Showing papers in "The Journal of Philosophy in 1974"

On Indeterminate Probabilities

Abstract: Some men disclaim certainty about anything. I am certain that they deceive themselves. Be that as it may, only the arrogant and foolish maintain that they are certain about everything. It is appropriate, therefore, to consider how judgments of uncertainty discriminate between hypotheses with respect to grades of uncertainty, probability, belief, or credence. Discriminations of this sort are relevant to the conduct of deliberations aimed at making choices between rival policies not only in the context of games of chance, but in moral, political, economic, or scientific decision making. If agent X wishes to promote some aim or system of values, he will (ceteris paribus) favour a policy that guarantees him against failure over a policy that does not. Where no guarantee is to be obtained, he will (or should) favor a policy that reduces the probability of failure to the greatest degree feasible. At any rate, this is so when X is engaged in deliberate decision making (as opposed to habitual or routine choice).

Linguistic Innateness and Its Evidence

Abstract: It has become increasingly popular of late to investigate the abilities of animals to learn to use a language. Not only have such phenomena as the dance of the bees, the songs of the whales, and the squeaks of the dolphin received close attention, but various attempts have been made to teach animals a natural language. Most notable of these perhaps have been the efforts to teach chimpanzees English. The Hayeses, for example, raised a chimpanzee, Viki, in a home environment similar to that of a preschool child, but Viki never learned to utter more than a few English words (Hayes & Nissen, 1971). The Gardners have increased the performance capabilities of their chimpanzee, Washoe, by teaching her sign language rather than spoken English, and Washoe is capable of understanding and generating a limited set of new sentences (Gardner & Gardner, 1971). Premack (1971) has pushed the linguistic competence of his chimpanzee, Sarah, even further. By using arbitrary plastic pieces for words, Premack claims to have taught Sarah certain rudiments of English syntax and semantics. Sarah strings her plastic words in grammatical order and seems able to answer questions, distinguish use and mention, deal with a range of sentences containing “some” and “all,” and handle certain logical operations. Just how far Sarah and Washoe can progress are taken by these theorists to be open questions, limited as much by experimental ingenuity as by the chimpanzees’ capacities.

Incongruous Counterparts, Intrinsic Features and the Substantiviality of Space

Abstract: Kant argued, as part of his argument that space is an a priori intuition, from the existence of incongruous counterparts (such as right- and left-handed gloves otherwise alike) to the existence of space as an entity over and above the material objects in it and their spatial relations to one another. Peter Remnant and John Earman have argued that Kant’s argument is incoherent.1 Graham Nerlich has recently invoked the dependence of facts about handedness on global features of space to attempt to revindicate Kant’s argument.2 I will argue here that, even taking account of the dependence of facts about handedness on global features of space, noticed by Earman and utilized by Nerlich, there is no good argument against relationism founded on facts about handedness. Or, more precisely, there is no good argument against relationism based on handedness which goes beyond the best standard arguments against relationism which invoke no facts about handedness at all.