Although it is a new approach to theory of knowledge, evolutionary epistemology has attracted much attention, primarily because it represents a serious attempt to flesh out a naturalized epistemology by drawing on several disciplines. In science is relevant to understanding the nature and development of knowledge, then evolutionary theory is among the disciplines worth a look. Insofar as evolutionary epistemology looks there, it is an interesting and potentially fruitful epistemological programme.
What makes a belief justified and what makes a true belief knowledge? Thinking that whether a belief deserves one of these appraisals is natural depends on what caused the depicted branch of knowledge to have the belief. In recent decades a number of epistemologists have pursued this plausible idea with a variety of specific proposals. Some causal theories of knowledge have it that a true belief that ‘p’ is knowledge just in case it has the right causal connection to the fact that ‘p’. Such a criterion can be applied only to cases where the fact that ‘p’ is a sort that can reach causal relations, as this seems to exclude mathematically and there necessary facts and perhaps any fact expressed by a universal generalization, and proponents of this sort of criterion have usually supposed that it is limited to perceptual representations where knowledge of particular facts about subjects environments.
For example, Armstrong (1973), predetermined that a position held by a belief in the form This perceived object is F is [non-inferential] knowledge if and only if the belief is a completely reliable sign that the perceived object is F, that is, the fact that the object is F contributed to causing the belief and its doing so depended on properties of the believer such that the laws of nature dictated that, for any subject χ and perceived object y, if χ has those properties and believed that y is F, then y is F. (Dretske (1981) offers a rather similar account, in terms of the beliefs being caused by a signal received by the perceiver that carries the information that the object is F).
Goldman (1986) has proposed an importantly different causal criterion, namely, that a true belief is knowledge if it is produced by a type of process that is globally and locally reliable. Causing true beliefs is sufficiently high is globally reliable if its propensity. Local reliability has to do with whether the process would have produced a similar but false belief in certain counterfactual situations alternative to the actual situation. This way of marking off true beliefs that are knowledge does not require the fact believed to be causally related to the belief, and so it could in principle apply to knowledge of any kind of truth.
Goldman requires the global reliability of the belief-producing process for the justification of a belief, he requires it also for knowledge because justification is required for knowledge. What he requires for knowledge, but does not require for justification is local reliability. His idea is that a justified true belief is knowledge if the type of process that produced it would not have produced it in any relevant counterfactual situation in which it is false. Its purported theory of relevant alternatives can be viewed as an attempt to provide a more satisfactory response to this tension in our thinking about knowledge. It attempts to characterize knowledge in a way that preserves both our belief that knowledge is an absolute concept and our belief that we have knowledge.
According to the theory, we need to qualify rather than deny the absolute character of knowledge. We should view knowledge as absolute, reactive to certain standards (Dretske, 1981 and Cohen, 1988). That is to say, in order to know a proposition, our evidence need not eliminate all the alternatives to that preposition, rather for us, that we can know our evidence eliminates al the relevant alternatives, where the set of relevant alternatives (a proper subset of the set of all alternatives) is determined by some standard. Moreover, according to the relevant alternatives view, and the standards determining that of the alternatives is raised by the sceptic are not relevant. If this is correct, then the fact that our evidence cannot eliminate the sceptics alternative does not lead to a sceptical result. For knowledge requires only the elimination of the relevant alternatives, so the relevant alternative view preserves in both strands in our thinking about knowledge. Knowledge is an absolute concept, but because the absoluteness is relative to a standard, we can know many things.
The interesting thesis that counts as a causal theory of justification (in the meaning of causal theory intended here) are that: A belief is justified in case it was produced by a type of process that is globally reliable, that is, its propensity to produce true beliefs-that can be defined (to a good approximation) As the proportion of the beliefs it produces (or would produce) that is true is sufficiently great.
This proposal will be adequately specified only when we are told (I) how much of the causal history of a belief counts as part of the process that produced it, (ii) which of the many types to which the process belongs is the type for purposes of assessing its reliability, and (iii) relative to why the world or worlds are the reliability of the process type to be assessed the actual world, the closet worlds containing the case being considered, or something else? Let us look at the answers suggested by Goldman, the leading proponent of a reliabilist account of justification.
(1) Goldman (1979, 1986) takes the relevant belief producing process to include only the proximate causes internal to the believer. So, for instance, when recently I believed that the telephone was ringing the process that produced the belief, for purposes of assessing reliability, includes just the causal chain of neural events from the stimulus in my ears inward ands other concurrent brain states on which the production of the belief depended: It does not include any events I the telephone, or the sound waves travelling between it and my ears, or any earlier decisions I made that were responsible for my being within hearing distance of the telephone at that time. It does seem intuitively plausible of a belief depends should be restricted to internal omnes proximate to the belief. Why? Goldman does not tell us. One answer that some philosophers might give is that it is because a beliefs being justified at a given time can depend only on facts directly accessible to the believers awareness at that time (for, if a believer ought to holds only beliefs that are justified, she can tell at any given time what beliefs would then be justified for her). However, this cannot be Goldmans answer because he wishes to include in the relevantly process neural events that are not directly accessible to consciousness.
(2) Once the reliabilist has told us how to delimit the process producing a belief, he needs to tell us which of the many types to which it belongs is the relevant type. Coincide, for example, the process that produces your current belief that you see a book before you. One very broad type to which that process belongs would be specified by coming to a belief as to something one perceives as a result of activation of the nerve endings in some of ones sense-organs. A constricted type, in which that unvarying processes belong would be specified by coming to a belief as to what one sees as a result of activation of the nerve endings in ones retinas. A still narrower type would be given by inserting in the last specification a description of a particular pattern of activation of the retinas particular cells. Which of these or other types to which the token process belongs is the relevant type for determining whether the type of process that produced your belief is reliable?
(3) Should the justification of a belief in a hypothetical, non-actual example turn on the reliability of the belief-producing process in the possible world of the example? That leads to the implausible result in that in a world run by a Cartesian demon-a powerful being who causes the other inhabitants of the world to have rich and coherent sets of perceptual and memory impressions that are all illusory the perceptual and memory beliefs of the other inhabitants are all unjustified, for they are produced by processes that are, in that world, quite unreliable. If we say instead that it is the reliability of the processes in the actual world that matters, we get the equally undesired result that if the actual world is a demon world then our perceptual and memory beliefs are all unjustified.
Goldmans solution (1986) is that the reliability of the process types is to be gauged by their performance in normal worlds, that is, worlds consistent with our general beliefs about the world . . . about the sorts of objects, events and changes that occur in it. This gives the intuitively right results for the problem cases just considered, but indicate by inference an implausible proportion of making compensations for alternative tending toward justification. If there are people whose general beliefs about the world are very different from mine, then there may, on this account, be beliefs that I can correctly regard as justified (ones produced by processes that are reliable in what I take to be a normal world) but that they can correctly regard as not justified.
However, these questions about the specifics are dealt with, and there are reasons for questioning the basic idea that the criterion for a beliefs being justified is its being produced by a reliable process. Thus and so, doubt about the sufficiency of the reliabilist criterion is prompted by a sort of example that Goldman himself uses for another purpose. Suppose that being in brain-state ‘B’ always causes one to believe that one is in brained-state ‘B’. Here the reliability of the belief-producing process is perfect, but we can readily imagine circumstances in which a person goes into grain-state ‘B’ and therefore has the belief in question, though this belief is by no means justified (Goldman, 1979). Doubt about the necessity of the condition arises from the possibility that one might know that one has strong justification for a certain belief and yet that knowledge is not what actually prompts one to believe. For example, I might be well aware that, having read the weather bureaus forecast that it will be much hotter tomorrow. I have ample reason to be confident that it will be hotter tomorrow, but I irrationally refuse to believe it until Wally tells me that he feels in his joints that it will be hotter tomorrow. Here what prompts me to believe dors not justify my belief, but my belief is nevertheless justified by my knowledge of the weather bureaus prediction and of its evidential force: I can advert to any disavowable inference that I ought not to be holding the belief. Indeed, given my justification and that there is nothing untoward about the weather bureaus prediction, my belief, if true, can be counted knowledge. This sorts of example raises doubt whether any causal conditions, are it a reliable process or something else, is necessary for either justification or knowledge.
Philosophers and scientists alike, have often held that the simplicity or parsimony of a theory is one reason, all else being equal, to view it as true. This goes beyond the unproblematic idea that simpler theories are easier to work with and gave greater aesthetic appeal.
One theory is more parsimonious than another when it postulates fewer entities, processes, changes or explanatory principles: The simplicity of a theory depends on essentially the same consecrations, though parsimony and simplicity obviously become the same. Demanding clarification of what makes one theory simpler or more parsimonious is plausible than another before the justification of these methodological maxims can be addressed.
If we set this description problem to one side, the major normative problem is as follows: What reason is there to think that simplicity is a sign of truth? Why should we accept a simpler theory instead of its more complex rivals? Newton and Leibniz thought that the answer was to be found in a substantive fact about nature. In Principia, Newton laid down as his first Rule of Reasoning in Philosophy that nature does nothing in vain . . . for Nature is pleased with simplicity and affects not the pomp of superfluous causes. Leibniz hypothesized that the actual world obeys simple laws because Gods taste for simplicity influenced his decision about which world to actualize.
The tragedy of the Western mind, described by Koyré, is a direct consequence of the stark Cartesian division between mind and world. We discovered the certain principles of physical reality, said Descartes, not by the prejudices of the senses, but by the light of reason, and which thus possess so great evidence that we cannot doubt of their truth. Since the real, or that which actually exists external to ourselves, was in his view only that which could be represented in the quantitative terms of mathematics, Descartes conclude that all quantitative aspects of reality could be traced to the deceitfulness of the senses.
The most fundamental aspect of the Western intellectual tradition is the assumption that there is a fundamental division between the material and the immaterial world or between the realm of matter and the realm of pure mind or spirit. The metaphysical frame-work based on this assumption is known as ontological dualism. As the word dual implies, the framework is predicated on an ontology, or a conception of the nature of God or Being, that assumes reality has two distinct and separable dimensions. The concept of Being as continuous, immutable, and having a prior or separate existence from the world of change dates from the ancient Greek philosopher Parmenides. The same qualities were associated with the God of the Judeo-Christian tradition, and they were considerably amplified by the role played in theology by Platonic and Neoplatonic philosophy.
Nicolas Copernicus, Galileo, Johannes Kepler, and Isaac Newton were all inheritors of a cultural tradition in which ontological dualism was a primary article of faith. Hence the idealization of the mathematical ideal as a source of communion with God, which dates from Pythagoras, provided a metaphysical foundation for the emerging natural sciences. This explains why, the creators of classical physics believed that doing physics was a form of communion with the geometrical and mathematical forms resident in the perfect mind of God. This view would survive in a modified form in what is now known as Einsteinian epistemology and accounts in no small part for the reluctance of many physicists to accept the epistemology associated with the Copenhagen Interpretation.
At the beginning of the nineteenth century, Pierre-Sinon LaPlace, along with a number of other French mathematicians, advanced the view that the science of mechanics constituted a complete view of nature. Since this science, by observing its epistemology, had revealed itself to be the fundamental science, the hypothesis of God was, they concluded, entirely unnecessary.
LaPlace is recognized for eliminating not only the theological component of classical physics but the entire metaphysical component as well. The epistemology of science requires, he said, that we proceed by inductive generalizations from observed facts to hypotheses that are tested by observed conformity of the phenomena. What was unique about LaPlaces view of hypotheses was his insistence that we cannot attribute reality to them. Although concepts like force, mass, motion, cause, and laws are obviously present in classical physics, they exist in LaPlaces view only as quantities. Physics is concerned, he argued, with quantities that we associate as a matter of convenience with concepts, and the truths about nature are only the quantities.
As this view of hypotheses and the truths of nature as quantities was extended in the nineteenth century to a mathematical description of phenomena like heat, light, electricity, and magnetism. LaPlaces assumptions about the actual character of scientific truths seemed correct. This progress suggested that if we could remove all thoughts about the nature of or the source of phenomena, the pursuit of strictly quantitative concepts would bring us to a complete description of all aspects of physical reality. Subsequently, figures like Comte, Kirchhoff, Hertz, and Poincaré developed a program for the study of nature hat was quite different from that of the original creators of classical physics.
The seventeenth-century view of physics as a philosophy of nature or as natural philosophy was displaced by the view of physics as an autonomous science that was the science of nature. This view, which was premised on the doctrine of positivism, promised to subsume all of nature with a mathematical analysis of entities in motion and claimed that the true understanding of nature was revealed only in the mathematical description. Since the doctrine of positivism assumes that the knowledge we call physics resides only in the mathematical formalism of physical theory, it disallows the prospect that the vision of physical reality revealed in physical theory can have any other meaning. In the history of science, the irony is that positivism, which was intended to banish metaphysical concerns from the domain of science, served to perpetuate a seventeenth-century metaphysical assumption about the relationship between physical reality and physical theory.
Epistemology since Hume and Kant has drawn back from this theological underpinning. Indeed, the very idea that nature is simple (or uniform) has come in for a critique. The view has taken hold that a preference for simple and parsimonious hypotheses is purely methodological: It is constitutive of the attitude we call scientific and makes no substantive assumption about the way the world is.
A variety of otherwise diverse twentieth-century philosophers of science have attempted, in different ways, to flesh out this position. Two examples must suffice here: Hesse (1969) as, for summaries of other proposals. Popper (1959) holds that scientists should prefer highly falsifiable (improbable) theories: He tries to show that simpler theories are more falsifiable, also Quine (1966), in contrast, sees a virtue in theories that are highly probable, he argues for a general connection between simplicity and high probability.
Both these proposals are global. They attempt to explain why simplicity should be part of the scientific method in a way that spans all scientific subject matters. No assumption about the details of any particular scientific problem serves as a premiss in Poppers or Quines arguments.
Newton and Leibniz thought that the justification of parsimony and simplicity flows from the hand of God: Popper and Quine try to justify these methodologically median of importance is without assuming anything substantive about the way the world is. In spite of these differences in approach, they have something in common. They assume that all users of parsimony and simplicity in the separate sciences can be encompassed in a single justifying argument. That recent developments in confirmation theory suggest that this assumption should be scrutinized. Good (1983) and Rosenkrantz (1977) has emphasized the role of auxiliary assumptions in mediating the connection between hypotheses and observations. Whether a hypothesis is well supported by some observations, or whether one hypothesis is better supported than another by those observations, crucially depends on empirical background assumptions about the inference problem here. The same view applies to the idea of prior probability (or, prior plausibility). In of a single hypo-physical science if chosen as an alternative to another even though they are equally supported by current observations, this must be due to an empirical background assumption.
Principles of parsimony and simplicity mediate the epistemic connection between hypotheses and observations. Perhaps these principles are able to do this because they are surrogates for an empirical background theory. It is not that there is one background theory presupposed by every appeal to parsimony; This has the quantifier order backwards. Rather, the suggestion is that each parsimony argument is justified only to each degree that it reflects an empirical background theory about the subjective matter. On this theory is brought out into the open, but the principle of parsimony is entirely dispensable (Sober, 1988).
This local approach to the principles of parsimony and simplicity resurrects the idea that they make sense only if the world is one way rather than another. It rejects the idea that these maxims are purely methodological. How defensible this point of view is, will depend on detailed case studies of scientific hypothesis evaluation and on further developments in the theory of scientific inference.
It is usually not found of one and the same that, an inference is a (perhaps very complex) act of thought by virtue of which act (1) I pass from a set of one or more propositions or statements to a proposition or statement and (2) it appears that the latter are true if the former is or are. This psychological characterization has occurred over a wider summation of literature under more lesser than inessential variations. Desiring a better characterization of inference is natural. Yet attempts to do so by constructing a fuller psychological explanation fail to comprehend the grounds on which inference will be objectively valid-A point elaborately made by Gottlob Frége. Attempts to understand the nature of inference through the device of the representation of inference by formal-logical calculations or derivations better (1) leave us puzzled about the relation of formal-logical derivations to the informal inferences they are supposedly to represent or reconstruct, and (2) leaves us worried about the sense of such formal derivations. Are these derivations inference? Are not informal inferences needed in order to apply the rules governing the constructions of formal derivations (inferring that this operation is an application of that formal rule)? These are concerns cultivated by, for example, Wittgenstein.
Coming up with an adequate characterization of inference-and even working out what would count as a very adequate characterization here is demandingly by no means nearly some resolved philosophical problem.
The rule of inference, as for raised by Lewis Carroll, the Zeno-like problem of how a proof ever gets started. Suppose I have as premises (I) p and (ii) p ➝ q. Can I infer q? Only, it seems, if I am sure of (iii) (p & p ➝q) ➝ q. Can I then infer q? Only, it seems, if I am sure that (iv) (p & p ➝ q & (p & p ➝ q) ➝ q) ➝ q. For each new axiom (N) I need a further axiom (N + 1) telling me that the set so far implies q, and the regress never stops. The usual solution is to treat a system as containing not only axioms, but also rules of inference, allowing movement from the axioms. The rule modus ponens allow us to pass from the first premise to q. Carrolls puzzle shows that distinguishing two theoretical categories is essential, although there may be choice about which theses to put in which category.
Traditionally, a proposition that is not a conditional, as with the affirmative and negative, modern opinion is wary of the distinction, since what appears categorical may vary with the choice of a primitive vocabulary and notation. Apparently categorical propositions may also turn out to be disguised conditionals: ‘X’ is intelligent (categorical?) Equivalent, if ‘X’ is given a range of tasks, she does them better than many people (conditional?). The problem is not merely one of classification, since deep metaphysical questions arise when facts that seem to be categorical and therefore solid, come to seem by contrast conditional, or purely hypothetical or potential.
Its condition of some classified necessity is so proven sufficient that if ‘p’ is a necessary condition of ‘q’, then ‘q’ cannot be true unless ‘p’; is true? If p is a sufficient condition, thus steering well is a necessary condition of driving in a satisfactory manner, but it is not sufficient, for one can steer well but drive badly for other reasons. Confusion may result if the distinction is not heeded. For example, the statement that ‘A’ causes ‘B’ may be interpreted to mean that ‘A’ is itself a sufficient condition for ‘B’, or that it is only a necessary condition fort ‘B’, or perhaps a necessary parts of a total sufficient condition. Lists of conditions to be met for satisfying some administrative or legal requirement frequently attempt to give individually necessary and jointly sufficient sets of conditions.
What is more, that if any proposition of the form if ‘p’ then ‘q’. The condition hypothesized, ‘p’. Is called the antecedent of the conditionals, and ‘q’, the consequent? Various kinds of conditional have been distinguished. Its weakest is that of material implication, merely telling that either ‘not-p’, or ‘q’. Stronger conditionals include elements of modality, corresponding to the thought that if ‘p’ is truer then ‘q’ must be true. Ordinary language is very flexible in its use of the conditional form, and there is controversy whether conditionals are better treated semantically, yielding differently finds of conditionals with different meanings, or pragmatically, in which case there should be one basic meaning with surface differences arising from other implicatures.
It follows from the definition of strict implication that a necessary proposition is strictly implied by any proposition, and that an impossible proposition strictly implies any proposition. If strict implication corresponds to ‘q’ follows from ‘p’, then this means that a necessary proposition follows from anything at all, and anything at all follows from an impossible proposition. This is a problem if we wish to distinguish between valid and invalid arguments with necessary conclusions or impossible premises.
The Humean problem of induction is that if we would suppose that there is some property A concerning and observational or an experimental situation, and that out of a large number of observed instances of ‘A’, some fraction m/n (possibly equal to 1) has also been instances of some logically independent property ‘B’. Suppose further that the background proportionate circumstances not specified in these descriptions have been varied to a substantial degree and that there is no collateral information available concerning the frequency of Bs among As or concerning causal or nomologically connections between instances of ‘A’ and instances of ‘B’.
In this situation, an enumerative or instantial induction inference would move rights from the premise, that m/n of observed ‘A’s’ are ‘B’s’ to the conclusion that approximately m/n of all ‘A’s’ are ‘B’s’. (The usual probability qualification will be assumed to apply to the inference, rather than being part of the conclusion.) Here the class of As should be taken to include not only unobserved ‘A’s’ and future ‘A’s’, but also possible or hypothetical As (an alternative conclusion would concern the probability or likelihood of the adjacently observed ‘A’ being a ‘B’).
The traditional or Humean problem of induction, often referred to simply as the problem of induction, is the problem of whether and why inferences that fit this schema should be considered rationally acceptable or justified from an epistemic or cognitive standpoint, i.e., whether and why reasoning in this way is likely to lead to true claims about the world. Is there any sort of argument or rationale that can be offered for thinking that conclusions reached in this way are likely to be true in the corresponding premisses is true ‒or even that their chances of truth are significantly enhanced?
Humes discussion of this issue deals explicitly only with cases where all observed ‘A’s’ are ‘B’s’ and his argument applies just as well to the more general case. His conclusion is entirely negative and sceptical: Inductive inferences are not rationally justified, but are instead the result of an essentially a-rational process, custom or habit. Hume (1711-76) challenges the proponent of induction to supply a cogent line of reasoning that leads from an inductive premise to the corresponding conclusion and offers an extremely influential argument in the form of a dilemma (a few times referred to as Humes fork), that either our actions are determined, in which case we are not responsible for them, or they are the result of random events, under which case we are also not responsible for them.
Such reasoning would, he argues, have to be either deductively demonstrative reasoning in the concerning relations of ideas or experimental, i.e., empirical, that reasoning concerning matters of fact or existence. It cannot be the former, because all demonstrative reasoning relies on the avoidance of contradiction, and it is not a contradiction to suppose that the course of nature may change, that an order that was observed in the past and not of its continuing against the future: But it cannot be, as the latter, since any empirical argument would appeal to the success of such reasoning about an experience, and the justifiability of generalizing from experience are precisely what is at issue-so that any such appeal would be question-begging. Hence, Hume concludes that there can be no such reasoning (1748).
An alternative version of the problem may be obtained by formulating it with reference to the so-called Principle of Induction, which says roughly that the future will resemble the past or, somewhat better, that unobserved cases will resemble observed cases. An inductive argument may be viewed as enthymematic, with this principle serving as a supposed premiss, in which case the issue is obviously how such a premiss can be justified. Humes argument is then that no such justification is possible: The principle cannot be justified a prior because having possession of been true in experiences without obviously begging the question is not contradictory to have possession of been true in experiences without obviously begging the question.
The predominant recent responses to the problem of induction, at least in the analytic tradition, in effect accept the main conclusion of Humes argument, namely, that inductive inferences cannot be justified in the sense of showing that the conclusion of such an inference is likely to be true if the premise is true, and thus attempt to find another sort of justification for induction. Such responses fall into two main categories: (i) Pragmatic justifications or vindications of induction, mainly developed by Hans Reichenbach (1891-1953), and (ii) ordinary language justifications of induction, whose most important proponent is Frederick, Peter Strawson (1919-). In contrast, some philosophers still attempt to reject Humes dilemma by arguing either (iii) That, contrary to appearances, induction can be inductively justified without vicious circularity, or (iv) that an anticipatory justification of induction is possible after all. In that:
(1) Reichenbachs view is that induction is best regarded, not as a form of inference, but rather as a method for arriving at posits regarding, i.e., the proportion of As remain additionally of Bs. Such a posit is not a claim asserted to be true, but is instead an intellectual wager analogous to a bet made by a gambler. Understood in this way, the inductive method says that one should posit that the observed proportion is, within some measure of an approximation, the true proportion and then continually correct that initial posit as new information comes in.
The gamblers bet is normally an appraised posit, i.e., he knows the chances or odds that the outcome on which he bets will actually occur. In contrast, the inductive bet is a blind posit: We do not know the chances that it will succeed or even that success is that it will succeed or even that success is possible. What we are gambling on when we make such a bet is the value of a certain proportion in the independent world, which Reichenbach construes as the limit of the observed proportion as the number of cases increases to infinity. Nevertheless, we have no way of knowing that there are even such a limit, and no way of knowing that the proportion of As are in addition of Bs converges in the end on some stable value than varying at random. If we cannot know that this limit exists, then we obviously cannot know that we have any definite chance of finding it.
What we can know, according to Reichenbach, is that if there is a truth of this sort to be found, the inductive method will eventually find it. That this is so is an analytic consequence of Reichenbachs account of what it is for such a limit to exist. The only way that the inductive method of making an initial posit and then refining it in light of new observations can fail eventually to arrive at the true proportion is if the series of observed proportions never converges on any stable value, which means that there is no truth to be found pertaining the proportion of ‘A’s’ additionally constitute ‘B’s’. Thus, induction is justified, not by showing that it will succeed or indeed, that it has any definite likelihood of success, but only by showing that it will succeed if success is possible. Reichenbachs claim is that no more than this can be established for any method, and hence that induction gives us our best chance for success, our best gamble in a situation where there is no alternative to gambling.
This pragmatic response to the problem of induction faces several serious problems. First, there are indefinitely many other methods for arriving at posits for which the same sort of defence can be given-methods that yield the same result as the inductive method over time but differ arbitrarily before long. Despite the efforts of others, it is unclear that there is any satisfactory way to exclude such alternatives, in order to avoid the result that any arbitrarily chosen short-term posit is just as reasonable as the inductive posit. Second, even if there is a truth of the requisite sort to be found, the inductive method is only guaranteed to find it or even to come within any specifiable distance of it in the indefinite long run. All the same, any actual application of inductive results always takes place in the presence to the future eventful states in making the relevance of the pragmatic justification to actual practice uncertainly. Third, and most important, it needs to be emphasized that Reichenbachs response to the problem simply accepts the claim of the Humean sceptic that an inductive premise never provides the slightest reason for thinking that the corresponding inductive conclusion is true. Reichenbach himself is quite candid on this point, but this does not alleviate the intuitive implausibility of saying that we have no more reason for thinking that our scientific and commonsense conclusions that result in the induction of it . . . is true than, to use Reichenbachs own analogy (1949), a blind man wandering in the mountains who feels an apparent trail with his stick has for thinking that following it will lead him to safety.
An approach to induction resembling Reichenbachs claiming in that those particular inductive conclusions are posits or conjectures, than the conclusions of cogent inferences, is offered by Popper. However, Poppers view is even more overtly sceptical: It amounts to saying that all that can ever be said in favour of the truth of an inductive claim is that the claim has been tested and not yet been shown to be false.
(2) The ordinary language response to the problem of induction has been advocated by many philosophers, none the less, Strawson claims that the question whether induction is justified or reasonable makes sense only if it tacitly involves the demand that inductive reasoning meet the standards appropriate to deductive reasoning, i.e., that the inductive conclusions are shown to follow deductively from the inductive assumption. Such a demand cannot, of course, be met, but only because it is illegitimate: Inductive and deductive reasons are simply fundamentally different kinds of reasoning, each possessing its own autonomous standards, and there is no reason to demand or expect that one of these kinds meet the standards of the other. Whereas, if induction is assessed by inductive standards, the only ones that are appropriate, then it is obviously justified.
The problem here is to understand to what this allegedly obvious justification of an induction amount. In his main discussion of the point (1952), Strawson claims that it is an analytic true statement that believing it a conclusion for which there is strong evidence is reasonable and an analytic truth that inductive evidence of the sort captured by the schema presented earlier constitutes strong evidence for the corresponding inductive conclusion, thus, apparently yielding the analytic conclusion that believing it a conclusion for which there is inductive evidence is reasonable. Nevertheless, he also admits, indeed insists, that the claim that inductive conclusions will be true in the future is contingent, empirical, and may turn out to be false (1952). Thus, the notion of reasonable belief and the correlative notion of strong evidence must apparently be understood in ways that have nothing to do with likelihood of truth, presumably by appeal to the standard of reasonableness and strength of evidence that are accepted by the community and are embodied in ordinary usage.
Understood in this way, Strawsons response to the problem of inductive reasoning does not speak to the central issue raised by Humean scepticism: The issue of whether the conclusions of inductive arguments are likely to be true. It amounts to saying merely that if we reason in this way, we can correctly call ourselves reasonable and our evidence strong, according to our accepted community standards. Nevertheless, to the undersealing of issue of wether following these standards is a good way to find the truth, the ordinary language response appears to have nothing to say.
(3) The main attempts to show that induction can be justified inductively have concentrated on showing that such as a defence can avoid circularity. Skyrms (1975) formulate, perhaps the clearest version of this general strategy. The basic idea is to distinguish different levels of inductive argument: A first level in which induction is applied to things other than arguments: A second level in which it is applied to arguments at the first level, arguing that they have been observed to succeed so far and hence are likely to succeed in general: A third level in which it is applied in the same way to arguments at the second level, and so on. Circularity is allegedly avoided by treating each of these levels as autonomous and justifying the argument at each level by appeal to an argument at the next level.
One problem with this sort of move is that even if circularity is avoided, the movement to higher and higher levels will clearly eventually fail simply for lack of evidence: A level will reach at which there have been enough successful inductive arguments to provide a basis for inductive justification at the next higher level, and if this is so, then the whole series of justifications collapses. A more fundamental difficulty is that the epistemological significance of the distinction between levels is obscure. If the issue is whether reasoning in accord with the original schema offered above ever provides a good reason for thinking that the conclusion is likely to be true, then it still seems question-begging, even if not flatly circular, to answer this question by appeal to anther argument of the same form.
(4) The idea that induction can be justified on a pure priori basis is in one way the most natural response of all: It alone treats an inductive argument as an independently cogent piece of reasoning whose conclusion can be seen rationally to follow, although perhaps only with probability from its premise. Such an approach has, however, only rarely been advocated (Russell, 19132 and BonJour, 1986), and is widely thought to be clearly and demonstrably hopeless.
Many on the reasons for this pessimistic view depend on general epistemological theses about the possible or nature of anticipatory cognition. Thus if, as Quine alleges, there is no a prior justification of any kind, then obviously a prior justification for induction is ruled out. Or if, as more moderate empiricists have in claiming some preexistent knowledge should be analytic, then again a prevenient justification for induction seems to be precluded, since the claim that if an inductive premise ids truer, then the conclusion is likely to be true does not fit the standard conceptions of analyticity. A consideration of these matters is beyond the scope of the present spoken exchange.
There are, however, two more specific and quite influential reasons for thinking that an early approach is impossible that can be briefly considered, first, there is the assumption, originating in Hume, but since adopted by very many of others, that a move forward in the defence of induction would have to involve turning induction into deduction, i.e., showing, per impossible, that the inductive conclusion follows deductively from the premise, so that it is a formal contradiction to accept the latter and deny the former. However, it is unclear why a prior approach need be committed to anything this strong. It would be enough if it could be argued that it is deductively unlikely that such a premise is true and corresponding conclusion false.
Reichenbach defends his view that pragmatic justification is the best that is possible by pointing out that a completely chaotic world in which there is simply not true conclusion to be found as to the proportion of As in addition that occur of, but Bs is neither impossible nor unlikely from a purely a prior standpoint, the suggestion being that therefore there can be no a prior reason for thinking that such a conclusion is true. Nevertheless, there is still a substring wayin laying that a chaotic world is a prior neither impossible nor unlikely without any further evidence does not show that such a world os not a prior unlikely and a world containing such-and-such regularity might anticipatorially be somewhat likely in relation to an occurrence of a long-run patten of evidence in which a certain stable proportion of observed As are Bs ~. An occurrence, it might be claimed, that would be highly unlikely in a chaotic world (BonJour, 1986).
So, to a better understanding of induction we should then term is most widely used for any process of reasoning that takes us from empirical premises to empirical conclusions supported by the premises, but not deductively entailed by them. Inductive arguments are therefore kinds of applicative arguments, in which something beyond the content of the premise is inferred as probable or supported by them. Induction is, however, commonly distinguished from arguments to theoretical explanations, which share this applicative character, by being confined to inferences in which he conclusion involves the same properties or relations as the premises. The central example is induction by simple enumeration, where from premises telling that Fa, Fb, Fc . . . where a, b, cs, are all of some kind G, it is inferred that Gs from outside the sample, such as future Gs, will be F, or perhaps that all Gs are F. In this, which and the other persons deceive them, children may infer that everyone is a deceiver: Different, but similar inferences of a property by some object to the same objects future possession of the same property, or from the constancy of some law-like pattern in events and states of affairs ti its future constancy. All objects we know of attract each other with a force inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them, so perhaps they all do so, and will always do so.
The rational basis of any inference was challenged by Hume, who believed that induction presupposed belie in the uniformity of nature, but that this belief has no defence in reason, and merely reflected a habit or custom of the mind. Hume was not therefore sceptical about the role of reason in either explaining it or justifying it. Trying to answer Hume and to show that there is something rationally compelling about the inference referred to as the problem of induction. It is widely recognized that any rational defence of induction will have to partition well-behaved properties for which the inference is plausible (often called projectable properties) from badly behaved ones, for which it is not. It is also recognized that actual inductive habits are more complex than those of similar enumeration, and that both common sense and science pay attention to such giving factors as variations within the sample giving us the evidence, the application of ancillary beliefs about the order of nature, and so on.
Nevertheless, the fundamental problem remains that ant experience condition by application show us only events occurring within a very restricted part of a vast spatial and temporal order about which we then come to believe things.
Uncompounded by its belonging of a confirmation theory finding of the measure to which evidence supports a theory fully formalized confirmation theory would dictate the degree of confidence that a rational investigator might have in a theory, given some-body of evidence. The grandfather of confirmation theory is Gottfried Leibniz (1646-1718), who believed that a logically transparent language of science would be able to resolve all disputes. In the 20th century a fully formal confirmation theory was a main goal of the logical positivist, since without it the central concept of verification by empirical evidence itself remains distressingly unscientific. The principal developments were due to Rudolf Carnap (1891-1970), culminating in his Logical Foundations of Probability (1950). Carnaps idea was that the measure necessitated would be the proportion of logically possible states of affairs in which the theory and the evidence both hold, compared ti the number in which the evidence itself holds that the probability of a preposition, relative to some evidence, is a proportion of the range of possibilities under which the proposition is true, compared to the total range of possibilities left by the evidence. The difficulty with the theory lies in identifying sets of possibilities so that they admit of measurement. It therefore demands that we can put a measure on the range of possibilities consistent with theory and evidence, compared with the range consistent with the evidence alone.
Among the obstacles the enterprise meets, is the fact that while evidence covers only a finite range of data, the hypotheses of science may cover an infinite range. In addition, confirmation proves to vary with the language in which the science is couched, and the Carnapian programme has difficulty in separating genuinely confirming variety of evidence from less compelling repetition of the same experiment. Confirmation also proved to be susceptible to acute paradoxes. Finally, scientific judgement seems to depend on such intangible factors as the problems facing rival theories, and most workers have come to stress instead the historically situated scene of what would appear as a plausible distinction of a scientific knowledge at a given time.
Arose to the paradox of which when a set of apparent incontrovertible premises is given to unacceptable or contradictory conclusions. To solve a paradox will involve showing either that there is a hidden flaw in the premises, or that the reasoning is erroneous, or that the apparently unacceptable conclusion can, in fact, be tolerated. Paradoxes are therefore important in philosophy, for until one is solved it shows that there is something about our reasoning and our concepts that we do not understand. What is more, and somewhat loosely, a paradox is a compelling argument from unacceptable premises to an unacceptable conclusion: More strictly speaking, a paradox is specified to be a sentence that is true if and only if it is false. A characterized objection lesson of it would be: The displayed sentence is false.
Seeing that this sentence is false if true is easy, and true if false, a paradox, in either of the senses distinguished, presents an important philosophical challenger. Epistemologists are especially concerned with various paradoxes having to do with knowledge and belief. In other words, for example, the Knower paradox is an argument that begins with apparently impeccable premisses about the concepts of knowledge and inference and derives an explicit contradiction. The origin of the reasoning is the surprise examination paradox: A teacher announces that there will be a surprise examination next week. A clever student argues that this is impossible. The test cannot be on Friday, the last day of the week, because it would not be a surprise. We would know the day of the test on Thursday evening. This means we can also rule out Thursday. For after we learn that no test has been given by Wednesday, we would know the test is on Thursday or Friday, and would already know that it s not on Friday and would already know that it is not on Friday by the previous reasoning. The remaining days can be eliminated in the same manner.
This puzzle has over a dozen variants. The first was probably invented by the Swedish mathematician Lennard Ekbon in 1943. Although the first few commentators regarded the reverse elimination argument as cogent, every writer on the subject since 1950 agrees that the argument is unsound. The controversy has been over the proper diagnosis of the flaw.
Initial analyses of the subjects argument tried to lay the blame on a simple equivocation. Their failure led to more sophisticated diagnoses. The general format has been an assimilation to better-known paradoxes. One tradition casts the surprise examination paradox as a self-referential problem, as fundamentally akin to the Liar, the paradox of the Knower, or Gödels incompleteness theorem. That in of itself, says enough that Kaplan and Montague (1960) distilled the following self-referential paradox, the Knower. Consider the sentence: (S) the negation of this sentence is known (to be true). Suppose that (S) is true. Then its negation is known and hence true. However, if its negation is true, then (S) must be false. Therefore (s) is false, or what is the name, the negation of (S) is true.
This paradox and its accompanying reasoning are strongly reminiscent of the Lair Paradox that (in one version) begins by considering a sentence This sentence is false and derives a contradiction. Versions of both arguments using axiomatic formulations of arithmetic and Gödel-numbers to achieve the effect of self-reference yields important meta-theorems about what can be expressed in such systems. Roughly these are to the effect that no predicates definable in the formalized arithmetic can have the properties we demand of truth (Tarskis Theorem) or of knowledge (Montague, 1963).
The usual proposals for dealing with the Liar paradox, its often to have their analogues for the Knower, e.g., that there is something wrong with a self-reference or that knowledge (or truth) is properly a predicate of propositions and not of sentences. The relies that show that some of these are not adequate are often parallel to those for the Liar paradox. In addition, on e c an try here what seems to be an adequate solution for the Surprise Examination Paradox, namely the observation that new knowledge can drive out knowledge, but this does not seem to work on the Knower (Anderson, 1983).
There are a number of paradoxes of the Liar family. The simplest example is the sentence This sentence is false, which must be false if it is true, and true if it is false. One suggestion is that the sentence fails to say anything, but sentences that fail to say anything are at least not true. In fact case, we consider to sentences This sentence is not true, which, if it fails to say anything is not true, and hence (this kind of reasoning is sometimes called the strengthened Liar). Other versions of the Liar introduce pairs of sentences, as in a slogan on the front of a T-shirt saying This sentence on the back of this T-shirt is false, and one on the back saying The sentence on the front of this T-shirt is true. It is clear that each sentence individually is well formed, and were it not for the other, might have said something true. So any attempt to dismiss the paradox by sating that the sentence involved are meaningless will face problems.
Even so, the two approaches that have some hope of adequately dealing with this paradox is hierarchy solutions and truth-value gap solutions. According to the first, knowledge is structured into levels. It is argued that there be bo one-coherent notion expressed by the verb; knows, but rather a whole series of notion of being knowable and wherefore knows, and so on (perhaps into transfinite), stated ion terms of predicate expressing such ramified concepts and properly restricted, (1)-(3) lead to no contradictions. The main objections to this procedure are that the meaning of these levels has not been adequately explained and that the idea of such subscripts, even implicit, in a natural language is highly counterintuitive the truth-value gap solution takes sentences such as (S) to lack truth-value. They are neither true nor false, but they do not express propositions. This defeats a crucial step in the reasoning used in the derivation of the paradoxes. Kripler (1986) has developed this approach in connection with the Liar and Asher and Kamp (1986) has worked out some details of a parallel solution to the Knower. The principal objection is that strengthened or super versions of the paradoxes tend to reappear when the solution itself is stated.
Since the paradoxical deduction uses only the properties (1)-(3) and since the argument is formally valid, any notion that satisfy these conditions will lead to a paradox. Thus, Grim (1988) notes that this may be read as is known by an omniscient God and concludes that there is no coherent single notion of omniscience. Thomason (1980) observes that with some different conditions, analogous reasoning about belief can lead to paradoxical consequence.
Overall, it looks as if we should conclude that knowledge and truth are ultimately intrinsically stratified concepts. It would seem that wee must simply accept the fact that these (and similar) concepts cannot be assigned of any-one fixed, finite or infinite. Still, the meaning of this idea certainly needs further clarification.
Its paradox arises when a set of apparently incontrovertible premises gives unacceptable or contradictory conclusions, to solve a paradox will involve showing either that there is a hidden flaw in the premises, or that the reasoning is erroneous, or that the apparently unacceptable conclusion can, in fact, be tolerated. Paradoxes are therefore important in philosophy, for until one is solved its shows that there is something about our reasoning and of concepts that we do not understand. Famous families of paradoxes include the semantic paradoxes and Zenos paradoxes. Art the beginning of the 20th century, paradox and other set-theoretical paradoxes led to the complete overhaul of the foundations of set theory, while the Sorites paradox has lead to the investigations of the semantics of vagueness and fuzzy logics.
It is, however, to what extent can analysis be informative? This is the question that gives a riser to what philosophers has traditionally called the paradox of analysis. Thus, consider the following proposition:
(1) To be an instance of knowledge is to be an instance of justified true belief not essentially grounded in any falsehood.
(1) if true, illustrates an important type of philosophical analysis. For convenience of exposition, I will assume (1) is a correct analysis. The paradox arises from the fact that if the concept of justified true belief not been essentially grounded in any falsification is the analysand of the concept of knowledge, it would seem that they are the same concept and hence that:
(2) To be an instance of knowledge is to be as an instance of.
knowledge and would have to be the same propositions as (1). But then how can (1) be informative when (2) is not? This is what is called the first paradox of analysis. Classical writings on analysis suggests a second paradoxical analysis (Moore, 1942).
(3) An analysis of the concept of being a brother is that to be a
brother is to be a male sibling. If (3) is true, it would seem that the concept of being a brother would have to be the same concept as the concept of being a male sibling and tat:
(4) An analysis of the concept of being a brother is that to be a brother is to be a brother
would also have to be true and in fact, would have to be the same proposition as (3?). Yet (3) is true and (4) is false.
Both these paradoxes rest upon the assumptions that analysis is a relation between concepts, than one involving entity of other sorts, such as linguistic expressions, and tat in a true analysis, analysand and analysandum are the same concept. Both these assumptions are explicit in Moore, but some of Moores remarks hint at a solution to that of another statement of an analysis is a statement partly about the concept involved and partly about the verbal expressions used to express it. He says he thinks a solution of this sort is bound to be right, but fails to suggest one because he cannot see a way in which the analysis can be even partly about the expression (Moore, 1942).
