Showing papers in "The Philosophical Review in 1983"

Justified belief and epistemically responsible action

Abstract: ne of the central projects of epistemological theorizing is the task of discovering the rules of ideal reasoning, both deductive and nondeductive. Another project involves appraising the beliefs of particular agents, or of particular communities. One obvious way to carry out this second project, assuming that the first has been completed, is to compare the manner in which the subject under study arrived at the belief in question with the rules of ideal reasoning. If the inferences made by the subject are licensed by the rules, then the belief is justified; if they are not, the belief is unjustified. Here we take a God's-eye view and hold our subject up to the highest standard of good reasoning. Setting our standards this high is often precisely what we wish to do. It is often useful and interesting to see the extent to which a subject's patterns of reasoning differ from the ideal. In this kind of evaluation, we remove our subject from his historical context and compare his reasoning with that of an ideal subject, out of time, whose reasoning is uninfluenced by the fads and fashions of a community, and informed only by objectively right principles of reason. By appraising subjects' beliefs in this way, we are able to see the extent to which individuals or communities progress toward the ideal. This is not, of course, the only standard by which one might reasonably appraise a subject's beliefs. Many subjects will, of course, fall short of the ideal. More importantly, subjects will often fall short of the ideal through no fault of their own. Rules of ideal reasoning are not easily come by, and it does not always show some shortcoming on the part of the subject that his reasoning was less than ideal. Sometimes we wish to know whether a subject was reasoning "as best he could," where this does not simply mean "in accord with rules of ideal reasoning"; we want to know whether the extent to which the subject departed from the ideal was his own fault.

The Will: A Dual Aspect Theory

Abstract: Part III Dual Aspect Theory: Introduction 9 Observation and the will 10 The scope to the intention 11 Voluntariness and volition 12 The proof of a duel aspect theory of physical action 13 The definition of action 14 Defining the psychological and the mental 15 The ontological status of physical action 16 Dual aspect theory and the epistemology of physical action Part IV From Mind to Body: Introduction 17 The antecedents of action (1): from desires to intention 18 The antecedents of action (2): from intending to trying 19 The antecedents of action (3): from will to action 20 The 'mental pineal gland'

Individuation by acquaintance and by stipulation

Abstract: W hat do we see when we see what isn't there? Macbeth the hallucinator sees a dagger. There is no dagger there to be seen: no ordinary steel dagger before his eyes, no miniature dagger on his retina or inside his brain, no ghostly dagger of spook-stuff. There is no reason to think that our world contains any such thing. But the lack of a dagger makes it mysterious how we can describe Macbeth's state, as we do, by means of predicates applying to the dagger he seems to see-it is bloody, it has a wooden handle-and not to the nerve signals, brain states, and other nondaggers that really exist. Notoriously, if we try to describe Macbeth adverbially-he is appeared to daggerishly, bloody-and-wooden-handled-daggerishly, and so on-it becomes plain that we only understand our Macbeth-descriptions by understanding the dagger-descriptions that are built into them. How so, if there is no dagger there to describe? The case of the missing dagger has been solved by inspector Hintikka.' I accept his solution, differing only on points of detail, and I shall begin this paper by restating it in my own way. When Macbeth is appeared to daggerishly, his experience has informational content, and part of that content is that there is a

Doubt and dogmatism : studies in Hellenistic epistemology

Abstract: A recent revival of interest has taken place in the Epicureans, Stoics and Sceptics, their theories and problems, and the lively debates that went on between them in ancient Greece. This study provides a philosophical introduction to the epistemological and metaphysical debates in which these Hellenistic thinkers marked out for philosophy some of its central concerns. In the first chapter David Sedley introduces the major thinkers of the period in a brief sketch of Hellenistic philosophy. The papers which follow were originally delivered and discussed at an international conference held in 1978 at Oriel College, Oxford, which was the first of a series of Symposia Hellenistica.

