately non-specific: that is to say the
desirer may recognize, and intend, that before he acts the desire or intention
D should be made more specific than it is; he has decided, say, that he wants a
large, fierce dog, but has not yet decided what kind he wants. It seems to me
that an indeterminately non-specific desire or intention differs from a
finitely non-specific desire in a way which is relevant to the application of
the concept of 'meanstaking'. If the man with the finitely non-specific desire
for a large, fierce dog decides on a mastiff, that would be (or at least could
be) a case of choosing a mastiff as a means to having a large, fierce dog, but
not something of which getting a large, fierce dog would be an effect. But, if
the man with the indeterminate desire for a large, fierce dog decides that he
wants a mastiff (as a further determination of that indeterminate desire), that
is not a case of meanspicking at all. (3) There is a further kind of
non-specificity which I mention only with a view to completeness: a desire D
may be vaguely, or indefinitely, non-specific; a man may have decided that he
wants a large, fierce dog, but it may not be very well defined what could count
as a large, fierce dog; a mastiff would count, and a Pekinese would not, but
what about a red setter? In such cases the desire or intention needs to be
interpreted, but not to be further specified. With regard to the first two
kinds of non-specificity, there are some remarks to be made. (1) We do not
usually (if we are sensible) make our desires more determinate than the
occasion demands; if getting a dog is not a present prospect, a man who decides
exactly what kind of dog he would like is engaging in fantasy. (2) The final
stage of determination may be left to the occasion of action; if I want to buy
some fancy curtains, I may leave the full determination of the kind until I see
them in the store. (3) Circumstances may change the status of a desire; a man
may have a finitely non-specific desire for a dog until he talks to end p.101
his wife, who changes things for him (making his desire indeterminately
non-specific). (4) Indeterminately non-specific desires may of course be
founded (and well founded) on reasons, and so may be not merely desires one
does have but also desires which one should have.We may now return to the boss
and his secretary. It seems to me that what the 'normally' behaved boss does
(assuming that he has a very new and inexperienced secretary) is to reach a
finitely non-specific desire or intention (or a set of such), communicate these
to his secretary, and leave to her the implementation of this (these)
intention(s); he presumes that nothing which she will do, and no problem which
she will encounter, will disturb his intention (for, within reasonable limits,
he does not care what she does), even though her execution of her tasks may
well involve considerable skill and diplomacy (deinotes). If she is more
senior, then he may well not himself reach a finitely, but only an
indeterminately, non-specific intention, leaving it to her to complete the
determination and trusting her to do so more or less as he would himself. If
she reaches a position in which she is empowered to make determinate his
intentions not as she thinks he would think best, but as she thinks best, then
I would say that she has ceased to be a secretary and has become an
administrative assistant. This might be a convenient place to refer briefly to
a distinction which is of some importance in practical thinking which is not
just a matter of finding a means, of one sort or another, to an already fixed
goal, and which is fairly closely related to the process of determination which
I have been describing. This is the distinction between non-propositional ends,
like power, wealth, skill at chess, gardening; and propositional or objective
ends, like to get the Dean to agree with my proposal, or that my uncle should
go to jail for his peculations of the family money. Non-propositional ends are
in my view universals, the kind of items to be named by mass-terms or abstract
nouns. I should like to regard their non-propositional appearance as genuine; I
would like them to be not only things which we can be said to pursue, but also
things which we can be said to care about; and I would not want to reduce
'caring about' to 'caring that', though of course there is an intimate end
p.102 connection between these kinds of caring. I would like to make the
following points. (1) Non-propositional ends enter into the most primitive
kinds of psychological explanation; the behaviour of lower animals is to be
explained in terms of their wanting food, not of their wanting (say) to eat an
apple. (2) Non-propositional ends are characteristically variable in degree,
and the degrees are valuationally ordered; for one who wants wealth, a greater
degree of wealth is (normally) preferable to a lesser degree. (3) They are the
type, I think, to which ultimate ends which are constitutive of happiness
belong; and not without reason, since their non-propositional, and often
non-temporal, character renders them fit members of an enduring system which is
designed to guide conduct in particular cases. (4) The process of determination
applies to them, indeed, starts with them; desire for power is (say) rendered
more determinate as desire for political power; and objectives (to get the
position of Prime Minister) may be reached by determination applied to
non-propositional ends. (5) Though it is clear to me that the distinction
exists, and that a number of particular items can be placed on one side or
another of the barrier, there is a host of uncertain examples, and the
distinction is not easy to apply. Let us now look at things from her (the
secretary's) angle. First, many (indeed most) of the things she does, though
perhaps cases of means-finding, will not be cases of finding means of the kind
which philosophers usually focus on, namely, causal means. She gets him an
air-ticket, which enables, but does not cause, him to travel to Kalamazoo,
Michigan; she arranges by telephone for him to stay at the Hotel Goosepimple; his
being booked in there is not an effect but an intended outcome of her
conversation on the telephone; and his being booked in at that hotel is not a
cause of his being booked at a hotel, but a way in which that situation or
circumstance is realized. Second, if during her operations she discovers that
there is an epidemic of yellow fever at Kalamazoo, she does not (unless she
wishes to be fired) go blindly ahead and book him in; she consults him, because
something has now happened end p.103 which will (if he knows of it) disturb his
finitely non-specific intention; indeed may confront the boss with a plurality
of conflicting (or apparently conflicting) ends or desiderata; a situation
which is next in line for consideration. Before turning to it, however, I think
I should remark that the kind of featureswhich have shown up in this
interpersonal transaction are also characteristic of solitary deliberation,
when the deliberator executes his own decisions. We are now, we suppose, at a
stage at which the secretary has come back to the boss to announce that if she
executes the task given her (implements the decision about what to do which he
has reached), there is such-and-such a snag; that is, the decision can be
implemented only at the cost of a consequence which will (or which she suspects
may) dispromote some further end which he wants to promote, or promote some
"counter-end" which he wants to dispromote. (1) We may remark that
this kind of problem is not something which only arises after a finitely
non-specific intention has been formed; exactly parallel problems are
frequently, though not invariably, encountered on the way towards a finitely
non-specific intention or desire. This prompts a further comment on Aristotle's
remark that, though wisdom is not identical with cleverness, wisdom does not
exist without cleverness. This dictum covers two distinct truths; first, that
if a man were good at deciding what to do, but terrible at executing it (he
makes a hash of working out train times, he is tactless with customs officials,
he irritates hotel clerks into non-cooperation), one might hesitate to confer
upon him the title 'wise'; at least a modicum of cleverness is required.
Second, and more interestingly, cleverness is liable to be manifested at all
stages of deliberation; every time a snag arises in connection with a tentative
determination of one's will, provided that the snag is not blatantly obvious,
some degree of cleverness is manifested in seeing that, if one does
such-and-such (as one contemplates doing), then there will be the undesirable
result that so-and-so. (2) The boss may now have to determine how 'deep' the
snag is, how radically his plan will have to be altered to surmount it. To lay
things out a bit, the boss might (in some sense of 'might'), in his
deliberation, have formed successively a series of indeterminately non-specific
intentions (I i , I ii , I iii , . . . I n ), where each end p.104 member is a
more specific determination of its predecessor, and I n represents the final
decision which he imparted to the secretary. He now (the idea is) goes back to
this sequence to find the most general (least specific) member which is such
that if he has that intention, then he is saddled with the unwanted
consequences. He then knows where modification is required. Of course, in
practice he may very well not have constructed such a convenient sequence; if
he has not, then he has partially to construct one on receipt of the bad news
from the secretary, to construct one (that is) which is just sufficiently well
filled in to enable him to be confident that a particular element in it is the
most generic intention of those he has, which generates the undesirable
consequence. Having now decided which desire or intention to remove, how does
he decide what to put in its place? How, in effect, does he 'compound' his
surviving end or ends with the new desideratum, the attainment of the end (or
the avoidance of the counter-end) which has been brought to light by the snag?
Now I have to confess that in connection with this kind of problem, I used to
entertain a certain kind of picture. Let us label (for simplicity) initially
just two ends E1 and E2, with degrees of "objective desirability" d 1
and d 2 . For any action a 1 which might realize E1, or E2, there will be a certain
probability p 1 that it will realize E1, a certain probability p 2 that it will
realize E2, and a probability p 12 (a function of p 1 and p 2 ) that it will
realize both. If E1 and E2 are inconsistent (again, for simplicity, let us
suppose they are) p 12 will be zero. We can now, in principle, characterize the
desirability of the action a 1 , relative to each end (E1 and E2), and to each
combination of ends (here just E1 and E2), as a function of the desirability of
the end and the probability that the action a 1 will realize that end, or
combination of ends. If we envisage a range of possible actions, which includes
a 1 together with other actions, we can imagine that each such action has a
certain degree of desirability relative to each end (E1 and (or) E2) and to
their combination. If we suppose that, for each possible action, these
desirabilities can be compounded (perhaps added), then we can suppose that one
particular possible action scored higher (in actiondesirability relative to
these ends) than any alternative possible action; and that this is the action
which wins out; that is, is the action which is, or at least should, end p.105
be performed. (The computation would in fact be more complex than I have
described, once account is taken of the fact that the ends involved are often
not definite (determinate) states of affairs(like becoming President), but are
variable in respect of the degree to which they might be realized (if one's end
is to make a profit from a deal, that profit might be of a varying magnitude);
so one would have to consider not merely the likelihood of a particular
action's realizing the end of making a profit, but also the likelihood of its
realizing that end to this or that degree; and this would considerably
complicate the computational problem.) No doubt most readers are far too
sensible ever to have entertained any picture even remotely resembling the
"Crazy-Bayesy" one I have just described. I was not, of course, so
foolish as to suppose that such a picture represents the manner in which
anybody actually decides what to do, though I did (at one point) consider the
possibility that it might mirror, or reflect, a process actually taking place
in the physiological underpinnings of psychological states (desires and
beliefs), a process in the 'animal spirits', so to speak. I rather thought that
it might represent an ideal, a procedure which is certainly unrealized in fact,
and quite possibly one which is in principle unrealizable in fact, but still
something to which the procedures we actually use might be thought of as
approximations, something for which they are substitutes; with the additional
thought that the closer the approximation the better the procedure. The
inspirational source of such pictures as this seems to me to be the very
pervasive conception of a mechanical model for the operations of the soul;
desires are like forces to which we are subject; and their influence on us, in
combination, is like the vectoring of forces. I am not at all sure that I
regard this as a good model; the strength of its appeal may depend considerably
on the fact that some model is needed, and that, if this one is not chosen, it
is not clear what alternative model is available. If we are not to make use of
any variant of my one-time picture, how are we to give a general representation
of the treatment of conflicting or competing ends? It seems to me that, for
example, the accountant with the injured wife in Boise might, in the first
instance, try to keep everything, to fulfil all relevant ends; he might think
of telephoning Redwood City to see if his firm could postpone for a week the
preparation of their accounts. If this is end p.106 ineffective, then he would
operate on some system of priorities. Looking after his wife plainly takes
precedence over attention to his firm's accounting, and over visiting his
mother. But having settled on measures which provide adequately for his wife's
needs, he then makes whatever adjustments he can to provide for the ends which
have lost the day. What he does not do, as a rule, is to compromise; even with
regard to his previous decision involving the conflict between the claims of
his firm and his mother, substantially he adopted a plan which would satisfy
the claims of the firm, incorporating therein a weekend with mother as a way of
doing what he could for her, having given priority to the claims of the firm.
Such systems of priorities seem to me to have, among their significant
features, the following. (1) They may be quite complex, and involve sub-systems
of priorities within a single main level of priority. It may be that, for me,
family concerns have priority over business concerns; and also that, within the
area of family concerns, matters affecting my children have priority over
matters concerning Aunt Jemima, whs been living with us all these years. (2)
There is a distinction between a standing, relatively long-term system of
priorities, and its application to particular occasions, with what might be
thought of as divergences between the two. Even though my relations with my
children have, in general, priority over my relations with Aunt Jemima, on a
particular occasion I may accord priority to spending time with Aunt Jemima to
get her out of one of her tantrums over taking my son to the zoo to see the hippopotami.
It seems to me that a further important feature of practical thinking, which
plays its part in simplifying the handling of problems with which such thinking
is concerned, is what I might call its 'revisionist' character (in a
non-practical sense of that term). Our desires, and ascriptions of
desirability, may be relative in more than one way. They may be
'desire-relative' in that my desiring A, or my regarding A as desirable, may be
dependent on my desiring, or regarding as desirable, B; the desire for, or the
desirability of, A may be parasitic on a desire for, or the desirability of, B.
This is the familiar case of A's being desired, or desirable for the sake of B.
But desires and desirabilities may be relative in another slightly less banal
way, which end p.107 (initially) one might think of as 'fact-relativity'. They
may be relative to some actual or supposed prevailing situation; and, relative
to such prevailing situations, things may be desired or thought desirablewhich
would not normally be so regarded. A man who has been sentenced to be hanged,
drawn, and quartered may be relieved and even delighted when he hears that the
sentence has been changed to beheading; and a man whose wealth runs into
hundreds of millions may be considerably upset if he loses a million or so on a
particular transaction. Indeed, sometimes, one is led to suspect that the
richer one is, the more one is liable to mind such decrements; witness the
story, no doubt apocryphal, that Paul Getty had pay-telephones installed in his
house for the use of his guests. The phenomenon of 'fact-relativity' seems to
reach at least to some extent into the area of moral desirabilities. It can be
used, I think, to provide a natural way of disposing of the Good Samaritan
paradox; and if one recalls the parable of the Prodigal Son, one may reflect
that what incensed the for so long blameless son was that there should be all
that junketing about a fact-relative desirability manifested by his errant
brother; why should one get a party for that? It perhaps fits in very well with
these reflections that our practical thinking, or a great part of it, should be
revisionist or incremental in character; that what very frequently happens is
that we find something in the prevailing situation (or the situation
anticipated as prevailing) which could do with improvement or remove a blemish.
We do not, normally, set to work to construct a minor Utopia. It is notable
that aversions play a particularly important role in incremental deliberations;
and it is perhaps just that (up to a point) the removal of objects of aversion
should take precedence over the installation of objects of desire. If I have to
do without something which I desire, the desired object is not (unless the
desire is extreme) constantly present in imagination to remind me that I am
doing without it; but if I have to do or have something which I dislike, the
object of aversion is present in reality, and so difficult to escape. This
revisionist kind of thinking seems to me to extend from the loftiest problems
(how to plan my life, which becomes how to improve on the pattern which
prevails) to the smallest (how to arrange the furniture); and it extends also,
at the next move so to speak, to the projected improvements which I entertain
in thought; I seek to improve on them; a master chess-player, end p.108 it is
said, sees at once what would be a good move for him to make; all his thought
is devoted to trying to find a better one. When one looks at the matter a
little more closely, one sees that 'fact-relative' desirability is really
desirability relative to an anticipated, expected, or feared temporal extension
of the actual state of affairs which prevails (an extension which is not
necessarily identical with what prevails, but which will come about unless
something is done about it). And looked at a little more closely still, such
desires or desirabilities are seen to be essentially comparative; what we try
for is thought of as better than the anticipated state which prompts us to try
for it. This raises the large and difficult question, how far is desirability
of its nature comparative? Is it just that the pundits have not yet given us a
non-comparative concept of desirability, or is there something in the nature of
desire, or in the use we want to make of the concept of desirability, which is
a good reason why we cannot have, or should not have, a noncomparative concept?
Or, perhaps, we do have one, which operates only in limited regions? Certainly
we do not have to think in narrowly incremental ways, as is attested by those
who seek to comfort us (or discomfort us) by getting us to count our blessings
(or the reverse); by, for example, pointing out that being beheaded is not
really so hot, or that, if you have 200 million left after a bad deal, you are
not doing so badly. Are such comforters abandoning comparative desirability, or
are they merely shifting the term of comparison? Do we find non-comparative
desirability (perhaps among other regions) in moral regions? If we say that a
man is honest, we are likely to mean that he is at least not less honest than
the average; but we do not expect a man, who wants or tries to be honest, just
to want or try to be averagely honest. Nor do we expect him to aspire to
supreme or perfect honesty (that might be a trifle presumptuous). We do expect,
perhaps, that he try to be as honest as he can, which may mean that we don't
expect him to form aspirations with regard to a lifetime record of any sort for
honesty, but we do expect him to try on each occasion, or limited bunch of
occasions, to be impeccably honest on those occasions, even though we know (and
he knows) that on some occasions at some times there will or may be lapses. If
something like this interpretation be correct, it may correspond to a general
feature of universals (non-propositional ends) of which one cannot have end
p.109 too much, a type of which certain moral universals are specimens;
desirabilities in the case of such universals are, perhaps, not comparative.
But these are unworked-out speculations.To summarize briefly this rambling,
hopefully somewhat diagnostic, and certainly unsystematic discussion. I have
suggested, in a preliminary enquiry into practical acceptability which is other
than technical acceptability: (1) that practical thinking, which is not just
means-end thinking, includes the determination or sharpening of antecedently
indeterminate desires and intentions; (2) that means-end thinking is involved
in the process of such determination; (3) that a certain sort of computational
model may not be suitable; (4) that systems of priorities, both general and
tailored to occasions, are central; (5) that much, though not perhaps all, of
practical thinking is revisionist and comparative in character. I turn now to a
brief consideration of questions (A) and (B) which I distinguished earlier, and
left on one side. These questions are: (A) What is the nature of happiness? (B)
In what sense, and why, should I desire or aim at my own happiness? I shall
take them together. First, question (B) seems to me to divide, on closer
examination, into three further questions. (1) Is there justification for the
supposition that one should, other things being equal, voluntarily continue
one's existence, rather than end it? (2) (Given that the answer to (1) is 'yes'.)
Is there justification for the idea that one should desire or seek to be happy?
(3) (Given that the answer to (2) is 'yes'.) Is there a way of justifying
(evaluating favourably) the acceptance of some particular set of ends (as
distinct from all other such sets) as constitutive of happiness (or of my
happiness)? end p.110 The second and third questions, particularly the third,
are closely related to, and likely to be dependent on, the account of happiness
provided in answer to question (A); indeed, such an account might wholly or
partly provide an answer to question (3), since "happiness" might
turn out to be a valueparadigmatic term, the meaning of which dictates that to
be happy is to have a combination of ends which (the combination) is valuable
with respect to some particular purpose or point of view. I shall say nothing
about the first two questions; one or both of these would, I suspect, require a
careful treatment of the idea of Final Causes, which so far I have not even
mentioned. I will discuss the third question and question (A) in the next
chapter. end p.111 5 Some Reflections About Ends and Happiness I The topic
which I have chosen is one which eminently deserves a thorough, systematic, and
fully theoretical treatment; such an approach would involve, I suspect, a
careful analysis of the often subtly different kinds of state which may be
denoted by the word 'want', together with a comprehensive examination of the
role which different sorts of wanting play in the psychological equipment of
rational (and non-rational) creatures. While I hope to touch on matters of this
sort, I do not feel myself to be quite in a position to attempt an analysis of
this kind, which would in any case be a very lengthy undertaking. So, to give
direction to my discussion, and to keep it within tolerable limits, I shall
relate it to some questions arising out of Aristotle's handling of this topic
in the Nicomachean Ethics; such a procedure on my part may have the additional
advantage of emphasizing the idea, in which I believe, that the proper habitat
for such great works of the past as the Nicomachean Ethics is not the museums
but the marketplaces of philosophy. My initial Aristotelian question concerns
two conditions which Aristotle supposes to have to be satisfied by whatever is
to be recognized as being the good for man. At the beginning of Nicomachean
Ethics I. 4, Aristotle notes that there is general agreement that the good for
man is to be identified with eudaemonia (which may or may not be well rendered
as 'happiness'), and that this in turn is to be identified with living well and
with doing well; but remarks that there is large-scale disagreement with
respect to any further and more informative specification of eudaemonia. In I.
7 he seeksend p.112 to confirm the identification of the good for man with
eudaemonia by specifying two features, maximal finality (unqualified finality)
and self-sufficiency, which, supposedly, both are required of anything which is
to qualify as the good for man, and are also satisfied by eudaemonia. 'Maximal
finality' is defined as follows: "Now we call that which is in itself
worthy of pursuit more final than that which is worthy of pursuit for the sake
of something else, and that which is never desirable for the sake of something
else more final than the things which are desirable both in themselves and for
the sake of that other thing, and therefore we call final without qualification
that which is always desirable in itself and never for the sake of something
else." Eudaemonia seems (intuitively) to satisfy this condition; such
things as honour, pleasure, reason, and virtue (the most popular candidates for
identification with the good for man and with eudaemonia) are chosen indeed for
themselves (they would be worthy of choice even if nothing resulted from them);
but they are also chosen for the sake of eudaemonia, since "we judge that
by means of them we shall be happy". Eudaemonia, however, is never chosen
for the sake of anything other than itself. After some preliminaries, the
relevant sense of 'self-sufficiency' is defined thus: "The selfsufficient
we now define as that which when isolated makes life desirable and lacking in
nothing." Eudaemonia, again, appears to satisfy this condition too; and
Aristotle adds the possibly important comment that eudaemonia is thought to be
"the most desirable of all things, without being counted as one good thing
among others". This remark might be taken to suggest that, in Aristotle's
view, it is not merely true that the possession of eudaemonia cannot be
improved upon by the addition of any other good, but it is true because
eudaemonia is a special kind of good, one which it would be inappropriate to
rank alongside other goods. This passage in Nicomachean Ethics raises in my
mindseveral queries: (1) It is, I suspect, normally assumed by commentators
that Aristotle thinks of eudaemonia as being the only item which satisfies the
condition of maximal finality. This uniqueness claim is not, however,
explicitly made in the passage (nor, so far as I can recollect, elsewhere); nor
is it clear to me that if it were made it end p.113 would be correct. Might it
not be that, for example, lazing in the sun is desired, and is desirable, for
its own sake, and yet is not something which is also desirable for the sake of something
else, not even for the sake of happiness? If it should turn out that there is a
distinction, within the class of things desirable for their own sake
(I-desirables), between those which are also desirable for the sake of
eudaemonia (H-desirables) and those which are not, then the further question
arises whether there is any common feature which distinguishes items which are
(directly) H-desirable, and, if so, what it is. This question will reappear
later. (2) Aristotle claims that honour, reason, pleasure, and virtue are all
both I-desirable and Hdesirable. But, at this stage in the Nicomachean Ethics,
these are uneliminated candidates for identification with eudaemonia; and,
indeed, Aristotle himself later identifies, at least in a sort of way, a special
version of one of them (metaphysical contemplation) with eudaemonia. Suppose
that it were to be established that one of these candidates (say, honour) is
successful. Would not Aristotle then be committed to holding that honour is
both desirable for its own sake, and also desirable for the sake of something
other than honour, namely, eudaemonia, that is, honour? It is not clear,
moreover, that this prima facie inconsistency can be eliminated by an appeal to
the non-extensionality of the context "——is desirable". For while the
argument-pattern 'α is desirable for the sake of β, β is identical with γ; so,
α is desirable for the sake of γ' may be invalid, it is by no means clear that
the argument-pattern 'α is desirable for the sake of β, necessarily β is
identical with γ; so, α is desirable for the sake of γ' is invalid. And, if it
were true that eudaemonia is to be identified with honour, this would
presumably be a non-contingent truth. (3) Suppose the following: (a) playing
golf and playing tennis are each I-desirables, (b) each is conducive to
physical fitness, which is itself I-desirable, (c) that a daily round of golf
and a daily couple of hours of tennis are each sufficient for peak physical
fitness, and (if you like, for simplicity), (d) that there is no third route to
physical fitness. Now, X and Y accept all these suppositions; X plays golf
daily, and Y plays both golf and tennis daily. It seems difficult to deny,
first, that it is quite conceivable that allof the sporting activities of these
gentlemen are undertaken both for their own sake and also for the sake of
physical fitness, and, second, that (pro end p.114 tanto) the life of Y is more
desirable than the life of X, since Y has the value of playing tennis while X
does not. The fact that in Y's life physical fitness is overdetermined does not
seem to be a ground for denying that he pursues both golf and tennis for the
sake of physical fitness; if we wished to deny this, it looks as if we could,
in certain circumstances, be faced with the unanswerable question, "If he
doesn't pursue each for the sake of physical fitness, then which one does he
pursue for physical fitness?" Let us now consider how close an analogy to
this example we can construct if we search for one which replaces references to
physical fitness by references to eudaemonia. We might suppose that X and Y
have it in common that they have distinguished academic lives, satisfying
family situations, and are healthy and prosperous; that they value, and rightly
value, these aspects of their existences for their own sakes and also regard
them as contributing to their eudaemonia. Each regards himself as a thoroughly
happy man. But Y, unlike X, also composes poetry, an activity which he cares
about and which he also thinks of as something which contributes to his
eudaemonia; the time which Y devotes to poetic endeavour is spent by X
pottering about the house doing nothing in particular. We now raise the
question whether or not Y's life is more desirable than X's, on the grounds
that it contains an I-desirable element, poetic composition, which X's life
does not contain, and that there is no counterbalancing element present in X's
life but absent in Y's. One conceivable answer would be that Y's life is indeed
more desirable than X's, since it contains an additional value, but that this
fact is consistent with their being equal in respect of eudaemonia, in line
with the supposition that each regards himself as thoroughly happy. If we give
this answer we, in effect, reject the Aristotelian idea that eudaemonia is, in
the appropriate sense, self-sufficient. There seems to me, however, to be good
reason not to give this answer. Commentators have disagreed about the precise
interpretation of the word "eudaemonia", but none, so far as I know,
has suggested what I think of as much the most plausible conjecture; namely,
that "eudaemonia" is to be understood as the name for that state or
condition which one's good daemon would (if he could) ensure for one; and my
good daemon is a being motivated, with respect to me, solely by concern for my
well-being or happiness. end p.115 To change the idiom, "eudaemonia"
is the general characterization of what a full-time and unhampered fairy
godmother would secure for you. The identifications regarded by Aristotle as unexcitingly
correct, of eudaemonia with doing well and with living well, now begin to look
like necessary truths. If this interpretation of "eudaemonia" is
correct (as I shall brazenly assume) then it would be quite impossible for Y's
life to be more desirable than X's, though X and Y are equal in respect of
eudaemonia; for this would amount to Y's being better off than X, though both
are equally well-off. Various other possible answers remain. It might be held
that not only is Y's life more desirable than X's, but Y is more eudaemon
(better off) than X. This idea preserves the proposed conceptual connection
between eudaemonia and being well-off, and relies on the not wholly implausible
principle that the addition of a value to a life enhances the value of that
life (whatever, perhaps, the liver may think). One might think of such a
principle, when more fully stated, as laying down or implying that any increase
in the combined value of the H-desirable elements realized in a particular life
is reflected, in a constant proportion, in an increase in the degree of
happiness or well-being exemplified by that life; or, more cautiously, that the
increase in happiness is not determined by a constant proportion, but rather in
some manner analogous to the phenomenon of diminishing marginal utility. I am
inclined to see the argument of this chapter as leading towards a discreet
erosion of the idea that the degree of a particular person's happiness is the
value of a function the arguments of which are measures of the particular
Hdesirables realized in that person's life, no matter what function is
suggested; but at the present moment it will be sufficient to cast doubt on the
acceptability of any of the crudest versions of this idea. To revert to the
case of X and Y: it seems to me that when we speak of the desirability of X's
life or of Y's life, the desirability of which we are speaking is the
desirability of that life from the point of view of the person whose life it
is; and that it is therefore counterintuitive to suppose that, for example, X
who thinks of himself as "perfectly happy" and so not to be made
either better off or more happy (though perhaps more accomplished) by an
injection of poetry composition, should be making a misassessment of what his
stateof well-being would be if the composition of poetry were added to his
occupation. Furthermore, if the pursuit end p.116 of happiness is to be the
proper end, or even a proper end, of living, to suppose that the added
realization of a further H-desirable to a life automatically increases the
happiness or well-being of the possessor of that life will involve a commitment
to an ethical position which I, for one, find somewhat unattractive; one would
be committed to advocating too unbridled an eudaemonic expansionism. A more
attractive position would be to suppose that we should invoke, with respect to
the example under consideration, an analogue not of diminishing marginal
utility, but of what might be called vanishing marginal utility; to suppose,
that is, that X and Y are, or at least may be, equally well-off and equally
happy even though Y's life contains an H-desirable element which is lacking in
X's life; that at a certain point, so to speak, the bucket of happiness is
filled, and no further inpouring of realized Hdesirables has any effect on its
contents. This position would be analogous to the view I adopted earlier with
respect to the possible overdetermination of physical fitness. Even should this
position be correct, it must be recognized that the really interesting work
still remains to be done; that would consist in the characterization of the
conditions which determine whether the realization of a particular set of
Hdesirables is sufficient to fill the bucket. The main result, then, of the
discussion has been to raise two matters for exploration; first, the
possibility of a distinction between items which are merely I-desirable and
items which are not only Idesirable but also H-desirable; and, second, the
possibility that the degree of happiness exemplified by a life may be
overdetermined by the set of H-desirables realized in that life, together with
the need to characterize the conditions which govern such overdetermination.
