Another analogically connected way to think about justification (a way to think about justification by the later Chisholm) is to think of it as simply a relation of fitting between a given proposition and one’s epistemic vase -which includes the other things one believes, as well as one’s experience. Perhaps tat is the way justification is to be thought of, but then, if it is no longer at all obvious that theistic belief has this property of justification if it seems as a probability with respect to many another body of evidence. Perhaps, again, it is like memory beliefs in this regard.
To recapitulate: The dominant Western tradition has been inclined to identify warrant with justification, it has been inclined to take the latter in terms of duty and the fulfilment of obligation, and hence to suppose that there is no epistemic duty not to believe in God unless you have good propositional evidence for the existence of God. Epistemological discussion of theistic belief, as a consequence, as concentrated on the propositional evidence for and against theistic belief, i.e., on arguments for and against theistic belief. But there is excellent reason to doubt that there are epistemic duties of the sort the tradition appeals to here.
And perhaps it was a mistake to identify warrant with justification in the first place. Napoleons have little warrant for him: His problem, however, need not be dereliction of epistemic duty. He is in difficulty, but it is not or necessarily that of failing to fulfill epistemic duty. He may be doing his epistemic best, but he may be doing his epistemic duty in excelsis: But his madness prevents his beliefs from having much by way of warrant. His lack of warrant is not a matter of being unjustified, i.e., failing to fulfill epistemic duty. So warrant and being epistemologically justified by name are not the same things. Another example, suppose (to use the favourite twentieth-century variant of Descartes’ evil demon example) I have been captured by Alpha-Centaurian super-scientists, running a cognitive experiment, they remove my brain, and keep it alive in some artificial nutrients, and by virtue of their advanced technology induce in me the beliefs I might otherwise have if I were going about my usual business. Then my beliefs would not have much by way of warrant, but would it be because I was failing to do my epistemic duty? Hardly.
As a result of these and other problems, another, externalist way of thinking about knowledge has appeared in recent epistemology, that a theory of justification is internalized if and only if it requires that all of its factors needed for a belief to be epistemically accessible to that of a person, internal to his cognitive perception, and externalist, if it allows that, at least some of the justifying factors need not be thus accessible, in that they can be external to the believer’ s cognitive Perspectives, beyond his ken. However, epistemologists often use the distinction between internalized and externalist theories of epistemic justification without offering any very explicit explanation.
Or perhaps the thing to say, is that it has reappeared, for the dominant sprains in epistemology priori to the Enlightenment were really externalist. According to this externalist way of thinking, warrant does not depend upon satisfaction of duty, or upon anything else to which the Knower has special cognitive access (as he does to what is about his own experience and to whether he is trying his best to do his epistemic duty): It depends instead upon factors ‘external’ to the epistemic agent -such factors as whether his beliefs are produced by reliable cognitive mechanisms, or whether they are produced by epistemic faculties functioning properly in-an appropriate epistemic environment.
How will we think about the epistemology of theistic belief in more than is less of an externalist way (which is at once both satisfyingly traditional and agreeably up to date)? I think, that the ontological question whether there is such a person as God is in a way priori to the epistemological question about the warrant of theistic belief. It is natural to think that if in fact we have been created by God, then the cognitive processes that issue in belief in God are indeed realisable belief-producing processes, and if in fact God created ‘us’, then no doubt the cognitive faculties that produce belief in God is functioning properly in an epistemologically congenial environment. On the other hand, if there is no such person as God, if theistic belief is an illusion of some sort, then things are much less clear. Then beliefs in God in of the most of basic ways of wishing that never doubt the production by which unrealistic thinking or another cognitive process not aimed at truth. Thus, it will have little or no warrant. And belief in God on the basis of argument would be like belief in false philosophical theories on the basis of argument: Do such beliefs have warrant? Notwithstanding, the custom of discussing the epistemological questions about theistic belief as if they could be profitably discussed independently of the ontological issue as to whether or not theism is true, is misguided. There two issues are intimately intertwined,
Nonetheless, the vacancy left, as today and as days before are an awakening and untold story beginning by some sparking conscious paradigm left by science. That is a central idea by virtue accredited by its epistemology, where in fact, is that justification and knowledge arising from the proper functioning of our intellectual virtues or faculties in an appropriate environment. This particular yet, peculiar idea is captured in the following criterion for justified belief:
(J) ‘S’ is justified in believing that ‘p’ if and only if of S’s believing that ‘p’ is the result of S’s intellectual virtues or faculties functioning in appropriate environment.
What is an intellectual virtue or faculty? A virtue or faculty in general is a power or ability or competence to achieve some result. An intellectual virtue or faculty, in the sense intended above, is a power or ability or competence to arrive at truths in a particular field, and to avoid believing falsehoods in that field. Examples of human intellectual virtues are sight, hearing, introspection, memory, deduction and induction. More exactly.
(V) A mechanism ‘M’ for generating and/or maintaining beliefs is an intellectual virtue if and only if ‘M’‘s’ is a competence to believing true propositions and refrain from false believing propositions within a field of propositions ‘F’, when one is in a set of circumstances ‘C’.
It is required that we specify a particular field of suggestions or its propositional field for ‘M’, since a given cognitive mechanism will be a competence for believing some kind of truths but not others. The faculty of sight, for example, allows ‘us’ to determine the colour of objects, but not the sounds that they associatively make. It is also required that we specify a set of circumstances for ‘M’, since a given cognitive mechanism will be a competence in some circumstances but not others. For example, the faculty of sight allows ‘us’ to determine colours in a well lighten room, but not in a darkened cave or formidable abyss.
According to the aforementioned formulations, what makes a cognitive mechanism an intellectual virtue is that it is reliable in generating true beliefs than false beliefs in the relevant field and in the relevant circumstances. It is correct to say, therefore, that virtue epistemology is a kind of Reliabilism. Whereas, genetic Reliabilism maintains that justified belief is belief that results from a reliable cognitive process, virtue epistemology makes a restriction on the kind of process which is allowed. Namely, the cognitive processes that are important for justification and knowledge is those that have their basis in an intellectual virtue.
Finally, that the concerning mental faculty reliability point to the importance of an appropriate environment. The idea is that cognitive mechanisms might be reliable in some environments but not in others. Consider an example from Alvin Plantinga. On a planet revolving around Alfa Centauri, cats are invisible to human beings. Moreover, Alfa Centaurian cats emit a type of radiation that causes humans to form the belief that there I a dog barking nearby. Suppose now that you are transported to this Alfa Centaurian planet, a cat walks by, and you form the belief that there is a dog barking nearby. Surely you are not justified in believing this. However, the problem here is not with your intellectual faculties, but with your environment. Although your faculties of perception are reliable on earth, yet are unrealisable on the Alga Centaurian planet, which is an inappropriate environment for those faculties.
The central idea of virtue epistemology, as expressed in (J) above, has a high degree of initial plausibility. By masking the idea of faculties’ cental to the reliability if not by the virtue of epistemology, in that it explains quite neatly to why beliefs are caused by perception and memories are often justified, while beliefs caused by unrealistic and superstition are not. Secondly, the theory gives ‘us’ a basis for answering certain kinds of scepticism. Specifically, we may agree that if we were brains in a vat, or victims of a Cartesian demon, then we would not have knowledge even in those rare cases where our beliefs turned out true. But virtue epistemology explains that what is important for knowledge is toast our faculties are in fact reliable in the environment in which we are. And so we do have knowledge so long as we are in fact, not victims of a Cartesian demon, or brains in a vat. Finally, Plantinga argues that virtue epistemology deals well with Gettier problems. The idea is that Gettier problems give ‘us’ cases of justified belief that is ‘truer by accident’. Virtue epistemology, Plantinga argues, helps ‘us’ to understand what it means for a belief to be true by accident, and provides a basis for saying why such cases are not knowledge. Beliefs are rue by accident when they are caused by otherwise reliable faculties functioning in an inappropriate environment. Plantinga develops this line of reasoning in Plantinga (1988).
But although virtue epistemology has god initial plausibility, it faces some substantial objections. The first of an objection, which virtue epistemology face is a version of the generality problem. We may understand the problem more clearly if we were to consider the following criterion for justified belief, which results from our explanation of (J).
(J ʹ) ‘S’ is justified in believing that ‘p’ if and entirely if.
(1) there is a field ‘F’ and a set of circumstances ‘C’ such that
(a) ‘S’ is in ‘C’ with respect to the proposition that ‘p’, and
(b) ‘S’ is in ‘C’ with respect to the proposition that ‘p’, and
©) If ‘S’ were in ‘C’ with respect to a proposition in ‘F’.
Then ‘S’ would very likely believe correctly with regard to
that proposition.
The problem arises in how we are to select an appropriate ‘F’ and ‘C’. For given any true belief that ‘p’, we can always come up with a field ‘F’ and a set of circumstances ‘C’, such that ‘S’ is perfectly reliable in ‘F’ and ‘C’. For any true belief that ‘p’, let ‘F’s’ be the field including only the propositions ‘p’ and ‘not-p’. Let ‘C’ include whatever circumstances there are which causes ‘p’s’ to be true, together with the circumstanced which causes ‘S’ to believe that ‘p’. Clearly, ‘S’ is perfectly reliable with respect to propositions in this field in these circumstances. But we do not want to say that all of S’s true beliefs are justified for ‘S’. And of course, there is an analogous problem in the other direction of generality. For given any belief that ‘p’, we can always specify a field of propositions ‘F’ and a set of circumstances ‘C’, such that ‘p’ is in ‘F’, ‘S’ is in ‘C’, and ‘S’ is not reliable with respect to propositions in ‘F’ in ‘C’.
Variations of this view have been advanced for both knowledge and justified belief. The first formulation of a reliability account of knowing appeared in a note by F.P. Ramsey (1931), who said that a belief was knowledge if it is true, certain and obtained by a reliable process. P. Unger (1968) suggested that ‘S’ knows that ‘p’ just in case it is not at all accidental that ‘S’ is right about its being the case that ‘p’. D.M. Armstrong (1973) drew an analogy between a thermometer that reliably indicates the temperature and a belief that reliably indicate the truth. Armstrong said that a non-inferential belief qualified as knowledge if the belief has properties that are nominally sufficient for its truth, i.e., guarantee its truth via laws of nature.
Closely allied to the nomic sufficiency account of knowledge, primarily due to F.I. Dretske (19712, 1981), A.I. Goldman (1976, 1986) and R. Nozick (1981). The core of tis approach is that S’s belief that ‘p’ qualifies as knowledge just in case ‘S’ believes ‘p’ because of reasons that would not obtain unless ‘p’s’ being true, or because of a process or method that would not yield belief in ‘p’ if ‘p’ were not true. For example, ‘S’ would not have his current reasons for believing there is a telephone before him, or would not come to believe this, unless there was a telephone before him. Thus, there is a counterfactual reliable guarantor of the belief’s being true. A variant of the counterfactual approach says that ‘S’ knows that ‘p’ only if there is no ‘relevant alterative’ situation in which ‘p’ is false but ‘S’ would still believe that ‘p’.
To a better understanding, this interpretation is to mean that the alterative attempt to accommodate any of an opposing strand in our thinking about knowledge one interpretation is an absolute concept, which is to mean that the justification or evidence one must have in order to know a proposition ‘p’ must be sufficient to eliminate all the alternatives to ‘p’ (where an alternative to a proposition ‘p’ is a proposition incompatible with ‘p’). That is, one’s justification or evidence for ‘p’ must be sufficient fort one to know that every alternative to ‘p’ is false. These elements of our thinking about knowledge are exploited by sceptical argument. These arguments call our attention to alternatives that our evidence cannot eliminate. For example, (Dretske, 1970), when we are at the zoo. We might claim to know that we see a zebra on the basis of certain visual evidence, namely a zebra-like appearance. The sceptic inquires how we know that we are not seeing a clearly disguised mule. While we do have some evidence against the likelihood of such a deception, intuitively it is not strong enough for ‘us’ to know that we are not so deceived. By pointing out alternatives of this nature that cannot eliminate, as well as others with more general application (dreams, hallucinations, etc.), the sceptic appears to show that this requirement that our evidence eliminate every alternative is seldom, if ever, met.
The above considerations show that virtue epistemology must say more about the selection of relevant fields and sets of circumstances. Establishing addresses the generality problem by introducing the concept of a design plan for our intellectual faculties. Relevant specifications for fields and sets of circumstances are determined by this plan. One might object that this approach requires the problematic assumption of a Designer of the design plan. But Plantinga disagrees on two counts: He does not think that the assumption is needed, or that it would be problematic. Plantinga discusses relevant material in Plantinga (1986, 1987 and 1988). Ernest Sosa addresses the generality problem by introducing the concept of an epistemic perspective. In order to have reflective knowledge, ‘S’ must have a true grasp of the reliability of her faculties, this grasp being itself provided by a ‘faculty of faculties’. Relevant specifications of an ‘F’ and ‘C’ are determined by this perspective. Alternatively, Sosa has suggested that relevant specifications are determined by the purposes of the epistemic community. The idea is that fields and sets of circumstances are determined by their place in useful generalizations about epistemic agents and their abilities to act as reliable-information sharers.
The second objection which virtue epistemology faces are that (J) and
(J ʹ) are too strong. It is possible for ‘S’ to be justified in believing that ‘p’, even when S’s intellectual faculties are largely unreliable. Suppose, for example, that Jane’s beliefs about the world around her are true. It is clear that in this case Jane’s faculties of perception are almost wholly unreliable. But we would not want to say that none of Jane’s perceptual beliefs are justified. If Jane believes that there is a tree in her yard, and she vases the belief on the usual tree-like experience, then it seems that she is as justified as we would be regarded a substitutable belief.
Sosa addresses the current problem by arguing that justification is relative to an environment ‘E’. Accordingly, ‘S’ is justified in believing that ‘p’ relative to ‘E’, if and only if S’s faculties would be reliable in ‘E’. Note that on this account, ‘S’ need not actually be in ‘E’ in order for ‘S’ to be justified in believing some proposition relative to ‘E’. This allows Soda to conclude that Jane has justified belief in the above case. For Jane is justified in her perceptual beliefs relative to our environment, although she is not justified in those beliefs relative to the environment in which they have actualized her.
We have earlier made mention about analyticity, but the true story of analyticity is surprising in many ways. Contrary to received opinion, it was the empiricist Locke rather than the rationalist Kant who had the better information account of this type or deductive proposition. Frége and Rudolf Carnap (1891-1970) A German logician positivist whose first major works was ‘Der logische Aufbau der Welt’ (1926, trs, as ‘The Logical Structure of the World,’ 1967). Carnap pursued the enterprise of clarifying the structures of mathematics and scientific language (the only legitimate task for scientific philosophy) in ‘Logische Syntax der Sprache’ (1934, trans. As ‘The Logical Syntax of Language,’ 1937). Yet, refinements continued with ‘Meaning and Necessity’ (1947), while a general losing of the original ideal of reduction culminated in the great ‘Logical Foundations of Probability’ and the most importantly single work of ‘confirmation theory’ in 1950. Other works concern the structure of physics and the concept of entropy.
Both, Frége and Carnap, represented as analyticity’s best friends in this century, did as much to undermine it as its worst enemies. Quine (1908-) whose early work was on mathematical logic, and issued in ‘A System of Logistic’ (1934), ‘Mathematical Logic’ (1940) and ‘Methods of Logic’ (1950) it was with this collection of papers a ‘Logical Point of View’ (1953) that his philosophical importance became widely recognized, also, Putman (1926-) his concern in the later period has largely been to deny any serious asymmetry between truth and knowledge as it is obtained in natural science, and as it is obtained in morals and even theology. Books include ‘Philosophy of logic’ (1971), ‘Representation and Reality’ (1988) and ‘Renewing Philosophy (1992). Collections of his papers include ‘Mathematics, Master, sand Method’ (1975), ‘Mind, Language, and Reality’ (1975), and ‘Realism and Reason (1983). Both of which represented as having refuted the analytic/synthetic distinction, not only did no such thing, but, in fact, contributed significantly to undoing the damage done by Frége and Carnap. Finally, the epistemological significance of the distinctions is nothing like what it is commonly taken to be.
Locke’s account of an analyticity proposition as, for its time, everything that a succinct account of analyticity should be (Locke, 1924, pp. 306-8) he distinguished two kinds of analytic propositions, identified propositions in which we affirm the said terms if itself, e.g., ‘Roses are roses’, and predicative propositions in which ‘a part of the complex idea is predicated of the name of the whole’, e.g., ‘Roses are flowers’ (pp. 306-7). Locke calls such sentences ‘trifling’ because a speaker who uses them ‘trifles with words’. A synthetic sentence, in contrast, such as a mathematical theorem, states ‘a truth and conveys with its informative real knowledge’. Correspondingly, Locke distinguishes two kinds of ‘ necessary consequences’, analytic entailment where validity depends on the literal containment of the conclusions in the premiss and synthetic entailments where it does not. (Locke did not originate this concept-containment notion of analyticity. It is discussions by Arnaud and Nicole, and it is safe to say it has been around for a very long time (Arnaud, 1964).
Kant’s account of analyticity, which received opinion tells ‘us’ is the consummate formulation of this notion in modern philosophy, is actually a step backward. What is valid in his account is not novel, and what is novel is not valid. Kant presents Locke’s account of concept-containment analyticity, but introduces certain alien features, the most important being his characterizations of most important being his characterization of analytic propositions as propositions whose denials are logical contradictions (Kant, 1783). This characterization suggests that analytic propositions based on Locke’s part-whole relation or Kant’s explicative copula are a species of logical truth. But the containment of the predicate concept in the subject concept in sentences like ‘Bachelors are unmarried’ is a different relation from containment of the consequent in the antecedent in a sentence like ‘If John is a bachelor, then John is a bachelor or Mary read Kant’s Critique’. The former is literal containment whereas, the latter are, in general, not. Talk of the ‘containment’ of the consequent of a logical truth in the metaphorical, a way of saying ‘logically derivable’.
Kant’s conflation of concept containment with logical containment caused him to overlook the issue of whether logical truths are synthetically deductive and the problem of how he can say mathematical truths are synthetically deductive when they cannot be denied without contradiction. Historically. , the conflation set the stage for the disappearance of the Lockean notion. Frége, whom received opinion portrays as second only to Kant among the champions of analyticity, and Carnap, who it portrays as just behind Frége, was jointly responsible for the appearance of concept-containment analyticity.
Frége was clear about the difference between concept containment and logical containment, expressing it as like the difference between the containment of ‘beams in a house’ the containment of a ‘plant in the seed’ (Frége, 1853). But he found the former, as Kant formulated it, defective in three ways: It explains analyticity in psychological terms, it does not cover all cases of analytic propositions, and, perhaps, most important for Frége’s logicism, its notion of containment is ‘unfruitful’ as a definition; mechanisms in logic and mathematics (Frége, 1853). In an insidious containment between the two notions of containment, Frége observes that with logical containment ‘we are not simply talking out of the box again what we have just put inti it’. This definition makes logical containment the basic notion. Analyticity becomes a special case of logical truth, and, even in this special case, the definitions employ the power of definition in logic and mathematics than mere concept combination.
Carnap, attempting to overcome what he saw a shortcoming in Frége’s account of analyticity, took the remaining step necessary to do away explicitly with Lockean-Kantian analyticity. As Carnap saw things, it was a shortcoming of Frége’s explanation that it seems to suggest that definitional relations underlying analytic propositions can be extra-logic in some sense, say, in resting on linguistic synonymy. To Carnap, this represented a failure to achieve a uniform formal treatment of analytic propositions and left ‘us’ with a dubious distinction between logical and extra-logical vocabulary. Hence, he eliminated the reference to definitions in Frége’s explanation of analyticity by introducing ‘meaning postulates’, e.g., statements such as (∀χ) (χ is a bachelor-is unmarried) (Carnap, 1965). Like standard logical postulate on which they were modelled, meaning postulates express nothing more than constrains on the admissible models with respect to which sentences and deductions are evaluated for truth and validity. Thus, despite their name, its asymptomatic-balance having to pustulate itself by that in what it holds on to not more than to do with meaning than any value-added statements expressing an indispensable truth. In defining analytic propositions as consequences of (an explained set of) logical laws, Carnap explicitly removed the one place in Frége’s explanation where there might be room for concept containment and with it, the last trace of Locke’s distinction between semantic and other ‘necessary consequences’.
Quine, the staunchest critic of analyticity of our time, performed an invaluable service on its behalf-although, one that has come almost completely unappreciated. Quine made two devastating criticism of Carnap’s meaning postulate approach that expose it as both irrelevant and vacuous. It is irrelevant because, in using particular words of a language, meaning postulates fail to explicate analyticity for sentences and languages generally, that is, they do not define it for variables ‘S’ and ‘L’ (Quine, 1953). It is vacuous because, although meaning postulates tell ‘us’ what sentences are to count as analytic, they do not tell ‘us’ what it is for them to be analytic.
Received opinion gas it that Quine did much more than refute the analytic/synthetic distinction as Carnap tried to draw it. Received opinion has that Quine demonstrated there is no distinction, however, anyone might try to draw it. Nut this, too, is incorrect. To argue for this stronger conclusion, Quine had to show that there is no way to draw the distinction outside logic, in particular theory in linguistic corresponding to Carnap’s, Quine’s argument had to take an entirely different form. Some inherent feature of linguistics had to be exploited in showing that no theory in this science can deliver the distinction. But the feature Quine chose was a principle of operationalist methodology characteristic of the school of Bloomfieldian linguistics. Quine succeeds in showing that meaning cannot be made objective sense of in linguistics. If making sense of a linguistic concept requires, as that school claims, operationally defining it in terms of substitution procedures that employ only concepts unrelated to that linguistic concept. But Chomsky’s revolution in linguistics replaced the Bloomfieldian taxonomic model of grammars with the hypothetico-deductive model of generative linguistics, and, as a consequence, such operational definition was removed as the standard for concepts in linguistics. The standard of theoretical definition that replaced it was far more liberal, allowing the members of as family of linguistic concepts to be defied with respect to one another within a set of axioms that state their systematic interconnections -the entire system being judged by whether its consequences are confirmed by the linguistic facts. Quine’s argument does not even address theories of meaning based on this hypothetico-deductive model (Katz, 1988b, Katz, 1990).
Putman, the other staunch critic of analyticity, performed a service on behalf of analyticity fully on a par with, and complementary to Quine’s, whereas, Quine refuted Carnap’s formalization of Frége’s conception of analyticity, Putman refuted this very conception itself. Putman put an end to the entire attempt, initiated by Fridge and completed by Carnap, to construe analyticity as a logical concept (Putman, 1962, 1970, 1975a).
However, as with Quine, received opinion has it that Putman did much more. Putman in credited with having devised science fiction cases, from the robot cat case to the twin earth cases, that are counter examples to the traditional theory of meaning. Again, received opinion is incorrect. These cases are only counter examples to Frége’s version of the traditional theory of meaning. Frége’s version claims both (1) that senses determines reference, and (2) that there are instances of analyticity, say, typified by ‘cats are animals’, and of synonymy, say typified by ‘water’ in English and ‘water’ in twin earth English. Given (1) and (2), what we call ‘cats’ could not be non-animals and what we call ‘water’ could not differ from what the earthier twin called ‘water’. But, as Putman’s cases show, what we call ‘cats’ could be Martian robots and what they call ‘water’ could be something other than H2O Hence, the cases are counter examples to Frége’s version of the theory.
Putman himself takes these examples to refute the traditional theory of meaning per se, because he thinks other versions must also subscribe to both (1) and. (2). He was mistaken in the case of (1). Frége’s theory entails (1) because it defines the sense of an expression as the mode of determination of its referent (Fridge, 1952, pp. 56-78). But sense does not have to be defined this way, or in any way that entails (1). / it can be defined as (D).
(D) Sense is that aspect of the grammatical structure of expressions and sentences responsible for their having sense properties and relations like meaningfulness, ambiguity, antonymy, synonymy, redundancy, analyticity and analytic entailment. (Katz, 1972 & 1990).
(Note that this use of sense properties and relations is no more circular than the use of logical properties and relations to define logical form, for example, as that aspect of grammatical structure of sentences on which their logical implications depend.)
(D) makes senses internal to the grammar of a language and reference an external; matter of language use -typically involving extra-linguistic beliefs, Therefore, (D) cuts the strong connection between sense and reference expressed in (1), so that there is no inference from the modal fact that ‘cats’ refer to robots to the conclusion that ‘Cats are animals’ are not analytic. Likewise, there is no inference from ‘water’ referring to different substances on earth and twin earth to the conclusion that our word and theirs are not synonymous. Putman’s science fiction cases do not apply to a version of the traditional theory of meaning based on (D).
The success of Putman and Quine’s criticism in application to Fridge and Carnap’s theory of meaning together with their failure in application to a theory in linguistics based on (D) creates the option of overcoming the shortcomings of the Lockean-Kantian notion of analyticity without switching to a logical notion. this option was explored in the 1960s and 1970s in the course of developing a theory of meaning modelled on the hypothetico-deductive paradigm for grammars introduced in the Chomskyan revolution (Katz, 1972).
This theory automatically avoids Frége’s criticism of the psychological formulation of Kant’s definition because, as an explication of a grammatical notion within linguistics, it is stated as a formal account of the structure of expressions and sentences. The theory also avoids Frége’s criticism that concept-containment analyticity is not ‘fruitful’ enough to encompass truths of logic and mathematics. The criticism rests on the dubious assumption, parts of Frége’s logicism, that analyticity ‘should’ encompass them, (Benacerraf, 1981). But in linguistics where the only concern is the scientific truth about natural concept-containment analyticity encompass truths of logic and mathematics. Moreover, since we are seeking the scientific truth about trifling propositions in natural language, we will eschew relations from logic and mathematics that are too fruitful for the description of such propositions. This is not to deny that we want a notion of necessary truth that goes beyond the trifling, but only to deny that, that notion is the notion of analyticity in natural language.
The remaining Frégean criticism points to a genuine incompleteness of the traditional account of analyticity. There are analytic relational sentences, for example, Jane walks with those with whom she strolls, ’Jack kills those he himself has murdered’, etc., and analytic entailment with existential conclusions, for example, ‘I think’, therefore ‘I exist’. The containment in these sentences is just as literal as that in an analytic subject-predicate sentence like ‘Bachelors are unmarried’, such are shown to have a theory of meaning construed as a hypothetico-deductive systemisations of sense as defined in (D) overcoming the incompleteness of the traditional account in the case of such relational sentences.
Such a theory of meaning makes the principal concern of semantics the explanation of sense properties and relations like synonymy, an antonymy, redundancy, analyticity, ambiguity, etc. Furthermore, it makes grammatical structure, specifically, senses structure, the basis for explaining them. This leads directly to the discovery of a new level of grammatical structure, and this, in turn, makes possible a proper definition of analyticity. To see this, consider two simple examples. It is a semantic fact that ‘a male bachelor’ is redundant and that ‘spinster’ is synonymous with ‘woman who never married; . In the case of the redundancy, we have to explain the fact that the sense of the modifier ‘male’ is already contained in the sense of its head ‘bachelor’. In the case of the synonymy, we have to explain the fact that the sense of ‘sinister’ is identical to the sense of ‘woman who never married’ (compositionally formed from the senses of ‘woman’, ‘never’ and ‘married’). But is so fas as such facts concern relations involving the components of the senses of ‘bachelor’ and ‘spinster’ and is in as far as these words are syntactic simple, there must be a level of grammatical structure at which syntactic simple are semantically complex. This, in brief, is the route by which we arrive a level of ‘decompositional semantic structure; that is the locus of sense structures masked by syntactically simple words.
Discovery of this new level of grammatical structure was followed by attemptive efforts as afforded to represent the structure of the sense’s finds there. Without going into detail of sense representations, it is clear that, once we have the notion of decompositional representation, we can see how to generalize Locke and Kant’s informal, subject-predicate account of analyticity to cover relational analytic sentences. Let a simple sentence ‘S’ consisted of a - place predicate ‘P’ with terms T1 . . . ,. Tn occupying its argument places. Then:
The analysis in case, first, S has a term T1 that consists of a place predicate Q (m > n or m = n) with terms occupying its argument places, and second, P is contained in Q and, for each term TJ . . . . T1 + I ,. . . . , Tn, TJ is contained in the term of Q that occupies the argument place in Q corresponding to the argument place occupied by TJ in P. (Katz, 1972)
To see how (A) works, suppose that ‘stroll’ in ‘Jane walks with those whom she strolls’ is decompositionally represented as having the same sense as ‘walk idly and in a leisurely way’. The sentence is analytic by (A) because the predicate ‘stroll’ (the sense of ‘stroll) and the term ‘Jane’ * the sense of ‘Jane’ associated with the predicate ‘walk’) is contained in the term ‘Jane’ (the sense of ‘she herself’ associated with the predicate ‘stroll’). The containment in the case of the other terms is automatic.
The fact that (A) itself makes no reference to logical operators or logical laws indicate that analyticity for subject-predicate sentences can be extended to simple relational sentences without treating analytic sentences as instances of logical truths. Further, the source of the incompleteness is no longer explained, as Fridge explained it, as the absence of ‘fruitful’ logical apparatus, but is now explained as mistakenly treating what is only a special case of analyticity as if it were the general case. The inclusion of the predicate in the subject is the special case (where n = 1) of the general case of the inclusion of an–place predicate (and its terms) in one of its terms. Noting that the defects by which Quine complained of in connection with Carnap’s meaning-postulated explication are absent in (A). (A) contains no words from a natural language. It explicitly uses variable ‘S’ and variable ‘L’ because it is a definition in linguistic theory. Moreover, (A) tell ‘us’ what property is in virtue of which a sentence is analytic, namely, redundant predication, that is, the predication structure of an analytic sentence is already found in the content of its term structure.
Received opinion has been anti-Lockean in holding that necessary consequences in logic and language belong to one and the same species. This seems wrong because the property of redundant predication provides a non-logic explanation of why true statements made in the literal use of analytic sentences are necessarily true. Since the property ensures that the objects of the predication in the use of an analytic sentence are chosen on the basis of the features to be predicated of them, the truth-conditions of the statement are automatically satisfied once its terms take on reference. The difference between such a linguistic source of necessity and the logical and
mathematical sources vindicate Locke’s distinction between two kinds of ‘necessary consequence’.
Received opinion concerning analyticity contains another mistake. This is the idea that analyticity is inimical to science, in part, the idea developed as a reaction to certain dubious uses of analyticity such as Frége’s attempt to establish logicism and Schlick’s, Ayer’s and other logical; postivists attempt to deflate claims to metaphysical knowledge by showing that alleged deductive truths are merely empty analytic truths (Schlick, 1948, and Ayer, 1946). In part, it developed as also a response to a number of cases where alleged analytic, and hence, necessary truths, e.g., the law of excluded a seeming next-to-last subsequent to have been taken as open to revision, such cases convinced philosophers like Quine and Putnam that the analytic/synthetic distinction is an obstacle to scientific progress.
The problem, if there is one is one is not analyticity in the concept-containment sense, but the conflation of it with analyticity in the logical sense. This made it seem as if there is a single concept of analyticity that can serve as the grounds for a wide range of deductive truths. But, just as there are two analytic/synthetic distinctions, so there are two concepts of concept. The narrow Lockean/Kantian distinction is based on a narrow notion of expressions on which concepts are senses of expressions in the language. The broad Frégean/Carnap distinction is based on a broad notion of concept on which concepts are conceptions -often scientific one about the nature of the referent (s) of expressions (Katz, 1972) and curiously Putman, 1981). Conflation of these two notions of concepts produced the illusion of a single concept with the content of philosophical, logical and mathematical conceptions , but with the status of linguistic concepts. This encouraged philosophers to think that they were in possession of concepts with the contentual representation to express substantive philosophical claims, e.g., such as Fridge, Schlick and Ayer’s, . . . and so on, and with a status that trivializes the task of justifying them by requiring only linguistic grounds for the deductive propositions in question.
