Toward a Spinozistic modification of skinner's theory of man

B. F. Skinner argues in Beyond Freedom and Dignity (New York 1971) that only his theory of man is compatible with a ‘scientific’ approach to human behavior. I argue that Skinner's entirely open‐ended view of man is inadequate for his own purposes in that it leaves no room for the claim that certain value judgments are universally valid, something I argue Skinner is committed to despite an explicit avowal in one place of cultural relativism. I then go on to show that a modification of Skinner's theory of man which builds on Spinoza's notion of conatus would provide one with a theory‐based rationale for universally valid judgments without involving one in a ‘non‐scientific’ approach to human behavior. Specifically, I argue that such a Spinozistic modification would provide one with a theory‐based guarantee that man will not evolve in such a way that a truly scientific observer would deem a totalitarian state good.     

BOOK REVIEWS

Abstract

Theories are metaphysically equivalent just if there is no fact of the matter that could render one theory true and the other false. In this paper I argue that if we are judiciously to resolve disputes about whether theories are equivalent or not, we need to develop testable criteria that will give us epistemic access to the obtaining of the relation of metaphysical equivalence holding between those theories. I develop such ‘diagnostic’ criteria. I argue that correctly inter-translatable theories are metaphysically equivalent, and what we need are ways of determining whether a putative translation is correct or not. To that end I develop a number of tools we can employ to discern whether a translation is a correct one.     

Moral Error Theory, Entailment and Presupposition

According to moral error theory, moral discourse is error-ridden. Establishing error theory requires establishing two claims. These are that moral discourse carries a non-negotiable commitment to there being a moral reality and that there is no such reality. This paper concerns the first and so-called non-negotiable commitment claim. It starts by identifying the two existing argumentative strategies for settling that claim. The standard strategy is to argue for a relation of conceptual entailment between the moral statements that comprise moral discourse and the statement that there is a moral reality. The non-standard strategy is to argue for a presupposition relation instead. Error theorists have so far failed to consider a third strategy, which uses a general entailment relation that doesn’t require intricate relations between concepts. The paper argues that both entailment claims struggle to meet a new explanatory challenge and that since the presupposition option doesn’t we have prima facie reason to prefer it over the entailment options. The paper then argues that suitably amending the entailment claims enables them to meet this challenge. With all three options back on the table the paper closes by arguing that error theorists should consider developing the currently unrecognised, non-conceptual entailment claim.     

Entailment and Bivalence

My purpose in this paper is to argue that the classical notion of entailment is not suitable for non-bivalent logics, to propose an appropriate alternative and to suggest a generalized entailment notion suitable to bivalent and non-bivalent logics alike. In classical two valued logic, one can not infer a false statement from one that is not false, any more than one can infer from a true statement a statement that is not true. In classical logic in fact preserving truth and preserving non-falsity are one and the same thing. They are not the same in non-bivalent logics however and I will argue that the classical notion of entailment that preserves only truth is not strong enough for such a logic. I will show that if we retain the classical notion of entailment in a logic that has three values, true, false and a third value in between, an inconsistency can be derived that can be resolved only by measures that seriously disable the logic. I will show this for a logic designed to allow for semantic presuppositions, then I will show that we get the same result in any three valued logic with the same value ordering. I will finally suggest how the notion of entailment should be generalized so that this problem may be avoided. The strengthened notion of entailment I am proposing is a conservative extension of the classical notion that preserves not only truth but the order of all values in a logic, so that the value of an entailed statement must alway be at least as great as the value of the sequence of statements entailing it. A notion of entailment this strong or stronger will, I believe, be found to be applicable to non-classical logics generally. In the opinion of Dana Scott, no really workable three valued logic has yet been developed. It is hard to disagree with this. A workable three valued logic however could perhaps be developed however, if we had a notion of entailment suitable to non-bivalent logics.     

Foucault, Feminism, and Informed Choice

The purpose of this paper is to show that the standard notion of informed choice is unacceptable and must be replaced. To do so, I examine Foucault's analysis of people in contemporary society, drawing attention to the ways power relations act upon us, and to the possibility of resistance. I show how feminist moral theory can be enriched by Foucault's analysis. Applying this new understanding of people and moral theory to an analysis of informed choice, I claim that the standard notion of informed choice is unacceptable, in part because it relies on a false conception of people. Its “necessary” features—intention, understanding, and absence of controlling influences—are much more difficult, if not impossible, to obtain than proponents of the standard notion believe. I end by offering direction for creating a new, Foucault-inspired, feminist theory of informed choice.     