Elsewhere, of such ways, as a solution to the second paradox, to which is explicating (3) as: (5) An analysis is given by saying that the verbal expression χ is a brother, expresses the same concept as is expressed by the conjunction of the verbal expressions χ is male, when used to express the concept of being male and χ is a sibling, when used to express the concept of being a sibling. (Ackerman, 1990).
An important point about (5) is as follows. Stripped of its philosophical jargon (analysis, concept, χ is a . . . ), (5) seems to state the sort of information generally stated in a definition of the verbal expression brother in terms of the verbal expressions male and sibling, where this definition is designed to draw upon listeners antecedent understanding of the verbal expression male and sibling, and thus, to tell listeners what the verbal expression brother really means, instead of merely providing the information that two verbal expressions are synonymous without specifying the meaning of either one. Thus, its solution to the second paradox seems to make the sort of analysis tat gives rise to this paradox matter of specifying the meaning of a verbal expression in terms of separate verbal expressions already understood and saying how the meanings of these separate, already-understood verbal expressions are combined. This corresponds to Moores intuitive requirement that an analysis should both specify the constituent concepts of the analysandum and tell how they are combined, but is this all there is to philosophical analysis?
To answer this question, we must note that, in addition too there being two paradoxes of analysis, there is two types of analyses that are relevant here. (There are also other types of analysis, such as reformatory analysis, where the analysand are intended to improve on and replace the analysandum. But since reformatory analysis involves no commitment to conceptual identity between analysand and analysandum, reformatory analysis does not generate a paradox of analysis and so will not concern us here.) One way to recognize the difference between the two types of analysis concerning us here is to focus on the difference between the two paradoxes. This can be done by means of the Frége-inspired sense-individuation condition, which is the condition that two expressions have the same sense if and only if they can be interchangeably salva veritate whenever used in propositional attitude context. If the expressions for the analysands and the analysandum in (1) met this condition, (1) and (2) would not raise the first paradox, but the second paradox arises regardless of whether the expression for the analysand and the analysandum meet this condition. The second paradox is a matter of the failure of such expressions to be interchangeable salva veritate in sentences involving such contexts as an analysis is given thereof. Thus, a solution (such as the one offered) that is aimed only at such contexts can solve the second paradox. This is clearly false for the first paradox, however, which will apply to all pairs of propositions expressed by sentences in which expressions for pairs of analysands and analysantia raising the first paradox is interchangeable.
At this point, we display attributes to the theory of experience, as it is not possible to define in an illuminating way, however, we know what experiences are through acquaintances with some of our own, e.g., visual experiences of as afterimage, a feeling of physical nausea or a tactile experience of an abrasive surface (which might be caused by an actual surface -rough or smooth, or which might be part of a dream, or the product of a vivid sensory imagination). The essential feature of experience is it feels a certain way -that there is something that it is like to have it. We may refer to this feature of an experience as its character.
Another core feature of the sorts of experience with which this may be of a concern, is that they have representational content. (Unless otherwise indicated, experience will be reserved for their contentual representations.) The most obvious cases of experiences with content are sense experiences of the kind normally involved in perception. We may describe such experiences by mentioning their sensory modalities ad their contents, e.g., a gustatory experience (modality) of chocolate ice cream (content), but do so more commonly by means of perceptual verbs combined with noun phrases specifying their contents, as in Macbeth saw a dagger. This is, however, ambiguous between the perceptual claim There was a (material) dagger in the world that Macbeth perceived visually and Macbeth had a visual experience of a dagger (the reading with which we are concerned, as it is afforded by our imagination, or perhaps, experiencing mentally hallucinogenic imagery).
As in the case of other mental states and events with content, it is important to distinguish between the properties that and experience represents and the properties that it possesses. To talk of the representational properties of an experience is to say something about its content, not to attribute those properties to the experience itself. Like every other experience, a visual; experience of a non-shaped square, of which is a mental event, and it is therefore not itself either irregular or is it square, even though it represents those properties. It is, perhaps, fleeting, pleasant or unusual, even though it does not represent those properties. An experience may represent a property that it possesses, and it may even do so in virtue of a rapidly changing (complex) experience representing something as changing rapidly. However, this is the exception and not the rule.
Which properties can be [directly] represented in sense experience is subject to debate. Traditionalists include only properties whose presence could not be doubted by a subject having appropriate experiences, e.g., colour and shape in the case of visual experience, and apparent shape, surface texture, hardness, etc., in the case of tactile experience. This view is natural to anyone who has an egocentric, Cartesian perspective in epistemology, and who wishes for pure data in experiences to serve as logically certain foundations for knowledge, especially to the immediate objects of perceptual awareness in or of sense-data, such categorized of colour patches and shapes, which are usually supposed distinct from surfaces of physical objectivity. Qualities of sense-data are supposed to be distinct from physical qualities because their perception is more relative to conditions, more certain, and more immediate, and because sense-data is private and cannot appear other than they are they are objects that change in our perceptual field when conditions of perception change. Physical objects remain constant.
Others who do not think that this wish can be satisfied, and who are more impressed with the role of experience in providing animisms with ecologically significant information about the world around them, claim that sense experiences represent properties, characteristic and kinds that are much richer and much more wide-ranging than the traditional sensory qualities. We do not see only colours and shapes, they tell us, but also earth, water, men, women and fire: We do not smell only odours, but also food and filth. There is no space here to examine the factors relevantly responsible to their choice of situational alternatives. Yet, this suggests that character and content are not really distinct, and there is a close tie between them. For one thing, the relative complexity of the character of sense experience places limitations upon its possible content, e.g., a tactile experience of something touching ones left ear is just too simple to carry the same amount of content as typically convincing to an every day, visual experience. Moreover, the content of a sense experience of a given character depends on the normal causes of appropriately similar experiences, e.g., the sort of gustatory experience that we have when eating chocolate would be not represented as chocolate unless it was normally caused by chocolate. Granting a contingent ties between the character of an experience and its possible causal origins, once, again follows that its possible content is limited by its character.
Character and content are nonetheless irreducibly different, for the following reasons. (1) There are experiences that completely lack content, e.g., certain bodily pleasures. (2) Not every aspect of the character of an experience with content is relevant to that content, e.g., the unpleasantness of an aural experience of chalk squeaking on a board may have no representational significance. (3) Experiences in different modalities may overlap in content without a parallel overlap in character, e.g., visual and tactile experiences of circularity feel completely different. (4) The content of an experience with a given character may vary according to the background of the subject, e.g., a certain content singing bird only after the subject has learned something about birds.
According to the act/object analysis of experience (which is a special case of the act/object analysis of consciousness), every experience involves an object of experience even if it has no material object. Two main lines of argument may be offered in support of this view, one phenomenological and the other semantic.
In an outline, the phenomenological argument is as follows. Whenever we have an experience, even if nothing beyond the experience answers to it, we seem to be presented with something through the experience (which is itself diaphanous). The object of the experience is whatever is so presented to us-is that it is an individual thing, an event, or a state of affairs.
The semantic argument is that objects of experience are required in order to make sense of certain features of our talk about experience, including, in particular, the following. (i) Simple attributions of experience, e.g., Rod is experiencing an oddity that is not really square but in appearance it seems more than likely a square, this seems to be relational. (ii) We appear to refer to objects of experience and to attribute properties to them, e.g., The after-image that John experienced was certainly odd. (iii) We appear to quantify ov er objects of experience, e.g., Macbeth saw something that his wife did not see.
The act/object analysis faces several problems concerning the status of objects of experiences. Currently the most common view is that they are sense-data - private mental entities that actually posses the traditional sensory qualities represented by the experiences of which they are the objects. But the very idea of an essentially private entity is suspect. Moreover, since an experience may apparently represent something as having a determinable property, e.g., redness, without representing it as having any subordinate determinate property, e.g., any specific shade of red, a sense-datum may actually have a determinate property subordinate to it. Even more disturbing is that sense-data may have contradictory properties, since experiences can have contradictory contents. A case in point is the waterfall illusion: If you stare at a waterfall for a minute and then immediately fixate on a nearby rock, you are likely to have an experience of the rocks moving upward while it remains in the same place. The sense-data theorist must either deny that there are such experiences or admit contradictory objects.
These problems can be avoided by treating objects of experience as properties. This, however, fails to do justice to the appearances, for experience seems not to present us with properties embodied in individuals. The view that objects of experience is Meinongian objects accommodate this point. It is also attractive in as far as (1) it allows experiences to represent properties other than traditional sensory qualities, and (2) it allows for the identification of objects of experience and objects of perception in the case of experiences that constitute perception.
According to the act/object analysis of experience, every experience with content involves an object of experience to which the subject is related by an act of awareness (the event of experiencing that object). This is meant to apply not only to perceptions, which have material objects (whatever is perceived), but also to experiences like hallucinations and dream experiences, which do not. Such experiences none the less appear to represent something, and their objects are supposed to be whatever it is that they represent. Act/object theorists may differ on the nature of objects of experience, which have been treated as properties. Meinongian objects (which may not exist or have any form of being), and, more commonly private mental entities with sensory qualities. (The term sense-data is now usually applied to the latter, but has also been used as a general term for objects of sense experiences, as in the work of G. E. Moore) Act/object theorists may also differ on the relationship between objects of experience and objects of perception. In terms of perception (of which we are indirectly aware) are always distinct from objects of experience (of which we are directly aware). Meinongian, however, may treat objects of perception as existing objects of experience. But sense-datum theorists must either deny that there are such experiences or admit contradictory objects. Still, most philosophers will feel that the Meinongians acceptance of impossible objects is too high a price to pay for these benefits.
A general problem for the act/object analysis is that the question of whether two subjects are experiencing one and the same thing (as opposed to having exactly similar experiences) appears to have an answer only on the assumption that the experiences concerned are perceptions with material objects. But in terms of the act/object analysis the question must have an answer even when this condition is not satisfied. (The answer is always negative on the sense-datum theory; it could be positive on other versions of the act/object analysis, depending on the facts of the case.)
In view of the above problems, the case for the act/object analysis should be reassessed. The phenomenological argument is not, on reflection, convincing, for it is easy enough to grant that any experience appears to present us with an object without accepting that it actually does. The semantic argument is more impressive, but is none the less answerable. The seemingly relational structure of attributions of experience is a challenge dealt with below in connection with the adverbial theory. Apparent reference to and quantification over objects of experience can be handled by analysing them as reference to experiences themselves and quantification over experiences tacitly typed according to content. Thus, The after-image that John experienced was colourfully appealing becomes Johns after-image experience was an experience of colour, and Macbeth saw something that his wife did not see becomes Macbeth had a visual experience that his wife did not have.
Pure cognitivism attempts to avoid the problems facing the act/object analysis by reducing experiences to cognitive events or associated disposition, e.g., Susys experience of a rough surface beneath her hand might be identified with the event of her acquiring the belief that there is a rough surface beneath her hand, or, if she does not acquire this belief, with a disposition to acquire it that has somehow been blocked.
This position has attractions. It does full justice to the cognitive contents of experience, and to the important role of experience as a source of belief acquisition. It would also help clear the way for a naturalistic theory of mind, since there seems to be some prospect of a physicalist/functionalist account of belief and other intentional states. But pure cognitivism is completely undermined by its failure to accommodate the fact that experiences have a felt character that cannot be reduced to their content, as aforementioned.
The adverbial theory is an attempt to undermine the act/object analysis by suggesting a semantic account of attributions of experience that does not require objects of experience. Unfortunately, the oddities of explicit adverbializations of such statements have driven off potential supporters of the theory. Furthermore, the theory remains largely undeveloped, and attempted refutations have traded on this. It may, however, be founded on sound basis intuitions, and there is reason to believe that an effective development of the theory (which is merely hinting at) is possible.
The relevant intuitions are (1) that when we say that someone is experiencing an A, or has an experience of an A, we are using this content-expression to specify the type of thing that the experience is especially apt to fit, (2) that doing this is a matter of saying something about the experience itself (and maybe about the normal causes of like experiences), and (3) that it is no-good of reasons to posit of its position to presuppose that of any involvements, is that its descriptions of an object in which the experience is. Thus the effective role of the content-expression in a statement of experience is to modify the verb it compliments, not to introduce a special type of object.
Modern approaches to perception tend to reject any conception of the eye as a camera or lense, simply responsible for producing private images, and stress the active life of the subject in and of the world, as the determinant of experience.
Nevertheless, the argument from illusion is of itself the usually intended directive to establish that certain familiar facts about illusion disprove the theory of perception called naïevity or direct realism. There are, however, many different versions of the argument that must be distinguished carefully. Some of these distinctions centre on the content of the premises (the nature of the appeal to illusion); others centre on the interpretation of the conclusion (the kind of direct realism under attack). Let us set about by distinguishing the importantly different versions of direct realism which one might take to be vulnerable to familiar facts about the possibility of perceptual illusion.
A crude statement of direct realism might go as follows. In perception, we sometimes directly perceive physical objects and their properties, we do not always perceive physical objects by perceiving something else, e.g., a sense-datum. There are, however, difficulties with this formulation of the view, as for one thing a great many philosophers who are not direct realists would admit that it is a mistake to describe people as actually perceiving something other than a physical object. In particular, such philosophers might admit, we should never say that we perceive sense-data. To talk that way would be to suppose that we should model our understanding of our relationship to sense-data on our understanding of the ordinary use of perceptual verbs as they describe our relation to and of the physical world, and that is the last thing paradigm sense-datum theorists should want. At least, many of the philosophers who objected to direct realism would prefer to express in what they were of objecting too in terms of a technical (and philosophically controversial) concept such as acquaintance. Using such a notion, we could define direct realism this way: In veridical experience we are directly acquainted with parts, e.g., surfaces, or constituents of physical objects. A less cautious venison of the view might drop the reference to veridical experience and claim simply that in all experience we are directly acquainted with parts or constituents of physical objects. The expressions knowledge by acquaintance and knowledge by description, and the distinction they mark between knowing things and knowing about things, are generally associated with Bertrand Russell (1872-1970), that scientific philosophy required analysing many objects of belief as logical constructions or logical fictions, and the programme of analysis that this inaugurated dominated the subsequent philosophy of logical atomism, and then of other philosophers, Russells The Analysis of Mind, the mind itself is treated in a fashion reminiscent of Hume, as no more than the collection of neutral perceptions or sense-data that make up the flux of conscious experience, and that looked at another way that also was to make up the external world (neutral monism), but An Inquiry into Meaning and Truth (1940) represents a more empirical approach to the problem. Yet, philosophers have perennially investigated this and related distinctions using varying terminology.
Distinction in our ways of knowing things, highlighted by Russell and forming a central element in his philosophy after the discovery of the theory of definite descriptions. A thing is known by acquaintance when there is direct experience of it. It is known by description if it can only be described as a thing with such-and-such properties. In everyday parlance, I might know my spouse and children by acquaintance, but know someone as the first person born at sea only by description. However, for a variety of reasons Russell shrinks the area of things that can be known by acquaintance until eventually only current experience, perhaps my own self, and certain universals or meanings qualify anything else is known only as the thing that has such-and-such qualities.
Because one can interpret the relation of acquaintance or awareness as one that is not epistemic, i.e., not a kind of propositional knowledge, it is important to distinguish the above aforementioned views read as ontological theses from a view one might call epistemological direct realism? In perception we are, on at least some occasions, non-inferentially justified in believing a proposition asserting the existence of a physical object. Since it is that these objects exist independently of any mind that might perceive them, and so it thereby rules out all forms of idealism and phenomenalism, which hold that there are no such independently existing objects. Its being to direct realism rules out those views defended under the cubic of critical naive realism, or representational realism, in which there is some non-physical intermediary -usually called a sense-datum or a sense impression -that must first be perceived or experienced in order to perceive the object that exists independently of this perception. Often the distinction between direct realism and other theories of perception is explained more fully in terms of what is immediately perceived, than mediately perceived. What relevance does illusion have for these two forms of direct realism?
The fundamental premise of the arguments is from illusion seems to be the theses that things can appear to be other than they are. Thus, for example, straight sticks when immerged in water looks bent, a penny when viewed from certain perspective appears as an illusory spatial elliptic circularity, when something that is yellow when place under red fluorescent light looks red. In all of these cases, one version of the argument goes, it is implausible to maintain that what we are directly acquainted with is the real nature of the object in question. Indeed, it is hard to see how we can be said to be aware of the really physical object at all. In the above illusions the things we were aware of actually were bent, elliptical and red, respectively. But, by hypothesis, the really physical objects lacked these properties. Thus, we were not aware of the substantial reality of been real as a physical objects or theory.
So far, if the argument is relevant to any of the direct realises distinguished above, it seems relevant only to the claim that in all sense experience we are directly acquainted with parts or constituents of physical objects. After all, even if in illusion we are not acquainted with physical objects, but their surfaces, or their constituents, why should we conclude anything about the hidden nature of our relations to the physical world in veridical experience?
We are supposed to discover the answer to this question by noticing the similarities between illusory experience and veridical experience and by reflecting on what makes illusion possible at all. Illusion can occur because the nature of the illusory experience is determined, not just by the nature of the object perceived, but also by other conditions, both external and internal as becoming of an inner or as the outer experience. But all of our sensations are subject to these causal influences and it would be gratuitous and arbitrary to select from indefinitely of many and subtly different perceptual experiences some special ones those that get us in touch with the real nature of the physical world and its surrounding surfaces. Red fluorescent light affects the way things look, but so does sunlight. Water reflects light, but so does air. We have no unmediated access to the external world.
At this point, its may prove as an alternative, in that it might be profitable to move our considerations to those of that have the possibility of considering the possibility of hallucination. Instead of comparing paradigmatic veridical perception with illusion, let us compare it with complete hallucination. For any experiences or sequence of experiences we take to be veridical, we can imagine qualitatively indistinguishable experiences occurring as part of a hallucination. For those who like their philosophical arguments spiced with a touch of science, we can imagine that our brains were surreptitiously removed in the night, and unbeknown to us are being stimulated by a neurophysiologist so as to produce the very sensations that we would normally associate with a trip to the Grand Canyon. Currently permit us into appealing of what we are aware of in this complete hallucination that is obvious that we are not awaken to the sparking awareness of physical objects, their surfaces, or their constituents. Nor can we even construe the experience as one of an objects appearing to us in a certain way. It is after all a complete hallucination and the objects we take to exist before us are simply not there. But if we compare hallucinatory experience with the qualitatively indistinguishable veridical experiences, should we most conclude that it would be special to suppose that in veridical experience we are aware of something radically different from what we are aware of in hallucinatory experience? Again, it might help to reflect on our belief that the immediate cause of hallucinatory experience and veridical experience might be the very same brain event, and it is surely implausible to suppose that the effects of this same cause are radically different -acquaintance with physical objects in the case of veridical experience: Something else in the case of hallucinatory experience.
This version of the argument from hallucination would seem to address straightforwardly the ontological versions of direct realism. The argument is supposed to convince us that the ontological analysis of sensation in both veridical and hallucinatory experience should give us the same results, but in the hallucinatory case there is no plausible physical object, constituent of a physical object, or surface of a physical object with which additional premiss we would also get an argument against epistemological direct realism. That premiss is that in a vivid hallucinatory experience we might have precisely the same justification for believing (falsely) what we do about the physical world as we do in the analogous, phenomenological indistinguishable, veridical experience. But our justification for believing that there is a table before us in the course of a vivid hallucination of a table are surely not non-inferential in character. It certainly is not, if non-inferential justifications are supposedly a consist but yet an unproblematic access to the fact that makes true our belief -by hypothesis the table does not exist. But if the justification that hallucinatory experiences give us the same as the justification we get from the parallel veridical experience, then we should not describe a veridical experience as giving us non-inferential justification for believing in the existence of physical objects. In both cases we should say that we believe what we do about the physical world on the basis of what we know directly about the character of our experience.
In this brief space, I can only sketch some of the objections that might be raised against arguments from illusion and hallucination. That being said, let us begin with a criticism that accepts most of the presuppositions of the arguments. Even if the possibility of hallucination establishes that in some experience we are not acquainted with constituents of physical objects, it is not clear that it establishes that we are never acquainted with a constituent of physical objects. Suppose, for example, that we decide that in both veridical and hallucinatory experience we are acquainted with sense-data. At least some philosophers have tried to identify physical objects with bundles of actual and possible sense-data.
To establish inductively that sensations are signs of physical objects one would have to observe a correlation between the occurrence of certain sensations and the existence of certain physical objects. But to observe such a correlation in order to establish a connection, one would need independent access to physical objects and, by hypothesis, this one cannot have. If one further adopts the verificationists stance that the ability to comprehend is parasitic on the ability to confirm, one can easily be driven to Humes conclusion:
Let us chance our imagination to the heavens, or to the utmost limits of the universe, we never really advance a step beyond ourselves, nor can conceivable any kind of existence, but those perceptions, which have appear̀d in that narrow compass. This is the universe of the imagination, nor have we have any idea but what is there Reduced. (Hume, 1739-40, pp. 67-8).
If one reaches such a conclusion but wants to maintain the intelligibility and verifiability of the assertion about the physical world, one can go either the idealistic or the phenomenalistic route.
However, hallucinatory experiences on this view is non-veridical precisely because the sense-data one is acquainted with in hallucination do not bear the appropriate relations to other actual and possible sense-data. But if such a view were plausible one could agree that one is acquainted with the same kind of a thing in veridical and non-veridical experience but insists that there is still a sense in which in veridical experience one is acquainted with constituents of a physical object?
Once one abandons epistemological; direct realises, but one has an uphill battle indicating how one can legitimately make the inferences from sensation to physical objects. But philosophers who appeal to the existence of illusion and hallucination to develop an argument for scepticism can be accused of having an epistemically self-defeating argument. One could justifiably infer sceptical conclusions from the existence of illusion and hallucination only if one justifiably believed that such experiences exist, but if one is justified in believing that illusion exists, one must be justified in believing at least, some facts about the physical world (for example, that straight sticks look bent in water). The key point to stress in relying to such arguments is, that strictly speaking, the philosophers in question need only appeal to the possibility of a vivid illusion and hallucination. Although it would have been psychologically more difficult to come up with arguments from illusion and hallucination if we did not believe that we actually had such experiences, I take it that most philosophers would argue that the possibility of such experiences is enough to establish difficulties with direct realism. Indeed, if one looks carefully at the argument from hallucination discussed earlier, one sees that it nowhere makes any claims about actual cases of hallucinatory experience.
Another reply to the attack on epistemological direct realism focuses on the implausibility of claiming that there is any process of inference wrapped up in our beliefs about the world and its surrounding surfaces. Even if it is possible to give a phenomenological description of the subjective character of sensation, it requires a special sort of skill that most people lack. Our perceptual beliefs about the physical world are surely direct, at least in the sense that they are unmediated by any sort of conscious inference from premisses describing something other than a physical object. The appropriate reply to this objection, however, is simply to acknowledge the relevant phenomenological fact and point out that from the perceptive of epistemologically direct realism, the philosopher is attacking a claim about the nature of our justification for believing propositions about the physical world. Such philosophers need carry out of any comment at all about the causal genesis of such beliefs.
As mentioned that proponents of the argument from illusion and hallucination have often intended it to establish the existence of sense-data, and many philosophers have attacked the so-called sense-datum inference presupposed in some statements of the argument. When the stick looked bent, the penny looked elliptical and the yellow object looked red, the sense-datum theorist wanted to infer that there was something bent, elliptical and red, respectively. But such an inference is surely suspect. Usually, we do not infer that because something appears to have a certain property, that affairs that affecting something that has that property. When in saying that Jones looks like a doctor, I surely would not want anyone to infer that there must actually be someone there who is a doctor. In assessing this objection, it will be important to distinguish different uses words like appears and looks. At least, sometimes to say that something looks F way and the sense-datum inference from an F appearance in this sense to an actual F would be hopeless. However, it also seems that we use the appears/looks terminology to describe the phenomenological character of our experience and the inference might be more plausible when the terms are used this way. Still, it does seem that the arguments from illusion and hallucination will not by themselves constitute strong evidence for sense-datum theory. Even if one concludes that there is something common to both the hallucination of a red thing and a veridical visual experience of a red thing, one need not describe a common constituent as awarenesses of something red. The adverbial theorist would prefer to construe the common experiential state as being appeared too redly, a technical description intended only to convey the idea that the state in question need not be analysed as relational in character. Those who opt for an adverbial theory of sensation need to make good the claim that their artificial adverbs can be given a sense that is not parasitic upon an understanding of the adjectives transformed into verbs. Still, other philosophers might try to reduce the common element in veridical and non-veridical experience to some kind of intentional state. More like belief or judgement. The idea here is that the only thing common to the two experiences is the fact that in both I spontaneously takes there to be present an object of a certain kind.
The selfsame objections can be started within the general framework presupposed by proponents of the arguments from illusion and hallucination. A great many contemporary philosophers, however, uncomfortable with the intelligibility of the concepts needed to make sense of the theories attacked even. Thus, at least, some who object to the argument from illusion do so not because they defend direct realism. Rather they think there is something confused about all this talk of direct awareness or acquaintance. Contemporary Externalists, for example, usually insist that we understand epistemic concepts by appeal: To nomologically connections. On such a view the closest thing to direct knowledge would probably be something by other beliefs. If we understand direct knowledge this way, it is not clar how the phenomena of illusion and hallucination would be relevant to claim that on, at least some occasions our judgements about the physical world are reliably produced by processes that do not take as their input beliefs about something else.
The expressions knowledge by acquaintance and knowledge by description, and the distinction they mark between knowing things and knowing about things, are now generally associated with Bertrand Russell. However, John Grote and Hermann von Helmholtz had earlier and independently to mark the same distinction, and William James adopted Grotes terminology in his investigation of the distinction. Philosophers have perennially investigated this and related distinctions using varying terminology. Grote introduced the distinction by noting that natural languages distinguish between these two applications of the notion of knowledge, the one being of the Greek ϒνѾναι, nosene, Kennen, connaître, the other being wissen, savoir (Grote, 1865). On Grotes account, the distinction is a natter of degree, and there are three sorts of dimensions of variability: Epistemic, causal and semantic.
We know things by experiencing them, and knowledge of acquaintance (Russell changed the preposition to by) is epistemically priori to and has a relatively higher degree of epistemic justification than knowledge about things. Indeed, sensation has the one great value of trueness or freedom from mistake.
A thought (using that term broadly, to mean any mental state) constituting knowledge of acquaintance with a thing is more or less causally proximate to sensations caused by that thing, while a thought constituting knowledge about the thing is more or less distant causally, being separated from the thing and experience of it by processes of attention and inference. At the limit, if a thought is maximally of the acquaintance type, it is the first mental state occurring in a perceptual causal chain originating in the object to which the thought refers, i.e., it is a sensation. The things presented to us in sensation and of which we have knowledge of acquaintance include ordinary objects in the external world, such as the sun.
Grote contrasted the imagistic thoughts involved in knowledge of acquaintance with things, with the judgements involved in knowledge about things, suggesting that the latter but not the former are mentally contentual by a specified state of affairs. Elsewhere, however, he suggested that every thought capable of constituting knowledge of or about a thing involves a form, idea, or what we might call contentual propositional content, referring the thought to its object. Whether contentual or not, thoughts constituting knowledge of acquaintance with a thing are relatively indistinct, although this indistinctness does not imply incommunicably. On the other hand, thoughts constituting distinctly, as a result of the application of notice or attention to the confusion or chaos of sensation. Grote did not have an explicit theory on reference, the relation by which a thought is of or about a specific thing. Nor did he explain how thoughts can be more or less indistinct.
Helmholtz held unequivocally that all thoughts capable of constituting knowledge, whether knowledge that has to do with Notions (Wissen) or mere familiarity with phenomena (Kennen), is judgements or, we may say, have conceptual propositional contents. Where Grote saw a difference between distinct and indistinct thoughts, Helmholtz found a difference between precise judgements that are expressible in words and equally precise judgements that, in principle, are not expressible in words, and so are not communicable. James was influenced by Helmholtz and, especially, by Grote. (James, 1975). Taken on the latters terminology, James agreed with Grote that the distinction between knowledge of acquaintance with things and knowledge about things involves a difference in the degree of vagueness or distinctness of thoughts, though he, too, said little to explain how such differences are possible. At one extreme is knowledge of acquaintance with people and things, and with sensations of colour, flavour, spatial extension, temporal duration, effort and perceptible difference, unaccompanied by knowledge about these things. Such pure knowledge of acquaintance is vague and inexplicit. Movement away from this extreme, by a process of notice and analysis, yields a spectrum of less vague, more explicit thoughts constituting knowledge about things.
All the same, the distinction was not merely a relative one for James, as he was more explicit than Grote in not imputing content to every thought capable of constituting knowledge of or about things. At the extreme where a thought constitutes pure knowledge of acquaintance with a thing, there is a complete absence of conceptual propositional content in the thought, which is a sensation, feeling or precept, of which he renders the thought incommunicable. James reasons for positing an absolute discontinuity in between pure cognition and preferable knowledge of acquaintance and knowledge at all about things seem to have been that any theory adequate to the facts about reference must allow that some reference is not conventionally mediated, that conceptually unmediated reference is necessary if there are to be judgements at all about things and, especially, if there are to be judgements about relations between things, and that any theory faithful to the common persons sense of life must allow that some things are directly perceived.
James made a genuine advance over Grote and Helmholtz by analysing the reference relation holding between a thought and of him to specific things of or about which it is knowledge. In fact, he gave two different analyses. On both analyses, a thought constituting knowledge about a thing refers to and is knowledge about a reality, whenever it actually or potentially ends in a thought constituting knowledge of acquaintance with that thing (1975). The two analyses differ in their treatments of knowledge of acquaintance. On Jamess first analysis, reference in both sorts of knowledge is mediated by causal chains. A thought constituting pure knowledge of acquaintances with a thing refers to and is knowledge of whatever reality it directly or indirectly operates on and resembles (1975). The concepts of a thought operating on a thing or terminating in another thought are causal, but where Grote found teleology and final causes. On Jamess later analysis, the reference involved in knowledge of acquaintance with a thing is direct. A thought constituting knowledge of acquaintance with a thing either is that thing, or has that thing as a constituent, and the thing and the experience of it is identical (1975, 1976).
James further agreed with Grote that pure knowledge of acquaintance with things, i.e., sensory experience, is epistemologically priori to knowledge about things. While the epistemic justification involved in knowledge about things rests on the foundation of sensation, all thoughts about things are fallible and their justification is augmented by their mutual coherence. James was unclear about the precise epistemic status of knowledge of acquaintance. At times, thoughts constituting pure knowledge of acquaintance are said to posses absolute veritableness (1890) and the maximal conceivable truth (1975), suggesting that such thoughts are genuinely cognitive and that they provide an infallible epistemic foundation. At other times, such thoughts are said not to bear truth-values, suggesting that knowledge of acquaintance is not genuine knowledge at all, but only a non-cognitive necessary condition of genuine knowledge, knowledge about things (1976). Russell understood James to hold the latter view.
Russell agreed with Grote and James on the following points: First, knowing things involves experiencing them. Second, knowledge of things by acquaintance is epistemically basic and provides an infallible epistemic foundation for knowledge about things. (Like James, Russell vacillated about the epistemic status of knowledge by acquaintance, and it eventually was replaced at the epistemic foundation by the concept of noticing.) Third, knowledge about things is more articulate and explicit than knowledge by acquaintance with things. Fourth, knowledge about things is causally removed from knowledge of things by acquaintance, by processes of reelection, analysis and inference (1911, 1913, 1959).
But, Russell also held that the term experience must not be used uncritically in philosophy, on account of the vague, fluctuating and ambiguous meaning of the term in its ordinary use. The precise concept found by Russell in the nucleus of this uncertain patch of meaning is that of direct occurrent experience of a thing, and he used the term acquaintance to express this relation, though he used that term technically, and not with all its ordinary meaning (1913). Nor did he undertake to give a constitutive analysis of the relation of acquaintance, though he allowed that it may not be unanalysable, and did characterize it as a generic concept. If the use of the term experience is restricted to expressing the determinate core of the concept it ordinarily expresses, then we do not experience ordinary objects in the external world, as we commonly think and as Grote and James held we do. In fact, Russell held, one can be acquainted only with ones sense-data, i.e., particular colours, sounds, etc.), ones occurrent mental states, universals, logical forms, and perhaps, oneself.
Russell agreed with James that knowledge of things by acquaintance is essentially simpler than any knowledge of truths, and logically independent of knowledge of truths (1912, 1929). The mental states involved when one is acquainted with things do not have propositional contents. Russells reasons here seem to have been similar to Jamess. Conceptually unmediated reference to particulars necessary for understanding any proposition mentioning a particular, e.g., 1918-19, and, if scepticism about the external world is to be avoided, some particulars must be directly perceived (1911). Russell vacillated about whether or not the absence of propositional content renders knowledge by acquaintance incommunicable.
Russell agreed with James that different accounts should be given of reference as it occurs in knowledge by acquaintance and in knowledge about things, and that in the former case, reference is direct. But Russell objected on a number of grounds to Jamess causal account of the indirect reference involved in knowledge about things. Russell gave a descriptional rather than a causal analysis of that sort of reference: A thought is about a thing when the content of the thought involves a definite description uniquely satisfied by the thing referred to. Indeed, he preferred to speak of knowledge of things by description, rather than knowledge about things.
Russell advanced beyond Grote and James by explaining how thoughts can be more or less articulate and explicit. If one is acquainted with a complex thing without being aware of or acquainted with its complexity, the knowledge one has by acquaintance with that thing is vague and inexplicit. Reflection and analysis can lead one to distinguish constituent parts of the object of acquaintance and to obtain progressively more comprehensible, explicit, and complete knowledge about it (1913, 1918-19, 1950, 1959).
Apparent facts to be explained about the distinction between knowing things and knowing about things are there. Knowledge about things is essentially propositional knowledge, where the mental states involved refer to specific things. This propositional knowledge can be more or less comprehensive, can be justified inferentially and on the basis of experience, and can be communicated. Knowing things, on the other hand, involves experience of things. This experiential knowledge provides an epistemic basis for knowledge about things, and in some sense is difficult or impossible to communicate, perhaps because it is more or less vague.
If one is unconvinced by James and Russells reasons for holding that experience of and reference work to things that are at least sometimes direct. It may seem preferable to join Helmholtz in asserting that knowing things and knowing about things both involve propositional attitudes. To do so would at least allow one the advantages of unified accounts of the nature of knowledge (propositional knowledge would be fundamental) and of the nature of reference: Indirect reference would be the only kind. The two kinds of knowledge might yet be importantly different if the mental states involved have different sorts of causal origins in the thinkers cognitive faculties, involve different sorts of propositional attitudes, and differ in other constitutive respects relevant to the relative vagueness and communicability of the mental sates.
In any of cases, perhaps most, Foundationalism is a view concerning the structure of the system of justified belief possessed by a given individual. Such a system is divided into foundation and superstructure, so related that beliefs in the latter depend on the former for their justification but not vice versa. However, the view is sometimes stated in terms of the structure of knowledge than of justified belief. If knowledge is true justified belief (plus, perhaps, some further condition), one may think of knowledge as exhibiting a Foundationalist structure by virtue of the justified belief it involves. In any event, the construing doctrine concerning the primary justification is layed the groundwork as affording the efforts of belief, though in feeling more free, we are to acknowledge the knowledgeable infractions that will from time to time be worthy in showing to its recognition.
The first step toward a more explicit statement of the position is to distinguish between mediate (indirect) and immediate (direct) justification of belief. To say that a belief is mediately justified is to any that it s justified by some appropriate relation to other justified beliefs, i.e., by being inferred from other justified beliefs that provide adequate support for it, or, alternatively, by being based on adequate reasons. Thus, if my reason for supposing that you are depressed is that you look listless, speak in an unaccustomedly flat tone of voice, exhibit no interest in things you are usually interested in, etc., then my belief that you are depressed is justified, if, at all, by being adequately supported by my justified belief that you look listless, speak in a flat tone of voice. . . .
A belief is immediately justified, on the other hand, if its justification is of another sort, e.g., if it is justified by being based on experience or if it is self-justified. Thus my belief that you look listless may not be based on anything else I am justified in believing but just on the cay you look to me. And my belief that 2 + 3 = 5 may be justified not because I infer it from something else, I justifiably believe, but simply because it seems obviously true to me.
In these terms we can put the thesis of Foundationalism by saying that all mediately justified beliefs owe their justification, ultimately to immediately justified beliefs. To get a more detailed idea of what this amounts to it will be useful to consider the most important argument for Foundationalism, the regress argument. Consider a mediately justified belief that ‘p’ (we are using lowercase letters as dummies for belief contents). It is, by hypothesis, justified by its relation to one or more other justified beliefs, ‘q’ and ‘r’. Now what justifies each of these, e.g., q? If it too is mediately justified that is because it is related accordingly to one or subsequent extra justified beliefs, e.g., By virtue of what is s justified? If it is mediately justified, the same problem arises at the next stage. To avoid both circularity and an infinite regress, we are forced to suppose that in tracing back this chain we arrive at one or more immediately justified beliefs that stop the regress, since their justification does not depend on any further justified belief.
According to the infinite regress argument for Foundationalism, if every justified belief could be justified only by inferring it from some further justified belief, there would have to be an infinite regress of justifications: Because there can be no such regress, there must be justified beliefs that are not justified by appeal to some further justified belief. Instead, they are non-inferentially or immediately justified, they are basic or foundational, the ground on which all our other justifiable beliefs are to rest.
Variants of this ancient argument have persuaded and continue to persuade many philosophers that the structure of epistemic justification must be foundational. Aristotle recognized that if we are to have knowledge of the conclusion of an argument in the basis of its premisses, we must know the premisses. But if knowledge of a premise always required knowledge of some further proposition, then in order to know the premise we would have to know each proposition in an infinite regress of propositions. Since this is impossible, there must be some propositions that are known, but not by demonstration from further propositions: There must be basic, non-demonstrable knowledge, which grounds the rest of our knowledge.
Foundationalist enthusiasms for regress arguments often overlook the fact that they have also been advanced on behalf of scepticism, relativism, fideisms, conceptualism and Coherentism. Sceptics agree with Foundationalists both that there can be no infinite regress of justifications and that nevertheless, there must be one if every justified belief can be justified only inferentially, by appeal to some further justified belief. But sceptics think all true justification must be inferential in this way -the Foundationalists talk of immediate justification merely overshadows the requiring of any rational justification properly so-called. Sceptics conclude that none of our beliefs is justified. Relativists follow essentially the same pattern of sceptical argument, concluding that our beliefs can only be justified relative to the arbitrary starting assumptions or presuppositions either of an individual or of a form of life.
Regress arguments are not limited to epistemology. In ethics there is Aristotles regress argument (in Nichomachean Ethics) for the existence of a single end of rational action. In metaphysics there is Aquinass regress argument for an unmoved mover: If a mover that it is in motion, there would have to be an infinite sequence of movers each moved by a further mover, since there can be no such sequence, there is an unmoved mover. A related argument has recently been given to show that not every state of affairs can have an explanation or cause of the sort posited by principles of sufficient reason, and such principles are false, for reasons having to do with their own concepts of explanation (Post, 1980; Post, 1987).
The premise of which in presenting Foundationalism as a view concerning the structure that is in fact exhibited by the justified beliefs of a particular person has sometimes been construed in ways that deviate from each of the phrases that are contained in the previous sentence. Thus, it is sometimes taken to characterise the structure of our knowledge or scientific knowledge, rather than the structure of the cognitive system of an individual subject. As for the other phrase, Foundationalism is sometimes thought of as concerned with how knowledge (justified belief) is acquired or built up, than with the structure of what a person finds herself with at a certain point. Thus some people think of scientific inquiry as starting with the recordings of observations (immediately justified observational beliefs), and then inductively inferring generalizations. Again, Foundationalism is sometimes thought of not as a description of the finished product or of the mode of acquisition, but rather as a proposal for how the system could be reconstructed, an indication of how it could all be built up from immediately justified foundations. This last would seem to be the kind of Foundationalism we find in Descartes. However, Foundationalism is most usually thought of in contemporary Anglo-American epistemology as an account of the structure actually exhibited by an individuals system of justified belief.
It should also be noted that the term is used with a deplorable looseness in contemporary, literary circles, even in certain corners of the philosophical world, to refer to anything from realism -the view that reality has a definite constitution regardless of how we think of it or what we believe about it to various kinds of absolutism in ethics, politics, or wherever, and even to the truism that truth is stable (if a proposition is true, it stays true).
Since Foundationalism holds that all mediate justification rests on immediately justified beliefs, we may divide variations in forms of the view into those that have to do with the immediately justified beliefs, the foundations, and those that have to do with the modes of derivation of other beliefs from these, how the superstructure is built up. The most obvious variation of the first sort has to do with what modes of immediate justification are recognized. Many treatments, both pro and con, are parochially restricted to one form of immediate justification self-evidence, self-justification (self-warrant), justification by a direct awareness of what the belief is about, or whatever. It is then unwarrantly assumed by critics that disposing of that one form will dispose of Foundationalism generally (Alston, 1989). The emphasis historically has been on beliefs that simply record what is directly given in experience (Lewis, 1946) and on self-evident propositions (Descartes clear and distinct perceptions and Lockes Perception of the agreement and disagreement of ideas). But self-warrant has also recently received a great deal of attention (Alston 1989), and there is also a reliabilist version according to which a belief can be immediately justified just by being acquired by a reliable belief-forming process that does not take other beliefs as inputs (BonJour, 1985, ch. 3).
Foundationalisms also differ as to what further constraints, if any, are put on foundations. Historically, it has been common to require of the foundations of knowledge that they exhibit certain epistemic immunities, as we might put it, immunity from error, refutation or doubt. Thus Descartes, along with many other seventeenth and eighteenth-century philosophers, took it that any knowledge worthy of the name would be based on cognations the truth of which is guaranteed (infallible), that were maximally stable, immune from ever being shown to be mistaken, as incorrigible, and concerning which no reasonable doubt could be raised (indubitable). Hence the search in the Meditations for a divine guarantee of our faculty of rational intuition. Criticisms of Foundationalism have often been directed at these constraints: Lehrer, 1974, Will, 1974? Both responded to in Alston, 1989. It is important to realize that a position that is Foundationalist in a distinctive sense can be formulated without imposing any such requirements on foundations.