Finally, there is an important epistemological implication of separating the broad and narrowed notions of analyticity. Fridge and Carnap took the broad notion of analyticity to provide foundations for necessary and a priority, and, hence, for some form of rationalism, and nearly all rationalistically inclined analytic philosophers followed them in this. Thus, when Quine dispatched the Frége-Carnap position on analyticity, it was widely believed that necessary, as a priority, and rationalism had also been despatched, and, as a consequence. Quine had ushered in an ‘empiricism without dogmas’ and ‘naturalized epistemology’. But given there is still a notion of analyticity that enables ‘us’ to pose the problem of how necessary, synthetic deductive knowledge is possible (moreover, one whose narrowness makes logical and mathematical knowledge part of the problem), Quine did not under-cut the foundations of rationalism. Hence, a serious reappraisal of the new empiricism and naturalized epistemology is, to any the least, is very much in order (Katz, 1990).
In some areas of philosophy and sometimes in things that are less than important we are to find in the deductively/inductive distinction in which has been applied to a wide range of objects, including concepts, propositions, truths and knowledge. Our primary concern will, however, be with the epistemic distinction between deductive and inductive knowledge. The most common way of marking the distinction is by reference to Kant’s claim that deductive knowledge is absolutely independent of all experience. It is generally agreed that S’s knowledge that ‘p’ is independent of experience just in case S’s belief that ‘p’ is justified independently of experience. Some authors (Butchvarov, 1970, and Pollock, 1974) are, however, in finding this negative characterization of deductive unsatisfactory knowledge and have opted for providing a positive characterisation in terms of the type of justification on which such knowledge is dependent. Finally, others (Putman, 1983 and Chisholm, 1989) have attempted to mark the distinction by introducing concepts such as necessity and rational unrevisability than in terms of the type of justification relevant to deductive knowledge.
One who characterizes deductive knowledge in terms of justification that is independent of experience is faced with the task of articulating the relevant sense of experience, and proponents of the deductive ly cites ‘intuition’ or ‘intuitive apprehension’ as the source of deductive justification. Furthermore, they maintain that these terms refer to a distinctive type of experience that is both common and familiar to most individuals. Hence, there is a broad sense of experience in which deductive justification is dependent of experience. An initially attractive strategy is to suggest that theoretical justification must be independent of sense experience. But this account is too narrow since memory, for example, is not a form of sense experience, but justification based on memory is presumably not deductive. There appear to remain only two options: Provide a general characterization of the relevant sense of experience or enumerates those sources that are experiential. General characterizations of experience often maintain that experience provides information specific to the actual world while non-experiential sources provide information about all possible worlds. This approach, however, reduces the concept of non-experiential justification to the concept of being justified in believing a necessary truth. Accounts by enumeration have two problems (1) there is some controversy about which sources to include in the list, and (2) there is no guarantee that the list is complete. It is generally agreed that perception and memory should be included. Introspection, however, is problematic, and beliefs about one’s conscious states and about the manner in which one is appeared to are plausible regarded as experientially justified. Yet, some, such as Pap (1958), maintain that experiments in imagination are the source of deductive justification. Even if this contention is rejected and deductive justification is characterized as justification independent of the evidence of perception, memory and introspection, it remains possible that there are other sources of justification. If it should be the case that clairvoyance, for example, is a source of justified beliefs, such beliefs would be justified deductively on the enumerative account.
The most common approach to offering a positive characterization of deductive justification is to maintain that in the case of basic deductive propositions, understanding the proposition is sufficient to justify one in believing that it is true. This approach faces two pressing issues. What is it to understand a proposition in the manner that suffices for justification? Proponents of the approach typically distinguish understanding the words used to express a proposition from apprehending the proposition itself and maintain that it is the latter which are relevant to deductive justification. But this move simply shifts the problem to that of specifying what it is to apprehend a proposition. Without a solution to this problem, it is difficult, if possible, to evaluate the account since one cannot be sure that the account since on cannot be sure that the requisite sense of apprehension does not justify paradigmatic inductive propositions as well. Even less is said about the manner in which apprehending a proposition justifies one in believing that it is true. Proponents are often content with the bald assertions that one who understands a basic deductive proposition can thereby ‘see’ that it is true. But what requires explanation is how understanding a proposition enable one to see that it is true.
Difficulties in characterizing deductive justification in a term either of independence from experience or of its source have led, out-of-the-ordinary to present the concept of necessity into their accounts, although this appeal takes various forms. Some have employed it as a necessary condition for deductive justification, others have employed it as a sufficient condition, while still others have employed it as both. In claiming that necessity is a criterion of the deductive. Kant held that necessity is a sufficient condition for deductive justification. This claim, however, needs further clarification. There are three theses regarding the relationship between the theoretically and the necessary that can be distinguished: (I) if ‘p’ is a necessary proposition and ‘S’ is justified in believing that ‘p’ is necessary, then S’s justification is deductive: (ii) If ‘p’ is a necessary proposition and ‘S’ is justified in believing that ‘p’ is necessarily true, then S’s justification is deductive: And (iii) If ‘p’ is a necessary proposition and ‘S’ is justified in believing that ‘p’, then S’s justification is deductive. For example, many proponents of deductive contend that all knowledge of a necessary proposition is deductive. (2) and (3) have the shortcoming of setting by stipulation the issue of whether inductive knowledge of necessary propositions is possible. (I) does not have this shortcoming since the recent examples offered in support of this claim by Kriple (1980) and others have been cases where it is alleged that knowledge of the ‘truth value’ of necessary propositions is knowable inductive. (i) has the shortcoming, however, of either ruling out the possibility of being justified in believing that a proposition is necessary on the basis of testimony or else sanctioning such justification as deductive. (ii) and (iii), of course, suffer from an analogous problem. These problems are symptomatic of a general shortcoming of the approach: It attempts to provide a sufficient condition for deductive justification solely in terms of the modal status of the proposition believed without making reference to the manner in which it is justified. This shortcoming, however, can be avoided by incorporating necessity as a necessary but not sufficient condition for a prior justification as, for example, in Chisholm (1989). Here there are two theses that must be distinguished: (1) If ‘S’ is justified deductively in believing that ‘p’, then ‘p’ is necessarily true; and (2) If ‘S’ is justified deductively in believing that ‘p’. Then ‘p’ is a necessary proposition. (1) and (2), however, allows this possibility. A further problem with both (1) and (2) is that it is not clear whether they permit deductively justified beliefs about the modal status of a proposition. For they require that in order for ‘S’ to be justified deductively in believing that ‘p’ is a necessary preposition it must be necessary that ‘p’ is a necessary proposition. But the status of iterated modal propositions is controversial. Finally, (1) and (2) both preclude by stipulation the position advanced by Kripke (1980) and Kitcher (1980) that there is deductive knowledge of contingent propositions.
The concept of rational unrevisability has also been invoked to characterize deductive justification. The precise sense of rational unrevisability has been presented in different ways. Putnam (1983) takes rational unrevisability to be both a necessary and sufficient condition for deductive justification while Kitcher (1980) takes it to be only a necessary condition. There are also two different senses of rational unrevisability that have been associated with the deductive (I) a proposition is weakly unreviable just in case it is rationally unrevisable in light of any future ‘experiential’ evidence, and (II) a proposition is strongly unrevisable just in case it is rationally unrevisable in light of any future evidence. Let us consider the plausibility of requiring either form of rational unrevisability as a necessary condition for deductive justification. The view that a proposition is justified deductive only if it is strongly unrevisable entails that if a non-experiential source of justified beliefs is fallible but self-correcting, it is not a deductive source of justification. Casullo (1988) has argued that it vis implausible to maintain that a proposition that is justified non-experientially is ‘not’ justified deductively merely because it is revisable in light of further non-experiential evidence. The view that a proposition is justified deductively only if it is weakly unrevisable is not open to this objection since it excludes only recision in light of experiential evidence. It does, however, face a different problem. To maintain that S’s justified belief that ‘p’ is justified deductively is to make a claim about the type of evidence that justifies ‘S’ in believing that ‘p’. On the other hand, to maintain that S’s justified belief that ‘p’ is rationally revisable in light of experiential evidence is to make a claim about the type of evidence that can defeat S’s justification for believing that ‘p’ that a claim about the type of evidence that justifies ‘S’ in believing that ‘p’. Hence, it has been argued by Edidin (1984) and Casullo (1988) that to hold that a belief is justified deductively only if it is weakly unrevisable is either to confuse supporting evidence with defeating evidence or to endorse some implausible this about the relationship between the two such as that if evidence of the sort as the kind ‘A’ can defeat the justification conferred on S’s belief that ‘p’ by evidence of kind ‘B’ then S’s justification for believing that ‘p’ is based on evidence of kind ‘A’.
The most influential idea in the theory of meaning in the past hundred years is the thesis that the meaning of an indicative sentence is given by its truth-conditions. On this conception, to understand a sentence is to know its truth-conditions. The conception was first clearly formulated by Fridge, was developed in a distinctive way by the early Wittgenstein, and is a leading idea of Donald Herbert Davidson (1917-), who is also known for rejection of the idea of as conceptual scheme, thought of as something peculiar to one language or one way of looking at the world, arguing that where the possibility of translation stops so dopes the coherence of the idea that there is anything to translate. His [papers are collected in the ‘Essays on Actions and Events’ (1980) and ‘Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation’ (1983). However, the conception has remained so central that those who offer opposing theories characteristically define their position by reference to it.
Wittgenstein’s main achievement is a uniform theory of language that yields an explanation of logical truth. A factual sentence achieves sense by dividing the possibilities exhaustively into two groups, those that would make it true and those that would make it false. A truth of logic does not divide the possibilities but comes out true in all of them. It, therefore, lacks sense and says nothing, but it is not nonsense. It is a self-cancellation of sense, necessarily true because it is a tautology, the limiting case of factual discourse, like the figure ‘0' in mathematics. Language takes many forms and even factual discourse does not consist entirely of sentences like ‘The fork is placed to the left of the knife’. However, the first thing that he gave up was the idea that this sentence itself needed further analysis into basic sentences mentioning simple objects with no internal structure. He was to concede, that a descriptive word will often get its meaning partly from its place in a system, and he applied this idea to colour-words, arguing that the essential relations between different colours do not indicate that each colour has an internal structure that needs to be taken apart. On the contrary, analysis of our colour-words would only reveal the same pattern-ranges of incompatible properties-recurring at every level, because that is how we carve up the world.
Indeed, it may even be the case that of our ordinary language is created by moves that we ourselves make. If so, the philosophy of language will lead into the connection between the meaning of a word and the applications of it that its users intend to make. There is also an obvious need for people to understand each other’s meanings of their words. There are many links between the philosophy of language and the philosophy of mind and it is not surprising that the impersonal examination of language in the ‘Tractatus: was replaced by a very different, anthropocentric treatment in ‘Philosophical Investigations?’
If the logic of our language is created by moves that we ourselves make, various kinds of realisms are threatened. First, the way in which our descriptive language carves up the world will not be forces on ‘us’ by the natures of things, and the rules for the application of our words, which feel the external constraints, will really come from within ‘us’. That is a concession to nominalism that is, perhaps, readily made. The idea that logical and mathematical necessity is also generated by what we ourselves accomplish what is more paradoxical. Yet, that is the conclusion of Wittengenstein (1956) and (1976), and here his anthropocentricism has carried less conviction. However, a paradox is not sure of error and it is possible that what is needed here is a more sophisticated concept of objectivity than Platonism provides.
In his later work Wittgenstein brings the great problem of philosophy down to earth and traces them to very ordinary origins. His examination of the concept of ‘following a rule’ takes him back to a fundamental question about counting things and sorting them into types: ‘What qualifies as doing the same again? Of a courser, this question as an inconsequential fundamental and would suggest that we forget it and get on with the subject. But Wittgenstein’s question is not so easily dismissed. It has the naive profundity of questions that children ask when they are first taught a new subject. Such questions remain unanswered without detriment to their learning, but they point the only way to complete understanding of what is learned.
It is, nevertheless, the meaning of a complex expression in a function of the meaning of its constituents, that is, indeed, that it is just a statement of what it is for an expression to be semantically complex. It is one of the initial attractions of the conception of meaning as truths-conditions that it permits a smooth and satisfying account of the way in which the meaning of a complex expression is a dynamic function of the meaning of its constituents. On the truth-conditional conception, to give the meaning of an expression is to state the contribution it makes to the truth-conditions of sentences in which it occurs. for singular terms-proper names, indexical, and certain pronoun’s -this is done by stating the reference of the term in question.
The truth condition of a statement is the condition the world must meet if the statement is to be true. To know this condition is equivalent to knowing the meaning of the statement. Although, this sounds as if it gives a solid anchorage for meaning, some of the security disappears when it turns out that the truth condition can only be defined by repeating the very same statement, the truth condition of ‘snow is white’ is that snow is white, the truth condition of ‘Britain would have capitulated had Hitler invaded’ is that Britain would halve capitulated had Hitler invaded. It is disputed whether this element of running-on-the-spot disqualifies truth conditions from playing the central role in a substantive theory of meaning. Truth-conditional theories of meaning are sometimes opposed by the view that to know the meaning of a statement is to be able to users it in a network of inferences.
On the truth-conditional conception, to give the meaning of expressions is to state the contributive function it makes to the dynamic function of sentences in which it occurs. For singular terms-proper names, and certain pronouns, as well are indexicals-this is done by stating the reference of the term in question. For predicates, it is done either by stating the conditions under which the predicate is true of arbitrary objects, or by stating the conditions under which arbitrary atomic sentence containing it is true. The meaning of a sentence-forming operator is given by stating its distributive contribution to the truth-conditions of a complete sentence, as a function of the semantic values of the sentences on which it operates. For an extremely simple, but nonetheless, it is a structured language, we can state the contributions various expressions make to truth conditions as follows:
A1: The referent of ‘London’ is London.
A2: The referent of ‘Paris’ is Paris.
A3: Any sentence of the form ‘a is beautiful’ is true if and only if the referent of ‘a’ is beautiful.
A4: Any sentence of the form ‘a is larger than b’ is true if and only if the referent of ‘a’ is larger than the referent of ‘b’.
A5: Any sentence of the form ‘It is not the case that A’ is true if and only if it is not the case that ‘A’ is true.
A6: Any sentence of the form ‘A and B’ are true if and only is ‘A’ is true and ‘B’ is true.
The principle’s A2-A6 form a simple theory of truth for a fragment of English. In this theory, it is possible to derive these consequences: That ‘Paris is beautiful’ is true if and only if Paris is beautiful (from A2 and A3), which ‘London is larger than Paris and it is not the cases that London is beautiful’ is true if and only if London is larger than Paris and it is not the case that London is beautiful (from A1 - As): And in general, for any sentence ‘A’ of this simple language, we can derive something of the form ‘A’ is true if and only if A’.
The theorist of truth conditions should insist that not every true statement about the reference of an expression be fit to be an axiom in a meaning-giving theory of truth for a language. The axiom:
London’ refers to the city in which there was a huge fire in 1666
is a true statement about the reference of ‘London?’. It is a consequence of a theory that substitutes this axiom for A! In our simple truth theory that ‘London is beautiful’ is true if and only if the city in which there was a huge fire in 1666 is beautiful. Since a subject can understand the name ‘London’ without knowing that last-mentioned truth conditions, this replacement axiom is not fit to be an axiom in a meaning-specifying truth theory. It is, of course, incumbent on a theorist of meaning as truth conditions to state the constraints on the acceptability of axioms in a way that does not presuppose a deductive, non-truth conditional conception of meaning.
Among the many challenges facing the theorist of truth conditions, two are particularly salient and fundamental. First, the theorist has to answer the charge of triviality or vacuity. Second, the theorist must offer an account of what it is for a person’s language to be truly descriptive by a semantic theory containing a given semantic axiom.
We can take the charge of triviality first. In more detail, it would run thus: Since the content of a claim that the sentence ‘Paris is beautiful’ in which is true of the divisional region, which is no more than the claim that Paris is beautiful, we can trivially describe understanding a sentence, if we wish, as knowing its truth-conditions, but this gives ‘us’ no substantive account of understanding whatsoever. Something other than a grasp to truth conditions must provide the substantive account. The charge rests upon what has been called the redundancy theory of truth, the theory that, is somewhat more discriminative. Horwich calls the minimal theory of truth, or deflationary view of truth, as fathered by Fridge and Ramsey. The essential claim is that the predicate’ . . . is true’ does not have a sense, i.e., expresses no substantive or profound or explanatory concepts that ought be the topic of philosophical enquiry. The approach admits of different versions, but centres on the points (1) that ‘it is true that p’ says no more nor less than ‘p’ (hence redundancy) (2) that in less direct context, such as ‘everything he said was true’, or ‘all logical consequences of true propositions are true’, the predicate functions as a device enabling ‘us’; to generalize than as an adjective or predicate describing the thing he said, or the kinds of propositions that follow from true propositions. For example, the second may translate as ‘ (∀ p, q) (p & p ➝ q ➝q) ‘ where there is no use of a notion of truth.
There are technical problems in interpreting all uses of the notion of truth in such ways, but they are not generally felt to be insurmountable. The approach needs to explain away apparently substantive uses of the notion, such a ;science aims at the truth’, or ‘truth is a norm governing discourse’. Indeed, postmodernist writing frequently advocates that we must abandon such norms, along with a discredited ‘objective’ conception of truth. But perhaps, we can have the norms even when objectivity is problematic, since they can be framed without mention of truth: Science wants it to be so that whenever science holds that ‘p’. Then ‘p’. Discourse is to be regulated by the principle that it is wrong to assert ‘p’ when ‘not-p’.
The disquotational theory of truth finds that the simplest formulation is the claim that expressions of the fern ‘S is true’ mean the same as expressions of the form ’S’. Some philosophers dislike the idea of sameness of meaning, and if this is disallowed, then the claim is that the two forms are equivalent in any sense of equivalence that matters. That is, it makes no difference whether people say ‘Dogs bark’ is true, or whether they say that ‘dogs bark’. In the former representation of what they say the sentence ‘Dogs bark’ is mentioned, but in the latter it appears to be used, so the claim that the two are equivalent needs careful formulation and defence. On the face of it someone might know that ‘Dogs bark’ is true without knowing what it means, for instance, if one were to find it in a list of acknowledged truths, although he does not understand English, and this is different from knowing that dogs bark. Disquotational theories are usually presented as versions of the redundancy theory of truth.
The minimal theory states that the concept of truth is exhausted by the fact that it conforms to the equivalence principle, the principle that for any proposition ‘p’, it is true that ‘p’ if and only if ‘p’. Many different philosophical theories of truth will, with suitable qualifications, accept that equivalence principle. The distinguishing feature of the minimal theory is its claim that the equivalence principle exhausts the notion of truths. It is how widely accepted, that both by opponents and supporters of truth conditional theories of meaning, that it is inconsistent to accept both minimal theory of truth and a truth conditional account of meaning (Davidson, 1990, Dummett, 1959 and Horwich, 1990). If the claim that the sentence ‘Paris is beautiful’ is true is exhausted by its equivalence to the claim that Paris is beautiful, it is circular to try to explain the sentence’s meaning in terms of its truth conditions. The minimal theory of truth has been endorsed by Ramsey, Ayer, the later Wittgenstein, Quine, Strawson, Horwich and-confusingly and inconsistently if be it correct-Fridge himself. But is the minimal theory correct?
The minimal or redundancy theory treats instances of the equivalence principle as definitional of truth for a given sentence. But in fact, it seems that each instance of the equivalence principle can itself be explained. The truths from which such an instance as:
‘London is beautiful’ is true if and only if London is beautiful
preserve a right to be interpreted specifically of A1 and A3 above? This would be a pseudo-explanation if the fact that ‘London’ refers to ‘London is beautiful’ has the truth-condition it does. But that is very implausible: It is, after all, possible to understand the name ‘London’ without understanding the predicate ‘is beautiful’. The idea that facts about the reference of particular words can be explanatory of facts about the truth conditions of sentences containing them in no way requires any naturalistic or any other kind of reduction of the notion of reference. Nor is the idea incompatible with the plausible point that singular reference can be attributed at all only to something that is capable of combining with other expressions to form complete sentences. That still leaves room for facts about an expression’s having the particular reference it does to be partially explanatory of the particular truth condition possessed by a given sentence containing it. The minimal; theory thus treats as definitional or stimulative something that is in fact open to explanation. What makes this explanation possible is that there is a general notion of truth that has, among the many links that hold it in place, systematic connections with the semantic values of sub-sentential expressions.
A second problem with the minimal theory is that it seems impossible to formulate it without at some point relying implicitly on features and principles involving truths that go beyond anything countenanced by the minimal theory. If the minimal theory treats truth as a predicate of anything linguistic, be it utterances, type-in-a-language, or whatever, then the equivalence schema will not cover all cases, but only those in the theorist’s own language. Some account has to be given of truth for sentences of other languages. Speaking of the truth of language-independence propositions or thoughts will only postpone, not avoid, this issue, since at some point principles have to be stated associating these language-independent entities with sentences of particular languages. The defender of the minimalist theory is likely to say that if a sentence ‘S’ of a foreign language is best translated by our sentence ‘p’, then the foreign sentence ‘S’ is true if and only if ‘p’. Now the best translation of a sentence must preserve the concepts expressed in the sentence. Constraints involving a general notion of truth are persuasive in a plausible philosophical theory of concepts. It is, for example, a condition of adequacy on an individualized account of any concept that there exists what is called ‘Determination Theory’ for that account-that is, a specification of how the account contributes to fixing the semantic value of that concept, the notion of a concept’s semantic value is the notion of something that makes a certain contribution to the truth conditions of thoughts in which the concept occurs. but this is to presuppose, than to elucidate, a general notion of truth.
It is also plausible that there are general constraints on the form of such Determination Theories, constraints that involve truth and which are not derivable from the minimalist’s conception. Suppose that concepts are individuated by their possession conditions. A concept is something that is capable of being a constituent of such contentual representational in a way of thinking of something-a particular object, or property, or relation, or another entity. A possession condition may in various says makes a thanker’s possession of a particular concept dependent upon his relations to his environment. Many possession conditions will mention the links between a concept and the thinker’s perceptual experience. Perceptual experience represents the world for being a certain way. It is arguable that the only satisfactory explanation of what it is for perceptual experience to represent the world in a particular way must refer to the complex relations of the experience to the subject’s environment. If this is so, then mention of such experiences in a possession condition will make possession of that condition will make possession of that concept dependent in part upon the environment relations of the thinker. Burge (1979) has also argued from intuitions about particular examples that, even though the thinker’s non-environmental properties and relations remain constant, the conceptual content of his mental state can vary if the thinker’s social environment is varied. A possession condition which property individuates such a concept must take into account the thinker’s social relations, in particular his linguistic relations.
One such plausible general constraint is then the requirement that when a thinker forms beliefs involving a concept in accordance with its possession condition, a semantic value is assigned to the concept in such a way that the belief is true. Some general principles involving truth can indeed, as Horwich has emphasized, be derived from the equivalence schema using minimal logical apparatus. Consider, for instance, the principle that ‘Paris is beautiful and London is beautiful’ is true if and only if ‘Paris is beautiful’ is true if and only if ‘Paris is beautiful’ is true and ‘London is beautiful’ is true. This follows logically from the three instances of the equivalence principle: ‘Paris is beautiful and London is beautiful’ is rue if and only if Paris is beautiful, and ‘London is beautiful’ is true if and only if London is beautiful. But no logical manipulations of the equivalence schemas will allow the deprivation of that general constraint governing possession conditions, truth and the assignment of semantic values. That constraint can have courses be regarded as a further elaboration of the idea that truth is one of the aims of judgement.
We now turn to the other question, ‘What is it for a person’s language to be correctly describable by a semantic theory containing a particular axiom, such as the axiom A6 above for conjunction?’ This question may be addressed at two depths of generality. At the shallower level, the question may take for granted the person’s possession of the concept of conjunction, and be concerned with what has to be true for the axiom correctly to describe his language. At a deeper level, an answer should not duck the issue of what it is to possess the concept. The answers to both questions are of great interest: We will take the lesser level of generality first.
When a person means conjunction by ‘sand’, he is not necessarily capable of formulating the axiom A6 explicitly. Even if he can formulate it, his ability to formulate it is not the causal basis of his capacity to hear sentences containing the word ‘and’ as meaning something involving conjunction. Nor is it the causal basis of his capacity to mean something involving conjunction by sentences he utters containing the word ‘and’. Is it then right to regard a truth theory as part of an unconscious psychological computation, and to regard understanding a sentence as involving a particular way of depriving a theorem from a truth theory at some level of conscious proceedings? One problem with this is that it is quite implausible that everyone who speaks the same language has to use the same algorithms for computing the meaning of a sentence. In the past thirteen years, thanks particularly to the work of Davies and Evans, a conception has evolved according to which an axiom like A6 is true of a person’s language only if there is a common component in the explanation of his understanding of each sentence containing the word ‘and’, a common component that explains why each such sentence is understood as meaning something involving conjunction (Davies, 1987). This conception can also be elaborated in computational terms: Suggesting that for an axiom like A6 to be true of a person’s language is for the unconscious mechanisms which produce understanding to draw on the information that a sentence of the form ‘A and B’ are true if and only if ‘A’ is true and ‘B’ is true (Peacocke, 1986). Many different algorithms may equally draw n this information. The psychological reality of a semantic theory thus involves, in Marr’s (1982) famous classification, something intermediate between his level one, the function computed, and his level two, the algorithm by which it is computed. This conception of the psychological reality of a semantic theory can also be applied to syntactic and phonol logical theories. Theories in semantics, syntax and phonology are not themselves required to specify the particular algorithms that the language user employs. The identification of the particular computational methods employed is a task for psychology. But semantics, syntactic and phonology theories are answerable to psychological data, and are potentially refutable by them-for these linguistic theories do make commitments to the information drawn upon by mechanisms in the language user.
This answer to the question of what it is for an axiom to be true of a person’s language clearly takes for granted the person’s possession of the concept expressed by the word treated by the axiom. In the example of the axiom A6, the information drawn upon is that sentences of the form ‘A and B’ are true if and only if ‘A’ is true and ‘B’ is true. This informational content employs, as it has to if it is to be adequate, the concept of conjunction used in stating the meaning of sentences containing ‘and’. So the computational answer we have returned needs further elaboration if we are to address the deeper question, which does not want to take for granted possession of the concepts expressed in the language. It is at this point that the theory of linguistic understanding has to draws upon a theory of concepts. It is plausible that the concepts of conjunction are individuated by the following condition for a thinker to possess it.
Finally, this response to the deeper question allows ‘us’ to answer two challenges to the conception of meaning as truth-conditions. First, there was the question left hanging earlier, of how the theorist of truth-conditions is to say what makes one axiom of a semantic theory is correctly in that of another, when the two axioms assign the same semantic values, but do so by means of different concepts. Since the different concepts will have different possession conditions, the dovetailing accounts, at the deeper level of what it is for each axiom to be correct for a person’s language will be different accounts. Second, there is a challenge repeatedly made by the minimalist theorists of truth, to the effect that the theorist of meaning as truth-conditions should give some non-circular account of what it is to understand a sentence, or to be capable of understanding all sentences containing a given constituent. For each expression in a sentence, the corresponding dovetailing account, together with the possession condition, supplies a non-circular account of what it is to understand any sentence containing that expression. The combined accounts for each of he expressions that comprise a given sentence together constitute a non-circular account of what it is to understand the compete sentences. Taken together, they allow the theorists of meaning as truth-conditions fully to meet the challenge.
A curious view common to that which is expressed by an utterance or sentence: The proposition or claim made about the world. By extension, the content of a predicate or other sub-sentential component is what it contributes to the content of sentences that contain it. The nature of content is the central concern of the philosophy of language, in that mental states have contents: A belief may have the content that the prime minister will resign. A concept is something that is capable of bringing a constituent of such contents. More specifically, a concept is a way of thinking of something-a particular object, or property or relation, or another entity. Such a distinction was held in Frége’s philosophy of language, explored in ‘On Concept and Object’ (1892). Fridge regarded predicates as incomplete expressions, in the same way as a mathematical expression for a function, such as sines . . . a log . . . , is incomplete. Predicates refer to concepts, which themselves are ‘unsaturated’, and cannot be referred to by subject expressions (we thus get the paradox that the concept of a horse is not a concept). Although Fridge recognized the metaphorical nature of the notion of a concept being unsaturated, he was rightly convinced that some such notion is needed to explain the unity of a sentence, and to prevent sentences from being thought of as mere lists of names.
Several different concepts may each be ways of thinking of the same object. A person may think of himself in the first-person way, or think of himself as the spouse of Mary Smith, or as the person located in a certain room now. More generally, a concept ‘c’ is distinct from a concept ‘d’ if it is possible for a person rationally to believe ‘d is such-and-such’. As words can be combined to form structured sentences, concepts have also been conceived as combinable into structured complex contents. When these complex contents are expressed in English by ‘that . . . ’clauses, as in our opening examples, they will be capable of being true or false, depending on the way the world is.
The general system of concepts with which we organize our thoughts and perceptions are to encourage a conceptual scheme of which the outstanding elements of our every day conceptual formalities include spatial and temporal relations between events and enduring objects, causal relations, other persons, meaning-bearing utterances of others, . . . and so on. To see the world as containing such things is to share this much of our conceptual scheme. A controversial argument of Davidson’s urges that we would be unable to interpret speech from a different conceptual scheme as even meaningful, Davidson daringly goes on to argue that since translation proceeds according ti a principle of clarity, and since it must be possible of an omniscient translator to make sense of, ‘us’ we can be assured that most of the beliefs formed within the commonsense conceptual framework are true.
Concepts are to be distinguished from a stereotype and from conceptions. The stereotypical spy may be a middle-level official down on his luck and in need of money. None the less, we can come to learn that Anthony Blunt, art historian and Surveyor of the Queen’s Pictures, are a spy; we can come to believe that something falls under a concept while positively disbelieving that the same thing falls under the stereotype associated wit the concept. Similarly, a person’s conception of a just arrangement for resolving disputes may involve something like contemporary Western legal systems. But whether or not it would be correct, it is quite intelligible for someone to rejects this conception by arguing that it dies not adequately provide for the elements of fairness and respect that are required by the concepts of justice.
Basically, a concept is that which is understood by a term, particularly a predicate. To posses a concept is to be able to deploy a term expressing it in making judgements, in which the ability connection is such things as recognizing when the term applies, and being able to understand the consequences of its application. The term ‘idea’ was formally used in the came way, but is avoided because of its associations with subjective matters inferred upon mental imagery in which may be irrelevant ti the possession of a concept. In the semantics of Fridge, a concept is the reference of a predicate, and cannot be referred to by a subjective term, although its recognition of as a concept, in that some such notion is needed to the explanatory justification of which that sentence of unity finds of itself from being thought of as namely categorized lists of itemized priorities.
A theory of a particular concept must be distinguished from a theory of the object or objects it selectively picks the outlying of the theory of the concept under which is partially contingent of the theory of thought and/or epistemology. A theory of the object or objects is part of metaphysics and ontology. Some figures in the history of philosophy-and are open to the accusation of not having fully respected the distinction between the kinds of theory. Descartes appears to have moved from facts about the indubitability of the thought ‘I think’, containing the fist-person was of thinking, to conclusions about the nonmaterial nature of the object he himself was. But though the goals of a theory of concepts and a theory of objects are distinct, each theory is required to have an adequate account of its relation to the other theory. A theory if concept is unacceptable if it gives no account of how the concept is capable of picking out the object it evidently does pick out. A theory of objects is unacceptable if it makes it impossible to understand how we could have concepts of those objects.
