The Quarrel Between Invariance and Flux: A Guide for Philosphers and Other Players (Studies of the Greater Philadelphia Philosophy Consortium)

“The Quarrel Between Invariance and Flux offers a fine collection of primary texts centering on a single main issue together with first-rate commentary by Joseph Margolis, one of the most interesting and best-informed contemporary philosophers. The happy result is an unusually well-thought-

Margolis / Catudal

P H I L O S O P H Y

GPPC

Greater Philadelphia Philosophy Consortium

out and useful anthology, combining continental and analytic sources, which will be of interest to beginning and advanced students everywhere.” —Tom Rockmore, Duquesne University “ This unusual compendium makes accessible the major themes that Margolis has elaborated in recent decades. It is philosophically clear and didactically effective. The book provides synoptic and distinctive treatments of highly contested philosophical quarrels, complete with primary texts that are sometimes unorthodox. The result is a unique and important resource.”

anthologies do, this volume tries to engage the reader’s active participation in understanding how philosophy came to be split between analytic and continental approaches and in finding ways to reconcile the two. It does so by tracing the history of philosophy as a perennial contest between two opposing worldviews: one that relates change to an underlying structure of invariance, and another that sees change itself (“flux”) as the basic condition of existence. The seven chapters cover the full range of major topics of philosophy, from metaphysics to epistemology to ethics, and present carefully selected readings from key thinkers—Plato, Aristotle, Locke, Hegel, and Peirce up to Heidegger, Husserl, Kuhn, Kripke, and Putnam, among others— juxtaposed and introduced by the editors so as to stimulate active thinking about how the debate between these competing visions plays out in each arena. A bibliography of additional sources ends each chapter. The result is a new and inspiring tool for teaching philosophy to both beginning and advanced students. Even seasoned professionals will have much to learn about the development of philosophy and its current predicament from accepting the challenge to rethink the tradition from the perspective presented here.

THE QUARREL BETWEEN INVARIANCE AND FLUX

Rather than just offer background readings or a survey of views on a subject, as traditional

A Guide for Philosophers and Other Players

—Michael Krausz, Bryn Mawr College

THE QUARREL BETWEEN INVARIANCE AND FLUX A Guide for Philosophers and Other Players

JACQUES CATUDAL is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Drexel University.

Joseph Margolis

JOSEPH MARGOLIS is Laura H. Carnell Professor of Philosophy at Temple University and author

of What, After All, Is a Work of Art? (Penn State, 1999). A Greater Philadelphia Philosophy Consortium series book. ISBN 0-271-02065-2 T H E P E N N S Y LVA N I A S TAT E U N I V E R S I T Y P R E S S U N I V E R S I T Y PA R K , PA

W W W . P S U . E D U /P S U P R E S S

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P E N N STATE PRESS

and

Jacques Catudal

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THE QUARREL BETWEEN I N VA R I A N C E A N D F L U X

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Studies of the Greater Philadelphia Philosophy Consortium Michael Krausz, editor Already published: Joseph Margolis, Michael Krausz, and Richard Burian, eds., Rationality, Relativism and the Human Sciences (Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1986) John Caputo and Mark Yount, eds., Foucault and the Critique of Institutions (Penn State Press, 1993)

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Joseph Margolis and Jacques Catudal

THE QUARREL BETWEEN INVARIANCE AND FLUX A Guide for Philosophers and Other Players

The Pennsylvania State University Press University Park, Pennsylvania

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Margolis, Joseph, 1924– The quarrel between invariance and flux : a guide for philosophers and other players / Joseph Margolis and Jacques Catudal. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-271-02064-4 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN 0-271-02065-2 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Analysis (Philosophy). 2. Philosophy, European. I. Catudal, Jacques, 1951– . II. Title. B808.5 .M36 116—dc21

2001 00-051595

Copyright © 2001 The Pennsylvania State University All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America Published by The Pennsylvania State University Press, University Park, PA 16802-1003 It is the policy of The Pennsylvania State University Press to use acid-free paper for the first printing of all clothbound books. Publications on uncoated stock satisfy the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences— Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48–1992.

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Contents

Preface

vi

Prospectus

1

1

First Philosophy and First- and Second-Order Discourse

11

Aristotle, “Being qua Being” Thomas S. Kuhn, “Revolutions as Changes of World View”

2

Reference and Predication

51

Max Black, “The Identity of Indiscernibles” Renford Bambrough, “Universals and Family Resemblances”

3

Knowledge and Existence

95

Martin Heidegger, “Temporality and Historicity” Hilary Putnam, “Realism and Reasonableness” Edmund L. Gettier, “Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?”

4

Individuation and Legitimation

135

Edmund Husserl, “The Thesis of the Natural Standpoint and Its Suspension” Charles S. Peirce, “Determination, Generality, and Vagueness” Saul A. Kripke, “Naming and Necessity”

5

History and Human Understanding

173

G.W.F. Hegel, “The Notion of the History of Philosophy” Alasdair MacIntyre, “The Rationality of Traditions”

6

Persons and Minds

207

John Locke, “Idea of Personal Identity” George Herbert Mead, “Mind, Self, and Society”

7

Norms and Values

235

Plato, “The Second-Best State” G.W.F. Hegel, “Critique of Kant” John L. Mackie, “The Subjectivity of Values” Index to Chapter Introductions

269

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Preface

It has been said that there are two diametrically opposed forms of piety in the West: one is convinced that the mysteries of God’s creation are so vast that humans cannot afford to neglect any potential resource for coming to understand the world; the other is convinced that divine constraints have been discernibly laid down for avoiding error and that we should abide by their prescriptions. When matters are cast this way, we favor the sense of the first conviction. Indeed, it is hard to see how yielding in favor of the second can be in accord with the spirit of philosophical inquiry. The only way, of course, is to presume a certain privilege. The readings we offer here we offer as part of the supreme conceptual contest of the West—possibly of the whole of terrestrial thought. The marvel is that it permits us to form an almost unlimited library of resources for deciding how the matter stands at the end of the twentieth century. Furthermore, in pursuing the contest under the economy of a convenient reader (one among indefinitely many possible such readers), we are led rather easily to try the essential thread of the entire history of philosophy. That is justification enough for the awkwardness of recommending “what to read.” The collection, however, is brief enough to yield at least an impatient sense of the endless option it recommends and yet sustained enough to yield a closer sense of the dialectical strategies that are at hand. That’s all it offers—except that, for those familiar with the great divide between “Anglo-American” and “continental European” philosophy, it shows how the resources and puzzles of each quite naturally invite and require close attention to those of the other. The matter is important because, at the beginning of a new century, we are already at the start of an even larger rapprochement between the conceptual resources of the West and East—and more. We thank Daniel Touey, who put different stages of the manuscript in good order. Also, we found it a more relaxed idiom to speak in the first person singular, to signify an unforced harmony of two voices. J.M. and J.C., July 2000

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Prospectus

This book is essentially a companion reader for Historied Thought, Constructed World (University of California Press, 1995), which I characterize as a philosophical primer for the turn into the new century. But it is also selfcontained. We are on the edge of a fundamental transformation in Western philosophy, which is itself part of an eventual rapprochement between Western and Asian thought. Karl Marx speculated in the nineteenth century that given the powers of the industrial technology that capitalism had made possible, the rise of the proletariat ushered in the prospect—for the first time in history—that moral, political, and economic planning could, in a non-utopian way, begin to address the interests of universal humanity (man as a “species-being”). We find ourselves, now, swept up in a new communications technology far less open to those innocent ideologies Marx’s analysis originally spawned. We certainly cannot presume that the changes facing us will be limited to philosophical matters. But anything in the way of a fundamental conceptual change cannot fail to give legible shape to the bewildering complexities of our own age. My conviction is that the transformation under way is best captured, philosophically, by the notions that the world is a flux or is in constant flux and that all thinking is historicized. I take these to be the most spacious and most resilient concepts we can find to accommodate all our theorizing concerns.

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2

The Quarrel Between Invariance and Flux

These ideas are not altogether new, of course, but how they have come together and how they have penetrated our ordinary conceptual habits are new, as are the energy and conviction they promise. The apparent facility with which they bring the conceptual quarrels of 2500 years of Western philosophy into a single inclusive order without palpably distorting or denying or restricting or ignoring any of the principal theorizing currents of the West’s entire history is new as well. This vitality was not characteristic of most of the work of the twentieth century. By and large, that work was marked by one or the other of two disturbing tendencies: the first—which prevailed in the first half of the century—favored (with very little in the way of a supporting rationale) an invariant, universal, normative model of analysis ranging over all disciplines, grounded (so it was supposed) in the empirically discerned, presumably necessary structures of the real world and actual thought; the second—which was fed by growing doubts about the validity of the first, particularly with regard to the human condition—led (in increasingly anarchical, even paradoxical, ways) to a widening split between socalled analytic and continental philosophies which addressed the prospects of the earlier tendency. Now, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, these opposed forces are nearly exhausted. A much more moderate cohort is forming in their wake, one noticeably willing to concede that the first wave had seriously exceeded its argumentative and evidentiary resources and that the second had too easily dismissed what might still be recovered of the rigor of the first. The homely truth proved to be that reality (or thought) is neither fixed in a way that we can assuredly secure nor chaotic in a way that utterly resists orderly analysis, and that analytic and continental philosophies had rather spitefully turned their back on each other and on ever using each other’s excluded resources. The middle ground is plainly the field in which the twenty-first century will find its best prospects. Accordingly, it will have to give up the doctrine of modal invariance, that is, the idea that the structure and order of reality and thought are not merely regular but necessarily fixed and changeless. There is no way of validating any such doctrine, and there is no need to do so. All practical and theorizing inquiries appear (now) to be historically formed, preformed in fact, perspectived, contexted, “interested,” partisan, prejudiced, incapable of ensuring any incontestable neutrality, yet viable and effective enough in terms of the actual survival of the human race. It seems that we cannot prove that there are any universal or changelessly shared forms of understanding that must underlie our disputes and disagreements

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Prospectus

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and make them viable. There seems to be no need to insist that reality must harbor such structures. Yet that single conviction is the salient thread of nearly the whole of Western philosophy. There you have the chastened “middle” ground between the failed projects of the opposed champions of the twentieth century. If I were asked to identify two texts that catch up the entire sense of what, along these lines, is philosophically most engaging and (at the same time) most preposterous in their claims, I would answer without hesitation: Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus and Heidegger’s “Letter on Humanism.” The marvelous thing about these two texts is that each has been called the greatest philosophical contribution of the twentieth century. Indeed, each has been universally adored and condemned, and the strongest philosophies of our age are almost unthinkable without reference to the strategies they embody. It is also impossible, frankly, to understand the fascination of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus without his Philosophical Investigations, which displaced it altogether; or Heidegger’s “Letter” without Being and Time, which it transformed. If you concede these pairings as more than pairings, then, I say, you can hardly mention any alternative texts that played the same large polarizing role in the second half of the twentieth century. Furthermore, the Tractatus and the “Letter” (and the associated Investigations and Being and Time) catch up—miraculously—the themes of necessary invariance and the insuperable flux of history which span the polar mysteries of twentieth-century thinking. This is neither an endorsement nor a condemnation of either Wittgenstein or Heidegger. Far from it. They help us grasp something of the cunning of the history of philosophy. For the entire trajectory of Western philosophy has prepared—largely subliminally—the ground for the still-unresolved contest between invariance and flux. My own sense is that resolving this contest will require a reconciliation of analytic and continental thought and the start of an inquiry (in its name) of the potentially congruent interests and sympathies of classical Asian philosophy at least. In this sense, this reader may be used apart from Historied Thought, Constructed World, though the plan of reading I offer is keyed to it. (Its own economies depend on it.) The essential connection between the two can be given in a single line—by way of the postulate of Historied Thought itself, namely, “thinking is history,” or “thinking is a history.” If the thesis of the middle ground holds, then there must be more than one way to pursue the contest between invariance and flux. What we need is a fresh span of texts to help us thread our way through the history of philosophy, to the resolution of the dawning puzzle of our age.

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The Quarrel Between Invariance and Flux

In that spirit, I offer a small compendium of orienting texts in the guise of a labyrinth we must traverse to gain our new bearings. What I have selected is a mix of pieces drawn from the most disparate sources—hardly supportive of the usual canonical readers (though never quite alien to their taste)— that span the gulf between analytic and continental thought and draw the prospect of reconciliation out of the resources of the older tradition from which both have sprung, now frankly skewed in favor of the flux. A good part of the collection’s appeal rests with the distinct sense that many different such collections could be assembled without difficulty. That’s all to the good and something of a surprise. For the sheer attempt to bridge the opposed practices that currently claim to belong to the same profession will seem too concessive in one direction or another simply because those who regularly read philosophy hardly expect such an effort to be made at all. But the time for a serious reckoning has arrived. The text remains somewhat inert, of course, until the activating themes are effectively supplied. The quarrels that are pursued here form a small selection of the organizing themes of Historied Thought. Once you see how certain exemplary debates may be worked, the compass of the entire argument comes into easy view. Each of the readings offered has good standing within the academic canon, but they are linked here to service the recovery of neglected possibilities, reasonable alternatives to the approved interpretation of standard pieces. I dare hardly hope to assemble a set of readings that will meet all needs and serve all levels of interest and still be slim enough to hold an audience through a single interval of study (a semester, for instance). At the very least, this is a reader for a cadre that might intrigue a larger readership—university students, faculty, professionals, an educated public. It is also, more seriously, a small specimen meant to show such audiences just how to turn the conceptual corner—from invariance to flux. What it brings to familiar texts is a conceptual overview. There is a profound inertia in the academy. Many concede the need for something less than a new canon and something more than a sense of stalemate. We need a tactful instrument to point the way to a new beginning: a set of ordered readings (and instruction) by which to give convenient shape to the “last” contest of our age and its resolution. It turns out that that is not as easy to construct as one might think. Brevity is key. I have already suggested that one could hardly enter into the quarrels of twentieth-century philosophy more effectively than by reading with care Wittgenstein’s Tractatus (qualified by the Investigations) and

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Prospectus

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Heidegger’s “Letter on Humanism” (qualifying Being and Time). But I have no illusion that anyone relatively unschooled in philosophy could possibly get his or her bearings by picking up those texts. Both have actually erased the marks of their dialectical power, the marks of conceptual continuity by which they are linked to earlier and later philosophy. Even experienced professionals are not terribly used to taking kindly to planetary trends. I offer a relatively systematic argument therefore, both here and (with some differences) in Historied Thought, regarding the puzzles that must be solved. In Historied Thought I have space enough to make my case. Here, I need something more convenient, more quickly grasped, easier to remember, more salient, more concessive to diversity, more improvisational, more openended. I deliberately omit the Tractatus or the “Letter” from my readings. The reason for that omission is obvious: however important they are, neither is particularly helpful in leading us to grasp the conceptual puzzles of our time or their possible resolution. In a way, they incarnate those puzzles—they are their most baffling exemplars. The selections I offer are meant to be read finally (and initially) along the recuperative lines (the middle course) being recommended. They form an invented educational space within the terms of which one can fix one’s bearings on the central contest and begin to master in a new way the technical issues at stake. The selections collect around a strategic puzzle or two. I make this clear in the briefest way. Each selection may be joined, of course, to others in the reader in innumerable ways or simply to other readings. Ideally, any text should find its niche in the encompassing narrative; and every text may change its lesson from one subaltern strategy to another. Anything less would betray a smaller contest than I imagine. What I have discovered in shaping this reader—something well known to those who administer interpretive tests involving different orderings of the same specimens—is the uncanny effectiveness (in theorizing terms) of merely juxtaposing specimen texts in the company of one speculative narrative or another. I bring my texts together in their initial milieu in order to promote both the rapprochement I urge (between analytic and continental philosophy) and the executive themes I recommend (flux and historicity). But there is no way of ensuring the effect wanted. I see the humor of too much conceptual carpentry. It affords another reason for making this reader brief. It cannot be more than an initial aid—a mere example of how to select, from the nearly endless literature, texts that genuinely contribute to a compendious sense of philosophy’s history, and bring us, at the same time, to the frontier puzzles of the twenti-

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eth century or, possibly, to the better solutions of the twenty-first. In short, this reader is a guided exercise meant to bring us to grips with the largest conceptual contest we can now envisage. In pursuing this exercise, I hope you will accept its intended instruction as pointing the way to a new view of philosophy’s function. You need not adopt its plan to adopt the new reading of that function. Many are now quite puzzled about the point of philosophy’s work. Of course, if reality had a fixed structure and the human mind were attuned to its discovery—which is Aristotle’s and Kant’s view (at least the Kant of the first Critique, The Critique of Pure Reason)—then you could easily insist on the straightforward continuity of canonical science and philosophy: that is, on the discernibility of “first principles” and First Philosophy, the standard benefits of a changeless order. But if you put that vision in doubt, as the deep theme of historicity requires, then you will have to scramble to explain philosophy’s purpose. In any case, you have, there, the beginning of a sense of the profound contest between invariance and flux. It is now barely two hundred years since the modern challenge of the meaning of history first began to dawn (at the time of the French Revolution). It has taken us two hundred years—it may take more—to guess its full significance. But it is also insistent in a new way that catches up the ancient story and that should not be ignored, although, of course, it is. If, furthermore, you concede that we are nearing a time (or that we are already at a time) when we must begin to reconcile the resources of Western thought with the resources of Hindu, Buddhist, Chinese, and Japanese thought at least, then you must concede that the very function of philosophy and the prospects for its best visions are a function of the resources that are brought together. The particular judgments we learn to make, in becoming the apt members of our society that we become, are, Wittgenstein observes, part of the “logic” of our powers of thinking. Very few have grasped the radical import of that lesson. But the practice of making judgments, Wittgenstein observes, changes under actual use. (I should say, more pointedly, that these practices change under the conditions of history—under the conditions of historied life.) If so, then the determinate function of philosophy is the function of a historically changing practice. And if that is true, then it was ever so, though always denied. It is said that one finds no final fixities in N¯ag¯arjuna’s vision early in the history of Indian Buddhism, or in Taoism, which deeply influenced the Buddhism of China and Japan. There, intelligible structures are no more than

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provisional regularities for equally provisional beings (ourselves). There, no fixedly determinate structures can be found. Something of this appears in the Buddhist notion of s¯ ´unyata¯ and the Chinese Tao. If so, then it is already intriguing to consider that conceptual changes under way in the West (regarding invariance and flux) are, by a curious turn of events, not altogether inhospitable to some form of global rapprochement, without our having done anything to concoct a suitable connection. Indeed, there is good reason to believe that the largest of the West’s conceptual visions are quite different from those just mentioned (for instance, those found in Aristotle and Kant and their opponents). Hence, an effort at rapprochement is worth the bother. Indeed, the effort is not simply worth the bother, it is unavoidable, but unless we do first address the disorder and internal strife within the West’s resources, it will not count. The truth is, the whole history of Western philosophy has been defined again and again and again in terms of the fixed certainties of certain first principles. It has insisted on the priority of necessary invariances and the intelligibility of all else in its terms: change, in particular, in all its forms. That vision has been so effectively entrenched that it comes as a surprise to learn that it is not really necessary at all, that ampler resources may be ready at hand. No doubt such fixities encourage political and religious fixities as well. The connivance between the two may not be accidental. But in our time, if there are more compelling fixities to be discerned, they will have to be fixities of informational exchange; and there, there is no assurance that such a claim would be plausible at all, or more plausible than the other. One begins to see how, if world and thought are defined within the flux, we may have to admit that the structures of social life are profoundly artifactual, historicized in fact. That’s not to say that social order is not necessary, but it queries whether any particular principle of order is conceptually, or practically, unalterable. The answer seems to be a straightforward No. In any event, to see the inseparability of theorizing about the world and theorizing about how we should conduct our lives is to reclaim the function of philosophy in the manner already sketched. It also confirms the underdetermination of philosophical texts. Yet to concede the lesson is also to begin to admit a much neglected resource that we have every reason to believe will dominate a good part of the twenty-first century: namely, the benefit of a critical review of the indefinitely many local and middle-sized traditions of the world that have played little or no part in the formation of the Eurocentric tradition of philosophy. We cannot say how such a study will play out, for instance, in terms of the “ontologies” and “epistemologies” of African, Native American, and South

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Pacific peoples. But we can no longer avoid the effort at shaping a global sensibility, and the historicizing of philosophy would make no sense if separated from such an effort. One final preliminary. It is very difficult to bring together in a single course of instruction readings from both analytic and continental sources. They tend to be incommensurable; they have different priorities and different ways of viewing rigor, and they have different voices. I favor analytic rigor but not the extraordinarily narrow scope of its present practice. For example, English-language analytic philosophy has hardly any interest in history or the significance of the fact that our ideas, our conceptions, and theories grow out of the historied life of the society in which we first gain our linguistic—a fortiori, our philosophical—competence. Analytic philosophy has no sustained interest in the profound linkage between theoria and praxis. But that, precisely, has been and still is the principal concern of continental philosophers. In making sense of such complexities, continental philosophy has conveyed its own contempt for what it judges to be the specious rigor of analytic philosophy. Part of the point of this reader is to co-opt both sides, to see the genuine merit of each, to find a way of welding together the best talents of each, and to improvise beyond their respective limitations. You will find that given the nature of the resources at hand, the contemporary selections that are offered could not but be drawn chiefly from analytic philosophy. I have, therefore, tried to indicate (with some tact) how analytic arguments lead inexorably to the need for a corrective rapprochement with continental resources. So I must give fair warning that this reader has a definite mission to accomplish: to convey briefly a proper sense of the larger argument of the primer it serves. It’s a bit like a roman à clef applied to the interpretation of philosophy. The story line develops by noticing the interconnections between seemingly disparate topics and texts: for instance, between reference and individuation and between those and the prospects of First Philosophy. These matters are muffled by local philosophical loyalties. The point of such a scruple is to discover just how blind we may have been. There’s no intent here to topple analytic philosophy. It’s more a matter of recovering the unperceived resources that Western philosophy obscures within itself, that would enable us to overcome its worst divisions, to retrieve its best promise, to prepare us for an ampler global practice. There’s nothing in that effort that would lead us to believe that there is never more than one supreme strategy to pursue. Finally, in the spirit of the primer and for didactic reasons, I close each chapter’s introduction with a theorem. Together, they collect, in the form of

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a digest, a manageably small number of the most strategic issues that need to be debated in the transition from the twentieth century to the twenty-first. But in making the effort, we must remember that we are not concerned merely with resolving the puzzles that arise. Those puzzles and their solutions have been posited many times before and in many different ways. The trick is to see how all such puzzles change under the premise of the flux and historicity. That, I say, has never been systematically explored in modern and contemporary philosophy. Applying it here, we find that the standard puzzles change quite radically. There’s the principal discovery. As a consequence, our labors start up in a new way and with a new degree of freedom. Such changes happen only rarely: they are themselves the gathering work of collective history.

Bibliography [Chuang Tzu]. The Complete Works of Chuang Tzu. Translated by Burton Watson. New York: Columbia University Press, 1968. Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. Translated by Joan Stambaugh. Albany: SUNY Press, 1996. ———. “Letter on Humanism.” Translated by Frank A. Capuzzi, with J. Glenn Gray and David Farrell Krell. In Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell. New York: Harper & Row, 1977. N¯ag¯arjuna. The Philosophy of the Middle Way (M¯ulamadhyamak¯akarik¯a). Translated by David J. Kalupahana. Albany: SUNY Press, 1966. Person and Community: Ghanaian Philosophy. Edited by Kwasi Wiredu and Kwame Gyekye. Volume 1. Washington, D.C.: Council for Research on Values and Philosophy, 1992. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Philosophical Investigations. 3d ed. Translated by G.E.M. Anscombe. New York: Macmillan, 1968. ———. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. 2d ed. Translated by D. F. Pears and B. F. Mcguinness. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1972.

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1 First Philosophy and First- and Second-Order Discourse

Introduction I suggest beginning with the Presocratics, particularly with Parmenides. Parmenides is best known for his dictum “What Is is, and What Is Not is not.” Unfortunately, we cannot be entirely certain what he meant by it. There’s reason to think he confuses the “not” of “not anything at all” (Not Being: the absence of all “being”) and the “not” of “not being thus and so” (Nonbeing: change especially, the inaptness of characterizing everything as changeless in regard to “being”). That is how Aristotle reads him and the point of his own important improvement on Parmenides: a way of regarding change as real, without generating paradox. Despite this central difficulty, Parmenides’ instruction is as close as we can come to the very beginning of Greek philosophy. Furthermore, Parmenides seems to have dominated a large part of the Presocratic world and identified the primacy of the problem of explaining change. In a sense, we are still in his debt, although the terms of reference have clearly changed. He may be thought to have introduced at one stroke the conceptual contest between invariance and flux and the implicit distinction between first- and second-order discourse. Furthermore, in doing that, he offers, and appears to realize that he is offering, a philosophical “first principle,” a principle sine qua non. Still, although it is intriguing

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to try to fathom what he means and whether his claim survives, his dictum is probably too obscure to support more than an opening sense of its bearing on Plato’s and Aristotle’s efforts to reconcile change and fixity. Aristotle takes himself to have exposed Parmenides’ confusion of the two senses of “not” and “being” and thus to have saved the intelligibility of change—a fortiori, the intelligibility of science, the description and explanation of changing things. But Aristotle succeeds essentially as a “temperate” Parmenidean, since it is clear that, for Aristotle, change is intelligible only in terms of what is necessarily changeless. The marvel is that nearly the whole of Western philosophy is committed, however obscurely or imperceptibly, to one form or another of that same thesis. Here and there, in the history of philosophy, it is true—notably, in Protagoras in the ancient world and, at the turn into the twentieth century, in Nietzsche—the doctrine of the flux shorn of all dependence on the prior truth of invariant reality has raised a dissenting voice; but it appears only rarely between those two boundaries. It was really in the second half of the twentieth century that the doctrine of the flux— the flat denial of modal or necessary invariance in reality and thought, not the denial of mere regularity or order—was deemed coherent and capable of supporting a comprehensive vision of a forceful kind. The full thesis is rarely put explicitly, but there is certainly a gathering sense that none of the determinate axioms the history of philosophy has spawned in the name of invariance is likely to survive in its original form. There is also no immediate prospect of our drumming out of bounds the endlessly varied resources of invariance itself. It is, nevertheless, startling to discover that, after twenty-five hundred years of continuous philosophy, events should have conspired to return us to the original concerns of the Presocratic and classical philosophers—and in a way that makes room for a possibility the Parmenidean tradition had either threatened with incoherence or rendered entirely dependent on the priorities of changelessness. In any case, it is Aristotle (in the Metaphysics, Book Gamma) who offers the most famous and most venerable attempt to legitimate a first principle— hence, a First Philosophy. The prospect of a First Philosophy can certainly be found in Plato, but Plato himself never betrays a commitment to it. Nowhere does he actually claim to have knowledge of the Forms. Indeed, in the early elenctic dialogues leading to Republic and in later dialogues, notably in Statesman, we are obliged to pursue our rational inquiries without the assurance of the eternal Forms. You may make of this what you will: on the whole, the tradition asserts that Plato was a Platonist, Plato himself does not. In fact, it is only in Aristotle that First Philosophy is explicitly explained and

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defended. In Plato, it is only explained. It may, in fact, have been defeated in Parmenides. Aristotle’s argument is notable because, first of all, it construes the structure of rational thought and the structure of reality as matched, so that violations of the principle of noncontradiction and excluded middle bear at once on what holds true necessarily for reasoning and what holds true necessarily in reality. If Aristotle is right, then, indeed, he has set a lower limit to any truth-seeking discourse and, in doing so, has successfully formulated a first principle, an inviolate condition on which all else depends. On the other hand, if he is wrong —and if we can (without self-contradiction) deny the necessity of invariance (and neutralize the dangers associated with noncontradiction and excluded middle), then he is wrong—then the fortunes of the doctrine of the flux would dramatically improve. That, in effect, is what has happened. There is no question that the prospects of the flux have been enhanced by the attraction of modern thinkers to the idea that the very forms of thinking (hence, the norms of logic and reason) are never more than artifacts of human history. The whole idea depends on construing the norms of logic and reason as never more than abstractions drawn and idealized from the actual conditions of life and naturallanguage argument (see Stachel). On that view, Aristotle’s principles cannot be pertinently characterized in any purely syntactic terms that are fixed in their own right and indifferent to our variably reflecting on ourselves and our world. Such principles have point, it may be said, only with respect to the actual practices of discourse; thus syntax becomes encumbered and debatable. Aristotle would agree (as in Rhetoric). But even so, the historied nature of thinking affords grounds for rejecting the supposed necessity of any first principle or First Philosophy. There, Aristotle would demur. He has no intention of denying that reality must necessarily possess invariant structures. The issue proves to be rather complicated. Aristotle insists that any exclusive adherence to change or “appearances” produces paradox and contradiction somewhere in discourse. The charge was directed primarily against Protagoras, whose views are uncomprehendingly reported in Plato’s Theaetetus—where the logic of Protagoras’s relativism and adherence to the flux are pretty well beaten into stupidity. We do not know what Protagoras’s theory ultimately was, but it is possible to reconstruct a reading of it (on the strength of the fragments reported) that need not lead at all to the selfreferential paradoxes the Theaetetus draws out or the contradictions Aristotle foresees. Surprisingly, a favorable strategy is afforded in Nietzsche’s Will to Power, that is, on the metaphysical side. This is all the more inter-

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esting because Nietzsche’s philosophical imagination lies behind nearly every contemporary effort to redeem the flux (Foucault’s historicism, for instance). Nietzsche also counts as one of the West’s earliest conceptual gymnasts in the interplay between Western and Asian philosophy. But never mind these slim allusions. Efforts in our own time to show the inescapability of first principles and First Philosophy proceed by demonstrating that if flux (or historicity) is the necessary condition of the world, then of course the theory of the flux defeats itself by making flux a form of invariance! Very pretty. But is such a finding unavoidable? It seems unlikely. A younger contemporary philosopher, Carl Page, influenced by the vigorous Platonism of Leo Strauss and his “school,” offers just that argument— which properly engages the contest between invariance and flux in a direct way and helps us sort out our conceptual options. Page’s strategy demonstrates that if indeed flux rather than invariant structure is the necessary condition of the world, then flux is the invariant structure that is the necessary condition of the world. It’s impossible to demonstrate that the world must be a flux. But if it may be a flux, then First Philosophy fails. The fluxists may claim no more than that flux wins by a faute de mieux argument: for instance, by defeating Aristotle and by defeating seriatim every presumed defense of the invariantist sort. Flux is no more than a philosophical bet, a reasoned conjecture that no demonstration of modal invariance will work. So we have made an important gain. It is a curious gain, however. For if you look carefully, you will see that admitting its force entails the insuperable conceptual informality of philosophy. You cannot bring philosophy to a close, you cannot formulate it as a closed system, if you cannot confirm flux as a first principle. But that of course is just the point of favoring the flux over the doctrine of invariance. To argue otherwise is to miss the point of the contest. Those who insist that that alone is the mark of failure argue “nostalgically”: they still have to make their case. The outcome of the quarrel between flux and invariance bears directly on the prospects of distinguishing between first- and second-order discourse (legitimative discourse). Both invariance and flux are visions that have secondorder import. The difference is that invariance is (as in Aristotle’s argument) a first principle, a basis for a First Philosophy, but the flux is neither and cannot be either, on pain of being defeated by Page’s kind of argument. That having been said, however, the further question arises whether or not, if flux or historicity is admitted, anything like the second-order legitimative concerns of standard philosophy can be redeemed. “Legitimative” questions are questions about the grounds on which a certain cognitional competence

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(as in science or moral judgment) is deemed “conceptually possible” or cognitively viable or actually valid; legitimative questions are not directly occupied with determining the truth or falsity of particular (first-order) claims about the world but with the truth or falsity of (second-order) claims about our competence to decide such claims. First- and second-order questions are plainly difficult to separate. In our own time, this has been strenuously denied, both in English-language analytic and continental European philosophy, by those who are now called postmodernists; notably, in the United States, by Richard Rorty and, in France, by Jean-François Lyotard. Lyotard has in fact been chiefly responsible for fixing, philosophically, this sense of “postmodernism” (a very different matter from that of postmodernism in architecture, where the term seems to have had its first use). Rorty’s and Lyotard’s notions are also different from a recuperative postmodernism (indeed, a postmodernism directed in part against their own work) as in the “postmodernist” ethics of theorists like Zygmunt Bauman (q.v.). In any case, it is a great irony that, for Rorty and Lyotard, the rejection of invariance has been thought to entail the rejection of all standard philosophy, all second-order legitimative inquiry. They reason that the analysis of knowledge and reality and meaning and truth and the like—the usual questions of second-order inquiry—makes no sense (so it is thought) unless these questions are addressed to a world specifically deemed to have invariant structure. In a way, the postmodernists offer a companion argument to Page’s (and Aristotle’s) claims. But is it valid? There you have the decisive secondorder question of our time. For according to the postmodernist view, there is a second-order question that, rightly answered, precludes the need to address ever again any second-order questions; and according to those who reject the postmodernist view, the fluxive nature of the world obliges us to construct provisional second-order policies about science and morality, without recovering modal invariances of any kind. It is a further irony that Rorty finds confirmation of his view in the work of Wittgenstein, Heidegger, and Dewey, whom he claims as his philosophical mentors. But they can hardly be thought to be unequivocal about the abandonment of philosophy proper, though they admittedly attack canonical views of second-order fixity. The strange thing is that Rorty’s postmodernism begins to look very much like what, in analytic philosophy, is now called “naturalizing” (following Quine’s well-known paper “Epistemology Naturalized”). For naturalizing precludes cognitive privilege, transcendental arguments, and the like, and yet it often restores a form of invariance. The underlying problem has been posed in a seminal way in Thomas

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Kuhn’s immensely influential monograph, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. You will find in Kuhn’s account the incontrovertible need for a determinate resolution of our views on invariance and flux and the inescapability, within the terms of history, of second-order judgments about what to regard as reality and evidence. Kuhn’s book, whose full meaning one may say without malice Kuhn himself did not entirely grasp, made its appearance in the early 1960s under the auspices of the unified science program. That itself is surprising, since Kuhn’s book was thought to undermine the progressivism of the inductivist vision of science, that is, the approximative discovery by inductive means of the real invariances of nature. And yet Rudolf Carnap, one of the co-leaders of the Positivist movement, is reported to have found Kuhn’s book “congenial” (see Earman). The fact remains that Kuhn’s detailed attention to the actual history and achievement of the physical sciences confirms the sense in which (as in choosing between Priestley and Lavoisier) first- and second-order questions implicate one another. Indeed, Kuhn’s thesis implicitly supports the possibility of abandoning the fixities of the covering-law model of canonical philosophies of science. Kuhn himself was increasingly drawn to such a move, but his initial loyalties were divided between the implications of invariance and flux. It is perhaps only in Foucault that one finds the beginnings of a full recovery of the Nietzschean conception of the flux cast (in the modern manner) in historicist terms. Certainly, Foucault offers one of its boldest statements; but as a so-called poststructuralist, Foucault, unlike Kuhn, has no sustained interest in demonstrating its coherence. At the very least, a sketch of such a demonstration is what is required in order to enlist the support of analytic philosophy. Kuhn approaches the poststructuralist extreme but remains skeptical about the power of legitimation. He makes two essential claims but falls back from their full defense: for one thing, he affirms straightout that it is “hopeless” to believe we can legitimate a neutral stance or a neutral perceptual language for the natural sciences (though he personally clings to the notion that there might well be grounds for a neutral stance); and for another, he admits that the changing “paradigms” of professional science are themselves the contingent artifacts of history, are likely to generate conceptual incommensurabilities, and are not for that reason open to any rationally confined replacement (though he himself believes such contests yield a form of progress). Speculations of these sorts make no sense outside the organizing vision of the flux. Kuhn steps back from the brink, leaving the matter unresolved.

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Others are more sanguine. For instance, nearly twenty years after the second edition of Kuhn’s Structure, Alasdair MacIntyre attempted to explain how a rational assessment of the superiority of one incommensurable paradigm over another was possible. MacIntyre explored the matter in the context of moral “crises,” but the general strategy was thought to be common coin for theoretical and practical disputes alike. Unfortunately, MacIntyre’s argument first admits the historicity of reason and then recovers the overriding invariance of reason itself: in other words, the argument blinks at the last moment. (See Chapter 5.) The principal options are now much clearer. We may locate our inquiries between the limits defined by Aristotle and Foucault: on the one hand, Aristotle insists that a departure from strict invariance leads to contradiction “somewhere”; on the other, Foucault proclaims the flux but does not confirm its coherence. Meanwhile, the postmodernists argue that the legitimative work of philosophy holds only within the terms of invariance, but that the advocacy of invariance depends on outmoded forms of cognitive privilege. The opponents of postmodernism find that a non sequitur, but they offer little else in the way of counterdemonstration. Furthermore, it begins to appear problematic whether second-order inquiries are necessary at all: whether, that is, second-order inquiry does or does not devolve into the causal inquiries of first-order science. There’s the point of Quine’s essay, and there’s the evidence of a convergence between postmodernism and the new “naturalizing” programs of analytic philosophy. Rorty is as much an exemplar as Quine is. For of course, whatever else may be true, legitimation can hardly be a causal question, for causal inquiries (as with Kuhn) themselves generate ulterior legitimative queries. The important thing to grasp is the lack of resolution. We find ourselves back once again in the quarrel about the standing of second-order legitimation. If legitimation must claim invariant results to be valid at all, then philosophy cannot proceed without “First Philosophy.” But in that case, philosophy is at mortal risk (as the postmodernists suppose), since there is no clear way to demonstrate the inviolability of First Philosophy. But if legitimation is subject to fluxive and historicized forces, then in what sense can it claim validity at all? The fact remains that, to date, there is no sustained account of what we should understand as acceptable legitimative strategies under the conditions of flux and historicity. There you have a sense of the conceptual puzzles of our philosophical future. Meanwhile, we may assure ourselves that Protagoras’s adherence to the doctrine of the flux—to the conceptual sufficiency of subscribing only to the

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changing “appearances” of the perceptual world (as Plato has it, in Theaetetus)—is entirely capable of being coherently construed. Plato and Aristotle oppose the idea, but they fail to make their case. The classic picture, once again, is blandly “Parmenidean”: it supposes (as Aristotle explicitly claims) that “appearances” are the appearances of determinate things (ousiai) and that determinate things necessarily possess invariant natures. But Protagoras may be read as supposing that what we regard as determinate things (including their “appearances,” in the conventional sense) are themselves heuristically or instrumentally posited (“constructed,” as we should now say) within the space of the flux itself. We cannot rightly claim (on textual grounds) that Protagoras held such a view; but it is quite consistent with what he is reported to have said. Curiously, it is also consistent with what N¯ag¯arjuna (the second-century Indian Buddhist) says, who also speaks of the perceptual flux. This is only to confirm the plausibility of attributing a congenial doctrine to Protagoras at the very beginning of Western thought. Nothing more depends on the textual issue: after all, we have nothing of Protagoras’s independent tracts, though we know his reputation. The point that’s worth insisting on is that the “Parmenidean” tradition was apparently already offset in ancient times by the Sophists at least—by Protagoras and Gorgias most notably. But the entire tradition had lost (even, on occasion, suppressed) the theme—at least until quite recently, until the recovery of historicity in the nineteenth century (with Hegel) and flux at the turn into the twentieth (with Nietzsche). There you have the sense of how we have returned (with greater resources) to the earliest puzzles of Western philosophy. There is no conceptual necessity to subscribe to First Philosophy and there are no modally necessary first principles.

BEING QUA BEING

Aristotle Chapter 1 There is a science which investigates being as being and the attributes which belong to this in virtue of its own nature. Now this is not the same as any of Aristotle, “Book Gamma (1003a17–1011b23),” in Metaphysics, trans. W. D. Ross (London: Oxford University Press, 1924).

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the so-called special sciences; for none of these others treats universally of being as being. They cut off a part of being and investigate the attribute of this part; this is what the mathematical sciences for instance do. Now since we are seeking the first principles and the highest causes, clearly there must be some thing to which these belong in virtue of its own nature. If then those who sought the elements of existing things were seeking these same principles, it is necessary that the elements must be elements of being not by accident but just because it is being. Therefore it is of being as being that we also must grasp the first causes. Chapter 2 There are many senses in which a thing may be said to ‘be’, but all that ‘is’ is related to one central point, one definite kind of thing, and is not said to ‘be’ by a mere ambiguity. Everything which is healthy is related to health, one thing in the sense that it preserves health, another in the sense that it produces it, another in the sense that it is a symptom of health, another because it is capable of it. And that which is medical is relative to the medical art, one thing being called medical because it possesses it, another because it is naturally adapted to it, another because it is a function of the medical art. And we shall find other words used similarly to these. So, too, there are many senses in which a thing is said to be, but all refer to one startingpoint; some things are said to be because they are substances, others because they are affections of substance, others because they are a process towards substance, or destructions or privations or qualities of substance, or productive or generative of substance, or of things which are relative to substance, or negations of one of these things or of substance itself. It is for this reason that we say even of non-being that it is non-being. As, then, there is one science which deals with all healthy things, the same applies in the other cases also. For not only in the case of things which have one common notion does the investigation belong to one science, but also in the case of things which are related to one common nature, for even these in a sense have one common notion. It is clear then that it is the work of one science also to study the things that are, qua being.—But everywhere science deals chiefly with that which is primary, and on which the other things depend, and in virtue of which they get their names. If, then, this is substance, it will be of substances that the philosopher must grasp the principles and the causes. Now for each one class of things, as there is one perception, so there is one science, as for instance grammar, being one science, investigates all ar-

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ticulate sounds. Hence to investigate all the species of being qua being is the work of a science which is generically one, and to investigate the several species is the work of the specific parts of the science. If, now, being and unity are the same and are one thing in the sense that they are implied in one another as principle and cause are, not in the sense that they are explained by the same definition (though it makes no difference even if we suppose them to be like that—in fact this would even strengthen our case); for ‘one man’ and ‘man’ are the same thing, and so are ‘existent man’ and ‘man’, and the doubling of the words in ‘one man and one existent man’ does not express anything different (it is clear that the two things are not separated either in coming to be or in ceasing to be); and similarly ‘one existent man’ adds nothing to ‘existent man’, so that it is obvious that the addition in these cases means the same thing, and unity is nothing apart from being; and if, further, the substance of each thing is one in no merely accidental way, and similarly is from its very nature something that is:—all this being so, there must be exactly as many species of being as of unity. And to investigate the essence of these is the work of a science which is generically one—I mean, for instance, the discussion of the same and the similar and the other concepts of this sort; and nearly all contraries may be referred to this origin; let us take them as having been investigated in the ‘Selection of Contraries’. And there are as many parts of philosophy as there are kinds of substance, so that there must necessarily be among them a first philosophy and one which follows this. For being falls immediately into genera; for which reason the sciences too will correspond to these genera. For the philosopher is like the mathematician, as that word is used; for mathematics also has parts, and there is a first and a second science and other successive ones within the sphere of mathematics. Now since it is the work of one science to investigate opposites, and plurality is opposed to unity—and it belongs to one science to investigate the negation and the privation because in both cases we are really investigating the one thing of which the negation or the privation is a negation or privation (for we either say simply that that thing is not present, or that it is not present in some particular class; in the latter case difference is present over and above what is implied in negation; for negation means just the absence of the thing in question, while in privation there is also employed an underlying nature of which the privation is asserted):—in view of all these facts, the contraries of the concepts we named above, the other and the dissimilar and the unequal, and everything else which is derived either from these or from plurality and unity, must fall within the province of the science above

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named. And contrariety is one of these concepts; for contrariety is a kind of difference, and difference is a kind of otherness. Therefore, since there are many senses in which a thing is said to be one, these terms also will have many senses, but yet it belongs to one science to know them all; for a term belongs to different sciences not if it has different senses, but if it has not one meaning and its definitions cannot be referred to one central meaning. And since all things are referred to that which is primary, as for instance all things which are called one are referred to the primary one, we must say that this holds good also of the same and the other and of contraries in general; so that after distinguishing the various senses of each, we must then explain by reference to what is primary in the case of each of the predicates in question, saying how they are related to it; for some will be called what they are called because they possess it, others because they produce it, and others in other such ways. It is evident, then, that it belongs to one science to be able to give an account of these concepts as well as of substance (this was one of the questions in our book of problems), and that it is the function of the philosopher to be able to investigate all things. For if it is not the function of the philosopher, who is it who will inquire whether Socrates and Socrates seated are the same thing, or whether one thing has one contrary, or what contrariety is, or how many meanings it has? And similarly with all other such questions. Since, then, these are essential modifications of unity qua unity and of being qua being, not qua numbers or lines or fire, it is clear that it belongs to this science to investigate both the essence of these concepts and their properties. And those who study these properties err not by leaving the sphere of philosophy, but by forgetting that substance, of which they have no correct idea, is prior to these other things. For number qua number has peculiar attributes, such as oddness and evenness, commensurability and equality, excess and defect, and these belong to numbers either in themselves or in relation to one another. And similarly the solid and the motionless and that which is in motion and the weightless and that which has weight have other peculiar properties. So too there are certain properties peculiar to being as such, and it is about these that the philosopher has to investigate the truth.—An indication of this may be mentioned:—dialecticians and sophists assume the same guise as the philosopher, for sophistic is Wisdom which exists only in semblance, and dialecticians embrace all things in their dialectic, and being is common to all things; but evidently their dialectic embraces these subjects because these are proper to philosophy.—For sophistic and dialectic turn on the same class of things as philosophy, but this differs from dialectic in the

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nature of the faculty required and from sophistic in respect of the purpose of the philosophic life. Dialectic is merely critical where philosophy claims to know, and sophistic is what appears to be philosophy but is not. Again, in the list of contraries one of the two columns is privative, and all contraries are reducible to being and non-being, and to unity and plurality, as for instance rest belongs to unity and movement to plurality. And nearly all thinkers agree that being and substance are composed of contraries; at least all name contraries as their first principles—some name odd and even, some hot and cold, some limit and the unlimited, some love and strife. And all the others as well are evidently reducible to unity and plurality (this reduction we must take for granted), and the principles stated by other thinkers fall entirely under these as their genera. It is obvious then from these considerations too that it belongs to one science to examine being qua being. For all things are either contraries or composed of contraries, and unity and plurality are the starting-points of all contraries. And these belong to one science, whether they have or have not one single meaning. Probably the truth is that they have not; yet even if ‘one’ has several meanings, the other meanings will be related to the primary meaning (and similarly in the case of the contraries), even if being or unity is not a universal and the same in every instance or is not separable from the particular instances (as in fact it probably is not; the unity is in some cases that of common reference, in some cases that of serial succession). And for this reason it does not belong to the geometer to inquire what is contrariety or completeness or unity or being or the same or the other, but only to presuppose these concepts and reason from this starting-point.—Obviously then it is the work of one science to examine being qua being, and the attributes which belong to it qua being, and the same science will examine not only substances but also their attributes, both those above named and the concepts ‘prior’ and ‘posterior’, ‘genus’ and ‘species’, ‘whole’ and ‘part’, and the others of this sort. Chapter 3 We must state whether it belongs to one or to different sciences to inquire into the truths which are in mathematics called axioms, and into substance. Evidently, the inquiry into these also belongs to one science, and that the science of the philosopher; for these truths hold good for everything that is, and not for some special genus apart from others. And all men use them, because they are true of being qua being and each genus has being. But men use them just so far as to satisfy their purposes; that is, as far as the genus to which

