Showing papers in "Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume in 1980"

Socrates and the Jury: Paradoxes in Plato's Distinction between Knowledge and True Belief

Abstract: At the end of the second part of Plato's Theaetetus (2ooD2oIC) Socrates undertakes to refute the suggestion that knowledge may be defined as true judgement/belief (al&thks doxa) He reckons that the refutation can be quickly done (20oA4-5) We need only consider, by way of counter-example, a jury which reaches the right verdict in a case of violent crime The jury, not having been present themselves as eyewitnesses to the crime, have to judge the case on the basis of testimony, on the word of others If they do reach the correct verdict, it is true opinion, but not knowledge That is the counter-example, and a very effective one it is So effective, in fact, that few readers stop long enough with the passage to notice that it is packed with paradox I count three paradoxes in a single page of the Oxford text The first is of historical interest only, but the second is of some significance for the interpretation of Plato's thinking about knowledge, while the third paradox points to a general philosophical moral

The Absence of a Gap between Facts and Values

Abstract: There is no general objection to arguing from facts to values, only a difficulty about getting both the values and the facts right. There is no logical 'gap' barring the way, nor is it clear what such a gap could be like. Both values and facts come in many shapes and are connected in various ways. There is no special reason why discussion of their relations should centre on the very general term good, any more than why metaphysical discussion should centre on the term real. But if we do con-

Semantic Theory and Grammatical Structure

Abstract: categorial complexity is to be replicated recursively by semantic complexity, the range of possible syntactic analyses for a particular fragment of language will depend significantly upon the richness of the chosen semantic theory. For example, within the framework of a Montague-type semantics, which allows a modeltheoretic characterization of intensions, there is the option of taking quantified expressions, such as every woman and some unicorn, as terms. This arises because terms, whether singular or general, can be treated semantically like simple predicates; that is, they can be assigned sets of entities, in this case properties rather than individuals. As a result, terms can be regarded syntactically as expressions which combine with intransitive verb phrases to yield sentences. Such a construction is said to be true just in case the property associated with the verb phrase belongs to the set of properties assigned to the term. In a semantics where intensions cannot be characterized, however, this option may not survive. Thus, standard first-order model theory, lacking as it does a special domain of possible worlds, permits the assimilation of quantified phrases to the category of terms only if the language contains for each term a predicate which uniquely characterizes that term. It might also be noted that such a semantics prevents necessarily and possibly from being represented as logical operators on sentences, because there is no way of characterizing this representation semantically. Given that semantic theory can constrain grammatical analysis in this way, we might wonder whether there is perhaps a preferred semantics which might, in virtue of its