A fundamental question for philosophy is: What individuates a given concept-that is, what makes it the one it is, rather than any other concept? One answer, which has been developed in great detail, is that it is impossible to give a non-trivial answer to this question (Schiffer, 1987). An alternative approach, addressees the question by starting from the idea that a concept id individuated by the condition that must be satisfied if a thinker is to posses that concept and to be capable of having beliefs and other attitudes whose content contains it as a constituent. So, to take a simple case, one could propose that the logical concept ‘and’ is individuated by this condition, it be the unique concept ‘C’ to posses that a thinker has to find these forms of inference compelling, without basing them on any further inference or information: From any two premisses ‘A’ and ‘B’, ACB can be inferred, and from any premiss ACB, each of ‘A’ and ‘B’ can be inferred. Again, a relatively observational concept such as ‘round’ can be individuated in part by stating that the thinker finds specified contents containing it compelling when he has certain kinds of perception, and in part by relating those judgements containing the concept and which are not based on perception to those judgements that are. A statement that individuates a concept by saying what is required for a thinker to posses it can be described as giving the possession condition for the concept.
A possession condition for a particular concept may actually make use of that concept. The possession condition for ‘and’ does so. We can also expect to use relatively observational concepts in specifying the kind of experience that have to be mentioned in the possession conditions for relatively observational concepts. What we must avoid is mention of the concept in question as such within the content of the attitudes attributed to the thinker in the possession condition. Otherwise we would be presupposing possession of the concept in an account that was meant to elucidate its possession. In talking of what the thinker finds compelling, the possession conditions can also respect an insight of the later Wittgenstein: That to find her finds it natural to go on in new cases in applying the concept.
Sometimes a family of concepts has this property: It is not possible to master any one of the members of the family without mastering the others. Two of the families that plausibly have this status are these: The family consisting of some simple concepts 0, 1, 2, . . . of the natural numbers and the corresponding concepts of numerical quantifiers there are 0 so-and-so, there is 1 so-and-so, . . . and the family consisting of the concepts ;belief’ and ‘desire’. Such families have come to be known as ‘local holism’. A local holism does not prevent the individuation of a concept by its possession condition. Rather, it demands that all the concepts in the family be individuated simultaneously. So one would say something of this form: Belief and desire form the unique pair of concepts C1 and C2 such that for as thinker to posses them are to meet such-and-such condition involving the thinker, C1 and C2. For these and other possession conditions to individuate properly, it is necessary that there be some ranking of the concepts treated. The possession conditions for concepts higher in the ranking must presuppose only possession of concepts at the same or lower levels in the ranking.
A possession conditions may in various way’s make a thinker’s possession of a particular concept dependent upon his relations to his environment. Many possession conditions will mention the links between a concept and the thinker’s perceptual experience. Perceptual experience represents the world as a certain way. It is arguable that the only satisfactory explanation of what it is for perceptual experience to represent the world in a particular way must refer to the complex relations of the experience to the subject’s environment. If this is so, then mention of such experiences in a possession condition will make possession of that concept dependent in part upon the environmental relations of the thinker. Burge (1979) has also argued from intuitions about particular examples that, even though the thinker’s non-environmental properties and relations remain constant, the conceptual content of his mental state can vary if the thinker’s social environment is varied. A possession condition that properly individuates such a concept must take into account the thinker’s social relations, in particular his linguistic relations.
Concepts have a normative dimension, a fact strongly emphasized by Kripke. For any judgement whose content involves a given concept, there is a correctness condition for that judgement, a condition that is dependent in part upon the identity of the concept. The normative character of concepts also extends into making the territory of a thinker’s reasons for making judgements. A thinker’s visual perception can give him good reason for judging ‘That man is bald’: It does not by itself give him good reason for judging ‘Rostropovich ids bald’, even if the man he sees is Rostropovich. All these normative connections must be explained by a theory of concepts one approach to these matters is to look to the possession condition for the concept, and consider how the referent of a concept is fixed from it, together with the world. One proposal is that the referent of the concept is that object (or property, or function, . . .) which makes the practices of judgement and inference mentioned in the possession condition always lead to true judgements and truth-preserving inferences. This proposal would explain why certain reasons are necessity good reasons for judging given contents. Provided the possession condition permits ‘us’ to say what it is about a thinker’s previous judgements that masker it the case that he is employing one concept rather than another, this proposal would also have another virtue. It would allow ‘us’ to say how the correctness condition is determined for a judgement in which the concept is applied to newly encountered objects. The judgement is correct if the new object has the property that in fact makes the judgemental practices mentioned in the possession condition yield true judgements, or truth-preserving inferences.
These manifesting dissimilations have occasioned the affiliated differences accorded within the distinction as associated with Leibniz, who declares that there are only two kinds of truths-truths of reason and truths of fact. The forms are all either explicit identities, i.e., of the form ‘A is A’, ‘AB is B’, etc., or they are reducible to this form by successively substituting equivalent terms. Leibniz dubs them ‘truths of reason’ because the explicit identities are self-evident deducible truths, whereas the rest can be converted to such by purely rational operations. Because their denial involves a demonstrable contradiction, Leibniz also says that truths of reason ‘rest on the principle of contradiction, or identity’ and that they are necessary [propositions, which are true of all possible words. Some examples are ‘All equilateral rectangles are rectangles’ and ‘All bachelors are unmarried’: The first is already of the form AB is B’ and the latter can be reduced to this form by substituting ‘unmarried man’ fort ‘bachelor’. Other examples, or so Leibniz believes, are ‘God exists’ and the truths of logic, arithmetic and geometry.
Truths of fact, on the other hand, cannot be reduced to an identity and our only way of knowing them is empirically by reference to the facts of the empirical world. Likewise, since their denial does not involve a contradiction, their truth is merely contingent: They could have been otherwise and hold of the actual world, but not of every possible one. Some examples are ‘Caesar crossed the Rubicon’ and ‘Leibniz was born in Leipzig’, as well as propositions expressing correct scientific generalizations. In Leibniz’s view, truths of fact rest on the principle of sufficient reason, which states that nothing can be so unless there is a reason that it is so. This reason is that the actual world (by which he means the total collection of things past, present and future) is better than any other possible worlds and was therefore created by ‘God’.
In defending the principle of sufficient reason, Leibniz runs into serious problems. He believes that in every true proposition, the concept of the predicate is contained in that of the subject. (This holds even for propositions like ‘Caesar crossed the Rubicon’: Leibniz thinks anyone who dids not cross the Rubicon, would not have been Caesar). And this containment relationship! Which is eternal and unalterable even by God ~?! Guarantees that every truth has a sufficient reason. If truths consists in concept containment, however, then it seems that all truths are analytic and hence necessary, and if they are all necessary, surely they are all truths of reason. Leibnitz responds that not every truth can be reduced to an identity in a finite number of steps, in some instances revealing the connection between subject and predicate concepts would requite an infinite analysis. But while this may entail that we cannot prove such propositions as deductively manifested, it does not appear to show that the proposition could have been false. Intuitively, it seems a better ground for supposing that it is necessary truth of a special sort. A related question arises from the idea that truths of fact depend on God’s decision to create.
the best of all possible worlds: If it is part of the concept of this world that it is best, now could its existence be other than necessary? Leibniz answers that its existence is only hypothetically necessary, i.e., it follows from God’s decision to create this world, but God had the power to decide otherwise. Yet God is necessarily good and non-deceiving, so how could he have decided to do anything else? Leibniz says much more about these masters, but it is not clear whether he offers any satisfactory solutions.
Necessary truths are ones that must be true, or whose opposite is impossible. Contingent truths are those that are not necessary and whose opposite is therefore possible. 1-3 below is necessary, 4-6, contingent.
1. It is not the case that it is raining and not raining
2. 2 + 2= 4
3. All bachelors are unmarried.
4. It seldom rains in the Sahara.
5. There are more than four states in the USA.
6. Some bachelors drive Maserati.
Plantinga (1974, p. 2) characterizes the sense of necessity illustrated in 1-3 as ‘broadly logical’. For it includes not only truths of logic, but those of mathematics, set theory, and other quasi-logical ones. Yet it is not so broads as to include matters of causal or natural necessity, such as: Nothing travels faster than the speed of light.
One would like an account of the basis of our distinction and a criterion by which to apply it. Some suppose that necessary truths are those we know as deductively possible. But we lack the criterion for deductive truths, and there are necessary truths we do not know at all, e.g., undiscovered mathematical ones. It would not help to say that necessary truths are one, and it is possible, in the broadly logical sense, to know of a deductive circularity. Finally, Kripke (1972, p.253 v) and Plantinga (1974, p. 8) argues that some contingent truths are knowable by deductive reasoning. Similar problems face the suggestion that necessary truths are the ones we know with the fairest of certainties: We lack a criterion for certainty, there are necessary truths we do not know, and (barring dubious arguments for scepticism) it is reasonable to suppose that we know some contingent truths with certainty.
Leibniz defined a necessary truth as one whose opposite implies a contradiction. Every such proposition, he held, is either an explicit identity, i.e., of the form ‘A is A’, ‘AB is B’, etc.) or is reducible to an identity by successively substituting equivalent terms. (thus, 3 above might be so reduced by substituting ‘unmarried man’; for ‘bachelor’.) This has several advantages over the ideas of the previous paragraph. First, it explicated the notion of necessity and possibility and seems to provide a criterion we can apply. Second, because explicit identities are self-evident a deductive propositions, the theory implies that all necessary truths are knowable deductively, but it does not entail that wee actually know all of them, nor does it define ‘knowable’ in a circular way. Third, it implies that necessary truths are knowable with certainty, but does not preclude our having certain knowledge of contingent truths by means other than a reduction.
Nevertheless, this view is also problematic, and Leibniz’s examples of reductions are too sparse to prove a claim about all necessary truths. Some of his reductions, moreover, are deficient: Fridge has pointed out, for example, that his proof of ‘2 + 2 = 4' presupposes the principle of association and so does not depend on the principle of identity. More generally, it has been shown that arithmetic cannot be reduced to logic, but requires the resources of set theory as well. Finally, there are other necessary propositions, e.g., ‘Nothing can be red and green all over’, which do not seem to be reducible to identities and which Leibniz does not show how to reduce.
Leibniz and others have thought of truths as a property of propositions, where the latter are conceived as things that may be expressed by, but are distinct from, linguistic items like statements. On another approach, truth is a property of linguistic entities, and the basis of necessary truth in convention. Thus A.J. Ayer, for example,. Argued that the only necessary truths are analytic statements and that the latter rest entirely on our commitment to use words in certain ways.
The slogan ‘the meaning of a statement is its method of verification’ expresses the empirical verification’s theory of meaning. It is more than the general criterion of meaningfulness if and only if it is empirically verifiable. If says in addition what the meaning of a sentence is: It is all those observations that would confirm or disconfirmed the sentence. Sentences that would be verified or falsified by all the same observations are empirically equivalent or have the same meaning. A sentence is said to be cognitively meaningful if and only if it can be verified or falsified in experience. This is not meant to require that the sentence be conclusively verified or falsified, since universal scientific laws or hypotheses (which are supposed to pass the test) are not logically deducible from any amount of actually observed evidence.
When one predicate’s necessary truth of a preposition one speaks of modality de dicto. For one ascribes the modal property, necessary truth, to a dictum, namely, whatever proposition is taken as necessary. A venerable tradition, however, distinguishes this from necessary de re, wherein one predicates necessary or essential possession of some property to an on object. For example, the statement ‘4 is necessarily greater than 2' might be used to predicate of the object, 4, the property, being necessarily greater than 2. That objects have some of their properties necessarily, or essentially, and others only contingently, or accidentally, are a main part of the doctrine called ‘essentialism’. Thus, an essentialist might say that Socrates had the property of being bald accidentally, but that of being self-identical, or perhaps of being human, essentially. Although essentialism has been vigorously attacked in recent years, most particularly by Quine, it also has able contemporary proponents, such as Plantinga.
Modal necessity as seen by many philosophers whom have traditionally held that every proposition has a modal status as well as a truth value. Every proposition is either necessary or contingent as well as either true or false. The issue of knowledge of the modal status of propositions has received much attention because of its intimate relationship to the issue of deductive reasoning. For example, no propositions of the theoretic content that all knowledge of necessary propositions is deductively knowledgeable. Others reject this claim by citing Kripke’s (1980) alleged cases of necessary theoretical propositions. Such contentions are often inconclusive, for they fail to take into account the following tripartite distinction: ‘S’ knows the general modal status of ‘p’ just in case ‘S’ knows that ‘p’ is a necessary proposition or ‘S’ knows the truth that ‘p’ is a contingent proposition. ‘S’ knows the truth value of ‘p’ just in case ‘S’ knows that ‘p’ is true or ‘S’ knows that ‘p’ is false. ‘S’ knows the specific modal status of ‘p’ just in case ‘S’ knows that ‘p’ is necessarily true or ‘S’ knows that ‘p’ is necessarily false or ‘S’ knows that ‘p’ is contingently true or ‘S’ knows that ‘p’ is contingently false. It does not follow from the fact that knowledge of the general modal status of a proposition is a deductively reasoned distinctive modal status is also given to theoretical principles. Nor des it follow from the fact that knowledge of a specific modal status of a proposition is theoretically given as to the knowledge of its general modal status that also is deductive.
The certainties involving reason and a truth of fact are much in distinction by associative measures given through Leibniz, who declares that there are only two kinds of truths-truths of reason and truths of fact. The former are all either explicit identities, i.e., of the form ‘A is A’, ‘AB is B’, etc., or they are reducible to this form by successively substituting equivalent terms. Leibniz dubs them ‘truths of reason’ because the explicit identities are self-evident theoretical truth, whereas the rest can be converted to such by purely rational operations. Because their denial involves a demonstrable contradiction, Leibniz also says that truths of reason ‘rest on the principle of contraction, or identity’ and that they are necessary propositions, which are true of all possible worlds. Some examples are that All bachelors are unmarried’: The first is already of the form ‘AB is B’ and the latter can be reduced to this form by substituting ‘unmarried man’ for ‘bachelor’. Other examples, or so Leibniz believes, are ‘God exists’ and the truth of logic, arithmetic and geometry.
Truths of fact, on the other hand, cannot be reduced to an identity and our only way of knowing hem os a theoretical manifestations, or by reference to the fact of the empirical world. Likewise, since their denial does not involve as contradiction, their truth is merely contingent: They could have been otherwise and hold of the actual world, but not of every possible one. Some examples are ‘Caesar crossed the Rubicon’ and ‘Leibniz was born in Leipzig’, as well as propositions expressing correct scientific generalizations. In Leibniz’s view, truths of fact rest on the principle of sufficient reason, which states that nothing can be so unless thee is a reason that it is so. This reason is that the actual world (by which he means the total collection of things past, present and future) is better than any other possible world and was therefore created by God.
In defending the principle of sufficient reason, Leibniz runs into serious problems. He believes that in every true proposition, the concept of the predicate is contained in that of the subject. (This hols even for propositions like ‘Caesar crossed the Rubicon’: Leibniz thinks anyone who did not cross the Rubicon would not have been Caesar) And this containment relationship-that is eternal and unalterable even by God-guarantees that every truth has a sufficient reason. If truth consists in concept containment, however, then it seems that all truths are analytic and hence necessary, and if they are all necessary, surely they are all truths of reason. Leibniz responds that not evert truth can be reduced to an identity in a finite number of steps: In some instances revealing the connection between subject and predicate concepts would require an infinite analysis. But while this may entail that we cannot prove such propositions as deductively probable, it does not appear to show that the proposition could have been false. Intuitively, it seems a better ground for supposing that it is a necessary truth of a special sort. A related question arises from the idea that truths of fact depend on God’s decision to create the best world, if it is part of the concept of this world that it is best, how could its existence be other than necessary? Leibniz answers that its existence is only hypothetically necessary, i.e., it follows from God’s decision to create this world, but God is necessarily good, so how could he have decided to do anything else? Leibniz says much more about the matters, but it is not clear whether he offers any satisfactory solutions.
The modality of a proposition is the way in which it is true or false. The most important division is between propositions true of necessity, and those true asa things are: Necessary as opposed to contingent propositions. Other qualifiers sometimes called ‘modal’ include the tense indicators ‘It will be the case that p’ or It was the case that p’, and there are affinities between the ‘deontic indicators’, as, ;it ought to be the case that p’ or ‘it is permissible that p’, and the logical modalities as a logic that study the notions of necessity and possibility. Modal logic was of a great importance historically, particularly in the light of various doctrines concerning the necessary properties of the deity, but was not a central topic of modern logic in its golden period at the beginning of the 20th century. It was, however, revived by C. I. Lewis, by adding to a propositional or predicate calculus two operators, □ and ◊ (sometimes written N and M), meaning necessarily and possibly, respectively. These like p ➞ ◊ p and □ p ➞ p will be wanted. Controversial theses include □ p ➞ □□ p (if a proposition is necessary, it is necessarily necessary, characteristic of the system known as S4) and ◊ p ➞ □ ◊ p (if a proposition is possible, it is necessarily possible, characteristic of the system known as S5). The classical ‘modal theory’ for modal logic, due to Kripke and the Swedish logician Stig Kanger, involves valuing propositions not as true or false ‘simplicitiers’, but as true or false art possible worlds, with necessity then corresponding to truth in all worlds, and possibly to truths in some world.
The doctrine advocated by David Lewis, which different ‘possible worlds’ are to be thought of as existing exactly as this one does. Thinking in terms of possibilities is thinking of real worlds where things are different, this view has been charged with misrepresenting it as some insurmountably unseeing to why it is good to save the child from drowning, since there is still a possible world in which she (or her counterpart) drowned, and from the standpoint of the universe it should make no difference that world is actual. Critics asio charge either that the notion fails to fit with a coherent theory of how we know about possible worlds, or with a coherent theory about possible worlds, or with a coherent theory of why we are interested in them, but Lewis denies that any other way of interpreting modal statements is tenable.
Thus and so, the ‘standard analysis’ of propositional knowledge, suggested by Plato and Kant among others, implies that if one has a justified true belief that ‘p’, then one knows that ‘p’. The belief condition ‘p’ believes that ‘p’, the truth condition requires that any known proposition be true. And the justification condition requires that any known proposition be adequately justified, warranted or evidentially supported. Plato appears to be considering the tripartite definition in the ‘Theaetetus’ (201c-202d), and to be endorsing its jointly sufficient conditions for knowledge in the ‘Meno’ (97e-98a). This definition has come to be called ‘the standard analysis’ of knowledge, and has received a serious challenge from Edmund Gettier’s counterexamples in 1963. Gettier published two counterexamples to this implication of the standard analysis. In essence, they are:
(1) Smith and Jones have applied for the same job. Smith is justified in believing that (a) Jones will get the job, and that (b) Jones has ten coins in his pocket. On the basis of (a) and (b) Smith infers, and thus is justified in believing, that ©) the person who will get the job has ten coins in his pocket. At it turns out, Smith himself will get the job, and he also happens to have ten coins in his pocket. So, although Smith is justified in believing the true proposition ©), Smith does not know ©).
(2) Smith is justified in believing the false proposition that (a) Smith owns a Ford. On the basis of (a) Smith infers, and thus is justified in believing, that (b) either Jones owns a Ford or Brown is in Barcelona. As it turns out, Brown or in Barcelona, and so (b) is true. So although Smith is justified in believing the true proposition (b). Smith does not know (b).
Gettier’s counterexamples are thus cases where one has justified true belief that ‘p’, but lacks knowledge that ‘p’. The Gettier problem is the problem of finding a modification of, or an alterative to, the standard justified-true-belief analysis of knowledge that avoids counterexamples like Gettier’s. Some philosophers have suggested that Gettier style counterexamples are defective owing to their reliance on the false principle that false propositions can justify one’s belief in other propositions. But there are examples much like Gettier’s that do not depend on this allegedly false principle. Here is one example inspired by Keith and Richard Feldman:
(3) Suppose Smith knows the following proposition, ‘m’: Jones, whom Smith has always found to be reliable and whom Smith, has no reason to distrust now, has told Smith, his office-mate, that ‘p’: He, Jones owns a Ford. Suppose also that Jones has told Smith that ‘p’ only because of a state of hypnosis Jones is in, and that ‘p’ is true only because, unknown to himself, Jones has won a Ford in a lottery since entering the state of hypnosis. And suppose further that Smith deduces from ‘m’ its existential generalization, ‘q’: There is someone, whom Smith has always found to be reliable and whom Smith has no reason to distrust now, who has told Smith, his office-mate, that he owns a Ford. Smith, then, knows that ‘q’, since he has correctly deduced ‘q’ from ‘m’, which he also knows. But suppose also that on the basis of his knowledge that ‘q’. Smith believes that ‘r’: Someone in the office owns a Ford. Under these conditions, Smith has justified true belief that ‘r’, knows his evidence for ‘r’, but does not know that ‘r’.
Gettier-style examples of this sort have proven especially difficult for attempts to analyse the concept of propositional knowledge. The history of attempted solutions to the Gettier problem is complex and open-ended. It has not produced consensus on any solution. Many philosophers hold, in light of Gettier-style examples, that propositional knowledge requires a fourth condition, beyond the justification, truth and belief conditions. Although no particular fourth condition enjoys widespread endorsement, there are some prominent general proposals in circulation. One sort of proposed modification, the so-called ‘defeasibility analysis’, requires that the justification appropriate to knowledge be ‘undefeated’ in the general sense that some appropriate subjunctive conditional concerning genuine defeaters of justification be true of that justification. One straightforward defeasibility fourth condition, for instance, requires of Smith’s knowing that ‘p’ that there be no true proposition ‘q’, such that if ‘q’ became justified for Smith, ‘p’ would no longer be justified for Smith (Pappas and Swain, 1978). A different prominent modification requires that the actual justification for a true belief qualifying as knowledge not depend I a specified way on any falsehood (Armstrong, 1973). The details proposed to elaborate such approaches have met with considerable controversy.
The fourth condition of evidential truth-sustenance may be a speculative solution to the Gettier problem. More specifically, for a person, ‘S’, to have knowledge that ‘p’ on justifying evidence ‘e’, ‘e’ must be truth-sustained in this sense for every true proposition ‘t’ that, when conjoined with ‘e’, undermines S’s justification for ‘p’ on ‘e’, there is a true proposition, ‘t’, that, when conjoined with ‘e’ & ‘t’, restores the justification of ‘p’ for ‘S’ in a way that ‘S’ is actually justified in believing that ‘p’. The gist of this resolving evolution, put roughly, is that propositional knowledge requires justified true belief that is sustained by the collective totality of truths. Herein, is to argue in Knowledge and Evidence, that Gettier-style examples as (1)-(3), but various others as well.
Three features that proposed this solution merit emphasis. First, it avoids a subjunctive conditional in its fourth condition, and so escapes some difficult problems facing the use of such a conditional in an analysis of knowledge. Second, it allows for non-deductive justifying evidence as a component of propositional knowledge. An adequacy condition on an analysis of knowledge is that it does not restrict justifying evidence to relations of deductive support. Third, its proposed solution is sufficiently flexible to handle cases describable as follows:
(4) Smith has a justified true belief that ‘p’, but there is a true proposition, ‘t’, which undermines Smith’s justification for ‘p’ when conjoined with it, and which is such that it is either physically or humanly impossible for Smith to be justified in believing that ‘t’.
Examples represented by (4) suggest that we should countenance varying strengths in notions of propositional knowledge. These strengths are determined by accessibility qualifications on the set of relevant knowledge-precluding underminers. A very demanding concept of knowledge assumes that it need only be logically possible for a Knower to believe a knowledge-precluding underminer. Less demanding concepts assume that it must be physically or humanly possible for a Knower to believe knowledge-precluding underminers. But even such less demanding concepts of knowledge need to rely on a notion of truth-sustained evidence if they are to survive a threatening range of Gettier-style examples. Given to some resolution that it needs be that the forth condition for a notion of knowledge is not a function simply of the evidence a Knower actually possesses.
The higher controversial aftermath of Gettier’s original counterexamples has left some philosophers doubted of the real philosophical significance of the Gettier problem. Such doubt, however, seems misplaced. One fundamental branch of epistemology seeks understanding of the nature of propositional knowledge. And our understanding exactly what prepositional knowledge is essentially involves our having a Gettier-resistant analysis of such knowledge. If our analysis is not Gettier-resistant, we will lack an exact understanding of what propositional knowledge is. It is epistemologically important, therefore, to have a defensible solution to the Gettier problem, however, demanding such a solution is.
Propositional knowledge (PK) is the type of knowing whose instance are labelled by means of a phrase expressing some proposition, e.g., in English a phrase of the form ‘that h’, where some complete declarative sentence is instantial for ‘h’.
Theories of ‘PK’ differ over whether the proposition that ‘h’ is involved in a more intimate fashion, such as serving as a way of picking out a proposition attitude required for knowing, e.g., believing that ‘h’, accepting that ‘h’ or being sure that ‘h’. For instance, the tripartite analysis or standard analysis, treats ‘PK’ as consisting in having a justified, true belief that ‘h’ , the belief condition requires that anyone who knows that ‘h’ believes that ‘h’, the truth condition requires that any known proposition be true, in contrast, some regarded theories do so consider and treat ‘PK’ as the possession of specific abilities, capabilities, or powers, and that view the proposition that ‘h’ as needed to be expressed only in order to label a specific instance of ‘PK’.
Although most theories of Propositional knowledge (PK) purport to analyse it, philosophers disagree about the goal of a philosophical analysis. Theories of ‘PK’ may differ over whether they aim to cover all species of ‘PK’ and, if they do not have this goal, over whether they aim to reveal any unifying link between the species that they investigate, e.g., empirical knowledge, and other species of knowing.
Very many accounts of ‘PK’ have been inspired by the quest to add a fourth condition to the tripartite analysis so as to avoid Gettier-type counterexamples to it, whereby a fourth condition of evidential truth-sustenance for every true proposition when conjoined with a regaining justification, which may require the justified true belief that is sustained by the collective totality of truths that an adequacy condition of propositional knowledge not restrict justified evidences in relation of deductive support, such that we should countenance varying strengths in notions of propositional knowledge. Restoratively, these strengths are determined by accessibility qualifications on the set of relevant knowledge-precluding underminers. A very demanding concept of knowledge assumes that it need only be logically possible for a Knower to believe a knowledge-precluding undeterminers, and less demanding concepts that it must physically or humanly possible for a Knower to believe knowledge-precluding undeterminers. But even such demanding concepts of knowledge need to rely on a notion of truth-sustaining evidence if they are to survive a threatening range of Gettier-style examples. As the needed fourth condition for a notion of knowledge is not a function simply of the evidence a Knower actually possesses. One fundamental source of epistemology seeks understanding of the nature of propositional knowledge, and our understanding exactly what propositional knowledge is essentially involves our having a Gettier-resistant analysis of such knowledge. If our analysis is not Gettier-resistant, we will lack an exact understanding of what propositional knowledge is. It is epistemologically important, therefore, to have a defensible solution to the Gettier problem, however, demanding such a solution is. And by the resulting need to deal with other counterexamples provoked by these new analyses.
Keith Lehrer (1965) originated a Gettier-type example that has been a fertile source of important variants. It is the case of Mr Notgot, who is in one’s office and has provided some evidence, ‘e’, in response to all of which one forms a justified belief that Mr. Notgot is in the office and owns a Ford, thanks to which one arrives at the justified belief that ‘h': ‘Someone in the office owns a Ford’. In the example, ‘e’ consists of such things as Mr. Notgot’s presently showing one a certificate of Ford ownership while claiming to own a Ford and having been reliable in the past. Yet, Mr Notgot has just been shamming, and the only reason that it is true that ‘h1' is because, unbeknown to oneself, a different person in the office owns a Ford.
Variants on this example continue to challenge efforts to analyse species of ‘PK’. For instance, Alan Goldman (1988) has proposed that when one has empirical knowledge that ‘h’, when the state of affairs (call it h*) expressed by the proposition that ‘h’ figures prominently in an explanation of the occurrence of one’s believing that ‘h’, where explanation is taken to involve one of a variety of probability relations concerning ‘h*’ , and the belief state. But this account runs foul of a variant on the Notgot case akin to one that Lehrer (1979) has described. In Lehrer’s variant, Mr Notgot has manifested a compulsion to trick people into justified believing truths yet falling short of knowledge by means of concocting Gettierized evidence for those truths. It we make the trickster’s neuroses highly specific ti the type of information contained in the proposition that ‘h’, we obtain a variant satisfying Goldman’s requirement That the occurrences of ‘h*’ significantly raises the probability of one’s believing that ‘h’. (Lehrer himself (1990, pp. 103-4) has criticized Goldman by questioning whether, when one has ordinary perceptual knowledge that abn object is present, the presence of the object is what explains one’s believing it to be present.)
In grappling with Gettier-type examples, some analyses proscribe specific relations between falsehoods and the evidence or grounds that justify one’s believing. A simple restriction of this type requires that one’s reasoning to the belief that ‘h’ does not crucially depend upon any false lemma (such as the false proposition that Mr Notgot is in the office and owns a Ford). However, Gettier-type examples have been constructed where one does not reason through and false belief, e.g., a variant of the Notgot case where one arrives at belief that ‘h’, by basing it upon a true existential generalization of one’s evidence: ‘There is someone in the office who has provided evidence e’, in response to similar cases, Sosa (1991) has proposed that for ‘PK’ the ‘basis’ for the justification of one’s belief that ‘h’ must not involve one’s being justified in believing or in ‘presupposing’ any falsehood, even if one’s reasoning to the belief does not employ that falsehood as a lemma. Alternatively, Roderick Chisholm (1989) requires that if there is something that makes the proposition that ‘h’ evident for one and yet makes something else that is false evident for one, then the proposition that ‘h’ is implied by a conjunction of propositions, each of which is evident for one and is such that something that makes it evident for one makes no falsehood evident for one. Other types of analyses are concerned with the role of falsehoods within the justification of the proposition that ‘h’ (Versus the justification of one’s believing that ‘h’). Such a theory may require that one’s evidence bearing on this justification not already contain falsehoods. Or it may require that no falsehoods are involved at specific places in a special explanatory structure relating to the justification of the proposition that ‘h’ (Shope, 1983.).
A frequently pursued line of research concerning a fourth condition of knowing seeks what is called a ‘defeasibility’ analysis of ‘PK.’ Early versions characterized defeasibility by means of subjunctive conditionals of the form, ‘If ‘A’ were the case then ‘B’ would be the case’. But more recently the label has been applied to conditions about evidential or justificational relations that are not themselves characterized in terms of conditionals. Early versions of defeasibility theories advanced conditionals where ‘A’ is a hypothetical situation concerning one’s acquisition of a specified sort of epistemic status for specified propositions, e.g., one’s acquiring justified belief in some further evidence or truths, and ‘B’; concerned, for instance, the continued justified status of the proposition that ‘h’ or of one’s believing that ‘h’.
A unifying thread connecting the conditional and non-conditional approaches to defeasibility may lie in the following facts: (1) What is a reason for being in a propositional attitude is in part a consideration , instances of the thought of which have the power to affect relevant processes of propositional attitude formation?: (2) Philosophers have often hoped to analyse power ascriptions by means of conditional statements: And (3) Arguments portraying evidential or justificational relations are abstractions from those processes of propositional attitude maintenance and formation that manifest rationality. So even when some circumstance, ‘R’, is a reason for believing or accepting that ‘h’, another circumstance, ‘K’ may present an occasion from being present for a rational manifestation of the relevant power of the thought of ‘R’ and it will not be a good argument to base a conclusion that ‘h’ on the premiss that ‘R’ and ‘K’ obtain. Whether ‘K’ does play this interfering, ‘defeating’. Role will depend upon the total relevant situation.
