"This reviewer had to be restrained from stopping people in the street to urge them to read it: They would learn something of the way science is done,...

In a number of influential articles published since 1972, Dorothy Grover has developed the prosentential theory of truth. Brought together and published with a new introduction, these essays are even more impressive as a group than they were as single contributions to philosophy and linguistics. Denying that truth has an explanatory role, the prosentential theory does not address traditional truth issues like belief, meaning, and justification. Instead, it focuses on the grammatical role of the truth predicate and asserts that (...) “it is true” is a prosentence, functioning much as a pronoun does. Grover defends the theory by indicating how it can handle notorious paradoxes like the Liar, as well as by analyzing some English truth-usages. The introduction to the volume surveys traditional theories of truth, including correspondence, pragmatic, and coherence theories. It discusses the essays to come and, finally, considers the implications of the prosentential theory for other theories. Despite the fact that the prosentential theory dismisses the “nature of truth” as a red herring, Grover shows that there are important aspects of traditional truth theories that prosentential theorists have the option of endorsing. (shrink)

In this chapter, Dorothy Walsh argues that any ethical theory requires an underlying speculative metaphysics.

The human body is becoming hot property, a resource to be “mined,” “harvested,” patented, and traded commercially for profit as well as scientific and therapeutic advances. Under the new entrepreneurial approach to the body old tensions take on new dimensions—about consent, the fair distribution of tissues and products developed from them, the individual and cultural values represented by the body, and public policy governing the use of organs and tissues.

In discussing propositional quantifiers we have considered two kinds of variables: variables occupying the argument places of connectives, and variables occupying the argument places of predicates.We began with languages which contained the first kind of variable, i.e., variables taking sentences as substituends. Our first point was that there appear to be no sentences in English that serve as adequate readings of formulas containing propositional quantifiers. Then we showed how a certain natural and illuminating extension of English by prosentences did provide (...) perspicuous readings. The point of introducing prosentences was to provide a way of making clear the grammar of propositional variables: propositional variables have a prosentential character — not a pronominal character. Given this information we were able to show, on the assumption that the grammar of propositional variables in philosopher's English should be determined by their grammar in formal languages (unless a separate account of their grammar is provided), that propositional variables can be used in a grammatically and philosophically acceptable way in philosophers' English. According to our criteria of well-formedness Carnap's semantic definition of truth does not lack an ‘essential’ predicate - despite arguments to the contrary. It also followed from our account of the prosentential character of bound propositional variables that in explaining propositional quantification, sentences should not be construed as names.One matter we have not discussed is whether such quantification should be called ‘propositional’, ‘sentential’, or something else. As our variables do not range over (they are not terms) either propositions, or sentences, each name is inappropriate, given the usual picture of quantification. But we think the relevant question in this context is, are we obtaining generality with respect to propositions, sentences, or something else?Because people have argued that all bound variables must have a pronominal character, we presented and discussed in the third section languages in which the variables take propositional terms as substituends. In our case we included names of propositions, that-clauses, and names of sentences in the set of propositional terms. We made a few comparisons with the languages discussed in the second section. We showed among other things how a truth predicate could be used to obtain generality. In contrast, the languages of the second section, using propositional variables, obtain generality without the use of a truth predicate. (shrink)

Moral and social arguments weigh heavily against performing medical procedures solely for purposes of sex selection. The medical profession has a responsibility to abandon its posture of ethical neutrality and take a firm stand now against sex selection.

Book synopsis: Vagueness is currently the subject of vigorous debate in the philosophy of logic and language. Vague terms-such as "tall", "red", "bald", and "tadpole"—have borderline cases ; and they lack well-defined extensions. The phenomenon of vagueness poses a fundamental challenge to classical logic and semantics, which assumes that propositions are either true or false and that extensions are determinate. Another striking problem to which vagueness gives rise is the sorites paradox. If you remove one grain from a heap of (...) sand, surely you must be left with a heap. Yet apply this principle repeatedly as you remove grains one by one, and you end up, absurdly, with a solitary grain that counts as a heap. This anthology collects papers in the field. After an introduction that surveys the field, the essays form four groups, starting with some historically notable pieces. The 1970s saw an explosion of interest in vagueness, and the second group of essays reprints classic papers from this period. The following group of papers represent current work on the logic and semantics of vagueness. The essays in the final group are contributions to the continuing debate about vague objects and vague identity. (shrink)

The scientific validity of racial categories has been the subject of debate among population geneticists, evolutionary biologists, and physical anthropologists for several decades. After World War II, the rejection of eugenics, which had supported sterilization laws and other destructive programs in the United States, generated a compelling critique of the biological basis of race. The classification of human beings into distinct biological “races” is a relatively recent invention propped up by deeply flawed evidence and historically providing the foundation of racist (...) ideology and inequities of power. Social scientists’ conclusion that race is socially constructed was confirmed by genomic studies of human variation, including the Human Genome Project, showing high levels of genetic similarity within the human species. Some scholars came to believe that the science of human genetic diversity would replace race as the preeminent means of grouping people for scientific purposes. (shrink)

