The relativity of perceptual knowledge

Since the most promising path to a solution to the problem of skepticism regarding perceptual knowledge seems to rest on a sharp distinction between perceiving and inferring, I begin by clarifying and defending that distinction. Next, I discuss the chief obstacle to success by this path, the difficulty in making the required distinction between merely logical possibilities that one is mistaken and the real (Austin) or relevant (Dretske) possibilities which would exclude knowledge. I argue that this distinction cannot be drawn in the ways Austin and Dretske suggest without begging the questions at issue. Finally, I sketch and defend a more radical way of identifying relevant possibilities that is inspired by Austin's controversial suggestion of a parallel between saying I know and saying I promise: a claim of knowledge of some particular matter is relative to a context in which questions about the matter have been raised.     

Technical flaws in the coherence theory

Conclusion We have argued that Lehrer's definitions of coherence and justification have serious technical defects. As a result, the definition of justification is both too weak and too strong. We have suggested solutions for some of the problems, but others seem irremediable. We would also argue more generally that if coherence is anything like what Lehrer's theory says it is, then coherence is neither necessary nor sufficient for justification. While our current objections are directed at the letter of Lehrer's theory, other criticisms can be aimed at its very spirit. We would argue that coherence is unnecessary for justification because of the existence of basic beliefs, those about self-presenting states (I have a tingling sensation in my leg) or self-evident truths (All men are men). Such beliefs may be justified even though there are no other propositions in the subject's acceptance system that makes them more probable than competitors. Coherence is, moreover, insufficient for justification, because it ignores the inferential structure of the subject's acceptance system, and requires no justification of any kind for the subject's acceptance system itself. But we must develop these more fundamental objections on another occasion.     

Theor of free choice permission

I argue that the conjunctive distribution of permissibility over or, which is a puzzling feature of free-choice permission is just one instance of a more general class of conjunctive occurrences of the word, and that these conjunctive uses are more directly explicable by the consideration that or is a descendant of oper than by reference to the disjunctive occurrences which logicalist prejudices may tempt us to regard as semantically more fundamental. I offer an account of how the disjunctive uses of or may have come about through an intermediate discourse-adverbial use of or, drawing a parallel with but, which, etymologically, is disjunctive rather than conjunctive and whose conjunctive uses seem to represent just such a discourse-adverbial application.     

PROXY FUNCTIONS,TRUTH AND REFERENCE

Quines ontological relativity is related to Tarskis theory of truth in two ways: Quine repudiates term-by-term-correspondence, as does Tarskis rule of truth; and Quines proxy argument in support of relativity finds exact formulation in Tarskis truth definition.Unfortunately, relativity is threatened by the fact that the proxy argument doesnt comply with the rule of truth (Tarskis celebrated condition (T)). Despite Quines express allegiance to (T), use of proxy schemes does not generate all of the true sentences condition (T) requires.A possible adjustment is to drop (T), retain the satisfaction definition and proxy argument, and appeal to the theory of observation and indeterminacy of reference as grounds of relativity. But as we shall see Quines theories of assent to observation sentences and of reference-learning dont square easily with his naturalism. The first attributes intentional attitudes to observers; and the second assumes a holistic context principle and a concept of individuation which do not withstand scrutiny as empirical notions. Both appear to violate Quines behavorist canon.A saving alternative is a theory of term-reference that appears in Roots of Reference and affords a return to behaviorism, and reinstatement of the proxy argument and relativity in a way compatible with Tarskis (T).     

Toulmin on Ideals of Natural Order

In this paper I criticize Toulmin's concept of Ideals of Natural Order and his account of the role these Ideals play in scientific explanation as given in his book, Foresight and Understanding. I argue that Toulmin's account of Ideals of Natural Order as those theories taken to be self evident by scientists at a given time introduces an undesirable subjectivism into his account of scientific explanation. I argue also that the history of science, especially the recent history of microphysics, does not support Toulmin's contentions about the supposed self-evidence of the basic explanatory theories in science.     

Becoming: A modest proposal

In this paper I attempt a new approach to an old technical term: becoming. I show how the theory that becoming is coming-to-be could be supported by a semantic derivation of the nominalization becoming from its verbal counterpart, by investigating the properties of the present progressive constructions in which becoming as a verbal appears. My theory denies that dates, or qualitative change, play an essential role in the analysis of becoming.     