(4) Let us move in a different direction. I have already remarked that, with
respect to the desirability-status of happiness and of the means thereto,
Aristotle subscribed to two theses, with which I have no quarrel (or, at least,
shall voice no quarrel). (A) That some things are both I-desirable and
H-desirable (are both ends in themselves and also means to happiness). (B) That
happiness, while desirable in itself, is not desirable for the sake of any
further end. end p.117 I have suggested the possibility that a further thesis
might be true (though I have not claimed that it is true), namely: (C) That
some things are I-desirable without being H-desirable (and, one might add,
perhaps without being desirable for the sake of any further end, in which case
happiness will not be the only item which is not desirable for the sake of any
further end). But there are two further as yet unmentioned theses which I am
inclined to regard as being not only true, but also important: first, (D) Any
item which is directly H-desirable must be I-desirable. And second, (E)
Happiness is attainable only via the realization of items which are I-desirable
(and also of course H-desirable). Thesis (D) would allow that an item could be
indirectly H-desirable without being I-desirable; engaging in morning press-ups
could be such an item, but only if it were desirable for the sake of (let us
say) playing cricket well, which would plainly be itself an item which was both
I-desirable and Hdesirable. A thesis related to (D), namely, (D′). (An item can
be directly conducive to the happiness of an individual x only if it is regarded
by x as being I-desirable) seems to me very likely to be true; the question
whether not only (D′) but (D) are true would depend on whether a man who
misconceives (if that be possible) certain items as being I-desirable could
properly be said to achieve happiness through the realization of those items.
To take an extreme case, could a wicked man who pervertedly regards cheating
others in an ingenious way as being I-desirable, and who delights in so doing,
properly be said to be (pro tanto) achieving happiness? I think Aristotle would
answer negatively, and I am rather inclined to side with him; but I recognize
that there is much to debate. A consequence of thesis (D), if true, would be
that there cannot be a happiness-pill (a pill the taking of which leads
directly tohappiness); there could be (and maybe there is) a pill which leads
directly to "feeling good" or to euphoria; but these states would
have to be distinguishable from happiness. Thesis (E) would imply that
happiness is essentially a dependent state; happiness cannot just happen; its
realization is conditional end p.118 upon the realization of one or more items
which give rise to it. Happiness should be thought of adverbially; to be happy
is, for some x, to x happily or with happiness. And reflection on the
interchangeability or near-interchangeability of the ideas of happiness and of
well-being would suggest that the adverbial in question is an evaluation
adverbial. The importance, for present purposes, of the two latest theses is to
my mind that questions are now engendered about the idea that items which are
chosen (or desirable) for the sake of happiness can be thought of as items
which are chosen (or desirable) as means to happiness, at least if the
means-end relation is conceived as it seems very frequently to be conceived in
contemporary philosophy; if, that is, x is a means to y just in case the doing
or producing of x designedly causes (generates, has as an effect) the
occurrence of y. For, if items the realization of which give rise to happiness
were items which could be, in the above sense, means to happiness, (a) it
should be conceptually possible for happiness to arise otherwise than as a
consequence of the occurrence of any such items, and (b) it seems too difficult
to suppose that so non-scientific a condition as the possession of intrinsic
desirability should be a necessary condition of an item's giving rise to
happiness. In other words, theses (D) and (E) seem to preclude the idea that
what directly gives rise to happiness can be, in the currently favoured sense,
a means to happiness. The issue which I have just raised is closely related to
a scholarly issue which has recently divided Aristotelian commentators; battles
have raged over the question whether Aristotle conceived of eudaemonia as a
'dominant' or as an 'inclusive' end. The terminology derives, I believe, from
W. F. R. Hardie; but I cite a definition of the question which is given by
Ackrill in a recent paper: "By 'an inclusive end' might be meant any end
combining or including two or more values or activities or goods . . . By 'a
dominant end' might be meant a monolithic end, an end consisting of just one
valued activity or good."1 One's initial reaction to this formulation may
fall short of overwhelming enlightenment, among other things, perhaps, because
the verb 'include' appears within end p.119 the characterization of an
inclusive end. I suspect, however, that this deficiency could be properly
remedied only by a logicometaphysical enquiry into the nature of the 'inclusion
relation' (or, rather, the family of inclusion relations), which would go far
beyond the limits of my present undertaking. But, to be less ambitious, let us,
initially and provisionally, think of an inclusive end as being a set of ends.
If happiness is in this sense an inclusive end, then we can account for some of
the features displayed in the previous section. Happiness will be dependent on
the realization of subordinate ends, provided that the set of ends constituting
happiness may not be the empty set (a reasonable, if optimistic, assumption).
Since the "happiness set" has as its elements I-desirables, what is
desirable directly for the sake of happiness must be I-desirable. And if it
should turn out to be the case, contrary perhaps to the direction of my argument
in the last section, that the happiness set includes all I-desirables, then we
should have difficulty in finding any end for the sake of which happiness would
be desirable. So far so good, perhaps; but so far may not really be very far at
all. Some reservation about the treatment of eudaemonia as an inclusive end is
hinted at by Ackrill: It is not necessary to claim that Aristotle has made
quite clear how there may be 'components' in the best life or how they may be
interrelated. The very idea of constructing a compound end out of two or more
independent ends may arouse suspicion. Is the compound to be thought of as a
mere aggregate or as an organized system? If the former, the move to eudaemonia
seems trivial—nor is it obvious that goods can be just added together. If the
latter, if there is supposed to be a unifying plan, what is it?2 From these
very pertinent questions, Ackrill detaches himself, on the grounds that his
primary concern is with the exposition and not with the justification of Aristotle's
thought. But we cannot avail ourselves of this rain check, and so the
difficulties which Ackrill touches on must receive further exposure.Let us
suppose a next-to-impossible world W, in which there are just three
I-desirables, which are also H-desirables, A, B, and C. If you like, you may
think of these as being identical, respectively, with honour, wealth, and
virtue. If, in general, happiness is end p.120 to be an inclusive end,
happiness-in-W will have as its components A, B, and C, and no others. Now one
might be tempted to suppose that, since it is difficult or impossible to deny
that to achieve happiness-in-W it is necessary and also sufficient to realize
A, to realize B, and to realize C, anyone who wanted to realize A, wanted to
realize B, and wanted to realize C would ipso facto be someone who wanted to
achieve happiness-in-W. But there seems to me to be a good case for regarding
such an inference as invalid. To want to achieve happiness-in-W might be
equivalent to wanting to realize A and to realize B and to realize C, or indeed
to wanting A and B and C; but there are relatively familiar reasons for
allowing that, with respect to a considerable range of psychological verbs
(represented by 'ψ'), one cannot derive from a statement of the form 'x ψ's
(that) A and x ψ's (that) B' a statement of the form 'x ψ's (that) A and B'.
For instance, it seems to me a plausible thesis that there are circumstances in
which we should want to say of someone that he believed that p and that he
believed that q, without being willing to allow that he believed that both p
and q. The most obvious cases for the application of the distinction would
perhaps be cases in which p and q are inconsistent; we can perhaps imagine
someone of whom we should wish to say that he believed that he was a
grotesquely incompetent creature, and that he also believed that he was a
world-beater, without wishing to say of him that he believed that he was both
grotesquely incompetent and a world-beater. Inconsistent beliefs are not, or
are not necessarily, beliefs in inconsistencies. Whatever reasons there may be
for allowing that a man may believe that p and believe that q without believing
that p and q would, I suspect, be mirrored in reasons for allowing that a man
may want A and want B without wanting both A and B; if I want a holiday in
Rome, and also want some headache pills, it does not seem to me that ipso facto
I want a holiday in Rome and some headache pills. Moreover, even if we were to
sanction the disputed inference, it would not, I think, be correct to make the
further supposition that a man who wants A and B (simply as a consequence of
wanting A and wanting B) would, or even could, want A (or want B) for the sake
of, or with a view to, realizing A and B. So even if, in world W, a man could
be said to want A and B and C, on the strength of wanting each one of them,
some further condition would end p.121 have to be fulfilled before we could say
of him that he wanted each of them for the sake of realizing A and B and C,
that is, for the sake of achieving happiness-in-W. In an attempt to do justice
to the idea that happiness should be treated as being an 'inclusive' end, let
me put forward a modest proposal; not, perhaps, the only possible proposal, but
one which may seem reasonably intuitive. Let us categorize, for present
purposes, the I-desirables in world W as 'universals'. I propose that to want,
severally, each of these I-desirables should be regarded as equivalent to
wanting the set whose members are just those I-desirables, with the
understanding that a set of universals is not itself a universal. So to want A,
want B, and want C is equivalent to wanting the set whose members are A, B, and
C ('the happinessin-W set'). To want happiness-in-W requires satisfaction of
the stronger condition of wanting A and B and C, which in turn is equivalent to
wanting something which is a universal, namely, a compound universal in which
are included just those universals which are elements of the happiness-inW set.
I shall not attempt to present a necessary and sufficient condition for the
fulfilment of the stronger rather than merely of the weaker condition; but I
shall suggest an important sufficient condition for this state of affairs. The
condition is the following: for x to want the conjunction of the members of a
set, rather than merely for him to want, severally, each member of the set, it
is sufficient that his wanting, severally, each member of the set should be
explained by (have as one of its explanations) the fact that there is an 'open'
feature F which is believed by x to be exemplified by the set, and the
realization of which is desired by x. By an open feature I mean a feature the
specification of which does not require the complete enumeration of the items
which exemplify it. To illustrate, a certain Oxford don at one time desired to
secure for himself the teaching, in his subject, at the colleges of Somerville,
St Hugh's, St Hilda's, Lady Margaret Hall, and St Anne's. (He failed, by two
colleges.) This compound desire was based on the fact that the named colleges
constituted the totality of women's colleges in Oxford, and he desired the
realization of the open feature consisting in his teaching, in his subject, at
all the women's colleges in Oxford. This sufficient condition is important in that it
is, I think, fulfilled with respect to all compound desires which are rational,
as distinct from end p.122 arbitrary or crazy. There can be, of course,
genuinely compound desires which are non-rational, and I shall not attempt to
specify the condition which distinguishes them; but perhaps I do not need to,
since I think we may take it as a postulate that, if a desire for happiness is
a compound desire, it is a rational compound desire. The proposal which I have
made does, I think, conform to acceptable general principles for metaphysical
construction. For it provides for the addition to an initially given category
of items ('universals') of a special sub-category ('compound universals') which
are counterparts of certain items which are not universals but rather sets of
universals. It involves, so to speak, the conversion of certain non-universals
into 'new' universals, and it seems reasonable to suppose that the purpose of
this conversion is to bring these non-universals, in a simple and relatively
elegant way, within the scope of laws which apply to universals. It must be
understood that by 'laws' I am referring to theoretical generalities which
belong to any of a variety of kinds of theory, including psychological,
practical, and moral theories; so among such laws will be laws of various kinds
relating to desires for ends and for means to ends. If happiness is an
inclusive end, and if, for it to be an inclusive end the desire for which is
rational, there must be an open feature which is exemplified by the set of
components of happiness, our next task is plainly to attempt to identify this
feature. To further this venture I shall now examine, within the varieties of
means-end relation, what is to my mind a particularly suggestive kind of case.
II At the start of this section I shall offer a brief sketch of the varieties,
or of some of the varieties, of means-end relation; this is a matter which is
interesting in itself, which is largely neglected in contemporary philosophy,
and which I am inclined to regard as an important bit of background in the
present enquiry. I shall then consider a particular class of cases in our
ordinary thinking about means and ends, which might be called cases of
'end-fixing', and which might provide an important modification to our
consideration of the idea that happiness is an inclusive end. end p.123 I shall
introduce the term 'is contributive to' as a general expression for what I have
been calling 'means-end' relation, and I shall use the phrase 'is contributive
in way w to' to refer, in a general way, to this or that particular specific
form of the contributiveness relation. I shall, for convenience, assume that
anyone who thinks of some state of affairs or action as being contributive to
the realization of a certain universal would have in mind that specific form of
contributiveness which would be appropriate to the particular case. We may now
say, quite unstartlingly, that x wants to do A for the sake of B just in case x
wants to do A because (1) x regards his doing A as something which would be
contributive in way w to the realization of B, and (2) x wants B. That leaves
us the only interesting task, namely, that of giving the range of specific
relations one element in which will be picked out by the phrase 'contributive
in way w', once A and B are specified. The most obvious mode of
contributiveness, indeed one which has too often been attended to to the
exclusion of all others, is that of causal antecedence; x's contributing to y
here consists in x's being the (or a) causal origin of y. But even within this
mode there may be more complexity than meets the eye. The causal origin may be
an initiating cause, which triggers the effect in the way in which flipping a
switch sets off illumination in a light bulb; or it may be a sustaining cause,
the continuation of which is required in order to maintain the effect in being.
In either case, the effect may be either positive or negative; I may initiate a
period of non-talking in Jones by knocking him cold, or sustain one by keeping
my hand over his mouth. A further dimension, in respect of which examples of
each variety of causal contributiveness may vary, is that of conditionality.
Doing A may be desired as something which will, given the circumstances which
obtain, unconditionally originate the realization of B, or as something which
will do so provided that a certain possibility is fulfilled. A specially
important subclass of cases of conditional causal contributiveness is the class
of cases in which the relevant possibility consists in the desire or will of
some agent, either the means-taker or someone else, that B should be realized;
these arecases in which x wants to do A in order to enable, or to make it
possible for, himself (or someone else) to achieve the realization of B; as
when, for example, x puts a corkscrew in his pocket to enable him later, should
be wish to do so, to open a bottle of wine. end p.124 But, for present
purposes, the more interesting modes of contributiveness may well be those
other than that of causal contributiveness. These include the following types.
(1) Specificatory contributiveness. To do A would, in the prevailing
circumstances, be a specification of, or a way of, realizing B; it being
understood that, for this mode of contributiveness, B is not to be a causal
property, a property consisting in being such as to cause the realization of C,
where C is some further property. A host's seating someone at his right-hand
side at dinner may be a specification of treating him with respect; waving a
Union Jack might be a way of showing loyalty to the Crown. In these cases, the
particular action which exemplifies A is the same as the item which exemplifies
B. Two further modes involve relations of inclusion, of one or another of the
types to which such relations may belong. (2) To do A may contribute to the
realization of B by including an item which realizes B. I may want to take a
certain advertised cruise because it includes a visit to Naples. (3) To do A
may contribute to the realization of B by being included in an item which
realizes B. Here we may distinguish more than one kind of case. A and B may be
identical; I may, for example, be hospitable to someone today because I want to
be hospitable to him throughout his visit to my town. In such a case the exemplification
of B (hospitality) by the whole (my behaviour to him during the week) will
depend on a certain distribution of exemplifications of B among the parts, such
as my behaviour on particular days. We might call this kind of dependence
"componentdependence". In other cases A and B are distinct, and in
some of these (perhaps all) B cannot, if it is exemplified by the whole, also
be exemplified by any part. These further cases subdivide in ways which are
interesting but not germane to the present enquiry. We are now in a position to
handle, not quite as Aristotle did, a 'paradox' about happiness raised by
Aristotle, which involves Solon's dictum "Call no man happy till he is
dead". I give a simplified, but I hope not distorted, version of the
'paradoxical' line of argument. If we start by suggesting that happiness is the
end for man, we shall have to modify this suggestion, replacing
"happiness" by "happiness in a complete life". (Aristotle
himself end p.125 applies the qualification "in a complete life" not
to happiness, but to what he gives as constituted of happiness, namely,
activity of soul in accordance with excellence). For, plainly, a life which as
a whole exemplifies happiness is preferable to one which does not. But since
lifelong happiness can only be exemplified by a whole life, non-predictive
knowledge that the end for man is realized with respect to a particular person
is attainable only at the end of the person's life, and so not (except possibly
at the time of his dying gasp) by the person himself. But this is paradoxical,
since the end for man should be such that non-predictive knowledge of its
realization is available to those who achieve its realization. I suggest that
we need to distinguish non-propositional, attributive ends, such as happiness,
and propositional ends or objectives, such as that my life, as a whole, should
be happy. Now it is not in fact clear that people do, or even should, desire
lifelong happiness; it may be quite in order not to think about this as an
objective. And, even if one should desire lifelong happiness, it is not clear
that one should aim at it, that one should desire, and do, things for the sake
of it. But let us waive these objections. The attainment of lifelong happiness,
an objective, consists in the realization, in a whole life, of the attributive
end happiness. This realization is component-dependent; it depends on a certain
distribution of realizations of that same end in episodes or phases of that
life. But these realizations are certainly nonpredictively knowable by the
person whose life it is. So, if we insist that to specify the end for man is to
specify an attributive end and not an objective, then the 'paradox' disappears.
The special class of cases to which one might be tempted to apply the term 'end-fixing'
may be approached in the following way. For any given mode of contributiveness,
say causal contributiveness, the same final position, that x wants (intends,
does) A as contributive to the realization of B, may be reached through more
than one process of thought. In line with the canonical Aristotelian model, x
maydesire to realize B, then enquire what would lead to B, decide that doing A
would lead to B, and so come to want, and to do, A. Alternatively, the
possibility of doing A may come to his mind, he then enquires what doing A
would lead to, sees that it would lead to B, which he wants, and so he comes to
want, and perhaps do, A. I now ask whether there are cases in which the
following end p.126 conditions are met: (1) doing A is fixed or decided, not
merely entertained as a possibility, in advance of the recognition of it as
desirable with a view to B, and (2) that B is selected as an end, or as an end
to be pursued on this occasion, at least partly because it is something which
doing A will help to realize. A variety of candidates, not necessarily good
ones, come to mind. (1) A man who is wrecked on a desert island decides to use
his stay there to pursue what is a new end for him, namely, the study of the
local flora and fauna. Here doing A (spending time on the island) is fixed but
not chosen; and the specific performances, which some might think were more
properly regarded as means to the pursuit of this study, are not fixed in
advance of the adoption of the end. (2) A man wants (without having a reason
for so wanting) to move to a certain town; he is uncomfortable with irrational
desires (or at least with this irrational desire), and so comes to want to make
this move because the town has a specially salubrious climate. Here, it seems,
the movement of thought cannot be fully conscious; we might say that the reason
why he wants to move to a specially good climate is that such a desire would
justify the desire or intention, which he already has, to move to the town in
question; but one would baulk at describing this as being his reason for
wanting to move to a good climate. The example which interests me is the
following. A tyrant has become severely displeased with one of his ministers,
and to humiliate him assigns him to the task of organizing the disposal of the
palace garbage, making clear that only a high degree of efficiency will save
him from a more savage fate. The minister at first strives for efficiency
merely in order to escape disaster; but later, seeing that thereby he can
preserve his self-respect and frustrate the tyrant's plan to humiliate him, he
begins to take pride in the efficient discharge of his duties, and so to be
concerned about it for its own sake. Even so, when the tyrant is overthrown and
the minister is relieved of his menial duties, he leaves them without regret in
spite of having been intrinsically concerned about their discharge. One might
say of the minister that he efficiently discharged his office for its own sake
in order to frustrate the tyrant; and this is clearly inadequately represented
as his being interested in the efficient discharge of his office both for its
own sake and for the end p.127 sake of frustrating the tyrant, since he hoped
to achieve the latter goal by an intrinsic concern with his office. It seems
clear that higher-order desires are involved; the minister wants, for its own
sake, to discharge his office efficiently, and he wants to want this because he
wants, by so wanting, to frustrate the tyrant. Indeed, wanting to do A for the
sake of B can plausibly be represented as having two interpretations. The first
interpretation is invoked if we say that a man who does A for the sake of B (1)
does A because he wants to do A and (2) wants to do A for the sake of B. Here
wanting A for the sake of B involves thinking that A will lead to B. But we can
conceive of wanting A for the sake of B (analogously with doing A for the sake
of B) as something which is accounted for by wanting to want A for the sake of
B; if so, we have the second interpretation, one which implies not thinking
that A will help to realize B, but rather thinking that wanting A will help to
realize B. The impact of this discussion, on the question of the kind of end
which happiness should be taken to be, will be that, if happiness is to be regarded
as an inclusive end, the components may be not the realizations of certain
ends, but rather the desires for those realizations. Wanting A for the sake of
happiness should be given the second mode of interpretation specified above,
one which involves thinking that wanting A is one of a set of items which
collectively exhibit the open feature associated with happiness. III My enquiry
has, I hope, so far given some grounds for the favourable consideration of
three theses: (1) happiness is an end for the sake of which certain
I-desirables are desirable, but is to beregarded as an inclusive rather than a
dominant end; (2) for happiness to be a rational inclusive end, the set of its
components must exemplify some particular open feature, yet to be determined;
and (3) the components of happiness may well be not universals or states of
affairs the realization of which is desired for its own sake, end p.128 but
rather the desires for such universals or states of affairs, in which case a
desire for happiness will be a higher-order desire, a desire to have, and
satisfy, a set of desires which exemplifies the relevant open feature. At this
point, we might be faced with a radical assault, which would run as follows.
"Your whole line of enquiry consists in assuming that, when some item is
desired, or desirable, for the sake of happiness, it is desired, or desirable,
as a means to happiness, and in then raising, as the crucial question, what
kind of an end happiness is, or what kind of means-end relation is involved.
But the initial assumption is a mistake. To say of an item that it is desired
for the sake of happiness should not be understood as implying that that item
is desired as any kind of a means to anything. It should be understood rather
as claiming that the item is desired (for its own sake) in a certain sort of
way: 'for the sake of happiness' should be treated as a unitary adverbial,
better heard, perhaps, as 'happinesswise'. To desire something happiness-wise
is to take the desire for it seriously in a certain sort of way, in particular
to take the desire seriously as a guide for living, to have incorporated it in
one's overall plan or system for the conduct of life. If one looks at the
matter this way, one can see at once that it is conceivable that these should
be I-desirables which are not H-desirables; for the question whether something
which is desirable is intrinsically desirable, or whether its desirability
derives from the desirability of something else, is plainly a different
question from the question whether or not the desire for it is to be taken
seriously in the planning and direction of one's life, that is, whether the
item is H-desirable. One can, moreover, do justice to two further
considerations which you have, so far, been ignoring: first, that what goes to
make up happiness is relative to the individual whose happiness it is, a truth
which is easily seen when it is recognized that what x desires (or should
desire) happiness-wise may be quite different from what y so desires; and,
second, that intuition is sympathetic to the admittedly vague idea that the
decision that certain items are constitutive of one's happiness is not so much
a matter of judgement or belief as a matter of will. One's happiness consists
in what one makes it consist in, an idea which will be easily accommodated if
'for the sake of happiness' is understood in the way which I propose." end
p.129 There is much in this (spirited yet thoughtful) oration towards which I
am sympathetic and which I am prepared to regard as important; in particular,
the idea of linking H-desirability with desires or concerns which enter into a
system for the direction of one's life, and the suggestion that the acceptance
of a system of ends as constituting happiness, or one's own happiness, is less a
matter of belief or judgement than of will. But, despite these attractive
features, and despite its air of simplifying iconoclasm, the position which is
propounded can hardly be regarded as tenable. When looked at more closely, it
can be seen to be just another form of subjectivism: what are ostensibly
beliefs that particular items are conducive to happiness are represented as
being in fact psychological states or attitudes, other than beliefs, with
regard to these items; and it is vulnerable to variants of stock objections to
subjectivist manœuvres. That in common speech and thought we have application
for, and so need a philosophical account of, not only the idea of desiring
things for the sake of happiness but, also, that of being happy (or well-off),
is passed over; and should it turn out that the position under consideration
has no account to offer of the latter idea, that would be not only paradoxical
but also, quite likely, theoretically disastrous. For it would seem to be the
case that the construction or adoption of a system of ends for the direction of
life is something which can be done well or badly, or better or less well; that
being so, there will be a demand for the specification of the criteria
governing this area of evaluation; and it will be difficult to avoid the idea
that the conditions characteristic of a good system of ends will be determined
by the fact that the adoption of a system conforming to those conditions will
lead, or is likely to lead, or other things being equal will lead, to the
realization of happiness; to something, that is, which the approach under
consideration might well not be able to accommodate. So it begins to look as if
we may be back where we were before the start of this latest discussion. But
perhaps not quite; for, perhaps, something can be done with the notion of a set
or system of endswhich is suitable for the direction of life. The leading idea
would be of a system which is maximally stable, one whose employment for the
direction of life would be maximally conducive end p.130 to its continued
employment for that purpose, which would be maximally self-perpetuating. To put
the matter another way, a system of ends would be stable to the extent to
which, though not constitutionally immune from modification, it could
accommodate changes of circumstances or vicissitudes which would impose
modification upon other less stable systems. We might need to supplement the
idea of stability by the idea of flexibility; a system will be flexible in so
far as, should modifications be demanded, they are achievable by easy
adjustment and evolution; flounderings, crises, and revolutions will be
excluded or at a minimum. A succession of systems of ends within a person's
consciousness could then be regarded as stages in the development of a single
life-scheme, rather than as the replacement of one life-scheme by another. We
might find it desirable also to incorporate into the working-out of these ideas
a distinction, already foreshadowed, between happiness-in-general and
happiness-for-an-individual. We might hope that it would be possible to present
happiness-in-general as a system of possible ends which would be specified in
highly general terms (since the specification must be arrived at in abstraction
from the idiosyncrasies of particular persons and their circumstances), a
system which would be determined either by its stability relative to stock
vicissitudes in the human condition, or (as I suspect) in some other way; and
we might further hope that happiness for an individual might lie in the
possession, and operation for the guidance of life, of a system of ends which
(a) would be a specific and personalized derivative, determined by that
individual's character, abilities, and situations in the world, of the system
constitutive of happiness in general; and (b) the adoption of which would be
stable for that individual in his circumstances. The idea that happiness might
be fully, or at least partially, characterized in something like this kind of
way would receive some support if we could show reason to suppose that features
which could plausibly be regarded, or which indeed actually have been regarded,
as characteristic of happiness, or at least of a satisfactory system for the
guidance of life, are also features which are conducive to stability. Refs.: H.