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their demonstrations refer extends. Therefore since these truths clearly hold good for all things qua being (for this is what is common to them), to him who studies being qua being belongs the inquiry into these as well. And for this reason no one who is conducting a special inquiry tries to say anything about their truth or falsity—neither the geometer nor the arithmetician. Some natural philosophers indeed have done so, and their procedure was intelligible enough; for they thought that they alone were inquiring about the whole of nature and about being. But since there is one kind of thinker who is above even the natural philosopher (for nature is only one particular genus of being), the discussion of these truths also will belong to him whose inquiry is universal and deals with primary substance. Physics also is a kind of Wisdom, but it is not the first kind.—And the attempts of some of those who discuss the terms on which truth should be accepted, are due to a want of training in logic; for they should know these things already when they come to a special study, and not be inquiring into them while they are listening to lectures on it. Evidently then it belongs to the philosopher, i.e., to him who is studying the nature of all substance, to inquire also into the principles of syllogism. But he who knows best about each genus must be able to state the most certain principles of his subject, so that he whose subject is existing things qua existing must be able to state the most certain principles of all things. This is the philosopher, and the most certain principle of all is that regarding which it is impossible to be mistaken; for such a principle must be both the best known (for all men may be mistaken about things which they do not know), and non-hypothetical. For a principle which every one must have who understands anything that is, is not a hypothesis; and that which every one must know who knows anything, he must already have when he comes to a special study. Evidently then such a principle is the most certain of all; which principle this is, let us proceed to say. It is, that the same attribute cannot at the same time belong and not belong to the same subject and in the same respect; we must presuppose, to guard against dialectical objections, any further qualifications which might be added. This, then, is the most certain of all principles, since it answers to the definition given above. For it is impossible for any one to believe the same thing to be and not to be, as some think Heraclitus says. For what a man says, he does not necessarily believe; and if it is impossible that contrary attributes should belong at the same time to the same subject (the usual qualifications must be presupposed in this premiss too), and if an opinion which contradicts another is contrary to it, obviously it is impossible for the same man at the same time to believe the same

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thing to be and not to be; for if a man were mistaken on this point he would have contrary opinions at the same time. It is for this reason that all who are carrying out a demonstration reduce it to this as an ultimate belief; for this is naturally the starting-point even for all the other axioms. Chapter 4 There are some who, as we said, both themselves assert that it is possible for the same thing to be and not to be, and say that people can judge this to be the case. And among others many writers about nature use this language. But we have now posited that it is impossible for anything at the same time to be and not to be, and by this means have shown that this is the most indisputable of all principles.—Some indeed demand that even this shall be demonstrated but this they do through want of education, for not to know of what things one should demand demonstration, and of what one should not, argues want of education. For it is impossible that there should be demonstration of absolutely everything (there would be an infinite regress, so that there would still be no demonstration); but if there are things of which one should not demand demonstration, these persons could not say what principle they maintain to be more self-evident than the present one. We can, however, demonstrate negatively even that this view is impossible, if our opponent will only say something; and if he says nothing, it is absurd to seek to give an account of our views to one who cannot give an account of anything, in so far as he cannot do so. For such a man, as such, is from the start no better than a vegetable. Now negative demonstration I distinguish from demonstration proper, because in a demonstration one might be thought to be begging the question, but if another person is responsible for the assumption we shall have negative proof, not demonstration: The starting-point for all such arguments is not the demand that our opponent shall say that something either is or is not (for this one might perhaps take to be a begging of the question), but that he shall say something which is significant both for himself and for another; for this is necessary, if he really is to say anything. For, if he means nothing, such a man will not be capable of reasoning, either with himself or with another. But if any one grants this, demonstration will be possible; for we shall already have something definite. The person responsible for the proof, however, is not he who demonstrates but he who listens; for while disowning reason he listens to reason. And

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again he who admits this has admitted that something is true apart from demonstration [so that not everything will be ‘so and not so’]. First then this at least is obviously true, that the word ‘be’ or ‘not be’ has a definite meaning, so that not everything will be ‘so and not so’.—Again, if ‘man’ has one meaning, let this be ‘two-footed animal’; by having one meaning I understand this:—if ‘man’ means ‘X’, then if A is a man ‘X’ will be what ‘being a man’ means for him. (It makes no difference even if one were to say a word has several meanings, if only they are limited in number; for to each definition there might be assigned a different word. For instance, we might say that ‘man’ has not one meaning but several, one of which would have one definition, viz. ‘two-footed animal’, while there might be also several other definitions if only they were limited in number; for a peculiar name might be assigned to each of the definitions. If, however, they were not limited but one were to say that the word has an infinite number of meanings, obviously reasoning would be impossible; for not to have one meaning is to have no meaning, and if words have no meaning our reasoning with one another, and indeed with ourselves, has been annihilated; for it is impossible to think of anything if we do not think of one thing; but if this is possible, one name might be assigned to this thing.) Let it be assumed then, as was said at the beginning, that the name has a meaning and has one meaning; it is impossible, then, that ‘being a man’ should mean precisely ‘not being a man’, if ‘man’ not only signifies something about one subject but also has one significance (for we do not identify ‘having one significance’ with ‘signifying something about one subject’, since on that assumption even ‘musical’ and ‘white’ and ‘man’ would have had one significance, so that all things would have been one; for they would all have had the same significance). And it will not be possible to be and not to be the same thing, except in virtue of an ambiguity, just as if one whom we call ‘man’, others were to call ‘not-man’; but the point in question is not this, whether the same thing can at the same time be and not be a man in name, but whether it can in fact.— Now if ‘man’ and ‘not-man’ mean nothing different, obviously ‘not being a man’ will mean nothing different from ‘being a man’; so that ‘being a man’ will be ‘not being a man’; for they will be one. For being one means this— being related as ‘raiment’ and ‘dress’ are, if their definition is one. And if ‘being a man’ and ‘being a not-man’ are to be one, they must mean one thing. But it was shown earlier that they mean different things.—Therefore, if it is true to say of anything that it is a man, it must be a two-footed animal (for

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this was what ‘man’ meant); and if this is necessary, it is impossible that the same thing should not at that time be a two-footed animal; for this is what ‘being necessary’ means—that it is impossible for the thing not to be. It is, then, impossible that it should be at the same time true to say the same thing is a man and is not a man. The same account holds good with regard to ‘not being a man’, for ‘being a man’ and ‘being a not-man’ mean different things, since even ‘being white’ and ‘being a man’ are different; for the former terms are much more opposed, so that they must a fortiori mean different things. And if any one says that ‘white’ means one and the same thing as ‘man’, again we shall say the same as what was said before, that it would follow that all things are one, and not only opposites. But if this is impossible, then what we have maintained will follow, if our opponent will only answer our question. And if, when one asks the question simply, he adds the contradictories, he is not answering the question. For there is nothing to prevent the same thing from being both a man and white and countless other things: but still, if one asks whether it is or is not true to say that this is a man, our opponent must give an answer which means one thing, and not add that ‘it is also white and large’. For, besides other reasons, it is impossible to enumerate its accidental attributes, which are infinite in number; let him, then, enumerate either all or none. Similarly, therefore, even if the same thing is a thousand times a man and a not-man, he must not, in answering the question whether this is a man, add that it is also at the same time a not-man, unless he is bound to add also all the other accidents, all that the subject is or is not; and if he does this, he is not observing the rules of argument. And in general those who say this do away with substance and essence. For they must say that all attributes are accidents, and that there is no such thing as ‘being essentially a man’ or ‘an animal’. For if there is to be any such thing as ‘being essentially a man’ this will not be ‘being a not-man’ or ‘not being a man’ (yet these are negations of it); for there was one thing which it meant, and this was the substance of something. And denoting the substance of a thing means that the essence of the thing is nothing else. But if its being essentially a man is to be the same as either being essentially a not-man or essentially not being a man, then its essence will be something else. Therefore our opponents must say that there cannot be such a definition of anything, but that all attributes are accidental; for this is the distinction between substance and accident—‘white’ is accidental to man, because though he is white, whiteness is not his essence. But if all statements are accidental, there will be nothing primary about which they are made, if the accidental always

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implies predication about a subject. The predication, then, must go on ad infinitum. But this is impossible; for not even more than two terms can be combined in accidental predication. For (1) an accident is not an accident of an accident, unless it be because both are accidents of the same subject. I mean, for instance, that the white is musical and the latter is white, only because both are accidental to man. But (2) Socrates is musical, not in this sense, that both terms are accidental to some thing else. Since then some predicates are accidental in this and some in that sense, (a) those which are accidental in the latter sense, in which white is accidental to Socrates, cannot form an infinite series in the upward direction; e.g., Socrates the white has not yet another accident; for no unity can be got out of such a sum. Nor again (b) will ‘white’ have another term accidental to it, e.g., ‘musical’. For this is no more accidental to that than that is to this; and at the same time we have drawn the distinction, that while some predicates are accidental in this sense, others are so in the sense in which ‘musical’ is accidental to Socrates; and the accident is an accident of an accident not in cases of the latter kind, but only in cases of the other kind, so that not all terms will be accidental. There must, then, even so be something which denotes substance. And if this is so, it has been shown that contradictories cannot be predicated at the same time. Again, if all contradictory statements are true of the same subject at the same time, evidently all things will be one. For the same thing will be a trireme, a wall, and a man, if of everything it is possible either to affirm or to deny anything (and this premiss must be accepted by those who share the views of Protagoras). For if any one thinks that the man is not a trireme, evidently he is not a trireme; so that he also is a trireme, if, as they say, contradictory statements are both true. And we thus get the doctrine of Anaxagoras, that all things are mixed together; so that nothing really exists. They seem, then, to be speaking of the indeterminate, and, while fancying themselves to be speaking of being, they are speaking about non-being; for it is that which exists potentially and not in complete reality that is indeterminate. But they must predicate of every subject the affirmation or the negation of every attribute. For it is absurd if of each subject its own negation is to be predicable, while the negation of something else which cannot be predicated of it is not to be predicable of it; for instance, if it is true to say of a man that he is not a man, evidently it is also true to say that he is either a trireme or not a trireme. If, then, the affirmative can be predicated, the negative must be predicable too; and if the affirmative is not predicable, the negative, at least, will be more predicable than the negative of the subject itself. If, then, even the latter negative is predicable, the negative of

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‘trireme’ will be also predicable; and, if this is predicable, the affirmative will be so too. Those, then, who maintain this view are driven to this conclusion, and to the further conclusion that it is not necessary either to assert or to deny. For if it is true that a thing is a man and a not-man, evidently also it will be neither a man nor a not-man. For to the two assertions there answer two negations, and if the former is treated as a single proposition compounded out of two, the latter also is a single proposition opposite to the former. Again, either the theory is true in all cases, and a thing is both white and not-white, and existent and non-existent, and all other assertions and negations are similarly compatible, or the theory is true of some statements and not of others. And if not of all, the exceptions will be contradictories of which admittedly only one is true; but if of all, again either the negation will be true wherever the assertion is, and the assertion true wherever the negation is, or the negation will be true where the assertion is, but the assertion not always true where the negation is. And (a) in the latter case there will be something which fixedly is not, and this will be an indisputable belief; and if non-being is something indisputable and knowable, the opposite assertion will be more knowable. But (b) if it is equally possible also to assert all that it is possible to deny, one must either be saying what is true when one separates the predicates (and says, for instance, that a thing is white, and again that it is not-white), or not. And if (i) it is not true to apply the predicates separately, our opponent is not saying what he professes to say, and also nothing at all exists, but how could nonexistent things speak or walk, as he does? Also all things would on this view be one, as has been already said, and man and God and trireme and their contradictories will be the same. For if contradictories can be predicated alike of each subject, one thing will in no wise differ from another; for if it differ, this difference will be something true and peculiar to it. And (ii) if one may with truth apply the predicates separately, the above-mentioned result follows none the less, and, further, it follows that all would then be right and all would be in error, and our opponent himself confesses himself to be in error.—And at the same time our discussion with him is evidently about nothing at all; for he says nothing. For he says neither ‘yes’ nor ‘no’, but ‘yes and no’; and again he denies both of these and says ‘neither yes nor no’; for otherwise there would already be something definite. Again, if when the assertion is true, the negation is false, and when this is true, the affirmation is false, it will not be possible to assert and deny the

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same thing truly at the same time. But perhaps they might say this was the very question at issue. Again, is he in error who judges either that the thing is so or that it is not so, and is he right who judges both? If he is right, what can they mean by saying that the nature of existing things is of this kind? And if he is not right, but more right than he who judges in the other way, being will already be of a definite nature, and this will be true, and not at the same time also not true. But if all are alike both wrong and right, one who is in this condition will not be able either to speak or to say anything intelligible; for he says at the same time both ‘yes’ and ‘no’. And if be makes no judgement but ‘thinks’ and ‘does not think’, indifferently, what difference will there be between him and a vegetable?—Thus, then, it is in the highest degree evident that neither any one of those who maintain this view nor any one else is really in this position. For why does a man walk to Megara and not stay at home, when he thinks he ought to be walking there? Why does he not walk early some morning into a well or over a precipice, if one happens to be in his way? Why do we observe him guarding against this, evidently because he does not think that falling in is alike good and not good? Evidently, then, he judges one thing to be better and another worse. And if this is so, he must also judge one thing to be a man and another to be not-a-man, one thing to be sweet and another to be not-sweet. For he does not aim at and judge all things alike, when, thinking it desirable to drink water or to see a man, he proceeds to aim at these things; yet he ought, if the same thing were alike a man and not-a-man. But, as was said, there is no one who does not obviously avoid some things and not others. Therefore, as it seems, all men make unqualified judgements, if not about all things, still about what is better and worse. And if this is not knowledge but opinion, they should be all the more anxious about the truth, as a sick man should be more anxious about his health than one who is healthy; for he who has opinions is, in comparison with the man who knows, not in a healthy state as far as the truth is concerned. Again, however much all things may be ‘so and not so’, still there is a more and a less in the nature of things; for we should not say that two and three are equally even, nor is he who thinks four things are five equally wrong with him who thinks they are a thousand. If then they are not equally wrong, obviously one is less wrong and therefore more right. If then that which has more of any quality is nearer the norm, there must be some truth to which the more true is nearer. And even if there is not, still there is already something better

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founded and liker the truth, and we shall have got rid of the unqualified doctrine which would prevent us from determining anything in our thought. Chapter 5 From the same opinion proceeds the doctrine of Protagoras, and both doctrines must be alike true or alike untrue. For on the one hand, if all opinions and appearances are true, all statements must be at the same time true and false. For many men hold beliefs in which they conflict with one another, and think those mistaken who have not the same opinions as themselves; so that the same thing must both be and not be. And on the other hand, if this is so, all opinions must be true; for those who are mistaken and those who are right are opposed to one another in their opinions; if, then, reality is such as the view in question supposes, all will be right in their beliefs. Evidently, then, both doctrines proceed from the same way of thinking. But the same method of discussion must not be used with all opponents; for some need persuasion, and others compulsion. Those who have been driven to this position by difficulties in their thinking can easily be cured of their ignorance; for it is not their expressed argument but their thought that one has to meet. But those who argue for the sake of argument can be cured only by refuting the argument as expressed in speech and in words. Those who really feel the difficulties have been led to this opinion by observation of the sensible world. (1) They think that contradictories or contraries are true at the same time, because they see contraries coming into existence out of the same thing. If, then, that which is not cannot come to be, the thing must have existed before as both contraries alike, as Anaxagoras says all is mixed in all, and Democritus too; for he says the void and the full exist alike in every part, and yet one of these is being, and the other nonbeing. To those, then, whose belief rests on these grounds, we shall say that in a sense they speak rightly and in a sense they err. For ‘that which is’ has two meanings, so that in some sense a thing can come to be out of that which is not, while in some sense it cannot, and the same thing can at the same time be in being and not in being—but not in the same respect. For the same thing can be potentially at the same time two contraries, but it cannot actually. And again we shall ask them to believe that among existing things there is also another kind of substance to which neither movement nor destruction nor generation at all belongs. And (2) similarly some have inferred from observation of the sensible world the truth of appearances. For they think that the truth should not be

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determined by the large or small number of those who hold a belief, and that the same thing is thought sweet by some when they taste it, and bitter by others, so that if all were ill or all were mad, and only two or three were well or sane, these would be thought ill and mad, and not the others. And again, they say that many of the other animals receive impressions contrary to ours; and that even to the senses of each individual, things do not always seem the same. Which, then, of these impressions are true and which are false is not obvious; for the one set is no more true than the other, but both are alike. And this is why Democritus, at any rate, says that either there is no truth or to us at least it is not evident. And in general it is because these thinkers suppose knowledge to be sensation, and this to be a physical alteration, that they say that what appears to our senses must be true for it is for these reasons that both Empedocles and Democritus and, one may almost say, all the others have fallen victims to opinions of this sort. For Empedocles says that when men change their condition they change their knowledge; For wisdom increases in men according to what is before them. And elsewhere he says that So far as their nature changed, so far to them always Came changed thoughts into mind. And Parmenides also expresses himself in the same way: For as at each time the much-bent limbs are composed, So is the mind of men; for in each and all men ’Tis one thing thinks—the substance of their limbs: For that of which there is more is thought. A saying of Anaxagoras to some of his friends is also related—that things would be for them such as they supposed them to be. And they say that Homer also evidently had this opinion, because he made Hector, when he was unconscious from the blow, lie ‘thinking other thoughts’—which implies that even those who are bereft of thought have thoughts, though not the same thoughts. Evidently, then, if both are forms of knowledge, the real things also are at the same time ‘both so and not so’. And it is in this direction that the consequences are most difficult. For if those who have seen

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most of such truth as is possible for us (and these are those who seek and love it most)—if these have such opinions and express these views about the truth, is it not natural that beginners in philosophy should lose heart? For to seek the truth would be to follow flying game. But the reason why these thinkers held this opinion is that while they were inquiring into the truth of that which is, they thought ‘that which is’ was identical with the sensible world; in this, however, there is largely present the nature of the indeterminate—of that which exists in the peculiar sense which we have explained; and therefore, while they speak plausibly, they do not say what is true (for it is fitting to put the matter so rather than as Epicharmus put it against Xenophanes). And again, because they saw that all this world of nature is in movement, and that about that which changes no true statement can be made, they said that of course, regarding that which everywhere in every respect is changing, nothing could truly be affirmed. It was this belief that blossomed into the most extreme of the views above mentioned, that of the professed Heracliteans, such as was held by Cratylus, who finally did not think it right to say anything but only moved his finger, and criticized Heraclitus for saying that it is impossible to step twice into the same river; for he thought one could not do it even once. But we shall say in answer to this argument also, that while there is some justification for their thinking that the changing, when it is changing, does not exist, yet it is after all disputable; for that which is losing a quality has something of that which is being lost, and of that which is coming to be, something must already be. And in general if a thing is perishing, there will be present something that exists; and if a thing is coming to be, there must be something from which it comes to be and something by which it is generated, and this process cannot go on ad infinitum.—But, leaving these arguments, let us insist on this, that it is not the same thing to change in quantity and in quality. Grant that in quantity a thing is not constant; still it is in respect of its form that we know each thing.—And again, it would be fair to criticize those who hold this view for asserting about the whole material universe what they saw only in a minority even of sensible things. For only that region of the sensible world which immediately surrounds us is always in process of destruction and generation; but this is—so to speak—not even a fraction of the whole, so that it would have been juster to acquit this part of the world because of the other part, than to condemn the other because of this.—And again, obviously we shall make to them also the same reply that we made long ago: we must show them and persuade them that there is something whose nature is changeless. Indeed, those who say that things at

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the same time are and are not, should in consequence say that all things are at rest rather than that they are in movement; for there is nothing into which they can change, since all attributes belong already to all subjects. Regarding the nature of truth, we must maintain that not everything which appears is true; firstly, because even if sensation—at least of the object peculiar to the sense in question—is not false, still appearance is not the same as sensation.—Again, it is fair to express surprise at our opponents’ raising the question whether magnitudes are as great, and colours are of such a nature, as they appear to people at a distance, or as they appear to those close at hand, and whether they are such as they appear to the healthy or to the sick, and whether those things are heavy which appear so to the weak or those which appear so to the strong, and those things true which appear to the sleeping or to the waking. For obviously they do not think these to be open questions; no one, at least, if when he is in Libya he has fancied one night that he is in Athens, starts for the concert hall.—And again with regard to the future, as Plato says, surely the opinion of the physician and that of the ignorant man are not equally weighty, for instance, on the question whether a man will get well or not.—And again, among sensations themselves the sensation of a foreign object and that of the appropriate object, or that of a kindred object and that of the object of the sense in question, are not equally authoritative, but in the case of colour sight, not taste, has the authority, and in the case of flavour taste, not sight; each of which senses never says at the same time of the same object that it simultaneously is ‘so and not so’.—But not even at different times does one sense disagree about the quality, but only about that to which the quality belongs. I mean, for instance, that the same wine might seem, if either it or one’s body changed, at one time sweet and at another time not sweet; but at least the sweet, such as it is when it exists, has never yet changed, but one is always right about it, and that which is to be sweet is of necessity of such and such a nature. Yet all these views destroy this necessity, leaving nothing to be of necessity, as they leave no essence of anything; for the necessary cannot be in this way and also in that, so that if anything is of necessity, it will not be ‘both so and not so’. And, in general, if only the sensible exists, there would be nothing if animate things were not; for there would be no faculty of sense. Now the view that neither the sensible qualities nor the sensations would exist is doubtless true (for they are affections of the perceiver), but that the substrata which cause the sensation should not exist even apart from sensation is impossible. For sensation is surely not the sensation of itself, but there is something beyond the sensation, which must be prior to the sensation; for that which

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moves is prior in nature to that which is moved, and if they are correlative terms, this is no less the case. Chapter 6 There are, both among those who have these convictions and among those who merely profess these views, some who raise a difficulty by asking, who is to be the judge of the healthy man, and in general who is likely to judge rightly on each class of questions. But such inquiries are like puzzling over the question whether we are now asleep or awake. And all such questions have the same meaning. These people demand that a reason shall be given for everything; for they seek a starting-point, and they seek to get this by demonstration, while it is obvious from their actions that they have no conviction. But their mistake is what we have stated it to be; they seek a reason for things for which no reason can be given; for the starting-point of demonstration is not demonstration. These, then, might be easily persuaded of this truth, for it is not difficult to grasp; but those who seek merely compulsion in argument seek what is impossible; for they demand to be allowed to contradict themselves—a claim which contradicts itself from the very first.—But if not all things are relative, but some are self-existent, not everything that appears will be true; for that which appears is apparent to some one; so that he who says all things that appear are true, makes all things relative. And, therefore, those who ask for an irresistible argument, and at the same time demand to be called to account for their views, must guard themselves by saying that the truth is not that what appears exists, but that what appears exists for him to whom it appears, and when, and to the sense to which, and under the conditions under which it appears. And if they give an account of their view, but do not give it in this way, they will soon find themselves contradicting themselves. For it is possible that the same thing may appear to be honey to the sight, but not to the taste, and that, since we have two eyes, things may not appear the same to each, if their sight is unlike. For to those who for the reasons named some time ago say that what appears is true, and therefore that all things are alike false and true, for things do not appear either the same to all men or always the same to the same man, but often have contrary appearances at the same time (for touch says there are two objects when we cross our fingers, while sight says there is one),—to these we shall say ‘yes, but not to the same sense and in the same part of it and under the same conditions and at the same time’, so that what appears will be with these qual-

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ifications true. But perhaps for this reason those who argue thus not because they feel a difficulty but for the sake of argument, should say that this is not true, but true for this man. And as has been said before, they must make everything relative—relative to opinion and perception, so that nothing either has come to be or will be without some one’s first thinking so. But if things have come to be or will be, evidently not all things will be relative to opinion.—Again, if a thing is one, it is in relation to one thing or to a definite number of things; and if the same thing is both half and equal, it is not to the double that the equal is correlative. If, then, in relation to that which thinks, man and that which is thought are the same, man will not be that which thinks, but only that which is thought. And if each thing is to be relative to that which thinks, that which thinks will be relative to an infinity of specifically different things. Let this, then, suffice to show (1) that the most indisputable of all beliefs is that contradictory statements are not at the same time true, and (2) what consequences follow from the assertion that they are, and (3) why people do assert this. Now since it is impossible that contradictories should be at the same time true of the same thing, obviously contraries also cannot belong at the same time to the same thing. For of contraries, one is a privation no less than it is a contrary—and a privation of the essential nature; and privation is the denial of a predicate to a determinate genus. If, then, it is impossible to affirm and deny truly at the same time, it is also impossible that contraries should belong to a subject at the same time, unless both belong to it in particular relations, or one in a particular relation and one without qualification. REVOLUTIONS AS CHANGES OF WORLD VIEW

Thomas S. Kuhn Examining the record of past research from the vantage of contemporary historiography, the historian of science may be tempted to exclaim that when paradigms change, the world itself changes with them. Led by a new paradigm, scientists adopt new instruments and look in new places. Even more important, during revolutions scientists see new and different things when looking with familiar instruments in places they have looked before. It is rather as if the professional community had been suddenly transported to anThomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 2d ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970). Reprinted by permission of the publisher, The University of Chicago Press, Copyright © 1962, 1970.

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other planet where familiar objects are seen in a different light and are joined by unfamiliar ones as well. Of course, nothing of quite that sort does occur: there is no geographical transplantation; outside the laboratory everyday affairs usually continue as before. Nevertheless, paradigm changes do cause scientists to see the world of their research-engagement differently. In so far as their only recourse to that world is through what they see and do, we may want to say that after a revolution scientists are responding to a different world. It is as elementary prototypes for these transformations of the scientist’s world that the familiar demonstrations of a switch in visual gestalt prove so suggestive. What were ducks in the scientist’s world before the revolution are rabbits afterwards. The man who first saw the exterior of the box from above later sees its interior from below. Transformations like these, though usually more gradual and almost always irreversible, are common concomitants of scientific training. Looking at a contour map, the student sees lines on paper, the cartographer a picture of a terrain. Looking at a bubblechamber photograph, the student sees confused and broken lines, the physicist a record of familiar subnuclear events. Only after a number of such transformations of vision does the student become an inhabitant of the scientist’s world, seeing what the scientist sees and responding as the scientist does. The world that the student then enters is not, however, fixed once and for all by the nature of the environment, on the one hand, and of science, on the other. Rather, it is determined jointly by the environment and the particular normal-scientific tradition that the student has been trained to pursue. Therefore, at times of revolution, when the normal-scientific tradition changes, the scientist’s perception of his environment must be re-educated— in some familiar situations he must learn to see a new gestalt. After he has done so the world of his research will seem, here and there, incommensurable with the one he had inhabited before. That is another reason why schools guided by different paradigms are always slightly at cross-purposes. In their most usual form, of course, gestalt experiments illustrate only the nature of perceptual transformations. They tell us nothing about the role of paradigms or of previously assimilated experience in the process of perception. But on that point there is a rich body of psychological literature, much of it stemming from the pioneering work of the Hanover Institute. An experimental subject who puts on goggles fitted with inverting lenses initially sees the entire world upside down. At the start his perceptual apparatus functions as it had been trained to function in the absence of the goggles, and the result is extreme disorientation, an acute personal crisis. But after the

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subject has begun to learn to deal with his new world, his entire visual field flips over, usually after an intervening period in which vision is simply confused. Thereafter, objects are again seen as they had been before the goggles were put on. The assimilation of a previously anomalous visual field has reacted upon and changed the field itself.1 Literally as well as metaphorically, the man accustomed to inverting lenses has undergone a revolutionary transformation of vision. The subjects of the anomalous playing-card experiment discussed in Section VI experienced a quite similar transformation. Until taught by prolonged exposure that the universe contained anomalous cards, they saw only the types of cards for which previous experience had equipped them. Yet once experience had provided the requisite additional categories, they were able to see all anomalous cards on the first inspection long enough to permit any identification at all. Still other experiments demonstrate that the perceived size, color, and so on, of experimentally displayed objects also varies with the subject’s previous training and experience.2 Surveying the rich experimental literature from which these examples are drawn makes one suspect that something like a paradigm is prerequisite to perception itself. What a man sees depends both upon what he looks at and also upon what his previous visual-conceptual experience has taught him to see. In the absence of such training there can only be, in William James’s phrase, “a bloomin’ buzzin’ confusion.” In recent years several of those concerned with the history of science have found the sorts of experiments described above immensely suggestive. N. R. Hanson, in particular, has used gestalt demonstrations to elaborate some of the same consequences of scientific belief that concern me here.3 Other colleagues have repeatedly noted that history of science would make better and more coherent sense if one could suppose that scientists occasionally experienced shifts of perception like those described above. Yet, though psychological experiments are suggestive, they cannot, in the nature of the case, be more than that. They do display characteristics of perception 1. The original experiments were by George M. Stratton, “Vision without Inversion of the Retinal Image,” Psychological Review, IV (1897), 341–60, 463–81. A more up-to-date review is provided by Harvey A. Carr, An Introduction to Space Perception (New York, 1935), pp. 18–57. 2. For examples, see Albert H. Hastorf, “The Influence of Suggestion on the Relationship between Stimulus Size and Perceived Distance,” Journal of Psychology, XXIX (1950), 195, 217; and Jerome S. Bruner, Leo Postman, and John Rodrigues, “Expectations and the Perception of Color,” American Journal of Psychology, LXIV (1951), 216–27. 3. N. R. Hanson, Patterns of Discovery (Cambridge, 1958), chap. i.

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that could be central to scientific development, but they do not demonstrate that the careful and controlled observation exercised by the research scientist at all partakes of those characteristics. Furthermore, the very nature of these experiments makes any direct demonstration of that point impossible. If historical example is to make these psychological experiments seem relevant, we must first notice the sorts of evidence that we may and may not expect history to provide. The subject of a gestalt demonstration knows that his perception has shifted because he can make it shift back and forth repeatedly while he holds the same book or piece of paper in his hands. Aware that nothing in his environment has changed, he directs his attention increasingly not to the figure (duck or rabbit) but to the lines on the paper he is looking at. Ultimately he may even learn to see those lines without seeing either of the figures, and he may then say (what he could not legitimately have said earlier) that it is these lines that he really sees but that he sees them alternately as a duck and as a rabbit. By the same token, the subject of the anomalous card experiment knows (or, more accurately, can be persuaded) that his perception must have shifted because an external authority, the experimenter, assures him that regardless of what he saw, he was looking at a black five of hearts all the time. In both these cases, as in all similar psychological experiments, the effectiveness of the demonstration depends upon its being analyzable in this way. Unless there were an external standard with respect to which a switch of vision could be demonstrated, no conclusion about alternate perceptual possibilities could be drawn. With scientific observation, however, the situation is exactly reversed. The scientist can have no recourse above or beyond what he sees with his eyes and instruments. If there were some higher authority by recourse to which his vision might be shown to have shifted, then that authority would itself become the source of his data, and the behavior of his vision would become a source of problems (as that of the experimental subject is for the psychologist). The same sorts of problems would arise if the scientist could switch back and forth like the subject of the gestalt experiments. The period during which light was “sometimes a wave and sometimes a particle” was a period of crisis—a period when something was wrong—and it ended only with the development of wave mechanics and the realization that light was a self-consistent entity different from both waves and particles. In the sciences, therefore, if perceptual switches accompany paradigm changes, we may not expect scientists to attest to these changes directly. Looking at the moon, the convert to Copernicanism does not say, “I used to see a planet, but now I see a satellite.” That

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locution would imply a sense in which the Ptolemaic system had once been correct. Instead, a convert to the new astronomy says, “I once took the moon to be (or saw the moon as) a planet, but I was mistaken.” That sort of statement does recur in the aftermath of scientific revolutions. If it ordinarily disguises a shift of scientific vision or some other mental transformation with the same effect, we may not expect direct testimony about that shift. Rather we must look for indirect and behavioral evidence that the scientist with a new paradigm sees differently from the way he had seen before. Let us then return to the data and ask what sorts of transformations in the scientist’s world the historian who believes in such changes can discover. Sir William Herschel’s discovery of Uranus provides a first example and one that closely parallels the anomalous card experiment. On at least seventeen different occasions between 1690 and 1781, a number of astronomers, including several of Europe’s most eminent observers, had seen a star in positions that we now suppose must have been occupied at the time by Uranus. One of the best observers in this group had actually seen the star on four successive nights in 1769 without noting the motion that could have suggested another identification. Herschel, when he first observed the same object twelve years later, did so with a much improved telescope of his own manufacture. As a result, he was able to notice an apparent disk-size that was at least unusual for stars. Something was awry, and he therefore postponed identification pending further scrutiny. That scrutiny disclosed Uranus’ motion among the stars, and Herschel therefore announced that he had seen a new comet! Only several months later, after fruitless attempts to fit the observed motion to a cometary orbit, did Lexell suggest that the orbit was probably planetary.4 When that suggestion was accepted, there were several fewer stars and one more planet in the world of the professional astronomer. A celestial body that had been observed off and on for almost a century was seen differently after 1781 because, like an anomalous playing card, it could no longer be fitted to the perceptual categories (star or comet) provided by the paradigm that had previously prevailed. The shift of vision that enabled astronomers to see Uranus, the planet, does not, however, seem to have affected only the perception of that previously observed object. Its consequences were more far-reaching. Probably, though the evidence is equivocal, the minor paradigm change forced by Herschel helped to prepare astronomers for the rapid discovery, after 1801, of the numerous minor planets or asteroids. Because of their small size, these 4. Peter Doig, A Concise History of Astronomy (London, 1950), pp. 115–16.

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did not display the anomalous magnification that had alerted Herschel. Nevertheless, astronomers prepared to find additional planets were able, with standard instruments, to identify twenty of them in the first fifty years of the nineteenth century.5 The history of astronomy provides many other examples of paradigm induced changes in scientific perception, some of them even less equivocal. Can it conceivably be an accident, for example, that Western astronomers first saw change in the previously immutable heavens during the half-century after Copernicus’ new paradigm was first proposed? The Chinese, whose cosmological beliefs did not preclude celestial change, had recorded the appearance of many new stars in the heavens at a much earlier date. Also, even without the aid of a telescope, the Chinese had systematically recorded the appearance of sunspots centuries before these were seen by Galileo and his contemporaries.6 Nor were sunspots and a new star the only examples of celestial change to emerge in the heavens of Western astronomy immediately after Copernicus. Using traditional instruments, some as simple as a piece of thread, late sixteenth-century astronomers repeatedly discovered that comets wandered at will through the space previously reserved for the immutable planets and stars.7 The very ease and rapidity with which astronomers saw new things when looking at old objects with old instruments may make us wish to say that, after Copernicus, astronomers lived in a different world. In any case, their research responded as though that were the case. The preceding examples are selected from astronomy because reports of celestial observation are frequently delivered in a vocabulary consisting of relatively pure observation terms. Only in such reports can we hope to find anything like a full parallelism between the observations of scientists and those of the psychologist’s experimental subjects. But we need not insist on so full a parallelism, and we have much to gain by relaxing our standard. If we can be content with the everyday use of the verb ‘to see,’ we may quickly recognize that we have already encountered many other examples of the shifts in scientific perception that accompany paradigm change. The extended use of ‘perception’ and of ‘seeing’ will shortly require explicit defense, but let me first illustrate its application in practice. 5. Rudolph Wolf, Geschichte der Astronomie (Munich, 1877), pp. 513–15, 683–93. Notice particularly how difficult Wolf’s account makes it to explain these discoveries as a consequence of Bode’s Law. 6. Joseph Needham, Science and Civilization in China, III (Cambridge, 1959), 423–29, 434–36. 7. T. S. Kuhn, The Copernican Revolution (Cambridge, Mass., 1957), pp. 206–9.

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Look again for a moment at two of our previous examples from the history of electricity. During the seventeenth century, when their research was guided by one or another effluvium theory, electricians repeatedly saw chaff particles rebound from, or fall off, the electrified bodies that had attracted them. At least that is what seventeenth-century observers said they saw, and we have no more reason to doubt their reports of perception than our own. Placed before the same apparatus, a modern observer would see electrostatic repulsion (rather than mechanical or gravitational rebounding), but historically, with one universally ignored exception, electrostatic repulsion was not seen as such until Hauksbee’s large-scale apparatus had greatly magnified its effects. Repulsion after contact electrification was, however, only one of many new repulsive effects that Hauksbee saw. Through his researches, rather as in a gestalt switch, repulsion suddenly became the fundamental manifestation of electrification, and it was then attraction that needed to be explained.8 The electrical phenomena visible in the early eighteenth century were both subtler and more varied than those seen by observers in the seventeenth century. Or again, after the assimilation of Franklin’s paradigm, the electrician looking at a Leyden jar saw something different from what he had seen before. The device had become a condenser, for which neither the jar shape nor glass was required. Instead, the two conducting coatings—one of which had been no part of the original device— emerged to prominence. As both written discussions and pictorial representations gradually attest, two metal plates with a non-conductor between them had become the prototype for the class.9 Simultaneously, other inductive effects received new descriptions, and still others were noted for the first time. Shifts of this sort are not restricted to astronomy and electricity. We have already remarked some of the similar transformations of vision that can be drawn from the history of chemistry. Lavoisier, we said, saw oxygen where Priestley had seen dephlogisticated air and where others had seen nothing at all. In learning to see oxygen, however, Lavoisier also had to change his view of many other more familiar substances. He had, for example, to see a compound ore where Priestley and his contemporaries had seen an elementary earth, and there were other such changes besides. At the very least, as a result of discovering oxygen, Lavoisier saw nature differently. And in the absence of some recourse to that hypothetical fixed nature that he “saw dif8. Duane Roller and Duane H. D. Roller, The Development of the Concept of Electric Charge (Cambridge, Mass., 1954), pp. 21–29. 9. [Kuhn refers the reader here to Section VII. Eds.]

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ferently,” the principle of economy will urge us to say that after discovering oxygen Lavoisier worked in a different world. I shall inquire in a moment about the possibility of avoiding this strange locution, but first we require an additional example of its use, this one deriving from one of the best known parts of the work of Galileo. Since remote antiquity most people have seen one or another heavy body swinging back and forth on a string or chain until it finally comes to rest. To the Aristotelians, who believed that a heavy body is moved by its own nature from a higher position to a state of natural rest at a lower one, the swinging body was simply falling with difficulty. Constrained by the chain, it could achieve rest at its low point only after a tortuous motion and a considerable time. Galileo, on the other hand, looking at the swinging body, saw a pendulum, a body that almost succeeded in repeating the same motion over and over again ad infinitum. And having seen that much, Galileo observed other properties of the pendulum as well and constructed many of the most significant and original parts of his new dynamics around them. From the properties of the pendulum, for example, Galileo derived his only full and sound arguments for the independence of weight and rate of fall, as well as for the relationship between vertical height and terminal velocity of motions down inclined planes.10 All these natural phenomena he saw differently from the way they had been seen before. Why did that shift of vision occur? Through Galileo’s individual genius, of course. But note that genius does not here manifest itself in more accurate or objective observation of the swinging body. Descriptively, the Aristotelian perception is just as accurate. When Galileo reported that the pendulum’s period was independent of amplitude for amplitudes as great as 90°, his view of the pendulum led him to see far more regularity than we can now discover there.11 Rather, what seems to have been involved was the exploitation by genius of perceptual possibilities made available by a medieval paradigm shift. Galileo was not raised completely as an Aristotelian. On the contrary, he was trained to analyze motions in terms of the impetus theory, a late medieval paradigm which held that the continuing motion of a heavy body is due to an internal power implanted in it by the projector that initiated its motion. Jean Buridan and Nicole Oresme, the fourteenth-century scholastics who brought the impetus theory to its most perfect formulations, are the first men known to have seen in oscillatory motions any part of what Galileo saw 10. Galileo Galilei, Dialogues concerning Two New Sciences, trans. H. Crew and A. de Salvio (Evanston, Ill., 1946), pp. 80–81, 162–66. 11. Ibid., pp. 91–94, 244.

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there. Buridan describes the motion of a vibrating string as one in which impetus is first implanted when the string is struck; the impetus is next consumed in displacing the string against the resistance of its tension; tension then carries the string back, implanting increasing impetus until the midpoint of motion is reached; after that the impetus displaces the string in the opposite direction, again against the string’s tension, and so on in a symmetric process that may continue indefinitely. Later in the century Oresme sketched a similar analysis of the swinging stone in what now appears as the first discussion of a pendulum.12 His view is clearly very close to the one with which Galileo first approached the pendulum. At least in Oresme’s case, and almost certainly in Galileo’s as well, it was a view made possible by the transition from the original Aristotelian to the scholastic impetus paradigm for motion. Until that scholastic paradigm was invented, there were no pendulums, but only swinging stones, for the scientist to see. Pendulums were brought into existence by something very like a paradigm-induced gestalt switch. Do we, however, really need to describe what separates Galileo from Aristotle, or Lavoisier from Priestley, as a transformation of vision? Did these men really see different things when looking at the same sorts of objects? Is there any legitimate sense in which we can say that they pursued their research in different worlds? Those questions can no longer be postponed, for there is obviously another and far more usual way to describe all of the historical examples outlined above. Many readers will surely want to say that what changes with a paradigm is only the scientist’s interpretation of observations that themselves are fixed once and for all by the nature of the environment and of the perceptual apparatus. On this view, Priestley and Lavoisier both saw oxygen, but they interpreted their observations differently; Aristotle and Galileo both saw pendulums, but they differed in their interpretations of what they both had seen. Let me say at once that this very usual view of what occurs when scientists change their minds about fundamental matters can be neither all wrong nor a mere mistake. Rather it is an essential part of a philosophical paradigm initiated by Descartes and developed at the same time as Newtonian dynamics. That paradigm has served both science and philosophy well. Its exploitation, like that of dynamics itself, has been fruitful of a fundamental understanding that perhaps could not have been achieved in another way. But as the ex12. M. Clagett, The Science of Mechanics in the Middle Ages (Madison, Wis., 1959), pp. 537–38, 570.

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ample of Newtonian dynamics also indicates, even the most striking past success provides no guarantee that crisis can be indefinitely postponed. Today research in parts of philosophy, psychology, linguistics, and even art history, all converge to suggest that the traditional paradigm is somehow askew. That failure to fit is also made increasingly apparent by the historical study of science to which most of our attention is necessarily directed here. None of these crisis-promoting subjects has yet produced a viable alternate to the traditional epistemological paradigm, but they do begin to suggest what some of that paradigm’s characteristics will be. I am, for example, acutely aware of the difficulties created by saying that when Aristotle and Galileo looked at swinging stones, the first saw constrained fall, the second a pendulum. The same difficulties are presented in an even more fundamental form by the opening sentences of this section: though the world does not change with a change of paradigm, the scientist afterward works in a different world. Nevertheless, I am convinced that we must learn to make sense of statements that at least resemble these. What occurs during a scientific revolution is not fully reducible to a reinterpretation of individual and stable data. In the first place, the data are not unequivocally stable A pendulum is not a falling stone, nor is oxygen dephlogisticated air. Consequently, the data that scientists collect from these diverse objects are, as we shall shortly see, themselves different. More important, the process by which either the individual or the community makes the transition from constrained fall to the pendulum or from dephlogisticated air to oxygen is not one that resembles interpretation. How could it do so in the absence of fixed data for the scientist to interpret? Rather than being an interpreter, the scientist who embraces a new paradigm is like the man wearing inverting lenses. Confronting the same constellation of objects as before and knowing that he does so, he nevertheless finds them transformed through and through in many of their details. None of these remarks is intended to indicate that scientists do not characteristically interpret observations and data. On the contrary, Galileo interpreted observations on the pendulum, Aristotle observations on falling stones, Musschenbroek observations on a charge-filled bottle, and Franklin observations on a condenser. But each of these interpretations presupposed a paradigm. They were parts of normal science, an enterprise that, as we have already seen, aims to refine, extend, and articulate a paradigm that is already in existence. Section III provided many examples in which interpretation played a central role. Those examples typify the overwhelming majority of research. In each of them the scientist, by virtue of an accepted paradigm, knew what a datum was, what instruments might be used to retrieve it, and what concepts were relevant to its inter-

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pretation. Given a paradigm, interpretation of data is central to the enterprise that explores it. But that interpretive enterprise—and this was the burden of the paragraph before last—can only articulate a paradigm, not correct it. Paradigms are not corrigible by normal science at all. Instead, as we have already seen, normal science ultimately leads only to the recognition of anomalies and to crises. And these are terminated, not by deliberation and interpretation, but by a relatively sudden and unstructured event like the gestalt switch. Scientists then often speak of the “scales falling from the eyes” or of the “lightning flash” that “inundates” a previously obscure puzzle, enabling its components to be seen in a new way that for the first time permits its solution. On other occasions the relevant illumination comes in sleep.13 No ordinary sense of the term ‘interpretation’ fits these flashes of intuition through which a new paradigm is born. Though such intuitions depend upon the experience, both anomalous and congruent, gained with the old paradigm, they are not logically or piecemeal linked to particular items of that experience as an interpretation would be. Instead, they gather up large portions of that experience and transform them to the rather different bundle of experience that will thereafter be linked piecemeal to the new paradigm but not to the old. To learn more about what these differences in experience can be, return for a moment to Aristotle, Galileo, and the pendulum. What data did the interaction of their different paradigms and their common environment make accessible to each of them? Seeing constrained fall, the Aristotelian would measure (or at least discuss—the Aristotelian seldom measured) the weight of the stone, the vertical height to which it had been raised, and the time required for it to achieve rest. Together with the resistance of the medium, these were the conceptual categories deployed by Aristotelian science when dealing with a falling body.14 Normal research guided by them could not have produced the laws that Galileo discovered. It could only—and by another route it did—lead to the series of crises from which Galileo’s view of the swinging stone emerged. As a result of those crises and of other intellectual changes besides, Galileo saw the swinging stone quite differently. Archimedes’ work on floating bodies made the medium non-essential; the impetus theory rendered the motion symmetrical and enduring; and Neo13. [Jacques] Hadamard, Subconscient intuition, et logique dans la recherche scientifique (Conférence faite au Palais de la Découverte le 8 Décembre 1945 [Alençon, n.d.]), pp. 7–8. A much fuller account, though one exclusively restricted to mathematical innovations, is the same author’s The Psychology of Invention in the Mathematical Field (Princeton, 1949). 14. T. S. Kuhn, “A Function for Thought Experiments,” in Mélanges Alexandre Koyré, ed. R. Taton and I. B. Cohen, to be published by Hermann (Paris) in 1963.

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platonism directed Galileo’s attention to the motion’s circular form.15 He therefore measured only weight, radius, angular displacement, and time per swing, which were precisely the data that could be interpreted to yield Galileo’s laws for the pendulum. In the event, interpretation proved almost unnecessary. Given Galileo’s paradigms, pendulum-like regularities were very nearly accessible to inspection. How else are we to account for Galileo’s discovery that the bob’s period is entirely independent of amplitude, a discovery that the normal science stemming from Galileo had to eradicate and that we are quite unable to document today. Regularities that could not have existed for an Aristotelian (and that are, in fact, nowhere precisely exemplified by nature) were consequences of immediate experience for the man who saw the swinging stone as Galileo did. Perhaps that example is too fanciful since the Aristotelians recorded no discussions of swinging stones. On their paradigm it was an extraordinarily complex phenomenon. But the Aristotelians did discuss the simpler case, stones falling without uncommon constraints, and the same differences of vision are apparent there. Contemplating a falling stone, Aristotle saw a change of state rather than a process. For him the relevant measures of a motion were therefore total distance covered and total time elapsed, parameters which yield what we should now call not speed but average speed.16 Similarly, because the stone was impelled by its nature to reach its final resting point, Aristotle saw the relevant distance parameter at any instant during the motion as the distance to the final end point rather than as that from the origin of motion.17 Those conceptual parameters underlie and give sense to most of his well-known “laws of motion.” Partly through the impetus paradigm, however, and partly through a doctrine known as the latitude of forms, scholastic criticism changed this way of viewing motion. A stone moved by impetus gained more and more of it while receding from its starting point; distance from rather than distance to therefore became the relevant parameter. In addition, Aristotle’s notion of speed was bifurcated by the scholastics into concepts that soon after Galileo became our average speed and instantaneous speed. But when seen through the paradigm of which these conceptions were a part, the falling stone, like the pendulum, exhibited its governing laws almost on inspection. Galileo was not one of the first men to suggest that stones fall with a uniformly accelerated motion.18 Furthermore, he had developed his theorem on this subject together with many of its consequences before he experi15. A. Koyré, Etudes Galiléennes (Paris, 1939), I, 46–51; and “Galileo and Plato,” Journal of the History of Ideas, IV (1943): 400–428. 16. Kuhn, “A Function for Thought Experiments,” in Mélanges Alexandre Koyré. 17. Koyré, Etudes . . . , II, 7–11.