Suppositions in argumentation

The atheist who begins to argue his case by saying, Suppose there is an omniscient Being of the sort in which Christians believe ... is employing a very familiar move in argumentation. However, most books on argumentation theory ignore suppositions completely. Searle omits suppositions entirely from his taxonomy of speech acts and this appears to lead to a similar omission in Speech Acts in Argumentative Discussions by van Eemeren and Grootendorst.This paper argues that suppositional argument is elegant, powerful and extremely common, that the correct way to understand it is based on Gottlob Frege's distinction between asserted and unasserted propositions and hence that suppositions are neither assertions nor (and this is more important) assertives. The paper discusses the connections between suppositions and conditionals; it argues that argumentation theory which ignores suppositions is systematically misleading; and it concludes by indicating some possible developments in argumentation theory.Revised version of a paper delivered at the University of Amsterdam, April 3, 1987.     

Think Before You Speak: Utterances and the Logic of Indexicals

This essay discusses some aspects of the logical behaviour of sentences in languages containing indexical and demonstrative expressions. After some preliminary remarks in section one, sections two and three focus on instances of logically true sentences that may be uttered falsely, and on cases of logically equivalent sentences whose utterances may have distinct truth-values. The logical and semantic problems taken into consideration include the validity of a Principle of Translation, the so-called puzzle of addressing, and examples related to measurement and approximation. Section four discusses the complementary phenomenon of sentences that may presumably always be uttered truly, but that do not qualify as logically true. In particular, I argue against the widespread tendency to consider I am here now or I exist as truths of the logic of indexicals.     

Early German approaches to experimental reading research: The contributions of Wilhelm Wundt and Ernst Meumann

Summary Wundt looked at the reading process from a predominantly theoretical perspective. He opposed the total shape theory formulated by Erdmann and Dodge and insisted on the occurrence of attention shifts during word recognition. As an alternative to the total shape theory, he formulated a two-stage theory of word recognition. An initial, apperceptive phase of reading is concerned with the active analysis of visually salient local details, and a second, assimilative phase fills in the unanalyzed parts of words on the basis of a passive evocation of earlier experiences with graphemic input. Meumann looked at the reading process from the point of view of an educational psychologist. His review of experimental reading research presents most of the basic issues which are still controversial today. In his recommendations for the teaching of reading, he emphasized the importance of analyzing words into their constituent sounds and of articulatory awareness as a precondition for the firm establishment of connections between graphemes and speech sounds. The review discusses some of the reasons why the experimentally based approach to the psychology of reading failed to evoke the interest of German educators after World War I.     

Valuational semantics of rule derivability

If a certain semantic relation (which we call local consequence) is allowed to guide expectations about which rules are derivable from other rules, these expectations will not always be fulfilled, as we illustrate. An alternative semantic criterion (based on a relation we call global consequence), suggested by work of J.W. Garson, turns out to provide a much better — indeed a perfectly accurate — guide to derivability.     

Richard Zaner’s Phenomenology of the Clinical Encounter

The clinical ethics propounded by Richard Zaner is unique. Partly because of his phenomenological orientation and partly because of his own daily practice as a clinical ethicist in a large university hospital, Zaner focuses on the particular concrete situations in which patients and their families confront illness and injury and struggle toward workable ways for dealing with them. He locates ethical reality in the clinical encounter. This encounter encompasses not only patient and physician but also the patients family and friends and indeed the entire lifeworld in which the patient is still striving to live. In order to illuminate the central moral constituents of such human predicaments, Zaner discusses the often-overlooked features of disruption and crisis, the changed self, the patients dependence and the physicians power, the violation of personal boundaries and their necessary reconfiguring, and the art of listening.     

Syllogisms with fractional quantifiers

Aristotle's syllogistic is extended to include denumerably many quantifiers such as more than 2/3 and exactly 2/3. Syntactic and semantic decision procedures determine the validity, or invalidity, of syllogisms with any finite number of premises. One of the syntactic procedures uses a natural deduction account of deducibility, which is sound and complete. The semantics for the system is non-classical since sentences may be assigned a value other than true or false. Results about symmetric systems are given. And reasons are given for claiming that syllogistic validity is relevant validity.     

The history of philosophy in contemporary philosophy: The view from Germany

Conclusion I have frequently mentioned objective problems and topics in the preceding sections. But what exactly is the force of objective here? As my remarks should have made clear I have been using objective to contrast with purely historical. A purely historical approach never gets beyond reproduction, commentary, and interpretation. I call an approach objective when it involves a philosopher who advances his own theses and claims.This minimal understanding of objectivity (in the context of my remarks in this paper) by no means implies that there are problems and topics, systems of concepts, methods, and similar factors that are eternal, completely independent of the contingencies of history (of philosophy, of the sciences), that are not relative to a language, to a logic, to a model, etc. Indeed whether there are problems, etc., in just this absolute, atemporal sense is itself a question for systematic philosophy. It seems clear that the formulation of a problem can only take place against a cognitive background of some sort and within some conceptual scheme.³⁴ Such an assumption is made by most if not all analytic philosophers. But the fact that a philosophical tradition recognizes conceptual schemes does not make it a purely historical, non-objective philosophy, in the sense already introduced and described. A philosopher who explicitly accepts a certain conceptual scheme proceeds in an entirely objective and systematic (and not purely historical) manner when, within this framework, he formulates his own theses.This paper is the text of a talk. the title is due to Barry Smith.     