P. Grice, “Means-end rationality.”
tempus: cited by Grice and Myro in the Grice-Myro theory of
identity. tense logic, an extension of classical logic introduced by Arthur
Prior Past, Present, and Future, 7, involving operators P and F for the past
and future tenses, or ‘it was the case that . . .’ and ‘it will be the case
that . . .’. Classical or mathematical logic was developed as a logic of
unchanging mathematical truth, and can be applied to tensed discourse only by
artificial regimentation inspired by mathematical physics, introducing
quantification over “times” or “instants.” Thus ‘It will have been the case
that p,’ which Prior represents simply as FPp, classical logic represents as
‘There [exists] an instant t and there [exists] an instant tH such that t [is]
later than the present and tH [is] earlier than t, and at tH it [is] the case
that pH, or DtDtH t o‹t8tH ‹t8ptH, where the brackets indicate that the verbs
are to be understood as tenseless. Prior’s motives were in part linguistic to
produce a formalization less removed from natural language than the classical
and in part metaphysical to avoid ontological commitment to such entities as
instants. Much effort was devoted to finding tense-logical principles
equivalent to various classical assertions about the structure of the
earlierlater order among instants; e.g., ‘Between any two instants there is
another instant’ corresponds to the validity of the axioms Pp P PPp and Fp P
FFp. Less is expressible using P and F than is expressible with explicit
quantification over instants, and further operators for ‘since’ and ‘until’ or
‘now’ and ‘then’ have been introduced by Hans Kamp and others. These are
especially important in combination with quantification, as in ‘When he was in
power, all who now condemn him then praised him.’ As tense is closely related
to mood, so tense logic is closely related to modal logic. As Kripke models for
modal logic consist each of a set X of “worlds” and a relation R of ‘x is an
alternative to y’, so for tense logic they consist each of a set X of
“instants” and a relation R of ‘x is earlier than y’: Thus instants, banished
from the syntax or proof theory, reappear in the semantics or model theory.
Modality and tense are both involved in the issue of future contingents, and
one of Prior’s motives was a desire to produce a formalism in which the views
on this topic of ancient, medieval, and early modern logicians from Aristotle
with his “sea fight tomorrow” and Diodorus Cronos with his “Master Argument” through
Ockham to Peirce could be represented. The most important precursor to Prior’s
work on tense logic was that on many-valued logics by Lukasiewicz, which was
motivated largely by the problem of future contingents. Also related to tense
and mood is aspect, and modifications to represent this grammatical category
evaluating formulas at periods rather than instants of time have also been
introduced. Like modal logic, tense logic has been the object of intensive
study in theoretical computer science, especially in connection with attempts
to develop languages in which properties of programs can be expressed and
proved; variants of tense logic under such labels as “dynamic logic” or
“process logic” have thus been extensively developed for technological rather than
philosophical motives. Refs.: H. P. Grice, “D. H. Mellor on real and irreal
time.”
terminus – horos – Cicero’s transliteration of the Greianism
--. terminist logic, a school of semantics until its demise in the humanistic
reforms. The chief goal of ‘terminisim’ – or terministic semantics -- is the
elucidation (or conceptual analysis) of the
form, the “exposition,” of a proposition advanced in the context of
Scholastic disputation. The cntral theory of terminisitc semantics concerns
this or that property of this or that term, especially the suppositum.
Terminisic semantics does the work of modern quantification theory. Important
semanticists in the school include Peter of Spain, Sherwood, Burleigh
(Burlaeus), Heytesbury, and Paolo Veneto.
the terminus a
quo-terminus a quem distinction: used
by Grice for the starting point of some process, as opposed to the terminus ad
quem, the ending point. E. g., change is a process that begins from some state,
the terminus a quo, and proceeds to some state at which it ends, the terminus
ad quem. In particular, in the ripening of an apple, the green apple is the
terminus a quo and the red apple is the terminus ad quem.
tertullian Roman – Grice says that ‘you’re the cream in my
coffee’ is absurd – “Can you believe it?” -- Adored by Grice because he
believed what he thought was absurd.
theologian, an early father of the Christian church. A layman from
Carthage, he laid the conceptual and linguistic basis for the doctrine of the
Trinity. Though appearing hostile to philosophy “What has Athens to do with
Jerusalem?” and to rationality “It is certain because it is impossible”,
Tertullian was steeped in Stoicism. He denounced all eclecticism not governed
by the normative tradition of Christian doctrine, yet commonly used philosophical
argument and Stoic concepts e.g., the corporeality of God and the soul. Despite
insisting on the sole authority of the New Testament apostles, he joined with
Montanism, which taught that the Holy Spirit was still inspiring prophecy
concerning moral discipline. Reflecting this interest in the Spirit, Tertullian
pondered the distinctions to which he gave the neologism trinitas within God.
God is one “substance” but three “persons”: a plurality without division. The
Father, Son, and Spirit are distinct, but share equally in the one Godhead.
This threeness is manifest only in the “economy” of God’s temporal action
toward the world; later orthodoxy e.g. Athanasius, Basil the Great, Augustine,
would postulate a Triunity that is eternal and “immanent,” i.e., internal to
God’s being.
testing: Grice: “A token proving testability.” Grice: “We need
a meta-test: a test for a test for implicatura.” late
14c., "small vessel used in assaying precious metals," from Old
French test, from Latin testum "earthen pot," related to testa
"piece of burned clay, earthen pot, shell" (see tete). Sense of
"trial or examination to determine the correctness of something" is
recorded from 1590s. The connecting notion is "ascertaining the quality of
a metal by melting it in a pot." Test Act was the name given to various
laws in English history meant to exclude Catholics and Nonconformists from
office, especially that of 1673, repealed 1828. Test drive (v.) is first
recorded 1954. In the sciences, capacity of a theory to undergo
experimental testing. Theories in the natural sciences are regularly subjected
to experimental tests involving detailed and rigorous control of variable
factors. Not naive observation of the workings of nature, but disciplined,
designed intervention in such workings, is the hallmark of testability.
Logically regarded, testing takes the form of seeking confirmation of theories
by obtaining positive test results. We can represent a theory as a conjunction
of a hypothesis and a statement of initial conditions, H • A. This conjunction
deductively entails testable or observational consequences O. Hence, H • A P O.
If O obtains, H • A is said to be confirmed, or rendered probable. But such
confirmation is not decisive; O may be entailed by, and hence explained by,
many other theories. For this reason, Popper insisted that the testability of
theories should seek disconfirmations or falsifications. The logical schema H •
A P O not-O not-H • A is deductively valid, hence apparently decisive. On this
view, science progresses, not by finding the truth, but by discarding the
false. Testability becomes falsifiability. This deductive schema modus tollens
is also employed in the analysis of crucial tests. Consider two hypotheses H1
and H2, both introduced to explain some phenomenon. H1 predicts that for some
test condition C, we have the test result ‘if C then e1’, and H2, the result
‘if C then e2’, where e1 and e2 are logically incompatible. If experiment
falsifies ‘if C then e1’ e1 does not actually occur as a test result, the
hypothesis H1 is false, which implies that H2 is true. It was originally
supposed that the experiments of J. B. L. Foucault constituted a decisive
falsifcation of the corpuscular theory of the nature of light, and thus
provided a decisive establishment of the truth of its rival, the wave theory of
light. This account of crucial experiments neglects certain points in logic and
also the role of auxiliary hypotheses in science. As Duhem pointed term, minor
testability 908 908 out, rarely, if
ever, does a hypothesis face the facts in isolation from other supporting
assumptions. Furthermore, it is a fact of logic that the falsification of a
conjunction of a hypothesis and its auxiliary assumptions and initial
conditions not-H • A is logically equivalent to not-H or not-A, and the test
result itself provides no warrant for choosing which alternative to reject.
Duhem further suggested that rejection of any component part of a complex
theory is based on extra-evidential considerations factors like simplicity and
fruitfulness and cannot be forced by negative test results. Acceptance of
Duhem’s view led Quine to suggest that a theory must face the tribunal of
experience en bloc; no single hypothesis can be tested in isolation. Original
conceptions of testability and falsifiability construed scientific method as
hypothetico-deductive. Difficulties with these reconstructions of the logic of
experiment have led philosophers of science to favor an explication of
empirical support based on the logic of probability. Grice: “Linguists never
take ‘testability’ too conceptually, as one can witness in Saddock’s hasty
proofs!” – Refs: H. P. Grice, “On testing for testing for conversational
implicatura.”
testis
(n.). (plural testes), Latin
testis "testicle," usually regarded as a special application of
testis "witness" (see testament), presumably because it "bears
witness to male virility" [Barnhart]. Stories that trace the use of the
Latin word to some supposed swearing-in ceremony are modern and groundless.
Compare Greek parastatai "testicles," from parastates "one that
stands by;" and French slang témoins, literally "witnesses." But
Buck thinks Greek parastatai "testicles" has been wrongly associated
with the legal sense of parastates "supporter, defender" and suggests
instead parastatai in the sense of twin "supporting pillars, props of a
mast," etc. Or it might be a euphemistic use of the word in the sense
"comrades." OED, meanwhile, points to Walde's suggestion of a
connection between testis and testa "pot, shell, etc." (see tete). testis "witness,"
from PIE *tri-st-i- "third person standing by," from root *tris-
"three" (see three) on the notion of "third person,
disinterested witness." -- as Grice notes, “it is etymologically -- or etymythologically -- related to ‘testicles,’”
-- Grice proposes an analysis of
‘testify’ in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions, “t is a testimony
iff t is an act of telling, including any assertion apparently intended to
impart information, regardless of social setting.” In an extended use, personal
letters and messages, books, and other published material purporting to contain
factual information also constitute testimony. As Grice notes, “testimony may
be sincere or insincere” -- and may express knowledge or baseless prejudice.
When it expresses knowledge, and it is rightly believed, this knowledge is
disseminated to its recipient, near or remote. Second-hand knowledge can be
passed on further, producing long chains of testimony; but these chains always
begin with the report of an eye-witness or expert. In any social group with a
common language there is potential for the sharing, through testimony, of the
fruits of individuals’ idiosyncratic acquisition of knowledge through
perception and inference. In advanced societies specialization in the gathering
and production of knowledge and its wider dissemination through spoken and
written testimony is a fundamental socio-epistemic fact, and a very large part
of each person’s body of knowledge and belief stems from testimony. Thus, the
question when a person may properly believe what another tells her, and what
grounds her epistemic entitlement to do so, is a crucial one in epistemology.
Reductionists about testimony insist that this entitlement must derive from our
entitlement to believe what we perceive to be so, and to draw inferences from
this according to familiar general principles. See e.g., Hume’s classic
discussion, in his “Enquiry into Human Understanding,” section X. On this view,
I can perceive that someone has told me that p, but can thereby come to know
that p only by means of an inference one
that goes via additional, empirically grounded knowledge of the trustworthiness
of that person. Anti-reductionists insist, by contrast, that there is a general
entitlement to believe what one is told just as such defeated by knowledge of
one’s informant’s lack of trustworthiness her mendacity or incompetence, but
not needing to be bolstered positively by empirically based knowledge of her
trustworthiness. Anti-reductionists thus see testimony as an autonomous source
of knowledge on a par with perception, inference, and memory. One argument
adduced for anti-reductionism is transcendental: We have many beliefs acquired
from testimony, and these beliefs are knowledge; their status as knowledge
cannot be accounted for in the way required by the reductionist, i. e., the
reliability of testimony cannot be independently confirmed; therefore, the
reductionist’s insistence on this is mistaken. However, while it is perhaps
true that the reliability of all the beliefs one has that depend on past
testimony cannot be simultaneously confirmed, one can certainly sometimes
ascertain, without circularity, that a specific assertion by a particular
person is likely to be correct if,
e.g.,one’s own experience has established that that person has a good track
record of reliability about that kind of thing. Grice: “Sometimes I use
testimonium.” Refs.: H. P. Grice, “Trust and rationality.”
tetens: philosopher, referred to by Grice as “Dutch Locke.” After
his studies in Rostock and Copenhagen, Tetens teaches at Bützow and Kiel. He
had a second successful career as a public servant in Denmark that did not leave him time for philosophical
explorations. Tetens is one of the most important mainland philosophers between
Wolff and Kant. Like Kant, whom he significantly influenced, Tetens attempts to
find a middle way between Descartes’s rationalism and Locke’s empiricism.
Tetens’s most important work, the “Philosophische Versuche über die menschliche
Natur und ihre Entwicklung,” is indicative of the state of philosophical
discussion before Kant’s Critique of Pure
Reason. Tetens, who follows the “psychological method” of Locke, tends toward a
naturalism. Tetens makes a more radical distinction between sensation and
reason than Hume allows and attempts to show how this or that basic rational
principle – a prequel to Grice’s principle of conversational cooperation --
guarantee the objectivity of human knowledge.
thales: called by
Grice the first Grecian philosopher (“Oddly, we call him a Ionian, but the
Ionian is quite a way from where he was born!”) – who poisted a ‘philosophical’
why-explanation. Grecian philosopher who
was regarded as one of the Seven Sages of Greece. He was also considered the
first philosopher, founder of the Milesians. Thales is also reputed to have
been an engineer, astronomer, mathematician, and statesman. His doctrines even
early Grecian sources know only by hearsay: he said that water is the arche,
and that the earth floats on water like a raft. The magnet has a soul, and all
things are full of the gods. Thales’ attempt to explain natural phenomena in
natural rather than exclusively supernatural terms bore fruit in his follower
Anaximander.
thema: a term Grice borrows from Stoic logic, after attending
a seminar on the topic by Benson Mates – a ‘thema’ is a ground rule used to
reduce argument forms to basic forms. The Stoics analyzed arguments by their
form schema, or tropos. They represented forms using numbers to represent
claims; for example, ‘if the first, the second; but the first; therefore the
second’. Grice uses “so-and-so” for ‘the first’ and ‘such and such’ for the
‘second’. “If so and so, such and such, but so and so; therefore, such and
such.” Some forms were undemonstrable; others were reduced to the
undemonstrable argument forms by ground rules themata; e.g., if R follows from
P & Q, -Q follows from P & -R. The five undemonstrable arguments are: 1
modus ponendo ponens; 2 modus tollendo tollens; 3 not both P and Q, P, so
not-Q; 4 P or Q but not both, P, so not-Q; and 5 disjunctive syllogism. The
evidence about the four ground rules is incomplete, but a sound and consistent
system for propositional logic can be developed that is consistent with the
evidence we have. See Diogenes Laertius, Lives of the Philosophers, for an
introduction to the Stoic theory of arguments; other evidence is more
scattered.
θ: Grice’s symbol for a theory. Grice uses small-case
theta for a token of a theory, and capital theta for a type of theory.– Grice
couldn’t quite stand some type of attitude he found in people like J. M.
Rountree – Rountree was claiming that one needs a ‘theory’ of meaning. Grice
responded: “ Rountree is wrong: if meaning is a matter of theory, it cannot be
a matter of intuition; and I’m sure it should be a matter of intuition for
Rountree!” theoretical term – Grice was once attracted to Ramsey’s essay on “Theories,”
but later came to see it as ‘pretentious’. “Surely the way *I* use ‘theory’ is
not Ramsey’s!” – If something is an object of an intuition by Grice, it cannot
be a theoretical term – theory and intuition don’t go together. They repel each
other! a term occurring in a scientific theory that purports to make reference
to an unobservable entity e.g., ‘electron’, property e.g., ‘the monatomicity of
a molecule’, or relation ‘greater electrical resistance’. The qualification
‘purports to’ is required because instrumentalists deny that any such
unobservables exist; nevertheless, they acknowledge that a scientific theory,
such as the atomic theory of matter, may be a useful tool for organizing our
knowledge of observables and predicting future experiences. Scientific
realists, in contrast, maintain that at least some of the theoretical terms
e.g., ‘quark’ or ‘neutrino’ actually denote entities that are not directly
observable they hold, i.e., that such
things exist. For either group, theoretical terms are contrasted with such
observational terms as ‘rope’, ‘smooth’, and ‘louder than’, which refer to
observable entities, properties, or relations. Much philosophical controversy
has centered on how to draw the distinction between the observable and the unobservable.
Did Galileo observe the moons of Jupiter with his telescope? Do we observe
bacteria under a microscope? Do physicists observe electrons in bubble
chambers? Do astronomers observe the supernova explosions with neutrino
counters? Do we observe ordinary material objects, or are sense-data the only
observables? Are there any observational terms at all, or are all terms
theory-laden? Another important meaning of ‘theoretical term’ occurs if one
regards a scientific theory as a semiformal axiomatic system. It is then
natural to think of its vocabulary as divided into three parts, i terms of
logic and mathematics, ii terms drawn from ordinary language or from other
theories, and iii theoretical terms that constitute the special vocabulary of
that particular theory. Thermodynamics, e.g., employs i terms for numbers and
mathematical operations, ii such terms as ‘pressure’ and ‘volume’ that are
common to many branches of physics, and iii such special thermodynamical terms
as ‘temperature’, ‘heat’, and ‘entropy’. In this second sense, a theoretical
term need not even purport to refer to unobservables. For example, although
special equipment is necessary for its precise quantitatheoretical entity
theoretical term 912 912 tive
measurement, temperature is an observable property. Even if theories are not
regarded as axiomatic systems, their technical terms can be considered
theoretical. Such terms need not purport to refer to unobservables, nor be the
exclusive property of one particular theory. In some cases, e.g., ‘work’ in
physics, an ordinary word is used in the theory with a meaning that departs
significantly from its ordinary use. Serious questions have been raised about
the meaning of theoretical terms. Some philosophers have insisted that, to be
meaningful, they must be given operational definitions. Others have appealed to
coordinative definitions to secure at least partial interpretation of axiomatic
theories. The verifiability criterion has been invoked to secure the
meaningfulness of scientific theories containing such terms. A theoretical
concept or construct is a concept expressed by a theoretical term in any of the
foregoing senses. The term ‘theoretical entity’ has often been used to refer to
unobservables, but this usage is confusing, in part because, without
introducing any special vocabulary, we can talk about objects too small to be
perceived directly e.g., spheres of
gamboge a yellow resin less than 106 meters in diameter, which figured in a
historically important experiment by Jean Perrin. Grice uses Ramsey’s concept of ‘theory’ –
“granting that Ramsey overrated theory, as all Cambridge men do!” -- theory-laden,
dependent on theory; specifically, involving a theoretical interpretation of
what is perceived or recorded. In the heyday of logical empiricism it was
thought, by Carnap and others, that a rigid distinction could be drawn between
observational and theoretical terms. Later, N. R. Hanson, Paul Feyerabend, and
others questioned this distinction, arguing that perhaps all observations are
theory-laden either because our perception of the world is colored by
perceptual, linguistic, and cultural differences or because no attempt to
distinguish sharply between observation and theory has been successful. This
shift brings a host of philosophical problems. If we accept the idea of radical
theoryladenness, relativism of theory choice becomes possible, for, given rival
theories each of which conditions its own observational evidence, the choice
between them would seem to have to be made on extra-evidential grounds, since
no theory-neutral observations are available. In its most perplexing form,
relativism holds that, theory-ladenness being granted, one theory is as good as
any other, so far as the relationship of theory to evidence is concerned.
Relativists couple the thesis of theory-ladenness with the alleged fact of the
underdetermination of a theory by its observational evidence, which yields the
idea that any number of alternative theories can be supported by the same
evidence. The question becomes one of what it is that constrains choices
between theories. If theory-laden observations cannot constrain such choices,
the individual subjective preferences of scientists, or rules of fraternal
behavior agreed upon by groups of scientists, become the operative constraints.
The logic of confirmation seems to be intrinsically contaminated by both
idiosyncratic and social factors, posing a threat to the very idea of
scientific rationality.
signum – Grice: “I prefer token, so Anglo-Saxon! Plus
I’m a ‘teacher’ – “to teach philosophy” --” whose explorations on the
Nicomachean Ethics, in one of their earlier incarnations, as a set of lecture
notes, sees me through terms of teaching Aristotle's moral theory.” “My own
philosophical life in this period involves two especially important aspects.”
ROBBING PETER TO PAY PAUL.. “The first is my prolonged collaboration with my
tutee at St. John’s, P. F. Strawson.”“Strawson’s and my efforts are partly
directed towards the giving of joint seminars.”“Strawson and I stage a number
of joint seminars on topics related to the notions of meaning, categories, and
logical form.” “But my association with P. F. Strawson is much more than an
alliance for the purpose of teaching.” -- theory of signs, the philosophical
and scientific theory of information-carrying entities, communication, and
information transmission. The term ‘semiotic’ was introduced by Locke for the
science of signs and signification. The term became more widely used as a
result of the influential work of Peirce and Charles Morris. With regard to
linguistic signs, three areas of semiotic were distinguished: pragmatics the study of the way people, animals, or
machines such as computers use signs; semantics
the study of the relations between signs and their meanings, abstracting
from their use; and syntax the study of
the relations among signs themselves, abstracting both from use and from
meaning. In Europe, the near-equivalent term ‘semiology’ was introduced by
Ferdinand de Saussure, the Swiss linguist. Broadly, a sign is any
information-carrying entity, including linguistic and animal signaling tokens,
maps, road signs, diagrams, pictures, models, etc. Examples include smoke as a
sign of fire, and a red light at a highway intersection as a sign to stop.
Linguistically, vocal aspects of speech such as prosodic features intonation,
stress and paralinguistic features loudness and tone, gestures, facial
expressions, etc., as well as words and sentences, are signs in the most
general sense. Peirce defined a sign as “something that stands for something in
some respect or capacity.” Among signs, he distinguished symbols, icons, and
indices. A symbol, or conventional sign, is a sign, typical of natural language
forms, that lacks any significant relevant physical correspondence with or
resemblance to the entities to which the form refers manifested by the fact
that quite different forms may refer to the same class of objects, and for
which there is no correlation between the occurrence of the sign and its
referent. An index, or natural sign, is a sign whose occurrence is causally or
statistically correlated with occurrences of its referent, and whose production
is not intentional. Thus, yawning is a natural sign of sleepiness; a bird call
may be a natural sign of alarm. Linguistically, loudness with a rising pitch is
a sign of anger. An icon is a sign whose form corresponds to or resembles its
referent or a characteristic of its referent. For instance, a tailor’s swatch
is an icon by being a sign that resembles a fabric in color, pattern, and
texture. A linguistic example is onomatopoeia
as with ‘buzz’. In general, there are conventional and cultural aspects
to a sign being an icon.
theosophy, any philosophical mysticism, especially
those that purport to be mathematically or scientifically based, such as
Pythagoreanism, Neoplatonism, or gnosticism. Vedic Hinduism, and certain
aspects of Buddhism, Taoism, and Islamic Sufism, can also be considered
theosophical. In narrower senses, ‘theosophy’ may refer to the philosophy of
Swedenborg, Steiner, or Madame Helena Petrovna Blavatsky 183. Swedenborg’s
theosophy originally consisted of a rationalistic cosmology, inspired by
certain elements of Cartesian and Leibnizian philosophy, and a Christian
mysticism. Swedenborg labored to explain the interconnections between soul and
body. Steiner’s theosophy is a reaction to standard scientific theory. It
purports to be as rigorous as ordinary science, but superior to it by
incorporating spiritual truths about reality. According to his theosophy, reality
is organic and evolving by its own resource. Genuine knowledge is intuitive,
not discursive. Madame Blavatsky founded the Theosophical Society in 1875. Her
views were eclectic, but were strongly influenced by mystical elements of philosophy.
thomism, the theology and philosophy of Thomas Aquinas.
The term is applied broadly to various thinkers from different periods who were
heavily influenced by Aquinas’s thought in their own philosophizing and
theologizing. Here three different eras and three different groups of thinkers
will be distinguished: those who supported Aquinas’s thought in the fifty years
or so following his death in 1274; certain highly skilled interpreters and
commentators who flourished during the period of “Second Thomism” sixteenthseventeenth
centuries; and various late nineteenth- and twentieth-century thinkers who have
been deeply influenced in their own work by Aquinas. Thirteenth- and
fourteenth-century Thomism. Although Aquinas’s genius was recognized by many
during his own lifetime, a number of his views were immediately contested by
other Scholastic thinkers. Controversies ranged, e.g., over his defense of only
one substantial form in human beings; his claim that prime matter is purely
potential and cannot, therefore, be kept in existence without some substantial
form, even by divine power; his emphasis on the role of the human intellect in
the act of choice; his espousal of a real distinction betweeen the soul and its
powers; and his defense of some kind of objective or “real” rather than a
merely mind-dependent composition of essence and act of existing esse in
creatures. Some of Aquinas’s positions were included directly or indirectly in
the 219 propositions condemned by Bishop Stephen Tempier of Paris in 1277, and
his defense of one single substantial form in man was condemned by Archbishop
Robert Kilwardby at Oxford in 1277, with renewed prohibitions by his successor
as archbishop of Canterbury, John Peckham, in 1284 and 1286. Only after
Aquinas’s canonization in 1323 were the Paris prohibitions revoked insofar as
they touched on his teaching in 1325. Even within his own Dominican order,
disagreement about some of his views developed within the first decades after
his death, notwithstanding the order’s highly sympathetic espousal of his
cause. Early English Dominican defenders of his general views included William
Hothum d.1298, Richard Knapwell d.c.1288, Robert Orford b. after 1250,
fl.129095, Thomas Sutton d. c.1315?, and William Macclesfield d.1303. Dominican Thomists included Bernard of Trilia
d.1292, Giles of Lessines in present-day Belgium d.c.1304?, John Quidort of
Paris d. 1306, Bernard of Auvergne d. after 1307, Hervé Nédélec d.1323, Armand
of Bellevue fl. 131634, and William Peter Godin d.1336. The secular master at
Paris, Peter of Auvergne d. 1304, while remaining very independent in his own
views, knew Aquinas’s thought well and completed some of his commentaries on
Aristotle. Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Thomism. Sometimes known as the
period of Second Thomism, this revival gained impetus from the early
fifteenth-century writer John Capreolus 13801444 in his Defenses of Thomas’s
Theology Defensiones theologiae Divi Thomae, a commentary on the Sentences. A
number of fifteenth-century Dominican and secular teachers in G. universities
also contributed: Kaspar Grunwald Freiburg; Cornelius Sneek and John Stoppe in
Rostock; Leonard of Brixental Vienna; Gerard of Heerenberg, Lambert of
Heerenberg, and John Versor all at Cologne; Gerhard of Elten; and in Belgium
Denis the Carthusian. Outstanding among various sixteenth-century commentators
on Thomas were Tommaso de Vio Cardinal Cajetan, Francis Sylvester of Ferrara,
Francisco de Vitoria Salamanca, and Francisco’s disciples Domingo de Soto and
Melchior Cano. Most important among early seventeenth-century Thomists was John
of St. Thomas, who lectured at Piacenza, Madrid, and Alcalá, and is best known
for his Cursus philosophicus and his Cursus theologicus. Theravada Buddhism
Thomism 916 916 The nineteenth- and
twentieth-century revival. By the early to mid-nineteenth century the study of
Aquinas had been largely abandoned outside Dominican circles, and in most Roman
Catholic s and seminaries a kind of Cartesian and Suarezian Scholasticism was
taught. Long before he became Pope Leo XIII, Joachim Pecci and his brother
Joseph had taken steps to introduce the teaching of Thomistic philosophy at the
diocesan seminary at Perugia in 1846. Earlier efforts in this direction had
been made by Vincenzo Buzzetti, by Buzzetti’s students Serafino and Domenico
Sordi, and by Taparelli d’Aglezio, who became director of the Collegio Romano
Gregorian in 1824. Leo’s encyclical
Aeterni Patris1879 marked an official effort on the part of the Roman Catholic
church to foster the study of the philosophy and theology of Thomas Aquinas.