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mented with an inclined plane. That theorem was another one of the network of new regularities accessible to genius in the world determined jointly by nature and by the paradigms upon which Galileo and his contemporaries had been raised. Living in that world, Galileo could still, when he chose, explain why Aristotle had seen what he did. Nevertheless, the immediate content of Galileo’s experience with falling stones was not what Aristotle’s had been. It is, of course, by no means clear that we need be so concerned with “immediate experience”—that is, with the perceptual features that a paradigm so highlights that they surrender their regularities almost upon inspection. Those features must obviously change with the scientist’s commitments to paradigms, but they are far from what we ordinarily have in mind when we speak of the raw data or the brute experience from which scientific research is reputed to proceed. Perhaps immediate experience should be set aside as fluid, and we should discuss instead the concrete operations and measurements that the scientist performs in his laboratory. Or perhaps the analysis should be carried further still from the immediately given. It might, for example, be conducted in terms of some neutral observation-language, perhaps one designed to conform to the retinal imprints that mediate what the scientist sees. Only in one of these ways can we hope to retrieve a realm in which experience is again stable once and for all—in which the pendulum and constrained fall are not different perceptions but rather different interpretations of the unequivocal data provided by observation of a swinging stone. But is sensory experience fixed and neutral? Are theories simply manmade interpretations of given data? The epistemological viewpoint that has most often guided Western philosophy for three centuries dictates an immediate and unequivocal, Yes! In the absence of a developed alternative, I find it impossible to relinquish entirely that viewpoint. Yet it no longer functions effectively, and the attempts to make it do so through the introduction of a neutral language of observations now seem to me hopeless. The operations and measurements that a scientist undertakes in the laboratory are not “the given” of experience but rather “the collected with difficulty.” They are not what the scientist sees—at least not before his research is well advanced and his attention focused. Rather, they are concrete indices to the content of more elementary perceptions, and as such they are selected for the close scrutiny of normal research only because they promise opportunity for the fruitful elaboration of an accepted paradigm. Far more clearly than the immediate experience from which they in part derive, operations and measurements are paradigm-determined. Science does not deal in all 18. Clagett, op. cit., chaps. iv, vi, and ix.

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possible laboratory manipulations. Instead, it selects those relevant to the juxtaposition of a paradigm with the immediate experience that that paradigm has partially determined. As a result, scientists with different paradigms engage in different concrete laboratory manipulations. The measurements to be performed on a pendulum are not the ones relevant to a case of constrained fall. Nor are the operations relevant for the elucidation of oxygen’s properties uniformly the same as those required when investigating the characteristics of dephlogisticated air. As for a pure observation-language, perhaps one will yet be devised. But three centuries after Descartes our hope for such an eventuality still depends exclusively upon a theory of perception and of the mind. And modern psychological experimentation is rapidly proliferating phenomena with which that theory can scarcely deal. The duck-rabbit shows that two men with the same retinal impressions can see different things; the inverting lenses show that two men with different retinal impressions can see the same thing. Psychology supplies a great deal of other evidence to the same effect, and the doubts that derive from it are readily reinforced by the history of attempts to exhibit an actual language of observation. No current attempt to achieve that end has yet come close to a generally applicable language of pure percepts. And those attempts that come closest share one characteristic that strongly reinforces several of this essay’s main theses. From the start they presuppose a paradigm, taken either from a current scientific theory or from some fraction of everyday discourse, and they then try to eliminate from it all non-logical and non-perceptual terms. In a few realms of discourse this effort has been carried very far and with fascinating results. There can be no question that efforts of this sort are worth pursuing. But their result is a language that—like those employed in the sciences—embodies a host of expectations about nature and fails to function the moment these expectations are violated. Nelson Goodman makes exactly this point in describing the aims of his Structure of Appearance: “It is fortunate that nothing more [than phenomena known to exist] is in question; for the notion of ‘possible’ cases, of cases that do not exist but might have existed, is far from clear.”19 No lan19. N. Goodman, The Structure of Appearance (Cambridge, Mass., 1951), pp. 4–5. The passage is worth quoting more extensively: “If all and only those residents of Wilmington in 1947 that weigh between 175 and 180 pounds have red hair, then ‘red-haired 1947 resident of Wilmington’ and ‘1947 resident of Wilmington weighing between 175 and 180 pounds’ may be joined in a constructional definition. . . . The question whether there ‘might have been’ someone to whom one but not the other of these predicates would apply has no bearing . . . once we have determined that there is no such person. . . . It is fortunate that nothing more is in question; for the notion of ‘possible’ cases, of cases that do not exist but might have existed, is far from clear.”

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guage thus restricted to reporting a world fully known in advance can produce mere neutral and objective reports on “the given.” Philosophical investigation has not yet provided even a hint of what a language able to do that would be like.

Bibliography Bauman, Zygmunt. Postmodern Ethics. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1993. Dewey, John. “Experience, Knowledge and Value: A Rejoinder.” In The Philosophy of John Dewey, ed. Paul Arthur Schlipp, 2d ed. New York: Tudor Publishing, 1951. ———. Reconstruction in Philosophy. Enlarged edition. Boston: Beacon Press, 1948. Earman, John. “Carnap, Kuhn, and the Philosophy of Scientific Methodology.” In World Changes: Thomas Kuhn and the Nature of Science, ed. Paul Horwich. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1993. Foucault, Michel. Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977. Translated by Colin Gordon et al. Edited by Colin Gordon. New York: Pantheon, 1980. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. Phenomenology of Spirit. Translated by A. V. Miller. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977. Kerferd, G. B. The Sophistic Movement. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981. Kirk, G. S., J. E. Raven, and M. Schofield. The Presocratic Philosophers. 2d ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983. Lyotard, Jean-François. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Translated by Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984. MacIntyre, Alasdair. Whose Justice? Which Rationality? Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1988. Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Will to Power. Translated by Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale. Edited by Walter Kaufmann. New York: Vintage Books, 1968. Page, Carl. Philosophical Historicism and the Betrayal of First Philosophy. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995. Plato: The Collected Dialogues. Edited by Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1963. Quine, W. V. “Epistemology Naturalized.” In Ontological Relativity and Other Essays. New York and London: Columbia University Press, 1969. Rorty, Richard. “Pragmatism, Davidson, and Truth.” In Truth and Interpretation: Perspectives on the Philosophy of Donald Davidson, ed. Ernest LePore. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1993. Stachel, John. “Comments on ‘Some Logical Problems Suggested by Empirical Theories’ by Professor Dalla Chiara.” In Language, Logic and Method, ed. Robert S. Cohen and Marx W. Wartofsky. Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1983.

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2 Reference and Predication

Introduction There is no analysis of natural-language discourse that does not feature reference and predication in the context of making assertions or truth-claims. The implications of that single fact are quite extraordinary. Furthermore, the standard calculi of formal logic have always fastened on the analysis of sentences of the subject/predicate sort (“The cat is on the mat,” “The present king of France is bald,” “Men are mortal”) even where they have ventured more global models. This is already apparent in the history of logic from, say, Aristotle’s syllogistic to the development of the modern predicate calculus and its philosophy, as in the contributions of such theorists as Frege, Peirce, Russell, Wittgenstein, Carnap, Tarski, Quine, and Strawson at least. The history of modern logic has often, however innocently, conveyed the impression that logic and arithmetic are autonomous domains addressed to the formal features of “propositions,” or “numbers,” that do not belong to the natural world. There are reasons for this conjecture but hardly any compelling theory: the principal reason rests with the perceived necessity said to hold among propositions and numbers that is more than conventional or definitional. One begins to imagine that there must be a real domain (not unlike Plato’s heaven of Forms) in which such necessities obtain that gifted in-

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quirers simply discover. Nevertheless, apart from the extravagance of such conjectures, there is a well-known controversy about the relationship between sentences (said to convey ideal propositions otherwise inaccessible) and speech acts (the use of sentences, in natural-language contexts, to convey assertions, commands, questions, and the like) that threatens to jeopardize the prospects of fitting a formal canon of deductive relations to sentences isolated from speech-act use or of fitting such a canon to speech acts themselves: that is, in a way that applies the supposed formal necessity of uninterpreted logical structures to the “syntax” of interpreted sentences or speech acts. Generally, those who are sanguine about the formal mapping of the syntactic necessities of relations said to hold between sentences or propositions treat sentences as well-formed and intact apart from speech-act contexts and construe speech acts pretty well as “external” ways of operating on independent sentences. R. M. Hare, for instance, distinguishes between the “neustic” and “phrastic” elements of linguistic utterances, by which he means that a propositional element (“the door’s being closed,” say) may remain unchanged when flanked by different “operators” that govern the propriety of assigning truth-values, inviting compliant action, and the like (“please,” “is it so?” “it is so,” and the like). Those who have misgivings about proceeding thus (for a variety of reasons) treat sentences essentially as abstractions (possibly idealized) from full-blooded speech-act contexts, which are similarly construed as abstracted from the even deeper practices of human life—for instance, from the mental, existential, and historical circumstances in which speech and other practices take place. Certainly, where so-called indexicals are used, as in “It’s raining,” “I said I would accompany him,” “What he said was true,” it is impossible to assign truth-values to what is uttered (bare sentences) apart from their speech-act contexts. The most famous demonstration of this surely occurs in Strawson’s critique of Russell’s account of denotation and definite descriptions. A convenient way of putting Strawson’s point is to say that reference is never more than a dependent speech act, that we can identify reference only as embedded in a more autonomous or integral use of sentences—as in commands, questions, and assertions—but also that the meaning of sentences embedded in referential acts is a function of such acts. Denotation, which was Russell’s apparent concern, is, in contrast to reference, a matter of the use of words within sentences or within sentences that are themselves used in the speech-act way. The two distinctions— between denotation and reference and between sentence and speech act—are

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obliquely linked in that denotation signifies the function, within sentences, of designating (as by proper name, definite description, indexical, or other words) something (some denotatum) that, in a speech-act context, could also function as the referent of such discourse. Strawson compellingly argued that for sentences like “The present king of France is bald,” the very question of whether the bivalent values true and false could rightly be said to apply to that sentence depended on answering the antecedent question whether, in asserting it (in the speech-act context) on the occasion when there might be (or was) no “present king of France” to refer to (when, that is, there was no actual denotatum that the definite description picked out or could pick out referentially), it would not be more perspicuous to say that all bets were off— that truth-value assignments did not apply there (or yet). Truth-value “gaps” arise in such circumstances for reasons that cannot be determined by first examining the syntax of isolated sentences. Notice: to admit truth-value gaps in this way is to deny, effectively, the unconditional independence of bivalence, even its supposed independence from semantic and contexted considerations of truth-value assignments in general. The concession is easily defended, but its radical import is not always perceived. At stake are two questions, both of which affect the rigor and autonomy of formal logic—a fortiori, what we should mean by the necessity of deductive or conceptual relations and what we should understand the truth-bearing function of sentences to be. A great deal hangs on this that is barely glimpsed through Strawson’s challenge. You begin to see, for instance, that Aristotle’s argument in favor of first principles and First Philosophy is put at risk (see Chapter 1). But more than that, the fortunes of a vast body of philosophy would be subverted if it turned out that the allegedly necessary structures of speech, thought, causality, and reality (the so-called de re and de dicto necessities) were not altogether inflexible in each and every substantive or interpreted domain. Put less frontally: if the logical syntax of sentences cannot be read off directly from well-formed specimens, without attention to their meanings or speech-act use, then there can be no way of reliably classifying sentences (as in Aristotle’s syllogistic or the first-order predicate calculus) drawn from natural-language use. To take a case that Quine discusses, if “necessarily, 9 is greater than 5” is true, it may either be false that “necessarily, the number of planets is greater than 5” or equivocal in a way uninterpreted syntax could never decide, even if the number of planets happens (contingently) to be 9. The strategic questions are these: first, what is the relation between the logic of sentences and the logic of speech acts? and second, what is the rela-

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tion between the formal or syntactic assignment of truth-values to sentences and the bearing of actual truth and belief on the paradigms of knowledge? Clearly, what a bona fide science is will be affected by how we answer. There is, for example, a famous little paper that raises the so-called “Gettier problem,” which poses potentially insuperable difficulties for the single bestknown analytic theory of knowledge, viz., the theory that knowledge = “justified true belief” (JTB). The paper generated an unheard-of industry when it first appeared. Enthusiasts gathered from every quarter to propose related puzzles that could also not be overtaken, or to solve the stubborn ones Edmund Gettier originally posed, by offering additional formal conditions on knowledge. But what (apart from Gettier’s own view) the Gettier case really demonstrates—which was not well perceived at first—is that both its puzzles and its would-be solutions simply presumed that the very choice of a “standard” logic, a logic that did not first take into account the “epistemic” or “semantic” or “pragmatic” complications of each speech-act context (which the canonical calculi never supplied), could be counted on to yield a proper answer. The syntax of any run of sentences proves to be a function of the meaning of those sentences—however “meaning” is construed. If you take this to be confirmed, it follows both that you cannot ever tell what logical canon applies to which sentences from a mere study of surface syntax, and that the formal structure of the logic of natural-language discourse is, irreducibly, a function of the larger conditions of human life and practice (which we may not be aware of at any given moment). There you have an opening large enough to admit the most serious doubts about the autonomy, precision, and closure of any formal calculus. You cannot find much of a worry about such threats in authors like Frege and Russell; and what you find in Carnap and Tarski is more in the way of limitations than an admission of the dubious standing of the project itself. Certainly, doubts are bound to arise about would-be logical necessities and principled priorities in the work of science and philosophy—as of permitting semantics to take precedence over metaphysics, or logic over experience, or science or philosophy over the contingencies of actual history. Michael Dummett, for instance, arguing in the spirit of the autonomy of logic, offers a seemingly plausible rationale for prioritizing the work of semantics over that of metaphysics; but of course, the counterargument (offered on grounds analogous to those just trotted out) would insist that no one can demonstrate a principled disjunction between semantics and metaphysics: semantics just is metaphysics “by other means”! Further, all priorities of the sorts mentioned are signs of unearned cognitive privilege.

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It takes but a step to realize that this entire matter may be read as a manifestation of the larger contest between invariance and flux. Among the partisans of the flux—or at least among fellow travelers who have serious doubts about the autonomy of logic or the analysis of language disjoined from what we take to be true about the world and (in particular) about our social practices—there simply cannot be any prior account of reference, predication, truth, or knowledge that pretends to be timelessly true or separable from the contingencies of societal life. Fortunately for such partisans, there are a number of middle-sized quarrels that support their claim without invoking unmanageably large conjectures. If such gains stand, then the advocates of invariance will have suffered a serious setback. How great a setback would have to be determined with care, but it would certainly be a substantial one. In fact, nearly all the strategies of twentieth-century analytic philosophy would be seriously weakened—many, perhaps mortally: for instance, those favored by Positivism, the unity of science program, logical atomism (in the sense of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus), physicalism, naturalism (in the manner associated with Quine), formal semantics (as favored by Tarski and, more quarrelsomely, by Davidson), the computational modeling of the mind, generative grammar (in Chomsky’s manner), the elimination of “folk-theoretic” idioms, supervenience, and the like. Such a “setback” would amount to a remarkable gain for the advocates of flux at very little cost, since all the programs mentioned suppose that we can construct an “improved” language for the formal and empirical sciences that does not sacrifice anything of importance as far as objective truth was concerned and, at the same time, complies with the extensional constraints codified in various ways in the classic formal calculi and invoked (sometimes in rather different ways) by such figures as Frege, Russell, and Quine. Apart from what we mean in a technical way by “extensional” logic, it may already be clear that considerations bearing on reference and predication in natural-language contexts and on how we might determine what is actually true in inquiries as we now understand them probably entail concessions that will ultimately prove incompatible with the “extensional” objective. If that is so, then a vast quantity of analytic philosophy will be severely weakened at a stroke, if not irretrievably lost. You can see at once that anything that leads to inextricably entrenching logic and science and conceptual analysis in the variable practices, or in the contingent history, of human societies, or that explains, by enculturation, whatever competence in science and philosophy we acquired, militates against “extensional” pro-

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grams—such, for instance, as might side with Russell against Strawson or (more curiously) with Wittgenstein’s Tractatus against the Philosophical Investigations. The strongest evidence runs against the usual canons. In any case, the burden of the argument fairly rests with the partisans of the canon. The rule of an extensional logic may be roughly characterized as follows. Grant first that there are atomic sentences whose truth-values are independent of those of any other such sentences; grant next that such sentences are bivalently either true or false. Then imagine that all other well-formed sentences are compound or complex combinations of atomic sentences constructed in such a way that an algorithm can be provided for mechanically determining the truth-value of any such constructed sentences by consulting only the truth-values assigned their constituent atomic sentences and the purely syntactic rules governing any logical connectives (“not,” “either . . . or . . . ,” “and,” “if . . . then . . . ,” and the like), quantifiers (“existential,” “universal,” or other), and “operators” of various sorts (“necessarily,” “possibly,” “impossibly,” and others) by which all complex and compound sentences are constructed. The truth-values that then obtain are said to answer only to the uninterpreted syntactic structure of the sentences involved and their connectives and operators. Their structure is assumed to be effectively independent of speech-act contexts, mental states, the way the world is, historical enculturation, and contingent knowledge. Grant all that, and you see at once how threatening the difficulties adduced are bound to be: for they make impossible the self-appointed task of an extensional logic. The point is this: to insist that the logical constancies just called into doubt represent, or are, the very structure of the real world and/or of rational thought is to endorse a palpable form of cognitive privilege or to presume the a priori truth of certain decisive fixities. You see, therefore, how radical is the labor that calls those assumptions into question. The odd thing is that wherever reference and predication are at stake—and they are at stake everywhere—arguments favoring the flux are extraordinarily easy to sustain. Bear in mind: the entire argument that has been gathering here is subversive of the “extensional” ideal of theorists like Frege, Russell, and the Wittgenstein of the Tractatus in the precise sense that the imputed extensional structure of the well-formed sentences of natural language (suitably abstracted or suitably idealized) is itself assignable only by prior reference to, is inextricably dependent on, the intensional structure of those sentences (in their own speech-act or deeper cultural contexts of use). In a word, on the argument championed here, extensional logic is an instrumental artifact of more fundamental intensional complexities. (By “intensional” is meant no more than

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the “non-extensional”; but the sense of the definition is that the formal, syntactic, uninterpreted, logical structure of sentences is a function of their meaning and use and more.) The model of reasoning being called into question is, in Frege’s terms, one that is said to capture the necessary “laws of thought” or, alternatively, the “laws of the laws of nature.” The opposing argument insists that the “application” of the would-be laws of noncontradiction, excluded middle, and identity, even the choice of bivalent truthvalues, and the like, does not arise except in semantically interpreted contexts and that, there, there is no principled disjunction between semantic and syntactic questions. Analytic philosophy has always shown a certain zeal about retiring reference. It could hardly hope to retire predication, since there seems to be no way of admitting assertions or truth-claims as such without admitting that some general predicable condition obtains: for example, even in affirming “It’s raining.” Even there, it is impossible to make sense of the assertion without supposing that, here and now, raining occurs (that is, it is raining in this part of the world, now). It’s the better part of wisdom to admit that, in natural-language discourse, reference and predication are ubiquitous and reference is not reducible to predication (or better, not reducible to predication within a quantified space). The most sustained, most ambitious effort in the twentieth century to compose a comprehensive formal logic—Russell and Whitehead’s Principia Mathematica—provides a first-order predicate calculus in which proper names and other denotative devices are to be retired in favor of predicative devices within quantified contexts. Given the intended economy (however overly sanguine), difficulties about eliminating reference and denotation are bound to threaten a heavy blow against the prospects of a thoroughly extensional logic. Now, Quine is famous for his attempt to retire reference: he does it by retiring denotation—or so it seems. In effect, if “Socrates exists” is true, then, Quine proposes, let us say (roughly), “There is something (∃x) such that it ‘socratizes.’ ” If we take “socratizing” to be a unique predicate that singles out the one we (now) identify as Socrates, then the quantified existential sentence Quine substitutes for the singular sentence we started with will obviously do—in terms of the equivalence of truth-values. The trouble is twofold, however: first, there’s no point in acknowledging reference if we do not mean to speak of a speaker’s effective ability to determine the referent of his discourse; second, Quine’s substitutional policy nowhere addresses the operative epistemic question or the underlying ontic one. If we think of “socratizing” as a general predicate (or as conveying an

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“indefinite description”), then, if it can be instantiated at all, it may be instantiated by other things as well (other than Socrates). Quine’s view is that it is in principle possible that some general predicate will single out (contingently) everything that could have been a denotatum named (say) by a “logically proper name” (a name uniquely assigned, as Russell thought possible, to everything there is). But Leibniz had already convincingly argued that as far as noncontradiction was concerned, there was no paradox in supposing that two numerically distinct things might share any set of general predicates if either instantiated them. Interestingly, Leibniz thought a benevolent God would never permit that to happen (God would have had his good reasons). But Quine can hardly claim to have earned the right to invoke Leibniz’s theology. He can rely only on noncontradiction—which is plainly unequal to the task. Max Black has given us a very pretty demonstration of the coherence of Leibniz’s conjecture (via a conjecture of Wittgenstein’s). In the Middle Ages, we may remind ourselves, the “subtlest” doctor, Duns Scotus, attempted to isolate the notion of the unique distinction of everything that exists—its “thisness” (haecceitas). He was obliged to admit that humans could not discern it, at least in mortal life! From a worldly view, however, this means that it cannot be discerned: in effect, haecceity has (or is) no quiddity (no “whatness,” no unique property), and it is incoherent, from the human point of view, to consider the conditions of discerning any such distinction, that, in principle, we cannot ourselves discern. If, however, subject/predicate sentences cannot be reinterpreted so as to retire denotation or, in the context of their assertive use, reference, then no calculus of first-order predicate logic could possibly be invariantly adequate for mapping the formal structure of such sentences. But that was precisely what the champions of the familiar calculi (Principia Mathematica, for instance) required, because failure there would spell failure with respect to the prospects of a comprehensive extensional logic. Many contemporary analytic philosophers (Putnam, Davidson) have spoken at one time or another of retiring reference, but they nowhere explain how to turn the trick—either epistemically or ontically. Reference is a puzzle, therefore. We obviously succeed at making reference, although there is no algorithm that accounts for our success. Furthermore, success in reference is “intentional” (being epistemically motivated and grounded in our beliefs and social practices). If you grant that, you subvert at a stroke the whole idea of mapping natural language extensionally (except piecemeal and dependently), for discourse about the “intentional” behaves “intensionally.” You cannot fail to see that that alone profoundly af-

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fects the better prospects of philosophy’s work. For instance, conceptual competence itself will (in some measure) be an artifact of our having internalized the contingent resources and habits of mind and action of the historical society into which we are born. If you grant that, then you are well on your way to strengthening the argument in favor of the flux. For then, there cannot be any determinate forms of necessary invariance regarding rationality, logical structure, argument, explanation, knowledge, understanding, or anything of the sort. That would be quite a gain for a modest effort. The issue hangs in the balance. The fuller explanation of reference’s success is readily supplied once we understand predication more adequately. But what we now begin to see is the incipient dismantling of the thesis that dominated analytic philosophy in the first half of the twentieth century and, in a somewhat weaker form, its central thesis down to the beginning of the twenty-first. This is not, of course, to repudiate formal logic. But it is to recover the tiresome puzzles of reference and predication that many had come to regard as more of a nuisance than an essential difficulty. We now see that they do indeed pose a challenge. For to fail to satisfy the canon’s optimism is, ineluctably, to yield in the direction of the main themes of continental philosophy, which for its own part, is often entirely indifferent to (even quite ignorant of) the import of the question. Reference cannot but be logically informal, context-bound— in a word, “Intentional” (in a sense still to be explained). It is also clear that it is impossible to individuate or identify (numerically) anything by considering only its “nature” or “essence” or general properties. The reason is this: general predicables are what several things may share if any one possesses them. There is no logical connection between numerical identity and predicative “whatness” or “thisness,” in the sense Duns Scotus considers. The question does not rely in any way on universals. In the limit, in formal terms but certainly not metaphysically, Quine’s theory is not really very far from Scotus’s, which provides a clue as to why both ultimately fail. In a word, they fail because, in their separate ways, each conflates the “logic” (or ontology) of denotation and predication. The difficulty with predication lies deeper. The issue is an absorbing one and marks the perseverating failure of philosophy from the time of Plato’s speculations to the end of the Middle Ages at least—and pretty well down to our own day. For example, the idea of “nomological necessity,” the idea of the changeless and exceptionless laws of nature (the theme of the unity of science program), is a version of the doctrine of modal invariance and, for that reason, rests on a favorable resolution of the problem of predication. Which,

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it needs to be said, it very nearly never addresses. (See Hempel.) You see, therefore, the strategic role of the issues being singled out. There is, for instance, an implicit Platonism in the unity of science program, a Platonism of changeless natures. You may wonder whether we need general predicates at all (“red,” “round,” “beloved,” “just”). Hume says “officially” (in A Treatise of Human Nature) that any change in things risks invalidating any claim to the effect that they have remained “the same”: whether, say, a boy has grown into a man (the same person) or a garment’s color has faded (but remains the same red). If Hume were right, language would be humanly impossible. Hence, Hume sensibly ignores his own official view and proceeds in his usual way to analyze a host of commonplace distinctions (insisting all the while on invoking “fiction” and “feigning” in denotative and predicative matters). Also, as an official empiricist, Hume tends to conflate questions of numerical identity and predicative similarity. Hume waves his hand, in explaining the success of natural language, by mentioning our “associative” habits of mind. He nowhere explains (he cannot, on his own theory) how “association” works in concrete cases, for that would entail conditions that he cannot admit—in particular, the real persistence of complex selves. This is not to dismiss Hume’s contributions to philosophy or to ignore the fact that he is much admired. But the plain fact is, Hume cannot secure his contribution in terms of his own systematic philosophy, and what he contributes must be secured by theories altogether contrary to his official view. This is usually what is meant by characterizing Hume as a philosophical “ironist.” There are two compelling steps involved in deciding the contest (about general predicables) between the partisans of invariance and the partisans of the flux: one confirms that we cannot apply any changeless tertium quid to the changing phenomena in which predicative similarity obtains; the other confirms that we need not do so in order to succeed in making valid predicative claims. Both are strenuously contested in the literature. The argument at the first step is startlingly brief: no one, it turns out, has the faintest idea how to put us in touch, epistemically, with those abstract “entities,” the Platonic Forms or the medieval’s Universals, by which we might confirm that we had rightly discerned a real similarity (and not one that was merely “apparent”). Extraordinary! And yet, if you read Plato carefully—the early elenctic dialogues in which, plainly, Socrates has no knowledge of the Forms, or those decisive dialogues (Parmenides, for instance) in which the whole compendium of difficulties regarding the Forms is neatly laid out, or certain late dialogues (Statesman, for instance) in which it is ad-

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mitted that we must carry on philosophically, as well as practically, without the Forms at all—then, literally, there is nothing to indicate that Plato ever claimed to know the Forms or to have shown us how to acquire or apply such knowledge in the world of change. No one has succeeded, where Plato has failed. It’s worth remarking that Russell was unusually unguarded in his advocacy of Platonism in predicative matters. He simply announces—without argument, without the sense of needing an argument—that when I see two distinct “reds” (seeing that this is red and that that is red), I must be seeing (I must, “there,” be directly “acquainted” with, perceptually) REDNESS: the very Universal! But Russell does not stop to consider that, in affirming the resemblance between any pair of things, I have not yet specified the determinate respect (the tertium) in virtue of which that similarity implicates a Universal that could function in a cognitive or criterial way when applied to some chance third thing. There’s the difficulty. No doubt Plato gives us a sketch (Symposium, Phaedrus, Republic) of what it would be like to have such knowledge (viewed from a deprived vantage); but apart from dubious claims about Plato’s “unwritten metaphysics,” there is nothing firmer (in Plato) in an epistemic sense—and there is nothing firmer about Universals in the whole library of philosophy. That comes as a surprise. Hence, if we can show (see Chapter 1) that it is indemonstrable that reality necessarily possesses an invariant nature, then nothing is seriously amiss if it should turn out that we don’t even know how to vouchsafe such knowledge or its application to the changing world. The theory holds that there (must) exist an entire array of unchanging abstract entities (the Forms or Universals or fixed concepts) to which real similarities (including the “appearances” of what is “real”) conform and by reference to which (somehow) we discern such similarities. That is why the Forms are said to be tertia: they mediate between the real similarities of given predicables and our judgments that apparent similarities are, or implicate, such real similarities (or more deeply, what makes such similarities possible). Furthermore, the doctrine is refined, by Aristotle (in De Anima), to such a point that universal predicative structures are said to inhere in things as their fixed essences and that the mind is natively endowed to intuit (by nous: rational intuition) such structures directly. It takes but a step to see that if Quine had really believed that the denotative name “Socrates” could be replaced effectively by the predicate “socratizing,” then he would have committed himself to a very strong “realist” sense of predicative similarity. He nowhere makes the case, and it goes contrary to his “nominalist” bent. In

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any case, he could not have agreed with Russell. There’s a great mystery there, not merely for Quine but for the whole of philosophy. For if predication cannot be retired and if it rests on the use of general predicables, we see that we cannot do without an account of how predication succeeds. But if “realism” fails (because we are never in touch with the Forms or Universals) and if “nominalism” fails (because it does not explain generality in epistemic terms), then philosophy risks being deprived of an essential part of its legitimative powers. That cannot be conceded without a struggle; and a proper “struggle,” as it turns out, is equal to the task. This brings us to the second step. For Quine would be entirely within his rights to claim that, for his own purpose, he need not embrace the theory of real Universals in order to champion the admissibility of “real generals.” The idea of “real generals,” the idea that different particular things may exhibit the same general attribute, does not as such entail either (a) the necessarily fixed nature of actual things or (b) the independent existence of tertia like the Platonic Forms or Universals. We do require, nevertheless, an explanation of how true predicative claims obtain. Quine does not pursue the question. The puzzle and its solution go very deep. Imagine (counterfactually) that the “properties” of any two things are dissimilar and that nothing that changes possesses the “properties” it “had” in earlier phases of that process. Predicative language—which is to say, natural language—would instantly collapse. That is the upshot of Hume’s “official” position. We cannot, it seems, avoid the use of general predicates or their use under discernible change and difference. If, also, we hold, as in the sciences, that we have made true discoveries about the physical world, then we are bound to admit “real generals” (the phrase is Peirce’s), no matter how we explain the fact. Nevertheless, there is a conceptual “test” that all candidate theories must address, namely, how to explain how, after having introduced a general predicate and its instantiating exemplars, we go on to apply it correctly to new cases. If I show you what I mean by “red” and then introduce you to some hitherto unknown shade of lipstick, how do you know that “red” rightly extends to that? The classic answer had been that you invoke the right Universal (“RED”: some universale ante rem, or post rem, or in re) by which you discern, in particular things, the relevant similarity you claim to find. (That is Russell’s view.) If you insist that the “Universal” is in the mind—either “really” there or agreed to by human convention (as by introducing general terms “for a purpose”), then you are still a “realist” (regarding Universals) in spite of yourself. That is the reductio of the “nominalist” position, also of the “conceptualist” (which leans in the nominalist’s direction). Strictly speak-

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ing, nominalists hold that there are no real similarities extending to indefinitely many things (beyond any two items), and that the similarity between any two items may be trivially affirmed. Here, it makes no difference, epistemically, whether “similarities” are (discerned) in the world or imposed on the world by a generalizing mind; or alternatively, whether they are “located” perceptually or in thought. (See Fodor.) The very fluency of natural-language discourse belies the claim that there must have been a linguistic convention at every point at which predicates are extended beyond their original exemplars; furthermore, the presumption that we could agree to a general policy of predicative extension in advance of new cases fails to recognize that the problem of real similarity dogs that proposal just as much as any more robust claim. There’s a stalemate there. Nelson Goodman, who is perhaps the best-known contemporary nominalist among English-language analytic philosophers, makes the extremely telling point that, initially, any two things can be rightly said to be “similar” sans phrase; but that if we claim that three or more things are similar “in the same respect,” we must identify what that respect is and how it may be discerned and made to function criterially. A moment’s reflection will convince you that that would lead to an infinite regress and would force us back to Universals (which nominalists abjure). Is there an alternative? Goodman says that for a “special” purpose (as in working in a scientific laboratory), we permit a certain rule or distinction to operate as that tertium quid, but he nowhere explains how his own solution escapes the regress he remarks or why, as a consequence, nominalism should be characterized as something other than a closet realism. There’s good reason to think Goodman cannot escape. But if he cannot, then nominalism is a failed option (epistemically) and some form of “realism” (some concession regarding “real generals”) will be required. What form should that concession take? There seems to be only one option left, if we rule out independent Universals (Platonic Forms or Aristotelian essences inhering in particular things) and if we rule out nominalism (or any near-variant of nominalism, so-called conceptualism for instance). The final option runs as follows: predicative generality is real in and only in the actual predicative practices of natural-language communities—if those practices are taken to be symbiotized with the world. (By “symbiotized,” I mean that there is no principled disjunction between the “subjective” and the “objective,” cognizing self and cognized world.) The answer is meant to disallow any theory that insists that it continues to make sense to ask whether our predicates do or do not correspond to, or represent, the predicables that inhere in an independent world. On the argument, to

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press the question is to invoke an insuperable skepticism. As a consequence, the standard opposition between realism and idealism is obviated. It would not be unfair to say that the whole thrust of modern philosophy—from Descartes to Kant to Hegel to Husserl to the most attenuated work of contemporary analytic philosophy (that of Davidson and Putnam, for instance)—has been largely devoted to precluding all forms of skepticism. But skepticism cannot ultimately be avoided unless we concede that there is no distinction in principle between analyzing our language (directed to the world) and analyzing the world (addressed by our language). We may say (though so speaking has no verbal currency) that the world is “languaged” and our language, “worlded.” (When, therefore, we speak of animal perception, we model what animals discern by way of the paradigm of human perceptual reporting.) We must suppose there is an indissoluble connection, an original “symbiosis,” between language and world that we cannot determinately penetrate in any way, and that discourse presupposes such a symbiosis. Alternatively put: the distinction between cognizer and cognized (“subject” and “object”) is certainly needed for all forms of discourse; but, on the premises invoked, it must be “constituted” (as we deem best) within the space of the symbiotized world. That, it needs to be said, is not tantamount to the traditional thesis we call idealism. (“Constructivism” or “constructionism” is a better term here.) Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, you remember, was premised on there being a necessary, determinate, extensional correspondence between language and world. (Wittgenstein precludes symbiosis in the Tractatus but he comes very close to restoring it in the Investigations. He does not actually address the issue. It probably was not part of his philosophical reading.) The thesis being recommended avoids the indemonstrable presumptions of the first (the Tractatus), and treats the second (the Investigations) as a faute de mieux argument. Once you favor the symbiotized option, the solution to the problem of “real generals” glides into view: we avoid skepticism and invariance at a stroke. There you have the key to the prospects of the flux. Nevertheless, the thesis is a dialectical bet, not a first principle. If you grant this much, you cannot fail to see that to admit language and world as indissolubly “symbiotized” is to admit that questions of truth arise only within that same symbiotized space. But if, as has been argued, modal invariance is indemonstrable, then truth cannot possibly play an independent, invariant, “regulative” function governing the objectivity of our sciences. The assignment of truth-values must, like the determination of pred-

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icative similarity, be an artifact of a symbiotized world, uttered and confirmed within and only within our form of life. If, furthermore, human inquiry is subject to the contingencies of history, then not only the puzzles of reference and predication but those of truth as well will force us to a more concessive stand on the resources of the flux. You will find that concession acknowledged obliquely but not consistently by Putnam, who (in the early stages of his career) had been an ardent advocate of the unity of science program. Now, holding what he calls an “internal realist” position, Putnam repudiates the correspondence thesis and denies any principled disjunction between the “subjective” and the “objective.” As a self-confessed Kantian, Putnam is a constructivist. Nevertheless, he clings to the idea that truth somehow functions regulatively—as a Grenzbegriff, an idealized constraint on belief in the service of what we suppose truth requires. Of course, it cannot so function, once Putnam restricts constructivism along the symbiotized lines just mentioned. There you have the key to the puzzle of predicative generality. Claims of predicative similarity cannot be vouchsafed in any strict criterial way; but then, they need not be. (In the interest of accuracy, it must be noted that Putnam has recently repudiated the position just sketched.) The resolution of all these difficulties depends on the same resource. We surely learn, in learning a natural language, how to reidentify referents and how to extend our general predicates validly. But we do not succeed by learning to apply fixed rules or algorithms or criteria or principles or tertia to particular cases. That would generate the intolerable regress already remarked. We neither discover that we have judged correctly nor merely decide how to act henceforth by consensual agreement: those are the failed options already put aside. The success of reference and predication lies entirely in the habituated and open-ended fluency of our cultural and linguistic practices— not in the sense that “anything goes” but in the sense that, adhering to our practices, we continually adduce ad hoc all sorts of contingent considerations that assure us dialectically that we cannot go entirely astray. We do survive, after all. We do make predictions on which we act. Our technology pays off. We remember where we thought we may have gone astray before and correct ourselves. That’s all! Wittgenstein makes the stunning suggestion that in pursuing our habituated practices we “follow a rule,” although “there is” no rule that we follow: our “rules” are no more than retrospective summaries of what we suppose to have been “the same” in our past practices. The future remains entirely

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open, Wittgenstein says—meaning that it is inherently improvisational, not regulated by fixed rules of any kind. In an entirely different idiom, HansGeorg Gadamer says that “we belong” to a tradition but “there is” no tradition to which we belong! You have only to see that if the thesis is historicized (as Gadamer insists: a matter that does not interest Wittgenstein), then we are well on our way to a coherent philosophy that relinquishes all the marks of modal invariance. The seeming paradox in Wittgenstein and Gadamer is easily explained: in, say, speaking of “following a rule,” we are speaking predicatively; but in denying that “there is a rule that we are following,” we are speaking referentially. There is no contradiction. Renford Bambrough offers a celebrated sketch of how to read the Wittgensteinian suggestion. The point is this: the conditions of referential and predicative success cannot be found anywhere but in the lebensformlich practices of our society (to speak in Wittgenstein’s way). There is literally nothing to compare or consult that could otherwise determine such success. Success (which is not validity) rests with our acting in accord with our practices; but, there, consensus has no criterial function. Consensus (like language itself) is no more than the collective medium of cultural life. Whatever criteria we invoke are already artifacts of consensual life. The extension of a general predicate, for instance, reflects our ongoing practice if, all things considered, it is socially tolerated, or we do rely on its general acceptance. There is no other recourse to be had. Bambrough does not take up the analysis of a practice; he is more interested in outflanking Platonism and nominalism. But he fails us here; for there is no reason “family resemblances” will not generate the same worries essences do. Bambrough does not address the matter. For his part, Wittgenstein suggests how substantive judgments actually enter into the very “logic” of rules—a fortiori, into the very rules of logic. The idea goes completely contrary to the spirit of extensional logics. In a way, it goes contrary to the letter of Wittgenstein’s Investigations. For it implicates the historicized drift of predicative similarity, which Wittgenstein nowhere addresses directly. In this sense, it would not be amiss to suggest that the Wittgenstein of the Investigations and On Certainty and Gadamer and Foucault form an increasingly radical array of commentators on the “logic” of historical practices, which of course cannot but affect our account of reference and predication—and more. But in drawing that conclusion, then, predictably, a Lebensform or practice or history will remain comparatively unformed and inexplicit. Certainly, in Investigations (and related texts), Wittgenstein was pre-

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scient about the reasons for the massive failure of all philosophical projects that might be drawn to the spare lines of the Tractatus. His worry, in reviewing the Tractatus (for instance, under the prodding of Frank Ramsey), was that he could not distinguish in principle between the natural impossibility that something could be both red and green at once and the supposed logical impossibility of two colors having application at the same point. Partly, this converges with the lesson of Quine’s famous paper “Two Dogmas of Empiricism”: in this regard, the whole project of the Tractatus was put at risk, since Wittgenstein meant to avoid there the intrusion of contingent facts (though he makes room, logically, for facts). More profoundly still, if the color question cannot be resolved, then the entire extensional model of the necessary correspondence (in Tractatus) between the logical structure of propositions and the underlying structure of the world is put in doubt. For then, it would be true that that very “logic” would generate a form of skepticism and would be unable to service the strong extensionalism of twentiethcentury analytic philosophy. Wittgenstein abruptly changes his approach in Investigations: there, he favors the radical idea of mapping all the regularities of language and thought in terms of our “language games.” He does not pursue the matter far enough; for instance, he does not explain what he means by the human Lebensform, and he has no interest in historicizing language games. He admits that they “change” in use and time. But his motive is conservative. He turns the argument chiefly against G. E. Moore’s (and Russell’s) presumptions regarding epistemic privilege. By and large, analytic philosophy has neglected Wittgenstein’s emphasis (in Investigations) on the irreducibly collective aspect of our language games. It is, for instance, precisely what accounts for the informal rigor of rules that are formulable in alternative ways but only from within the open-ended practice of an actual society. It bears decisively on the problem of generality. It precludes de re and de dicto necessity and privilege. It governs the scope and relevance of the “laws” of logic. And it supplies no more than the most minimal clue about alternative solutions to the problem of knowledge—while avoiding an infinite regress resulting from denying foundationalist theories. The crucial step that Wittgenstein does not consider—possibly due to his limited reading in philosophy—concerns the decisive work of Kant and Hegel. Nevertheless, Wittgenstein secures an important gain here—one that is absent in Kant and (arguably) present in Hegel: namely, that knowledge is ascribed to individual selves or subjects but only in virtue of their conformity with a collective practice. This is a profound and difficult discovery that, misleadingly put, suggests that cognitive

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claims are made valid on noncognitive grounds; whereas it is closer to the truth to say that individual “performance” manifests collective “competence”; not that the first proceeds by way of theoretical criteria, but that the second identifies the practices within which the first functions as it does. Such a solution would never have been countenanced before the post-Kantian movement (so-called German Idealism) and certainly never before Hegel’s conception of history. Dewey, it may be noted, deepens the resources of the fluxist account by arguing that our cognizing powers are, in fact, ultimately grounded in our noncognitive animal natures and that those powers emerge in the process of learning to resolve the impasse or blockage of practical animal life. Here, you may see how the views of the later Wittgenstein and those of a pragmatist like Dewey begin to converge. Reference and predication are inherently informal and ineliminable; cannot be regimented, epistemically, in any algorithmic or entirely extensional way; and function effectively in accord with the lebensformlich or sittlich practices of a society.

THE IDENTITY OF INDISCERNIBLES

Max Black A. THE PRINCIPLE of the Identity of Indiscernibles seems to me obviously true. And I don’t see how we are going to define identity or establish the connection between mathematics and logic without using it. B. It seems to me obviously false. And your troubles as a mathematical logician are beside the point. If the principle is false you have no right to use it. A. You simply say it’s false—and even if you said so three times that wouldn’t make it so. B. Well, you haven’t done anything more yourself than assert the principle to be true. As Bradley once said, “Assertion can demand no more than counter-assertion; and what is affirmed on the one side, we on the other can simply deny.” A. How will this do for an argument? If two things, a and b, are given, the first has the property of being identical with a. Now b cannot have this property, for else b would be a, and we should have only one thing, not two as asMax Black, “The Identity of Indiscernibles,” in Problems of Analysis: Philosophical Essays (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1954). © Naomi Black. Reprinted by permission.

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sumed. Hence a has at least one property, which b does not have, that is to say the property of being identical with a. B. This is a roundabout way of saying nothing, for “a has the property of being identical with a” means no more than “a is a.” When you begin to say “a is . . .” I am supposed to know what thing you are referring to as “a” and I expect to be told something about that thing. But when you end the sentence with the words “is a” I am left still waiting. The sentence “a is a” is a useless tautology. A. Are you as scornful about difference as about identity? For a also has, and b does not have, the property of being different from b. This is a second property that the one thing has but not the other. B. All you are saying is that b is different from a. I think the form of words “a is different from b” does have the advantage over “a is a” that it might be used to give information. I might learn from hearing it used that “a” and “b” were applied to different things. But this is not what you want to say, since you are trying to use the names, not mention them. When I already know what “a” and “b” stand for, “a is different from b” tells me nothing. It, too, is a useless tautology. A. I wouldn’t have expected you to treat “tautology” as a term of abuse. Tautology or not, the sentence has a philosophical use. It expresses the necessary truth that different things have at least one property not in common. Thus different things must be discernible; and hence, by contraposition, indiscernible things must be identical. Q.E.D. B. Why obscure matters by this old-fashioned language? By “indiscernible” I suppose you mean the same as “having all properties in common.” Do you claim to have proved that two things having all their properties in common are identical? A. Exactly. B. Then this is a poor way of stating your conclusion. If a and b are identical, there is just one thing having the two names “a” and “b”; and in that case it is absurd to say that a and b are two. Conversely, once you have supposed there are two things having all their properties in common, you can’t without contradicting yourself say that they are “identical.” A. I can’t believe you were really misled. I simply meant to say it is logically impossible for two things to have all their properties in common. I showed that a must have at least two properties—the property of being identical with a, and the property of being different from b—neither of which can be a property of b. Doesn’t this prove the principle of Identity of Indiscernibles?

