Van Fraassen (1980) and Winther (2009) claim that we can explain phenomena in terms of scientific theories without believing that they are true. I argue that we ought to believe that they are true in order to use them to explain and understand phenomena. A scientific antirealist who believes that scientific theories are merely empirically adequate cannot use them to explain or to understand phenomena. The mere belief that they are empirically adequate produces neither explanation nor (...) understanding of phenomena. Explanation and understanding are the benefits of science only a scientific realist is entitled to. (shrink)

Scientific realists have argued that the truth(likeness) of our theories provides the only explanation for the success of science. I consider alternative explanations proposed by antirealists. I endorse Leplin's contention that neither van Fraassen's Darwinist explanation nor Laudan's methodological explanation provides the sort of explanatory alternative which is called for in this debate. Fine's suggestion--that the empirical adequacy of our theories already explains their success--is more promising for antirealists. Leplin claims that this putative explanation collapses into (...) realism on one reading and into vacuity on another reading. But his analysis conflates three doctrines into two, and one of the three avoids both realism and vacuity. (shrink)

For the past decade and a half, Aristotelians have tried to counter the following criticism articulated by John Doris: if we look at personality and social psychology research, we must conclude that we generally neither have, nor have the capacity to develop, character traits of the kind envisioned by Aristotle and his followers. Some defenses of Aristotelian virtue ethics proceed by trying to insulate it from this challenge, while others have tried to dissipate the force of Doris's critique by (...) showing how virtue ethics and recent findings in personality psychology share surprisingly extensive common ground. For example, in their 2009 books, Daniel Russell and Nancy Snow both argue that the empirical research regarding character complements - not undermines - virtue ethics. Specifically, each argues that the situationally sensitive Cognitive-Affective Personality System developed by Walter Mischel and Yuichi Shoda can be integrated into a virtue ethical moral philosophy and theory of character. In this paper, I raise several objections to their attempts to use the CAPS model to rehabilitate Aristotelian virtue ethics and argue that, as a result, this model has not been shown to have the promise Snow and Russell allege it has. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Nature of Proof in PsychiatryPaul Lieberman (bio)Keywordspsychotherapy process, knowledge and psychiatry, externalism, WittgensteinThis vivid clinical report illustrates recognizably, and provocatively, a number of routine, but often unexamined, clinical questions. In its few paragraphs, it depicts challenges that each practitioner confronts, and, in the flux of clinical work, addresses, however implicitly and imperfectly, every day: From what data, and by what processes, does a clinical formulation, or way of (...) understanding, come into being? How do we appraise its accuracy and adequacy? Of what value is even a well-substantiated understanding, in the mind of the therapist, to the patient? What is the power of empathy as a treatment tool? How do we assess someone's status as a “good candidate for therapy?” When, typically, only the outlines of a problem are visible, and its origins and implications are largely hidden, by what right do we recommend psychotherapy, and with what conception, at what level of detail, of what its outcome will be? These are among the questions that Dr. Bailey's story challenges us to address.They are clinical questions, of course, because they deal with empirical matters of fact—psychological processes, outcomes studies, and evidence. But they are also philosophical because, as Freud insisted and Dr. Bailey shows, information obtained in the clinical situation often has power and authority that lead us to believe we understand what is going on, understand the other person, even in the absence of scientifically tested hypotheses, or the clear application of research-based evidence. Interactions between people—including clinical interactions—have a life and ability to engage us. Their meanings can seem so transparent and convincing that no doubt or questioning may seem cogent. At their most powerful, such experiences can reawaken us to important realms of experience and feeling which we might, otherwise, forget, ignore, suppress, deny, or in other ways keep out of awareness; they have the potential to arouse us and reconnect us with truths that, once revived, can seem both valid and important—perhaps the kind of experience that we may derive from works of art or literature (in fact, Dr. Bailey's account could be seen as a clinical parable—meant to be neither true nor false, but instructive). But even less dramatic examples are commonplace: we do routinely claim to know and be able to interpret and understand the actions of other people from our everyday interactions with and observations of them.What is less clear is how to account for these convictions and how to appraise their value, because they do not derive from established scientific procedures. Clinical intuition has a role throughout medicine, but we usually expect it to be subjected later to more rigorous tests to establish the correct diagnosis. Yet, as Dr. Bailey's case illustrates, clinical intuition in the psychiatric encounter seems somehow different. When Colin [End Page 225] leads Dr. Bailey to the conclusion that a “painful lack of wounds” has made him depressed, we find this credible. It seems similarly credible that Dr. Bailey might be anxious about his own capacity to defend his young family, because he says he is, that he perceives Colin as testing his manhood or sincerity, because that seems to fit Colin's temperament, that being accurately understood is helpful, because most of us have had that experience and valued it, and that, most generally, an absence of challenge or of activity could be depressing. But suppose a patient believed that a painful lack of wounds produced diabetes instead of depression, or suppose he had developed epilepsy and attributed that to an absence of combat experience. We might see these as ‘pre-scientific’ or ‘hypothesis-generating’ (or worse). By contrast, it seems timid to consider psychiatric formulations to be always and only provisional or hypothetical.In what ways and to what extent should we expect psychiatry to be different, and why? Several considerations suggest that psychiatry's reasons are not, always and everywhere, the same as those of general medicine, nor are its objectives.In general medicine, we distinguish between signs and symptoms, on the one hand, and “underlying” disease processes, on the other. But in psychiatry, this distinction can be... (shrink)

The proposition I elucidate and defend in this paper is that the explanatory power of Malgorzata Czarnocka’s conception of symbolic truth extends beyond our knowledge of empirical reality and includes our knowledge of human nature and human values. The paper is composed of two parts. In the first part I present a detailed analysis of the conception of symbolic truth. The focus in this analysis is on the nature of the correspondence relation which connects a true statement (...) and the cognitive object. Czarnocka persuasively argues that this relation is neither isomorphic nor homomorphic in character. She advances a detailed analysis of sensual perception as the locus of the cognitive act. The outcome of this analysis is that the structure of the statement which is articulated in this act does not copy or mirror the structure of the object but is a linguistic representation. In the second part of the paper I argue that empirical reality is not the paradigm of reality and that scientific knowledge is not the paradigm of knowledge. The domain of humanity is as real as the domain of empirical reality, and our knowledge of this domain is as central to our life as scientific knowledge is. Moreover, I argue that Czarnocka’s conception of symbolic truth functions adequately in explaining the possibility of knowledge of human nature and human values with special focus on the literary work of art. (shrink)

Suppose that scientific realists believe that a successful theory is approximately true, and that constructive empiricists believe that it is empirically adequate. Whose belief is more likely to be false? The problem of underdetermination does not yield an answer to this question one way or the other, but the pessimistic induction does. The pessimistic induction, if correct, indicates that successful theories, both past and current, are empirically inadequate. It is arguable, however, that they are approximately true. Therefore, scientific realists overall (...) take less epistemic risk than constructive empiricists. (shrink)

The paper discusses the concept of adequacy central for Pertażycki’s methodology. According to Petrażycki any valuable scientific theory should be adequate, that is, neither limping nor jumping. Consequently, adequacy of a theory is a stronger condition than its truth. Every adequacy theory is true, but not conversely. However, there is problem, because scientific laws are conditionals. This suggests that adequacy is too strong conditions, because the consequence of an implication has a wider scope than (...) its antecedent. Thus, laws should have the form of equivalence. The paper shows how model-theoretic characterization of theories allows to recognize truth and adequacy, consistently with Petrażycki’s claims. (shrink)

An incorrect interpretation of Goodman’s theory of counterfactuals is persistently being offered in the literature. I find that strange. Even more so since the incorrectness is rather obvious. In this paper I try to figure out why is that happening. First I try to explain what Goodman did say, which of his claims are ignored, and what he did not say but is sometimes ascribed to him. I emphasize one of the bad features of the interpretation: it gives counterfactuals (...) some formal properties that neither Goodman nor (usually) the interpreter would accept. The usual interpretation (UI), which I claim should not be ascribed to Goodman, considers a counterfactual A>C true iff A, together with natural laws and all contingent truths cotenable with it, entails C. (UI) makes valid the law of conditional excluded middle, which Goodman clearly rejected. Among possible reasons for which the interpreters might find (UI) adequate is that (UI), as I argue, smuggles in the idea of minimal change, which is otherwise attractive, natural to many, but not to be found anywhere in Goodman’s paper. At the end I stress the significance of Goodman’s theory by arguing that we still need some of his notions to test the adequacy of our modern theories. (shrink)

The traditional No-Miracles Argument (TNMA) asserts that the novel predictive success of science would be a miracle, and thus too implausible to believe, if successful theories were not at least approximately true. The TNMA has come under fire in multiple ways, challenging each of its premises and its general argumentative structure. While the TNMA relies on explaining novel predictive success via the truth of the theories, we put forth a deductive version of the No-Miracles argument (DNMA) that avoids inference (...) to the best explanation entirely. Instead, a relatively simple empirical framework and a probabilistic analysis can accomplish the ambitious goals of the TNMA while entirely sidestepping its problems. This close-but-distinct argument has many independent strengths and comparatively few weaknesses. Indeed, objections tailored specifically to the DNMA reveal surprising insights into how exactly NMAs are neither circular nor question-begging, as has been widely speculated. (shrink)