The intent was to draw upon Aquinas’s original writings in order to prepare
students of philosophy and theology to deal with problems raised by
contemporary thought. The Leonine Commission was established to publish a
critical edition of all of Aquinas’s writings; this effort continues today.
Important centers of Thomistic studies developed, such as the Higher Institute
of Philosophy at Louvain founded by Cardinal Mercier, the Dominican School of
Saulchoir in France, and the Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies in
Toronto. Different groups of Roman, Belgian, and Jesuits acknowledged a deep indebtedness to
Aquinas for their personal philosophical reflections. There was also a
concentration of effort in the United States at universities such as The
Catholic of America, St. Louis , Notre
Dame, Fordham, Marquette, and Boston , to mention but a few, and by the
Dominicans at River Forest. A great weakness of many of the nineteenthand
twentieth-century Latin manuals produced during this effort was a lack of
historical sensitivity and expertise, which resulted in an unreal and highly
abstract presentation of an “Aristotelian-Thomistic” philosophy. This weakness
was largely offset by the development of solid historical research both in the
thought of Aquinas and in medieval philosophy and theology in general,
championed by scholars such as H. Denifle, M. De Wulf, M. Grabmann, P.
Mandonnet, F. Van Steenberghen, E. Gilson and many of his students at Toronto,
and by a host of more recent and contemporary scholars. Much of this historical
work continues today both within and without Catholic scholarly circles. At the
same time, remarkable diversity in interpreting Aquinas’s thought has emerged
on the part of many twentieth-century scholars. Witness, e.g., the heavy
influence of Cajetan and John of St. Thomas on the Thomism of Maritain; the
much more historically grounded approaches developed in quite different ways by
Gilson and F. Van Steenberghen; the emphasis on the metaphysics of
participation in Aquinas in the very different presentations by L. Geiger and
C. Fabro; the emphasis on existence esse promoted by Gilson and many others but
resisted by still other interpreters; the movement known as Transcendental
Thomism, originally inspired by P. Rousselot and by J. Marechal in dialogue
with Kant; and the long controversy about the appropriateness of describing
Thomas’s philosophy and that of other medievals as a Christian philosophy. An
increasing number of non-Catholic thinkers are currently directing considerable
attention to Aquinas, and the varying backgrounds they bring to his texts will
undoubtedly result in still other interesting interpretations and applications
of his thought to contemporary concerns.
jarvis, j. Grice collaborated with Jarvis’s husband at
Oxford. analytic philosopher best known for her contribution to moral
philosophy and for her paper “A Defense of Abortion” 1. Thomson has taught at
M.I.T. since 4. Her work is centrally concerned with issues in moral philosophy,
most notably questions regarding rights, and with issues in metaphysics such as
the identity across time of people and the ontology of events. Her Acts and
Other Events 7 is a study of human action and provides an analysis of the part
whole relation among events. “A Defense of Abortion” has not only influenced
much later work on this topic but is one of the most widely discussed papers in
contemporary philosophy. By appeal to imaginative scenarios analogous to
pregnancy, Thomson argues that even if the fetus is assumed to be a person, its
rights are in many circumstances outweighed by the rights of the pregnant
woman. Thus the paper advances an argument for a right to abortion that does
not turn upon the question of whether the fetus is a person. Several of
Thomson’s essays, including “Preferential Hiring” 3, “The Right to Privacy” 5,
and “Killing, Letting Die, and the Trolley Problem” 6, address the questions of
what constitutes Thomson, Judith Jarvis Thomson, Judith Jarvis 917 917 an infringement of rights and when it is
morally permissible to infringe a right. These are collected in Rights,
Restitution, and Risk: Essays in Moral Theory 6. Thomson’s The Realm of Rights
0 offers a systematic account of human rights, addressing first what it is to
have a right and second which rights we have. Thomson’s work is distinguished
by its exceptionally lucid style and its reliance on highly inventive examples.
The centrality of examples to her work reflects a methodological conviction
that our views about actual and imagined cases provide the data for moral
theorizing. Refs.: H. P. Grice and J. F. Thomson, ‘The philosophy of action and
free will.’
thoreau: h. d. born in Concord, Massachusetts, New
England, he attended Harvard, and, rather than the usual Rhodes scholarship to
Oxford, he returns to Concord to study nature and write, making a frugal living
as a schoolteacher, land surveyor, and pencil maker. Commentators have
emphasized three aspects of his life: his love and penetrating study of the
flora and fauna of the Concord area, recorded with philosophical reflections in
Walden 1854; his continuous pursuit of simplicity in the externals of life,
thus avoiding a life of “quiet desperation”; and his acts of civil
disobedience. The last item has been somewhat overemphasized; not paying a poll
tax by way of protest was not original with Thoreau. However, his essay
“Resistance to Civil Government” immortalized his protest and influenced people
like Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr., in later years. Thoreau eventually
helped runaway slaves at considerable risk; still, he considered himself a
student of nature and not a reformer. Refs.: H. P. Grice, “What Thoreau missed
at Oxford.”
Gedanke experiment – Grice: “Oddly, Turing’s Gedanke
experiment’ is about the meaning of ‘gedanke’!” -- used by Grice, first, in his
“Some remarks about the senses.” His Gedanke experiment involves a Martian who
comes and conquers the earth. He has four eyes in his face, with two of them he
x-s, with the other tow he y-s. Tthought experiment, a technique for testing a
hypothesis by imagining a situation and what would be said about it or more
rarely, happen in it. This technique is often used by philosophers to argue for
or against a hypothesis about the meaning or applicability of a concept. For
example, Locke imagined a switch of minds between a prince and a cobbler as a
way to argue that personal identity is based on continuity of memory, not
continuity of the body. To argue for the relativity of simultaneity, Einstein
imagined two observers one on a train,
the other beside it who observed
lightning bolts. And according to some scholars, Galileo only imagined the
experiment of tying two five-pound weights together with a fine string in order
to argue that heavier bodies do not fall faster. Thought experiments of this
last type are rare because they can be used only when one is thoroughly
familiar with the outcome of the imagined situation. J.A.K. Thrasymachus fl.
427 B.C., Grecian Sophist from Bithynia who is known mainly as a character in
Book I of Plato’s Republic. He traveled and taught extensively throughout the
Grecian world, and was well known in Athens as a teacher and as the author of
treatises on rhetoric. Innovative in his style, he was credited with inventing
the “middle style” of rhetoric. The only surviving fragment of a speech by
Thrasymachus was written for delivery by an Athenian citizen in the assembly,
at a time when Athens was not faring well in the Peloponnesian War; it shows
him concerned with the efficiency of government, pleading with the Athenians to
recognize their common interests and give up their factionalism. Our only other
source for his views on political matters is Plato’s Republic, which most
scholars accept as presenting at least a half-truth about Thrasymachus. There,
Thrasymachus is represented as a foil to Socrates, claiming that justice is
only what benefits the stronger, i.e., the rulers. From the point of view of
those who are ruled, then, justice always serves the interest of someone else,
and rulers who seek their own advantage are unjust. Refs.: H. P. Grice, “Some
remarks about the senses,” in WoW – Coady, “The senses of the Martians.”
tillich: p. philosopher, born in Starzeddel, eastern
Germany, he was educated in philosophy and theology and ordained in the
Prussian Evangelical Church in 2. He served as an army chaplain during World
War I and later taught at Berlin, Marburg, Dresden, Leipzig, and Frankfurt. In
November 3, following suspension from his teaching post by the Nazis, he
emigrated to the United States, where he taught at Columbia and Union
Theological Seminary until 5, and then at Harvard and Chicago until his death.
A popular preacher and speaker, he developed a wide audience in the United
States through such writings as The Protestant Era 8, Systematic Theology three
volumes: 1, 7, 3, The Courage to Be 2, and Dynamics of Faith 7. His sometimes
unconventional lifestyle, as well as his syncretic yet original thought, moved
“on the boundary” between theology and other elements of culture especially art, literature, political
thought, and depth psychology in the
belief that religion should relate to the whole extent, and the very depths, of
human existence. Tillich’s thought, despite its distinctive “ontological”
vocabulary, was greatly influenced by the voluntaristic tradition from
Augustine through Schelling, Schopenhauer, Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud. It was a
systematic theology that sought to state fresh Christian answers to deep
existential questions raised by individuals and cultures his method of correlation. Every age has its
distinctive kairos, “crisis” or “fullness of time,” the right time for creative
thought and action. In Weimar G.y, Tillich found the times ripe for religious
socialism. In postWorld War II America, he focused more on psychological
themes: in the midst of anxiety over death, meaninglessness, and guilt,
everyone seeks the courage to be, which comes only by avoiding the abyss of
non-being welling up in the demonic and by placing one’s unconditional faith ultit’ien Tillich, Paul 919 919 mate concern not in any particular being e.g. God but in
Being-Itself “the God above God,” the ground of being. This is essentially the
Protestant principle, which prohibits lodging ultimate concern in any finite
and limited reality including state, race, and religious institutions and
symbols. Tillich was especially influential after World War II. He represented
for many a welcome critical openness to the spiritual depths of modern culture,
opposing both demonic idolatry of this world as in National Socialism and
sectarian denial of cultural resources for faith as in Barthian
neo-orthodoxy.
tempus – applied by H. P. Grice and G. Myro in the
so-called “Grice-Myro theory of identity,” a time-relative identity, drawing
from A. N. Prior, of Oxford, D. Wiggins, Wykeham professor of logic at Oxford,
and Geach (married to an Oxonian donna),
time, “a moving image of eternity” Plato; “the number of movements in
respect of the before and after” Aristotle; “the Life of the Soul in movement
as it passes from one stage of act or experience to another” Plotinus; “a
present of things past, memory, a present of things present, sight, and a
present of things future, expectation” Augustine. These definitions, like all
attempts to encapsulate the essence of time in some neat formula, are
unhelpfully circular because they employ temporal notions. Although time might
be too basic to admit of definition, there still are many questions about time
that philosophers have made some progress in answering by analysis both of how
we ordinarily experience and talk about time, and of the deliverances of
science, thereby clarifying and deepening our understanding of what time is.
What follows gives a sample of some of the more important of these issues. Temporal
becoming and the A- and B-theories of time. According to the B-theory, time
consists in nothing but a fixed “B-series” of events running from earlier to
later. The A-theory requires that these events also form an “A-series” going
from the future through the present into the past and, moreover, shift in
respect to these determinations. The latter sort of change, commonly referred
to as “temporal becoming,” gives rise to well-known perplexities concerning
both what does the shifting and the sort of shift involved. Often it is said
that it is the present or now that shifts to ever-later times. This quickly
leads to absurdity. ‘The present’ and ‘now’, like ‘this time’, are used to
refer to a moment of time. Thus, to say that the present shifts to later times
entails that this very moment of time
the present will become some
other moment of time and thus cease to be identical with itself! Sometimes the
entity that shifts is the property of nowness or presentness. The problem is
that every event has this property at some time, namely when it occurs. Thus,
what must qualify some event as being now simpliciter is its having the
property of nowness now; and this is the start of an infinite regress that is
vicious because at each stage we are left with an unexpurgated use of ‘now’,
the very term that was supposed to be analyzed in terms of the property of
nowness. If events are to change from being future to present and from present
to past, as is required by temporal becoming, they must do so in relation to
some mysterious transcendent entity, since temporal relations between events
and/or times cannot change. The nature of the shift is equally perplexing, for
it must occur at a particular rate; but a rate of change involves a comparison
between one kind of change and a change of time. Herein, it is change of time
that is compared to change of time, resulting in the seeming tautology that
time passes or shifts at the rate of one second per second, surely an absurdity
since this is not a rate of change at all. Broad attempted to skirt these
perplexities by saying that becoming is sui generis and thereby defies
analysis, which puts him on the side of the mystically inclined Bergson who
thought that it could be known only through an act of ineffable intuition. To
escape the clutches of both perplexity and mysticism, as well as to satisfy the
demand of science to view the world non-perspectivally, the B-theory attempted
to reduce the A-series to the B-series via a linguistic reduction in which a
temporal indexical proposition reporting an event as past, present, or future
is shown to be identical with a non-indexical proposition reporting a relation
of precedence or simultaneity between it and another event or time. It is
generally conceded that such a reduction fails, since, in general, no indexical
proposition is identical with any non-indexical one, this being due to the fact
that one can have a propositional attitude toward one of them that is not had
to the other; e.g., I can believe that it is now raining without believing that
it rains tenselessly at t 7. The friends of becoming have drawn the wrong moral
from this failure that there is a
mysterious Mr. X out there doing “The Shift.” They have overlooked the fact
that two sentences can express different propositions and yet report one and
the same event or state of affairs; e.g., ‘This is water’ and ‘this is a
collection of H2O molecules’, though differing in sense, report the same state
of affairs this being water is nothing but
this being a collection of H2O molecules. It could be claimed that the same
holds for the appropriate use of indexical and non-indexical sentences; the
tokening at t 7 of ‘Georgie flies at this time at present’ is coreporting with
the non-synonymous ‘Georgie flies tenselessly at t 7’, since Georgie’s flying
at this time is the same event as Georgie’s flying at t 7, given that this time
is t 7. This effects the same ontological reduction of the becoming of events
to their bearing temporal relations to each other as does the linguistic reduction.
The “coreporting reduction” also shows the absurdity of the “psychological
reduction” according to which an event’s being present, etc., requires a
relation to a perceiver, whereas an event’s having a temporal relation to
another event or time does not require a relation to a perceiver. Given that
Georgie’s flying at this time is identical with Georgie’s flying at t 7, it
follows that one and the same event both does and does not have the property of
requiring relation to a perceiver, thereby violating Leibniz’s law that
identicals are indiscernible. Continuous versus discrete time. Assume that the
instants of time are linearly ordered by the relation R of ‘earlier than’. To
say that this order is continuous is, first, to imply the property of density or
infinite divisibility: for any instants i 1 and i 2 such that Ri1i 2, there is
a third instant i 3, such that Ri1i 3 and Ri3i 2. But continuity implies
something more since density allows for “gaps” between the instants, as with
the rational numbers. Think of R as the ‘less than’ relation and the i n as
rationals. To rule out gaps and thereby assure genuine continuity it is
necessary to require in addition to density that every convergent sequence of
instants has a limit. To make this precise one needs a distance measure d
, on pairs of instants, where di m, i n
is interpreted as the lapse of time between i m and i n. The requirement of
continuity proper is then that for any sequence i l , i 2, i 3, . . . , of
instants, if di m i n P 0 as m, n P C, there is a limit instant i ø such that
di n, iø P 0 as n P C. The analogous
property obviously fails for the rationals. But taking the completion of the
rationals by adding in the limit points of convergent sequences yields the real
number line, a genuine continuum. Numerous objections have been raised to the
idea of time as a continuum and to the very notion of the continuum itself.
Thus, it was objected that time cannot be composed of durationless instants
since a stack of such instants cannot produce a non-zero duration. Modern
measure theory resolves this objection. Leibniz held that a continuum cannot be
composed of points since the points in any finite closed interval can be put in
one-to-one correspondence with a smaller subinterval, contradicting the axiom that
the whole is greater than any proper part. What Leibniz took to be a
contradictory feature is now taken to be a defining feature of infinite
collections or totalities. Modern-day Zenoians, while granting the viability of
the mathematical doctrine of the continuum and even the usefulness of its
employment in physical theory, will deny the possibility of its applying to
real-life changes. Whitehead gave an analogue of Zeno’s paradox of the
dichotomy to show that a thing cannot endure in a continuous manner. For if i
1, i 2 is the interval over which the thing is supposed to endure, then the
thing would first have to endure until the instant i 3, halfway between i 1 and
i 2; but before it can endure until i 3, it must first endure until the instant
i 4 halfway between i 1 and i 3, etc. The seductiveness of this paradox rests
upon an implicit anthropomorphic demand that the operations of nature must be
understood in terms of concepts of human agency. Herein it is the demand that
the physicist’s description of a continuous change, such as a runner traversing
a unit spatial distance by performing an infinity of runs of ever-decreasing
distance, could be used as an action-guiding recipe for performing this feat,
which, of course, is impossible since it does not specify any initial or final
doing, as recipes that guide human actions must. But to make this
anthropomorphic demand explicit renders this deployment of the dichotomy, as
well as the arguments against the possibility of performing a “supertask,”
dubious. Anti-realists might deny that we are committed to real-life change
being continuous by our acceptance of a physical theory that employs principles
of mathematical continuity, but this is quite different from the Zenoian claim
that it is impossible for such change to be continuous. To maintain that time
is discrete would require not only abandoning the continuum but also the
density property as well. Giving up either conflicts with the intuition that
time is one-dimensional. For an explanation of how the topological analysis of
dimensionality entails that the dimension of a discrete space is 0, see W.
Hurewicz, Dimension Theory, 1. The philosophical and physics literatures
contain speculations about a discrete time built of “chronons” or temporal
atoms, but thus far such hypothetical entities have not been incorporated into
a satisfactory theory. Absolute versus relative and relational time. In a
scholium to the Principia, Newton declared that “Absolute, true and
mathematical time, of itself and from its own nature, flows equably without
relation to anything external.” There are at least five interrelated senses in
which time was absolute for Newton. First, he thought that there was a
frame-independent relation of simultaneity for events. Second, he thought that
there was a frame-independent measure of duration for non-simultaneous events.
He used ‘flows equably’ not to refer to the above sort of mysterious “temporal
becoming,” but instead to connote the second sense of absoluteness and partly
to indicate two further kinds of absoluteness. To appreciate the latter, note
that ‘flows equably’ is modified by ‘without relation to anything external’.
Here Newton was asserting third sense of ‘absolute’ that the lapse of time
between two events would be what it is even if the distribution and motions of
material bodies were different. He was also presupposing a related form of
absoluteness fourth sense according to which the metric of time is intrinsic to
the temporal interval. Leibniz’s philosophy of time placed him in agreement
with Newton as regards the first two senses of ‘absolute’, which assert the
non-relative or frame-independent nature of time. However, Leibniz was very
much opposed to Newton on the fourth sense of ‘absolute’. According to
Leibniz’s relational conception of time, any talk about the length of a
temporal interval must be unpacked in terms of talk about the relation of the
interval to an extrinsic metric standard. Furthermore, Leibniz used his
principles of sufficient reason and identity of indiscernibles to argue against
a fifth sense of ‘absolute’, implicit in Newton’s philosophy of time, according
to which time is a substratum in which physical events are situated. On the
contrary, the relational view holds that time is nothing over and above the structure
of relations of events. Einstein’s special and general theories of relativity
have direct bearing on parts of these controversies. The special theory
necessitates the abandonment of frame-independent notions of simultaneity and
duration. For any pair of spacelike related events in Minkowski space-time
there is an inertial frame in which the events are simultaneous, another frame
in which the first event is temporally prior, and still a third in which the
second event is temporally prior. And the temporal interval between two
timelike related events depends on the worldline connecting them. In fact, for
any e 0, no matter how small, there is a
worldline connecting the events whose proper length is less than e. This is the
essence of the so-called twin paradox. The general theory of relativity
abandons the third sense of absoluteness since it entails that the metrical
structure of space-time covaries with the distribution of mass-energy in a
manner specified by Einstein’s field equations. But the heart of the
absoluterelational controversy as
focused by the fourth and fifth senses of ‘absolute’ is not settled by relativistic
considerations. Indeed, opponents from both sides of the debate claim to find
support for their positions in the special and general theories. H. P. Grice,
“D. H. Mellor on real and irreal time.”
tempus -- time slice: used by Grice in two different
contexts: personal identity, and identity in general. In identity in general,
Grice draws from Geach and Wiggins, and with the formal aid of Myro, construct
a system of a first-order predicate calculus with time-relative identity -- a
temporal part or stage of any concrete particular that exists for some interval
of time; a three-dimensional cross section of a fourdimensional object. To
think of an object as consisting of time slices or temporal stages is to think
of it as related to time in much the way that it is related to space: as
extending through time as well as space, rather than as enduring through it.
Just as an object made up of spatial parts is thought of as a whole made up of
parts that exist at different locations, so an object made up of time slices is
thought of as a whole made up of parts or stages that exist at successive
times; hence, just as a spatial whole is only partly present in any space that
does not include all its spatial parts, so a whole made up of time slices is
only partly present in any stretch of time that does not include all its
temporal parts. A continuant, by contrast, is most commonly understood to be a
particular that endures through time, i.e., that is wholly present at each
moment at which it exists. To conceive of an object as a continuant is to
conceive of it as related to time in a very different way from that in which it
is related to space. A continuant does not extend through time as well as
space; it does not exist at different times by virtue of the existence of
successive parts of it at those times; it is the continuant itself that is
wholly present at each such time. To conceive an object as a continuant,
therefore, is to conceive it as not made up of temporal stages, or time slices,
at all. There is another, less common, use of ‘continuant’ in which a
continuant is understood to be any particular that exists for some stretch of
time, regardless of whether it is the whole of the particular or only some part
of it that is present at each moment of the particular’s existence. According
to this usage, an entity that is made up of time slices would be a kind of
continuant rather than some other kind of particular. Philosophers have
disputed whether ordinary objects such as cabbages and kings endure through
time are continuants or only extend through time are sequences of time slices.
Some argue that to understand the possibility of change one must think of such
objects as sequences of time slices; others argue that for the same reason one
must think of such objects as continuants. If an object changes, it comes to be
different from itself. Some argue that this would be possible only if an object
consisted of distinct, successive stages; so that change would simply consist
in the differences among the successive temporal parts of an object. Others
argue that this view would make change impossible; that differences among the
successive temporal parts of a thing would no more imply the thing had changed
than differences among its spatial parts would.
H. P. Grice, “D. H. Mellor on real and irreal time.”
token-reflexive, an expression that refers to itself in
an act of speech or writing, such as ‘this token’. The term was coined by
Reichenbach, who conjectured that all indexicals, all expressions whose
semantic value depends partly on features of the context of utterance, are
tokenreflexive and definable in terms of the phrase ‘this token’. He suggested that
‘I’ means the same as ‘the person who utters this token’, ‘now’ means the same
as ‘the time at which this token is uttered’, ‘this table’ means the same as
‘the table pointed to by a gesture accompanying this token’, and so forth.
Russell made a somewhat similar suggestion in his discussion of egocentric
particulars. Reichenbach’s conjecture is widely regarded as false; although ‘I’
does pick out the person using it, it is not synonymous with ‘the person who
utters this token’. If it were, as David Kaplan observes, ‘If no one were to
utter this token, I would not exist’ would be true.
toletus, F. Jesuit theologian and philosopher. Born in
Córdoba, he studied at Valencia, Salamanca, and Rome, and became the first
Jesuit cardinal in 1594. He composed commentaries on several of Aristotle’s
works and a commentary on Aquinas’s Summa theologiae. Toletus followed a
Thomistic line, but departed from Thomism in some details. He held that
individuals are directly apprehended by the intellect and that the agent intellect
is the same power as the possible intellect. He rejected the Thomistic
doctrines of the real distinction between essence and existence and of
individuation by designated matter; for Toletus individuation results from
form.
tonk, a sentential connective whose meaning and logic
are completely characterized by the two rules or axioms 1 [P P P tonk Q] and 2
[P tonk Q P Q]. If 1 and 2 are added to any normal system, then every Q can be
derived from any P. A. N. Prior invented ‘tonk’ to show that deductive validity
must not be conceived as depending solely on arbitrary syntactically defined
rules or axioms. We may prohibit ‘tonk’ on the ground that it is not a natural,
independently meaningful notion, but we may also prohibit it on purely
syntactical grounds. E.g., we may require that, for every connective C, the
C-introduction rule [xxx P . . . C . . .] and the C-elimination rule [ - - - C
- - - P yyy] be such that the yyy is part of xxx or is related to xxx in some
other syntactical way.
topic-neutral, noncommittal between two or more
ontological interpretations of a term. J. J. C. Smart suggested that
introspective reports can be taken as topic-neutral: composed of terms neutral
between “dualistic metaphysics” and “materialistic metaphysics.” When one
asserts, e.g., that one has a yellowish-orange afterimage, this is tantamount
to saying ‘There is something going on that is like what is going on when I
have my eyes open, am awake, and there is an orange illuminated in good light
in front of me, i.e., when I really see an orange’. The italicized phrase is,
in Smart’s terms, topic-neutral; it refers to an event, while remaining
noncommittal about whether it is material or immaterial. The term has not
always been restricted to neutrality regarding dualism and materialism. Smart
suggests that topic-neutral descriptions are composed of “quasi-logical” words,
and hence would be suitable for any occasion where a relatively noncommittal
expression of a view is required.
topos – Grice: “I will use the Latinate ‘commonplace’” –
‘locus communis’-- topic, the analysis of common strategies of argumentation,
later a genre of literature analyzing syllogistic reasoning. Aristotle
considered the analysis of types of argument, or “topics,” the best means of
describing the art of dialectical reasoning; he also used the term to refer to
the principle underlying the strategy’s production of an argument. Later
classical commentators on Aristotle, particularly Latin rhetoricians like
Cicero, developed Aristotle’s discussions of the theory of dialectical
reasoning into a philosophical form. Boethius’s work on topics exemplifies the
later classical expansion of the scope of topics literature. For him, a topic
is either a self-evidently true universal generalization, also called a
“maximal proposition,” or a differentia, a member of the set of a maximal
proposition’s characteristics that determine its genus and species. Man is a
rational animal is a maximal proposition, and like from genus, the differentia
that characterizes the maximal proposition as concerning genera, it is a topic.
