Showing papers in "The Philosophical Review in 1985"

Semantics And Cognition

Abstract: Buku ini merupakan volume ke delapan dalam seri Current Studies in Linguistics. Buku ini mencoba menjawab pertanyaan-pertanyaan linguistik seperti konsep makna dan juga tentang struktur makna.

The Philosophical Writings of Descartes

Abstract: These two volumes provide a translation of the philosophical works of Descartes, based on the best available Latin and French texts. They are intended to replace the only reasonably comprehensive selection of his works in English, by Haldane and Ross, first published in 1911. All the works included in that edition are translated here, together with a number of additional texts crucial for an understanding of Cartesian philosophy, including important material from Descartes' scientific writings. The result should meet the widespread demand for an accurate and authoritative edition of Descartes' philosophical writings in clear and readable modern English.

Spheres of Justice: A Defense of Pluralism and Equality

Abstract: that a plurality of the American Catholic bishops endorse a nuclear freeze (p. 4), saying that they are thus "taking their stance with Moscow,55 which is for a freeze, and not with the Vatican, which "is still in favor of disarmament?not a freeze.55 To make any sense at all, Mr. Lawler must mean that being for the freeze means that one is not for disarmament? hardly a rational position. One recalls here the arguments, during the 19305s and 19405s, that being for racial justice in the United States was suspect if not immoral, in the eyes of some, because the communists also favored it.

Folk Psychology Is Here To Stay

Abstract: Folk psychology is a network of principles which constitutes a sort of common-sense theory about how to explain human behavior. These principles provide a central role to certain propositional attitudes, particularly beliefs and desires. The theory asserts, for example, that if someone desires that p, and this desire is not overridden by other desires, and he believes that an action of kind K will bring it about that p, and he believes that such an action is within his power, and he does not believe that some other kind of action is within his power and is a preferable way to bring it about that p, then ceteris paribus, the desire and the beliefs will cause him to perform an action of kind K. The theory is largely functional, in that the states it postulates are characterized primarily in terms of their causal relations to each other, to perception and other environmental stimuli, and to behavior. Folk psychology (henceforth FP) is deeply ingrained in our common-sense conception of ourselves as persons. Whatever else a person is, he is supposed to be a rational (at least largely rational) agent-that is, a creature whose behavior is systematically caused by, and explainable in terms of, his beliefs, desires, and related propositional attitudes. The wholesale rejection of FP, therefore, would entail a drastic revision of our conceptual scheme. This fact seems to us to constitute a good prima facie reason for not discarding FP too quickly in the face of apparent difficulties. Recently, however, FP has come under fire from two quarters. Paul Churchland (1981) has argued that since FP has been with us for at least twenty-five centuries, and thus is not the product of any deliberate and self-conscious attempt to develop a psychological theory which coheres with the account of homo sapiens which the natural sciences provide, there is little reason to suppose that FP is true, or that humans undergo beliefs, desires, and the like. And Stephen Stich (1983) has argued that current work in cognitive science suggests that no events or states posited by a mature cognitive psychology will be identifiable as the events and states posited by FP; Stich maintains that if this turns out to be the case,

Why propensities cannot be probabilities

Abstract: The notion that probability theory is the theory of chance has an immediate appeal. We may allow that there are other kinds of things to which probability can address itself, things such as degrees of rational belief and degrees of confirmation, to name only two, but if chance forms part of the world, then probability theory ought, it would seem, to be the device to deal with it. Although chance is undeniably a mysterious thing, one promising way to approach it is through the use of propensities-indeterministic dispositions possessed by systems in a particular environment, exemplified perhaps by such quite different phenomena as a radioactive atom's propensity to decay and my neighbor's propensity to shout at his wife on hot summer days. There is no generally accepted account of propensities, but whatever they are, propensities must, it is commonly held, have the properties prescribed by probability theory. My contention is that they do not and, that rather than this being construed as a problem for propensities, it is to be taken as a reason for rejecting the current theory of probability as the correct theory of chance. The first section of the paper will provide an informal version of the argument, indicating how the causal nature of propensities cannot be adequately represented by standard probability theory. In the second section a full version of the argument will be given so that the assumptions underlying the informal account can be precisely identified. The third section examines those assumptions and deals with objections that could be raised against the argument and its conclusion. The fourth and final section draws out some rather more general consequences of accepting the main argument. Those who find the first section sufficiently persuasive by itself may wish to go immediately to the final section, returning thereafter to the second and third sections as necessary. ? Copyright 1985 Paul Humphreys

Husserl, Perception, and Temporal Awareness.

Abstract: The interest of modern philosophers in the nature of perception has been motivated by this question: Does our perceptual experience provide rational justification of our empirical beliefs? The same question motivated Husserl's study of perception, and he answered it in the affirmative.This book clarifies Husserl's notion of perceptual experience as \"immediate\" or \"direct\" with respect to its purported object, and outlines his theory of evidence. In particular, it focuses on Husserl's account of our perceptual experience of time, an aspect of perception rarely noted in', recent philosophical literature, yet which must be taken into consideration if an adequate account of perception is to be provided. Perhaps equally important, there is a new wave of work in phenomenology (and intentionality), reflecting a synthesis of phenomenological and analytic philosophy, Miller's book is an important contribution to that \"new wave,\" and has a significant bearing on contemporary issues in cognitive science.A Bradford Book.