Accordingly, one of the most sophisticated defeasibility accounts, which has been proposed by John Pollock (1986), requires that in order to know that ‘h’, one must believe that ‘h’ on the basis of an argument whose force is not defeated in the above way, given the total set of circumstances described by all truths. More specifically, Pollock defines defeat as a situation where (1) one believes that ‘p’ and it is logically possible for one to become justified in believing that ‘h’ by believing that ’p’, and (2) on e actually has a further set of beliefs, ‘S’ logically has a further set of beliefs, ‘S’, logically consistent with the proposition that ‘h’, such that it is not logically possible for one to become justified in believing that ‘h’ by believing it ion the basis of holding the set of beliefs that is the union of ‘S’ with the belief that ‘p’ (Pollock, 1986, pp. 36, 38). Furthermore, Pollock requires for ‘PK’ that the rational presupposition in favour of one’s believing that ‘h’ created by one’s believing that ‘p’ is undefeated by the set of all truths, including considerations that one does not actually believe. Pollock offers no definition of what this requirements means. But he may intend roughly the following: There ‘T’ is the set of all true propositions: (I) one believes that ‘p’ and it is logically possible for one to become justified in believing that ‘h’; by believing that ‘p’. And (II) there are logically possible situations in which one becomes justified in believing that ‘h’ on the bass of having the belief that ‘p’ and the beliefs in ‘T’ . Thus, in the Notgot example, since ‘T’ includes the proposition that Mr. Notgot does own a Ford, one lack’s knowledge because condition (II) is not satisfied.
But given such an interpretation. Pollock’s account illustrates the fact that defeasibility theories typically have difficulty dealing with introspective knowledge of one’s beliefs. Suppose that some proposition, say that ƒ, is false, but one does not realize this and holds the belief that ƒ. Condition
(II) has no knowledge that h2 ?: ‘I believe that ƒ’. At least this is so if one’s reason for believing that h2 includes the presence of the very condition of which one is aware, i.e., one’s believing that ƒ. It is incoherent to suppose hat one retains the latter reason, also, believes the truth that not-ƒ. This objection can be avoided, but at the cost of adopting what is a controversial view about introspective knowledge that ‘h’,namely, the view that one’s belief that ‘h’ is in such cases mediated by some mental state intervening between the mental state of which there is introspective knowledge and he belief that ‘h’, so that is mental state is rather than the introspected state that it is included in one’s reason for believing that ‘h’. In order to avoid adopting this controversial view, Paul Moser (1989) gas proposed a disjunctive analysis of ‘PK’, which requires that either one satisfy a defeasibility condition rather than like Pollock’s or else one believes that ‘h’ by introspection. However, Moser leaves obscure exactly why beliefs arrived at by introspections account as knowledge.
Early versions of defeasibility theories had difficulty allowing for the existence of evidence that is ‘merely misleading’, as in the case where one does know that ‘h3: ‘Tom Grabit stole a book from the library’, thanks to having seen him steal it, yet where, unbeknown to oneself, Tom’s mother out of dementia gas testified that Tom was far away from the library at the time of the theft. One’s justifiably believing that she gave the testimony would destroy one’s justification for believing that ‘h3' if added by itself to one’s present evidence.
At least some defeasibility theories cannot deal with the knowledge one has while dying that ‘h4: ‘In this life there is no timer at which I believe that ‘d’, where the proposition that ‘d’ expresses the details regarding some philosophical matter, e.g., the maximum number of blades of grass ever simultaneously growing on the earth. When it just so happens that it is true that ‘d’, defeasibility analyses typically consider the addition to one’s dying thoughts of a belief that ‘d’ in such a way as to improperly rule out actual knowledge that ‘h4'.
A quite different approach to knowledge, and one able to deal with some Gettier-type cases, involves developing some type of causal theory of Propositional knowledge. The interesting thesis that counts as a causal theory of justification (in the meaning of ‘causal theory; intended here) is the that of a belief is justified just in case it was produced by a type of process that is ‘globally’ reliable, that is, its propensity to produce true beliefs-that can be defined (to a god enough approximation) as the proportion of the bailiffs it produces (or would produce were it used as much as opportunity allows) that are true-is sufficiently meaningful-variations of this view have been advanced for both knowledge and justified belief. The first formulation of reliability account of knowing appeared in a note by F.P. Ramsey (1931), who said that a belief was knowledge if it is true, certain can obtain by a reliable process. P. Unger (1968) suggested that ‘S’ knows that ‘p’ just in case it is not at all accidental that ‘S’ is right about its being the casse that ‘p’. D.M. Armstrong (1973) said that a non-inferential belief qualified as knowledge if the belief has properties that are nominally sufficient for its truth, i.e., guarantee its truth through and by the laws of nature.
Such theories require that one or another specified relation hold that can be characterized by mention of some aspect of cassation concerning one’s belief that ‘h’ (or one’s acceptance of the proposition that ‘h’) and its relation to state of affairs ‘h*’, e.g., h* causes the belief: h* is causally sufficient for the belief h* and the belief have a common cause. Such simple versions of a causal theory are able to deal with the original Notgot case, since it involves no such causal relationship, but cannot explain why there is ignorance in the variants where Notgot and Berent Enç (1984) have pointed out that sometimes one knows of χ that is ø thanks to recognizing a feature merely corelated with the presence of øness without endorsing a causal theory themselves, there suggest that it would need to be elaborated so as to allow that one’s belief that χ has ø has been caused by a factor whose correlation with the presence of øness has caused in oneself, e.g., by evolutionary adaption in one’s ancestors, the disposition that one manifests in acquiring the belief in response to the correlated factor. Not only does this strain the unity of as causal theory by complicating it, but no causal theory without other shortcomings has been able to cover instances of deductively reasoned knowledge.
Causal theories of Propositional knowledge differ over whether they deviate from the tripartite analysis by dropping the requirements that one’s believing (accepting) that ‘h’ be justified. The same variation occurs regarding reliability theories, which present the Knower as reliable concerning the issue of whether or not ‘h’, in the sense that some of one’s cognitive or epistemic states, θ, are such that, given further characteristics of oneself-possibly including relations to factors external to one and which one may not be aware-it is nomologically necessary (or at least probable) that ‘h’. In some versions, the reliability is required to be ‘global’ in as far as it must concern a nomologically (probabilistic) relationship) relationship of states of type θ to the acquisition of true beliefs about a wider range of issues than merely whether or not ‘h’. There is also controversy about how to delineate the limits of what constitutes a type of relevant personal state or characteristic. (For example, in a case where Mr Notgot has not been shamming and one does know thereby that someone in the office owns a Ford, such as a way of forming beliefs about the properties of persons spatially close to one, or instead something narrower, such as a way of forming beliefs about Ford owners in offices partly upon the basis of their relevant testimony?)
One important variety of reliability theory is a conclusive reason account, which includes a requirement that one’s reasons for believing that ‘h’ be such that in one’s circumstances, if h* were not to occur then, e.g., one would not have the reasons one does for believing that ‘h’, or, e.g., one would not believe that ‘h’. Roughly, the latter is demanded by theories that treat a Knower as ‘tracking the truth’, theories that include the further demand that is roughly, if it were the case, that ‘h’, then one would believe that ‘h’. A version of the tracking theory has been defended by Robert Nozick (1981), who adds that if what he calls a ‘method’ has been used to arrive at the belief that ‘h’, then the antecedent clauses of the two conditionals that characterize tracking will need to include the hypothesis that one would employ the very same method.
But unless more conditions are added to Nozick’s analysis, it will be too weak to explain why one lack’s knowledge in a version of the last variant of the tricky Mr Notgot case described above, where we add the following details: (a) Mr Notgot’s compulsion is not easily changed, (b) while in the office, Mr Notgot has no other easy trick of the relevant type to play on one, and ©) one arrives at one’s belief that ‘h’, not by reasoning through a false belief ut by basing belief that ‘h’, upon a true existential generalization of one’s evidence.
Nozick’s analysis is in addition too strong to permit anyone ever to know that ‘h’: ‘Some of my beliefs about beliefs might be otherwise, e.g., I might have rejected on of them’. If I know that ‘h5' then satisfaction of the antecedent of one of Nozick’s conditionals would involve its being false that ‘h5', thereby thwarting satisfaction of the consequent’s requirement that I not then believe that ‘h5'. For the belief that ‘h5' is itself one of my beliefs about beliefs (Shope, 1984).
Some philosophers think that the category of knowing for which true. Justified believing (accepting) is a requirement constituting only a species of Propositional knowledge, construed as an even broader category. They have proposed various examples of ‘PK’ that do not satisfy the belief and/ort justification conditions of the tripartite analysis. Such cases are often recognized by analyses of Propositional knowledge in terms of powers, capacities, or abilities. For instance, Alan R. White (1982) treats ‘PK’ as merely the ability to provide a correct answer to a possible questions, however, White may be equating ‘producing’ knowledge in the sense of producing ‘the correct answer to a possible question’ with ‘displaying’ knowledge in the sense of manifesting knowledge. (White, 1982). The latter can be done even by very young children and some non-human animals independently of their being asked questions, understanding questions, or recognizing answers to questions. Indeed, an example that has been proposed as an instance of knowing that ‘h’ without believing or accepting that ‘h’ can be modified so as to illustrate this point. Two examples concerns an imaginary person who has no special training or information about horses or racing, but who in an experiment persistently and correctly picks the winners of upcoming horseraces. If the example is modified so that the hypothetical ‘seer’ never picks winners but only muses over whether those horses wight win, or only reports those horses winning, this behaviour should be as much of a candidate for the person’s manifesting knowledge that the horse in question will win as would be the behaviour of picking it as a winner.
These considerations expose limitations in Edward Craig’s analysis (1990) of the concept of knowing of a person’s being a satisfactory informant in relation to an inquirer who wants to find out whether or not ‘h’. Craig realizes that counterexamples to his analysis appear to be constituted by Knower who are too recalcitrant to inform the inquirer, or too incapacitate to inform, or too discredited to be worth considering (as with the boy who cried ‘Wolf’). Craig admits that this might make preferable some alternative view of knowledge as a different state that helps to explain the presence of the state of being a suitable informant when the latter does obtain. Such the alternate, which offers a recursive definition that concerns one’s having the power to proceed in a way representing the state of affairs, causally involved in one’s proceeding in this way. When combined with a suitable analysis of representing, this theory of propositional knowledge can be unified with a structurally similar analysis of knowing how to do something.
Knowledge and belief, according to most epistemologists, knowledge entails belief, so that I cannot know that such and such is the case unless I believe that such and such is the case. Others think this entailment thesis can be rendered more accurately if we substitute for belief some closely related attitude. For instance, several philosophers would prefer to say that knowledge entail psychological certainties (Prichard, 1950 and Ayer, 1956) or conviction (Lehrer, 1974) or acceptance (Lehrer, 1989). None the less, there are arguments against all versions of the thesis that knowledge requires having a belief-like attitude toward the known. These arguments are given by philosophers who think that knowledge and belief (or a facsimile) are mutually incompatible (the incomparability thesis), or by ones who say that knowledge does not entail belief, or vice versa, so that each may exist without the other, but the two may also coexist (the separability thesis).
The incompatibility thesis is sometimes traced to Plato ©. 429-347 BC) in view of his claim that knowledge is infallible while belief or opinion is fallible (‘Republic’ 476-9). But this claim would not support the thesis. Belief might be a component of an infallible form of knowledge in spite of the fallibility of belief. Perhaps, knowledge involves some factor that compensates for the fallibility of belief.
A. Duncan-Jones (1939: Also Vendler, 1978) cite linguistic evidence to back up the incompatibility thesis. He notes that people often say ‘I do not believe she is guilty. I know she is’ and the like, which suggest that belief rule out knowledge. However, as Lehrer (1974) indicates, the above exclamation is only a more emphatic way of saying ‘I do not just believe she is guilty, I know she is’ where ‘just’ makes it especially clear that the speaker is signalling that she has something more salient than mere belief, not that she has something inconsistent with belief, namely knowledge. Compare: ‘You do not hurt him, you killed him’.
H.A. Prichard (1966) offers a defence of the incompatibility thesis that hinges on the equation of knowledge with certainty (both infallibility and psychological certitude) and the assumption that when we believe in the truth of a claim we are not certain about its truth. Given that belief always involves uncertainty while knowledge never dies, believing something rules out the possibility of knowing it. Unfortunately, however, Prichard gives ‘us’ no goods reason to grant that states of belief are never ones involving confidence. Conscious beliefs clearly involve some level of confidence, to suggest that we cease to believe things about which we are completely confident is bizarre.
A.D. Woozley (1953) defends a version of the separability thesis. Woozley’s version, which deals with psychological certainty rather than belief per se, is that knowledge can exist in the absence of confidence about the item known, although might also be accompanied by confidence as well. Woozley remarks that the test of whether I know something is ‘what I can do, where what I can do may include answering questions’. On the basis of this remark he suggests that even when people are unsure of the truth of a claim, they might know that the claim is true. We unhesitatingly attribute knowledge to people who give correct responses on examinations even if those people show no confidence in their answers. Woozley acknowledges, however, that it would be odd for those who lack confidence to claim knowledge. It would be peculiar to say, ‘I am unsure whether my answer is true: Still, I know it is correct’. But this tension Woozley explains using a distinction between conditions under which we are justified in making a claim (such as a claim to know something), and conditions under which the claim we make is true. While ‘I know such and such’ might be true even if I am unsure whether such and such holds, nonetheless it would be inappropriate for me to claim that I know that such and such unless I were sure of the truth of my claim.
Colin Radford (1966) extends Woozley’s defence of the separability thesis. In Radford’s view, not only is knowledge compatible with the lack of certainty, it is also compatible with a complete lack of belief. He argues by example. In one example, Jean has forgotten that he learned some English history year’s priori and yet he is able to give several correct responses to questions such as ‘When did the Battle of Hastings occur’? Since he forgot that he took history, he considers the correct response to be no more than guesses. Thus, when he says that the Battle of Hastings took place in 1066 he would deny having the belief that the Battle of Hastings took place in 1066. A disposition he would deny being responsible (or having the right to be convincing) that 1066 was the correct date. Radford would none the less insist that Jean know when the Battle occurred, since clearly be remembering the correct date. Radford admits that it would be inappropriate for Jean to say that he knew when the Battle of Hastings occurred, but, like Woozley he attributes the impropriety to a fact about when it is and is not appropriate to claim knowledge. When we claim knowledge, we ought, at least to believe that we have the knowledge we claim, or else our behaviour is ‘intentionally misleading’.
Those that agree with Radford’s defence of the separability thesis will probably think of belief as an inner state that can be detected through introspection. That Jean lack’s beliefs about English history is plausible on this Cartesian picture since Jean does not find himself with any beliefs about English history when ne seek them out. One might criticize Radford, however, by rejecting that Cartesian view of belief. One could argue that some beliefs are thoroughly unconscious, for example. Or one could adopt a behaviourist conception of belief, such as Alexander Bain’s (1859), according to which having beliefs is a matter of the way people are disposed to behave (and has not Radford already adopted a behaviourist conception of knowledge?) Since Jean gives the correct response when queried, a form of verbal behaviour, a behaviourist would be tempted to credit him with the belief that the Battle of Hastings occurred in 1066.
D.M. Armstrong (1873) takes a different tack against Radford. Jean does know that the Battle of Hastings took place in 1066. Armstrong will grant Radfod that point, in fact, Armstrong suggests that Jean believe that 1066 is not the date the Battle of Hastings occurred, for Armstrong equates the belief that such and such is just possible but no more than just possible with the belief that such and such is not the case. However, Armstrong insists, Jean also believes that the Battle did occur in 1066. After all, had Jean been mistaught that the Battle occurred in 1066, and subsequently ‘guessed’ that it took place in 1066, we would surely describe the situation as one in which Jean’s false belief about the Battle became unconscious over time but persisted of a memory trace that was causally responsible for his guess. Out of consistency, we must describe Radford’s original case as one that Jean’s true belief became unconscious but persisted long enough to cause his guess. Thus, while Jean consciously believes that the Battle did not occur in 1066, unconsciously he does believe it occurred in 1066. So after all, Radford does not have a counterexample to the claim that knowledge entails belief.
Armstrong’s response to Radford was to reject Radford’s claim that the examinee lacked the relevant belief about English history. Another response is to argue that the examinee lacks the knowledge Radford attributes to him (cf. Sorenson, 1982). If Armstrong is correct in suggesting that Jean believes both that 1066 is and that it is not the date of the Battle of Hastings, one might deny Jean knowledge on the grounds that people who believe the denial of what they believe cannot be said t know the truth of their belief. Another strategy might be to compare the examinee case with examples of ignorance given in recent attacks on externalist accounts of knowledge (needless to say. Externalists themselves would tend not to favour this strategy). Consider the following case developed by BonJour (1985): For no apparent reason, Samantha believes that she is clairvoyant. Again, for no apparent reason, she one day comes to believe that the President is in New York City, even though she has every reason to believe that the President is in Washington, DC. In fact, Samantha is a completely reliable clairvoyant, and she has arrived at her belief about the whereabouts of the President thorough the power of her clairvoyance. Yet surely Samantha’s belief is completely irrational. She is not justified in thinking what she does. If so, then she does not know where the President is. But Radford’s examinee is unconventional. Even if Jean lacks the belief that Radford denies him, Radford does not have an example of knowledge that is unattended with belief. Suppose that Jean’s memory had been sufficiently powerful to produce the relevant belief. As Radford says, in having every reason to suppose that his response is mere guesswork, and he has every reason to consider his belief false. His belief would be an irrational one, and hence one about whose truth Jean would be ignorant.
Least has been of mention to an approaching view from which ‘perception’ basis upon itself as a fundamental philosophical topic both for its central place in ant theory of knowledge, and its central place un any theory of consciousness. Philosophy in this area is constrained by a number of properties that we believe to hold of perception, (1) It gives ‘us’ knowledge of the world around ‘us’. (2) We are conscious of that world by being aware of ‘sensible qualities’: Colour, sounds, tastes, smells, felt warmth, and the shapes and positions of objects in the environment. (3) Such consciousness is effected through highly complex information channels, such as the output of the three different types of colour-sensitive cells in the eye, or the channels in the ear for interpreting pulses of air pressure as frequencies of sound. (4) There ensues even more complex neurophysiological coding of that information, and eventually higher-order brain functions bring it about that we interpreted the information so received. (Much of this complexity has been revealed by the difficulties of writing programs enabling computers to recognize quite simple aspects of the visual scene.) The problem is to avoid thinking of here being a central, ghostly, conscious self, fed information in the same way that a screen if fed information by a remote television camera. Once such a model is in place, experience will seem like a veil getting between ‘us’ and the world, and the direct objects of perception will seem to be private items in an inner theatre or sensorium. The difficulty of avoiding this model is epically cute when we considered the secondary qualities of colour, sound, tactile feelings and taste, which can easily seem to have a purely private existence inside the perceiver, like sensation of pain. Calling such supposed items names like ‘sense-data’ or ‘percepts’ exacerbates the tendency, but once the model is in place, the first property, that perception gives ‘us’ knowledge of the world and its surrounding surfaces, is quickly threatened, for there will now seem little connection between these items in immediate experience and any independent reality. Reactions to this problem include ‘scepticism’ and ‘idealism’.
A more hopeful approach is to claim that the complexities of (3) and (4) explain how we can have direct acquaintance of the world, than suggesting that the acquaintance we do have been at best indirect. It is pointed out that perceptions are not like sensation, precisely because they have a content, or outer-directed nature. To have a perception is to be aware of the world for being such-and-such a way, than to enjoy a mere modification of sensation. But such direct realism has to be sustained in the face of the evident personal (neurophysiological and other) factors determining haw we perceive. One approach is to ask why it is useful to be conscious of what we perceive, when other aspects of our functioning work with information determining responses without any conscious awareness or intervention. A solution to this problem would offer the hope of making consciousness part of the natural world, than a strange optional extra.
Furthering, perceptual knowledge is knowledge acquired by or through the senses and includes most of what we know. We cross intersections when we see the light turn green, head for the kitchen when we smell the roast burning, squeeze the fruit to determine its ripeness, and climb out of bed when we hear the alarm ring. In each case we come to know something-that the light has turned green, that the roast is burning, that the melon is overripe, and that it is time to get up-by some sensory means. Seeing that the light has turned green is learning something-that the light has turned green-by use of the eyes. Feeling that the melon is overripe is coming to know a fact-that the melon is overripe-by one’s sense to touch. In each case the resulting knowledge is somehow based on, derived from or grounded in the sort of experience that characterizes the sense modality in question.
Much of our perceptual knowledge is indirect, dependent or derived. By this I mean that the facts we describe ourselves as learning, as coming to know, by perceptual means are pieces of knowledge that depend on our coming to know something else, some other fact, in a more direct way. We see, by the gauge, that we need gas, see, by the newspapers, that our team has lost again, see, by her expression, that she is nervous. This derived or dependent sort of knowledge is particularly prevalent in the cases of vision, but it occurs, to a lesser degree, in every sense modality. We install bells and other noise-makers so that we calm for example, hear (by the bell) that someone is at the door and (by the alarm) that its time to get up. When we obtain knowledge in this way, it is clear that unless one sees-hence, comes to know something about the gauge (that it says) and (hence, know) that one is described as coming to know by perceptual means. If one cannot hear that the bell is ringing, one cannot-in at least in this way-hear that one’s visitors have arrived. In such cases one sees (hears, smells, etc.) that ‘a’ is ‘F’, coming to know thereby that ‘a’ is ‘F’, by seeing (hearing, etc.) that some other condition, ‘b’s’ being ‘G’, obtains when this occurs, the knowledge (that ‘a’ is ‘F’) is derived from, or dependent on, the more basic perceptual knowledge that ‘b’ is ‘G’.
In its earliest of formidable combinations were awaiting the presence to the future extending for several of thousands of years, that ‘Nothing was constant in the whole world.’ Discoveries made since, throughout this intermittent interval, especially in sciences were comforted by such topis as astronomy, geology, and physiology, and have borne out, to an extent that contemporaries could not have previously conceived. The heavens and everything that lie below them change their shape, as do the earth and all that it contains . . . our own bodies are always ceaselessly changing, and what we have been, or now are, we shall not be tomorrow. Intellectually we know this well; but the feeling-realization of the all-persuasiveness of change is a realization that persistently rouses anxiety in us. The manifestations and determinants of this anxiety concerning change are the components derived from ‘subjective’ after-effects of years-long exposed to extremely poor integrations, and the ‘objectivity’ as implicated by the associative orientations so as directorially propositioned to law and order.
Briefly, to note , that to a degree such anxiety is existential in nature: Not only do we know, from our life experience, that change may prove harmful to us; we know, also, that none of us can escape the final change that will rob us of life itself.
Mankind’s anxiety in face of the universality of change is revealed in many areas of human activity, as a triplet of disclosed entries will be of comment. It is to be seen, first, in the dependence of so many of us upon the religious concept of a god, somewhere, which is not only omnipotent but external and changeless. Secondly, the history of philosophy shows that a long series of philosophers has devoted their efforts to the delineation of something eternal, enshrined in a changing world. Plato, for example, postulated in his Theory of Ideas, which he considered the object of true knowledge, and he regarded the perpetually changing things of ordinary life is merely the transitory manifestation of these. Plotinus, the last of the great Greek philosophers, went as far as to assert that only the ‘spiritual’ world is real, and held that the changing world of perception flows from this spiritual world like light from an unvarying undiminishing source. Aristotle postulated a Thought of Thought, a god who is immutable and apart fro what is happening in the world, as did Spinosa state that the essences of individual mutable things are to be sought only from fixed and external things.
In our anxiety concerning the ubiquity of change, we may find refuge not only in religious or in the pursuit of some personal philosophy as such, but, thirdly, in scientific endeavours, having to point out that science, by it is very nature, can work only what is supposed to repeat itself, and therefore, in vain, does life evolve before our eyes as a continuous creation of unforeseeable form: The idea always persists that form, unforseeablity and continuity are mere appearances - the outward reflection of our own ignorance
Freud gives a picture of which leaves an inaccurate but comforting impression that at least a part of us - namely that in which is free from change. In his paper entitled Thoughts for the Times on War and Death. In 1915, he said, . . . the evolution of the mind shows a peculiarity that is present in no other process of development. When a village grows into a town, a child into the man, the village and the child become submerged in the town and the man. . . . It is otherwise with the development of the mind
. . . The primitive stage [of mental development] can always be re-established; primitive mind is, in the fullest meaning of the word, imperishable.
Thus, no matter what the current debate or discussion, the central issue is often without conceptual and contextual representation, that if one is without concept, one is without idea, such if in one foul swoop would ingest the mere truth that lies in the underlying paradoxes of why is there something instead of nothing? Whatever it is that makes it would otherwise be mere utterances and inscriptions into the instrumentation of communication and understanding. This philosophical problem is to demystify the over-flowing emptiness that what we know of ourselves and subjectively reassembles the reality of our inherent worldly perceptions.
It is just that scientists are unbiased observers who use the scientific method to confirm conclusively and conclusively falsify various theories. These experts have no preconceptions in gathering the data and logically derive theories from these objective observations. One great strength of science is that it is self-correcting, because scientists readily abandon theories when they are shown to be rational. Although such eminent views of science have been accepted by many people, they are almost completely untrue. Data can neither conclusively confirm nor conclusively falsify theories, there really is no such thing as the scientific method, data become somewhat subjective in practice, and scientists have displayed a surprisingly fierce loyalty to their theories. There have been many misconceptions of what science is and is not.
Science is a project whose goal is to obtain knowledge of the natural world. The philosophy of science is a discipline that deals with the system of science itself. It examines science’s structure, components, techniques, assumptions, limitations, and so forth.
Since so much of life both inside and outside the study is concerned with finding explanations of things, it would be desirable of having a concept of what counts as good explanations, and what distinguished good from bad. Under the influence of logical positivist approaches to the structure of science, it was felted that the criterion ought to be found in a definite logical relationship between the explananas (that which does the explaining) and the explananadum (that which is to be explained). This approach culminated in the covering law model of explanation, or the view that an event is explained when it is subsumed under a law of nature, that is, its occurrence is deducible from the law plus a set of initial conditions. A law would itself explained by being deduced from a higher-order or covering law, in the way that Kepler’s laws of planetary motion are deducible from Newton’s laws of motion. The covering law model may be adapted to include explanation by showing that something is probable, given a statistical law. Questions for the covering law model include querying whether laws are necessary to explanation (we explain everyday events without overtly citing laws); querying whether they are sufficient (it may not explain an event just to say that it is an example of the kind of thing that always happens); and querying whether a purely logical relationship is adapted to capturing the requirements we make of explanation. There may include, for instance, that we have a ‘feel’ for what is happening, or that the explanation proceeds concerning things that are familiar to us or improbability, or that we can give a model of what is going on. None of these notions is captured in a purely logical approach. Recent work, therefore, has tended to stress the contextual and pragmatic elements in requirements for explanation, so that what counts as a good explanation given one set of categorical concerns may not do so given another.
Science frequently protests against the encroachments of the philosopher who wishes to interpret its theories in a metaphysical sense. ‘You keep to your province. ‘I will keep to mine,’ it says to the metaphysician ‘I am concerned only with phenomena, their sequences and their quantitative relations you are concerned with substance and accident, matter and form, cause and affect in a word, with reality itself.’ ‘Let us be content to leave one another alone and to keep our provinces distinct.’
This principle might work very well, provided the province of science could be completely shut off from the realm of philosophy, and provided neither philosophers nor scientists were anxious to scale the dividing wall. Unfortunately, neither condition is completely fulfilled. The respective provinces of science and of philosophy coincide in two points. In the first place, the phenomena whose variations are measured, classified, and to some extent explained by the scientist, are precisely the same as those whose ratio essendi and ratio cognoscendi the philosopher seeks to discover; while the methods that the scientist uses presuppose the principles of sound logic, a discussion of which clearly lies within the sphere of the philosopher, quâ logicians. In the second place: Often enough the scientists are not content to keep to his science. He insists upon his right to speculate metaphysically on the validity of scientific theories and on the ultimate nature of the phenomena with which he has to deal, and it is by no means uncommon to find that he mingles his metaphysical assumptions with the methods and principles of his science.
Epistemology or science is that part of philosophy that asks ‘what can we know?’ ‘What can we be sure of?’ ‘How do we get beyond mere opinion to real knowledge?’ Traditionally, there are two approaches to epistemology: Rationalism, which says we gain knowledge through reasoning, and empiricism, which says we gain knowledge through sensory experience. Although there are a few extremist philosophers, generally most agree that both these approaches to knowledge are needed, and that to some extent they support and correct each other.
Rationalists focus on what they call necessary truth. By that they mean that certain things are necessarily true, always, universally. Another term that means the same thing is a priori truth. ‘A priori’ is Latin for ‘beforehand,’ so a priori truth is something you know must be true before you even start looking at the world the senses reveal to us.
The most basic form of necessary truth is the self-evident truth. Self-evident means you do not really even have to think about it. It has to be true. The truths of mathematics, for example, are often thought of as self-evident. One plus one equal’s two. You do not need to go all over the world counting things to prove this. In fact, one plus one equal two is something you need to believe before you can count at all. (One of the criticisms that empiricists would put forth is that ‘one plus one is two’ is trivial. It is tautological, meaning it is true, sure, but not because it is self-evident: It is true because we made it that way. One plus one is the definition of two, and so with the rest of mathematics. We created math in such a way that it works consistently for us.
Other self-evident truths that have been put forth over the years include ‘you cannot be in two places at once,’ ‘something either is or it isn’t,’ ‘everything exists.’ These are pretty good candidates, ‘don’t you think?’ Nonetheless, it is self-evident to one person is not self-evident to another. ‘God exists’ is perhaps the most obvious one, and some people disagree with it quite vigorously. Or ‘the universe had to have a beginning’
- some people believe it has always been. A familiar use of the phrase ‘self-evident’ is Thomas Jefferson's use of it in the Declaration of Independence: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident: That all men are created equal,’ . . . still, it is pretty obvious to most that this is not, really, true. Instead, it is a rhetorical device, that is, it sounds good to put it that way
In order to reason our way to more complex knowledge, we have to add deduction (also known as analytic truth) to the picture. This is what we usually think of when we think of thinking: With the rules of logic, we can discover what truths follow from other truths. The basic form of this is the syllogism, a pattern invented by Aristotle that has continued to be the foundation of logic to the present
The traditional example is this one, called modus ponens: ‘Men are mortal.’ ‘Socrates is a man.’ Therefore ‘Socrates is mortal.’ If ‘x’, then ‘y’ (if you are human, then you are mortal). ‘x’ (you are human). Therefore, ‘y’ (you are mortal). This result will always be true, if the first two parts are true. So we can create whole systems of knowledge by using more and more of these logical deductions.
Another syllogism that always works is in the form ‘If ‘x’, then ‘y’ not ‘y’, . . . therefore not ‘x’.’ If you are human, then you are mortal. You are not mortal. Therefore, you are not human. If the first two parts are true, then the last one is necessarily true. This one is called ‘modus tollens.’
On the other hand, there are two examples that don’t work, even though they sound an awful lot like the same. If ‘x’, then ‘y’. Not ‘x’. Therefore not ‘y’. If you are human, then you are mortal. You are not human. Therefore you are not mortal. That, of course, would come as a big surprise to animals. Or look at this example: If God would show himself to me personally, which would prove the truth of religion. However, he hasn’t done so. Therefore, religion is false.’ It sounds like a reasonable argument, but it is not, e.g., this is called denial of the antecedent.
