The task of this paper is to exhibit Wittgenstein’s method of perspicuous presentation as aiming at a distinctive kind of self-knowledge. Three influential readings of Wittgenstein’s concept of perspicuous presentation – Hacker’s, Baker’s and Sluga’s – are examined. All of them present what Wittgenstein calls the “unsurveyablity of our grammar” as a result of the “complexity” of our language. Contrary to this, a fundamental difference between matter-of-factual complexity and the unsurveyability of grammar is pointed out. What (...) perspicuous presentations are designed to deal with, isn’t, accordingly, occasioned by the complexity of our language but by an unnoticed assimilation of our own activities as speaking beings to matter-of-factual affairs. In response to this, perspicuous presentations help us to fully appropriate our activities as speakers in virtue of achieving a transparent understanding of the use of “our words”. It thus provides us with a distinctive kind of grammatical self-knowledge. (shrink)

Gordon Baker in his last decade published a series of papers (now collected inBaker 2004), which are revolutionary in their proposals for understanding of later Wittgenstein. Taking our lead from the first of those papers, on “perspicuous presentations,” we offer new criticisms of ‘elucidatory’ readers of later Wittgenstein, such as Peter Hacker: we argue that their readings fail to connect with the radically therapeutic intent of the ‘perspicuous presentation’ concept, as an achievement‐term, rather than a kind of (...) ‘objective’ mapping of a ‘conceptual landscape.’Baker's Wittgenstein, far from being a ‘language policeman’ of the kind that often fails to influence mainstream philosophy, offers an alternative to the latent scientism of Wittgenstein's influential ‘elucidatory’ readers. (shrink)

This anthology focuses on the extraordinary contributions Wittgenstein made to several areas in the philosophy of psychology - contributions that extend to psychology, psychiatry, sociology and anthropology. To bring them a richly-deserved attention from across the language barrier, Danièle Moyal-Sharrock has translated papers by eminent French Wittgensteinians. They here join ranks with more familiar renowned specialists on Wittgenstein's philosophical psychology. While revealing differences in approach and interests, this coming together of some of the best minds on the subject discloses a (...) surprising degree of consensus, and gives us the clearest picture yet of Wittgenstein as a philosopher of psychology. (shrink)

In what follows, I will concentrate on the type of temporality which structures Wittgenstein's method of a perspicuous representation, or of a synoptic overview (übersichtliche Darstellung). I will argue that the temporal order which applies to (giving) a perspicuous representation is best to be described as retroactivity, deferred action or afterwardness (Nachträglichkeit), a concept which calls into question the ordinary conception of time as a linear and irreversible process as well as of a clear break between present and (...) past. First, I will turn to Sigmund Freud and the way he developed the concept of Nachträglichkeit or retroactivity in some of his case-studies. The basic idea here is that the meaning or content of a past experience is constituted by repeating it in a different or disguised way. I will then argue that the relation between a perspicuous representation and what is made perspicuous is best interpreted as a relation of Nachträglichkeit. This interpretation also accounts for the involvement of the subject in the object made perspicuous—as it is stressed by Wittgenstein and illustrated by his discursive method. (shrink)

In Knowing and Seeing, Michael Ayers presents a view of what he calls primary knowledge according to which one who knows in that way both knows perspicuously and knows how they know. Here, I use some general considerations about seeing, knowing, and knowing how one knows in order to raise some questions about this view. More specifically, I consider some putative limits on one’s capacity to know how one knows. The main question I pursue concerns whether perspicuity should be thought (...) of either (i) as a condition of sensory experience, (ii) as a condition of sense-based cognition, or (iii) as an interface condition, involving interrelations between sensory experience and sense-based cognition. (shrink)

Deciding what role perspicuous representations play in Wittgenstein’s philosophy matters, not only for determining what one thinks of the contributions of this great figure of twentieth century philosophy but also for recognising the ‘live options’ for conducting philosophical enquiries full stop. It is not surprising, given this importance, that perspicuous representations is the topic of the opening chapter of Gordon Baker’s posthumous collection of essays on philosophical method. In that contribution he offers grounds for thinking that the relevant (...) passage in which the notion is explicitly mentioned (cited above) should be read as promoting a strongly therapeutic approach to philosophy: he exposes ‘this possibility’ in the modest hope of persuading receptive readers to explore it further for themselves (see Baker 2004, 46). I endorse some of Baker’s central insights about understanding and use of perspicuous representations but I firmly reject his conclusions about the end of philosophy. Specifically, I agree with him that Wittgenstein set his face against the very idea of philosophical ‘theorising’, but I deny that this led him (or ought to lead anyone) to promote a purely therapeutic philosophy. In the first three sections, I supply reasons for preferring an account of Wittgenstein’s approach to philosophy that emphasises its clarificatory ambitions. In doing so, I say something about: (i) what I take perspicuous representations to be and how they function; (ii) what motivates Baker’s reading and its implications; and (iii) how perspicuous and other forms of representations have been misused in attempts at so-called philosophical theorising. I conclude by proposing that in steering clear of both theory and extreme therapy, it is possible to prosecute a positive philosophy – one that employs perspicuous representations to bring ‘relevant connections’ to light for the purposes of enabling us to understand and reflect on aspects of various domains of human being. (shrink)

Some 55 years after the publication of Russell's seminal ‘On Denoting’, Quine adopted the theory of definite descriptions presented therein to formulate his perspicuous lingua franca for the sciences. This paper illustrates how, in so doing, Quine's lingua franca inherited an old antinomy at the core of Russell's theory of definite descriptions, specifically, the lack of congruency between notation and metaphysical commitments when the variable assumes the role of fundamental singular reference. In this context, the paper contends that the (...) phrase ‘to be is purely and simply to be the value of the variable’ is far from the straightforward solution Quine initially envisioned for his lingua franca. Additionally, it argues that it is unlikely that an attempt to account for a determinate object theory, such as those propounded by Russell and Quine, can prove successful when grounded in a referential theory of quantificational logic where the variable, seen as a simple range of values, holds fundamental singular referent‐position. The paper concludes by suggesting that Meinong's object theory could resolve the problem of the variable, albeit at the cost of potentially undesirable ontological and logical commitments. Alternatively, Kit Fine's recent work on other antinomies in the variable may provide a promising approach to exploring how to salvage the variable as a formal foundation for ontology. (shrink)

Some 55 years after the publication of Russell's seminal ‘On Denoting’, Quine adopted the theory of definite descriptions presented therein to formulate his perspicuous lingua franca for the sciences. This paper illustrates how, in so doing, Quine's lingua franca inherited an old antinomy at the core of Russell's theory of definite descriptions, specifically, the lack of congruency between notation and metaphysical commitments when the variable assumes the role of fundamental singular reference. In this context, the paper contends that the (...) phrase ‘to be is purely and simply to be the value of the variable’ is far from the straightforward solution Quine initially envisioned for his lingua franca. Additionally, it argues that it is unlikely that an attempt to account for a determinate object theory, such as those propounded by Russell and Quine, can prove successful when grounded in a referential theory of quantificational logic where the variable, seen as a simple range of values, holds fundamental singular referent-position. The paper concludes by suggesting that Meinong's object theory could resolve the problem of the variable, albeit at the cost of potentially undesirable ontological and logical commitments. Alternatively, Kit Fine's recent work on other antinomies in the variable may provide a promising approach to exploring how to salvage the variable as a formal foundation for ontology. (shrink)