A problem for actualism about possible worlds

Abstract: T he notion of a possible world has many uses in the formal philosophy of language. Its primary use, of course, is in the interpretation of sentences about necessity and possibility. A proposition is necessary if and only if it is true in all possible worlds; possible if and only if true in some possible world. One advantage of the possible worlds interpretation is its extensionality. The intensional notions of necessity and possibility are replaced by quantifiers over possible worlds. The language in which these quantifiers appear, sometimes called "world theory," can be given an ordinary Tarski semantics. A second advantage of the possible worlds interpretation is purely heuristic. It just seems to help our modal thinking to imagine other possible worlds. However, the nature of possible worlds is the subject of a familiar controversy, the dispute between actualism and possibilism. One common position in this controversy, which I shall call atomistic actualism, seems to me the most plausible. Nevertheless, I shall show that it is open to serious objection. It fails to provide an adequate interpretation for certain modal sentences, assuming that we adopt standard rules of interpretation. Thus we must either reject atomistic actualism, even though, as I shall argue in the next section, the alternatives are not attractive, or reject the standard semantics, despite its practical successes.

Kant’s Theory of Mind: An Analysis of the Paralogisms of Pure Reason

Abstract: (* NEW TO THIS EDITION) *PREFACE I. INTRODUCTION II. IMMATERIALITY III. INTERACTION IV. IDENTITY V. IMMORTALITY VI. INDEPENDENCE VII. IDEALITY *POSTSCRIPT *BIBLIOGRAPHY *INDEX.

How One Becomes What One Is

Abstract: Being and becoming, according to Nietzsche, are not at all related as we commonly suppose. "Becoming," he writes, "must be explained without recourse to final intentions.... Becoming does not aim at a final state, does not flow into 'being'." 'One of his many criticisms of philosophers ("humans have always been philosophers") is that they have turned away from what changes and have only tried to understand what is: "But since nothing is, all that was left to the philosopher as his 'world' was the imaginary."2 His thinking is informed by his opposition to the very idea of a distinction between appearance and reality.l In

Propositional Structure and Illocutionary Force: A Study of the Contribution of Sentence Meaning to Speech Acts

Abstract: This book offers a new theory of the structure of propositions, which provides a uniform treatment of constative and performative sentences. Jerrold Katz shows that performatives can enter into logically valid arguments, even though, as Austin claimed, they can't be true or false. Katz also argues that speech act theory is not a theory at all, but an assortment of observations about heterogeneous aspects of the performance of speech acts. He shows that a better explanation of speech acts is given by a grammatical account of the iIIocutionary potential of sentences and a separate pragmatic account of how this potential is realized in actual speech situtations. Katz provides such a grammatical account, which makes it possible for the first time to explain the iIIocutionary potential of sentences within grammar."

Kant's intentions in the refutation of idealism

Abstract: In the "Refutation of Idealism"' which he added to the second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant claimed that "the mere, but empirically determined consciousness of my own existence proves the existence of objects in space outside me." The argument for this thesis turns on the claims that "All time-determination presupposes something 'permanent' in perception,"2 and that "perception of this permanent is possible only through a thing outside me and not through the mere representation of a thing outside me" (B 275; see also B xl). But these confidently asserted claims raise two serious problems. First, in spite of the stress Kant places on the contrast between a "thing outside me" and a "mere representation," it is not obvious what this contrast means. Thus, what the Refutation is sup-

Kant and the Transcendental Object: A Hermeneutic Study

Abstract: This book is an attempt to conduct a comprehensive examination of Kant's metaphysic of Transcendental Idealism, which is everywhere presupposed by his critical theory of knowledge, his theory of the moral and the aesthetic judgement, and his rational approach to religion. It will attempt to show that this metaphysic is profoundly coherent, despite frequent inconsistencies of expression, and that it throws an indispensable light on his critical enquiries. Kant conceives of knowledge in especially narrow terms, and there is nothing absurd in the view that thinkables must, in his sense, extend far more widely than knowables. Kant also goes further than most who have thought in his fashion in holding that, not only the qualities of the senses, but also the space and time in which we place them, have non-sensuous, non-spatial, and non-temporal foundations in relations among thinkables that transcend empirical knowledge. This contention also reposes on important arguments, and can be given a sense that will render it interesting and consistent. The book explores this sense, and connects it with the thought of Kant's immediate predecessors in the great German scholastic movement that began with Leibniz: this scholasticism, it will be held, is throughout preserved as the unspoken background of Kant's critical developments, whose great innovation really consisted in pushing it out of the region of the knowable, into the region of what is permissively or, in some cases, obligatorily, thinkable.

Reference, Truth and Reality : Essays on the Philosophy of Language

Abstract: A set of papers clarifying some of the central issues raised by the connections between language, reality and human understanding.