Kai Nielsen and Felicity McCutcheon have each in their own way taken issue with the received view that Wittgenstein’s remarks on religious language are to be construed as a form of “fideism”. They each provide sharply divergent views on Wittgenstein’s remarks on the meaning of religious language and, indeed, the importance of religion itself. These differences, however, serve to bring into relief both Wittgenstein’s recognition of the genuinely descriptive nature of ordinary religious discourse and his underlying political sensitivity. The paper (...) reflects on these differences in the the recent works of Nielsen and McCutcheon on Wittgenstein’s alleged fedeism.“…speak the old language… but speak it in a way that is appropriate to the modern world, without on that account necessarily being in accordance with its taste.” (Wittgenstein, 1980, 60e). (shrink)

How should sociologists use the word theory? Gabriel Abend’s recent insistence that this question should be tackled politically raises two important issues: Is sociology political? And if so, what normative implications follow for its organization? Drawing on Wittgenstein’s notion of family resemblance and post-Gramscian theories of hegemony, I argue that Abend’s proposal that semantic questions about theory can be addressed separately from ontological, evaluative, and teleological ones is untenable. Disagreements about the latter are constitutive, not merely supplementary to the meaning (...) of theory. Against Abend’s deliberative-democratically oriented vision, I propose an agonistic politics of theory. In doing so, I consider both the internal inconsistencies of deliberativism and the practical advantages and sociological relevance of agonism. (shrink)

W. B. Yeats's great celebration of the human imagination, ‘Byzantium’, of which these are the first and last verses, is concerned with the tension, reconciliation and movement between two types of sensibility, the sensual and the spiritual, that of natural life and that of transcendent symbol, in this poem imaged as ‘the fury and the mire of human veins’ and as ‘bird or golden handiwork . . . of changeless metal’. In it, as Richard Ellmann puts it, ‘the teeming images, (...) “that dolphin-torn, that gong-tormented sea”, flood up to the marbles of Byzantium itself, where they are at last brought under control by “the golden smithies of the Emperor”’ – himself, inter alia , an image of poet. (shrink)

Oscar Wilde remarked in The Picture of Dorian Gray that, ‘It is only the shallow people who do not judge by appearances.’ Over three centuries of natural science show that, at least as far as the study of the natural world is concerned, Wilde's epigram is itself shallow. Weber used the term ‘disenchantment’ to mean the elimination of magic from the modern scientific world view: the intellectual rationalisation of the world embodied in modern science has made it impossible to believe (...) in magic or an invisible God or gods, without a ‘sacrifice of the intellect’. (shrink)

The philosophy of memory has been largely dominated by what could be called ‘the representative theory of memory’. In trying to give an account of ‘what goes on in one's mind’ when one remembers something, or of what ‘the mental content of remembering’ consists, philosophers have usually insisted that there must be some sort of mental image, picture, or copy of what is remembered. Aristotle said that there must be ‘something like a picture or impression’; William James thought that there (...) must be in the mind 'an image or copy’ of the original event; Russell said that ‘Memory demands an image’. In addition to the image or copy a variety of other mental phenomena have been thought to be necessary. In order for a memory image to be distinguished from an expectation image, the former must be accompanied by ‘a feeling of pastness’. One has confidence that the image is of something that actually occurred because the image is attended by ‘a feeling of familiarity’. And in order that you may be sure that the past event not merely occurred but that you witnessed it, your image of the event must be presented to you with a feeling of ‘warmth and intimacy’. When all the required phenomena are put together, the mental content of remembering turns out to be, as William James says, ‘a very complex representation’. (shrink)