We argue that presentism, understood as a view about time and existence, can perspicuously be defined in opposition to all other familiar contenders without appeal to any notion of presentness or cognate notions such as concreteness. Given recent worries about the suitability of such notions to cut much metaphysical ice, this should be welcomed by presentism's defenders. We also show that, irrespective of its sparse ideology, the proposed formulation forestalls any deviant interpretation at odds with the view it aims to (...) capture. (shrink)

In the 1st part authors investigate Wittgenstein as the morphologist. They explicate his notion of overview and seeing connections as his description of the method and they also make a few notes on authors which influenced him on this matter . Besides that they summarise some places from Wittgenstein and commentaries regarding his morphological method and some of the obvious applications of it. The main goal is to comment on PI: 122 and GB: 133. Perspicuous presentation seems to (...) be a conceptual investigation which consists in finding similarities and analogies between many and at first glance completely different and disconnected cases which is in fact morphology as a method. In the 2nd part authors investigate Wittgenstein as the morphologist. They discuss the nature of morphology regarding grammar, customs and institutions and try to make sense of advantages and disadvantages of morphology regarding the method of philosophical inquiry. Acknowledging the role of morphology helps us to better understand the later Wittgenstein. It gives us perspicuous presentation of of PI. In the paper they also try to come up with an answer to few important objections to the morphological method by quoting Wittgenstein. That which is morphologically important is organisation of phenomena, their pattern which should be seen in order to be understood. There is also the distinction within the notion of morphology, namely morphology as a method, when it is applied and the morphology as a structure or organisation, when it is explicated from the phenomena. (shrink)

Resumo O objetivo deste artigo é apresentar os temas do “novo método” filosófico e da “Filosofia da Psicologia”, nos escritos tardios de Ludwig Wittgenstein, como relacionados prática e necessariamente. Para o proposto, a estratégia expositiva segue a seguinte ordem: analisam-se os pressupostos filosóficos relativamente irrefletidos que determinam a visão que o jovem Wittgenstein tinha do “método correto da Filosofia” e da “Filosofia da Psicologia”; interpreta-se a volta filosófica de 1929 como comprometida em apresentar o rosto ainda informe do “novo método” (...) e retomar criticamente os alvos do TLP, sob essa nova perspectiva metodológica; e considera-se a Filosofia da psicologia de Wittgenstein inserida numa perspectiva diferente da perspectiva da ciência psicológica do fim do século XIX e início do século XX, fundamentada em investigações empíricas. Essas observações constituem propriamente uma prática do “novo método” de apresentação perspícua e se caracteriza como um aspecto-chave e necessário, um filtro, para a compreensão das observações do filósofo em torno da psicologia e de seu objetivo em dissolver os problemas metafísicos ali presentes.The main purpose of this article is to present the themes of the philosophical “new method” and the “philosophy of psychology” in Ludwig Wittgenstein’s late writings as practically and necessarily related. For the proposed, our expository strategy follows the following order: we analyzed the relatively unreasonable philosophical presuppositions that determine the young Ludwig’s view of the “correct method of philosophy” and of “philosophy of psychology”; we interpreted the philosophical turn of 1929 as committed to presenting the still-informed face of the “new method” and to critically revisiting the TLP targets under this new methodological perspective; and we considered Wittgenstein’s philosophy of psychology inserted in a different perspective from the perspective of the psychological science of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century based on empirical investigations. These observations are properly a practice of the “new method” of perspicuous presentation and they are characterized as a key and necessary aspect, a filter, for the understanding of the philosopher’s observations about psychology, and his goal in dissolving the metaphysical problems present there. (shrink)

Wittgenstein on philosophical problems : from one fundamental problem to particular problems -- The Tractatus on philosophical problems -- Wittgenstein's later conception of philosophical problems -- Examples of philosophical problems as based on misunderstandings -- Tendencies and inclinations of thinking : philosophy as therapy -- Wittgenstein's notion of peace in philosophy : the contrast with the Tractatus -- Two conceptions of clarification -- The Tractatus's conception of philosophy as logical analysis -- Wittgenstein's later critique of the Tractatus's notion of logical (...) analysis -- Clarification in Wittgenstein's later philosophy -- From metaphysics and philosophical theses to grammar : Wittgenstein's turn -- Philosophical theses, metaphysical philosophy, and the Tractatus -- Metaphysics and conceptual investigation : the problem with metaphysics -- Conceptual investigation and the problem of dogmatism -- Wittgenstein's turn -- The turn and the role of rules -- Rules as objects of comparison -- Rules, metaphysical projection, and the logic of language -- Grammar, meaning, and language -- Grammar, use, and meaning : the problem of the status of Wittgenstein's remarks -- Wittgenstein's formulation of his conception of meaning -- The concept of language : comparisons with instruments and games -- Wittgenstein's development and the advantages of his mature view -- Examples as centers of variation and the conception of language as a family -- Avoiding dogmatism about meaning -- Wittgenstein's methodological shift and analyses in terms of necessary conditions -- The concepts of essence and necessity -- Constructivist readings and the arbitrariness/nonarbitrariness of grammar -- Problems with constructivism -- The methodological dimension of Wittgenstein's conception of essence -- The nontemporality of grammatical statements -- Explanations of necessity in terms of factual regularities -- Wittgenstein's account of essence and necessity -- Beyond theses about the source of necessity -- Philosophical hierarchies and the status of clarificatory statements -- Philosophical hierarchies and Wittgenstein's "leading principle" -- The concept of perspicuous presentation -- The (alleged) necessity of accepting philosophical statements -- The concept of agreement and the problem of injustice -- The criteria of the correctness of grammatical remarks -- Multidimensional descriptions and the new use of old dogmatic claims -- Wittgenstein's conception of philosophy, everyday language, and ethics -- Metaphysics disguised as methodology -- The historicity of philosophy -- Philosophy and the everyday. (shrink)

Resumo O objetivo deste artigo é apresentar os temas do “novo método” filosófico e da “Filosofia da Psicologia”, nos escritos tardios de Ludwig Wittgenstein, como relacionados prática e necessariamente. Para o proposto, a estratégia expositiva segue a seguinte ordem: analisam-se os pressupostos filosóficos relativamente irrefletidos que determinam a visão que o jovem Wittgenstein tinha do “método correto da Filosofia” e da “Filosofia da Psicologia”; interpreta-se a volta filosófica de 1929 como comprometida em apresentar o rosto ainda informe do “novo método” (...) e retomar criticamente os alvos do TLP, sob essa nova perspectiva metodológica; e considera-se a Filosofia da psicologia de Wittgenstein inserida numa perspectiva diferente da perspectiva da ciência psicológica do fim do século XIX e início do século XX, fundamentada em investigações empíricas. Essas observações constituem propriamente uma prática do “novo método” de apresentação perspícua e se caracteriza como um aspecto-chave e necessário, um filtro, para a compreensão das observações do filósofo em torno da psicologia e de seu objetivo em dissolver os problemas metafísicos ali presentes.The main purpose of this article is to present the themes of the philosophical “new method” and the “philosophy of psychology” in Ludwig Wittgenstein’s late writings as practically and necessarily related. For the proposed, our expository strategy follows the following order: we analyzed the relatively unreasonable philosophical presuppositions that determine the young Ludwig’s view of the “correct method of philosophy” and of “philosophy of psychology”; we interpreted the philosophical turn of 1929 as committed to presenting the still-informed face of the “new method” and to critically revisiting the TLP targets under this new methodological perspective; and we considered Wittgenstein’s philosophy of psychology inserted in a different perspective from the perspective of the psychological science of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century based on empirical investigations. These observations are properly a practice of the “new method” of perspicuous presentation and they are characterized as a key and necessary aspect, a filter, for the understanding of the philosopher’s observations about psychology, and his goal in dissolving the metaphysical problems present there. (shrink)