continent. 1.3 (2011): 149-155. The world is teeming. Anything can happen. John Cage, “Silence” 1 Autonomy means that although something is part of something else, or related to it in some way, it has its own “law” or “tendency” (Greek, nomos ). In their book on life sciences, Medawar and Medawar state, “Organs and tissues…are composed of cells which…have a high measure of autonomy.”2 Autonomy also has ethical and political valences. De Grazia writes, “In Kant's enormously influential moral philosophy, autonomy (...) , or freedom from the causal determinism of nature, became prominent in justifying the human use of animals.”3 One of the oldest uses of autonomy in English is a description of the French civil war from the late sixteenth century: “Others of the…rebellion entred in counsell, whether they ought to admit the King vpon reasonable conditions, specially hauing their autonomy.”4 Life, and in particular human life, and in particular human politics, is well served by the usages of autonomy . What about the rest of reality, however? Should it be thought of, if it's even considered real and mind-independent, as pure stuff for the manipulation or decorative tastes of truly autonomous beings? We tend to think of things such as paperweights and iPhones as mere tools of human design and human use. To use them is to cause them to exist as fully and properly as they can. But according to Martin Heidegger, when a tool such as a paperweight is used, it disappears, or withdraws ( Entzug ). We are preoccupied with copying the page that the paperweight is holding down. We are concerned with an essay deadline, and the paperweight simply disappears into this general project. If the paperweight slips, or if the iPhone freezes, we might notice it. All of a sudden it becomes vorhanden (present-at-hand) rather than zuhanden (ready-to-hand).5 Yet Heidegger is unable to draw a meaningful distinction between what happens to a paperweight when it slips from the book I'm copying from and what happens to the paperweight when it presses on the still resilient pages of the thick paperback itself. Further still and related to this point, even when I am using the paperweight as part of some general task, I am not using the entirety of the paperweight as such. My project itself selects a thin slice of paperweight-being for the purposes of holding down a book. Even when it is zuhanden the paperweight is withdrawn. Graham Harman is the architect of this way of thinking.6 Harman discovered a gigantic coral reef of withdrawn entities beneath the Heideggerian submarine of Da-sein, which itself is operating at an ontological depth way below the choppy surface of philosophy, beset by the winds of epistemology, and infested with the sharks of materialism, idealism, empiricism and most of the other isms that have defined what is and what isn't for the last several hundred years. At a moment when the term ontology was left alone like a piece of well chewed old chewing gum that no one wants to have anything to do with, object-oriented ontology (OOO) has put it back on the table. The coral reef isn't going anywhere and once you have discovered it, you can't un-discover it. And it seems to be teeming with strange facts. The first fact is that the entities in the reef—we call them “objects” somewhat provocatively—constitute all there is: from doughnuts to dogfish to the Dog Star to Dobermans to Snoop Dogg. People, plastic clothes pegs, piranhas and particles are all objects. And they are all pretty much the same, at this depth. There is not much of a distinction between life and non-life (as there isn't in contemporary life science). And there is not much of a distinction between intelligence and non-intelligence (as there is in contemporary artificial intelligence theory). A lot of these distinctions are made by humans, for humans (anthropocentrism). And the concept autonomy has come into play in policing such distinctions. In this essay I shall to try to liberate autonomy for the sake of nonhumans. I shall do so by parsing carefully the title, which is taken from Hakim Bey's work The Temporary Autonomous Zone .8 First we shall explore the term autonomous . Then we shall explore what the full meaning of zone is. Finally, we shall investigate what temporary means. Each of these terms is of great value. An object withdraws from access. This means that its very own parts can't access it. Since an object's parts can't fully express the object, the object is not reducible to its parts. OOO is anti-reductionist. But OOO is also anti-holist. An object can't be reduced to its “whole” either, “reduced upwards” as it were. The whole is not greater than the sum of its parts. So we have a strange irreductionist situation in which an object is reducible neither to its parts nor to its whole. A coral reef is made of coral, fish, seaweed, plankton and so on. But one of these things on its own doesn't embody part of a reef. Yet the reef just is an assemblage of these particular parts. You can't find a coral reef in a parking lot. In this way, the vibrant realness of a reef is kept safe both from its parts and from its whole. Moreover, the reef is safe from being mistaken for a parking lot. Objects can't be reduced to tiny Lego bricks such as atoms that can be reused in other things. Nor can be reduced upwards into instantiations of a global process. A coral reef is an expression of the biosphere or of evolution, yes; but so is this sentence, and we ought to be able to distinguish between coral reefs and sentences in English. The preceding facts go under the heading of undermining . Any attempt to undermine an object—in thought, or with a gun, or with heat, or with the ravages of time or global warming—will not get at the withdrawn essence of the object. By essence is meant something very different from essentialism . This is because essentialism depends upon some aspect of an object that OOO holds to be a mere appearance of that object, an appearance-for some object. This reduction to appearance holds even if that object for which the appearance occurs is the object itself! Even a coral reef can't grasp its essential coral reefness. In essentialism, a superficial appearance is taken for the essence of a thing, or of things in general. In thinking essentialism we may be able to discern another way of avoiding OOO. This is what Harman has christened overmining .? The overminer decides that some things are more real than others: say for example human perception. Then the overminer decides that other things are only granted realness status by somehow coming into the purview of the more real entity. When I measure a photon, when I see a coral reef, it becomes what it is. But when I measure a photon, I never measure the actual photon. Indeed, since at the quantum scale to measure means “to hit with a photon or an electron beam” (or whatever), measurement, perception ( aisthesis ), and doing become the same. What I “see” are deflections, tracks in a diffusion cloud chamber or interference patterns. Far from underwriting a world of pure illusion where the mind is king, quantum theory is one of the very first truly rigorous realisms, thinking its objects as irreducibly resistant to full comprehension, by anything.9 So far we have made objects safe from being swallowed up by larger objects and broken down into smaller objects—undermining. And so far we have made objects safe from being mere projections or reflections of some supervenient entity—overmining. That's quite a degree of autonomy. Everything in the coral reef, from the fish to a single coral lifeform to a tiny plankton, is autonomous. But so is the coral reef itself. So are the heads of the coral, a community of tiny polyps. So is each individual head. Each object is like one of Leibniz's monads, in that each one contains a potentially infinite regress of other objects; and around each object, there is a potentially infinite progress of objects, as numerous multiverse theories are now also arguing. But the infinity, the uncountability, is more radical than Leibniz, since there is nothing stopping a group of objects from being an object, just as a coral reef is something like a society of corals. Each object is “a little world made cunningly” (John Donne).10 We are indeed approaching something like the political valance of autonomy . The existence of an object is irreducibly a matter of coexistence. Objects contain other objects, and are contained “in” other objects. Let us, however, explore further the ramifications of the autonomy of objects. We will see that this mereological approach (based on the study of parts) only gets at part of the astonishing autonomy of things. Yet there are some more things to be said about mereology before we move on. Consider the fact that since objects can't be undermined or overmined, it means that there is strictly no bottom object . There is no object to which all other objects can be reduced, so that we can say everything we want to say about them, hypothetically at least, based on the behavior of the bottom object. The idea that we could is roughly E.O Wilson's theory of consilience .11 Likewise, there is no object from which all things can be produced, no top object . Objects are not emanations from some primordial One or from a prime mover. There might be a god, or gods. Suppose there were. In an OOO universe even a god would not know the essential ins and outs of a piece of coral. Unlike even some forms of atheism, the existence of god (or nonexistence) doesn't matter very much for OOO. If you really want to be an atheist, you might consider giving OOO a spin. If there is no top object and no bottom object, neither is there a middle object . That is, there is no such thing as a space, or time, “in” which objects float. There is no environment distinct from objects. There is no Nature (I capitalize the word to reinforce a sense of its deceptive artificiality). There is no world, if by world we mean a kind of “rope” that connects things together.12 All such connections must be emergent properties of objects themselves. And this of course is well in line with post-Einsteinian physics, in which spacetime just is the product of objects, and which may even be an emergent property of a certain scale of object larger than 10?¹?cm).13 Objects don't sit in a box of space or time. It's the other way around: space and time emanate from objects. How does this happen? OOO tries to produce an explanation from objects themselves. Indeed, the ideal situation would be to rely on just one single object. Otherwise we are stuck with a reality in which objects require other entities to function, which would result in some kind of undermining or overmining. We shall see that we have all the fuel we need “inside” one object to have time and space, and even causality. We shall discover that rather than being some kind of machinery or operating system that underlies objects, causality itself is a phenomenon that floats ontologically “in front of” them. In so doing, we will move from the notion of autonomy and begin approaching a full exploration of the notion of zone , which was promised at the outset of this essay. Since an object is withdrawn, even “from itself,” it is a self-contradictory being. It is itself and not-itself, or in a slightly more expanded version, there is a rift between essence and appearance within an object (as well as “between” them). This rift can't be the same as the clichéd split between substance and accidents , which is the default ontology. On this view, things are like somewhat boring cupcakes with somewhat less boring sugar sprinkles on them of different colors and shapes. But on the OOO view, what is called substance is just another limited slice of an object, a way of apprehending something that is ontologically fathoms deeper. What is called substance and what is called accidence are just on the side of what this essay calls appearance. The rift (Greek, chorismos ) between essence and appearance means that an object presents us with something like what in logic is known as the Liar: some version of the sentence “This sentence is false.” The sentence is true, which means that it is a lie, which means that it is false. Or the sentence is false, which means that it is telling the truth, which means that it is true. Now logic since Aristotle has tried desperately to quarantine such beasts in small backwaters and side streets so that they don't act too provocatively.14 But if OOO holds, then at least one very significant thing in the universe is both itself and not-itself: the object. An object is p ? ¬p. To cope with this fact, we shall need some kind of paraconsistent or even fully dialetheic logic, one that is not allergic to dialetheias (double-truthed things). Yet if we accept that objects are dialetheic, p ? ¬p, we can derive all kinds of things easily from objects. Consider the fact of motion. If objects only occupy one location “in” space at any “one” time, then Zeno's paradoxes will apply to trying to think how an object moves. Yet motion seems like a basic, simple fact of our world. Either everything is just an illusion and nothing really moves at all (Parmenides). Or objects are here and not-here “at the same time.”15 This latter possibility provides the basic setup for all the motion we could wish for. Objects are not “in” time and space. Rather, they “time” (a verb) and “space.” They produce time and space. It would be better to think these verbs as intransitive rather than transitive, in the manner of dance or revolt . They emanate from objects, yet they are not the object. “How can we know the dancer from the dance?” (Yeats).16 The point being, that for there to be a question, there must be a distinction—or there must not be (p ? ¬p).17 It becomes impossible to tell: “What constitutes pretense is that, in the end, you don't know whether it's pretense or not.”18 In this notion of the emergence of time and space from an object we can begin to understand the term zone . Zone can mean belt , something that winds around something else. We talk of temperate zones and war zones. A zone is a place where a certain action is taking place: the zone winds around, it radiates heat, bullets fly, armies are defeated. To speak of an autonomous zone is to speak of a place that a certain political act has carved out of some other entity. Cynically, Tibet is called TAR, the Tibetan Autonomous Region, for this very reason. In this phrase, Region tries to emulate zone : it sounds as if the place has its own rules, but of course, it is very much under the control of China. What action is taking place? “[N]ot something that just is what it is, here and now, without mystery, but something like a quest…a tone on its way calling forth echoes and responses…water seeking its liquidity in the sunlight rippling across the cypresses in the back of the garden.”19 If as suggested earlier there is no functional difference between substance and accidence; if there is no difference between perceiving and doing; if there is no real difference between sentience and non-sentience—then causality itself is a strange, ultimately nonlocal aesthetic phenomenon. A phenomenon, moreover, that emanates from objects themselves, wavering in front of them like the astonishingly beautiful real illusion conjured in this quotation of Alphonso Lingis. Lingis's sentence does what it says, casting a compelling, mysterious spell, the spell of causality, like a demonic force field. A real illusion: if we knew it was an illusion, if it were just an illusion, it would cease to waver. It would not be an illusion at all. We would be in the real of noncontradiction. Since it is like an illusion, we can never be sure: “What constitutes pretense…” A zone is what Lingis calls a level . A zone is not entirely a matter of “free will”: this concept has already beaten down most objects into abject submission. Objects are far more threateningly autonomous, and sensually autonomous, than the Kantian version of autonomy cited in the first paragraph of this essay. A zone is not studiously decided upon by an earnest committee before it goes into action. One of its predominant features is that it is already happening . We find ourselves in it, all of a sudden, in the late afternoon as the shadows lengthen around a city square, giving rise to an uncanny sensation of having been here before. Objects emit zones. Wherever I find myself a zone is already happening, an autonomous zone. It is the nonautonomous zones that are impositions on what is already the case. Or rather, these zones are autonomous zones that exclude and police. They are brittle. Every object is autonomous, but some objects try to maintain themselves through rigidity and brittleness, like (and such as) a police state. Paradoxically, the more rigidly one tries to exclude contradiction, the more virulent become the dialetheias that are possible. I can get around “This sentence is false” by imagining that there are metalanguages that explain what counts as a sentence. Then I can decide that this isn't a real sentence. This is basically Alfred Tarski's strategy, since he invented the notion of metalanguage specifically to cope with dialetheias.20 For example we might claim that sentences such as “This sentence is false” are neither true nor false. But then you can imagine a strengthened version of the Liar such as: “This sentence is not true”; or “This sentence is neither true nor false.” And we can go on adding to the strengthened Liar if the counter-attack tries to build immunity by specifying some fourth thing that a sentence can be besides true, false, and neither true nor false: “This sentence is false, or neither true nor false, or the fourth thing.” And so on.21 It seems as if language becomes more brittle the more it tries to police the Liars of this world. Why? I believe that this increasing brittleness is a symptom of a deep fact about reality. What is this deep fact? Simply that there are objects, that these objects are withdrawn, and that they are walking contradictions. This means indeed that (as Lacan put it) “there is no metalanguage,” since a metalanguage would function as a “middle object” that gave coherency and evenness to the others.22 Since there is no metalanguage, there is no rising above the disturbing illusory play of causality. This may even have political implications: no global critique is therefore possible, and attempts to smooth out or totalize are doomed to fail. To think the zone is to think the notion of temporary , which we shall now begin to discuss in greater detail. The zone is not in time: rather it “times.” But because a zone is an emanation of an object, it is based on a wavering fragility, since objects are p ? ¬p. When an object is born, that means that it has broken free of some other object. An object can be born because it and other objects are fragile. If not, no movement would be possible. Objects contain the seeds of their own destruction, a dialetheic sentence that says something like “This sentence cannot be proved.” Kurt Gödel argues that every true system of propositions contains at least one sentence that the system cannot prove. In order to be true, the system must have a minimum incoherence. To be real, it has to be fragile. Imagine a record player. Now imagine a record called I Cannot Be Played on This Record Player . When you play it on this record player, it produces sympathetic vibrations that cause the record player to shudder apart. No matter how many defense mechanisms you build in, there will always be the possibility of at least one record that destroys the record player.23 That is what being physical is. An object is inherently fragile because it is both itself and not-itself. When the rift between appearance and essence collapses, that is called destruction, ending, death. When an object breaks, several new objects are born. An opera singer sings a loud note in tune with the resonant frequency of a wine glass. (See the movie included below.) The singing is a zone, an autonomous level of intensity, opening a rift between appearance and essence. The glass ripples—for a moment it is nakedly a glass and a not-glass—almost as if it were having an orgasm, a little death. It is caught in the rift of the singing. Then its structure can't handle the coherence of the sound waves, and it breaks. It is incoherence and inconsistency that is the mark of existence, not consistency and noncontradiction. When things break or die, they become coherent. Essence disappears into appearance. I become the memories of friends. A glass becomes a dancing wave. Instantly, there are glass fragments, new temporary autonomous zones. The fragments have broken free from the glass. They are no longer its parts, but emanate their own time and space, becoming perhaps accidental weapons as they bury themselves in my flesh. Thus Hakim Bey's instructions on creating temporary autonomous zones oscillate disturbingly between performance art and politics, circus clowning and revolution. To play with the aesthetic is to play with causality, to rip from the sensual ether emanating from things new regions, new zones. Anarchist politics is the creation of fresh objects in a reality without a top or a bottom object, or for that matter a middle object: Everything in nature is perfectly real including consciousness, there's absolutely nothing to worry about. Not only have the chains of the Law been broken, they never existed; demons never guarded the stars, the Empire never got started, Eros never grew a beard. … There is no becoming, no revolution, no struggle, no path; already you're the monarch of your own skin—your inviolable freedom waits to be completed only by the love of other monarchs: a politics of dream, urgent as the blueness of sky.24 Bey imagines that this is because chaos is a primordial “undifferentiated oneness-of-being.” A Parmenides or a Spinoza or a Laruelle would read this a certain way. Individual objects, or decisions to talk about this rather than that, are just maggot-like things crawling around on the surface of the giant cheese of oneness.25 Yet he also describes chaos as “Primordial uncarved block, sole worshipful monster, inert & spontaneous, more ultraviolet than any mythology.” This image is of an inconsistent object, not of an undifferentiated field. An object, indeed, that can be distinguished from other things. If not, then the first part of The Temporary Autonomous Zone , subtitled “The Broadsheets of Ontological Anarchism,” is a kind of onto-theology. Onto-theology proclaims that some things are more real than others. Bey, however, is writing poetically, and thus ambiguously. We are at liberty to read “undifferentiated oneness-of-being” as something like the irreducibility of a thing to its parts and so forth (undermining and overmining). This certainly seems closer to the language in the following paragraph: “There is no becoming … already you're the monarch of your own skin.”26 On this view, there is no difference between art and politics: “When ugliness, poor design & stupid waste are forced upon you, turn Luddite, throw your shoe in the works, retaliate.” Since Romanticism this has been the war cry of the vanguard artist.27 To say to is to fall prey to the tired axioms of the avant-garde, and we think we know how the game goes. But OOO is not simply a way to advocate “new and improved” versions of this shock-the-bourgeoisie boredom. Bey's text is certainly full enough of that. Rather, since causality as such is aesthetic, and since nonhumans are not that different from humans, the new approach would be to form aesthetic–causal alliances with nonhumans. These alliances would have to resist becoming brittle, whether that brittleness is right wing (authoritarianism) or left wing (the endless maze of critique). No “ism,” especially not the ultimate forms, nihilism and cynicism, is in any sense effective at this point. All forms of brittleness are based on the mistaken assumption that there is a metalanguage and that therefore “Anything you can do, I can do meta.” I will not be listing any approaches here, as Bey does. Such lists and manifestos belong to the vanguardism that no longer works. Why? Not because of some marvelous revolution in human consciousness, but because nonhumans have so successfully impinged upon human social, psychic and aesthetic space. It is the time after the end of the world. That happened in 1945, when a thin layer of radioactive materials was deposited in Earth's crust. Geology now calls it this era the Anthropocene . Ironically, this period, named after humans, is the moment at which even the most thick headed of us make decisive contact with nonhumans, from mercury in our blood to manta rays to magnesium. Richard Dawkins, Pat Robertson and Lady Gaga all have to deal with global warming and mass extinction, somehow. We now live in an Age of Asymmetry marked by a skewed, spiraling relationship between vast knowledge and vast nonhuman things—both become vaster and vaster because of one another and for the same reasons.28 This means that coming up with the perfect attitude or the perfect aesthetic prescription just won't work any more. Even the most hardened anthropocentrist now has to pay through the nose for basic food supplies, and has to use more sunscreen. Whether he knows it or acknowledges it, he is already acting with regard towards nonhumans. There is nothing special to think, no special critique that will get rid of the stains of coexistence. The problem won't fit into the well-established modern boxes, which is why the “mystical,” “spiritual” quality of Bey's prose is welcome. Of course, when I put it this way, you may immediately close off and decide that I am talking about perfect attitudes after all, or something outside of politics, or other ways that the radical left marshals to police its thinking of the nonhuman. Because that is what is really at stake in all this: the nonhuman in its coexistence with the human—bosons, gods, clouds, spirits, lifeforms, experiences, the sunlight rippling across the cypresses. Bey begins to get at this in a Latour litany in the second part of The Temporary Autonomous Zone , “The Assassins”: Pomegranate, mulberry, persimmon, the erotic melancholy of cypresses, membrane-pink shirazi roses, braziers of meccan aloes & benzoin, stiff shafts of ottoman tulips, carpets spread like make-believe gardens on actual lawns—a pavilion set with a mosaic of calligrammes—a willow, a stream with watercress—a fountain crystalled underneath with geometry— the metaphysical scandal of bathing odalisques, of wet brown cupbearers hide-&-seeking in the foliage—“water, greenery, beautiful faces.”29 This will be conveniently dismissed as orientalism. If we're never allowed to escape the crumbling prison of modernity for fear of imperialism there is truly no hope. In a similar way, the fear of anthropocentrism and anthropomorphism is very often staged from a place that just is anthropocentrism .30 Critique turns into ressentiment . An object radiates a zone that is aesthetic and therefore causal. Because objects “time” they are temporary. Not because they exist “in” time that eventually gets the better of them. Their very existence implies the possibility of their non-existence. Since objects are not consistent, they can cease to exist. But nothing, no one, will ever be able to insert a blade between appearance and existence, even thought there is a rift there. Now that's what I call autonomy. NOTES 1. John Cage, Silence: Lectures and Writings (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1973), 96. 2. P. B. Medawar and J. S. Medawar, The Life Science: Current Ideas in Biology (London: Wildwood House, 1977), 8. 3. David DeGrazia, Animal Rights: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 5. 4. Antony Colynet, A True History of the Civil Warres in France (London, 1591), 480. 5. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time , tr. Joan Stambaugh (Albany, N.Y: State University of New York Press, 1996) 62–71. 6. Graham Harman, Tool-Being: Heidegger and the Metaphysics of Objects (Peru, IL: Open Court, 2002). 7. Hakim Bey, The Temporary Autonomous Zone (Brooklyn: Autonomedia, 1991). 8. Graham Harman, The Quadruple Object (Ripley: Zero Books, 2011), 7–18. 9. This is not the place to get into an argument about quantum theory, but I have argued that quanta also do not endorse a world that I can't speak about because it is only real when measured. This world is that of the reigning Standard Model proposed by Niels Bohr and challenged by De Broglie and Bohm (and now the cosmologist Valentini, among others). See Timothy Morton, “Here Comes Everything: The Promise of Object-Oriented Ontology,” Qui Parle 19.2 (Spring–Summer, 2011), 163–190. 10. John Donne, Holy Sonnets 15, in The Major Works: Including Songs and Sonnets and Sermons , ed. John Carey (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). 11. Edward O. Wilson, Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge (New York: Knopf, 1998). 12. Martin Heidegger, What Is a Thing? (Washington: Regnery, 1968), 243. 13. Albert Einstein, Relativity: The Special and the General Theory (London: Penguin, 2006); Petr Horava, “Quantum Gravity at a Lifshitz Point,” arXiv:0901.3775v2 [hep-th]. 14. Graham Priest, In Contradiction (Oxford University Press, 2006), passim: the most notable recent quarantine officers have been Tarski, Russell, and Frege. 15. Priest, In Contradiction , 172–181. 16. William Butler Yeats, “Among School Children,” Collected Poems , ed. Richard J. Finneran (New York: Scribner, 1996). 17. Paul de Man, “Semiology and Rhetoric,” Diacritics 3.3 (Autumn, 1973), 27–33 (30). 18. Jacques Lacan, Le seminaire, Livre III: Les psychoses (Paris: Editions de Seuil, 1981), 48. See Slavoj Zizek, The Parallax View (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2006), 206. 19. Alphonso Lingis, The Imperative (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998), 29. 20. Priest, In Contradiction , 9–27. 21. See Graham Priest and Francesco Berto, “ Dialetheism ,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2010 Edition), ed. Edward N. Zalta. 22. Jacques Lacan, Écrits: A Selection , tr. Alan Sheridan (London: Tavistock, 1977), 311. 23. The analogy can be found at length in Douglas Hofstadter, “Contracrostipunctus,” Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (New York: Basic Books, 1999), 75–81. 24. Bey, “ Chaos: The Broadsheets of Ontological Anarchism ,” Temporary Autonomous Zone . 25. This is closest to the language of François Laruelle in Philosophies of Difference: A Critical Introduction to Non-Philosophy (New York: Continuum, 2011) 179. 26. Bey, “ Chaos: The Broadsheets of Ontological Anarchism ,” Temporary Autonomous Zone . 27. Peter Bürger, Theory of the Avant Garde (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984). 28. For further discussion see Timothy Morton, “From Modernity to the Anthropocene: Ecology and Art in the Age of Asymmetry,” The International Social Science Journal 209 (forthcoming). 29. Bey, “ The Assassins ,” Temporary Autonomous Zone . 30. Timothy Morton, The Ecological Thought (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2010), 75–76. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 41.1 (2003) 125-126 [Access article in PDF] Sextus Empiricus. Against the Grammarians (Adversos Mathematicos I). Introduction, Commentary, and Translation by D. L. Blank. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998. Pp. lvi + 436. Cloth, $105.00. Sesto Empirico. Contro gli astrologi. Introduction, Commentary, and Translation by Emidio Spinelli. Naples: Bibliopolis, 2000. Pp. 230. Paper, L. 70.000. No historian of philosophy should be retailing the old canards (...) that the Hellenistic philosopher Sextus Empiricus was silly, wholly confused, or merely a compiler and not a philosopher in his own right. These translations and commentaries, along with the recent work of Richard Bett, James Hankinson, and others, should bury those notions forever.Against the Grammarians is the first and Against the Astrologers is the fifth volume of Sextus's six-volume Against the Teachers of the technai or professional arts and sciences (grammar, rhetoric, geometry, arithmetic, astrology, and music). Sextus is not against all forms of the study of these matters; in fact, one of the skeptic's "rules for living" is that he will engage in an art (techne) to make a living (Outlines of Pyrrhonism, I.24). But he is against the claims of each of them to special technical expertise. He prefers the unpretentious experience of everyday life—living by the phenomena; non-expert, practical forms of grammar, astronomy, music—to fancy theories about the nature of things.Against the Grammarians is Sextus's critique of the interpreters of poetry and prose—today's English professors and historians. Philosophers will be amused by his deconstruction of various sorts of lit crit arrogance and rashness that are still with us. Regrettably, some of us are not immune from the same critiques.Against the Astrologers is Sextus's critique of the Chaldean soothsayers. He is not against the observation of celestial phenomena for agricultural or navigational purposes. His critiques of the astrologers for lack of empirical evidence and promotion of superstition make him sound like a proto-scientist.One originality of Sextus's work was his combination of a dogmatic Epicurean critique of the grammatologists and astrologers with a skeptical aporetic critique. Precisely because he does not hesitate to make use of the arguments of others, some interpreters have decided that Sextus was unoriginal and derivative. But Blank and Spinelli both show that he recombines these arguments in ways that no one else had done. That is one of the ways of being original in philosophy. The upshot is that he is our earliest source of quite a number of critiques of grammarians and astrologers.The use of dogmatic arguments raises the problem of whether Sextus engages in so-called "negative dogmatism" in these volumes. Right at the beginning of Against the Astrologers, Sextus accuses them of violating "right reason." What right does a skeptic have to invoke such a standard? Some have felt that at this stage Sextus was a dogmatic skeptic, invoking one set of truths to tear down another. But that is not necessary. Blank and Spinelli explain this well with a combination of points. One, we can see the dogmatic and Epicurean attacks as clearing the ground for the following skeptical equipollence of arguments. Two, we can follow Jonathan Barnes in assuming that each claim that something has been demolished assumes the counterargument that it has been proven, so that the implied upshot is equipollence. Three, "right reason" can be the sort of unpretentious practical reasoning and living in accord with the appearances that the skeptics often claimed to live by.Spinelli and Blank provide many useful improvements over the previous English translations of these texts by Bury and the Italian translations by Russo. Blank rightly relies on Spinelli's 1995 translation and commentary on Sextus's Against the Ethicists and Spinelli rightly relies on Blank for a number of points. Spinelli supplies the Greek on facing pages of the translation; Blank does not. Spinelli also supplies five Greek zodiac charts and a beautiful print of a fifteenth-century zodiac.Neither Blank nor Spinelli unduly lionizes Sextus. They admit that... (shrink)