It is something of a commonplace of Butlerian interpretation that the main interest and achievements of Butler's moral philosophy are in normative ethics, and not metaethics. He wishes to bring moral enlightenment to citizens and not, to philosophers, epistemological enlightenment. Nonetheless for that he makes a number of remarks which, if we were collecting for some bizarre purpose metaethical forms of words, we would note down and include in our collection. Thus he makes some progress towards the development of a (...) moral epistemology, a theory of moral judgment. My purpose here is to assess those steps, and to see how far the structure which results can be called a theory. I have the impression that much of the reluctance among scholars to allow that Butler does have a theory of moral judgment is caused by the metaethical blinkers that they themselves wear; what is in fact the beginnings of an unfashionable and unconventional theory is seen as unsophisticated confusion. But I shall not overdo praise of Butler. I shall suggest that Aristotle does a somewhat better job of developing this type of theory. (shrink)

In this paper I shall suggest that philosophy which bases itself firmly inlife is incompatible with idealism. The example of such a philosophy to be discussed is the later work of Wittgenstein, and I shall define in what sense this is ‘based in life’, with particular reference to his concept of ‘Lebensform’, or ‘life-form’. I shall understand idealism to be, in general terms, the doctrine that idea is the primary, or the only, category of being. Various kinds of idealism may (...) then be distinguished according to the precise definition each gives of ‘idea’, and of the category, if any, which is held to be less fundamental. Thus, in brief, in Platonic idealism, absolute immaterial being is ontologically prior to the changing world given to sense-experience; in the idealistic systems of more modern thought, mind is more fundamental than matter; or again, subject, or spirit, is more fundamental than object. While the various systems of idealism are properly classed together so far as they assign priority to the concept idea , it is clear that they differ in their interpretations of the concept. When one has in mind these differences, it is of course misconceived to speak of idealism as a single doctrine; nevertheless, it is plausible to suppose that philosophers have been led to apply the term ‘idealism’ to various systems despite their differences, because there is indeed a common tendency of thought to be found in them. The present paper takes this supposition as a working hypothesis, with the particular aim of establishing that philosophy based in life is incompatible with philosophy based in idea, whatever be reasonably meant by ‘idea’. In brief my argument will be this: that life is no idea. (shrink)

Recent work on dispositions offers a new solution to the long-running dispute about whether explanations of intentional action are causal explanations. The dispute seemed intractable because of a lack of percipience about dispositions and a commitment to Humean orthodoxies about causation on both sides.

In Michael Moore's important book Causation and Responsibility, he holds that causal contribution matters to responsibility independently of its relevance to action. We are responsible for our actions, according to Moore, because where there is action, we typically also find the kind of causal contribution that is crucial for responsibility. But it is causation, and not action, that bears the normative weight. This paper assesses this claim and argues that Moore's reasons for it are unconvincing. It is suggested that sometimes (...) a person's responsibility for that to which he causally contributes depends on his recognition of an identity between himself and the protagonist of the event for which he is held responsible. Since this fact about identity is not captured by causal contribution, action matters to responsibility for reasons that are not exhausted by the fact that action involves causal contribution. The relevance of this idea for accomplice liability is also briefly discussed. (shrink)

In 1974, David Best rightly contrasted purposive sports (exemplified by most sports) with aesthetic sports; and recently I was careful to exempt the issues for aesthetic sports from my critique of the prospects for an all-embracing philosophy of officiating. While discretion plays a part in umpiring or refereeing in both kinds of sports, it is especially important for aesthetic sports (such as gymnastic vaulting, ice-skating or diving), where the manner of execution determines victory. Here, it is urged that the issue (...) of objectivity for judgements in aesthetic sports is not the most crucial aspect: we have reason to expect correct accounts from knowledgeable, sensitive and experienced judges or umpires. Impartiality remains a concern, of course, not least between the training for judges or umpires might tend to favour particular styles of performing key movements. So that many past rule-changes are explained as attempts to improve fairness, with competitors getting their ‘just deserts’. In doing so, they have implicitly contributed to what is then valued in the manner of execution in aesthetic sports. The term ‘aesthetic’ is generally applied in its positive valence, although one must recognize the negative valence also. But, for aesthetic sports, the rules provide guidance as to what will or will not be regarded positively in the context of competition. And rule-changes here will sometimes be best explained as attempting to modify what is rewarded in such sports, the manner of performance. Such changes might be expected to bear on the character of the sport (here exemplified through men’s ice-skating). (shrink)