Shakespeare displays the dance of human passions, one might say. … But he displays it to us in a dance, not naturalistically.In the Tractatus, Wittgenstein says that ethics cannot be put into words. This does not mean he thought ethics could not be made manifest; and indeed I will suggest that Wittgenstein took the best manifestation of ethics to be in aesthetics, and more specifically literature. Literature uses words in such a way as to allow ethics to show itself. It (...) does this, I suggest, through perspicuous presentations, though of a different kind than those of philosophy. Wittgenstein takes us some way toward fleshing out the literary nature of perspicuous presentations, but not far enough. To do this, I will... (shrink)

This paper presents an 'internal' criticism of Winch's seminal 'Understanding a Primitive Society'. It distinguishes between two contrasting approaches to critical social understanding: (1) the metaphysical approach, central to the whole tradition of critical philosophy and critical social theory from Kant, through Marx to the Frankfurt School and contemporary theorists such as Habermas and Searle; (2) the descriptive approach, advocated by Winch, and which derives from Wittgenstein's critique of philosophical theory. It is argued, against a long tradition of 'critical theory' (...) depicting Wittgenstein's philosophy as irredeemably 'conservative', that the descriptive approach is perfectly apt for generating a critical understanding of central Western institutions. Rather than seeking to provide an explanatory theory through which to discern what allegedly is imperceptible to theoretically unaided perception (i.e. the metaphysical approach), the descriptive approach aims for a 'perspicuous presentation' of our everyday practices and institutions in such a way as to see their 'irrational' and 'alienating' dimensions. Winch's basic position in 'Understanding a Primitive Society' is endorsed, but it is argued that ultimately he fails in his descriptive intent. In place of the Christian prayer analogy that Winch invokes in order to make sense of Zande witchcraft, it is proposed that Western commodity production and exchange provide a more appropriate, instructive, and critical comparison. (shrink)

This chapter takes inspiration from Wittgenstein’s thinking to formulate a non-reductive toolbox for the study of religion associated with generative modelling, specifically as applied in complex adaptive systems theory. It converges on a communal perspective on religion as multiscale active inference that contrasts starkly with common ‘straw person’ perspectives on religion that reduce it to ‘erroneous’ theorising generated by the brain. In contrast, we argue, religious practices at the enculturated level of description involve implicit and explicit meanings, experienced both individually (...) and collectively. Firstly, we characterise these in terms of Wittgenstein’s notions of rule-following and language games. Secondly, we discuss how the collective and perspectival aspects of religion in enculturation with morals, doctrines, rituals, and expressions can be formalised in terms of deep active inference in multi-agent systems. This approach describes how religions are incommensurable with scientific methods due to the epistemic separation between the different kinds of language games of religious and scientific practices. Their touchpoints tend to give rise to perpetual confusion and unproductive discussions, requiring perspicuous presentations that can be formulated with our toolbox. In this sense, our account has implications for tackling complex societal challenges such as ethical policy-making. (shrink)

Accuracy in the philosophical theory of rationality demands that we recognize particular beliefs as arising within the context of larger units, the cultural or conceptual schemes, patterns, or practices, involvement in which itself provides standards and grounds for their rational evaluation. At the same time, though, a satisfactory account of rationality cannot hold the standards, values, or commitments of one particular culture, practice, or conceptual scheme, even one’s own, immune from rational criticism. In order to accurately and responsibly picture the (...) shape of our commitments and the dynamics of their revision over time, in other words, the theory of rationality must reconcile the immanence of reason to particular cultural and conceptual units with its transcendence of them. This raises a deep and far-ranging problem of perspective. In his perspicuous presentation of it, Hilary Putnam put the problem this way: There are two points that must be balanced, both points that have been made by philosophers of many different kinds: (1) talk of what is ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ in any area only makes sense against the background of an inherited tradition; but (2) traditions themselves can be criticized … On the one hand, there is no notion of reasonableness at all without cultures, practices, procedures; on the other hand, the cultures, practices, procedures we inherit are not an algorithm to be slavishly followed. As Mill said, commenting on his own inductive logic, there is no rule book which will not lead to terrible results ‘if supposed to be conjoined with universal idiocy.’ Reason is, in this sense, both immanent (not to be found outside of concrete language games and institutions) and transcendent (a regulative idea that we use to criticize the conduct of all activities and institutions). (p. 431). As Putnam argues, it is difficult to find a standpoint of theory from which the contrasting claims of immanence and transcendence can be reconciled.. (shrink)

The development of G. H. von Wright’s work in ethics is traced from the early 1950s to the publication of The Varieties of Goodness in 1963, with special focus on the influences stemming from Wittgenstein’s later thought. In 1952, von Wright published an essay suggesting a formal analysis of the concept of value. This attempt was soon abandoned. The change of approach took place at the time von Wright started his work on Wittgenstein’s Nachlass and tried to articulate the main (...) lines of Wittgenstein’s Philosophische Untersuchungen in spoken and written form. This preoccupation with Wittgenstein led to a new approach to value judgments in an 1954 article, which shows strong late-Wittgensteinian influences on methodical as well as stylistic levels. Some traces of the 1954 approach are still visible in The Varieties of Goodness, while the stylistic imitations and allusions have mostly been dropped. Furthermore, von Wright’s approach in The Varieties is wider in scope, aiming at a broad overview of the phenomenon von Wright calls the “varieties of goodness”. But new conncections to the later Wittgenstein also seem to emerge: the idea of a "perspicuous presentation" of ethical concepts and the will to make philosophy relevant for "kulturens större sammanhang". (shrink)

How is it that we can be moved by what we know does not exist? In this paper, I examine the so-called 'paradox of fiction', showing that it fatally hinges on cognitive theories of emotion such as Kendall Walton's pretend theory and Peter Lamarque's thought theory. I reject these theories and acknowledge the concept-formative role of genuine emotion generated by fiction. I then argue, contra Jenefer Robinson, that this 'éducation sentimentale' is not achieved through distancing, but rather through the engagement (...) of our emotions. Literature does this, I claim, by its uniquely perspicuous presentations of emotional concepts, and the cognitive pleasure that such 'presentations' prompt in us. (shrink)

In ‘The Status of Content,’ Paul Boghossian points out an embarrassment in which A.J. Ayer finds himself in his extensive irrealism. Ayer embraces both an emotivist theory of ethics and a deflationary theory of truth. According to an emotivist theory, sentences that look like perfectly good declarative sentences, such as ‘One ought not to kill,’ should be interpreted as non-declarative sentences. According to a deflationary theory of truth, ‘truth’ is not a predicate of sentences, and sentences of the form ‘“p” (...) is true’ are equivalent to sentences of the form ‘p.’ Boghossian argues that emotivism and deflationism turn out to be incompatible.Boghossian's criticism should not be presented before we ask this question: What motivates Ayer's subversion of surface grammar? A typical motivation to provide an analysis of a certain region of discourse is to find a way in which patterns of inference and compositionality could be more perspicuously presented. (shrink)