Recent work on quantum gravity suggests that neither spacetime nor spatiotemporally located entites exist at a fundamental level. The loss of both brings with it the threat of empirical incoherence. A theory is empirically incoherent when the truth of that theory undermines the empirical justification for believing it. If neither spacetime nor spatiotemporally located entities exist as a part of a fundamental theory of QG, then such a theory seems to imply that there are no (...) observables and so no way that the theory can be confirmed. The threat of empirical incoherence can be addressed by treating spacetime and spatiotemporally located entities as emergent. The question then arises as to what the metaphysical nature of this emergence might be. In this paper, I explore a functionalist approach to this kind of emergence in the context of loop quantum gravity. I begin by rehearsing the spacetime functionalist’s account of emergence, clarifying the view along the way. I proceed to sketch out a functionalist treatment of spatiotemporally located entities and combine the two forms of functionalism into a double functionalism, according to which both spacetime and matter have the same functional realisers. (shrink)

Based on da Costa's and French's notions of partial structures and pragmatic truth, this paper examines two possible characterizations of the concept of empirical adequacy, one depending on the notion of partial isomorphism, the other on the hierarchy of partial models of phenomena, and both compatible with an empiricist view. These formulations can then be employed to illuminate certain aspects of scientific practice.An empirical theory must single out a specific part of the world, establish reference to (...) that part, and say—by way of contingent, substantial claim about the world—that its models fit that. Now, how exactly can this be done? Bas C. van Fraassen. (shrink)

The main purpose of this paper is to investigate various notions of empirical equivalence in relation to the two main arguments for realism in the philosophy of science, namely the no-miracles argument and the indispensability argument. According to realism, one should believe in the existence of the theoretical entities postulated by empirically adequate theories. According to the no-miracles argument, one should do so because truth is the the best explanation of empirical adequacy. According to the indispensability (...) argument, one should do so because the theoretical terms employed in the formulation of an empirically adequate theory are practically indispensable for the formulation of its empirical content. The no-miracles argument might be refuted if one can establish an underdetermination thesis to the effect that every theory has empirically equivalent rivals that are incompatible with each other. Insofar as truth cannot explain the empirical adequacy of two incompatible theories, there is an obvious conflict between the underdetermination thesis and the no-miracles argument. I show that, under certain assumptions, some but not all notions of empirical equivalence support the underdetermination thesis. The indispensability argument might be refuted if one can establish a dispensability thesis to the effect that, for any theory with a practical formulation, there is an empirically equivalent theory with a practical formulation in purely empirical terms. I show that some but not all notions of empirical equivalence support this thesis. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Socratic Virtue: Making the Best of the Neither-Good-Nor-BadJ. Clerk ShawNaomi Reshotko. Socratic Virtue: Making the Best of the Neither-Good-Nor-Bad. Cambridge-New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Pp. xiv + 204. Cloth, $68.00.In this engaging and provocative book, Naomi Reshotko advances a naturalistic interpretation of Socratic philosophy, i.e., of those views expressed by Plato’s Socrates that best comport with Aristotle’s descriptions of Socrates. She contrasts her reading with (...) those that project foreign commitments onto the text, including: (i) moralism, or the separation of ethics from empirical science; (ii) two-dimensional semantics, or theories of meaning that distinguish the semantic contribution to a psychological state made by its subject’s conception of its objects from that made by its actual objects; and (iii) privileged access, or psychological theories that grant human beings incorrigibility concerning some aspect of their own psyches.Part I reviews and synthesizes views that the author shares with Terry Penner: that all desire is for one’s own real (not apparent) good, so that an agent’s belief about what is overall best for her invariably guides her actions; that all human virtue is identical to wisdom; and that virtue, so understood, guarantees the greatest possible satisfaction of the desire for one’s own real good, and so makes one live as well as possible.Part II places the distinction among the good, the bad, and the neither-good-nor-bad (NGNB) at the center of Socratic ethics. On Reshotko’s reading, the only goods are virtue and happiness, and the only bads vice and misery. She does not adequately explain why all actions are NGNB (16, 173), even though actions are individuated by their actual consequences (34–36), so that every action is either good or bad (98). Virtue’s goodness is due to its stable nomological (not conceptual or logical) connection to happiness. This makes virtue the only unconditional, other-generated good, while happiness is the only unconditional, self-generated good—its goodness does not depend on any nomological relation it enters into.Part III provides more detail about virtue and happiness. First, Reshotko explains that virtue is wisdom because it is the science of human happiness, and that this science is identical to every other science. Strictly speaking, nobody knows anything without knowing everything, although some people do grasp “some parts of knowledge” (160). Reshotko advocates this view as a solution to the closing puzzles of the Charmides. Socrates and Critias cannot figure out how temperance benefits, first because they assume that it is knowledge [End Page 132] of all things except good and bad, and then because they assume that it is knowledge of good and bad in isolation from other sciences (173a–175a). But if Socratic wisdom is the structured grasp of everything, then their puzzle is resolved. Second, Reshotko claims that happiness is a life maximally composed of pleasures. While she is sympathetic with the view that happiness is composed of modal pleasures (see G. Rudebusch, Socrates, Pleasure, and Value, Oxford 1999), she concludes that sensate pleasures can also be parts of happiness (185n7).The book’s major flaw is its limited engagement with textual evidence that seems to tell against the author’s readings and its limited coverage of alternative interpretations from the secondary literature. I mention three striking examples here.First, Reshotko argues that harming others is inconsistent with self-benefit because of the likelihood of reciprocal harm (65–71). She then notes passages where Socrates speaks as though harming others harms one’s soul simply by making it more unjust, which makes vice sound like a self-generated bad. Gorgias 472c–481b is particularly problematic in this respect, since Socrates claims there that doing injustice is less painful (but worse) than suffering it. Reshotko tries to make such passages conform with her initial explanation: harming others tends to entrench false beliefs that harming others is consistent with self-benefit, which leads to more harm of others and so more reciprocal harm (71–72, 174). This may be workable, but absent more extensive argument, it seems like an ad hoc maneuver.Second, Reshotko wants to avoid giving... (shrink)

This paper explains the empirical markers by which Kant thinks that one can identify moral responsibility. After explaining the problem of discerning such markers within a Kantian framework, I briefly explain Kant’s empirical psychology. I then argue that Kant’s empirical markers for moral responsibility—linked to higher faculties of cognition—are not sufficient conditions for moral responsibility, primarily because they are empirical characteristics subject to natural laws. Next, I argue that these markers are not necessary conditions of (...) moral responsibility. Given Kant’s transcendental idealism, even an entity that lacks these markers could be free and morally responsible, although as a matter of fact Kant thinks that none are. Given that they are neither necessary nor sufficient conditions, I discuss the status of Kant’s claim that higher faculties are empirical markers of moral responsibility. Drawing on connections between Kant’s ethical theory and ‘common rational cognition’, I suggest that Kant’s theory of empirical markers can be traced to ordinary common sense beliefs about responsibility. This suggestion helps explain both why empirical markers are important and what the limits of empirical psychology are within Kant’s account of moral responsibility.Keywords: Immanuel Kant; Moral responsibility; Freedom; Empirical psychology; Transcendental idealism; Reason; Common sense; Anthropology. (shrink)

It is widely accepted in contemporary philosophy of science that the domain of application of a theory is typically larger than its explanatory covering power: theories can be applied to phenomena that they do not explain. I argue for an analogous thesis regarding the notion of empirical adequacy. A theory’s domain of application is typically larger than its domain of empirical adequacy: theories are often applied to phenomena from which they receive no empirical confirmation.