There are various ways of distinguishing types of Foundationalist epistemology by the use of the variations we have been enumerating. Plantinga (1983), has put forwards an influential innovation of criterial Foundationalism, specified in terms of limitations on the foundations. He construes this as a disjunction of ancient and medieval Foundationalism, which takes foundations to comprise what is self-evidently and evident to he senses, and modern Foundationalism that replaces evidently to the senses with incorrigible, which in practice was taken to apply only to beliefs about ones present states of consciousness. Plantinga himself developed this notion in the context of arguing those items outside this territory, in particular certain beliefs about God, could also be immediately justified. A popular recent distinction is between what is variously called strong or extreme Foundationalism and moderate, modest or minimal Foundationalism, with the distinction depending on whether various epistemic immunities are required of foundations. Finally, its distinction is simple and iterative Foundationalism (Alston, 1989), depending on whether it is required of a foundation only that it is immediately justified, or whether it is also required that the higher level belief that the firmer belief is immediately justified is itself immediately justified. Suggesting only that the plausibility of the stronger requirement stems from a level confusion between beliefs on different levels.
The classic opposition is between Foundationalism and Coherentism. Coherentism denies any immediate justification. It deals with the regress argument by rejecting linear chains of justification and, in effect, taking the total system of belief to be epistemically primary. A particular belief is justified yo the extent that it is integrated into a coherent system of belief. More recently into a pragmatist like John Dewey has developed a position known as contextualism, which avoids ascribing any overall structure to knowledge. Questions concerning justification can only arise in particular context, defined in terms of assumptions that are simply taken for granted, though they can be questioned in other contexts, where other assumptions will be privileged.
Foundationalism can be attacked both in its commitment to immediate justification and in its claim that all mediately justified beliefs ultimately depend on the former. Though, it is the latter that is the positions weakest point, most of the critical fire has been detected to the former. As pointed out about much of this criticism has been directly against some particular form of immediate justification, ignoring the possibility of other forms. Thus, much anti-Foundationalist artillery has been directed at the myth of the given. The idea that facts or things are given to consciousness in a pre-conceptual, pre-judgmental mode, and that beliefs can be justified on that basis (Sellars, 1963). The most prominent general argument against immediate justification is a level ascent argument, according to which whatever is taken ti immediately justified a belief that the putative justifier has in supposing to do so. Hence, since the justification of the higher level belief after all (BonJour, 1985). We lack adequate support for any such higher level requirements for justification, and if it were imposed we would be launched on an infinite undergo regress, for a similar requirement would hold equally for the higher level belief that the original justifier was efficacious.
Coherence is a major player in the theatre of knowledge. There are coherence theories of belief, truth, and justification. These combine in various ways to yield theories of knowledge. We will proceed from belief through justification to truth. Coherence theories of belief are concerned with the content of beliefs. Consider a belief you now have, the beliefs that you are reading a page in a book, so what makes that belief the belief that it is? What makes it the belief that you are reading a page in a book than the belief hat you have a monster in the garden?
One answer is that the belief has a coherent place or role in a system of beliefs. Perception has an influence on belief. You respond to sensory stimuli by believing that you are reading a page in a book rather than believing that you have a centaur in the garden. Belief has an influence on action. You will act differently if you believe that you are reading a page than if you believe something about a centaur. Perspicacity and action undermine the content of belief, however, the same stimuli may produce various beliefs and various beliefs may produce the same action. The role that gives the belief the content it has in the role it plays in a network of relations to the beliefs, the role in inference and implications, for example, I refer different things from believing that I am inferring different things from believing that I am reading a page in a book than from any other beliefs, just as I infer that belief from any other belief, just as I infer that belief from different things than I infer other beliefs from.
The input of perception and the output of an action supplement the centre role of the systematic relations the belief has to other beliefs, but it is the systematic relations that give the belief the specific content it has. They are the fundamental source of the content of beliefs. That is how coherence comes in. A belief has the content that it does because of the way in which it coheres within a system of beliefs (Rosenberg, 1988). We might distinguish weak coherence theories of the content of beliefs from strong coherence theories. Weak coherence theories affirm that coherences are one-determinant of the content of belief. Strong coherence theories of the contents of belief affirm that coherence is the sole determinant of the content of belief.
When we turn from belief to justification, we are in confronting a corresponding group of similarities fashioned by their coherences motifs. What makes one belief justified and another not? The answer is the way it coheres with the background system of beliefs. Again, there is a distinction between weak and strong theories of coherence. Weak theories tell us that the way in which a belief coheres with a background system of beliefs is one determinant of justification, other typical determinants being perception, memory and intuition. Strong theories, by contrast, tell us that justification is solely a matter of how a belief coheres with a system of beliefs. There is, however, another distinction that cuts across the distinction between weak and strong coherence theories of justification. It is the distinction between positive and negative coherence theories (Pollock, 1986). A positive coherence theory tells us that if a belief coheres with a background system of belief, then the belief is justified. A negative coherence theory tells us that if a belief fails to cohere with a background system of beliefs, then the belief is not justified. We might put this by saying that, according to a positive coherence theory, coherence has the power to produce justification, while according to a negative coherence theory, coherence has only the power to nullify justification.
A strong coherence theory of justification is a combination of a positive and a negative theory that tells us that a belief is justified if and only if it coheres with a background system of beliefs.
Traditionally, belief has been of epistemological interest in its propositional guise: S believes that p, where p is a proposition toward which an agent, S, exhibits an attitude of acceptance. Not all belief is of this sort. If I trust what you say, I believe you. And someone may believe in Mrs. Thatcher, or in a free-market economy, or in God. It is sometimes supposed that all belief is reducible to propositional belief, belief-that. Thus, my believing you might be thought a matter of my believing, perhaps, that what you say is true, and your belief in free-markets or in God, a matter of your believing that free-market economys are desirable or that God exists.
It is doubtful, however, that non-propositional believing can, in every case, be reduced in this way. Debate on this point has tended to focus on an apparent distinction between belief-that and belief-in, and the application of this distinction to belief in God. Some philosophers have followed Aquinas ©. 1225-74), in supposing that to believe in, and God is simply to believe that certain truths hold: That God exists, that he is benevolent, etc. Others (e.g., Hick, 1957) argue that belief-in is a distinctive attitude, one that includes essentially an element of trust. More commonly, belief-in has been taken to involve a combination of propositional belief together with some further attitude.
H.H. Price (1969) defends the claims that there are different sorts of belief-in, some, but not all, reducible to beliefs-that. If you believe in God, you believe that God exists, that God is good, etc., but, according to Price, your belief involves, in addition, a certain complex pro-attitude toward its object. One might attempt to analyse this further attitude in terms of additional beliefs-that: ‘S’ believes in ‘χ’ just in case (1) ‘S’ believes that χ exists (and perhaps holds further factual beliefs about (χ): (2) ‘S’ believes that ‘χ’ is good or valuable in some respect, and (3) ‘S’ believes that ‘χ’s’ being good or valuable in this respect is itself is a good thing. An analysis of this sort, however, fails adequately to capture the further affective component of belief-in. Thus, according to Price, if you believe in God, your belief is not merely that certain truths hold, you posses, in addition, an attitude of commitment and trust toward God.
Notoriously, belief-in outruns the evidence for the corresponding belief-that. Does this diminish its rationality? If belief-in presupposes belief-that, it might be thought that the evidential standards for the former must be, at least as high as standards for the latter. And any additional pro-attitude might be thought to require a further layer of justification not required for cases of belief-that.
Some philosophers have argued that, at least for cases in which belief-in is synonymous with faith (or faith-in), evidential thresholds for constituent propositional beliefs are diminished. You may reasonably have faith in God or Mrs. Thatcher, even though beliefs about their respective attitudes, were you to harbour them, would be evidentially substandard.
Belief-in may be, in general, less susceptible to alternations in the face of unfavourable evidence than belief-that. A believer who encounters evidence against Gods existence may remain unshaken in his belief, in part because the evidence does not bear on his pro-attitude. So long as this is united with his belief that God exists, the belief may survive epistemic buffeting-and reasonably so in a way that an ordinary propositional belief-that would not.
At least two large sets of questions are properly treated under the heading of epistemological religious beliefs. First, there is a set of broadly theological questions about the relationship between faith and reason, between what one knows by way of reason, broadly construed, and what one knows by way of faith. These theological questions may as we call theological, because, of course, one will find them of interest only if one thinks that in fact there is such a thing as faith, and that we do know something by way of it. Secondly, there is a whole set of questions having to do with whether and to what degree religious beliefs have warrant, or justification, or positive epistemic status. The second, is seemingly as an important set of a theological question is yet spoken of faith.
Epistemology, so we are told, is theory of knowledge: Its aim is to discern and explain that quality or quantity enough of which distinguishes knowledge from mere true belief. We need a name for this quality or quantity, whatever precisely it is, call it warrant. From this point of view, the epistemology of religious belief should centre on the question whether religious belief has warrant, an if it does, hoe much it has and how it gets it. As a matter of fact, however, epistemological discussion of religious belief, at least since the Enlightenment (and in the Western world, especially the English-speaking Western world) has tended to focus, not on the question whether religious belief has warrant, but whether it is justified. More precisely, it has tended to focus on the question whether those properties enjoyed by theistic belief -the belief that there exists a person like the God of traditional Christianity, Judaism and Islam: An almighty Law Maker, or an all-knowing and most wholly benevolent and a loving spiritual person who has created the living world. The chief question, therefore, has ben whether theistic belief is justified, the same question is often put by asking whether theistic belief is rational or rationally acceptable. Still further, the typical way of addressing this question has been by way of discussing arguments for or and against the existence of God. On the pro side, there are the traditional theistic proofs or arguments: The ontological, cosmological and teleological arguments, using Kants terms for them. On the other side, the anti-theistic side, the principal argument is the argument from evil, the argument that is not possible or at least probable that there be such a person as God, given all the pain, suffering and evil the world displays. This argument is flanked by subsidiary arguments, such as the claim that the very concept of God is incoherent, because, for example, it is impossible that there are the people without a body, and Freudian and Marxist claims that religious belief arises out of a sort of magnification and projection into the heavens of human attributes we think important.
But why has discussion centred on justification rather than warrant? And precisely what is justification? And why has the discussion of justification of theistic belief focussed so heavily on arguments for and against the existence of God?
As to the first question, we can see why once we see that the dominant epistemological tradition in modern Western philosophy has tended to identify warrant with justification. On this way of looking at the matter, warrant, that which distinguishes knowledge from mere true belief, just is justification. Belief theory of knowledge-the theory according to which knowledge is justified true belief has enjoyed the status of orthodoxy. According to this view, knowledge is justified truer belief, therefore any of your beliefs have warrant for you if and only if you are justified in holding it.
But what is justification? What is it to be justified in holding a belief? To get a proper sense of the answer, we must turn to those twin towers of western epistemology. René Descartes and especially, John Locke. The first thing to see is that according to Descartes and Locke, there are epistemic or intellectual duties, or obligations, or requirements. Thus, Locke:
Faith is nothing but a firm assent of the mind, which if it is regulated, A is our duty, cannot be afforded to anything, but upon good reason: And cannot be opposite to it, he that believes, without having any reason for believing, may be in love with his own fanciers: But, neither seeks truth as he ought, nor pats the obedience due his maker, which would have him use those discerning faculties he has given him: To keep him out of mistake and error. He that does this to the best of his power, however, he sometimes lights on truth, is in the right but by chance: And I know not whether the luckiest of the accidents will excuse the irregularity of his proceeding. This, at least is certain, that he must be accountable for whatever mistakes he runs into: Whereas, he that makes use of the light and faculties God has given him, by seeks sincerely to discover truth, by those helps and abilities he has, may have this satisfaction in doing his duty as rational creature, that though he should miss truth, he will not miss the reward of it. For he governs his assent right, and places it as he should, who in any case or matter whatsoever, believes or disbelieves, according as reason directs him. He manages otherwise, transgresses against his own light, and misuses those faculties, which were given him . . . (Essays 4.17.24).
Rational creatures, creatures with reason, creatures capable of believing propositions (and of disbelieving and being agnostic with respect to them), say Locke, have duties and obligation with respect to the regulation of their belief or assent. Now the central core of the notion of justification(as the etymology of the term indicates) this: One is justified in doing something or in believing a certain way, if in doing one is innocent of wrong doing and hence not properly subject to blame or censure. You are justified, therefore, if you have violated no duties or obligations, if you have conformed to the relevant requirements, if you are within your rights. To be justified in believing something, then, is to be within your rights in so believing, to be flouting no duty, to be to satisfy your epistemic duties and obligations. This way of thinking of justification has been the dominant way of thinking about justification: And this way of thinking has many important contemporary representatives. Roderick Chisholm, for example (as distinguished an epistemologist as the twentieth century can boast), in his earlier work explicitly explains justification in terms of epistemic duty (Chisholm, 1977).
The (or, a) main epistemological; questions about religious believe, therefore, has been the question whether or not religious belief in general and theistic belief in particular is justified. And the traditional way to answer that question has been to inquire into the arguments for and against theism. Why this emphasis upon these arguments? An argument is a way of marshalling your propositional evidence-the evidence from other such propositions as likens to believe-for or against a given proposition. And the reason for the emphasis upon argument is the assumption that theistic belief is justified if and only if there is sufficient propositional evidence for it. If there is not much by way of propositional evidence for theism, then you are not justified in accepting it. Moreover, if you accept theistic belief without having propositional evidence for it, then you are ging contrary to epistemic duty and are therefore unjustified in accepting it. Thus, W.K. William James, trumpets that it is wrong, always everything upon insufficient evidence, his is only the most strident in a vast chorus of only insisting that there is an intellectual duty not to believe in God unless you have propositional evidence for that belief. A few others in the choir: Sigmund Freud, Brand Blanshard, H.H. Price, Bertrand Russell and Michael Scriven.)
Now how it is that the justification of theistic belief gets identified with there being propositional evidence for it? Justification is a matter of being blameless, of having done ones duty (in this context, ones epistemic duty): What, precisely, has this to do with having propositional evidence?
The answer, once, again, is to be found in Descartes especially Locke. As, justification is the property your beliefs have when, in forming and holding them, you conform to your epistemic duties and obligations. But according to Locke, a central epistemic duty is this: To believe a proposition only to the degree that it is probable with respect to what is certain for you. What propositions are certain for you? First, according to Descartes and Locke, propositions about your own immediate experience, that you have a mild headache, or that it seems to you that you see something red: And second, propositions that are self-evident for you, necessarily true propositions so obvious that you cannot so much as entertain them without seeing that they must be true. (Examples would be simple arithmetical and logical propositions, together with such propositions as that the whole is at least as large as the parts, that red is a colour, and that whatever exists has properties.) Propositions of these two sorts are certain for you, as fort other prepositions. You are justified in believing if and only if when one and only to the degree to which it is probable with respect to what is certain for you. According to Locke, therefore, and according to the whole modern Foundationalist tradition initiated by Locke and Descartes (a tradition that until has recently dominated Western thinking about these topics) there is a duty not to accept a proposition unless it is certain or probable with respect to what is certain.
In the present context, therefore, the central Lockean assumption is that there is an epistemic duty not to accept theistic belief unless it is probable with respect to what is certain for you: As a consequence, theistic belief is justified only if the existence of God is probable with respect to what is certain. Locke does not argue for his proposition, he simply announces it, and epistemological discussion of theistic belief has for the most part followed hin ion making this assumption. This enables us to see why epistemological discussion of theistic belief has tended to focus on the arguments for and against theism: On the view in question, theistic belief is justified only if it is probable with respect to what is certain, and the way to show that it is probable with respect to what it is certain are to give arguments for it from premises that are certain or, are sufficiently probable with respect to what is certain.
There are at least three important problems with this approach to the epistemology of theistic belief. First, there standards for theistic arguments have traditionally been set absurdly high (and perhaps, part of the responsibility for this must be laid as the door of some who have offered these arguments and claimed that they constitute wholly demonstrative proofs). The idea seems to test. a good theistic argument must start from what is self-evident and proceed majestically by way of self-evidently valid argument forms to its conclusion. It is no wonder that few if any theistic arguments meet that lofty standard -particularly, in view of the fact that almost no philosophical arguments of any sort meet it. (Think of your favourite philosophical argument: Does it really start from premisses that are self-evident and move by ways of self-evident argument forms to its conclusion?)
Secondly, attention has ben mostly confined to three theistic arguments: The traditional arguments, cosmological and teleological arguments, but in fact, there are many more good arguments: Arguments from the nature of proper function, and from the nature of propositions, numbers and sets. These are arguments from intentionality, from counterfactual, from the confluence of epistemic reliability with epistemic justification, from reference, simplicity, intuition and love. There are arguments from colours and flavours, from miracles, play and enjoyment, morality, from beauty and from the meaning of life. This is even a theistic argument from the existence of evil.
But there are a third and deeper problems here. The basic assumption is that theistic belief is justified only if it is or can be shown to be probable with respect to many a body of evidence or proposition - perhaps, those that are self-evident or about ones own mental life, but is this assumption true? The idea is that theistic belief is very much like a scientific hypothesis: It is acceptable if and only if there is an appropriate balance of propositional evidence in favour of it. But why believe a thing like that? Perhaps the theory of relativity or the theory of evolution is like that, such a theory has been devised to explain the phenomena and gets all its warrant from its success in so doing. However, other beliefs, e.g., memory beliefs, feelifelt in other minds is not like that, they are not hypothetical at all, and are not accepted because of their explanatory powers. There are instead, the propositions from which one start in attempting to give evidence for a hypothesis. Now, why assume that theistic belief, belief in God, is in this regard more like a scientific hypothesis than like, say, a memory belief? Why think that the justification of theistic belief depends upon the evidential relation of theistic belief to other things one believes? According to Locke and the beginnings of this tradition, it is because there is a duty not to assent to a proposition unless it is probable with respect to what is certain to you, but is there really any such duty? No one has succeeded in showing that, say, belief in other minds or the belief that there has been a past, is probable with respect to what is certain for us. Suppose it is not: Does it follow that you are living in epistemic sin if you believe that there are other minds? Or a past?
There are urgent questions about any view according to which one has duties of the sort do not believe p unless it is probable with respect to what is certain for you; . First, if this is a duty, is it one to which I can conform? My beliefs are for the most part not within my control: Certainly they are not within my direct control. I believe that there has been a past and that there are other people, even if these beliefs are not probable with respect to what is certain forms (and even if I came to know this) I could not give them up. Whether or not I accept such beliefs are not really up to me at all, For I can no more refrain from believing these things than I can refrain from conforming yo the law of gravity. Second, is there really any reason for thinking I have such a duty? Nearly everyone recognizes such duties as that of not engaging in gratuitous cruelty, taking care of ones children and ones aged parents, and the like, but do we also find ourselves recognizing that there is a duty not to believe what is not probable (or, what we cannot see to be probable) with respect to what are certain for us? It hardly seems so. However, it is hard to see why being justified in believing in God requires that the existence of God be probable with respect to some such body of evidence as the set of propositions certain for you. Perhaps, theistic belief is properly basic, i.e., such that one is perfectly justified in accepting it on the evidential basis of other propositions one believes.
Taking justification in that original etymological fashion, therefore, there is every reason ton doubt that one is justified in holding theistic belief only inf one is justified in holding theistic belief only if one has evidence for it. Of course, the term justification has under-gone various analogical extensions in the of various philosophers, it has been used to name various properties that are different from justification etymologically so-called, but anagogically related to it. In such a way, the term sometimes used to mean propositional evidence: To say that a belief is justified for someone is to saying that he has propositional evidence (or sufficient propositional evidence) for it. So taken, however, the question whether theistic belief is justified loses some of its interest; for it is not clear (given this use) beliefs that are unjustified in that sense. Perhaps, one also does not have propositional evidence for ones memory beliefs, if so, that would not be a mark against them and would not suggest that there be something wrong holding them.
Another analogically connected way to think about justification (a way to think about justification by the later Chisholm) is to think of it as simply a relation of fitting between a given proposition and ones epistemic vase -which includes the other things one believes, as well as ones experience. Perhaps tat is the way justification is to be thought of, but then, if it is no longer at all obvious that theistic belief has this property of justification if it seems as a probability with respect to many another body of evidence. Perhaps, again, it is like memory beliefs in this regard.
To recapitulate: The dominant Western tradition has been inclined to identify warrant with justification, it has been inclined to take the latter in terms of duty and the fulfilment of obligation, and hence to suppose that there is no epistemic duty not to believe in God unless you have good propositional evidence for the existence of God. Epistemological discussion of theistic belief, as a consequence, as concentrated on the propositional evidence for and against theistic belief, i.e., on arguments for and against theistic belief. But there is excellent reason to doubt that there are epistemic duties of the sort the tradition appeals to here.
And perhaps it was a mistake to identify warrant with justification in the first place. Napoleons have little warrant for him: His problem, however, need not be dereliction of epistemic duty. He is in difficulty, but it is not or necessarily that of failing to fulfill epistemic duty. He may be doing his epistemic best, but he may be doing his epistemic duty in excelsis: But his madness prevents his beliefs from having much by way of warrant. His lack of warrant is not a matter of being unjustified, i.e., failing to fulfill epistemic duty. So warrant and being epistemologically justified by name are not the same things. Another example, suppose (to use the favourite twentieth-century variant of Descartes evil demon example) I have been captured by Alpha-Centaurian super-scientists, running a cognitive experiment, they remove my brain, and keep it alive in some artificial nutrients, and by virtue of their advanced technology induce in me the beliefs I might otherwise have if I were going about my usual business. Then my beliefs would not have much by way of warrant, but would it be because I was failing to do my epistemic duty?
As a result of these and other problems, another, externalist way of thinking about knowledge has appeared in recent epistemology, that a theory of justification is internalized if and only if it requires that all of its factors needed for a belief to be epistemically accessible to that of a person, internal to his cognitive perception, and externalist, if it allows that, at least some of the justifying factors need not be thus accessible, in that they can be external to the believer s cognitive Perspectives, beyond his ken. However, epistemologists often use the distinction between internalized and externalist theories of epistemic justification without offering any very explicit explanation.
Or perhaps the thing to say, is that it has reappeared, for the dominant sprains in epistemology priori to the Enlightenment were really externalist. According to this externalist way of thinking, warrant does not depend upon satisfaction of duty, or upon anything else to which the Knower has special cognitive access (as he does to what is about his own experience and to whether he is trying his best to do his epistemic duty): It depends instead upon factors external to the epistemic agent -such factors as whether his beliefs are produced by reliable cognitive mechanisms, or whether they are produced by epistemic faculties functioning properly in-an appropriate epistemic environment.
How will we think about the epistemology of theistic belief in more than is less of an externalist way (which is at once both satisfyingly traditional and agreeably up to date)? I think, that the ontological question whether there is such a person as God is in a way priori to the epistemological question about the warrant of theistic belief. It is natural to think that if in fact we have been created by God, then the cognitive processes that issue in belief in God are indeed realisable belief-producing processes, and if in fact God created us, then no doubt the cognitive faculties that produce belief in God is functioning properly in an epistemologically congenial environment. On the other hand, if there is no such person as God, if theistic belief is an illusion of some sort, then things are much less clear. Then beliefs in God in of the most of basic ways of wishing that never doubt the production by which unrealistic thinking or another cognitive process not aimed at truth. Thus, it will have little or no warrant. And belief in God on the basis of argument would be like belief in false philosophical theories on the basis of argument: Do such beliefs have warrant? Notwithstanding, the custom of discussing the epistemological questions about theistic belief as if they could be profitably discussed independently of the ontological issue as to whether or not theism is true, is misguided. There two issues are intimately intertwined,
Nonetheless, the vacancy left, as today and as days before are an awakening and untold story beginning by some sparking conscious paradigm left by science. That is a central idea by virtue accredited by its epistemology, where in fact, is that justification and knowledge arising from the proper functioning of our intellectual virtues or faculties in an appropriate environment.
Finally, that the concerning mental faculty reliability point to the importance of an appropriate environment. The idea is that cognitive mechanisms might be reliable in some environments but not in others. Consider an example from Alvin Plantinga. On a planet revolving around Alfa Centauri, cats are invisible to human beings. Moreover, Alfa Centaurian cats emit a type of radiation that causes humans to form the belief that there I a dog barking nearby. Suppose now that you are transported to this Alfa Centaurian planet, a cat walks by, and you form the belief that there is a dog barking nearby. Surely you are not justified in believing this. However, the problem here is not with your intellectual faculties, but with your environment. Although your faculties of perception are reliable on earth, yet are unrealisable on the Alga Centaurian planet, which is an inappropriate environment for those faculties.
The central idea of virtue epistemology, as expressed in (J) above, has a high degree of initial plausibility. By masking the idea of faculties cental to the reliability if not by the virtue of epistemology, in that it explains quite neatly to why beliefs are caused by perception and memories are often justified, while beliefs caused by unrealistic and superstition are not. Secondly, the theory gives us a basis for answering certain kinds of scepticism. Specifically, we may agree that if we were brains in a vat, or victims of a Cartesian demon, then we would not have knowledge even in those rare cases where our beliefs turned out true. But virtue epistemology explains that what is important for knowledge is toast our faculties are in fact reliable in the environment in which we are. And so we do have knowledge so long as we are in fact, not victims of a Cartesian demon, or brains in a vat. Finally, Plantinga argues that virtue epistemology deals well with Gettier problems. The idea is that Gettier problems give us cases of justified belief that is truer by accident. Virtue epistemology, Plantinga argues, helps us to understand what it means for a belief to be true by accident, and provides a basis for saying why such cases are not knowledge. Beliefs are rue by accident when they are caused by otherwise reliable faculties functioning in an inappropriate environment. Plantinga develops this line of reasoning in Plantinga (1988).
The Humean problem if induction supposes that there is some property A pertaining to an observational or experimental situation, and that of A, some fraction m/n (possibly equal to 1) have also been instances of some logically independent property B. Suppose further that the background circumstances, have been varied to a substantial degree and that there is no collateral information available concerning the frequency of Bs among As or concerning causal nomological connections between instances of A and instances of B.
In this situation, an enumerative or instantial inductive inference would move from the premise that m/n of observed ‘A’s’ are ‘B’s’ to the conclusion that approximately m/n of all ‘A’s’ and ‘B’s’. (The usual probability qualification will be assumed to apply to the inference, than being part of the conclusion). Hereabouts the class of As should be taken to include not only unobservable As of future As, but also possible or hypothetical as. (An alternative conclusion would concern the probability or likelihood of the very next observed ‘A’ being a ‘B’).
The traditional or Humean problem of induction, often refereed to simply as the problem of induction, is the problem of whether and why inferences that fit this schema should be considered rationally acceptable or justified from an epistemic or cognitive standpoint, i.e., whether and why reasoning in this way is likely lead to true claims about the world. Is there any sort of argument or rationale that can be offered for thinking that conclusions reached in this way are likely to be true if the corresponding premiss is true or even that their chances of truth are significantly enhanced?
Humes discussion of this deals explicitly with cases where all observed ‘A’s’ are ‘B’s’, but his argument applies just as well to the more general casse. His conclusion is entirely negative and sceptical: inductive inferences are not rationally justified, but are instead the result of an essentially a-rational process, custom or habit. Hume challenges the proponent of induction to supply a cogent line of reasoning that leads from an inductive premise to the corresponding conclusion and offers an extremely influential argument in the form of a dilemma, to show that there can be no such reasoning. Such reasoning would, ne argues, have to be either deductively demonstrative reasoning concerning relations of ideas or experimental, i.e., empirical, reasoning concerning mattes of fact to existence. It cannot be the former, because all demonstrative reasoning relies on the avoidance of contradiction, and it is not a contradiction to suppose that the course of nature may change, tat an order that was observed in the past will not continue in the future: but it also cannot be the latter, since any empirical argument would appeal to the success of such reasoning in previous experiences, and the justifiability of generalizing from previous experience is precisely what is at issue - so that any such appeal would be question-begging, so then, there can be no such reasoning.
An alternative version of the problem may be obtained by formulating it with reference to the so-called Principle of Induction, which says roughly that the future will resemble or, that unobserved cases will reassembly observe cases. An inductive argument may be viewed as enthymematic, with this principle serving as a suppressed premiss, in which case the issue is obviously how such a premise can be justified. Humes argument is then that no such justification is possible: The principle cannot be justified speculatively as it is not contradictory to deny it: it cannot be justified by appeal to its having been true in pervious experience without obviously begging te question.
The predominant recent responses to the problem of induction, at least in the analytic tradition, in effect accept the main conclusion of Humes argument, viz. That inductive inferences cannot be justified I the sense of showing that the conclusion of such an inference is likely to be truer if the premise is true, and thus attempt to find some other sort of justification for induction.
Bearing upon, and if not taken into account the term induction is most widely used for any process of reasoning that takes us from empirical premises to empirical conclusions supported by the premise, but not deductively entailed by them. Inductive arguments are therefore kinds of amplicative argument, in which something beyond the content of the premises is inferred as probable or supported by them. Induction is, however, commonly distinguished from arguments to theoretical explanations, which share this amplicative character, by being confined to inference in which the conclusion involves the same properties or relations as the premises. The central example is induction by simple enumeration, where from premiss telling that ‘Fa’, ‘Fb’, ‘Fc’. , where ‘a’, ‘b’, ‘c’, are all of some kind ‘G’, It is inferred ‘G’s’ from outside the sample, such as future ‘G’s’ will be ‘F’, or perhaps other person deceive them, children may well infer that everyone is a deceiver. Different but similar inferences are those from the past possession of a property by some object to the same objects future possession, or from the constancy of some law-like pattern in events, and states of affairs to its future constancy: all objects we know of attract each the with a fore inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them, so perhaps they all do so, an will always do so.
The rational basis of any inference was challenged by David Hume (1711-76), who believed that induction of nature, and merely reflected a habit or custom of the mind. Hume was not therefore sceptical about the propriety of processes of inducting ion, but sceptical about the tole of reason in either explaining it or justifying it. trying to answer Hume and to show that there is something rationally compelling about the inference is referred to as the problem of induction. It is widely recognized that any rational defence of induction will have to partition well-behaved properties for which the inference is plausible (often called projectable properties) from badly behaved ones for which t is not. It is also recognized that actual inductive habits are more complex than those of simple and science pay attention to such factors as variations within the sample of giving us the evidence, the application of ancillary beliefs about the order of nature, and so on. Nevertheless, the fundamental problem remains that any experience shows us only events occurring within a very restricted part of the vast spatial temporal order about which we then come to believe things.
All the same, the classical problem of induction is often phrased in terms of finding some reason to expect that nature is uniform. In Fact, Fiction and Forecast (1954) Goodman showed that we need in addition some reason for preferring some uniformities to others, for without such a selection the uniformity of nature is vacuous. Thus, suppose that all examined emeralds have been green. Uniformity would lead us to expect that future emeralds will be green as well. But, now we define a predicate grue: is trued if and only if ‘x’ is examined before time ‘T’ and is green, or ‘χ’ is examined after ‘T’ and is blue? Let ‘T’ refer to some time around the present. Then if newly examined emeralds are like previous ones in respect of being grue, they will be blue. We prefer blueness a basis of prediction to gluiness, but why?
Goodman argued that although his new predicate appears to be gerrymandered, and itself involves a reference to a difference, this is just aparohial or language-relative judgement, there being no language-independent standard of similarity to which to appeal. Other philosophers have not been convince by this degree of linguistic relativism. What remains clear that the possibility of these bent predicates put a decisive obstacle in face of purely logical and syntactical approaches to problems of confirmation?.
Suvch that both, Frége and Carnap, represented as analyticities best friends in this century, did as much to undermine it as its worst enemies. Quine (1908-) whose early work was on mathematical logic, and issued in A System of Logistic (1934), Mathematical Logic (1940) and Methods of Logic (1950) it was with this collection of papers a Logical Point of View (1953) that his philosophical importance became widely recognized, also, Putman (1926-) his concern in the later period has largely been to deny any serious asymmetry between truth and knowledge as it is obtained in natural science, and as it is obtained in morals and even theology. Books include Philosophy of logic (1971), Representation and Reality (1988) and Renewing Philosophy (1992). Collections of his papers include Mathematics, Master, sand Method (1975), Mind, Language, and Reality (1975), and Realism and Reason (1983). Both of which represented as having refuted the analytic/synthetic distinction, not only did no such thing, but, in fact, contributed significantly to undoing the damage done by Frége and Carnap. Finally, the epistemological significance of the distinctions is nothing like what it is commonly taken to be.
Lockes account of an analyticity proposition as, for its time, everything that a succinct account of analyticity should be (Locke, 1924, pp. 306-8) he distinguished two kinds of analytic propositions, identified propositions in which we affirm the said terms if itself, e.g., Roses are roses, and predicative propositions in which a part of the complex idea is predicated of the name of the whole, e.g., Roses are flowers, Locke calls such sentences trifling because a speaker who uses them trifles with words. A synthetic sentence, in contrast, such as a mathematical theorem, states a truth and conveys with its informative real knowledge. Correspondingly, Locke distinguishes two kinds of necessary consequences, analytic entailment where validity depends on the literal containment of the conclusions in the premiss and synthetic entailments where it does not. (Locke did not originate this concept-containment notion of analyticity. It is discussions by Arnaud and Nicole, and it is safe to say it has been around for a very long time (Arnaud, 1964).
Kants account of analyticity, which received opinion tells us is the consummate formulation of this notion in modern philosophy, is actually a step backward. What is valid in his account is not novel, and what is novel is not valid. Kant presents Lockes account of concept-containment analyticity, but introduces certain alien features, the most important being his characterizations of most important being his characterization of analytic propositions as propositions whose denials are logical contradictions (Kant, 1783). This characterization suggests that analytic propositions based on Lockes part-whole relation or Kants explicative copula are a species of logical truth. But the containment of the predicate concept in the subject concept in sentences like Bachelors are unmarried is a different relation from containment of the consequent in the antecedent in a sentence like If John is a bachelor, then John is a bachelor or Mary read Kants Critique. The former is literal containment whereas, the latter are, in general, not. Talk of the containment of the consequent of a logical truth in the metaphorical, a way of saying logically derivable.
Kants conflation of concept containment with logical containment caused him to overlook the issue of whether logical truths are synthetically deductive and the problem of how he can say mathematical truths are synthetically deductive when they cannot be denied without contradiction. Historically. , the conflation set the stage for the disappearance of the Lockean notion. Frége, whom received opinion portrays as second only to Kant among the champions of analyticity, and Carnap, who it portrays as just behind Frége, was jointly responsible for the appearance of concept-containment analyticity.
Frége was clear about the difference between concept containment and logical containment, expressing it as like the difference between the containment of beams in a house the containment of a plant in the seed (Frége, 1853). But he found the former, as Kant formulated it, defective in three ways: It explains analyticity in psychological terms, it does not cover all cases of analytic propositions, and, perhaps, most important for Fréges logicism, its notion of containment is unfruitful as a definition; mechanisms in logic and mathematics (Frége, 1853). In an insidious containment between the two notions of containment, Frége observes that with logical containment we are not simply talking out of the box again what we have just put inti it. This definition makes logical containment the basic notion. Analyticity becomes a special case of logical truth, and, even in this special case, the definitions employ the power of definition in logic and mathematics than mere concept combination.
Carnap, attempting to overcome what he saw a shortcoming in Fréges account of analyticity, took the remaining step necessary to do away explicitly with Lockean-Kantian analyticity. As Carnap saw things, it was a shortcoming of Fréges explanation that it seems to suggest that definitional relations underlying analytic propositions can be extra-logic in some sense, say, in resting on linguistic synonymy. To Carnap, this represented a failure to achieve a uniform formal treatment of analytic propositions and left us with a dubious distinction between logical and extra-logical vocabulary. Hence, he eliminated the reference to definitions in Fréges of analyticity by introducing meaning postulates, e.g., statements such as ‘(∀χ)’ (‘χ’ is a bachelor-is unmarried) (Carnap, 1965). Like standard logical postulate on which they were modelled, meaning postulates express nothing more than constrains on the admissible models with respect to which sentences and deductions are evaluated for truth and validity. Thus, despite their name, its asymptomatic-balance having to pustulate itself by that in what it holds on to not more than to do with meaning than any value-added statements expressing an indispensable truth. In defining analytic propositions as consequences of (an explained set of) logical laws, Carnap explicitly removed the one place in Fréges explanation where there might be room for concept containment and with it, the last trace of Lockes distinction between semantic and other necessary consequences.
Quine, the staunchest critic of analyticity of our time, performed an invaluable service on its behalf-although, one that has come almost completely unappreciated. Quine made two devastating criticism of Carnaps meaning postulate approach that expose it as both irrelevant and vacuous. It is irrelevant because, in using particular words of a language, meaning postulates fail to explicate analyticity for sentences and languages generally, that is, they do not define it for variables ‘S’ and ‘L’ (Quine, 1953). It is vacuous because, although meaning postulates tell us what sentences are to count as analytic, they do not tell us what it is for them to be analytic.
Received opinion gas it that Quine did much more than refute the analytic/synthetic distinction as Carnap tried to draw it. Received opinion has that Quine demonstrated there is no distinction, however, anyone might try to draw it. This, too, is incorrect. To argue for this stronger conclusion, Quine had to show that there is no way to draw the distinction outside logic, in particular theory in linguistic corresponding to Carnaps, Quines argument had to take an entirely different form. Some inherent feature of linguistics had to be exploited in showing that no theory in this science can deliver the distinction. But the feature Quine chose was a principle of operationalist methodology characteristic of the school of Bloomfieldian linguistics. Quine succeeds in showing that meaning cannot be made objective sense of in linguistics. If making sense of a linguistic concept requires, as that school claims, operationally defining it in terms of substitution procedures that employ only concepts unrelated to that linguistic concept. But Chomskys revolution in linguistics replaced the Bloomfieldian taxonomic model of grammars with the hypothetico-deductive model of generative linguistics, and, as a consequence, such operational definition was removed as the standard for concepts in linguistics. The standard of theoretical definition that replaced it was far more liberal, allowing the members of as family of linguistic concepts to be defied with respect to one another within a set of axioms that state their systematic interconnections -the entire system being judged by whether its consequences are confirmed by the linguistic facts. Quines argument does not even address theories of meaning based on this hypothetico-deductive model (Katz, 1988 and 1990).
Putman, the other staunch critic of analyticity, performed a service on behalf of analyticity fully on a par with, and complementary to Quines, whereas, Quine refuted Carnaps formalization of Fréges conception of analyticity, Putman refuted this very conception itself. Putman put an end to the entire attempt, initiated by Fridge and completed by Carnap, to construe analyticity as a logical concept (Putman, 1962, 1970, 1975).
However, as with Quine, received opinion has it that Putman did much more. Putman in credited with having devised science fiction cases, from the robot cat case to the twin earth cases, that are counter examples to the traditional theory of meaning. Again, received opinion is incorrect. These cases are only counter examples to Fréges version of the traditional theory of meaning. Fréges version claims both (1) that senses determines reference, and (2) that there are instances of analyticity, say, typified by cats are animals, and of synonymy, say typified by water in English and water in twin earth English. Given (1) and (2), what we call cats could not be non-animals and what we call water could not differ from what the earthier twin called water. But, as Putmans cases show, what we call cats could be Martian robots and what they call water could be something other than H2O Hence, the cases are counter examples to Fréges version of the theory.
The remaining Frégean criticism points to a genuine incompleteness of the traditional account of analyticity. There are analytic relational sentences, for example, Jane walks with those with whom she strolls, Jack kills those he
himself has murdered, etc., and analytic entailment with existential conclusions, for example, I think, therefore I exist. The containment in these sentences is just as literal as that in an analytic subject-predicate sentence like Bachelors are unmarried, such are shown to have a theory of meaning construed as a hypothetico-deductive systemisations of sense as defined in (D) overcoming the incompleteness of the traditional account in the case of such relational sentences.
Such a theory of meaning makes the principal concern of semantics the explanation of sense properties and relations like synonymy, an antonymy, redundancy, analyticity, ambiguity, etc. Furthermore, it makes grammatical structure, specifically, senses structure, the basis for explaining them. This leads directly to the discovery of a new level of grammatical structure, and this, in turn, makes possible a proper definition of analyticity. To see this, consider two simple examples. It is a semantic fact that a male bachelor is redundant and that single person is synonymous with woman who never married; . In the case of the redundancy, we have to explain the fact that the sense of the modifier male is already contained in the sense of its head bachelor. In the case of the synonymy, we have to explain the fact that the sense of sinister is identical to the sense of woman who never married (compositionally formed from the senses of woman, never and married). But is so fas as such facts concern relations involving the components of the senses of bachelor and spinster and is in as far as these words are syntactic simple, there must be a level of grammatical structure at which syntactic simple are semantically complex. This, in brief, is the route by which we arrive a level of decompositional semantic structure; that is the locus of sense structures masked by syntactically simple words.
Once, again, the fact that (A) itself makes no reference to logical operators or logical laws indicate that analyticity for subject-predicate sentences can be extended to simple relational sentences without treating analytic sentences as instances of logical truths. Further, the source of the incompleteness is no longer explained, as Fridge explained it, as the absence of fruitful logical apparatus, but is now explained as mistakenly treating what is only a special case of analyticity as if it were the general case. The inclusion of the predicate in the subject is the special case (where n = 1) of the general case of the inclusion of an–place predicate (and its terms) in one of its terms. Noting that the defects, by which, Quine complained of in connection with Carnaps meaning-postulated explication are absent in (A). (A) contains no words from a natural language. It explicitly uses variable ‘S’ and variable ‘L’ because it is a definition in linguistic theory. Moreover, (A) tell us what property is in virtue of which a sentence is analytic, namely, redundant predication, that is, the predication structure of an analytic sentence is already found in the content of its term structure.
Received opinion has been anti-Lockean in holding that necessary consequences in logic and language belong to one and the same species. This seems wrong because the property of redundant predication provides a non-logic explanation of why true statements made in the literal use of analytic sentences are necessarily true. Since the property ensures that the objects of the predication in the use of an analytic sentence are chosen on the basis of the features to be predicated of them, the truth-conditions of the statement are automatically satisfied once its terms take on reference. The difference between such a linguistic source of necessity and the logical and
mathematical sources vindicate Lockes distinction between two kinds of necessary consequence.
Received opinion concerning analyticity contains another mistake. This is the idea that analyticity is inimical to science, in part, the idea developed as a reaction to certain dubious uses of analyticity such as Fréges attempt to establish logicism and Schlicks, Ayers and other logical; postivists attempt to deflate claims to metaphysical knowledge by showing that alleged deductive truths are merely empty analytic truths (Schlick, 1948, and Ayer, 1946). In part, it developed as also a response to a number of cases where alleged analytic, and hence, necessary truths, e.g., the law of excluded a seeming next-to-last subsequent to have been taken as open to revision, such cases convinced philosophers like Quine and Putnam that the analytic/synthetic distinction is an obstacle to scientific progress.