Explanatory metaphysics aspires to explain the less fundamental in terms of the more fundamental. But we should recognize two importantly different approaches to this task. According to the generation approach, more basic features of reality generate (or give rise to) less basic features. According to the reduction approach, less perspicuous ways of representing reality reduce to (or collapse into) more perspicuous ways of representing reality. The main goals of this paper are to present the core differences between the (...) two approaches (§2), to demonstrate the distinction's significance (§3), to provide some resources for adjudicating between the approaches (§4), and to argue that the project of explanatory metaphysics needs both (§5). (shrink)

Wittgenstein presents in the Tractatus a variable purporting to capture the general form of proposition. One understanding of what Wittgenstein is doing there, an understanding in line with the ‘new’ reading of his work championed by Diamond, Conant and others, sees it as a deflationary or even an implosive move—a move by which a concept sometimes put by philosophers to distinctively metaphysical use is replaced, in a perspicuous notation, by an innocent device of generalization, thereby dispersing the clouds of (...) philosophy that formerly surrounded the concept. By asking how Wittgenstein supposed his variable to work, and what work he imagined it was fit for, the paper questions the adequacy of that understanding. (shrink)

I present and defend a novel version of the homeostatic property cluster account of natural kinds. The core of the proposal is a development of the notion of co-occurrence, central to the HPC account, along information-theoretic lines. The resulting theory retains all the appealing features of the original formulation, while increasing its explanatory power, and formal perspicuity. I showcase the theory by applying it to the problem of reconciling the thesis that biological species are natural kinds with the fact that (...) many such species are polymorphic. (shrink)

We present a novel, perspicuous framework for building iterated ultrapowers. Furthermore, our framework naturally lends itself to the construction of a certain type of order indiscernibles, here dubbed tight indiscernibles, which are shown to provide smooth proofs of several results in general model theory.

The objective of the present edition of this monograph is the same as that of earlier editions, namely, to provide readers with some mathemati cal maturity a rigorous and modern introduction to the ideas and principal theorems of probabilistic information theory. It is not necessary that readers have any prior knowledge whatever of information theory. The rapid development of the subject has had the consequence that any one book can now cover only a fraction of the literature. The latter is (...) often written by engineers for engineers, and the mathematical reader may have some difficulty with it. The mathematician who understands the content and methods of this monograph should be able to read the literature and start on research of his own in a subject of mathematical beauty and interest. The present edition differs from the second in the following: Chapter 6 has been completely replaced by one on arbitrarily varying channels. Chapter 7 has been greatly enlarged. Chapter 8 on semi-continuous channels has been drastically shortened, and Chapter 11 on sequential decoding completely removed. The new Chapters 11-15 consist entirely of material which has been developed only in the last few years. The topics discussed are rate distortion, source coding, multiple access channels, and degraded broadcast channels. Even the specialist will find a new approach in the treatment of these subjects. Many of the proofs are new, more perspicuous, and considerably shorter than the original ones. (shrink)

Miranda Fricker's original presentation of Hermeneutical Injustice left open theoretical choice points leading to criticisms and subsequent clarifications with the resulting dialectic appearing largely verbal. The absence of perspicuous exposition of hallmarks of Hermeneutical Injustice might suggest scenarios exhibiting some – but not all – such hallmarks are within its purview when they are not. The lack of clear hallmarks of Hermeneutical Injustice, moreover, obscures both the extent to which Fricker's proposed remedy Hermeneutical Justice – roughly, virtuous communicative (...) practices – adequately addresses the injustice, and the accuracy of criticisms suggesting that Hermeneutical Justice is insufficient to the task. In what follows, after briefly defending necessary and sufficient conditions for what I take to be the best candidate interpretation of Hermeneutical Injustice, I build on recent work on moral responsibility to construct and defend a rigorous explication of Hermeneutical Justice. (shrink)

This paper presents, explains, and addresses the pedagogical utility of the “Wachter crystal,” a three-dimensional representation of basic principles of logic designed and created by Thomas Wachter in 1992. The author first discusses a way of understanding relations of logical inference which groups propositions possessing identical truth tables into the same class (that is, a way of conceptualizing rules for replacement). Next, the author presents and explains a 16 x 16 matrix, the most basic figure for representing the inferential relations (...) between the classes of propositional logic. Such a matrix easily maps reflexivity, asymmetry, and transitivity in relations of implication. Moreover, since the relations and properties it illustrates can also be illustrated by a lattice, one can construct a three-dimensional model to represent them. The Wachter crystal, which resembles chemists’ models of molecules, illustrates the same principles as the matrix while foregrounding the commonly-neglected difference between Philonian conditionals (which belong to the object language of propositional logic) and implication (which belong to the metalanguage). In addition to being a perspicuous and aesthetically engaging way to represent basic principles of propositional logic, the Wachter crystal is a bridge to more advanced logical concepts such as modal logic, sentence connectives, and predicates of sentences. (shrink)

The author presents an epistemic logic with quantification, formulated in terms of consistency in model systems. To support results like "a knows p, and p implies q, therefore a knows q," consistency of a set of statements is reinterpreted as defensibility, or immunity to criticism. Perspicuous informal analyses, such as the remarks on the role of pronouns, augment the book's philosophical value.--N. A. G.

Hobbes begins the Elements of Law by claiming that "[t]he true and perspicuous explanation of the elements of laws natural and politic... dependeth upon the knowledge of what is human nature." 1 He agrees that morality and politics are "not to be discovered but to be made," but they are to be made as solutions to problems discovered through a detailed study of human nature.2 Among other things, this study reveals that humans are obsessed both with contemplating their own (...) power and having others recognize it. The former desire is the desire for glory: the latter is the desire for honour. Hobbes goes on to show the conflict these desires cause. They ensure scarcity, since their objects are intrinsically scarce, and they contribute to irresolution, and so make it hard to keep covenants. In addition, they determine the form of any solution: the market is not a fully satisfactory solution, and the sovereign must redirect desires for honour and glory into harmless channels. I shall first argue against David Gauthier, who takes Hobbesian men to pursue honour and glory as mere instruments to the satisfaction of their asocial desires. I shall then present a revamped version of what Jean Hampton calls the "passions account" of conflict, defending it from her objections. I shall close by sketching how Hobbes responds to the problems caused by the desire for honour and glory. (shrink)

The early modern era produced the Scientific Revolution, which originated our present understanding of the natural world. Concurrently, philosophers established the conceptual foundations of modernity. This rich and comprehensive volume surveys and illuminates the numerous and complicated interconnections between philosophical and scientific thought as both were radically transformed from the late sixteenth to the mid-eighteenth century. The chapters explore reciprocal influences between philosophy and physics, astronomy, mathematics, medicine, and other disciplines, and show how thinkers responded to an immense range of (...) intellectual, material, and institutional influences. The volume offers a unique perspicuity, viewing the entire landscape of early modern philosophy and science, and also marks an epoch in contemporary scholarship, surveying recent contributions and suggesting future investigations for the next generation of scholars and students. (shrink)