In a priori analogies, the analogue is constructed in imagination, sharing certain properties with the primary subject. The analogue has some further property clearly consequent on those shared properties. Ceteris paribus the primary subject has that property also. The warrant involves non-empirical, e.g., moral intuition but is also defeasible. The argument is thus neither deductive nor inductive, but an additional type. In an inductive analogy, the analogues back the warrant from below. Distinguishing these two types of arguments by (...) analogy gives epistemic evaluative factors primacy over resemblance factors in classifying arguments—a prescient insight on Govier’s part. (shrink)

In his book, The Scientific Image, Bas van Fraassen argues for an anti-realist view of science according to which the sole epistemological aim of science is to "save the phenomena". As originally conceived, his constructive empiricism is strongly extensional, but in his account of the empirical adequacy of probabilistic theories, van Fraassen reluctantly abandons this extensional position, arguing that modal (intensional) notions are unavoidable in interpreting probability. I argue in this paper that van Fraassen has not presented the (...) strongest possible case for a fully extensional account of empirical adequacy. On the present account, a probabilistic theory is empirically adequate just in case there is no theory that has a higher likelihood relative to all the phenomena in the actual world. I prove that a theory is empirically adequate if and only if the probability attributed to each observable event that occurs in the actual world is its limiting relative frequency. Thus, in so far as one is concerned with the empirical adequacy (rather than with the literal truth) of probabilistic theories, strict relative frequencies provide an adequate basis for "interpreting probability". Probabilistic theories are treated in a genuine measurement context. In this connection I distinguish between worlds that are "strongly infinite" and worlds that are only "weakly infinite". It is characteristic of the former worlds that there is no limit to the precision of actual measurements. I show by example that in some "strongly infinite" worlds, theories will be empirically adequate only if observables are represented by continuous (rather than discrete) random variables. The range of such examples is clarified by a theorem which states necessary and sufficient conditions under which the "phenomena can be saved" without recourse to continuous random variables and real numbers. (shrink)

Nowadays there is a growing tendency in the philosophy of science to think that some phenomena cannot be exhaustively explained, or even described, by a single theory or a particular approach. Thus, we are occasionally required to use various approaches in order to give account of the phenomenon we are analyzing. And sometimes, we can appreciate this as an invitation to be pluralist in certain respects about our understanding of a particular aspect in science. -/- During the last decade applications (...) of pluralism have increased and led to several other relevant debates in the philosophy of science. By the strengthening of pluralism, new questions have emerged, and more importantly, new alternatives have been offered in dealing with problems about how to interpret the ontology and the ontological commitments of particular theories, or how to apply strategies to analyze and understand specific episodes from the history of science, or how to work within different, and sometimes incompatible, explanations about a particular phenomenon, among others. In general, pluralism seems to be a very rich and yet not enough explored path for the philosophy of science in general. -/- Today, it is recognized that, at least for methodological purposes, the application of pluralism to the study of science can offer a great number of benefits. One of them would be the opportunity of analyzing the role that some epistemic virtues -such as scope, fruitfulness, consistency, and simplicity, to name just a few- play in the scientific activity. From the different pluralist positions, a lot has been said about empirical adequacy, refutability and explanatory power yet consistency power, yet, consistency has not been equally dealt with. -/- As a matter of fact, the lack of consistency and its philosophical implications have been studied from an angle that does not necessarily involve a pluralism of any kind. At the moment, it is commonly accepted that inconsistencies are more frequent in scientific development that the traditional philosophy of science could have expected and the idea that inconsistency is not always a synonym of logical anarchy, as it was suggested in the classical literature of logic and the philosophy of science, has been gaining support. All this has been possible, mostly, thanks to the emergence of paraconsistent logics and the availability of case studies that show how inconsistency is not an uncommon phenomenon in science. -/- But pluralism does not necessarily entail inconsistency toleration nor vice versa. Accordingly the main motivation for this volume is to explore the links between pluralism and inconsistency toleration in science, in order to connect the reflections on inconsistency toleration with broader and major issues in philosophy of science. In order to do so, we will suggest two different lines of investigation: first, to focus on the implication of some pluralistic accounts in the philosophy of science, regarding inconsistency; and second to analyze the implications of some paraconsistent approaches regarding pluralism in science. (shrink)

Laudan famously argued that neither truth nor approximate truth can be part of an explanation of a scientific theory's predictive success because in the history of science there were theories that enjoyed some limited success but now are considered outright false. The power of his argument lay in the many historic examples he listed . Realists have disputed that all theories on Laudan's list can be regarded as predictively successful but let's suppose momentarily that at least some (...) exist that support his point. In this case, there are historic false theories that made some true predictions. We are aiming for a general explanation of a theory's predictive success and hence these false theories necessarily are on board. Now, Laudan also argues that historic false theories – the downright false ones and the ones we nowadays judge as strictly false, but approximately true – do not in any principled sense differ from the ones we presently accept. These theories seem to present a good basis for inductively inferring that any presently accepted scientific theory is actually false. Many presently accepted theories certainly are predictively successful to a great extent and certainly their success should be covered by an acceptable explanation. Since there seems to be inductive support for the conclusion that …. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Anthony Close THE EMPIRICAL AUTHOR: SALMAN RUSHDIE'S THE SATANIC VERSES HOBBES, comparing the author ofan action to the owner ofgoods, asserts, "And as the right of possession, is called dominion; so the right of doing any action, is called authority" (Leviathan, Book I, chap. 16). My purpose in this essay is to apply this Hobbesian maxim to the relation Author/Text, expanding somewhat Hobbes's notion of authority. I presuppose (...) that in our day-to-day dealings with our fellow men, we envisage each others' acts as exhibiting purpose and commitment, which make them ours in more than the platitudinous sense that we performed them. By virtue of that, they confer on us a privileged, though clearly not unchallengeable, authority in saying what they are and what they are for. Such, in effect, is the position reached by Austin in How to Do Things with Words, and it broadly corresponds to that of various philosophical writings on human action—by Anscombe, Davidson, and Melden.1 To be sure, we may legitimately consider human behavior from other viewpoints (e.g., structuralist, anthropological, psychoanalytical, Marxist) trained on its unconscious presuppositions. Yet, insofar as such theorizing fails to acknowledge the priority of the Hobbesian perspective, it will seem perverse for a reason that has been well put by Charles Taylor. Precisely because history is made up of purposeful activity, Taylor argues, we need to explain historical patterns in a way that is "intelligible in relation to conscious action" even though they may not "issue from conscious action."2 By this criterion much of our modern literary theory is defective. A vivid measure of the deficiency is provided by the furor over Salman Rushdie's TL· Satanic Verses, culminatingin thefatwa pronounced against Philosophy and Literature, © 1990, 14: 248-267 Anthony Close249 him by the Ayatollah Khomeini in February 1989. I take it that for anyone vocationally committed to the practice or study ofliterature and to the cause of freedom of expression, the defense of Rushdie cannot be a matter of indifference. Nor can one be indifferent to the chasm of misunderstanding that separates Rushdie and his apologists from the novel's Muslim opponents. I believe that these two causes—defending Rushdie and bridging the chasm—can be reconciled by offering better explanations ofhis novel in place ofcrude denunciations or, from some non-Muslim quarters, smug and knowing dismissals. Yet, as we shall see, the task of explanation could be considered hamstrung by our modern poetics. I was reminded ofHobbes's textby Rushdie's lucid and cogent defense of his novel in TL· Independent (London, February 4, 1990). Against the accusations that he had deliberately reviled the Islamic faith, he argued as follows. Though TL· Satanic Verses, like many novels that Rushdie esteems, is a work of radical dissent, questioning, and reimagining, it is motivated by a spirit of serious inquiry rather than debunking derision. More particularly, it reflects a determination that underlies all Rushdie's work: "to create a literary language and literary forms in which the experience offormerly-colonised, still-disadvantaged peoples might find full expression." He continues: "It is written from the very experience of uprooting, disjuncture and metamorphosis... that is the migrant condition, and from which, I believe, can be derived a metaphor for all humanity.... [It] celebrates hybridity, impurity, intermingling, the transformation that comes of new and unexpected combinations of human beings, cultures, ideas, politics, movies, songs. It rejoices in mongrelisation and fears the absolutism of the Pure." Note the insistence on how these themes flow direcdy from Rushdie's own experience. Two days after the publication of this article, Harold Pinter gave on Rushdie's behalf a lecture on the relationship of literature to religion and society at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London. In this lecture, Rushdie articulated a Bakhtinian view of the novelist's function: to dramatize ironically and noncommittally the clash of voices, languages, and ideologies in a world without gods and without traditionsanctioned truth. Rushdie referred specifically, I think, to a species of postmodernist novel which we may dub "palimpsest history";3 the species includes Rushdie's works, García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude, Carlos Fuentes's Terra Nostra... (shrink)

One of the most serious pre-occupations of post-medieval philosophy has been to distinguish those kinds of assertion which are either true or false from those which are neither true nor false. A solution to this problem would be of the highest importance. It would indicate in what areas rational inquiry has some hope of success and in what areas it is doomed to frustration. It would tell us, for example, whether it is worth trying to think about the possible (...) mistakenness of our moral principles, or whether such thinking is bound to be ineffective since no truth or falsity attaches to them. (shrink)

The argument of this book moves through four issues: the logic of determinate negation, the possibility of philosophical criticism, the description of philosophical experience, and the priority of a philosophical intuition. If a system of thought claims, as Hegel's does, to be internally complete and self-justifying, it can reach conclusions only by analysing what is already present in it. So if such a system is to avoid terminating with an empty starting-point, it must consist of an explication of an undetermined (...) origin-point which both provides a justification for denying the adequacy of that starting-point and also provides the content of the first and subsequent advances. However,, negation does not in itself provide advance, just as dispelling an illusion does not necessarily result in knowing any truth. Only a "thing-like" or at least mind-like object is such that to negate it in some respect will leave it a subsisting entity with new properties; but when the objects of pure science are the very thoughts by which the science is proceeding, the negation of one of them would bring the science to a halt. Although a logic of determinate negation cannot be argued for in general, it might still find a special sort of validation within the system in which it is used. And after all to understand any philosophical system is to learn how to work with its concepts to develop a pattern of discourse, and is not in general to translate that system into, and evaluate it by means of, some other system. Of course, even if we attempt an "immanent critique" of Hegel's philosophy, we will still be faced with the problem of whether the justification will appear at the end of the system or at the beginning. But even this problem is avoided if in some sense the beginning is also the end, if philosophical progress is not the deduction of certain propositions from others, but instead the self-explication of a single philosophical experience. Now this philosophical experience whose articulation is science differs from "common" experience by accepting no passively received presuppositions, and this means that philosophy neither describes the world as given nor transforms the given world into something else, but rather recreates the world in its necessity in the realm of pure thought precisely by creating that realm ex nihilo To engage in movements within the philosophical system, then, is not to take up exigencies either from pre-philosophical experience or from pre-Hegelian philosophy, since the ground for this movement is created only by the necessity with which the experience of pure thought is present to the person who engages in it. For this reason, Hegel's notion of dialectical method is non-inferential and "intuitionistic." This controversial claim is argued for in four ways. First, common intuition is normally valued as low-level cognition because of its subjective relativity, and its lack of criteria for verification and of specifically appropriate content, but the "purified" intuition in question would be universally valid, verified by its internal necessity, and content-producing. Second, Hegel approves of Descartes' movement without propositional inferences to an intuition of the cogito. Third, Hegel emphasizes the way in which scientific thought is "observing Reason." Fourth, since subject and object are ultimately equivalent, it cannot be that the knowing subject has to bring rules of inference to its subject-matter; the subject-matter does the developing, the science just moves through it, and the agent who carries out the science is not an individual agent, but in some sense is "beyond [sic] the empirical self". Finally, only if the motivation for dialectical movement is originally intuited can Hegel claim that the first move of Thought is both simple and determinate, both immanent and critical, both negative and progressive. (shrink)