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B. Perhaps you have proved something. If so, the nature of your proof should show us exactly what you have proved. If you want to call “being identical with a” a “property” I suppose I can’t prevent you. But you must then accept the consequences of this way of talking. All you mean when you say “a has the property of being identical with a” is that a is a. And all you mean when you say “b does not have the property of being identical with a” is that b is not a. So what you have “proved” is that a is a and b is not a, that is to say, b and a are different. Similarly, when you said that a, but not b, had the property of being different from b, you were simply saying that a and b were different. In fact you are merely redescribing the hypothesis that a and b are different by calling it a case of “difference of properties.” Drop the misleading description and your famous principle reduces to the truism that different things are different. How true! And how uninteresting! A. Well, the properties of identity and difference may be uninteresting, but they are properties. If I had shown that grass was green, I suppose you would say I hadn’t shown that grass was colored. B. You certainly would not have shown that grass had any color other than green. A. What it comes to is that you object to the conclusion of my argument following from the premise that a and b are different. B. No, I object to the triviality of the conclusion. If you want to have an interesting principle to defend, you must interpret “property” more narrowly—enough so, at any rate, for “identity” and “difference” not to count as properties. A. Your notion of an interesting principle seems to be one which I shall have difficulty in establishing. Will you at least allow me to include among “properties” what are sometimes called “relational characteristics”—like being married to Caesar or being at a distance from London? B. Why not? If you are going to defend the principle, it is for you to decide what version you wish to defend. A. In that case, I don’t need to count identity and difference as properties. Here is a different argument that seems to me quite conclusive. The only way we can discover that two different things exist is by finding out that one has a quality not possessed by the other or else that one has a relational characteristic that the other hasn’t. If both are blue and hard and sweet and so on, and have the same shape and dimensions and are in the same relations to everything in the universe, it is logically impossible to tell them apart. The supposition that in such a

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case there might really be two things would be unverifiable in principle. Hence it would be meaningless. B. You are going too fast for me. A. Think of it this way. If the principle were false, the fact that I can see only two of your hands would be no proof that you had just two. And even if every conceivable test agreed with the supposition that you had two hands, you might all the time have three, four, or any number. You might have nine hands, different from one another and all indistinguishable from your left hand, and nine more all different from each other but indistinguishable from your right hand. And even if you really did have just two hands, and no more, neither you nor I nor anybody else could ever know that fact. This is too much for me to swallow. This is the kind of absurdity you get into, as soon as you abandon verifiability as a test of meaning. B. Far be it from me to abandon anything you hold so sacred. Before I give you a direct answer, let me try to describe a counterexample. Isn’t it logically possible that the universe should have contained nothing but two exactly similar spheres? We might suppose that each was made of chemically pure iron, had a diameter of one mile, that they had the same temperature, color, and so on, and that nothing else existed. Then every quality and relational characteristic of the one would also be a property of the other. Now if what I am describing is logically possible, it is not impossible for two things to have all their properties in common. This seems to me to refute the Principle. A. Your supposition, I repeat, isn’t verifiable and therefore can’t be regarded as meaningful. But supposing you have described a possible world, I still don’t see that you have refuted the principle. Consider one of the spheres, a . . . B. How can I, since there is no way of telling them apart? Which one do you want me to consider? A. This is very foolish. I mean either of the two spheres, leaving you to decide which one you wished to consider. If I were to say to you, “Take any book off the shelf,” it would be foolish on your part to reply, “Which?” B. It’s a poor analogy. I know how to take a book off a shelf, but I don’t know how to identify one of two spheres supposed to be alone in space and so symmetrically placed with respect to each other that neither has any quality or character the other does not also have. A. All of which goes to show as I said before, the unverifiability of your supposition. Can’t you imagine that one sphere has been designated as “a”?

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B. I can imagine only what is logically possible. Now it is logically possible that somebody should enter the universe I have described, see one of the spheres on his left hand and proceed to call it “a.” I can imagine that all right, if that’s enough to satisfy you. A. Very well, now let me try to finish what I began to say about a . . . B. I still can’t let you, because you, in your present situation, have no right to talk about a. All I have conceded is that if something were to happen to introduce a change into my universe, so that an observer entered and could see the two spheres, one of them could then have a name. But this would be a different supposition from the one I wanted to consider. My spheres don’t yet have names. If an observer were to enter the scene, he could perhaps put a red mark on one of the spheres. You might just as well say, “By ‘a’ I mean the sphere which would be the first to be marked by a red mark if anyone were to arrive and were to proceed to make a red mark!” You might just as well ask me to consider the first daisy in my lawn that would be picked by a child, if a child were to come along and do the picking. This doesn’t now distinguish any daisy from the others. You are just pretending to use a name. A. And I think you are just pretending not to understand me. All I am asking you to do is to think of one of your spheres, no matter which, so that I may go on to say something about it when you give me a chance. B. You talk as if naming an object and then thinking about it were the easiest thing in the world. But it isn’t so easy. Suppose I tell you to name any spider in my garden: if you can catch one first or describe one uniquely you can name it easily enough. But you can’t pick one out, let alone “name” it, by just thinking. You remind me of the mathematicians who thought that talking about an Axiom of Choice would really allow them to choose a single member of a collection when they had no criterion of choice. A. At this rate you will never give me a chance to say anything. Let me try to make my point without using names. Each of the spheres will surely differ from the other in being at some distance from that other one, but at no distance from itself—that is to say, it will bear at least one relation to itself— being at no distance from, or being in the same place as—that it does not bear to the other. And this will serve to distinguish it from the other. B. Not at all. Each will have the relational characteristic being at a distance of two miles, say, from the center of a sphere one mile in diameter, etc. And each will have the relational characteristic (if you want to call it that) of being in the same place as itself. The two are alike in this respect as in all others.

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A. But look here. Each sphere occupies a different place; and this at least will distinguish them from one another. B. This sounds as if you thought the places had some independent existence, though I don’t suppose you really think so. To say the spheres are in “different places” is just to say that there is a distance between the two spheres; and we have already seen that this will not serve to distinguish them. Each is at a distance—indeed the same distance—from the other. A. When I said they were at different places I didn’t mean simply that they were at some distance from one another. That one sphere is in a certain place does not entail the existence of any other sphere. So to say that one sphere is in its place, and the other in its place, and then to add that these places are different seems to me different from saying the spheres are at a distance from one another. B. What does it mean to say “a sphere is in its place”? Nothing at all, so far as I can see. Where else could it be? All you are saying is that the spheres are in different places. A. Then my retort is, What does it mean to say, “Two spheres are in different places”? Or, as you so neatly put it, “Where else could they be?” B. You have a point. What I should have said was that your assertion that the spheres occupied different places said nothing at all, unless you were drawing attention to the necessary truth that different physical objects must be in different places. Now if two spheres must be in different places, as indeed they must, to say that the spheres occupy different places is to say no more than that they are two spheres. A. This is like a point you made before. You won’t allow me to deduce anything from the supposition that there are two spheres. B. Let me put it another way. In the two-sphere universe, the only reason for saying that the places occupied are different would be that different things occupied them. So in order to show the places were different you would first have to show, in some other way, that the spheres were different. You will never be able to distinguish the spheres by means of the places they occupy. A. A minute ago, you were willing to allow that somebody might give your spheres different names. Will you let me suppose that some traveler has visited your monotonous “universe” and has named one sphere “Castor” and the other “Pollux”? B. All right—provided you don’t try to use those names yourself. A. Wouldn’t the traveler, at least, have to recognize that being at a dis-

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tance of two miles from Castor was not the same property as being at a distance of two miles from Pollux? B. I don’t see why. If he were to see that Castor and Pollux had exactly the same properties, he would see that “being at a distance of two miles from Castor” meant exactly the same as “being at a distance of two miles from Pollux.” A. They couldn’t mean the same. If they did, “being at a distance of two miles from Castor and at the same time not being at a distance of two miles from Pollux” would be a selfcontradictory description. But plenty of bodies could answer to this description. Again if the two expressions meant the same, anything which was two miles from Castor would have to be two miles from Pollux—which is clearly false. So the two expressions don’t mean the same and the two spheres have at least two properties not in common. B. Which? A. Being at a distance of two miles from Castor and being at a distance of two miles from Pollux. B. But now you are using the words “Castor” and “Pollux” as if they really stood for something. They are just our old friends “a” and “b” in disguise. A. You surely don’t want to say that the arrival of the name-giving traveler creates spatial properties? Perhaps we can’t name your spheres and therefore can’t name the corresponding properties; but the properties must be there. B. What can this mean? The traveler has not visited the spheres, and the spheres have no names—neither “Castor,” nor “Pollux,” nor “a,” nor “b,” nor any others. Yet you still want to say they have certain properties which cannot be referred to without using names for the spheres. You want to say “the property of being at a distance from Castor” though it is logically impossible for you to talk in this way. You can’t speak, but you won’t be silent. A. How eloquent, and how unconvincing! But since you seem to have convinced yourself, at least, perhaps you can explain another thing that bothers me: I don’t see that you have a right to talk as you do about places or spatial relations in connection with your so-called “universe.” So long as we are talking about our own universe—the universe—I know what you mean by “distance,” “diameter,” “place,” and so on. But in what you want to call a universe, even though it contains only two objects, I don’t see what such words could mean. So far as I can see, you are applying these spatial

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terms in their present usage to a hypothetical situation which contradicts the preconditions of that usage. B. What do you mean by “precondition”? A. Well, you spoke of measured distances, for one thing. Now this assumes some means of measurement. Hence your “universe” must contain at least a third thing—a ruler or some other measuring device. B. Are you claiming that a universe must have at least three things in it? What is the least number of things required to make a world? A. No, all I am saying is that you cannot describe a configuration as spatial unless it includes at least three objects. This is part of the meaning of “spatial”—and it is no more mysterious than saying you can’t have a game of chess without there existing at least thirty-five things (thirty-two pieces, a chessboard, and two players). B. If this is all that bothers you, I can easily provide for three or any number of things without changing the force of my counterexample. The important thing, for my purpose, was that the configuration of two spheres was symmetrical. So long as we preserve this feature of the imaginary universe, we can now allow any number of objects to be found in it. A. You mean any even number of objects. B. Quite right. Why not imagine a plane running clear through space, with everything that happens on one side of it always exactly duplicated at an equal distance in the other side. A. A kind of cosmic mirror producing real images. B. Yes, except that there wouldn’t be any mirror! The point is that in this world we can imagine any degree of complexity and change to occur. No reason to exclude rulers, compasses, and weighing machines. No reason, for that matter, why the Battle of Waterloo shouldn’t happen. A. Twice over, you mean—with Napoleon surrendering later in two different places simultaneously! B. Provided you wanted to call both of them “Napoleon.” A. So your point is that everything could be duplicated on the other side of the nonexistent Looking Glass. I suppose whenever a man got married, his identical twin would be marrying the identical twin of the first man’s fiancee? B. Exactly. A. Except that “identical twins” wouldn’t be numerically identical? B. You seem to be agreeing with me. A. Far from it. This is just a piece of gratuitous metaphysics. If the inhabitants of your world had enough sense to know what was sense and what wasn’t, they would never suppose all the events in their world were dupli-

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cated. It would be much more sensible for them to regard the “second” Napoleon as a mere mirror image—and similarly for all the other supposed “duplicates.” B. But they could walk through the “mirror” and find water just as wet, sugar just as sweet, and grass just as green on the other side. A. You don’t understand me. They would not postulate “another side.” A man looking at the “mirror” would be seeing himself, not a duplicate. If he walked in a straight line toward the “mirror” he would eventually find himself back at his starting point, not at a duplicate of his starting point. This would involve their having a different geometry from ours—but that would be preferable to the logician’s nightmare of the reduplicated universe. B. They might think so—until the twins really began to behave differently for the first time! A. Now it’s you who are tinkering with your supposition. You can’t have your universe and change it too. B. All right, I retract. A. The more I think about your “universe” the queerer it seems. What would happen when a man crossed your invisible “mirror”? While he was actually crossing, his body would have to change shape, in order to preserve the symmetry. Would it gradually shrink to nothing and then expand again? B. I confess I hadn’t thought of that. A. And here is something that explodes the whole notion. Would you say that one of the two Napoleons in your universe had his heart in the right place—literally, I mean? B. Why, of course. A. In that case his “mirror-image” twin would have the heart on the opposite side of the body. One Napoleon would have his heart on the left of his body, and the other would have it on the right of his body. B. It’s a good point, though it would still make objects like spheres indistinguishable. But let me try again. Let me abandon the original idea of a plane of symmetry and to suppose instead that we have only a center of symmetry. I mean that everything that happened at any place would be exactly duplicated at a place an equal distance on the opposite side of the center of symmetry. In short, the universe would be what the mathematicians call “radially symmetrical.” And to avoid complications we could suppose that the center of symmetry itself was physically inaccessible, so that it would be impossible for any material body to pass through it. Now in this universe, identical twins would have to be either both right-handed or both lefthanded.

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A. Your universes are beginning to be as plentiful as blackberries. You are too ingenious to see the force of my argument about verifiability. Can’t you see that your supposed description of a universe in which everything has its “identical twin” doesn’t describe anything verifiably different from a corresponding universe without such duplication? This must be so, no matter what kind of symmetry your universe manifested. B. You are assuming that in order to verify that there are two things of a certain kind, it must be possible to show that one has a property not possessed by the other. But this is not so. A pair of very close but similar magnetic poles produce a characteristic field of force which assures me that there are two poles, even if I have no way of examining them separately. The presence of two exactly similar stars at a great distance might be detected by some resultant gravitational effect or by optical interference—or in some such similar way—even though we had no way of inspecting one in isolation from the other. Don’t physicists say something like this about the electrons inside an atom? We can verify that there are two, that is to say a certain property of the whole configuration, even though there is no way of detecting any character that uniquely characterizes any element of the configuration. A. But if you were to approach your two stars one would have to be on your left and one on the right. And this would distinguish them. B. I agree. Why shouldn’t we say that the two stars are distinguishable— meaning that it would be possible for an observer to see one on his left and the other on his right, or more generally, that it would be possible for one star to come to have a relation to a third object that the second star would not have to that third object. A. So you agree with me after all. B. Not if you mean that the two stars do not have all their properties in common. All I said was that it was logically possible for them to enter into different relationships with a third object. But this would be a change in the universe. A. If you are right, nothing unobserved would be observable. For the presence of an observer would always change it, and the observation would always be an observation of something else. B. I don’t say that every observation changes what is observed. My point is that there isn’t any being to the right or being to the left in the two-sphere universe until an observer is introduced, that is to say until a real change is made. A. But the spheres themselves wouldn’t have changed.

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B. Indeed they would: they would have acquired new relational characteristics. In the absence of any asymmetric observer, I repeat, the spheres would have all their properties in common (including, if you like, the power to enter into different relations with other objects). Hence the Principle of Identity of Indiscernibles is false. A. So perhaps you really do have twenty hands after all? B. Not a bit of it. Nothing that I have said prevents me from holding that we can verify that there are exactly two. But we could know that two things existed without there being any way to distinguish one from the other. The Principle is false. A. I am not surprised that you ended in this way, since you assumed it in the description of your fantastic “universe.” Of course, if you began by assuming that the spheres were numerically different though qualitatively alike, you could end by “proving” what you first assumed. B. But I wasn’t “proving” anything. I tried to support my contention that it is logically possible for two things to have all their properties in common by giving an illustrative description. (Similarly, if I had to show it is logically possible for nothing at all to be seen I would ask you to imagine a universe in which everybody was blind.) It was for you to show that my description concealed some hidden contradiction. And you haven’t done so. A. All the same I am not convinced. B. Well, then, you ought to be. UNIVERSALS AND FAMILY RESEMBLANCES

Renford Bambrough I believe that Wittgenstein solved what is known as “the problem of universals,” and I would say of his solution, as Hume said of Berkeley’s treatment of the same topic, that it is “one of the greatest and most valuable discoveries that has been made of late years in the republic of letters.” I do not expect these claims to be accepted by many philosophers. Since I claim that Wittgenstein solved the problem, I naturally do not claim to be making an original contribution to the study of it. Since I recognize that few philosophers will accept my claim that Wittgenstein solved it, I naturally regard it as Renford Bambrough, “Universals and Family Resemblances,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 61 (1960–61). Reprinted by courtesy of the Editor of the Aristotelian Society. © 1961.

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worth while to continue to discuss the problem. My purpose is to try to make clear what Wittgenstein’s solution is and to try to make clear that it is a solution. Philosophers ought to be wary of claiming that philosophical problems have been finally solved. Aristotle and Descartes and Spinoza and Berkeley and Hume and the author of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus lie at the bottom of the sea not far from this rock, with the skeletons of many lesser men to keep them company. But nobody suggests that their journeys were vain, or that nothing can be saved from the wrecks. In seeking for Wittgenstein’s solution we must look mainly to his remarks about “family resemblances” and to his use of the example of games. In the Blue Book he speaks of “our craving for generality” and tries to trace this craving to its sources: This craving for generality is the resultant of a number of tendencies connected with particular philosophical confusions. There is— (a) The tendency to look for something in common to all the entities which we commonly subsume under a general term.—We are inclined to think that there must be something in common to all games, say, and that this common property is the justification for applying the general term “game” to the various games; whereas games form a family the members of which have family likenesses. Some of them have the same nose, others the same eyebrows and others again the same way of walking; and these likenesses overlap. The idea of a general concept being a common property of its particular instances connects up with other primitive, too simple, ideas of the structure of language. It is comparable to the idea that properties are ingredients of the things which have the properties; e.g., that beauty is an ingredient of all beautiful things as alcohol is of beer and wine, and that we therefore could have pure beauty, unadulterated by anything that is beautiful. (b) There is a tendency rooted in our usual forms of expression, to think that the man who has learnt to understand a general term, say, the term “leaf,” has thereby come to possess a kind of general picture of a leaf, as opposed to pictures of particular leaves. He was shown different leaves when he learnt the meaning of the word “leaf”; and showing him the particular leaves was only a means to the end of producing “in him” an idea which we imagine to be some kind of general image. We say that he sees what is in common to all these leaves; and

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this is true if we mean that he can on being asked tell us certain features or properties which they have in common. But we are inclined to think that the general idea of a leaf is something like a visual image, but one which only contains what is common to all leaves. (Galtonian composite photograph.) This again is connected with the idea that the meaning of a word is an image, or a thing correlated to the word. (This roughly means, we are looking at words as though they all were proper names, and we then confuse the bearer of a name with the meaning of the name.) In the Philosophical Investigations Wittgenstein again speaks of family resemblances, and gives a more elaborate account of the similarities and differences between various games: 66. Consider for example the proceedings that we call “games.” I mean board-games, card-games, ball-games, Olympic games, and so on. What is common to them all?—Don’t say: “there must be something common, or they would not be called ‘games’ ”—but look and see whether there is anything common to all.—For if you look at them you will not see something that is common to all, but similarities, relationships, and a whole series of them at that. To repeat: don’t think, but look!—Look for example at board-games, with their multifarious relationships. Now pass to card-games; here you find many correspondences with the first group, but many common features drop out, and others appear. When we pass next to ball-games, much that is common is retained, but much is lost.—Are they all “amusing”? Compare chess with noughts and crosses. Or is there always winning and losing, or competition between players? Think of patience. In ball games there is winning and losing; but when a child throws his ball at the wall and catches it again, this feature has disappeared. Look at the parts played by skill and luck; and at the difference between skill in chess and skill in tennis. Think now of games like ring-a-ring-a-roses; here is the element of amusement, but how many other characteristic features have disappeared! And we can go through the many, many other groups of games in the same way; can see how similarities crop up and disappear. And the result of this examination is: we see a complicated network of similarities overlapping and criss-crossing: sometimes overall similarities, sometimes similarities of detail.

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67. I can think of no better expression to characterize these similarities than “family resemblances”; for the various resemblances between the members of a family: build, features, color of eyes, gait, temperament, etc. etc. overlap and criss-cross in the same way.—And I shall say: “games” form a family. Wittgenstein expounds his analogy informally, and with great economy. Its power can be displayed in an equally simple but more formal way by considering a situation that is familiar to botanical taxonomists.1 We may classify a set of objects by reference to the presence or absence of features ABCDE. It may well happen that five objects edcba are such that each of them has four of these properties and lacks the fifth, and that the missing feature is different in each of the five cases. A simple diagram will illustrate this situation: e ABCD

d ABCE

c ABDE

b ACDE

a BCDE

Here we can already see how natural and how proper it might be to apply the same word to a number of objects between which there is no common feature. And if we confine our attention to any arbitrarily selected four of these objects, say edca, then although they all happen to have B in common, it is clear that it is not in virtue of the presence of B that they are all rightly called by the same name. Even if the actual instances were indefinitely numerous, and they all happened to have one or more of the features in common, it would not be in virtue of the presence of the common feature or features that they would all be rightly called by the same name, since the name also applies to possible instances that lack the feature or features. The richness of the possibilities of the family resemblances model becomes more striking still if we set it out more fully and formally in terms of a particular family than Wittgenstein himself ever did. Let us suppose that “the Churchill face” is strikingly and obviously present in each of ten members of the Churchill family, and that when a family group photograph is set before 1. I have profited from several discussions with Dr. S. M. Walters on taxonomy and the problem of universals. On the more general topics treated in this paper I have had several helpful discussions with Mr. R. A. Becher. Miss G.E.M. Anscombe kindly lent me the proofs of her essay on Aristotle, which is to appear in Three Philosophers by Miss Anscombe and Mr. P. T. Geach.

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us it is unmistakable that these ten people all belong to the same family. It may be that there are ten features in terms of which we can describe “the family face” (high forehead, bushy eye-brows, blue eyes, Roman nose, high cheekbones, cleft chin, dark hair, dimpled cheeks, pointed ears and ruddy complexion). It is obvious that the unmistakable presence of the family face in every single one of the ten members of the family is compatible with the absence from each of the ten members of the family of one of the ten constituent features of the family face. It is also obvious that it does not matter if it happens that the feature which is absent from the face of each individual member of the family is present in every one of the others. The members of the family will then have no feature in common, and yet they will all unmistakably have the Churchill face in common. This example is very artificial, and it may seem at first sight that its artificiality plays into my hands. But on the contrary, the more natural the example is made the more it suits my purpose. If we remember that a family face does not divide neatly into ten separate features, we widen rather than reduce the scope for large numbers of instances of the family face to lack a single common feature. And if we remember that what goes for faces goes for features too; that all cleft chins have nothing in common except that they are cleft chins, that the possible gradations from Roman nose to snub nose or from high to low cheekbones are continuous and infinite, we see that there could in principle be an infinite number of unmistakable Churchill faces which had no feature in common. In fact it now becomes clear that there is a good sense in which no two members of the Churchill family need have any feature in common in order for all the members of the Churchill family to have the Churchill face. The passages that I have quoted contain the essence of Wittgenstein’s solution of the problem of universals, but they are far from exhausting his account of the topic. Not only are there other places where he speaks of games and of family resemblances: what is more important is that most of his philosophical remarks in The Blue and Brown Books and in the Philosophical Investigations are concerned with such questions as “What is the meaning of a word?” “What is language?” “What is thinking?” “What is understanding?” And these questions are various forms of the question to which theories of universals, including Wittgenstein’s theory of universals, are meant to be answers. There is a clear parallel between what Wittgenstein says about games and what he says about reading, expecting, languages, numbers, propositions; in all these cases we have the idea that there is a common element or ingredient, and Wittgenstein shows us that there is no

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such ingredient or element. The instances that fall under each of these concepts form a family. It is already clear that the point Wittgenstein made with the example of games has a much wider range of application than that example itself. But exactly how wide is its application meant to be? Wittgenstein’s own method of exposition makes it difficult to answer this question. In his striving to find a cure for “our craving for generality,” in his polemic against “the contemptuous attitude towards the particular case,” he was understandably wary of expressing his own conclusions in general terms. Readers and expositors of Wittgenstein are consequently impelled to make use of glosses and paraphrases and interpretations if they wish to relate his work to philosophical writings and doctrines that are expressed in another idiom; that is to say, to most other philosophical writings and doctrines. I believe that this is why Wittgenstein’s solution of the problem of universals has not been widely understood, and why, in consequence, it has not been widely seen to be a solution.2 In avoiding the generalities that are characteristic of most philosophical discussion he also avoided reference to the standard “problems of philosophy” and to the “philosophical theories” which have repeatedly been offered as answers to them. He talks about games and families and colors, about reading, expecting and understanding, but not about “the problem of universals.” He practiced an activity which is “one of the heirs of the subject which used to be called ‘philosophy,’ ” but he did not relate the results of his activity to the results of the enquiries to which it was an heir. He did not, for example, plot the relation between his remarks on games and family resemblances and the doctrines of those philosophers who had been called Nominalists and Realists. When I claim that Wittgenstein solved the problem of universals I am claiming that his remarks can be paraphrased into a doctrine which can be set out in general terms and can be related to the traditional theories, and which can then be shown to deserve to supersede the traditional theories. My purpose in this paper is to expound such a doctrine and to defend it. But first I must return to my question about the range of application of the point that is made by the example of games, since it is at this crucial first stage that most readers of Wittgenstein go wrong. When we read what he says about games and family resemblances, we are naturally inclined to ask 2. Of recent writings on this topic I believe that only Professor Wisdom’s Metaphysics and Verification (reprinted in Philosophy and Psycho-analysis) and Mr. D. F. Pears’ Universals (reprinted in Flew, Logic and Language, Second Series) show a complete understanding of the nature and importance of Wittgenstein’s contribution.

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ourselves, “With what kinds of concepts is Wittgenstein contrasting the concepts of game, language, proposition, understanding?” I shall consider three possible answers to this question. The first answer is suggested by Professor Ayer’s remarks about games and family resemblances [in] The Problem of Knowledge. Ayer contrasts the word “game” with the word “red,” on the ground that the former does not, while the latter does, mark “a simple and straightforward resemblance” between the things to which the word is applied. He claims that, “The point which Wittgenstein’s argument brings out is that the resemblance between the things to which the same word applies may be of different degrees. It is looser and less straightforward in some cases than in others.” Now this contrast between simple and complicated concepts is important, and the games example is a convenient means of drawing attention to it, but I am sure that this is not the point that Wittgenstein was making with his example. In the Brown Book he asks, “Could you tell me what is in common between a light red and a dark red?” and in the Philosophical Investigations (Section 73) he asks, “Which shade is the ‘sample in my mind’ of the color green—the sample of what is common to all shades of green?” Wittgenstein could as easily have used the example of red things as the example of games to illustrate “the tendency to look for something in common to all the entities which we commonly subsume under a general term.” Just as cricket and chess and patience and ring-a-ring-a-roses have nothing in common except that they are games, so poppies and blood and pillar-boxes and huntingcoats have nothing in common except that they are red. A second possible answer is implied by a sentence in Mr. P. F. Strawson’s Individuals: “It is often admitted, in the analytical treatment of some fairly specific concept, that the wish to understand is less likely to be served by the search for a single strict statement of the necessary and sufficient conditions of its application than by seeing its applications—in Wittgensteins’s simile— as forming a family, the members of which may, perhaps, be grouped around a central paradigm case and linked with the latter by various direct or indirect links of logical connexion and analogy.” The contrast is not now between simple and complex concepts, but between two kinds of complex concepts: those which are definable by the statement of necessary and sufficient conditions and those which are not. But once again the contrast, although it is important, and is one which the family resemblances simile and the example of games are well able to draw, is not the point that Wittgenstein is concerned with. In the sense in which, according to Wittgenstein, games have nothing in common except that they are games, and red things have nothing

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in common except that they are red, brothers have nothing in common except that they are brothers. It is true that brothers have in common that they are male siblings, but their having in common that they are male siblings is their having in common that they are brothers, and not their having in common something in addition to their being brothers. For a concept which can be explained in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions cannot be ultimately explained in such terms. To satisfy the craving for an ultimate explanation of “brother” in such terms it would be necessary to define “male” and “sibling,” and the words in which “male” and “sibling” were defined, and so on ad infinitum and ad impossibile. What then is the contrast that Wittgenstein meant to draw? I suggest that he did not mean to draw a contrast at all. Professor Wisdom has remarked that the peculiar difficulty of giving a philosophical account of universals lies in this: that philosophers are usually engaged in implicitly or explicitly comparing and contrasting one type of proposition with another type of proposition (propositions about minds with propositions about bodies, propositions of logic with propositions about matters of fact, propositions about the present and the past with propositions about the future, etc.) whereas propositions involving universals cannot be compared or contrasted with propositions that do not involve universals, since all propositions involve universals.3 If we look at Wittgenstein’s doctrine in the light of this remark we can understand it aright and can also see why it has been misunderstood in just those ways that I have mentioned. It is because of the very power of the ways of thought against which Wittgenstein was protesting that philosophers are led to offer accounts of his doctrine which restrict the range of its application. They recognize the importance of Wittgenstein’s demonstration that at least some general terms can justifiably be applied to their instances although those instances have nothing in common. But they are so deeply attached to the idea that there must be something in common to the instances that fall under a general term that they treat Wittgenstein’s examples as special cases, as rogues and vagabonds in the realm of concepts, to be contrasted with the general run of law-abiding concepts which do mark the presence of common elements in their instances. Here we come across an ambiguity which is another obstacle to our getting a clear view of the problem of universals and of Wittgenstein’s solution of it. Ayer remarks, in the passage to which I have already referred, that, “It 3. Professor Wisdom has pointed out to me that further discussion would be necessary to show that claims of the form “This is Jack” are not exceptions to this rule.

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is correct, though not at all enlightening, to say that what games have in common is their being games.” It is certainly correct, but I strongly deny that it is unenlightening. It is of course trivially and platitudinously true, but trivialities and platitudes deserve emphatic affirmation when, as often in philosophy, they are explicitly or implicitly denied, or forgotten, or overlooked. Now the platitude that all games have in common that they are games is denied by the nominalist, who says that all games have nothing in common except that they are called games. And it is not only the nominalist, but also his opponent, who misunderstands the central importance of the platitude that all games have in common that they are games. When he is provoked by the nominalist’s claim that all games have nothing in common except that they are called games, and rightly wishes to insist that games have something more in common than simply that they are called games, he feels that he must look for something that games have in common apart from being games. This feeling is entirely misplaced. The very terms of the nominalist’s challenge require only that the realist should point out something that games have in common apart from being called games, and this onus is fully discharged by saying that they are games. Although the feeling is misplaced, it is a very natural feeling, as we can see by considering the kinds of case in which we most typically and ordinarily ask what is in common to a set of objects. If I ask you what these three books have in common, or what those four chairs have in common, you will look to see if the books are all on the same subject or by the same author or published by the same firm; to see if the chairs are all Chippendale or all three-legged or all marked “Not to be removed from this room.” It will never occur to you to say that the books have in common that they are books or the chairs that they are chairs. And if you find after close inspection that the chairs or the books do not have in common any of the features I have mentioned, and if you cannot see any other specific feature that they have in common, you will say that as far as you can see they have nothing in common. You will perhaps add that you suppose from the form of my question that I must know of something that they have in common. I may then tell you that all the books once belonged to John Locke or that all the chairs came from Ten Rillington Place. But it would be a poor sort of joke for me to say that the chairs were all chairs or that the books were all books. If I ask you what all chairs have in common, or what all books have in common, you may again try to find a feature like those you would look for in the case of these three books or those four chairs; and you may again think that it is a poor sort of joke for me to say that what all books have in

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common is that they are books and that what all chairs have in common is that they are chairs. And yet this time it is not a joke but an important philosophical truth. Because the normal case where we ask “What have all these chairs, books or games in common?” is one in which we are not concerned with their all being chairs, books or games, we are liable to overlook the extreme peculiarity of the philosophical question that is asked with the words “What do all chairs, all books, all games have in common?” For of course games do have something in common. They must have something in common, and yet when we look for what they have in common we cannot find it. When we try to say what they have in common we always fail. And this is not because what we are looking for lies deeply hidden, but because it is too obvious to be seen; not because what we are trying to say is too subtle and complicated to be said, but because it is too easy and too simple to be worth saying: and so we say something more dramatic, but something false, instead. The simple truth is that what games have in common is that they are games. The nominalist is obscurely aware of this, and by rejecting the realist’s talk of transcendent, immanent or subsistent forms or universals he shows his awareness. But by his own insistence that games have nothing in common except that they are called games he shows the obscurity of his awareness. The realist too is obscurely aware of it. By his talk of transcendent, immanent or subsistent forms or universals he shows the obscurity of his awareness. But by his hostility to the nominalist’s insistence that games have nothing in common except that they are called games he shows his awareness. All this can be more fully explained by the application of what I will call “Ramsey’s Maxim.” F. P. Ramsey, after mapping the course of an inconclusive dispute between Russell and W. E. Johnson, writes as follows: “Evidently, however, none of these arguments are really decisive, and the position is extremely unsatisfactory to any one with real curiosity about such a fundamental question. In such cases it is a heuristic maxim that the truth lies not in one of the two disputed views but in some third possibility which has not yet been thought of, which we can only discover by rejecting something assumed as obvious by both the disputants” (The Foundations of Mathematics). It is assumed as obvious by both the nominalist and the realist that there can be no objective justification for the application of a general term to its instances unless its instances have something in common over and above their having in common that they are its instances. The nominalist rightly holds that there is no such additional common element, and he therefore wrongly concludes that there is no objective justification for the application of any

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general term. The realist rightly holds that there is an objective justification for the application of general terms, and he therefore wrongly concludes that there must be some additional common element. Wittgenstein denied the assumption that is common to nominalism and realism, and that is why I say that he solved the problem of universals. For if we deny the mistaken premiss that is common to the realist’s argument and the nominalist’s argument then we can deny the realist’s mistaken conclusion and deny the nominalist’s mistaken conclusion; and that is another way of saying that we can affirm the true premiss of the nominalist’s argument and can also affirm the true premiss of the realist’s argument. The nominalist says that games have nothing in common except that they are called games. The realist says that games must have something in common, and he means by this that they must have something in common other than that they are games. Wittgenstein says that games have nothing in common except that they are games. Wittgenstein thus denies at one and the same time the nominalist’s claim that games have nothing in common except that they are called games and the realist’s claim that games have something in common other than that they are games. He asserts at one and the same time the realist’s claim that there is an objective justification for the application of the word “game” to games and the nominalist’s claim that there is no element that is common to all games. And he is able to do all this because he denies the joint claim of the nominalist and the realist that there cannot be an objective justification for the application of the word “game” to games unless there is an element that is common to all games (universalia in rebus) or a common relation that all games bear to something that is not a game (universalia ante res). Wittgenstein is easily confused with the nominalist because he denies what the realist asserts: that games have something in common other than that they are games. When we see that Wittgenstein is not a nominalist we may easily confuse him with the realist because he denies what the nominalist asserts: that games have nothing in common except that they are called games. But we can now see that Wittgenstein is neither a realist nor a nominalist: he asserts the simple truth that they both deny and he also asserts the two simple truths of which each of them asserts one and denies the other. I will now try to put some flesh on to these bare bones. The value and the limitations of the nominalist’s claim that things which

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are called by the same name have nothing in common except that they are called by the same name can be seen if we look at a case where a set of objects literally and undeniably have nothing in common except that they are called by the same name. If I choose to give the name “alpha” to each of a number of miscellaneous objects (the star Sirius, my fountain-pen, the Parthenon, the color red, the number five, and the letter Z) then I may well succeed in choosing the objects so arbitrarily that I shall succeed in preventing them from having any feature in common, other than that I call them by the name “alpha.” But this imaginary case, to which the nominalist likens the use of all general words, has only to be described to be sharply contrasted with the typical case in which I apply a general word, say “chair,” to a number of the instances to which it applies. In the first place, the arbitrariness of my selection of alphas is not paralleled in the case in which I apply the word “chair” successively to the chair in which I am now sitting, the Speaker’s Chair in the House of Commons, the chair used at Bisley for carrying the winner of the Queen’s Prize, and one of the deck chairs on the beach at Brighton. In giving a list of chairs I cannot just mention anything that happens to come into my head, while this is exactly what I do in giving my list of alphas. The second point is that the class of alphas is a closed class. Once I have given my list I have referred to every single alpha in the universe, actual and possible. Although I might have included or excluded any actual or possible object whatsoever when I was drawing up my list, once I have in fact made my arbitrary choice, no further application can be given to the word “alpha” according to the use that I have prescribed. For if I later add an object that I excluded from my list, or remove an object that I included in it, then I am making a different use of the word “alpha.” With the word “chair” the position is quite different. There are an infinite number of actual and possible chairs. I cannot aspire to complete the enumeration of all chairs, as I can arbitrarily and at any point complete the enumeration of all alphas, and the word “chair,” unlike the word “alpha,” can be applied to an infinite number of instances without suffering any change of use. These two points lead to a third and decisive point. I cannot teach the use of the word “alpha” except by specifically attaching it to each of the objects in my arbitrarily chosen list. No observer can conclude anything from watching me attach the label to this, that, or the other object, or to any number of objects however large, about the nature of the object or objects, if any, to which I shall later attach it. The use of the word “alpha” cannot be learned or taught as the use of a general word can be learned or taught. In teaching the use of a general word we may and must refer to characteristics of the ob-

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jects to which it applies, and of the objects to which it does not apply, and indicate which of these characteristics count for the application of the word and which count against it. A pupil does not have to consult us on every separate occasion on which he encounters a new object, and if he did consult us every time we should have to say that he was not learning the use of the word. The reference that we make to a finite number of objects to which the word applies, and to a finite number of objects to which the word does not apply, is capable of equipping the pupil with a capacity for correctly applying or withholding the word to or from an infinite number of objects to which we have made no reference. All this remains true in the case where it is not I alone, but a large number of people, or all of us, who use the word “alpha” in the way that I suggest. Even if everybody always called a particular set of objects by the same name, that would be insufficient to ensure that the name was a general name, and the claim of the name to be a general name would be defeated by just that necessity for reference to the arbitrary choices of the users of the name that the nominalist mistakenly claims to find in the case of a genuinely general name. For the nominalist is right in thinking that if we always had to make such a reference then there would be no general names as they are understood by the realist. The nominalist is also right in the stress that he puts on the role of human interests and human purposes in determining our choice of principles of classification. How this insistence on the role of human purposes may be reconciled with the realist’s proper insistence on the objectivity of the similarities and dissimilarities on which any genuine classification is based can be seen by considering an imaginary tribe of South Sea Islanders. Let us suppose that trees are of great importance in the life and work of the South Sea Islanders, and that they have a rich and highly developed language in which they speak of the trees with which their island is thickly clad. But they do not have names for the species and genera of trees as they are recognized by our botanists. As we walk round the island with some of its inhabitants we can easily pick out orange-trees, date-palms and cedars. Our hosts are puzzled that we should call by the same name trees which appear to them to have nothing in common. They in turn surprise us by giving the same name to each of the trees in what is from our point of view a very mixed plantation. They point out to us what they called a mixed plantation, and we see that it is in our terms a clump of trees of the same species. Each party comes to recognize that its own classifications are as puzzling to the other as the other’s are puzzling to itself.

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This looks like the sort of situation that gives aid and comfort to the nominalist in his battle against the realist. But if we look at it more closely we see that it cannot help him. We know already that our own classification is based on similarities and differences between the trees, similarities and differences which we can point out to the islanders in an attempt to teach them our language. Of course we may fail, but if we do it will not be because we must fail. Now either (a) The islanders have means of teaching us their classifications, by pointing out similarities and differences which we had not noticed, or in which we had not been interested, in which case both classifications are genuine, and no rivalry between them, of a kind that can help the nominalist, could ever arise; or (b) Their classification is arbitrary in the sense in which my use of the word “alpha” was arbitrary, in which case it is not a genuine classification. It may be that the islanders classify trees as “boat-building trees,” “housebuilding trees,” etc., and that they are more concerned with the height, thickness and maturity of the trees than they are with the distinctions of species that interest us. In a particular case of prima facie conflict of classifications, we may not in fact be able to discover whether what appears to be a rival classification really is a classification. But we can be sure that if it is a classification then it is backed by objective similarities and differences, and that if it is not backed by objective similarities and differences then it is merely an arbitrary system of names. In no case will it appear that we must choose between rival systems of genuine classification of a set of objects in such a sense that one of them is to be recognized as the classification for all purposes. There is no limit to the number of possible classifications of objects. (The nominalist is right about this.)4 There is no classification of any set of objects which is not objectively based on genuine similarities and differences. (The realist is right about this) The nominalist is so impressed by the infinite diversity of possible classifications that he is blinded to their objectivity. The realist is so impressed by the objectivity of all genuine classifications that he underestimates their diversity. 4. Here one may think of Wittgenstein’s remark that “every application of every word is arbitrary,” which emphasizes that we can always find some distinction between any pair of objects, however closely similar they may be. What might be called the principle of the diversity of discernibles guarantees that we can never be forced to apply the same word to two different things.

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Of course we may if we like say that there is one complete system of classification which marks all the similarities and all the differences. (This is the realist’s summing up of what we can learn by giving critical attention to the realist and the nominalist in turn.) Or we may say that there are only similarities and differences, from which we may choose according to our purposes and interests. (This is the nominalist’s summing up.) In talking of genuine or objective similarities and differences we must not forget that we are concerned with similarities and differences between possible cases as well as between actual cases, and indeed that we are concerned with the actual cases only because they are themselves a selection of the possible cases. Because the nominalist and the realist are both right and both wrong, each is driven into the other’s arms when he tries to be both consistent and faithful to our language, knowledge and experience. The nominalist talks of resemblances until he is pressed into a corner where he must acknowledge that resemblance is unintelligible except as resemblance in a respect, and to specify the respect in which objects resemble one another is to indicate a quality or property. The realist talks of properties and qualities until, when properties and qualities have been explained in terms of other properties and other qualities, he can at last do nothing but point to the resemblances between the objects that are said to be characterized by such and such a property or quality. The question “Are resemblances ultimate or are properties ultimate?” is a perverse question if it is meant as one to which there must be a simple, single answer. They are both ultimate, or neither is ultimate. The craving for a single answer is the logically unsatisfiable craving for something that will be the ultimate terminus of explanation and will yet itself be explained.

Bibliography Aristotle. On the Soul (De Anima). In The Complete Works of Aristotle (The Revised Oxford Translation), vol. 1, ed. Jonathan Barnes. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984. Carnap, Rudolf. The Philosophy of Rudolf Carnap. Edited by Paul Arthur Schlipp. La Salle, Ill.: Open Court, 1963. Chomsky, Noam. Rules and Representations. New York: Columbia University Press, 1980. Davidson, Donald. “A Coherence Theory of Truth and Knowledge.” In Truth and Interpretation: Perspectives on the Philosophy of Donald Davidson, ed. Ernest LePore. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986. Dewey, John. Experience and Nature. New York: Dover, 1958.

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Dummett, Michael. The Logical Basis of Metaphysics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Fodor, Jerry A. Psychosemantics: The Problem of Meaning in the Philosophy of Mind. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1987. Frege, Gottlob. “On Sense and Reference.” Translated by Max Black. In Translations from the Philosophical Writings of Gottlob Frege, ed. Peter Geach and Max Black. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1960. Gadamer, Hans-Georg. Truth and Method. Translated by Garrett Barden and John Cumming. New York: Seabury Press, 1975. Garver, Newton. “Naturalism and Transcendentality: The Case of ‘Form of Life.’ ” In Wittgenstein and Contemporary Philosophy, ed. Souren Teghrarian. Bristol: Thoemmes Press, 1994. Gettier, Edmund. “Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?” Analysis 23, no. 6 (June 1963); also in Chapter 3. Goodman, Nelson. “Seven Strictures on Similarity.” In Experience and Theory, ed. Lawrence Foster and J. W. Swanson. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1970. Hare, R. M. The Language of Morals. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1952. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. Phenomenology of Spirit. Translated by A. V. Miller. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977. Hempel, Carl G. “The Function of General Laws in History.” In Aspects of Scientific Explanation and Other Essays in the Philosophy of Science. New York: Free Press, 1965. Hume, David. A Treatise of Human Nature. Edited by L. A. Selby-Bigge. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1888. The Leibniz-Clarke Correspondence. Edited by H. G. Alexander. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1956. Peirce, Charles Sanders. “What Pragmatism Is.” In Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, vol. 5, ed. Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1962. Plato. The Collected Dialogues of Plato. Edited by Edith Hamilton and Huntingdon Cairns. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1963. Putnam, Hilary. The Many Faces of Realism. La Salle, Ill.: Open Court, 1987. ———. Meaning and the Moral Sciences. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978. Quine, W. V. “Two Dogmas of Empiricism.” In From a Logical Point of View. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1953. ———. Word and Object. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1960. Russell, Bertrand. “On Denoting.” Mind 14 (1905). ———. The Problems of Philosophy. London: Oxford University Press, 1912. Scotus, John Duns. Philosophical Writings: A Selection. Translated by Alan Wolter. 2d ed. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987. Strawson, P. F. “On Referring.” Mind 59, n.s. (1950). Tarski, Alfred. “The Concept of Truth in Formalized Languages.” Translated by J. W. Woodger. In Logic, Semantics, Metamathematics, 2d ed., ed. John Corcoran. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1983. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. On Certainty. Translated by Denis Paul and G.E.M. Anscombe. Edited by G.E.M. Anscombe and G. H. von Wright. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1969. ———. Philosophical Investigations. 3d ed. Translated by G.E.M. Anscombe. New York: Macmillan, 1968.

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3 Knowledge and Existence

Introduction As already remarked, Aristotle supposes that reality has a necessarily invariant structure. He seems to regard this as a truth independent of whatever we conjecture about the nature of knowledge. Yet, of course, he does also claim (in De Anima and Posterior Analytics) that we have the requisite sui generis competence (nous: rational intuition) for discerning such structures. There is no evidence of any such competence apart from the obvious argument that if reality is invariantly structured, then we must indeed possess the cognate ability to discern that fact. The truth is, there is no way to prioritize metaphysics over epistemology or epistemology over metaphysics. Whatever we say is true of reality rests on whatever we suppose we can validly claim, and whatever we claim (in terms of our subjective or cognitional powers) we suppose holds true in virtue of the way the world is. Early modern philosophers—particularly Descartes, Locke, and Kant—had (wrongly) supposed that they could segregate the analysis of knowledge and the analysis of the world, that is, the study of certain interior “subjective” resources and the independent “objective” features of the world itself, despite the fact that our knowledge of the second arises only from the exercise of the first and the reliability of the first is confirmed

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only by the match between what it yields and what the second manifests. So that if, in coming to know the independent world we must always rely on “ideas” in the mind, which cannot in principle claim direct access to the world said to be known, we cannot confirm that those ideas ever correspond to the way the world actually is. This is the insuperable formula of modern skepticism. Descartes recognized that he could not escape the threat, since, in order to make the cogito argument support a reliable body of knowledge, he had to offset the malice of a possible Evil Demon; and Locke realized that (as a Cartesian) he had somehow to guarantee (but could not) that his “ideas” of so-called “primary qualities” did indeed accurately “represent” the independent world. In an important sense, these are the early epistemic antecedents of Wittgenstein’s attenuated correspondentism (Tractatus), which, however, does not advance any epistemological doctrine of its own. These two themes—(a) the principled disjunction between the resources of knowledge and the “corresponding” properties of the independent world and (b) the restriction of our cognitive resources to an entirely interior “representational” function (a tertium)—are the chief sources of an intolerable skepticism that runs through much of modern philosophy (see Popkin). Berkeley was the first important philosopher to grasp the matter correctly, although he saves the day with an extravagant thesis regarding God’s mind, which effectively restores a kind of Platonism. Berkeley does, however, make two decisive contributions that anticipate the improved strategies of Kant and the post-Kantian (German) Idealists: first, that our ideas of primary qualities (those associated with Newton’s physics) are inseparable from our ideas of secondary qualities (the salient features of the ordinary world); and second, that the mind cannot grasp the actual properties of what is objectively real unless there is a prior, equally real connection between what we discern among our (“subjective”) ideas and what, in their (“objective”) representational function, we take them to be the resemblant ideas of. Berkeley was remarkably skillful in this double regard, in Dialogues Between Hylas and Philonous, but he was obliged to work with an impoverished idiom in which knowledge was restricted to the representational “ideas” he himself realized were the source of the skepticism he sought to overcome. The resolution of modern skepticism requires two distinct steps. Speaking loosely, we may say the first was taken by Kant and the second by Hegel. Kant argues (in the Critique of Pure Reason) that the cognizable structure of the objective world is itself constituted—originally structured—in accord with the prior constituting powers of experience, the so-called pure intuitions of time and space, and the categories of the understanding: in effect, the in-

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telligible (all the intelligible) structures of reality that the mind is capable of comprehending. Kant believed these structures to be necessarily invariant in our “constructed” (our intelligible) world. By this single elegant stroke, the denial that there is any real difference between the source of the cognizable features of the world and the reflexively mapped categories by which alone we understand the world, Kant proves to be the great innovator of modern philosophy, eclipsing Berkeley’s primitive challenge to Locke and Descartes. There are at least two unanswerable difficulties in Kant’s account, however. For one, Kant offers his view in terms of the same generic idiom (subjectivism) that Descartes and Locke prefer, which produces skepticism (representationalism). That is, when Kant speaks of cognition, he speaks of what is entirely confined or interior to subjective experience; yet he treats the content of human understanding as “representational” of something entirely exterior, disjunctively “other” than representational ideas. (His own system precludes the intelligibility of such a claim, or else falls short in the skeptical way.) For another, although he treats what we discover in the objective world as empirically contingent, he also claims to be able to discern in such discovery the necessary work and prior structure of the cognizing mind apart from the cognized world (“understanding”) by which the discovered world is first constituted as intelligible (transcendentalism). By the first maneuver, Kant means to overcome skepticism, but the effort to do so threatens to reinstate skepticism in an even deeper way. For if the “subjective” and the “objective” are radically disjoined, then Kant cannot really avoid the full representationalist idiom; and if he cannot, then he cannot avoid the original skepticism. By the second, Kant poses a murkier puzzle. For we can never be quite sure how Kant construes the “relationship” between the existing human cognizer who is encountered in the same world in which ordinary “objects” are encountered and the transcendental Subject (often referred to merely as the “understanding”) that plays the purported constituting role that makes possible the equivalence of the “transcendental idealism” and “empirical realism” the first Critique affirms. Plainly, this difficulty harbors a deeper threat of skepticism. To have construed the constituting “understanding” as merely the subjective (or “psychological”) mind of individual persons would have entrenched the preposterous idea that the world was no more than a construct (or fiction) of our individual minds; but to have construed the understanding as a distinct “Subjective” power (not a “psychological” power and not a merely human “mind”) would have introduced an utterly mysterious deus ex machina to

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ensure that our apparent knowledge was indeed reliable and objective. To say that it could not be otherwise, that it must be necessarily so, could not really fail to be so, a priori, is to risk the obvious empirical facts: for instance, the plain replaceability of Euclid’s geometry, the falsifiability of Newton’s physics, both of which Kant concedes would subvert his entire system; but to admit the unresolved puzzle of our cognitive success is to stalemate forever the entire transcendental prospect of a critical epistemology. There can be little doubt that Kant was struggling to make do with the limited resources of pre-Revolutionary eighteenth-century philosophy; the transcendental signifies his best effort to mark the conditions of objectivity in public terms short of the recovery of the social, the collective, the historical sources of human reason and understanding. Hegel saw all this clearly and, in the Phenomenology of Spirit, rejected the disjunction between the “real” and the “apparent” (Erscheinungen)—in effect, the disjunction between the objective and the subjective or, even more tellingly, the discredited disjunction between the “noumenal” and the “phenomenal.” This is the point of insisting on the unity of knowledge “in-andfor-itself” (the union of knowledge and truth). Kant construed the intelligible world as constituted by the inherent structuring powers of experience and understanding, but he did not think of these (human) powers as socially or historically constituted in their own turn. Hence, he pretends to discern certain invariant, necessary structures of understanding somehow embedded in the contingencies of subjective experience. He does not satisfactorily explain how such a discovery is possible, but he clearly believes the understanding is structured as a closed system of categories. The idea that the understanding is, intrinsically, socially constituted—is indeed a cognizing “subject” whose developing awareness of its own experience includes the developing history of its own society’s effort at understanding the world—is alien to the Kant of the Critique of Pure Reason but an essential part of the meaning of Hegel’s principal notion: Geist. Although it is also true that, for his part, Hegel was attracted to certain unexplained “necessities” said to be internal to Geist itself, the truth is: Geist cannot meaningfully be a cognizing agent, a subject of any sort. It must be a nominalization ranging over the predicable saliencies of an entire historical society by which our first-order knowledge is provisionally legitimated. Hegel nowhere unpacks the notion; it is, admittedly, well nigh impenetrable. It was, however, Hegel’s supreme contribution to have grasped the fact that skepticism could never be put to rest without taking a step beyond the puzzles of representationality and correspondence (call that symbiosis).