The problem, if there is, one is one is not analyticity in the concept-containment sense, but the conflation of it with analyticity in the logical sense. This made it seem as if there is a single concept of analyticity that can serve as the grounds for a wide range of deductive truths. But, just as there are two analytic/synthetic distinctions, so there are two concepts of concept. The narrow Lockean/Kantian distinction is based on a narrow notion of expressions on which concepts are senses of expressions in the language. The broad Frégean/Carnap distinction is based on a broad notion of concept on which concepts are conceptions -often scientific one about the nature of the referent (s) of expressions (Katz, 1972) and curiously Putman, 1981). Conflation of these two notions of concepts produced the illusion of a single concept with the content of philosophical, logical and mathematical conceptions, but with the status of linguistic concepts. This encouraged philosophers to think that they were in possession of concepts with the contentual representation to express substantive philosophical claims, e.g., such as Fridge, Schlick and Ayers, . . . and so on, and with a status that trivializes the task of justifying them by requiring only linguistic grounds for the deductive propositions in question.
Finally, there is an important epistemological implication of separating the broad and narrowed notions of analyticity. Fridge and Carnap took the broad notion of analyticity to provide foundations for necessary and a priority, and, hence, for some form of rationalism, and nearly all rationalistically inclined analytic philosophers followed them in this. Thus, when Quine dispatched the Frége-Carnap position on analyticity, it was widely believed that necessary, as a priority, and rationalism had also been despatched, and, as a consequence. Quine had ushered in an empiricism without dogmas and naturalized epistemology. But given there is still a notion of analyticity that enables us to pose the problem of how necessary, synthetic deductive knowledge is possible (moreover, one whose narrowness makes logical and mathematical knowledge part of the problem), Quine did not under-cut the foundations of rationalism. Hence, a serious reappraisal of the new empiricism and naturalized epistemology is, to any the least, is very much in order (Katz, 1990).
In some areas of philosophy and sometimes in things that are less than important we are to find in the deductively/inductive distinction in which has been applied to a wide range of objects, including concepts, propositions, truths and knowledge. Our primary concern will, however, be with the epistemic distinction between deductive and inductive knowledge. The most common way of marking the distinction is by reference to Kants claim that deductive knowledge is absolutely independent of all experience. It is generally agreed that Ss knowledge that p is independent of experience just in case Ss belief that p is justified independently of experience. Some authors (Butchvarov, 1970, and Pollock, 1974) are, however, in finding this negative characterization of deductive unsatisfactory knowledge and have opted for providing a positive characterisation in terms of the type of justification on which such knowledge is dependent. Finally, others (Putman, 1983 and Chisholm, 1989) have attempted to mark the distinction by introducing concepts such as necessity and rational unrevisability than in terms of the type of justification relevant to deductive knowledge.
One who characterizes deductive knowledge in terms of justification that is independent of experience is faced with the task of articulating the relevant sense of experience, and proponents of the deductive ly cites intuition or intuitive apprehension as the source of deductive justification. Furthermore, they maintain that these terms refer to a distinctive type of experience that is both common and familiar to most individuals. Hence, there is a broad sense of experience in which deductive justification is dependent of experience. An initially attractive strategy is to suggest that theoretical justification must be independent of sense experience. But this account is too narrow since memory, for example, is not a form of sense experience, but justification based on memory is presumably not deductive. There appear to remain only two options: Provide a general characterization of the relevant sense of experience or enumerates those sources that are experiential. General characterizations of experience often maintain that experience provides information specific to the actual world while non-experiential sources provide information about all possible worlds. This approach, however, reduces the concept of non-experiential justification to the concept of being justified in believing a necessary truth. Accounts by enumeration have two problems (1) there is some controversy about which sources to include in the list, and (2) there is no guarantee that the list is complete. It is generally agreed that perception and memory should be included. Introspection, however, is problematic, and beliefs about ones conscious states and about the manner in which one is appeared to are plausible regarded as experientially justified. Yet, some, such as Pap (1958), maintain that experiments in imagination are the source of deductive justification. Even if this contention is rejected and deductive justification is characterized as justification independent of the evidence of perception, memory and introspection, it remains possible that there are other sources of justification. If it should be the case that clairvoyance, for example, is a source of justified beliefs, such beliefs would be justified deductively on the enumerative account.
The most common approach to offering a positive characterization of deductive justification is to maintain that in the case of basic deductive propositions, understanding the proposition is sufficient to justify one in believing that it is true. This approach faces two pressing issues. What is it to understand a proposition in the manner that suffices for justification? Proponents of the approach typically distinguish understanding the words used to express a proposition from apprehending the proposition itself and maintain that it is the latter which are relevant to deductive justification. But this move simply shifts the problem to that of specifying what it is to apprehend a proposition. Without a solution to this problem, it is difficult, if possible, to evaluate the account since one cannot be sure that the account since on cannot be sure that the requisite sense of apprehension does not justify paradigmatic inductive propositions as well. Even less is said about the manner in which apprehending a proposition justifies one in believing that it is true. Proponents are often content with the bald assertions that one who understands a basic deductive proposition can thereby see that it is true. But what requires explanation is how understanding a proposition enable one to see that it is true.
Difficulties in characterizing deductive justification in a term either of independence from experience or of its source have led, out-of-the-ordinary to present the concept of necessity into their accounts, although this appeal takes various forms. Some have employed it as a necessary condition for deductive justification, others have employed it as a sufficient condition, while still others have employed it as both. In claiming that necessity is a criterion of the deductive. Kant held that necessity is a sufficient condition for deductive justification. This claim, however, needs further clarification. There are three theses regarding the relationship between the theoretically and the necessary that can be distinguished: (I) if p is a necessary proposition and ‘S’ is justified in believing that ‘p’ is necessary, then ‘S’s’ justification is deductive: (ii) If ‘p’ is a necessary proposition and ‘S’ is justified in believing that ‘p’ is necessarily true, then ‘S’s’ justification is deductive: And (iii) If ‘p’ is a necessary proposition and ‘S’ is justfied in believing that ‘p’, then ‘S’s’ justification is deductive. For example, many proponents of deductive contend that all knowledge of a necessary proposition is deductive. (2) and (3) have the shortcoming of setting by stipulation the issue of whether inductive knowledge of necessary propositions is possible. (I) does not have this shortcoming since the recent examples offered in support of this claim by Kriple (1980) and others have been cases where it is alleged that knowledge of the truth value of necessary propositions is knowable inductive. (I) has the shortcoming, however, of either ruling out the possibility of being justified in believing that a proposition is necessary on the basis of testimony or else sanctioning such justification as deductive. (ii) and (iii), of course, suffer from an analogous problem. These problems are symptomatic of a general shortcoming of the approach: It attempts to provide a sufficient condition for deductive justification solely in terms of the modal status of the proposition believed without making reference to the manner in which it is justified. This shortcoming, however, can be avoided by incorporating necessity as a necessary but not sufficient condition for a prior justification as, for example, in Chisholm (1989). Here there are two theses that must be distinguished: (1) If ‘S’ is justified deductively in believing that ‘p’, then p is necessarily true. (2) If ‘p’ is justified deductively in believing that ‘p’. Then ‘p’ is a necessary proposition. (1) and (2), however, allows this possibility. A further problem with both (1) and (2) is that it is not clear whether they permit deductively justified beliefs about the modal status of a proposition. For they require that in order for ‘S’ to be justified deductively in believing that ‘p’ is a necessary preposition it must be necessary that p is a necessary proposition. But the status of iterated modal propositions is controversial. Finally, (1) and (2) both preclude by stipulation the position advanced by Kripke (1980) and Kitcher (1980) that there is deductive knowledge of contingent propositions.
The concept of rational unrevisability has also been invoked to characterize deductive justification. The precise sense of rational unrevisability has been presented in different ways. Putnam (1983) takes rational unrevisability to be both a necessary and sufficient condition for deductive justification while Kitcher (1980) takes it to be only a necessary condition. There are also two different senses of rational unrevisability that have been associated with the deductive (I) a proposition is weakly unreviable just in case it is rationally unrevisable in light of any future experiential evidence, and (II) a proposition is strongly unrevisable just in case it is rationally unrevisable in light of any future evidence. Let us consider the plausibility of requiring either form of rational unrevisability as a necessary condition for deductive justification. The view that a proposition is justified deductive only if it is strongly unrevisable entails that if a non-experiential source of justified beliefs is fallible but self-correcting, it is not a deductive source of justification. Casullo (1988) has argued that it vis implausible to maintain that a proposition that is justified non-experientially is not justified deductively merely because it is revisable in light of further non-experiential evidence. The view that a proposition is justified deductively only if it is, weakly unrevisable is not open to this objection since it excludes only recession in light of experiential evidence. It does, however, face a different problem. To maintain that ‘S’s’ justified belief that ‘p’ is justified deductively is to make a claim about the type of evidence that justifies ‘S’ in believing that ‘p’. On the other hand, to maintain that ‘S’s’ justified belief that p is rationally revisable in light of experiential evidence is to make a claim about the type of evidence that can defeat ‘S’s’ justification for believing that p that a claim about the type of evidence that justifies ‘S’ in believing that ‘p’. Hence, it has been argued by Edidin (1984) and Casullo (1988) that to hold that a belief is justified deductively only if it is weakly unrevisable is either to confuse supporting evidence with defeating evidence or to endorse some implausible this about the relationship between the two such as that if evidence of the sort as the kind ‘A’ can defeat the justification conferred on ‘S’s belief that ‘p’ by evidence of kind ‘B’ then ‘S’s’ justification for believing that ‘p’ is based on evidence of kind ‘A’.
The most influential idea in the theory of meaning in the past hundred years is the thesis that the meaning of an indicative sentence is given by its truth-conditions. On this conception, to understand a sentence is to know its truth-conditions. The conception was first clearly formulated by Fridge, was developed in a distinctive way by the early Wittgenstein, and is a leading idea of Donald Herbert Davidson (1917-), who is also known for rejection of the idea of as conceptual scheme, thought of as something peculiar to one language or one way of looking at the world, arguing that where the possibility of translation stops so dopes the coherence of the idea that there is anything to translate. His [papers are collected in the Essays on Actions and Events (1980) and Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation (1983). However, the conception has remained so central that those who offer opposing theories characteristically define their position by reference to it.
Wittgensteins main achievement is a uniform theory of language that yields an explanation of logical truth. A factual sentence achieves sense by dividing the possibilities exhaustively into two groups, those that would make it true and those that would make it false. A truth of logic does not divide the possibilities but comes out true in all of them. It, therefore, lacks sense and says nothing, but it is not nonsense. It is a self-cancellation of sense, necessarily true because it is a tautology, the limiting case of factual discourse, like the figure ‘0' in mathematics. Language takes many forms and even factual discourse does not consist entirely of sentences like The fork is placed to the left of the knife. However, the first thing that he gave up was the idea that this sentence itself needed further analysis into basic sentences mentioning simple objects with no internal structure. He was to concede, that a descriptive word will often get its meaning partly from its place in a system, and he applied this idea to colour-words, arguing that the essential relations between different colours do not indicate that each colour has an internal structure that needs to be taken apart. On the contrary, analysis of our colour-words would only reveal the same pattern-ranges of incompatible properties-recurring at every level, because that is how we carve up the world.
Indeed, it may even be the case that of our ordinary language is created by moves that we ourselves make. If so, the philosophy of language will lead into the connection between the meaning of a word and the applications of it that its users intend to make. There is also an obvious need for people to understand each others meanings of their words. There are many links between the philosophy of language and the philosophy of mind and it is not surprising that the impersonal examination of language in the Tractatus: was replaced by a very different, anthropocentric treatment in Philosophical Investigations?
If the logic of our language is created by moves that we ourselves make, various kinds of realises are threatened. First, the way in which our descriptive language carves up the world will not be forces on us by the natures of things, and the rules for the application of our words, which feel the external constraints, will really come from within us. That is a concession to nominalism that is, perhaps, readily made. The idea that logical and mathematical necessity is also generated by what we ourselves accomplish what is more paradoxical. Yet, that is the conclusion of Wittgenstein (1956) and (1976), and here his anthropocentricism has carried less conviction. However, a paradox is not sure of error and it is possible that what is needed here is a more sophisticated concept of objectivity than Platonism provides.
In his later work Wittgenstein brings the great problem of philosophy down to earth and traces them to very ordinary origins. His examination of the concept of following a rule takes him back to a fundamental question about counting things and sorting them into types: What qualifies as doing the same again? Of a courser, this question as an inconsequential fundamental and would suggest that we forget it and get on with the subject. But Wittgensteins question is not so easily dismissed. It has the naive profundity of questions that children ask when they are first taught a new subject. Such questions remain unanswered without detriment to their learning, but they point the only way to complete understanding of what is learned.
It is, nevertheless, the meaning of a complex expression in a function of the meaning of its constituents, that is, indeed, that it is just a statement of what it is for an expression to be semantically complex. It is one of the initial attractions of the conception of meaning as truths-conditions that it permits a smooth and satisfying account of the way in which the meaning of a complex expression is a dynamic function of the meaning of its constituents. On the truth-conditional conception, to give the meaning of an expression is to state the contribution it makes to the truth-conditions of sentences in which it occurs. for singular terms-proper names, indexicals, and certain pronouns -this is done by stating the reference of the term in question.
The truth condition of a statement is the condition the world must meet if the statement is to be true. To know this condition is equivalent to knowing the meaning of the statement. Although, this sounds as if it gives a solid anchorage for meaning, some of the security disappears when it turns out that the truth condition can only be defined by repeating the very same statement, the truth condition of snow is white is that snow is white, the truth condition of Britain would have capitulated had Hitler invaded is that Britain would halve capitulated had Hitler invaded. It is disputed whether this element of running-on-the-spot disqualifies truth conditions from playing the central role in a substantive theory of meaning. Truth-conditional theories of meaning are sometimes opposed by the view that to know the meaning of a statement is to be able to users it in a network of inferences.
In theorist of truth conditions should insist that not every true statement about the reference of an expression be fit to be an axiom in a meaning-giving theory of truth for a language. The axiom:
London refers to the city in which there was a huge fire in 1666
is a true statement about the reference of London?. It is a consequence of a theory that substitutes this axiom for A! In our simple truth theory that London is beautiful is true if and only if the city in which there was a huge fire in 1666 is beautiful. Since a subject can understand the name London without knowing that last-mentioned truth conditions, this replacement axiom is not fit to be an axiom in a meaning-specifying truth theory. It is, of course, incumbent on a theorist of meaning as truth conditions to state the constraints on the acceptability of axioms in a way that does not presuppose a deductive, non-truth conditional conception of meaning.
Among the many challenges facing the theorist of truth conditions, two are particularly salient and fundamental. First, the theorist has to answer the charge of triviality or vacuity. Second, the theorist must offer an account of what it is for a persons language to be truly descriptive by a semantic theory containing a given semantic axiom.
We can take the charge of triviality first. In more detail, it would run thus: Since the content of a claim that the sentence Paris is beautiful in which is true of the divisional region, which is no more than the claim that Paris is beautiful, we can trivially describe understanding a sentence, if we wish, as knowing its truth-conditions, but this gives us no substantive account of understanding whatsoever. Something other than a grasp to truth conditions must provide the substantive account. The charge rests upon what has been called the redundancy theory of truth, the theory that, is somewhat more discriminative. Horwich calls the minimal theory of truth, or deflationary view of truth, as fathered by Fridge and Ramsey. The essential claim is that the predicate . . . is true does not have a sense, i.e., expresses no substantive or profound or explanatory concepts that ought be the topic of philosophical enquiry. The approach admits of different versions, but centres on the points (1) that it is true that p says no more nor less than p (hence redundancy) (2) that in less direct context, such as everything he said was true, or all logical consequences of true propositions are true, the predicate functions as a device enabling us; to generalize than as an adjective or predicate describing the thing he said, or the kinds of propositions that follow from true propositions. For example, the second may translate as (∀ p, q) (p & p ➝ q ➝q) where there is no use of a notion of truth.
There are technical problems in interpreting all uses of the notion of truth in such ways, but they are not generally felt to be insurmountable. The approach needs to explain away apparently substantive uses of the notion, such of a science aims at the truth, or truth is a norm governing discourse. Indeed, postmodernist writing frequently advocates that we must abandon such norms, along with a discredited objective conception of truth. But perhaps, we can have the norms even when objectivity is problematic, since they can be framed without mention of truth: Science wants it to be so that whenever science holds that ‘p’. Then ‘p’. Discourse is to be regulated by the principle that it is wrong to assert ‘p’ when ‘not-p’.
The disquotational theory of truth finds that the simplest formulation is the claim that expressions of the formed ‘S’ is true mean the same as expressions of the form ‘S’. Some philosophers dislike the idea of sameness of meaning, and if this is disallowed, then the claim is that the two forms are equivalent in any sense of equivalence that matters. That is, it makes no difference whether people say Dogs bark is true, or whether they say that dogs bark. In the former representation of what they say the sentence Dogs bark is mentioned, but in the latter it appears to be used, so the claim that the two are equivalent needs careful formulation and defence. On the face of it someone might know that Dogs bark is true without knowing what it means, for instance, if one were to find it in a list of acknowledged truths, although he does not understand English, and this is different from knowing that dogs bark. Disquotational theories are usually presented as versions of the redundancy theory of truth.
The minimal theory states that the concept of truth is exhausted by the fact that it conforms to the equivalence principle, the principle that for any proposition ‘p’, it is true that ‘p’ if and only if ‘p’. Many different philosophical theories of truth will, with suitable qualifications, accept that equivalence principle. The distinguishing feature of the minimal theory is its claim that the equivalence principle exhausts the notion of truths. It is how widely accepted, that both by opponents and supporters of truth conditional theories of meaning, that it is inconsistent to accept both minimal theory of truth and a truth conditional account of meaning (Davidson, 1990, Dummett, 1959 and Horwich, 1990). If the claim that the sentence Paris is beautiful is true is exhausted by its equivalence to the claim that Paris is beautiful, it is circular to try to explain the sentences meaning in terms of its truth conditions. The minimal theory of truth has been endorsed by Ramsey, Ayer, the later Wittgenstein, Quine, Strawson, Horwich and-confusingly and inconsistently if be it correct-Fridge himself. But is the minimal theory correct?
The minimal or redundancy theory treats instances of the equivalence principle as definitional of truth for a given sentence. But in fact, it seems that each instance of the equivalence principle can itself be explained. The truths from which such an instance as: London is beautiful is true if and only if London is beautiful, preserve a right to be interpreted specifically of this would be a pseudo-explanation if the fact that London refers to London is beautiful has the truth-condition it does. But that is very implausible: It is, after all, possible to understand the name London without understanding the predicate is beautiful. The idea that facts about the reference of particular words can be explanatory of facts about the truth conditions of sentences containing them in no way requires any naturalistic or any other kind of reduction of the notion of reference. Nor is the idea incompatible with the plausible point that singular reference can be attributed at all only to something that is capable of combining with other expressions to form complete sentences. That still leaves room for facts about an expressions having the particular reference it does to be partially explanatory of the particular truth condition possessed by a given sentence containing it. The minimal; theory thus treats as definitional or stimulative something that is in fact open to explanation. What makes this explanation possible is that there is a general notion of truth that has, among the many links that hold it in place, systematic connections with the semantic values of sub-sentential expressions.
A second problem with the minimal theory is that it seems impossible to formulate it without at some point relying implicitly on features and principles involving truths that go beyond anything countenanced by the minimal theory. If the minimal theory treats truth as a predicate of anything linguistic, be it utterances, type-in-a-language, or whatever, then the equivalence schema will not cover all cases, but only those in the theorists own language. Some account has to be given of truth for sentences of other languages. Speaking of the truth of language-independence propositions or thoughts will only postpone, not avoid, this issue, since at some point principles have to be stated associating these language-independent entities with sentences of particular languages. The defender of the minimalist theory is likely to say that if a sentence ‘S’ of a foreign language is best translated by our sentence ‘p’, then the foreign sentence ‘S’ is true if and only if ‘p’. Now the best translation of a sentence must preserve the concepts expressed in the sentence. Constraints involving a general notion of truth are persuasive in a plausible philosophical theory of concepts. It is, for example, a condition of adequacy on an individualized account of any concept that there exists what is called Determination Theory for that account-that is, a specification of how the account contributes to fixing the semantic value of that concept, the notion of a concepts semantic value is the notion of something that makes a certain contribution to the truth conditions of thoughts in which the concept occurs. but this is to presuppose, than to elucidate, a general notion of truth.
It is also plausible that there are general constraints on the form of such Determination Theories, constraints that involve truth and which are not derivable from the minimalists conception. Suppose that concepts are individuated by their possession conditions. A concept is something that is capable of being a constituent of such contentual representational in a way of thinking of something-a particular object, or property, or relation, or another entity. A possession condition may in various says makes a thankers possession of a particular concept dependent upon his relations to his environment. Many possession conditions will mention the links between a concept and the thinkers perceptual experience. Perceptual experience represents the world for being a certain way. It is arguable that the only satisfactory explanation of what it is for perceptual experience to represent the world in a particular way must refer to the complex relations of the experience to the subjects environment. If this is so, then mention of such experiences in a possession condition will make possession of that condition will make possession of that concept dependent in part upon the environment relations of the thinker. Burge (1979) has also argued from intuitions about particular examples that, even though the thinkers non-environmental properties and relations remain constant, the conceptual content of his mental state can vary if the thinkers social environment is varied. A possession condition which property individuates such a concept must take into account the thinkers social relations, in particular his linguistic relations.
One such plausible general constraint is then the requirement that when a thinker forms beliefs involving a concept in accordance with its possession condition, a semantic value is assigned to the concept in such a way that the belief is true. Some general principles involving truth can indeed, as Horwich has emphasized, be derived from the equivalence schema using minimal logical apparatus. Consider, for instance, the principle that Paris is beautiful and London is beautiful is true if and only if Paris is beautiful is true if and only if Paris is beautiful is true and London is beautiful is true. This follows logically from the three instances of the equivalence principle: Paris is beautiful and London is beautiful is rue if and only if Paris is beautiful, and London is beautiful is true if and only if London is beautiful. But no logical manipulations of the equivalence schemas will allow the deprivation of that general constraint governing possession conditions, truth and the assignment of semantic values. That constraint can have courses be regarded as a further elaboration of the idea that truth is one of the aims of judgement.
We now turn to the other question, What is it for a persons language to be correctly describable by a semantic theory containing a particular axiom, such as the axiom A6 above for conjunction? This question may be addressed at two depths of generality. At the shallower level, the question may take for granted the persons possession of the concept of conjunction, and be concerned with what has to be true for the axiom correctly to describe his language. At a deeper level, an answer should not duck the issue of what it is to possess the concept. The answers to both questions are of great interest: We will take the lesser level of generality first.
When a person means conjunction by sand, he is not necessarily capable of formulating the explicitly of the axiom. Even if he can formulate it, his ability to formulate it is not the causal basis of his capacity to hear sentences containing the word and as meaning something involving conjunction. Nor is it the causal basis of his capacity to mean something involving conjunction by sentences he utters containing the word and. Is it then right to regard a truth theory as part of an unconscious psychological computation, and to regard understanding a sentence as involving a particular way of depriving a theorem from a truth theory at some level of conscious proceedings? One problem with this is that it is quite implausible that everyone who speaks the same language has to use the same algorithms for computing the meaning of a sentence. In the past thirteen years, thanks particularly to the work of Davies and Evans, a conception has evolved according to which an axiom is true of a persons language only if there is a common component in the explanation of his understanding of each sentence containing the word and, a common component that explains why each such sentence is understood as meaning something involving conjunction (Davies, 1987). This conception can also be elaborated in computational terms: Suggesting that for an axiom to be true of a persons language is for the unconscious mechanisms which produce understanding to draw on the information that a sentence of the form ‘A’ and ‘B’ are true if and only if ‘A’ is true and ‘B’ is true (Peacocke, 1986). Many different algorithms may equally draw n this information. The psychological reality of a semantic theory thus involves, in Marrs (1982) famous classification, something intermediate between his level one, the function computed, and his level two, the algorithm by which it is computed. This conception of the psychological reality of a semantic theory can also be applied to syntactic and phonol logical theories. Theories in semantics, syntax and phonology are not themselves required to specify the particular algorithms that the language user employs. The identification of the particular computational methods employed is a task for psychology. But semantics, syntactic and phonology theories are answerable to psychological data, and are potentially refutable by them-for these linguistic theories do make commitments to the information drawn upon by mechanisms in the language user.
This answer to the question of what it is for an axiom to be true of a persons language clearly takes for granted the persons possession of the concept expressed by the word treated by the axiom. In the example of the axiom A6, the information drawn upon is that sentences of the form ‘A’ and ‘B’ are true if and only if ‘A’ is true and ‘B’ is true. This informational content employs, as it has to if it is to be adequate, the concept of conjunction used in stating the meaning of sentences containing and. So the computational answer we have returned needs further elaboration if we are to address the deeper question, which does not want to take for granted possession of the concepts expressed in the language. It is at this point that the theory of linguistic understanding has to draws upon a theory of concepts. It is plausible that the concepts of conjunction are individuated by the following condition for a thinker to possess it.
Finally, this response to the deeper question allows us to answer two challenges to the conception of meaning as truth-conditions. First, there was the question left hanging earlier, of how the theorist of truth-conditions is to say what makes one axiom of a semantic theory is correctly in that of another, when the two axioms assign the same semantic values, but do so by means of different concepts. Since the different concepts will have different possession conditions, the dovetailing accounts, at the deeper level of what it is for each axiom to be correct for a persons language will be different accounts. Second, there is a challenge repeatedly made by the minimalist theorists of truth, to the effect that the theorist of meaning as truth-conditions should give some non-circular account of what it is to understand a sentence, or to be capable of understanding all sentences containing a given constituent. For each expression in a sentence, the corresponding dovetailing account, together with the possession condition, supplies a non-circular account of what it is to understand any sentence containing that expression. The combined accounts for each of he expressions that comprise a given sentence together constitute a non-circular account of what it is to understand the compete sentences. Taken together, they allow the theorists of meaning as truth-conditions fully to meet the challenge.
A curious view common to that which is expressed by an utterance or sentence: The proposition or claim made about the world. By extension, the content of a predicate or other sub-sentential component is what it contributes to the content of sentences that contain it. The nature of content is the central concern of the philosophy of language, in that mental states have contents: A belief may have the content that the prime minister will resign. A concept is something that is capable of bringing a constituent of such contents.
Several different concepts may each be ways of thinking of the same object. A person may think of himself in the first-person way, or think of himself as the spouse of Mary Smith, or as the person located in a certain room now. More generally, a concept c is distinct from a concept d if it is possible for a person rationally to believe d is such-and-such. As words can be combined to form structured sentences, concepts have also been conceived as combinable into structured complex contents. When these complex contents are expressed in English by that . . . clauses, as in our opening examples, they will be capable of being true or false, depending on the way the world is.
The general system of concepts with which we organize our thoughts and perceptions are to encourage a conceptual scheme of which the outstanding elements of our every day conceptual formalities include spatial and temporal relations between events and enduring objects, causal relations, other persons, meaning-bearing utterances of others, . . . and so on. To see the world as containing such things is to share this much of our conceptual scheme. A controversial argument of Davidsons’ urges that we would be unable to interpret speech from a different conceptual scheme as even meaningful, Davidson daringly goes on to argue that since translation proceeds according ti a principle of clarity, and since it must be possible of an omniscient translator to make sense of, us we can be assured that most of the beliefs formed within the commonsense conceptual framework are true.
Concepts are to be distinguished from a stereotype and from conceptions. The stereotypical spy may be a middle-level official down on his luck and in need of money. None the less, we can come to learn that Anthony Blunt, art historian and Surveyor of the Queens Pictures, are a spy; we can come to believe that something falls under a concept while positively disbelieving that the same thing falls under the stereotype associated wit the concept. Similarly, a persons conception of a just arrangement for resolving disputes may involve something like contemporary Western legal systems. But whether or not it would be correct, it is quite intelligible for someone to rejects this conception by arguing that it dies not adequately provide for the elements of fairness and respect that are required by the concepts of justice.
Basically, a concept is that which is understood by a term, particularly a predicate. To posses a concept is to be able to deploy a term expressing it in making judgements, in which the ability connection is such things as recognizing when the term applies, and being able to understand the consequences of its application. The term idea was formally used in the came way, but is avoided because of its associations with subjective matters inferred upon mental imagery in which may be irrelevant to the possession of a concept. In the semantics of Fridge, a concept is the reference of a predicate, and cannot be referred to by a subjective term, although its recognition of as a concept, in that some such notion is needed to the explanatory justification of which that sentence of unity finds of itself from being thought of as namely categorized lists of itemized priorities.
A theory of a particular concept must be distinguished from a theory of the object or objects it selectively picks the outlying of the theory of the concept under which is partially contingent of the theory of thought and/or epistemology. A theory of the object or objects is part of metaphysics and ontology. Some figures in the history of philosophy-and are open to the accusation of not having fully respected the distinction between the kinds of theory. Descartes appears to have moved from facts about the indubitability of the thought I think, containing the fist-person was of thinking, to conclusions about the nonmaterial nature of the object he himself was. But though the goals of a theory of concepts and a theory of objects are distinct, each theory is required to have an adequate account of its relation to the other theory. A theory if concept is unacceptable if it gives no account of how the concept is capable of picking out the object it evidently does pick out. A theory of objects is unacceptable if it makes it impossible to understand how we could have concepts of those objects.
A fundamental question for philosophy is: What individuates a given concept-that is, what makes it the one it is, rather than any other concept? One answer, which has been developed in great detail, is that it is impossible to give a non-trivial answer to this question (Schiffer, 1987). An alternative approach, addressees the question by starting from the idea that a concept id individuated by the condition that must be satisfied if a thinker is to posses that concept and to be capable of having beliefs and other attitudes whose content contains it as a constituent. So, to take a simple case, one could propose that the logical concept and is individuated by this condition, it be the unique concept ‘C’ to posses that a thinker has to find these forms of inference compelling, without basing them on any further inference or information: From any two premisses ‘A’ and ‘B’, ‘ACB’ can be inferred, and from any premiss ‘ACB’, each of ‘A’ and ‘B’ can be inferred. Again, a relatively observational concept such as round can be individuated in part by stating that the thinker finds specified contents containing it compelling when he has certain kinds of perception, and in part by relating those judgements containing the concept and which are not based on perception to those judgements that are. A statement that individuates a concept by saying what is required for a thinker to posses it can be described as giving the possession condition for the concept.
A possession condition for a particular concept may actually make use of that concept. The possession condition for and does so. We can also expect to use relatively observational concepts in specifying the kind of experience that have to be mentioned in the possession conditions for relatively observational concepts. What we must avoid is mention of the concept in question as such within the content of the attitudes attributed to the thinker in the possession condition. Otherwise we would be presupposing possession of the concept in an account that was meant to elucidate its possession. In talking of what the thinker finds compelling, the possession conditions can also respect an insight of the later Wittgenstein: That to find her finds it natural to go on in new cases in applying the concept.
Sometimes a family of concepts has this property: It is not possible to master any one of the members of the family without mastering the others. Two of the families that plausibly have this status are these: The family consisting of some simple concepts 0, 1, 2, . . . of the natural numbers and the corresponding concepts of numerical quantifiers there are 0 so-and-so, there is 1 so-and-so, . . . and the family consisting of the concepts; belief and desire. Such families have come to be known as local holism. A local holism does not prevent the individuation of a concept by its possession condition. Rather, it demands that all the concepts in the family be individuated simultaneously. So one would say something of this form: Belief and desire form the unique pair of concepts C1 and C2 such that for as thinker to posses them are to meet such-and-such condition involving the thinker, C1 and C2. For these and other possession conditions to individuate properly, it is necessary that there be some ranking of the concepts treated. The possession conditions for concepts higher in the ranking must presuppose only possession of concepts at the same or lower levels in the ranking.
A possession conditions may in various ways make a thinkers possession of a particular concept dependent upon his relations to his environment. Many possession conditions will mention the links between a concept and the thinkers perceptual experience. Perceptual experience represents the world as a certain way. It is arguable that the only satisfactory explanation of what it is for perceptual experience to represent the world in a particular way must refer to the complex relations of the experience to the subjects environment. If this is so, then mention of such experiences in a possession condition will make possession of that concept dependent in part upon the environmental relations of the thinker. Burge (1979) has also argued from intuitions about particular examples that, even though the thinkers non-environmental properties and relations remain constant, the conceptual content of his mental state can vary if the thinkers social environment is varied. A possession condition that properly individuates such a concept must take into account the thinkers social relations, in particular his linguistic relations.
Concepts have a normative dimension, a fact strongly emphasized by Kripke. For any judgement whose content involves a given concept, there is a correctness condition for that judgement, a condition that is dependent in part upon the identity of the concept. The normative character of concepts also extends into making the territory of a thinkers reasons for making judgements. A thinkers visual perception can give him good reason for judging That man is bald: It does not by itself give him good reason for judging Rostropovich ids bald, even if the man he sees is Rostropovich. All these normative connections must be explained by a theory of concepts one approach to these matters is to look to the possession condition for the concept, and consider how the referent of a concept is fixed from it, together with the world. One proposal is that the referent of the concept is that object or, property, or function, . . . which makes the practices of judgement and inference mentioned in the possession condition always lead to true judgements and truth-preserving inferences. This proposal would explain why certain reasons are necessity good reasons for judging given contents. Provided the possession condition permits us to say what it is about a thinkers previous judgements that masker it, the case that he is employing one concept rather than another, this proposal would also have another virtue. It would allow us to say how the correctness condition is determined for a judgement in which the concept is applied to newly encountered objects. The judgement is correct if the new object has the property that in fact makes the judgmental practices mentioned in the possession condition yield true judgements, or truth-preserving inferences.
These manifesting dissimilations have occasioned the affiliated differences accorded within the distinction as associated with Leibniz, who declares that there are only two kinds of truths-truths of reason and truths of fact. The forms are all either explicit identities, i.e., of the form ‘A’ is ‘A’, ‘AB’ is ‘B’, etc., or they are reducible to this form by successively substituting equivalent terms. Leibniz dubs them truths of reason because the explicit identities are self-evident deducible truths, whereas the rest can be converted to such by purely rational operations. Because their denial involves a demonstrable contradiction, Leibniz also says that truths of reason rest on the principle of contradiction, or identity and that they are necessary [propositions, which are true of all possible words. Some examples are All equilateral rectangles are rectangles and All bachelors are unmarried: The first is already of the form ‘AB’ is ‘B’ and the latter can be reduced to this form by substituting unmarried man fort bachelor. Other examples, or so Leibniz believes, are God exists and the truths of logic, arithmetic and geometry.
Truths of fact, on the other hand, cannot be reduced to an identity and our only way of knowing them is empirically by reference to the facts of the empirical world. Likewise, since their denial does not involve a contradiction, their truth is merely contingent: They could have been otherwise and hold of the actual world, but not of every possible one. Some examples are Caesar crossed the Rubicon and Leibniz was born in Leipzig, as well as propositions expressing correct scientific generalizations. In Leibnizs view, truths of fact rest on the principle of sufficient reason, which states that nothing can be so unless there is a reason that it is so. This reason is that the actual world (by which he means the total collection of things past, present and future) is better than any other possible worlds and was therefore created by God.
In defending the principle of sufficient reason, Leibniz runs into serious problems. He believes that in every true proposition, the concept of the predicate is contained in that of the subject. (This holds even for propositions like Caesar crossed the Rubicon: Leibniz thinks anyone who dids not cross the Rubicon, would not have been Caesar). And this containment relationship! Which is eternal and unalterable even by God ~? Guarantees that every truth has a sufficient reason. If truths consists in concept containment, however, then it seems that all truths are analytic and hence necessary, and if they are all necessary, surely they are all truths of reason. Leibnitz responds that not every truth can be reduced to an identity in a finite number of steps, in some instances revealing the connection between subject and predicate concepts would requite an infinite analysis. But while this may entail that we cannot prove such propositions as deductively manifested, it does not appear to show that the proposition could have been false. Intuitively, it seems a better ground for supposing that it is necessary truth of a special sort. A related question arises from the idea that truths of fact depend on Gods decision to creates the best of all possible worlds: If it is part of the concept of this world that it is best, now could its existence be other than necessary? Leibniz answers that its existence is only hypothetically necessary, i.e., it follows from Gods decision to create this world, but God had the power to decide otherwise. Yet God is necessarily good and non-deceiving, so how could he have decided to do anything else? Leibniz says much more about these masters, but it is not clear whether he offers any satisfactory solutions.
Leibniz and others have thought of truths as a property of propositions, where the latter are conceived as things that may be expressed by, but are distinct from, linguistic items like statements. On another approach, truth is a property of linguistic entities, and the basis of necessary truth in convention. Thus A.J. Ayer, for example,. Argued that the only necessary truths are analytic statements and that the latter rest entirely on our commitment to use words in certain ways.
The slogan the meaning of a statement is its method of verification expresses the empirical verifications theory of meaning. It is more than the general criterion of meaningfulness if and only if it is empirically verifiable. If says in addition what the meaning of a sentence is: It is all those observations that would confirm or disconfirmed the sentence. Sentences that would be verified or falsified by all the same observations are empirically equivalent or have the same meaning. A sentence is said to be cognitively meaningful if and only if it can be verified or falsified in experience. This is not meant to require that the sentence be conclusively verified or falsified, since universal scientific laws or hypotheses (which are supposed to pass the test) are not logically deducible from any amount of actually observed evidence.
When one predicates necessary truth of a preposition one speaks of modality dedicto. For one ascribes the modal property, necessary truth, to a dictum, namely, whatever proposition is taken as necessary. A venerable tradition, however, distinguishes this from necessary de re, wherein one predicates necessary or essential possession of some property to an on object. For example, the statement ‘4' is necessarily greater than ‘2' might be used to predicate of the object, ‘4', the property, being necessarily greater than ‘2'. That objects have some of their properties necessarily, or essentially, and others only contingently, or accidentally, are a main part of the doctrine called; essentialism. Thus, an essentials might say that Socrates had the property of being bald accidentally, but that of being self-identical, or perhaps of being human, essentially. Although essentialism has been vigorously attacked in recent years, most particularly by Quine, it also has able contemporary proponents, such as Plantinga.
Modal necessity as seen by many philosophers whom have traditionally held that every proposition has a modal status as well as a truth value. Every proposition is either necessary or contingent as well as either true or false. The issue of knowledge of the modal status of propositions has received much attention because of its intimate relationship to the issue of deductive reasoning. For example, no propositions of the theoretic content that all knowledge of necessary propositions is deductively knowledgeable. Others reject this claim by citing Kripkes (1980) alleged cases of necessary theoretical propositions. Such contentions are often inconclusive, for they fail to take into account the following tripartite distinction: ‘S’ knows the general modal status of ‘p’ just in case ‘S’ knows that ‘p’ is a necessary proposition or ‘S’ knows the truth that ‘p’ is a contingent proposition. ‘S’ knows the truth value of ‘p’ just in case ‘S’ knows that ‘p’ is true or ‘S’ knows that ‘p’ is false. ‘S’ knows the specific modal status of ‘p’ just in case ‘S’ knows that ‘p’ is necessarily true or ‘S’ knows that ‘p’ is necessarily false or ‘S’ knows that ‘p’ is contingently true or ‘S’ knows that ‘p’ is contingently false. It does not follow from the fact that knowledge of the general modal status of a proposition is a deductively reasoned distinctive modal status is also given to theoretical principles. Nor des it follow from the fact that knowledge of a specific modal status of a proposition is theoretically given as to the knowledge of its general modal status that also is deductive.
The certainties involving reason and a truth of fact are much in distinction by associative measures given through Leibniz, who declares that there are only two kinds of truths-truths of reason and truths of fact. The former are all either explicit identities, i.e., of the form ‘A’ is ‘A’, ‘AB’ is ‘B’, etc., or they are reducible to this form by successively substituting equivalent terms. Leibniz dubs them truths of reason because the explicit identities are self-evident theoretical truth, whereas the rest can be converted to such by purely rational operations. Because their denial involves a demonstrable contradiction, Leibniz also says that truths of reason rest on the principle of contraction, or identity and that they are necessary propositions, which are true of all possible worlds. Some examples are that All bachelors are unmarried: The first is already of the form ‘AB’ is ‘B’ and the latter can be reduced to this form by substituting unmarried man for bachelor. Other examples, or so Leibniz believes, are God exists and the truth of logic, arithmetic and geometry.
Truths of fact, on the other hand, cannot be reduced to an identity and our only way of knowing hem os a theoretical manifestations, or by reference to the fact of the empirical world. Likewise, since their denial does not involve as contradiction, their truth is merely contingent: They could have been otherwise and hold of the actual world, but not of every possible one. Some examples are Caesar crossed the Rubicon and Leibniz was born in Leipzig, as well as propositions expressing correct scientific generalizations. In Leibnizs view, truths of fact rest on the principle of sufficient reason, which states that nothing can be so unless thee is a reason that it is so. This reason is that the actual world (by which he means the total collection of things past, present and future) is better than any other possible world and was therefore created by God.
In defending the principle of sufficient reason, Leibniz runs into serious problems. He believes that in every true proposition, the concept of the predicate is contained in that of the subject. (This hols even for propositions like Caesar crossed the Rubicon: Leibniz thinks anyone who did not cross the Rubicon would not have been Caesar) And this containment relationship-that is eternal and unalterable even by God-guarantees that every truth has a sufficient reason. If truth consists in concept containment, however, then it seems that all truths are analytic and hence necessary, and if they are all necessary, surely they are all truths of reason. Leibniz responds that not evert truth can be reduced to an identity in a finite number of steps: In some instances revealing the connection between subject and predicate concepts would require an infinite analysis. But while this may entail that we cannot prove such propositions as deductively probable, it does not appear to show that the proposition could have been false. Intuitively, it seems a better ground for supposing that it is a necessary truth of a special sort. A related question arises from the idea that truths of fact depend on Gods decision to create the best world, if it is part of the concept of this world that it is best, how could its existence be other than necessary? Leibniz answers that its existence is only hypothetically necessary, i.e., it follows from Gods decision to create this world, but God is necessarily good, so how could he have decided to do anything else? Leibniz says much more about the matters, but it is not clear whether he offers any satisfactory solutions.