Nick Dyer-Witheford and Greig de Peuter. Games of Empire: Global Capitalism and Video Games . Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 2009. 320pp. pbk. $19.95 ISBN-13: 978-0816666119. In Games of Empire , Nick Dyer-Witheford and Greig de Peuter expand an earlier study of “the video game industry as an aspect of an emerging postindustrial, post-Fordist capitalism” (xxix) to argue that videogames are “exemplary media of Empire” (xxix). Their notion of “Empire” is based on Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s Empire (2000), which (...) characterizes the contemporary world order as a decentralized system of global economic, political, and economic power that transcends national boundaries. In the view of the authors, Hardt and Negri’s account sets itself apart from other analyses of international politics by offering a “comprehensive account of conditions of work, forms of subjectivity, and types of struggle in contemporary capital” (xx). Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter thus divide Games of Empire into three sections to reflect each of these aspects of Empire ’s argument, seeing their work as the first account to explore “virtual games within a system of global ownership, privatized property, coercive class relations, military operations, and radical struggle” (xxix). Books in the University of Minnesota Press’s Electronic Mediations series “explore the humanistic and social implications” of new technologies that spark “significant changes in society and culture, politics and economics, thinking and being.” That’s an abstract goal, and one that Games of Empire surely meets. Yet at times it can be difficult to understand exactly which specific intervention this book seeks to make. It is unclear whether the authors of Games of Empire see their work as an indictment of game scholars’ lack of attention to political economy, or whether it’s a work of political theory hoping to show that other disciplines should be paying more attention to the production and play of videogames. Because Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter don’t directly criticize previous political critiques of gaming—such as Edward Castronova’s exploration of the “porous membrane” allowing two-way traffic between virtual economies and those of the real world, or Alexander Galloway’s unraveling of control protocols in algorithmic design, or Ian Bogost’s idea of political procedural rhetoric—they sometimes leave the reader wondering how to situate the book in the broader discourse on games and politics, either separately or together. Thus, Games of Empire might best be seen as an introduction to the writings of Hardt and Negri for game players and designers, rather than as a text for communicating the basic concepts of game studies and design. It is neither a truly new theory of games or digital media, nor is it a new theory of Empire—and that’s not a criticism. It is instead an introduction to Empire through popular culture, as Zizek does for Lacan in Looking Awry . If one were teaching an introductory course on contemporary political theory, this book would offer obvious inroads into Negri and Hardt’s thinking for a number of reasons. Despite its radical ideological bent, the book isn’t off-putting to readers who don’t necessarily share the authors’ politics. It synthesizes complex ideas from difficult thinkers like Marx, Foucault, and Guattari while integrating modifications and critiques of Empire theory itself. And although the book is dense, sometimes feeling longer than it actually is (just over 200 pages), Games of Empire maintains a breezy readability by tightly coupling core concepts of Empire theory to well-known games and widely-publicized conflicts within the videogame industry. The first section of the book focuses on immaterial labor, the accumulation of “cognitive capital,” and the global process of manufacturing videogame consoles. It is significant for the authors that videogames began as hacker experiments within research institutes of the military industrial complex, programmed on stolen time, before becoming a commodity (7). This is the first in a string of examples showing how creative dissidence and conflict fuel the continuing evolution of Empire’s control. Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter explain that the videogame industry now constitutes an international production apparatus dominating both creative work in developed nations and manual labor in developing ones. Because game industries in the United States, Western Europe, and Japan are predominately non-unionized, they serve as an exemplary system for analyzing how global capital exploits contemporary intellectual work—including an excellent analysis of the “EA Spouse” scandal of 2004. On the side of the consumer, the authors argue that rabid “console races” that drive the industry forward from a technological perspective serve to structure gamer identity and combat piracy; later in the book, these machines offer a window into the worlds of Congolese coltan mining and electronic waste (222-224). In the second section, Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter move on to deep case studies of individual games to show how the most popular game genres embed imperial assumptions about conflict, exchange, and urban life. First they argue that military training games such as Full Spectrum Warrior —co-developed by university researchers, industry developers, and military contractors—contribute to the “banalization” of war, a subjective state wherein perpetual preparedness for war is accepted as a part of everyday life (100). Chapter five covers Michel Foucalt’s notion of “biopower,” the extension of capital accumulation to life itself. The authors argue that virtual worlds such as World of Warcraft , which take market capitalism as a given and force players into essentialist roles and racial antagonisms, are organized to maximize control and profit (often on the backs of virtual currency “farmers” in China and southeast Asia). Finally, they criticize the naïve assumption that humor and cynicism in the popular sandbox game franchise Grand Theft Auto offer any remedy to its racialized, violent content. Instead, such games indulge and normalize the fantasy of getting rich at any cost by keeping the realities of contemporary urban life and corporate greed at a safe distance (181). Part three of Games of Empire focuses on “games of multitude,” a preliminary attempt to escape from Empire’s order through alternate modes of videogame development and play. Multitude is defined dialectically, as “the engine and the enemy” of Empire (187). This is the most important, yet also most contradictory section of the text. It lays bare the process by which Empire and its media feed our creative and intellectual development to overabundance. At a certain point, the force of the multitude reaches such a level that it threatens the stability of Empire; however, instead of following Hardt and Negri’s utopian assumptions about the radical potential of the multitude, the authors here follow Paolo Virno’s warning that Empire is “very good at adopting apparently iconoclastic practices and utopian ideas as management techniques and revenue sources” (188). At every turn, advances in player configurative power provide new sources of revenue and advertising angles for the game industry. A disappointing shortcoming of these latter pages is the lack of truly new examples for radical resistance within game development. Instead, it turns out that the radical left seems satisfied with the same mild successes that the left-of-center also has celebrated: artist’s mods, virtual world activism, and critical counterplay within strategy- and wargames. Having been frequently cited by many authors before Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter, this idea of subversion or resistance through play feels tired and unpersuasive. It is unclear if the authors believe it is possible to embrace game design itself as a way of pursuing what they call “exodus” from Empire, or if an all-too-fashionable subversion is the only workable strategy. While the book does explore how the earliest independent game studios were eventually subverted and incorporated into the game industry proper, it doesn’t affirm or critique more recent non-commercial, DIY game development projects such as Klik-of-the-Month Club and Ludum Dare. Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter’s analysis of so-called “tactical games,” including the editorial works of La Molleindustria, leads to an even more ambivalent take on the contemporary design ecology. At the conclusion of his essay on “Countergaming,” Galloway asserts that avant-garde videogame artists “should create new grammars of action […] should create alternative algorithms” (Galloway 125). Yet Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter characterize works such as McDonald’s Video Game and Oiligarchy as didactic, suggesting that the role of radical political games might be “limited to that of agitprop” (199). They are concerned that games like those of Molleindustria rigidly structure the activities of their players in order to prove a point. Yet, despite their repeated assertion that the equation of greater interactivity with democratic digital liberation is flawed, the authors see potential in policy simulators that “allow players to edit or tweak” (202) their parameters in response to what Bogost has called simulation fever , the simultaneous drive toward and fear of simulation (Bogost 108). The possibility of practicing radical design is bucked, and early attempts at critical game development like those of Molleindustria’s seem to be relegated to the status of exceptions that prove the rule for player-centered exodus. Overall, there is one glaring question Games of Empire leaves unanswered: how exactly are videogames the “exemplary media” of Empire, and what are the implications of videogames being exemplary in this way? Presumably Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter want to avoid essentialist claims, so they’re not keen on following Wark’s desire to mark “the game’s difference from [legacy media] as something that speaks to changes in the overall structure of social and technical relations” (Wark 225). It is also unclear how the production apparatuses, labor standards, and subjectivizing processes involved in the creation and use of other any other kind of digital media would fail to justify their equally exemplary status. Even the book’s concluding paragraph holds that virtual games “are one molecular component of this undecidable collective mutation” (Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter 229) of intellect, labor, and daily life. In the end, the authors seem to back away from their focus on games as exemplary to bring their work in line with broader theories of the gradual digitization of the everyday, in line with Galloway and Manovich. Despite these flaws, there is an undeniable elegance to Games of Empire ’s contrasting of gaming’s overwhelmingly imperial content with its multitudinous form . And its ambivalence about the potential of independent or political game development might be seen by scholars of Empire as a strength rather than a weakness, an acceptance that every new expression of multitude offers another opportunity for the expansion of Empire. The book also functions as a strong, all-encompassing call to greater responsibility on the part of mainstream game developers to be more conscious of the ideologies they embed in their work, of the way their intellectual property is used and manipulated by those who employ them, and of the material impact their industry has on the world at large. For players it offers a toolbox of concepts for radical examinations of their own play activities, asking them to be more cognizant of the consequences of their consumption of digital media and the ways in which their virtual lives interface with the real. REFERENCES Bogost, Ian. Unit Operations: An Approach to Videogame Criticism . Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2006. Castranova, Edward. Synthetic Worlds: The Business and Culture of Online Games . Chicago, Illinois: University of Chicago Press, 2006. Dyer-Witheford, Nick and de Peuter, Greig. Games of Empire: Global Capitalism and Video Games . Minneapolis, Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 2009. Galloway, Alexander. Gaming: Essays on Algorithmic Culture . Minneapolis, Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 2006). Wark, McKenzie. Gamer Theory . Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2007. (shrink)

I first ask what it is to make up a story. In order to answer that question, I give existence and identity conditions for stories. I argue that a story exists whenever there is some narrative content that has intentionally been made accessible. I argue that stories are abstract types, individuated by the conditions that must be met by something in order to be a properly formed token of the type. However, I also argue that the truth of our (...) story identity attributions---sentences like, "Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings is the same story as JRR Tolkien's Lord of the Rings''---are relative to their context of use, so that the same attribution of identity might be true in one context or false in another because of a change in what's being said about the works in the differing contexts. From those existence and identity conditions, I draw the conclusions that story is best understood to be a phase sortal of some abstract types, and that what it is to make up a story is to identify a type of narrative representation and its content, such that the content is neither based on actual events nor on the content of other stories to an objectionable degree. In chapter 2, I ask what it is for a story to be complete. I argue for the general meta-thesis I call "Completion Pluralism", viz. that there are many kinds of artwork completeness, many corresponding senses of 'complete', and no kind of artwork completeness is objectively more important than any other. I give a pair of arguments against those who would deny Completion Pluralism, endorsing Completion Monism instead. First, I show how Monistic analyses of the one (or one most important) kind of artwork completeness fail. I also show that each Monistic theory's failure is contingent on the assumption of Completion Monism: the denial of Completion Monism dissolves each argument against the extensional adequacy of extant theories of artwork completeness. I argue that this is all best explained by the idea that Completion Pluralism is true. Second, I argue that Completion Pluralism fits best with the variety of interests that we bring to questions about artwork completeness: there is no single or overriding concern we have when we want to know whether an artwork is complete. We shouldn't expect completeness to be a single sort of thing, then. I show how to put Completion Pluralism to work by identifying different kinds of artwork completeness in artworks. Finally, I introduce a new kind of completeness particular to stories, what I call "narrative completion", and show how it's distinct from other kinds of completeness discussed. In chapter 3, I argue that the distinction between fictional and non-fictional stories is the degree to which stories are made-up. In short, a fictional story is a made-up story. I first provide a couple desiderata for thinking about theories of fiction, then show how the two most popular extant theories of fiction---the prop theory and the genre theory---fall short in meeting one or more of those desiderata to some extent. I then show how the theory that fictions are made-up stories better meets the desiderata, using my account of what it is to make up a story from chapter 1. I turn to explicitly ontological matters in chapter 4. Addressing the question of what stories are, I show that both the theses that they are eternal and immutable and that they are created and historical seem plausible for independent reasons. I discuss a schema of an argument some philosophers who hold to the latter view (those I call "Creationists") attempt to give for their view. However, I show how those who hold to the view that stories are eternal and immutable ("Platonists") can account for all the same appearances as the Creationists, usually at least as well and sometimes with a better accounting. Similar, deductive arguments for Platonism will give rise to similar responses from the Creationist, however. In the end, then, the style of argument in particular is unlikely to advance the discussion much. Finally, I attempt to advance the discussion by building an abductive case for Platonism. First, I vindicate a particular metaontological methodology for the debate at hand, a methodology that allows for "revisionary" outcomes in our ontologies of art objects. Second, I build a case for Platonism by arguing that it best explains a number of features of stories discussed in the previous chapters. Moreover, I argue that Creationism is committed to an implausible account of how some abstract objects come into existence. Given the combination of those facts, I argue that we should prefer Platonism to Creationism. (shrink)

Van Fraassen (1980) claims that successful theories exist today because successful theories survive and unsuccessful ones die. Wray (2007, 2010) appeals to Stanford’s new pessimistic induction (2006), arguing that van Fraassen’s selectionist explanation is better than the realist explanation that successful theories exist because they are approximately true. I argue that if the pessimistic induction is correct, then the evolutionary explanation is neither true nor empirically adequate, and that realism is better than selectionism because realism explains more phenomena in (...) science than selectionism. (shrink)

A survey of the modern theories of explanation leads us to conclude that it is J. Woodward\'s conterfactual approach that seems to set out a promising agenda for setting up a satisfactory model of explanation. Such a model would need to come to terms with two stipulations, i.e. to reflect causal asymmetry and be empirically adequate. To meet the latter I modify the counterfactual model of explanation to require a class of observationally equivalent (Bayesian) causal models instead of the true (...) causal model. For in most cases empirical adequacy of causal models, i.e. their identifiability and consistency with observed distributions, would neither grant the stronger conclusion Woodward embeds in his conterfactual account of explanation nor license metaphysical naturalism. (shrink)

The overarching topic of this dissertation is the semantics and pragmatics of definite descriptions. It focuses on the question whether sentences such as ‘the king of France is bald’ literally assert the existence of a unique king or simply presuppose the existence of such a king. One immediate obstacle to resolving this question is that immediate truth value judgments about such sentences are particularly unstable; some elicit a clear intuition of falsity whereas others simply seem awkward or strange. Because (...) of these variations, truth value judgments are generally considered unreliable. In the first chapter of the dissertation, an explanation of this phenomenon is developed. It is observed that when these types of sentences are considered in the context of a discourse, a systematic pattern in judgments emerges. This pattern, it is argued, should be explained in terms of certain pragmatic factors, e.g. whether a speaker’s utterance is interpreted as cooperative. A detailed and general explanation of the phenomenon is then presented which draws importantly on recent research in the semantics and pragmatics of questions and focus. It is shown that the behavior of these judgments can be systematically explained, that truth value judgments are not as unreliable as standardly assumed, and that the proposed explanation best supports the conclusion that definite descriptions presuppose rather than assert existence. In the second chapter, the following problem is investigated. If definite descriptions are assumed to literally assert existence, a sentence such as ‘Hans wants the ghost in his attic to be quiet’ is incorrectly predicted to be true only if Hans wants there to be a ghost in his attic. This prediction is often considered evidence against Russell’s quantificational analysis and evidence in favor of the referential analysis of Frege and Strawson. Against this claim, it is demonstrated that this problem is a general problem about the existence commitments of natural language determiners, i.e. not an argument in favor of a referential analysis. It is shown that in order to avoid these undesirable predictions, quite radical changes to the semantic framework are required. For example, it must be assumed that a sentence of the form ‘The F is G’ has the open sentence ‘x is G’ as its asserted content. A uniform quantificational and presuppositional analysis of definites and indefinites is outlined which by exploiting certain features of so-called dynamic semantics unproblematically assumes that the asserted contents indeed are open sentences. In view of the proposed quantificational/presuppositional analysis, the dissertation is concluded by a rejection of the argument put forward by Reimer and Devitt that definite descriptions are ambiguous between attributive and referential uses. Reimer and Devitt’s argument is based primarily on the assumption that definite descriptions are conventionally used to communicate singular thoughts and that the conventional meaning of a definite description therefore must be fundamentally indexical/directly referential. I argue that this argument relies crucially on tacit assumptions about semantic processing for which no empirical evidence is provided. I also argue that the argument is too general; if sound, it would be an argument for an indexical treatment of most, if not all, other determiners. I then conclude by demonstrating that the view does not explain any new data and thus has no clear motivation. In short, this dissertation provides a detailed pragmatic explanation of a long-standing puzzle about truth value judgments and then outlines a novel dynamic semantic analysis of definites and indefinites. This analysis solves a significant problem about existence commitments — a problem that neither Russell’s nor the Frege/Strawson analysis are equipped to handle. This analysis is then defended against the claim that definite descriptions are ambiguous. (shrink)

Is the point of belief and assertion invariably to think or say something true? Is the truth of a belief or assertion absolute, or is it only relative to human interests? Most philosophers think it incoherent to profess to believe something but not think it true, or to say that some of the things we believe are only relatively true. Common sense disagrees. It sees many opinions, such as those about matters of taste, as neither true nor false; (...) it takes it as obvious that some of the truth is relative. Mark Richard's accessible book argues that when it comes to truth, common sense is right, philosophical orthodoxy wrong. The first half of the book examines connections between the performative aspects of talk, our emotions and evaluations, and the conditions under which talk and thought qualifies as true or false. It argues that the performative and expressive sometimes trump the semantic, making truth and falsity the wrong dimension of evaluation for belief or assertion. Among the topics taken up are: racial slurs and other epithets; relations between logic and truth; the status of moral and ethical talk; vagueness and the liar paradox. The book's second half defends the idea that much of everyday thought and talk is only relatively true or false. Truth is inevitably relative, given that we cannot work out in advance how our concepts will apply to the world. Richard explains what it is for truth to be relative, rebuts standard objections to relativism, and argues that relativism is consistent with the idea that one view can be objectively better than another. The book concludes with an account of matters of taste and of how it is possible for divergent views of such matters to be equally valid, even if not true or false. When Truth Gives Out will be of interest not only to philosophers who work on language, ethics, knowledge, or logic, but to any thoughtful person who has wondered what it is, or isn't, for something to be true. (shrink)