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Hegel expresses this mythically by viewing the “world’s” constituting role (equally, the self-constitution of cognizing mind) as the entire history of Geist. On Hegel’s view, cognizer and cognized form an indissoluble unity (a dialectical process of self-union and self-division or self-alienation), but the content of that unity changes over the course of history. Geist is no more confined to the human mind than is Kantian understanding. What the connection is in both instances is, plainly, a source of puzzlement. Whatever cognizing powers are imputed to actual historical societies affect the subsequent formation and transformation of the further conceptual resources of that same society. Hence, Hegel (but not the Kant of the Critique of Pure Reason) introduces the idea of the historicity of thinking, the idea that thinking inherently manifests the structure of an evolving (collective) history. In a way, Hegel both supersedes Kant and dreams of bringing his predecessor’s work to full perfection. Behind the purple prose there remains one unshakable discovery: namely, that the accumulating history of what counts as knowledge (and our cognizing competence) is the essential condition of the continuing evolution of knowledge itself (and of our cognizing competence); furthermore, that same process must be understood as gathering up the aggregated experience of individual human subjects as well as the collective ethos of the historical society within whose terms such individuals function in the apt (but limited) way they do. All that is part and parcel of the “experience” imputed to Hegel’s invented subject, Geist. The shortest way to glimpse the difference between Kant and Hegel is to compare the preface to the second edition of Kant’s first Critique (read in the context of the entire Critique of Pure Reason) and the Introduction to Hegel’s Phenomenology (read in the context of the entire Phenomenology). Hegel makes the history and historicity of thought part of the very “possibility” of evolving knowledge. In doing that—and in overcoming, at the same time, the dual skeptical threat of representationality (the cognizing relationship between “subject” and “object”) and of correspondence (the congruence between the cognized structure of “appearance” and the cognizable structure of “reality”: what he designates, respectively, as the “for itself” [Consciousness] and the “in itself” [Truth])—Hegel effectively undercuts the Kantian notion of understanding as a closed, timelessly adequate system of conceptual categories. Of course, to have done all that was to have put in permanent jeopardy the very search for the supposed synthetic a priori conditions of knowledge—unless, paradoxically, they could be found within the flux of history. The lingering effects of Hegel’s critique of Kant may be found in Ernst

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Cassirer’s impressive effort to save the Kantian system within the Hegelian context of evolving history: accordingly, Cassirer reconciles the recently developed science of biology with the established sciences of the Kantian canon. Once the lesson dawns, the idea of transcendentally necessary knowledge gives way to reasoned conjectures, and a priori foundations give way to history. (See Coffa.) There you have the essential clue to the trajectory of the theory of knowledge from Hegel to the end of the twentieth century (despite the irony, let it be said, that, in our time, the eclipse of apriorism entails the eclipse of historicism as well). In one stroke, therefore, Hegel shows us how (a) to avoid skepticism, (b) to avoid solipsism, and (c) to outflank unrestricted modal invariances. It’s true that Hegel continues to speak of “necessities” internal to his symbiotized reality (Geist); but it is also true that no one has been able to confirm a fully legible reading of his claim, and the sense of it seems to be entirely congruent with the garden-variety contingencies of history. There you have the single clue to the “Hegelian” spirit of American pragmatism and the restored skeptical cast of late analytic philosophies that have replaced pragmatism but claim to have incorporated its best economies. For, in a fair sense, Anglo-American analytic philosophy is the continuation of eighteenthcentury philosophy (both Kantian and pre-Kantian) largely unaffected by the nineteenth-century themes of symbiosis and historicity. A particularly instructive symptom appears in Michael Dummett’s influential discussion of the reasons for disjoining semantics and metaphysics and for assigning cognitive priority to inquiries into the first over inquiries into the second. Read against the backdrop of the distinctions now in hand, it is difficult not to fit what Dummett says into either a Cartesian or a Kantian mold; but on either reading the argument returns us to the dualism that the line of inquiry linking Berkeley to Hegel and Hegel to Dewey might well have precluded. One may see a similar thread in the sequence running from Hegel to Marx and from Marx to Foucault. These distinctions help to fix our sense of the divide between “analytic” and “continental” philosophy. In any case, once you concede that Kant cannot solve his own puzzle (which ultimately marks his work as Cartesian, in spite of his critique of Descartes), you see that the import of representationalism (the first of the two skeptical puzzles mentioned) cannot be decisively resolved except by resolving the second (correspondentism: the puzzle of the relationship between appearance and reality). If you see that, you see as well that you cannot favor Kant’s solution except in Hegel’s way; and you cannot accept either Kant or Hegel without rejecting the unsecured doctrines usually (possibly in-

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accurately) ascribed to Hegel: namely, (a) the actuality of Geist, (b) the teleologism of “its” history, and (c) the pretense of discerning genuine necessities internal to the life of Geist (that are neither of the de re or de dicto sort that Aristotle addresses in Metaphysics Gamma). Given these caveats, what remains of Hegel’s contribution is still hospitable to the world of historicity and flux. We cannot say with certainty whether, or to what extent, Hegel might have endorsed these economies. In any case, they lead to a favorable reading of history that is more characteristic (more in accord with Nietzsche’s and Foucault’s intuitions) of recent treatments of historicism. (See Löwith.) Still, it is not an improbable reading of Hegel that suggests that what he grasped was that human thought spontaneously imposes on itself the telic, narratized, and totalized structures he imputes to Geist. They are, so to say, “necessary” to the human conception of Geist (of Geist’s having a history). But Geist itself is a nominalization of the narrative unity of any historicized account of actual human knowledge. In this sense, Hegel is plainly not an “Idealist.” There you have an inkling of the meaning of historicity, the single most important large philosophical idea of the modern world, the only one of the fundamental concepts of Western philosophy that had not yet been developed prior to the French Revolution—and, of course, the one that is the strongest theme among contemporary champions of the flux. It may seem strange to say, but it is still true, that late analytic philosophy is largely caught up with variations of the old quarrel between pre-Kantian and Kantian (first Critique) options; whereas late continental European thought is largely occupied with variations of late-Kantian thought (the argument of the Critique of Judgment and beyond) and post-Kantian thought. On the side of English-language philosophy, this same contrast appears most recently in (what would otherwise be) the merely local contest between Davidson’s influential “A Coherence Theory of Truth and Knowledge” and Putnam’s “internal realism”—and his increasing dissatisfaction with his own earlier advocacy of an objectivism (not too distant from Davidson’s) insufficiently informed by a Kantian-like constraint. At the moment (that is, at the “moment” of that contest, since Putnam has now repudiated his internal realism), Putnam is on the edge of conceding Hegelian-like objections to his own Kantian-like insistence that truth is a Grenzbegriff, an invariant limitconcept, which, in spite of disallowing a disjunction between the subjective and the objective, is said to “regulate” all contingent truth-claims about the world. The doctrine is plainly “Kantian,” in the most vulnerable (“transcendental”) sense—which is to say, it is untenable under the conception of

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symbiotizing or historicizing the “Kantian” view of understanding in Hegel’s direction. Davidson’s ingenious—but unguarded—solution to the problem of objective knowledge sounds for all the world like a Cartesian solution, despite its canny grasp of the up-to-date work of the analytic tradition. Davidson coopts for his own purpose the master intuition of Wittgenstein’s “epistemology” (in Investigations), but it is a doubtful coup. Certainly, Davidson makes no room for history; certainly, he resists offering any theory about the social formation of our cognitional powers; certainly, he insists that we cannot be deceived in the preponderance of our beliefs and admits no need to explain the fact. He collects the advantage of a canonical realism (a realism hospitable to the themes of physicalism and the unity of science), but he refuses to defend (or even to detail) its epistemic payoff. For instance, he insists on the truth of the great mass of our ordinary beliefs—and even the probable truth of any random belief among them—but he nowhere considers the effect of the changing history of science on the possibility that false (but still pragmatically “adequate”) beliefs may serve our quotidian interests. Putnam opposes all this. Davidson’s theory is easier to defend, though it is nowhere defended; Putnam’s may be more worthy of defense, though it is ultimately indefensible. A good sense of these differences and their importance may be found in Rorty’s astute summary of the matter, although the analysis is skewed in Rorty’s own postmodernist idiom. There is no need, in favoring Hegel’s improvement, to subscribe to Hegel’s extravagances. And yet much of what Hegel says in his “idealist” idiom may be read more temperately. For example, if mind and world are “symbiotized” and if, emphasizing the cognitive side of that symbiosis, one treats the whole of reality as an encompassing “Geist” discerning “its” own (internal) structure through historical time, we may understand Hegel to be saying that the “world” is the self-reflecting Geist posited (now) as the “other,” the “non-Geist,” that counts, step by step, as the mounting discoveries of objective inquiry. The extravagance is plainly there, but it is meant to offset the alleged correspondence between ideas and world (even in Berkeley). So the language of Geist brings together (a) the subjective side of the run of preKantian/Kantian thought, (b) the objective side of what is “other” than that, the “world,” which all hands wish to preserve, and (c) the union of (a) and (b) as internal to a putatively inclusive being (“Absolute Geist”) which is the logical “space,” so to say, in which the historical unfolding of human knowledge obtains, cast (metaphorically) as the creative process of Geist’s

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“self”-knowledge. Even the telic aspects of the account can be made to yield more acceptable readings. But there’s no question that Hegel’s language is incredibly inflated and hopelessly misleading. Nevertheless, the improvement over Kant stands: the relocation of epistemic legitimation in the collective processes of historical life. In fact, as I have already suggested, a plausible case can be made for claiming that the philosophy of the past two centuries is largely centered on the puzzles, and the relationship between the puzzles, that Kant and Hegel address. That’s not to say that contemporary philosophy is expressly occupied with those puzzles or with their natural progeny. On the contrary, twentieth-century Anglo-American analytic philosophy is largely pre-Kantian in inspiration and is only now coming to terms again with the Kantian puzzles. It has yet to recover—one may not unreasonably claim—Hegel’s instructive contribution! The reason is simply that the historicity of thought— the idea that thinking is inherently historied, formed and transformed by the conditions of actual societal life—is nearly completely absent from Englishlanguage philosophy. It was deliberately snuffed out in England by Russell and Moore early in the twentieth century (see Hylton); and its American strains have been more than subordinated to the ahistorical naturalism that one finds in Quine and Davidson. You will find a nearly perfect illustration of this “Cartesian” side of late English-language naturalism very candidly and energetically offered in Michael Devitt’s Realism and Truth. In a remarkable way, the Cartesian-Kantian drama has been reenacted with new conceptual fittings in the recent opposition between Davidson and Putnam. Davidson abandons the entire question of legitimating knowledge, though he affirms by main force the massive core of public knowledge. Curiously, he ignores Kuhn’s emphasis (even Quine’s, if the truth be known) on historical shifts in science’s description and explanation of natural phenomena; he concedes no role to history or interpretive theories of the epistemological sort. They feed, Davidson believes, the boundless appetite of Cartesian doubt. So Davidson is himself a kind of Cartesian manqué. No need, he thinks, to put the Evil Demon back in the bottle, no need to invoke the cogito argument. The world, it seems, is compliantly transparent, reliably realist in its direct disclosures. For his part, Putnam, who began his career committed to the “scientific realism” of the unity of science program, never abandoned a respect for the relevance of legitimative questions. The world (for Putnam) was never transparent in Davidson’s way. Hence, Putnam was drawn more and more in Kant’s direction—toward an epistemically “constructed” world (not a

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fiction) and toward acknowledging the essential regulative function of truth as a Grenzbegriff. He may have been attracted to the Kantian orientation of Carnap and the positivists (see Friedman). Needless to say, Putnam eschews any detailed Kantian labors. He complicates his thesis, however, since he is an admitted “pluralist”—meaning, by that, that there is no uniquely correct account of the world. He is not as bold as Quine (the Quine of the “indeterminacy of translation” doctrine); but then, Quine rests his tolerant account of incompatible metaphysical parsings of the world on an initial holism that is not itself subject to pluralistic diversity. That assumption is nowhere legitimated in Quine and nowhere postulated in Putnam. As a consequence, Quine is a mysterious non-realist and Putnam, an equally mysterious realist. The principal trouble with Putnam’s account is that he believes he can legitimate the objectivity of science in spite of conceding that there is no demarcation line (no “Dedekind cut”) between the “subjective” and the “objective.” And yet, of course, that admission (“internal realism”) and the admission of intransparency (the need for conceptual tertia and the threat of Kuhnian incommensurabilities) are now pressing Putnam in the direction of more and more “Hegelian” concessions. The prophecy is not important, but the dialectic of the contest is worth keeping in mind. As already remarked, the quarrel between Davidson and Putnam is neatly chronicled by Rorty, although it is also dampened by Rorty’s postmodernist tastes and (what comes, surprisingly, to much the same thing) his preference for Davidson. But we must not suppose that this regressive pattern is restricted to analytic philosophy. Far from it. The remarkable thing is that it appears in another influential form, in continental philosophy, in Heidegger’s Being and Time. For Heidegger, reacting to the ultimate untenability of Husserl’s “Cartesian” and “Kantian” dualism, tries to reclaim (or better, to trump) Hegel’s theme—by way of the internal connection between Dasein and Sein. Heidegger manages only to resurrect a deeper Kantianism of his own manufacture; one that now holds between the “ontic” and the “ontological,” where the latter is unabashedly “noumenal” in both aspiration and inspiration. In this sense, Heidegger retreats to a difficulty even deeper than Kant’s—and deeper than Husserl’s phenomenology of the cognizing “subject.” On this oblique reading, the strongest currents of continental philosophy are every bit as “Cartesian” as those of late English-language philosophy—though by an altogether different route. There is a story told about Dewey to the effect that someone once presented him with a copy of Heidegger’s book, which Dewey characterized as

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the work of a Swabian peasant trying to imitate Dewey! There’s enough in the idea to explain why Rorty favors both Dewey and Heidegger as his totems. But the truth is, Dewey is “Hegelian” only in being utterly opposed to dualisms of every sort. He is actually more of an evolutionist than a historicist, though without admitting any objective telos in nature. And Heidegger is more “Kantian” in insisting on a strange sort of ultimate fixity within the flux of history (the final meaning of the “self-disclosure” of Being, as in the fatal “Letter on Humanism” and the reinterpretation of Parmenides and Heraclitus). But neither Dewey nor Heidegger is, finally, a historicist. You may also find in this a clue to Rorty’s divided allegiance and, beyond that, to the regressive tendencies of contemporary philosophy, whether analytic or continental. At this very moment, for instance, in both France and Germany, the collapse of the Heideggerean and Marxian hegemonies has turned many leading thinkers against historicity and back to the seemingly steady innocence of analytic philosophy (and even First Philosophy). Habermas is, perhaps, the best known European exemplar—replacing Marx with Kant. But that signifies abandoning, hardly deflecting, the historicist claim. Convergent tendencies appear in recent French philosophy, which is noticeably Cartesian and/or drawn to American analytic philosophy. According to the argument favored here, invariance must give way to flux, and flux cannot (in our time) be ultimately opposed to historicity. Symptomatically, Habermas has turned against both, which, you may conjecture, counts as the usual disjunctive choice already posed in Hegel, Marx, the Frankfurt-Critical school, and Heidegger. The better policy seems to lie with historicity—hence with the denial of invariance and de re and de dicto necessities. All we require is the avoidance of skepticism and privilege. But that is the lesson of the flux. (Foucault has cleverly turned the point against Habermas himself. See Chapter 4 and “What Is Enlightenment?”) If you grant the validity of this general picture, you begin to see the sense in which Wittgenstein’s Investigations (turned against the Tractatus) presents a fledgling start against both Anglo-American analytic philosophy and the extravagant possibilities of Husserl’s and Heidegger’s phenomenologies. It is important to take notice of the fact that Wittgenstein’s notion of a Lebensform (and its various “language games”) is systematically ignored among analytic philosophers, even where they favor Wittgenstein’s critique of correspondentism and his insistence on the logical informality of natural-language discourse. The key to Wittgenstein’s novelty lies with the idea that human intelligence and cognizing behavior are collectively informed (informed in a lebensformlich way). Against the analysts, this signifies an avoidance of

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solipsism; and against the continentals (attracted to Husserl and Heidegger— and beyond), it signifies the avoidance of a mysterious noumenal domain that governs the Kantian-like world of objective appearances but is inaccessible to the language and resources of the latter. Had Wittgenstein developed an interest in the historied nature of thought, he might have “recovered” a Hegelian-like reading of language games. But as we know, he was profoundly conservative and ahistorical in his soul. Hence, Wittgenstein’s idea of the Lebensform is no more than a half-step back to Hegel’s notion of the sittlich: it is, in effect, the work of a philosophical genius deprived of a close reading of the philosophical record. The matter is of some importance, for Wittgenstein represents the interesting possibility of a third way between the regressive (objectivist) solipsism and/or representationalism of late analytic philosophy drawn largely to preKantian sources and the regressive (transcendentalist) solipsism of Husserlian and Heideggerean phenomenology drawn largely to a reality hidden from the cognizing resources of the other. One perspicuous assessment of Wittgenstein’s contribution suggests that adopting the notion of the Lebensform entails the inescapability and adequacy of grounding all our cognizing and active powers in the collective practices of an enabling culture. In that sense, analytic philosophy proves not to have grasped the need for such an admission, and Husserlian and Heideggerean phenomenology pretends to escape its limitations (along the lines of a novel, but decidedly extravagant, “Idealism”). As a result, analytic philosophy remains “primitive” despite its impressive technical discipline, and continental philosophy proves to be hopelessly arbitrary and unworldly in its pretensions. Hence, Wittgenstein may be said to have construed philosophy, by sheer intuition, as nothing more or less than Weltanschauungsphilosophie: possibly even close to the sense in which Heidegger excoriates Karl Jaspers’s frank acceptance (as an existentialist) of such a characterization. Except, of course, that once again, Wittgenstein has nothing to say about the historical nature of a Weltanschauung (a worldview or ideology or cultural perspective). Heidegger resists the idea; but he ultimately fails and produces a humbug in its place (the final Kehre of the “Letter on Humanism”), which isolates the self-revelatory role of Sein (Being) already posited in Being and Time. And theorists like Davidson and Putnam (and, ultimately, Rorty) savage one another in debating whether, under self-impoverishing conditions, a Kantian or a pre-Kantian epistemology should be preferred. The hopelessness of both options is just what is implicitly discerned in Wittgenstein’s “third” way of resolving the problem of predication—which, as already remarked, Bambrough fails to characterize adequately. There you

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have the point of the “third” way of philosophy that leads, in a forward direction, from Wittgenstein to Hegel, then to Nietzsche and beyond (at least in an exploratory way) to Dilthey and Dewey and Gadamer and Foucault. In fact, Wittgenstein actually glimpses the duality of Weltanschauungsphilosophie: its horizonality and its precluding modal necessity (see On Certainty, § 425). Philosophy at the very end of the twentieth century was uncertain about the need to return to Hegel, but there it is. Correctly read, it signifies the eclipse of all forms of modal necessity imputed to the natural world or the constituting powers of thought (in the epistemic sense) or a realm of Being beyond our normal ken. That is the converging theme of Weltanschauungsphilosophie, historicism, fluxism, pragmatism, and that entire contrived tradition that links such disparate figures as Protagoras, N¯ag¯arjuna, Nietzsche, Dewey, the Wittgenstein of the Investigations, Foucault, and the more daring ventures of T. S. Kuhn. There is no necessity to admit necessarily invariant structures in reality or thought.

TEMPORALITY AND HISTORICITY

Martin Heidegger 72. Existential and Ontological Exposition of the Problem of History All our efforts in the existential analytic are geared to the one goal of finding a possibility of answering the question of the meaning of being in general. The development of this question requires that we delineate the phenomenon in which something like being itself becomes accessible—the phenomenon of the understanding of being. But this phenomenon belongs to the constitution of being of Da-sein. Only when this being has been interpreted beforehand in a sufficiently primordial way, can the understanding of being contained in its constitution of being itself be grasped, and only on that basis can we formulate the question of being understood in this understanding and the question of what such understanding “presupposes.” Although many structures of Da-sein still remain in the dark with regard to particulars, yet it seems that we have reached the requisite, primordial inReprinted from Being and Time: A Translation of “Sein und Zeit” by Martin Heidegger. Translated by Joan Stambaugh. By permission of the State University of New York Press. © 1996. State University of New York. All rights reserved.

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terpretation of Da-sein with the clarification of temporality as the primordial condition of the possibility of care. Temporality was set forth with regard to the authentic potentiality-of-being-a-whole of Da-sein. The temporal interpretation of care was then confirmed by demonstrating the temporality of heedful being-in-the-world. Our analysis of the authentic potentiality-ofbeing-a-whole revealed that an equiprimordial connection of death, guilt, and conscience is rooted in care. Can Da-sein be understood still more primordially than in the project of its authentic existence? Although up to now we have not seen any possibility of a more radical starting point for our existential analytic, yet with regard to the above discussion of the ontological meaning of everydayness, a serious reservation comes to light: Has indeed the whole of Da-sein with respect to its authentic being-awhole been captured in the fore-having of our existential analysis? It may be that the fine of questioning related to the wholeness of Da-sein possesses a genuinely unequivocal character ontologically. The question itself may even have been answered with regard to being-toward-the-end. However, death is, after all, only the “end” of Dasein, and formally speaking, it is just one of the ends that embraces the totality of Da-sein. But the other “end” is the “beginning,” “birth.” Only the being “between” birth and death presents the whole we are looking for. Then the previous orientation of our analytic would remain “one-sided,” in spite of all its tendencies toward a consideration of existing being-a-whole and in spite of the genuineness with which authentic and inauthentic being-toward-death have been explicated. Da-sein has been our theme only as to how it exists, so to speak, “forward” and leaves everything that has been “behind.” Not only did being-toward-thebeginning remain unnoticed, but, above all, the way Da-sein stretches along between birth and death. Precisely the “connection of life,” in which, after all, Da-sein constantly somehow holds itself, was overlooked in our analysis of being-a-whole. Must we not then take back our point of departure of temporality as the meaning of being of the totality of Da-sein, even though what we addressed as the “connection” between birth and death is ontologically completely obscure? Or does temporality, as we set it forth, first give the foundation on which to provide an unequivocal direction for the existential and ontological question of that “connection”? Perhaps it is already a gain in the field of this inquiry if we learn not to take the problems too lightly. What seems “more simple” than the nature of the “connection of life” between birth and death? It consists of a succession of experiences “in time.”

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If we pursue this characterization of the connection in question and above all of the ontological assumption behind it in a more penetrating way, something remarkable happens. In this succession of experiences only the experience that is objectively present “in the actual now” is “really” “real.” The experiences past and just coming, on the other hand, are no longer or not yet “real.” Da-sein traverses the timespan allotted to it between the two boundaries in such a way that it is “real” only in the now and hops, so to speak, through the succession of nows of its “time.” For this reason one says that Da-sein is “temporal.” The self maintains itself in a certain sameness throughout this constant change of experiences. Opinions diverge as to how this persistent self is to be defined and how one is to determine what relation it may possibly have to the changing experiences. The being of this persistingly changing connection of experiences remains undetermined. But basically something objectively present “in time,” but of course “unthinglike,” has been posited in this characterization of the connection of life, whether one admits it or not. With regard to what was developed as the meaning of being of care under the rubric of temporality, we found that while following the guideline of the vulgar interpretation of Da-sein, within its own limits, is justified and adequate, we could not carry through a genuine ontological analysis of the way Da-sein stretches along between birth and death if we take this interpretation as our guideline, nor could we even establish such an analysis as a problem. Da-sein does not exist as the sum of the momentary realities of experiences that succeed each other and disappear. Nor does this succession gradually fill up a framework. For how should that framework be objectively present, when it is always only the experience that one is having “right now” that is “real,” and when the boundaries of the framework—birth that is past and death that is yet to come—are lacking reality. At bottom, even the vulgar interpretation of the “connectedness of life” does not think of a framework spanned “outside” of Da-sein and embracing it, but correctly looks for it in Da-sein itself. When, however, one tacitly regards this being ontologically as something objectively present “in time,” an attempt at any ontological characterization of the being “between” birth and death gets stranded. Da-sein does not first fill up an objectively present path or stretch “of life” through the phases of its momentary realities, but stretches itself along in such a way that its own being is constituted beforehand as this stretching along. The “between” of birth and death already lies in the being of Da-sein. On the other hand, it is by no means the case that Dasein is real in a point of time, and that, in addition, it is then “surrounded” by the nonreality of its birth and its death. Understood existentially, birth is never something past in the sense

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of what is no longer objectively present, and death is just as far from having the kind of being of something outstanding that is not yet objectively present but will come. Factical Da-sein exists as born, and, born, it is already dying in the sense of being-toward-death. Both “ends” and their “between” are as long as Da-sein factically exists, and they are in the sole way possible on the basis of the being of Da-sein as care. In the unity of thrownness and the fleeting or else anticipatory being-toward-death, birth and death “are connected” in the way appropriate to Da-sein. As care, Da-sein is the “Between.” But the constitutional totality of care has the possible ground of its unity in temporality. The ontological clarification of the “connectedness of life,” that is, of the specific way of stretching along, movement, and persistence of Da-sein, must accordingly be approached in the horizon of the temporal constitution of this being. The movement of existence is not the motion of something objectively present. It is determined from the stretching along of Da-sein. The specific movement of the stretched out stretching itself along, we call the occurrence of Da-sein. The question of the “connectedness” of Da-sein is the ontological problem of its occurrence. To expose the structure of occurrence and the existential and temporal conditions of its possibility means to gain an ontological understanding of historicity. With the analysis of the specific movement and persistence appropriate to the occurrence of Da-sein, our inquiry returns to the problem that was touched upon right before the exposition of temporality: to the question of the constancy of the self that we determined as the who of Da-sein. Selfconstancy is a mode of being of Da-sein and is thus grounded in a specific temporalizing of temporality. The analysis of occurrence introduces the problems found in a thematic investigation into temporalization as such. If the question of historicity leads back to those “origins,” the place of the problem of history has thus already been decided upon. We must not search in historiography as the science of history. Even if the scientific and theoretical kind of treatment of the problem of “history” does not just aim at an “epistemological” (Simmel) clarification of historiographical comprehension, or at the logic of the concept formation of historiographical presentation (Rickert), but is rather oriented toward the “objective side,” history is accessible in this line of questioning only as the object of a science. The basic phenomenon of history, which is prior to the possibility of making something thematic by historiography and underlies it, is thus irrevocably set aside. How history can become a possible object for historiography, can be gathered only from the kind of being of what is historical, from historicity and its rootedness in temporality.

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If historicity itself is to be illuminated in terms of temporality, and primordially in terms of authentic temporality, then it is essential to this task that it can only be carried out by way of a phenomenological construction.1 The existential and ontological constitution of historicity must be mastered in opposition to the vulgar interpretation of the history of Da-sein that covers over. The existential construction of historicity has its definite support in the vulgar understanding of Da-sein and is guided by those existential structures attained so far. We shall first describe the vulgar concept of history, so that we may give our investigation an orientation as to the factors which are generally held to be essential for history. Here it must become clear what is primordially considered as historical. Thus the point of departure for the exposition of the ontological problem of historicity has been designated. Our interpretation of the authentic potentiality-of-being-a-whole of Dasein and our analysis of care as temporality arising from that interpretation, offer the guideline for the existential construction of historicity. The existential project for the historicity of Da-sein only reveals what already lies enveloped in the temporalizing of temporality. Corresponding to the rootedness of historicity in care, Da-sein always exists as authentically or inauthentically historical. What we had in view under the rubric of everydayness for the existential analytic of Da-sein as the nearest horizon gets clarified as the inauthentic historicity of Da-sein. Disclosure and interpretation belong essentially to the occurrence of Dasein. From the kind of being of this being that exists historically, there arises the existentiell possibility of an explicit disclosure and grasp of history. Making it thematic, that is, the historiographical disclosure of history, is the presupposition for the possibility of “building up the historical world in the sciences of the humanities.” The existential interpretation of historiography as a science aims solely at a demonstration of its ontological provenance from the historicity of Da-sein. Only from here are the boundaries to be staked out within which a theory of science oriented toward the factical business of science may expose itself to the chance elements of its line of questioning. The analysis of the historicity of Da-sein attempted to show that this being is not “temporal,” because it “is in history,” but because, on the contrary, it exists and can exist historically only because it is temporal in the ground of its being. Nevertheless, Da-sein must also be called “temporal” in the sense of its 1. Project.

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being “in time.” Factical Da-sein needs and uses the calendar and the clock even without a developed historiography. What occurs “with it,” it experiences as occurring “in time.” In the same way, the processes of nature, whether living or lifeless, are encountered “in time.” They are within-time. So while our analysis of how the “time” of within-time-ness has its source in temporality will be deferred until the next chapter, it would be easy to put this before the discussion of the connection between historicity and temporality. What is historical is ordinarily characterized with the aid of the time of within-time-ness. But if this vulgar characterization is to be stripped of its seeming self-evidence and exclusiveness, historicity is to be “deduced” beforehand purely from the primordial temporality of Da-sein. This is required by the way these are “objectively” connected. But since time as within-time-ness also “stems” from the temporality of Da-sein, historicity and within-time-ness turn out to be equiprimordial. The vulgar interpretation of the temporal character of history is thus justified within its limits. After this first characterization of the course of the ontological exposition of historicity in terms of temporality, do we still need explicit assurance that the following inquiry does not believe that the problem of history can be solved by a sleight of hand? The paucity of the available “categorial” means and the uncertainty of the primary ontological horizons become all the more obtrusive, the more the problem of history is traced to its primordial rootedness. In the following reflections, we shall content ourselves with indicating the ontological place of the problem of historicity. Basically, the following analysis is solely concerned with furthering the investigations of Dilthey in a preparatory way. Today’s present generation has not as yet made them its own. Our exposition of the existential problem of historicity—an exposition, moreover, that is of necessity limited by our fundamental and ontological aim—is divided up as follows: the vulgar understanding of history and the occurrence of Da-sein (section 73); the fundamental constitution of historicity (section 74); the historicity of Da-sein and world history (section 75); the existential origin of historiography from the historicity of Da-sein (section 76); the connection of the previous exposition of the problem of historicity with the investigations of Dilthey and the ideas of Count Yorck (section 77). 73. The Vulgar Understanding of History and the Occurrence of Da-sein Our next goal is to find the point of departure for the primordial question of the essence of history, that is, for the existential construction of historicity.

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This point is designated by what is primarily historical. Thus our reflections begin with a characterization of what is meant by the expressions “history” and “historical” in the vulgar interpretation of Da-sein. They are ambiguous. The most obvious ambiguity of the term “history” has often been noted, and it is by no means “approximate.” It makes itself known in the fact that it means “historical reality” as well as the possibility of a science of it. For the time being, we shall leave out the signification of “history” in the sense of a science of history (historiography). Among the meanings of the expression “history” that signify neither the science of history nor the latter as an object, but rather this being itself which has not necessarily been objectified, the one in which this being is understood as something past claims a preferred use. This significance makes itself known in talk such as “this or that already belongs to history.” Here “past” means on the one hand “no longer objectively present,” or else “indeed still objectively present, but without ‘effect’ on the ‘present.’ ” However, what is historical as what is past also has the opposite significance when we say that one cannot evade history. Here history means what is past,2 but is nevertheless still having an effect. However, what is historical as what is past is understood in a positive or privative effective relation to the “present” in the sense of what is real “now” and “today.” “The past” has a remarkable ambiguity here. Here “the past” belongs irrevocably to an earlier time; it belonged to former events and can yet still be objectively present “now”—for example, the remains of a Greek temple. A “bit of the past” is still “present” in it. Thus history does not so much mean the “past” in the sense of what is past, but the derivation from it. Whatever “has a history” is in the context of a becoming. Here the “development” is sometimes a rise, sometimes a fall. Whatever “has a history” in this way can at the same time “make” history. “Epoch making,” it “presently” determines a “future.” Here history means a “connection” of events and “effects” that moves through the “past,” the “present” and the “future.” Here the past has no particular priority. Furthermore, history signifies the whole of beings that change “in time,” the transformations and destinies of humankind, human institutions and their “cultures,” in contradistinction to nature that similarly moves “in time.” History means here not so much the kind of being, the occurrence, as the region of beings that one distinguishes from nature with regard to the essential determination of the existence of human being as “spirit” and “culture,” although nature, too, belongs in a way to history thus understood. 2. What preceded beforehand and now still remains.

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And finally, what has been handed down as such is taken to be “historical,” whether it be known historiographically or taken over as being selfevident and concealed in its derivation. If we consider the four meanings together, we find that history is the specific occurrence of existing Da-sein happening in time, in such a way that the occurrence in being-with-one-another that is “past” and at the same time “handed down” and still having its effect is taken to be history in the sense emphasized. The four meanings have a connection in that they are related to human being as the “subject” of events. How is the kind of occurrence of these events to be determined? Is the occurrence a succession of processes, a changing appearance and disappearance of events? In what way does this occurrence of history belong to Da-sein? Is Da-sein factically already “objectively present” beforehand, and then at times gets into “a history”? Does Dasein first become historical through a concatenation of circumstances and events? Or is the being of Da-sein first constituted by occurrence, so that only because Da-sein is historical in its being are anything like circumstances, events, and destinies ontologically possible? Why does precisely the past have an important function in the “temporal” characterization of Dasein occurring “in time”? If history belongs to the being of Da-sein, and if this being is grounded in temporality, it seems logical to begin the existential analysis of historicity with the characteristics of what is historical that evidently have a temporal meaning. Thus a more precise characterization of the remarkable priority of the “past” in the concept of history should prepare the exposition of the fundamental constitution of historicity. The “antiquities” preserved in museums (for example, household things) belong to a “time past,” and are yet still objectively present in the “present.” How are these useful things historical when they are, after all, not yet past? Only because they became an object of historiographical interest, of the cultivation of antiquity and national lore? But such useful things can only, after all, be historiographical objects because they are somehow in themselves historical. We repeat the question: With what justification do we call these beings historical when they are not yet past? Or do these “things” “in themselves” yet have “something past” about them although they are still objectively present today? Are these objectively present things then still what they were? Evidently these “things” have changed. The tools have become fragile and worm-eaten “in the course of time.” But yet the specific character of the past that makes them something historical does not lie in this transience that continues even during their objective presence in the museum. But then

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what is past about the useful thing? What were the “things” that they no longer are today? They are still definite useful things, but out of use. However, if they were still in use, like many heirlooms in the household, would they then not be historical? Whether in use or out of use, they are no longer what they were. What is “past”? Nothing other than the world within which they were encountered as things at hand belonging to a context of useful things and used by heedful Da-sein existing-in-the-world. That world is no longer. But what was previously innerworldly in that world is still objectively present. As useful things belonging to that world, what is now still objectively present can nevertheless belong to the “past.” But what does it mean that the world no-longer-is? World is only in the mode of existing Dasein, that is, factically as being-in-the-world. The historical character of extant antiquities is thus grounded in the “past” of Da-sein to whose world that past belongs. According to this, only “past” Da-sein would be historical, but not “present” Da-sein. However, can Da-sein be past at all, if we define “past” as “now no longer objectively present or at hand”? Evidently Da-sein can never be past, not because it is imperishable, but because it can essentially never be objectively present. Rather, if it is, it exists. But a Da-sein that no longer exists is not past in the ontologically strict sense; it is rather having-been-there. The antiquities still objectively present have a “past” and a character of history because they belong to useful things and originate from a world that has-been—the world of a Da-sein that has-been-there. Da-sein is what is primarily historical. But does Da-sein first become historical by no longer being there? Or is it historical precisely as factically existing? Is Da-sein something that has-been only in the sense of having-been-there, or has it been as something making present and futural, that is, in the temporalizing of its temporality? From this preliminary analysis of the useful things belonging to history that are still objectively present and yet somehow “past,” it becomes clear that this kind of being is historical only on the basis of its belonging to the world. But the world has a historical kind of being because it constitutes an ontological determination of Da-sein. Furthermore, we can see that when one designates a time as “the past,” the meaning of this is not unequivocal, but “the past” is manifestly distinct from the having-been, which we got to know as a constituent of the ecstatic unity of the temporality of Da-sein. But thus the enigma ultimately only becomes more acute; why is that precisely the “past” or, more appropriately, the having-been predominately determines what is historical when, after all, having-been temporalizes itself equiprimordially with present and future. We asserted that Da-sein is what is primarily historical. But secondarily

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historical is what is encountered within the world, not only useful things at hand in the broadest sense, but also nature in the surrounding world as the “historical ground.” We call beings unlike Da-sein that are historical by reason of their belonging to the world that which is world-historical. We can show that the vulgar concept of “world history” arises precisely from our orientation toward what is secondarily historical. What is world-historical is not first historical on the basis of a historiographical objectivation, but rather as the being that it is in itself encountered in the world. The analysis of the historical character of a useful thing still objectively present not only led us back to Da-sein as what is primarily historical, but at the same time made it dubious whether the temporal characteristics of what is historical should be primarily oriented toward the being-in-time of something objectively present at all. Beings do not become “more historical” as we go on to a past ever farther away, so that what is most ancient would be the most authentically historical. But the “temporal” distance from now and today again has no primarily constitutive significance for the historicity of authentically historical beings, not because they are not “in time” or are timeless, but rather because they primordially exist temporally in a way that nothing objectively present “in time,” whether passing away or coming into being, could ever, by its ontological essence, be temporal in such a way. It will be said that these are overly complicated remarks. No one denies that human existence is basically the primary “subject” of history, and the vulgar concept of history cited says this clearly enough. But the thesis that “Da-sein is historical” not only means the ontic fact that human being presents a more or less important “atom” in the business of world history, and remains the plaything of circumstances and events, but poses the problem why and on the basis of what ontological condition, does historicity belong to the subjectivity of the “historical” subject as its essential constitution? REALISM AND REASONABLENESS

Hilary Putnam Some questions in philosophical logic are able to divide philosophers into warring camps. Since the middle of the twentieth century, this has been the case with the question of the status of dispositional statements (and with the Reprinted by permission of Open Court Publishing Company, a division of Carus Publishing Company, Peru, Ill., from The Many Faces of Realism by Hilary Putnam, Copyright © 1987 by Open Court Publishing Company.

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closely related question of the status of counterfactual conditionals). For some philosophers dispositions are simply part of ‘the furniture of the universe’; for others, the use of a dispositional notion in a philosophical analysis is a sign of ‘low standards’, of willingness to ‘explain the obscure by the still more obscure’; while for still others (perhaps the silent majority) dispositional notions are unavoidable in what we do but troubling to the conscience. This is a relatively new state of affairs: the writers who make up the canon of ‘Modern Philosophy’ (or at least of seventeenth-century to midnineteenth-century philosophy) all availed themselves of the notion of a Power (i.e., a dispositional property) without any visible pangs of conscience. Perhaps this is not surprising, as it is only since the appearance of mathematical logic that we have realized how hard it is to give an interpretation of counterfactual conditionals and of dispositional predicates in truth-functional1 terms. But, in a way, it should have been realized a long time ago that the talk of Powers in ‘modern’ philosophy was problematical, for such talk is a hang-over from medieval philosophy, not something that belongs in its own right to the new picture. The heart of the new picture is the new conception of the ‘external’ world, the conception of the external world as governed by strict laws of the form with which we are familiar from the work of Newton and his successors. It is this conception that motivates the division of properties into primary and secondary, or into intrinsic properties of the external things and powers to affect the mind of the observer. A world governed by a system of differential equations is one thing; a medieval (or an Aristotelian) world governed by Substantial Forms which manifest themselves as ‘tendencies’ rather than as exceptionless laws is something else. The Cartesian picture is confused. It exhibits both modern physicalist and medieval ‘tendency-ist’ forms of explanation in an unhappy coexistence. The new image of nature—the World Machine—ought to have no place for the classical ‘tendencies’. In the previous lecture this was argued with the aid of the example of the color predicate ‘red’. Something is red if it has a certain tendency—the tendency to produce certain ‘sense impressions’ (according to the seventeenth and eighteenth century story), or a certain ‘brain-state’ (an alternative to the 1. In logic a way of connecting statements is called ‘truth functional’ if the truth value of the resulting statement can be determined given just the truth values of the components. Counterfactual conditionals all have false antecedents and typically they have false consequents as well; yet some of them are true and some false. Thus the counterfactual is not a truth-function of its parts.

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dualist story that goes back at least as far as Diderot if not to Hobbes), or (in a story which is overly simple but at least avoids the mind-body problem) if it has the tendency to selectively absorb and reflect certain wavelengths of light. But what does ‘have the tendency’ mean? Tendencies, as I said in yesterday’s lecture, do not exemplify the operation of strict laws (in the modern sense of ‘strict law’); they are sloppy things, that manifest themselves ‘under normal conditions’. To analyze the dispositional idiom we need an analysis of the phrase ‘under normal conditions’, or something similar, and, in fact, the attempts to produce a theory which have been made by contemporary authors2 involve such notions as the ‘similarity’ of a whole possible world with another whole world—notions which attempt to express, or at least to substitute for, the desired notion of a ‘normal’ state of affairs. But the currently most fashionable of these—the notion of ‘similarity’ of possible worlds—only illustrates the distance of counterfactual (and dispositional) talk from the world picture of physics—illustrates it by introducing a metaphysical primitive which sticks out like a sore thumb. Other philosophers content themselves with introducing dispositional predicates one by one, as needed, without any attempt to analyze or account for the general dispositional idiom. Sometimes this can be justified (from an ‘Objectivist’ point of view) by showing that the predicate so introduced is coextensive with a nondispositional (perhaps a structural) predicate. But most dispositional notions—e.g., ‘red’, ‘poisonous’, ‘tending to say da if the linguist says gavagai and both of them are watching a rabbit’—are almost certain not to be coextensive with predicates definable in the language of fundamental physics. Certain other philosophers have suggested that dispositional predicates are not, in general, the sorts of predicates for which one ought to expect there to be necessary and sufficient conditions. Perhaps such a word as ‘poisonous’ is only partly defined; perhaps when we encounter a new substance that human beings are capable of ingesting or breathing or touching we just extend the notion of being poisonous as we extend our other notions (including the notion of what is ‘normal’) in the given circumstances.3 Other philosophers have suggested that such dispositional statements as ‘X is poisonous’ do not predicate a property at all; they are ways in which we perform the speech act of licensing an inference. As the late J. L. Mackie put it, 2. David Lewis, Counterfactuals (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1973). 3. This idea was implicit in Carnap’s treatment of dispositional predicates via “reduction sentences” in “Testability and Meaning,” Philosophy of Science 3:420–68 (1936); 4:1–40 (1937).

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such statements can be assertible under appropriate conditions without possessing any property a realist would recognize as ‘truth’. (They are ‘not simply true’, he claimed.)4 What many of these theories have in common is a denial that the semantics of dispositional sentences is the classical bivalent truth-conditional semantics. Either dispositional sentences aren’t ‘simply true’ and ‘simply false’ at all, these authors say, or else they are true and false only in certain cases (the cases in which the dispositional predicate has been defined), and remain to be given a truth value in all other cases. (On either form of the view, the dispositional predicate lacks a well-defined extension.) As I mentioned in the last lecture, similar issues arise in connection with the notions of causality and of explanation (conceived of as a relation between events or between ‘situations’, rather than as a relation between statements). Like dispositions, causal and explanatory relations may be strict (the event or ‘situation’ described as the cause may be connected by strict laws with the event or situation which is taken to be the effect) or may be loose (the event or situation described as the cause may bring about the effect only ‘under suitable circumstances’). And the loose causal relations are, once again, an embarrassment from the point of view of the ‘Objectivist’ picture— the picture of nature as the World Machine. If we could define in physicalistic terms what it is for a feature of a situation to be only an ‘attendant circumstance’, we might be able to explain ‘X brought about Y’ as meaning that given the attendant circumstances, it followed from physical laws that Y would happen if X did; but unfortunately, an intrinsic distinction between situations which are capable of being ‘bringers about’ and situations which are only attendant ‘circumstances’ has much more to do with medieval (and Aristotelian) notions of ‘efficient causation’ than with post-Newtonian ones. And once again, some philosophers have proposed either to reject the loose causal and explanatory relations altogether,5 while others have proposed that the loose causal and explanatory relations6 have only ‘assertibility conditions’ and not ‘truth conditions’. My own view—the view I began to sketch out for you in the last lecture— differs from all of these. These authors all assume we can make the distinction 4. J. L. Mackie, The Cement of the Universe (New York, Oxford University Press, 1974). 5. E.g., Hempel proposed to count as complete “explanations” only those explanations which fit his strict Deductive Nomological Model. (Cf. Hempel and Oppenheim, “The Logic of Scientific Explanation,” reprinted in Feigl and Brodbeck, eds., Readings in the Philosophy of Science, 319–52 [New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1953]). 6. Mackie referred to the notion we use in these as our “paleolithic” notion of causation.