The modality of a proposition is the way in which it is true or false. The most important division is between propositions true of necessity, and those true as a things are: Necessary as opposed to contingent propositions. Other qualifiers sometimes called modal include the tense indicators It will be the case that ‘p’ or It was the case that ‘p’, and there are affinities between the deontic indicators, as it ought to be the case that ‘p’ or it is permissible that ‘p’, and the logical modalities as a logic that study the notions of necessity and possibility. Modal logic was of a great importance historically, particularly in the light of various doctrines concerning the necessary properties of the deity, but was not a central topic of modern logic in its golden period at the beginning of the 20th century. It was, however, revived by C. I. Lewis, by adding to a propositional or predicate calculus two operators, □ and ◊ (sometimes written N and M), meaning necessarily and possibly, respectively. These like p ➞ ◊ p and □ p ➞ p will be to include □ p ➞ □□ p , if a proposition is necessary, and ◊ p ➞ □ ◊ p, if a proposition is possible. The classical modal theory for modal logic, due to Kripke and the Swedish logician Stig Kanger, involves valuing propositions not as true or false simplicitiers, but as true or false art possible worlds, with necessity then corresponding to truth in all worlds, and possibly to truths in some world.
The doctrine advocated by David Lewis, which different possible worlds are to be thought of as existing exactly as this one does. Thinking in terms of possibilities is thinking of real worlds where things are different, this view has been charged with misrepresenting it as some insurmountably unseeing to why it is good to save the child from drowning, since there is still a possible world in which she (or her counterpart) drowned, and from the standpoint of the universe it should make no difference that world is actual. Critics asio charge either that the notion fails to fit with a coherent theory of how we know about possible worlds, or with a coherent theory about possible worlds, or with a coherent theory of why we are interested in them, but Lewis denies that any other way of interpreting modal statements is tenable.
Knowledge and belief, according to most epistemologists, knowledge entails belief, so that I cannot know that such and such is the case unless I believe that such and such is the case. Others think this entailment thesis can be rendered more accurately if we substitute for belief some closely related attitude. For instance, several philosophers would prefer to say that knowledge entail psychological certainties (Prichard, 1950 and Ayer, 1956) or conviction (Lehrer, 1974) or acceptance (Lehrer, 1989). None the less, there are arguments against all versions of the thesis that knowledge requires having a belief-like attitude toward the known. These arguments are given by philosophers who think that knowledge and belief (or a facsimile) are mutually incompatible (the incomparability thesis), or by ones who say that knowledge does not entail belief, or vice versa, so that each may exist without the other, but the two may also coexist (the separability thesis).
The incompatibility thesis is sometimes traced to Plato, 429-347 Bc in view of his claim that knowledge is infallible while belief or opinion is fallible (Republic 476-9). But this claim would not support the thesis. Belief might be a component of an infallible form of knowledge in spite of the fallibility of belief. Perhaps, knowledge involves some factor that compensates for the fallibility of belief.
A. Duncan-Jones (1939: Also Vendler, 1978) cite linguistic evidence to back up the incompatibility thesis. He notes that people often say I do not believe she is guilty. I know she is and the like, which suggest that belief rule out knowledge. However, as Lehrer (1974) indicates, the above exclamation is only a more emphatic way of saying I do not just believe she is guilty, I know she is where just makes it especially clear that the speaker is signalling that she has something more salient than mere belief, not that she has something inconsistent with belief, namely knowledge. Compare: You do not hurt him, you killed him.
A. Prichard (1966) offers a defence of the incompatibility thesis that hinges on the equation of knowledge with certainty (both infallibility and psychological certitude) and the assumption that when we believe in the truth of a claim we are not certain about its truth. Given that belief always involves uncertainty while knowledge never dies, believing something rules out the possibility of knowing it. Unfortunately, however, Prichard gives us no goods reason to grant that states of belief are never ones involving confidence. Conscious beliefs clearly involve some level of confidence, to suggest that we cease to believe things about which we are completely confident is bizarre.
A.D. Woozley (1953) defends a version of the separability thesis. Woozleys version, which deals with psychological certainty rather than belief per se, is that knowledge can exist in the absence of confidence about the item known, although might also be accompanied by confidence as well. Woozley remarks that the test of whether I know something is what I can do, where what I can do may include answering questions. On the basis of this remark he suggests that even when people are unsure of the truth of a claim, they might know that the claim is true. We unhesitatingly attribute knowledge to people who give correct responses on examinations even if those people show no confidence in their answers. Woozley acknowledges, however, that it would be odd for those who lack confidence to claim knowledge. It would be peculiar to say, I am unsure whether my answer is true: Still, I know it is correct. But this tension Woozley explains using a distinction between conditions under which we are justified in making a claim (such as a claim to know something), and conditions under which the claim we make is true. While I know such and such might be true even if I am unsure whether such and such holds, nonetheless it would be inappropriate for me to claim that I know that such and such unless I were sure of the truth of my claim.
Colin Radford (1966) extends Woozleys defence of the separability thesis. In Radfords view, not only is knowledge compatible with the lack of certainty, it is also compatible with a complete lack of belief. He argues by example. In one example, Jean has forgotten that he learned some English history years priori and yet he is able to give several correct responses to questions such as When did the Battle of Hastings occur? Since he forgot that he took history, he considers the correct response to be no more than guesses. Thus, when he says that the Battle of Hastings took place in 1066 he would deny having the belief that the Battle of Hastings took place in 1066. A disposition he would deny being responsible (or having the right to be convincing) that 1066 was the correct date. Radford would none the less insist that Jean know when the Battle occurred, since clearly be remembering the correct date. Radford admits that it would be inappropriate for Jean to say that he knew when the Battle of Hastings occurred, but, like Woozley he attributes the impropriety to a fact about when it is and is not appropriate to claim knowledge. When we claim knowledge, we ought, at least to believe that we have the knowledge we claim, or else our behaviour is intentionally misleading.
Those that agree with Radfords defence of the separability thesis will probably think of belief as an inner state that can be detected through introspection. That Jean lacks beliefs about English history is plausible on this Cartesian picture since Jean does not find himself with any beliefs about English history when ne seek them out. One might criticize Radford, however, by rejecting that Cartesian view of belief. One could argue that some beliefs are thoroughly unconscious, for example. Or one could adopt a behaviourist conception of belief, such as Alexander Bains (1859), according to which having beliefs is a matter of the way people are disposed to behave (and has not Radford already adopted a behaviourist conception of knowledge?) Since Jean gives the correct response when queried, a form of verbal behaviour, a behaviourist would be tempted to credit him with the belief that the Battle of Hastings occurred in 1066.
D.M. Armstrong (1873) takes a different tack against Radford. Jean does know that the Battle of Hastings took place in 1066. Armstrong will grant Radfod that point, in fact, Armstrong suggests that Jean believe that 1066 is not the date the Battle of Hastings occurred, for Armstrong equates the belief that such and such is just possible but no more than just possible with the belief that such and such is not the case. However, Armstrong insists, Jean also believes that the Battle did occur in 1066. After all, had Jean been mistaught that the Battle occurred in 1066, and subsequently guessed that it took place in 1066, we would surely describe the situation as one in which Jeans false belief about the Battle became unconscious over time but persisted of a memory trace that was causally responsible for his guess. Out of consistency, we must describe Radfords original case as one that Jeans true belief became unconscious but persisted long enough to cause his guess. Thus, while Jean consciously believes that the Battle did not occur in 1066, unconsciously he does believe it occurred in 1066. So after all, Radford does not have a counterexample to the claim that knowledge entails belief.
Armstrongs response to Radford was to reject Radfords claim that the examinee lacked the relevant belief about English history. Another response is to argue that the examinee lacks the knowledge Radford attributes to him (cf. Sorenson, 1982). If Armstrong is correct in suggesting that Jean believes both that 1066 is and that it is not the date of the Battle of Hastings, one might deny Jean knowledge on the grounds that people who believe the denial of what they believe cannot be said to’ know the truth of their belief. Another strategy might be to compare the examine case with examples of ignorance given in recent attacks on externalist accounts of knowledge (needless to say. Externalists themselves would tend not to favour this strategy). Consider the following case developed by BonJour (1985): For no apparent reason, Samantha believes that she is clairvoyant. Again, for no apparent reason, she one day comes to believe that the President is in New York City, even though she has every reason to believe that the President is in Washington, D.C. In fact, Samantha is a completely reliable clairvoyant, and she has arrived at her belief about the whereabouts of the President thorough the power of her clairvoyance. Yet surely Samanthas belief is completely irrational. She is not justified in thinking what she does. If so, then she does not know where the President is. But Radfords examinee is unconventional. Even if Jean lacks the belief that Radford denies him, Radford does not have an example of knowledge that is unattended with belief. Suppose that Jeans memory had been sufficiently powerful to produce the relevant belief. As Radford says, in having every reason to suppose that his response is mere guesswork, and he has every reason to consider his belief false. His belief would be an irrational one, and hence one about whose truth Jean would be ignorant.
Least has been of mention to an approaching view from which perception basis upon itself as a fundamental philosophical topic both for its central place in a theory of knowledge, and its central place un any theory of consciousness. Philosophy in this area is constrained by a number of properties that we believe to hold of perception, (1) It gives us knowledge of the world around us. (2) We are conscious of that world by being aware of sensible qualities: Colour, sounds, tastes, smells, felt warmth, and the shapes and positions of objects in the environment. (3) Such consciousness is effected through highly complex information channels, such as the output of the three different types of colour-sensitive cells in the eye, or the channels in the ear for interpreting pulses of air pressure as frequencies of sound. (4) There ensues even more complex neurophysiological coding of that information, and eventually higher-order brain functions bring it about that we interpreted the information so received. (Much of this complexity has been revealed by the difficulties of writing programs enabling computers to recognize quite simple aspects of the visual scene.) The problem is to avoid thinking of here being a central, ghostly, conscious self, fed information in the same way that a screen if fed information by a remote television camera. Once such a model is in place, experience will seem like a veil getting between us and the world, and the direct objects of perception will seem to be private items in an inner theatre or sensorium. The difficulty of avoiding this model is epically cute when we considered the secondary qualities of colour, sound, tactile feelings and taste, which can easily seem to have a purely private existence inside the perceiver, like sensation of pain. Calling such supposed items names like sense-data or percepts exacerbates the tendency, but once the model is in place, the first property, that perception gives us knowledge of the world and its surrounding surfaces, is quickly threatened, for there will now seem little connection between these items in immediate experience and any independent reality. Reactions to this problem include scepticism and idealism.
A more hopeful approach is to claim that the complexities of (3) and (4) explain how we can have direct acquaintance of the world, than suggesting that the acquaintance we do have been at best indirect. It is pointed out that perceptions are not like sensation, precisely because they have a content, or outer-directed nature. To have a perception is to be aware of the world for being such-and-such a way, than to enjoy a mere modification of sensation. But such direct realism has to be sustained in the face of the evident personal (neurophysiological and other) factors determining haw we perceive. One approach is to ask why it is useful to be conscious of what we perceive, when other aspects of our functioning work with information determining responses without any conscious awareness or intervention. A solution to this problem would offer the hope of making consciousness part of the natural world, than a strange optional extra.
Furthering, perceptual knowledge is knowledge acquired by or through the senses and includes most of what we know. We cross intersections when we see the light turn green, head for the kitchen when we smell the roast burning, squeeze the fruit to determine its ripeness, and climb out of bed when we hear the alarm ring. In each case we come to know something-that the light has turned green, that the roast is burning, that the melon is overripe, and that it is time to get up-by some sensory means. Seeing that the light has turned green is learning something-that, the light has turned green-by use of the eyes. Feeling that the melon is overripe is coming to know a fact-that the melon is overripe-by ones sense to touch. In each case the resulting knowledge is somehow based on, derived from or grounded in the sort of experience that characterizes the sense modality in question.
Much of our perceptual knowledge is indirect, dependent or derived. By this I mean that the facts we describe ourselves as learning, as coming to know, by perceptual means are pieces of knowledge that depend on our coming to know something else, some other fact, in a more direct way. We see, by the gauge, that we need gas, see, by the newspapers, that our team has lost again, see, by her expression, that she is nervous. This derived or dependent sort of knowledge is particularly prevalent in the cases of vision, but it occurs, to a lesser degree, in every sense modality. We install bells and other noise-makers so that we calm for example, hear (by the bell) that someone is at the door and (by the alarm) that its time to get up. When we obtain knowledge in this way, it is clear that unless one can see, hence, comes to know something about the gauge (that it says) and, hence, know that one is described as coming to know by perceptual means. If one cannot hear that the bell is ringing, one cannot-in at least in this way-hear that ones visitors have arrived. In such cases one sees (hears, smells, etc.) that ‘a’ is ‘F’, coming to know thereby that ‘a’ is ‘F’, by seeing (hearing, etc.) that some other condition, ‘b’s’ being ‘G’, obtains when this occurs, the knowledge (that a is F) is derived from, or dependent on, the more basic perceptual knowledge that ‘b’ is ‘G’.
Perhaps as a better strategy is to tie an account save that part that evidence could justify explanation for it is its truth alone. Since, at least the time of Aristotle philosophers of explanatory knowledge have emphasizes of its importance that, in its simplest therms, we want to know not only what are the composite peculiarities and particulars points of issue but also why it is. This consideration suggests that we define an explanation as an answer to a why-question. Such a definition would, however, be too broad, because some why-questions are requests for consolation (Why did my son have to die?) Or moral justification (Why should women not be paid the same as men for the same work?) It would also be too narrow because some explanations are responses to how-questions (How does radar work?) Or how-possibility-questions (How is it possible for cats always to land their feet?)
In its overall sense, to explain means to make clear, to make plain, or to provide understanding. Definition of this sort are philosophically unhelpful, for the terms used in the deficient are no less problematic than the term to be defined. Moreover, since a wide variety of things require explanation, and since many different types of explanation exist, as more complex explanation is required. To facilitate the requirement leaves, least of mention, for us to consider by introduction a bit of technical terminology. The term explanation is used to refer to that which is to be explained: The term explanans refers to that which does the explaining, the explanans and the explanation taken together constitute the explanation.
One common type of explanation occurs when deliberate human actions are explained in terms of conscious purposes. Why did you go to the pharmacy yesterday? Because I had a headache and needed to get some aspirin. It is tacitly assumed that aspirin is an appropriate medication for headaches and that going t the pharmacy would bean efficient way of getting some. Such explanations are, of course, teleological, referring, ss they do, to goals. The explanans is not the realisation of a future goal - if the pharmacy happened to be closed for stocktaking the aspirin would have ben obtained there, bu t that would not invalidate the explanation. Some philosophers would say that the antecedent desire to achieve the end is what doers the explaining: Others might say that the explaining is done by the nature of the goal and the fact that the action promoted the chances of realizing it. (Taylor, 1964). In that it should not be automatically be assumed that such explanations are causal. Philosophers differ considerably on whether these explanations are to be framed in terms of cause or reason, but the distinction cannot be used to show that the relation between reasons and the actions they justify is in no way causal, and there are many differing analyses of such concepts as intention and agency. Expanding the domain beyond consciousness, Freud maintained, in addition, that much human behaviour can be explained in terms of unconscious and conscious wishes. Those Freudian explanations should probably be construed as basically causal.
Problems arise when teleological explanations are offered in other context. The behaviour of non-human animals is often explained in terms of purpose, e.g., the mouse ran to escape from the cat. In such cases the existence of conscious purpose seems dubious. The situation is still more problematic when a supr-empirical purpose in invoked -, e.g., the explanations of living species in terms of Gods purpose, or the vitalistic explanations of biological phenomena in terms of a entelechy or vital principle. In recent years an anthropic principle has received attention in cosmology (Barrow and Tipler, 1986). All such explanations have been condemned by many philosophers an anthropomorphic.
Nevertheless, philosophers and scientists often maintain that functional explanations play an important an legitimate role in various sciences such as, evolutionary biology, anthropology and sociology. For example, of the peppered moth in Liverpool, the change in colour from the light phase to the dark phase and back again to the light phase provided adaption to a changing environment and fulfilled the function of reducing predation on the spacies. In the study of primitive soviets anthropologists have maintained that various rituals the (rain dance) which may be inefficacious in braining about their manifest gaols (producing rain), actually cohesion at a period of stress (often a drought). Philosophers who admit teleological and/or functional explanations in common sense and science oftentimes take pans to argue that such explanations can be annualized entirely in terms of efficient causes, thereby escaping the charge of anthropomorphism (Wright, 1976): Again, however, not all philosophers agree.
Mainly to avoid the incursion of unwanted theology, metaphysics, or anthropomorphism into science, many philosophers and scientists, especially during the first half of the twentieth century - held that science provides only descriptions and predictions of natural phenomena, but not explanations for a series of influential philosophers of science - including Karl Popper (1935) Carl Hempel and Paul Oppenheim (1948) and Hempel (1965) - maintained that empirical science can explain natural phenomena without appealing to metaphysics or theology. It appears that this view is now accepted by the vast majority of philosophers of science, though there is sharp disagreement on the nature of scientific explanation.
The foregoing approach, developed by Hempel, Popper and others, became virtually a received view in the 1960s and 1970s. According to this view, to give a scientific explanation of any natural phenomenon is to show how this phenomena can be subsumed under a law of nature. A particular repture in a water pipe can be explained by citing the universal law that water expands when it freezes and the fact that the temperature of water in a pipe dropped below the freezing point. General law, as well as particular facts, can be explained by subsumption, the law of conservation of linear momentum can be explained by derivation from Newtons second and third laws of motion. Each of these explanations is a deductive argument: The explanans contains one or more statements of universal laws and, in many cases, statements deceiving initial conditions. This pattern of explanation is known as the deductive-nomological (D-N) model. Any such argument shows that the explanandun had to occur given the explanans.
Many, though not all, adherents of the received view allow for explanation by subsumption under statistical laws. Hempel (1965) offers as an example the case of a man who recovered quickly from a streptococcus infection as a result of treatment with penicillin. Although not all strep infections clar up quickly under this treatment, the probability of recovery in such cases is high, and this is sufficient for legitimate explanation According to Hempel. This example conforms to the inductive-statistical (I-S) model. Such explanations are viewed as arguments, but they are inductive than deductive. In these instances the explanation confers high inductive probability on the explanandum. An explanation of a particular fact satisfying either the ‘D-N’ or ‘I-S’ model is an argument to the effect that the fact in question was to b e expected by virtue of the explanans.
The received view been subjected to strenuous criticism by adherents of the causal/mechanical approach to scientific explanation (Salmon 1990). Many objections to the received view we engendered by he absence of caudal constraints (due largely to worries about Humes critique) on the ‘N-D’ and ‘I-S’ models. Beginning in the late 1950s, Michael Scriven advanced serious counter-examples to Hempels models: He was followed in the 1960s by Wesley Salmon and in the 1970s by Peter Railton. As accorded to the view, one explains phenomena identifying causes (a death is explained resalting from a massive cerebral haemorrhage) or by exposing underlying mechanisms (the behaviour of a gas is explained in terms of the motion of constituent molecules).
A unification approach to explanation carries with the basic idea that we understand our world more adequately to the extent that we can reduce the number of independent assumptions we must introduce to account for what goes on in it. Accordingly, we understand phenomena to the degree that we can fit them into an overall world picture or Weltanschauung. In order to serve in scientific explanation, the world picture must be scientifically well founded.
During the pas half-century much philosophical attention has ben focussed on explanation in science and in history. Considerable controversy has surrounded the question of whether historical explanation must be scientific, or whether history requires explanations of different types. Many diverse views have been articulated: The forgoing brief survey does not exhaust the variety (Salmon, 1990).
In everyday life we encounter many types of explanation, which appear not to raise philosophical difficulties, in addition to those already made of mention. Prior to take-off a flight attendant explains how to use the safety equipment on the aero-plane. In a museum the guide explain the significance of a famous painting. A mathematics teacher explains a geometrical proof to a bewildered student. A newspaper story explains how a prisoner escaped. Additional examples come easily to mind, the main point is to remember the great variety of contexts in which explanations are sought and given into.
Another item of importance to epistemology is the wider held notion that non-demonstrative inferences can be characterized as inference to the best explanation. Given the variety of views on the nature of explanation, this popular slogan can hardly provide a useful philosophical analysis
Early versions of defeasibility theories had difficulty allowing for the existence of evidence that was merely misleading, as in the case where one does know that Tom Grabit stole a book from the library, thanks to having seen him steal it, yet where, unbeknown to oneself, Toms mother out of dementia gas testified that Tom was far away from the library at the time of the theft. Ones justifiably believing that she gave the testimony would destroy ones justification for believing that h3 if added by itself to ones present evidence.
At least some defeasibility theories cannot deal with the knowledge one has while dying that h4: In this life there is no timer at which I believe that ‘d’, where the proposition that d expresses the details regarding some philosophical matter, e.g., the maximum number of blades of grass ever simultaneously growing on the earth. When it just so happens that it is true that ‘d’, defeasibility analyses typically consider the addition to ones dying thoughts of a belief that d in such a way as to improperly rule out actual knowledge that a quite different approach to knowledge, and one able to deal with some Gettier-type cases, involves developing some type of causal theory of Propositional knowledge. The interesting thesis that counts as a causal theory of justification (in the meaning of causal theory: Intended here) is the that of a belief is justified just in case it was produced by a type of process that is globally reliable, that is, its propensity to produce true beliefs-that can be defined (to a god enough approximation) as the proportion of the bailiffs it produces (or would produce where it used as much as opportunity allows) that are true-is sufficiently meaningful-variations of this view have been advanced for both knowledge and justified belief. The first formulation of reliability account of knowing appeared in a note by F.P. Ramsey (1931), who said that a belief was knowledge if it is true, certain can obtain by a reliable process. P. Unger (1968) suggested that ‘S’ knows that ‘p’ just in case it is not at all accidental that ‘S’ is right about its being the case that ‘p’. D.M. Armstrong (1973) said that a non-inferential belief qualified as knowledge if the belief has properties that are nominally sufficient for its truth, i.e., guarantee its truth through and by the laws of nature.
Such theories require that one or another specified relation hold that can be characterized by mention of some aspect of cassation concerning ones belief that ones acceptance of the proposition that its relation to state of affairs, e.g., h causes the belief: h is causally sufficient for the belief h and the belief have a common cause. Such simple versions of a causal theory are able to deal with the original Notgot case, since it involves no such causal relationship, but cannot explain why there is ignorance in the variants where Notgot and Berent Enç (1984) have pointed out that sometimes one knows of χ that is ø thanks to recognizing a feature merely corelated with the presence of øness without endorsing a causal theory themselves, there suggest that it would need to be elaborated so as to allow that ones belief that χ has ø has been caused by a factor whose correlation with the presence of øness has caused in oneself, e.g., by evolutionary adaption in ones ancestors, the disposition that one manifests in acquiring the belief in response to the correlated factor. Not only does this strain the unity of as causal theory by complicating it, but no causal theory without other shortcomings has been able to cover instances of deductively reasoned knowledge.
Causal theories of Propositional knowledge differ over whether they deviate from the tripartite analysis by dropping the requirements that ones believing (accepting) that h be justified. The same variation occurs regarding reliability theories, which present the Knower as reliable concerning the issue of whether or not h, in the sense that some of ones cognitive or epistemic states, θ, are such that, given further characteristics of oneself-possibly including relations to factors external to one and which one may not be aware-it is nomologically necessary (or at least probable) that h. In some versions, the reliability is required to be global in as far as it must concern a nomologically (probabilistic) relationship) relationship of states of type θ to the acquisition of true beliefs about a wider range of issues than merely whether or not there is. Also the controversy about how to delineate the limits of what constitutes a type of relevant personal state or characteristic. (For example, in a case where Mr Notgot has not been shamming and one does know thereby that someone in the office owns a Ford, such as a way of forming beliefs about the properties of persons spatially close to one, or instead something narrower, such as a way of forming beliefs about Ford owners in offices partly upon the basis of their relevant testimony?)
One important variety of reliability theory is a conclusive reason account, which includes a requirement that ones reasons for believing that h be such that in ones circumstances, if h* were not to occur then, e.g., one would not have the reasons one does for believing that h, or, e.g., one would not believe that h. Roughly, the latter is demanded by theories that treat a Knower as tracking the truth, theories that include the further demand that is roughly, if it were the case, that h, then one would believe that h. A version of the tracking theory has been defended by Robert Nozick (1981), who adds that if what he calls a method has been used to arrive at the belief that h, then the antecedent clauses of the two conditionals that characterize tracking will need to include the hypothesis that one would employ the very same method.
But unless more conditions are added to Nozicks analysis, it will be too weak to explain why one lacks knowledge in a version of the last variant of the tricky Mr Notgot case described above, where we add the following details: (a) Mr Notgots compulsion is not easily changed, while in the office, Mr Notgot has no other easy trick of the relevant type to play on one, and finally for ones belief that h, not by reasoning through a false belief ut by basing belief that h, upon a true existential generalization of ones evidence.
Some philosophers think that the category of knowing for which is true. Justified believing (accepting) is a requirement constituting only a species of Propositional knowledge, construed as an even broader category. They have proposed various examples of PK that do not satisfy the belief and/ort justification conditions of the tripartite analysis. Such cases are often recognized by analyses of Propositional knowledge in terms of powers, capacities, or abilities. For instance, Alan R. White (1982) treats PK as merely the ability to provide a correct answer to a possible questions, however, White may be equating producing knowledge in the sense of producing the correct answer to a possible question with displaying knowledge in the sense of manifesting knowledge. (White, 1982). The latter can be done even by very young children and some non-human animals independently of their being asked questions, understanding questions, or recognizing answers to questions. Indeed, an example that has been proposed as an instance of knowing that h without believing or accepting that h can be modified so as to illustrate this point. Two examples concerns an imaginary person who has no special training or information about horses or racing, but who in an experiment persistently and correctly picks the winners of upcoming horseraces. If the example is modified so that the hypothetical seer never picks winners but only muses over whether those horses wight win, or only reports those horses winning, this behaviour should be as much of a candidate for the persons manifesting knowledge that the horse in question will win as would be the behaviour of picking it as a winner.
These considerations now placed upon our table, least that we take to consider of their vulnerability, that is in regard to their limitation: Edward Craigs analysis (1990) of the concept of knowing of a persons being a satisfactory informant in relation to an inquirer who wants to find out whether or not h. Craig realizes that counterexamples to his analysis appear to be constituted by Knower who are too recalcitrant to inform the inquirer, or too incapacitate to inform, or too discredited to be worth considering (as with the boy who cried Wolf). Craig admits that this might make preferable some alternative view of knowledge as a different state that helps to explain the presence of the state of being a suitable informant when the latter does obtain. Such the alternate, which offers a recursive definition that concerns ones having the power to proceed in a way representing the state of affairs, causally involved in ones proceeding in this way. When combined with a suitable analysis of representing, this theory of propositional knowledge can be unified with a structurally similar analysis of knowing how to do something.
Knowledge and belief, according to most epistemologists, knowledge entails belief, so that I cannot know that such and such is the case unless I believe that such and such is the case. Others think this entailment thesis can be rendered more accurately if we substitute for belief some closely related attitude. For instance, several philosophers would prefer to say that knowledge entail psychological certainties (Prichard, 1950 and Ayer, 1956) or conviction (Lehrer, 1974) or acceptance (Lehrer, 1989). None the less, there are arguments against all versions of the thesis that knowledge requires having a belief-like attitude toward the known. These arguments are given by philosophers who think that knowledge and belief (or a facsimile) are mutually incompatible (the incomparability thesis), or by ones who say that knowledge does not entail belief, or vice versa, so that each may exist without the other, but the two may also coexist (the separability thesis).
The incompatibility thesis is sometimes traced to Plato (429-347 Bc) in view of his claim that knowledge is infallible while belief or opinion is fallible (Republic 476-9). But this claim would not support the thesis. Belief might be a component of an infallible form of knowledge in spite of the fallibility of belief. Perhaps, knowledge involves some factor that compensates for the fallibility of belief.
A. Duncan-Jones (1939: Also Vendler, 1978) cite linguistic evidence to back up the incompatibility thesis. He notes that people often say I do not believe she is guilty. I know she is and the like, which suggest that belief rule out knowledge. However, as Lehrer (1974) indicates, the above exclamation is only a more emphatic way of saying I do not just believe she is guilty, I know she is where just makes it especially clear that the speaker is signalling that she has something more salient than mere belief, not that she has something inconsistent with belief, namely knowledge. Compare: You do not hurt him, you killed him.
H.A. Prichard (1966) offers a defence of the incompatibility thesis that hinges on the equation of knowledge with certainty (both infallibility and psychological certitude) and the assumption that when we believe in the truth of a claim we are not certain about its truth. Given that belief always involves uncertainty while knowledge never dies, believing something rules out the possibility of knowing it. Unfortunately, however, Prichard gives us no goods reason to grant that states of belief are never ones involving confidence. Conscious beliefs clearly involve some level of confidence, to suggest that we cease to believe things about which we are completely confident is bizarre.
A.D. Woozley (1953) defends a version of the separability thesis. Woozleys version, which deals with psychological certainty rather than belief per se, is that knowledge can exist in the absence of confidence about the item known, although might also be accompanied by confidence as well. Woozley remarks that the test of whether I know something is what I can do, where what I can do may include answering questions. On the basis of this remark he suggests that even when people are unsure of the truth of a claim, they might know that the claim is true. We unhesitatingly attribute knowledge to people who give correct responses on examinations even if those people show no confidence in their answers. Woozley acknowledges, however, that it would be odd for those who lack confidence to claim knowledge. It would be peculiar to say, I am unsure whether my answer is true: Still, I know it is correct But this tension Woozley explains using a distinction between conditions under which we are justified in making a claim (such as a claim to know something), and conditions under which the claim we make is true. While I know such and such might be true even if I am unsure whether such and such holds, nonetheless it would be inappropriate for me to claim that I know that such and such unless I were sure of the truth of my claim.
Colin Radford (1966) extends Woozleys defence of the separability thesis. In Radfords view, not only is knowledge compatible with the lack of certainty, it is also compatible with a complete lack of belief. He argues by example. In one example, Jean has forgotten that he learned some English history years priori and yet he is able to give several correct responses to questions such as When did the Battle of Hastings occur? Since he forgot that he took history, he considers the correct response to be no more than guesses. Thus, when he says that the Battle of Hastings took place in 1066 he would deny having the belief that the Battle of Hastings took place in 1066. A disposition he would deny being responsible (or having the right to be convincing) that 1066 was the correct date. Radford would none the less insist that Jean know when the Battle occurred, since clearly be remembering the correct date. Radford admits that it would be inappropriate for Jean to say that he knew when the Battle of Hastings occurred, but, like Woozley he attributes the impropriety to a fact about when it is and is not appropriate to claim knowledge. When we claim knowledge, we ought, at least to believe that we have the knowledge we claim, or else our behaviour is intentionally misleading.
Those that agree with Radfords defence of the separability thesis will probably think of belief as an inner state that can be detected through introspection. That Jean lacks beliefs about English history is plausible on this Cartesian picture since Jean does not find himself with any beliefs about English history when ne seek them out. One might criticize Radford, however, by rejecting that Cartesian view of belief. One could argue that some beliefs are thoroughly unconscious, for example. Or one could adopt a behaviourist conception of belief, such as Alexander Bains (1859), according to which having beliefs is a matter of the way people are disposed to behave (and has not Radford already adopted a behaviourist conception of knowledge?) Since Jean gives the correct response when queried, a form of verbal behaviour, a behaviourist would be tempted to credit him with the belief that the Battle of Hastings occurred in 1066.
D.M. Armstrong (1873) takes a different tack against Radford. Jean does know that the Battle of Hastings took place in 1066. Armstrong will grant Radfod that point, in fact, Armstrong suggests that Jean believe that 1066 is not the date the Battle of Hastings occurred, for Armstrong equates the belief that such and such is just possible but no more than just possible with the belief that such and such is not the case. However, Armstrong insists, Jean also believes that the Battle did occur in 1066. After all, had Jean been mistaught that the Battle occurred in 1066, and subsequently guessed that it took place in 1066, we would surely describe the situation as one in which Jeans false belief about the Battle became unconscious over time but persisted of a memory trace that was causally responsible for his guess. Out of consistency, we must describe Radfords original case as one that Jeans true belief became unconscious but persisted long enough to cause his guess. Thus, while Jean consciously believes that the Battle did not occur in 1066, unconsciously he does believe it occurred in 1066. So after all, Radford does not have a counterexample to the claim that knowledge entails belief.
Armstrongs response to Radford was to reject Radfords claim that the examinee lacked the relevant belief about English history. Another response is to argue that the examinee lacks the knowledge Radford attributes to him (cf. Sorenson, 1982). If Armstrong is correct in suggesting that Jean believes both that 1066 is and that it is not the date of the Battle of Hastings, one might deny Jean knowledge on the grounds that people who believe the denial of what they believe cannot be said t know the truth of their belief. Another strategy might be to compare the examine case with examples of ignorance given in recent attacks on externalist accounts of knowledge (needless to say. Externalists themselves would tend not to favour this strategy). Consider the following case developed by BonJour (1985): For no apparent reason, Samantha believes that she is clairvoyant. Again, for no apparent reason, she one day comes to believe that the President is in New York City, even though she has every reason to believe that the President is in Washington, DC. In fact, Samantha is a completely reliable clairvoyant, and she has arrived at her belief about the whereabouts of the President thorough the power of her clairvoyance. Yet surely Samanthas belief is completely irrational. She is not justified in thinking what she does. If so, then she does not know where the President is. But Radfords examinee is unconventional. Even if Jean lacks the belief that Radford denies him, Radford does not have an example of knowledge that is unattended with belief. Suppose that Jeans memory had been sufficiently powerful to produce the relevant belief. As Radford says, in having every reason to suppose that his response is mere guesswork, and he has every reason to consider his belief false. His belief would be an irrational one, and hence one about whose truth Jean would be ignorant.
Least has been of mention to an approaching view from which perception basis upon itself as a fundamental philosophical topic both for its central place in ant theory of knowledge, and its central place un any theory of consciousness. Philosophy in this area is constrained by a number of properties that we believe to hold of perception, (1) It gives us knowledge of the world around us, (2) We are conscious of that world by being aware of sensible qualities: Colour, sounds, tastes, smells, felt warmth, and the shapes and positions of objects in the environment. (3) Such consciousness is effected through highly complex information channels, such as the output of the three different types of colour-sensitive cells in the eye, or the channels in the ear for interpreting pulses of air pressure as frequencies of sound. (4) There ensues even more complex neurophysiological coding of that information, and eventually higher-order brain functions bring it about that we interpreted the information so received. (Much of this complexity has been revealed by the difficulties of writing programs enabling computers to recognize quite simple aspects of the visual scene.) The problem is to avoid thinking of here being a central, ghostly, conscious self, fed information in the same way that a screen if fed information by a remote television camera. Once such a model is in place, experience will seem like a veil getting between us and the world, and the direct objects of perception will seem to be private items in an inner theatre or sensorium. The difficulty of avoiding this model is epically cute when we considered the secondary qualities of colour, sound, tactile feelings and taste, which can easily seem to have a purely private existence inside the perceiver, like sensation of pain. Calling such supposed items names like sense-data or percepts exacerbates the tendency, but once the model is in place, the first property, that perception gives us knowledge of the world and its surrounding surfaces, is quickly threatened, for there will now seem little connection between these items in immediate experience and any independent reality. Reactions to this problem include scepticism and idealism.
A more hopeful approach is to claim that the complexities of (3) and (4) explain how we can have direct acquaintance of the world, than suggesting that the acquaintance we do have been at best indirect. It is pointed out that perceptions are not like sensation, precisely because they have a content, or outer-directed nature. To have a perception is to be aware of the world for being such-and-such a way, than to enjoy a mere modification of sensation. But such direct realism has to be sustained in the face of the evident personal (neurophysiological and other) factors determining haw we perceive. One approach is to ask why it is useful to be conscious of what we perceive, when other aspects of our functioning work with information determining responses without any conscious awareness or intervention. A solution to this problem would offer the hope of making consciousness part of the natural world, than a strange optional extra.
Furthering, perceptual knowledge is knowledge acquired by or through the senses and includes most of what we know. We cross intersections when we see the light turn green, head for the kitchen when we smell the roast burning, squeeze the fruit to determine its ripeness, and climb out of bed when we hear the alarm ring. In each case we come to know something-that the light has turned green, that the roast is burning, that the melon is overripe, and that it is time to get up-by some sensory means. Seeing that the light has turned green is learning something-that the light has turned green-by use of the eyes. Feeling that the melon is overripe is coming to know a fact-that the melon is overripe-by ones sense to touch. In each case the resulting knowledge is somehow based on, derived from or grounded in the sort of experience that characterizes the sense modality in question.
Much of our perceptual knowledge is indirect, dependent or derived. By this I mean that the facts we describe ourselves as learning, as coming to know, by perceptual means are pieces of knowledge that depend on our coming to know something else, some other fact, in a more direct way. We see, by the gauge, that we need gas, see, by the newspapers, that our team has lost again, see, by her expression, that she is nervous. This derived or dependent sort of knowledge is particularly prevalent in the cases of vision, but it occurs, to a lesser degree, in every sense modality. We install bells and other noise-makers so that we calm for example, hear (by the bell) that someone is at the door and (by the alarm) that its time to get up. When we obtain knowledge in this way, it is clear that unless one sees-hence, comes to know something about the gauge (that it says) and (hence, know) that one is described as coming to know by perceptual means. If one cannot hear that the bell is ringing, one cannot-in at least in this way-hear that ones visitors have arrived. In such cases one sees (hears, smells, etc.) that ‘a’ is ‘F’, coming to know thereby that ‘a’ is ‘F’, by seeing (hearing, etc.) that some other condition, ‘b’s’ being ‘G’, obtains when this occurs, the knowledge (that a is F) is derived from, or dependent on, the more basic perceptual knowledge that ‘b’ is ‘G’.
And finally, the representational Theory of mind (RTM) (which goes back at least to Aristotle) takes as its starting point commonsense mental states, such as thoughts, beliefs, desires, perceptions and images. Such states are said to have intentionality - they are about or refer to things, and may be evaluated with respect to properties like consistency, truth, appropriateness and accuracy. (For example, the thought that cousins are not related is inconsistent, the belief that Elvis is dead is true, the desire to eat the moon is inappropriate, a visual experience of a ripe strawberry as red is accurate, an image of George W. Bush with deadlocks is inaccurate.)
The Representational Theory of Mind, defines such intentional mental states as relations to mental representations, and explains the intentionality of the former in terms of the semantic properties of the latter. For example, to believe that Elvis is dead is to be appropriately related to a mental representation whose propositional content is that Elvis is dead. (The desire that Elvis be dead, the fear that he is dead, the regret that he is dead, etc., involve different relations to the same mental representation.) To perceive a strawberry is to have a sensory experience of some kind which is appropriately related to (e.g., caused by) the strawberry Representational theory of mind also understands mental processes such as thinking, reasoning and imagining as sequences of intentional mental states. For example, to imagine the moon rising over a mountain is to entertain a series of mental images of the moon (and a mountain). To infer a proposition ‘q’ from the propositions ‘p’ and if ‘p’ then ‘q’ is (among other things) to have a sequence of thoughts of the form ‘p’, if ‘p’ then ‘q,’ ‘q’.
Contemporary philosophers of mind have typically supposed (or at least hoped) that the mind can be naturalized - i.e., that all mental facts have explanations in the terms of natural science. This assumption is shared within cognitive science, which attempts to provide accounts of mental states and processes in terms (ultimately) of features of the brain and central nervous system. In the course of doing so, the various sub-disciplines of cognitive science (including cognitive and computational psychology and cognitive and computational neuroscience) postulate a number of different kinds of structures and processes, many of which are not directly implicated by mental states and processes as commonsensical conceived. There remains, however, a shared commitment to the idea that mental states and processes are to be explained in terms of mental representations.
In philosophy, recent debates about mental representation have centred around the existence of propositional attitudes (beliefs, desires, etc.) and the determination of their contents (how they come to be about what they are about), and the existence of phenomenal properties and their relation to the content of thought and perceptual experience. Within cognitive science itself, the philosophically relevant debates have been focussed on the computational architecture of the brain and central nervous system, and the compatibility of scientific and commonsense accounts of mentality.
Intentional Realists such as Dretske (e.g., 1988) and Fodor (e.g., 1987) note that the generalizations we apply in everyday life in predicting and explaining each others behaviour (often collectively referred to as folk psychology) are both remarkably successful and indispensable. What a person believes, doubts, desires, fears, etc. is a highly reliable indicator of what that person will do; and we have no other way of making sense of each others behaviour than by ascribing such states and applying the relevant generalizations. We are thus committed to the basic truth of commonsense psychology and, hence, to the existence of the states its generalizations refer to. (Some realists, such as Fodor, also hold that commonsense psychology will be vindicated by cognitive science, given that propositional attitudes can be construed as computational relations to mental representations.)
Intentional Eliminativists, such as Churchland, (perhaps) Dennett and (at one time) Stich argue that no such things as propositional attitudes (and their constituent representational states) are implicated by the successful explanation and prediction of our mental lives and behaviour. Churchland denies that the generalizations of commonsense propositional-attitude psychology are true. He (1981) argues that folk psychology is a theory of the mind with a long history of failure and decline, and that it resists incorporation into the framework of modern scientific theories (including cognitive psychology). As such, it is comparable to alchemy and phlogiston theory, and ought to suffer a comparable fate. Commonsense psychology is false, and the states (and representations) it postulates simply don’t exist. (It should be noted that Churchland is not an eliminativist about mental representation tout court.
Dennett (1987) grants that the generalizations of commonsense psychology are true and indispensable, but denies that this is sufficient reason to believe in the entities they appear to refer to. He argues that to give an intentional explanation of a systems behaviour is merely to adopt the intentional stance toward it. If the strategy of assigning contentful states to a system and predicting and explaining its behaviour (on the assumption that it is rational - i.e., that it behaves as it should, given the propositional attitudes it should have in its environment) is successful, then the system is intentional, and the propositional-attitude generalizations we apply to it are true. But there is nothing more to having a propositional attitude than this.
Though he has been taken to be thus claiming that intentional explanations should be construed instrumentally, Dennett (1991) insists that he is a moderate realist about propositional attitudes, since he believes that the patterns in the behaviour and behavioural dispositions of a system on the basis of which we (truly) attribute intentional states to it are objectively real. In the event that there are two or more explanatorily adequate but substantially different systems of intentional ascriptions to an individual, however, Dennett claims there is no fact of the matter about what the system believes (1987, 1991). This does suggest an irrealism at least with respect to the sorts of things Fodor and Dretske take beliefs to be; though it is not the view that there is simply nothing in the world that makes intentional explanations true.
