On "On what there is"

All sides in the recent debates over the Quine-Putnam Indispensability thesis presuppose Quine's criterion for determining what a discourse is ontologically committed to. I subject the criterion to scrutiny, especially in regard to the available competitor-criteria, asking what means of evaluation there are for comparing alternative criteria against each other. Finding none, the paper concludes that ontological questions, in a certain sense , are philosophically indeterminate.     

On memory

Abstract

Locke, in the seventeenth century, postulated (and rejected) an impossible language in which each individual thing, each stone, each bird and each branch, would have its own name; Funes once projected an analogous language, but discarded it because it seemed too general to him, too ambiguous. In fact, Funes remembered not only every leaf of every tree of every wood, but also every one of the times he had perceived or imagined it. He decided to reduce each of his past days to some seventy thousand memories, which would then he defined by means of ciphers. He was dissuaded from this by two considerations: his awareness that the task was interminable, his awareness that it was useless. He thought that by the hour of his death he would not even have finished classifying all the memories of his childhood. —Jorge Luis Borges, “'Funes the Memorious”     

On integrity

This paper argues that, rather than statutory registration, it is the personal integrity of the individual practitioner that will best safeguard the interest of the client and ultimately the image and reputation of the counselling/psychotherapy profession within society. An attempt is made to define integrity as an absolute moral component of the personality and to consider its significance to the therapeutic relationship. Trust, too, is considered as a vital factor in this relationship. As well as the integrity of the individual practitioner, the integrity of the psychotherapy profession as a whole is considered with particular regard to its considerable reliance on the production of theory for its sense of self worth, as opposed to its efficacy as a therapeutic enterprise.     

公民资格论——政府公共性视界中的公民公共感能力探究

政府公共性意义上的公民,分享着两项公共权利,承担着两项公共义务。他们不仅能够感知和理解公共权利和公共义务,而且具有把它们化为现实的公共感能力。用公共感能力确定公民的资格,为公民的概念提供了规范的标准,从而与国籍描述的公民资格区分开来,把公民定义为与市民不同的公共角色。公民作为公共的角色,应该积极地从正反两面培养自己的公共感能力,不断创造自己作为公民的价值。     

On convention

Summary If my main criticism of Lewis is sound, we must conclude that there are at least two distinct types of convention: co-ordination conventions and conventions constituting autonomous practices. It is only possible in the case of the former, but not the latter, to specify the agents' structure of preferences, and the problem the convention is there to solve, antecedently and independently of the content of the conventions themselves. Conventions constituting an autonomous practice are constitutive of the point of, and the values inherent in the practice itself and hence they are not explicable in terms of solutions to co-ordination problems. Thus, from the vantage point of practical reasoning, Lewis' theory of conventions is partial and limited. It is superior, however, to the alternative offered by Gilbert, as it provides a good answer, albeit limited in scope, to the question of the normativity of conventions. Gilbert's analysis is more fundamentally flawed. She has failed to undermine Lewis' insight that conventions are arbitrary rules, due to her misconstrual of what arbitrariness consists in. Consequently, Gilbert's analysis of the normativity of social conventions in terms of joint acceptance is doubly inadequate: it fails to distinguish conventions from many other types of rule people follow, and it fails to answer the question of the normativity of conventions in terms of reasons for action.In the course of this discussion, I have side-stepped all the difficult questions concerning the conventionality of language, judging them to be far too complex issues to be dealt with within the confines of this article. I do hope, however, that an awareness of the distinction between co-ordination conventions and conventions of autonomous practices, will facilitate the arguments over the conventionality of language as well.I am indebted to Timothy Williamson and Joseph Raz with whom I have discussed these matters at length, and I am grateful for their invaluable comments on a draft of this paper. I am also indebted to Brian Bix, Ruth Gavison, Alon Harel, Edna Ullmann-Margalit, and the editors of Synthese for their helpful comments and suggestions.