Two concepts of deductive justification

Summary The term “deductive justification” is used either in the relative or absolute sense. In the first case, a sentence is deductively justified with respect to a class of premisses and may be more or less probable, depending on the degree of justification (eventually non-deductive) of the premisses. In the second sense, a sentence justified deductively in a language to which it belongs, is necessarily true, provided only the meaning postulated by the semantical rules of its expressions can be realized (i. e. if the denotata assigned to the expressions by the semantical rules do exist); in this second case, the statement justified deductively is analytic in the given language. Thus the explication of the latter concept of deductive justification requires an explication of the concept of an analytic statement in a language.     

Two concepts of adaptation: Darwin's and psychology's

The paper takes issue with the traditional view of Darwin's influence on psychology; namely, that it is he who passed on to psychology the concept of individual adaptation. Three arguments are presented: a) that Darwin, qua scientist, was only interested in species adaptation, an entirely different concept from that of individual adaptation, b) that Darwin's writings on individual adaptation are so unexceptional that it is inconceivable that psychologists should have been influenced by them, and c) that the two concepts are logically incompatible since species adaptation presupposes a strict hereditary determinism, while individual adaptation conceives of the organism either as free and undetermined or else as determined by the environment.     

Looking backward at the socialist utopia

Utopia and Anti‐Utopia in Modern Times, by Krishan Kumar, Basil Blackwell, 1987, x + 506 pages, hb £24.50     

Perversion of utopia. Clinical and ideologic aspects of J. Chasseguet-Smirgel]

The author criticizes Chasseguet-Smirgel's generalized negative conception of utopia. He points out the constructive and progressive aspects of utopia.     

Fuzziness of concepts and concepts of fuzziness

It has been a vexing question in recent years whether concepts are fuzzy. In this paper several views on the fuzziness of concepts are pointed out to have stemmed from dubious concepts of fuzziness. The underlying notions of the roles feasibly played byprototype, set, andprobability in modeling concepts strongly suggest that the controversy originates from a vague relation between intuitive and mathematical ideas in the cognitive sciences. It is argued that the application of fuzzy sets cannot resolve this vagueness since they are one sided,viz., defined on sets. An alternative definition based on classes (in the sense of axiomatic set theory) is proposed.     

Elegant variations: remarks on Rorty's ‘Liberal utopia’

Richard Rorty constructs a vision of the ideal citizen and the ideal society on the basis of three basic concepts: ethnocentrism, liberalism, and irony. This article critically examines his understanding of these three concepts and how he interrelates them. I will argue that Rorty's political philosophy is lacking in internal coherence due to the strong tensions between these fundamental concepts, and that his political ideals may be less desirable than they may appear at first sight. I conclude by briefly sketching an alternative view which retains some elements from Rorty but which may possess greater internal coherence.     

Comparative concepts

Comparative concepts such as greener than or higher than are ways of ordering objects. They are fundamental to our grasp of gradable concepts, that is, the type of meanings expressed by gradable general terms, such as ??is green?? or ??is high??, which are embeddable in comparative constructions in natural language. Some comparative concepts seem natural, whereas others seem gerrymandered. The aim of this paper is to outline a theoretical approach to comparative concepts that bears both on the account of naturalness for comparative concepts and on the theory of gradable concepts. The approach is novel in that it carries some basic assumptions from Peter G?rdenfors?? conceptual spaces account of categorical concepts over to comparative concepts. The offered approach is more general than G?rdenfors?? account in that it supplies a framework of graded categorisation that includes his categorisation rule as a limiting case. Importantly, it provides also a new argument for adopting G?rdenfors?? particular model of categorisation.