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between what is ‘simply true’ and what has only ‘assertibility conditions’, or the cut between what is already true or false and what is an ‘extension of previous use’ (albeit one that we all make the same way), or between what is a ‘projection’ and what is an independent and unitary property of things in themselves. I think that, epistemically at least, the attempt to draw this distinction, to make this cut, has been a total failure. The time has come to try the methodological hypothesis that no such cut can be made. I recall a conversation with Noam Chomsky many years ago in which he suggested that philosophers often take perfectly sensible continua and get in trouble by trying to convert them into dichotomies. Consider, for example, the continuum between the relatively ‘subjective’ (or, at least, interest- and culture-relative) and the relatively ‘objective’ (or, at least, interest- and culture-independent). Prephilosophically, most of us would probably agree on the ordering of the following properties along this continuum: (1) Being very amusing (as in ‘the behavior of young babies is often very amusing’) (2) Being a region of space which contains at least one hydrogen atom (assume classical physics for this one—no relativity or quantum mechanics, please!) (3) Being soluble. (4) A single case counterfactual conditional—e.g., the property we predicate of a particular match at a particular time when we say it would have lit if it had been struck at that time. (5) Meaning ‘Do you speak French?’ (predicated of a particular utterance). I suppose the average person might rank these predications as follows (taking the left hand end of the line to represent the ‘subjective’ and the right hand end to represent the ‘objective’): Being Amusing

Counter- Meaning Being Contains factual ‘———’ Soluble Hydrogen

(A Plausible Objective-Subjective Ranking) —Yet as soon as we are asked to make a ‘Dedekind cut’—to turn this ranking into a dichotomy—we find that there is no agreement at all in our philosophical intuitions. Quine, for example would put the cut between 5 and 3—counting both dispositional predicates (such as ‘soluble’) and nondispositional predicates from fundamental physics as ‘objective’ and all the others as more or less subjective (or ‘second class’, in his terminology).

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Some philosophers might disagree with me on the position of the meaningassignment 5—some counting it as more ‘objective’ than the assignment of solubility to a substance—and draw the line after 1, 4, and 3. Philosophers who are ‘comfortable’ with counterfactuals would make still another choice for the location of the ‘cut’, placing it immediately after 1—i.e., counting ‘amusing’ as subjective and all the rest as ‘objective’. But my own view, as I have said (and perhaps Chomsky’s as well, if I understood him aright) is that the enterprise isn’t worth the candle. The game is played out. We can make a rough sort of rank ordering (although even here there are disagreements), but the idea of a ‘point at which’ subjectivity ceases and Objectivity-with-acapital-O begins has proved chimerical. If this is right, then a number of other famous dichotomies must be abandoned. Two of these have already been mentioned, namely: Projection/Property of the thing in itself and ‘Power’/ Property of the thing in itself The rejection of these three dichotomies is the essence of the ‘internal realism’ I defended before this very assembly nine years ago. My rejection of these dichotomies will trouble many, and it should. Without the constraint of trying to ‘save the appearances’, philosophy becomes a game in which anyone can—and, as a rule does—say just about anything. Unless we take our intuitions seriously, we cannot do hard philosophy at all. So I respect philosophers who insist that the traditional dichotomies are deeply intuitive, and who ‘need a lot of convincing’ before they will give them up. But if philosophy which simply scorns our intuitions is not worth the candle, philosophy which tries to preserve all of them becomes a vain attempt to have the past over again. There are phenomena which really do challenge our intuitions—the phenomenon Husserl described in The Crisis of the European Sciences and Transcendental Philosophy, the breakdown of the great seventeenth-century project of trying to turn physics into metaphysics (‘Objectivism’)—the breakdown I described in the preceding lecture—is one such. On the one hand, seventeenth-century science succeeded in smashing the medieval foundations of knowledge—and not just of knowledge, but of religion, politics, and morality as well. On the other hand, the line of thinking that said, ‘Well, if science smashed all that, well and good. Science will give us better in its place,’ now looks tired. (It already seemed tired to Kant—and not because Kant was a foe of science or

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Enlightenment; on the contrary, he was a great scientist and a great man of the Enlightenment.) Science is wonderful at destroying metaphysical answers, but incapable of providing substitute ones. Science takes away foundations without providing a replacement. Whether we want to be there or not, science has put us in the position of having to live without foundations. It was shocking when Nietzsche said this, but today it is commonplace; our historical position—and no end to it is in sight—is that of having to philosophize without ‘foundations’. The impossibility of imagining what credible ‘foundations’ might look like is one phenomenon, but not the only phenomenon, that challenges our ‘intuitions’. Since the end of the nineteenth century science itself has begun to take on a ‘non-classical’—that is, a non-seventeenth-century-appearance. In the last lecture I described the phenomenon of conceptual relativity—one which has simple illustrations, like the ones I used, but which has become pervasive in contemporary science. That there are ways of describing what are (in some way) the ‘same facts’ which are (in some way) ‘equivalent’ but also (in some way) ‘incompatible’ is a strikingly non-classical phenomenon. Yet contemporary logicians and meaning theorists generally philosophize as if it did not exist. If claiming to abandon all our ‘intuitions’ is mere show, retaining all of them would require us to philosophize as if the phenomena I just reminded you of did not exist. The task of the philosopher, as I see it, is to see which of our intuitions we can responsibly retain and which we must jettison in a period of enormous and unprecedented intellectual, as well as material, change. If I reject the dichotomies I depicted, it is not, then, because I fail to recognize their intuitive appeal, or because that intuitive appeal counts for nothing in my eyes. It is rather because these dichotomies have become distorting lenses which prevent us from seeing real phenomena—the phenomena I have been describing—in their full extent and significance. Yet I still term myself a ‘realist’—even if I spell it all in lower case—and can one be any sort of a realist without the dichotomies? In particular, is not the dichotomy between what is a ‘human projection’—what is not ‘simply true’, what has ‘assertibility conditions’ rather than ‘realist truth conditions’—and what is in the things ‘in themselves’ constitutive of realism? Part of my answer to that question was given in the first lecture. Far from being constitutive of commonsense realism, that dichotomy tends to undermine it, as I tried to show. But another part of the answer must consist in showing that the rejection of this dichotomy is not a simple capitulation to

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garden-variety cultural relativism, or to the idea that every conceptual scheme is as good as every other. What is strange about the fear that only the Metaphysical Realist can save fair Common Sense from Demon Relativism is that even Metaphysical Realists recognize that the writ of rationality runs farther than what they are pleased to call ‘realist truth’. Mackie did not think that ordinary-language causal statements, e.g., ‘the failure of the safety valve caused the boiler to explode’, are ‘simply true’, but he would certainly have distinguished between ‘reasonable’ and ‘unreasonable’ ones. Perhaps such statements have only ‘assertibility’ conditions rather than ‘truth’ conditions, perhaps they are used to issue ‘inference licenses’ rather than to ‘describe’, but that does not make them arbitrary. If we license one another to expect X to dissolve when put in water when X is a piece of sugar, this is part of a practice whose success we can explain; and if we issued the same license when X was a piece of steel, nature would show us our mistake. In the same way, Quine denies that ‘X means Do you speak French?’ states a ‘fact’, even when X is the familiar French utterance, Parlez-vous français?; but he would certainly answer the question ‘What does Parlez-vous français? mean?’ with ‘It means Do you speak French?’ and not with ‘It means Coachman, stop, the road is jerky; look out! you will lose the turkey.’ That one answer to this sort of question has ‘heuristic’ value and the other does not is something he himself points out. (I am not claiming that Quine is a ‘metaphysical realist’, in my sense, since he does not accept the correspondence theory of truth; but his ‘robust realism’ has an important feature in common with metaphysical realism—namely, the existence of a sharp line between what there is a ‘fact of the matter’ about, and what has only ‘heuristic’ value, or value when our interests are less than ‘theoretical’.) In sum, my own position involves the denial of yet another dichotomy: (Type of Statement) Possesses only assertibility- VS. Possesses truth-conditions conditions We can know that it is ‘true’, speaking with the vulgar, that the water would have boiled if I had turned on the stove, without having the slightest idea whether this ‘truth’ is ‘realist truth’ (Mackie’s ‘simply true’) or only an idealization of ‘warranted assertibility’. Nor need we suppose the question makes sense. Rejecting the dichotomy within kinds of ‘truth’—kinds of truth in the commonsense world—is not the same thing as saying ‘anything goes’.

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Reality Without the Dichotomies How can one assure oneself that this is not sheer linguistic idealism? Perhaps the best place to start is with the explanation of internal realism that I gave in the first lecture. That explanation certainly sounds like ‘linguistic idealism’; according to me, how many objects there are in the world (and even whether certain objects—individual space-time points, in the second of the examples I used—exist at all as individual ‘particulars’) is relative to the choice of a conceptual scheme. How can one propound this sort of relativistic doctrine and still claim to believe that there is anything to the idea of ‘externality’, anything to the idea that there is something ‘out there’ independent of language and the mind? Well, it really isn’t so hard. Look again at the picture I showed you: World 1 x1, x2, x3

(A world à la Carnap)

World 2 x1, x2, x3, x1  x2, x1  x3, x2  x3, x1  x2  x3 (‘Same’ world à la Polish logician)

How we go about answering the question, ‘How many objects are there?’—the method of ‘counting’, or the notion of what constitutes an ‘object’—depends on our choice (call this a ‘convention’); but the answer does not thereby become a matter of convention. If I choose Carnap’s language, I must say there are three objects because that is how many there are. If I choose the Polish logician’s language (this is the language of a Polish logician who has not yet invented the ‘null object’ O, remember), I must say there are seven objects, because that is how many objects (in the Polish logician’s sense of ‘object’) there are. There are ‘external facts’, and we can say what they are. What we cannot say—because it makes no sense—is what the facts are independent of all conceptual choices. A metaphor which is often employed to express this is the metaphor of the ‘cookie cutter’. The things independent of all conceptual choices are the dough; our conceptual contribution is the shape of the cookie cutter. Unfortunately, this metaphor is of no real assistance in understanding the phenomenon of conceptual relativity. Take it seriously, and you are at once forced to answer the question, ‘What are the various parts of the dough?’. If you answer, that (in the present case) the ‘atoms’ of the dough are x1, x2, x3 and the other parts are the mereological sums containing more than one

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‘atom’, then you have simply adopted the Polish Logician’s version. Insisting that this is the correct view of the metaphysical situation is just another way of insisting that mereological sums really exist. But internal realism denies that this is more the ‘right’ way to view the situation than is insisting that only Carnap’s ‘individuals’ really exist. The metaphysician who takes the latter view can also explain the success of the Polish Logician’s Version, after all: he can say that when the Polish Logician says, as it might be, that (I) There is at least one object which is partly red and partly black. —this is to be understood as a useful façon de parler, rather than as something which is ‘literally true’. Under an adequate translation scheme (and such a scheme can be easily given in a recursive way, in the case of the kind of first-order language that Carnap had in mind in these simple examples), I turns out to say no more than (II) There is at least one red object and there is at least one black object. —says when written in the Carnapian language. (To verify this, assuming that ‘red’ and ‘black’ are predicates of Carnap’s language, observe that the only way a Polish Logician’s object—a mereological sum—can be partly red is by containing a red atom, and the only way it can be partly black is by containing a black atom. So if I is true in the Polish Logician’s language, then there is at least one red atom and at least one black atom—which is what II says in Carnap’s language. Conversely, if there is at least one black atom and at least one red atom, then their mereological sum is an ‘object’—in the Polish Logician’s sense—which is partly red and partly black.) To claim that such a translation scheme shows what is ‘really going on’ is just a way of insisting that mereological sums don’t ‘really exist’. The Cookie Cutter Metaphor denies (rather than explaining) the phenomenon of conceptual relativity. The other way of dealing with our little example—producing a translation scheme which reinterprets the logical connectives (in this case, existence), in such a way that each statement in the ‘richer’ language can be ‘translated’ into the more ‘parsimonious’ language— may also be used to deny the phenomenon of conceptual relativity; but it is, nonetheless, more sophisticated than the Cookie Cutter Metaphor. The Cookie Cutter Metaphor assumes that all existence statements that we count as true in our several versions really are true; it’s just that the variables of quantification pick out different mereological sums as their ranges in the case of different languages. The device of reinterpretation goes beyond this in recognizing that one person’s ‘existence’ claim may be another person’s something else. Sometimes it is suggested that in such cases we should not be ‘neutrals’;

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we should always adopt the more parsimonious version. ‘If we don’t have to postulate such strange discontinuous objects as mereological sums, then shouldn’t we take that as a reason for concluding that they don’t really exist, that they are just (at best) a façon de parler?’ To this metaphysical move there is, inevitably, an equally metaphysical rejoinder: ‘Aren’t almost all the “objects” we talk about—chairs and tables, our own bodies, countries, not to mention such scientific objects as solar systems and galaxies—“strange discontinuous objects”? It hardly follows that they don’t really exist. Yet, if my body exists, if this chair exists, if the solar system exists, then why should we not say that the discontinuous object consisting of my nose and the Eiffel Tower also exists? This is an unnatural object to talk about, to be sure, but what has the “naturalness” of an object to do with its existence?’ What is right with the second of the ways we considered of reconciling the two versions or ‘worlds’—reinterpreting the existential quantifier—is that the notions of ‘object’ and ‘existence’ are not treated as sacrosanct, as having just one possible use. It is very important to recognize that the existential quantifier itself can be used in different ways—ways consonant with the rules of formal logic. What would be wrong, were we to do it, would be to accept this idea, and then go on to single out one use of the existential quantifier— the use in Carnap’s Version—as the only metaphysically serious one. But go one step farther: take the position that one may either treat Carnap’s Version as ‘correct’ and interpret the Polish Logician’s Version as a façon de parler in the manner illustrated by the reinterpretation of I as II, or treat the Polish Logician’s Version as ‘correct’ and interpret Carnap’s Version as a language in which the range of the individual variables is restricted to atoms (as suggested by the Cookie Cutter Metaphor). That is, take the position that one will be equally ‘right’ in either case. Then you have arrived at the position I have called ‘internal realism’! What is wrong with the notion of objects existing ‘independently’ of conceptual schemes is that there are no standards for the use of even the logical notions apart from conceptual choices. What the Cookie Cutter Metaphor tries to preserve is the naive idea that at least one Category—the ancient category of Object or Substance—has an absolute interpretation. The alternative to this idea is not the view that, in some inconceivable way, it’s all just language. We can and should insist that some facts are there to be discovered and not legislated by us. But this is something to be said when one has adopted a way of speaking, a language, a ‘conceptual scheme’. To talk of ‘facts’ without specifying the language to be used is to talk of nothing; the

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word ‘fact’ no more has its use fixed by Reality Itself than does the word ‘exist’ or the word ‘object’. Of course, the adoption of internal realism is the renunciation of the notion of the ‘thing in itself’. And here lies the connection between the almost trivial example we have been discussing and the profound metaphysical dichotomies (or would-be dichotomies) we discussed earlier. Internal realism says that the notion of a ‘thing in itself’ makes no sense; and not because ‘we cannot know the things in themselves’. This was Kant’s reason, but Kant, although admitting that the notion of a thing in itself might be ‘empty’, still allowed it to possess a formal kind of sense. Internal realism says that we don’t know what we are talking about when we talk about ‘things in themselves’. And that means that the dichotomy between ‘intrinsic’ properties and properties which are not intrinsic also collapses—collapses because the ‘intrinsic’ properties were supposed to be just the properties things have ‘in themselves’. The thing in itself and the property the thing has ‘in itself’ belong to the same circle of ideas, and it is time to admit that what the circle encloses is worthless territory. A dichotomy whose relation to these notions may be somewhat less evident is the dichotomy between ‘truth conditional semantics’ and ‘assertibility conditional semantics’. Yet what could ground the claim that certain sorts of statements, for example, ‘If I had put a pan of water on the stove and turned on the flame, the water would have boiled’, have only ‘assertibility conditions’ and not ‘truth conditions’? What, that is, but a preconceived idea of what is and is not ‘ontologically queer’, that is, what is and is not capable of being a part of the world as the world is ‘in itself’? As I argued in yesterday’s lecture, the problem with that preconceived idea, in its Humean as well as in its Cartesian version, was its inability to tell any story about the mind (or, if you prefer, about ‘intentionality’) which was not riddled with contradictions or saddled with arbitrary and unconvincing posits; and I argued that this remains its problem today. What does the world look like without the dichotomies? It looks both familiar and different. It looks familiar, insofar as we no longer try to divide up mundane reality into a ‘scientific image’ and a ‘manifest image’ (or our evolving doctrine into a ‘first-class’ and a ‘second-class’ conceptual system). Tables and chairs (and yes, pink ice cubes) exist just as much as quarks and gravitational fields, and the fact that this pot of water would have boiled if I had put it on the stove and turned on the flame is as much a ‘fact’ as is the circumstance that the water weighs more than eight ounces. The idea that most of mundane reality is illusion (an idea which has haunted Western phi-

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losophy since Plato, in spite of Aristotle’s valiant counterattack) is given up once and for all. But mundane reality looks different, in that we are forced to acknowledge that many of our familiar descriptions reflect our interests and choices. Imagine that the escape valve on a pressure cooker sticks and the pressure cooker explodes. We say—and the conceptual relativist regards this as a perfectly ‘true’ statement, without making any fuss about whether it is ‘simply true’ or only a ‘good inference license’—’The stuck valve caused the pressure cooker to explode’. We do not say ‘The presence of ? caused the pressure cooker to explode’, where ? is, say, an arbitrary irregularly shaped piece of the surface of the cooker, 0.1 cm. in area. Yet, in the physics of the explosion, the role played by the stuck valve is exactly the same as the role of ?: the absence of either would have permitted the steam to escape, bringing down the pressure and averting the explosion. Why, then, do we speak of one of these things and not the other as ‘causing’ the explosion? Well, we know that the valve ‘should have’ let the steam escape—that is its ‘function’, what it was designed to do. On the other hand, the surface element ? was not doing anything ‘wrong’ in preventing the steam from escaping; containing the steam is the ‘function’ of the surface of which ? is a part. So when we ask ‘Why did the explosion take place?’, knowing what we know and having the interests we do have, our ‘explanation space’ consists of the alternatives: (1) Explosion taking place (2) Everything functioning as it should What we want to know, in other words, is why 1 is what happened, as opposed to 2. We are simply not interested in why 1 is what happened as opposed to such alternatives as: (3) The surface element ? is missing, and no explosion takes place. This ‘explanatory relativity’ is paralleled by a relativity in our use of such locutions as ‘caused’ and ‘the cause’. Since the question ‘Why did the pressure cooker explode?’ assumes an explanation space which does not include the alternative 3, or similar alternatives, we understand such factors as the presence of ? to be ‘background conditions’ and not ‘causes’. This relativity of causes to interests, and to background conditions not mentioned in the ‘hard science’ explanation of the event in question, does not make causation something we simply legislate. Given our interests and what we regard as the relevant background conditions, it would be simply false to say that it was the wall of the pressure cooker that caused the explosion (unless it happened to be defective, and it should happen to be the

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defect and not the condition of the valve that ‘explains’ the explosion). Our conceptual scheme restricts the ‘space’ of descriptions available to us; but it does not predetermine the answers to our questions. It is understandable, however, that many philosophers should read a different moral into this story. Does not the situation lend itself naturally to a dichotomy? Should we not regard the ‘hard science’ description of the situation (‘The pressure increased in the closed container until a certain coefficient was exceeded. The material then ruptured . . .’) with its exact laws and numerical coefficients as the description of the ‘objective facts’, and regard the singling out of the bit of material, or whatever, that kept the valve from working as ‘the cause’ as semi-magical Stone Age thinking? If we want to be generous and leave a place for this useful way of speaking, while denying that there exists a distinction between ‘causes’ and ‘background conditions’ in Nature Itself, we can just say that causal statements have ‘assertibility’ conditions in ordinary language but not, strictly speaking, ‘truth conditions’. The problem with all this—the problem I discussed in the first lecture—is that if the causes/background conditions distinction is fundamentally subjective, not descriptive of the world in itself, then current philosophical explanations of the metaphysical nature of reference are bankrupt. Barwise and Perry, for example, tell us that what links certain states of affairs to certain mental states is that the states of affairs cause those states; this is the intentional link, at least in certain metaphysically basic cases. Glymour and Devitt (independently) both tell us that words are connected to their referents by ‘causal connection’. Richard Boyd tells us that ‘the causal theory of reference is correct because the causal theory of knowledge is correct.’ But the notions on which causal theories of knowledge and reference depend— the difference between a cause and a mere background condition, the legitimacy of counterfactuals—are precisely what is called into question by the ‘inference license’ interpretation of causal statements and counterfactuals. If these notions are ‘saved’ only to the extent of being treated as heuristics (as ‘projections’, in the terminology of the first lecture), then it cannot also be held that they explain how reference comes to exist in the world as the world is ‘in itself’. Nor would dualism help, if we were willing to adopt it. For what description do we have of the mind ‘in itself’? Kant’s exposure of the bankruptcy of ‘rational psychology’ still stands. Rather than succumb to the temptation to repeat verbatim all the proposals of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, we have to recognize that

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such familiar statements as the statement that the stuck valve caused the pressure cooker to explode reflect both the way things are and our interests and assumptions about the way things are without giving in to the temptation to suppose that the philosophically relevant description of ‘the way things are’ is something other than ‘the valve stuck and caused the pressure cooker to explode’ (or whatever the example may be). Given a language, we can describe the ‘facts’ that make the sentences of that language true and false in a ‘trivial’ way—using the sentences of that very language; but the dream of finding a well-defined Universal Relation between a (supposed) totality of all facts and an arbitrary true sentence in an arbitrary language, is just the dream of an absolute notion of a fact (or of an ‘object’) and of an absolute relation between sentences and the facts (or the objects) ‘in themselves’; the very dream whose hopelessness I hoped to expose with the aid of my little example involving three Carnapian individuals and seven nonempty mereological sums. IS JUSTIFIED TRUE BELIEF KNOWLEDGE?

Edmund L. Gettier Various attempts have been made in recent years to state necessary and sufficient conditions for someone’s knowing a given proposition. The attempts have often been such that they can be stated in a form similar to the following:1 (a)

S knows that P

IFF

(i) (ii) (iii)

P is true, S believes that P, and S is justified in believing that P.

For example, Chisholm has held that the following gives the necessary and sufficient conditions for knowledge:2 (b) S knows that P

IFF

(i) S accepts P, (ii) S has adequate evidence for P, and (iii) P is true.

Edmund L. Gettier, “Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?” Analysis 23, no. 6 (June 1963): 121–23. Reprinted by permission of Edmund L. Gettier, © 1963. 1. Plato seems to be considering some such definition at Theaetetus 201, and perhaps accepting one at Meno 98. 2. Roderick M. Chisholm, Perceiving: a Philosophical Study (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1957), p. 16.

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Ayer has stated the necessary and sufficient conditions for knowledge as follows:3 (c)

S knows that P

IFF

(i) (ii) (iii)

P is true, S is sure that P is true, and S has the right to be sure that P is true.

I shall argue that (a) is false in that the conditions stated therein do not constitute a sufficient condition for the truth of the proposition that S knows that P. The same argument will show that (b) and (c) fail if ‘has adequate evidence for’ or ‘has the right to be sure that’ is substituted for ‘is justified in believing that’ throughout. I shall begin by noting two points. First, in that sense of ‘justified’ in which S’s being justified in believing P is a necessary condition of S’s knowing that P, it is possible for a person to be justified in believing a proposition that is in fact false. Secondly, for any proposition P, if S is justified in believing P, and P entails Q, and S deduces Q from P and accepts Q as a result of this deduction, then S is justified in believing Q. Keeping these two points in mind, I shall now present two cases in which the conditions stated in (a) are true for some proposition, though it is at the same time false that the person in question knows that proposition. Case I Suppose that Smith and Jones have applied for a certain job. And suppose that Smith has strong evidence for the following conjunctive proposition: (d) Jones is the man who will get the job, and Jones has ten coins in his pocket. Smith’s evidence for (d) might be that the president of the company assured him that Jones would in the end be selected, and that he, Smith, had counted the coins in Jones’s pocket ten minutes ago. Proposition (d) entails: (e) The man who will get the job has ten coins in his pocket. Let us suppose that Smith sees the entailment from (d) to (e), and accepts (e) on the grounds of (d), for which he has strong evidence. In this case, Smith is clearly justified in believing that (e) is true. But imagine, further, that unknown to Smith, he himself, not Jones, will get the job. And, also, unknown to Smith, he himself has ten coins in his 3. A. J. Ayer, The Problem of Knowledge (London: Macmillan, 1956), p. 34.

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pocket. Proposition (e) is then true, though proposition (d), from which Smith inferred (e), is false. In our example, then, all of the following are true: (i) (e) is true, (ii) Smith believes that (e) is true, and (iii) Smith is justified in believing that (e) is true. But it is equally clear that Smith does not know that (e) is true; for (e) is true in virtue of the number of coins in Smith’s pocket, while Smith does not know how many coins are in Smith’s pocket, and bases his belief in (e) on a count of the coins in Jones’s pocket, whom he falsely believes to be the man who will get the job. CASE II Let us suppose that Smith has strong evidence for the following proposition: (f) Jones owns a Ford. Smith’s evidence might be that Jones has at all times in the past within Smith’s memory owned a car, and always a Ford, and that Jones has just offered Smith a ride while driving a Ford. Let us imagine, now, that Smith has another friend, Brown, of whose whereabouts he is totally ignorant. Smith selects three place-names quite at random, and constructs the following three propositions: (g) Either Jones owns a Ford, or Brown is in Boston; (h) Either Jones owns a Ford, or Brown is in Barcelona; (i) Either Jones owns a Ford, or Brown is in Brest-Litovsk, Each of these propositions is entailed by (f). Imagine that Smith realizes the entailment of each of these propositions he has constructed by (f), and proceeds to accept (g), (h), and (i) on the basis of (f). Smith has correctly inferred (g), (h), and (i) from a proposition for which he has strong evidence. Smith is therefore completely justified in believing each of these three propositions. Smith, of course, has no idea where Brown is. But imagine now that two further conditions hold. First, Jones does not own a Ford, but is at present driving a rented car. And secondly, by the sheerest coincidence, and entirely unknown to Smith, the place mentioned in proposition (h) happens really to be the place where Brown is. If these two conditions hold then Smith does not know that (h) is true, even though (i) (h) is true, (ii) Smith does believe that (h) is true, and (iii) Smith is justified in believing that (h) is true. These two examples show that definition (a) does not state a sufficient condition for someone’s knowing a given proposition. The same cases, with appropriate changes, will suffice to show that neither definition (b) nor definition (c) do so either.

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Bibliography Aristotle. Metaphysics. In The Complete Works of Aristotle (The Revised Oxford Translation), vol. 2, ed. Jonathan Barnes. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984. ———. On the Soul (De Anima). In The Complete Works of Aristotle (The Revised Oxford Translation), vol. 1, ed. Jonathan Barnes. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984. ———. Posterior Analytics. In The Complete Works of Aristotle (The Revised Oxford Translation), vol. 1, ed. Jonathan Barnes. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984. Berkeley, George. Dialogues Between Hylas and Philonous. In The Works of George Berkeley, Bishop of Cloyne, 9 vols., ed. A. A. Luce and T. E. Jessop. Edinburgh: Nelson, 1948–57. Cassirer, Ernst. The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms. 3 vols. Translated by Ralph Manheim. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1953, 1955, 1957. Coffa, J. Alberto. The Semantic Tradition From Kant to Carnap: To the Vienna Station. Edited by Linda Wessels. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Davidson, Donald. “A Coherence Theory of Truth and Knowledge.” In Truth and Interpretation: Perspectives on the Philosophy of Donald Davidson, ed. Ernest LePore. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986; Cambridge, Mass.: Basil Blackwell, 1993. Dewey, John. Experience and Nature. 2d ed. New York: Dover, 1958. ———. Reconstruction in Philosophy. Enlarged edition. Boston: Beacon Press, 1948. Dummett, Michael. The Logical Basis of Metaphysics. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991. Foucault, Michel. “What Is Enlightenment?” Translated by Catherine Porter. In The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow. New York: Pantheon Books, 1984. Friedman, Michael. “Carnap’s Aufbau Reconsidered.” Nous 22 (1987). Gadamer, Hans-Georg. Truth and Method. Translated by Garrett Barden and John Cumming. New York: Seabury Press, 1975. Habermas, Jürgen. Communication and the Evolution of Society. Translated by Thomas McCarthy. Boston: Beacon Press, 1979. ———. “Discourse Ethics: Notes on a Program of Philosophical Justification.” Translated by Christian Lenhardt and Shierry Weber Nicholsen. In Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1990. ———. Legitimation Crisis. Translated by Thomas McCarthy. Boston: Beacon Press, 1975. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. Phenomenology of Spirit. Translated by A. V. Miller. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977. Hylton, Peter. Russell, Idealism and the Emergence of Analytic Philosophy. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990. Jaspers, Karl. Psychologie der Weltanschauungen. 5th ed. Berlin: Springer Verlag, 1960. Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Judgment. Translated by Werner S. Pluhar. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987. ———. Critique of Pure Reason. Translated by Norman Kemp Smith. London: Macmillan, 1953.

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Kuhn, Thomas. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. 2d enlarged edition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970. Löwith, Karl. From Hegel to Nietzsche: The Revolution in Nineteenth-Century Thought. Translated by David E. Green. New York: Columbia University Press, 1991. Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Will to Power. Translated by Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale. Edited by Walter Kaufmann. New York: Vintage Books, 1968. Oppenheim, Paul, and Hilary Putnam. “Unity of Science as a Working Hypothesis.” Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science, vol. 2, ed. Herbert Feigl, Michael Scriven, and Grover Maxwell. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1958. Peirce, Charles Sanders, “Consequences of Critical Common-sensism.” In Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, vol. 5, ed. Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1962. Popkin, Richard B. The History of Scepticism from Erasmus to Spinoza. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1979. Putnam, Hilary. The Many Faces of Realism. La Salle, Ill.: Open Court, 1987. ———. Meaning and the Moral Sciences. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978. Quine, W. V. “Epistemology Naturalized.” In Ontological Relativity and Other Essays. New York and London: Columbia University Press, 1969. ———. The Pursuit of Truth. Rev. ed. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993. Rorty, Richard. “Pragmatism, Davidson, and Truth.” In Truth and Interpretation: Perspectives on the Philosophy of Donald Davidson, ed. Ernest LePore. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1993. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. On Certainty. Translated by Denis Paul and G.E.M. Anscombe. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1969. ———. Philosophical Investigations. 3d ed. Translated by G.E.M. Anscombe. New York: Macmillan, 1968.

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4 Individuation and Legitimation

Introduction Without any doubt, Husserl is the most important philosopher of the twentieth century to have attempted to reclaim the enterprise of second-order legitimation in terms of a fundamental disjunction between the “transcendental” and the “natural” powers of reason. Husserl sought an absolute, utterly sui generis, entirely adequate reflexive, “subjective” or conceptual competence in terms of which all the forms of knowledge and human understanding could be demonstrated to rest on an ineluctable foundation. His entire career was a series of ever-new beginnings and deeper and deeper approximations to what he regarded as a “neo-Cartesian” or “quasi-Cartesian” undertaking. He even came to regard the anticipated success of his effort as linked to the resolution of what he called the “crisis of European man,” which he associated with an illicit confidence in the competence of “natural reason.” Husserl may have been the most indefatigable of philosophers. We are plainly in his debt; for by the sheer industry and acuity of his effort, we are now reasonably sure that the project (his project) of recovering “transcendental” reason was and remains doomed to utter failure! (That was not his purpose, of course.) There is no way to demonstrate that second-order legitimation can be made to rest on an unconditionally apo-

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dictic subjective source, or even a source that by self-corrective methods and the “bracketing” of extraneous “natural” or psychological resources (the epoché) could eventually improve its approximation to such certitude and fixity. (See Chapter 3.) Husserl was aware of all the pertinent challenges to his thesis—in a sense entirely analogous to that in which Plato (in Parmenides) was obviously aware of all the objections to the doctrine of the Forms. Husserl’s Fifth Meditation (in Cartesian Meditations) makes this abundantly clear, as does his having commissioned Eugen Fink to draft materials for an additional meditation by which he meant to put to rest the ultimate questions he had not yet successfully resolved. (In Plato’s case, we cannot be sure that the author of the theory of the Forms actually believed in them.) There are, however, two difficulties that Husserl never successfully overcame: one, the solipsism of the so-called “transcendental” method of phenomenology, which appears to be inexpungeable from the very notion of a uniquely privileged competence; the other, the lack of evidence that the would-be powers of transcendental reflection are really separable in a functional way from the powers of “natural” (human) reason—by which (the latter) Husserl understood the “subjective” aptitudes examined in the early modern tradition that spanned the work of Galileo and Descartes and Kant. (The “subjective” powers of transcendental phenomenology are meant to be essentially different from the “subjective” powers of natural perception and understanding.) One sees the importance of the issue in Husserl’s distress at discovering that Heidegger (whom he had invited to draft an updated version of his Britannica article on phenomenology) had effectively “anthropologized” his phenomenology, that is, had brought it within the scope of “natural” reason (see Biemel). He was astute enough to see its subversive import; but the irony is, it subverted the transcendental pretensions of Heidegger’s Basic Problems of Phenomenology as well: for naturalizing phenomenology leads in the direction of a Weltanschauungsphilosophie. Many have dismissed Husserl’s undertaking as a strange perseveration. But in many ways it counts as the clearest, most honest effort to test the viability of two matched distinctions: one, between naturally and transcendentally competent subjects; the other, between objectivist and apodictic cognitive powers. The two kinds of distinction are effectively paired by Husserl in the sense given. Husserl realized that one could not ensure the apodictic powers of cognizing subjects if those subjects were construed only in naturalistic or phenomenal or empiricist or culturally determined or weltanschauung-like—or languaged—ways. He therefore scrupulously disjoined

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the two. Now, what is historically interesting about this maneuver is that one can trace more than an incipient tendency in Descartes and Kant to yield along the same lines. Both Descartes’s defeat of the Evil Demon’s threat and Kant’s insistence on a reflexive a priori “understanding” of the constituting powers of the “subject” of knowledge implicate something very similar to Husserl’s disjunction, except that, unlike Husserl, neither Descartes nor Kant was entirely clear about the import of the option. The trouble is, the grounds for legitimating such distinctions are hardly compelling. (See Toulmin, with regard to the beginning of this bifurcating tendency.) In a way, the critique of Kant, along these lines, on the part of the German Idealists and the companion critique of Husserl by Merleau-Ponty and Heidegger converge in raising similar questions—in spite of anything in Hegel or Heidegger that might lead us to favor the same kind of disjunction. The possibility is obviously there in Hegel and Heidegger as well. (In Hegel, but not in Heidegger, the matter is noticeably ambiguous.) In any case, the counterargument maintains that the distinction between first- and second-order (legitimative) discourse is not the same as that between naturalistic and transcendental (“pure phenomenological”) reason (in Husserl’s sense). It is part of the irony of the postmodernists (Rorty in particular) that no legitimative discourse can (they believe) fail to be a priori, apodictic, modally necessary, and that there is no convincing ground for supposing such transcendental or apodictic powers can ever be in actual play. We may agree with the postmodernists in their second claim, but their first is either arbitrary or a petitio. The upshot of these considerations is this: (a) second-order discourse is embedded in the same cognitive resources as is first-order discourse and is distinguished only in functional terms; (b) the search for the universally invariant conditions of human knowledge is, whatever its aspirations, constrained by the limitations of our “natural” (our biological and culturally formed) powers; and (c) there can be no exit, in these regards, from the preformative contingencies of history and cultural context. What may be said, therefore, paraphrasing Kant, is that naturalism without phenomenology is blind and phenomenology without naturalism is empty. The formula yields an analogue for every doctrine that presumes to match the privilege that Descartes, Kant, or Husserl reserves (in different ways) for himself—as, for instance, in Hegel and Heidegger. This is the point of the important strategic judgment that philosophy cannot but be a form of Weltanschauungsphilosophie—in the sense (explicit or implicit) in which Kant and Husserl and Heidegger deny. The apparent subjective foundations of knowledge

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may invite our queries, but there are no foundational powers by which to determine what the ultimate foundations of human knowledge are! There you have the failure as well as the saving grace of phenomenology—and naturalism. Hegel had already ventured, in his own Phenomenology, an entirely different form of inquiry—a ‘“phenomenology” restricted to analyzing phenomena, an inquiry that could reasonably claim (against Descartes and Kant and, by anticipation, Husserl) to be “presuppositionless” regarding both the “subjective” and the “objective.” For what Hegel meant was, first, that the subjective and the objective belong to a symbiotized space; second, that the articulation of each and their external relationship could never exceed the historical perspective from which any such effort might be made; hence, third, that every particular such effort could never recover the ultimate “presuppositions” on which it might be thought to depend in some timeless way. (You may treat this as the continuation of the analysis of Geist begun in the preceding chapter.) By contrast, Husserl’s phenomenology is the very paradigm of an inquiry aspiring to First Philosophy. It was forever in search of the ultimate cogito. Hence, when, as in the Crisis volume, Husserl tried to come to terms with the historicity and cultural formation of human cognition, he failed to explain how to disjoin the apodictic possibilities of transcendental reason from the contamination of natural reason: Husserl understood, of course, that such “contamination” precluded apodicticity itself. That is precisely what Heidegger grasped but denied in his own oracular way; and that is the question no one has satisfactorily answered in Husserl’s way. Correctly read, Husserl’s failure entails Kant’s failure as well. The irony is that Husserl did not discern the need to plumb the “naturalistic” sources of his own “transcendental” phenomenology. You may count this as a sketch of the modern analogue of the brief analysis already offered regarding Aristotle’s Metaphysics. For Aristotle argued that the “real” was necessarily invariant and that to deny invariance inevitably produces self-contradiction. Husserl pursues instead a source of reason that is said to be unencumbered in any essential way by language, natural psychological or biological limitations, historical contingency, or anything of the kind. The joint failure of Aristotle and Husserl, therefore, strengthens the philosophical “bet” against the doctrine of invariance and against any epistemic dualism or “foundationalism” at the heart of inquiry. The upshot is a radical constraint on the prospects of legitimation (or First Philosophy). For both Aristotle and Husserl (and Kant) pretend that they

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have discovered a novel form of necessity that is not quite captured by the usual de re and de dicto distinctions. We might have proceeded in another way. If we remind ourselves of the analysis of reference and predication, it should be clear at once that if referential and predicative “speech acts” cannot escape the lebensformlich practices of “natural” human societies, then Husserlian phenomenology is doomed to failure: furthermore, with that failure also end the prospects for any privileged form of philosophical legitimation. The refutation is trim and worth pursuing a little further. The question is whether—in the idiom Heidegger and Jaspers took opposite sides on—philosophy (as remarked a moment ago) can possibly be anything but weltanschauung-like: that is, whether philosophy can escape the tacit formative interests and conceptual horizon of a living society. Heidegger thought to escape such a limitation by way of the self-disclosure of Being (whether through Dasein, as in Being and Time, or through the direct disclosure of Sein itself, as in the “Letter on Humanism”). That is the contested distinction between the “two” phases of Heidegger’s work and what is supposed to be bridged by the lesson of the Presocratics read one way or the other before and after Heidegger’s notorious Kehre. In any case, late French philosophy, particularly in the work of Derrida and Foucault (and, in a fair sense, Lyotard as well), dismantles the legitimative pretensions of Husserl and Kant and Descartes and the Francophone structuralists (notably, Saussure) by exotic strategies that have (now) pretty well run their course. Derrida’s famous essay, “Differance,” shows by a parasitic technique (that serves philosophy but is not itself a philosophical method) that Husserl’s (or any other philosopher’s) presumption to have fixed the “origin” at which language first meets the world (the skeptical thesis Hegel had dethroned) could never be more than delusive. In effect, Derrida raises the important question of how (say, by “eidetic variation”) we could ever suppose we were approaching the Archimedean point at which conceptual “essences” could be successfully (apodictically) fixed once and for all. Without an “origin,” there can be no adequate basis for claiming to have isolated “essences”; but there is no way to recover such “origins.” That explains why Derridean deconstruction is a distant form of the Hegelian argument. Derrida applies his rather maddening technique (“deconstruction”) chiefly against Husserl and Saussure (as in Of Grammatology). He links its effect to Heidegger’s use of the dialectical treatment of Sein and Seiende—that is, to Heidegger’s reference to a “source” (Sein) of intelligibly structured plural

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entities (Seiende) that lacks any assignable structure of its own; but his technique also recalls Hegel’s more legible dialectic of the self-alienating feature of Geist—of appearance and reality: that is, that there is no determinate end to the historical déroulement of knowledge. All such idioms are on the florid side, of course—whether belonging to Hegel, Heidegger, Derrida, Levinas, Foucault, Deleuze, Lyotard, Lacan, or Irigaray—and each has its favorite narrow target. But all in all, these strategies pursue (or pursue in their best moments) a “presuppositionless” critique of one or another form of cognitive privilege—epistemic priorities, “foundations,” “origins,” “totalization” (that is, the fixity and inclusiveness of categorical schemes), or modal invariance. Foucault’s strategy, for instance, rests with “genealogies,” the historical critique of the way in which truth and objectivity are systematically pursued in one contingent “regime of knowledge” or another (episteme)—on the condition that that same critique becomes in time the target of another critique grounded in some later similar review. This is the point of Foucault’s ingenious treatment of Kant as a “genealogist,” (see Chapter 3), although, of course, Kant means by his effort to install a changeless transcendental method. Foucault effectively reconciles the two conceptions (truth as an artifact of history and historical truth) and defuses the pretension of privilege. Both of these ways of working (Derrida’s and Foucault’s) focus on the insuperably problematic nature of the difference between “appearance” and “reality”: hence, they do so within the Hegelian ambit but also in a way opposed to Hegel’s own pretensions. All such practitioners are aware of subverting the claims of legitimative privilege Husserl had fully expected to vindicate. Of all the French figures mentioned, Foucault and Derrida are the least equivocal in this regard. It would not be unfair to say that, within the late Marxist tradition, the work of the early Frankfurt-Critical school affords something of a German analogue of the post-Hegelian French concerns just remarked. There are impressive technical skills on both sides, but the Frankfurt-Critical figures, Horkheimer and Adorno in particular, worked in more conventional canonical ways (and a little earlier) than their French counterparts. (See Adorno.) You may now guess at the remarkable convergence between the recent attacks on legitimative privilege separately mounted by analytic and continental philosophers. It is not easy to see in Quine and Heidegger, for instance, any such convergence; although it is there and although both Quine and Heidegger seriously falter in favoring their own philosophical convictions (regarding invariance and privilege). But you can certainly see the derived convergence in Rorty and Derrida and Foucault, without deciding the

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validity of the arguments of any of them. Derrida and Foucault are rightly regarded as “poststructuralists,” meaning by that that they subvert the sense of structural closure favored by the structuralists (Lévi-Strauss and, more dubiously, Saussure), Husserl, and classical philosophy, without themselves being at all interested in developing a diminished form of legitimation; whereas the “postmodernists,” Rorty and Lyotard particularly, hurry to the illicit conclusion that legitimation can only be privileged (or transcendental) and that since that is no longer possible, canonical philosophy must be at an end. The middle ground may be gained by demonstrating that a diminished form of legitimation makes perfect sense and is worth the effort. That has indeed been shown in the matter of reference and predication. For one thing, there must be a solution to the problem if we are to make sense of the viability of natural-language discourse; and for another, there are bound to be competing explanations that would need to be assessed if we are to reclaim a fair picture of what we are actually about. So postmodernism is a pointless extravagance and a disservice; for our failure to confirm our apodictic pretensions hardly confirms that all legitimative procedures are illicit or pointless. But the issue goes deeper. For it is not merely that we must choose between legitimative rationales; we must also make a choice that frees us from those forms of modal invariance which can no longer be defended. The problem of legitimation has become the problem of reconciling legitimation and the flux—or historicity. In their very different ways, Quine and Heidegger fall back to forms of privilege neither would be willing to acknowledge: Quine, to physicalism and extensionalism; Heidegger, to the revelations of Sein (whether in the vicinity of Dasein or directly on its own). Both oppose canonical forms of legitimation: Quine, noncausal explanations (the “naturalizing” stance of “Epistemology Naturalized”); Heidegger, the Kantian and Husserlian forms of transcendental reasoning (superseded in “Letter On Humanism”). You may claim to see in this the ineluctable appeal of Hegel. You may also claim, fairly enough, to find a similar struggle in late Frankfurt-Critical thinking, in Habermas for instance: the attempt to legitimate the necessities of reason (bearing on knowledge and rational practice) that escape all forms of transcendentalism. The struggle is already apparent in the early Frankfurt figures. We may clinch the argument by examining another set of standard puzzles. Consider, in addition to reference and predication, the problem of individuation and identity. A claim loyal to canonical invariance holds that nothing can remain the same if it changes its “nature.” The argument

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appears in Aristotle: everything has its dynamis—that’s to say, its potency to manifest the full activity (energeia) of its own mode of actuality (Physics, Metaphysics). But there is no need to hold that particular or individual things cannot lack fixed natures. That is an illusion created by interpreting the logic of subject/predicate sentences in terms of modal invariance—Aristotle’s first principle, in fact. Aristotle does not discuss individuation in a pointed way, although he admits individuated particulars and although he offers a decided improvement on the Presocratics, who do not really engage the issue at all. He tells us what particulars are like, according to his theory. But his theory is both too weak and too strong. On the weak side, particulars are numerically different because they have their own “portion” of matter (hyle). But if matter must be partitioned, then we need to know how to partition matter—and doing that, we face an insoluble regress. Aristotle introduces hyle without intending to use it to determine whether we have or do not have a single thing before us—one, say, that we could reidentify as (a) “this such.” Still, on the weak side, every particular is said, by Aristotle, to be an instance of a determinate kind or nature; but things are never adequately individuated by reference to (their) natures (which are nothing but general predicables). On the other hand, if we say (as Aristotle says) that a particular (ousia) is “a portion of matter formed,” then the theory is too strong; for that is exactly what we want to understand and still need to have explained (an individuated thing). We want to understand how to recognize something as an individual thing persisting over time and change rather than, say, as a particular camel or tree or man; also, as something different from different instantiations of the same and different predicables, whether Aristotelian “natures” or not. Aristotle thinks he has no need for such an instrument because he has his doctrine of invariance. But if you give up invariance, you see at once what has eluded him—the individual instances themselves. You will find the individuative thesis deformed in an extraordinary way in Hume, whose extreme empiricism makes it impossible to recover the classical thesis or to resolve the matter with any success at all. But as the ingenious nominalist and radical empiricist that he is, Hume manages to recover the doctrine’s general lineaments—by a tricky (ultimately untenable) use of “fiction” and “feigning.” Although Hume casts his account of individuation and numerical identity in the impoverished idiom empiricism provides, you will find that he holds to all the classical claims, except that he can no longer distinguish between numerical identity and qualitative similarity (since “ideas” play a double role in empiricist theories: they count both as individual enti-

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ties and as qualitatively constant predicables), and except that he can no longer distinguish between numerical identity accompanied by qualitative change and the mere multiple instantiation of given qualities (whether the same or different). Once you add to this the extensionalist optimism vested in the predicate calculus (as by Frege, Russell, and Quine), individuation, but not identity, proves an entirely subaltern matter. Thus, in his well-known discussion of the Morning Star and Evening Star, Frege never rightly broaches the question of individuating the planet that proved to be Venus, even though (on an argument already supplied) different entities may, in principle, instantiate any set of general predicables any single entity instantiates. Frege does not address the matter; he addresses formal identity instead. Quine, as we have seen, runs the risk of committing a blunder that (at least distantly) is the analogue of Duns Scotus’s unsatisfactory speculation regarding haecceitas. Scotus ensures God’s understanding of his own creation by replacing the material ground of individuation (among the Aristotelians) with a formal (predicative) principle of determinate “thisness,” which apparently God (but not we ourselves) can know; and Quine presupposes sufficient precision in the use of proper names and predicates to justify replacing the supposed function of the one by the quantificationally restricted use of the other. There’s further evidence here, therefore, of the conceptual weakness of the extensionalism mounted on the resources of the first-order predicate calculus. It would not be too much to say, as a consequence, that the implied assurance of the extensionalists betrays an apriorism and a taste for apodicticity that they nowhere admit or defend. It is a dampened apriorism, to be sure. It cannot be acknowledged lest it violate the usual economies of late analytic philosophy—for instance, the important lesson of Quine’s “Two Dogmas” paper. In any event, the a priori element, which is fairly explicit in Frege and Russell and the early Positivists and obscured in Quine and Davidson, is more Cartesian and empiricist than Kantian or post-Kantian. It is for this reason that it made sense (and still makes sense), though it will be contested, to find a common tendency—comparing such disparate thinkers as Heidegger and Quine—to discount Weltanschauungsphilosophie, which, in its own turn, is the ineluctable upshot of the Hegelian critique of Kant. Witness Marx. That is a finding of considerable power and importance, particularly as the major thrust of English-language analytic philosophy is decidedly “pre-Kantian.” It is, for instance, for that reason that the importance of Hegel and the regressive nature of Husserl’s undertaking are not easily perceived.