Because he believed dialectical reasoning leads to categorical, not
conditional, conclusions, Boethius felt that the discovery of an argument
entailed discovering a middle term uniting the two, previously unjoined terms
of the conclusion. Differentiae are the genera of these middle terms, and one
constructs arguments by choosing differentiae, thereby determining the middle
term leading to the conclusion. In the eleventh century, Boethius’s logical structure
of maximal propositions and differentiae was used to study hypothetical
syllogisms, while twelfth-century theorists like Abelard extended the
applicability of topics structure to the categorical syllogism. By the
thirteenth century, Peter of Spain, Robert Kilwardby, and Boethius of Dacia
applied topics structure exclusively to the categorical syllogism, principally
those with non-necessary, probable premises. Within a century, discussion of
topics structure to evaluate syllogistic reasoning was subsumed by consequences
literature, which described implication, entailment, and inference relations
between propositions. While the theory of consequences as an approach to
understanding relations between propositions is grounded in Boethian, and
perhaps Stoic, logic, it became prominent only in the later thirteenth century
with Burley’s recognition of the logical significance of propositional
logic.
toxin puzzle, a puzzle about intention and practical
rationality: trustworthy billionaire, call him Paul, offers you, Peter, a
million pounds for intending tonight to drink a certain toxin tomorrow. Peter
is convinced that Paul can tell what Peter intends independently of what Peter
does. The toxin would make Peter painfully ill for a day. But Peter needs to drink
it to get the money. Constraints on the formation of a prize-winning intention
include prohibitions against “gimmicks,” “external incentives,” and forgetting
relevant details; e. g. Peter will not receive the money if Peter has a
hypnotist “implant the intention” or hire a hit man to kill Peter should Peter not
drink the toxin. If, by midnight tonight, without violating any rules, Peter
forms an intention to drink the toxin tomorrow, Peter will find a million
pounds in his bank account when he awakes tomorrow morning. Peter probably
would drink the toxin for a million dollars. But can you, without violating the
rules, intend tonight to drink it tomorrow? Apparently, you have no reason to
drink it and an excellent reason not to drink it. Seemingly, you will infer
from this that you will eschew drinking the toxin, and believing that you will top-down
eschew drinking it seems inconsistent with intending to drink it. Even so,
there are several reports in the philosophical literature of possible people
who struck it rich when offered the toxin deal! Refs: H. P. Grice, “Grice’s
book of paradoxes, with puzzling illustrations to match!”
transcendentale: Grice: “Trust Cicero to look for the
abstract!” -- transcendentia, broadly, the property of rising out of or above
other things virtually always understood figuratively; in philosophy, the
property of being, in some way, of a higher order. A being, such as God, may be
said to be transcendent in the sense of being not merely superior, but
incomparably superior, to other things, in any sort of perfection. God’s
transcendence, or being outside or beyond the world, is also contrasted, and by
some thinkers combined, with God’s immanence, or existence within the world. In
medieval philosophy of logic, terms such as ‘being’ and ‘one’, which did not
belong uniquely to any one of the Aristotelian categories or types of
predication such as substance, quality, and relation, but could be predicated
of things belonging to any or to none of them, were called transcendental. In
Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, principles that profess wrongly to take us
beyond the limits of any possible experience are called transcendent; whereas
anything belonging to non-empirical thought that establishes, and draws
consequences from, the possibility and limits of experience may be called
transcendental. Thus a transcendental argument in a sense still current is one
that proceeds from premises about the way in which experience is possible to
conclusions about what must be true of any experienced world. Transcendentalism
was a philosophical or religious movement in mid-nineteenth-century New
England, characterized, in the thought of its leading representative, Ralph
Waldo Emerson, by belief in a transcendent spiritual and divine principle in
human nature.
transcendental argument: Grice: “I prefer metaphysical
argument.’ -- an argument that elucidates the conditions for the possibility of
some fundamental phenomenon whose existence is unchallenged or uncontroversial
in the philosophical context in which the argument is propounded. Such an
argument proceeds deductively, from a premise asserting the existence of some
basic phenomenon such as meaningful discourse, conceptualization of objective
states of affairs, or the practice of making promises, to a conclusion
asserting the existence of some interesting, substantive enabling conditions
for that phenomenon. The term derives from Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason,
which gives several such arguments. The paradigmatic Kantian transcendental
argument is the “Transcendental Deduction of the Pure Concepts of
Understanding.” Kant argued there that the objective validity of certain pure,
or a priori, concepts the “categories” is a condition for the possibility of
experience. Among the concepts allegedly required for having experience are
those of substance and cause. Their apriority consists in the fact that
instances of these concepts are not directly given in sense experience in the
manner of instances of empirical concepts such as red. This fact gave rise to
the skepticism of Hume concerning the very coherence of such alleged a priori
concepts. Now if these concepts do have objective validity, as Kant endeavored
to prove in opposition to Hume, then the world contains genuine instances of
the concepts. In a transcendental argument concerning the conditions for the
possibility of experience, it is crucial that some feature entailed by the
having of experience is identified. Then it is argued that experience could not
have this feature without satisfying some substantive conditions. In the
Transcendental Deduction, the feature of experience on which Kant concentrates
is the ability of a subject of experience to be aware of several distinct inner
states as all belonging to a single consciousness. There is no general
agreement on how Kant’s argument actually unfolded, though it seems clear to
most that he focused on the role of the categories in the synthesis or
combination of one’s inner states in judgments, where such synthesis is said to
be required for one’s awareness of the states as being all equally one’s own
states. Another famous Kantian transcendental argument the “Refutation of Idealism” in the
CriToynbee, Arnold transcendental argument 925
925 tique of Pure Reason shares a
noteworthy trait with the Transcendental Deduction. The Refutation proceeds
from the premise that one is conscious of one’s own existence as determined in
time, i.e., knows the temporal order of some of one’s inner states. According
to the Refutation, a condition for the possibility of such knowledge is one’s
consciousness of the existence of objects located outside oneself in space. If
one is indeed so conscious, that would refute the skeptical view, formulated by
Descartes, that one lacks knowledge of the existence of a spatial world
distinct from one’s mind and its inner states. Both of the Kantian
transcendental arguments we have considered, then, conclude that the falsity of
some skeptical view is a condition for the possibility of some phenomenon whose
existence is acknowledged even by the skeptic the having of experience;
knowledge of temporal facts about one’s own inner states. Thus, we can isolate
an interesting subclass of transcendental arguments: those which are
anti-skeptical in nature. Barry Stroud has raised the question whether such
arguments depend on some sort of suppressed verificationism according to which
the existence of language or conceptualization requires the availability of the
knowledge that the skeptic questions since verificationism has it that
meaningful sentences expressing coherent concepts, e.g., ‘There are tables’,
must be verifiable by what is given in sense experience. Dependence on a highly
controversial premise is undesirable in itself. Further, Stroud argued, such a
dependence would render superfluous whatever other content the anti-skeptical
transcendental argument might embody since the suppressed premise alone would
refute the skeptic. There is no general agreement on whether Stroud’s doubts
about anti-skeptical transcendental arguments are well founded. It is not
obvious whether the doubts apply to arguments that do not proceed from a
premise asserting the existence of language or conceptualization, but instead
conform more closely to the Kantian model. Even so, no anti-skeptical
transcendental argument has been widely accepted. This is evidently due to the
difficulty of uncovering substantive enabling conditions for phenomena that
even a skeptic will countenance.
transcendentalism, a religious-philosophical viewpoint
held by a group of New England intellectuals, of whom Emerson, Thoreau, and
Theodore Parker were the most important. A distinction taken over from Samuel
Taylor Coleridge was the only bond that universally united the members of the
Transcendental Club, founded in 1836: the distinction between the understanding
and reason, the former providing uncertain knowledge of appearances, the latter
a priori knowledge of necessary truths gained through intuition. The
transcendentalists insisted that philosophical truth could be reached only by reason,
a capacity common to all people unless destroyed by living a life of externals
and accepting as true only secondhand traditional beliefs. On almost every
other point there were disagreements. Emerson was an idealist, while Parker was
a natural realist they simply had
conflicting a priori intuitions. Emerson, Thoreau, and Parker rejected the
supernatural aspects of Christianity, pointing out its unmistakable parochial
nature and sociological development; while James Marsh, Frederick Henry Hedge,
and Caleb Henry remained in the Christian fold. The influences on the
transcendentalists differed widely and explain the diversity of opinion. For
example, Emerson was influenced by the Platonic tradition, G. Romanticism,
Eastern religions, and nature poets, while Parker was influenced by modern
science, the Scottish realism of Reid and Cousin which also emphasized a priori
intuitions, and the G. Higher Critics. Emerson, Thoreau, and Parker were also
bonded by negative beliefs. They not only rejected Calvinism but Unitarianism
as well; they rejected the ordinary concept of material success and put in its
place an Aristotelian type of selfrealization that emphasized the rational and
moral self as the essence of humanity and decried idiosyncratic self-realization
that admires what is unique in people as constituting their real value.
transcendentale: Grice: “The formation of this
Ciceronian expression is fascinating. There’s the descent of the lark, and the
transcend of the lark!” -- transcendentals, also called transcendentalia, terms
or concepts that apply to all things regardless of the things’ ontological kind
or category. transcendental deduction transcendentals 926 926 Terms or concepts of this sort are
transcendental in the sense that they transcend or are superordinate to all
classificatory categories. The classical doctrine of the transcendentals,
developed in detail in the later Middle Ages, presupposes an Aristotelian
ontology according to which all beings are substances or accidents classifiable
within one of the ten highest genera, the ten Aristotelian categories. In this
scheme being Grecian on, Latin ens is not itself one of the categories since
all categories mark out kinds of being. But neither is it a category above the
ten categories of substance and accidents, an ultimate genus of which the ten
categories are species. This is because being is homonymous or equivocal, i.e.,
there is no single generic property or nature shared by members of each
category in virtue of which they are beings. The ten categories identify ten
irreducible, most basic ways of being. Being, then, transcends the categorial
structure of the world: anything at all that is ontologically classifiable is a
being, and to say of anything that it is a being is not to identify it as a
member of some kind distinct from other kinds of things. According to this
classical doctrine, being is the primary transcendental, but there are other
terms or concepts that transcend the categories in a similar way. The most
commonly recognized transcendentals other than being are one unum, true verum,
and good bonum, though some medieval philosophers also recognized thing res,
something aliquid, and beautiful pulchrum. These other terms or concepts are
transcendental because the ontological ground of their application to a given
thing is precisely the same as the ontological ground in virtue of which that
thing can be called a being. For example, for a thing with a certain nature to
be good is for it to perform well the activity that specifies it as a thing of
that nature, and to perform this activity well is to have actualized that
nature to a certain extent. But for a thing to have actualized its nature to
some extent is just what it is for the thing to have being. So the actualities
or properties in virtue of which a thing is good are precisely those in virtue
of which it has being. Given this account, medieval philosophers held that
transcendental terms are convertible convertuntur or extensionally equivalent
idem secundum supposita. They are not synonymous, however, since they are
intensionally distinct differunt secundum rationem. These secondary
transcendentals are sometimes characterized as attributes passiones of being
that are necessarily concomitant with it. In the modern period, the notion of
the transcendental is associated primarily with Kant, who made ‘transcendental’
a central technical term in his philosophy. For Kant the term no longer
signifies that which transcends categorial classification but that which
transcends our experience in the sense of providing its ground or structure.
Kant allows, e.g., that the pure forms of intuition space and time and the pure
concepts of understanding categories such as substance and cause are
transcendental in this sense. Forms and concepts of this sort constitute the
conditions of the possibility of experience.
Trans-finitum, definitum, infinitum: Trans-finite
number, in set theory, an infinite cardinal or ordinal number.
transformation – Grice: “My system G makes minimal use
of transformations” -- minimal transformation rule: an axiom-schema or rule of
inference. Grice: “Strictly, an Ovidian metamorphose!” -- A transformation rule
is thus a rule for transforming a possibly empty set of wellformed formulas
into a formula, where that rule operates only upon syntactic information. It
was this conception of an axiom-schema and rule of inference that was one of
the keys to creating a genuinely rigorous science of deductive reasoning. In
the 0s, the idea was imported into linguistics, giving rise to the notion of a
transformational rule. Such a rule transforms tree structures into tree
structures, taking one from the deep structure of a sentence, which determines
its semantic interpretation, to the surface structure of that sentence, which
determines its phonetic interpretation. Grice: “Chomsky misuses
‘transformation.’” --
metaosiosis – cited by Grice, one of his metaphysical
routines. transubstantiation, change of one substance into another.
Aristotelian metaphysics distinguishes between substances and the accidents
that inhere in them; thus, Socrates is a substance and being snub-nosed is one
of his accidents. The Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches appeal to
transubstantiation to explain how Jesus Christ becomes really present in the
Eucharist when the consecration takes place: the whole substances of the bread
and wine are transformed into the body and blood of Christ, but the accidents
of the bread and wine such as their shape, color, and taste persist after the
transformation. This seems to commit its adherents to holding that these
persisting accidents subsequently either inhere in Christ or do not inhere in
any substance. Luther proposed an alternative explanation in terms of
consubstantiation that avoids this hard choice: the substances of the bread and
wine coexist in the Eucharist with the body and blood of Christ after the
consecration; they are united but each remains unchanged. P.L.Q. transvaluation
of values.
transversum -- Transversality – a term Grice borrowed from
Heidegger – ‘the greatest philosopher that ever lived.” -- transcendence of the sovereignty of identity
or self-sameness by recognizing the alterity of the Other as Unterschied to use Heidegger’s term which signifies the sense of relatedness by
way of difference. An innovative idea employed and appropriated by such diverse
philosophers as Merleau-Ponty, Sartre, Gilles Deleuze, and Félix Guattari,
transversality is meant to replace the Eurocentric formulation of truth as
universal in an age when the world is said to be rushing toward the global
village. Universality has been a Eurocentric idea because what is particular in
the West is universalized, whereas what is particular elsewhere remains
particularized. Since its center is everywhere and its circumference nowhere, truth
is polycentric and correlative. Particularly noteworthy is the phenomenologist Calvin O. Schrag’s attempt to
appropriate transversality by splitting the difference between the two extremes
of absolutism and relativism on the one hand and modernity’s totalizing
practices and postmodernity’s fragmentary tendencies on the other.
arbor
griceiana, arbor porphyriana: a structure generated from the logical and
metaphysical apparatus of Aristotle’s Categories, as systematized by Porphyry
and later writers. A tree in the category of substance begins with substance as
its highest genus and divides that genus into mutually exclusive and
collectively exhaustive subordinate genera by means of a pair of opposites,
called differentiae, yielding, e.g., corporeal substance and incorporeal
substance. The process of division by differentiae continues until a lowest
species is reached, a species that cannot be divided further. The species
“human being” is said to be a lowest species whose derivation can be recaptured
from the formula “mortal, rational, sensitive, animate, corporeal
substance.”
trinitarianism, -- “Raining, raining, raining.” -- the
theological doctrine that God consists of three persons, “in Strawson’s usage
of the expression” – Vide Grice, “Personal identity,” -- The persons who
constitute the Holy Trinity are the Father; the Son, who is Jesus Christ; and
the Holy Spirit or Holy Ghost. The doctrine states that each of these three
persons is God and yet they are not three Gods but one God. According to a
traditional formulation, the three persons are but one substance. In the
opinion of Aquinas, the existence of God can be proved by human reason, but the
existence of the three persons cannot be proved and is known only by
revelation. According to Christian tradition, revelation contains information
about the relations among the three persons, and these relations ground proper
attributes of each that distinguish them from one another. Thus, since the
Father begets the Son, a proper attribute of the Father is paternity and a
proper attribute of the Son is filiation. Procession transparent Trinitarianism
928 928 or spiration is a proper
attribute of the Holy Spirit. A disagreement about procession has contributed
to dividing Eastern and Western Christianity. The Eastern Orthodox church
teaches that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father through the Son. A theory
of double procession according to which the Holy Spirit proceeds from the
Father and the Son has been widely accepted in the West. This disagreement is
known as the filioque ‘and the Son’ controversy because it arose from the fact
that adding this Latin phrase to the Nicene Creed became acceptable in the West
but not in the East. Unitarianism denies that God consists of three persons and
so is committed to denying the divinity of Jesus. The monotheistic faiths of
Judaism and Islam are unitarian, but there are unitarians who consider
themselves Christians. H. P. Grice, “Raining, raining, raining – my mother and
the Trinitarians.”
troeltsch: philosopher whose primary aim was to provide a
scientific foundation for theology. Educated at Erlangen, Göttingen under
Ritschl and Lagarde, and Berlin, he initially taught theology at Heidelberg and
later philosophy in Berlin. He launched the school of history of religion with
his epoch-making “On Historical and Dogmatical Method in Theology” 6. His
contributions to theology The Religious Apriori, 4, philosophy, sociology, and
history Historicism and Its Problems, 2 were vastly influential. Troeltsch
claimed that only a philosophy of religion drawn from the history and
development of religious consciousness could strengthen the standing of the
science of religion among the sciences and advance the Christian strategy
against materialism, naturalism, skepticism, aestheticism, and pantheism. His
historical masterpiece, Protestantism and Progress 6, argues that early
Protestantism was a modified medieval Catholicism that delayed the development
of modern culture. As a sociologist, he addressed, in The Social Teachings of
the Christian Churches 2, the twofold issue of whether religious beliefs and
movements are conditioned by external factors and whether, in turn, they affect
society and culture. From Christian social history he inferred three types of
“sociological self-formation of the Christian idea”: the church, the sect, and
the mystic
tropic: Grice: “Cf. Cicero, ‘Tropicus, and
sub-tropicus’ –“ used by R. M. Hare and H. P. Grice – Hare introduced the
‘tropic’ to contrast with the ‘phrastic,’ the ‘neustic,’ and the ‘clistic’ – “I
often wondered if Hare was not distinguishing too narrowly” – H. P. Grice --trope,
in recent philosophical usage, an “abstract particular”; an instance of a
property occurring at a particular place and time, such as the color of the
cover of this book or this . The whiteness of this and the whiteness of the previous are two distinct tropes, identical neither
with the universal whiteness that is instantiated in both s, nor with the itself; although the whiteness of this cannot exist independently of this ,
this could be dyed some other color. A
number of writers, perhaps beginning with D. C. Williams, have argued that
tropes must be included in our ontology if we are to achieve an adequate
metaphysics. More generally, a trope is a figure of speech, or the use of an
expression in a figurative or nonliteral sense. Metaphor and irony, e.g., fall
under the category of tropes. If you are helping someone move a glass table but
drop your end, and your companion says, “Well, you’ve certainly been a big
help,” her utterance is probably ironical, with the intended meaning that you
have been no help. One important question is whether, in order to account for
the ironical use of this sentence, we must suppose that it has an ironical
meaning in addition to its literal meaning. Quite generally, does a sentence
usable to express two different metaphors have, in addition to its literal
meaning, two metaphorical meanings and
another if it can be hyperbolic, and so forth? Many philosophers and other
theorists from Aristotle on have answered yes, and postulated such figurative
meanings in addition to literal sentence meaning. Recently, philosophers loath
to multiply sentence meanings have denied that sentences have any non-literal
meanings.Their burden is to explain how, e.g., a sentence can be used
ironically if it does not have an ironical sense or meaning. Such philosophers
disagree on whether tropes are to be explained semantically or pragmatically. A
semantic account might hypothesize that tropes are generated by violations of
semantical rules. An important pragmatic approach is Grice’s suggestion that
tropes can be subsumed under the more general phenomenon of conversational implicaturum.
verisimilitude -- truthlikeness, a term introduced by
Karl Popper to explicate the idea that one theory may have a better
correspondence with reality, or be closer to the truth, or have more
verisimilitude, than another theory. Truthlikeness, which combines truth with
information content, has to be distinguished from probability, which increases
with lack of content. Let T and F be the classes of all true and false
sentences, respectively, and A and B deductively closed sets of sentences.
According to Popper’s qualitative definition, A is more truthlike than B if and
only if B 3 T 0 A 3 T and A 3 F 0 B 3 F, where one of these setinclusions is
strict. In particular, when A and B are non-equivalent and both true, A is more
truthlike than B if and only if A logically entails B. David Miller and Pavel
Tichý proved in 4 that Popper’s definition is not applicable to the comparison
of false theories: if A is more truthlike than B, then A must be true. Since
the mid-0s, a new approach to truthlikeness has been based upon the concept of
similarity: the degree of truthlikeness of a statement A depends on the
distances from the states of affairs allowed by A to the true state. In Graham
Oddie’s Likeness to Truth 6, this dependence is expressed by the average
function; in Ilkka Niiniluoto’s Truthlikeness 7, by the weighted average of the
minimum distance and the sum of all distances. The concept of verisimilitude is
also used in the epistemic sense to express a rational evaluation of how close
to the truth a theory appears to be on available evidence.
verum – Grice: “Cognate with German ‘wahr’” -- there’s
the ‘truth table’ and the ‘truth’ -- truth table, a tabular display of one or
more truth-functions, truth-functional operators, or representatives of
truth-functions or truth-functional operators such as well-formed formulas of
propositional logic. In the tabular display, each row displays a possible
assignment of truthvalues to the arguments of the truth-functions or
truth-functional operators. Thus, the collection of all rows in the table
displays all possible assignments of truth-values to these arguments. The
following simple truth table represents the truth-functional operators negation
and conjunction: truth, coherence theory of truth table 931 931 Because a truth table displays all
possible assignments of truth-values to the arguments of a truth-function,
truth tables are useful devices for quickly ascertaining logical properties of
propositions. If, e.g., all entries in the column of a truth table representing
a proposition are T, then the proposition is true for all possible assignments
of truth-values to its ultimate constituent propositions; in this sort of case,
the proposition is said to be logically or tautologically true: a tautology. If
all entries in the column of a truth table representing a proposition are F,
then the proposition is false for all possible assignments of truth-values to
its ultimate constituent propositions, and the proposition is said to be
logically or tautologically false: a contradiction. If a proposition is neither
a tautology nor a contradiction, then it is said to be a contingency. The truth
table above shows that both Not-P and Pand-Q are contingencies. For the same
reason that truth tables are useful devices for ascertaining the logical
qualities of single propositions, truth tables are also useful for ascertaining
whether arguments are valid or invalid. A valid argument is one such that there
is no possibility no row in the relevant truth table in which all its premises
are true and its conclusion false. Thus the above truth table shows that the argument
‘P-and-Q; therefore, P’ is valid. Verum
-- truth-value, most narrowly, one of the values T for ‘true’ or F for ‘false’
that a proposition may be considered to have or take on when it is regarded as
true or false, respectively. More broadly, a truth-value is any one of a range
of values that a proposition may be considered to have when taken to have one
of a range of different cognitive or epistemic statuses. For example, some
philosophers speak of the truth-value I for ‘indeterminate’ and regard a proposition
as having the value I when it is indeterminate whether the proposition is true
or false. Logical systems employing a specific number n of truthvalues are said
to be n-valued logical systems; the simplest sort of useful logical system has
two truth-values, T and F, and accordingly is said to be two-valued.
Truth-functions are functions that take truth-values as arguments and that
yield truth-values as resultant values. The truthtable method in propositional
logic exploits the idea of truth-functions by using tabular displays. Verum -- truth-value
semantics, interpretations of formal systems in which the truth-value of a
formula rests ultimately only on truth-values that are assigned to its atomic
subformulas where ‘subformula’ is suitably defined. The label is due to Hugues
Leblanc. On a truth-value interpretation for first-order predicate logic, for
example, the formula atomic ExFx is true in a model if and only if all its
instances Fm, Fn, . . . are true, where the truth-value of these formulas is
simply assigned by the model. On the standard Tarskian or objectual
interpretation, by contrast, ExFx is true in a model if and only if every
object in the domain of the model is an element of the set that interprets F in
the model. Thus a truth-value semantics for predicate logic comprises a
substitutional interpretation of the quantifiers and a “non-denotational”
interpretation of terms and predicates. If t 1, t 2, . . . are all the terms of
some first-order language, then there are objectual models that satisfy the set
{Dx-Fx, Ft1, Ft2 . . . .}, but no truth-value interpretations that do. One can
ensure that truth-value semantics delivers the standard logic, however, by
suitable modifications in the definitions of consistency and consequence. A set
G of formulas of language L is said to be consistent, for example, if there is
some G' obtained from G by relettering terms such that G' is satisfied by some
truth-value assignment, or, alternatively, if there is some language L+
obtained by adding terms to L such that G is satisfied by some truth-value
assignment to the atoms of L+. Truth-value semantics is of both technical and
philosophical interest. Technically, it allows the completeness of first-order
predicate logic and a variety of other formal systems to be obtained in a
natural way from that of propositional logic. Philosophically, it dramatizes
the fact that the formulas in one’s theories about the world do not, in
themselves, determine one’s ontological commitments. It is at least possible to
interpret first-order formulas without reference to special truth-table method
truth-value semantics 932 932 domains
of objects, and higher-order formulas without reference to special domains of
relations and properties. The idea of truth-value semantics dates at least to
the writings of E. W. Beth on first-order predicate logic in 9 and of K.
Schütte on simple type theory in 0. In more recent years similar semantics have
been suggested for secondorder logics, modal and tense logics, intuitionistic
logic, and set theory. Truth, the quality of those propositions that accord
with reality, specifying what is in fact the case. Whereas the aim of a science
is to discover which of the propositions in its domain are true i.e., which
propositions possess the property of Trinity truth 929 929 truth
the central philosophical concern with truth is to discover the nature
of that property. Thus the philosophical question is not What is true? but rather,
What is truth? What is one saying about
a proposition in saying that it is true? The importance of this question stems
from the variety and depth of the principles in which the concept of truth is
deployed. We are tempted to think, e.g., that truth is the proper aim and
natural result of scientific inquiry, that true beliefs are useful, that the
meaning of a sentence is given by the conditions that would render it true, and
that valid reasoning preserves truth. Therefore insofar as we wish to
understand, assess, and refine these epistemological, ethical, semantic, and
logical views, some account of the nature of truth would seem to be required.
Such a thing, however, has been notoriously elusive. The belief that snow is
white owes its truth to a certain feature of the external world: the fact that
snow is white. Similarly, the belief that dogs bark is true because of the fact
that dogs bark. Such trivial observations lead to what is perhaps the most
natural and widely held account of truth, the correspondence theory, according
to which a belief statement, sentence, proposition, etc. is true provided there
exists a fact corresponding to it. This Aristotelian thesis is unexceptionable
in itself. However, if it is to provide a complete theory of truth and if it is to be more than merely a picturesque
way of asserting all instances of ‘the belief that p is true if and only if
p’ then it must be supplemented with
accounts of what facts are, and what it is for a belief to correspond to a
fact; and these are the problems on which the correspondence theory of truth
has foundered. A popular alternative to the correspondence theory has been to
identify truth with verifiability. This idea can take on various forms. One
version involves the further assumption that verification is holistic i.e., that a belief is verified when it is
part of an entire system of beliefs that is consistent and “harmonious.” This
is known as the coherence theory of truth and was developed by Bradley and
Brand Blanchard. Another version, due to Dummett and Putnam, involves the
assumption that there is, for each proposition, some specific procedure for
finding out whether one should believe it or not. On this account, to say that
a proposition is true is to say that it would be verified by the appropriate
procedure. In mathematics this amounts to the identification of truth with
provability and is sometimes referred to as intuitionistic truth. Such theories
aim to avoid obscure metaphysical notions and explain the close relation
between knowability and truth. They appear, however, to overstate the intimacy
of that link: for we can easily imagine a statement that, though true, is
beyond our power to establish as true. A third major account of truth is
James’s pragmatic theory. As we have just seen, the verificationist selects a
prominent property of truth and considers it to be the essence of truth.