Another equalling effect carries on like this: If ‘x’, then ‘y’, ‘y’ therefore ‘x’. If you are human, then you are mortal. You are mortal. Therefore you are human. Or try this one: ‘If God created the universe, we would see order in nature. We do in fact see order in the universe - the laws of nature! Therefore, God must have created the universe.’ It sounds good, doesn’t it? Yet it is not at all logical: The order in the universe could have another cause, e.g., This is called ‘affirmation of the consequent.’
There are many types of rationalism, and we usually refer to them by their creators. The best known, of course, is Plato’s (and ‘Socrates’). Aristotle, although he pretty much invented modern logic, is not entirely a rationalist - he was also interested in the truths of the senses. The most magnificent example of rationalism is Benedict Spinoza’s. In a book called Ethics, he began with one self-evident truth: God exists. By God, he meant the entire universe, both physical and spiritual, so his truth does seem pretty self- evident: Everything that is, is. However, from that truth, he carefully, in steps upon reasons of his way to a very sophisticated system of metaphysics, ethics, and psychology.
Many people think that empiricism is the same thing as science. That is an unfortunate mistake. The reason that empiricism is so closely tied in our minds to science is really more historical than philosophical: After many centuries of religious rationalism dominating European thinking, people like Galileo and Francis Bacon came out and said, hey, how about paying some attention to the world out there, instead of just trying to derive truth from the scriptures? The stage for this change in attitude was, in fact, already set by St. Thomas Aquinas, who at least felt that scriptural truth and empirical truth need not conflict
The simplest form of empirical truth is that based on direct observation - taking a good hard look. Now this is not the same as anecdotal evidence, such as ‘I know a fellow who has a cousin in Toronto who married a woman whose college roommate is a UFO.’ It’s not really even the same as ‘I saw a UFO.’ It means that there is an observation that was made and that you can make, too, and that, if it were possible, everyone should be able to make. In other words, ‘here’s a UFO: Take a look.’
In order to build a more complex body of knowledge from direct observations, we must make use of induction, also known as indirect empirical knowledge. We take the observations and carefully stretch them to cover more ground than we could actually cover directly. The basic form of this is called generalization. Say you see that a certain metal melts at a certain temperature. In fact, you’ve seen it many times, and you’ve shown it to others. At some point, you make the inductive leap and say ‘the melting point of this metal is so many degrees.’ Now it’s true that you haven’t melted every bit of this metal in the universe, but you feel reasonably confident that (under the same conditions) it will melt at so many degrees. That’s’ generalization.’
You can see that this is where statistics comes in, especially in a more wishy-washy science like psychology. How many observations do you need to make before you can comfortably generalize? How many exceptions to the desired result can you explain away as some sort of methodological error before it gets to be too much? What are the odds that my observation is actually true beyond these few instances of it? Just like there are different style’s rationalism, there are different types of empiricism. In this case, we have given them some names. Most empirical approaches are forms of epistemological realism, which says that what the senses show us is reality, is the truth.
The basic form of realism is direct realism (also known as simple or ‘naive’ realism - the latter obviously used by those who disagree with it). Direct realism says that what you see is what you get: The senses portray the world accurately. The Scottish philosopher Thomas Reid is the best known direct realist.
The other kind is called critical (or representative) realism, which suggests that we see sensations, the images of the things in the real world, not the things directly. Critical realists, like rationalists, point out how often our eyes (and other senses) deceive us. One famous example is the way a stick jutting out of the water seems to be bent at the point out which it comes. Take it out of the water, and you find it is straight. Apparently, something about the optics of air and water leads to this illusion. So what we really see are sensations, which are representations of what is real. Descartes and Locke were both critical realists. So are the majority of psychologists who study sensation, perception, and cognition.
But, to give Reid his due, a direct realist would respond to the critical realist that what we call illusions are actually matters of insufficient information. We don’t perceive the world in flash photos: We move around, move our eyes and ears, use all our senses. . . . To go back to the stick, a complete empirical experience of it would include seeing it from all directions, perhaps even removing it. Then we will see not only the real stick, just as it is, but the laws of air-water optics as well. A modern direct realist is the psychologist J. J. Gibson.
There is a third, and rather unusual form of empiricism called subjective idealism that is most associated with Bishop George Berkeley. As an idealist in terms of his metaphysics, he argued that what we see is actually already a psychological or mental thing with which to begin. In fact, if we don’t see it, it isn’t really there: ‘To be is to be perceived’ is how he put it. Now, this doesn’t mean that the table you are sitting at simply ceases to be when you leave the room: God’s mind is always present to maintain the table’s existence.
There is this famous question: ‘If a tree falls in the woods, and there is no one there to hear it, does it make a sound?’ The subjective idealist answer is yes, it does, because God is always there. No other way to look at these three empirical approaches is like this: Critical realism postulates two steps to experiencing the world. First there is the thing itself and the light or sounds (etc.) it gives off. Second, there is the mental processing that goes on sometime after that light hits our retinas, or the sound hits our eardrums. Direct realism says that the first step is enough. Subjective idealism says that the second step is all there is. The traditional, ideal picture of science looks like this: Let’s start with a theory about how the world works. From this theory we deduce, using our best logic, a hypothesis, a guess, regarding what we will find in the world of our senses, moving from the general to the specific. This is ‘rationalism.’ Then, when we observe what happens in the world of our senses, we take that information and inductively support or alter our theory, moving from the specific to the general. This is ‘empiricism.’ And then we start again around the circle.
So science combines empiricism and rationalism into a cycle of progressive knowledge. The traditional, ideal picture of science looks like this: Let’s start with a theory about how the world works. From this theory we deduce, using our best logic, a hypothesis, a guess, regarding what we will find in the world of our senses, moving from the general to the specific. This is rationalism. Then, when we observe what happens in the world of our senses, we take that information and inductively support or alter our theory, moving from the specific to the general. This is empiricism. And then we start again around the circle. So science combines empiricism and rationalism into a cycle of progressive knowledge.
Now, if a particular scientist wishes to indulge in metaphysical speculations it is not for the philosopher to say him nay. It is only natural that one who devotes himself to the study of the laws which govern the phenomenal world should desire to know what phenomena are, and should form for themselves a metaphysical theory of the universe. But if the scientist constructs a metaphysical theory, he can hardly complain should the philosopher criticise that theory which is not the less metaphysical because it comes from the pen of a scientist. Physicists such as M. Duhem place themselves beyond the reach of the metaphysician by denying that their theories have in any sense a metaphysical import; but there are others who, in discussing the methods of science and the validity of its laws, have taken up a definite metaphysical position, which, they tell us, are more compatible with, if it is not actually presupposed by, the principles of science. This attitude, which is becoming more and more prevalent both in Germany and in France, is closely connected with the pragmatic movement. The pragmatic method claims to be based on that of science, and not a few scientists seem in return much inclined to adopt as their own the pragmatic theory of knowledge-in-general and the philosophy of Pure Experience with which it is so intimately bound up. Science has given up the naive, uncritical and often materialistic Realism which was formerly its customary attitude, and in its stead many of the devotees have taken up, not the non-metaphysical position of M. Duhem, but the position of Empirical Idealism.
Fifty years ago every scientist started from the common-sense point of view, assuming with his less educated brethren, that material things really exist independently of the exercise of mental activity. He took it for granted that his thoughts about the universe did not affect the nature of the ‘facts’ with which he had to deal. He did not trouble about the possibility of there being any a priori forms of the mind to which experience, consciously or unconsciously, had to conform; nor did he dream that in observing facts he was in reality making them. The aim of scientific research was to give an explanation, not only of the relations holding between phenomena, but also of the nature of the universe itself. Both mechanists and dynamists hoped to find an interpretation of the objective, real world at least in so far as it is material. Their atoms and molecules and their centres of force were real entities constitutive of material things and giving rise to those phenomena which we perceive by the senses. In fact, the complaint which the mechanist found with the dynamist was that the latter introduced into reality an unknown entity ‘force’, which could neither be imagined nor defined.
At present the position is changed. By many of our leading scientists the older metaphysics has been discarded and an Empirical Idealism or Pragmatic Sensationalism substituted in its stead. Mind and matter, relatively independent, are no longer the metaphysical conditions of scientific knowledge. For matter has been substituted sensation, and instead of knowledge arising through the manifestation of objective reality to a relatively passive mind, knowledge is now said to be due for the most part to the constructive activity of thought, to ‘l’action pensée,’ to ideas due, in part at least, to the creative power of mind, and striving to realise themselves in the field of sense-experience. The data of modern science are sensations; its aim is to discover the relations which hold between them; the means by which it seeks to acquire this knowledge is first of all sense-experience, in which experiment plays an important part, and, secondly, a mental activity of a higher order in which spontaneity and choice are conspicuous. Through the senses we have experience of relations between phenomena and sensation-complexes, and through the instrumentality of definitions and hypotheses created by thought we endeavour to arrange and classify these relations, to subsume them under general forms, and, if possible, to reduce them to unity by the discovery, or better, perhaps, the invention of some primary relation which holds throughout.
Two names stand out prominently as representative of this attitude, at once metaphysical and epistemological, in regard to the scope of science. They are those of Mach and Karl Pearson; and to these we may add a third, chosen from the more sceptical school of the Philosophie de la Contingence, M.Le Roy. M. Poincaré, on the other hand must be placed in a different category, for he admits the’objectivity’ of fact, and even to ‘laws’ assigns a certain 'normal objectivity,' though in certain passages he seems to speak as if he were a sensationalist like Mach.
Mach distinguishes three stages in scientific procedure, the experimental stage, in which we are in immediate contact with reality,
i.e., with sensation, and merely tabulate the results of experiment and observation; the deductive stage, in which we substitute mental images for facts, as in Mechanical Physics; and the formal stage, in which our terms consist of algebraical symbols, and our aim is to construct by their means the most convenient and most uniform synopsis of results. Similarly Poincaré distinguishes three kinds of hypotheses, (1) hypotheses suggested by facts and verified at least peu près in experience, (2) ‘indifferent hypotheses,’ which are useful in that they express under images and figures relations between phenomena. However, which are neither true nor false; and (3) mathematical conventions, which consist of definitions more or less arbitrary, and which are independent of experience. Poincaré's 'indifferent hypotheses' correspond to Mach's second stage in the development of science, and manifest a tendency eventually to disappear. Already Mach himself prefers to dispense with their service as rather encumbering than facilitating thought: While Poincaré though he considers them still indispensable for the moment, holds them to be devoid of real significance.
Thus the second stage of scientific procedure in this view is of secondary importance. It is the experimental and mathematical stages that really constitute science. By observation and experiment we are brought into contact with reality; not indeed with the material world, for no such entity is supposed to exist, nor even with the world of sensible appearances strictly so-called - for an appearance implies something that appears - but with sensations. The objective condition of scientific knowledge, the reality which in science we desire to know, is sensation. The data of experience are sensations. Mach, in his Analyse der Empfindungen und das Verhältniss des Physischen zum Psychischen, has developed this view at considerable length. Sensations and sensation-complexes - these, he says, are reality. All science consists in the analysis of sensations. Nature is composed of elements given by the senses. From these we choose those which are most important for practical purposes and call them ‘objects’ or ‘things.’ But ‘things’ are really abstractions, and a name is a symbol for a complex of sensations whose variations we neglect. There are no things - in-themselves, nor are sensations symbols of things, but what we call things are symbols of sensation-complexes of relative stability. Colours, sounds, pressures, spaces, durations, these are the real things. All thought is governed by the principle of Thought-Economy. We are ever trying to save ourselves trouble. Hence we have acquired the habit of grouping sensations together in a lump and calling them by a single name. One group of sensations we call ‘water’, another ‘a leaf,’ another ‘a stone’. Smaller groups, again, are combined to form larger ones. The group 'leaf' is joined to the groups ‘branch,’ ‘stem’,' etc., and the whole, being vaguely or generically pictured, becomes a ‘plant’. These larger groups, again, are included in others larger still. What we call 'the external world' comprises all those sensation-complexes which are relatively constant, i.e., which repeat themselves again and again in the same sort of way and are not subject to the control of our will: whereas 'the self' comprises that other very extensive group of sensation-complexes, some of which are always present in consciousness, though ever varying in tone, while others can be produced at any time if we so desire, and thus are directly under our control
In the external group the relations between sensation-complexes are constant, i.e., the complexes follow one another in the same order. Thus the sensation-complex (water) is juxtaposed in a certain way to another complex (Bunsen-burner), and always after a certain time the bright transparency of the former complex gives place to a dull whiteness of another considerably greater in extent. Ordinarily, however, we prefer
- according to the ‘Princip der Denkökonomie’ - to use names to denote our sensation complexes, as it saves us the time and trouble of describing them. The usual account that one would give of the above phenomenon, for instance, would be that when we heat water over a Bunsen-burner after a time it begins to boil. Indeed, it would be very awkward for the sensationalist, if he often had to carry out Pascal’s principle of substituting the definition for the thing defined.
The physicist selects the above class of sensations, which are characterised by greater stability, greater regularity, and are common to humanity, as the data of his scientific researches while the psychologist treats of these in another way, and also of other sensations which are less stable, more subject to the control of the will, and, hence, often peculiar to the individual. But the standpoint of Mach is really psychological throughout. Both psychologist and physicist treat of the same class of objects from different points of view.
All that we can know of the world is necessarily reduced to sense-perception: and all that we can wish to know is given in the solution of a mathematical problem, in the knowledge of the functional dependence which exists between sense-elements. This exhausts the sources of the knowable.
Professor Mach has given up the apparently hopeless task of reducing things to indefinitely small and ultimate elements. Both he and Poincaré prefer to regard atoms and such like as hypotheses, as mere picturesque fictions of greater or less utility, but of no objective value; and for things Mach substitutes sensations. Scientifically, indeed, sensation is regarded as a form of energy, the differences of which are probably quantitative. But in course of time, says Mach, we shall discover that the sense of hunger is not so very different from the action of sulphuric acid on zinc, and that our will is not so very different from the pressure of stone on its support, and so we shall get nearer nature. Thus, for Energetics, everything is reducible to energy, alias sensation, and the final aim of physical science is to demonstrate the truth of this assertion.
Both Mach and Poincaré speak of the sense-data of science as if they were uninfluenced by the subjective factor in cognition. They regard them as relatively stable, independent of the individual, and therefore objective. But even in the objects of scientific knowledge, philosophers such as M.Le Roy would admit an element of ‘contingency.’ Sensations are not given in isolation, but are grouped together in complexes and integrated into percepts and in the construction of our percepts there may enter an element of caprice. We are influenced by our point de vue choisi d'avance, practical utility in some cases, the exigencies of scientific theory in others. Hence we introduce into our percepts just what suits our convenience and leave out the rest. This follows logically from the philosophy of Pure Experience, a philosophy which is practically identical with the metaphysical standpoint of MM. Karl Pearson and Mach. For if, as M.Le Roy says, ‘nothing is put before the mind, but what is put by the mind’; if, in other words, we do not copy reality, but construct it, as Dr. Schiller affirms then all is due to ‘hypothesis and fabrication’ either by the individual or by the race, i.e., we construct our percepts as well as our concepts. Again, racial development takes place by individual variation, and this is possible in the sphere of experience only if thought exercises purposive control over the data of sense, in which case even in this, the lowest stage of human knowledge, we must admit that there is an element of caprice. Hence: all scientific laws are unverifiable, to put the matter rigorously, first because they are the instrument with which we make in the continuity of the primitive datum the indispensable parcelling out (morel age) without which thought remains powerless and shut in, and again because they constitute the criterion itself with which we judge the apparatus and methods which it is necessary to use in order to subject them to an examination, the accuracy of which may be able to surpass all assignable limits.
Contingency and choice in the sphere of experimental science is emphatically denied by Poincaré ‘All which the scientist creates in a fact,’ he says, ‘is the language in which he expresses it.’ We do not interfere with facts, except in so far as we select those which are relevant to our purpose. In experience relations are determined, not by experiment, but by inexorable laws which govern the succession of our sensation-complexes. ‘We do not copy reality’ - that is true; but the laws which govern the sequences and combinations of sensations are fixed for us, and not by us. They are something which we experience as a datum, not, and something we arbitrarily construct; and these laws may be known by us at least à peu près.
This view, though doubtless the correct one, is hardly consistent with the doctrine that sensations and not material objects are the data of science. If it be the mind that groups sensations together and so forms sensation-complexes or objects, then, as M.Le Roy and Dr. Schiller affirm, such groupings may not always be precisely identical. Not only may modification and even mutilation of fact have occurred during the long process in which habits of perception have been built up and have become common to the race, but such modifications are still possible since habits are only relatively constant and only approximately common to the race. Moreover, the significance of M. Poincaré's assertion that all we create in a fact is the language, in which we express it, is considerably modified when we compare it with another statement with the effect that ‘language is strewn with preconceived ideas’; for the latter, since their influence is unconscious, are far more dangerous than those which we deliberately formulate and makes use of in hypotheses.
M.Le Roy's statement, therefore, that scientific laws are unverifiable because they are the instruments by means of which we parcel out the primitive datum of experience would seem to be valid in a pragmatic and evolutionary theory of knowledge. His second argument (granting the validity of his premises) is no less conclusive. When the correspondence-notion of truth is rejected, our only criteria of truth are utility and consistency, both of which are determined by the development and systematisation of science itself. Scientific laws, as M. Duhem has pointed out, mutually involve and imply each other's truth. Therefore, if in no individual case we can eliminate the subjective element and so prove that a law has arisen from the manifestation of reality itself to our minds, we have no right to assume one law to prove another; all laws, whether empirical or not, will be equally unverifiable in the pragmatic and pseudo-scientific theory of knowledge.
The unrestricted jurisdiction of the Princip der Denkökonomie points to the same conclusion for, according to Professor Mach, this principle is not confined to the realm of physical theory, but is a general principle applicable to all forms of cognition alike. It governs the construction of the percepts and concepts of common-sense, just as it directs the scientist in the formulation of definitions and physical hypotheses. Efficiency depends upon economy, and efficiency, adaptation to environment, and practical utility for the control of sense-experience is the final aim, not only of physical theory, but of all human cognition.
The Pragmatism and Sensationalism of Mach and Karl Pearson, which is really a philosophical theory of knowledge, must be carefully distinguished from the view that in Physical Theory definitions and laws are merely symbolic formulae, useful for the classification, co-ordination and systematisation of scientific fact: for this view is held by many who, except on this point, are in no sense pragmatists either in regard to science or philosophy. A pragmatic interpretation of physical theory is, in fact, quite compatible with metaphysical Realism.
For instance, M. Duhem is a realist in regard to the notions of common-sense, yet he tells us that the aim of physical theory is ‘to construct a symbolic representation of what our senses, aided by instruments, make us know, in order to render easier, more rapid, and more sure, reasoning about experimental knowledge.’ Concepts for him as for M.M. Poincaré and Mach are means to this end. Their function is symbolic. As definitions they are arbitrary, and in no way represent reality or reveal its inner rational structure. ‘Masses’ are ‘coefficients which it is convenient to introduce into our calculations.’ ‘Energy’ must not be confused with the force exerted by a horse in drawing a cart: It is merely ‘the function of the state of a system whose total differential in every elementary modification is equal to the excess of work over heat set free.’ Concepts as definitions form the basis of scientific deduction, but they do not reveal the nature of objective facts. The most they can do is to indicate certain experiences, and so enable us to verify the phenomenal relations which we have deduced by means of mathematical reasoning in which these symbolic definitions function as terms.
Some have endeavoured to find a similarity between M. Duhem's theory of chemical combination and the scholastic doctrine of matter and form. This, however, as he informs us in his work entitled Le Mixte et la combinaison chimique, in which his views on that subject are developed, is merely an analogy, and nothing more. ‘Forms,’ as conceived by the chemist and the physicist, are quantitative, not qualitative; whereas quality is of the essence of things, the nature of which it is the business of the metaphysician and not of the scientist to determine. Nevertheless, in spite of this denial that 'forms' in chemistry and in physics are comparable with the metaphysical forms of Aristotle, and M. Duhem's standpoint is quite compatible with Realism; and it is so precisely because he relegates all questions as to the nature of quality and essence to Metaphysics.
The standpoint of M. Duhem differs essentially, therefore, from that of Karl Pearson and Mach; for, while carefully distinguishing physical theory from physical fact, M. Duhem does not identify the latter with sensation, but leaves it to the metaphysician to determine the ultimate nature of the data of experience. Again, it is only in Theory that postulation and symbolism are admitted by M. Duhem, and that we are allowed to construct and modify definitions at will. Mathematical Physics in the course of its development is independent of Experimental Physics, and uses a different method. In the latter we are bound down by empirical facts, whereas Mathematical Physics is free to disregard all facts till theory is complete, when it must be verified as a whole by comparing the conclusions which have been mathematically deduced with the complexus of experimental data. ‘In the course of its development a physical theory is free to choose whatever way it pleases, provided it avoids all logical contradiction; in particular, it is free to disregard the facts of experience.’
On the other hand, for Professor Mach, and apparently for
M. Poincaré also, symbolism, postulation and the principle of Thought-economy apply to theory and fact alike. The experimental differs from the mathematical stage only in this respect, which in the former we group under one name sensations which are actually present in consciousness, and our grouping is more or less spontaneous; whereas in the latter we arbitrarily combine symbols denoting sensation-complexes already grouped, and postulate that the new symbol shall denote actual groupings which have never as yet been given in consciousness.
The real difference, then, between Karl Pearson and Mach on the one hand and Duhem on the other is in regard to their philosophic standpoint. Both Karl Pearson and Mach, and, to some extent, Poincaré also, philosophise on the data of experience and on the development of knowledge overall; and their philosophy is pragmatic. M. Duhem declines to philosophise, and, if a pragmatist at all. is a pragmatist only in regard to the methodology of physical theory, an attitude which is quite consistent with philosophic Realism?
There is also a further difference between the views of M. Poincaré and M. Duhem in regard to the relation of Mathematical to Experimental Physics. M. Poincaré admits ‘truths founded on experience and verified almost exactly so far as concerns systems which are practically isolated,’ and these truths, he says, when generalised beyond the limits within which experience verifies them, become ‘postulates, applicable to the whole universe and regarded as rigorously true.’ ‘Mais, le principe désormais crystallisé pour ainsi dire, n’est plus soumis au contrôle de l'expérience. I n’est pas vrai ou faux, it est commode.’ With that, such principles as Newton's Laws of Inertia and of the Equality of Action and Reaction, Lavoisier's Conservation of Mass, Mayer's Conservation of Energy, and Carnot’s Degradation of Energy are axiomatic, though not a priori. They are suggested by facts, but are unverifiable, because in their absolute form they are mere conventions; and our right to postulate them lies precisely in this, that experience can never contradict them.
Mathematical Physics, on the other hand, for M. Duhem is entirely independent of experience throughout the whole process of its development. No hypothesis whatever can be verified till the theory of Physics is complete in every detail, for every physical law is ‘a symbolic relation the application of which to concrete reality supposes that one accepts quite a system of other laws.’ No individual, physical law is, properly speaking, either true or false, but only approximate, and on that account provisional. Sufficiently approximate to-day, but the time will come when it will no longer satisfy our demand for accuracy. Principles, therefore, which Milhaud Le Roy and Poincaré alike place beyond the control of experience are, says M. Duhem, either not physical laws at all (since every physical law must retain its meaning when we insert the words à peu près, which these do not) or else, when their consequences have been fully deduced, they must be rigorously subjected to the test of experience in the theory to which they belong, and with that theory stand or fall. In other words, Poincaré, admitting the existence of relatively isolated systems of experimental facts, thinks that it is possible to apply the process of verification to a physical theory in the course of its development; while Duhem, convinced that all physical laws are intimately connected, prefers to formulate a complete and self-consistent system of hypotheses before attempting to compare the consequences of any one of these hypotheses with experimental fact. A similar difference is manifest in regard to the method of teaching Physics. Poincaré prefers the inductive and experimental method. Duhem holds that physical theory should be presented to those who are capable of receiving it, in toto, and that experiments should serve merely as illustrations of different stages in its development.
This difference between two of our most eminent physicists, though great at first sight, can, as to some extent, be explained. M. Duhem insists that all hypotheses must be verifiable à peu près if they are to have physical significance: consequently, there can be no laws in physical theory, when complete, which are not at least approximately true. On the other hand, the use of purely conventional hypotheses in the construction of a theory is allowable, provided they are ultimately verifiable in their systematic completeness. M. Poincaré points out that such conventional hypotheses are often experimental laws generalised beyond the limits within which they are verifiable, and so worded that they cannot, as such, be contradicted by experience. That in their most general form, as applicable to the whole universe, universal postulates of this kind cannot be verified directly, is obvious; for not only are they universal, but they are expressed in symbolic terms, such as energy and inertia, terms which it is almost impossible to translate into their corresponding sensations (if such there be). Yet, inasmuch as such postulates lead to particular conclusions about less abstract realities of which we can have immediate experience, inasmuch as their function is to guide us in the construction of hypotheses which are verifiable à peu près, and so have a physical sense, it may be said that even the most abstract laws and the most general principles can be verified indirectly through their consequences.
Another of the great causes for argument (and not merely philosophical argument either), stems from real or imagined or misunderstood differences in the basic assumptions upon which a discussion is based. Two people will find it very difficult to communicate productively, if they do not share a common language. As a Canadian, I too would find it impossible to communicate with a Russian, for example, if we shared no common language. Especially if the communications were taking place over the telephone, where even sign language or body language would not be possible. The trouble starts in many arguments, when the parties to the discussion appear to speak the same language. Consider English, for example. Many pundits suggest, not entirely in humour, that the greatest difficulties in an Anglo-American relations stem from the fact that the two nations speak what is supposed to be the same language. The problem of missed communication is hidden because everybody is using the same words. Just because the audio sounds are the same, everybody assumes that the meanings are the same. It is frequently discovered, after much fruitless argument and disagreements, that the two ‘opposing’ positions in the argument are not as far apart as was initially believed. When the actual meanings are made clear, the fog created by the words used can be more easily cleared. This is one reason why good diplomats and mediators are so often successful. They make a special effort to get past the words to the meaning.
For this reason, Evolutionary Pragmatism must begin with detailed definitions of the meanings behind the words being employed. But before getting into the philosophical discussion, It would to be that it would be advantageous to digress a little, and talk a bit more about the nature and consequences of Axiom Systems.
To prevent any misunderstanding, in the discussion that follows, the terms ‘starting axioms’, ‘a priori postulates’, ‘initial postulates’, and ‘underlying basic assumptions’ are going to be used relatively interchangeably. They all mean roughly the same thing. They all refer to the basic starting propositions upon which the rest of a discussion or logical analysis is based. Frequently, these starting positions are left unsaid. And there in lays the problem. Since they are left unspoken, the assumptions that you start with, may not be as the same assumption, that in most cases, this may not cause any more than temporary difficulties. But in the case of the development of an entire system of philosophical argument, the starting points are critical.
Every system as being structured has of its reasoning a set of basic axioms. Mathematics (of which the discipline of Deductive Logic is a part) is the only reasoning system that makes it a basic fundamental rule to detail and document the axioms before starting the reasoning. But all systems of reasoning do have their axioms.
The most fundamental and significant aspect of starting axioms, is that they are not ‘provable.’ Axioms are axioms because there is no way to derive them from more fundamental principles, and no way to ‘prove’ them by using information drawn from experience. Axioms, by their nature, can be neither ‘deduced,’ nor ‘induced.’ If there were a way to deduce them from other principles, then those other principles would become the axioms, and the statement that was just proved, would become one of the theorems or consequences of the more basic axioms. If there was a way to induce them from experience, then they would become a ‘law’ in the sense of the definition provided at the start of this chapter, rather than an axiom.
It is also in the nature of starting axioms, that the structure of any reasoning built upon them is intimately dependent upon them. To use an example from Mathematics, let us consider the field of Geometry. Most of us are familiar with the geometry of the plane, called ‘Euclidean Geometry.’ Many of us studied this geometry in high school and many of us can remember some of the Theorems that you laboured to prove during the course of your studies. Remember the struggle to use a set of limited deductive rules to prove a ‘New Idea?’ Do you recall the geometric proof that the interior angles of a triangle (drawn on a Euclidean plane) sum to 180 degrees?
All of Euclidean Geometry is based on five basic assumptions that Euclid made about the nature of the plane upon which he played his geometry game. It also makes use of a carefully defined and quite limited set of rules of logical deduction. By employing these rules, new Theorems can be deduced from the basic axioms. Once deduced, these theorems can be used as part of the proof of another new Theorem. In this way, an entire set of knowledge about lines and polygons can be developed. All from a set of deduction rules, and five basic axioms.
Although most people are at least passing familiar with Euclidean Geometry, not many are familiar with Riemannian Geometry . . . Riemann (Georg Friedrich Bernhard Riemann, 1826-1866) was a mathematician of the 19th century. He examined Euclid's five basic axioms and decided to see what would result if he modified them. The result of his ‘relaxation’ of only a single one of Euclid’s five axioms was his development of Riemannian Geometry. Euclid’s 5th axiom specified (approximately, in readable English)
‘Through any given point, only one line can be drawn parallel to another line’: What Riemann did, was eliminate this axiom, and allow a variable number of lines to be drawn parallel to a given line. When he examined the result of this change, he found that there were only three answers that would result in a consistent set of Theorems. (The importance of consistency we will examine later.) Riemann found that through any given point, zero, one or an infinity of lines can be drawn parallel to another line. What he had discovered, was that there is a different kind of geometry, that yields different theorems, and different answers to simple questions, depending upon the detailed specification of the ‘Fifth Axiom.’ These geometries together form the body of mathematics known as Riemannian Geometry. Euclidean Geometry is now understood by mathematicians to be a ‘special case’ of Riemannian Geometry. That is to say, by setting a free variable (the number of lines that can be drawn parallel to another - more properly expressed as the curvature of the plane) to a specific value, Riemannian Geometry looks like Euclidean Geometry. The difference is that to Euclid, Euclidean Geometry was all there was, while to modern mathematicians, the geometry of the plane is but one case of the more generalized Riemannian Geometry. Riemannian Geometry is said to ‘contain’ Euclidean Geometry. The fact that Riemannian Geometry contains Euclidean Geometry, does not make Euclidean geometry wrong. Given the starting assumptions of Euclidean geometry, the rest of the discipline is properly deduced, and self-consistent. It is merely that the starting assumptions have a determining impact on the resulting structure.
Two aspects of this comparison between Euclidean and Riemannian Geometry are of significance to this discussion of starting axioms. The first thing to understand from this example, is that the resulting body of knowledge deducible from the starting axioms, even following the same rules of deduction, can look quite different as a result of seemingly small changes in the axioms. The second important thing to understand, is that the answers that the two Axiom Systems give to seemingly simple questions can be quite different. To a Euclidean geometer, the sum of the interior angles of a triangle is a constant (180 degrees). To a Riemannian geometer, the sum is a function of the curvature of the plane. Since the Euclidean geometer cannot even comprehend that the plane can curve, the two cannot properly hold a meaningful discussion on this subject. It is but one example of the confusion that results when two people attempt to communicate, but do not share a common ground. They are building on different postulates.
