Showing papers in "Philosophical Investigations in 1989"

What's Luck Got to Do with It?

Abstract: In the introduction to What’s Luck Got To Do With It?, author Joseph Mazur provides a brief account of his early indoctrination into the gambling world. Mazur’s recollection of conversations on luck and odds with his uncles suggests he had a precocious fascination in understanding why people gamble despite the inherent mathematical disadvantage. Later in life, the question still lingered as he watched patrons at local convenience stores buying fistfuls of lottery tickets. This book is the result of his long-held interest in gambling, which aims to explore the gambler’s illusion (or “gambler’s fallacy”) that deviations from average outcomes of random events should correct themselves in the short term. Although it might seem ambitious to write an entire volume on a gambling-related cognition, Mazur nevertheless demonstrates in three sections the incredibly deep historical, mathematical, and psychological significance of this human fallacy.

My Neighbour and My Neighbours

Abstract: In his excellent collection, Trying to Make Sense, Peter Winch juxtaposes two papers, ‘Eine Einstellung zur Seele’ and ‘Who is My Neighbour?’.1 In the former, he discusses what is involved in Wittgenstein’s remark, ‘My attitude toward him is an attitude towards a soul. I am not of the opinion that he has a soul’ (Investigations II, iv). In the second, he discusses the reaction of the Good Samaritan to the man who had fallen among thieves. Winch argues that what Wittgenstein says about an attitude towards a soul throws considerable light on the Samaritan’s reaction. But what exactly does this involve? The more carefully we try to answer this question, the more doubtful Winch’s claim becomes. In fact, one may conclude that very little light is shed on the Samaritan’s reaction by Wittgenstein’s notion of an attitude towards a soul. That is the conclusion for which I shall argue in this paper.