Similarly the pragmatist focuses on another important characteristic namely, that true beliefs are a good basis
for action and takes this to be the very
nature of truth. True assumptions are said to be, by definition, those that
provoke actions with desirable results. Again we have an account with a single
attractive explanatory feature. But again the central objection is that the
relationship it postulates between truth and its alleged analysans in this case, utility is implausibly close. Granted, true beliefs
tend to foster success. But often actions based on true beliefs lead to
disaster, while false assumptions, by pure chance, produce wonderful results.
One of the few fairly uncontroversial facts about truth is that the proposition
that snow is white is true if and only if snow is white, the proposition that
lying is wrong is true if and only if lying is wrong, and so on. Traditional
theories of truth acknowledge this fact but regard it as insufficient and, as
we have seen, inflate it with some further principle of the form ‘X is true if
and only if X has property P’ such as corresponding to reality, verifiability,
or being suitable as a basis for action, which is supposed to specify what
truth is. A collection of radical alternatives to the traditional theories
results from denying the need for any such further specification. For example,
one might suppose with Ramsey, Ayer, and Strawson that the basic theory of
truth contains nothing more than equivalences of the form, ‘The proposition
that p is true if and only if p’ excluding instantiation by sentences such as
‘This proposition is not true’ that generate contradiction. This so-called
deflationary theory is best presented following Quine in conjunction with an
account of the raison d’être of our notion of truth: namely, that its function
is not to describe propositions, as one might naively infer from its syntactic
form, but rather to enable us to construct a certain type of generalization.
For example, ‘What Einstein said is true’ is intuitively equivalent to the
infinite conjunction ‘If Einstein said that nothing goes faster than light,
then nothing goes faster than light; and if Einstein said truth truth 930 930 that nuclear weapons should never be
built, then nuclear weapons should never be built; . . . and so on.’ But
without a truth predicate we could not capture this statement. The deflationist
argues, moreover, that all legitimate uses of the truth predicate including those in science, logic, semantics,
and metaphysics are simply displays of
this generalizing function, and that the equivalence schema is just what is
needed to explain that function. Within the deflationary camp there are various
competing proposals. According to Frege’s socalled redundancy theory,
corresponding instances of ‘It is true that p’ and ‘p’ have exactly the same
meaning, whereas the minimalist theory assumes merely that such propositions
are necessarily equivalent. Other deflationists are skeptical about the
existence of propositions and therefore take sentences to be the basic vehicles
of truth. Thus the disquotation theory supposes that truth is captured by the
disquotation principle, ‘p’ is true if and only if p’. More ambitiously, Tarski
does not regard the disquotation principle, also known as Tarski’s T schema, as
an adequate theory in itself, but as a specification of what any adequate
definition must imply. His own account shows how to give an explicit definition
of truth for all the sentences of certain formal languages in terms of the
referents of their primitive names and predicates. This is known as the
semantic theory of truth. .
Turing: Grice: “While not a philosopher, Turing’s thought
experiment is about the ‘conceptual analysis’ of ‘thought’” --similar to a
Griceian machine -- a machine, an
abstract automaton or imagined computer consisting of a finite automaton
operating an indefinitely long storage tape. The finite automaton provides the
computing power of the machine. The tape is used for input, output, and
calculation workspace; in the case of the universal Turing machine, it also
specifies another Turing machine. Initially, only a finite number of squares of
the tape are marked with symbols, while the rest are blank. The finite
automaton part of the machine has a finite number of internal states and
operates discretely, at times t % 0, 1, 2, . . . . At each time-step the
automaton examines the tape square under its tape head, possibly changes what
is there, moves the tape left or right, and then changes its internal state.
The law governing this sequence of actions is deterministic and is defined in a
state table. For each internal state and each tape symbol or blank under the
tape head, the state table describes the tape action performed by the machine
and gives the next internal state of the machine. Since a machine has only a
finite number of internal states and of tape symbols, the state table of a
machine is finite in length and can be stored on a tape. There is a universal
Turing machine Mu that can simulate every Turing machine including itself: when
the state table of any machine M is written on the tape of Mu, the universal
machine Mu will perform the same input-output computation that M performs. Mu
does this by using the state table of M to calculate M’s complete history for
any given input. Turing machines may be thought of as conceptual devices for
enumerating the elements of an infinite set e.g., the theorems of a formal
language, or as decision machines e.g., deciding of any truth-functional
formula whether it is a tautology. A. M. Turing showed that there are
welldefined logical tasks that cannot be carried out by any machine; in
particular, no machine can solve the halting problem. Turing’s definition of a
machine was theoretical; it was not a practical specification for a machine.
After the modern electronic computer was invented, he proposed a test for
judging whether there is a computer that is behaviorally equivalent to a human
in reasoning and intellectual creative power. The Turing test is a “black box”
type of experiment that Turing proposed as a way of deciding whether a computer
can think. Two rooms are fitted with the same input-output equipment going to
an outside experimenter. A person is placed in one room and a programmed
electronic computer in the other, each in communication with the experimenter.
By issuing instructions and asking questions, the experimenter tries to decide
which room has the computer and which the human. If the experimenter cannot
tell, that outcome is strong evidence that the computer can think as well as
the person. More directly, it shows that the computer and the human are
equivalent for all the behaviors tested. Since the computer is a finite
automaton, perhaps the most significant test task is that of doing creative mathematics
about the non-enumerable infinite.
turnbull, G.: moral sense philosopher and educational theorist.
He was briefly a philosophy regent at Aberdeen and a teacher of Reid. His
Principles of Moral and Christian Philosophy 1740 and Discourse upon the Nature
and Origin of Moral and Civil Laws 1741 show him as the most systematic of
those who aimed to recast moral philosophy on a Newtonian model, deriving moral
laws “experimentally” from human psychology. In A Treatise on Ancient Painting
1740, Observations Upon Liberal Education 1742, and some smaller works, he
extolled history and the arts as propaedeutic to the teaching of virtue and
natural religion.
Grice’s
Martian Chronicles -- Twin-Earth – as
opposed to Mars -- a fictitious planet first visited by Hilary Putnam in a
thought experiment inspired by H. P. Grice in “Some remarks about the senses”
-- designed to show, among other things, that “ ‘meanings’ just ain’t in the
head” “The Meaning of ‘Meaning’,” 5. Twin-Earth is exactly like Earth with one
notable exception: ponds, rivers, and ice trays on Twin-Earth contain, not H2O,
but XYZ, a liquid superficially indistinguishable from water but with a
different chemical constitution. According to Putnam, although some inhabitants
of Twin-Earth closely resemble inhabitants of Earth, ‘water’, when uttered by a
Twin-Earthling, does not mean water. Water is H2O, and, on Twin-Earth, the word
‘water’ designates a different substance, XYZ, Twin-water. The moral drawn by
Putnam is that the meanings of at least some of our words, and the significance
of some of our thoughts, depend, in part, on how things stand outside our
heads. Two “molecular duplicates,” two agents with qualitatively similar mental
lives, might mean very different things by their utterances and think very
different thoughts. Although Twin-Earth has become a popular stopping-off place
for philosophers en route to theories of meaning and mental content, others
regard Twin-Earth as hopelessly remote, doubting that useful conclusions can be
drawn about our Earthly circumstances from research conducted there. Suppose that long-awaited invasion of the
Martians takes place, that they turn out to be friendly creatures and teach us
their language. We get on all right, except that we find no verb in their
language which unquestionably corresponds to our verb “see.” Instead we find
two verbs which we decide to render as “x” and “y”: we find that (in their
tongue) they speak of themselves as x-ing, and also as y-ing, things to be of
this and that color, size, and shape. Further, in physical appearance they are
more or less like ourselves, except that in their heads they have, one above
the other, two pairs of organs, not perhaps exactly like one another, but each
pair more or less like our eyes: each pair of organs is found to be sensitive
to light waves. It turns out that for them x-ing is dependent on the operation
of the upper organs, and y-ing on that of the lower organs. The question which
it seems natural to ask is this: Are x-ing and y-ing both cases of seeing, the
difference between them being that x-ing is seeing with the upper organs, and
y-ing is seeing with the lower organs? Or alternatively, do one or both of
these accomplishments constitute the exercise of a new sense, other than that
of sight? If we adopt, to distinguish the senses, a combination of suggestion
(I) with one or both of suggestions (III) or (IV), the answer seems clear: both
x-ing and y-ing are seeing, with different pairs of organs. But is the question
really to be settled so easily? Would we not in fact want to ask whether x-ing
something to be round was like y-ing it to be round, or whether when something
x-ed blue to them this was like or unlike its y-ing blue to them? If in answer
to such questions as these they said, “Oh no, there’s all the difference in the
world!” then I think we should be inclined to say that either x-ing or y-ing
(if not both) must be something other than seeing: we might of course be quite
unable to decide which (if either) was seeing. (I am aware that here those
whose approach is more Wittgensteinian than my own might complain that unless
something more can be said about how the difference between x-ing and y-ing
might “come out” or show itself in publicly observable phenomena, then the
claim by the supposed Martians that x-ing and y-ing are different would be one
of which nothing could be made, which would leave one at a loss how to
understand it. First, I am not convinced of the need for “introspectible”
differences to show themselves in the way this approach demands (I shall not
discuss this point further); second, I think that if I have to meet this
demand, I can. One can suppose that one or more of these Martians acquired the
use of the lower y-ing organs at some comparatively late date in their careers,
and that at the same time (perhaps for experimental purposes) the operation of
the upper x-ing organs was inhibited. One might now be ready to allow that a
difference between Some Remarks about the Senses 47 x-ing and y-ing would have
shown itself if in such a situation the creatures using their y-ing organs for
the first time were unable straightaway, without any learning process, to use
their “color”-words fluently and correctly to describe what they detected
through the use of those organs.) It might be argued at this point that we have
not yet disposed of the idea that the senses can be distinguished by an amalgam
of suggestions (I), (III), and (IV); for it is not clear that in the example of
the Martians the condition imposed by suggestion (I) is fulfilled. The thesis,
it might be said, is only upset if x-ing and y-ing are accepted as being the
exercise of different senses; and if they are, then the Martians’ color-words
could be said to have a concealed ambiguity. Much as “sweet” in English may
mean “sweet-smelling” or “sweet-tasting,” so “blue” in Martian may mean
“blue-x-ing” or “blue-y-ing.” But if this is so, then the Martians after all do
not detect by x-ing just those properties of things which they detect by y-ing.
To this line of argument there are two replies: (1) The defender of the thesis
is in no position to use this argument; for he cannot start by making the
question whether x-ing and y-ing are exercises of the same sense turn on the
question (inter alia) whether or not a single group of characteristics is
detected by both, and then make the question of individuation of the group turn
on the question whether putative members of the group are detected by one, or
by more than one, sense. He would be saying in effect, “Whether, in x-ing and
y-ing, different senses are exercised depends (inter alia) on whether the same
properties are detected by x-ing as by y-ing; but whether a certain x-ed
property is the same as a certain y-ed property depends on whether x-ing and
y-ing are or are not the exercise of a single sense.” This reply seems fatal.
For the circularity could only be avoided by making the question whether “blue”
in Martian names a single property depend either on whether the kinds of
experience involved in x-ing and y-ing are different, which would be to
reintroduce suggestion (II), or on whether the mechanisms involved in x-ing and
y-ing are different (in this case whether the upper organs are importantly
unlike the lower organs): and to adopt this alternative would, I think, lead to
treating the differentiation of the senses as being solely a matter of their
mechanisms, thereby making suggestion (I) otiose. (2) Independently of its
legitimacy or illegitimacy in the present context, we must reject the idea that
if it is accepted that in x-ing and y-ing different senses are being exercised,
then Martian color-words will be ambiguous. For ex hypothesi there will be a
very close correlation between things x-ing blue and their y-ing blue, far
closer 48 H. P. Grice than that between things smelling sweet and their tasting
sweet. This being so, it is only to be expected that x-ing and y-ing should
share the position of arbiters concerning the color of things: that is, “blue”
would be the name of a single property, determinable equally by x-ing and y-ing.
After all, is this not just like the actual position with regard to shape,
which is doubly determinable, by sight and by touch? While I would not wish to
quarrel with the main terms of this second reply, I should like briefly to
indicate why I think that this final quite natural comparison with the case of
shape will not do. It is quite conceivable that the correlation between x-ing
and y-ing , in the case supposed, might be close enough to ensure that Martian
color-words designated doubly determinable properties, and yet that this
correlation should break down in a limited class of cases: for instance, owing
to some differences between the two pairs of organs, objects which transmitted
light of a particular wavelength might (in standard conditions) x blue but y
black. I suggest, then, that given the existence of an object which, for the
Martians, standardly x-ed blue but y-ed black (its real color being
undecidable), no conclusion could be drawn to the effect that other objects do,
or could as a matter of practiSome Remarks about the Senses 51 cal possibility
be made to, x one way and y another way either in respect of color or in
respect of some other feature within the joint province of x-ing and y-ing.
Refs.: H. P. Grice, “Some remarks about the senses,” in WoW --. Coady, “The
senses of the Martians.”
tychism: from Grecian tyche, ‘chance’, Peirce’s doctrine that
there is absolute chance in the universe and its fundamental laws are
probabilistic and inexact. Peirce’s tychism is part of his evolutionary
cosmology, according to which all regularities of nature are products of growth
and development, i.e., results of evolution. The laws of nature develop over
time and become increasingly rigid and exact; the apparently deterministic laws
of physics are limiting cases of the basic, probabilistic laws. Underlying all
other laws is “the tendency of all things to take habits”; Peirce calls this
the Law of Habit. In his cosmology his tychism is associated with synechism,
the doctrine of the continuity of nature. His synechism involves the doctrine
of the continuity of mind and matter; Peirce sometimes expressed this view by
saying that “matter is effete mind.”
Grice’s “The
Three-Year-Old’s Guide to Russell’s Theory of Types,” with an advice to parents
by P. F. Starwson -- type theory,
broadly, any theory according to which the things that exist fall into natural,
perhaps mutually exclusive, categories or types. In most modern discussions,
‘type theory’ refers to the theory of logical types first sketched by Russell
in The Principles of Mathematics 3. It is a theory of logical types insofar as
it purports only to classify things into the most general categories that must
be presupposed by an adequate logical theory. Russell proposed his theory in
response to his discovery of the now-famous paradox that bears his name. The
paradox is this. Common sense suggests that some classes are members of
themselves e.g., the class of all classes, while others are not e.g., the class
of philosophers. Let R be the class whose membership consists of exactly those
classes of the latter sort, i.e., those that are not members of themselves. Is
R a member of itself? If so, then it is a member of the class of all classes
that are not members of themselves, and hence is not a member of itself. If, on
the other hand, it is not a member of itself, then it satisfies its own
membership conditions, and hence is a member of itself after all. Either way
there is a contradiction. The source of the paradox, Russell suggested, is the
assumption that classes and their members form a single, homogeneous logical
type. To the contrary, he proposed that the logical universe is stratified into
a regimented hierarchy of types. Individuals constitute the lowest type in the
hierarchy, type 0. For purposes of exposition, individuals can be taken to be
ordinary objects like chairs and persons. Type 1 consists of classes of
individuals, type 2 of classes of classes of individuals, type 3 classes of
classes of classes of individuals, and so on. Unlike the homogeneous universe,
then, in the type hierarchy the members of a given class must all be drawn from
a single logical type n, and the class itself must reside in the next higher
type n ! 1. Russell’s sketch in the Principles differs from this account in certain
details. Russell’s paradox cannot arise in this conception of the universe of
classes. Because the members of a class must all be of the same logical type,
there is no such class as R, whose definition cuts across all types. Rather,
there is only, for each type n, the class Rn of all non-self-membered classes
of that type. Since Rn itself is of type n ! 1, the paradox breaks down: from
the assumption that Rn is not a member of itself as in fact it is not in the
type hierarchy, it no longer follows that it satisfies its own membership
conditions, since those conditions apply only to objects of type n. Most formal
type theories, including Russell’s own, enforce the class membership
restrictions of simple type theory syntactically such that a can be asserted to
be a member of b only if b is of the next higher type than a. In such theories,
the definition of R, hence the paradox itself, cannot even be expressed.
Numerous paradoxes remain unscathed by the simple type hierarchy. Of these, the
most prominent are the semantic paradoxes, so called because they explicitly
involve semantic notions like truth, as in the following version of the liar
paradox. Suppose Epimenides asserts that all the propositions he asserts today
are false; suppose also that that is the only proposition he asserts today. It
follows immediately that, under those conditions, the proposition he asserts is
true if and only if it is false. To address such paradoxes, Russell was led to
the more refined and substantially more complicated system known as ramified
type theory, developed in detail in his 8 paper “Mathematical Logic as Based on
the Theory of Types.” In the ramified theory, propositions and properties or
propositional functions, in Russell’s jargon come to play the central roles in the
type-theoretic universe. Propositions are best construed as the metaphysical
and semantical counterparts of sentences
what sentences express and
properties as the counterparts of “open sentences” like ‘x is a philosopher’
that contain a variable ‘x’ in place of a noun phrase. To distinguish
linguistic expressions from their semantic counterparts, the property expressed
by, say, ‘x is a philosopher’, will be denoted by ‘x ^ is a philosopher’, and
the proposition expressed by ‘Aristotle is a philosopher’ will be denoted by
‘Aristotle is a philosopher’. A property . . .x ^ . . . is said to be true of
an individual a if . . . a . . . is a true proposition, and false of a if . . .
a . . . is a false proposition where ‘. . . a . . .’ is the result of replacing
‘x ^ ’ with ‘a’ in ‘. . . x ^ . . .’. So, e.g., x ^ is a philosopher is true of
Aristotle. The range of significance of a property P is the collection of
objects of which P is true or false. a is a possible argument for P if it is in
P’s range of significance. In the ramified theory, the hierarchy of classes is
supplanted by a hierarchy of properties: first, properties of individuals i.e.,
properties whose range of significance is restricted to individuals, then
properties of properties of individuals, and so on. Parallel to the simple
theory, then, the type of a property must exceed the type of its possible
arguments by one. Thus, Russell’s paradox with R now in the guise of the
property x ^ is a property that is not true of itself is avoided along analogous lines. Following
the mathematician Henri Poincaré,
Russell traced the type theory type theory 935
935 source of the semantic paradoxes to a kind of illicit
self-reference. So, for example, in the liar paradox, Epimenides ostensibly
asserts a proposition p about all propositions, p itself among them, namely
that they are false if asserted by him today. p thus refers to itself in the
sense that it or more exactly, the
sentence that expresses it quantifies
over i.e., refers generally to all or some of the elements of a collection of
entities among which p itself is included. The source of semantic paradox thus
isolated, Russell formulated the vicious circle principle VCP, which proscribes
all such self-reference in properties and propositions generally. The liar
proposition p and its ilk were thus effectively banished from the realm of
legitimate propositions and so the semantic paradoxes could not arise. Wedded
to the restrictions of simple type theory, the VCP generates a ramified
hierarchy based on a more complicated form of typing. The key notion is that of
an object’s order. The order of an individual, like its type, is 0. However,
the order of a property must exceed the order not only of its possible
arguments, as in simple type theory, but also the orders of the things it
quantifies over. Thus, type 1 properties like x ^ is a philosopher and x ^ is
as wise as all other philosophers are first-order properties, since they are
true of and, in the second instance, quantify over, individuals only. Properties
like these whose order exceeds the order of their possible arguments by one are
called predicative, and are of the lowest possible order relative to their
range of significance. Consider, by contrast, the property call it Q x ^ has
all the first-order properties of a great philosopher. Like those above, Q also
is a property of individuals. However, since Q quantifies over first-order
properties, by the VDP, it cannot be counted among them. Accordingly, in the
ramified hierarchy, Q is a second-order property of individuals, and hence
non-predicative or impredicative. Like Q, the property x ^ is a first-order
property of all great philosophers is also second-order, since its range of
significance consists of objects of order 1 and it quantifies only over objects
of order 0; but since it is a property of first-order properties, it is
predicative. In like manner it is possible to define third-order properties of
individuals, third-order properties of first-order properties, third-order
properties of second-order properties of individuals, third-order properties of
secondorder properties of first-order properties, and then, in the same
fashion, fourth-order properties, fifth-order properties, and so on ad
infinitum. A serious shortcoming of ramified type theory, from Russell’s
perspective, is that it is an inadequate foundation for classical mathematics.
The most prominent difficulty is that many classical theorems appeal to
definitions that, though consistent, violate the VCP. For instance, a wellknown
theorem of real analysis asserts that every bounded set of real numbers has a
least upper bound. In the ramified theory, real numbers are identified with
certain predicative properties of rationals. Under such an identification, the
usual procedure is to define the least upper bound of a bounded set S of reals
to be the property call it b some real number in S is true of x ^ , and then
prove that this property is itself a real number with the requisite
characteristics. However, b quantifies over the real numbers. Hence, by the
VCP, b cannot itself be taken to be a real number: although of the same type as
the reals, and although true of the right things, b must be assigned a higher
order than the reals. So, contrary to the classical theorem, S fails to have a
least upper bound. Russell introduced a special axiom to obviate this
difficulty: the axiom of reducibility. Reducibility says, in effect, that for
any property P, there is a predicative property Q that is true of exactly the
same things as P. Reducibility thus assures that there is a predicative
property bH true of the same rational numbers as b. Since the reals are
predicative, hence of the same order as bH, it turns out that bH is a real
number, and hence that S has a least upper bound after all, as required by the
classical theorem. The general role of reducibility is thus to undo the
draconian mathematical effects of ramification without undermining its capacity
to fend off the semantic paradoxes.
token-type
distinction – Grice: “Strictly, they
are not antonyms – and token is too English!” Grice: “Token is cognate with
‘teach,’ a Graeco-Roman thing, cfr. insignum – insignare – to teach is to show,
almost, with an m-intention behind.” -- first the token, then the type – if
necessary; “After all a type is a set of tokens” -- used by Grice: there’s a
type of an utterer, but there’s the individual utterer: In symbols, “u” is an
individual utterer, say, Grice. “U” is a type of utterer, say Oxonian
philosophy dons. Aas drawn by Peirce, the contrast between a category and a
member of that category. An individual or token is said to exemplify a type; it
possesses the property that characterizes that type. In philosophy this
distinction is often applied to linguistic expressions and to mental states,
but it can be applied also to objects, events, properties, and states of
affairs. Related to it are the distinctions between type and token
individuation and between qualitative and numerical identity. Distinct tokens
of the same type, such as two ants, may be qualitatively identical but cannot
be numerically identical. Irrespective of the controversial metaphysical view
that every individual has an essence, a type to which it belongs essentially,
every individual belongs to many types, although for a certain theoretical or
practical purpose it may belong to one particularly salient type e.g., the
entomologist’s Formicidae or the picnicker’s buttinsky. The typetoken
distinction as applied in the philosophy of language marks the difference
between linguistic expressions, such as words and sentences, which are the
subject of linguistics, and the products of acts of writing or speaking the
subject of speech act theory. Confusing the two can lead to conflating matters
of speaker meaning withmatters of word or sentence meaning as noted by Grice.
An expression is a linguistic type and can be used over and over, whereas a
token of a type can be produced only once, though of course it may be
reproduced copied. A writer composes an essay a type and produces a manuscript
a token, of which there might be many copies more tokens. A token of a type is
not the same as an occurrence of a type. In the previous sentence there are two
occurrences of the word ‘type’; in each inscription of that sentence, there are
two tokens of that word. In philosophy of mind the typetoken distinction
underlies the contrast between two forms of physicalism, the typetype identity
theory or type physicalism and the tokentoken identity theory or token
physicalism.
Ubaldi: Italian philosopher. Refs.: Luigi Speranza,
“Ubalid e Grice,” per il Club Anglo-Italiano, The Swimming-Pool Library, Villa
Grice, Liguria, Italia.
uncertainty: one of those negativisims by Grice – cfr.
‘non-certainty’ -- v. certum. It may be held that ‘uncertain’ is wrong. Grice
is certain that p. It is not the case that Grice is certain that p.
universale: Grice: “Very Ciceronian – not found in Aristotle.” --
Like ‘qualia,’ which is the plural for ‘quale,’ ‘universalia’ is the plural for
‘universale.’ The totum for Grice on “all” -- This is a Gricism. It all started
with arbor porphyriana. It is supposed to translate Aristotle’s “to kath’olou”
(which happens to be one of the categories in Kant, “alleheit,” and which
Aristotle contrasts with “to kath’ekastou,” (which Kant has as a category, SINGULARITAS.
For a nominalist, any predicate is a ‘name,’ hence ‘nominalism.’ Opposite
‘realism.’ “Nominalism” is actually a misnomer. The opposite of realism is
anti-realism. We need something like ‘universalism,’ (he who believes in the
existence, not necessary ‘reality’ of a universal) and a ‘particularist,’ or
‘singularist,’ who does not. Note that the opposite of ‘particularism,’ is
‘totalism.’ (Totum et pars). Grice holds a set-theoretical approach to the
universalium. Grice is willing to provide always a set-theoretical
extensionalist (in terms of predicate) and an intensionalist variant in terms
of property and category. Grice explicitly uses ‘X’ for utterance-type
(WOW:118), implying a distinction with the utterance-token. Grice gets engaged
in a metabolical debate concerning the reductive analysis of what an
utterance-type means in terms of a claim to the effect that, by uttering
x, an utterance-token of utterance-type X, the utterer means that p. The implicaturum
is x (utterance-token). Grice is not enamoured with the type/token or
token/type distinction. His thoughts on logical form are provocative. f
you cannot put it in logical form, it is not worth saying. Strawson
infamously reacted with a smile. Oh, no: if you CAN put it in logical form, it
is not worth saying. Grice refers to the type-token distinction when he uses x
for token and X for type. Since Bennett cares to call Grice a
meaning-nominalist we should not care about the type X anyway. He expands on
this in Retrospective Epilogue. Grice should have payed more attention to the
distinction seeing that it was Ogdenian. A common mode of estimating the
amount of matter in a printed book is to count the number of words. There will
ordinarily be about twenty thes on a page, and, of course, they count as twenty
words. In another use of the word word, however, there is but one word the in
the English language; and it is impossible that this word should lie visibly on
a page, or be heard in any voice. Such a Form, Peirce, as cited by Ogden and
Richards, proposes to term a type. A single object such as this or that word on
a single line of a single page of a single copy of a book, Peirce ventures to
call a token. In order that a type may be used, it has to be embodied in a
token which shall be a sign of the type, and thereby of the object the type
signifies, and Grice followed suit. Refs.: Some of the sources are given under
‘abstractum.’ Also under ‘grecianism,’ since Grice was keen on exploring what
Aristotle has to say about this in Categoriae, due to his joint research with Austin,
Code, Friedman, and Strawson. Grice also has a specific Peirceian essay on the
type-token distinction. BANC.
universalis: Grice – “A Ciceronian technicism, not found in
Aristotle. -- (‘the altogether nice girl’) dictum de omni et nullo, also dici
de omni et nullo Latin, ‘said of all and none’, two principles that were
supposed by medieval logicians to underlie all valid syllogisms. Dictum de omni
applies most naturally to universal affirmative propositions, maintaining that
in such a proposition, whatever falls under the subject term also falls under
the predicate term. Thus, in ‘Every whale is a mammal’, whatever is included
under ‘whale’ is included under ‘mammal’. Dictum de nullo applies to universal
negative propositions, such as ‘No whale is a lizard’, maintaining that
whatever falls under the subject term does not fall under the predicate
term. SYLLOGISM. W.E.M. Diderot, Denis
171384, philosopher, Encyclopedist,
dramatist, novelist, and art critic, a champion of Enlightenment values. He is
known primarily as general editor of the Encyclopedia 174773, an analytical and
interpretive compendium of eighteenth-century science and technology. A friend
of Rousseau and Condillac, Diderot tr. Shaftesbury’s Inquiry Concerning Virtue
1745 into . Revealing Lucretian affinities Philosophical Thoughts, 1746, he
assailed Christianity in The Skeptics’ Walk 1747 and argued for a materialistic
and evolutionary universe Letter on the Blind, 1749; this led to a short
imprisonment. Diderot wrote mediocre bourgeois comedies; some bleak fiction The
Nun, 1760; and two satirical dialogues, Rameau’s Nephew 1767 and Jacques the
Fatalist 176584, his masterpieces. He innovatively theorized on drama Discourse
on Dramatic Poetry, 1758 and elevated art criticism to a literary genre Salons
in Grimm’s Literary Correspondence. At Catherine II’s invitation, Diderot
visited Saint Petersburg in 1773 and planned the creation of a Russian .