Response to Stuart Rennie's ‘Elegant variations’

Abstract

In Happiness, Tabensky equates the notion of happiness to Aristotelian eudaimonia. I shall claim that doing so amounts to equating two concepts that moderns cannot conceptually equate, namely, the good for a person and the good person or good life. In §2 I examine the way in which Tabensky deals with this issue and claim that his idea of happiness is as problematic for us moderns as is any translation of the notion of eudaimonia in terms of happiness. Naturally, if happiness understood as eudaimonia is ambiguous, so will be the notion of a desire for happiness, which we find at the core of Tabensky’s whole project. In §3 I shall be concerned with another aspect of the desire for happiness; namely, its alleged self-justifying nature. I will attempt to undermine the idea that this desire is self-justifying by undermining the criterion on which Tabensky takes self-justifiability to rest, i.e. its basicness, but also by shedding doubt on the idea that there is such a thing as an ultimate basic principle and, even if there were, that it is what Tabensky calls the eudaimon principle.     

Adhoccery in Epistemology

Abstract

Ernest Sosa has argued that the relevant alternatives theory of knowledge has yet to overcome serious difficulties. The most serious difficulty is that of providing criteria for when a rival alternative to a claim is relevant. Without such criteria, the theory is ad hoc. I argue that most other externalist theories of knowledge, including Sosa's own, fall victim to this criticism. At the end of the paper I make a suggestion as to why Sosa's objection might not be as damaging as it at first seems.     

Tarski on the Necessity Reading of Convention T

Tarski’s Convention T is often taken to claim that it is both sufficient and necessary for adequacy in a definition of truth that it imply instances of the T-schema where the embedded sentence translates the mentioned sentence. However, arguments against the necessity claim have recently appeared, and, furthermore, the necessity claim is actually not required for the indefinability results for which Tarski is justly famous; indeed, Tarski’s own presentation of the results in the later Undecidable Theories makes no mention of an assumption to the effect that the definition of truth implies the biconditionals. This raises a question: was Tarski in fact committed to the necessity claim in the important papers of the 1930s and 40s? I argue that he was not. The discussion of this apparently esoteric interpretive issue in fact gets to the heart of many important questions about truth, and in the final sections of the paper I discuss the importance of the T-biconditionals in the theory of meaning and the relation of deflationary and inflationary theories of truth to the semantic paradoxes.     

The Hypothesis Of Ether And Reid's Interpretation Of Newton's First Rule Of Philosophizing

My object is to question a recurrent claim made to the point that Thomas Reid (1710–1796) was hostile to ether theories and that this hostility had its source in his distinctive interpretation of the first of Newton's regulæ philosophandi. Against this view I will argue that Reid did not have any quarrel at all with unobservable or theoretical entities as such, and that his objections against actual theories concerning ether were scientific rather than philosophical, even when based on Newton's first rule. I argue further that Reid's insistence on Newton's rule concerns, not direct observation, but rather the notion of explanation itself.     

Hegel on Legal and Moral Responsibility

When Hegel first addresses moral responsibility in the Philosophy of Right, he presupposes that agents are only responsible for what they intended to do, but appears to offer little, if any, justification for this assumption. In this essay, I claim that the first part of the Philosophy of Right, “Abstract Right”, contains an implicit argument that legal or external responsibility (blame for what we have done) is conceptually dependent on moral responsibility proper (blame for what we have intended). This overlooked argument satisfies the first half of a thesis Hegel applies to action in the Encyclopaedia Logic, namely, that the outer must be inner, and thus provides a necessary complement for his more explicit treatment of the second half of that thesis, that the inner must be outer. The claim that agents are only responsible for what they intended to do might appear, at first, to risk conflating legal and moral responsibility and to lack the necessary means to deal with the phenomenon of moral luck, but I argue that if it is properly situated within the whole of Hegel's philosophy of action it can be saved from both of these consequences and so take its place as an essential component of Hegel's full theory of moral responsibility.     

Agent Causation and the Phenomenology of Agency

Several philosophers claim that the phenomenology of one's own agency conflicts with standard causal theories of action, couched in terms of causation by mental events or states. Others say that the phenomenology is prima facie incompatible with such a theory, even if in the end, a reconciliation can be worked out. Here, it is argued that the type of action theory in question is consistent with what can plausibly be said to be presented to us in our experience of our agency. Several routes to a claim that there is nevertheless a prima facie incompatibility are examined, and all are found wanting. The phenomenology of agency, it is argued, is no threat to a standard causal theory of action.     