(Davidson 1973, 1974 and Lewis 1974 also defend the view that what it is to have a propositional attitude is just to be interpretable in a particular way. It is, however, not entirely clear whether they intend their views to imply irrealism about propositional attitudes.). Stich (1983) argues that cognitive psychology does not (or, in any case, should not) taxonomize mental states by their semantic properties at all, since attribution of psychological states by content is sensitive to factors that render it problematic in the context of a scientific psychology. Cognitive psychology seeks causal explanations of behaviour and cognition, and the causal powers of a mental state are determined by its intrinsic structural or syntactic properties. The semantic properties of a mental state, however, are determined by its extrinsic properties - e.g., its history, environmental or intra-mental relations. Hence, such properties cannot figure in causal-scientific explanations of behaviour. (Fodor 1994 and Dretske 1988 are realist attempts to come to grips with some of these problems.) Stich proposes a syntactic theory of the mind, on which the semantic properties of mental states play no explanatory role.
It is a traditional assumption among realists about mental representations that representational states come in two basic varieties (Boghossian 1995). There are those, such as thoughts, which are composed of concepts and have no phenomenal (what-its-like) features (qualia), and those, such as sensory experiences, which have phenomenal features but no conceptual constituents. (Non-conceptual content is usually defined as a kind of content that states of a creature lacking concepts might nonetheless enjoy. On this taxonomy, mental states can represent either in a way analogous to expressions of natural languages or in a way analogous to drawings, paintings, maps or photographs. (Perceptual states such as seeing that something is blue, are sometimes thought of as hybrid states, consisting of, for example, a Non-conceptual sensory experience and a thought, or some more integrated compound of sensory and conceptual components.)
Some historical discussions of the representational properties of mind (e.g., Aristotle 1984, Locke 1689/1975, Hume 1739/1978) seem to assume that Non-conceptual representations - percepts (impressions), images (ideas) and the like - are the only kinds of mental representations, and that the mind represents the world in virtue of being in states that resemble things in it. On such a view, all representational states have their content in virtue of their phenomenal features. Powerful arguments, however, focussing on the lack of generality (Berkeley 1975), ambiguity (Wittgenstein 1953) and non-compositionality (Fodor 1981) of sensory and imagistic representations, as well as their unsuitability to function as logical (Frége 1918/1997, Geach 1957) or mathematical (Frége 1884/1953) concepts, and the symmetry of resemblance (Goodman 1976), convinced philosophers that no theory of mind can get by with only Non-conceptual representations construed in this way.
Contemporary disagreement over Non-conceptual representation concerns the existence and nature of phenomenal properties and the role they play in determining the content of sensory experience. Dennett (1988), for example, denies that there are such things as qualia at all; while Brandom (2002), McDowell (1994), Rey (1991) and Sellars (1956) deny that they are needed to explain the content of sensory experience. Among those who accept that experiences have phenomenal content, some (Dretske, Lycan, Tye) argue that it is reducible to a kind of intentional content, while others (Block, Loar, Peacocke) argue that it is irreducible.
There has also been dissent from the traditional claim that conceptual representations (thoughts, beliefs) lack phenomenology. Chalmers (1996), Flanagan (1992), Goldman (1993), Horgan and Tiensen (2003), Jackendoff (1987), Levine (1993, 1995, 2001), McGinn (1991), Pitt (2004), Searle (1992), Siewert (1998) and Strawson (1994), claim that purely symbolic (conscious) representational states themselves have a (perhaps proprietary) phenomenology. If this claim is correct, the question of what role phenomenology plays in the determination of content reprises for conceptual representation; and the eliminativist ambitions of Sellars, Brandom, Rey, would meet a new obstacle. (It would also raise prima face problems for reductionist representations.
The representationalist thesis is often formulated as the claim that phenomenal properties are representational or intentional. However, this formulation is ambiguous between a reductive and a non-deductive claim (though the term representationalism is most often used for the reductive claim). On one hand, it could mean that the phenomenal content of an experience is a kind of intentional content (the properties it represents). On the other, it could mean that the (irreducible) phenomenal properties of an experience determine an intentional content. Representationalists such as Dretske, Lycan and Tye would assent to the former claim, whereas phenomenalists such as Block, Chalmers, Loar and Peacocke would assent to the latter. (Among phenomenalists, there is further disagreement about whether qualia are intrinsically representational (Loar) or not (Block, Peacocke).
Most (reductive) representationalists are motivated by the conviction that one or another naturalistic explanation of intentionality is, in broad outline, correct, and by the desire to complete the naturalization of the mental by applying such theories to the problem of phenomenality. (Needless to say, most phenomenalists (Chalmers is the major exception) are just as eager to naturalize the phenomenal - though not in the same way.)
The main argument for representationalism appeals to the transparency of experience (Tye 2000). The properties that characterize what its like to have a perceptual experience are presented in experience as properties of objects perceived: in attending to an experience, one seems to see through it to the objects and properties it is experiences of. They are not presented as properties of the experience itself. If nonetheless they were properties of the experience, perception would be massively deceptive. But perception is not massively deceptive. According to the representationalist, the phenomenal character of an experience is due to its representing objective, non-experiential properties. (In veridical perception, these properties are locally instantiated; in illusion and hallucination, they are not.) On this view, introspection is indirect perception: one comes to know what phenomenal features ones experience has by coming to know what objective features it represents.
In order to account for the intuitive differences between conceptual and sensory representations, representationalists appeal to their structural or functional differences. Dretske (1995), for example, distinguishes experiences and thoughts on the basis of the origin and nature of their functions: an experience of a property P is a state of a system whose evolved function is to indicate the presence of P in the environment; a thought representing the property P, on the other hand, is a state of a system whose assigned (learned) function is to calibrate the output of the experiential system. Rey (1991) takes both thoughts and experiences to be relations to sentences in the language of thought, and distinguishes them on the basis of (the functional roles of) such sentences constituent predicates. Lycan (1987, 1996) distinguishes them in terms of their functional-computational profiles. Tye (2000) distinguishes them in terms of their functional roles and the intrinsic structure of their vehicles: thoughts are representations in a language-like medium, whereas experiences are image-like representations consisting of symbol-filled arrays. (the account of mental images in Tye 1991.)
Phenomenalists tend to make use of the same sorts of features (function, intrinsic structure) in explaining some of the intuitive differences between thoughts and experiences; but they do not suppose that such features exhaust the differences between phenomenal and non-phenomenal representations. For the phenomenalism, it is the phenomenal properties of experiences - qualia themselves - that constitute the fundamental difference between experience and thought. Peacocke (1992), for example, develops the notion of a perceptual scenario (an assignment of phenomenal properties to coordinates of a three-dimensional egocentric space), whose content is correct (a semantic property) if in the corresponding scene (the portion of the external world represented by the scenario) properties are distributed as their phenomenal analogues are in the scenario.
Another sort of representation championed by phenomenalists, e.g., Block, Chalmers (2003) and Loar (1996) is the phenomenal concept - a conceptual/phenomenal hybrid consisting of a phenomenological sample (an image or an occurrent sensation) integrated with (or functioning as) a conceptual component. Phenomenal concepts are postulated to account for the apparent fact (among others) that, as McGinn (1991) puts it, you cannot form [introspective] concepts of conscious properties unless you yourself instantiate those properties. One cannot have a phenomenal concept of a phenomenal property ‘P’, and, hence, phenomenal beliefs about ‘P’, without having experience of ‘P’, because P itself is (in some way) constitutive of the concept of ‘P’. (Jackson 1982, 1986 and Nagel 1974.)
Though imagery has played an important role in the history of philosophy of mind, the important contemporary literature on it is primarily psychological. In a series of psychological experiments done in the 1970s (summarized in Kosslyn 1980 and Shepard and Cooper 1982), subjects response time in tasks involving mental manipulation and examination of presented figures was found to vary in proportion to the spatial properties (size, orientation, etc.) of the figures presented. The question of how these experimental results are to be explained has kindled a lively debate on the nature of imagery and imagination.
Kosslyn (1980) claims that the results suggest that the tasks were accomplished via the examination and manipulation of mental representations that themselves have spatial properties - i.e., pictorial representations, or images. Others, principally Pylyshyn (1979, 1981, 2003), argue that the empirical facts can be explained in terms exclusively of discursive, or propositional representations and cognitive processes defined over them. (Pylyshyn takes such representations to be sentences in a language of thought.)
The idea that pictorial representations are literally pictures in the head is not taken seriously by proponents of the pictorial view of imagery The claim is, rather, that mental images represent in a way that is relevantly like the way pictures represent. (Attention has been focussed on visual imagery - hence the designation pictorial; though of course there may imagery in other modalities - auditory, olfactory, etc. - as well.)
The distinction between pictorial and discursive representation can be characterized in terms of the distinction between analog and digital representation (Goodman 1976). This distinction has itself been variously understood (Fodor & Pylyshyn 1981, Goodman 1976, Haugeland 1981, Lewis 1971, McGinn 1989), though a widely accepted construal is that analog representation is continuous (i.e., in virtue of continuously variable properties of the representation), while digital representation is discrete (i.e., in virtue of properties a representation either has or doesnt have) (Dretske 1981). (An analog/digital distinction may also be made with respect to cognitive processes. (Block 1983.)) On this understanding of the analog/digital distinction, imagistic representations, which represent in virtue of properties that may vary continuously (such as being more or less bright, loud, vivid, etc.), would be analog, while conceptual representations, whose properties do not vary continuously (a thought cannot be more or less about Elvis: either it is or it is not) would be digital.
It might be supposed that the pictorial/discursive distinction is best made in terms of the phenomenal and nonphenomenal distinction, but it is not obvious that this is the case. For one thing, there may be nonphenomenal properties of representations that vary continuously. Moreover, there are ways of understanding pictorial representation that presuppose neither phenomenality nor analogicity. According to Kosslyn (1980, 1982, 1983), a mental representation is quasi-pictorial when every part of the representation corresponds to a part of the object represented, and relative distances between parts of the object represented are preserved among the parts of the representation. But distances between parts of a representation can be defined functionally rather than spatially - for example, in terms of the number of discrete computational steps required to combine stored information about them. (Rey 1981.)
Tye (1991) proposes a view of images on which they are hybrid representations, consisting both of pictorial and discursive elements. On Tyes account, images are (labelled) interpreted symbol-filled arrays. The symbols represent discursively, while their arrangement in arrays has representational significance (the location of each cell in the array represents a specific viewer-centred 2-D location on the surface of the imagined object)
The contents of mental representations are typically taken to be abstract objects (properties, relations, propositions, sets, etc.). A pressing question, especially for the naturalist, is how mental representations come to have their contents. Here the issue is not how to naturalize content (abstract objects cant be naturalized), but, rather, how to provide a naturalistic account of the content-determining relations between mental representations and the abstract objects they express. There are two basic types of contemporary naturalistic theories of content-determination, causal-informational and functional.
Causal-informational theories (Dretske 1981, 1988, 1995) hold that the content of a mental representation is grounded in the information it carries about what does (Devitt 1996) or would (Fodor 1987, 1990) cause it to occur. There is, however, widespread agreement that causal-informational relations are not sufficient to determine the content of mental representations. Such relations are common, but representation is not. Tree trunks, smoke, thermostats and ringing telephones carry information about what they are causally related to, but they do not represent (in the relevant sense) what they carry information about. Further, a representation can be caused by something it does not represent, and can represent something that has not caused it.
The main attempts to specify what makes a causal-informational state a mental representation are Asymmetric Dependency Theories (e.g., Fodor 1987, 1990, 1994) and Teleological Theories (Fodor 1990, Millikan 1984, Papineau 1987, Dretske 1988, 1995). The Asymmetric Dependency Theory distinguishes merely informational relations from representational relations on the basis of their higher-order relations to each other: informational relations depend upon representational relations, but not vice-versa. For example, if tokens of a mental state type are reliably caused by horses, cows-on-dark-nights, zebras-in-the-mist and Great Danes, then they carry information about horses, etc. If, however, such tokens are caused by cows-on-dark-nights, etc. because they were caused by horses, but not vice versa, then they represent horses.
According to Teleological Theories, representational relations are those a representation-producing mechanism has the selected (by evolution or learning) function of establishing. For example, zebra-caused horse-representations do not mean zebra, because the mechanism by which such tokens are produced has the selected function of indicating horses, not zebras. The horse-representation-producing mechanism that responds to zebras is malfunctioning.
Functional theories (Block 1986, Harman 1973), hold that the content of a mental representation is grounded in its (causal computational, inferential) relations to other mental representations. They differ on whether relata should include all other mental representations or only some of them, and on whether to include external states of affairs. The view that the content of a mental representation is determined by its inferential/computational relations with all other representations is holism; the view it is determined by relations to only some other mental states is localism (or molecularism). (The view that the content of a mental state depends on none of its relations to other mental states is atomism.) Functional theories that recognize no content-determining external relata have been called solipsistic (Harman 1987). Some theorists posit distinct roles for internal and external connections, the former determining semantic properties analogous to sense, the latter determining semantic properties analogous to reference (McGinn 1982, Sterelny 1989)
(Reductive) representationalists (Dretske, Lycan, Tye) usually take one or another of these theories to provide an explanation of the (Non-conceptual) content of experiential states. They thus tend to be Externalists about phenomenological as well as conceptual content. Phenomenalists and non-deductive representationalists (Block, Chalmers, Loar, Peacocke, Siewert), on the other hand, take it that the representational content of such states is (at least in part) determined by their intrinsic phenomenal properties. Further, those who advocate a phenomenology-based approach to conceptual content (Horgan and Tiensen, Loar, Pitt, Searle, Siewert) also seem to be committed to internalist individuation of the content (if not the reference) of such states.
Generally, those who, like informational theorists, think relations to ones (natural or social) environment are (at least partially) determinative of the content of mental representations are Externalists (e.g., Burge 1979, 1986, McGinn 1977, Putnam 1975), whereas those who, like some proponents of functional theories, think representational content is determined by an individuals intrinsic properties alone, are internalists (or individualists; cf. Putnam 1975, Fodor 1981)
This issue is widely taken to be of central importance, since psychological explanation, whether commonsense or scientific, is supposed to be both causal and content-based. (Beliefs and desires cause the behaviours they do because they have the contents they do. For example, the desire that one have a beer and the beliefs that there is beer in the refrigerator and that the refrigerator is in the kitchen may explain ones getting up and going to the kitchen.) If, however, a mental representations having a particular content is due to factors extrinsic to it, it is unclear how its having that content could determine its causal powers, which, arguably, must be intrinsic. Some who accept the standard arguments for externalism have argued that internal factors determine a component of the content of a mental representation. They say that mental representations have both narrow content (determined by intrinsic factors) and wide or broad content (determined by narrow content plus extrinsic factors). (This distinction may be applied to the sub-personal representations of cognitive science as well as to those of commonsense psychology.
Narrow content has been variously construed. Putnam (1975), Fodor (1982)), and Block (1986), for example, seem to understand it as something like dedicto content (i.e., Frégean sense, or perhaps character, à la Kaplan 1989). On this construal, narrow content is context-independent and directly expressible. Fodor (1987) and Block (1986), however, have also characterized narrow content as radically inexpressible. On this construal, narrow content is a kind of proto-content, or content-determinant, and can be specified only indirectly, via specifications of context/wide-content pairings. On both construal, narrow contents are characterized as functions from context to (wide) content. The narrow content of a representation is determined by properties intrinsic to it or its possessor such as its syntactic structure or its intra-mental computational or inferential role (or its phenomenology).
Burge (1986) has argued that causation-based worries about externalist individuation of psychological content, and the introduction of the narrow notion, are misguided. Fodor (1994, 1998) has more recently urged that a scientific psychology might not need narrow content in order to supply naturalistic (causal) explanations of human cognition and action, since the sorts of cases they were introduced to handle, viz., Twin-Earth cases and Frigg cases, are either nomologically impossible or dismissible as exceptions to non-strict psychological laws.
The leading contemporary version of the Representational Theory of Mind, the Computational Theory of Mind (CTM), claims that the brain is a kind of computer and that mental processes are computations. According to the computational theory of mind, cognitive states are constituted by computational relations to mental representations of various kinds, and cognitive processes are sequences of such states. The computational theory of mind and the representational theory of mind, may by attempting to explain all psychological states and processes in terms of mental representation. In the course of constructing detailed empirical theories of human and animal cognition and developing models of cognitive processes implementable in artificial information processing systems, cognitive scientists have proposed a variety of types of mental representations. While some of these may be suited to be mental relata of commonsense psychological states, some - so-called subpersonal or sub-doxastic representations - are not. Though many philosophers believe that computational theory of mind can provide the best scientific explanations of cognition and behaviour, there is disagreement over whether such explanations will vindicate the commonsense psychological explanations of prescientific representational theory of mind.
According to Stichs (1983) Syntactic Theory of Mind, for example, computational theories of psychological states should concern themselves only with the formal properties of the objects those states are relations to. Commitment to the explanatory relevance of content, however, is for most cognitive scientists fundamental (Fodor 1981, Pylyshyn 1984, Von Eckardt 1993). That mental processes are computations, which computations are rule-governed sequences of semantically evaluable objects, and that the rules apply to the symbols in virtue of their content, are central tenets of mainstream cognitive science.
Explanations in cognitive science appeal to a many different kinds of mental representation, including, for example, the mental models of Johnson-Laird 1983, the retinal arrays, primal sketches and 2½ -D sketches of Marr 1982, the frames of Minsky 1974, the sub-symbolic structures of Smolensky 1989, the quasi-pictures of Kosslyn 1980, and the interpreted symbol-filled arrays of Tye 1991 - in addition to representations that may be appropriate to the explanation of commonsense psychological states. Computational explanations have been offered of, among other mental phenomena, belief (Fodor 1975, Field 1978), visual perception (Marr 1982, Osherson, 1990), rationality (Newell and Simon 1972, Fodor 1975, Johnson-Laird and Wason 1977), language learning and (Chomsky 1965, Pinker 1989), and musical comprehension (Lerdahl and Jackendoff 1983).
A fundamental disagreement among proponents of computational theory of mind concerns the realization of personal-level representations (e.g., thoughts) and processes (e.g., inferences) in the brain. The central debate here is between proponents of Classical Architectures and proponents of Conceptionist Architectures.
The classicists (e.g., Turing 1950, Fodor 1975, Fodor and Pylyshyn 1988, Marr 1982, Newell and Simon 1976) hold that mental representations are symbolic structures, which typically have semantically evaluable constituents, and that mental processes are rule-governed manipulations of them that are sensitive to their constituent structure. The connectionists (e.g., McCulloch & Pitts 1943, Rumelhart 1989, Rumelhart and McClelland 1986, Smolensky 1988) hold that mental representations are realized by patterns of activation in a network of simple processors (nodes) and that mental processes consist of the spreading activation of such patterns. The nodes themselves are, typically, not taken to be semantically evaluable; nor do the patterns have semantically evaluable constituents. (Though there are versions of Connectionism - localist versions - on which individual nodes are taken to have semantic properties (e.g., Ballard 1986, Ballard & Hayes 1984).) It is arguable, however, that localist theories are neither definitive nor representative of the Conceptionist program (Smolensky 1988, 1991, Chalmers 1993).
Classicists are motivated (in part) by properties thought seems to share with language. Fodors Language of Thought Hypothesis (LOTH) (Fodor 1975, 1987), according to which the system of mental symbols constituting the neural basis of thought is structured like a language, provides a well-worked-out version of the classical approach as applied to commonsense psychology. According to the language of thought hypothesis, the potential infinity of complex representational mental states is generated from a finite stock of primitive representational states, in accordance with recursive formation rules. This combinatorial structure accounts for the properties of productivity and systematicity of the system of mental representations. As in the case of symbolic languages, including natural languages (though Fodor does not suppose either that the language of thought hypothesis explains only linguistic capacities or that only verbal creatures have this sort of cognitive architecture), these properties of thought are explained by appeal to the content of the representational units and their combinability into contentful complexes. That is, the semantics of both language and thought is compositional: the content of a complex representation is determined by the contents of its constituents and their structural configuration.
Connectionists are motivated mainly by a consideration of the architecture of the brain, which apparently consists of layered networks of interconnected neurons. They argue that this sort of architecture is unsuited to carrying out classical serial computations. For one thing, processing in the brain is typically massively parallel. In addition, the elements whose manipulation drives computation in Conceptionist networks (principally, the connections between nodes) are neither semantically compositional nor semantically evaluable, as they are on the classical approach. This contrast with classical computationalism is often characterized by saying that representation is, with respect to computation, distributed as opposed to local: representation is local if it is computationally basic; and distributed if it is not. (Another way of putting this is to say that for classicists mental representations are computationally atomic, whereas for connectionists they are not.)
Moreover, connectionists argue that information processing as it occurs in Conceptionist networks more closely resembles some features of actual human cognitive functioning. For example, whereas on the classical view learning involves something like hypothesis formation and testing (Fodor 1981), on the Conceptionist model it is a matter of evolving distribution of weight (strength) on the connections between nodes, and typically does not involve the formulation of hypotheses regarding the identity conditions for the objects of knowledge. The Conceptionist network is trained up by repeated exposure to the objects it is to learn to distinguish; and, though networks typically require many more exposures to the objects than do humans, this seems to model at least one feature of this type of human learning quite well.
Further, degradation in the performance of such networks in response to damage is gradual, not sudden as in the case of a classical information processor, and hence more accurately models the loss of human cognitive function as it typically occurs in response to brain damage. It is also sometimes claimed that Conceptionist systems show the kind of flexibility in response to novel situations typical of human cognition - situations in which classical systems are relatively brittle or fragile.
Some philosophers have maintained that Connectionism entails that there are no propositional attitudes. Ramsey, Stich and Garon (1990) have argued that if Conceptionist models of cognition are basically correct, then there are no discrete representational states as conceived in ordinary commonsense psychology and classical cognitive science. Others, however (e.g., Smolensky 1989), hold that certain types of higher-level patterns of activity in a neural network may be roughly identified with the representational states of commonsense psychology. Still others (e.g., Fodor & Pylyshyn 1988, Heil 1991, Horgan and Tienson 1996) argue that language-of-thought style representation is both necessary in general and realizable within Conceptionist architectures. (MacDonald & MacDonald 1995 collects the central contemporary papers in the classicist/Conceptionist debate, and provides useful introductory material as well.
Whereas Stich (1983) accepts that mental processes are computational, but denies that computations are sequences of mental representations, others accept the notion of mental representation, but deny that computational theory of mind provides the correct account of mental states and processes.
Van Gelder (1995) denies that psychological processes are computational. He argues that cognitive systems are dynamic, and that cognitive states are not relations to mental symbols, but quantifiable states of a complex system consisting of (in the case of human beings) a nervous system, a body and the environment in which they are embedded. Cognitive processes are not rule-governed sequences of discrete symbolic states, but continuous, evolving total states of dynamic systems determined by continuous, simultaneous and mutually determining states of the systems components. Representation in a dynamic system is essentially information-theoretic, though the bearers of information are not symbols, but state variables or parameters.
Horst (1996), on the other hand, argues that though computational models may be useful in scientific psychology, they are of no help in achieving a philosophical understanding of the intentionality of commonsense mental states. computational theory of mind attempts to reduce the intentionality of such states to the intentionality of the mental symbols they are relations to. But, Horst claims, the relevant notion of symbolic content is essentially bound up with the notions of convention and intention. So the computational theory of mind involves itself in a vicious circularity: the very properties that are supposed to be reduced are (tacitly) appealed to in the reduction.
To say that a mental object has semantic properties is, paradigmatically, to say that it may be about, or be true or false of, an object or objects, or that it may be true or false simpliciter. Suppose I think that ocelots take snuff. I am thinking about ocelots, and if what I think of them (that they take snuff) is true of them, then my thought is true. According to representational theory of mind such states are to be explained as relations between agents and mental representations. To think that ocelots take snuff is to token in some way a mental representation whose content is that ocelots take snuff. On this view, the semantic properties of mental states are the semantic properties of the representations they are relations to.
Linguistic acts seem to share such properties with mental states. Suppose I say that ocelots take snuff. I am talking about ocelots, and if what I say of them (that they take snuff) is true of them, then my utterance is true. Now, to say that ocelots take snuff is (in part) to utter a sentence that means that ocelots take snuff. Many philosophers have thought that the semantic properties of linguistic expressions are inherited from the intentional mental states they are conventionally used to express (Grice 1957, Fodor 1978, Schiffer, 1972/1988, Searle 1983). On this view, the semantic properties of linguistic expressions are the semantic properties of the representations that are the mental relata of the states they are conventionally used to express.
It is also widely held that in addition to having such properties as reference, truth-conditions and truth - so-called extensional properties - expressions of natural languages also have intensional properties, in virtue of expressing properties or propositions - i.e., in virtue of having meanings or senses, where two expressions may have the same reference, truth-conditions or truth value, yet express different properties or propositions (Frigg 1892/1997). If the semantic properties of natural-language expressions are inherited from the thoughts and concepts they express (or vice versa, or both), then an analogous distinction may be appropriate for mental representations.
Søren Aabye Kierkegaard (1813-1855), a Danish religious philosopher, whose concern with individual existence, choice, and commitment profoundly influenced modern theology and philosophy, especially existentialism.
Søren Kierkegaard wrote of the paradoxes of Christianity and the faith required to reconcile them. In his book Fear and Trembling, Kierkegaard discusses Genesis 22, in which God commands Abraham to kill his only son, Isaac. Although God made an unreasonable and immoral demand, Abraham obeyed without trying to understand or justify it. Kierkegaard regards this leap of faith as the essence of Christianity.
Kierkegaard was born in Copenhagen on May 15, 1813. His father was a wealthy merchant and strict Lutheran, whose gloomy, guilt-ridden piety and vivid imagination strongly influenced Kierkegaard. Kierkegaard studied theology and philosophy at the University of Copenhagen, where he encountered Hegelian philosophy and reacted strongly against it. While at the university, he ceased to practice Lutheranism and for a time led an extravagant social life, becoming a familiar figure in the theatrical and lodges, for what seemed as the sociological hosting attributions for beaming intellectuals that resided in Copenhagen. After his father’s death in 1838, however, he decided to resume his theological studies. In 1840 he became engaged to the 17-year-old Regine Olson, but almost immediately he began to suspect that marriage was incompatible with his own brooding, complicated nature and his growing sense of a philosophical vocation. He abruptly broke off the engagement in 1841, but the episode took on great significance for him, and he repeatedly alluded to it in his books. At the same time, he realized that he did not want to become a Lutheran pastor. An inheritance from his father allowed him to devote himself entirely to writing, and in the remaining 14 years of his life he produced more than 20 books.
Kierkegaards work is deliberately unsystematic and consists of essays, aphorisms, parables, fictional letters and diaries, and other literary forms. Many of his works were originally published under pseudonyms. He applied the term existential to his philosophy because he regarded philosophy as the expression of an intensely examined individual life, not as the construction of a monolithic system in the manner of the 19th-century German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, whose work he attacked in Concluding Unscientific Postscript (1846; translated 1941). Hegel claimed to have achieved a complete rational understanding of human life and history; Kierkegaard, on the other hand, stressed the ambiguity and paradoxical nature of the human situation. The fundamental problems of life, he contended, defy rational, objective explanation; the highest truth is subjective.
Kierkegaard maintained that systematic philosophy not only imposed a false perspective on human existence but that it also, by explaining life in terms of logical necessity, becomes a means of avoiding choice and responsibility. Individuals, he believed, create their own natures through their choices, which must be made in the absence of universal, objective standards. The validity of a choice can only be determined subjectively.
In his first major work, Either/Or (two volumes, 1843; translated 1944), Kierkegaard described two spheres, or stages of existence, that the individual may choose: the aesthetic and the ethical. The character that gives to the study of conceptual representations involves the side of practical reasoning, of good, right, duty, obligation, virtue, freedom, rationality, and choice. Also, and without exception the affiliated contributors to the second-order study of objectivity, subjectivity, relativism, or scepticism, in that it may administer to claims made in these terms. For the kinds of problems encountered, that of which the subject that applies ethics to actual practical problems, is such as those of abortion, euthanasia, treatment of animals, or other generally shared in or participated problems. That the claims of ethics are objectively true, they are not relative to a subject or a culture, nor purely subjective in their nature, in opposition to error theories, scepticism and relativism. The central problem is finding the source of the required objectivity. Intricately accorded by some sorted existence or a place of ethical properties and ethical thought in the matter-of-course, free from pretension or calculably opened conditions that display of an unclothed world. In the form as aforementioned, and supposedly refuted by the British philosopher George Edward Moore (1873-1958), this is the view that the meaning of an ethical predicate (‘ . . . is good) is identical with that of a predicate displaying the features in virtue of which the object is good, e.g., . . . ‘is such as to create happiness’, if one operates a utilitarian standard. Moore attacks this with the open question argument. Other positions calling them naturalism may abandon the claim about identity of meaning, but still hold that ethical properties which are identical with natural properties, rather as we hold that water is such, that even if the two terms mean something different, most widely, naturalism includes any belief that the nature of ethical thinking is exhaustively understood in terms of natural propensities of human beings, without mysterious intuitions, or operations of conscience, or divine help.
Although the morality of people and their ethics amount to the same thing, there is a usage that restricts morality to systems such as that of Kant, based on notions such as duty, obligation, and principles of conduct, reserving ethics for the more Aristotelian approach to practical reasoning, as it is based on the notion of a virtue and generally avoiding the separation of ‘moral’ considerations from other practical considerations. The scholarly issues are complex, with some writers seeing Kant as more Aristotelian and Aristotle as more involved with a separate sphere of responsibility and duty, than the simple contrast suggests.
Its consequence or prominence is eminently exceeded by something that aesthetic ways of life, are the pursuit factors of one’s own pleasure as an end in itself, in ethics the view that such a pursuit is the proper aim of all action. The psychological pursuit of one’s own ‘pleasure’ as an end in itself, is rooted in the ethical view that such a pursuit is the proper alliance intended of all action. Since there are different conceptions of pleasure, there is correspondingly different varieties of hedonism. Unless one’s own pleasure can somehow be identified with that of others. Hedonism stands opposed to the disinterested concern for others commonly thought to be essential elements of morality, although there are various ways of tying to align the pursuit of selfish pleasures. In that with some aligned degree of concern for others, psychological hedonism, is the view that either contingently, because of our human nature, or as a matter of conceptual necessity, as people only pursue their own pleasures. It is not true, on either construction, although the morality of people and their ethics amount to the same thing, there is a usage that restricts morality to systems such as that of Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), the German philosopher and founder of critical philosophy, that based on notions such as duty, obligation, and principles of conduct, wherefore, reserving ethics for the more Aristotelean approach to practical reasoning, and, again, is based on the notion of a virtue and generally to avoid such as the separation of moral considerations from those that are otherwise practically in the same. In various ways that which is the view that either contingently, because of our human nature, or as a matter of conceptual necessity, are those of the people that only pursue their own pleasures. It is not true, on either construction, however, if it is refined hedonism, hence consisting of a search for pleasure and a cultivation of a mood. The aesthetic individual constantly seeks variety and novelty in an effort to stave off boredom but eventually must confront boredom and despair. The ethical way of life involves an intense, passionate commitment to duty, to unconditional social and religious obligations. His later influence expanded in the 20th century, in particular amongst thinkers concerned with problems of religious and ethical choice, and especially among existentialists concerned with the same problems. His works include Enten-eller, 1843, translated as, Either/Or: A Fragment of Life, 1944. Afsluttende Uvidenskabelig Efterskrift (1846, translated as, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, 1941), and Sygdomen Til Deden (1849, translated as The Sickness unto Death, 1941), the compositions, such as Stages on Lifes Way (1845; translated 1940), Kierkegaard’s understanding of his submission to duty as the loss of individual responsibility, whereby he proposed of the cultural religion, under which one submits to the will of God, but in doing so he finds something that is authentic and generatively forwarded to freedom. Fragments from these sentences are accorded by the literature as they are marked and noted as, In Fear and Trembling (1846; translated 1941). Kierkegaard focused on Gods command that Abraham sacrifice his son Isaac (Genesis 22: 1-19), of which is the greatest and ultimate of sacrifices that violates Abrahams ethical convictions. Abraham proves his faith by resolutely setting out to obey Gods command, even though he cannot understand it. This suspension of the ethical, as Kierkegaard called it, allows Abraham to achieve an authentic commitment to God. To avoid ultimate despair, the individual must make a similar leap of faith into a religious life, which is inherently paradoxical, mysterious, and full of risk. One is called to it by the feeling of dread (The Concept of Dread, 1844; translated 1944), which is explicitly implicate the ultimate fear of nothingness.
Toward the end of his life Kierkegaard was involved in bitter controversies, especially with the established Danish Lutheran church, which he regarded as worldly and corrupt. His later works, such as The Sickness Unto Death (1849; translated 1941), reflect an increasingly somber view of Christianity, emphasizing suffering as the essence of authentic faith. He also intensified his attack on modern European society, which he denounced in The Present Age (1846; translated 1940) its lack of warming passion and its quantitative sense of value. The stress of his prolific writings and of the controversies under which he engaged gradually undermined his health, and in October 1855 he fainted in defeat as he was to vanquish into the chambering avenues in that he died in Copenhagen on November 11, 1855.
Kierkegaards influence was at first confined to Scandinavia and to German-speaking Europe, where his work had a strong impact on Protestant Theology and on such writers as the 20th-century Austrian novelist Franz Kafka. As existentialism emerged as a general European movement after World War I, Kierkegaards work was widely translated, and he was recognized as one of the seminal figures of modern culture.
Since scientists, during the nineteenth century were engrossed with uncovering the workings of external reality and seemingly knew of themselves that these virtually overflowing burdens of nothing, in that were about the physical substrates of human consciousness, the business of examining the distributive contribution in dynamic functionality and structural foundation of mind became the province of social scientists and humanists. Adolphe Quételet proposed a social physics that could serve as the basis for a new discipline called sociology, and his contemporary Auguste Comte concluded that a true scientific understanding of the social reality was quite inevitable. Mind, in the view of these figures, was a separate and distinct mechanism subject to the lawful workings of a mechanical social reality.
More formal European philosophers, such as Immanuel Kant, sought to reconcile representations of external reality in mind with the motions of matter-based on the dictates of pure reason. This impulse was also apparent in the utilitarian ethics of Jerry Bentham and John Stuart Mill, in the historical materialism of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, and in the pragmatism of Charles Smith, William James and John Dewey. These thinkers were painfully aware, however, of the inability of reason to posit a self-consistent basis for bridging the gap between mind and matter, and each remains obliged to conclude that the realm of the mental exists only in the subjective reality of the individual.
The fatal flaw of pure reason is, of course, the absence of emotion, and purely explanations of the division between subjective reality and external reality, of which had limited appeal outside the community of intellectuals. The figure most responsible for infusing our understanding of the Cartesian dualism with contextual representation of our understanding with emotional content was the death of God theologian Friedrich Nietzsche 1844-1900. After declaring that God and divine will, did not exist, Nietzsche reified the existence of consciousness in the domain of subjectivity as the ground for individual will and summarily reducing all previous philosophical attempts to articulate the will to truth. The dilemma, forth in, had seemed to mean, by the validation, . . . as accredited for doing of science, in that the claim that Nietzsche earlier version to the will to truth, disguises the fact that all alleged truths were arbitrarily created in the subjective reality of the individual and are expressed or manifesting the individualism of will.
In Nietzsches’ view, the separation between mind and matter is more absolute and total than previously been imagined. Based on the assumption that there is no real necessity to account for its correspondence between linguistic constructions of reality or the position as held within human subjectivity and external reality. He deduced that we are all locked in a prison house of language. And the prison, as he concluded it, was also a space where the philosopher can examine the innermost desires of his nature and articulate a new message of individual existence founded on will.
Those who fail to enact their existence in this space, Nietzsche says, are enticed into sacrificing their individuality on the nonexistent altars of religious beliefs and democratic or socialists’ ideals and become, therefore, members of the anonymous and docile crowd. Nietzsche also invalidated the knowledge claims of science in the examination of human subjectivity. Science, he said. Is not exclusive to natural phenomenons and favors reductionistic examination of phenomena at the expense of mind? It also seeks to reduce the separateness and uniqueness of mind with mechanistic descriptions that disallow and basis for the free exercise of individual will.
Nietzsches emotionally charged defense of intellectual freedom and radial empowerment of mind as the maker and transformer of the collective fictions that shape human reality in a soulless mechanistic universe proved terribly influential on twentieth-century thought. Furthermore, Nietzsche sought to reinforce his view of the subjective character of scientific knowledge by appealing to an epistemological crisis over the foundations of logic and arithmetic that arose during the last three decades of the nineteenth century. Through a curious course of events, attempted by Edmund Husserl 1859-1938, a German mathematician and a principal founder of phenomenology, wherefor to resolve this crisis resulted in a view of the character of consciousness that closely resembled that of Nietzsche.
The philosophical postmodernists were correct in assuming that scientific knowledge exists in human subjective reality and wrong in assuming that this knowledge is not privileged in coordinating our experience with physical reality. As such, this is the scientific communities were correct in assuming that the mathematical description of nature is privileged and wrong in assuming that this description exists in some sense prior to or outside of human consciousness. Obviously, this suggests that the communicants of cultural stain should take responsibility for escalating the conflicting debate between those that are and those that should be, in other words, all deliberate efforts in the understanding in the interests of human survival be themselves clearly aware of why this is the case.
The best-known disciple of Husserl was Martin Heidegger, and the work of both figures greatly influenced that of the French atheistic existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre. The work of Husserl, Heidegger, and Sartre became foundational to that of the principal architects of philosophical postmodernism, and deconstructionist Jacques Lacan, Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida. It obvious attribution of a direct linkage between the nineteenth-century crisis about the epistemological foundations of mathematical physics and the origin of philosophical postmodernism served to perpetuate the Cartesian two-world dilemma in an even more oppressive form. It also allows us better to understand the origins of cultural ambience and the ways in which they could resolve that conflict.
The mechanistic exemplar of the late in the nineteenth century began when Einstein came to know of his applicable abilities so marked and noted through his proven depictions, from which. Toward which time, that his studies were sustained within the physics, that from which time most physicists believed that it represented an eternal truth, however, Einstein was open to fresh ideas. Inspired by Machs critical mind, he demolished the Newtonian ideas of space and time and replaced them with new, relativistic notions.
Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980), was a French philosopher, dramatist, novelist, and political journalist, who was a leading exponent of existentialism. Jean-Paul Sartre helped to develop existential philosophy through his writings, novels, and plays. Much as much of the focus laid upon Sartres’ work on the dilemma of choice is faced by free individuals and on the challenge of creating meaning by acting responsibly in an indifferent world. In stating that man is condemned to be free, Sartre reminds us of the responsibility that accompanies human decisions.
Sartre was born in Paris, June 21, 1905, and educated at the Écôle Normale Supérieure in Paris, the University of Fribourg in Switzerland, and the French Institute in Berlin. He taught philosophy at various lycées from 1929 until the outbreak of World War II, when he was called into military service. In 1940-41 he was imprisoned by the Germans; after his release, he taught in Neuilly, a small but flourishing town in France, and later in Paris, he was an active member in the French Resistance. The German authorities, unaware of his underground activities, permitted the production of his antiauthoritarian play The Flies (1943; translated 1946) and the publication of his major philosophic work Being and Nothingness (1943; translated 1953). Sartre gave up teaching in 1945 and founded the political and literary magazine Les Temps Modernes, of which he became the editor in chief. Sartre was active after 1947 as an independent Socialist, critical of both the USSR and the United States in the so-called cold war years. Later, he supported Soviet positions but still frequently criticized Soviet policies. Most of his writing of the 1950s deals with literary and political problems. Sartre rejected the 1964 Nobel Prize in literature, explaining that to accept such an award would compromise his integrity as a writer.
Sartres’ philosophy is concerned entirely with the nature of human life, and the structures of consciousness. As a fault it gains expression in his novels and, lays as well as in more orthodox academic treatises, its immediate ancestor is the phenomenological tradition of his teachers, and Sartre can in most simply be seen as concerned with the rebutable charge of idealism as it is laid at the door of ‘phenomenonology’. The agent is not a spectator of the world, but like everything in the world, constituted by acts of intentionality and consciousness. Thus, constituted by the historically situated, but an agent whose own mode of locating itself in the world makes for responsibility and emotion. Sabre thus locales the essential nature of human existence in the capacity for choice, although choice, being equally incomparable with determinism and with the existence of a Kantian moral law, implies a synthesis of consciousness (being for itself) and the objective (being in itself) that is forever unstable. For all that was to come, Sartres philosophical transactions were to be combined with the phenomenology of the German philosopher Edmund Husserl, and those contributive efforts in metaphysics came from the German philosopher’s Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and Martin Heidegger, and the social theories of Karl Marx all were to adjoin of an organization through which a single view was to be called existentialism. This view, which relates philosophical theory to life, literature, psychology, and political action, stimulated so much popular interest that existentialism became a worldwide movement.
In his early philosophic work, Being and Nothingness, Sartre conceived humans as beings who create their own world by rebelling against authority and by accepting personal responsibility for their actions, unaided by society, traditional morality, or religious faith. Distinguishing between human existence and the nonhuman world, he maintained that human existence is characterized by nothingness, that is, by the capacity to negate and rebel. His theory of an existential psychoanalysis asserted the inescapable responsibility of all individuals for their own decisions and made the recognition of ones absolute freedom of choice the necessary condition for authentic human existence. His plays and novels express the belief that freedom and acceptance of personal responsibility are the main values in life and that individuals must rely on their creative powers rather than on social or religious authority.
In his later philosophic work, Critique of Dialectical Reason (1960; translated 1976), was a consolidated placement for France‘s leading existentialist philosopher? Sartre, at the same time, human behaviors rendered to social order and it portrayed, and legitimized, as an outcome of free-choice (consciousness) and Being in-itself (the non-conscious world). He rejects cental tenets of the rationalist and empiricist traditions, cabling the view that the mind or self is a thing or substance ‘Descartes’ substantialist illusion’ and claiming that consciousness does not contain ideas or representation of the material world. Sartre also attacks idealism in the forms associated with Berkeley and Kant, and concludes that his account of the relationship between consciousness and the world is neither realist nor idealist.
Sartre also discusses Being for-others. Which comprises the aspects of experience pertaining to interactions with other minds? Sartre’s rejection of ideas, and the denial of realism in the theory of perception was not, however, inconsistent with his claim to be neither realist nor idealist, since by ‘realist’ he means views which allow for the mutual independence or in-principle separability of mind and world. Against this Sartre emphasizes, after Heidegger, that perceptual experience has an active dimension, in that it is a way of interacting and dealing with the world, than a way of merely contemplating it (‘activity as spontaneous, unreflecting consciousness, constituted a certain existential stratum in the world). Consequently, he holds that experience is richer and open to more aspects of the world, than empiricist writers customarily claim.