The language dependence of accuracy

David Miller has demonstrated to the satisfaction of a variety of philosophers that the accuracy of false quantitative theories is language dependent (cf. Miller 1975). This demonstration renders the accuracy-based mode of comparison for such theories obsolete. The purpose of this essay is to supply an alternate basis for theory comparison which in this paper is deemed the knowledge-based mode of quantitative theory comparison. It is argued that the status of a quantitative theory as knowledge depends primarily on the soundness of the measurement procedure which produced the theory; such soundness is invariant, on my view, under Milleresque translations. This point is the basis for the linguistic invariance of knowledgelikeness. When the aim of science is not construed simply in terms of the truthlikeness or accuracy of theories, but in terms of the knowledge such theories embody, Miller's language dependence problem is overcome. One result of this analysis is that the possibility of objective scientific progress is restored, a possibility that Miller's analysis has prima facie defeated.I am grateful to Noretta Koertge for numerous comments and criticisms. Thanks are also due to David Miller for clarification of several points in his (1975). Veronica Barnes also made a number of pertinent observations.     

Causal condition,causal asymmetry,and the counterfactual analysis of causation

In a recent paper Causal Asymmetry, Douglas Ehring has proposed an intriguing solution to the vexing problem of causal asymmetry. The aim of this paper is to show that his theory is not satisfactory. Moreover, the examples that I use in showing the defect of Ehring's theory also indicate that the counterfactual analysis of causation has a problem that cannot be remedied by Marshall Swain's suggested refinement of the counterfactual analysis of causation in Causation and Distinct Events.     

Responsibility and the explanatory view of consequences

Conclusion I conclude that the explanatory view of consequences is a fruitful one.This view accounts for our common sense view that actions are, in some sense, sufficient for their consequences. It shows in a concrete and illuminating manner that we are or may be responsible for a vast number of events no matter how innocently our actions may be described. It allows for the fact that individuals lack responsibility for consequences of collective actions, thereby explaining a generally felt double effect built into our social morality. It brings into light and explains the fact that some degree of determinism seems to be presupposed if people are ever morally responsible for any events whatsoever. Finally, the explanatory view of consequences yields precise and attractive interpretations of the open and the closed views of responsibility.     

Local Theories of Causation and the a Posteriori Identification of the Causal Relation

The need to find an intrinsic characterization of what makes a relation between events causal arises not only in local theories of causation like Salmon's process theory but also in global approaches like Lewis' counterfactual theory. According to the localist intuition, whether a process connecting two events is causal should depend only on what goes on between the events, not on conditions that hold elsewhere in the world. If such intrinsic characterizations could be found, an identification of the causal relation in the actual world (though not in other possible worlds) with physical processes may be feasible (the a posteriori identification). I consider recent proposals made for intrinsic characterizations of causality and conclude that none of them is able to deliver the intended result.     

Confusion in philosophy: A comment on Williams (1992)

Patricia Williams made a number of claims concerning the methods and practise of cladistic analysis and classification. Her argument rests upon the distinction of two kinds of hierarchy: a divisional hierarchy depicting evolutionary descent and the Linnean hierarchy describing taxonomic groups in a classification. Williams goes on to outline five problems with cladistics that lead her to the conclusion that systematists should eliminate cladism as a school of biological taxonomy and to replace it either with something that is philosophically coherent or to replace it with pure methodology, untainted by theory (Williams 1992, 151). Williams makes a number of points which she feels collectively add up to insurmountable problems for cladistics. We examine Williams' views concerning the two hierarchies and consider what cladists currently understand about the status of ancestors. We will demonstrate that Williams has seriously misunderstood many modern commentators on this subject and all of her five persistent problems are derivable from this misunderstanding.

Nelson (1989, 67).

     

Natural deduction rules for English

A system of natural deduction rules is proposed for an idealized form of English. The rules presuppose a sharp distinction between proper names and such expressions as the c, a (an) c, some c, any c, and every c, where c represents a common noun. These latter expressions are called quantifiers, and other expressions of the form that c or that c itself, are called quantified terms. Introduction and elimination rules are presented for any, every, some, a (an), and the, and also for any which, every which, and so on, as well as rules for some other concepts. One outcome of these rules is that Every man loves some woman is implied by, but does not imply, Some woman is loved by every man, since the latter is taken to mean the same as Some woman is loved by all men. Also, Jack knows which woman came is implied by Some woman is known by Jack to have come, but not by Jack knows that some woman came.