This is the introductory essay to a collection commemorating the 100th anniversary of the publication in Mind of Bertrand Russell’s paper ‘On Denoting’.

§I. Anti-realism of the sort which Michael Dummett has expounded takes issue with the traditional idea that an understanding of any statement (here, declarative sentence) is philosophically correctly analysed as involving grasp of conditions necessary and sufficient for its truth. Many kinds of statement to which, as we ordinarily think, we attach a clear sense would have to be represented, according to this tradition, as possessingverification-transcendenttruth-conditions; if true that is to say, they would be so in virtue of circumstances of (...) a type transcending our range of possible awareness. Exactly where to draw the boundaries of our possible awareness might be controversial; but there is clearly no being aware, in the relevant sense, of the kind of state of affairs which would make true a generalization of theoretical physics, an assertion about James II weight on his twenty-eighth birthday, a claim about what would have happened if Edward Heath had not sought a fresh mandate during the miners' strike, or—from your point of view—the statement that my left ear aches. In each of these kinds of case the traditional view, while granting that we (or you) cannot experience the truth-conferring states of affairs as such, would nevertheless credit us with a clear conception of the type of thing they would be. To be sure, there is then no possibility of a straightforward construal of this conception as a recognitional capacity. But the traditional view tends to conceal from itself the problematic status which the alleged grasp of truth-conditions therefore assumes by working with the picture that the ‘conception’ isindirectlyrecognitional, that itissues ina cluster of unproblematic recognitional capacities; in particular, the ability to recognize what is or is not good evidence for the relevant statement and the ability to recognize its logical relations to other statements. (shrink)

It is important to try to understand Berkeley's exact position on what it is for someone to perceive an idea. He is frequently presented as holding that to perceive an idea is to be confronted by an object which is in some sense mind-dependent and private, and, if taken in a certain way, such a remark is not inaccurate. But the interpretation which renders it accurate needs to be specified and this is a task which awaits completion. Until it is (...) completed, questions like ‘Can Berkeley account for everything we, as plain men, legitimately want to say?’, ‘Are his arguments against the possibility of mind-independent material substances sound?’, and ‘Is he right to hold that the ideas involved in different sense modalities are always different?’, cannot be finally resolved.George Pitcher, in “Minds and Ideas in Berkeley”, makes a good start on the problem, but he does not consider a sufficient number of alternative analyses of ‘So and so perceives such and such an idea’. As a result he fails to pinpoint the exact analysis which Berkeley himself would favour. (shrink)

In the present state of philosophy in the English-speaking world, to choose to talk about sense data may seem perverse. What could be more boring for one's audience than to attempt variations on so threadbare a theme? And worse, what could be more unfashionable in the aftermath of Wittgenstein and Austin? My reasons for selecting this unpromising topic are twofold. First, the general theme of this series of lectures is empiricism. And whatever meanings we put upon that ambiguous word, it (...) is clear that as a matter of history the problems of perception have been important problems for nearly all those philosophers who would consider themselves to be empiricists. And however unsatisfactory sense datum theories of perception may now be held to be, such theories have been central to the empiricist tradition. Secondly, it is important not to be too much impressed by the fact that a particular philosophical opinion is fashionable or unfashionable. The former certainly does not guarantee its truth nor the latter its falsity. It has often been remarked that philosophical opinions are very rarely refuted. Instead they fall out of vogue only to return some years later in another guise. It is perhaps time to take another look at the notion of sense data. The most ingenious and persistent attacks on analyses of perception in terms of sense data have been at best indecisive, as Professor Ayer showed in his reply to Austin's Sense and Sensibilia. (shrink)

Philosophical theses are sometimes assailed from so many sides that, even if they have not been refuted, it becomes difficult for them to gain a fair hearing. A case in point seems to be the thesis that the sentence ‘Every event has a cause' may on occasion be used to assert something which, as a matter of contingent fact, is either true or false. In the interests of logical chivalry, I want to take up its defence.My aim, it should be (...) noted, is not to defend the truth of the Causal Principle, to claim that our world is one in which every event is causally determined by another event or set of events. So I shall have nothing to say about the arguments of those who—like the quantum physicists, Heisenberg, Bohr, and Born—claim to have shown that the Causal Principle is false; claim, that is, that our world is fundamentally indeterministic. My concern is only to establish the right of determinists and indeterminists alike to take seriously the question whether our world is in fact one in which every event has a cause. (shrink)

I want to attempt to analyze a forgotten area in the philosophy of emotions, the relations between physiological changes and the emotions. I want to do this: by first of all briefly setting out some distinctions necessary to the understanding of the position I will be arguing for, then by trying to elucidate what exactly is to be understood by the term ‘physiological change’ in the context of an emotion, by showing that particular physiological changes are not part of the (...) concept of any particular emotion and are only linked causally to the cognitive-appetitive part of an occurrent emotional state, by showing, however, that the notion of a physiological change is part of the concept of an emotional state, and, finally, by drawing out some consequences of this analysis. (shrink)

Drawing on the findings of neuroscience, this text proposes and defends the hypothesis that the various modalities of sensation share a generic form that the author, Austen Clark, calls feature-placing.