James Tully: To Think and Act Differently collects classic, contemporary, and previously unpublished examples of public philosophy in action from across James Tully's four decades of scholarship. The book provides readers with a perspicuous representation of public philosophy as an ongoing experiment with reconstructing the practice of political theory as a democratizing and diversifying dialogue between scholars and citizens. This volume offers an overview of this participatory mode of political philosophy and political change by reconstructing the arc of Tully's (...) intellectual trajectory in contexts, illuminating moments of clarification and transformation, and the ways it continues to shed new insights into the challenges of citizenship in the present. Topics discussed include approaches to the history of political though, constitutionalism, democratic theory, comparative political theory, intercultural dialogue and translation; Indigenous political thought; settler colonialism and empire; climate change and sustainability; modernity; nonviolence; and mutual aid. It will be of interest to scholars of political philosophy, political theory, constitutional law, Indigenous studies, intellectual history, and ecological humanities. It will be of interest to scholars of political philosophy, political theory, constitutional law, Indigenous studies, intellectual history, and ecological humanities. (shrink)

In his (several times reprinted) article How Wide Is the Gap Between Facts and Values? N. Rescher aspires to clarify the long-lasting discussion on the ‘is-ought’ (‘fact-value’) gap by providing a framework in which the related arguments can be perspicuously articulated. He then argues that even if the logical gap may bereal, the transition from factual premises to value conclusions is smoothly mediated by trivially true value statements. We scrutinize Rescher’s argumentation and show defects in the presented lines of reasoning. (...) In particular, we argue that his tripartite division of statements (factual, evaluative, hybrid), as well as his emphasis on the role of evaluative truisms, introduce serious problems that escape Rescher’s attention. We thus conclude that he failed to achieve his goals. (shrink)

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

One approach to the paradoxes of self-referential languages is to allow some sentences to lack a truth value (or to have more than one). Then assigning truth values where possible becomes a fixpoint construction and, following Kripke, this is usually carried out over a partially ordered family of three-valued truth-value assignments. Some years ago Matt Ginsberg introduced the notion of bilattice, with applications to artificial intelligence in mind. Bilattices generalize the structure Kripke used in a very natural way, while making (...) the mathematical machinery simpler and more perspicuous. In addition, work such as that of Yablo fits naturally into the bilattice setting. What I do here is present the general background of bilattices, discuss why they are natural, and show how fixpoint approaches to truth in languages that allow self-reference can be applied. This is not new work, but rather is a summary of research I have done over many years. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Demise of the Aesthetic in Literary StudyEugene GoodheartAnumber of years ago at an MLA convention I was on a search committee interviewing candidates for a position in Victorian literature in our department. One of the candidates had done a dissertation on Christina Rossetti in which “Goblin Market” played a prominent role. As I recall, the candidate was putting forth a New Historicist or feminist argument about the poem, (...) when one of my colleagues on the committee interrupted her with the question: “But is it a good poem?” The question took me by surprise, for I didn’t remember such a question having been asked of students in years. It dumbfounded the candidate. She had apparently never considered the question. The poem was there as an occasion for... I was about to write interpretation or analysis, but it would be more accurate to say: a placement in a particular discourse—historicist, feminist, deconstructionist, ideological. The candidate’s fluency about the poem came to a halt. She spluttered a few phrases about the power of the poem. She was unprepared to answer the question, having never been asked or taught to ask it by her teachers of any poem or novel or play that she had read.We may not have been fair in our judgment of her. If we had been consistent and asked the same question of all the candidates, I don’t think we would have met with greater success. Our candidate’s disability was, indeed still is, built into the profession of literary studies at the present time. That aesthetic judgment is not one of the current professional practices is clear not only from its absence in the content of literary study but from the styles of the discoursers. No longer written [End Page 139] in a vernacular style, criticism has become a species of sociological prose once held in contempt by literary scholars: ponderous, abstract, obscure, ungainly, jargonish. There are practitioners of New Historicism, ideology critique, and deconstruction who write well, but who seem to regard their own gifts of expression as incidental, and are not in the least discomfited by the bad writing of others.Style is not an incidental matter. Orwell made a compelling case for its political and moral significance. In his classic essay “Politics and the English Language,” he preaches the virtues of plain speech, the transparent and elegant style as a mark of self-honesty. (Transparency makes it difficult to conceal your ideas from yourself.) In Writing Degree Zero and subsequent writings, Barthes deconstructed, so to speak, the Enlightenment myth of transparency as a guarantor of honesty and truth. Reality was not as perspicuous to “natural” plain writing as the Enlightenment believed. Barthes’s own style (rich, inventive, personal, alternately perspicuous, and obscure) is that of an imaginative writer. I don’t want to adjudicate the differences between Orwell and Barthes, but I should note what may not be obvious: they have a shared aesthetic concern with style, a concern that has virtually disappeared from academic discourse.It has become almost an embarrassment to speak in behalf of aesthetic value in the academy. One of the few unembarrassed exceptions is the voice of Harold Bloom whose jeremiad The Western Canon begins defiantly with an affirmation of the aesthetic against its demystifiers. “‘Aesthetic value’ is sometimes regarded as a suggestion of Immanuel Kant’s rather than an actuality, but that has not been my experience during a lifetime of reading.” 1 I take it that Bloom is saying that aesthetic value is an experience and not a theory. Indeed, if we insist on a theoretical justification of the aesthetic, we will end up speaking as does Barbara Herrnstein Smith of its contingent and subjective status (it is in the eye of the beholder and every beholder sees things differently) or we may find that the aesthetic is inescapably contaminated by political, moral, and philosophical interests. “Contaminated” perhaps, but as Bloom says, not reducible to these interests. It is useful to remember that aesthetics has been traditionally associated with the idea of disinterestedness. As Jerome Stolnitz remarks, we perceive beauty when it is the object of a “disinterested and sympathetic attention... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:336 BOOK REVIEWS The Nature of All Being: A Study of Wittgenstein's Modal Atomism. By RAYMOND BRADLEY. New York and Oxford: The Oxford University Press, 1992. Pp. xxi + 244. $39.95. Bradley offers as his point of departure this epigraph from Wittgenstein 's Notebooks 1914-1916, written 22 January, 1915: My whole task consists in giving the nature of the proposition. In giving the nature of all being. (And here (...) being does not stand for existence.) His aim in this contribution to the corpus of Wittgenstein scholarship is to " bring into sharp focus the crucial role which modal notions-the notions of necessity, contingency, possibility, impossibility, and so onplay in Wittgenstein's early thinking" (xiii). At this task the book is a clear success. I know of no other work on the Tractatus which is so thoroughly dedicated to the role of modal notions, nor of any which does so much to bring the early Wittgenstein into conversation with contemporary philosophers who work on modal logic and who talk about possible worlds. Bradley convincingly argues that Wittgenstein is not only the largely unrecognized Urvater of modal logic in the twentieth century, with a stature that ought to be equivalent to that of Leibniz, he also presented arguments that even now have an important role to play in contemporary debates among possible world theorists and practitioners of modal logic. Philosophers who are interested in modal logic, especially its history, or in the logical structures of the Tractatus, will find very much of interest in this book. Those who, on the other hand, are chiefly interested in Wittgenstein's views on ethics, the aesthetic, God, or the mystical, or who are interested in the relation between the Tractatus and his later work, will find little here to their taste. The book's structure perspicuously tracks Bradley's argument. Chapter One sets the reader straight on what modal atomism is, giving the history of Wittgenstein's association with Russell, and establishing that the atomism of the Tractatus is in fact modal in nature. Chapter Two argues that Wittgenstein is a possibilist, that is, that he asserts the reality of merely possible entities and that his work is consistent with the modern modal logic called SS. Chapter Three turns to the ontological side, showing how Wittgenstein's commitments to atomic objects as the " substance of the world " entails certain modal relations among objects and the complex facts which they may form. In Chapter Four logic and ontology are brought together in an account of the mirroring relation through which language depicts the world, with attention to a set of intricately argued principles that makes this relation possible. The final chapter brings Wittgenstein's thought to bear on the BOOK REVIEWS 337 whole range of contemporary problems and issues in modal logic, demonstrating by example the author's contention that the Tractatus, rightly attended to, contains important contributions, still unappre· ciated, to the field. Bradley's overall intentions could not be more clear. His strategy for each chapter is clear. Each chapter is divided into between ten and twenty short sections each of which has a specific and well-defined topic. The argumentation within each such section, with a pardonable lapse or two, is well-structured and easy to follow, even for one whose expertise in modal logic is not honed by regular practice. And yet the hook has, on reading, the feel of a very dense landscape of trees, with· out much overview of the forest. This impression is given, I believe, by the style of argumentation. While the topics are sequentially related and build to a general picture, the arguments that must be articulated and answered in each section have little relation, one to the next: a problem in this view, a contradiction or a paradox in that, a resolution, and then on to the next section, where an apparent inconsistency of some sort must be addressed, and so on. There is the feeling of dealing serially with connected topics, but not the feeling of cumulative argumentation building toward a conclusion. A conclusion, however, there is: that Wittgenstein was the modal logician par excellence of the early 20th century, who has much... (shrink)