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But we must not fail to flesh out the full import of the individuative question raised a moment ago. For if individuation is inherently informal (logically), then, of course, all the assurances of apodicticity go by the board, whether Cartesian, Kantian, Husserlian, Heideggerian, Fregean, Russellian, or Quinean. The connection is almost never perceived: it is, of course, the extension of what has already been said regarding reference and predication. To return, then: since particulars are, in the analytic tradition, no more than instantiations of given predicables, since individuals (that is, individuated particulars) are no longer featured, Hume’s empiricism tends to be seen (in the analytic tradition) as a profound anticipation of the rigor of a more advanced conception. But the fact is, it is an impoverished idiom—or better, could easily be interpreted to anticipate the opposite (the Kantian) enthusiasm for Hume (which seems a littler closer to Hume’s own “nonofficial” view). There are, you will find, remarkably few discussions of the persistence or continuity of given particulars or, more interestingly, of the individuation of particulars as distinct from what may be said about the persistence (the numerical identity or identifiability) of already individuated particulars (physical bodies or persons, for instance). To feature the continuity of particulars of this or that kind puts a premium on the fixity of their “natures.” But to work with (individuated) continua like events or careers or histories, without insisting on essentialized natures, allows us to entertain a greater range of conceptual tolerance. Frege thinks of persistence and continuity chiefly in terms of numerical identity, not of individuation. Nearly all analytic philosophers concur (see Hirsch). But the policy is demonstrably defective. Bear in mind, numerical identity presupposes individuation, whereas individuation entails identity. Rightly understood, this signifies that both Frege’s and Quine’s analyses are seriously incomplete as well as defective: Frege could never really tell whether the Morning Star and the Evening Star were one and the same; and Quine could never assure us that “socratizing” could be used to single out what, in context, we successfully single out as the unique historical figure Socrates. These objections are insuperable if applied to Frege’s or Quine’s extensionalisms. The best-known attack on the Fregean line (which extends to Russell and Quine) appears in Saul Kripke’s wellknown paper “Naming and Necessity.” By the way, it makes no difference whether we speak of “real” or “nominal” essences (along Locke’s lines). It takes but a moment to grasp that if reference succeeds in terms of the consensual practices of a historical society (without, of course, presuming that consensus functions criterially), then since reference serves both indi-

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viduative and identificatory concerns, individuation is also a consensual matter. That is not to say that “anything goes,” that there are no general concerns of systematicity (predictability, personal responsibility, proprietary rights, or the like) in virtue of which one scheme of individuation will be found to be better than another. But there is no algorithmic solution to the problem of individuation just as there is none for the problems of reference and predication. You see, therefore, that the emphasis in the predicate calculus on abstractly quantified number (without prior attention to the actual identification and reidentification of particulars in the real world) obscures the fact that individuation (a fortiori, numerical identity) cannot be freed from intensional (non-extensional) complications. But to admit that is to admit the weltanschauung-like nature of logic itself and the epistemic discipline that it serves. The supposed autonomy of logic is, ultimately, an analogue of Husserl’s division between the Transcendental Ego and the culturally contingent human subject. If logic is a Platonist realm, then of course logicians had better be suitably equipped—cognitionally. If you bring all this together with the change in the fortunes of legitimation, you cannot avoid conceding that individuals may well lack invariant natures. But if so, then the resolution of the problem of individuation and identity—like that of reference and predication before it—confirms the resilience of the doctrine of the flux and the importance of legitimative matters under conditions of flux and historicity. What is essential to grasp is that numerical identity is nowhere “perceived” to be such (as Hume was well aware) but also that individuation is also not so perceived (which Hume did not appreciate: see his use of the notions of “unity” and “invariableness”). Although individuative and identificatory assertions plainly occur in first-order discourse, we make sense of them only in terms of second-order reflections. The same is true of referential and predicative success and of truth and knowledge in general. Grant that, and postmodernism and the “naturalisms” restricted to first-order or merely causal matters cannot but be defective philosophies. Knowledge is a certain normative status accorded certain firstorder states and processes. It cannot be reduced to the latter (as with Quine) and it cannot be separated from the latter (as with Husserl and Heidegger). Numerical identity, then, implicates the application of individuative criteria. There are no rules about what, substantively, is required in the way of qualitative similarity, continuity, unity of “nature,” or anything of the kind, that satisfactorily determine number or numerical identity. Such formulas as “one person, one body,” for instance, favored by P. F. Strawson and Bernard Williams (for somewhat different reasons), or “bodily continuity” and

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“psychological continuity” favored by Derek Parfit, or “one’s remembering or not remembering,” favored problematically by Locke, hardly explicate the individuation of persons—or our theory of what a person is. This is not to say that individuation or reidentification is not “sortally” explicated, in Strawson’s sense of “sortal”: that is, in the sense in which (ultimately Aristotle’s sense) a thing’s being of a kind enables us to individuate and reidentify it—as in speaking of this or that particular horse; it is only that so speaking says nothing about the logical constraints on sortals themselves, as in being fixed or variable. In fact, sortals are formed by way of individuative proposals (as the biology of butterflies and caterpillars, “social amoebae,” and “multiple personality” cases attest). There is no way to free the logic of “natures” from that of “individuals.” In this sense, “sortals” are not merely “natures” but “natures” fitted to individuative considerations. Hence, once again, we must admit that our individuative and predicative distinctions are weltanschauung-like (or lebensformlich or sittlich). Ultimately, all such distinctions “arise together”; there is no prioritizing one over the other. Similarly, even when Leibniz declares that there are no two leaves that are “exactly alike” (in terms of general predicables), saying that says nothing (yet) about whether the claim is meant to be a logically necessary one (which Leibniz disowns) or whether such a difference establishes, in itself, numerical identity or difference, or merely confirms numerical difference where individuation already obtains. If we make concessions along these lines, then sortals—a fortiori, “natures,” “natural kinds,” “essences”—need not be predicatively invariant in any “realist” sense; or else we simply concede that we may determine what to regard as the (“nominally”) defining sortal for any particular longitudinal career. In the latter instance, invariance proves to be an artifact of flux. Remember: identity concerns being the same one of this or that “nature” or “kind,” whereas individuation concerns what constitutes the same one individual (to which a sortal nature may thereupon be assigned). Thus, the characters in Bram Stoker’s Dracula begin to learn that a variety of seemingly disconnected manifestations (the appearance of what is judged to be a bat, a cloud, a pair of burning eyes, a wolf, a man dressed in a cape) are all to be henceforth regarded as the predicable manifestations of one individual being—not independent particulars in their own right—a being of a hitherto unknown sort: the vampire, which, then, as a matter of trivial logic, is necessarily one with itself (whatever its “nature” may be). What is of the utmost importance is that none of these logical niceties

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settles the question whether sortals or natures need be invariant in any determinate predicative sense, or determines whether (what is usually but doubtfully denied) any individual can remain the same individual though it slough off a would-be nature (usually assigned it), in order to acquire another. Lucy Westenra, in Dracula, is (in the story) the same person throughout but not the same woman (since she becomes a vampire). Her “nature” changes and the supposed “sortal” proves inappropriate. The point is not that there are vampires but that the notion is coherent and that there could be natural phenomena that would invite a similar solution. If you give up Aristotle’s notion of fixed essences, or place in doubt the theory of natural kinds associated with the covering-law model of explanation in science (see Hempel), then it is entirely possible to accommodate, coherently, the verbal adjustment being broached. In fact, it is normally the case that, say, a certain small pool of water and a certain small block of ice are deemed to be one and the same “quantity” of water in virtue of the laws governing changes of physical state and our individuative practices regarding quantities of water. But the practice is empirically guided, not invariant; it is constructed, and it depends on second-order considerations, for instance favoring systematic coherence across all discourse. These considerations cannot ensure that the natures of things—relative to which the world is thought to include certain persisting individuals—can be rightly said to contain those individuals only if their natures remain invariant. The coelacanth remains a fish, though it has evolved incipient limbs. The logical informality of predication, even the variability (over time) of what falls within the scope of particular predicables, is not an obstacle to coherent discourse. But if that is conceded in the case of predication, it cannot fail to be true of individuation, which makes use of predication as well as the formalities of reference and denotation. The concession is needed, for example, in the empirical work of biological evolution (see Mayr), since if species evolve, it must be possible for biological individuals to be characterized in terms of species membership, despite the fact that, over time, any species to which they putatively belong may change with respect to whatever is judged to be its “essence.” If you follow the logic of this, then any apparent substantive invariance in the intelligible world cannot fail to be relativized to our contingent experience of that world; and then our reflexive judgments about what is deemed changeless in the categories of human understanding will be subject, congruently, to similar modes of change. But that, ultimately, is the Cartesian, Kantian, Husserlian question in another guise. It is also what Foucault, for one, would subvert—but does not care to address with sufficient

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patience. The extreme possibilities of this line of conjecture are posed by C. S. Peirce. For it is Peirce who speculates that in any determinate predication, there is always an implicit indeterminacy regarding some further subaltern predicative opposition (as, in predicating “human” of these and those referents, regarding the further predication of the opposed predicables “male” and “female”): hence, that the principles of noncontradiction and excluded middle are not, invariantly, universally applicable to all possible predicates. The applicability of such further predicates, Peirce thinks, depends on an interpretive intervention that lays down that applicability (what Peirce calls Thirdness). But since such interpretation is itself an expression of an implicit community of “interpretants,” which, though never fully articulated by Peirce, may be reasonably construed in collectivist terms in a manner akin to Hegel’s view of Geist (in spite of the fact that Peirce himself is a critic of Hegel, though not noticeably a fully comprehending critic), Peirce is also inclined to treat individuated persons or selves as not completely determinate or autonomous individuals. (Here, one sees an important divergence between Peirce and Dewey and, more instructively, between Peirce and Frege.) In a more contemporary idiom, one might now say that individuation (hence: a determinate individual or individual thing) is an artifact of our collective practice; and that, in particular, the individuation of those individuals (persons or selves) that, reflexively, enter into the practice of individuation itself (by sharing a common cultural practice) are artifacts of their own ongoing practice. That is hardly Peirce’s own idiom, though it can be reconciled with its main themes. The conceptual distinction between, but inseparability of, first- and second-order discourse precludes the naturalistic reduction of legitimation as well as transcendental apodicticity.

THE THESIS OF THE NATURAL STANDPOINT AND ITS SUSPENSION

Edmund Husserl 27. The World of the Natural Standpoint: I and My World About Me Our first outlook upon life is that of natural human beings, imaging, judging, feeling, willing, “from the natural standpoint.” Let us make clear to ourReprinted with the permission of Simon & Schuster, Inc., from Ideas: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology by Edmund Husserl, translated by W. R. Boyce Gibson, Copyright © 1962 by Macmillan Publishing Company.

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selves what this means in the form of simple meditations which we can best carry on in the first person. I am aware of a world, spread out in space endlessly, and in time becoming and become, without end. I am aware of it, that means, first of all, I discover it immediately, intuitively, I experience it. Through sight, touch, hearing etc., in the different ways of sensory perception, corporeal things somehow spatially distributed are for me simply there, in verbal or figurative sense “present,” whether or not I pay them special attention by busying myself with them, considering, thinking, feeling, willing. Animal beings also, perhaps men, are immediately there for me; I look up, I see them, I hear them coming towards me, I grasp them by the hand; speaking with them, I understand immediately what they are sensing and thinking, the feelings that stir them, what they wish or will. They too are present as realities in my field of intuition, even when I pay them no attention. But it is not necessary that they and other objects likewise should be present precisely in my field of perception. For me real objects are there, definite, more or less familiar, agreeing with what is actually perceived without being themselves perceived or even intuitively present. I can let my attention wander from the writing-table I have just seen and observed, through the unseen portions of the room behind my back to the verandah, into the garden, to the children in the summer-house, and so forth, to all the objects concerning which I precisely “know” that they are there and yonder in my immediate co-perceived surroundings—a knowledge which has nothing of conceptual thinking in it, and first changes into clear intuiting with the bestowing of attention, and even then only partially and for the most part very imperfectly. But not even with the added reach of this intuitively clear or dark, distinct or indistinct co-present margin, which forms a continuous ring around the actual field of perception, does that world exhaust itself which in every waking moment is in some conscious measure “present” before me. It reaches rather in a fixed order of being the limitless beyond. What is actually perceived, and what is more or less clearly co-present and determinate (to some extent at least), is partly pervaded, partly girt about with a dimly apprehended depth or fringe of indeterminate reality. I can pierce it with rays from the illuminating focus of attention with varying success. Determining representations, dim at first, then livelier, fetch me something out, a chain of such recollections takes shape, the circle of determinacy extends ever farther, and eventually so far that the connexion with the actual field of perception as the immediate environment is established. But in general the issue is a different one: an empty mist of dim indeterminacy gets studded over with intuitive possibilities or pre-

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sumptions, and only the “form” of the world as “world” is foretokened. Moreover, the zone of indeterminacy is infinite. The misty horizon that can never be completely outlined remains necessarily there. As it is with the world in its ordered being as a spatial present—the aspect I have so far been considering—so likewise is it with the world in respect to its ordered being in the succession of time. This world now present to me, and in every waking “now” obviously so, has its temporal horizon, infinite in both direction, its known and unknown, its intimately alive and its unalive past and future. Moving freely within the moment of experience which brings what is present into my intuitional grasp, I can follow up these connexions of the reality which immediately surrounds me. I can shift my standpoint in space and time, look this way and that, turn temporally forwards and backwards; I can provide for myself constantly new and more or less clear and meaningful perceptions and representations, and images also more or less clear, in which I make intuitable to myself whatever can possibly exist really or supposedly in the steadfast order of space and time. In this way, when consciously awake, I find myself at all times, and without my ever being able to change this, set in relation to a world which, through its constant changes, remains one and ever the same. It is continually “present” for me, and I myself am a member of it. Therefore this world is not there for me as a mere world of facts and affairs, but, with the same immediacy, as a world of values, a world of goods, a practical world. Without further effort on my part I find the things before me furnished not only with the qualities that befit their positive nature, but with value-characters such as beautiful or ugly, agreeable or disagreeable, pleasant or unpleasant, and so forth. Things in their immediacy stand there as objects to be used, the “table” with its “books,” the “glass to drink from,” the “vase,” the “piano,” and so forth. These values and practicalities, they too belong to the constitution of the “actually present” objects as such, irrespective of my turning or not turning to consider them or indeed any other objects. The same considerations apply of course just as well to the men and beasts in my surroundings as to “mere things.” They are my “friends” or my “foes,” my “servants” or “superiors,” “strangers” or “relatives,” and so forth. 28. The “Cogito.” My Natural World-about-me and the Ideal Worlds-about-me It is then to this world, the world in which I find myself and which is also my world-about-me, that the complex forms of my manifold and shifting spon-

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taneities of consciousness stand related: observing in the interests of research the bringing of meaning into conceptual form through description; comparing and distinguishing, collecting and counting, presupposing and inferring, the theorizing activity of consciousness, in short, in its different forms and stages. Related to it likewise are the diverse acts and states of sentiment and disapproval, joy and sorrow, desire and aversion, hope and fear, decision and action. All these, together with the sheer acts of the Ego, in which I become acquainted with the world as immediately given me, through spontaneous tendencies to turn towards it and to grasp it, are included under the one Cartesian expression: Cogito. In the natural urge of life I live continually in this fundamental form of all “wakeful” living, whether in addition I do or do not assert the cogito, and whether I am or am not “reflectively” concerned with the Ego and the cogitare. If I am so concerned, a new cogito has become livingly active, which for its part is not reflected upon, and so not objective for me. I am present to myself continually as someone who perceives, represents, thinks, feels, desires, and so forth; and for the most part herein I find myself related in present experience to the fact-world which is constantly about me. But I am not always so related, not every cogito in which I live has for its cogitatum things, men, objects or contents of one kind or another. Perhaps I am busied with pure numbers and the laws they symbolize: nothing of this sort is present in the world about me, this world of “real fact.” And yet the world of numbers also is there for me, as the field of objects with which I am arithmetically busied; while I am thus occupied some numbers or constructions of a numerical kind will be at the focus of vision, girt by an arithmetical horizon partly defined, partly not; but obviously this being-there-for-me, like the being there at all, is something very different from this. The arithmetical world is there for me only when and so long as I occupy the arithmetical standpoint. But the natural world, the world in the ordinary sense of the word, is constantly there for me, so long as I live naturally and look in its direction. I am then at the “natural standpoint,” which is just another way of stating the same thing. And there is no need to modify these conclusions when I proceed to appropriate to myself the arithmetical world, and other similar “worlds,” by adopting the corresponding standpoint. The natural world still remains “present,” I am at the natural standpoint after as well as before, and in this respect undisturbed by the adoption of new standpoints. If my cogito is active only in the worlds proper to the new standpoints, the natural world remains unconsidered; it is now the background for my consciousness as act, but it is not the encircling sphere within which an

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arithmetical world finds its true and proper place. The two worlds are present together but disconnected, apart, that is, from their relation to the Ego, in virtue of which I can freely direct my glance or my acts to the one or to the other. 29. The “Other” Ego-subject and the Intersubjective Natural World-about-me Whatever holds good for me personally, also holds good, as I know, for all other men whom I find present in my world-about-me. Experiencing them as men, I understand and take them as Ego-subjects, units like myself, and related to their natural surroundings. But this in such wise that I apprehend the world-about-them and the world-about-me objectively as one and the same world, which differs in each case only through affecting consciousness differently. Each has his place whence he sees the things that are present, and each enjoys accordingly different appearances of the things. For each, again, the fields of perception and memory actually present are different, quite apart from the fact that even that which is here intersubjectively known in common is known in different ways, is differently apprehended, shows different grades of clearness, and so forth. Despite all this, we come to understandings with our neighbours, and set up in common an objective spatiotemporal fact-world as the world about us that is there for us all, and to which we ourselves none the less belong. 30. The General Thesis of the Natural Standpoint That which we have submitted towards the characterization of what is given to us from the natural standpoint, and thereby of the natural standpoint itself, was a piece of pure description prior to all “theory.” In these studies we stand bodily aloof from all theories, and by “theories” we here mean anticipatory ideas of every kind. Only as facts of our environment, not as agencies for uniting facts validly together, do theories concern us at all. But we do not set ourselves the task of continuing the pure description and raising it to a systematically inclusive and exhaustive characterization of the data, in their full length and breadth, discoverable from the natural standpoint (or from any standpoint, we might add, that can be knit up with the same in a common consent). A task such as this can and must—as scientific—be undertaken, and it is one of extraordinary importance, although so far scarcely noticed. Here it is not ours to attempt. For us who are striving towards the entrance-gate of phenomenology all the necessary work in this direction has

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already been carried out; the few features pertaining to the natural standpoint which we need are of a quite general character, and have already figured in our descriptions, and been sufficiently and fully clarified. We even made a special point of securing this full measure of clearness. We emphasize a most important point once again in the sentences that follow: I find continually present and standing over against me the one spatiotemporal fact-world to which I myself belong, as do all other men found in it and related in the same way to it. This “fact-world,” as the world already tells us, I find to be out there, and also take it just as it gives itself to me as something that exists out there. All doubting and rejecting of the data of the natural world leaves standing the general thesis of the natural standpoint. “The” world is as fact-world always there; at the most it is at odd points “other” than I supposed, this or that under such names as “illusion,” “hallucination,” and the like, must be struck out of it, so to speak; but the “it” remains ever, in the sense of the general thesis, a world that has its being out there. To know it more comprehensively, more trustworthily, more perfectly than the naive lore of experience is able to do, and to solve all the problems of scientific knowledge which offer themselves upon its ground, that is the goal of the sciences of the natural standpoint. 31. Radical Alteration of the Natural Thesis “Disconnexion,” “Bracketing” Instead now of remaining at this standpoint, we propose to alter it radically. Our aim must be to convince ourselves of the possibility of this alteration on grounds of principle. The General Thesis according to which the real world about me is at all times known not merely in a general way as something apprehended, but as a fact-world that has its being out there, does not consist of course in an act proper, in an articulated judgment about existence. It is and remains something all the time the standpoint is adopted, that is, it endures persistently during the whole course of our life of natural endeavour. What has been at any time perceived clearly, or obscurely made present, in short everything out of the world of nature through experience and prior to any thinking, bears in its totality and in all its articulated sections the character “present” “out there,” a character which can function essentially as the ground of support for an explicit (predicative) existential judgment which is in agreement with the character it is grounded upon. If we express that same judgment, we know quite well that in so doing we have simply put into the form of a

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statement and grasped as a predication what already lay somehow in the original experience, or lay there as the character of something “present to one’s hand.” We can treat the potential and unexpressed thesis exactly as we do the thesis of the explicit judgment. A procedure of this sort, possible at any time, is, for instance, the attempt to doubt everything which Descartes, with an entirely different end in view, with the purpose of setting up an absolutely indubitable sphere of Being, undertook to carry through. We link on here, but add directly and emphatically that this attempt to doubt everything should serve us only as a device of method, helping us to stress certain points which by its means, as though secluded in its essence, must be brought clearly to light. The attempt to doubt everything has its place in the realm of our perfect freedom. We can attempt to doubt anything and everything, however convinced we may be concerning what we doubt, even though the evidence which seals our assurance is completely adequate. Let us consider what is essentially involved in an act of this kind. He who attempts to doubt is attempting to doubt “Being” of some form or other, or it may be Being expanded into such predicative forms as “It is,” “It is this or thus,” and the like. The attempt does not affect the form of Being itself. He who doubts, for instance, whether an object, whose Being he does not doubt, is constituted in such and such a way doubts the way it is constituted. We can obviously transfer this way of speaking from the doubting to the attempt at doubting. It is clear that we cannot doubt the Being of anything, and in the same act of consciousness (under the unifying form of simultaneity) bring what is substantive to this Being under the terms of the Natural Thesis, and so confer upon it the character of “being actually there” (vorhanden). Or to put the same in another way: we cannot at once doubt and hold for certain one and the same quality of Being. It is likewise clear that the attempt to doubt any object of awareness in respect of it being actually there necessarily conditions a certain suspension (Aufhebung) of the thesis; and it is precisely this that interests us. It is not a transformation of the thesis into its antithesis, of positive into negative; it is also not a transformation into presumption, suggestion, indecision, doubt (in one or another sense of the word); such shifting indeed is not at our free pleasure. Rather is it something quite unique. We do not abandon the thesis we have adopted, we make no change in our conviction, which remains in itself what it is so long as we do not introduce new motives of judgment, which we precisely refrain from doing. And yet the thesis undergoes a modification—whilst re-

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maining in itself what it is, we set it as it were “out of action,” we “disconnect it,” “bracket it.” It still remains there like the bracketed in the bracket, like the disconnected outside the connexional system. We can also say: The thesis is experience as lived (Erlebnis), but we make “no use” of it, and by that, of course, we do not indicate privation (as when we say of the ignorant that he makes no use of a certain thesis); in this case rather, as with all parallel expressions, we are dealing with indicators that point to a definite but unique form of consciousness, which clamps on to the original simple thesis (whether it actually or even predicatively posits existence or not), and transvalues it in a quite peculiar way. This transvaluing is a concern of our full freedom, and is opposed to all cognitive attitudes that would set themselves up as co-ordinate with the thesis, and yet within the unity of “simultaneity” remain incompatible with it, as indeed it is in general with all attitudes whatsoever in the strict sense of the word. In the attempt to doubt applied to a thesis which, as we presuppose, is certain and tenaciously held, the “disconnexion” takes place in and with a modification of the antithesis, namely with the “supposition” (Ansetzung) of Non-Being, which is thus the partial basis of the attempt to doubt. With Descartes this is so markedly the case that one can say that his universal attempt at doubt is just an attempt at universal denial. We disregard this possibility here, we are not interested in every analytical component of the attempt to doubt, nor therefore in its exact and completely sufficing analysis. We extract only the phenomenon of “bracketing” or “disconnection,” which is obviously not limited to that of the attempt to doubt, although it can be detached from it with special ease but can appear in other contexts also, and with no less ease independently. In relation to every thesis and wholly uncoerced we can use this peculiar , (epokhe—abstention), a certain refraining from judgment which is compatible with the unshaken and unshakable because self-evidencing conviction of Truth. The thesis is “put out of action,” bracketed, it passes off into the modified status of a “bracketed thesis” and the judgment simpliciter into “bracketed judgment.” Naturally one should not simply identify this consciousness with that of “mere supposal,” that nymphs, for instance, are dancing in a ring; for thereby no disconnecting of a living conviction that goes on living takes place, although from another side the close relation of the two forms of consciousness lies clear. Again, we are not concerned here with supposal in the sense of “assuming” or taking for granted, which in the equivocal speech of current usage may also be expressed in the words: “I suppose (I make the assumption) that it is so and so.”

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Let us add further that nothing hinders us from speaking bracketing correlatively also, in respect of an objectivity to be posited, what ever be the region or category to which it belongs. What is meant in this case is that every thesis related to this objectivity must be disconnected and changed into its bracketed counterpart. On closer view, moreover, the “bracketing” image is from the outset better suited to the sphere of the object, just as the expression “to put out of action” better suits the sphere of the Act or of Consciousness. 32. The Phenomenological  We can now let the universal , (epokhe—abstention) in the sharply defined and novel sense we have given to it step into the place of the Cartesian attempt at universal doubt. But on good grounds we limit the universality of this . For were it as inclusive as it is in general capable of being, then since every thesis and every judgment can be modified freely to any extent, and every objectivity that we can judge or criticize can be bracketed, no field would be left over for unmodified judgments, to say nothing of a science. But our design is just to discover a new scientific domain, such as might be won precisely through the method of bracketing, though only through a definitely limiting form of it. The limiting consideration can be indicated in a word. We put out of action the general thesis which belongs to the essence of the natural standpoint, we place in brackets whatever it includes respecting the nature of Being: this entire natural world therefore which is continually “there for us,” “present to our hand,” and will ever remain there, is a “factworld” of which we continue to be conscious, even though it pleases us to put it in brackets. If I do this, as I am fully free to do, I do not then deny this “world,” as though I were a sophist, I do not doubt that it is there as though I were a sceptic; but I use the “phenomenological” , which completely bars me from using any judgment that concerns spatio-temporal existence (Dasein). Thus all sciences which relate to this natural world, though they stand never so firm to me, though they fill me with wondering admiration, though I am far from any thought of objecting to them in the least degree, I disconnect them all, I make absolutely no use of their standards, I do not appropriate a single one of the propositions that enter into their systems, even though their evidential value is perfect, I take none of them, no one of them serves me for a foundation—so long, that is, as it is understood, in the way these sciences themselves understand it, as a truth concerning the realities of this

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world. I may accept it only after I have placed it in the bracket. That means: only in the modified consciousness of the judgment as it appears in disconnexion, and not as it figures within the science as its proposition, a proposition which claims to be valid and whose validity I recognize and make use of. The  here in question will not be confined with that which positivism demands, and against which, as we were compelled to admit, it is itself an offender. We are not concerned at present with removing the preconceptions which trouble the pure positivity (Sachlichkeit) of research, with the constituting of a science “free from theory” and “free from metaphysics” by bringing all the grounding back to the immediate data, nor with the means of reaching such ends, concerning whose value there is indeed no question. What we demand lies along another line. The whole world as placed within the nature-setting and presented in experience as real, taken completely “free from all theory,” just as it is in reality experienced, and made clearly manifest in and through the linkings of our experiences, has now no validity for us, it must be set in brackets, untested indeed but also uncontested. Similarly all theories and sciences, positivistic or otherwise, which relate to this world, however good they may be, succumb to the same fate.

DETERMINATION, GENERALITY, AND VAGUENESS

Charles S. Peirce 446. Character IV. By all odds, the most distinctive character of the Critical Common-sensist [. . .] lies in his insistence that the acritically indubitable is invariably vague. . . . 447. Accurate writers have apparently made a distinction between the definite and the determinate. A subject is determinate in respect to any character which inheres in it or is (universally and affirmatively) predicated of it, as well as in respect to the negative of such character, these being the very same respect. In all other respects it is indeterminate. The definite shall be defined presently. A sign (under which designation I place every kind of thought, and not alone external signs), that is in any respect objectively indeterminate (i.e., whose object is undetermined by the sign itself) is objectively general in so far as it extends to the interpreter the privilege of carryReprinted by permission of the publisher from Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, Volume V, edited by Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, Copyright © 1934, 1962 by The President and Fellows of Harvard College.

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ing its determination further.1 Example: “Man is mortal.” To the question, What man? the reply is that the proposition explicitly leaves it to you to apply its assertion to what man or men you will. A sign that is objectively indeterminate in any respect is objectively vague in so far as it reserves further determination to be made in some other conceivable sign, or at least does not appoint the interpreter as its deputy in this office. Example: “A man whom I could mention seems to be a little conceited.” The suggestion here is that the man in view is the person addressed; but the utterer does not authorize such an interpretation or any other application of what she says. She can still say, if she likes, that she does not mean the person addressed. Every utterance naturally leaves the right of further exposition in the utterer; and therefore, in so far as a sign is indeterminate, it is vague, unless it is expressly or by a well-understood convention rendered general. Usually, an affirmative predication covers generally every essential character of the predicate, while a negative predication vaguely denies some essential character. In another sense, honest people, when not joking, intend to make the meaning of their words determinate, so that there shall be no latitude of interpretation at all. That is to say, the character of their meaning consists in the implications and non-implications of their words; and they intend to fix what is implied and what is not implied. They believe that they succeed in doing so, and if their chat is about the theory of numbers, perhaps they may. But the further their topics are from such presciss, or “abstract,” subjects, the less possibility is there of such precision of speech. In so far as the implication is not determinate, it is usually left vague; but there are cases where an unwillingness to dwell on disagreeable subjects causes the utterer to leave the determination of the implication to the interpreter; as if one says, “That creature is filthy, in every sense of the term.” 448. Perhaps a more scientific pair of definitions would be that anything is general in so far as the principle of excluded middle does not apply to it and is vague in so far as the principle of contradiction does not apply to it. Thus, although it is true that “Any proposition you please, once you have de1. Hamilton and a few other logicians understood the subject of a universal proposition in the collective sense; but every person who is well-read in logic is familiar with many passages in which the leading logicians explain with an iteration that would be superfluous if all readers were intelligent, that such a subject is distributively not collectively general. A term denoting a collection is singular, and such a term is an “abstraction” or product of the operation of hypostatic abstraction as truly as is the name of the essence. “Mankind” is quite as much an abstraction and ens rationis as is “humanity.” Indeed, every object of a conception is either a signate individual or some kind of indeterminate individual. Nouns in the plural are usually distributive and general; common nouns in the singular are usually indefinite.

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termined its identity, is either true or false”; yet so long as it remains indeterminate and so without identity, it need neither be true that any proposition you please is true, nor that any proposition you please is false. So likewise, while it is false that “A proposition whose identity I have determined is both true and false,” yet until it is determinate, it may be true that a proposition is true and that a proposition is false.2 2. These remarks require supplementation. Determination, in general, is not defined at all; and the attempt at defining the determination of a subject with respect to a character only covers (or seems only to cover) explicit propositional determination. The incidental remark [447] to the effect that words whose meaning should be determinate would leave “no latitude of interpretation” is more satisfactory, since the context makes it plain that there must be no such latitude either for the interpreter or for the utterer. The explicitness of the words would leave the utterer no room for explanations of his meaning. This definition has the advantage of being applicable to a command, to a purpose, to a medieval substantial form; in short to anything capable of indeterminacy. (That everything indeterminate is of the nature of a sign can be proved inductively by imagining and analyzing instances of the surdest description. Thus, the indetermination of an event which should happen by pure chance without cause, sua sponte, as the Romans mythologically said, spontanément in French (as if what was done of one’s own motion were sure to be irrational), does not belong to the event—say, an explosion—per se, or as explosion. Neither is it by virtue of any real relation: it is by virtue of a relation of reason. Now what is true by virtue of a relation of reason is representative, that is, is of the nature of a sign. A similar consideration applies to the indiscriminate shots and blows of a Kentucky free fight.) Even a future event can only be determinate in so far as it is a consequent. Now the concept of a consequent is a logical concept. It is derived from the concept of the conclusion of an argument. But an argument is a sign of the truth of its conclusion; its conclusion is the rational interpretation of the sign. This is in the spirit of the Kantian doctrine that metaphysical concepts are logical concepts applied somewhat differently from their logical application. The difference, however, is not really as great as Kant represents it to be, and as he was obliged to represent it to be, owing to his mistaking the logical and metaphysical correspondents in almost every case. Another advantage of this definition is that it saves us from the blunder of thinking that a sign is indeterminate simply because there is much to which it makes no reference; that, for example, to say, “C. S. Peirce wrote this article,” is indeterminate because it does not say what the color of the ink used was, who made the ink, how old the father of the ink-maker [was] when his son was born, nor what the aspect of the planets was when that father was born. By making the definition turn upon the interpretation, all that is cut off. At the same time, it is tolerably evident that the definition, as it stands, is not sufficiently explicit, and further, that at the present stage of our inquiry cannot be made altogether satisfactory. For what is the interpretation alluded to? To answer that convincingly would be either to establish or to refute the doctrine of pragmaticism. Still some explanations may be made. Every sign has a single object, though this single object may be a single set or a single continuum of objects. No general description can identify an object. But the common sense of the interpreter of the sign will assure him that the object must be one of a limited collection of objects. Suppose, for example, two Englishmen to meet in a continental railway carriage. The total number of subjects of which there is any appreciable probability that one will speak to the other perhaps does not exceed a million; and each will have perhaps half that million not far below the surface of consciousness, so that each unit of it is ready to suggest itself. If one mentions Charles the Second, the other need not consider what possible Charles the Second is meant. It is no doubt the English Charles Second. Charles the Second of England was quite a different man on

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449. In those respects in which a sign is not vague, it is said to be definite, and also with a slightly different mode of application, to be precise, a meaning probably due to prœcisus having been applied to curt denials and refusals. It has been the well-established, ordinary sense of precise since the Plantagenets; and it were much to be desired that this word, with its derivatives precision, precisive, etc., should, in the dialect of philosophy, be restricted to this sense. To express the act of rendering precise (though usually

different days; and it might he said that without further specification the subject is not identified. But the two Englishmen have no purpose of splitting hairs in their talk; and the latitude of interpretation which constitutes the indeterminacy of a sign must be understood as a latitude which might affect the achievement of a purpose. For two signs whose meanings are for all possible purposes equivalent are absolutely equivalent. This, to be sure, is rank pragmaticism; for a purpose is an affection of action. What has been said of subjects is as true of predicates. Suppose the chat of our pair of Englishmen had fallen upon the color of Charles II’s hair. Now that colors are seen quite differently by different retinas is known. That the chromatic sense is much more varied than it is positively known to be is quite likely. It is very unlikely that either of the travelers is trained to observe colors or is a master of their nomenclature. But if one says that Charles II had dark auburn hair, the other will understand him quite precisely enough for all their possible purposes; and it will be a determinate predication. The October remarks [i.e., those in the above paper] made the proper distinction between the two kinds of indeterminacy, viz.: indefiniteness and generality, of which the former consists in the sign’s not sufficiently expressing itself to allow of an indubitable determinate interpretation, while the [latter] turns over to the interpreter the right to complete the determination as he please. It seems a strange thing, when one comes to ponder over it, that a sign should leave its interpreter to supply a part of its meaning; but the explanation of the phenomenon lies in the fact that the entire universe—not merely the universe of existents, but all that wider universe, embracing the universe of existents as a part, the universe which we are all accustomed to refer to as “the truth”—that all this universe is perfused with signs, if it is not composed exclusively of signs. Let us note this in passing as having a bearing upon the question of pragmaticism. The October remarks, with a view to brevity, omitted to mention that both indefiniteness and generality might primarily affect either the logical breadth or the logical depth of the sign to which it belongs. It now becomes pertinent to notice this. When we speak of the depth, or signification, of a sign we are resorting to hypostatic abstraction, that process whereby we regard a thought as a thing, make an interpretant sign the object of a sign. It has been a butt of ridicule since Molière’s dying week, and the depth of a writer on philosophy can conveniently be sounded by his disposition to make fun of the basis of voluntary inhibition, which is the chief characteristic of mankind. For cautious thinkers will not be in haste to deride a kind of thinking that is evidently founded upon observation—namely, upon observation of a sign. At any rate, whenever we speak of a predicate we are representing a thought as a thing, as a substantia, since the concepts of substance and subject are one, its concomitants only being different in the two cases. It is needful to remark this in the present connexion, because, were it not for hypostatic abstraction, there could be no generality of a predicate, since a sign which should make its interpreter its deputy to determine its signification at his pleasure would not signify anything, unless nothing be its significate.—From “Basis of Pragmaticism,” 1906, following somewhat after 554.

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only in reference to numbers, dates, and the like), the French have the verb prèciser, which, after the analogy of dècider, should have been prècider. Would it not be a useful addition to our English terminology of logic, to adopt the verb to precide, to express the general sense, to render precise? Our older logicians with salutary boldness seem to have created for their service the verb to prescind, the corresponding Latin word meaning only to “cut off at the end,” while the English word means to suppose without supposing some more or less determinately indicated accompaniment. In geometry, for example, we “prescind” shape from color, which is precisely the same thing as to “abstract” color from shape, although very many writers employ the verb “to abstract” so as to make it the equivalent of “prescind.” But whether it was the invention or the courage of our philosophical ancestors which exhausted itself in the manufacture of the verb “prescind,” the curious fact is that instead of forming from it the noun prescission, they took pattern from the French logicians in putting the word precision to this second use. About the same time3 (see Watts, Logick, 1725, I, vi, 9 ad. fin.) the adjective precisive was introduced to signify what prescissive would have more unmistakably conveyed. If we desire to rescue the good ship Philosophy for the service of Science from the hands of lawless rovers of the sea of literature, we shall do well to keep prescind, presciss, prescission, and prescissive on the one hand, to refer to dissection in hypothesis, while precide, precise, precision, and precisive are used so as to refer exclusively to an expression of determination which is made either full or free for the interpreter. We shall thus do much to relieve the stem “abstract” from staggering under the double burden of conveying the idea of prescission as well as the unrelated and very important idea of the creation of ens rationis out of an    —to filch the phrase to furnish a name for an expression of non-substantive thought—an operation that has been treated as a subject of ridicule—this hypostatic abstraction—but which gives mathematics half its power. 450. The purely formal conception that the three affections of terms, determination, generality, and vagueness, form a group dividing a category of what Kant calls “functions of judgment” will be passed by as unimportant by those who have yet to learn how important a part purely formal conceptions may play in philosophy. Without stopping to discuss this, it may be pointed out that the “quantity” of propositions in logic, that is, the distribution of the 3. But unfortunately it has not been in the writer’s power to consult the Oxford Dictionary concerning these words; so that probably some of the statements in the text might be corrected with the aid of that work.

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first subject,4 is either singular (that is, determinate, which renders it substantially negligible in formal logic), or universal (that is, general), or particular (as the mediaeval logicians say, that is, vague or indefinite). It is a curious fact that in the logic of relations it is the first and last quantifiers of a proposition that are of chief importance. To affirm of anything that it is a horse is to yield to it every essential character of a horse; to deny of anything that it is a horse is vaguely to refuse to it some one or more of those essential characters of the horse. There are, however, predicates that are unanalyzable in a given state of intelligence and experience. These are, therefore, determinately affirmed or denied. Thus, this same group of concepts reappears. Affirmation and denial are in themselves unaffected by these concepts, but it is to be remarked that there are cases in which we can have an apparently definite idea of a border line between affirmation and negation. Thus, a point of a surface may be in a region of that surface, or out of it, or on its boundary. This gives us an indirect and vague conception of an intermediary between affirmation and denial in general, and consequently of an intermediate, or nascent state, between determination and indetermination. There must be a similar intermediacy between generality and vagueness. Indeed, in an article in the seventh volume of The Monist there lies just beneath the surface of what is explicitly said, the idea of an endless series of such intermediacies. NAMING AND NECESSITY

Saul A. Kripke The first topic in the pair of topics is naming. By a name here I will mean a proper name, i.e., the name of a person, a city, a country, etc. It is well known that modern logicians also are very interested in definite descriptions: phrases of the form ‘the x such that øx’, such as ‘the man who corrupted Hadleyburg’. Now, if one and only one man ever corrupted Hadleyburg, then that man is the referent, in the logician’s sense, of that description. We will use the term ‘name’ so that it does not include definite descriptions of Reprinted by permission of the publisher from Naming and Necessity by Saul Kripke, Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Copyright © 1972, 1980 by Saul A. Kripke. 4. Thus returning to the writer’s original nomenclature, in despite of Monist VII, [3.532] where an obviously defective argument was regarded as sufficient to determine a mere matter of terminology. But the Quality of propositions is there regarded from a point of view which seems extrinsic. I have not had time, however, to re-explore all the ramifications of this difficult question by the aid of existential graphs, and the statement in the text about the last quantifier may need modification.

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that sort, but only those things which in ordinary language would be called ‘proper names’. If we want a common term to cover names and descriptions, we may use the term ‘designator’. It is a point, made by Donnellan,1 that under certain circumstances a particular speaker may use a definite description to refer, not to the proper referent, in the sense that I’ve just defined it, of that description, but to something else which he wants to single out and which he thinks is the proper referent of the description, but which in fact isn’t. So you may say, ‘The man over there with the champagne in his glass is happy’, though he actually only has water in his glass. Now, even though there is no champagne in his glass, and there may be another man in the room who does have champagne in his glass, the speaker intended to refer, or maybe, in some sense of ‘refer’, did refer, to the man he thought had the champagne in his glass. Nevertheless, I’m just going to use the term ‘referent of the description’ to mean the object uniquely satisfying the conditions in the definite description. This is the sense in which it’s been used in the logical tradition. So, if you have a description of the form ‘the x such that øx’, and there is exactly one x such that øx, that is the referent of the description. Now, what is the relation between names and descriptions? There is a well known doctrine of John Stuart Mill, in his book A System of Logic, that names have denotation but not connotation. To use one of his examples, when we use the name ‘Dartmouth’ to describe a certain locality in England, it may be so called because it lies at the mouth of the Dart. But even, he says, 1. Keith Donnellan, “Reference and Definite Descriptions,” Philosophical Review 75 (1966), pp. 281–304. See also Leonard Linsky, “Reference and Referents,” in Philosophy and Ordinary Language (ed. Caton) (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1963). Donnellan’s distinction seems applicable to names as well as to descriptions. Two men glimpse someone at a distance and think they recognize him as Jones. ‘What is Jones doing?’ ‘Raking the leaves’. If the distant leaf-raker is actually Smith, then in some sense they are referring to Smith, even though they both use ‘Jones’ as a name of Jones. In the text, I speak of the ‘referent’ of a name to mean the thing named by the name—e.g., Jones, not Smith—even though a speaker may sometimes properly be said to use the name to refer to someone else. Perhaps it would have been less misleading to use a technical term, such as ‘denote’ rather than ‘refer’. My use of ‘refer’ is such as to satisfy the schema, ‘The referent of “X” is X’, where ‘X’ is replaceable by any name or description. I am tentatively inclined to believe, in opposition to Donnellan, that his remarks about reference have little to do with semantics or truth-conditions, though they may be relevant to a theory of speech-acts. Space limitations do not permit me to explain what I mean by this, much less defend the view, except for a brief remark: Call the referent of a name or description in my sense the ‘semantic referent’; for a name, this is the thing named, for a description, the thing uniquely satisfying the description. Then the speaker may refer to something other than the semantic referent if he has appropriate false beliefs. I think this is what happens in the naming (Smith-Jones) cases and also in the Donnellan ‘champagne’ case; the one requires no theory that names are ambiguous, and the other requires no modification of Russell’s theory of descriptions.

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had the Dart (that’s a river) changed its course so that Dartmouth no longer lay at the mouth of the Dart, we could still with propriety call this place ‘Dartmouth’, even though the name may suggest that it lies at the mouth of the Dart. Changing Mill’s terminology, perhaps we should say that a name such as ‘Dartmouth’ does have a ‘connotation’ to some people, namely, it does connote (not to me—I never thought of this) that any place called ‘Dartmouth’ lies at the mouth of the Dart. But then in some way it doesn’t have a ‘sense’. At least, it is not part of the meaning of the name ‘Dartmouth’ that the town so named lies at the mouth of the Dart. Someone who said that Dartmouth did not lie at the Dart’s mouth would not contradict himself. It should not be thought that every phrase of the form ‘the x such that Fx’ is always used in English as a description rather than a name. I guess everyone has heard about The Holy Roman Empire, which was neither holy, Roman nor an empire. Today we have The United Nations. Here it would seem that since these things can be so-called even though they are not Holy Roman United Nations, these phrases should be regarded not as definite descriptions, but as names. In the case of some terms, people might have doubts as to whether they’re names or descriptions; like ‘God’—does it describe God as the unique divine being or is it a name of God? But such cases needn’t necessarily bother us. Now here I am making a distinction which is certainly made in language. But the classical tradition of modern logic has gone very strongly against Mill’s view. Frege and Russell both thought, and seemed to arrive at these conclusions independently of each other, that Mill was wrong in a very strong sense: really a proper name, properly used, simply was a definite description abbreviated or disguised. Frege specifically said that such a description gave the sense of the name.2 2. Strictly speaking, of course, Russell says that the names don’t abbreviate descriptions and don’t have any sense; but then he also says that, just because the things that we call ‘names’ do abbreviate descriptions, they’re not really names. So, since ‘Walter Scott’, according to Russell, does abbreviate a description, ‘Walter Scott’ is not a name; and the only names that really exist in ordinary language are, perhaps, demonstratives such as ‘this’ or ‘that’, used on a particular occasion to refer to an object with which the speaker is ‘acquainted’ in Russell’s sense. Though we won’t put things the way Russell does, we could describe Russell as saying that names, as they are ordinarily called, do have sense. They have sense in a strong way, namely, we should be able to give a definite description such that the referent of the name, by definition, is the object satisfying the description. Russell himself, since he eliminates descriptions from his primitive notation, seems to hold in ‘On Denoting’ that the notion of ‘sense’ is illusory. In reporting Russell’s views, we thus deviate from him in two respects. First, we stipulate that ‘names’ shall be names as ordinarily conceived, not Russell’s ‘logically proper names’; second, we regard descriptions, and their abbreviations, as having sense.

