Showing papers in "The Philosophical Quarterly in 1964"

The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.

Abstract: A scientific community cannot practice its trade without some set of received beliefs. These beliefs form the foundation of the \"educational initiation that prepares and licenses the student for professional practice\". The nature of the \"rigorous and rigid\" preparation helps ensure that the received beliefs are firmly fixed in the student's mind. Scientists take great pains to defend the assumption that scientists know what the world is like...To this end, \"normal science\" will often suppress novelties which undermine its foundations. Research is therefore not about discovering the unknown, but rather \"a strenuous and devoted attempt to force nature into the conceptual boxes supplied by professional education\".

Hume on is and ought

Abstract: Hume’s famous passage1 has recently come in for some re-interpretation. Contemporary philosophers were accustomed to interpret Hume as condemning any attempt to deduce ought from is. But Mr A. C. MacIntyre (Paper I) and Mr Geoffrey Hunter (Paper III), amongst others, have assured us that he was doing no such thing. So far from condemning this move, he was in fact intent upon making it himself. In the famous passage he was simply complaining ‘that earlier writers have failed to explain how this deduction is possible’ (Hunter’s interpretation), or rejecting the way in which religious moralists make the move, that is, ‘repudiating a religious foundation for morality and putting in its place a foundation in human needs, interests, desires, and happiness’ (MacIntyre’s interpretation). MacIntyre thinks that Hume’s attempt to make the move ‘shows us how it can be made’ (p. 46); Hunter, on the other hand, says that Hume was ‘mistaken’ (p. 62). But, in the view that he was attempting to make it, they are at one. I do not think that they have proved their point. Two issues are involved here, of course: (i) what was Hume’s opinion in this matter of is and ought?, and (ii) what is the correct view? I shall try not to confuse them.