Promoting science, especially biology and chemistry, Diderot unfolded a
philosophy of nature inclined toward monism. His works include physiological
investigations, Letter on the Deaf and Dumb 1751 and Elements of Physiology
177480; a sensationalistic epistemology, On the Interpretation of Nature 1745;
an aesthetic, Essays on Painting 1765; a materialistic philosophy of science,
D’Alembert’s Dream 1769; an anthropology, Supplement to the Voyage of
Bougainville 1772; and an anti-behavioristic Refutation of Helvétius’ Work “On
Man” 177380.
universalisierung:
Grice: “Ironically, the Dutch so careful with
their lingo, this is vague, in that the universe is not a pluriverse.” -- While
Grice uses ‘universal,’ he means like Russell, the unnecessary implication of
‘every.’ Oddly, Kant does not relate this –ung with the first of his three
categories under ‘quantitas,’ the universal. But surely they are related.
Problem is that Kant wasn’t aware because he kept moving from the Graeco-Roman
classical vocabulary to the Hun. Thus, Kant has “Allheit,” which he renders in
Latinate as “Universitas,” and “Totalität,” gehört in der Kategorienlehre des
Philosophen Immanuel Kant zu den reinen Verstandesbegriffen, d. h. zu den
Elementen des Verstandes, welche dem Menschen bereits a priori, also unabhängig
von der sinnlichen Erfahrung gegeben sind. “Allheit” wird wie Einheit und
Vielheit den Kategorien der “Quantität” zugeordnet und entspricht den Einzelnen
Urteilen (Urteil hier im Sinn von 'Aussage über die Wirklichkeit') in der Form
„Ein S ist P“, also z. B. „Immanuel Kant ist ein Philosoph“. Sie wird von Kant
definiert als „die Vielheit als Einheit betrachtet“ (KrV, B 497 f.)[3]. Siehe
auch Transzendentale Analytik Weblinks. Allheit – Bedeutungserklärungen,
Wortherkunft, Synonyme, Übersetzungen Einzelnachweise Immanuel Kant: Kritik der reinen Vernunft.
Reclam, Stuttgart 1966, ISBN 3-15-006461-9.
Peter Kunzmann, Franz-Peter Burkard, Franz Wiedmann: dtv-Atlas zur
Philosophie. dtv, München 1991, ISBN 3-423-03229-4, S. 136 ff. Zitiert nach Arnim Regenbogen, Uwe Meyer
(Hrsg.): Wörterbuch der Philosophischen Begriffe. Meiner, Hamburg 2005, ISBN
3-7873-1738-4: Allheit Kategorie: Ontologie. Referred to by Grice in his
“Method,” – “A requisite for a maxim to enter my manual, which I call the
Immanuel, is that it should be universalizable. Die Untersuchung zur
»Universalisierung in der Ethik« greift eine Problematik auf, die für eine
Reihe der prominentesten Ethikentwürfe der Gegenwart sowohl des
deutschsprachigen wie des angelsächsischen Raumes zentral ist, nämlich ob der
normative Rationalitätsanspruch, den ethische Argumentationen erheben, auf eine
dem wissenschaftlichen Anspruch der deskriptiven Gesetzeswissenschaften
vergleichbare Weise eingelöst werden kann, nämlich durch Verallgemeinerungs-
oder Universalisierungsprinzipien. universalizability
Ethics The idea that moral judgments should be universalizable can be traced to
the Golden Rule and Kant’s ethics. In the twentieth century it was elaborated
by Hare and became a major thesis of his prescriptivism. The principle states
that all moral judgments are universalizable in the sense that if it is right
for a particular person A to do an action X, then it must likewise be right to
do X for any person exactly like A, or like A in the relevant respects.
Furthermore, if A is right in doing X in this situation, then it must be right
for A to do X in other relevantly similar situations. Hare takes this feature
to be an essential feature of moral judgments. An ethical statement is the
issuance of a universal prescription. Universalizability is not the same as generality,
for a moral judgment can be highly specific and detailed and need not be
general or simple. The universalizability principle enables Hare to avoid the
charge of irrationality that is usually lodged against non-cognitivism, to
which his prescriptivism belongs, and his theory is thus a great improvement on
emotivism. “I have been maintaining that the meaning of the word ‘ought’ and
other moral words is such that a person who uses them commits himself thereby
to a universal rule. This is the thesis of universalizability.” Hare, Freedom
and Reason.
unstructured:
Grice: “Paget was able to structure compositionality with his hands!” -- one of
those negativisms of Grice (cfr. ‘non-structured’). Surely Grice cared a hoot
for French anthropological structuralism! So he has the ‘unstructured’ followed
by the structured. A handwave is unstructured, meaning syntactically
unstructured, and in it you have all the enigma of reason resolved. By waving
his hand, U means that SUBJECT: the emissor, copula IS, predicate: A KNOWER OF
THE ROUTE, or ABOUT TO LEAVE the emissor.There is a lot of structure in the
soul of the emissor. So apply this to what Grice calls a ‘soul-to-soul
transfer’ to which he rightly reduces communication. Even if it is n
unstructured communication device, and maybe a ‘one-off’ one, to use
Blackburn’s vulgarism, we would have the three types of correspondence of
Grice’s Semantic Triangle obtaining. First, the psychophysical. The emissor
knows the route, and he shows it. And he wants the emissee to ‘catch’ or get
the emissor’s drift. It is THAT route which he knows. So the TWO psychophysical
correspondences obtain. Then there are the two psychosemiotic correspondences.
The emissor intends that the emissor will recognise the handwave as a signal that
he, the emissor, knows the route. As for the emissee’s psychosemiotic
correspondence: he better realise it is THAT route – to Banbury, surely, with
bells in his shoes, as Grice’s mother would sing to him. And then we have the
two semio-physical correspondences. If the emissor DOES know the route (and he
is not lying, or rather, he is not mistaken about it), then that’s okay. Many
people say or signal that they know because they feel ashamed to admit their
ignorance. So it is very expectable, outside Oxford, to have someone waving
meaning that he knows the route, when he doesn’t. This is surely non-natural,
because it’s Kiparsky-non-factive. Waving the hand thereby communicating that
he knows the route does not entail that he knows the route (as ‘spots’ do
entail measles). From the emissee’s point of view, provided the emissor knows
the route and shows it, the emissee will understand, hopefully, and feel
assured that the emissor will hopefully reach the destination, Banbury, surely,
safely enough.
uptake: used
by Grice slightly different from Austin. Austin: “The performance of an
illocutionary act involves the securing of uptake.” “I distinguish some senses
of consequences and effects, especially three senses in which effects can come
in even with illocutionary acts, viz. securing uptake, taking effect, and
inviting a response.” “Comparing
stating to what we have said about the illocu- tionary act, it is an act
to which, just as much as to other illocutionary acts, it is essential to
‘secure uptake’ : the doubt about whether I stated something if it was
not heard or understood is just the same as the doubt about whether
I warned sotto voce or protested if someone did not take it as a protest,
&c. And statements do ‘take effect’ just as much as ‘namings’, say:
if I have stated something, then that commits me to other
statements: other statements made by me will be in order or out of
order.” Refs.: H. P. Grice, “Verstehen and uptake.”
urmsonianism.
Who other than Urmson would come up with a counter-example to the sufficiency
of Grice’s analysis of an act of communication. In a case of bribery, the
response or effect in the emittee is NOT meant to be recognised. So we need a
further restriction unless we want to say that the briber means that his emittee
recognise the ‘gift’ as a meta-bribe. Refs.: Urmson, “Introduction” to Austin’s
Philosophical Papers, cited by Grice. Urmson, Introduction to Austin’s How to
do things with words, cited by Grice. Urmson on Grice, “The Independent.”
Urmson on pragmatics.
urmson’s
bribe: Urmson’s use of the bribe is
‘accidental.’ What Urmson is getting at is that if the briber intends the bribe
acts as a cause to effect a response, even a cognitive one, in the bribe, the
propositional complexum, “This is a bribe,” should not necessarily be
communicated. It is amazing how Grice changed the example into one about
physical action. They seem different. On the other hand, Grice would not have
cared to credit Urmson had it not believed it worth knowing that the criticism
arose within the Play Group (Grice admired Urmson). In his earlier “Meaning,”
Grice presents his own self-criticisms to arrive at a more refined analysis.
But in “Utterer’s meaning and intention,” when it comes to the SUFFICIENCY,
it’s all about other people: notably Urmson and Strawson. Grice cites Stampe
before Strawson, but many ignore Stampe on the basis that Strawson does not
credit him, and there is no reason why he should have been aware of it. But
Stampe was at Oxford at the time so this is worth noting. It has to be
emphasised that the author list is under ‘sufficiency.’ Under necessity, Grice
does not credit the source of the objections, so we can assume it is Grice
himself, as he had presented criticisms to his own view within the same
‘Meaning.’ It is curious that Grice loved Stampe. Grice CHANGED Urmon’s
example, and was unable to provide a specific scenario to Strawson’s alleged
counterexample, because Strawson is vague himself. But Stampe’s, Grice left
unchanged. It seems few Oxonian philosohpers of Grice’s playgroup had his
analytic acumen. Consider his sophisticated account of ‘meaning.’ It’s
different if you are a graduate student from the New World, and you have to
prove yourself intelligent. But for Grice’s playgroup companion, only three or
four joined in the analysis. The first is Urmson. The second is Strawson. The
case by Urmson involved a tutee offering to buy Gardiner an expensive dinner,
hoping that Gardiner will give him permission for an over-night visit to
London. Gardiner knows that his tutee wants his permission. The
appropriate analysans for "By offering to buy Gardiner an expensive
dinner, the tuttee means that Gardiner should give him permission for an
overnight stay in London" are fulfilled: (1) The tutee offers to buy Gardiner
an expensive dinner with the intention of producing a certain response on the
part of Gardiner (2) The tutee intends that Gardiner should recognize (know,
think) that the tutee is offering to buy him an expensive dinner with the
intention of producing this response; (3) The tutee intends that Gardiners
recognition (thought) that the tutee has the intention mentioned in (2) should
be at least part of Gardiners reason for producing the response mentioned. If
in general to specify in (i) the nature of an intended response is to specify
what was meant, it should be correct not only to say that by offering to buy
Gardiner an expensive dinner, the tutee means that Gardiner is to give him
permission for an overnight stay in London, but also to say that he meas that Gardiner
should (is to) give him permission for an over-night visit to London. But in
fact one would not wish to say either of these things; only that the tutee
meant Gardiner to give him permission. A restriction seems to be required, and
one which might serve to eliminate this range of counterexamples can be
identified from a comparison of two scenarios. Grice goes into a tobacconists
shop, ask for a packet of my favorite cigarettes, and when the unusually
suspicious tobacconist shows that he wants to see the color of my money before
he hands over the goods, I put down the price of the cigarettes on the counter.
Here nothing has been meant. Alternatively, Grice goes to his regular
tobacconist (from whom I also purchase other goods) for a packet of my regular
brand of Players Navy Cuts, the price of which is distinctive, say 43p. Grice
says nothing, but puts down 43p. The tobacconist recognizes my need, and hands
over the packet. Here, I think, by putting down 43p I meant something-Namesly,
that I wanted a packet of Players Navy Cuts. I have at the same time provided
an inducement. The distinguishing feature of the second example seems to be
that here the tobacconist recognized, and was intended to recognize, what he
was intended to do from my "utterance" (my putting down the money),
whereas in the first example this was not the case. Nor is it the case with
respect to Urmson’s case of the tutees attempt to bribe Gardiner. So one might
propose that the analysis of meaning be amended accordingly. U means something
by uttering x is true if: (i) U intends, by uttering x, to induce a certain
response in A (2) U intends A to recognize, at least in part from the utterance
of x, that U intends to produce that response (3) U intends the fulfillment of
the intention mentioned in (2) to be at least in part As reason for fulfilling
the intention mentioned in (i). This copes with Urmsons counterexample to
Grices proposal in the Oxford Philosophical Society talk involving the tutee
attempting to bribe Gardiner.
use: Grice: “I
would rephrase Vitter’s adage, ‘Don’t ask for the expression meaning, as for
the UTTERER’s meaning, if you have to axe at all!” -- while Grice uses ‘use,’
as Ryle once told him, ‘you should use ‘usage, too.’ Parkinson was nearby. When
Warnock commissioned Parkinson to compile a couple of Oxonian essays on meaning
and communication, Parkinson unearthed the old symposium by Ryle and Findlay on
the matter. Typically, when Ryle reprinted it, he left Findlay out!
sender: Grice:
“Surely, if there is a ‘recipient,’ there must be a ‘sender.’” Grice: “I prefer
‘sender’ as correlative for ‘recipient,’ since there is an embedded
intentionality about it.” Cf. Sting, “Message in a bottle – sending out an S.
O. S.” – Grice: “Addresser and addressee sound otiose.” – Grice: “Then there’s
this jargon of the ‘target’ addressee’ – while we are in the metaphorical
mode!” -- emissor: utterer: cf.
emissum, emissor. Usually Homo sapiens sapiens – and usually Oxonian, the Homo
sapiens sapiens Grice interactes with. Sometimes tutees, sometimes tutor. There
is something dualistic about the ‘utterer.’ It is a vernacularism from English
‘out.’ So the French impressionists were into IM-pressing, out to in; the
German expressionists were into EX-pressing, in to out. Or ‘man’. The important
thing is for Grice to avoid ‘speaker.’ He notes that ‘utterance’ has a nice
fuzziness about it. He still notes that he is using ‘utter’ in a ‘perhaps
artificial’ way. He was already wedded to ‘utter’ in his talk for the Oxford Philosopical Society.
Grice does not elaborate much on general gestures or signals. His main example
is a sort of handwave by which the emissor communicates that either he knows
the route or that he is about to leave the addressee. Even this is complex.
Let’s try to apply his final version of communication to the hand-wave. The
question of “Homo sapiens sapiens” is an interesting one. Grice is all for
ascribing predicates regarding the soul to what he calls the ‘lower animals’.
He is not ready to ascribe emissor’s meaning to them. Why? Because of Schiffer!
I mean, when it comes to the conditions of necessity of the reductive analysis,
he seems okay. When it comes to the sufficiency, there are two types of
objection. One by Urmson, easily dismissed. The second, first by Stampe and Strawson,
not so easily. But Grice agrees to add a clause limiting intentions to be ‘in
the open.’ Those who do not have a philosophical background usually wonder
about this. So for their sake, it may be worth considering Grice’s synthetic a
posteriori argument to refuse an emissor other than a Homo sapiens sapiens to
be able to ‘mean,’ if not ‘communicate,’ or ‘signify.’ There is an objection which is not mentioned by his
editors, which seems to Grice to be one to which Grice must respond. The
objection may be stated thus. One of the leading strands in Grice’s reductive
analysis of an emissor communicating that p is that communication is not to be
regarded exclusively, or even primarily, as a ‘feature’ of emissors who use
what philosophers of language call ‘language’ (Sprache, Taal, Langage,
Linguaggio – to restrict to the philosophical lexicon, cf. Plato’s Cratylus),
and a fortiori of an emissor who emits this or that “linguistic” ‘utterance.’ There
are many instances of NOTABLY NON-“linguistic” vehicles or devices of
communication, within a communication-system, which fulfil this or that
communication-function; these vehicles or devices are mostly syntactically un-structured
or amorphous. Sometimes, a device may exhibit at least some rudimentary syntactic
structure, in that we may distinguish a totum from a pars and identify a
‘simplex’ within a ‘complexum.’ Grice’s intention-based reductive analysis of a
communicatum, based on Aristotle, Locke, and Peirce, is designed to allow for
the possibility that a non-“linguistic,” and, further, indeed a non-“conventional”
'utterance' token, perhaps even manifesting some degree of syntactic structure,
and not just a block of an amorphous signal, may be within the ‘repertoire’ of
‘procedures’ of this or that organism, or creature, or agent, which, even if
not relying on any apparatus for communication of the kind that that we may
label ‘linguistic’ or otherwise ‘conventional,’
‘do’ this or that ‘thing’ thereby ‘communicating’ that p, or q. To
provide for this possibility, it is plainly necessary that the key ingredient in
any representation of ‘communicating,’ viz. intending that p, should be a ‘state’
of the emissor’s soul the capacity for which does not require what we may label
the ‘possession’ of, shall we say, a ‘faculty,’ of what philosophers call ‘a’
‘language’ (Sprache, Taal, langue, lingua – note that in German we do not
distinguish between ‘die Deutsche Sprache’ and ‘Sprache’ as ‘ein Facultat.’).
Now a philosopher, relying on this or that neo-Prichardian reductive analysis
of ‘intending that p,’ may not be willing to allow the possibility of such,
shall we call it, pre-linguistic intending that p, or non-linguistic intending
that p. Surely if the emissor realizes that his addressee does not share what
the Germans call ‘die Deutsche Sprache,” the emissor may still communicate with
his addresse this or that by doing this or that. E. g. he may simulate that he
wants to smoke a cigarette and wonders if his addressee has one to spare.
Against that objection, Grice surely wins the day. But Grice grants that
winning the day on THAT front may not be enough. And that is because, as far as
Grice’s Oxonian explorations on communication go, in a succession of
increasingly elaborate moves – ending with a ‘closure’ clause which cut this
succession of increasingly elaborate moves -- designed to thwart this or that
scenario, later deemed illegitimate, involving two rational agents where the
emissor relies on an ‘inference-element’ that it is not the case that he
intends his addressee will recogise – Grice is led to restrict the ‘intending’
which is to constitute a case of an emissor communicating that p to
C-intending. Grice suspects that whatever may be the case in general with
regard to ‘intending,’ C-intending seems for some reason to Grice to be
unsophisticatedly, viz. plainly, too sophisticated a ‘state’ of a soul to be
found in an organism, ‘pirot,’ creature, that we may not want to deem ‘rational,’
or as the Germans would say, a creature that is destitute of “Die Deutsche Sprache.”
We need the pirot to be “very intelligent, indeed rational.”Grice regrets that
some may think that what he thought were unavoidable rear-guard actions (ending
with a complex reductive analysis of C-intending) seem to have undermined the
raison d'etre of the Griciean campaign.”Unfortunately, Grice provides what he
admittedly labels “a brief reply” which “will have to suffice.” Why? Because “a
full treatment would require delving deep into crucial problems concerning the
boundaries between vicious and virtuous circularity.” Which is promising. It is
not something totally UNATTAINABLE. It reduces to the philosopher being
virtuously circular, only! Why is the ‘virtuous circle’ so crucial – vide
‘circulus virtuosus.’ virtŭōsus , a, um, adj. virtus, I.virtuous, good (late
Lat.), Aug. c. Sec. Man. 10. A circle is virtuous if it is not that bad. In
this case, we need the ‘virtuous circle’ because we are dealing with ‘a loop.’
This is exactly Schiffer’s way of putting it in his ‘Introduction’ to Meaning
(second edition). There is a ‘conceptual loop.’ Schiffer is not interested in
‘communicating;’ only ‘meaning.’ But his point can be transferred. He is saying
that ‘U means that p,’ may rely on ‘U intends that p,’ where ‘U intends that p’
relies on ‘U means that p.’ There is a loop. In more generic terms:We have a
creature, call it a pirot P1 that, by doing thing T, communicates that p. Are
we talking of the OBSERVER? I hope so, because Grice’s favourite pirot is the
parrot. So we have Prince Maurice’s Parrot. Locke: Since I think I may be
confident, that, whoever should see a CREATURE of his own shape or make, though
it had no more reason all its life than a cat or a PARROT, would call him still
A MAN; or whoever should hear a cat or a parrot discourse, reason, and
philosophize, would call or think it nothing but a cat or a PARROT; and say,
the one was A DULL IRRATIONAL MAN, and the other A VERY INTELLIGENT RATIONAL
PARROT. A relation we have in an author of great note, is sufficient to
countenance the supposition of A RATIONAL PARROT. The author’s words are: I had
a mind to know, from Prince Maurice's own mouth, the account of a common, but
much credited story, that I had heard so often from many others, of an old
parrot he has, that speaks, and asks, and answers common questions, like A
REASONABLE CREATURE. So that those of his train there generally conclude it to
be witchery or possession; and one of his chaplains, would never from that time
endure A PARROT, but says all PARROTS have a devil in them. I had heard many
particulars of this story, and as severed by people hard to be discredited,
which made me ask Prince Maurice what there is of it. Prince Maurice says, with
his usual plainness and dryness in talk, there is something true, but a great
deal false of what is reported. I desired to know of him what there was of the
first. Prince Maurice tells me short and coldly, that he had HEARD of such A
PARROT; and though he believes nothing of it, and it was a good way off, yet he
had so much curiosity as to send for the parrot: that it was a very great
parrot; and when the parrot comes first into the room where Prince Maurice is,
with a great many men about him, the parrot says presently, What a nice company
is here. One of the men asks the parrot, ‘What thinkest thou that man is?,’
ostending his finger, and pointing to Prince Maurice. The parrot answers, ‘Some
general -- or other.’ When the man brings the parrot close to Prince Maurice,
Prince Maurice asks the parrot., “D'ou venez-vous?” The parrot answers, “De
Marinnan.” Then Prince Maurice goes on, and poses a second question to the
parrot. “A qui estes-vous?” The Parrot answers: “A un Portugais.” Prince
Maurice asks a third question. “Que fais-tu la?” The parrot answers: “Je garde
les poulles.”Prince Maurice smiles, which pleases the Parrot. Prince Maurice,
violating a Griceian maxim, and being just informed that p, asks whether p.
This is his fourth question. “Vous gardez les poulles?” The Parrot answers, “Oui,
moi; et je scai bien faire.” The Parrott appeals to Peirce’s iconic system and
makes the chuck four or five times that a man uses to make to chickens when a
man calls them. I set down the words of this worthy dialogue in French, just as
Prince Maurice said them to me. I ask Prince Maurice in what ‘language’ the
parrot speaks. Prince Maurice says that the parrot speaks in Brazilian. I ask
Prince William whether he understands the Brazilian language. Prince Maurice
says: No, but he has taken care to have TWO interpreters by him, the one a
Dutchman that spoke Brazilian, and the other a Brazilian that spoke Dutch; that
Prince Maurice asked them separatelyand privately, and both of them AGREED in
telling Prince Maurice just the same thing that the parrot had said. I could
not but tell this ODD story, because it is so much out of the way, and from the
first hand, and what may pass for a good one; for I dare say Prince Maurice at
least believed himself in all he told me, having ever passed for a very honest
and pious man. I leave it to naturalists to reason, and to other men to believe,
as they please upon it. However, it is not, perhaps, amiss to relieve or
enliven a busy scene sometimes with such digressions, whether to the purpose or
no.Locke takes care that the reader should have the story at large in the
author's own words, because he seems to me not to have thought it incredible.For
it cannot be imagined that so able a man as he, who had sufficiency enough to
warrant all the testimonies he gives of himself, should take so much pains, in
a place where it had nothing to do, to pin so close, not only on a man whom he
mentions as his friend, but on a prince in whom he acknowledges very great
honesty and piety, a story which, if he himself thought incredible, he could
not but also think RIDICULOUS. Prince Maurice, it is plain, who vouches this
story, and our author, who relates it from him, both of them call this talker A
PARROT. And Locke asks any one else who thinks such a story fit to be told,
whether, if this PARROT, and all of its kind, had always talked, as we have a
prince's word for it this one did,- whether, I say, they would not have passed
for a race of RATIONAL ANIMALS; but yet, whether, for all that, they would have
been allowed to be MEN, and not PARROTS? For I presume it is not the idea of A
THINKING OR RATIONAL BEING alone that makes the idea of A MAN in most people's
sense: but of A BODY, so and so shaped, joined to it: and if that be the idea
of a MAN, the same successive body not shifted all at once, must, as well as THE SAME
IMMATERIAL SPIRIT, go to the making of the same MAN. So back to Grice’s pirotology.But first a precis of the
conversation, or languaging:PARROT: What a nice company is here.MAN (pointing
to Prince Maurice): What thinkest thou that man is?PARROT: Some general -- or
other. (i. e. the parrot displays what Grice calls ‘up-take.’ The parrot
recognizes the man’s c-intention. So far is ability to display uptake.PRINCE
MAURICE: D'ou venez-vous?PARROT: De Marinnan.PRINCE MAURICE: A qui
estes-vous?PARROT: A un Portugais.PRINCE MAURICE: Que fais-tu la?PARROT: Je
garde les poulles.PRINCE MAURICE SMILES and flouts a Griceian maxim: Vous
gardez les poulles?PARROT (losing patience, and grasping the Prince’s implicaturum
that he doubts it): Oui, moi. Et je scai bien faire.(The Parrott then appeals
to Peirce’s iconic system and makes the chuck five times that a man uses to
make to chickens when a man calls them.)So back to Grice:“According to my most
recent speculations about communication, one should distinguish between what I
call the ‘factual’ or ‘de facto’ character of behind the state of affairs that
one might describe as ‘rational agent A communicates that p,’ for those
communication-relevant features which obtain or are present in the
circumstances) the ‘titular’ or ‘de jure’ character, viz. the nested
C-intending which is only deemed to be present. And the reason Grice calls it
‘nested’ is that it involves three sub-intentions:(C) Emissor E communicates
that (psi*) p iff Emissor E c-intends that A recognises that E psi-s that p
iffC1: Emissor E intends A to recognise that A psi-s that p.C2: Emissor intends
that A recognise C1 by A recognising C2C3: There is no inference-element which
is C-constitutive such that Emissor relies on it and yet does not intend A to
recognise.Grice:“The titular or de jure character of the state of affairs that
is described as “Emissor communicates that p,” involves self-reference in the
closure clause regarding the third intention, C3, may be thought as being
‘regressive,’ or involving what mathematicians mean when they use “, …;” and
the translators of Aristotle, ‘eis apeiron,’ translated as ‘ad infinitum.’There
may be ways of UNDEEMING this, i. e. of stating that self-reference and closure
are meant to BLOCK an infinite regress. Hence the circle, if there is one – one
feature of a virtuous circle is that it doesn’t look like a circle simpliciter
-- would be virtuous. The ‘de jure’
character stands for a situation which, in Grice’s words, is “infinitely
complex,” and so cannot be actually present in toto – only DEEMED to be.”“In
which case,” Grice concludes pointing to the otiosity or rendering inoperative,
“to point out that THE INCONCEIVABLE actual presence of the ‘de jure’ character
of ‘Emissor communicates that p’ WOULD, still, be possible, or would be
detectable, only via the ‘use’ of something like ‘die Deutsche Sprache’ seem to
serve little, if any, purpose.”“At its most meagre, the factual or ‘de facto’
character consists merely in the pre-rational ‘counterpart’ of the state of
affairs describable by “Emissor E communicates that p,” which might amount to
no more than making a certain sort of utterance in order thereby to get some
creature to think or want some particular thing.This meagre condition does not
involve a reference to any expertise regarding anything like ‘die Deutsche
Sprache.’Let’s reformulate the condition.It’s just a pirot, at a ‘pre-rational’
level. The pirot does a thing T IN ORDER THEREBY to get some other pirot to
think or do some particular thing. To echo Hare,Die Tur ist geschlossen, ja.Die
Tur ist geschlossen, bitte.Grice continues as a corollary: “Maybe in a less
straightforward instance of “Emissor E communicates that p” there is actually
present the C-intention whose feasibility as an ‘intention’ suggests some
ability to use ‘die Deutsche Sprache.’But vide “non-verbal communication,”
pre-verbal communication, languaging, pre-conventional communication, gestural
communication – as in What Grice has as “a gesture (a signal).” Not necessary
‘conventional,’ and MAYBE ‘established’ – is one-off sufficient for
‘established’? I think so. By waving his hand in a particular way (“a
particular sort of hand wave”), the emissor communicates that he knows the
route (or is about to leave the addressee). Grice concludes about the less straightforward
instances, that there can be no advance guarantee when this will be so, i. e.
that there is actually present the C-intention whose feasibility as an
intention points to some capacity to use ‘die Deutsche Sprache.’Grice adds: “It
is in any case arguable that the use of ‘die Deutsche Sprache’ would here be an
indispensable aid to philosophising about communication, rather than it being an
element in the PHILOSOPHISING about communication! Philosophers
of Grice’s generation use ‘man’ on purpose to mean ‘mankind’. What a man means.