In addition to empirical adequacy and compatibility with other current theories, scientific theories are commonly judged on three criteria â simplicity, elegance, and fertility. Fertility has received comparatively little attention in the philosophical literature. A definition of a certain sort of fertility, called P-fertility, proposed by Ernan McMullin, is that it consists in the capacity of a theory to be successfully modified over time to explain new experimental data or theoretical insights. McMullin made the major claim that (...) he has a novel and perhaps the sole argument for Scientific Realism. His argument involves two strands (i) theories must be considered diachronically and it is an historical fact that long standing successful scientific theories are P-fertile, and (ii) the correct explanation of this fact is that these theories reflect the realities of a mind-independent world. A rebuttal of McMullinâs position given in the literature is considered and rejected. His argument therefore requires further consideration. The plausible first strand of McMullinâs argument is accepted for the purposes of discussion, and thus the observation requires explanation, either along McMullinâs own lines or otherwise. The concept of diachronicity and the implications of accepting a diachronic view of scientific theories are considered. The identity of theory across time can be understood both from a Realist and an Anti-realist perspective via the concept of significant claims in the successive versions of the long standing successful theories. This defuses a possible objection to McMullinâs argument, namely that by assuming diachronicity he begs the question against the Anti-realist. Explanations of the conjunction of success and P-fertility are examined from the perspective of Scientific Realism and the major current Anti-realist stances â Entity Realism, Structural Realism, Instrumentalism, and Internal Realism. 3 To justify the second strand of McMullinâs argument, a notion of the approximate truth or of the verisimilitude of theories is required. Inter alia it is argued that a distinction must be made between the approximate truth of a scientific theory and that of a simple assertion or a simple narrative. The concepts of the approximate truth of scientific theories and their verisimilitude are explored and some serious difficulties are identified. First, it is difficult to accommodate differences in respect as well as in degree in delineating the nature of an approximately true theory. Second, it is difficult to give a satisfactory account of the metric used to assess the verisimilitude of theories. It is argued that in any case no version of these concepts can adequately support the second strand of McMullinâs thesis. This is because, at best, approximate truth and verisimilitude can only support a pragmatic claim â the improved empirical adequacy of successive versions of the long standing theory. In contrast, McMullinâs thesis requires that successor versions generally are better theories. Third, there is an intractable theory dependent weighting problem posed by the open ended nature of scientific theories in contrast with the closed narratives describing idealized models. The role of the approximate truth of scientific theories is explored, within the frameworks of Realism and Anti-realism, with regard to the possible responses to the existence of two highly successful, well corroborated, but incompatible theories â general relativity and quantum mechanics. It is suggested that Scientific Realism itself, not only McMullinâs argument for Scientific Realism, requires the notion of approximate truth or verisimilitude of theories. Putnamâs Internal Realism is considered, and, if as I suggest, no adequate account of the concepts of the approximate truth or verisimilitude of scientific theories can be given, Internal Realism (which need not draw on these concepts because of its denial that there is a unique correct description of the world) is more plausible than the full blooded Scientific Realism advocated by McMullin, despite granting the claim of the historical observation of the conjunction between long standing successful theories and their P-fertility. (shrink)

Justificationism differs from realism about how linguistic meaning is given, and hence in its associated conception of truth, and in particular in rejecting bivalence. Empirical discourse differs from mathematical primarily in that an effective decision-procedure for an empirical statement may cease to be available at a later time. The contrast is not that empirical knowledge is derived from what is mind-dependent, namely perception, whereas mathematical knowledge is not so derived. Mathematical knowledge does not accrue simply because (...) a proof exists: the proof has to be understood and recognized to be valid. Most ordinary mathematical proofs are indirect: they supply an effective means, in principle, to construct a direct or canonical proof. An indirect justification for asserting an empirical statement does not, in general, supply a means for bringing into existence a direct justification; it merely provides a ground for supposing that a direct justification would be or have been available for someone suitably placed to make the necessary observations. But it is by what constitutes direct evidence for a statement that its meaning is given; a grasp of its meaning does not rest on an ability to survey all conceivable indirect evidence. A direct justification of an empirical statement of the kind capable of being used as a report of observation must be an actual or possible observation by a suitably placed observer. A possible observation need not be explained by means of a counterfactual: it may be taken as consisting of the appropriate physical stimuli. This way of understanding it evades all three of the untenable choices Peacocke offers the justificationist. Unlike mathematical ones, empirical statements are often justifiably asserted on probabilistic grounds. When the statement admits of a conclusive justification, probabilistic evidence will not figure as a direct justification for asserting it, and hence as determining its meaning, so no circularity is involved, as Peacocke charges. There may, however, be empirical statements that can neither be reports of observation nor admit of a conclusive justification. Such statements can be asserted only on inductive or abductive grounds; this goes to characterize their meanings. Their meanings must therefore be explained by specifying such grounds as the most direct justifications of them that can be given, although they are difeasible rather than conclusive. Peacocke appears to deny that there can be statements that transcend all possible verification. To vindicate such a view from a realist standpoint is surely very difficult: it requires a demonstration that we could not grasp what it would be for such a statement to be true. It is very obscure what a realist's conception of truth is. The principle of bivalence remains a strong mark of differentiation between a justificationist and a realist conception of truth; a clear argument why the principle should be accepted would greatly help to clarify how the realist conceives of truth. I enjoyed reading Peacocke's article, but remain as perplexed as I was before just how he does conceive of truth. (shrink)

A Moderate Anti-realist approach to truth and meaning, built around the concept of knowability, will be introduced and argued for in this essay. Our starting point will be the two fundamental anti-realists principles that claim that neither truth nor meaning can outstrip knowability and our focus will be on the challenge of adequately formalizing these principles and incorporating them into a formal theory. Accordingly, the author will introduce a MAR truth operator that is built on a (...) distinction between being true and being factual. He will show then that this approach partitions propositions into eight classes, on the basis of their knowability. We will then ask the following question: Given the anti-realist principles, what kind of theory of propositional meaning can properly explain the meaninglessness of fully unknowable propositions? This question will lead us to the claim that the meaning/content of propositions should be identified not with the set of possible worlds in which the propositions are true/factual, but rather in which they are known. This modified approach will then be used to analyze both the Liar Paradox and the Strengthened Liar. To anticipate the conclusion of this essay, it will be shown that a MAR framework can render definite truth and factuality values to the Liar sentence and it will also confirm our intuition that such paradoxical sentences are devoid of proper meaning. (shrink)

In this chapter, I argue against empiricist positions which claim that empirical evidence can be sufficient to defeasibly justify aesthetic judgements, or judgements about the adequacy of aesthetic judgements, or sceptical judgements about someone's capacity to form adequate aesthetic judgements. First, empirical evidence provides neither inferential, nor non-inferential justification for aesthetic opinions. Second, while empirical evidence may tell us how we do respond aesthetically to artworks, it cannot tell us how we should respond to them. (...) And, third, empirical insights into the irrationality of many of our aesthetic judgements do not warrant the sceptical conclusion that we ought to refrain from forming aesthetic opinions. As a consequence of these limitations to aesthetic empiricism, we should endorse the rationalist position that aesthetic criticism is largely a matter of reasoning and, moreover, a collective undertaking. (shrink)

McGowan argues “that ordinary utterances routinely enact norms without the speaker having or exercising any special authority” and thereby not “merely cause” but “constitute” harm if harm results from adherence to the enacted norms. The discovery of this “previously overlooked mechanism,” she claims, provides a potential justification for “further speech regulation.” Her argument is unsuccessful. She merely redefines concepts like “harm constitution” and “norm enactment” and fails to explain why speech that “constitutes” harm is legally or morally problematic and (...) thus an initially more plausible target for speech regulation than speech that “merely causes” harm. Even if she could explain that, however, her account would still be incapable of identifying cases where utterances “constitute harm.” This is so for two reasons. First, she provides neither analytical nor empirical criteria for deciding which so-called “s-norms” have been enacted by an “ordinary utterance.” Second, even if such criteria could be provided, there is no epistemically available means to distinguish whether harm has ensued due to adherence to the enacted s-norms or through other mechanisms. Given this lack of criteria and practical applicability, there is no way that this account could serve as a principled basis for speech regulation – it could only serve as a pretext for arbitrary censorship. (shrink)