During contractual negotiations, one party may lead the other into error, thus causing loss or damage. If misrepresentation is shown, the aggrieved party may therefore claim for damages or rescission. In the English law, it was for many years unclear whether a finding of misrepresentation required proof of deliberate, intentional fraud, or whether it could be analysed as a simple failure of consensus, in which case it would be sufficient to show negligence. According to the traditional rule, the misleading declaration (...) had to be factually false, and concern an existing state of affairs or a verifiable past event. However, expressions of personal opinion or of future intention can mislead, although they cannot sensibly be considered as true or false. Further, in practice, many literally true sentences are liable to give false impressions. Such statements may be ambiguous or only partly true. Like linguists and ethical philosophers, the judges are confronted with recursive problems of understanding and re-interpretation. Citations from a number of celebrated English cases are given to show that in spite of significant developments, no legal rules or principles can satisfactorily account for intuitions concerning intentional behaviour and morality. (shrink)

From the “psychoplasmic” offspring in The Brood (1979) to the tattooed encodings in Eastern Promises (2007), David Cronenberg presents a compelling vision of embodiment, which challenges traditional accounts of personal identity and obliges us to ask how human beings persist through different times, places, and bodily states while retaining their sameness. Traditionally, the response to this question has emphasised the importance of cognitive memory in securing the continuity of consciousness. But what has been underplayed in this debate is the question (...) of how the body can both reinforce and disrupt the grounds for our personal identity. Accordingly, by turning the notoriously “body conscious” work of Cronenberg, especially his seminal The Fly (1986), I intend to pursue the relation between identity and embodiment in the following way. First, by augmenting John Locke’s account of personal identity with a specific appeal to the body, I will explore how Cronenberg’s treatment of embodiment as a site of independent experience challenges the idea we have that cognitive memory is the guarantor of personal identity. Cronenberg’s treatment of the “New Flesh” posits an account of the body that undermines the Cartesian and Lockean account of personal identity as being centred on the mind. In its place, I will argue that Cronenberg shows us how the body establishes a personality independently of the mind. Second, through focusing explicitly on body memory, I will explore how we, as embodied subjects, relate to our bodies in a Cronenbergian world. Approaching this relation between memory and embodiment via the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty, I will argue that memory is at the heart of Cronenberg’s vision of body horror. I will conclude by suggesting that far from generating unity, Cronenberg’s vision of embodiment and identity is diseased (often literally) by a memory that cannot be assimilated by cognition. The result of this failure to assimilate body memory, is that memory itself occupies the role of the monster within. (shrink)

Reason, objectivity, and human nature are now suspect ideas. Among postmodern thinkers, Richard Rorty has advanced an especially forceful critique of these notions. Drawing partly on Wittgenstein's philosophy of language, Rorty contends that objectivity is no more than a metaphysical name for intersubjective agreement, and that “human nature” is an empty category, there being nothing beneath history and culture. Wittgenstein himself, however, recognized within the world's many civilizations “the common behavior of mankind,” without which Rorty's ethnocentric “solidarity” would be inconceivable. (...) This common form of life—the life of those who speak—encompasses countless human activities that presuppose and are interwoven with the concepts of reason and objectivity. (shrink)

In his later lectures, published as The Hermeneutics of the Subject, Michel Foucault surveys different modalities of obtaining ‘truth’ about one's self and the world: from Socrates to the Cynics, Stoics, Epicureans and early church writers. Genealogically tracing this opposition between knowing self and world, he occasionally invites phenomenological enquiry into how this epistemic couplet bears on education. Drawing on three vignettes familiar to educators, my investigation explores modes of discovering self and world through counselling, distributed governance in the classroom (...) and the arts of writing. In each case we confront a paradox of freedom, in that agency is needed, already, to liberate the self from the world. An exegetical task is to show how Foucault worked through this philosophical problem, of relevance to many situations in education, by re-reading Kant, Nietzsche and Heidegger. (shrink)