What a man utters. The utterer is the man. In semiotics one can use something
more Latinate, like gesturer, or emitter – or profferer. The distinction is
between what an utterer means and what the logical and necessary implication.
He doesn’t need to say this since ‘imply’ in the logical usage does not take
utterer as subject. It’s what the utterer SAYS that implies this or that. (Strawson
and Wiggins, p. 519). The utterer is possibly the ‘expresser.’
unamuno: m. d. b. Born in Bilbao, he studied in Bilbao and
Madrid and taught Grecian and philosophy in Salamanca. His open criticism of
the government led to dismissal from the and exile 430 and, again, to dismissal from
the rectorship in 6. Unamuno is an important figure in letters. Like Ortega y Gasset, his aim was to
capture life in its complex emotional and intellectual dimensions rather than
to describe the world scientifically. Thus, he favored fiction as a medium for
his ideas and may be considered a precursor of existentialism. He wrote several
philosophically significant novels, a commentary on Don Quijote 5, and some
poetry and drama; his philosophical ideas are most explicitly stated in Del
sentimiento trágico de la vida “The Tragic Sense of Life,” 3. Unamuno perceived
a tragic sense permeating human life, a sense arising from our desire for
immortality and from the certainty of death. In this predicament man must abandon
all pretense of rationalism and embrace faith. Faith characterizes the
authentic life, while reason leads to despair, but faith can never completely
displace reason. Torn between the two, we can find hope only in faith; for
reason deals only with abstractions, while we are “flesh and bones” and can
find fulfillment only through commitment to an ideal.
unexpected
examination paradox, a paradox about
belief and prediction. One version is as follows: It seems that a teacher could
both make, and act on, the following announcement to his class: “Sometime
during the next week I will set you an examination, but at breakfast time on
the day it will occur, you will have no good reason to expect that it will
occur on that day.” If he announces this on Friday, could he not do what he
said he would by, say, setting the examination on the following Wednesday? The
paradox is that there is an argument purporting to show that there could not be
an unexpected examination of this kind. For let us suppose that the teacher
will carry out his threat, in both its parts; i.e., he will set an examination,
and it will be unexpected. Then he cannot set the examination on Friday
assuming this to be the last possible day of the week. For, by the time Friday
breakfast arrives, and we know that all the previous days have been
examination-free, we would have every reason to expect the examination to occur
on Friday. So leaving the examination until Friday is inconsistent with setting
an unexpected examination. For similar reasons, the examination cannot be held
on Thursday. Given our previous conclusion that it cannot be delayed until
Friday, we would know, when Thursday morning came, and the previous days had
been examination-free, that it would have to be held on Thursday. So if it were
held on Thursday it would not be unexpected. So it cannot be held on Thursday.
Similar reasoning sup938 U 938 posedly
shows that there is no day of the week on which it can be held, and so
supposedly shows that the supposition that the teacher can carry out his threat
must be rejected. This is paradoxical, for it seems plain that the teacher can
carry out his threat. Refs.: H. P. Grice, “Grice’s book of paradoxes, with
pictures and illustrations to confuse you.”
uniformity of
nature – Grice: “’uniformity’ has
nothing to do with ‘form’ here!” – Grice: “I once used the phrase in a tutorial
with Hardie: “What do you mean by ‘of’?’ he asked” -- a state of affairs thought to be required if
induction is to be justified. For example, inductively strong arguments, such
as ‘The sun has risen every day in the past; therefore, the sun will rise
tomorrow’, are thought to presuppose that nature is uniform in the sense that
the future will resemble the past, in this case with respect to the diurnal
cycle. The Scottish empiricist Hume was the first to make explicit that the
uniformity of nature is a substantial assumption in inductive reasoning. Hume
argued that, because the belief that the future will resemble the past cannot
be grounded in experience for the future
is as yet unobserved induction cannot be
rationally justified; appeal to it in defense of induction is either
question-begging or illicitly metaphysical. Francis Bacon’s “induction by
enumeration” and J. S. Mill’s “five methods of experimental inquiry” presuppose
that nature is uniform. Whewell appealed to the uniformity of nature in order
to account for the “consilience of inductions,” the tendency of a hypothesis to
explain data different from those it was originally introduced to explain. For
reasons similar to Hume’s, Popper holds that our belief in the uniformity of
nature is a matter of faith. Reichenbach held that although this belief cannot
be justified in advance of any instance of inductive reasoning, its
presupposition is vindicated by successful inductions. It has proved difficult
to formulate a philosophical statement of the uniformity of nature that is both
coherent and informative. It appears contradictory to say that nature is
uniform in all respects, because inductive inferences always mark differences
of some sort e.g., from present to future, from observed to unobserved, etc.,
and it seems trivial to say that nature is uniform in some respects, because
any two states of nature, no matter how different, will be similar in some
respect. Not all observed regularities in the world or in data are taken to
support successful inductive reasoning; not all uniformities are, to use
Goodman’s term, “projectible.” Philosophers of science have therefore proposed
various rules of projectibility, involving such notions as simplicity and
explanatory power, in an attempt to distinguish those observed patterns that
support successful inductions and thus are taken to represent genuine causal
relations from those that are accidental or spurious.
unity in diversity, in aesthetics, the principle that the parts of the
aesthetic object must cohere or hang together while at the same time being
different enough to allow for the object to be complex. This principle defines
an important formal requirement used in judging aesthetic objects. If an object
has insufficient unity e.g., a collection of color patches with no recognizable
patterns of any sort, it is chaotic or lacks harmony; it is more a collection
than one object. But if it has insufficient diversity e.g., a canvas consisting
entirely of one color with no internal differentiations, it is monotonous.
Thus, the formal pattern desired in an aesthetic object is that of complex
parts that differ significantly from each other but fit together to form one
interdependent whole such that the character or meaning of the whole would be
changed by the change of any part.
einheit – H. P. Grice, “Unity of science and teleology.” unity
of science, a situation in which all branches of empirical science form a
coherent system called unified science. Unified science is sometimes extended
to include formal sciences e.g., branches of logic and mathematics. ‘Unity of
science’ is also used to refer to a research program aimed at unified science.
Interest in the unity of science has a long history with many roots, including
ancient atomism and the work of the
Encyclopedists. In the twentieth century this interest was prominent in
logical empiricism see Otto Neurath et al., International Encyclopedia of
Unified Science, vol. I, 8. Logical empiricists originally conceived of unified
science in terms of a unified language of science, in particular, a universal
observation language. All laws and theoretical statements in any branch of
science were to be translatable into such an observation language, or else be
appropriately related to sentences of this language. In unified science unity
of science 939 939 addition to
encountering technical difficulties with the observationaltheoretical distinction,
this conception of unified science also leaves open the possibility that
phenomena of one branch may require special concepts and hypotheses that are
explanatorily independent of other branches. Another concept of unity of
science requires that all branches of science be combined by the intertheoretic
reduction of the theories of all non-basic branches to one basic theory usually
assumed to be some future physics. These reductions may proceed stepwise; an
oversimplified example would be reduction of psychology to biology, together
with reductions of biology to chemistry and chemistry to physics. The
conditions for reducing theory T2 to theory T1 are complex, but include
identification of the ontology of T2 with that of T1, along with explanation of
the laws of T2 by laws of T1 together with appropriate connecting sentences.
These conditions for reduction can be supplemented with conditions for the
unity of the basic theory, to produce a general research program for the
unification of science see Robert L. Causey, Unity of Science, 7. Adopting this
research program does not commit one to the proposition that complete
unification will ever be achieved; the latter is primarily an empirical
proposition. This program has been criticized, and some have argued that
reductions are impossible for particular pairs of theories, or that some
branches of science are autonomous. For example, some writers have defended a
view of autonomous biology, according to which biological science is not
reducible to the physical sciences. Vitalism postulated non-physical attributes
or vital forces that were supposed to be present in living organisms. More
recent neovitalistic positions avoid these postulates, but attempt to give
empirical reasons against the feasibility of reducing biology. Other, sometimes
a priori, arguments have been given against the reducibility of psychology to
physiology and of the social sciences to psychology. These disputes indicate
the continuing intellectual significance of the idea of unity of science and
the broad range of issues it encompasses.
universal
instantiation: Grice: “Slightly
confusing in that the universe is not a pluri-verse.” -- discussed by Grice in
his System G -- also called universal quantifier elimination. 1 The argument
form ‘Everything is f; therefore a is f’, and arguments of this form. 2 The
rule of inference that permits one to infer that any given thing is f from the
premise that everything is f. In classical logic, where all terms are taken to
denote things in the domain of discourse, the rule says simply that from vA[v]
one may infer A[t], the result of replacing all free occurrences of v in A[v]
by the term t. If non-denoting terms are allowed, however, as in free logic,
then the rule would require an auxiliary premise of the form Duu % t to ensure
that t denotes something in the range of the variable v. Likewise in modal
logic, which is sometimes held to contain terms that do not denote “genuine
individuals” the things over which variables range, an auxiliary premise may be
required. 3 In higher-order logic, the rule of inference that says that from
XA[X] one may infer A[F], where F is any expression of the grammatical category
e.g., n-ary predicate appropriate to that of X e.g., n-ary predicate variable.
G.F.S.
universalisability: -- Grice: ‘Slightly confusing, in that the universe
is not a pluri-verse” -- discussed along three dimension by Grice:
applicational conceptual, and formal. -- 1 Since the 0s, the moral criterion
implicit in Kant’s first formulation of the categorical imperative: “Act only
on that maxim that you can at the same time will to be a universal law,” often
called the principle of universality. A maxim or principle of action that
satisfies this test is said to be universalizable, hence morally acceptable;
one that does not is said to be not universalizable, hence contrary to duty. 2
A second sense developed in connection with the work of Hare in the 0s. For
Hare, universalizability is “common to all judgments which carry descriptive
meaning”; so not only normative claims moral and evaluative judgments but also
empirical statements are universalizable. Although Hare describes how such
universalizuniversal universalizability 940
940 ability can figure in moral argument, for Hare “offenses against . .
. universalizability are logical, not moral.” Consequently, whereas for Kant
not all maxims are universalizable, on Hare’s view they all are, since they all
have descriptive meaning. 3 In a third sense, one that also appears in Hare,
‘universalizability’ refers to the principle of universalizability: “What is
right or wrong for one person is right or wrong for any similar person in
similar circumstances.” This principle is identical with what Sidgwick The
Methods of Ethics called the Principle of Justice. In Generalization in Ethics
1 by M. G. Singer b.6, it is called the Generalization Principle and is said to
be the formal principle presupposed in all moral reasoning and consequently the
explanation for the feature alleged to hold of all moral judgments, that of
being generalizable. A particular judgment of the form ‘A is right in doing x’
is said to imply that anyone relevantly similar to A would be right in doing
any act of the kind x in relevantly similar circumstances. The characteristic
of generalizability, of presupposing a general rule, was said to be true of
normative claims, but not of all empirical or descriptive statements. The
Generalization Principle GP was said to be involved in the Generalization
Argument GA: “If the consequences of everyone’s doing x would be undesirable,
while the consequences of no one’s doing x would not be, then no one ought to
do x without a justifying reason,” a form of moral reasoning resembling, though
not identical with, the categorical imperative CI. One alleged resemblance is
that if the GP is involved in the GP, then it is involved in the CI, and this
would help explain the moral relevance of Kant’s universalizability test. 4 A
further extension of the term ‘universalizability’ appears in Alan Gewirth’s
Reason and Morality 8. Gewirth formulates “the logical principle of
universalizability”: “if some predicate P belongs to some subject S because S
has the property Q . . . then P must also belong to all other subjects S1, S2,
. . . , Sn that have Q.” The principle of universalizability “in its moral
application” is then deduced from the logical principle of universalizability,
and is presupposed in Gewirth’s Principle of Generic Consistency, “Act in
accord with the generic rights of your recipients as well as yourself,” which
is taken to provide an a priori determinate way of determining relevant
similarities and differences, hence of applying the principle of
universalizability. The principle of universalizability is a formal principle;
universalizability in sense 1, however, is intended to be a substantive principle
of morality.
universe of
discourse: Grice: “The phrase is
confusing, seeing the uni-verse, is not a pluri-verse.” Tthe usually limited
class of individuals under discussion, whose existence is presupposed by the
discussants, and which in some sense constitutes the ultimate subject matter of
the discussion. Once the universe of a discourse has been established,
expressions such as ‘every object’ and ‘some object’ refer respectively to
every object or to some object in the universe of discourse. The concept of
universe of discourse is due to De Morgan in 1846, but the expression was
coined by Boole eight years later. When a discussion is formalized in an
interpreted standard first-order language, the universe of discourse is taken
as the “universe” of the interpretation, i.e., as the range of values of the
variables. Quine and others have emphasized that the universe of discourse
represents an ontological commitment of the discussants. In a discussion in a
particular science, the universe of discourse is often wider than the domain of
the science, although economies of expression can be achieved by limiting the
universe of discourse to the domain.
use-mention
distinction: Grice: “I once used
Jevons’s coinage in a tutorial with Hardie; he said, ‘What do you mean by
‘of’?’” -- Grice: “Strictly, if you mention, you are using!” -- discussed by
Grice in “Retrospective epilogue” – the only use of a vehicle of communication
is to communicate. two ways in which terms enter into discourse used when they refer to or assert something,
mentioned when they are exhibited for consideration of their properties as
terms. If I say, “Mary is sad,” I use the name ‘Mary’ to refer to Mary so that
I can predicate of her the property of being sad. But if I say, “ ‘Mary’ contains
four letters,” I am mentioning Mary’s name, exhibiting it in writing or speech
to predicate of that term the property of being spelled with four letters. In
the first case, the sentence occurs in what Carnap refers to as the material
mode; in the second, it occurs in the formal mode, and hence in a metalanguage
a language used to talk about another language. Single quotation marks or
similar orthographic devices are conventionally used to disambiguate mentioned
from used terms. The distinction is important because there are fallacies of
reasoning based on usemention confusions in the failure to observe the use
mention distinction, especially when the referents of terms are themselves
linguistic entities. Consider the inference: 1 Some sentences are written in
English. 2 Some sentences are written in English. Here it looks as though the
argument offers a counterexample to the claim that all arguments of the form
‘P, therefore P’ are circular. But either 1 asserts that some sentences are
written in English, or it provides evidence in support of the conclusion in 2
by exhibiting a sentence written in English. In the first case, the sentence is
used to assert the same truth in the premise as expressed in the conclusion, so
that the argument remains circular. In the second case, the sentence is
mentioned, and although the argument so interpreted is not circular, it is no
longer strictly of the form ‘P, therefore P’, but has the significantly
different form, ‘ “P” is a sentence written in English, therefore P’.
English
futilitarians: utilitarianism, the
moral theory that an action is morally right if and only if it produces at
least as much good utility for all people affected by the action as any
alternative action the person could do instead. Its best-known proponent is J.
S. Mill, who formulated the greatest happiness principle also called the
principle of utility: always act so as to produce the greatest happiness. Two
kinds of issues have been central in debates about whether utilitarianism is an
adequate or true moral theory: first, whether and how utilitarianism can be
clearly and precisely formulated and applied; second, whether the moral
implications of utilitarianism in particular cases are acceptable, or instead
constitute objections to it. Issues of formulation. A central issue of
formulation is how utility is to be defined and whether it can be measured in
the way utilitarianism requires. Early utilitarians often held some form of
hedonism, according to which only pleasure and the absence of pain have utility
or intrinsic value. For something to have intrinsic value is for it to be
valuable for its own sake and apart from its consequences or its relations to
other things. Something has instrumental value, on the other hand, provided it
brings about what has intrinsic value. Most utilitarians have held that
hedonism is too narrow an account of utility because there are many things that
people value intrinsically besides pleasure. Some nonhedonists define utility
as happiness, and among them there is considerable debate about the proper
account of happiness. Happiness has also been criticized as too narrow to
exhaust utility or intrinsic value; e.g., many people value accomplishments,
not just the happiness that may accompany them. Sometimes utilitarianism is
understood as the view that either pleasure or happiness has utility, while
consequentialism is understood as the broader view that morally right action is
action that maximizes the good, however the good is understood. Here, we take
utilitarianism in this broader interpretation that some philosophers reserve
for consequentialism. Most utilitarians who believe hedonism gives too narrow
an account of utility have held that utility is the satisfaction of people’s
informed preferences or desires. This view is neutral about what people desire,
and so can account for the full variety of things and experiences that
different people in fact desire or value. Finally, ideal utilitarians have held
that some things or experiences, e.g. knowledge or being autonomous, are
intrinsically valuable or good whether or not people value or prefer them or
are happier with them. Whatever account of utility a utilitarian adopts, it
must be possible to quantify or measure the good effects or consequences of
actions in order to apply the utilitarian standard of moral rightness.
Happiness utilitarianism, e.g., must calculate whether a particular action, or
instead some possible alternative, would produce more happiness for a given
person; this is called the intrapersonal utility comparison. The method of
measurement may allow cardinal utility measurements, in which numerical units
of happiness may be assigned to different actions e.g., 30 units for Jones
expected from action a, 25 units for Jones from alternative action b, or only
ordinal utility measurements may be possible, in which actions are ranked only
as producing more or less happiness than alternative actions. Since nearly all
interesting and difficult moral problems involve the happiness of more than one
person, utilitarianism requires calculating which among alternative actions
produces the greatest happiness for all people affected; this is called the
interpersonal utility comparison. Many ordinary judgments about personal action
or public policy implicitly rely on interpersonal utility comparisons; e.g.,
would a family whose members disagree be happiest overall taking its vacation
at the seashore or in the mountains? Some critics of utilitarianism doubt that
it is possible to make interpersonal utility comparisons. Another issue of
formulation is whether the utilitarian principle should be applied to
individual actions or to some form of moral rule. According to act
utilitarianism, each action’s rightness or wrongness depends on the utility it
produces in comparison with possible alternatives. Even act utilitarians agree,
however, that rules of thumb like ‘keep your promises’ can be used for the most
part in practice because following them tends to maximize utility. According to
rule utilitarianism, on the other hand, individual actions are evaluated, in
theory not just in practice, by whether they conform to a justified moral rule,
and the utilitarian standard is applied only to general rules. Some rule
utilitarians hold that actions are right provided they are permitted by rules
the general acceptance of which would maximize utility in the agent’s society,
and wrong only if they would be prohibited by such rules. There are a number of
forms of rule utilitarianism, and utilitarians disagree about whether act or
rule utilitarianism is correct. Moral implications. Most debate about
utilitarianism has focused on its moral implications. Critics have argued that
its implications sharply conflict with most people’s considered moral
judgments, and that this is a strong reason to reject utilitarianism.
Proponents have argued both that many of these conflicts disappear on a proper
understanding of utilitarianism and that the remaining conflicts should throw
the particular judgments, not utilitarianism, into doubt. One important
controversy concerns utilitarianism’s implications for distributive justice.
Utilitarianism requires, in individual actions and in public policy, maximizing
utility without regard to its distribution between different persons. Thus, it
seems to ignore individual rights, whether specific individuals morally deserve
particular benefits or burdens, and potentially to endorse great inequalities
between persons; e.g., some critics have charged that according to
utilitarianism slavery would be morally justified if its benefits to the
slaveowners sufficiently outweighed the burdens to the slaves and if it
produced more overall utility than alternative practices possible in that
society. Defenders of utilitarianism typically argue that in the real world
there is virtually always a better alternative than the action or practice that
the critic charges utilitarianism wrongly supports; e.g., no system of slavery
that has ever existed is plausibly thought to have maximized utility for the
society in question. Defenders of utilitarianism also typically try to show
that it does take account of the moral consideration the critic claims it
wrongly ignores; for instance, utilitarians commonly appeal to the declining
marginal utility of money equal marginal
increments of money tend to produce less utility e.g. happiness for persons,
the more money they already utilitarianism utilitarianism have as giving some support to equality in income
distribution. Another source of controversy concerns whether moral principles
should be agent-neutral or, in at least some cases, agent-relative.
Utilitarianism is agent-neutral in that it gives all people the same moral
aim act so as to maximize utility for
everyone whereas agent-relative
principles give different moral aims to different individuals. Defenders of
agent-relative principles note that a commonly accepted moral rule like the
prohibition of killing the innocent is understood as telling each agent that he
or she must not kill, even if doing so is the only way to prevent a still
greater number of killings by others. In this way, a non-utilitarian,
agent-relative prohibition reflects the common moral view that each person
bears special moral responsibility for what he or she does, which is greater
than his or her responsibility to prevent similar wrong actions by others.
Common moral beliefs also permit people to give special weight to their own
projects and commitments and, e.g., to favor to some extent their own children
at the expense of other children in greater need; agent-relative responsibilities
to one’s own family reflect these moral views in a way that agent-neutral
utilitarian responsibilities apparently do not. The debate over neutrality and
relativity is related to a final area of controversy about utilitarianism.
Critics charge that utilitarianism makes morality far too demanding by
requiring that one always act to maximize utility. If, e.g., one reads a book
or goes to a movie, one could nearly always be using one’s time and resources
to do more good by aiding famine relief. The critics believe that this wrongly
makes morally required what should be only supererogatory action that is good, but goes beyond “the
call of duty” and is not morally required. Here, utilitarians have often argued
that ordinary moral views are seriously mistaken and that morality can demand
greater sacrifices of one’s own interests for the benefit of others than is
commonly believed. There is little doubt that here, and in many other cases,
utilitarianism’s moral implications significantly conflict with commonsense
moral beliefs the dispute is whether
this should count against commonsense moral beliefs or against utilitarianism.
Refs.: H. P. Grice, “Bergmann on Stephen
and the English utilitarians.”
vagum: Oddly,
A. C. Ewing has a very early thing on ‘vagueness.’ Grice liked Ewing. There is
an essay on “Clarity” which relates. Cf. Price, “Clarity is not enough” Which
implicates it IS a necessity, though. Cf. “Clarity – who cares?” Some days,
Grice did not feel ‘Grecian,’ and would use very vernacular expressions. He
thought that what Cicero calls ‘vagum’ is best rendered in Oxfordshire dialect
as ‘fuzzy.’ It is not clear which of Grice’s maxim controls this. The opposite
of ‘vague’ is ‘specific.’ Grice was more concerned about this in the earlier
lectures where he has under the desideratum of conversational candour and the
principle of conversational benevolence, and the desideratum of conversational
clarity that one should be explicit, and make one’s point explicit. But under
the submaxims of the conversational category of modus (‘be perspicuous [sic]),
none seem to prohibit ‘vagueness’ as such: Avoid
obscurity of expression.Avoid ambiguity.Be brief (avoid unnecessary prolixity).Be orderly The one he later calls a
‘tailoring principle’ ‘frame your contribution in way that facilitates a
reply’, the ‘vagueness’ avoidance seems implicit. Cf. fuzzy. The indeterminacy of the field of application of an
expression, in contrast to precision. For instance, the expression “young man”
is vague since the point at which its appropriate application to a person
begins and ends cannot be precisely defined. Vagueness should be distinguished
from ambiguity, by which a term has
more than one meaning. The vagueness of an expression is due to a semantic
feature of the term itself, rather than to the subjective condition of its
user. Vagueness gives rise to borderline cases, and propositions with vague
terms lack a definite truth-value. For this reason, Frege rejected the
possibility of vague concepts, although they are tolerated in recent work in
vague or fuzzy logic. Various paradoxes arise due to the vagueness of words,
including the ancient sorites paradox. It is because of its intrinsic vagueness
that some philosophers seek to replace ordinary language with an ideal
language. But ordinary language philosophers hold that this proposal creates a
false promise of eliminating vagueness. Wittgenstein’s notion of family
resemblance in part is a model of meaning that tolerates vagueness. As a
property of expressions, vagueness extends to all sorts of cognitive
representations. Some philosophers hold that there can be vagueness in things
as well as in the representation of things. “A representation is vague when the
relation of the representing system to the represented system is not one–one,
but one–many.” Russell, Collected Papers of Bertrand Russell, vol. IX.
Refs.: H. P. Grice, “Fuzzy impicatures, and how to unfuzz them;” H. P. Grice,
“The conversational maxim of vagueness avoidance.”
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