Arthur Kaufmann is one of the most prominent figures among the contemporary philosophers of law in German speaking countries. For many years he was a director of the Institute of Philosophy of Law and Computer Sciences for Law at the University in Munich. Presently, he is a retired professor of this university. Rare in the contemporary legal thought, Arthur Kaufmann's philosophy of law is one with the highest ambitions — it aspires to pinpoint the ultimate foundations of law by explicitly (...) proposing an ontology, a general theory of knowledge and concept of a person. Kaufmann's work derives, first of all, from the thinking of Gustav Radburch, his teacher, and then from ideas of Karl Engish and Hans-Georg Gadamer. The philosophy undertakes to pursue the ultimate foundation of law, law which is understood by Kaufmann, first of all, as a "concrete judgement" that is, what is right in a concrete situation. Justice belongs to the essence of law and "unjust law" is contradictio in adiectio. Kaufmann opposes all those theories, which as the only foundation for establishing just law (Recht) adopt legal norms (Gesetz). In Kaufmann's opinion , such theories are powerless in the face of all types of distortions of law rendered by political forces. He suggests that the basic phenomenon which needs to be explained and which cannot be disregarded by a philosopher of law is so-called "legal lawlessness" ("Gestzliches Unrecht"). "Legal lawlessness" which forms a part of life experience for the people of twentieth century totalitarian states. It proved "with the accuracy of scientific experiment" that the reality of law consists of something more than bare conformity with legal norms. The existence of lex corrupta indicates that law contains something "non-dispositive" which requires acknowledgment of both law-maker and judge. Kaufmann, accepting the convergent concept of truth and cognition, assumes that "non-dispositive" content, emerging as the conformity of a number of cognitive acts of different subjects (inter-subjective communicativeness and verifiability), indicates the presence of being in this cognition. The questions "What is law?" and "What are the principles of a just solution?" lead straight to the ontology of law, to the question about the ontological foundations of law. Kaufmann discerns the ontological foundations of law in the specifically understood "nature of things" and, ultimately, in a "person". He proposes a procedural theory of justice, founded on a "person". In my work, I undertake to reconstruct the train of thought which led Kaufmann to the recognition of a "person" as the ontological foundation of law. In the first part, the conception of philosophy adopted by Kaufmann, initial characteristics of law — of reality which is the subject of analysis, as well as, the requirements for proper philosophical explanation of law posed by Kaufmann are introduced. In the second, Kaufmann's reconstruction of the process of the realisation of law is presented. Next, the conception of analogy which Kaufmann uses when explaining law is analyzed. In the fourth part, Kaufmann's conception of ontological foundations of law is discussed. A critical analysis is carried out in which I demonstrate that the theory of the ontological foundation of law proposed by Kaufmann and the concept of a person included in it do not allow a satisfac¬tory explanation of the phenomenon of "legal lawlessness" and lead to a number of difficulties in the philosophical explanation of law. Finally, the perspectives of a proper formulation of the issue of the ontological foundations of law are drafted in the context of the analyzed theory. My interest is centered on the conception of philosophy adopted by Kaufmann, according to which the existence of the reality is inferred on the basis of a certain configuration of the content of consciousness, whereas at the point of departure of philosophy of law, the data to be explained is a certain process, which is, basically, a process of cognition, while the reality appears only as a condition for the possibility of the occurrence of the process. I wish to argue that the difficulties which appear in the explanation of law are a consequence of the assumed fundamental philosophical solu¬tions, which seem to be characteristic, though usually not assumed explicitly, in philoso¬phy and theory of law dominant at present in continental Europe. Thereby, I wish to show the significance of ontological and epistemological solutions to the possibility of a proper formulation of the problems posed by philosophy and theory of law. Kaufmann proclaims himself in favour of a philosophy which poses questions about the ultimate foundations of understanding of the reality. In epistemology, he assumes that answers to the questions "What is reality like?" and ultimately "What is real?" are inferred on the basis of uniformity of a cognitive acts of different subjects. Cognition of the reality is accomplished exclusively through the content of conceptual material. The two fundamental questions posed by philosophy of law are "What is just law?" and "How is the just law enacted?" The latter is a question about the process of achieving a solution to a concrete case. Since, in Kaufmann's opinion, law does not exist apart from the process of its realisation, an answer to the question about the manner of realisation of law is of fundamental significance to answering the question: "What is law?" and to the explanation of the question about the ontological grounding of law, which is, as well, the foundation of justice. The proper solution has to take into account the moment of "non-dispositive" content of law; its positiveness understood as the reality and, at the same time, it has to point to the principles of the historical transformation of the content. Law, in the primary meaning of the word, always pertains, in Kaufmann's opinion, to a concrete case. A legal norm is solely the "possibility" of law and the entirely real law is ipsa res iusta, that which is just in a given situation. Determination of what is just takes place in a certain type of process performed by a judge (or by man confronted with a choice). Kaufmann aims to reconstruct this process. A question about the ontological foundation of law is a question about the ontological foundations of this process. In the analyzed theory it is formulated as a question about the transcendental conditions, necessary for the possibility of the occurrence of the process: how the reality should be thought to make possible the reconstructed process of the realisation of law. Kaufmann rejects the model for finding a concrete solution based on simple subsump¬tion and proposes a model in which concrete law ensues, based on inference by analogy, through the process of "bringing to conformity" that which is normative with that which is factual. Kaufmann distinguishes three levels in the process of the realisation of law. On the highest level, there are the fundamental legal principles, on the second legal norms, on the third — concrete solutions. The fundamental principles of law are general inasmuch as they cannot be "applied" directly to concrete conditions of life, however, they play an important part in establishing norms. A judge encounters a concrete situation and a system of legal norms. A life situation and norms are situated on inherently different levels of factuality and normativeness. In order to acquire a definite law both a norm (system of norms) and a life situation (Lebenssachverhalt) should undergo a kind of "treatment" which would allow a mutual conformity to be brought to them. Legal norms and definite conditions of life come together in the process of analogical inference in which the "factual state" ("Tatbestand") — which represents a norm, and in the "state of things" ("Sachverhalt") — which represents a specific situation are constructed. A "factual state" is a sense interpreted from a norm with respect to specific conditions of life. The "state of things" is a sense constructed on the basis of concrete conditions of life with respect to norms (system of norms). Legal norms and concrete conditions of life meet in one common sense established during the process of realisation of law. Mutatis mutandis the same refers to the process of composition of legal norms: as the acquisition of concrete law consists in a mutual "synchronization" of norms and concrete conditions of life, so acquisition of legal norms consists of bringing to conformity fundamental principles and possible conditions of life. According to Kaufmann, both of these processes are based on inference through analogy. As this inference is the heart of these processes it is simultaneously a foundation finding just law and justice. How does Kaufmann understand such an inference? As the basis for all justice he assumes a specifically interpreted distributive justice grounded on proportionality. Equality of relations is required between life conditions and their normative qualification. Concrete conditions of life are ascribed normative qualification not through simple application of a general norm. More likely, when we look for a solution we go from one concrete normative qualified case to another, through already known "applications" of norms to a new "application". The relation between life conditions and their normative qualifica¬tion has to be proportional to other, earlier or possible (thought of) assignments of that which is factual to that which is normative. Law as a whole does not consist of a set of norms, but only of a unity of relations. Since law is a, based on proportion, relative unity of a norm and conditions of life, in order to explain law in philosophical manner, the question about ontological base of this unity has to be asked. What is it that makes the relation between a norm and conditions of life "non-dispositive"? What is the basis for such an interpretation of a norm and case which makes it possible to bring a norm and conditions of life into mutual "conformity"? This is a question about a third thing (next to norms and conditions of life), with respect to which the relative identity between a norm and conditions of life occurs, about the intermediary between that which is normative and that which is factual and which provides for the process of establishing of norms, as well as, finding solutions. It is the "sense" in which the idea of law or legal norm and conditions of life have to be identical to be brought to mutual "conformity". In Kaufmann's opinion such a sense is nothing else but the "nature of things" which determines the normative qualification of the reality. Since establishment of this "sense" appears to be "non-dispositive" and controlled inter-subjectively (namely, other subjects will reach a similar result) so, in conformity with the convergent concept of truth, the "nature of things" must be assigned a certain ontological status. According to Kaufmann this is a real relation which occurs between being and obligation, between the conditions of life and normative quality. However, it should be underlined that from the point of view of the analyzed system the "nature of things" is a correlate of constructed sense, a result of a construction which is based on the principle of consistent understanding of senses ("non-normative" and "normative") and is not a reality which is transcendent against the arrangement of senses. In Kaufmann's theory, inference from analogy appears to be a process of reshaping the concepts (senses) governed by tendency to understand the contents appearing in relations between that which is factual and that which is normative in a consistent way. The analogical structure of language (concepts) and recognition of being as composed of an essence and existence is an indispensable requirement for the possibility of the realisation of law, based on specifically understood inference from analogy. It is necessary to assume a moment of existence without content which ensures unity of cognition. Existence emerges thus as a condition of the possibility of cognition. According to Kaufmann, the "nature of things" is the heart of inference through analogy and the basis for establishment of finding of law. Inference from the "state of things" to a norm or from a norm to the "state of things" always means inference through the "nature of things". The "nature of things" is the proper medium of objective legal sense sought in every cognition of law. In Kaufmann's view, the question whether the "nature of things" is ultima ratio of interpretation of law or is only a means of supplement gaps in law or whether it is one of the sources of law, is posed wrongly. The "nature of things" serves neither to supplement the gaps nor is it a source of law as, for example, a legal norm may be. It is a certain kind of "catalyst" necessary in every act of making law and solving a concrete case. Owing to "nature of things" it is possible to bring to a mutual conformity the idea of law and possible conditions of life or legal norms and concrete conditions of life. In Kaufmann's conception the "nature of things" is not yet the ultimate basis for understanding the "non-dispositiveness" of law. The relation between obligation and being is determined in the process of the realisation of law. Both the process itself and that which is transformed in this process are given. A question about the ontological bases of "material" contents undergoing "treatment" in the process of the realisation of law and about being which is the basis of regularity of the occurrence of the process arises. Only this will allow an explanation that the result of the process is not optional. Thus, a question about reality to which law refers and about the subject realising the law has to be formed. To this, Kaufmann gives the following answer: that which is missing is man but not "empirical man" but man as a "person". A "person" understood as a set of relations between man and other people and things. A "person" is the intermediary between those things which are different — norm and case are brought to conformity. A "person" is that which is given and permanent in the process of the realisation of law. It determines the content of law, is "subject" of law; this aspect is described by Kaufmann as the "what" of the process of realisation of law. A "person" consists of precisely just these relations which undergo "treatment" in the process. On the other hand, a "person" is "a place" in which the processes of realisation of law occur, it is the "how" of normative discourse, a "person" is that which determines the procedure of the process, being "outside" of it. This aspect of a "person" is connected with the formal moment of law. A "person" being, at the same time, the "how" and the "what" of the process of the realisation of law, is also, to put it differently, a structural unity of relation and that which constitutes this relation (unity of relatio and relata). According to this approach a "person" is neither an object nor a subject. It exists only "in between". It is not substance. Law is the relation between being and obligation. That which is obligatory is connected with that which is general. That which is general does not exist on its own, it is not completely real. Accordingly, a "person" as such is also not real. It is relational, dynamic and historical. A "person" is not a state but an event. In Kaufmann's opinion, such a concept of a "person" helps to avoid the difficulties connected with the fungibility of law in classical legal positivism. A "person" is that which is given, which is not at free disposal and secures the moment of "non-dispositiveness" of law. Kaufmann concludes: "The idea (»nature«) of law is either the idea of a personal man or is nothing". Theory points at the structure of realising law and explains the process of adoption of general legal norms for a concrete situation. The analysis has shown however, that in this theory a satisfactory answer to the question about the ultimate foundations of law is not given. It seems that in the analyzed theory the understanding of human being takes place through understanding of law. What is good for man as a "person", what is just, what a "person" deserves may be determined only against the existing system of law. A "per¬son" adopted as a basis of law is the reality postulated in the analysis of the process of the realisation of law. It is a condition of possibility of this process ( explaining, on one hand, its unity and, on the other hand, the non-dispositive moments stated in this process). A "person" in the discussed theory is entirely defined by the structure of law, it can be nothing more than that which is given in law, what law refers to, what law is about. Being, which is a "person", is constituted by relations between people and objects, the relations which are based on fundamental links between norms and conditions of life established in a process of bringing them to conformity. It has to be assumed that man as a "person" is a subject of law only as far as realising law "treats" given senses according to their current configuration. The system of law is a starting point and it describes in content what man is as a "person". Moreover, being a "person" is the condition for entering legal relations. Consistently, Kaufmann writes that "empirical man" is not the subject of law, man is not "out of nature" a "person". People become "persons" due to the fact that they acknowledge each other as "persons" — acknowledging, at the same time, law. This acknowledgement is a con¬dition of existence, of the possibility of the occurrence of process of realisation of law and of constituting legal relations which ultimately constitute a "person". Kaufmann assumes, that law tends towards a moral aim: it may and must create an external freedom, without which the internal freedom to fulfil moral obligations cannot develop. However, this postulate is not based on the necessary structure of human being. From the point of view of his system, it is nothing more than only a condition for the possibility of the occurrence of the process of the realisation of law — lack of freedom would destroy the "how" of this process. Thus, the postulate to protect the freedom of personal acts has to be interpreted, in accordance with the analyzed theory, as a postulate, the fulfilment of which aims ultimately at the accomplishment of the very same process of realisation of law itself and not the realisation of a given man. Kaufmann considers a "person" to be an element which unites the system of law as a whole. Law is a structure of relations, which are interdependent and inter-contingent. Consequently, a "person" which is to form the ontological basis of law has to be entity consisting of all relations. Being also the "how" of the process of realisation of law, if a "person" is to warrant its unity, it has to be a common source for all procedures. Hence, a single "person" would constitute a subject of law. Man appears to be only a moment of a certain entirety, realisation of which should be an aim of his actions. Law, creating a "person" as an object and subject of law becomes a primary entity. In the analyzed theory, the basis for determination of aims which law sets to man is not the allocation of man-subject to something which improves him but rather, such relation is only just constituted by law. A question appears, why should aims set in law also be the aims of "empirical man"? Why is this "empirical man" to be punished in the name of a "person" understood in such a way? If, however, it is assumed that what is man is determined by a system which is superior to him, then man has to be understood only as a part of a whole and there are no grounds to prohibit istrumental treatment of man and so the road to all aspects of totalitarianism might be opened. A problem of the application of created theory to the reality arises, the reality which the theory pretends to explain. Ultimately in his theory Kaufmann does not give any systemic grounds for a radical questioning of the validity of any legal norms. Every new norm becomes an equal part of system of norms. It is only its interpretation and application to given conditions of life that may be disputable, however, this refers to all norms without exception. Cohesive inter-pretation of norms and applications is necessary and sufficient for the acquisition of just law. New norms have to be interpreted in the light of others, correspondingly, the other norms require reinterpretation in the light of the new ones. Contradiction in interpretation of a norm does not form a basis for questioning norms but may serve only to question the manner of their interpretation (understanding). Therefore, no grounds exist to assume any legal norm as criminal or unjust, and in consequence, to question any consistently realised system based on formally, properly established norms, as "legal lawlessness". As law and a "person" do not exist without the process of realisation of law, the role of legal safety becomes crucial as the condition for the possibility of the occurrence of the process of realisation of law. Denying legal safety would be tantamount to negation of law in general (also of moral law) as negation of safety takes away, at the same time, the basis for occurrence of the process of realisation of law. Moreover, any lack of legal safety would also mean lack of a basis for the existence of man as a "person". Kaufmann's thesis, that civil disobedience is legalized only when it has a chance to lead to success, consistent with his concept of the foundations of law, seems to point directly to conclusions which deny the facts taken under consideration and doubtlessly Kaufmann's own intentions, since it would have to be assumed that accordingly there are no grounds to question a legal system in force based on violence which secures its operation. Force finally seems to determine which one of the mutually irreconcilable normative systems constitute law and which does not. A legitimate position is one which leads to success, it is the weaker system which is negated. If so, then basically violent imposition of law is not an act directed against the law in force but, to the contrary, realisation of law. In the context of the new system the former system of law may be talked about as unjust solely in the sense of being incapable of being consistently united with the new. However, at the base, ultimately, lies force which reaffirms differences and excludes from the process of realisation of law certain norms and their interpretations. Kaufmann was aiming at grounding of that which is "non-dispositive" in a certain given framework of interpretation. Nevertheless, he does not provide foundations for the understanding of phenomena, which he undertakes to explain at a point of departure. Instead of explaining them the theory negates the possibility of their existence. The reality postulated in regard to "non-dispositive" moments of the reconstructed process of acquiring law consist of a specifically understood "person", which appears in Kaufmann's conceptions as a condition of the possibility of the realisation of law. According to this approach understanding of a "person" may be only a function of law. To understand "legal lawlessness" and foundations of justice it is necessary to look for such theory of law in which understanding of man as a "person" and being is not a function of understanding of law (in which a "person" is not only a condition for possibility of reconstructed process of realisation of law; for possibility of cognition processes). It seems necessary to start from theory of being and a "person" based on broader experience than the one assumed by Kaufmann and reconstruct the ontological foundations of the process of realisation of law only in such perspective. Kaufmann points out that that to which law refers is ipsa res iusta a concrete relation of man to other people and things. This relation, in his theory, appears to be basically only just constituted by law (normative senses "applied" to conditions of life). Therefore, understanding the relation between a given man and other people and things which constitute the aim of his actions, that is understanding of good, is enacted against the background of constitution of senses; constitution which is a result of a process aiming towards consistent understanding of particular contents (of nor¬mative and non-normative senses). "Being" is secondary towards constructed senses it is only their correlate. The primary relation consists of relation of a man to law (system of norms), while the secondary relation is one of man to something which is the aim of his action (relation between man and good). Considering such approach it is difficult to envision a satisfying answer to the fundamental question: why does law put concrete man under any obligation to obey it? The source of this problem can be seen in reduction of the base for understanding good to content of obligation formulated in auto-reflection. Such reduction seems to be a consequence of Kaufmann's adoption of "convergent concept of truth" and in con¬sequence his recognition of indirect, essentialistic grasp of reality formulated in concepts as the basic and only foundation of theory of being and of law. In view of such an approach, analogy of law, concepts and being is the condition for the possibility of the process of transformation of senses which aims at consistent interpretation of all law. Existence is postulated with respect to the possibility of unity of experience and cognition. However, also a different approach to understanding of the problem of being and good is possible. In spontaneous cognition being is affirmed, first of all, not as a certain, non-contradictory, determined content, but as something existing. Together with a cer¬tain content (passed indirectly through notions) existence of being is co-given. The basis for unity of being is not formed by the consistence of content, as it is in the case of the theories departing from the analysis of cognition processes, but by an act of existence realising content (essence). Such an approach makes it also possible to go beyond the convergent concept of truth. It is worth mentioning that allocation of an agent to good is realised not only by the content of duty. A statement that something is good is primary with respect to determination of this good in content. The recognised good always bears some content, however, there are no reasons to base the concept of good exclusively on indirect, formulated in concepts cognition. As primary, can be adopted the relation of man to good and not of man to law. Determination in content appears to be only an articulation of aspectual cognition of being, as an object of action. In such a case the basis for relative unity of norm and conditions of life is not the "nature of things" understood as correlate of sense but it is relation to good based on internal constitution of man as potential, not self-sufficient being. It does not mean, that the moments of the process of realisation of law singled out by Kaufmann are not important to determination of what is just. He, quite rightly, points to significant role played by norms in the evaluation of concrete situations, in man's search for closer specification in content of good innate to him. The structure of process of determining law for a concrete situation, to a great degree corresponds to the processes of determining law which take place not only in the legal sciences. Kaufmann's analyses of the process of realisation of law show the complexity of the structure of these processes and point towards important moments allowing a better understanding of law and man. Nevertheless, these analyses cannot be a basis for construction of philosophical theory of law, theory which hopes to point out the ultimate, ontological foundations for understanding law. Kaufmann's results may become fully valid only in a more general perspective including broader experience at the point of departure. (shrink)

There is no immediate knowledge, neither empirical nor conceptual. Hegel shows this in his Phenomenology of Spirit. He develops this most important insight in his writings on logic. Science is the project of developing situation-independent generic sentences – which are not to be confused with universally quantified empirical statements. Rather, the sentences articulate law sor rules of default inference and proper judgment in a generic way. They are set as “conceptually valid” not only on merely verbal or (...) conventional grounds, but are “material” in their world-relation. In other words, science develops “the concept” which, in turn, enables us to understand, i.e. to use languages and to think about reality and possibilities more or less correctly. “The concept” is, therefore, the system of generic conditions of all “meaning” and “truth” and is, as such, presupposed in empirical judgments of the category of singularity. “Reason” is the subjective side of “spirit”, which, in turn, is nothing but our practice of scientific development. If we look at this practice from within, spirit is the “self-development” of conceptual contents. Moreover, any causal explanation and any appeal to forces or dispositions rest on conceptual constructions of generic models. This is the core claim of Hegel’s idealism with respect to causes and grounds by which we “explain” appearances: The underlying “Wirklichkeit” is our own scientific construction suited to our joint experiences. (shrink)

This paper argues that a consideration of the problem of providing truthmakers for negative truths undermines truthmaker theory. Truthmaker theorists are presented with an uncomfortable dilemma. Either they must take up the challenge of providing truthmakers for negative truths, or else they must explain why negative truths are exceptions to the principle that every truth must have a truthmaker. The first horn is unattractive since the prospects of providing truthmakers for negative truths do not look good neither (...) absences, nor totality states of affairs, nor Graham Priest and J.C. Beall’s ‘polarities’ (Beall, 2000; Priest, 2000) are up to the job. The second horn, meanwhile, is problematic because restricting the truthmaker principle to atomic truths, or weakening it to the thesis that truth supervenes on being, undercuts truthmaker theory’s original motivation. The paper ends by arguing that truthmaker theory is, in any case, an under-motivated doctrine because the groundedness of truth can be explained without appeal to the truthmaker principle. This leaves us free to give the ommonsensical and deflationary explanation of negative truths that common-sense suggests. (shrink)

There are at least three different genealogical accounts of morality: the ontogenetic, the sociohistorical, and the evolutionary. One can thus construct, in principle, three distinct genealogical debunking arguments of morality, i.e., arguments that appeal to empirical data, or to an empirical hypothesis, about the origin of morality to undermine either its ontological foundation or the epistemic credentials of our moral beliefs. The genealogical account that has been, particularly since the early 2000s, the topic of a burgeoning line of (...) inquiry in the metaethical literature is the one that explains the origin of moral thinking by appealing to Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution through natural selection. For this reason, when it comes to genealogical debunking arguments, it is various types of evolutionary debunking argument (EDA) that are the focus of the current debate between moral skeptics and moral realists. Evolutionary moral debunkers maintain that the capacity to make moral judgments is an evolved trait—a view accepted by most of their detractors. They maintain, in addition, that such a capacity is an adaptation—i.e., a trait selected for because it enhances reproduction and survival—and not merely either a by-product of an adaptation or an evolutionary accident—a view accepted by fewer of their detractors. Roughly put, the thrust of EDAs is that biological evolution is aimed, not at moral belief-forming processes that are reliable, but at moral belief-forming processes that are adaptive. In other words, the evolutionary function of those processes is not that of tracking the moral truth: their general success at matching or accurately representing allegedly objective or attitude-independent moral facts, properties, or truths explains neither their emergence nor their persistence. Humans are therefore disposed to make moral judgments regardless of the evidence to which they are exposed, regardless of whether there are or are not objective moral facts, properties, or truths. In the contemporary scene, the most important and influential EDAs are those advanced by Richard Joyce and Sharon Street. Although Joyce’s EDA is more elaborate than Street’s inasmuch as it is based on a detailed evolutionary account of morality, it is Street’s EDA that has received the most attention among those seeking to defend moral realism against EDAs. If an EDA can establish at most an epistemological conclusion, then it could be argued that Joyce’s argument (at least the version defended in his later works) is superior to Street’s given that the conclusion of the former is epistemological whereas that of the latter is ontological. Indeed, while Joyce’s EDA is taken to support epistemological moral skepticism, according to which our moral beliefs are epistemically unjustified, Street’s is taken to support moral anti-realism (moral constructivism in particular), according to which attitude-independent moral facts do not exist. (shrink)