Choices Chance and Change: Luck Egalitarianism Over Time

The family of theories dubbed ‘luck egalitarianism’ represent an attempt to infuse egalitarian thinking with a concern for personal responsibility, arguing that inequalities are just when they result from, or the extent to which they result from, choice, but are unjust when they result from, or the extent to which they result from, luck. In this essay I argue that luck egalitarians should sometimes seek to limit inequalities, even when they have a fully choice-based pedigree (i.e., result only from the choices of agents). I grant that the broad approach is correct but argue that the temporal standpoint from which we judge whether the person can be held responsible, or the extent to which they can be held responsible, should be radically altered. Instead of asking, as Standard (or Static) Luck Egalitarianism seems to, whether or not, or to what extent, a person was responsible for the choice at the time of choosing, and asking the question of responsibility only once, we should ask whether, or to what extent, they are responsible for the choice at the point at which we are seeking to discover whether, or to what extent, the inequality is just, and so the question of responsibility is not settled but constantly under review. Such an approach will differ from Standard Luck Egalitarianism only if responsibility for a choice is not set in stone—if responsibility can weaken then we should not see the boundary between luck and responsibility within a particular action as static. Drawing on Derek Parfit’s illuminating discussions of personal identity, and contemporary literature on moral responsibility, I suggest there are good reasons to think that responsibility can weaken—that we are not necessarily fully responsible for a choice for ever, even if we were fully responsible at the time of choosing. I call the variant of luck egalitarianism that recognises this shift in temporal standpoint and that responsibility can weaken Dynamic Luck Egalitarianism (DLE). In conclusion I offer a preliminary discussion of what kind of policies DLE would support.     

Paraconsistent vagueness: a positive argument

Paraconsistent approaches have received little attention in the literature on vagueness (at least compared to other proposals). The reason seems to be that many philosophers have found the idea that a contradiction might be true (or that a sentence and its negation might both be true) hard to swallow. Even advocates of paraconsistency on vagueness do not look very convinced when they consider this fact; since they seem to have spent more time arguing that paraconsistent theories are at least as good as their paracomplete counterparts, than giving positive reasons to believe on a particular paraconsistent proposal. But it sometimes happens that the weakness of a theory turns out to be its mayor ally, and this is what (I claim) happens in a particular paraconsistent proposal known as subvaluationism. In order to make room for truth-value gluts subvaluationism needs to endorse a notion of logical consequence that is, in some sense, weaker than standard notions of consequence. But this weakness allows the subvaluationist theory to accommodate higher-order vagueness in a way that it is not available to other theories of vagueness (such as, for example, its paracomplete counterpart, supervaluationism).     

Rules as the Impetus of Cultural Evolution

In this paper I put forward a thesis regarding the anatomy of “cultural evolution”, in particular the way the “cultural” transmission of behavioral patterns came to piggyback, through us humans, on the transmission effected by genetic evolution. I claim that what grounds and supports this new kind of transmission is a complex behavioral “meta-pattern” that makes it possible to grasp a pattern as something that “ought to be”, i.e. that transforms the pattern into what we can call a rule. (Here I draw especially on the philosophical insights of Wilfrid Sellars.) In this way I interlink empirical research done in evolution theory with some more speculative philosophical theories, thus shedding new light on the former and adding an empirical footing to the latter.     

What is so Magical About a Theory of Intrinsic Intensionality?

Abstract

Curiously missing in the vast literature on Hilary Putnam's so-called model-theoretic argument against semantic realism is any response from would-be proponents of what Putnam would call magical theories of reference. Such silence is surprising in light of the fact that such theories have occupied a significant position in the history of philosophy and the fact that there are still several prominent thinkers who would, no doubt, favor such a theory. This paper develops and examines various responses to Putnam's argument on behalf of the proponent of a magical theory of reference. While Putnam's explicit replies to such responses to his argument seem to involve little more than name calling, I develop arguments that show that there are significant problems facing any would-be proponent of such a view. While magical theories of reference are far from the strawmen Putnam seems to take them to be, there are, I argue, genuine reasons for a semantic realist to prefer a non-magical theory of reference.     

Patriotic Conscientious Objection to Military Service

The purpose of this paper is to show that conscientious objection (henceforth CO) to military service is essentially not a dilemma of freedom of conscience versus the duty to obey the law, but above all a dilemma between two conflicting patriotic moral obligations. Furthermore, the paper demonstrates that CO is justifiable on the basis of what is known as moderate patriotism, that is, out of a patriotism which is committed simultaneously to universal and particular values. The paper begins with a critical discussion of theoretical weaknesses in liberal thought of CO. Then, the concept of moderate patriotism is presented, followed by a discussion of the notion of patriotic CO (PCO). The next stage presents a step Towards A Theory of PCO to Military Service and shows how it differs from other liberal theories of disobedience. The conclusion is that if CO on patriotic grounds is morally justifiable, it follows that this is an act committed within the framework of legitimate political discourse. Therefore, PCO is politically legitimate even if it is not always legal. In other words, the discussion of PCO offers a theoretical distinction between political legitimacy and legality.