Volume 39, Issue 2, April-June 2024, Page 140-142.

The primary narrative problem of the analyst is, then, not how to tell a normative chronological life history; rather, it is how to tell the several histories of each analysis. From this vantage point, the event with which to start the model analytic narration is not the first occasion of thought—Freud's wish-fulfilling hallucination of the absent breast; instead, one should start from a narrative account of the psychoanalyst's retelling of something told by an analysand and the analysand's response to that (...) narrative transformation. In the narration of this moment of dialogue lies the structure of the analytic past, present, and future. It is from this beginning that the accounts of early infantile development are constructed. Those traditional developmental accounts, over which analysts labored so hard, may now be seen in a new light: less as positivistic sets of factual findings about mental development and more as hermeneutically filled-in narrative structures. The narrative structures that have been adopted control the telling of the events of the analysis, including the many tellings and retellings of the analysand's life history. The time is always present. The event is always an outgoing dialogue. Roy Schafer is clinical professor of psychology and psychiatry at Cornell University Medical College, adjunct professor of psychology at New York University, and a supervising and training analyst at Columbia University's Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research. He is the author of A New Language for Psychoanalysis, Language and Insight, and Narrative Actions in Psychoanalysis: Narratives of Space and Narratives of Time. (shrink)

One of the distinguishing features of mathematics is the exceptional level of consensus among mathematicians. However, an analysis of what mathematicians agree on, how they achieve this agreement, and the relevant historical conditions is lacking. This paper is a programmatic intervention providing a preliminary analysis and outlining a research program in this direction.First, I review the process of ‘negotiation’ that yields agreement about the validity of proofs. This process most often does generate consensus, however, it may give rise to another (...) kind of disagreement: whether the original and new proof are effectively the same, leading to potential disagreement about the validity of the original proof.Second, I historicize the phenomenon of consensus. I show that in earlier European mathematics and other mathematical cultures, consensus about the validity of arguments was substantially weaker or conceived differently than it is today. This means that contemporary consensus about the validity of mathematical proofs should be explained by historical changes in mathematical practice.Finally, I conjecture what brought about the contemporary form of mathematical consensus. Since a sharp rise in consensus occurs around the turn of the 20th century, it makes sense to explain this consensus by the concurrent formalization of mathematics. However, this explanation has a major flaw: it explains a really existing phenomenon (consensus) by something that hardly ever happens (writing proofs in formal languages). I will therefore explain the ways in which formalization does enter mathematical practice so as to account for contemporary forms of mathematical consensus. (shrink)

In this article, Roy Bhaskar suggests how critical realism might facilitate the understanding of persons and improve their lives. He considers the implicit potentialities of persons and how they ca...

Prize: One hundred dollars to the first person who identifies a picture of a logical impossibility. I may be willing to pay more for the painting itself. This finder’s fee is simply for pointing out the picture. Let me explain more precisely what I seek.

As an academic discipline, Religious Studies has sought to differentiate itself from Theology both in focus and methodology. Scholars have broadened their research to include sacred traditions outs...

My thesis is that you can lie with ‘ P therefore Q ’ without P or Q being lies. For you can lie by virtue of not believing that P supports Q. My thesis is reconciled with the principle that all lies are assertions through H. P. Grice’s account of conventional implicatures. These semantic cousins of conversational implicatures are secondary assertions that clarify the speaker’s attitude toward his primary assertions. The meaning of ‘therefore’ commits the speaker to an entailment thesis (...) even though the speaker does not enter that commitment into the text. Insincere conventional implicatures are akin to insincerely asserted footnotes. An absence of lies in the text is compatible with the presence of lies in the meta-text. (shrink)

This paper studies Paul Cohen’s philosophy of mathematics and mathematical practice as expressed in his writing on set-theoretic consistency proofs using his method of forcing. Since Cohen did not consider himself a philosopher and was somewhat reluctant about philosophy, the analysis uses semiotic and literary textual methodologies rather than mainstream philosophical ones. Specifically, I follow some ideas of Lévi-Strauss’s structural semiotics and some literary narratological methodologies. I show how Cohen’s reflections and rhetoric attempt to bridge what he experiences as an (...) uncomfortable tension between reality and the formal by means of his notion of intuition. (shrink)