This book attempts to marry truth-conditional semantics with cognitive linguistics in the church of computational neuroscience. To this end, it examines the truth-conditional meanings of coordinators, quantifiers, and collective predicates as neurophysiological phenomena that are amenable to a neurocomputational analysis. Drawing inspiration from work on visual processing, and especially the simple/complex cell distinction in early vision (V1), we claim that a similar two-layer architecture is sufficient to learn the truth-conditional meanings of the logical coordinators and logical quantifiers. As a prerequisite, (...) much discussion is given over to what a neurologically plausible representation of the meanings of these items would look like. We eventually settle on a representation in terms of correlation, so that, for instance, the semantic input to the universal operators (e.g. and, all)is represented as maximally correlated, while the semantic input to the universal negative operators (e.g. nor, no)is represented as maximally anticorrelated. On the basis this representation, the hypothesis can be offered that the function of the logical operators is to extract an invariant feature from natural situations, that of degree of correlation between parts of the situation. This result sets up an elegant formal analogy to recent models of visual processing, which argue that the function of early vision is to reduce the redundancy inherent in natural images. Computational simulations are designed in which the logical operators are learned by associating their phonological form with some degree of correlation in the inputs, so that the overall function of the system is as a simple kind of pattern recognition. Several learning rules are assayed, especially those of the Hebbian sort, which are the ones with the most neurological support. Learning vector quantization (LVQ) is shown to be a perspicuous and efficient means of learning the patterns that are of interest. We draw a formal parallelism between the initial, competitive layer of LVQ and the simple cell layer in V1, and between the final, linear layer of LVQ and the complex cell layer in V1, in that the initial layers are both selective, while the final layers both generalize. It is also shown how the representations argued for can be used to draw the traditionally-recognized inferences arising from coordination and quantification, and why the inference of subalternacy breaks down for collective predicates. Finally, the analogies between early vision and the logical operators allow us to advance the claim of cognitive linguistics that language is not processed by proprietary algorithms, but rather by algorithms that are general to the entire brain. Thus in the debate between objectivist and experiential metaphysics, this book falls squarely into the camp of the latter. Yet it does so by means of a rigorous formal, mathematical, and neurological exposition – in contradiction of the experiential claim that formal analysis has no place in the understanding of cognition. To make our own counter-claim as explicit as possible, we present a sketch of the LVQ structure in terms of mereotopology, in which the initial layer of the network performs topological operations, while the final layer performs mereological operations. The book is meant to be self-contained, in the sense that it does not assume any prior knowledge of any of the many areas that are touched upon. It therefore contains mini-summaries of biological visual processing, especially the retinocortical and ventral /what?/ parvocellular pathways computational models of neural signaling, and in particular the reduction of the Hodgkin-Huxley equations to the connectionist and integrate-and-fire neurons Hebbian learning rules and the elaboration of learning vector quantization the linguistic pathway in the left hemisphere memory and the hippocampus truth-conditional vs. image-schematic semantics objectivist vs. experiential metaphysics and mereotopology. All of the simulations are implemented in MATLAB, and the code is available from the book’s website. • The discovery of several algorithmic similarities between visison and semantics. • The support of all of this by means of simulations, and the packaging of all of this in a coherent theoretical framework. (shrink)

This essay argues that what makes Michel Foucault’s oeuvre not only stand apart but also cohere is an assiduous philosophical practice taking the form of an ongoing yet concrete self-modification in the medium of thought. Part I gives an account of three essential aspects of Foucault’s conception of philosophical activity. Beginning with his famous characterization of philosophy in terms of ascēsis, it moves on to articulate his characterization of philosophical practice as a distinct form of meditation, differing from both Cartesian (...) meditation and Hegelian meditation, as it aims to stand vigil for the day to come and operates as a preface to transgression. Part II begins the articulation of crucial traits left implicit in this understanding of philosophy by turning to Foucault’s in-depth investigation of philosophy in Antiquity during his lectures at the Collège de France in the 1980s. First, it develops how philosophy here begins to constitute and distinguish itself by establishing itself as an activity that has a privileged relationship to truth and truth-telling as an unremitting, existentially determining challenge for the philosopher. Further, it instantiates how Platonism elaborates the need for a sustained ‘auto-ascetic’ ethical non-compliant differentiation as the condition of possibility for accessing and stating truth, and then describes how the assertion of an ethical differentiation and attitude in Cynicism takes the form of an insistent combat for another world in this world. Finally, it underlines how the ethical-practical philosophical work upon oneself in Antiquity is developed in an ongoing critical and political exchange with others. Part III indicates how ethical differentiation according to Foucault remains an essential precondition for the practice of philosophy and is further developed in the modern age. This is particularly perspicuous in Kant’s determination of the Enlightenment, in the attitude of modernity exemplified by Baudelaire, and in the history of revolt since the beginning of early Modernity. On this background, Part IV develops how philosophy as an ongoing meditative practice of self-modification leads to an affirmative critique, confirming the virtuality of this world in order to investigate the potentiality in the examined. In this manner, the essay presents Foucault’s philosophical practice as well as an outline of the history of ideas of a seemingly alternate, yet still agenda-setting conception of philosophical practice today. (shrink)