Kant’s Theory of Geometry

Abstract: Since the important work of early twentieth century philosophers of geometry like Russell and Carnap, Schlick and Reichenbach, Kant’s theory of geometry has not looked very attractive. After their work and the work of Riemann, Hilbert, and Einstein from which they drew their inspiration, Kant’s conception is liable to seem quaint at best and silly at worst. His picture of geometry as somehow grounded in our intuition of space and time appears thoroughly wrong; and there is a consequent tendency to view the Transcendental Aesthetic as an unfortunate embarrassment that one has simply to rush through on the way to the more relevant and enduring insights of the Analytic.2

Aristotle on the goods of fortune

Abstract: In this paper I discuss one aspect of Aristotle's theory in the Nicomachean Ethics of eudaimonia ("happiness," or, more illuminatingly, "a humanly flourishing life" or simply "a good life"). The question I want to raise concerns the relation Aristotle establishes in the Nicomachean Ethics between eudaimonia and those goods that he describes as external (ta ektos agatha). Though this is little remarked on by commentators, Aristotle's theory of eudaimonia in the Nicomachean Ethics differs importantly from what one finds in the corresponding passages of the Eudemian Ethics and the Magna Moralia. All three accounts agree in making eudaimonia consist in completely virtuous living (MM) or (what comes to the same) in completely virtuous activity (EE, NE) over a complete lifetime.' This is what is sometimes referred to as the "definition" that Aristotle reaches in the NE as the conclusion of his famous argument starting from the idea that human beings, as such, have an ergon or essential work (NE I 7, 1098a 16-18). But only in the NE does he go on to say (in the next chapter, Chapter 8) that eudaimonia requires in addition2 being sufficiently equipped

Style and personality in the literary work

Abstract: Jn this paper I want to describe and defend a certain conception of literary style. If we look at literary style in the way I shall suggest, it will explain many of the problems that surround this elusive concept such as why something can be an element of style in the work of one author and not in another, what the difference is between individual style and general style, and how style differs from "signature." The ordinary conception of style is that it consists of nothing but a set of verbal elements such as a certain kind of vocabulary, imagery, sentence structure and so on. On my conception, however, a literary style is rather a way of doing certain things, such as describing characters, commenting on the action and manipulating the plot. I shall claim that an author's way of doing these things is an expression of her personality, or, more accurately, of the personality she seems to have. The verbal elements of style gain their stylistic significance by contributing to the expression of this personality, and they cannot be identified as stylistic elements independently of the personality they help to express. Many theorists and critics have written as if style were an expression of personality. A good recent example is an essay on the first paragraph of Henry James' novel The Ambassadors, in.which the writer, Ian Watt, claims that

The justification of general deterrence

Abstract: A side from any "backward-looking" or retributivistic aims we A may happen to have, there are at least two things we are typically trying to do when we punish someone for disobeying the law: we are trying to keep them from disobeying the law again, and we are trying to keep others from following their example. In many cases, we may have reason to believe that both of these aims will be served quite effectively by one and the same penalty: the "two-to-five" that we give the mugger for his first offense may arguably be likely both to deter him and to serve as an effective warning to others not to do likewise. In other cases, though, what we think is necessary for effectively deterring potential wrongdoers may be considerably more than what we think is necessary in order to keep the wrongdoer we are punishing from doing wrong again. The most dramatic example of this latter sort of case, of course, is capital punishment. For holding aside complications that are irrelevant to the present point, it seems that the most we would ever have to do to keep a convicted murderer from murdering again would be to imprison him for life. If, however, we had reason to believe that certain potential murderers could be deterred from murdering if we executed those convicted of the relevant sorts of murders, we might be tempted to resort to execution despite the fact that we are willing to concede that this is not necessary in order to keep the person executed from murdering again. It is sometimes said that in treating convicted capital criminals in this way we would be wronging them, since we would be "using" them as a means to our own social ends. We may believe, of course, on retributive grounds, that capital criminals deserve to die, so that might be our reason for executing them. The effect our action has on potential murderers would then be just a happy side-effect. If, however, we do not accept this retributive rationale, and yet do believe that capital punishment is both necessary and morally justifiable as a way of reducing capital crime, we will face the challenge that is implicit in our remarks above: that of explaining by what