This essay focuses on the extent to which the methods of analytic philosophy can be useful to feminist philosophers. I pose nine general questions feminist philosophers might ask to determine the suitability of a philosophical method. Examples include: Do its typical ways of formulating problems or issues encourage the inclusion of a wide variety of women's points of view? Are its central concepts gender-biased, not merely in their origin, but in very deep, continuing ways? Does it facilitate uncovering roles that (...) gender, politics, power, and social context play in philosophy as well as in other facets of life? (shrink)

The most popular uniting theme in feminist peace literature grounds women's peace work in mothering. I argue if maternal arguments do not address the variety of relationships different races and classes of mothers have to institutional violence and/or the military, then the resulting peace politics can only draw incomplete conclusions about the relationships between maternal work/thinking and peace. To illustrate this I compare two models of mothering: Sara Ruddick's decription of "maternal practice" and Patricia Hill Collins's account of racial-ethnic women's (...) "motherwork.". (shrink)

It has been suggested that the enterprise of developing mechanistic theories of the human cognitive architecture is flawed because the theories produced are not directly falsifiable. Newell attempted to sidestep this criticism by arguing for a Lakatosian model of scientific progress in which cognitive architectures should be understood as theories that develop over time. However, Newell's own candidate cognitive architecture adhered only loosely to Lakatosian principles. This paper reconsiders the role of falsification and the potential utility of Lakatosian principles in (...) the development of cognitive architectures. It is argued that a lack of direct falsifiability need not undermine the scientific development of a cognitive architecture if broadly Lakatosian principles are adopted. Moreover, it is demonstrated that the Lakatosian concepts of positive and negative heuristics for theory development and of general heuristic power offer methods for guiding the development of an architecture and for evaluating the contribution and potential of an architecture's research program. (shrink)

This paper addresses theoretical problems arising from the vagueness of language terms, and intuitions of the vagueness of the concepts to which they refer. It is argued that the central intuitions of prototype theory are sufficient to account for both typicality phenomena and psychological intuitions about degrees of membership in vaguely defined classes. The first section explains the importance of the relation between degrees of membership and typicality (or goodness of example) in conceptual categorization. The second and third section address (...) arguments advanced by Osherson and Smith (1997), and Kamp and Partee (1995), that the two notions of degree of membership and typicality must relate to fundamentally different aspects of conceptual representations. A version of prototype theory—the Threshold Model—is proposed to counter these arguments and three possible solutions to the problems of logical selfcontradiction and tautology for vague categorizations are outlined. In the final section graded membership is related to the social construction of conceptual boundaries maintained through language use. (shrink)

I have argued that orthographic processing cannot be understood and modeled without considering the manner in which orthographic structure represents phonological, semantic, and morphological information in a given writing system. A reading theory, therefore, must be a theory of the interaction of the reader with his/her linguistic environment. This outlines a novel approach to studying and modeling visual word recognition, an approach that focuses on the common cognitive principles involved in processing printed words across different writing systems. These claims were (...) challenged by several commentaries that contested the merits of my general theoretical agenda, the relevance of the evolution of writing systems, and the plausibility of finding commonalities in reading across orthographies. Other commentaries extended the scope of the debate by bringing into the discussion additional perspectives. My response addresses all these issues. By considering the constraints of neurobiology on modeling reading, developmental data, and a large scope of cross-linguistic evidence, I argue that front-end implementations of orthographic processing that do not stem from a comprehensive theory of the complex information conveyed by writing systems do not present a viable approach for understanding reading. The common principles by which writing systems have evolved to represent orthographic, phonological, and semantic information in a language reveal the critical distributional characteristics of orthographic structure that govern reading behavior. Models of reading should thus be learning models, primarily constrained by cross-linguistic developmental evidence that describes how the statistical properties of writing systems shape the characteristics of orthographic processing. When this approach is adopted, a universal model of reading is possible. (shrink)

This target article's handling of theory and data and the range of evidence surveyed for its main contention fall short of normal BBS standards. However, the contention itself is reasonable and can be supported if one rejects the metaphor for linguistic competence and accepts that are no more than the way the brain does language.