Sartre argued that the influence of modern society over the individual is so great as to produce serialization, by which he meant loss of self. Individual power and freedom can only be regained through group revolutionary action. Despite this exhortation to revolutionary political activity, Sartre himself did not join the Communist Party, thus retaining the freedom to criticize the Soviet invasions of Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968.
Nonetheless, the phenomenological claims are such that things as illusions and hallucinations, for which are normally cited as problems for direct realists. However, he describes the act of imaging as a ‘transformation’ of ‘psychic material’. This connects with his views that even a physical image such as a photograph of a tree does not figure as an object of consciousness when it is experienced as a tree-representation, rather than as a piece of colored card, but even so, the fact remains that the photograph continues to contribute to the character of the experience. Given this, it is hard to see how Sartre avoids positing a mental analogue of a photograph for episodes of mental imaging, and rejection of visual representations. It may be that the regarding imaging was debased and derivative perceptual knowledge, again, this merely raises more of the issues of perceptual illusion and hallucination, and the problem of reconciling them with direct realism. He died in Paris, April 15, 1980.
The part of the theory of framing designs or semiotics, that concern the relationship between speakers and their significancy of meaning to affix the action, gesture or word by which a common thought, or wish is exposed through signs. The study of the principles governing appropriate conversational moves is generally called pragmatics that application for pragmatics treats of special kinds of linguistic infection, such as interview and speech asking, nevertheless, the philosophical movement that has had a major impact on American culture from the late 19th century to the present. Pragmatism calls for ideas and theories to be tested in practice, by assessing whether acting upon the idea or theory produces desirable or undesirable results. According to pragmatists, all claims about truth, knowledge, morality, and politics must be tested in this way. Pragmatism has been critical of traditional Western philosophy, especially the notions that there are absolute truths and absolute values. Although pragmatism was popular for a time in France, England, and Italy, most observers believe that it encapsulates an American faith in know-how and practicality and an equally American continental distrust of abstract theories and ideologies.
Pragmatists regard all theories and institutions as tentative hypotheses and solutions. For this reason they believed that efforts to improve society, through such means as education or politics, must be geared toward problem solving and must be ongoing. Through their emphasis on connecting theory to practice, pragmatist thinkers attempted to transform all areas of philosophy, from metaphysics to ethics and political philosophy.
Pragmatism sought a middle ground between traditional ideas about the nature of reality and radical theories of nihilism and irrationalism, which had become popular in Europe in the late 19th century. Traditional metaphysics assumed that the world has a fixed, intelligible structure and that human beings can know absolute or objective truths about the world and about what constitutes moral behavior. Nihilism and irrationalism, on the other hand, denied those very assumptions and their certitude. Pragmatists today still try to steer a middle course between contemporary offshoots of these two extremes.
The ideas of the pragmatists were considered revolutionary when they first appeared. To some critics, pragmatism refusal to affirm any absolutes carried negative implications for society. For example, pragmatists do not believe that a single absolute idea of goodness or justice exists, but rather than these concepts are changeable and depend on the context in which they are being discussed. The absence of these absolutes, critics feared, could result in a decline in moral standards. The pragmatist’s denial of absolutes, moreover, challenged the foundations of religion, government, and schools of thought. As a result, pragmatism influenced developments in psychology, sociology, education, semiotics (the study of signs and symbols), and scientific method, as well as philosophy, cultural criticism, and social reform movements. Various political groups have also drawn on the assumptions of pragmatism, from the progressive movements of the early 20th century to later experiments in social reform.
Pragmatism is best understood in its historical and cultural context. It arose during the late 19th century, a period of rapid scientific advancement typified by the theories of British biologist Charles Darwin, whose theories suggested too many thinkers that humanity and society are in a perpetual state of progress. During this same period a decline in traditional religious beliefs and values accompanied the industrialization and material progress of the time. In consequence it became necessary to rethink fundamental ideas about values, religion, science, community, and individuality.
The three most important pragmatists are American philosophers’ Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, and John Dewey. Peirce was primarily interested in scientific method and mathematics; his objective was to infuse scientific thinking into philosophy and society, and he believed that human comprehension of reality was becoming ever greater and that human communities were becoming increasingly progressive. Peirce developed pragmatism as a theory of meaning - in particular, the meaning of concepts used in science. The meaning of the concept brittle, for example, is given by the observed consequences or properties that objects called brittle exhibit. For Peirce, the only rational way to increase knowledge was to form mental habits that would test ideas through observation, experimentation, or what he called inquiry. Many philosophers known as logical positivist, a group of philosophers who have been influenced by Peirce, believed that our evolving species was fated to get ever closer to Truth. Logical positivist emphasize the importance of scientific verification, rejecting the assertion of positivism that personal experience is the basis of true knowledge.
James moved pragmatism in directions that Peirce strongly disliked. He generalized Peirces doctrines to encompass all concepts, beliefs, and actions; he also applied pragmatist ideas to truth as well as to meaning. James was primarily interested in showing how systems of morality, religion, and faith could be defended in a scientific civilization. He argued that sentiment, as well as logic, is crucial to rationality and that the great issues of life - morality and religious belief, for example - are leaps of faith. As such, they depend upon what he called the will to believe and not merely on scientific evidence, which can never tell us what to do or what is worthwhile. Critics charged James with relativism (the belief that values depend on specific situations) and with crass expediency for proposing that if an idea or action works the way one intends, it must be right. But James can more accurately be described as a pluralist - someone who believes the world to be far too complex for any-one philosophy to explain everything.
Deweys philosophy can be described as a version of philosophical naturalism, which regards human experience, intelligence, and communities as ever-evolving mechanisms. Using their experience and intelligence, Dewey believed, human beings can solve problems, including social problems, through inquiry. For Dewey, naturalism led to the idea of a democratic society that allows all members to acquire social intelligence and progress both as individuals and as communities. Dewey held that traditional ideas about knowledge, truth, and values, in which absolutes are assumed, are incompatible with a broadly Darwinian world view in which individuals and society is progressing. In consequence, he felt that these traditional ideas must be discarded or revised. Indeed, for pragmatists, everything people know and do depend on a historical context and are thus tentative rather than absolute.
Many followers and critics of Dewey believe he advocated elitism and social engineering in his philosophical stance. Others think of him as a kind of romantic humanist. Both tendencies are evident in Deweys writings, although he aspired to synthesize the two realms.
The pragmatist’s tradition was revitalized in the 1980s by American philosopher Richard Rorty, who has faced similar charges of elitism for his belief in the relativism of values and his emphasis on the role of the individual in attaining knowledge. Interest has renewed in the classic pragmatists - Pierce, James, and Dewey - as an alternative to Rortys interpretation of the tradition.
In an ever-changing world, pragmatism has many benefits. It defends social experimentation as a means of improving society, accepts pluralism, and rejects’ dead dogmas. But a philosophy that offers no final answers or absolutes and that appears vague as a result of trying to harmonize opposites may also be unsatisfactory to some.
One of the five branches into which semiotics is usually divided into a study of meaning of words, and their relation as designed by the object studied, that if a language is provided with a truth-definition, this is a sufficient characterization of its concept of truth, there is no further regionally philological attribution as felt by its writing. The view is similar to the ‘disquotational theory’, however, an influential proposal is that this relationship as a truth-definition is best understood by attempting to provide that which will involve giving a full description for the language, which systematic effect terms and structure of different kinds have on the truth-conditions of sentences containing them. Signs, - that is, words, expressions, and sentences, and semantics tries to answer such questions as: What is the meaning of the expressioned word ‘X’? They do this by studying what signs, as well as how signs possess significance, . . . that is, how they are intended by orators who openly speak of how they designate (make reference to things and ideas), and how they are interpreted by recipients. The goal of semantics is to match the meanings of signs - what they stand for - with the process of assigning those meanings.
Semantics is studied from philosophical (pure) and linguistic (descriptive and theoretical) approaches, and an approach known as general semantics. Philosophers look at the behavior that goes with the process of meaning. Linguists study the elements or features of meaning as they are related in a linguistic system. General semanticists concentrate on meaning as influencing what people think and do.
These semantic approaches also have broader application. Anthropologists, through descriptive semantics, study what people categorize as culturally important. Psychologists draw on theoretical semantic studies that attempt to describe the mental process of understanding and to identify how people acquire meaning (as well as sound and structure) in language. Animal behaviorists research how and what other species communicate. Exponents of general semantics examine the different values (or connotations) of signs that supposedly mean the same thing, such as the victor at Jena and the loser at Waterloos, are forthwith in referring to Napoleon, also in a general semantic vein, is literarily critical of the prominent persuasions that had influenced by studies differentiating versed languages insofar as the explicit formalities that ordinary language and describing how literarily metaphors evoke feelings and attitudes.
In the late 19th century Michel Jules Alfred Breal, a French philologist, proposed a science of significations that would investigate how sense is attached to expressions and other signs. In 1910 the British philosophers’ Alfred North Whitehead and Bertrand Russell published Principia Mathematica, which strongly influenced the Vienna Circle, a group of philosophers who developed the rigorous philosophical approach known as logical positivism.
One of the leading figures of the Vienna Circle, the German philosopher Rudolf Carnap, made a major contribution to philosophical semantics by developing symbolic logic, a system for analyzing signs and what they designate. In logical positivism, meaning is a relationship between words and things, and its study is empirically based: Because language, ideally, is a direct reflection of reality, signs match things and facts. In symbolic logic, however, mathematical notation is used to state what signs designate and to do so more clearly and precisely than is possible in ordinary language. Symbolic logic is thus itself a language, specifically, a metalanguage (formal technical language) used to talk about an object language (the language that is the object of a given semantic study).
An object language has a speaker (for example, a French woman) using expressions (such as la plume rouge) to designate a meaning (in this case, to indicate a definite pen - a plume - and of the colour red - rouge, an easy partaking for remedial purposes). The full description of an object language in symbols is called the semiotic of that language. A language’s semiotic has the following aspects: (1) a semantic aspect, in which signs (words, expressions, sentences) are given specific designations; (2) a pragmatic aspect, in which the contextual relations between speakers and signs are indicated; and (3) a syntactic aspect, in which formal relations among the elements within signs (for example, among the sounds in a sentence) are indicated.
An interpreted language in symbolic logic is an object language together with rules of meaning that link signs and designations. Each interpreted sign has a truth condition - a condition that must be met in order for the sign to be true. A sign meaning is what the sign designates when its truth condition is satisfied. For example, the expression or sign the moon is a sphere is understood by someone who knows English; however, although it is understood, it may or may not be true. The expression is true if the thing it is extended to - the moon - is in fact, a circular orbital. To determine the sign’s truth value, one must look at the moon for purposes of self-consciousness.
The symbolic logic of logical positivist philosophy thus represents an attempt to get at meaning by way of the empirical verifiability of signs - by whether the truth of the sign can be confirmed by observing something in the real world. This attempt at understanding meaning has been only moderately successful. The Austrian-British philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein rejected it in favor of his ordinary language philosophy, in which he asserted that thought is based on everyday language. Not all signs designate things in the world, he pointed out, nor can all signs be associated with truth values. In his approach to philosophical semantics, the rules of meaning are disclosed in how speech is used.
From ordinary-language philosophy has evolved the current theory of speech-act semantics. The British philosopher J. L. Austin claimed that, by speaking, a person performs an act, or does something (such as state, predict, or warn), and that meaning is found in what an expression does, in the act it performs. The American philosopher John R. Searle extended Austins ideas, emphasizing the need to relate the functions of signs or expressions to their social context. Searle asserted that speech encompasses at least three kinds of acts: (1) locutionary acts, in which things are said with a certain sense or reference (as in the moon is a sphere); (2) illocutionary acts, in which such acts as promising or commanding are performed by means of speaking; and (3) perlocutionary acts, in which the speaker, by speaking, does something to someone else (for example, angers, consoles, or persuades someone). The speaker’s intentions are conveyed by the illocutionary force that is given to the signs - that is, by the gestural simplicity in what is said. To be successfully meant, however, the signs must also be appropriate, sincere, consistent with the speaker’s general beliefs and conduct, and recognizable as meaningful by the hearer.
What has developed in philosophical semantics, then, is a distinction between truth-based semantics and speech-act semantics. Some critics of speech-act theory believe that it deals primarily with meaning in communication (as opposed to meaning in language) and thus is part of the pragmatic aspect of a language semiotic - that it relates to signs and to the knowledge of the world shared by speakers and hearers, rather than relating to signs and their designations (semantic aspect) or to formal relations among signs (syntactic aspect). These scholars hold that semantics should be restricted to assigning interpretations to signs alone - independent of a speaker and hearer.
Studies in descriptive semantics, were of what a distinction of a thing or state of affairs was any symptom or potent usage that concurs through its own content. The American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914) described such that were artificial signs, but this is a mistake for symbols are not typically used to infer the presence of what they symbolize, nonetheless, only to represent them in their absence, or to express intentions or to conjure up thoughts and emotions centered upon them. The theory of this difference lies at the heart of the philosophy of language. For signs are differentiated in their meanings in particular languages. They aim, for instance, to identify what constitutes nouns or noun-phrases and verbs or verb-phrases. For some languages, such as English, this is done with subject-predicate analysis. For languages without clear-cut distinctions between nouns, verbs, and prepositions, it is possible to say what the signs mean by analyzing the structure of what are called propositions. In such an analysis, a sign is seen as an operator that combines with one or more arguments (also signs), often nominal argument (noun phrases) or, relates nominal arguments to other elements in the expression (such as prepositional phrases or adverbial phrases). For example, in the expression Bill gives Mary the book, gives is an operator that relates the arguments’ Bill, Mary, and the book.
Whether using subject-predicate analysis or propositional analysis, descriptive semanticists establish expression classes (classes of items that can substitute for one another within a sign) and classes of items within the conventional parts of speech (such as nouns and verbs). The resulting classes are thus defined in terms of syntax, and they also have semantic roles; that is, the items in these classes perform specific grammatical functions, and in so doing they establish meaning by predicating, referring, making distinctions among entities, relations, or actions. For example, the kiss belongs to an expression class with other items such as hit and sees, as well as to the conventional part of speech verbs, in which it is part of a subclass of operators requiring two arguments (an actor and a receiver). In Mary kissed John, the syntactic role of the kiss is to relate two nominal arguments (Mary and John), whereas its semantic role is to identify a type of action. Unfortunately for descriptive semantics, however, it is not always possible to find a one-to-one correlation of syntactic classes with semantic roles. For instance, John has the same semantic role - to identify a person - in the following two sentences: John is easy to please and John is eager to please. The syntactic role of John in the two sentences, however, is different: In the first, John is the receiver of an action; in the second, John is the actor.
Linguistic semantics is also used by anthropologists called ethnoscientists to conduct formal semantic analysis (componential analysis) to determine how expressed signs - usually single words as vocabulary items called lexemes - in a language are related to the perceptions and thoughts of the people who speak the language. Componential analysis tests the idea that linguistic categories influence or determine how people view the world; this idea is called the Whorf hypothesis after the American anthropological linguist Benjamin Lee Whorf, who proposed it. In componential analysis, lexemes that have a common range of meaning constitute a semantic domain. Such a domain is characterized by the distinctive semantic features (components) that differentiate individual lexemes in the domain from one another, and also by features shared by all the lexemes in the domain. Such componential analysis points out, for example, that in the domain seat in English, the lexemes chair, sofa, loveseat, and bench can be distinguished from one another according too many people who have accommodatingly conformed of whether a back support is included. At the same time, all these lexemes share a common component, or features the meaning of something on which to put in a seating position.
Linguistic pursuants, in such a componential analysis hope to identify a universal set class of such semantic features, from which are drawn the different sets of features that characterize different languages. This idea of universal semantic features has been applied to the analysis of systems of myth and kinship in various cultures by the French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss. He showed that people organize their societies and interpret their place in these societies in ways that, despite apparent differences, have remarkable underlying similarities.
Linguists concerned with theoretical semantics are looking for a general theory of meaning in language. To such linguists, known as transformational-generative grammarians, meaning is part of the linguistic knowledge or competence that all humans possess. A generative grammar as a model of linguistic competence has a phonological (sound-system), a syntactic, and a semantic component. The semantic component, as part of a generative theory of meaning, is envisioned as a system of rules that govern how interpretable signs are interpreted and determine that other signs (such as Colorless green ideas sleep furiously), although grammatical expressions, are meaningless - semantically blocked. The rules must also account for how a sentence as such as them passed the port at midnight can have at least two interpretations.
Generative semantics grew out of proposals to explain a speaker’s ability to produce and understand new expressions where grammar or syntax fails. Its goal is to explain why and how, for example, a person understands at first hearing that the sentence Colorless green ideas sleep furiously has no meaning, even though it follows the rules of English grammar; or how, in hearing a sentence with two possible interpretations, such that those who passed the port at midnight, one ought to make up one’s mind with which meaning applies.
In generative semantics, the idea developed that all information needed to semantically interpret a sign (usually a sentence) is contained in the sentences underlying grammatical or syntactic deep structure. The deep structure of a sentence involves lexemes (understood as words or vocabulary items composed of bundles of semantic features selected from the proposed universal set of semantic features). On the sentences surface (that is, when it is spoken) these lexemes will appear as nouns, verbs, adjectives, and other parts of speech - that is, as vocabulary items. When the sentence is formulated by the speaker, semantic roles (such as subject, the object, predicates) are assigned to the lexemes; the listener hears the spoken sentence and interprets the semantic features that are meant.
Whether deep structure and semantic interpretation are distinct from one another is a matter of controversy. Most generative linguists agree, however, that a grammar should generate the set of semantically enabling, by which formed expressions that are possible in a given language, in that the grammar should associate a semantic interpretation with each expression.
Another subject of debate is whether semantic interpretation should be understood as syntactically based, that is, coming from sentences of a deep structure, or whether it should be seen as semantically debased and founded, according to Noam Chomsky, an American scholar who is particularly influential in this field. It is possible, however, - in a syntactically based theory - for which surface structures and depthful restrictions may jointly determine the semantic interpretation of an expression.
The focus of general semantics is how people evaluate words and how that evaluation influences their behavior. Begun by the Polish American linguist Alfred Korzybski and long associated with the American semanticist and politician S. I. Hayakawa, general semantics has been used in efforts to make people aware of dangers inherent in treating words as more than symbols. It has been extremely popular with writers who use language to influence peoples ideas. In their work, these writers use general-semantics guidelines for avoiding loose generalizations, rigid attitudes, inappropriate finality, and imprecision. Some philosophers and linguists, however, have criticized general semantics as lacking scientific rigor, and the approach has declined in popularity.
Positivism, system of philosophy based on experience and empirical knowledge of natural phenomena, in which metaphysics and theology are regarded as inadequate and imperfect systems of knowledge. The doctrine was first called positivism by the 19th-century French mathematician and philosopher Auguste Comte (1798-1857), but some of the positivist concepts may be traced to the British philosopher David Hume, the French philosopher Duc de Saint-Simon, and the German philosopher Immanuel Kant.
Comte chose the word positivism on the ground that it indicated the reality and constructive tendency that he claimed for the theoretical aspect of the doctrine. He was, in the main, interested in a reorganization of social life for the good of humanity through scientific knowledge, and thus controls of natural forces. The two primary components of positivism, the philosophy and the polity (or a program of individual and social conduct), were later welded by Comte into a whole under the conception of a religion, in which humanity was the object of worship. A number of Comtes disciples refused, however, to accept this religious development of his philosophy, because it seemed to contradict the original positivist philosophy. Many of doctrines that Comtes was later to adjustively adapt and developed by the British social philosophers John Stuart Mill and Herbert Spencer and by the Austrian philosopher and physicist Ernst Mach.
During the early 20th century a group of philosophers who were concerned with developments in modern science rejected the traditional positivist ideas that held personal experience to be the basis of true knowledge and emphasized the importance of scientific verification. This group came to be known as logical positivist, and it included the Austrian Ludwig Wittgenstein and the British Bertrand Russell and G. E. Moore. It was Wittgensteins Tractatus Logico-philosophicus (1921; German-English parallels text, 1922) that proved to be of decisive influence in the rejection of metaphysical doctrines for their meaninglessness and the acceptance of empiricism as a matter of logical necessity.
The positivist today, who has rejected this so-called Vienna school of philosophy, prefers to call themselves logical empiricist in order to dissociate themselves from the emphasis of the earlier thinkers on scientific verification. They maintain that the verification principle itself is philosophically unverifiable.
Bertrand Arthur William Russell (1872-1970), British philosopher, mathematician, and Nobel laureate, who, as a positivist might befittingly bring about an emphasis on logical analysis that has influenced the course of 20th-century schools of thought. In the early 20th century British mathematician and philosopher Bertrand Russell, along with British mathematician and philosopher Alfred North Whitehead, attempted to demonstrate that mathematics and numbers can be understood as groups of concepts, or classes. Russell and Whitehead tried to show that mathematics is closely related to logic and, in turn, that ordinary sentences can be logically analyzed using mathematical symbols for words and phrases. This idea resulted in a new symbolic language, used by Russell in a field he termed philosophical logic, in which philosophical propositions were reformulated and examined according to his symbolic logic.
Born in Trelleck, Wales, on May 18, 1872, Russell was educated at Trinity College, University of Cambridge. After graduation in 1894, he traveled in France, Germany, and the United States and was then made a fellow of Trinity College. From an early age he developed a strong sense of social consciousness; at the same time, he involved himself in the study of logical and mathematical questions, which he had made his special fields and on which he was called to lecture at many institutions throughout the world. He achieved prominence with his first major work, The Principles of Mathematics (1902), in which he attempted to remove mathematics from the realm of abstract philosophical notions and to give it a precise scientific framework.
Russell then collaborated for eight years with the British philosopher and mathematician Alfred North Whitehead to produce the monumental work Principia Mathematica (three volumes, 1910-1913). This work showed that mathematics can be stated in terms of the concepts of general logic, such as class and membership in a class. It became a masterpiece of rational thought. Russell and Whitehead proved that numbers can be defined as classes of a certain type, and in the process they developed logic concepts and a logic notation that established symbolic logic as an important specialization within the field of philosophy. In his next major work, The Problems of Philosophy (1912), Russell borrowed from the fields of sociology, psychology, physics, and mathematics to refute the tenets of idealism, the dominant philosophical school of the period, which held that all objects and experiences are the product of the intellect. Russell, a realist, believed that objects perceived by the senses have an inherent reality independent of the mind.
Russell criticized both adherents, whose participation involved of World War I (1914-1918), and for his uncompromising stand he was fined, imprisoned, and deprived of his teaching post at Cambridge. In prison he wrote Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy (1919), combining the two areas of knowledge he regarded as inseparable. After the war he visited the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic, and in his book Practice and Theory of Bolshevism (1920) he expressed his disappointment with the form of socialism practiced there. He felt that the methods used to achieve a Communist system was intolerable and that the results obtained were not worth the price paid.
Russell taught at Beijing University in China during 1921 and 1922. From 1928 to 1932, after he returned to England, he conducted the private, highly progressive Beacon Hill School for young children. From 1938 to 1944 he taught at various educational institutions in the United States. He was barred, however, from teaching at the College of the City of New York (now City College of the City University of New York) by the state supreme court because of his attacks on religion in such works as What I Believe (1925) and his advocacy of sexual freedom, expressed in Manners and Morals (1929).
Russell returned to England in 1944 and was reinstated as a fellow of Trinity College. Although he abandoned pacifism to support the Allied cause in World War II (1939-1945), he became an ardent and active opponent of nuclear weapons. In 1949 he was awarded the Order of Merit by King George VI. Russell received the 1950 Nobel Prize for Literature and was cited as the champion of humanity and freedom of thought. He led a movement in the late 1950s advocating unilateral nuclear disarmament by Britain, and at the age of 89 he was imprisoned after an antinuclear demonstration. He died on February 2, 1970.
In addition to his earlier work, Russell also made a major contribution to the development of logical positivism, a strong philosophical movement of the 1930s and 1940s. The major Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, at one time Russells student at Cambridge, was strongly influenced by his original concept of logical atomism. In his search for the nature and limits of knowledge, Russell was a leader in the revival of the philosophy of empiricism in the larger field of epistemology. In Our Knowledge of the External World (1926) and Inquiry into Meaning and Truth (1962), he attempted to explain all factual knowledge as constructed out of immediate experiences. Among his other books is The ABC of Relativity (1925), Education and the Social Order (1932), A History of Western Philosophy (1945), The Impact of Science upon Society (1952), My Philosophical Development (1959), War Crimes in Vietnam (1967), and The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell (three volumes, 1967-1969).
Analytic and Linguistic philosophy begins in the 20th-century as philosophical movement, it is dominant in Britain and the United States since World War II, and aims to clarify language and analyze the concepts expressed in it. The movement has been given a variety of designations, including linguistic analysis, logical empiricism, logical positivism, Cambridge analysis, and Oxford philosophy. The last two labels are derived from the universities in England where this philosophical method has been particularly influential. Although no specific doctrines or tenets are accepted by the movement as a whole, analytic and linguistic philosophers agree that the proper activity of philosophy is clarifying language, or, as some prefer, clarifying concepts. The aim of this activity is to settle philosophical disputes and resolve philosophical problems, which, it is argued, originates in linguistic confusion.
A considerable diversity of views exists among analytic and linguistic philosophers regarding the nature of conceptual or linguistic analysis. Some have been primarily concerned with clarifying the meaning of specific words or phrases as an essential step in making philosophical assertions clear and unambiguous. Others have been more concerned with determining the general conditions that must be met for any linguistic utterance to be meaningful; their intent is to establish a criterion that will distinguish between meaningful and nonsensical sentences. Still other analysts have been interested in creating formal, symbolic languages that are mathematical in nature. Their claim is that philosophical problems can be more effectively dealt with once they are formulated in a rigorous logical language.
By contrast, many philosophers associated with the movement have focused on the analysis of ordinary, or natural, language. Difficulties arise when concepts such as time and freedom, for example, are considered apart from the linguistic context in which they normally appear. Attention to language as it is ordinarily used is the key, it is argued, to resolving many philosophical puzzles.
Many experts believe that philosophy as an intellectual discipline originated with the work of Plato, one of the most celebrated philosophers in history. The Greek thinker had an immeasurable influence on Western thought. However, Platos expression of ideas in the form of dialogues - his dialectical method, used most famously by his teacher Socrates - has led to difficulties in interpreting some of the finer points of his thoughts. The issue of what exactly Plato meant to say is addressed in the following excerpt by author R. M. Hare.
Linguistic analysis as a method of philosophy is as old as the Greeks. Several of the dialogues of Plato, for example, are specifically concerned with clarifying terms and concepts. Nevertheless, this style of philosophizing has received dramatically renewed emphasis in the 20th century. Influenced by the earlier British empirical tradition of John Locke, George Berkeley, David Hume, and John Stuart Mill and by the writings of the German mathematician and philosopher Gottlob Frége, the 20th-century English philosophers’ G. E. Moore and Bertrand Russell became the founders of this contemporary analytic and linguistic trend. As students together at the University of Cambridge, Moore and Russell rejected Hegelian idealism, particularly as it was reflected in the work of the English metaphysician F. H. Bradley, who held that nothing is completely real except the Absolute. In their opposition to idealism and in their commitment to the view that careful attention to language is crucial in philosophical inquiry, and they set the mood and style of philosophizing for much of the 20th century English-speaking world.
For Moore, philosophy was first and foremost analysis. The philosophical task involves clarifying puzzling propositions or concepts by indicating fewer puzzling propositions or concepts to which the originals are held to be logically equivalent. Once this task has been completed, the truth or falsity of problematic philosophical assertions can be determined more adequately. Moore was noted for his careful analyses of such puzzling philosophical claims as time is unreal, analyses that then were to benefit from a store of ardently assistive in the determining of truth of such assertions.
Russell, strongly influenced by the precision of mathematics, was concerned with developing an ideal logical language that would accurately reflect the nature of the world. Complex propositions, Russell maintained, can be resolved into their simplest components, which he called atomic propositions. These propositions refer to atomic facts, the ultimate constituents of the universe. The metaphysical views based on this logical analysis of language and the insistence that meaningful propositions must correspond to facts constitute what Russell called logical atomism. His interest in the structure of language also led him to distinguish between the grammatical form of a proposition and its logical form. The statements John is good and John is tall have the same grammatical form but different logical forms. Failure to recognize this would lead one to treat the property goodness as if it were a characteristic of John in the same way that the property tallness is a characteristic of John. Such failure results in philosophical confusion.
Austrian-born philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein was one of the most influential thinkers of the 20th century. With his fundamental work, Tractatus Logico-philosophicus, published in 1921, he became a central figure in the movement known as analytic and linguistic philosophy.
Russells work in mathematics attracted to Cambridge, and the Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, who became a central figure in the analytic and linguistic movement. In his first major work, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921; translated 1922), in which he first presented his theory of language, Wittgenstein argued that all philosophy is a critique of language and that philosophy aims at the logical clarification of thoughts. The results of Wittgensteins analysis resembled Russells logical atomism. The world, he argued, is ultimately composed of simple facts, which it is the purpose of language to picture. To be meaningful, statements about the world must be reducible to linguistic utterances that have a structure similar to the simple facts pictured. In this early Wittgensteinian analysis, only propositions that picture facts—the propositions of science - are considered factually meaningful. Metaphysical, theological, and ethical sentences were judged to be factually meaningless.
Influenced by Russell, Wittgenstein, Ernst Mach, and others, a group of philosophers and mathematicians in Vienna in the 1920s initiated the movement known as logical positivism. Led by Moritz Schlick and Rudolf Carnap, the Vienna Circle initiated one of the most important chapters in the history of analytic and linguistic philosophy. According to the positivist, the task of philosophy is the clarification of meaning, not the discovery of new facts (the job of the scientists) or the construction of comprehensive accounts of reality (the misguided pursuit of traditional metaphysics).
The positivist divided all meaningful assertions into two classes: analytic propositions and empirically verifiable ones. Analytic propositions, which include the propositions of logic and mathematics, are statements the truth or falsity of which depend altogether on the meanings of the terms constituting the statement. An example would be the proposition two plus two equals four. The second class of meaningful propositions includes all statements about the world that can be verified, at least in principle, by sense experience. Indeed, the meaning of such propositions is identified with the empirical method of their verification. This verifiability theory of meaning, the positivist concluded, would demonstrate that scientific statements are legitimate factual claims and that metaphysical, religious, and ethical sentences are factually lacking contents that could or should be present. The ideas of logical positivism were made popular in England by the publication of A. J. Ayers Language, Truth and Logic in 1936.
The positivist verifiability theory of meaning came under intense criticism by philosophers such as the Austrian-born British philosopher Karl Popper. Eventually this narrow theory of meaning yielded to a broader understanding of the nature of language. Again, an influential figure was Wittgenstein. Repudiating many of his earlier conclusions in the Tractatus, he initiated a new line of thought culminating in his posthumously published Philosophical Investigations (1953; translated 1953). In this work, Wittgenstein argued that once attention is directed to the way language is actually used in ordinary discourse, the variety and flexibility of language become clear. Propositions do much more than simply picture facts.
This recognition led to Wittgensteins influential concept of language games. The scientist, the poet, and the theologian, for example, are involved in different language games. Moreover, the meaning of a proposition must be understood in its context, that is, in terms of the rules of the language game of which that proposition is a part. Philosophy, concluded Wittgenstein, is an attempt to resolve problems that arise as the result of linguistic confusion, and the key to the resolution of such problems is ordinary language analysis and the proper use of language.
Finally, for which Wittgenstein comes as a particular note for his contribution to the movement known as analytic and linguistic philosophy. He was born in Vienna on April 26, 1889, Wittgenstein was raised in a wealthy and cultured family. After attending schools in Linz and Berlin, he went to England to study engineering at the University of Manchester. His interest in pure mathematics led him to Trinity College, University of Cambridge, to study with Bertrand Russell. There he turned his attention to philosophy. By 1918, Ludwig Wittgenstein’s (1889-1951) work of the early period. Culminating in the completion in the Tractatus Logico-philosophicus (1921; translated 1922), and the late period from 1929 until his death, whose most famous expression is in the act, process, or instance of expressing in words the manifestations in one that calls to mind another that is oftentimes symbolically the given expression to a thought or an emotion that is viewed as freely phrased. The Philosophical investigations, published in 1953, but collected from notebooks and lecture notes. As both are dominated by as concern with the nature of language. The very implications in the early works language = is treated in relative abstraction from the activities of human beings, however, the Tractatus was a major influence on logical positivism, as the Tractus moves to a denial of cognitive meaning to sentences whose function does fit into its conception with ethics, or meaning, or the self. Doctrine s about logical form are amongst the things that can be shown, but not said,’wherefore, we cannot speak, thereof we must be silent.
The most sustaining and influential application of such are the idea that was in the philosophy of mind, justly as Wittgenstein explored the roles that identify with the self-contemplation, or sensations, or in intension, or beliefs actually play in our social lives, in order to undermine the Cartesian picture that the functions to describe the goings-on in an inner theater of which the subject is the lone spectator. Passages that subsequently become known as the ‘rule’ following consideration and the ‘private’ language argument are among the functional topics of modern philosophy of language and mind, although their precise interpretation is endlessly controversial.
Subsequently, he turned from philosophy and for several years taught elementary school in an Austrian village. In 1929 he returned to Cambridge to resume his work in philosophy and was appointed to the faculty of Trinity College. Soon he began to reject certain conclusions of the Tractatus and to develop the position reflected in his Philosophical Investigations (pub. posthumously 1953; translated 1953). Wittgenstein retired in 1947; he died in Cambridge on April 29, 1951. A sensitive, intense man who often sought solitude and was frequently depressed, Wittgenstein abhorred pretense and was noted for his simple style of life and dress. The philosopher was forceful and confident in personality, however, and he exerted considerable influence on those with whom he came in contact.
Wittgensteins philosophical life may be divided into two distinct phases: an early period, represented by the Tractatus, and a later period, represented by the Philosophical Investigations. Throughout most of his life, however, Wittgenstein consistently viewed philosophy as linguistic or conceptual analysis. In the Tractatus he argued that philosophy aims at the logical clarification of thoughts. In the Philosophical Investigations, however, he maintained that philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language.
Language, Wittgenstein argued in the Tractatus, is composed of complex propositions that can be analyzed into fewer complex propositions until one arrives at simple or elementary propositions. Correspondingly, the world is composed of complex facts that can be analyzed into fewer complex facts until one arrives at simple, or atomic, facts. The world is the totality of these facts. According to Wittgensteins picture theory of meaning, it is the nature of elementary propositions logically to picture atomic facts, or states of affairs. He claimed that the nature of language required elementary propositions, and his theory of meaning required that there be atomic facts pictured by the elementary propositions. On this analysis, only propositions that picture facts - the propositions of science - are considered cognitively meaningful. Metaphysical and ethical statements are not meaningful assertions. The logical positivist associated with the Vienna Circle was greatly influenced by this conclusion.
Wittgenstein came to believe, however, that the narrow view of language reflected in the Tractatus was mistaken. In the Philosophical Investigations he argued that if one actually looks to see how language is used, the variety of linguistic usage becomes clear. Words are like tools, and just as tools serve different functions, so linguistic expressions serve many functions. Although some propositions are used to picture facts, others are used to command, question, pray, thank, curse, and so on. This recognition of linguistic flexibility and variety led to Wittgensteins concept of a language game and to the conclusion that people play different language games. The scientist, for example, is involved in a different language game than the theologian. Moreover, the meaning of a proposition must be understood in terms of its context, that is, in terms of the rules of the game through which its proposition is a part. The key to the resolution of philosophical puzzles is the therapeutic process of examining and describing language in use.
Once again, the psychology proven attempts are well grounded to evolutionary principles, in which a variety of higher mental functions may be adaptations, forced in response to selection pressures on the human populations through evolutionary time. Candidates for such theorizing include material and paternal motivations, capacities for love and friendship, the development of language as a signalling system cooperative and aggressive, our emotional repertoire, our moral and reactions, including the disposition to detect and punish those who cheat on agreements or who free-ride on =the work of others, our cognitive structures, nd many others. Evolutionary psychology goes hand-in-hand with neurophysiological evidence about the underlying circuitry in the brain which subserves the psychological mechanisms it claims to identify. The approach was foreshadowed by Darwin himself, and William James, as well as the sociology of E.O. Wilson. The terms of use are applied, more or less aggressively, especially to explanations offered in sociobiology and evolutionary psychology.
Another assumption that is frequently used to legitimate the real existence of forces associated with the invisible hand in neoclassical economics derives from Darwins view of natural selection as a war-like competing between atomized organisms in the struggle for survival. In natural selection as we now understand it, cooperation appears to exist in complementary relation to competition. Complementary relationships between such results are emergent self-regulating properties that are greater than the sum of parts and that serve to perpetuate the existence of the whole.
According to E.O Wilson, the human mind evolved to believe in the gods and people need a sacred narrative to have a sense of higher purpose. Yet it is also clear that the gods in his view are merely human constructs and, therefore, there is no basis for dialogue between the world-view of science and religion. Science for its part, said Wilson, will test relentlessly every assumption about the human condition and in time uncover the bedrock of the moral a religious sentiment. The eventual result of the competition between the other, will be the secularization of the human epic and of religion itself.
Man has come to the threshold of a state of consciousness, regarding his nature and his relationship to te Cosmos, in terms that reflects reality. By using the processes of nature as metaphor, to describe the forces by which it operates upon and within Man, we come as close to describing reality as we can within the limits of our comprehension. Men will be very uneven in their capacity for such understanding, which, naturally, differs for different ages and cultures, and develops and changes over the course of time. For these reasons it will always be necessary to use metaphor and myth to provide comprehensible guides to living. In thus way, Mans imagination and intellect play vital roles on his survival and evolution.
Since so much of life both inside and outside the study is concerned with finding explanations of things, it would be desirable to have a concept of what counts as a good explanation from bad. Under the influence of logical positivist approaches to the structure of science, it was felt that the criterion ought to be found in a definite logical relationship between the exlanans (that which does the explaining) and the explanandum (that which is to be explained). The approach culminated in the covering law model of explanation, or the view that an event is explained when it is subsumed under a law of nature, that is, its occurrence is deducible from the law plus a set of initial conditions. A law would itself be explained by being deduced from a higher-order or covering law, in the way that Johannes Kepler(or Keppler, 1571-1630), was by way of planetary motion that the laws were deducible from Newtons laws of motion. The covering law model may be adapted to include explanation by showing that something is probable, given a statistical law. Questions for the covering law model include querying for the covering laws are necessary to explanation (we explain whether everyday events without overtly citing laws): Querying whether they are sufficient (it may not explain an event just to say that it is an example of the kind of thing that always happens). And querying whether a purely logical relationship is adapted to capturing the requirements, we make of explanations. These may include, for instance, that we have a feel for what is happening, or that the explanation proceeds in terms of things that are familiar to us or unsurprising, or that we can give a model of what is going on, and none of these notions is captured in a purely logical approach. Recent work, therefore, has tended to stress the contextual and pragmatic elements in requirements for explanation, so that what counts as good explanation given one set of concerns may not do so given another.
The argument to the best explanation is the view that once we can select the best of any in something in explanations of an event, then we are justified in accepting it, or even believing it. The principle needs qualification, since something it is unwise to ignore the antecedent improbability of a hypothesis which would explain the data better than others, e.g., the best explanation of a coin falling heads 530 times in 1,000 tosses might be that it is biassed to give a probability of heads of 0.53 but it might be more sensible to suppose that it is fair, or to suspend judgement.
In a philosophy of language is considered as the general attempt to understand the components of a working language, the relationship that understanding the speaker has to its elements, and the relationship they bear to the world. The subject therefore embraces the traditional division of semiotic into syntax, semantics, and pragmatics. The philosophy of language thus mingles with the philosophy of mind, since it needs an account of what it is in our understanding that enables us to use language. It so mingles with the metaphysics of truth and the relationship between sign and object. Much as much is that the philosophy in the 20th century, has been informed by the belief that philosophy of language is the fundamental basis of all philosophical problems, in that language is the distinctive exercise of mind, and the distinctive way in which we give shape to metaphysical beliefs. Particular topics will include the problems of logical form? And the basis of the division between syntax and semantics, as well as problems of understanding the number and nature of specifically semantic relationships such as meaning, reference, predication, and quantification. Pragmatics includes that of speech acts, while problems of rule following and the indeterminacy of translation infect philosophies of both pragmatics and semantics.
On this conception, to understand a sentence is to know its truth-conditions, and, yet, in a distinctive way the conception has remained central that those who offer opposing theories characteristically define their position by reference to it. The Concepcion of meaning s truth-conditions needs not and should not be advanced for being in itself as complete account of meaning. For instance, one who understands a language must have some idea of the range of speech acts contextually performed by the various types of a sentence in the language, and must have some idea of the insufficiencies of various kinds of speech acts. The claim of the theorist of truth-conditions should rather be targeted on the notion of content: If an indicative sentence differs in what they strictly and literally say, then this difference is fully accounted for by the difference in the truth-conditions.
The meaning of a complex expression is a function of the meaning of its constituent. This is just as a sentence of what it is for an expression to be semantically complex. It is one of the initial attractions of the conception of meaning truth-conditions tat it permits a smooth and satisfying account of the way in which the meaning of s complex expression is a function of the meaning of its constituents. On the truth-conditional conception, to give the meaning of an expression is to state the contribution it makes to the truth-conditions of sentences in which it occurs. For singular terms - proper names, indexical, and certain pronouns - this is done by stating the reference of the terms in question. For predicates, it is done either by stating the conditions under which the predicate is true of arbitrary objects, or by stating the conditions under which arbitrary atomic sentences containing it is true. The meaning of a sentence-forming operator is given by stating its contribution to the truth-conditions of as complex sentence, as a function of the semantic values of the sentences on which it operates.
The theorist of truth conditions should insist that not every true statement about the reference of an expression is fit to be an axiom in a meaning-giving theory of truth for a language, such is the axiom: London refers to the city in which there was a huge fire in 1666, is a true statement about the reference of London. It is a consequent of a theory which substitutes this axiom for no different a term than of our simple truth theory that London is beautiful is true if and only if the city in which there was a huge fire in 1666 is beautiful. Since a subject can understand the name London without knowing that last-mentioned truth condition, this replacement axiom is not fit to be an axiom in a meaning-specifying truth theory. It is, of course, incumbent on a theorised meaning of truth conditions, to state in a way which does not presuppose any previous, non-truth conditional conception of meaning
Among the many challenges facing the theorist of truth conditions, two are particularly salient and fundamental. First, the theorist has to answer the charge of triviality or vacuity, second, the theorist must offer an account of what it is for a persons language to be truly describable by as semantic theory containing a given semantic axiom.