Ways of Moral Learning

Abstract: The issue of moral relativism is the question of how similar morality is to science-or, more precisely, to the common image of science as using reason and evidence to establish objective truths. So one would think that the best discussions of moral relativism would be based on the best philosophy of science of the time. In fact, the most advanced discussions of the issue are still limited by obsolete views of meaning and justification, inherited from positivist philosophy of science. After defending this diagnosis, I will base a solution to the problem of moral relativism on a more completely post-positivist account of meaning and justification. From this perspective, the problem of relativism will turn out to be a question about learning: do our moral beliefs emerge from a process of reliable learning, and are there contrary processes of moral learning that we cannot refute in any fair way? On the most plausible reading of the current evidence, anthropological, historical and psychological, the answer is at least half-relativist. The truth in moral absolutism is that our moral talk refers to something real and often describes it correctly. Our basic moral beliefs are sustained by processes of detection as the post-positivist account of reference requires. But the truth in relativism is that some moral outlooks radically different from our own are associated with rival conceptions of moral learning, whose claim to reliability cannot be refuted. While our confidence in our ways of learning is reasonable, it would be incorrect to assess the other ways as unreasonable or ill-informed. In the natural sciences, when people investigate the world using rival techniques, instruments or hypotheses, there is almost always reason to hope that more evidence would be the basis for a fair argument resolving the disputes between them. In morality, conflicting ways of learning often turn out to represent different kinds of emotional maturity, neither of them subject to fair refutation in light of the totality of data. This, and this alone, is the relativist difference between morality and science.

John Buridan on self-reference : chapter eight of Buridan's Sophismata, with a translation, an introduction, and a philosophical commentary

Abstract: John Buridan was a fourteenth-century philosopher who enjoyed an enormous reputation for about two hundred years, was then totally neglected, and is now being 'rediscovered' through his relevance to contemporary work in philosophical logic. The final chapter of Buridan's Sophismata deals with problems about self-reference, and in particular with the semantic paradoxes. He offers his own distinctive solution to the well-known 'Liar Paradox' and introduces a number of other paradoxes that will be unfamiliar to most logicians. Buridan also moves on from these problems to more general questions about the nature of propositions, the criteria of their truth and falsity and the concepts of validity and knowledge. This edition of that chapter is intended to make Buridan's ideas and arguments accessible to a wider range of readers. The volume should interest many philosophers, linguists and logicians, who are increasingly finding in medieval work striking anticipations of their own concerns.

Aristotle's Theory of Descriptions

Abstract: Aristotle has a doctrine, or series of doctrines, of accidental predication, accidental being, accidental unity and accidental sameness, which scholars have recently illuminated by reference to problems in the philosophy of logic. (See references below to papers by Gareth Matthews, Nicholas White and Alan Code.) But they have not so far found a single key to the understanding of these doctrines. The key can, I believe, be found by comparing Aristotle's doctrines with Russell's Theory of Descriptions. Russell's theory is couched in the formal mode of speech: it is concerned with distinguishing amongst expressions which rank grammatically as subjects of sentences those which alone are true logical subjects. Aristotle's theory is couched for the most part in the material mode: he speaks of accidental unities or beings as though they were a subclass of entities, in a way which has allowed Gareth Matthews recently to talk of this doctrine as a doctrine of "kooky objects."' The doctrine of accidental or per accidens predication, appearing as it does in Aristotle's logical works, has a more linguistic ring, and perhaps it is this which has prevented it from being used to illuminate his use of the term "accidental (kata symbekikos)" to headline his more metaphysical doctrines of sameness, unity and being. When one examines the doctrine of per accidens predication, however, one is forcibly struck by the similarity between the way in which Aristotle describes this phenomenon and the way in which Russell analyzes propositions containing definite descriptions. Aristotle's "kooky objects" are near relations of Russell's "logical fictions." And the use to which Russell puts his theory in solving problems of intentionality turns out to be strongly reminiscent of the use to

How the Laws of Physics Lie.

Abstract: In this sequence of philosophical essays about natural science, Nancy Cartwright argues that fundamental explanatory laws, the deepest and most admired successes of modern physics, do not in fact describe the regularities that exist in nature. Yet she is not 'anti-realist'. Rather, she draws a novel distinction, arguing that theoretical entities, and the complex and localized laws that describe them, can be interpreted realistically, but that the simple unifying laws of basic theory cannot.

The Possibility of Absent Qualia

Abstract: I Q ydney Shoemaker has defended functionalism against the ab3sent qualia objection.' The purpose of the present paper is to vindicate that objection by refuting Shoemaker's case against it. Shoemaker's principal argument against the possibility of absent qualia goes like this: The qualitative character of pain is known. Thus, one of the causal properties of pain must be to produce beliefs about its qualitative character in a way that gives the beliefs knowledge-level justification. If there could be some characterless state that replicated the whole functional role of pain in our mental lives, then this ersatz pain state would produce the same beliefs about qualitative character, and they would have the same justification. On this assumption, we have no evidence that distinguishes genuine pains from such ersatz pain states. This is incompatible with the fact that we know the qualitative character of pain, because distinguishing evidence is required for knowledge. Hence, a characterless functional replica of pain is not really possible. Any state having the functional role of pain must also have qualitative character. It is best not to evaluate Shoemaker's argument in this rough form. It is vital to determine what it is legitimate here to include within the functional role of pain. Furthermore, the argument is only part of Shoemaker's case against the absent qualia objection to functionalism. He believes that this argument is jeopardized by the apparent possibility that the reference of mental state terms has been fixed in a "parochial" way. Shoemaker uses new considerations to dispute that possibility. Finally Shoemaker uses the new considerations to support a second argument against absent qualia, one that bypasses the epistemic premises of the first argument.