So too with philosophy. Unless there is an agreement on starting postulates, philosophical discussion will be fruitless. The necessary agreement need not be complete, merely sufficient to allow a common basis upon which to found the discussion. The two geometers could, for example, agree to discuss the geometry of the plane. The Euclidean geometer would regard this as a discussion of ‘the whole shebang,’ while the Riemannian geometer would regard it as a discussion of only a special subset of ‘the whole shebang.’ This might cause some confusion if the argument digressed into the nature of ‘the whole shebang,’ but would be sufficient to allow specific discussion on, say, the sum of the interior angles of a triangle
The foregoing diversion, is that you, must decide whether or not it is worth your while to continue reading. If you cannot agree with the basic starting axiom upon which Evolutionary Pragmatism is built, even if simply for the sake of curiosity and interest in what follows, then further efforts at understanding Evolutionary Pragmatism on your part will be a waste of your time. If you determine that you cannot accept the Basic Axiom for whatever reason, then the rest of this work will be meaningless. You will not even be able to argue that its conclusions, deductions, or hypotheses have no common ground upon which to base further understanding or discussion. As, perhaps, your thought processes would be sufficiently alien to me, as to any formal logical development are justly to be of something other to understand, particularly of the Evolutionary Pragmatism, in that we would probably not be able to discuss anything more relevant than the weather. And probably not even that: Reality is objective (independent of any observer), constant (permits repeatable observations) and self-consistent (does not exhibit mutually contradictory cause-effect relationships)
If, on the other hand, you can accept this Basic Axiom of Evolutionary Pragmatism, then you may find the rest just as stimulating as this work is interesting, as for now, with the foregoing out of the way, the processes concurrent with the theoretical involvements may lead to further developments of such Evolutionary Principles, in that is by some presented concept of ‘Reality.’
A presupposed accountable truth is pragmatism (James 1909; and Papineau (1987). As we have observed, that the verifications selects aprominent property of truth and considers it to be the essence of truth. Similarly, the pragmatist focuses on another important characteristic namely, that true belief is a good basis for action and takes this to be the very nature of truth. True assumptions are said to be, by definition, those that provoke actions with desirable results. Once more, we have an account statement with a single attractive explanatory characteristic, besides, it postulates between truth and it alleged analysand, in this case, utility is implausibly closed. Granted, true belief tends to foster success, but it happens regularly that actions based on true beliefs lean toward disaster, while false assumptions, by pure chance, produce wonderful results.
One of the few uncontroversial facts about truth is that the preposition that ‘snow is white’ if and only ‘if snow is white’, the proposition that lying is wrong is true if and only if lying is wrong, and so on. Traditional theories acknowledge this fact but regard it as insufficient and, as w have seen, inflate it with some further principle of the form that, ‘X is true if and only if ‘X’ has property p’ (as corresponding to reality, verifiability, or being suitable as a basis for action), which is supposed to specify what truth is. Some radical alternatives to the traditional theories result from denying the need for any such further specification (Ramsey 1927, Strawson 1950 and Quine 1990) For example, we might suppose that the basic theory of truth contains nothing more that equivalences of the form, ‘the proposition that p is true if and only if p’ (Horwich 1990).
This sort of proposal is best given as a formal account of the ‘raison de étre’ of our notion of truth, namely that enables us to express attitudes toward these propositions we can designate but not explicitly formulate. Suppose, for example, you are told that Einstein’s last words expressed a claim about physics, an area in which you think he was very reliable. Suppose that, unknown to you, his claim was the proposition whose ‘quantum mechanics are wrong’. What conclusions can you draw? Exactly which proposition becomes the appropriate object of your belief? Surely not that quantum mechanics is wrong, but, because you are not aware that it is what he said . What we ave needed is something equivalent to the infinite conjunction: ‘If what Einstein said was that E = mc2, then E = mc2, and if what he said, as that quantum mechanics were wrong, then quantum mechanics are wrong . . . and so on?’
That is, a proposition ‘K’ with the following properties, that from ‘K’ and any further premises of the form. Einstein’s claim was the proposition that ‘p’ you can imply ‘p’. Whatever it is, now supposes, as the deflationist says, that our understanding of the truth predicate consists in the stimulative decision to accept any instance of the schema. The proposition that ‘p’ is true if and only if ‘p’, then your problem is solved. For ‘K’ is the proposition, ‘Einstein’s claim is true’, it will have precisely the inferential power needed. From it and Einstein’s claim is the proposition that quantum mechanics are wrong, you can use Leibniz’s law to imply; the proposition that quantum mechanics is wrong is true, which given the relevant axiom of the deflationary theory, allows you to derive quantum mechanics is wrong. Thus, one point in favour of the deflationary theory is that it squares with a plausible story about the function of our notion of truth, in that its axiom explains that function without the need for further analysis of ‘what truth is.
Not all variants of deflationism have this virtue, according to the redundancy performatives theory of truth, the pair of sentences, ‘The proposition that ‘p is true’: and plain ‘p’ has the same meaning and express the same statement as one and anther, so it is a syntactic illusion to think that p is true,’ attributes any sort of property to a proposition (Ramsey 1924 and Strawson 1950). Yet in that case, it becomes hard to explain why we are entitled to infer ‘The proposition that quantum mechanics are wrong is true’ from Einstein’s claim is the proposition that quantum mechanics are wrong. Einstein’s claim is true, for if truth is not property, then we can no longer account for the inference by invoking that the law that if ‘X’, appears identical with ‘Y’ then any property of ‘X’ is a property of ‘Y’, and vice vera. Thus the redundancy/performatives theory, by identifying than merely correlating the contents of ‘The proposition that ‘p is true’ and ‘p’, precludes the prospect of a good explanation of one on truth’s most significant and useful characteristics. So, putting restrictions on our assembling claim to the weak is better, of its equivalence schema: The proposition that ‘p is true is and ‘is only p’.’
Additionally, it is commonly supposed that problems about the nature of truth are intimately bound up with questions as to the accessibility and autonomy of facts in various domains: Questions about whether the facts can be known and whether they can exist independently of our capacity to discover (Dummett 1978 and Putnam 1981). One might reason, for example, that if ‘T’ is true means nothing more than ‘T’ will be verified, then certain forms of scepticism, specifically those that doubt the correctness of our methods of verification, that will be precluded, and that the facts will have been revealed as dependent on human practices. Alternatively, it might be said that if truth were an inexplicable, primitive, non-epistemic property, then the fact that ‘T’ is true would be completely independent of us. Moreover, we could, in that case, have no reason to assume that the propositions we believe in, that in adopting its property, so scepticism would be unavoidable. In a similar vein, it might be thought that as special, and perhaps undesirable features of the deflationary approach, is that truth is derived of such metaphysical or epistemological implications.
Upon closer scrutiny, it is far from clear that there exists ‘any’ account of truth with consequences regarding the accessibility or autonomy of non-semantic matters. For although an account of truth may be expected to have such implications for facts from ‘T is true’, it cannot be assumed without further argument that the same conclusion will apply to the fact ‘T’, For it cannot be assumed that ‘T’ and ‘T’ are equivalent to one another given the account of ‘true’ that is being employed. Of course, if truth is defined in the way that the deflationist proposes, then the equivalence holds by definition, it is, nonetheless, that if true is defined by reference to some metaphysical or epistemological characteristic, the equivalence schema is thrown into doubt, pending some demonstration that the trued predicate, in the sense assumed, will be satisfied, as far as there are thoughts to be epistemologically problematic, in that of hanging over ‘T’ that do not threaten ‘T’ is true, given the needed demonstrations will be proven difficult. Similarly, if ‘truth’ is so defined that the fact ‘T’ is true is true, then again, it is unclear that the equivalence schema will hold. It would seem, therefore, that the attempt to base epistemological or metaphysical conclusions of a theory of truth must fail because in any such attempt, the equivalence schema will b e simultaneously relied on and undermined.
The identity theory of truth is notably absent from textbook discussions of truth; and there is controversy over whether it is a theory of truth at all. Those who think that it is not are likely to make one or both of the following objections: It is obviously absurd; no one has ever held it. The remainder of this section is devoted to considering these two objections.
The identity theory is clearly absurd from the point of view of those who, for instance, believe that truth-bearers are sentences and truth-makers non-linguistic states of affairs. But it may be available to those who hold the kinds of metaphysical views which make truth-bearers and truth-makers more alike. (For ease of expression, its use in the vocabulary of ‘judgments’ and ‘facts’ for truth-bearers and truth-makers respectively, recognizing that these terms can be tendentious - especially in expressing the views of philosophers who abjured them.)
Some philosophers have tried to make judgments more like facts. Russell, reacting against idealism, at one stage adopted a view of judgment which did not regard it as an intermediary between the mind and the world: instead, the constituents of judgments are the very things the judgments are about. This involves a kind of realism about judgments, and looks as though it offers the possibility of an identity theory of truth. But since both true and false judgments are equally composed of real constituents, truth would not be distinguished from falsehood by being identical with reality; an identity theory of truth is thus unavailable on this view of judgment because it would be rendered vacuous by being inevitably accompanied by an identity theory of falsehood. Those who have held this sort of view of judgments, such as Moore and Russell, have accordingly been forced to hold that truth is an unanalyzable property of some judgments. If one looks for an identity theory here, one finds what might be called an identity theory of judgment rather than of truth. Less brutally condensed accounts of these matters can be found in Baldwin (1991),
Other philosophers, notably those who have held the idealist view that reality is experience, have implied that facts are more like judgments. One such is F.H. Bradley, who explicitly embraced an identity theory of truth, regarding it as the only account capable of resolving the difficulties he finds with the correspondence theory. The way he reaches it is worth describing in a little detail, for it shows how he could avoid allowing the theory to be rendered vacuous by an accompanying identity theory of falsehood.
Bradley argues that the correspondence theory's view of facts as real and mutually independent entities is unsustainable: the impression of their independent existence is the outcome of the illegitimate projection onto the world of the divisions with which thought must work, a projection which creates the illusion that a judgment can be true by corresponding to part of a situation: as, e.g., the remark: ‘The pie is in the oven’ might appear to be true despite its (by omission) detaching the pie from its dish and the oven from the kitchen. His hostility to such abstraction ensures that, according to Bradley's philosophical logic, at most one’s judgment can be true - that which encapsulates reality in its entirety. This allows his identity theory of truth to be accompanied by a non-identity theory of falsehood, since he can account for falsehood as a falling short of this vast judgment and hence as an abstraction of part of reality from the whole. The result is his adoption of the idea that there are degrees of truth: that judgment is the least true which is the most distant from the whole of reality. Although the consequence is that all ordinary judgments will turn out to be more or less infected by falsehood, Bradley allows some sort of place for false judgment and the possibility of distinguishing worse from better. One might argue that the reason the identity theory of truth remains only latent in Russell and Moore is the surrounding combination of their atomistic metaphysics and their assumption that truth is not a matter of degree.
For Bradley, then, at most one’s judgment can be fully true. But even this one judgment has so far been conceived as describing reality, and its truth as consisting in correspondence with a reality not distorted by being mentally cut up into illusory fragments. Accordingly, even this one, for the very reason that it remains a description, will be infected by falsehood unless it ceases altogether to be a judgment and becomes the reality it is meant to be about. This apparently bizarre claim becomes intelligible if seen as both the most extreme expression of his hostility to abstraction and a reaction to the most fundamental of his objections to the correspondence theory, which is the same as Frége's: that for there is to be correspondence rather than identity between judgment and reality, the judgment must differ from reality and in so far as it does differ, to that extent must distort and so falsify it.
Thus Bradley's version of the identity theory turns out to be misleadingly so-called. For it is in fact an eliminativist theory: when truth is attained, judgments disappear and only reality is left. It is not surprising that Bradley, despite expressing his theory in the language of identity, talked of the attainment of complete truth in terms of thought’s suicide. In the end, then, even the attribution of the identity theory of truth to one who explicitly endorsed it turns out to be dubious.
More recently there have been attempts, consciously taking inspiration from Frége, to defend a metaphysically neutral version of the theory: holding that truth-bearers are the contents of thoughts, and that facts are simply true thoughts rather than the metaphysically weighty sorts of things envisaged in correspondence theories. That is, the identity is not conceived as a (potentially troublesome) relation between an apparently mind-dependent judgment and an apparently mind-independent fact. A claimed benefit of this version is that it is not immediately disabled by the inevitable accompaniment of an identity theory of falsehood. The difficulty for these attempts is to make out the claim that they involve a theory of truth at all, since they lack independent accounts of truth-bearer and truth-maker to give the theory substance.
The most thorough account of this type is found in Dodd (2000). But although the adherence to an identity theory is actually defends a variety of deflationism: ‘truth is nothing more than that whose expression in a language gives that language a device for the formulation of indirect and generalized assertions.’ What became of the identity theory? The answer ‘lies in the fact that Dodd conceives his identity theory as consisting entirely in the denial of correspondence and the identification of facts with true thoughts. It actually has nothing to say about ‘the nature of truth,’ as traditionally conceived, offering no definition of ‘is true,’ no explanation of what truth consists in or of the difference between truth and falsehood. This theory is ‘modest,’ to use Dodd's expression, as opposed to ‘robust’ identity theories which begin from the bipolar recognition of independent conceptions of fact (conceived as truth-maker) and proposition (conceived as truth-bearer) employed in correspondence theories, and then attempt in one way or another to eliminate the apparent gap between them. Dodd's view is that his ‘modest’ theory gets some bite from its opposition to correspondence theories; and he urges (as does Hornsby) that we should anyway scale down our expectations of what a theory of truth can provide. However, the history of identity theories of truth reveals them as tending to mutate into other theories when put under pressure, as one can see from the discussion as presented. Dodd holds that this is a problem only for robust theories. Yet his theory also exemplifies a variety of this tendency: in the end, it evolves into deflationism.
Although it is difficult to find a completely uncontroversial attribution of the identity theory, there is evidence of its presence in the thought of a few major philosophers. As one might expect, mystical philosophers attracted by the idea that the world is a unity express views which at least resemble the theory. Bradley may also fall into this category; in any case, he and Frége have already been mentioned. Bolzano and Meinong are other possibilities: Findlay, for example, believes Meinong to have held an identity theory, reminding us that on his view, there are no entities between our minds and the facts: Facts themselves are true in so far as they are the objects of judgments. C.A. Baylis defended a similar account of truth in 1948, and Roderick Chisholm endorsed a recognizably Meinongian account in his Theory of Knowledge. A sketchy version of the theory is embraced in Woozley's Theory of Knowledge. There are also the attempts, once again already mentioned, to establish a metaphysically neutral version: these show that there can be no doubt that some philosophers have tried to defend something that they wished to call an identity theory of truth.
Thomas Baldwin argues that the identity theory of truth, though itself indefensible, has played an influential but subterranean role within philosophy from the nineteenth century onwards, citing as examples philosophers of widely different convictions. One of his attributions is queried in Stern (1993), others in Candlish (1995). Whether or not Baldwin is right - and it is possible that the theory is no more than a historical curiosity - the identity theory of truth in its full-blooded form may turn out to be best thought of as comparable to solipsism: Rarely, if ever, consciously held, but the inevitable result of thinking out the most extreme consequences of assumptions which philosophers often just take for granted.
Within measure, the most influential idea in the theory of meaning in the past hundred years is the theses that meaning of an indicative sentence is given by its truth-conditions. On this conception, to understand sentences is to know its truth-conditions. Its conception was first clearly formulated by Frége (1848-1925), as developed in a distinctive way by the early Wittgenstein (1889-1951) and is leading idea of Davidson (1917). The conception has remained central that all who of opposing theories characteristically define their position by reference to it.
The conception of meaning as truth-conditions necessarily are not and should not be advanced as a complete account of meaning. For instance, one who understands a language must have some ideas of the range of speech acts conventionally acted by the various types of a sentence in the language, and must have some idea of the significance of various kinds of speech acts. The claim of the theorist of truth-conditions should as an alternative is targeted on the notion of content: If two indicative sentence differ in what they strictly and literally say, then this differences is fully accountable for by the difference in their truth-conditions. Most basic to truth-conditions is simply of statements that are the condition the world must meet if the statement is to be true. To know this condition is equivalent to knowing the meaning of the statement. Although this sounds as if it gives a solid anchorage for meaning, some of the security disappears when it turned out that the truth condition can only be defined by repeating the very statement, as a truth condition of ‘snow is white’ is that ‘snow is white,’ the truth condition that ‘Britain would have capitulated had Hitler invaded’ is that ‘Britain would have capitulated had Hitler invaded.’
This element of running-on-the-spot disqualifies truth conditions from playing the central role in a substantive theory of meaning. Truth-conditional theories of meaning are sometimes opposed by the view that to know the meaning of a statement is to be able to see it in a network of inferences.
Whatever it is that makes, of what otherwise would be forwarded by mere sounds and inscriptions into instrument of communication and understanding. That this may very well be it a philosophical problem, in that of demystifying this powered relation, it to if of what we know of ourselves and the world and surrounding surfaces thereof. Contributions to the study include the theory of ‘speech acts’ and the investigation of commendations. As well as the relationship between words and ideas, also the world and of its surrounding surfaces, by which some persons expressed by a sentence are often distributive dynamic attributes, whereby the causality of its relational alterative and the environmental placements or its opposite of displacement, may, in other words, that in which he or she is positioned of place. For example, the disease I refer to by the term like ‘arthritis’ or the kind of tree I refer to as a ‘birch’, will be defined by criterial possibilities of imaging two persons who are alternatively placed differently in some environmental placement, however, everything appears the same to each of them, in that, between them the possibility under which the defined space now belongs of a philosophical problem. They are the essential components of understanding and any intelligible position that is true must be capable of being understood. Such that whichever is expressed by some utterance or sentence, the proportion or claim made about the world may be its extension, the content of a predicate or substantial component in what it contributes to the content of its sentence that contain it. The nature of content is the central concern on philosophy of language.
Without displacing quantification, we are the specifying qualifies under which to liberated by a definitive meaning, in so, that to whatever has had to occasion an ordinary language especially a set of prioritized categories when each spoken language deemed by some necessity of right, in that by archaic conflicting appears of its ugly head. However, if we were to assume that without such miss-measure would their be, in at least, the balanced equalization that will have brought but only to theorizing over such matters of some absolute omnipotency. Within its position, it should, in at least, bring to some comforting definition of what one will find its meaning, additionally, it is supposed that it can be intorted as a successive session in that most humans utter sounds. Humans typically pick the sound that they predict will likely improve the odds that something desire will happen. This utterance can be ‘wahhhh!’, ‘Goobalyblock’, ‘Give me all your money’, ‘What time is it?’, ‘ Como estas?’, ‘no’, ‘I'm sorry’, ‘thank you’. The listening party will then do whatever he/she feels like. This may be ignored, answer a question, perform a cart-wheel in response to a question, lie, disregard/obey a command, etc. This process repeats while either party can and wants to talk.
There is no necessity in this model for words to mean the same thing from speaker to speaker. If we are both bilingual I could ask you questions in German that you answer in English. It is important though that each party knows what the other party means by each word though. If two languages have the same syntax it could be construed that they are both one language and that it just so happens that people who know a certain section of vocabulary rarely know the other section and vice versa. On the same token, if we mean different things by certain words we could be considered to be speaking two separate (although very similar) languages
Because all statements are about reality, it is impossible for two rational, honest humans to disagree about the truth of any utterance (if they are speaking the same language). It is also impossible that any two different rational humans would make a different choice regardless of the language they spoke. Given that both humans knew everything and could calculate anything instantaneously.
Once, again, and given that both humans knew everything, could calculate anything instantaneously, were in the exact same position, and had the exact same desires. It’s quite apparent that the meaning of any collection of symbols or utterance can only be determined if the language it is in is known.
Any statement-question command using certain assumptions can be viewed as a system of equations: This requires that we are already aware of the truth of what the statement translates to and that we can determine how statements are separated. Even if all of those conditions were met there are still infinite solutions to the equations (if the meaning of no word is known from the start). So anything that is communicated is only interpretable if the language it is in is known.
As an interesting side note, since humans do learn some words/concepts this way they can be mistaken. For example every other speaker may believe we are in some situation similar to that presented in ‘The Matrix’. And so that they don't have to state ‘In the matrix’ so often (i.e:, ‘In the matrix my cat is black’) they define ‘is' to mean the concept you would visualize as what is provided by the you-English definition of ‘is, in the matrix,’
Aul Kripke claimed that are two exactly kinds of meaning. One cannot dispute this without a given definition for the concept of ‘meaning’ he was using . It will represent instead, the present for acceptance of the definition of a possible concept of meaning and illustrate that disagreement is impossible on this issue. Hopefully the concept of meaning provided will be similar to that to which we refer when we speak so that this issue will be relevant.
The truth and meaningfulness of a statement are not functions of that statement alone. Obviously the language in which that utterance is spoken (some sound could mean one thing on one language and a different in a different language) can totally change the truth/meaningfulness of an utterance. So exactly what ‘the King of France is bald’ means and the whether or not it is false depends on only terminology. This terminology is the definition of ‘false’, ‘meaning’, and ‘is’ as well as the ‘language’ being spoken
Any definitions can be used for those terms. In which it will offer of an example as a set of definitions for which the answer is obvious. For any set of concise definitions the answer to questions such as ‘Is that statement false or meaningless [for a specific language?]’ will be apparent or the question itself will be unclear. In-frowardly, insofar as (1) Language - ‘Method used to convert sound/symbols into processes (or vice versa).’ By definition of meaning provided, English is not a language. English doesn't state a clear set of standards for interpreting errors (unlike programming languages), so English cannot interpret all text. So by my definition set we cannot analyse a question like ‘Is the King of France is bald. False or meaningless?’ until we specify what language (by my provided definition of language) is being used. Whatever language was come up with, it would state how to handle all situations. Some situations, which may be labelled ‘errors’, would include: groups of characters that aren't words, syntax violations, contradictions in plurality/quantity/existence, conflicting statements, etc. The Kings’ example is just simply an error. So let's, just to finish an example with an answer, ask about whether the Kings’ statement is meaningless in the language, at this moment. By my sample definitions, in my language, the statement ‘The king of France is bald’ is meaningless. That is to say it causes an error and so all mental processes associated with that statement (updating my knowledge of the world) are cancelled. So there are no processes and it is therefore meaningless. Nonetheless, my mentality will be aware that something was said, the specifics of what was said, and will likely decide it’s efficient to debug the error [ask] ‘France doesn't have a king at the moment, were you referring to a different country?’ just for the record he responds ‘No, I was impersonating an Englishman who lived a long time ago.’ It is to realize that this whole issue lacks practical applications. The only reason of an explanation is how to untangle this mess of semantics is to illustrate that it can be done objectively and perhaps to shed luminance on language.
Language and philosophy have an intimate connection to one another; without a philosophical examination of the meanings and structure of language, we cannot easily ascertain the objective truth of the statements we make, nor can we usefully discuss abstract concepts. The philosophy of language seeks to understand the concepts expressed by language and to find a system by which it can effectively and accurately do so. This is more difficult than it appears at first; philosophers are looking for a theory of language which avoids the minute errors of meaning and usage which occur in all discussions of abstractive concepts and which tend to lead those discussions into complicated dead-ends.
Since so much of the philosophy is currently concerned with the linguistic representation of reality, the bond between the philosophical and the linguistic is growing stronger. Philosophers can only write syntax for the languages they want to use in expressing theory with some knowledge of linguistics; and linguists can use philosophical principles to solve problems of meaning and syntax. This strong link can be exploited to the advantage of both sides.
In recent history philosophers have struggled with the question of precision in language and have sought to construct a system or structure under which meanings can be discussed without danger of falling into circular or metaphysical traps. Two major approaches to this question have arisen in scientific circles of the twentieth century. Logical empiricism, also known as logical positivism, seeks to produce a language which consists of symbols combined precisely in accordance with specific rules; this would eliminate the philosophical convolutions that arise from the use of imprecise and confusingly ordered language. Ordinary language theory, on the other hand, suggests that these philosophical problems appear when language is used improperly: The language itself is perfectly acceptable and can be easily applied to the discussion of abstractive and philosophical conceptualizations without undue modifications, as long as it is used and interpreted properly. Each of the movements in linguistic philosophy had its strengths and weaknesses, and its supporters and detractors.
Pure metaphysical speculation which is not based on fact is, to the empiricists, neither relevant nor useful. The only truth, in this philosophy, is that which is mathematically provable or experimentally observable. This truth can be divided into two categories: analytic truths are based on inherent meanings and can be observed through the application of reason, if not experiment; synthetic truths are those facts which are obtained from the experience of reality.? Any system of communication must, in order to be meaningful, include some way to represent the truth accurately; any empiricist will tell you that this truth is only valuable and meaningful if it can be considered absolute and provable. In order to be perfectly accurate in representing the truth, language must conform to a certain set of specifications designed to prevent it from wandering into speculation, and under which it becomes possible to ascertain absolutely the truth of any statement. These rules are called formalist semantics. Syntax differs from semantics in that syntax guides the proper formation of elements of a language into statements, whereas semantics consists of the correct association of elements of language with elements of the real world.
In one view, philosophy itself cannot be anything other than logically empirical because the purpose of philosophy is to elucidate and clarify truth, and this clarification consists of the examination of language to see that it conforms to the concrete facts of reality. The philosopher's task is to analyse language and untangle the convolutions of common language into the simplicity of logical language. Sengupta quotes Ayer, one of the mainstays of the logical positivism movement, as saying that the philosopher ‘is not concerned with the physical properties of things. He is concerned only with the way in which we speak about them.’ Thus philosophy must be empiricist and formalistic in order to discuss aspects of reality with accuracy and truth.
The names most commonly associated with logical positivism come from the philosophical movement known as the Vienna Circle. This group of philosophers included such famous names as Carnap, Schlick, and Gödel; their main goal was to establish a context for philosophical thought which relied on observable fact and disregarded the metaphysical. They came together in the 1920's Vienna to create a philosophy that would oppose metaphysics and provide a basis for clarity in science.
Language and philosophy have an intimate connection to one another: Without a philosophical examination of the meanings and structure of language, we cannot easily ascertain the objective truth of the statements we make, nor can we usefully discuss abstract concepts. The philosophy of language seeks to understand the concepts expressed by language and to find a system by which it can effectively and accurately do so. This is more difficult than it appears at first: Philosophers are looking for a theory of language which avoids the minute errors of meaning and usage which occur in all discussions of abstract concepts and which tend to lead those discussions into complicated dead-ends.
Since so much of the philosophy is currently concerned with the linguistic representation of reality, the bond between the philosophical and the linguistic is growing stronger. Philosophers can only write syntax for the languages they want to use in expressing theory with some knowledge of linguistics; and linguists can use philosophical principles to solve problems of meaning and syntax. This strong link can be exploited to the advantage of both sides. In recent history philosophers have struggled with the question of precision in language and have sought to construct a system under which meanings can be discussed without danger of falling into circular or metaphysical traps. Two major approaches to this question have arisen in scientific circles of the twentieth century. Logical empiricism, also known as logical positivism, seeks to produce a language which consists of symbols combined precisely in accordance with specific rules: This would eliminate the philosophical convolutions that arise from the use of imprecise and confusingly ordered language. Ordinary language theory, on the other hand, suggested that these philosophical problems appear when language is used improperly: The language itself is perfectly acceptable and can be easily applied to the discussion of abstract and philosophical concepts without undue modifications, as long as it is used and interpreted properly. Each of the said movements in linguistic philosophy had its strengths and weaknesses, and its supporters and detractors.
Pure metaphysical speculation which is not based on fact is, to the empiricists, neither relevant nor useful. The only truth, in this philosophy, is that which is mathematically provable or experimentally observable. This truth can be divided into two categories: Analytic truths are based on inherent meanings and can be observed through the application of reason, if not experiment; synthetic truths are those facts which are obtained from the experience of reality. How does this apply to linguistic philosophy? Any system of communication must, in order to be meaningful, include some way to represent the truth accurately; any empiricist will tell you that this truth is only valuable and meaningful if it can be considered absolute and provable. In order to be perfectly accurate in representing the truth, language must conform to a certain set of specifications designed to prevent it from wandering into speculation, and under which it becomes possible to ascertain absolutely the truth of any statement. These rules are called ‘formalist semantics.’ Syntax differs from semantics in that syntax guides the proper formation of elements of a language into statements, whereas semantics consists of the correct association of elements of language with elements of the real world.
In philosophy it cannot be anything other than logically empirical because the purpose of philosophy is to elucidate and clarify truth, and this clarification consists of the examination of language to see that it conforms to the concrete facts of reality. The philosopher’s task is to analyse language and untangle the convolutions of common language into the simplicity of logical language. Sengupta quotes Ayer, one of the mainstays of the logical positivism movement, as saying that the philosopher ‘is not concerned with the physical properties of things. He is concerned only with the way in which we speak about them.’ Thus philosophy must be empiricist and formalistic in order to discuss aspects of reality with accuracy and truth.
In the 1930's, Rudolf Carnap, one of the chief logical positivists, developed what he called Logische Syntax. The aim of this work was to describe a theory of the logical syntax of language that would allow meaningful sentences to be created without reference to the meanings of specific symbols or words. This theory would be held to the same strict standards as a scientific theory. Essentially logical syntax formed a mathematical model of language which could be manipulated and proved just as any other mathematical or logical construct. It is a reductionist model, attempting to show that the logic of sentences is based upon the order of the word-symbols in that sentence, and do not require any reference to anything outside that sequence (i.e., reference to the semantical associations of the word symbols) in order to be meaningful. In other words, a sentence arranged according to formalistic syntax will be meaningful no matter what the word-symbols themselves represent
G.E. Moore, although not an original member of the Vienna circle, was another philosopher whose work furthered the aims of logical positivism; he helped to formulate the movement’s view of the purpose of philosophy. In his view, as Qadir summarizes, ‘the business of Philosophy is clarification and elucidation of concepts and not the discovery of facts.’ This concept is one of logical positivism's unique identifiers, distinguishing it from definitions of philosophy which purport that the task of the philosopher is to provide new knowledge. Syed Ataur Rahim, a professor at the University of Karachi, composed for his doctoral thesis a reply of metaphysics to the attacks posed by logical positivism. He asserts that the logical positivists misdefine metaphysics in their attempt to disarm it; metaphysics is not meaningless or unrelated to facts, but rather is ‘an epistemologico-ontological inquiry.’ Rational metaphysical inquiry is necessary for the construction of rational thoughts and for the furthering of scientific inquiry; unobservable ideas, which would be considered irrelevant by logical positivists, must be entertained before the formation of rational explanations about reality can take place. Therefore, a language based only on the concepts of logical positivism would be bereft of the contributions of metaphysics, and would lead only to a sterile field of scientific thought.
During its prime, the movement contributed several theories to the study of language. Its distinction between cognitive and non-cognitive meanings separated the functions of language into informational and emotional categories; only the first category, however, was considered meaningful by the empiricists. Logical problems arise when the second category is treated in the same way as the first; it must be remembered that a statement with qualities of emotion or appeal is not subject to distinctions of truth or falsity, and is therefore meaningless. Carnap suggested that both of these two categories could be found in any one sentence; but only the cognitive portion of the sentence was significant; all emotive value was irrelevant. Additionally, a line could be drawn between the significant and the non-significant uses of language; questions of religion and ethics were considered insignificant, since they did not refer primarily to aspects of the material world, and only language which could be dealt with utilizing methods of empirical proof was considered significant.
The ideal language sought by the empiricists has several identifiable properties. It was intended primarily to add conventions to language at points where the guidelines of semantics and syntax were loose enough to allow metaphysical speculation or, equivalently, nonsense. For instance, Katz cites Carnap, one of the founders of the Vienna Circle, as suggesting the inadequacy of normal grammar because it allows sentences such as ‘Caesar is a prime number’ to be considered grammatically correct. This ideal is based on mathematical and logical models; it represents the structure of a natural language but supposedly eliminates the aguenesses and possibilities for misconception to which natural languages are prone.
In essence, logical empiricists have several main postulates. Anything that is not based on rational fact is not eligible for philosophical contemplation. Philosophy’s main concern is with science and scientific language. The only way to make sure that language remains factual is to devise an artificial language that can only be used to create statements which refer to analytically or synthetically true information.
Formalism does have its faults, however. It presumes that all meaningful concepts can be expressed in terms of synthetically or analytically provable language, which may not necessarily be true; such a view eliminates the possibility of statements which have validity although we have yet to find methods of proving them, It is difficult to translate assertions from the ideal logical language into meaningful common language, since the former assertions are devoid of the added non-cognitive meanings which we commonly use to clarify cognitive meanings; and formalistic syntax cannot accommodate certain concepts of significance that are associated with normal language, nor can it express ideas above a certain level of complexity, since increased complexity often incorporates philosophical concepts which have a partially metaphysical nature.