Epstein, Flynn, and Martohardjono's presentation of the principal approaches to UG access in L2 acquisition is misleading; they have neglected the possibility that the L1 grammar forms the learner's initial representation of the L2, with subsequent modifications constrained by UG. Furthermore, their experimental data are open to several interpretations and are consistent with a number of different positions in the field.

Issues concerning UG access for L2 acquisition as formulated by Epstein et al. are misleading as well as poorly discussed. UG accessibility can only be fully evaluated with respect to the steady state gram mar reached by the learner. The steady state for LI learners is self evidently the adult grammar in the speech community. For L2 learners, however, the steady state is not obvious. Yet, without its clear characterization, debates concerning stages of L2 acquisition and direct and indirect UG (...) accessibility cannot be resolved. (shrink)

To what extent, if any, does Universal Grammar (UG) constrain second language (L2) acquisition? This is not only an empirical question, but one which is currently investigable. In this context, L2 acquisition is emerging as an important new domain of psycholinguistic research. Three logical possibilities have been articulated regarding the role of UG in L2 acquisition: The first is the hypothesis that claims that no aspect of UG is available to the L2 learner. The second is the hypothesis that claims (...) that only LI instantiated principles and LI instantiated parameter-values of UG are available to the learner. The third, called the hypothesis, asserts that UG in its entirety constrains L2 acquisition. (shrink)

Contrary to his own perspective, Rachlin introduces a ghostly inner cost to explain the persistence of behavioral patterns and agency to explain their origins. Both inconsistencies can be set straight by taking account of history and a context larger than the pattern itself. Persistence is explained by stimulus control, if one assumes that defection from a pattern has stimulus properties and is punished. The origins of patterns are understood as an outcome of selection in the larger context of cultural or (...) biological evolution. (shrink)

Self-control is in the eye of the beholder. However, we speak of if a person has come to think conscious thoughts that change the motivational value of stimuli in the outside world. It is claimed that conscious thinking, and not habits bordering on compulsion, is behind self-control.

The present intractability of and near intractability of make self-control a difficult topic.

Operant psychologists are looking for alternatives to radical behaviorism. Rachlin offers teleological behaviorism, but it may pose as many difficulties as radical behaviorism. There is, however, a less drastic way to defend Rachlin's thesis of It portrays operant principles as relating distal efficient causes to behavioral effects.

In the real world, there are choices between large, delayed, punctate rewards and small, more immediate rewards as well as choices between patterns and acts. A common element in these situations is the choice between long- and short-term interests. Key issues for future research appear to be how acts are restructured into larger patterns of behavior, and whether, as Rachlin implies, pattern perception is the cause of pattern generation.

Teleological behaviorism, unlike Skinnerian behaviorism, recognizes that are needed to account adequately for human behavior, but it rejects the essential role in behavioral explanations of the subjective perspective of the agent. I argue that teleological behaviorism fails because of this rejection.

Rachlin's view of self-control as a sequence or chain of behaviors is contrasted with traditional behavioral analyses of self-control which emphasize a simplistic interpretation of the hyperbolic function relating small-sooner (SS) and larger-later (LL) reinforcers to specific behaviors. The validity of Rachlin's teleological analysis is examined in relation to the acquisition and steady-state performance of self-control behaviors. Central to an analysis of self-control is the functional difference between behavior under the control of SS and LL reinforcers, because SS-reinforced behavior is (...) more complex due to temporal parameters. (shrink)

Self-control, so important in the theory and practice of psychology, has usually been understood introspectively. This target article adopts a behavioral view of the self (as an abstract class of behavioral actions) and of self-control (as an abstract behavioral pattern dominating a particular act) according to which the development of self-control is a molar/molecular conflict in the development of behavioral patterns. This subsumes the more typical view of self-control as a now/later conflict in which an act of self-control is a (...) choice of a larger but later reinforcer over a smaller but sooner reinforcer. If at some future time the smaller-sooner reinforcer will be more valuable than the larger-later reinforcer, self-control may be achieved through a commitment to the largerlater reinforcer prior to that point. According to some, there is a progressive internalization of commitment in the development of self-control. This presents theoretical and empirical problems. In two experiments temporal patterning of choices increased self-control. (shrink)