Several important discussions of Bradley’s ethical theory have recently appeared, among which is Professor Don MacNiven’s interesting paper on Bradley’s critical analyses of Utilitarian and Kantian ethics. In addition to directing us to central features in, and problems with, Bradley’s understanding of these doctrines, MacNiven correctly emphasizes the role of psychological discussions in Ethical Studies and remarks the distinction Bradley made between the moralist and the moral philosopher. Bradley is trying to understand moral experience, “the world of the thinking, feeling (...) moral agent, living his or her life out in the concrete context of family, society, and state,” and theories or systems of ethics are being judged according to their ability to illuminate that experience. MacNiven’s main concern is with Bradley’s arguments that neither utilitarianism and the empirical psychology on which it is grounded nor the Kantian ethics and the rational psychology that grounds it can satisfactorily explain moral experience. I do not wish to discuss these here. Rather, I want to offer some remarks about a topic that is introduced in MacNiven’s article but not discussed there because it is outside the scope of that paper. The topic arises when MacNiven mentions consistency and contradiction. He notes Bradley’s rejection of pure formalism in ethics, a purely formal theory being characterized as advocating the practical maxim, “realize non-contradiction”. One would be surprised to discover that Bradley thought such a view totally wrongheaded, and MacNiven rightly remarks that it “would be odd for Bradley to deny consistency a role in moral thought. After all, the principle of noncontradiction is fundamental for Bradley’s metaphysics and his coherence theory of truth.” However, as MacNiven would recognize, we need not be directed forward to Appearance and Reality to be assured of this, for noncontradiction has a central place in Ethical Studies. What is perhaps surprising is that there we are presented with the notion of a felt contradiction. In fact, there is considerable mention of feelings in Ethical Studies, and the notions of harmony and felt unity as well as that of a felt contradiction appear to be especially important. (shrink)

This paper includes seven chapters. The first chapter discusses the purport and the structure of Vimalakirti Nirdesa Sutra. Its purport is inconceivable liberation-development and liberation of living beings-purification of Buddha-fields. These three items are one essentially, the inconceivable liberation being the essence of its purport and the development and liberation of living beings and the purification of Buddha-fields being the function of it. Essence and function are identical. This sutra has a structure that goes forward step by step and arranges (...) in a crisscross pattern. The second chapter discusses the thought of sunya. On one hand, this sutra follows and develops the thought of sunya in the Prajn~a^pa^ramita^-su^tra while paying much emphasis on the middle-way sunya, on the other hand, it is characterized by two points in the way of its thought of sunya: all things standing on the root which is baseless and surpassing it within e qu-sunya. The third chapter argues the thought of middle way and non-discrimination. The domain of the bodhisattva embodies the thought of middle way. The thought of middle way of this sutra influenced greatly Na^ga^rjuna who claimed eight-not middle way. Jizang and Zhiyi followed and developed the thought of his. Nonduality is without discrimination. The dharma of nonduality is middle way dharmata^. The theory of dharmata^ is profound and abstruse, being without any form and beyond speech. Entering-the Dharma-door of nonduality has three layers of meaning. Nonduality is inconceivable and entering-the Dharma-door of nonduality is inconceivable liberation. The idea of nonduality of this sutra had a profound impact on Huineng’s Tanjing and Jizang’s thought of nonduality in four-layer two truths. The theory of sunya, middle way and non-discrimination discussed in the above two chapters, is the way of thinking of this sutra which is named as the negative affirming. Without the way of thinking of this kind, no sentient beings were gifted with the great compassion and skill in liberative technique.Without it, there were no developing and liberating living beings and purifying Buddha-fields. The fourth chapter discusses the thought of inconceivable liberation. In general, the Inconceivable is that which is beyond contemplation or conceptualization, beyond linguistic expression. In this sutra, apart from the above significance, the Inconceivable is equal to Liberation. The essence of inconceivable liberation is developing and liberating living beings and purifying Buddha-fields, is being released in liberation without abandoning the passions that are the province of the world, is following the way to attain the qualities of the Buddha, is neither destroying the compounded nor resting in the uncompounded, is being beyond the world without abandoning it. The fifth chapter argues the probability and method of developing and liberating sentient beings, that is, the thought of the Buddha-qualities and skill in liberative technique. The family of the Tathagatas', being constituted by all passions, is different from the true mind, the pure mind, the tatha^gatagarbha or the Buddha-nature. So it is certain that the thought of the Buddha-qualities would develop into the idea which insists on all sentient beings having the Buddha-nature. Zhiyi’s theory of evil-nature was evolved from the thought of the family of the Tathagatas'. The skill in liberative technique has many meanings: (1) A method, a means, a device for saving sentient beings; "expedient means" (upa^ya). "Excellent method for converting beings" (upa^ya-kau/salya). The wisdom of being able to save sentient beings by knowing discriminated phenomena. A temporary teaching established in order to lead sentient beings to the true teaching. This is a subject of primary importance in the Lotus Sutra. (2) A plan, scheme, design (a^rambha). (3) Usage of metaphor in teaching. (4) Chinese Buddhists utilized the doctrine of expedient means to help deal with the hermeneutical problem of reconciling the disparities among the different teachings attributed to the Buddha-to explain that the differences in the teachings of the Buddha delivered in his forty-nine year ministry were the result of the different audiences he addressed. The sixth chapter discusses how to purify the Buddha-fields. When we say that the purity of the Buddha-field reflecting the purity of one’s own mind, the mind is not the transcendental pure one, but the empirical one after arousing the thought of intention to achieve enlightenment. The purity of one’s own mind leading to the purity of the Buddha-field, means that the pure Buddha-field are constructed not only by purifying his own mind but also by purifying all living beings’ minds. Huineng’s idea of “one’s own mind is Buddha immediately” and the argument of “one’s own mind is pure Buddha-field immediately” are greatly different from the thought of the purity of one’s own mind leading to the purity of the Buddha-field. The seventh chapter discusses the relation between this sutra and householder-Buddhism and the secularization of Buddhism. This sutra doesn’t gives theoretical arguments for the householder-Buddhism and the secularization of Buddhism. (shrink)

Cognitive neuroscience is an interdisciplinary enterprise aimed at explaining cognition and behavior. It appears to be succeeding. What accounts for this apparent explanatory success? According to one prominent philosophical thesis, cognitive neuroscience explains by discovering and describing mechanisms. This "mechanist thesis" is open to at least two interpretations: a strong metaphysical thesis that Carl Craver and David Kaplan defend, and a weaker methodological thesis that William Bechtel defends. I argue that the metaphysical thesis is false and that the methodological thesis (...) is too weak to account for the explanatory promise of cognitive neuroscience. My argument draws support from a representative example of research in this field, namely, the neuroscience of decision-making. The example shows that cognitive neuroscience explains in a variety of ways and that the discovery of mechanisms functions primarily as a way of marshaling evidence in support of the models of cognition that are its principle unit of explanatory significance. -/- The inadequacy of the mechanist program is symptomatic of an implausible but prominent view of scientific understanding. On this view, scientific understanding consists in an accurate and complete description of certain "objective" explanatory relations, that is, relations that hold independently of facts about human psychology. I trace this view to Carl Hempel's logical empiricist reconceptualization of scientific understanding, which then gets extended in Wesley Salmon's causal-mechanistic approach. I argue that the twin objectivist ideals of accuracy and completeness are neither ends we actually value nor ends we ought to value where scientific understanding is concerned. -/- The case against objectivism motivates psychologism about understanding, the view that understanding depends on human psychology. I propose and defend a normative psychologistic framework for investigating the nature of understanding in the mind sciences along three empirically-informed dimensions: 1) What are the ends of understanding? 2) What is the nature of the cognitive strategy that we deploy to achieve those ends; and 3) Under what conditions is our deployment of this strategy effective toward achieving those ends? To articulate and defend this view, I build on the work of Elliot Sober to develop a taxonomy of psychologisms about understanding. Epistemological psychologism, a species of naturalism, is the view that justifying claims about understanding requires appealing to what scientists actually do when they seek understanding. Metaphysical psychologism is the view that the truth-makers for claims about understanding include facts about human psychology. I defend both views against objections. (shrink)

Foundationalist theories of justification for science were undermined by the theory-ladeness thesis, which has affinities with coherentist epistemologies. A challenge for defenders of coherentist theories of scientific justification is to specify coherence relations relevant to science and to show how these relations make the truth of their bearers likely. Coherence relations include characteristics that pick out better explanations in the implementation of abductive arguments. Empiricist philosophers have attacked abductive reasoning by claiming that explanatory virtues are pragmatic, having no implications (...) regarding truth. However, empiricist's basic beliefs are subject to the same challenges facing abduction, both of which can be met by citing causally coherent etiologies, which are commonplace in biological explanations, and by demonstrating the relevance of causal coherence to truth. (shrink)

Constructive empiricism is supposed to offer a positive alternative to scientific realism that dispenses with the need for metaphysics. I first review the terms of the debate before arguing that the standard objections to constructive empiricism are not decisive. I then explain van Fraassen's views on modality and counterfactuals, and argue that, because constructive empiricism recommends on epistemological grounds belief in the empirical adequacy rather than the truth of theories, it requires that there be an objective (...) modal distinction between the observable and the unobservable. This conclusion is incompatible with van Fraassen's empiricism. Finally I explain some further problems for constructive empiricism that arise when we consider modal matters. (shrink)

The three basic kinds of theory development are expansion, contraction and revision by empirical evidence. Under empiricist assumptions, the history of scientific evidence can be represented by a sequence of true and cumulatively increasing evidence sets which in the limit determine the complete structure of the world. Under these assumptions it turns out that purely universal hypotheses are falsifiable with certainty, but verifiable only in the limit, ∀-∃-hypotheses are falsifiable in the limit but not verifiable in the limit, and (...) ∀-∃-∀-hypotheses are neither nor. In the consequence, hypotheses with complex quantification structure can only be confirmed probabilistically. While these results are based on “empiricist” assumptions, the revision of theories which contain theoretical concepts requires either a given partition of possible hypotheses out of which the most promising one is chosen, or it requires steps of abductive belief revision. Revision of scientific theories is based on a Lakatosian preference structure, following the idea that in case of a conflict between theory and data, only peripherical parts of the theory are revised, while the theory’s core is saved from revision as long as possible. Surprisingly, the revision of a false theory by true empirical evidence does not necessarily increase the theory’s truthlikeness. Moreover, increase in empirical adequacy does not necessarily indicate progress in theoretical truthlikeness; a well-known attempt to justify this inference is Putnam’s no-miracles argument. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Truth Will Set You Free, or How a Troubled Philosophical Theory May Help to Understand How People Talk About Their AddictionPatricia A. Ross (bio)Keywordsveridicality of narrative, contingency of theories, belief-behavior, causal connectionConsider the following proposition: If one were to recognize the unsatisfactory implications of maintaining a certain theoretical position, one would thereby be motivated to accept a more adequate theory, which would alter one's beliefs and, in (...) turn, alter the behaviors that are based upon those beliefs. Faith in this proposition is what motivates many of us to teach. But, alas...Allison Mitchell's argument for rethinking addiction intervention—in particular, rethinking twelve-step programs—is premised on this proposition. According to her argument, addicts function with an impoverished sense of self that is reflective of a grossly simplified form of philosophical materialism. By recognizing the limitations of this philosophically unconvincing view, and by, in effect, accepting a better, more complete materialism, addicts can come to modify their self-conception. This modification is instrumental to recovery.A careful consideration of the chain of events being proposed, and the problems with it, is helpful for understanding the limitations of her argument. There are four points that I consider in turn: (1) considering narratives can tell us something about the self-conception of addicts, (2) philosophical materialism can help us to understand and explain something about an addict's self-conception and how it is inadequate, (3) this sense of self is distinct from nonusers and the way in which it is distinct helps to understand the problem of addiction, and (4) a change in self-conception with respect to materialism helps recovery and, thus, our best intervention is one based on having addicts accept a full materialist theory of the self and not a pretheoretic one. [End Page 227]With respect to the first point, it should be noted that Mitchell's overall argument does not depend on whether or not it is true that narratives of addiction tell us something veridical about the self-conception of addicts. Such narratives may simply provide us with a potential theory—a possible worlds scenario—of how addicts conceive of themselves. Mitchell points this out herself. The narratives and the interpretation that she provides of these narrative, "are meant only to highlight a certain pattern of self-expression and conception that may in fact be common in persons who use mind-altering substances; the readings do not establish any empirical matters of fact or philosophical truths, nor do they prove any conclusions about how such persons (must) express themselves or conceive their nature" (Mitchell 2006, 214).Thus, what the argument is actually concerned with are the theoretical claims about the self-conception of addicts that are garnered from these narratives. Nevertheless, because the narratives provide the starting point for Mitchell's argument, it is worth thinking carefully about the epistemic status of this body of literature. In particular, could a consideration of such literature lead us astray in our endeavors to understand how addicts might misconceive of themselves and, if so, in what way? What sort of epistemic status does this information hold?Mitchell is motivated by Wittgensteinian analyses of the relationship between thought and language. The particular idea that she employs from Wittgenstein is that every act of self-expression, whether it is verbal or written narrative, reveals something about the conceptual framework with which the author is working. Thus, one can learn about the author of a narrative—one can acquire a sense of how that individual conceives of him- or herself—by looking at the language that is employed to talk about and describe him- or herself.Mitchell enumerates some problems with this approach. She mentions that the author may fail to make his or her intended sense clear to readers; that the reader's narrative expectations determine the interpretation given to the narrative; that literary narrative may be less direct, less ordinary than everyday uses of language; and that interpreting such narrative via philosophical framework may ascribe to people positions that are more precise and sophisticated than they actually intend (p. 213).Aside from these quite serious problems, it is necessary to recognize... (shrink)

The central virtue at issue in recent philosophical discussions of the empirical adequacy of virtue ethics has been the virtue of compassion. Opponents of virtue ethics such as Gilbert Harman and John Doris argue that experimental results from social psychology concerning helping behavior are best explained not by appealing to so-called ‘global’ character traits like compassion, but rather by appealing to external situational forces or, at best, to highly individualized ‘local’ character traits. In response, a number of philosophers (...) have argued that virtue ethics can accommodate the empirical results in question. My own view is that neither side of this debate is looking in the right direction. For there is an impressive array of evidence from the social psychology literature which suggests that many people do possess one or more robust global character traits pertaining to helping others in need. But at the same time, such traits are noticeably different from a traditional virtue like compassion. (shrink)