In some ways the absolute refusal of empiricism to accommodate the idea of the existence of concepts other than the concrete may have contributed to its fall from philosophical popularity. This narrowed view cut off the logical positivists from consideration of all the possibilities of language. As Duke undergraduate and philosophy aficionado Allan Stevens noted: ‘Imagine the scientist who demands logical proof for every idea he acquires. There are two courses of action open to him. He can either spend all of his time trying to rationally verify minor reasonable truths, or he can just disregard the ideas that it is inconvenient to prove. Either example would extremely limit his total body of knowledge.’
Although this movement was considered by some to be more concerned with the reform of science than of language, one of logical positivism's major foci was the reform of language to make it more precise and so to make it a better tool for the description of reality. This goal was never realized before the movement decreased in strength, although modern linguistic theory owes a great deal to empiricist concepts
Logical empiricism did not go unchallenged by the philosophical community. One of the main counter-movements was called ordinary language theory; this theory suggested that everyday language without any special, more formal semantics could be used to discuss philosophical thought; it just had to be used correctly. Errors in usage, not deficiencies in the structure of language, led to philosophical misconceptualization. Ludwig Wittgenstein, originally a member of the positivists’ Vienna Circle, had a major influence on the formation of this theory.
Although at first he agreed with the principles of logical empiricism, Wittgenstein came to believe that it was too scientific for the topics it attempted to address and could not accommodate those valid parts of philosophical thought which were characterized by ambiguity. The artificial language created by the empiricists was overly scientific and tried to assign absolute meaning to non-absolute terms. Some terms necessarily possessed a degree of vagueness and could not be bound by the strictures of formalism, or else some valuable meanings would be lost. The search for understanding would not benefit so much from an insistence on absolute and perfect precision of meaning, created within the framework of an artificial logical language, as it would from the correct usage of the already existing language and the avoidance of errors propagated from its misuse.
Although Wittgenstein originally supported the philosophy of the Vienna Circle, he later reconsidered his views. His metamorphosing views embody the conflict between logical empiricism and ordinary language because over the course of his own scholarly career he supported the positions of both sides, at some point switching his consideration from one to the other. His Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus is a standard reading in logical positivism; his later Philosophical Investigations refutes and criticizes the thought described in the Tractatus. The main thrust of the Investigations' opposition to the ideas described in Table 1 is that the logical, fixed form of the world and the objects in it, described by the empiricists in the formulation of their theories, is in itself a metaphysical construction. Empiricism relies on the existence of a fixed form of the world because only in this fixed state can it be assured that the real world is composed of unassailable facts to which language can refer (Malcolm). In his later philosophical work, Wittgenstein began to question the unassailability of this reality; Malcolm describes his new view as a realization ‘, . . . that the formation of concepts, of the boundaries of what is thinkable, will be influenced by what is contingent - by facts of nature, including human nature.’ Therefore the logical suppositions of positivism were themselves metaphysical concepts, as constructs of an ideal world.
Wittgenstein considered the positivistic view, which underneath all apparently complex statements and concepts lie essentially and absolutely simple elements of reality, to be allusory. This simplicity was necessary to the aforementioned construction of a fixed and logical universe to which formalistic language could be applied. But reality has not been shown to reduce to these simple elements and thus the assumption that it does is unjustifiable.
Wittgenstein also altered his conception of the proposition as correspondent to reality. In the positivistic view a thought is a representation of a certain specific reality. Propositions are verbal expressions of specific thoughts; in order for the propositions to be logically empirical, the thoughts must likewise be reducible to simple and fixed elements, which Wittgenstein decided was unnecessary. Any method by which thoughts and propositions were connected with aspects of reality could be interpreted in various ways by various people, and thus thoughts on the same real object could differ from one another according to the path through which the object was intellectually interpreted. Therefore, propositions (correspondent to thoughts) which purportedly referred to the same aspect of reality might not be equivalent, and so the empiricist principle that a statement should have a singular correspondence with reality would not be maintain.
The theory of language that Katz developed was designed to explain the theory of linguistic structure while remaining true to the factual basis of natural language. Essentially, the explanation posited is a model of communication which suggests that a speaker be following rules with a definite structure when he creates or understands novel sentences; these rules allow him to ascertain meanings compositionally, deducing the meaning of a sentence from the meanings of its parts. In this way his theory compromised between empiricism and ordinary language: It asserts that thoughts and ideas are unobservable but that this is no more a meaningless piece of metaphysics than the scientific assertion of unobservable and theoretical particles. The scientific method allows the scientifically unobservable to be considered valid, just because there is any similar method for establishing the empiricism of ideas doesn't mean that they are any more metaphysical.
Peter Achinstein examined a contemporary positivist approach which, although it did not attempt a reconciliation with ordinary language, still modified the original version to adapt it to modern thought. In his view, the anti-positivist was more concerned with the main features of concepts and ignored certain parts that might not apply in all cases. The positivist, on the other hand, wants to give all concepts an absolute and complete set of attributes that are empirically provable and uniform . The view which lies between these suggests the necessity of a general set of conditions to define concepts; however, instead of eliminating those which do not fit this structure can be used to understand more about the concepts which are slightly outside the given structure.
As we draw closer to a time in which concepts such as love and the soul can be expressed in biological terms, connected intimately with brain tissue and the workings of the body, the scientific language of the logical positivists appears more and more applicable to previously unscientific terms. It is not necessary, however, to consider immaterial concepts meaningless; it is possible that they simply have not yet crossed the boundary into the scientific world. For instance, as we come closer to describing feelings in terms of neurotransmitter levels and neuronal firings, we also come closer to giving them meaning on the empirical level. Who can say that this concept which is presently immaterial (and therefore empirically insignificant) will never come under the auspices of positivistic science? Thus it appears that the empiricists, in insisting that the metaphysical was meaningless, may have spoken too soon; over time the metaphysical may metamorphose into the physical, as we learn more and more. And in its place may arise deeper layers of the metaphysical; will we ever eliminate the unprovable?
In the 1930's, Rudolf Carnap, one of the chief logical positivists, developed what he called Logische Syntax. The aim of this work was to describe a theory of the logical syntax of language that would allow meaningful sentences to be created without reference to the meanings of specific symbols or words. This theory would be held to the same strict standards as a scientific theory. Essentially logical syntax formed a mathematical model of language which could be manipulated and proved just as any other mathematical or logical construct. It is a reductionist model attempting to show that the logic of sentences is based upon the order of the word-symbols in that sentence, and do not require any reference to anything outside that sequence (i.e., reference to the semantical associations of the word symbols) in order to be meaningful. In other words, a sentence arranged according to formalistic syntax will be meaningful no matter what the word-symbols themselves represent.
Particularly, the problem of indeterminancy of transition, inscrutability of reference, language, prediction, rule following, semantics and translation. Just a well as the topics referring to subordinate headings associated with ‘logic’. The loss of confidence has a determinate meaning (each have of the others encoding) is an element common both to postmodern uncertainties in the theory of criticism and to the analytic tradition that follows writers such as Quine (1906). Still, it may be asked, why should we suppose that fundamental epistemic notions should be kept in account for behavioural terms of what grounds are there for supposing that ‘p knows p,’ is a subjective matter in that the prestigiousness of its statement between some subject statement and that of a physical theory that physically is forwarded upon an objection between nature and its mirror? The answer is that the only alternative seems to be to take knowledge of inner states premising from with our knowledge of other things is normally implied,. And without which our knowable knowledge of other things is normally inferred, and without which knowledge would be ungrounded. However, it is not really coherent, and does not in the last analysis’ make sense, to suggest that human knowledge have in excess of having strong foundations or grounds. it should be remembered that to say that truth and knowledge can only be judged by the statement of our own days’, which is not to say it is less meaningful nor is it more estranged than displaced off from the world, which we had supposed. Conjecturing it is justly as nothing that really counts as justification, such as the rules by which reference is governed we have already accepted, and that the pace is no way to get outside of our beliefs and our oral communications so as to find some experiment with which other than are coherent. The fact is hat the professional philosophers have thought it might be otherwise, since one and only they are haunted by the logic of epistemological scepticism.
What Quine opposes as ‘residual Platonism’ is not so much the hypostasising of non-physical entities as the notion of ‘correspondence’ with things that final courts of appeal for evaluating present practices. Unfortunately, Quine for all that is incompatible with its basic insights, substitutes for this correspondence to physical enmities, and specially to the basic entities, whatever they turn out to be, of physical science. Nevertheless, when their doctrines are purified, the convergent is on a single claim. That no account of knowledge can depend on the assumption of some privileged relations to reality. Their work brings an account of knowledge that can account only to a description of human behaviour.
In regards to an epistemology of science, that this singular project seeks to bring together a number of strands in recent research in the philosophy of science and overall epistemology to provide a coherent picture of the epistemology of science: Such are they are: (1) Naturalism: This project in naturalistic in two related senses. First, it takes knowledge to be a natural phenomenon, whose nature is to be understood in terms of its role in explaining the interaction of an individual or a community and their environment. Secondly, it accepts that a satisfactory epistemology of science will have to draw upon empirical research in psychology, neuroscience, history, and sociology.
(2) A modified Kuhnian picture of the process of scientific change with modifications are to accept a Kuhnian account of the way science changes (normal science interspersed with revolutionary science) and a Kuhnian account of why this happens (the priority of paradigms as exemplary scientific achievements). The way that paradigms operate when employed by an individual, being related to the capacity for rule-less pattern recognition, is something to be explained by reference to research in psychology and neuroscience. The way that individuals are inculcated in a paradigm and acquire a shared ability to recognise certain similarity relations among puzzle-solutions is to be explained by sociology, illustrated by historical examples. (3) An investigation of the psychology of scientific inference: The picture Kuhn himself gives us is of paradigms providing us with the ability directly to recognise similarities without mediation by conscious rules. As a picture of puzzle-solving and puzzle-evaluation this is too simple, even if an important starting point, since it is clear that scientific reasoning is a multi-step process involving reflection and cogitation, and so is not a matter of one-step immediate pattern-recognition. So an important task is to see how Kuhn’s insight can be modified to accommodate a more realistic picture of scientific reasoning and inference. This needs to be linked with an account of the logical structure of scientific reasoning.
(4) Inference to the Best Explanation is taken by Inference to the Best Explanation to be the logical structure of some of the most important scientific reasoning, including reasoning that extends theoretical knowledge. Its view does employ much of the content of the account provided by Peter Lipton, but also seeks to strengthen it by showing that for knowledge it is necessary (and possible) that Inference to the Best Explanation operates by eliminating all but one live potential explanation. According to Lipton not every potential explanation gets considered: bizarre explanations don’t enter the field, plausible explanations get conscious attention. It may be proposed that one of the functions of Kuhnian paradigms and similarity recognition be to direct scientists’ attention to the plausible explanations and to filter out the bizarre ones.
(5) Social knowing The Kuhnian picture being developed is neither purely individualistic nor purely social. This raises the question, what is the relationship between individual knowledge and social knowledge? In opposition to both traditional epistemology and more radical social epistemology, as it can be of an argument that neither is reducible to the other. Instead individual and social knowledge share the same structure. Williamson claims that individual knowledge is a factive mental state; Purposing that social knowledge is a factive state of some social structure. Not every aspect of this social structure is a human individual; it will include such items as libraries, journals, laboratories, structured by relationships of trust, authority, and power. Also its proposes of a task for the sociology of scientific knowledge, which is to investigate the causes and conditions whereby a society can be so organised as to produce scientific knowledge (as opposed to mere widespread belief). (6) Scientific progress Continuing with the Williamsonian theme that knowledge is the central concept in epistemology, under which it may be to argue that scientific progress is the accumulation of scientific knowledge and that the aim of science is the production of scientific knowledge
Language and philosophy have an intimate connection to one another, without a philosophical examination of the meanings and structure of language, we cannot easily ascertain the objective truth of the statements we make, nor can we usefully discuss abstract concepts. The philosophy of language seeks to understand the concepts expressed by language and to find a system by which it can effectively and accurately do so. This is more difficult than it appears at first; philosophers are looking for a theory of language which avoids the minute errors of meaning and usage which occur in all discussions of abstract concepts and which tend to lead those discussions into complicated dead-ends.
Since so much of the philosophy is currently concerned with the linguistic representation of reality, the bond between the philosophical and the linguistic is growing stronger. Philosophers can only write syntax for the languages they want to use in expressing theory with some knowledge of linguistics; and linguists can use philosophical principles to solve problems of meaning and syntax. This strong link can be exploited to the advantage of both sides.
In recent history philosophers have struggled with the question of precision in language and have sought to construct a system under which meanings can be discussed without danger of falling into circular or metaphysical traps. Two major approaches to this question have arisen in scientific circles of the twentieth century. Logical empiricism, also known as logical positivism, seeks to produce a language which consists of symbols combined precisely in accordance with specific rules; this would eliminate the philosophical convolutions that arise from the use of imprecise and confusingly ordered language. Ordinary language theory, on the other hand, suggested that these philosophical problems appear when language is used improperly; the language itself is perfectly acceptable and can be easily applied to the discussion of abstract and philosophical concepts without undue modifications, as long as it is used and interpreted properly. Each of the movements in linguistic philosophy had its strengths and weaknesses, and its supporters and detractors.
Pure metaphysical speculation which is not based on fact is, to the empiricists, neither relevant nor useful. The only truth, in this philosophy, is that which is mathematically provable or experimentally observable. This truth can be divided into two categories: analytic truths are based on inherent meanings and can be observed through the application of reason, if not experiment; synthetic truths are those facts which are obtained from the experience of reality? Any system of communication must, in order to be meaningful, include some way to represent the truth accurately; any empiricist will tell you that this truth is only valuable and meaningful if it can be considered absolute and provable. In order to be perfectly accurate in representing the truth, language must conform to a certain set of specifications designed to prevent it from wandering into speculation, and under which it becomes possible to ascertain absolutely the truth of any statement. These rules are called formalist semantics. Syntax differs from semantics in that syntax guides the proper formation of elements of a language into statements, whereas semantics consists of the correct association of elements of language with elements of the real world.
In one view, philosophy itself cannot be anything other than logically empirical because the purpose of philosophy is to elucidate and clarify truth, and this clarification consists of the examination of language to see that it conforms to the concrete facts of reality. The philosopher’s task is to analyse language and untangle the convolutions of common language into the simplicity of logical language. Sengupta quotes Ayer, one of the mainstays of the logical positivism movement, as saying that the philosopher ‘is not concerned with the physical properties of things. He is concerned only with the way in which we speak about them.’ Thus philosophy must be empiricist and formalistic in order to discuss aspects of reality with accuracy and truth.
In philosophy it cannot be anything other than logically empirical because the purpose of philosophy is to elucidate and clarify truth, and this clarification consists of the examination of language to see that it conforms to the concrete facts of reality. The philosopher’s task is to analyse language and untangle the convolutions of common language into the simplicity of logical language. Sengupta. Once, again, quotes Ayer, one of the mainstays of the logical positivism movement, as saying that the philosopher ‘is not concerned with the physical properties of things. He is concerned only with the way in which we speak about them.’ Thus philosophy must be empiricist and formalistic in order to discuss aspects of reality with accuracy and truth.
Nevertheless, one might object that peripheral self-awareness is nowhere to be found in one’s phenomenology. To be sure, the phenomenologists themselves did claim to find it. From Brentano (1874), through Husserl (1928) and Sartre (1937, 1943), to recent work by the so-called Heidelberg School, Smith (1989), and Zahavi (1999), the distinction between reflective and non-reflective self-awareness has been consistently drawn in the European continent. It may to suggest, that the distinction thus belaboured in the Phenomenological tradition be captured in the difference between transitive and intransitive modes of self-consciousness, that is, between being self-conscious of a thought or a percept and self-consciously thinking or perceiving. But a persistent objector could readily profess not to find anything like such peripheral self-awareness in her phenomenology and insist that the phenomenologists themselves have been, in this regard as in others, overly inflationist in their proclamations concerning the actual phenomenology of mental life.
This is a fair objection. But it may unwittingly impose an inordinate burden of proof on the proponent of intransitive self-consciousness. For how would one argue for the very existence of a certain mental phenomenon? Thus, to have as yet to encounter an effective argument against eliminativism about the propositional attitudes, or about consciousness and qualia, say of the sort espoused by Churchland (1984). Even so, we did encounter such an argument above, namely, that there appears to be peripheral awareness of every other sort, and it would be quite odd if the only exception was awareness of oneself. At this point, it is likened to try and explain away the relative intuitive appeal of eliminativism about intransitive self-consciousness, in comparison to, say, eliminativism about the qualitative character of colour experiences.
One factor may simply be that the qualitative character of colour experiences is much more phenomenologically impressive. In this respect, the proponent of intransitive self-consciousness is in a similar position to those philosophers who claim that conscious propositional attitudes have a phenomenal character (Strawson 1994, Horgan and Tienson 2002, Kriegel 2003, 2004). The problem they face is that the phenomenal character of propositional attitudes, if there is any, is clearly less striking than that of colour experiences. But the common tendency to take colour experiences as the gold standard of phenomenology may be theoretically limiting inasmuch as it may set the bar too high. For any other sort of phenomenology is bound to be milder.
Furthermore, special difficulties attach to noticing not just to an awareness of another perspective with a previously unrecognized body of knowledge but to a radically different way of being-in-the-world. In addition, this different way of being leads naturally to a different mode or practice of inquiry (i.e., the methods of Phenomenological research). This chapter will compare Phenomenological psychology to the more mainstream behavioural and psychoanalytic approaches (Valle, 1989), present the essence of the existential-phenomenological perspective (Valle, King, and Halling, 1989), describe the nature of an emerging transpersonal-phenomenological psychology (Valle, 1995), and present an overview of the transpersonal dimensions or themes emerging from seven recently completed empirical Phenomenological research projects.
Existentialism as the philosophy of being became intimately paired with phenomenology as the philosophy of experience because it is our experience alone that serves as a means or way to inquire about the nature of existence (i.e., what it means to be). Existential-phenomenology as a specific branch or system of philosophy was, therefore, the natural result, with what we have come to know as Phenomenological methods being the manifest, practical form of this inquiry. Existential-phenomenology when applied to experiences of psychological interest became existential-phenomenological psychology and has taken its place within the general context of humanistic or ‘third force’ psychology; it is humanistic psychology that offers an openness to human experience as it presents itself in awareness.
From a historical perspective, the humanistic approach has been both a reaction to and a progression of the world views that constitute mainstream psychology, namely, behavioural-experimental and psychoanalytic psychology. It is in this way that the philosophical bases that underlie both existential-phenomenological and transpersonal (‘fourth force’) psychology have taken root and grown in this field.
In classic behaviourism, the human individual is regarded as a passive entity whose experience cannot be accurately verified or measured by natural scientific methods. This entity, seen as implicitly separate from its surrounding environment, simply responds or reacts to stimuli that impinge on it from the external physical and social world. Because only that which can be observed with the senses and quantified, and whose qualities and dimensions can be agreed to by more than one observer, is recognized as acceptable evidence, human behaviour (including verbal behaviour) became the focus of psychology
In a partial response to this situation, the radical behaviourism of Skinner (e.g., 1974) claims to have collapsed this classic behaviour - experience split by regarding thoughts and emotions as subject to the same laws that govern operant conditioning and the roles that stimuli, responses, and reinforcement schedules play within this paradigm. Thoughts and feelings are, simply, behaviours.
In the psychoanalytic perspective, an important difference with behavioural psychology stands out. Experience is recognized not only as an important part of being human but as essential in understanding the adult personality. It is within this context that both Freud’s personal unconscious and Jung's collective unconscious take their places. The human being is, thereby, more whole yet is still treated as a basically passive entity that responds to stimuli from within (e.g., childhood experiences, current emotions, and unconscious motives), rather than the pushes and pulls from without. Whether the analyst speaks of one’s unresolved oral stage issues or the subtle effects of the shadow archetype, the implicit separation of person and world remains unexamined, as does the underlying causal interpretation of all behaviour and experience. Both behavioural and analytic psychology are grounded in an uncritically accepted linear temporal perspective that seeks to explain human nature via the identification of prior causes and subsequent effects.
Only in the existential-phenomenological approach in psychology is the implicitly accepted causal way of being seen as only one of many ways human beings can experience themselves and the world. More specifically, our being presents itself to awareness as a being-in-the-world in which the human individual and his or her surrounding environment are regarded as inextricably intertwined. The person and world are said to co-constitute one another. One has no meaning when regarded independently of the other. Although the world is still regarded as essentially different from the person in kind, the human being, with his or her full experiential depth, is seen as an active agent who makes choices within a given external situation (i.e., human freedom always presents itself as a situated freedom). Other concepts coming from existential - Phenomenological psychology include the prereflective, lived structure, the life-world, and intentionality. All these represent aspects or facets of the deeper dimensions of human being and human capacity.
The prereflective level of awareness is central to understanding the nature of Phenomenological research methodology. Reflective, conceptual experience is regarded as literally a ‘reflection’ of a preconceptual and, therefore, prelanguaged, foundational, bodily knowing that exists ‘as lived’ before or prior to any cognitive manifestation of this purely felt-sense. Consider, for example, the way a sonata exists or lives in the hands of a performing concert pianist. If the pianist begins to think about which note to play next, the style and power of the performance is likely to suffer noticeably.
This prereflective knowing is present as the ground of any meaningful (meaning-full) human experience and exists in this way, not as a random, chaotic inner stream of subtle senses or impressions but as a prereflective structure. This embodied structure or essence exists as an aspect or a dimension of each individual’s Lebenswelt or life-world and emerges at the level of reflective awareness as meaning. Meaning, then, is regarded by the Phenomenological psychologist as the manifestation in conscious, reflective awareness of the underlying prereflective structure of the particular experience being addressed. In this sense, the purpose of any empirical Phenomenological research project is to articulate the underlying lived structure of any meaningful experience on the level of conceptual awareness. In this way, understanding for its own sake is the purpose of Phenomenological research. The results of such an investigation usually take the form of basic constituents (essential elements) that collectively represent the structure or essence of the experience for that study. They are the notes that compose the melody of the experience being investigated.
Possible topics for a Phenomenological study include, therefore, any meaningful human experience that can be articulated in our everyday language such that a reasonable number of individuals would recognize and acknowledge the experience being described (e.g., ‘being anxious,’ ‘really feeling understood,’ ‘forgiving another,’ ‘learning,’ and ‘feeling ashamed’). These many experiences constitute, in a real sense, the fabric of our existence as experienced. In this way, Phenomenological psychology with its attendant research methods has been, to date, a primarily existential-phenomenological psychology. From this perspective, reflective awareness and prereflective awareness are essential elements or dimensions of human being as a being-in-the-world. They co-constitute one another. One cannot be fully understood without reference to the other. They are truly two sides of the same coin.
Some experiences and certain types of awareness, however, do not seem to be captured or illuminated by Phenomenological reflections on descriptions of our conceptually recognized experiences and/or our prereflective felt-sense of things. Often referred to as transpersonal, transcendent, sacred, or spiritual experience, these types of awareness are not really experience in the way we normally use the word, nor are they the same as our prereflective sensibilities. The existential Phenomenological notion of intentionality is helpful in understanding this distinction.
The world’s transpersonal, transcendent, sacred, and spiritual represent subtle distinctions among themselves. For example, ‘transpersonal’ currently refers to any experience that is transgenic, including the archetypal realities of Jung’s collective unconscious as well as radical transcendent awareness. Although notions such as the collective unconscious refer to states of mind that are deeper than or beyond our normal ego consciousness, ‘transcendent’ refers to a completely sovereign or soul awareness without the slightest inclination to define itself as anything outside itself including contents of the mind, either conscious or unconscious, personal or collective (i.e., awareness that is not only transgenic but transmind). This distinction between transpersonal and transcendent awareness may lead to the emergence of a fifth force or more purely spiritual psychology.
In existential-phenomenological psychology, intentionality refers to the nature or essence of consciousness as it presents itself. Consciousness is said to be intentional, meaning that consciousness always has an object, whether that intended object be a physical object, a person, or an idea or a feeling. Consciousness is always a ‘consciousness of’ something that is not consciousness itself. This particular way of defining or describing intentionality directly implies the deep, implicit interrelatedness between the perceiver and that which is perceived that characterizes consciousness in this approach. This inseparability enables us, through disciplined reflection, to illumine the meaning that was previously implicit and unlanguaged for us in the situation as it was lived.
Transcendent awareness, on the other hand, seems somehow ‘prior to’ this reflective-prereflective realm, presenting itself as more of a space or ground from which our more common experience and felt-sense emerge. This space or context does, however, present itself in awareness, and is, thereby, known to the one who is experiencing. Moreover, implicit in this awareness is the direct and undeniable realization that this foundational space is not of the phenomenal realm of perceiver and the perceived. Rather, it is a noumenal, unitive space within or from which both intentional consciousness and phenomenal experience manifest. From reflections on my own experience (Valle, 1989) offering the following six qualities or characteristics of transpersonal/transcendent awareness (often recognized in the practice of meditation)
(1). There is a deep stillness and peace that I sense as both existing as itself and, at the same time, as ‘behind’ all thoughts, emotions, or felt-senses (bodily or otherwise) that might arise or crystallize in or from this stillness. ‘I’ experience this as an ‘isness’ or ‘amness’ rather than a state of whatness or ‘I am this’ or ‘that.’ This stillness is, by its nature, neither active nor in the body and is, in this way, prior to both the prereflective and reflective levels of awareness. (2). There is an all-pervading aura or feeling of love for and contentment with all that exists, a feeling that exists simultaneously in my mind and heart. Although rarely focussed as a specific desire for anyone or anything, it is, nevertheless, experienced as an intense, inner energy or inspired ‘pressure’ that yearns, even ‘cries,’ for a creative and passionate expression. I sense an open embracing of everyone and everything just as they are, that literally melts into a deep peace when I find myself able to simply ‘ let it all be.’ Peace of mind is, here, a heart-felt peace (3) Existing as or with the stillness and love is a greatly diminished, and on occasion absent, sense of ‘I.’ The more common sense of ‘I am thinking or feeling this or that’ becomes a fully present ‘I am’ or simply, when in its more intense form, an ‘amness’ (pure Being in the Heideggerian sense). The sense of a ‘perceiver’ and ‘that which is perceived’ has dissolved; there is no longer any ‘one’ to perceive as we normally experience this identity and relationship.(4) My normal sense of space seems transformed. There is no sense of ‘being there,’ of being extended in and occupying space, but, similar to the previously mentioned, simply Being. Also, there is a loss of awareness of my body-sense as a thing or spatial container. This ranges from an experience of distance from sensory input to a radical forgetfulness of the body’s very existence. It is that my everyday, limited sense of body-space touches a sense of the infinite. (5) Time is also quite different from my everyday sense of linear passing time. Seemingly implicit in the sense of stillness described here is also a sense of time ‘hovering’ or standing still, of being forgotten (i.e., no longer a quality of mind) much as the body is forgotten. No thoughts dwelling on the past, no thoughts moving into the future - hours of linear time are experienced as a moment, as the eternal Now.(6) Bursts or flashes of insight are often part of this awareness, insights that have no perceived or known antecedents but that emerge as complete or full-blown. These insights or intuitive ‘seeings’ have some of the qualities of more common experience (e.g., although ‘lighter,’ there is a felt weightiness or subtle ‘content’ to them), but they initially have an ‘other-than-me’ quality about them, as if the thoughts and words that emerge from the insights are being done to or, even, through me - a sense that my mind and its contents are vehicles for the manifestation as experience of something greater and/or more powerful than myself. In its most intense or purest form, the ‘other-than-me’ quality dissolves as the ‘me’ expands to a broader, more inclusive sense of self that holds within it all that was previously felt as ‘other-than-me.’
Since these six qualities, we have come to recognize two additional dimensions or essential characteristics of transcendent awareness: (a) a surrendering of one's sense of control with regard to the outcome of one's actions, and the dissolution of fear that seems to always follow this ‘letting go,’ and (b) the transformative power of transcendent experience, realized as a change in one’s preferences, inclinations, emotional and behavioural habits, and understanding of life itself. This self-transformation is often personally painful because this power both challenges and changes the comfortable patterns of thoughts and feelings we have so carefully constructed through time, a transformation of whom we believe we are.
These qualities or dimensions call us to a recontextualization of intentionality by acknowledging a field of awareness that appears to be inclusive of the intentional nature of mind but, at the same time, not of it. In this regard, (Valle, 1989) offer the notion of a ‘transintentionality’ to philosophically address this consciousness without an object (Merrell-Wolff, 1973). As Phenomenological psychologist and researcher, Steen Halling (1988) has rightfully pointed out, consciousness without an object is also consciousness without a subject. Transintentional awareness, therefore, represents a way of being in which the separateness of a perceiver and that which is perceived has dissolved, a reality not of (or in some way beyond) time, space, and causation as we normally know them.
Here is a bridge between existential/humanistic and transpersonal/transcendent approaches in psychology. It is here that we are called to recognize the radical distinction between the reflective/prereflective realm and pure consciousness, between rational/emotive processes and transcendent/spiritual awareness, between intentional knowing of the finite and being the infinite. It is, therefore, mind, not consciousness per se, that is characterized by intentionality, and it is our recognition of the Transintentional nature of Being that calls us to investigate those experiences that clearly reflect or present these transpersonal dimensions in the explicit context of Phenomenological research methods.
This presentation is based on the following thoughts regarding the meaning of transpersonal in this context. On the basis of the themes that Huxley (1970) claimed to compose the perennial philosophy,(Valle, 1989) presented five premises that characterize any philosophy or psychology as transpersonal: (1) That a transcendent, transconceptual reality or Unity binds together (i.e., is immanent in) all apparently separate phenomena, whether these phenomena be physical, cognitive, emotional, intuitive, or spiritual: (2) That the individual or ego-self is not the ground of human awareness but, rather, only one relative reflection-manifestation of a greater transpersonal (as ‘beyond the personal’) Self or One (i.e., pure consciousness without subject or object). (3) That each individual can directly experience this transpersonal reality that is related to the spiritual dimensions of human life (4) That this experience represents a qualitative shift in one’s mode of experiencing and involves the expansion of one’s self-identity beyond ordinary conceptual thinking and ego-self awareness
(i.e., mind is not consciousness, however, if one is to thinking one has of oneself the dimension of consciousness). (5) That this experience is self-validating.
It has been written and taught for millennia in the spiritual circles of many cultures that sacred experience presents itself directly in one’s awareness (i.e., without any mediating sensory or reflective processes) and, as such, is self-validating. The direct personal experience of God is, therefore, the ‘end’ of all spiritual philosophy and practice.
Transcendent/sacred/divine experience has been recognized and often discussed, both directly and metaphorically, as either intense passion or the absolute stillness of mind (these thoughts and those that follow regarding passion and peace of mind are from Valle, 1995). In day-to-day experience, a harmonious union of passion and stillness or peace of mind is rarely experienced. Passion and stillness are regarded as somehow antagonistic to each other. For example, when one is passionately involved with some project or person, the mind is quite active and intensely involved. On the other hand, the calm, serene, and profoundly peaceful quality of mind that often accompanies deep meditation is fully disengaged from and, thereby, disinterested in things and events of the world.
What presents itself as quite paradoxical on one level offers a way to approach the direct personal experience of the transcendent, that is, to first recognize and then deepen any experience in which passion and peace of mind are simultaneously fully present in one’s awareness. If divine presence manifests in human awareness in these two ways, and sacred experience is what one truly seeks, it becomes important to approach and understand those experiences wherever these two dimensions exist in an integrated and harmonious way. In this way, one comes to understand the underlying essence that these dimensions share rather than simply being satisfied with the seeming opposites they first appear to be.