The costliness of disrupting a pattern may not be a useful criterion for distinguishing between acts and patterns; there are instances in which omitted components of patterns are hard to detect (e.g., typographical errors), or in which distortions are easily introduced (e.g., slurred words in a trite phrase). Are there behavioral criteria for distinguishing between acts and patterns?

There may be evolutionary as well as economic reasons why organisms generally act impulsively. I discuss this possibility and suggest some follow-up experiments that may clarify the exciting empirical and theoretical contributions made by the experiments discussed in the target article.

Rachlin's hyperbolic-discounting model captures basic features of the subtlety of human impulsiveness and self-control and has received convincing experimental support. His distinction between self-control patterns and impulsive acts expands his earlier work to a greater range of self-control behaviors. Possible mechanisms that may weaken or strengthen patterns of self-control are considered.

Regarding Rachlin's behavioral act/pattern theory of self-control, it is argued that some cases of self-control involve pattern/ pattern conflicts rather than merely act/pattern conflicts and that some patterns must be viewed as internal representational states of mind (plans) rather than merely as patterns of actual overt behavior.

Rachlin introduces a new theory before exhausting its predecessor. His earlier model of future-discounting may be developed by integrating over the duration of extended rewards and punishers. The difference in value of an event within a pattern over the event in isolation derives from the deprivation provided by the pattern; yet the pattern attracts because acute rewards are more potent than incremental deprivations.

Transcendence, defined as the capacity to perceive the immediate stimulus environment in relation to long-range or abstract concerns, is a key aspect of self-control, and indeed self-regulation often breaks down because attention becomes focused exclusively on the immediate stimuli (i.e., transcendence fails). Factors that restrict attention to the here and now will weaken self-control, whereas factors that promote transcendence will enhance it. Guilt may be one example of the latter.

Portraying psychological process as extended over time in multiply overlapping scales is a conceptual advance that can be understood as analogous to our understanding of spatial relationships. There may be a residual contradiction, however, when Rachlin invokes in ways that seem to imply earlier conceptions. The roles of superimposed or conditionally related stimuli also remain to be addressed.

Complex cases of self-control involve processes such as guilt-avoidance, inhibition, self-punishment, conscious thought, free will, and imagination. Such processes, conceived as internal mediating mechanisms, serve the function in psychological theory of avoiding teleological causation. Acceptance of the scientific legitimacy of teleological behaviorism would obviate the need for internal mediation, redefine the above processes in terms of temporally extended patterns of overt behavior, and clarify their relation to selfcontrol.

Rachlin's view of self-control is rejected on the grounds that his arguments do not establish the possibility of abstract, external, stimulus patterns and that his experiments, although they show that pigeons and human beings do sometimes choose postponed rather than immediate gratification, do not challenge the commonly held view that internal factors are involved in the former choice.

Rachlin's attack on the internal commitment model rests on the demonstrably false claim that self-punishment does not exist. He is correct that habits are an effective device for solving self-control problems, but his additional claim that they are the only such device makes it hard to explain how good habits develop in the first place. Someone with a self-control problem would always choose the spuriously attractive reward, which, over time, would create bad habits.

Toward a neurobiologically grounded approach to explaining self-control we discuss the case of a patient with a bilateral lesion in frontal ventromedial cortex. Patients with such lesions display a marked deficit in social decision making. Compared with an account that examines the causal antecedents of self-control, Rachlin's behaviorist approach seems lacking in explanatory strength.

The primary argument against Rachlin's act-versus-pattern analysis of self-control is that it is wrong to think of a temptation as a solitary act while the alternative is conceived of as an element of a pattern. Either both are solitary acts or both are members of patterns, however different the patterns may be in their complexity and abstractness.