This monograph is a detailed study, and systematic defence, of the Growing Block Theory of time (GBT), first conceived by C.D. Broad. The book offers a coherent, logically perspicuous and ideologically lean formulation of GBT, defends it against the most notorious objections to be found in the extant philosophical literature, and shows how it can be derived from a more general theory, consistent with relativistic spacetime, on the pre-relativistic assumption of an absolute and total temporal order. -/- The authors (...) devise axiomatizations of GBT and its competitors which, against the backdrop of a shared quantified tense logic, significantly improves the prospects of their comparative assessment. Importantly, neither of these axiomatizations involves commitment to properties of presentness, pastness or futurity. The authors proceed to address, and defuse, a number of objections that have been marshaled against GBT, including the so-called epistemic objection according to which the theory invites skepticism about our temporal location. The challenge posed by relativistic physics is met head-on, by replacing claims about temporal variation by claims about variation across spacetime. -/- The book aims to achieve the greatest possible rigor. The background logic is set out in detail, as are the principles governing the notions of precedence and temporal location. The authors likewise devise a novel spacetime logic suited for the articulation, and comparative assessment, of relativistic theories of time. The book comes with three technical appendices which include soundness and completeness proofs for the systems corresponding to GBT and its competitors, in both their pre-relativistic and relativistic forms. -/- The book is primarily directed at researchers and graduate students working on the philosophy of time or temporal logic, but is of interest to metaphysicians and philosophical logicians more generally. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Rhetoric 36.1 (2003) 39-47 [Access article in PDF] Restraint and Emotion in Cicero's De Oratore Per Fjelstad In De Oratore Cicero has the revered orator Crassus ask, "Who then is the man who gives people a thrill? whom do they stare at in amazement when he speaks? who is interrupted by applause? who is thought to be so to say a god among men?" (1942a, III.53). Crassus, (...) who is asking his companions to think about emotional energy in speech, goes on, "It is those whose speeches are clear, explicit, and full, perspicuous in matter and language, and who in actual delivery achieve a sort of rhythm and cadence—that is, whose style I call 'ornate'."Several things are striking about the passage. First, it resolves its inquiry by invoking the concept of ornatus, a word widely used to translate the Greek idea of kosmos (DiLorenzo 1978). Cicero thus refers to a quality that joins the ideas of cosmic order, physical beauty, and earthly power. Second, the passage is delivered in the midst of Crassus's discussion of the fourth rhetorical canon, that referring to the elaboration of ideas in language, of selecting levels of style and modes of verbal embellishment. Third, the passage ranges across the entire field of rhetorical art, at least as indexed by the scope of the canons. The performative quality directly under discussion, that which gives people a thrill—initially associated with the Theophrastian virtues of style that Crassus has been enumerating, that is, clarity and explicitness—quickly is expanded to include copiousness of invention, perspicuity of language, and energetic beauty in delivery. Cicero's Crassus thus discusses a performative dynamic that appears to govern rhetoric as a whole.As the other characters in the dialogue discuss this quality of speech, which engages listeners emotionally and transforms their experience of the present, they bound beyond the preliminary categories of their analysis and describe a power of speech that is aesthetic and philosophical. As the [End Page 39] narrator of this dialogue, Cicero eventually associates the possibility of emotional transformation with a quality of performance we might identify as graceful or urbane. Cicero suggests that performative style can rise above particular details, conventions, and rules of standard rhetorical instruction. Ornate speech is, in sum, emotionally transformative. In detail, however, how does Cicero theorize this grand ability? What goals, resources, or models does he invoke?This essay argues that Cicero's theory of ornatus insists an orator display emotions relevant to the performance while responding to the need of listeners to hear emotional expression against a backdrop of relative calm. In developing this analysis, I claim that the dialogic format of De Oratore allows insight to emerge from juxtaposed perspectives, that Cicero's ideal of ornatus contains a limiting threshold for performative exuberance, and that his examples of emotional engagement illustrate the importance of context and aesthetic restraint. Theoretical tensions as sources for synthetic insight Theoretical tensions in Cicero's De Oratore are instructive. While Cicero's effort to reconcile Isocratean practice with Aristotelian teleology ultimately makes for a rough fit, the juxtaposition of those understandings within the dialogue also generates new insight, even about limits for rhetorical theory itself. Referring to this mode of theorizing as "ironic eloquence," Michael Leff holds that "through this merger of theory and practice, the rival conceptions of oratory as systematic art and oratory as synthetic practice coalesce within the text, the two perspectives interacting to produce a development that incorporates both" (1986, 323).A similar theoretical tension can be observed in De Oratore regarding the prospects and significance of emotional engagement in oratorical performance. In discussing the practices of emotional oratory Cicero draws on three distinct intellectual sources: a quasi-enthymematic model of emotional engagement, in which an orator need not share or display the sought-after emotional response; a mimetic theory of theatrical performance (that is, a typology of tonal and gestural "moods"); and a latent theory of "authenticity," according to which that which is being theatrically displayed is not "fakely" fictional, but somehow genuine.The conflicting theories suggest... (shrink)

An examination of Smith’s Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres and The Theory of Moral Sentiments as complementary to one another and as refinements in earlier eighteenth-century revisions of rhetorical theory and moral philosophy. Smith’s scientific approach to language, rhetoric, and moral thinking emphasizes the improvement of the individual by exposure to stimulating works of art, literature, and spoken language, and encourages individuals to produce such works in order to provide examples to their fellows. Smith’s emphasis upon history in all (...) his works provides an example of his theory and practice of perspicuity and mutually beneficial social exchanges past and present. Smith’s recommendations to the historian, later seen as exemplary, led Dugald Stewart to refer to Smith’s histories and those of his contemporaries as speculative and conjectural vehicles for advancing the science of man. (shrink)

A major philosophical mind in his day, William Paley wrote in a lucid style that made complex ideas more accessible to a wide readership. This work, first published in 1785, was based on the lectures he gave on moral philosophy at Christ's College, Cambridge. Cited in parliamentary debates and remaining on the syllabus at Cambridge into the twentieth century, it stands as one of the most influential texts to emerge from the Enlightenment period in Britain. An orthodox theologian, grounding his (...) utilitarian ethics in strong religious faith, Paley held notably progressive views on issues of toleration and the slave trade. His perspicuity prompted one contemporary to remark that the book 'presents a subject which has always been considered as harsh and difficult, in the most agreeable and intelligible form … we sit down to be informed of our duty, and are surprised to meet with amusement'. (shrink)

Cognitively modern human beings have language, art, science, religion, refined tool use, advanced music and dance, fashions of dress, and mathematics. Blue jays, border collies, dolphins, and bonobos do not. Only human beings have what we have, and this discontinuity in Life, this perspicuous Grand Difference, presents us with the most abiding and compelling scientific riddle of all. In The Way We Think, Gilles FauconnieRAnd I put forward the hypothesis that The Grand Difference arose in the following way . (...) The basic mental operation of conceptual integration, also known as ‘blending’, has been present and evolving in various species foRA long time, probably since early mammals, and there is no reason to doubt that many mammalian species aside from human beings have the ability to execute rudimentary forms of conceptual integration. Human beings evolved not an entirely different kind of mind, but instead the capacity for the strongest form of conceptual integration, known as ‘double- scope’ blending. Human beings are thus on a gradient with other species, but what a difference an extra step makes. Double-scope blending is the hallmark of cognitively modern human beings, and The Grand Difference is the product of double-scope blending. What is blending and why is it so important? As an illustration, consider our perception of a seal. The eyes of a seal are remarkably like the eyes of a human being. When we see a seal at the seashore, it is impossible to resist the conclusion that we and the seal share a category. Compelling and evident analogies leap out at us, between the seal’s appearance and ours, between the seal’s motion and ours. Our human eyes align toward an object as our limbs propel our bodies toward it, and it seems to be no different for the seal. Working from such analogies, we immediately forge a mental blend of ourselves and the seal. The result is a conception of a seal that has not only all of the seal’s appearance and motion but additionally a feature we know only of ourselves the possession of a mind . . (shrink)