The relationship between passion and peacefulness is addressed in many of the world’s scriptures and other spiritual writings. These two threads, for example, run through the Psalms (May and Metzger, 1977) of the Judeo-Christian tradition. At one point, we read, ‘Be still and know that I am God’ (Psalm 46) and ‘For God alone my soul waits in silence’ (Psalm 62,) and at another point, ‘For zeal for thy house has consumed me’ (Psalm 69) and ‘My soul is consumed with longing for thy ordinances’ (Psalm 119). Stillness, silence, zeal, and longing all seem to play an essential part in this process.
In his teachings on attaining the direct experience of God through the principles and practices of Yoga, Paramahansa Yogananda (1956) affirms, that ‘I am calmly active. I am actively calm. I am a Prince of Peace sitting on the throne of poise, directing the kingdom of activity.’ And, more recently, Treya Wilber (quoted in Wilber, 1991) offers an eloquent exposition of this integration: Perhaps, the Carmelites’ emphasis on passion and the Buddhists’ parallel emphasis on equanimity. It suddenly occurred to me that our normal understanding of what passion means is loaded with the idea of clinging, of wanting something or someone, of fearing losing them, of possessiveness. But what if you had passion without all that stuff, passion without attachment, passion clean and pure? What would that be like, what would that mean? I thought of those moments in meditation when I’ve felt my heart open, a painfully wonderful sensation, a passionate feeling but without clinging to any content or person or thing. And the two words suddenly coupled in my mind and made a whole. Passionate equanimity - to be fully passionate about all aspects of life, about one’s relationship with spirit, to care to the depth of one’s being but with no trace of clinging or holding, that's what the phrase has come to mean to me. It feels full, rounded, complete, and challenging
It is here that existential-phenomenological psychology with its attendant descriptive research methodologies comes into play. For if, indeed, we each identify with the contents of our reflective awareness and speak to and/or share with one another from this perspective to better understand the depths and richness of our meaningful experience, then Phenomenological philosophy and method offer us the perfect, perhaps only, mirror to approach transcendent experience. Experiences that present themselves as passionate, as peaceful, or as an integrated awareness of these two become the focus for exploring in a direct, empirical, and human scientific way the nature of transcendent experience as we live it. Here are the ‘flesh’ and promise of a transpersonal-phenomenological psychology
Particular reports for a list of the specific constituents presented in each study, a reflective overview of these results reveals an emerging pattern of common elements or themes. We offer these eleven themes as a beginning matrix or tapestry of transpersonal dimensions interwoven throughout the descriptions of these experiences, not as constituents per se resulting from a more formal protocol analysis. As we looked over the results of these studies, these themes naturally emerged, falling, even, into a natural order. Some are clearly distinct, whereas others appear as more implicitly interconnected. These themes are:(1). An instrument, vehicle, or container for the experience(2) Intense emotional or passionate states, pleasant or painful(3) Being in the present moment, often with an acute awareness of one's authentic nature (4) anscending space and time (5) Expansion of boundaries with a sense of connectedness or oneness, often with the absence of fear(6) A stillness or peace, often accompanied by a sense of surrender (7) A sense of knowing, often as sudden insights and with a heightened sense of spiritual understanding (8) Unconditional love (9) Feeling grateful, blessed, or graced (10) Ineffability (11) Self-transformation.
It seems that the transpersonal/transcendent aspects of any given experience manifest in, come through, or make themselves known via an identifiable form or vehicle. This theme was evident in all seven research studies, the specific forms being silence, being with the dying, being with suffering, near-death experience, being with one’s spiritual teacher, and synchronicity. Transpersonal experiences can come through many forms including meditation, rituals, dreams, sexual experience, celibacy, initiations, music, breath awareness, physical and emotional pain, psychedelic drugs, and the experience of beauty (Maslow’s, 1968, description and discussion of peak experiences are relevant here as well as to a number of the themes discussed below). We again use a musical analogy: Just as the violin, piano, flute, or voice can be an instrument for the manifestation/expression of a melody, so, too, there are many ways in and through which consciousness reveals its nature.
The existential-phenomenologist may interpret this as further evidence for the intentional nature of consciousness, that this is simply the way in which consciousness presents itself to the perceiver. There is also the view that consciousness is a constant stream of ‘energy’ existing beyond the duality of subject-object (i.e., consciousness without an object) that flows through all creation, being both all-pervasive and unitive by its nature. Aware of the paradox implied in this perspective, Capra (1983) states.
[The mystical view] regards consciousness as the primary reality and ground of all being. In its purest form, consciousness, . . . is non- material, formless, and void of all content; it is often described as ‘pure consciousness,’ultimate reality,’ a ‘suchness’ and the like. This manifestation of pure consciousness is associated with the Divine. . . . The mystical view of consciousness is based on the experience of reality in non-ordinary modes of awareness, which are traditionally achieved through meditation, but may occur spontaneously in the process of artistic creation and in various other contexts, such as transcend.
Consorting, with any process drawing to some conclusion from a set of premises is called a processes of reasoning. If the conclusion concerns what we do, the process is called practical reasoning, otherwise pure theoretical reasoning. Evidently, such processes may be good or bad, if they are good, the premise support or even entailing the conclusions drawn, and if they are bad, the premise offers no support to the conclusion. Formal logic studies the cases under which conclusions are validly drawn from premises, but little human reasoning is overtly of the forms logicians identify. Partly, we are concerned to draw conclusions that ‘go-beyond’ our premises, in that the conclusions of logically valid are abutments do not for the process of using evidence to reach a wider range of conclusive evidential matters. Nonetheless, such anticipatory pessimism in the opposite direction to the prospects of conformation, that denying that we can assess the result of abduction in terms of probability. A cognitive process of reasoning in which a conclusion is played-out from a set of premises usually confine themselves to the conclusions that are supposed in following from the premises, e.g., an inference is logically valid, in that of deductibility in a logically defined syntactic premises. But without there being to any reference to the intended interpretation of its theory. Furthermore, s we reason we use indefinite traditional knowledge or common-sense sets of presuppositions about what is likely or not a task of an automated reasoning project, which is to mimic this causal use of knowledge by the way of the world in computer programs.
Without the fundamental discipline of linguistic analysis philosophy cuts itself adrift from ordinary meaning and enters an Alice-in-Wonderland fantasy of wishful wisdom. Yes, of course the nature of the human mind is a great puzzle. But if we approach this 'great puzzle' in a bare hands, undisciplined way, we put ourselves into the case of looking for something, without the faintest idea of what it is. That is a dumb quest. Probably the dumb quest for an insight into the nature of one's own mind is the worst example of such defective search procedure.
Many philosophers have been puzzled about the nature of consciousness. As a result, a huge literature allegedly about this subject, but really constituting a dense fog blanket of near- meaningless rhetoric, has been devised. In that finding its difficult to explain to an ordinary friend what is the point of such lengthy, scholastic, consciously obscure, artifice. What does it achieve? Does it clarify the individual's mind? Does it clarify the great intellectual issues of the day? Certainly not! It may serve to de-clarify the great intellectual issues of the day, because it helps to give philosophy, the art, a poor reputation: as being more interested in appearances than in realities, as being quite content to bandy-about badly focussed but meretricious sentences. We can't hope to get anywhere in philosophy unless we first concentrate our attention on focussing very firmly onto meanings.
What ever the bet on 'getting there' by the facile short-cut of introspection. To think one might get there by introspection is like thinking that the way to solve an equation is to stare at it harder and harder - for as long as it takes - until the unknown value of ‘x’ finally ('as it must of course') reveals itself! Introspective philosophy, it is widely agreed, is a reaction against positivism and physicalism: but, if so, the reaction has gone much too far. The main complaint against the positivists and the physicalists is surely that, in their blind attachment to scientific modes, they show a dismal insensitivity to human culture, human values, human relationships. They do, but it is what they lack that defines the complaint, not what they know. There can be no excuse for rejecting scientific modes of clarification out of hand in any department of human activity: least of all in one - philosophy - which must trade in clarification if it trades in anything at all. Yes, we need clarification in other areas too. But don't let's turn our backs on what we have.
Willard van Orman Quine, the most influential American philosopher of the latter half of the 20th century, when after the wartime period in naval intelligence, punctuating the rest of his career with extensive foreign lecturing and travel. Quine’s early work was in mathematical logic, and issued A System of Logistics (1934), Mathematical Logic (1940) and Methods of Logic (1950) wherefore, it was with the collection of papers from a Logical Point of View (1953) that his philosophical importance became widely recognized. Quine’s work dominated concerns with the problems of convention, meaning and synonymy cemented by Word and Object (1960), in which the indeterminacy of radical translation first takes centre-stage. In this and many subsequent writings Quine takes a bleak view of the nature of the language with which we ascribe thoughts and beliefs to ourselves and others. These ‘intentional idioms’ resist smooth incorporation into the scientific world view, and Quine responds with scepticism toward them, not quite endorsing ‘eliminativism’, but regarded them as second-rate idioms, unsuitable for describing strict and literal facts. For similar reasons he consistently expressed suspicion of the logical and philosophical propriety of appeal to logical; possibilities and possible worlds. The language that are properly behaved and suitable for literal and true descriptions of the world as those of mathematics and science. The entities to which his theories refer must be taken with full seriousness in our ontology although an empiricist, Quine thus supposes that the abstract objects of a set theory are required by science, and therefore exist. In the theory of knowledge Quine associates with a ‘holistic view’ of verification, conceiving of a body of knowledge in terms of a web touching experience at the periphery, but with each point connected by a network of relations to other points.
Quine is also known for the view that epistemology should be naturalized, or conducted in a scientific spirit, with the object of investigation being the relationship, in human beings, between the voice of experience and the outputs of belief. Although Quine’s approaches to the major problems of philosophy have been attacked as betraying undue ‘scientism’ and sometimes ‘behaviourism’, the clarity of his vision and the scope of his writings made him the major focus of Anglo-American work of the past forty years in logic, semantics and epistemology. As well as the works cited his writings’ cover The Ways of Paradox and Other Essays (1966), Ontological Relativity and Other Essays (1969), Philosophy of Logic (1970), The Roots of Reference (1974) and The Time of My Life: An Autobiography (1985).
Coherence is a major player in the theatre of knowledge. These are cogences theories of belief, truth and justification, as these are to combine themselves in the various ways to yield theories of knowledge coherence theories of belief and concerned with the contentual representation of beliefs. Consider a belief you now have the beliefs that you are reading a page in a book, in so, that, what makes that belief the belief that is? What makes it the belief that you are reading a page in a book than that of having a belief that you have a monster in your garden?
One answer is that belief has a coherent place or role in a system of beliefs, perception or having the perceptivity that has its influenced on beliefs. As you respond to sensory stimuli by believing that you are reading a page in a book than believing that you have some monster in your garden. Belief has an influence on action, or its belief is a desire to act, if belief will differentiate the differences between them, then its belief is a desire or if you were to believe that you are reading a page than if you believed in something about a monster, sortal perceptivals hold accountable the perceptivity and actions tat are indeterminate to its content if its belief is the action as if simulated by its inner and latent coherence in that of your belief, however. The role that gives the belief the content it has is the role it plays within a network of relations to other beliefs, some latently causal than other relations other than to the role in inference and implication. For example, I infer different things from believing that I am reading a page in a book than from any other, justly as I infer about other beliefs.
The information of perceptibility and the output of an action supplement as the central role of the systematic relations that the belief has to other beliefs, but the systematic relations gives the belief its specific contentual representation it has. They are the fundamental source of the content of belief. That is how coherence comes in. A belief that the representational content under which it does because of the way in which it coheres within a system of beliefs (Rosenberg 1988). We might distinguish weak coherence theories of the content of beliefs from stronger coherence theories. Weak coherence theories affirm that coherence is on e determinant of the representation given that the contents are of belief. Strong coherence theories of the content of belief affirm that coherence is the sole determinant of the contentual representations of belief.
When we turn from belief to justification, we confront a similar group of coherence theories. What makes one belief justified and another not? Again, there is a distinction between weak and strong theoretic principles that govern its theory of coherence. Weak theories tell us that the way in which a belief coheres with a background system of beliefs in one determinant of justification, other typical determinants being perceptivity, memory, and the collection of sensory data, however, strong theories, or dominant projections are in coherence to justification as solely a matter of how a belief coheres with a system of latent hierarchical beliefs. There is, nonetheless, another distinction that cuts across the distinction between weak and strong coherence theories between positive and negative coherence theory (Pollock 1986). A positive coherence theory tells us that if a belief coheres with a background system of beliefs, then the belief is justified. A negative coherence theory tells us that if a belief fails to cohere with a background system of beliefs, then the belief is not justified. We might put this by saying that, according to the positivity of a coherence theory, coherence has the power to produce justification, while according to its being adhered by negativity, the coherence theory has only the power to nullify justification.
Least there be mention, a strong coherence theory of justification is a formidable combination under which a positive and a negative theory tell us that a belief is justified if and only if it coheres with a background system of inter-connectivity of beliefs. Coherence theories of justification and knowledge have most often been rejected for being unable to deal with an accountable justification toward the perceptivity upon which its protection of knowledge (Audi 1988 and Pollock 1986), and therefore, considering a perceptual example that will serve as a kind of crucial test will be most appropriate. Suppose that a person, call her Julia, and works with a scientific instrumentation that has a gauging measure upon temperatures of liquids in a container. The gauge is marked in degrees, she looks at the gauge and sees that the reading is 125 degrees. What is she justifiably to believe, and why? Is she, for example, justified in believing that the liquid in the container is 125 degrees? Clearly, that depends on her background beliefs. A weak coherence theorist might argue that, though her belief that she sees the numerical digits 125 degrees, and is immediately justified as a direct sensory evidence without appeal to a background system, the belief that the location in the container is 125 degrees, that results from coherence with a background system of latent beliefs that affirm to the shaping perceptivity that its 125 as visually read to be 125 degrees on the gauge that measures the temperature of the liquid in the container. This, nonetheless. Of a weak coherence view that combines coherence with direct perceptibility as its evidence, in that the foundation of justification, is to account for the justification of our beliefs.
A strong coherence theory would go beyond the claim of the weak coherence theory to affirm that the justification of all beliefs, including the belief that one sees the shaping to sensory data that holds accountable a measure of 125, or even the more cautious belief that one sees a shape, resalting from the perceptivals of coherence theory, in that it coheres with a background system. One may argue for this strong coherence theory in a number of different ways. One line or medium through which to appeal to the coherence theory of contentual representation. If the content of the perceptual belief results from the relations of the belief to other beliefs in a network system of beliefs, then one may notably argue that the justification of perceptivity, that the belief in a resultant under which its relation of the belief to other beliefs, in the network system of beliefs is in argument for the strong coherence theory is that without any assumptive reason that the coherence theory of contentual beliefs, In as much as the supposed causes that only produce the consequences we expect. Consider the very cautious belief that ‘I see a shape’. How may the justifications for that perceptual belief are an existent result that is characterized of its material coherence with a background system of beliefs? What might the background system tell us that would justify that belief? Our background system contains a simple and primary theory about our relationship to the world and its surrounding surfaces, in that we perceive as it is or should be believed. To come to the specific point at issue, we believe that we can tell a shape when we see one, completely differentiate its form as perceived to sensory data, that we are to test of ourselves about such simple matters as whether we see a shape before us or not, as in the acceptance of opening to nature the inter-connectivity between belief and the progression through which is acquired from past experiential conditions of applicability, and not beyond deception. Moreover, when Julia sees the believing desire to act upon what either coheres with a weak or strong coherence of theory, she shows that its belief, as a measurable quality or entity of 125, has the essence in as much as there is much more of a structured distinction of circumstance, which is not of those that are deceptive about whether she sees that shape or sincerely does not see of it shaping distinction, however, light is good. The numeral shapes are largely, readily discernible and so forth. These are beliefs that Julia has single handedly authenticated by reasons for justification. Her successive malignance to sensory access to data involved is justifiably a subsequent belief, under which with those beliefs, and so she is justified and creditable.
The philosophical problems include, discovering whether belief differs from other varieties of assent, such as ‘acceptance’ discovering to what extent degree of belief is possible, understanding the ways in which belief is controlled by rational and irrational factors, and discovering it links with other properties, such as the possession of conceptual or linguistic skills. This last set of problems includes the question of whether prelinguistic infants or animals are property said to have beliefs.
Thus, we might think of coherence as inference to the best explanation based on a background system of beliefs, since we are not aware of such inferences for the most part, the inference must be interpreted as unconscious inferences, as information processing, based on or finding the background system that proves most convincing of acquiring its act and used from the motivational force that its underlying and hidden desire are to do so. One might object to such a account on the grounds that not all justifiable inferences are self-explanatory, and more generally, the account of coherence may, at best, is ably successful to competitions that are based on background systems (BonJour 1985 and Lehrer 1990). The belief that one sees a shape competes with the claim that one does not, with the claim that one is deceived, and other sceptical objections. The background system of beliefs informs one that one is acceptingly trustworthy and enables him or her to meet the objection. A belief coheres with a background system just in case it enables either to meet the sceptical objections and in the way justifies one in the belief. This is a standard strong coherence theory of justification (Lehrer 1990).
Illustrating the relationship between positive and negative coherence theories in terms of the standard coherence theory is easy. If some objection to belief cannot be met in terms of the background system of beliefs of a person, then the person is not justified in the belief. So, to turn to Julia, suppose that she has been told that a warning light has been installed on her gauge to tell her when it is not functioning properly and that when the red light is on, the gauge is malfunctioning. Suppose that when she sees the reading of 125, she also sees that the red light is on. Imagine, finally, that this is the first time the red light has been on, and, after years of working with the gauge, Julia, who has always placed her trust in the gauge, believes what the gauge tells her, that the liquid in the container is at 125 degrees. Though she believes what she reads is at 125 degrees is not a justified belief because it fails to cohere with her background belief that the gauge is malfunctioning. Thus, the negative coherence theory tells us that she is not justified in her belief about the temperature of the content in the container. By contrast, when the red light is not illuminated and the background system of Julia tell her that under such conditions that the gauge I a trustworthy indicator of the temperature of the liquid in the container, then she is justified. The positive coherence theory tell us that she is justified in her belief because her belief coheres with her background system of Julia , telling that under such conditions that the gauge is a trustworthy indicator of the temperature of the liquid in the container, then she is justified. The positive coherence theory tell us that she is justified in her belief because her belief coheres with her background system continuing as a trustworthy system.
As the foregoing sketch and illustration of coherence theories of justification have a common feature, namely, that they are what is called internalistic theories of justification: What makes of such a view the absence of any requirement that the person for whom the belief is justified have of any cognitive access to the relation of reliability in question. Lacking such access, such a person will usually have no reason for thinking that the belief is true or likely to be true, but will, on such an account are none the lesser to appear epistemologically justified in accepting it. Thus, such a view arguably marks a major break from the modern epistemological tradition, which identifies epistemic justification with having a reason, perhaps even a conclusive reason, for thinking that the belief is true. An epistemologist working within this tradition is likely to feel that the externalist, than offering a competing account of the same concept of epistemic justification with which the traditional epistemologist is concerned, has simply changed the subject.
They are theories affirming that coherence is a matter of internal relations between beliefs and that justification is a matter of coherence. If, then, justification is solely a matter of internal relations between beliefs, we are left with the possibility that the internal relations might fail to correspond with any external reality. Ho w one might object, can be to assume the including of interiority. A subjective notion of justification bridge the gap between mere true belief, which might be no more than a lucky guess, and knowledge, which must be grounded in some connection between internal subjective conditions and external objective realities?
The answer is that it cannot and that something more than justified true belief is required for knowledge. This result has, however, been established quite apart from consideration of coherence theories of justification. What are required maybe put by saying that the justification that one must be undefeated by errors in the background system of beliefs? Justification is undefeated by errors just in case any correction of such errors in the background system of belief would sustain the justification of the belief on the basis of the corrected system. So knowledge, on this sort of positivity I acclaimed by the coherence theory, under which the true belief that coheres with the background belief system and corrected versions of that system. In short, knowledge is true belief plus justification resulting from coherence and undefeated by error (Lehrer 1990). The connection between internal and subjective conditions of belief and external objectivity are from which reality’s result from the required correctness of our beliefs about the relations between those conditions and realities. In the example of Julia, she believes that her internal subjectivity to conditions of sensory data in which the experience and perceptual beliefs are connected with the external objectivity in which reality is the temperature of the liquid in the container in a trustworthy manner. This background belief is essential to the justification of her belief that the temperature of the liquid in the container is 125 degrees, and the correctness of that background belief is essential to the justification remaining undefeated. So our background system of beliefs contains a simple theory about our relation to the external world that justifies certain of our beliefs that cohere with that system. For instance, such justification to convert to knowledge, that theory must be sufficiently free from error so that the coherence sustained in corrected versions of our background system of beliefs. The correctness of the simple background theory provides the connection between the internal condition and external reality.
The coherence theory of truth arises naturally out of a problem raised by the coherence theory of justification. The problem is that anyone seeking to determine whether she has knowledge is confined to the search for coherence among her beliefs. The sensory experiences she has been deaf-mute until they are represented in the form of some perceptual belief. Beliefs are the engines that pull the train of justification. Nevertheless, what assurance do we have that our justification is based on true beliefs? What justification do we have that any of our justifications are undefeated? The fear that we might have none, that our beliefs might be the artifacts of some deceptive demon or scientist, leads to the quest to reduce truth to some form, perhaps an idealized form, of justification (Rescher 1973 and Rosenberg 1980). That would close the threatening sceptical gap between justification and truth. Suppose that a belief is true if and only if it is justifiable of some person. For such a person there would be no gap between justification and truth or between justification and undefeated justification. Truth would be coherence with some ideal background system of beliefs, perhaps one expressing a consensus among systems or some consensus among belief systems or some convergence toward a consensus. Such a view is theoretically attractive for the reduction it promises, but it appears open to profound objectification. One is that there is a consensus that we can all be wrong about at least some matters, for example, about the origins of the universe. If there is a consensus that we can all be wrong about something, then the consensual belief system rejects the equation of truth with the consensus. Consequently, the equation of truth with coherence with a consensual belief system is itself incoherent.
Coherence theories of the content of our beliefs and the justification of our beliefs themselves cohere with our background system but coherence theories for truth do not. A defender of coherentism must accept the logical gap between justified belief and truth, but may believe that our capacities suffice to close the gap to yield knowledge. That view is, at any rate, a coherent one.
What makes a belief justified and what makes a true belief knowledge? Thinking that whether a belief deserves one of these appraisals is natural depending on what causal subject to have the belief. In recent decades a number of epistemologists have pursued this plausible idea with variety of specific proposals. Some causal theories of knowledge have it that a true belief that ‘p’ is knowledge just in case it has the right causal connection to the fact that ‘p’. Such a criterion can be applied only to cases where the fact that ‘p’ is a sort that can enter causal relations, this seems to exclude mathematical and other necessary facts and perhaps any fact expressed by a universal generalization, and proponents of this sort of criterion have usually the sort of criterion have usually supposed that it is limited to perceptual knowledge of particular fact about the subject’s environment.
For example, Armstrong (1973) proposed that a belief of the form ‘This (perceived) object is F’ is (non-inferential) knowledge if and only if the belief in a completely reliable sign that the perceived object is ‘F’, that is, the fact that the object is ‘F’ contributed to causing the belief and its doing so depended on properties of the believer such that the laws of nature dictated that, for any object ‘x’ is to occur, and so thus a perceived object of ‘y’, if ‘x’ undergoing those properties are for us to believe that ‘y’ is ‘F’, then ‘y’ is ‘F’ (Dretske (1981) offers a rather similar account, in terms of the belief’s being caused by a signal received by the perceiver that carries the information that the object is ‘F’).
This sort of condition fails, however, to be sufficient for non-inferential perceptual knowledge, because it is compatible with the belief’s being unjustified, and an unjustifiable belief cannot be knowledge. For example, suppose that your mechanisms for colour perception are working well, but you have been give n good reason to think otherwise, to think that the substantive primary colours that are perceivable, that things look tinted to you and tinted things look tinted. If you fail to heed these reasons you have for thinking that your colour perception or sensory data is a way. Believing in a ‘thing’, which looks to blooms of vividness that you are to believe of its tint, your belief will fail to be justified and will therefore fail to be knowledge, even though it is caused by the thing’s being tinted in such a way as t be a completely reliable ign, or to carry the information, in that the thing is tinted.
One could fend off this sort of counterexample by simply adding to the causal condition the requirement that the belief be justified, by this enriched condition would still be insufficient. Suppose, for example, that in nearly all people, but not in you, as it happens, causes the aforementioned aberration in colour perceptions. The experimenter tells you that you have taken sch a drug but then says, ‘no, hold off a minute, the pill you took was just a placebo’ suppose further, that this last thing te experimenter tells you is false. Her telling you that it was a false statement, and, again suppose, telling you this gives you justification for believing that looks a subtractive primary colour to you that it is a sensorial primary colour, in that the fact you were to expect that the experimenters last statements were false, making it the case that your true belief is not knowledgeably correct, thought as though to satisfy its causal condition.
Goldman (1986) has proposed an importantly different causal criterion namely, that a true belief is knowledge, if it is produced by type of process that is ‘globally’ and ‘locally’ reliable. causing true beliefs as sufficiently high and globally reliable in its propensity. Local reliability has to do with whether the process would have produced a similar but false belief in certain counterfactual situation alternative to the actual situation. This way of marking off true beliefs that are knowledge does not require the fact believed to be casually related to the belief, and si it could in principle apply to knowledge of any kind of truth.
Goldman requires tat global reliability of the belief-producing process for the justification of a belief, he requires it also for knowledge because justification is required for knowledge, under which requires for knowledge but does not require for justification, which is locally reliable. His idea is that justified true belief is knowledge if the type of process that produced it would not have produced it in any relevant counterfactual situation in which it is false. Thee relevant alternative account of knowledge can be motivated by noting that other concepts exhibit the same logical structure e. two examples of this are the concept ‘flat’ and te concept ‘empty’ (Dretske 1981). Both appear to be absolute concepts. . . . A space is empty only if it does not contain anything and a surface is flat only if it does not have any bumps. However, the absolute character of these concepts is relative to a standard. In the case of ;flat’, there is a standard for what counts as a bump and in the case of ‘empty’, there is a standard for what counts a thing. To be flat is to be free of any relevant bumps and to be empty is to be devoid of all relevant things.
What makes an alternative situation relevant? Goldman does not try to formulate examples of what he takes to be relevantly alterative, but suggests of one. Suppose, that a parent takes a child’s temperature with thermometer that the parent selected at random from several lying in the medicine cabinet. Only the particular thermometer chosen was in good working order, it correctly shows the child’s temperature to be normal, but if it had been abnormal then any of the other thermometers would have erroneously shown it to be normal. Te parent’s actual true belief is caused by a globally reliable process but, because it was ‘just luck’ that te parent happened to select a good thermometer, ‘we would not say that te parent knows that the child’s temperature is normal.’ Goldman gives yet another example: Suppose: -
Wally spots Ruth across the street and correctly believes that it is Ruth.
If it did so occur that it was Ruth’s twin sister, he would be mistaken her
for Ruth. Does Wally know Ruth? As long as there is a serious possibility that person across the street might have been Joan rather than, . . .
we would deny that Wally knows. (Goldman 1986)
Goldman suggests that the reason for denying knowledge in the thermometer example, be that it was ‘just luck’ tat the parent did not pick a non-working thermometer and in the twin’s example, the reason is that there was ‘a serious possibility’ that it might have been the one in which Wally could have probably had mistaken. This suggests the following criterion of relevance: An alternative situation, whereby, that the same belief is produced in thee same way but is false, it is relevantly just in case at some point before the actual belief was to its cause, by which a chance that the actual belief was to have caused, in that the chance of what situation’s having come about was instead of the actual situation was to converge, nonetheless, by the chemical components that constitute its inerter-actual exchange by which endorphin excitation was to influence e and so give to the excitability of neuronal transmitters that deliver messages, inturn, the excited endorphin’s gave ‘change’ to ‘chance’, thus it has of itself the existential position of holding a given to opportunities too decided upon numerous accounts of combination as given the chance to change. Thus and so, our interpretations of which the sensory-data is unduly persuaded by innate capabilities that at times are latently hidden to arise within the mind or brain, giving to its existential decision of a chosen chance of luck.
One of the most durable and intractable issues in the history of philosophy has been the problem of universals. Closely related to this, and a major subject of debate in 20th century philosophy, has been the problem of the nature of the meaning.
The problem of universals goes back to Plato and Aristotle. The matter at issue is that, on the one hand, the objects of experience are individual, particular, and concrete, while, on the other hand, the objects of thought, or most of the kinds of things that we know even about individuals, are general and abstract, i.e. universals. Thus, a house may be red, but there are many other red things, so redness is a general property, a universal. Redness can also be conceived in the abstract, separated from any particular thing, but it cannot exist in experience except as a property of some particular thing and it cannot even be imagined but with some other minimal properties, e.g. extension. Abstraction is especially conspicuous in mathematics, where numbers, geometrical shapes, and equations are studied in complete separation from experience. The question that may be asked, then, is how it is that general properties or abstract objects are related to the world, how they exist in or in relation to individual objects, and how it is that we know them when experience only seems to reveal individual things.
Plato's answer to this was that universals exist in a separate reality as special objects, distinct in kind, from the things of experience. This is Plato's famous theory of ‘Forms.’ Plato himself used the terms idéa and eîdos in Greek, which could mean the ‘look’ of a thing, its form, or the kind or sort of a thing [Liddell and Scott, An Intermediate Greek-English Lexicon, Oxford, 1889, 1964, pp. 226 & 375]. Since Aristotle used the term eîdos to mean something else and consistently used idéa to refer to Plato's theory, in the history of philosophy we usually see references to Plato's ‘theory of Ideas.’
Although Aristotle said that Socrates had never separated the Forms from the objects of experience, which is probably true, some of Socrates's language suggests the direction of Plato's theory. Thus, in the , Socrates, in asking for a definition of piety, that he does not want to know about individual pious things, but about the ‘idea itself,’ so that he may ‘look upon it’ and, using it ‘as a model [parádeigma],’ judge ‘that any action of yours or another's that is of that kind is pious, and if it is not that it is not’- G.M.A. Grube trans., Hackett, 1986]. Plato concludes that what we ‘look upon’ as a model, and is not an object of experience, is some other kind of real object, which has an existence elsewhere. That ‘elsewhere’ is the ‘World of Forms,’ to which we have only had access, as the Myth of Chariot in the Phaedrus says, before birth, and which we are now only remembering. Later, the decided that we have access now, immediately and intuitively, to the Forms, but while this produces a rather different kind of theory, both epistemologically and metaphysically, it still posits universals as objects at a higher level of reality than the objects of experience (which partake of matter and evil)
Plato himself realized, as recounted in the Parmenides, that there were some problems and obscurities with his theory. Some of these could be dismissed as misunderstandings; others were more serious. Most important, however, was the nature of the connection between the objects of experience and the Forms. Individual objects ‘participate’ in the Forms and derive their character, even, Plato says in the , their existence, from the Forms, but it is never clear how this is supposed to work if the World of Forms is entirely separate from the world of experience that we have here. In the Timaeus, Plato has a Creator God, the ‘Demiurge,’ fashioning the world in the image of the Forms, but this cannot explain the on-going coming-into-being of subsequent objects that will ‘participate’ themselves. Plato's own metaphorical language in describing the relationship, which empirical objects are ‘shadows’ of the Forms, probably suggested the Neoplatonic solution that such objects are attenuated emanations of Being, like dim rays of sunlight at some distance from the source
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