The Revenge Problem threatens every approach to the semantic paradoxes that proceeds by introducing nonclassical semantic values. Given any such collection Δ of additional semantic values, one can construct a Revenge sentence:This sentence is either false or has a value in Δ.TheEmbracing Revengeview, developed independently by Roy T. Cook and Phlippe Schlenker, addresses this problem by suggesting that the class of nonclassical semantic values is indefinitely extensible, with each successive Revenge sentence introducing a new ‘pathological’ semantic value into the discourse. (...) The view is explicitly motivated in terms of the idea that every notion thatseemsto be expressible should, if at all possible,beexpressible. Extant work on the Embracing Revenge view has failed to live up to this promise, since the formal languages developed within such work are expressively impoverished. We rectify this here by developing a much richer formal language, and semantics for that language, and we then prove an extremely powerful expressive completeness result for the system in question. (shrink)

This chapter focuses on armchair inquiry. Thought experiment has the feel of clairvoyance, thus eliciting awe in some and suspicion in others. But the wonder of thought experiment is just a special case of our vague puzzlement about how a question could be answered by merely thinking. There is no mystery when investigators look, measure, and manipulate. Their answers come from the news borne by observation and experiment. But if you just ponder, then the information you have leaving the armchair (...) is the same as the information you had when you sat down. It is argued that part of our wonder is based on a modal fallacy. The theories of armchair inquiry that promise answers to the legitimate portion of our wonder are surveyed. Finally, a cleansing model of rationality that sets the stage for a detailed analysis of how thought experiments work is developed. (shrink)

My thesis is that ‘rational’ is an absolute concept like ‘flat’ and ‘clean’. Absolute concepts are best defined as absences. In the case of flatness, the absence of bumps, curves, and irregularities. In the case of cleanliness, the absence of dirt. Rationality, then, is the absence of irrationalities such as bias, circularity, dogmatism, and inconsistency.

Semantic indeterminacy is the ether of philosophy of language. It fills the interstices of our intentions and pervades accounts of presupposition, tense, fiction, translation, and especially, vagueness. Yet semantic indeterminacy is as impossible as ectoplasm. Indeed, more so! The demonstration need only borrow a few assumptions used elsewhere in widely accepted impossibility results. Since an impossibility is never a necessary condition for anything actual, semantic indeterminacy must be superfluous. Language is no more explained by semantic indeterminacy than calculus is explained (...) by (pre-Robinsonian) infinitesimals. (shrink)

But a winner must supply a nonevasive picture with no limit on potential detail--a purely imagistic depiction that does not rely on a mere description of an impossibility. There are logical minded philosophers from David Hume to Saul Kripke who think the prize cannot be won: What is conceivable is possible and whatever is depicted is thereby conceived, therefore, impossibilities cannot be depicted. Yet there is a rich aesthetics of inconsistency, best known through M. C. Escher. So I proceed with (...) the fine print for the competition. (shrink)

Peter Slezak and William Boos have independently advanced a novel interpretation of Descartes's "cogito". The interpretation portrays the "cogito" as a diagonal deduction and emphasizes its resemblance to Godel's theorem and the Liar. I object that this approach is flawed by the fact that it assigns 'Buridan sentences' a legitimate role in Descartes's philosophy. The paradoxical nature of these sentences would have the peculiar result of undermining Descartes's "cogito" while enabling him to "disprove" God's existence.

Counter to ‘political meritocracy’, the goal of this article is to present a different approach to incorporating the Confucian political ideal into an ethical modification of liberal democracy, nam...

(1978). George Hoggart Toulmin's theory of man and the earth in the light of the development of British geology. Annals of Science: Vol. 35, No. 4, pp. 339-352.

Catholics condemn Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) as a fanatic; he fails to cushion ‘Never lie' with a distinction between venial and mortal sin. But Kant has secular substitutes: lie/mislead, candor/honesty, commission/omission, deception/illusion, discursive/pictorial. Kant weaves these distinctions into a safety net for polite society, business, politics, and religion. Kant's break-away disciple, Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762–1814) removes this safety net. Any intentional propagation of error suffices for lying. Ditto for refraining to correct a remedial error. Why? Because we all have a duty (...) to perfect each other. This moral development requires rational informed choice. Being misinformed subverts freedom. The medium of misinformation is irrelevant: utterances, silences, pictures, music, dance, private thoughts, telepathy. To Fichte's relief, Kant overcame the temptation to save an innocent man from murder by lying. But Fichte still thought Kant manifested a corrupt mind by merely considering lying! (shrink)

En opposant comme deux substances irréductibles l’âme et le corps, Descartes n’explique pas l’unité qui est en l’homme. En décrivant l’effort comme une réalité intermédiaire entre le corps et l’âme, Maine de Biran ressaisit l’individualité même. Devant le mystère humain, il faut donc invoquer l’expérience biranienne et non la métaphysique cartésienne : il convient d’appréhender, avant toute analyse, l’unité d’un élan, qui se disperse peut-être, mais garde sa souplesse.