Since the content of a claim that the sentence Paris is beautiful are true amounts to no more than the claim that Paris is beautiful, we can trivially describers understanding a sentence, if we wish, as knowing its truth-conditions, but this gives us no substantive account of understanding whatsoever. Something other than grasp of truth conditions must provide the substantive account. The charge rests upon what has been called the redundancy theory of truth, the theory which, somewhat more discriminatingly. Horwich calls the minimal theory of truth. Its conceptual representation that the concept of truth is exhausted by the fact that it conforms to the equivalence principle, the principle that for any proposition p, it is true that p if and only if P. Many different philosophical theories of truth will, with suitable qualifications, except that equivalence principle. The distinguishing feature of the minimal theory is its claim that the equivalence principle exhausts the notion of truth. It is now widely accepted, both by opponents and supporters of truth conditional theories of meaning, that it is inconsistent to accept both minimal theory of ruth and a truth conditional account of meaning. If the claim that the sentence Paris is beautiful is true is exhausted by its equivalence to the claim that Paris is beautiful, it is circular to try of its truth conditions. The minimal theory of truth has been endorsed by the Cambridge mathematician and philosopher Plumpton Ramsey (1903-30), and the English philosopher Jules Ayer, the later Wittgenstein, Quine, Strawson. Horwich and - confusing and inconsistently if this article is correct - Frége himself. But is the minimal theory correct?
The minimal theory treats instances of the equivalence principle as definitional of truth for a given sentence, but in fact, it seems that each instance of the equivalence principle can itself be explained. The truths from which such an instance as: London is beautiful is true if and only if London is beautiful. This would be a pseudo-explanation if the fact that London refers to London consists in part in the fact that London is beautiful has the truth-condition it does. But it is very implausible, it is, after all, possible to understand the name London without understanding the predicate is beautiful.
Sometimes, however, the counterfactual conditional is known as subjunctive conditionals, insofar as a counterfactual conditional is a conditional of the form if p were to happen q would, or if p was to have happened q would have happened, where the supposition of p is contrary to the known fact that not-p. Such assertions are nevertheless, useful if you broke the bone, the X-ray would have looked different, or if the reactors were to fail, this mechanism wold clicks in are important truths, even when we know that the bone is not broken or are certain that the reactor will not fail. It is arguably distinctive of laws of nature that yield counterfactual (if the metal were to be heated, it would expand), whereas accidentally true generalizations may not. It is clear that counterfactuals cannot be represented by the material implication of the propositional calculus, since that conditionals come out true whenever p is false, so there would be no division between true and false counterfactual.
Although the subjunctive form indicates some counterfactual, in many contexts it does not seem to matter whether we use a subjunctive form, or a simple conditional form: If you run out of water, you will be in trouble seems equivalent to if you were to run out of water, you would be in trouble, in other contexts there is a big difference: If Oswald did not kill Kennedy, someone else did is clearly true, whereas if Oswald had not killed Kennedy, someone would have is most probably false.
The best-known modern treatment of counterfactuals is that of David Lewis, which evaluates them as true or false according to whether q is true in the most similar possible worlds to ours in which p is true. The similarity-ranking this approach needs have proved controversial, particularly since it may need to presuppose some notion of the same laws of nature, whereas art of the interest in counterfactuals is that they promise to illuminate that notion. There is a growing awareness that the classification of conditionals is an extremely tricky business, and categorizing them as counterfactuals or does not be of limited use.
The pronouncing of any conditional; preposition of the form if p then Q. The condition hypothesizes, P. Its called the antecedent of the conditional, and q the consequent. Various kinds of conditional have been distinguished. The weaken in that of material implication, merely telling us that with not-p. or q. stronger conditionals include elements of modality, corresponding to the thought that if p is true then q must be true. Ordinary language is very flexible in its use of the conditional form, and there is controversy whether, yielding different kinds of conditionals with different meanings, or pragmatically, in which case there should be one basic meaning which case there should be one basic meaning, with surface differences arising from other implicatures.
We now turn to a philosophy of meaning and truth, for which it is especially associated with the American philosopher of science and of language (1839-1914), and the American psychologist philosopher William James (1842-1910), wherefore the study in Pragmatism is given to various formulations by both writers, but the core is the belief that the meaning of a doctrine is the same as the practical effects of adapting it. Peirce interpreted of theocratical sentence ids only that of a corresponding practical maxim (telling us what to do in some circumstance). In James the position issues in a theory of truth, notoriously allowing that belief, including for example, belief in God, is the widest sense of the works satisfactorily in the widest sense of the word. On Jamess view almost any belief might be respectable, and even rue, provided it works (but working is no simple matter for James). The apparent subjectivist consequences of tis were wildly assailed by Russell (1872-1970), Moore (1873-1958), and others in the early years of the 20 century. This led to a division within pragmatism between those such as the American educator John Dewey (1859-1952), whose humanistic conception of practice remains inspired by science, and the more idealistic route that especially by the English writer F.C.S. Schiller (1864-1937), embracing the doctrine that our cognitive efforts and human needs actually transform the reality that we seek to describe. James often writes as if he sympathizes with this development. For instance, in The Meaning of Truth (1909), he considers the hypothesis that other people have no minds (dramatized in the sexist idea of an automatic sweetheart or female zombie) and remarks hat the hypothesis would not work because it would not satisfy our egoistic craving for the recognition and admiration of others. The implication that this is what makes it true that the other persons have minds in the disturbing part.
Modern pragmatists such as the American philosopher and critic Richard Rorty (1931-) and some writings of the philosopher Hilary Putnam (1925-) who has usually tried to dispense with an account of truth and concentrate, as perhaps James should have done, upon the nature of belief and its relations with human attitude, emotion, and need. The driving motivation of pragmatism is the idea that belief in the truth on te one hand must have a close connection with success in action on the other. One way of cementing the connection is found in the idea that natural selection must have adapted us to be cognitive creatures because beliefs have effects, as they work. Pragmatism can be found in Kants doctrine of the primary of practical over pure reason, and continued to play an influential role in the theory of meaning and of truth.
In case of fact, the philosophy of mind is the modern successor to behaviourism, as do the functionalism that its early advocates were Putnam (1926-) and Sellars (1912-89), and its guiding principle is that we can define mental states by a triplet of relations they have on other mental stares, what effects they have on behaviour. The definition need not take the form of a simple analysis, but if w could write down the totality of axioms, or postdate, or platitudes that govern our theories about what things of other mental states, and our theories about what things are apt to cause (for example), a belief state, what effects it would have on a variety of other mental states, and what affects it is likely to have on behaviour, then we would have done all that is needed to make the state a proper theoretical notion. It could be implicitly defied by these theses. Functionalism is often compared with descriptions of a computer, since according to mental descriptions correspond to a description of a machine in terms of software, that remains silent about the underlaying hardware or realization of the program the machine is running. The principal advantage of functionalism includes its fit with the way we know of mental states both of ourselves and others, which is via their effects on behaviour and other mental states. As with behaviourism, critics charge that structurally complex items that do not bear mental states might nevertheless, imitate the functions that are cited. According to this criticism functionalism is too generous and would count too many things as having minds. It is also queried whether functionalism is too paradoxical, able to see mental similarities only when there is causal similarity, when our actual practices of interpretations enable us to ascribe thoughts and desires to differently from our own, it may then seem as though beliefs and desires can be variably realized causal architecture, just as much as they can be in different neurophysiological states.
The philosophical movement of Pragmatism had a major impact on American culture from the late 19th century to the present. Pragmatism calls for ideas and theories to be tested in practice, by assessing whether acting upon the idea or theory produces desirable or undesirable results. According to pragmatists, all claims about truth, knowledge, morality, and politics must be tested in this way. Pragmatism has been critical of traditional Western philosophy, especially the notions that there are absolute truths and absolute values. Although pragmatism was popular for a time in France, England, and Italy, most observers believe that it encapsulates an American faith in know-how and practicality and an equally American distrust of abstract theories and ideologies.
In mentioning the American psychologist and philosopher we find William James, who helped to popularize the philosophy of pragmatism with his book Pragmatism: A New Name for Old Ways of Thinking (1907). Influenced by a theory of meaning and verification developed for scientific hypotheses by American philosopher C. S. Peirce, James held that truths are what works, or has good experimental results. In a related theory, James argued the existence of God is partly verifiable because many people derive benefits from believing.
The Association for International Conciliation first published a William James pacifist statement, The Moral Equivalent of War, in 1910. James, a highly respected philosopher and psychologist, was one of the founders of pragmatism - a philosophical movement holding that ideas and theories must be tested in practice to assess their worth. James hoped to find a way to convince men with a long-standing history of pride and glory in war to evolve beyond the need for bloodshed and to develop other avenues for conflict resolution. Spelling and grammars represent standards of the time.
Pragmatists regard all theories and institutions as tentative hypotheses and solutions. For this reason they believed that efforts to improve society, through such means as education or politics, must be geared toward problem solving and must be ongoing. Through their emphasis on connecting theory to practice, pragmatist thinkers attempted to transform all areas of philosophy, from metaphysics to ethics and political philosophy.
Pragmatism sought a middle ground between traditional ideas about the nature of reality and radical theories of nihilism and irrationalism, which had become popular in Europe in the late 19th century. Traditional metaphysics assumed that the world has a fixed, intelligible structure and that human beings can know absolute or objective truths about the world and about what constitutes moral behavior. Nihilism and irrationalism, on the other hand, denied those very assumptions and their certitude. Pragmatists today still try to steer a middle course between contemporary offshoots of these two extremes.
The ideas of the pragmatists were considered revolutionary when they first appeared. To some critics, pragmatisms refusal to affirm any absolutes carried negative implications for society. For example, pragmatists do not believe that a single absolute idea of goodness or justice exists, but rather than these concepts are changeable and depend on the context in which they are being discussed. The absence of these absolutes, critics feared, could result in a decline in moral standards. The pragmatist’s denial of absolutes, moreover, challenged the foundations of religion, government, and schools of thought. As a result, pragmatism influenced developments in psychology, sociology, education, semiotics (the study of signs and symbols), and scientific method, as well as philosophy, cultural criticism, and social reform movements. Various political groups have also drawn on the assumptions of pragmatism, from the progressive movements of the early 20th century to later experiments in social reform.
Pragmatism is best understood in its historical and cultural context. It arose during the late 19th century, a period of rapid scientific advancement typified by the theories of British biologist Charles Darwin, whose theories suggested too many thinkers that humanity and society are in a perpetual state of progress. During this same period a decline in traditional religious beliefs and values accompanied the industrialization and material progress of the time. In consequence it became necessary to rethink fundamental ideas about values, religion, science, community, and individuality.
The three most important pragmatists are American philosophers’ Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, and John Dewey. Peirce was primarily interested in scientific method and mathematics; his objective was to infuse scientific thinking into philosophy and society, and he believed that human comprehension of reality was becoming ever greater and that human communities were becoming increasingly progressive. Peirce developed pragmatism as a theory of meaning - in particular, the meaning of concepts used in science. The meaning of the concept brittle, for example, is given by the observed consequences or properties that objects called brittle exhibit. For Peirce, the only rational way to increase knowledge was to form mental habits that would test ideas through observation, experimentation, or what he called inquiry. Many philosophers known as logical positivist, a group of philosophers who have been influenced by Peirce, believed that our evolving species was fated to get ever closer to Truth. Logical positivist emphasize the importance of scientific verification, rejecting the assertion of positivism that personal experience is the basis of true knowledge.
James moved pragmatism in directions that Peirce strongly disliked. He generalized Peirces doctrines to encompass all concepts, beliefs, and actions; he also applied pragmatist ideas to truth as well as to meaning. James was primarily interested in showing how systems of morality, religion, and faith could be defended in a scientific civilization. He argued that sentiment, as well as logic, is crucial to rationality and that the great issues of life - morality and religious belief, for example - are leaps of faith. As such, they depend upon what he called the will to believe and not merely on scientific evidence, which can never tell us what to do or what is worthwhile. Critics charged James with relativism (the belief that values depend on specific situations) and with crass expediency for proposing that if an idea or action works the way one intends, it must be right. But James can more accurately be described as a pluralist - someone who believes the world to be far too complex for any-one philosophy to explain everything.
Deweys philosophy can be described as a version of philosophical naturalism, which regards human experience, intelligence, and communities as ever-evolving mechanisms. Using their experience and intelligence, Dewey believed, human beings can solve problems, including social problems, through inquiry. For Dewey, naturalism led to the idea of a democratic society that allows all members to acquire social intelligence and progress both as individuals and as communities. Dewey held that traditional ideas about knowledge, truth, and values, in which absolutes are assumed, are incompatible with a broadly Darwinian world-view in which individuals and society is progressing. In consequence, he felt that these traditional ideas must be discarded or revised. Indeed, for pragmatists, everything people know and do depend on a historical context and are thus tentative rather than absolute.
Many followers and critics of Dewey believe he advocated elitism and social engineering in his philosophical stance. Others think of him as a kind of romantic humanist. Both tendencies are evident in Deweys writings, although he aspired to synthesize the two realms.
The pragmatist’s tradition was revitalized in the 1980s by American philosopher Richard Rorty, who has faced similar charges of elitism for his belief in the relativism of values and his emphasis on the role of the individual in attaining knowledge. Interest has renewed in the classic pragmatists - Pierce, James, and Dewey - have an alternative to Rortys interpretation of the tradition.
The Philosophy of Mind, is the branch of philosophy that considers mental phenomena such as sensation, perception, thought, belief, desire, intention, memory, emotion, imagination, and purposeful action. These phenomena, which can be broadly grouped as thoughts and experiences, are features of human beings; many of them are also found in other animals. Philosophers are interested in the nature of each of these phenomena as well as their relationships to one-another and to physical phenomena, such as motion.
The most famous exponent of dualism was the French philosopher René Descartes, who maintained that body and mind are radically different entities and that they are the only fundamental substances in the universe. Dualism, however, does not show how these basic entities are connected.
In the work of the German philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, the universe is held to consist of infinite measures that are numerically distinct substances, or monad. This view is pluralistic in the sense that it proposes the existence of many separate entities, and it is monistic in its assertion that each monad reflects within itself the entire universe.
Other philosophers have held that knowledge of reality is not derived from a priori principles, but is obtained only from experience. This type of metaphysic is called empiricism. Still another school of philosophy has maintained that, although an ultimate reality does exist, it is altogether inaccessible to human knowledge, which is necessarily subjective because it is confined to states of mind. Knowledge is therefore not a representation of external reality, but merely a reflection of human perceptions. This view is known as skepticism or agnosticism in respect to the soul and the reality of God.
The 18th-century German philosopher Immanuel Kant had published his monumental completion of his works as, The Critique of Pure Reason in 1781, yet three years later, he expanded on his study of the modes of thinking with an essay entitled. What is Enlightenment? In this 1784 essay, Kant challenged readers to dare to know, arguing that it was not only a civic but also a moral duty to exercise the fundamental freedoms of thought and expression.
Several major viewpoints were combined in the work of Kant, who developed a distinctive critical philosophy called transcendentalism. His philosophy is agnostic in that it denies the possibility of a strict knowledge of ultimate reality; it is empirical in that it affirms that all knowledge arises from experience and is true of objects of actual and possible experience; and it is rationalistic in that it maintains the a priori character of the structural principles of this empirical knowledge.
These principles are held to be necessary and universal in their application to experience, for in Kants view the mind furnishes the archetypal forms and categories (space, time, causality, substance, and relation) to its sensations, and these categories are logically anterior to experience, although manifested only in experience. Their logical anteriority to experience along with consciousness for which is the central focus of the philosophy of mind, least of mention, these categories or structural principle’s transcendental, that in some sense the objects have their ordinary properties, as owning their causal powers, and their spatial and temporal position, only because our minds are so structured that these are the categories we impose upon the manifold of experience. However, post-Structuralists writings to denote an external, objective languages whose independent references are of those that fixes reference meanings. These points, it is alleged cannot play any role in the interpretation of texts, their introduction only provides yet more text. So, that, in Kant, one that proves conclusion by showing that unless it was true, experiences itself would be impossible. And, again, in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, the selection through which it deals with the attempts to prove of the practical application, in that their personal assimilated categorical phenomena became a topic or question of transcendental resolution, and is not purely a matter of logic or mathematics, and also lies beyond the scope of both sense experience and of the proper use of theoretical answers to sense experience. But many other questions may, perhaps, include those raised by metaphysical problems, such as scepticism and physicalism. Philosophical attitudes to such questions range from fascination to outright denial of their existence. They transcend all experience, both actual and possible. Although these principles determine all experience, they do not in any way affect the nature of things in themselves. The knowledge of which these principles are the necessary conditions must not be considered, therefore, as constituting a revelation of things as they are in themselves. This knowledge concerns things only insofar as they appear to human perception or as they can be apprehended by the senses. The argument by which Kant sought to fix the limits of human knowledge within the framework of experience and to demonstrate the inability of the human mind to penetrate beyond experience strictly by knowledge to the realm of ultimate reality constitutes the critical feature of his philosophy, giving the key word to the titles of his three leading treatises, Critique of Pure Reason, Critique of Practical Reason, and Critique of Judgment. In the system propounded in these works, Kant sought also to reconcile science and religion in a world of two levels, comprising noumena, objects conceived by reason although not perceived by the senses, and phenomena, things as they appear to the senses and are accessible to material study. He maintained that, because God, freedom, and human immortality are noumenal realities, these concepts are understood through moral faith rather than through scientific knowledge. With the continuous development of science, the expansion of metaphysics to include scientific knowledge and methods became one of the major objectives of metaphysicians.
Some of Kants most distinguished followers, notably Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Friedrich Schillings, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, and Friedrich Schleiermacher, negated Kants criticism in their elaborations of his transcendental metaphysics by denying the Kantian conception of the thing-in-itself. They thus developed an absolute idealism in opposition to Kants critical transcendentalism.
Since the formation of the hypothesis of absolute idealism, the development of metaphysics has resulted in as many types of metaphysical theory as existed in pre-Kantian philosophy, despite Kants contention that he had fixed definitely the limits of philosophical speculation. Notable among these later metaphysical theories is radical empiricism, or pragmatism, a native American form of metaphysics expounded by Charles Sanders Peirce, developed by William James, and adapted as instrumentalism by John Dewey; voluntarism, the foremost exponents of which are the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer and the American philosopher Josiah Royce; phenomenalism, as it is exemplified in the writings of the French philosopher Auguste Comte and the British philosopher Herbert Spencer; emergent evolution, or creative evolution, originated by the French philosopher Henri Bergson; and the philosophy of the organism, elaborated by the British mathematician and philosopher Alfred North Whitehead. The salient doctrines of pragmatism are that the chief function of thought is to guide action, that the meaning of concepts is to be sought in their practical applications, and that truth should be tested by the practical effects of belief; according to instrumentalism, ideas are instruments of action, and their truth is determined by their role in human experience. In the theory of voluntarism is of the desire to act in a particular way or have a particular thing, as to be inclined to whichever inclinations has in mind to think it fit when one’s will and judgements come in conflict, such that the aspects of mind involved in choosing or deciding upon the disposition of controlling one’s actions, impulses or emotions as a self-indulgent character. That postulated as the supreme manifestation of reality, that the exponents of phenomenalism, who are sometimes called positivist, contend that everything can be analyzed in terms of actual or possible occurrences, or phenomena, in that anything that cannot be analyzed in this manner cannot be understood in the emergence of the creative evolution, the evolutionary process is characterized as spontaneous and unpredictable rather than mechanistically determined. The philosophy of the organism combines an evolutionary stress on constant process with a metaphysical theory of God, the eternal objects, and creativity.
In the 20th century the validity of metaphysical thinking has been disputed by the logical positivist and by the so-called dialectical materialism of the Marxists. The basic principle maintained by the logical positivist is the verifiability theory of meaning. According to this theory a sentence has factual meaning only if it meets the test of observation. Logical positivist argue that metaphysical expressions such as Nothing exists except material particles and Everything is part of one all-encompassing spirit cannot be tested empirically. Therefore, according to the verifiability theory of meaning, these expressions have no factual cognitive meaning, although they can have an emotive meaning relevant to human hopes and feelings.
The dialectical materialists assert that the mind is conditioned by and reflects material reality. Therefore, speculations that conceive of constructs of the mind as having any other than material reality are themselves unreal and can result only in delusion. To these assertions metaphysicians reply by denying the adequacy of the verifiability theory of meaning and of material perception as the standard of reality. Both logical positivism and dialectical materialism, they argue, conceal metaphysical assumptions, for example, that everything is observable or at least connected with something observable and that the mind has no distinctive life of its own. In the philosophical movement known as existentialism, thinkers have contended that the questions of the nature of being and of the individuals relationships to it are extremely important and meaningful in terms of human life. The investigation of these questions is therefore considered valid whether its results can be verified objectively.
Since the 1950s the problems of systematic analytical metaphysics have been studied in Britain by Stuart Newton Hampshire and Peter Frederick Strawson, the former concerned, in the manner of Spinoza, with the relationship between thought and action, and the latter, in the manner of Kant, with describing the major categories of experience as they are embedded in language. Metaphysic has been pursued much in the spirit of positivism by Wilfred Stalker Sellars and Willard Van Orman Quine. Sellars have sought to express metaphysical questions in linguistic terms, and Quine has attempted to determine whether the structure of language commits the philosopher to asserting the existence of any entities whatever and, if so, what kind. In these new formulations the issues of metaphysics and ontology remain vital.
In the 17th century, French philosopher René Descartes proposed that only two substances ultimately exist of mind and body. Yet, if the two are entirely distinct, as Descartes believed, how can one substance interact with the other? And how, for example, is the intention of a human mind able to cause movement in the persons limbs? to have an intention to be in a state of mind that is favourably directed towards bringing about (for maintaining, or avoiding) some state of affairs, but which is not a mere desire or wish, since it also sees the subject on a course to bring that state of affairs about. The notion thus inherits its all to the problems of intentionality. The specific problems it raises include characterizing the difference between doing something accidentally and doing lies in a preceding act of mind or volition is not very happy, since it may be our automatic to do what is nevertheless intentional, for example putting one’s foot forward while walking. Conversely, unless the formation of volition is unintentional, and thus raises the same question, the presence of volition might be unintentional or beyond one’s control. Intentions are most finely grained than movements on a set of movements ,may both be answering the question and starting a wait, yet this may be intentional and the other not.
The issue of the interaction between mind and body is known in philosophy as the mind-body problem. Many fields other than philosophy shares an interest in the nature of mind. In religion, the nature of mind is connected with various conceptions of the soul and the possibility of life after death. In many abstract theories of mind there is considerable overlap between philosophy and the science of psychology. Once part of philosophy, psychology split off and formed a separate branch of knowledge in the 19th century. While psychology used scientific experiments to study mental states and events, philosophy used justifiable explanations atop of arguments and thought experiments in seeking to understand the concepts that underlie mental phenomena. Also influenced by philosophy of mind is the field of artificial intelligence (AI), which endeavors to develop computers that can mimic what the human mind can do. Cognitive science attempts to integrate the understanding of mind provided by philosophy, psychology, AI, and other disciplines. Finally, all of these fields benefit from the detailed understanding of the brain that has emerged through neuroscience in the late 20th century.
Philosophers use the characteristics of inward accessibility, subjectivity, intentionality, goal-directedness, creativity and freedom, and consciousness to distinguish mental phenomena from physical phenomena.
Perhaps the most important characteristic of mental phenomena is that they are inwardly accessible, or available to us through introspection. We each know our own minds - our sensations, thoughts, memories, desires, and fantasies - in a direct sense, by internal reflection. We also know our mental states and mental events in a way that no one else can. In other words, we have privileged access to our own mental states.
Certain mental phenomena, those we generally call experiences, have a subjective nature - that is, they have certain characteristics we become aware of when we reflect. For instance, there is something it is like to feel pain, or have an itch, or see something red. These characteristics are subjective in that they are accessible to the subject of the experience, the person who has the experience, but not to others.
Other mental phenomena, which we broadly refer to as thoughts, have a characteristic philosophers call intentionality. Intentional thoughts are about other thoughts or objects, which are represented as having certain properties or for being related to one another in a certain way. The belief that California is west of Nevada, for example, is about California and Nevada and represents the former for being west of the latter. Although we have privileged access to our intentional states, many of them do not seem to have a subjective nature, at least not in the way that experiences do.
A number of mental phenomena appear to be connected to one another as elements in an intelligent, goal-directed system. The system works as follows: First, our sense organs are stimulated by events in our environment; next, by virtue of these stimulations, we perceive things about the external world; finally, we use this information, as well as information we have remembered or inferred, to guide our actions in ways that further our goals. Goal-directedness seems to accompany only mental phenomena.
Another important characteristic of mind, especially of human minds, is the capacity for choice and imagination. Rather than automatically converting past influences into future actions, individual minds are capable of exhibiting creativity and freedom. For instance, we can imagine things we have not experienced and can act in ways that no one expects or could predict.
Mental phenomena are conscious, and consciousness may be the closest term we have for describing what is special about mental phenomena. Minds are sometimes referred to as consciousness, yet it is difficult to describe exactly what consciousness is. Although consciousness is closely related to inward accessibility and subjectivity, these very characteristics seem to hinder us in reaching an objective scientific understanding of it.
Although philosophers have written about mental phenomena since ancient times, the philosophy of mind did not garner much attention until the work of French philosopher René Descartes in the 17th century. Descartes work represented a turning point in thinking about mind by making a strong distinction between bodies and minds, or the physical and the mental. This duality between mind and body, known as Cartesian dualism, has posed significant problems for philosophy ever since.
Descartes believed there are two basic kinds of things in the world, a belief known as substance dualism. For Descartes, the principles of existence for these two groups of things - bodies and minds - are completely different from one another: Bodies exist by being extended in space, while minds exist by being conscious. According to Descartes, nothing can be done to give a body thought and consciousness. No matter how we shape a body or combine it with other bodies, we cannot turn the body into a mind, a thing that is conscious, because being conscious is not a way of being extended.
For Descartes, a person consists of a human body and a human mind causally interacting with one another. For example, the intentions of a human being of a quality or by some degree actionable above which point, may well have been responsible for bringing about that persons’ limbs to move. In this way, the mind can affect the body. In addition, the sense organs of a human being maybe affected by light, pressure, or sound, external sources, which in turn affect the brain, affecting mental states. Thus, the body may affect the mind. Exactly how mind can affect body, and vice versa, is a central issue in the philosophy of mind, and is known as the mind-body problem. According to Descartes, this interaction of mind and body is peculiarly intimate. Unlike the interaction between a pilot and his ship, the connection between mind and body more closely resembles two substances that have been thoroughly mixed together.
In response to the mind-body problem arising from Descartes theory of substance dualism, a number of philosophers have advocated various forms of substance monism, the doctrine that there is ultimately just one kind of thing in reality. In the 18th century, Irish philosopher George Berkeley claimed there were no material objects in the world, only minds and their ideas. Berkeley thought that talk about physical objects was simply a way of organizing the flow of experience. Near the turn of the 20th century, American psychologist and philosopher William James proposed another form of substance monism. James claimed that experience is the basic stuff from which both bodies and minds are constructed.
Most philosophers of mind today are substance monists of a third type: They are materialists who believe that everything in the world is basically material, or a physical object. Among materialists, there is still considerable disagreement about the status of mental properties, which are conceived as properties of bodies or brains. Materialists who are property diarists believe that mental properties are an additional kind of property or attribute, not reducible to physical properties. Property dualists have the problem of explaining how such properties can fit into the world envisaged by modern physical science, according to which there are physical explanations for all things.
Materialists who are property monists believe that there is ultimately only one type of property, although they disagree on whether or not mental properties exist in material form. Some property monists, known as reductive materialists, hold that mental properties exist simply as a subset of relatively complex and nonbasic physical properties of the brain. Reductive materialists have the problem of explaining how the physical states of the brain can be inwardly accessible and have a subjective character, as mental states do. Other property monists, known as eliminative materialists, consider the whole category of mental properties to be a mistake. According to them, mental properties should be treated as discredited postulates of an outmoded theory. Eliminative materialism is difficult for most people to accept, since we seem to have direct knowledge of our own mental phenomena by introspection and because we use the general principles we understand about mental phenomena to predict and explain the behavior of others.
Philosophy of mind concerns itself with a number of specialized problems. In addition to the mind-body problem, important issues include those of the individuals’ identity, immortality, and artificial intelligence.
During much of Western history, the mind has been identified with the soul as presented in Christian Theology. According to Christianity, the soul is the source of a persons’ identity and is usually regarded as immaterial; thus, it is capable of enduring after the death of the body. Descartes conception of the mind as a separate, nonmaterial substance fits well with this understanding of the soul. In Descartes view, we are aware of our bodies only as the cause of sensations and other mental phenomena. Consequently our personal essence is composed more fundamentally of mind and the preservation of the mind after death would constitute our continued existence.
The mind as conceivable to envisage the possibilities by materialist forms of substance, just as monism does not fit as neatly with this traditional concept of the soul. With materialism, once a physical body is destroyed, nothing enduring remains. Some philosophers think that a concept of personal identity can be constructed that permits the possibility of life after death without appealing to separate immaterial substances. Following in the tradition of 17th-century British philosopher John Locke, these philosophers propose that a person consists of a stream of mental events linked by memory. These links of memory, rather than a single underlying substance, provide the unity of a single consciousness through time. Immortality is conceivable if we think of these memory links as connecting a later consciousness in heaven with an earlier one on earth.
The field of artificial intelligence also raises interesting questions for the philosophy of mind. People have designed machines that mimic or model many aspects of human intelligence, and there are robots currently in use whose behavior is described in terms of goals, beliefs, and perceptions. Such machines are capable of behavior that, were it exhibited by a human being, would surely be taken to be free and creative. As an example, in 1996 an IBM computer named Deep Blue won a chess game against Russian world champion Garry Kasparov under international match regulations. Moreover, it is possible to design robots that have some sort of privileged access to their internal states. Philosophers disagree over whether such robots truly think or simply appear to think and whether such robots should be considered to be conscious
Dualism, in philosophy, the theory that the universe is explicable only as a whole composed of two distinct and mutually irreducible elements. In Platonic philosophy the ultimate dualism is between being and nonbeing - that is, between ideas and matter. In the 17th century, dualism took the form of belief in two fundamental substances: mind and matter. French philosopher René Descartes, whose interpretation of the universe exemplifies this belief, was the first to emphasize the irreconcilable difference between thinking substance (mind) and extended substance (matter). The difficulty created by this view was to explain how mind and matter interact, as they apparently do in human experience. This perplexity caused some Cartesians to deny entirely any interaction between the two. They asserted that mind and matter are inherently incapable of affecting each other, and that any reciprocal action between the two is caused by God, who, on the occasion of a change in one, produces a corresponding change in the other. Other followers of Descartes abandoned dualism in favor of monism.
In the 20th century, reaction against the monistic aspects of the philosophy of idealism has to some degree revived dualism. One of the most interesting defenses of dualism is that of Anglo-American psychologist William McDougall, who divided the universe into spirit and matter and maintained that good evidence, both psychological and biological, indicates the spiritual basis of physiological processes. French philosopher Henri Bergson in his great philosophic work Matter and Memory likewise took a dualistic position, defining matter as what we perceive with our senses and possessing in itself the qualities that we perceive in it, such as color and resistance. Mind, on the other hand, reveals itself as memory, the faculty of storing up the past and utilizing it for modifying our present actions, which otherwise would be merely mechanical. In his later writings, however, Bergson abandoned dualism and came to regard matter as an arrested manifestation of the same vital impulse that composes life and mind.
Dualism, in philosophy, the theory that the universe is explicable only as a whole composed of two distinct and mutually irreducible elements. In Platonic philosophy the ultimate dualism is between being and nonbeing - that is, between ideas and matter. In the 17th century, dualism took the form of belief in two fundamental substances: mind and matter. French philosopher René Descartes, whose interpretation of the universe exemplifies this belief, was the first to emphasize the irreconcilable difference between thinking substance (mind) and extended substance (matter). The difficulty created by this view was to explain how mind and matter interact, as they apparently do in human experience. This perplexity caused some Cartesians to deny entirely any interaction between the two. They asserted that mind and matter are inherently incapable of affecting each other, and that any reciprocal action between the two is caused by God, who, on the occasion of a change in one, produces a corresponding change in the other. Other followers of Descartes abandoned dualism in favor of monism.
In the 20th century, reaction against the monistic aspects of the philosophy of idealism has to some degree revived dualism. One of the most interesting defenses of dualism is that of Anglo-American psychologist William McDougall, who divided the universe into spirit and matter and maintained that good evidence, both psychological and biological, indicates the spiritual basis of physiological processes. French philosopher Henri Bergson in his great philosophic work Matter and Memory likewise took a dualistic position, defining matter as what we perceive with our senses and possessing in itself the qualities that we perceive in it, such as color and resistance. Mind, on the other hand, reveals itself as memory, the faculty of storing up the past and utilizing it for modifying our present actions, which otherwise would be merely mechanical. In his later writings, however, Bergson abandoned dualism and came to regard matter as an arrested manifestation of the same vital impulse that composes life and mind.
For many people understanding the place of mind in nature is the greatest philosophical problem. Mind is often though to be the last domain that stubbornly resists scientific understanding and philosophers defer over whether they find that cause for celebration or scandal. The mind-body problem in the modern era was given its definitive shape by Descartes, although the dualism that he espoused is in some form whatever there is a religious or philosophical tradition there is a religious or philosophical tradition whereby the soul may have an existence apart from the body. While most modern philosophers of mind would reject the imaginings that lead us to think that this makes sense, there is no consensus over the best way to integrate our understanding of people as bearers of physical properties lives on the other.
Occasionalism finds from it terms as employed to designate the philosophical system devised by the followers of the 17th-century French philosopher René Descartes, who, in attempting to explain the interrelationship between mind and body, concluded that God is the only cause. The occasionalists began with the assumption that certain actions or modifications of the body are preceded, accompanied, or followed by changes in the mind. This assumed relationship presents no difficulty to the popular conception of mind and body, according to which each entity is supposed to act directly on the other; these philosophers, however, asserting that cause and effect must be similar, could not conceive the possibility of any direct mutual interaction between substances as dissimilar as mind and body.
According to the occasionalists, the action of the mind is not, and cannot be, the cause of the corresponding action of the body. Whenever any action of the mind takes place, God directly produces in connection with that action, and by reason of it, a corresponding action of the body; the converse process is likewise true. This theory did not solve the problem, for if the mind cannot act on the body (matter), then God, conceived as mind, cannot act on matter. Conversely, if God is conceived as other than mind, then he cannot act on mind. A proposed solution to this problem was furnished by exponents of radical empiricism such as the American philosopher and psychologist William James. This theory disposed of the dualism of the occasionalists by denying the fundamental difference between mind and matter.
Generally, along with consciousness, that experience of an external world or similar scream or other possessions, takes upon itself the visual experience or to prevent one from possessing of some normal visual experience, that this, however, does not perceive the world accurately. In its frontal experiment. As researchers reared kittens in total darkness, except that for five hours a day the kittens were placed in an environment with only vertical lines. When the animals were later exposed to horizontal lines and forms, they had trouble perceiving these forms.
Philosophers have long debated the role of experience in human perception. In the late 17th century, Irish philosopher William Molyneux wrote to his friend, English philosopher John Locke, and asked he to consider the following scenario: Suppose that you could restore sight to a person who was blind. Using only vision, would that person be able to tell the difference between a cube and a sphere, which she or he had previously experienced only through touch? Locke, who emphasized the role of experience in perception, thought the answer was no. Modern science actually allows us to address this philosophical question, because a very small number of people who were blind have had their vision restored with the aid of medical technology.
Two researchers, British psychologist Richard Gregory and British-born neurologists’ Oliver Sacks, have written about their experiences with men who were blind for a long time due to cataracts and then had their vision restored late in life. When their vision was restored, they were often confused by visual input and were unable to see the world accurately. For instance, they could detect motion and perceive colors, but they had great difficulty with complex stimuli, such as faces. Much of their poor perceptual ability was probably due to the fact that the synapses in the visual areas of their brains had received little or no stimulation throughout their lives. Thus, without visual experience, the visual system does not develop properly.
Visual experience is useful because it creates memories of past stimuli that can later serve as a context for perceiving new stimuli. Thus, you can think of experience as a form of context that you carry around with you. A visual illusion occurs when your perceptual experience of a stimulus is substantially different from the actual stimulus you are viewing. In the previous example, you saw the green circles as different sizes, even though they were actually the same size. To experience another illusion, look at the illustration entitled Zöllner Illusion. What shape do you see? You may see a trapezoid that is wider at the top, but the actual shape is a square. Such illusions are natural artifacts of the way our visual systems work. As a result, illusions provide important insights into the functioning of the visual system. In addition, visual illusions are fun to experience.
Consider the pair of illusions in the accompanying illustration, Illusions of Length. These illusions are called geometrical illusions, because they use simple geometrical relationships to produce the illusory effects. The first illusion, the Müller-Lyer illusion, is one of the most famous illusions in psychology. Which of the two horizontal lines is longer? Although your visual system tells you that the lines are not equal, a ruler would tell you that they are equal. The second illusion is called the Ponzo illusion. Once again, the two lines do not appear to be equal in length, but they are.
Prevailing states of consciousness, are not as simple, or agreed-upon by any steadfast and held definition of itself, in so, that, consciousness exists. Attempted definitions tend to be tautological (for example, consciousness defined s awareness) or merely descriptive (for example, consciousness described as sensations, thoughts, or feelings). Despite this problem of definition, the subject of consciousness has had a remarkable history. At one time the primary subject matter of psychology, consciousness as an area of study suffered an almost total demise, later reemerging to become a topic of current interest.
René Descartes applied rigorous scientific methods of deduction to his exploration of philosophical questions. Descartes is probably best known for his pioneering work in philosophical skepticism. Author Tom Sorell examines the concepts behind Descartes work Meditationes de Prima Philosophia (1641; Meditations on First Philosophy), focusing on its unconventional use of logic and the reactions it aroused. Most of the philosophical discussions of consciousness arose from the mind-body issues posed by the French philosopher and mathematician René Descartes in the 17th century. Descartes asked: Is the mind, or consciousness, independent of matter? Is consciousness extended (physical) or unextended (nonphysical)? Is consciousness determinative, or is it determined? English philosophers such as John Locke equated consciousness with physical sensations and the information they provide, whereas European philosophers such as Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and Immanuel Kant gave a more central and active role to consciousness.
The philosopher who most directly influenced subsequent exploration of the subject of consciousness was the 19th-century German educator Johann Friedrich Herbart, who wrote that ideas had quality and intensity and that they may inhibit or facilitate one another. Thus, ideas may pass from states of reality (consciousness) to states of a tendency (unconsciousness), with the dividing line between the two states being described as the threshold of consciousness. This formulation of Herbart clearly presages the development, by the German psychologist and physiologist Gustav Theodor Fechner, of the psychophysical measurement of sensation thresholds, and the later development by Sigmund Freud of the concept of the unconscious.
The experimental analysis of consciousness dates from 1879, when the German psychologist Wilhelm Max Wundt started his research laboratory. For Wundt, the task of psychology was the study of the structure of consciousness, which extended well beyond sensations and included feelings, images, memory, attention, duration, and movement. Because early interest focused on the content and dynamics of consciousness, it is not surprising that the central methodology of such studies was introspection; that is, subjects reported on the mental contents of their own consciousness. This introspective approach was developed most fully by the American psychologist Edward Bradford Titchener at Cornell University. Setting his task as that of describing the structure of the mind, Titchener attempted to detail, from introspective self-reports, the dimensions of the elements of consciousness. For example, taste was dimensionalized into four basic categories: sweet, sour, salt, and bitter. This approach was known as structuralism.
By the 1920s, however, a remarkable revolution had occurred in psychology that was to essentially remove considerations of consciousness from psychological research for some 50 years: Behaviorism captured the field of psychology. The main initiator of this movement was the American psychologist John Broadus Watson. In a 1913 article, Watson stated, I believe that we can write a psychology and never use the term’s consciousness, mental states, mind . . . imagery and the like. Psychologists then turned almost exclusively to behavior, as described in terms of stimulus and response, and consciousness was totally bypassed as a subject. A survey of eight leading introductory psychology texts published between 1930 and the 1950s found no mention of the topic of consciousness in five texts, and in two it was treated as a historical curiosity.
Occasioning, in the late 1950s, were of interest in the subject of consciousness returned, specifically in those subjects and techniques relating to altered states of consciousness: sleep and dreams, meditation, biofeedback, hypnosis, and drug-induced states. Much into a surge of sleep and dream research was directly fueled by a discovery relevant to the nature of consciousness. A physiological indicator of the dream state was found: At roughly 90-minute intervals, the eyes of sleepers were observed to move rapidly, and at the same time the sleepers brain waves would show a pattern resembling the waking state. When people were awakened during these periods of rapid eye movement, they almost always reported dreams, whereas if awakened at other times they did not. This and other research clearly indicated that sleep, once considered a passive state, were instead an active state of consciousness.
During the 1960s, an increased search for higher levels of consciousness through meditation resulted in a growing interest in the practices of Zen Buddhism and Yoga from Eastern cultures. A full flowering of this movement in the United States was seen in the development of training programs, such as Transcendental Meditation, that were self-directed procedures of physical relaxation and focused attention. Biofeedback techniques also were developed to bring body systems involving factors such as blood pressure or temperature under voluntary control by providing feedback from the body, so that subjects could learn to control their responses. For example, researchers found that persons could control their brain-wave patterns to some extent, particularly the so-called alpha rhythms generally associated with a relaxed, meditative state. This finding was especially relevant to those interested in consciousness and meditation, and a number of alpha training programs emerged.
Another subject that led to increased interest in altered states of consciousness was hypnosis, which involves a transfer of conscious control from the subject to another person. Hypnotism has had a long and intricate history in medicine and folklore and has been intensively studied by psychologists. Much has become known about the hypnotic state, relative to individual suggestibility and personality traits; the subject has now largely been demythologized, and the limitations of the hypnotic state are fairly well known. Despite the increasing use of hypnosis, however, much remains to be learned about this unusual state of focused attention.
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