There has been a long debate on whether demonstratives are directly referential as Kaplan originally argued, or indirectly referential like a definite description. I propose a new analysis of demonstratives that combines intuitions from both direct and indirect approaches. The demonstrative is analyzed as an indirectly referential expression with a binary maximality operator that takes two arguments, where the second argument can be a deictic pointing, an anaphoric index, or a relative clause. Direct reference is encoded not in the meaning (...) of the demonstrative but in the meaning contributed by the pointing gesture, thus capturing both direct and indirect uses. I further propose that some pronouns in English function as demonstratives, realizing the binary structure and competing with the demonstrative. The main advantages of this proposal include (a) deriving the distribution of pronominal and adnominal demonstratives systematically; (b) capturing the unique interaction that demonstratives have with a pointing gesture; and (c) locating English demonstratives against a larger, cross-linguistic picture. (shrink)

Plato's use of illustrative material, in the widest sense, is very varied. Parts of the field have had some study—his use of metaphor and simile and his use of proverbs, at least as regards subject-matter and sources. The object of the present article is to consider in general what may already have been catalogued somewhere—his quotations from other writers and his references to myths and to other stories.

I argue that the suppositional view of conditionals, which is quite popular for indicative conditionals, extends also to subjunctive or counterfactual conditionals. According to this view, conditional judgements should not be construed as factual, categorical judgements, but as judgements about the consequent under the supposition of the antecedent. The strongest evidence for the view comes from focusing on the fact that conditional judgements are often uncertain; and conditional uncertainty, which is a well-understood notion, does not function like uncertainty about matters (...) of fact. I argue that the evidence for this view is as strong for subjunctives as it is for indicatives. (shrink)

This paper examines some French feminist uses of Lacanian psychoanalysis. I focus on two Lacanian influenced accounts of psychological oppression, the first by Luce Irigaray and the second by Julia Kristeva, and I argue that these accounts fail to meet criteria for an adequate political psychology.

Book synopsis: Philosophers have long been fascinated by the connection between cause and effect: are 'causes' things we can experience, or are they concepts provided by our minds? The study of causation goes back to Aristotle, but resurged with David Hume and Immanuel Kant, and is now one of the most important topics in metaphysics. Most of the recent work done in this area has attempted to place causation in a deterministic, scientific, worldview. But what about the unpredictable and chancey (...) world we actually live in: can one theory of causation cover all instances of cause and effect? (shrink)

The association of poetry and femininity … excluded women poets. For the female figures onto whom the men projected their artistic selves—Tennyson’s Mariana and Lady of Shalott, Browning’s Pippa and Balaustion, Arnold’s Iseult of Brittany—represent an intensification of only a part of the poet, not his full consciousness: a part, furthermore, which is defined as separate from and ignorant of the public world and the great range of human experience in society. Such figures could not write their own poems; the (...) male poet, who stands outside the private world of art, has to do that for them. The Lady of Shalott could not imagine someone complex and experienced enough to imagine the world beyond range of her windows, or to imagine her. A woman poet who identified herself with such a stock figure of intense and isolated art would hardly be able to write at all. Or, like the Lady of Shalott preparing her death-ship, she could write only her own name, only herself. For a man, writing poetry meant an apparent withdrawal from the public sphere , but for a woman it meant just the opposite: a move toward public engagement and self-assertion in the masculine world. She could not just reverse the roles in her poetry and create a comparable male self-projection, since the male in this set of opposites is defined as experienced, complexly self-conscious, and part of the public world and therefore could not serve as a figure for the poet. We can formulate the problem like this: a man’s poem which contains a female self-projection shows to distinctly different figures, poet and projection; in a woman’s poem on the same model, the two would blur into one.Furthermore, it’s not really poets that are women, for the Victorians: poems are women. The cliché that style is the man arises more readily and with much greater literalness and force when the stylist is a woman, and it is often charged with erotic intensity. The young lovers in Gilbert and Sullivan’s Iolanthe describe their perfect love by singing that he is the sculptor and she the clay, he the singer and she the song. Ladislaw in Middlemarch tells Dorothea that she needn’t write poems because she is a poem. Edgar Allan Poe remarks in a review of Barrett Browning’s works that “a woman and her book are identical.” In her love letters Barrett Browning herself worried about the problem of her identity—was she her poems, were they she, which was Browning in love with? “I love your verses with all my heart, dear Miss Barrett,” he had written disconcertingly in his first letter, “… and I love you too.” […] As we can see in Tennyson’s The Princess, the lyric in particular seemed female to Victorians—private, nonlogical, purely emotional—and it is surely no accident that large numbers of English and American women began to publish poetry in the nineteenth century, when the lyric established its dominance. Victorian poems like Victorian women were expected to be morally and spiritually uplifting, to stay mostly in the private sphere, and to provide emotional stimulus and release for overtasked men of affairs.9 All this may have encouraged women to write poetry, but at the same time it made writing peculiarly difficult because it reinforced the aspects of conventional Victorian femininity—narcissism, passivity, submission, silence—most inimical to creative activity. Since women already are the objects they try to create, why should they write? 9. John Woolford points this out in “EBB: Woman and Poet,” Browning Society Notes 9 : 4. Dorothy Mermin is professor and chairman in the department of English at Cornell University. She is the author of The Audience in the Poem and is currently working on a critical study of Elizabeth Barrett Browning. (shrink)