In this paper I shall “draw” a sketch of a version of Meinongian Presentism. After having briefly presented some data that presentists need to explain and three problems that typically affect presentism (the triviality objection, the problem of the reference of true propositions’ constituents that seem to involve merely past and merely future objects, the truthmaking problem), I shall clarify the bases of my theory. First, I shall reject the actualist presentist assumption, according to which there are no things that (...) do not exist now. Secondly, I shall introduce some notions (e.g., the ones of tensed properties and of temporal existence) that will be useful in order to clarify the contrast between eternalist and non-eternalist metaphysical theories of time. Thirdly, I shall define Meinongian Presentism. Finally, I shall try to demonstrate that this version can deal with the aforementioned problems and with the presentist data in a serious and perspicuous way. (shrink)

I argue that knowledge about the human condition can be derived from appreciating works of fictional literature. I support this claim in two major ways. ;First, I present a theory of "fictive modeling," which holds that: Fictive works may embody the structure of some subject matter ; and Such an embodiment allows the subject matter's structure to become more perspicuous to suitable appreciators and, thereby, susceptible to a wide range of epistemic operations . I contend this theory accommodates more (...) segments of the knowledge acquisition process than standard propositional theories, which limit what we learn from fiction to propositions contained either implicitly or explicitly in a fictive text. I hold that fictive knowledge includes shifts in pattern recognition, conceptual classification and analogical projection--each of which is an important epistemic result in science and practical affairs, yet which is inadequately articulated by the notion of a determinate proposition. ;Second, I analyze several kinds of knowledge fiction typically generates about the human condition. These include both descriptive and normative knowledge concerning human emotions, subjective "ways of seeing," and self-deceptions, as well as imaginative knowledge of other people's views and circumstances. ;In my discussion, I challenge Plato's conception that fictive art leads appreciators to have hedonic and emotive experiences which discourage the attainment of knowledge. I contend Plato underestimates the capacity of appreciators to subject fictive models to critical testing and, in this way, to control such experience. Critical testing may be accomplished by employing the claims and procedures of experts or the appreciator's own experiences. ;I also discuss the beneficial role served by literacy critics, who guide appreciators in identifying and assessing epistemic models contained in fictive works. Concerning the problem of multiple, yet contrary, interpretations of a work , I claim there is no logical difficulty here, since there are good reasons to accept the premise that fictive works are structurally ambiguous objects. (shrink)

We use the primitive ontology framework of Allori et al. to analyze the quantum information-theoretic interpretation of Bub and Pitowsky. There are interesting parallels between the two approaches, which differentiate them both from the more standard realist interpretations of quantum theory. Where they differ, however, is in terms of their commitments to an underlying ontology on which the manifest image of the world supervenes. Employing the primitive ontology framework in this way makes perspicuous the differences between the quantum information-theoretic (...) interpretation, and the various realist interpretations of quantum theory. It also allows us to identify a sense in which the commitments of quantum information-theoretic interpretation are underspecified. Several possible ways of completing the interpretation are presented, and it is suggested that the most likely strategy would leave the information-theoretic interpretation such that it would fail to qualify as a theory, according to the primitive ontology approach. (shrink)

This essay responds to Hirstein, Sifferd and Fagan’s book, Responsible Brains, which claims that executive function is the guiding mechanism that supports both responsible agency and the necessity for some excuses. In contrast, I suggest that executive function is not the universal acid and the neuroscience at present contributes almost nothing to the necessary psychological level of explanation and analysis. To the extent neuroscience can be useful, it is virtually entirely dependent on well-validated psychology to correlate with the neuroscientific variables (...) under investigation. The essay considers what executive function is and what the neuroscience adds to our understanding of it. Then it addresses moral and legal responsibility generally, and specific doctrines. Executive function is seldom found to be the most perspicuous approach to any of the general or specific moral and legal questions. (shrink)

In [15], [16] G. Kreisel introduced the no-counterexample interpretation (n.c.i.) of Peano arithmetic. In particular he proved, using a complicated ε-substitution method (due to W. Ackermann), that for every theorem A (A prenex) of first-order Peano arithmetic PA one can find ordinal recursive functionals Φ A of order type 0 which realize the Herbrand normal form A H of A. Subsequently more perspicuous proofs of this fact via functional interpretation (combined with normalization) and cut-elimination were found. These proofs however (...) do not carry out the no-counterexample interpretation as a local proof interpretation and don't respect the modus ponens on the level of the no-counterexample interpretation of formulas A and A → B. Closely related to this phenomenon is the fact that both proofs do not establish the condition (δ) and--at least not constructively-- (γ) which are part of the definition of an 'interpretation of a formal system' as formulated in [15]. In this paper we determine the complexity of the no-counterexample interpretation of the modus ponens rule for (i) PA-provable sentences, (ii) for arbitrary sentences A, B ∈ L(PA) uniformly in functionals satisfying the no-counterexample interpretation of (prenex normal forms of) A and A → B, and (iii) for arbitrary A, B ∈ L(PA) pointwise in given α( 0 ) -recursive functionals satisfying the no-counterexample interpretation of A and A → B. This yields in particular perspicuous proofs of new uniform versions of the conditions (γ), (δ). Finally we discuss a variant of the concept of an interpretation presented in [17] and show that it is incomparable with the concept studied in [15], [16]. In particular we show that the no-counterexample interpretation of PA n by α( n (ω))-recursive functionals (n ≥ 1) is an interpretation in the sense of [17] but not in the sense of [15] since it violates the condition (δ). (shrink)

Metaphysics is the thoroughly empirical science. Every item of experience must be evidence for or against any hypothesis of speculative cosmology, and every experienced object must be an exemplar and test case for the categories of analytic ontology. Technically, therefore, one example ought for our present theme to be as good as another. The more dignified examples, however, are darkened with a patina of tradition and partisanship, while some frivolous ones are peculiarly perspicuous. Let us therefore imagine three lollipops, (...) made by a candy man who buys sticks from a big supplier and molds candy knobs on them. Lollipop No. 1 has a red round peppermint head, No. 2 a brown round chocolate head, No. 3 a red square peppermint head. The circumstance here which mainly provokes theories of subsistence and inherence is similarity with difference: each lollipop is partially similar to each other and partially different from it. If we can give a good account of this circumstance in this affair we shall have the instrument to expose the anatomy of everything, from an electron or an apple to archangels and the World All. (shrink)

Shame is a puzzling emotion. On the one hand, to feel ashamed is to feel badly about oneself; but on the other hand, it also seems to be a response to the way the subject is perceived by other people. So whose standards is the subject worried about falling short of, his own or those of an audience? I begin by arguing that it is the audience's standards that matter, and then present a theory of shame according to which shame (...) is a response to the subject's perception that he is not thought of in the way he intrinsically values himself for being thought of by someone else. Then I go on to suggest some refinements to this basic view. First, the subject of shame is primarily concerned about his audience's attitudes toward him, not what they believe about him. And second, there may be one particular attitude which he values himself for inspiring. There is no very perspicuous term for this attitude, so I call it ‘proto-respect’ – the attitude a social animal directs toward those it regards as valuable allies or bad enemies. (shrink)