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Now the reasons against Mill’s view and in favor of the alternative view adopted by Frege and Russell are really very powerful; and it is hard to see— though one may be suspicious of this view because names don’t seem to be disguised descriptions—how the Frege-Russell view, or some suitable variant, can fail to be the case. Let me give an example of some of the arguments which seem conclusive in favor of the view of Frege and Russell. The basic problem for any view such as Mill’s is how we can determine what the referent of a name, as used by a given speaker, is. According to the description view, the answer is clear. If ‘Joe Doakes’ is just short for ‘the man who corrupted Hadleyburg’, then whoever corrupted Hadleyburg uniquely is the referent of the name ‘Joe Doakes’. However, if there is not such a descriptive content to the name, then how do people ever use names to refer to things at all? Well, they may be in a position to point to some things and thus determine the references of certain names ostensively. This was Russell’s doctrine of acquaintance, which he thought the so-called genuine or proper names satisfied. But of course ordinary names refer to all sorts of people, like Walter Scott, to whom we can’t possibly point. And our reference here seems to be determined by our knowledge of them. Whatever we know about them determines the referent of the name as the unique thing satisfying those properties. For example, if I use the name ‘Napoleon’, and someone asks, ‘To whom are you referring?’, I will answer something like, ‘Napoleon was emperor of the French in the early part of the nineteenth century; he was eventually defeated at Waterloo’, thus giving a uniquely identifying description to determine the referent of the name. Frege and Russell, then, appear to give the natural account of how reference is determined here; Mill appears to give none. There are subsidiary arguments which, though they are based on more specialized problems, are also motivations for accepting the view. One is that sometimes we may discover that two names have the same referent, and express this by an identity statement. So, for example (l guess this is a hackneyed example), you see a star in the evening and it’s called ‘Hesperus’. (That’s what we call it in the evening, is that right?—I hope it’s not the other way around.) We see a star in the morning and call it ‘Phosphorus’. Well, then, in fact we find that it’s not a star, but is the planet Venus and that Hesperus and Phosphorus are in fact the same. So we express this by ‘Hesperus is Phosphorus’. Here we’re certainly not just saying of an object that it’s identical with itself. This is something that we discovered. A very natural thing to say is that the real content [is that] the star which we saw in the evening is the star which we saw in the morning (or, more accurately, that the thing

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which we saw in the evening is the thing which we saw in the morning). This, then, gives the real meaning of the identity statement in question; and the analysis in terms of descriptions does this. Also we may raise the question whether a name has any reference at all when we ask, e.g., whether Aristotle ever existed. It seems natural here to think that what is questioned is not whether this thing (man) existed. Once we’ve got the thing, we know that it existed. What really is queried is whether anything answers to the properties we associate with the name—in the case of Aristotle, whether any one Greek philosopher produced certain works, or at least a suitable number of them. It would be nice to answer all of these arguments. I am not entirely able to see my way clear through every problem of this sort that can be raised. Furthermore, I’m pretty sure that I won’t have time to discuss all these questions in these lectures. Nevertheless, I think it’s pretty certain that the view of Frege and Russell is false.3 Many people have said that the theory of Frege and Russell is false, but, in my opinion, they have abandoned its letter while retaining its spirit, namely, they have used the notion of a cluster concept. Well, what is this? The obvious problem for Frege and Russell, the one which comes immediately to mind, is already mentioned by Frege himself. He said, In the case of genuinely proper names like ‘Aristotle’ opinions as regards their sense may diverge. As such may, e.g., be suggested: Plato’s disciple and the teacher of Alexander the Great. Whoever accepts this sense will interpret the meaning of the statement ‘Aristotle was born in Stagira’, differently from one who interpreted the sense of ‘Aristotle’ as the Stagirite teacher of Alexander the Great. As long as the nominatum remains the same, these fluctuations in sense are tolerable. But they should be avoided in the system of a demonstrative science and should not appear in a perfect language.4 3. When I speak of the Frege-Russell view and its variants, I include only those versions which give a substantive theory of the reference of names. In particular, Quine’s proposal that in a ‘canonical notation’ a name such as ‘Socrates’ should be replaced by a description ‘the Socratizer’ (where ‘Socratizes’ is an invented predicate), and that the description should then be eliminated by Russell’s method, was not intended as a theory of reference for names but as a proposed reform of language with certain advantages. The problems discussed here will all apply, mutatis mutandis, to the reformed language; in particular, the question, ‘How is the reference of “Socrates” determined?’ yields to the question, ‘How is the extension of “Socratizes” determined?’ Of course I do not suggest that Quine has ever claimed the contrary. 4. Gottlob Frege, “On Sense and Nominatum,” translated by Herbert Feigl, in Readings in Philosophical Analysis, ed. Herbert Feigl and Wilfrid Sellars (New York: Appleton Century Crofts, 1949), p. 86.

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So, according to Frege, there is some sort of looseness or weakness in our language. Some people may give one sense to the name ‘Aristotle’, others may give another. But of course it is not only that; even a single speaker when asked ‘What description are you willing to substitute for the name?’ may be quite at a loss. In fact, he may know many things about him; but any particular thing that he knows he may feel clearly expresses a contingent property of the object. If ‘Aristotle’ meant the man who taught Alexander the Great, then saying ‘Aristotle was a teacher of Alexander the Great’ would be a mere tautology. But surely it isn’t; it expresses the fact that Aristotle taught Alexander the Great, something we could discover to be false. So, being the teacher of Alexander the Great cannot be part of [the sense of] the name. The most common way out of this difficulty is to say ‘really it is not a weakness in ordinary language that we can’t substitute a particular description for the name; that’s all right. What we really associate with the name is a family of descriptions.’ A good example of this is (if I can find it) in Philosophical Investigations, where the idea of family resemblances is introduced and with great power. Consider this example. If one says ‘Moses did not exist’, this may mean various things. It may mean: the Israelites did not have a single leader when they withdrew from Egypt—or: their leader was not called Moses—or: there cannot have been anyone who accomplished all that the Bible relates of Moses— . . . But when I make a statement about Moses,—am I always ready to substitute some one of those descriptions for ‘Moses’? I shall perhaps say: by ‘Moses’ I understand the man who did what the Bible relates of Moses, or at any rate, a good deal of it. But how much? Have I decided how much must be proved false for me to give up my proposition as false? Has the name ‘Moses’ got a fixed and unequivocal use for me in all possible cases?5 According to this view, and a locus classicus of it is Searle’s article on proper names,6 the referent of a name is determined not by a single description but by some cluster or family. Whatever in some sense satisfies enough or most of the family is the referent of the name. I shall return to this view later. It may seem, as an analysis of ordinary language, quite a bit more plausible than that of Frege and Russell. It may seem to keep all the virtues and remove the defects of this theory. Let me say (and this will introduce us to another new topic before I really 5. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, translated by G. E. M. Anscombe (New York: MacMillan, 1953), ß 79. 6. John R. Searle, “Proper Names,” Mind 67 (1958), 166–73.

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consider this theory of naming) that there are two ways in which the cluster concept theory, or even the theory which requires a single description, can be viewed. One way of regarding it says that the cluster or the single description actually gives the meaning of the name; and when someone says ‘Walter Scott’, he means the man such that such and such and such and such. Now another view might be that even though the description in some sense doesn’t give the meaning of the name, it is what determines its reference and although the phrase ‘Walter Scott’ isn’t synonymous with ‘the man such that such and such and such and such’, or even maybe with the family (if something can be synonymous with a family), the family or the single description is what is used to determine to whom someone is referring when he says ‘Walter Scott’. Of course, if when we hear his beliefs about Walter Scott we find that they are actually much more nearly true of Salvador Dali, then according to this theory the reference of this name is going to be Mr. Dali, not Scott. There are writers, I think, who explicitly deny that names have meaning at all even more strongly than I would but still use this picture of how the referent of the name gets determined. A good case in point is Paul Ziff, who says, very emphatically, that names don’t have meaning at all, [that] they are not a part of language in some sense. But still, when he talks about how we determine what the reference of the name was, then he gives this picture. Unfortunately I don’t have the passage in question with me, but this is what he says.7 The difference between using this theory as a theory of meaning and using it as a theory of reference will come out a little more clearly later on. But some of the attractiveness of the theory is lost if it isn’t supposed to give the meaning of the name; for some of the solutions of problems that I’ve just mentioned will not be right, or at least won’t clearly be right, if the description doesn’t give the meaning of the name. For example, if someone said ‘Aristotle does not exist’ means ‘there is no man doing such and such’, or in 7. Ziff’s most detailed statement of his version of the cluster-of-descriptions theory of the reference of names is in “About God,” reprinted in Philosophical Turnings (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, and London: Oxford University Press, 1966), pp. 94–96. A briefer statement is in his Semantic Analysis (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1960), pp. 102–5 (esp. pp. 103–4). The latter passage suggests that names of things with which we are acquainted should be treated somewhat differently (using ostension and baptism) from names of historical figures, where the reference is determined by (a cluster of) associated descriptions. On p. 93 of Semantic Analysis Ziff states that ‘simple strong generalization(s) about proper names’ are impossible; ‘one can only say what is so for the most part. . . .’ Nevertheless Ziff clearly states that a cluster-ofdescriptions theory is a reasonable such rough statement, at least for historical figures. For Ziff’s view that proper names ordinarily are not words of the language and ordinarily do not have meaning, see pp. 85–89 and 93–94 of Semantic Analysis.

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the example from Wittgenstein, ‘Moses does not exist’, means ‘no man did such and such’, that might depend (and in fact, I think, does depend) on taking the theory in question as a theory of the meaning of the name ‘Moses’, not just as a theory of its reference. Well, I don’t know. Perhaps all that is immediate now is the other way around: if ‘Moses’ means the same as ‘the man who did such and such’ then to say that Moses did not exist is to say that the man who did such and such did not exist, that is, that no one person did such and such. If, on the other hand, ‘Moses’ is not synonymous with any description, then even if its reference is in some sense determined by a description, statements containing the name cannot in general be analyzed by replacing the name by a description, though they may be materially equivalent to statements containing a description. So the analysis of singular existence statements mentioned above will have to be given up, unless it is established by some special argument, independent of a general theory of the meaning of names; and the same applies to identity statements. In any case, I think it’s false that ‘Moses exists’ means that at all. So we won’t have to see if such a special argument can be drawn up. . . .8 I wish at this point to introduce something which I need in the methodology of discussing the theory of names that I’m talking about. We need the notion of ‘identify across possible worlds’ as it’s usually and, as I think, somewhat misleadingly called,9 to explicate one distinction that I want to make now. What’s the difference between asking whether it’s necessary that 9 is greater than 7 or whether it’s necessary that the number of planets is greater than 7? Why does one show anything more about essence than the other? The answer to this might be intuitively ‘Well, look, the number of planets might have been different from what it in fact is. It doesn’t make any sense, though, to say that nine might have been different from what it in fact 8. Those determinists who deny the importance of the individual in history may well argue that had Moses never existed, someone else would have arisen to achieve all that he did. Their claim cannot be refuted by appealing to a correct philosophical theory of the meaning of ‘Moses exists’. 9. Misleadingly, because the phrase suggests that there is a special problem of ‘transworld identification’, that we cannot trivially stipulate whom or what we are talking about when we imagine another possible world. The term ‘possible world’ may also mislead; perhaps it suggests the ‘foreign country’ picture. I have sometimes used ‘counterfactual situation’ in the text; Michael Slote has suggested that ‘possible state (or history) of the world’ might be less misleading then ‘possible world’. It is better still, to avoid confusion, not to say, ‘In some possible world, Humphrey would have won’ but rather, simply, ‘Humphrey might have won’. The apparatus of possible words has (I hope) been very useful as far as the set-theoretic model-theory of quantified modal logic is concerned, but has encouraged philosophical pseudo-problems and misleading pictures.

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is’. Let’s use some terms quasi-technically. Let’s call something a rigid designator if in every possible world it designates the same object, a nonrigid or accidental designator if that is not the case. Of course we don’t require that the objects exist ill all possible worlds. Certainly Nixon might not have existed if his parents had not gotten married, in the normal course of things. When we think of a property as essential to an object we usually mean that it is true of that object in any case where it would have existed. A rigid designator of a necessary existent can be called strongly rigid. One of the intuitive theses I will maintain in these talks is that names are rigid designators. Certainly they seem to satisfy the intuitive test mentioned above: although someone other than the U.S. President in 1970 might have been the U.S. President in 1970 (e.g., Humphrey might have), no one other than Nixon might have been Nixon. In the same way, a designator rigidly designates a certain object if it designates that object wherever the object exists; if, in addition, the object is a necessary existent, the designator can be called strongly rigid. For example, ‘the President of the U.S. in 1970’ designates a certain man. Nixon: but someone else (e.g., Humphrey) might have been the President in 1970, and Nixon might not have; so this designator is not rigid. In these lectures, I will argue, intuitively, that proper names are rigid designators, for although the man (Nixon) might not have been the President, it is not the case that he might not have been Nixon (though he might not have been called ‘Nixon’). Those who have argued that to make sense of the notion of rigid designator, we must antecedently make sense of ‘criteria of transworld identity’ have precisely reversed the cart and the horse; it is because we can refer (rigidly) to Nixon, and stipulate that we are speaking of what might have happened to him (under certain circumstances), that ‘transworld identifications’ are unproblematic in such cases.10 The tendency to demand purely qualitative descriptions of counterfactual situations has many sources. One, perhaps, is the confusion of the epistemological and the metaphysical, between a prioricity and necessity. If someone identifies necessity with a prioricity, and thinks that objects are named by means of uniquely identifying properties, he may think that it is the properties used to identify the object which, being known about it a priori, must be used to identify it in all possible worlds, to find out which object is 10. Of course I don’t imply that language contains a name for every object. Demonstratives can be used as rigid designators, and free variables can be used as rigid designators of unspecified objects. Of course when we specify a counterfactual situation, we do not describe the whole possible world but only the portion which interests us.

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Nixon. As against this, I repeat: (1) Generally, things aren’t ‘found out’ about a counterfactual situation, they are stipulated; (2) possible worlds need not be given purely qualitatively, as if we were looking at them through a telescope. And we will see shortly that the properties an object has in every counterfactual world have nothing to do with properties used to identify it in the actual world.

Bibliography Adorno, Theodor W. Against Epistemology: A Metacritique. Translated by Willis Domingo. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1983. Aristotle. Metaphysics. In The Complete Works of Aristotle (The Revised Oxford Translation), vol. 2, ed. Jonathan Barnes. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984. ———. Physics. In The Complete Works of Aristotle (The Revised Oxford Translation), vol. 2, ed. Jonathan Barnes. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984. Biemel, Walter. “Husserl’s Encyclopedia Britannica Article and Heidegger’s Remarks Thereon.” In Husserl: Expositions and Appraisals, ed. Frederick Elliston and Peter McCormick. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1977. Derrida, Jacques. “Difference.” Translated by Alan Bass. In Margins of Philosophy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982. ———. Of Grammatology. Translated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979. Descartes, René. The Philosophical Works of Descartes. 2 vols. Translated by Elizabeth S. Haldane and G.R.T. Ross. 1911. Corrected edition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1931. Fink, Eugen. Sixth Meditation. Translated by Ronald Bruzina. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988. Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish. Translated by Alan Sheridan. New York: Pantheon Books, 1977. ———. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. New York: Vintage Books, 1970. Frege, Gottlob. “On Sense and Reference.” Translated by Max Black. In Translations from the Philosophical Writings of Gottlob Frege, ed. Peter Geach and Max Black. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1960. Grene, Marjorie. Philosophy in and out of Europe. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1976. Heidegger, Martin. The Basic Problems of Phenomenology. Translated by Albert Hofstader. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982. ———. Being and Time. Translated by Joan Stambaugh. Albany: SUNY Press, 1996. ———. “Letter on Humanism.” Translated by Frank A. Capuzzi, with J. Glenn Gray and David Farrell Krell. In Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell. New York: Harper & Row, 1977. Hempel, Carl G. “The Function of General Laws in History.” In Aspects of Scientific Explanation and Other Essays. New York: Free Press, 1965. Hirsch, Eli. The Concept of Identity. New York: Oxford University Press, 1982.

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Hume, David. A Treatise of Human Nature. Edited by L. A. Selby-Bigge. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1888. Husserl, Edmund. Cartesian Meditations. Translated by Dorian Cairns. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1960. ———. “The Origin of Geometry.” Translated by David Carr. In The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Philosophy. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1970. Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Pure Reason. Translated by Norman Kemp Smith. London: Macmillan, 1953. Kripke, Saul A. Naming and Necessity. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1972. ———. Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Languages: An Elementary Exposition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982. Leibniz, Gottfried. Leibniz: Discourse on Metaphysics and Correspondence with Arnauld. Translated by G. R. Montgomery. La Salle, Ill.: Open Court, 1902. Locke, John. An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. 2 vols. Edited by A. C. Fraser. New York: Dover, 1959. Lyotard, Jean-François. The Differend: Phrases in Dispute. Trans. Georges van den Abbeele. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988. Mayr, Ernst. Toward a New Philosophy of Biology: Observations of an Evolutionist. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. The Visible and the Invisible. Edited by Claude Lefort. Translated by Alphonso Lingis. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1968. Parfit, Derek. Reasons and Persons. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984. Peirce, Charles Sanders. Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce. 6 vols. Edited by Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1962. Plato. Parmenides. Translated by F. M. Cornford. In The Collected Dialogues of Plato, ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1963. Quine, W. V. “Two Dogmas of Empiricism.” In From A Logical Point of View. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1953. ———. Word and Object. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1960. Rorty, Richard. “On Lyotard and Habermas.” In Philosophical Papers, vol. 2. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Saussure, Ferdinand de. Course in General Linguistics. Translated by Roy Harris. La Salle, Ill.: Open Court, 1986. Strawson, P. F. Individuals: An Essay in Descriptive Metaphysics. London: Methuen, 1959. Toulmin, Stephen. Cosmopolis: The Hidden Agenda of Modernism. New York: Free Press, 1990. ———. Human Understanding: The Collective Use and Evolution of Concepts. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972. Wiggins, David. Sameness and Substance. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1980. Williams, Bernard. Problems of the Self. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971.

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5 History and Human Understanding

Introduction It would be impossible, without the dawning of history as a new philosophical category, without the idea that thinking, belief, knowledge, the very capacity to theorize about and interpret the world, is first formed by the enculturing processes of social history—it would be impossible—to imagine how Western philosophy could ever have superseded Kant, or what falling back to pre-Kantian conceptions would rightly signify. Twentieth-century analytic philosophy indeed retreated to pre-Kantian themes. Continental philosophy has been more adventurous, but only because it never denied the immensely new beginnings ushered in by Hegel’s critique of Kant. The principal retrograde figure of continental thought (as we have seen) was Husserl, although Husserl pursued his new conjunction of Descartes and Kant with a power and inventiveness no one could have anticipated. Husserl spawned a discipline rich enough to survive his own solipsism and rejection of Hegel. In fact, phenomenology is still in the process of being recovered along historicized lines—hardly straightforwardly, of course, as may be seen in Heidegger, and hardly systematically, as is apparent in Foucault. The Hegelian theme itself is something of an embarrassment—caught up as it is in the mysteries of Hegel’s prose. No one is

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now willing to adopt Hegel’s idiom, but his conceptual distinctions are another matter. So, for instance, Hegel contrasts his doctrine with Aristotle’s regarding “potency” (dynamis) and “actuality” (energeia). Aristotle holds that things that fall under natural kinds are ordered in a telic way; nature, it seems, harbors real “potentialities.” That pattern, Hegel says, is “circular,” meaning that it repeats itself in an invariant way in plural instances. But “Mind” (Geist) is altogether different, since its inherent nature is never less than “actual.” (This might also have been Aristotelian, but then it would not have been subject to change.) It evolves historically, is telic, but never immanent in the potentiated sense. By the telic aspect of Geist’s self-understanding, Hegel apparently means that Geist is absorbed in the discovery of the internal “necessities” of its own inclusive evolving history! Hegel expresses this by speaking of Geist as self-constrained (“free”) by dint of the “necessity” of its “actual” objective. The extravagant formula comes to this: human histories are to be read as “concretely” manifesting Geist’s “universal” project. In favoring such a policy one cannot, however, find any “necessity” that is not really a “contingency,” or any telic order that is not also projected by way of an invented narrative, or any total inclusiveness that does not betray the limited perspective of a particular stage of human history. Hegel’s whole scheme is a purple code for a grandiose commitment to symbiosis and historicity. We should not be distorting Hegel, therefore, if we construe his account in slimmer terms: if we give up the idea of Geist as an “entity,” if we abandon the ideal telos of its “being,” if we treat every historical “necessity” as rhetorical or anthropomorphized. (That seems to be the meaning of “absolute knowledge”: knowledge that is neither absolute nor apodictic, but merely “totalized,” seemingly inclusive when viewed from this or that historical perspective.) What this means is (a) that nothing humans discern is irrelevant to a coherent theory of the whole of their evolving experience; (b) that every such synchronic account becomes a datum for a later effort of the same sort; (c) that human self-understanding cannot fail to view its present conception as “potentiated” by its constructed past; (d) that evolving history keeps generating new conceptual futures relative to its conceptual pasts; and (e) that the capacity to understand the world and our place in it is an artifact of that unfolding history. There you have the theme that runs through Marx, Nietzsche, Dilthey, Heidegger, Adorno, Gadamer, and Foucault at least—now made legible and lean. Marx counts as a straightforward Hegelian, and

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Nietzsche as Hegel’s polar antagonist largely responsible for simplifying and radicalizing (even for recovering) the Hegelian thesis in a compelling way. At face value—that is, not reliably—Hegel faces changeless Truth and eternal Thought (Geist) and Nietzsche, truth as a supreme Fiction and thought as the endlessly diverse, systematic, biologically cunning forms of Self-deception (the Will to Power). The matter has been debated, but it seems fair to say that Hegel is a philosophical ironist of sorts, but not in the sense in which Hume is an ironist (setting aside his empiricism whenever he would be “serious”—“carefree,” as he puts it). Hume realized as well as anyone that his official empiricism could not possibly work. The reason was and is as simple as it is stunning: Hume’s theory requires a cognizing subject or self capable of persisting as a real entity; but his theory—in particular, the notion of the “association of ideas” by which Hume arrogates to himself the huge convenience of inventing whatever fictions he wishes—cannot succeed if there is no “self” to manipulate “associated” ideas. Hence, when he construes the self as itself a fiction, Hume foists on us an impossible paradox. He blithely dismisses, therefore, his “official” line—he speaks disarmingly of the “careless” pattern of his reflections—and turns instead to the puzzles of the “vulgar” (meaning: moral matters and the structure of the self) without ever bothering to secure the technical idiom he needs. It’s possible that Hegel imagined that he alone was on speaking terms with “Absolute Geist’s” innermost reflections; but he warns his readers that the penetration of history requires a long reflection extending through history itself. It is more natural to think that Hegel offered a plausible exemplar of how a historically situated philosopher might imagine narratizing his own critique of Kant. If so, then the theory is a form of irony: substituting a series of historical perspectives for the unitary life of Absolute Geist—when all there is is the postulated unity of these perspectives. Hegel is not an ironist, then, in symbiotizing and historicizing Kant’s “constructivism.” He is obviously serious about his correction. Hume cannot afford a similar luxury. The point is that, on this reading, the three distinctive features of Hegel’s explicit theory of history are hyperbolic attributions: the “totalizing” that is Geist’s inconclusiveness reflects the horizonal perspective from which we view our world; the telos of Geist’s unitary career reflects the disposition of our usual mode of understanding time’s arrow as an intelligible narrative; and the “internal” necessities of Geist’s history reflect what, under the contingencies of our own mode of understanding, we cannot imagine could have been otherwise. If so, then Hegel corrects the extravagances of the Hegelians—the very

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“Hegelianism” we attribute to him. Such a recovery is much too easy, of course. No one can be quite certain about Hegel’s final meaning. Like Plato, but for entirely different reasons, we cannot be sure about Hegel’s ultimate philosophical commitment. (In the sense of favoring authorial intent, Plato and Hegel are the most baffling of Western philosophers.) But whatever Hegel’s commitment may have been, it must have harbored something of the correctives just adduced. Nietzsche reaches a not dissimilar finding, except that Nietzsche casts his discovery (perhaps because of an interest in Indian and Buddhist thought) in terms of a radical vision of the flux; by contrast, Hegel attempts to keep to the language of invariance he inherits from Kant and Aristotle. (The effect is often purely verbal.) The confluence of these two themes—the dominance of Hegel and the reading of Hegel’s notion in Nietzsche’s fluxive way—finds an extraordinarily simplified form in Foucault’s genealogies. Nietzsche, of course, is the most extreme opponent of Hegel (see Löwith); paradoxically, he is also the principal philosopher through whom Hegel was sympathetically reinterpreted in the twentieth century. This penny history may be put to work in much more workmanlike terms. The problem Hegel bequeaths us, which runs through Nietzsche and Heidegger and Foucault at least (as well as through Marx and Dilthey and Adorno and Gadamer), is nothing less than the reconceptualization of the standard problems of philosophy under the condition of historicity. That is already a splendid bequest. Its minima (but little more) may be found in Foucault: (a) the rejection of the teleology of history, (b) the impossibility of overcoming a plurality of fragmented, often opposed perspectives, and (c) the reduction of apparent conceptual necessities to artifacts within one episteme (one encompassing conceptual scheme) or another, that coalesce for a time in the life of a society and then are scattered and displaced. You will find this very clearly limned in Foucault’s Discipline and Punish; but Foucault has little interest in putting his account in a form that might be compared with Hegel’s. The closest Foucault comes to systematic philosophy is in specifying the “historical a priori” of his “archaeologies” (in The Order of Things). But of course, it is hardly an accident that Husserl had already spoken of the “historical a priori” (in an entirely different spirit) in “The Origin of Geometry.” You cannot find a fully pared-down account of historicity to compare with Foucault’s except in the blander vision of Gadamer’s Truth and Method. Both Foucault and Gadamer have the advantage of having absorbed Husserl and Heidegger in addition to Hegel and Nietzsche. But Fou-

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cault is something of a Nietzschean himself whereas Gadamer is something of a Heideggerian; Foucault reacts against French structuralism and an Althusserian Marxism (see Poster), whereas Gadamer reacts against romantic hermeneutics (see E. D. Hirsch). Still, the sense of a coherent recovery of the problems of philosophy along historicist lines lies somewhere between the executive insights of Foucault and the detailed articulations of Gadamer. By the time we reach the mediating point between Gadamer and Foucault, we find that we ourselves are Hegelians of a sort stripped down along the lines already twice tallied. It needs to be said as well that we cannot make a full-blooded comparison between analytic and continental accounts of historicity. There are hardly any sustained analytic accounts of historicity, though there are accounts of history—an entirely different matter. Here and there, you will find an isolated analytic voice—an English-language philosopher—who touches on the themes of historicity: for example, Thomas Kuhn, Paul Feyerabend, Alasdair MacIntyre, Charles Taylor. These are nearly the only ones of recent record (except for that of the conceptual primer this reader is meant to serve). There is also the nearly isolated voice of R. G. Collingwood, who in some extraordinarily attenuated way anticipated (by his notion of “absolute presupposition,” which bears a resemblance to Foucault’s “epistemes” and Gadamer’s horizoned “traditions”) the historicity of a hermeneutic understanding of human culture. (Collingwood’s absolute presuppositions are, of course, historically contingent. But so are Hegel’s.) The only other relevant analytic strand is Wittgenstein’s, which, in the work of Peter Winch for instance, concedes the divergence of our “language games” and their capacity to change, but falls short of any explicit historicity. In general, the analytic discussion of history (as distinct from historicity) unconditionally opposes the admission of the latter, as in the exemplary views of Carl Hempel and Karl Popper, straddling different currents of the same unity of science program. Historicity appears to be the single large conception that the ancient and early modern philosophers had not yet guessed at. It signifies (following the French Revolution) the most radical change in thinking in the last two hundred years. It has been resisted, of course, through the entire length of the twentieth century—successfully, if one consults the academy. The principal lines of resistance are pre-Kantian and Kantian. By and large, the AngloAmerican world has chosen the first; German philosophy, the second; and French philosophy, dominated for many years by Heidegger, now finds itself without an anchor. (French philosophy has had to come to terms with the deep suspicion that Heidegger’s inquiries are hopelessly compromised by his

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Nazism as well as with his pretense at ontological prophecy, as in “Letter on Humanism.”) Gadamer’s historicized hermeneutics (itself indebted to Heidegger’s critique of Hegel) bids fair to domesticate the entire range of the interpretive and self-interpretive concerns of humans. Foucault is more radical than Gadamer, but, being Nietzschean, he is also more fragmented. The natural opponent of both Gadamer and Foucault (also, ultimately, the opponent of Hegel and Marx and Nietzsche) is Jürgen Habermas, despite the fact that Habermas was originally drawn to Marxist and Frankfurt-Critical forms of analysis. Over the years, Habermas has drummed out the historicism of his earlier philosophy and replaced Marx with Kant, under the influence of Karl-Otto Apel (a frank apriorist). What you will find in Habermas’s critique of Gadamer is a pragmatist’s attempt to formulate an evolutionary approximation to Kant’s “universal” structures of reason. There is, you see, a general retreat in late-twentieth-century philosophy from the principal forms of historicism. On the whole, the American pragmatists have been evolutionists, not historicists; although Peirce (not unlike Cassirer) tends to meld Kant with Hegel or Hegel with Kant—and history with evolution or evolution with history. In the German tradition, Habermas’s (and Apel’s) direction signifies (often along independent lines) a return to First Philosophy (as, for instance, in Tugendhat). What needs to be remembered is that the quarrel between Gadamer and Habermas—ostensibly a quarrel about the effect of history on objectivity in the human sciences—is actually concerned with the analysis of what a person is. Habermas means to reconcile the theory of the self with the legitimated recovery of universal norms of reason; Gadamer believes that human nature cannot be other than variably “constructed,” historicized. Habermas pretends, however, that his universalism is drawn from the “dialogic” play of historical forces themselves; and Gadamer believes that the diverse horizonal “prejudices” of historicized “I’s and Thou’s” still manage to confirm the constancy of the humane values of the “classical” world. One way or another, neither is prepared to breach the doctrine of an invariant order that links Plato and Aristotle and Kant and Hegel. Still, universalism and historicism are incompatible. Once you deny the inclusive unity of Hegel’s Geist (which is what remains ambiguously in play in Heidegger’s Being and Time), the recovery of invariance, universality, the supposed necessities internal to historical thought cannot rightly be reclaimed. Gadamer wins hands down, therefore, but the victory belongs to Nietzsche’s remarkable prescience, even though Nietzsche’s views make no explicit appearance in the contest between Habermas and Gadamer.

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The supreme quarrel of our century concerns the reconcilability of (Kantian) universalism and (Hegelian) historicism shorn of textual loyalties to either. The short finding is this: they cannot be reconciled. Philosophy, therefore, finds itself at a crossroads. If thinking is historicized, then universal truths are artifacts of a carpentered history; and if we can escape history, then historicism is no more than a pernicious doctrine. There you have the point of the quarrel between Habermas and Gadamer and, more obliquely, the point of the quarrel between Lévi-Strauss and Sartre and, more obscurely, that between Husserl and Heidegger (or between Husserl and the late phenomenologists who had questioned—subversively—whether the Lebenswelt could ever be superseded philosophically). An explanatory word is needed here because the term “historicism” is decidedly equivocal. The term is here used as a nominalization of “historicizing,” where historicizing is wedded to the flux, hence is opposed to invariance and the recovery of the necessary grounds for objective knowledge and the like; whereas “historicism” often means, in the post-Hegelian world, the claimed recovery of sources of objective knowledge and certainty within the apparent flux of history, hence (as in Ranke, as an opponent of Hegel) it signifies what is often called the false historicity of modernism, the failure to concede that the “objectivism” claimed for any historical perspective will be overtaken by the (different) “objectivism” of a subsequent perspective. In the Anglo-American world, most of the marks of the contest regarding Hegel and Kant have been erased; but even there you can make out the same quarrel between Dewey (opposing dualisms) and Quine (entrenching physicalism and extensionalism). Perhaps the most instructive small version of that quarrel (in the Anglo-American world) holds between Alasdair MacIntyre (a somewhat Hegelianized Thomist—if you can imagine that) and Peter Winch (a Wittgensteinian drawn, on anthropological grounds, to Kuhnian-like incommensurabilities but without invoking historicity). The most important consequence of invoking the Hegelian concept affects the notion of a self or person. If the Hegelian (or Nietzschean) transformation is adopted, then the entire course of philosophy will be altered and the prospects of invariance thereupon defeated at a stroke. For once you accept Hegel’s critique of Kant’s “dualism”—which persists without invoking history—you lose invariance’s conceptual ground. It is an extraordinary precipitate of the turn into the nineteenth century that the insistence on modal invariance is, everywhere, inversely linked to the would-be resolution of skepticism. There you have the mark of the secret skepticism that lies at the heart of

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the puzzle about the relationship between “naturalized” human subjects and “transcendentalized” Subjects. To favor the first over the second is, ultimately, to favor historicity; to favor the second over the first is to favor invariance. When the “two” are joined—revealingly but inconclusively, in Dilthey, Heidegger, Peirce, Cassirer, Adorno, Gadamer, Kuhn, Winch, Taylor, Habermas, and in a more casual way Hilary Putnam and Richard Bernstein—the “invariant” cannot be more than a contingent regularity that appears inviolate under one horizon or another. However, the argument precludes all of the usual de re and de dicto necessities. There’s the radical import of the “telos” of late-twentieth-century philosophy. Give up invariance, and you have no reason to oppose historicism (historicity), provided only it can be made coherent. The argument proceeds in a natural way from the resolution of the problem of reference and predication. It is but a step from there to grasp that the “self,” formed in mastering all our natural-language aptitudes, is no more than the functional site of these same encultured skills. The “nature” of the self accords with the conditions of referential and predicative success. It is as if Wittgenstein’s tentative hints at the collective structure of the Lebensform were vestigial reminders of, or incipient links to recovering, Hegel’s Sitten. Individual selves are, then, the individuated sites of collective aptitudes, hence not, qua encultured, altogether separable from one another, although, qua members of Homo sapiens, obviously separable. You see the sense in which this catches up Peirce’s line of thinking regarding the indeterminacies of predication and individuation (see Chapter 4). Remember: predicables have an inherent indeterminacy (or are inexhaustibly determinable), if nominalism and realism fail; and Intentional predicables are indeterminate (or endlessly determinable) in a further respect, being inherently interpretable. Both kinds of indeterminacy are historicized—but in different ways. (Here, “Intentional” is a term of art signifying culturally significative attributes—or the entities of which such attributes may be said to specify their “natures,” cultural artifacts of one kind or another; hence, symbolic, semiotic, linguistic, expressive, representational, historical, and similar attributes. The Intentional includes the “intentional” in the usual psychological sense associated with Brentano’s work and the phenomenological sense associated with Husserl’s, when the “intentional” is itself culturally transformed as by acquiring a language. Animal intentionality is characteristically modeled, heuristically, on the human paradigm, which is itself intrinsically Intentional.) It is the coherence of the argument, not its superiority, that is at stake. For

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if you look back to the issues with which we began, you cannot fail to see that the entire philosophical canon—featuring Aristotle and Kant and coursing down in an ever more attenuated way to Habermas and Quine—has supposed that the essential structure of persons remains invariant. Extraordinary! Give up that single idea and you cannot then fail to install two quite radical doctrines: one, that the objective structure of the world requires the mediation of interpretive tertia (theories and conceptual schemes) and is itself an artifact of same; the other, that the operative forms of objectivity are themselves artifacts of historicized forces. There you have the spare reading of Hegel salvaged in Foucault and Gadamer—or even a Hegelianized Kant, as in Dilthey and Cassirer. One immense issue remains. If, as in the whole of modern philosophy, selves are, preeminently, the sites of knowledge (and of inquiry and belief, of speech and understanding, of rationally informed activity), then if the various forms of knowledge are artifacts of history, persons cannot be naturalkind entities, because their “natures” are reflexively specified, in a historicized way, in accord with legitimative concerns. You see, therefore, the point of the confrontation posed by Quine’s “naturalizing” strategies and the spoiler role of Rorty’s “postmodernist” dismissal of second-order inquiry. A related objection applies to Putnam’s insistence that truth continues to function (in the post-Kantian world) as a Grenzbegriff, in spite of the fact that, for Putnam, there is no principled disjunction between the “subjective” and the “objective.” Effectively, the admission of selves is tantamount to the admission of legitimative discourse. The reverse is also true. The argument also entails that the rejection of any disjunction between the “subjective” and the “objective” (Hegel’s original contribution, which Kant “resists”) signifies (a) that the structure of the world cannot be segregated from the categories of analysis answering to our perspectived interests; (b) that as a result of (a), the sciences cannot but be “human sciences”; and (c) that all discourse (inquiry, knowledge, objectivity, understanding, reason, argument, explanation, interpretation, the assignment of truth-values) cannot but be “folk-theoretic,” by which I mean that there is no sense in which the human ingredient in the world can be denied or eliminated. Reductive and eliminative treatments of the psychological (or “subjective”) features of human life—for instance, in the work of Paul Churchland and Daniel Dennett—tend to dismiss or ignore too easily the conceptual bond between the cognitive and whatever is posited as mental or psychological. Discourse about reality cannot, however, rightly ignore the epistemic conditions of

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realism; the conditions of realism cannot fail to address the classic threats of skepticism; and skeptical threats cannot be met except by legitimating the cognitive pretensions of our subjective aptitudes. To return to our tally: by (a), we may understand the inseparability of realism and idealism (or what would have been wrongly signaled by that distinction); by (b), the ineliminibility of Intentionality; and by (c), the defeat of naturalism, extensionalism, reductionism, eliminativism, postmodernism, and similar doctrines. These are promissory notes, of course. By “Intentionality,” we may now understand the formative and enabling function of a collective culture (primarily but not exclusively through language) through which (within a symbiotized world) all inquiry and activity behave in interpretive and historicized ways. In short, the Intentional = the cultural, where on the evidence we have, the Intentional is sui generis and irreducible. By this single stroke, Brentano’s and Husserl’s analyses of “intentionality” (subject to solipsistic and skeptical dangers) are recovered in an ampler space. (For a sense of what is at stake, see Chisholm and Mohanty.) You begin to see the upshot of admitting historicity. It is a theme utterly unlike any of Aristotle’s notions of change or process or causality (in Metaphysics or Physics). After Kant, the admission of historicity makes sense only (a) in terms of symbiosis and (b) in a way that entails the inseparability of first- and second-order discourse. The reductio of postmodernism and naturalism now signifies that we cannot make sense of natural-language discourse if we deny or eliminate its legitimative dimension. Consequently, to acknowledge the existence of human selves is tantamount to admitting the pertinence of legitimation and the constructed standing of cognitive and practical norms. But there are no facts or truths if there are no objective norms. It’s only that “objectivity” itself (or “neutrality”) may (and must) be construed as an artifact of history. In effect, this is the solution of Kuhn’s puzzle—which had eluded Kuhn. We may turn the tables, therefore, on all those analyses of selves that anticipate their utter elimination. For it is now no longer a question of firstorder reduction or elimination—as was thought to be the case in the earlier, more naive forms of physicalism developed under the auspices of Positivism and the extreme forms of the unity of science program (as by J.J.C. Smart). It is now a question of how to reduce or eliminate the “constructive” or second-order conditions of any discourse. Theorists like Churchland are fond of saying that “folk” psychology—the admission of “Intentionally” constituted entities capable of mental states and mentally motivated behavior—is simply empirically mistaken. But the very idea of discerning such an

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error and of construing an alternative description and explanation of whatever phenomena we may admit seems, now, to be insuperably “folk”-theoretic. Churchland nowhere explains how to put the matter otherwise. Hence, though it may seem unlikely, the force of the argument between Kant and Hegel directly threatens the entire thrust of the boldest reductive and eliminative efforts of recent analytic philosophy. History is not explicable solely in terms of ordered change through physical time. If it were, then theorists like Hempel and Popper, if not Aristotle himself, would have provided adequately for it. Yet none of these theorists seriously entertains the need to distinguish between physical and historical time or between physical change and historical change. The point of difference rests with what has already been marked as the Intentional: the “cultural,” the collective features of traditions, practices, institutions, rules, norms, and the like viewed as inherently significant, significative, symbolic, semiotic, linguistic, rhetorical, expressive, representational, or interpretable. The entire world is “perfused” with signs, to use Peirce’s idiom (bridging the difference between Kant and Hegel). There is no determinately intelligible world if there is no community of selves; and if selves are themselves historical artifacts of the enculturing powers of a society of apt (already encultured) members of Homo sapiens, then what we count as the intelligible world is also altered in Intentional ways by the historied career of such societies. That is the upshot of symbiosis. In canonical analytic philosophy, to say that would be a scandal—it would be to claim a change in reality as a result of a mere change of description (see Dennett, for instance). But that is a mistaken reading of Intentionality: for, for one thing, the “change” in the determinate structure of the nonhuman world is motivated epistemically, not ontically, under symbiosis, and is not the effect of mere description (which is Kuhn’s precise point, implicitly opposed to Dennett’s); and for a second, the change in the determinate structure of Intentional phenomena (the semiotized world of human culture) cannot be characterized in terms of description or redescription alone. There you have a reading of Kuhn’s paradox regarding Priestley and Lavoisier that Kuhn himself could not entirely master. (Kuhn was not entirely aware of his own Kantian and Hegelian assumptions.) It is clear, therefore, that we need not abandon our habit of speaking of “independent” nature or reality. Realism, objectivity, neutrality, confirmation, knowledge— these are all artifacts of critical reflection in a world in which the “subjective” and the “objective” are already symbiotized: collective, in terms of consensual human experience; public, in terms of a critical posit regarding what

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is real; constructive, in terms of the irretrievability of any fixed and independent rule of neutrality. We need only remember that the ontic independence of the determinate world is itself a reasoned epistemic artifact internal to the space of symbiosis. Historicism and universalism are incompatible.

THE NOTION OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY

G.W.F. Hegel Prefatory Note In the History of Philosophy the observation is immediately forced upon us that it certainly presents great interest if its subject is regarded from a favourable point of view, but that it would still possess interest even if its end were regarded as opposite to what it is. Indeed, this interest may seem to increase in the degree in which the ordinary conception of Philosophy, and of the end which its history serves, is reversed; for from the History of Philosophy a proof of the futility of the science is mainly derived. The demand that a history, whatever the subject may be, should state the facts without prejudice and without any particular object or end to be gained by its means, must be regarded as a fair one. But with a commonplace demand like this, we do not get far; for the history of a subject is necessarily intimately connected with the conception which is formed of it. In accordance with this what is important in it is determined, and the relation of the events to the end regulates the selection of facts to be recorded, the mode of comprehending them, and the point of view under which they are regarded. It may happen from the ideas formed of what a State really is, that a reader of the political history of a country may find therein nothing of what he looks for. Still more may this be the case in the history of Philosophy, and representations of this history may be instanced in which everything, excepting what was supposed to be Philosophy, appears to be found. In other histories we have a clear conception of their subjects, at least so far as their principal points are concerned; we know whether they concern a particular land, people or race, or whether their subject is the science of mathematics, physics, &c., or an art, such as painting. The science of PhiG.W.F. Hegel. Lectures on the History of Philosophy. Translated by E. S. Haldane. Introduction by F. C. Beiser. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995.

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losophy has, however, this distinguishing feature, and, if you will, this disadvantage as compared with other sciences, that we find the most varied points of view as regards its Notion, and regarding that which it ought to and can accomplish. If this first assumption, the conception of the subject of the history, is not established, the history itself is necessarily made vacillating, and it only obtains consistency when it sets forth a definite conception: but then in view of the various ways of regarding its subject, it easily draws upon itself the reproach of one-sidedness. That drawback relates, however, only to an external consideration of this narrative; there is another and greater disadvantage allied to it. If there are different Notions of the science of Philosophy, it is the true Notion alone that puts us in a position to understand the writings of philosophers who have worked in the knowledge of it. For in thought, and particularly in speculative thought, comprehension means something quite different from understanding the grammatical sense of the words alone, and also from understanding them in the region of ordinary conception only. Hence we may possess a knowledge of the assertions, propositions, or of the opinions of philosophers; we may have occupied ourselves largely with the grounds of and deductions from these opinions, and the main point in all that we have done may be wanting—the comprehension of the propositions. There is hence no lack of voluminous and even learned histories of Philosophy in which the knowledge of the matter itself about which so much ado has been made, is absent. The authors of such histories may be compared to animals which have listened to all the tones in some music, but to whose senses the unison, the harmony of their tones, has not penetrated. The circumstance mentioned makes it in no science so necessary as in the history of Philosophy to commence with an Introduction, and in it correctly to define, in the first place, the subject of the history about to be related. For it may be said, How should we begin to treat a subject, the name of which is certainly mentioned often enough, but of whose nature we as yet know nothing ? In treating the history of Philosophy thus, we could have no other guidance than that of seeking out and taking up whatever has received the name of Philosophy, anywhere or any time. But in fact, when the Notion of Philosophy is established, not arbitrarily but in a scientific way, such treatment becomes the science of Philosophy itself. For in this science the peculiar characteristic is that its Notion forms the beginning in appearance merely, and it is only the whole treatment of the science that is the proof, and indeed we may say the finding of its Notion; and this is really a result of that treatment.

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In this Introduction the Notion of the science of Philosophy, of the subject of its history, has thus likewise to be set forth. At the same time, though this Introduction professes to relate to the history of Philosophy only, what has just been said of Philosophy on the whole, also holds good. What can be said in this Introduction is not so much something which may be stated beforehand, as what can be justified or proved in the treatment of the history. These preparatory explanations are for this reason only, not to be placed in the category of arbitrary assumptions. But to begin with stating what in their justification are really results, can only have the interest which may be possessed by a summary, given in advance, of the most general contents of a science. It must serve to set aside many questions and demands which might, from our ordinary prejudices, arise in such a history. Introduction There are various aspects under which the History of Philosophy may possess interest. We shall find the central point of this interest in the essential connection existing between what is apparently past and the present stage reached by Philosophy. That this connection is not one of the external considerations which may be taken into account in the history of Philosophy, but really expresses its inner character: that the events of this history, while they perpetuate themselves in their effects like all other events, yet produce their results in a special way—this it is which is here to be more clearly expounded. What the history of Philosophy shows us is a succession of noble minds, a gallery of heroes of thought, who, by the power of Reason, have penetrated into the being of things, of nature and of spirit, into the Being of God, and have won for us by their labours the highest treasure, the treasure of reasoned knowledge. The events and actions of this history are therefore such that personality and individual character do not enter to any large degree into its content and matter. In this respect the history of Philosophy contrasts with political history, in which the individual, according to the peculiarity of his disposition, talents, affections, the strength or weakness of his character, and in general, according to that through which he is this individual, is the subject of actions and events. In Philosophy, the less deserts and merits are accorded to the particular individual, the better is the history; and the more it deals with thought as free, with the universal character of man as man, the more this thought, which is devoid of special characteristic, is itself shown to be the producing subject.

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The acts of thought appear at first to be a matter of history, and, therefore, things of the past, and outside our real existence. But in reality we are what we are through history: or, more accurately, as in the history of Thought, what has passed away is only one side, so in the present, what we have as a permanent possession is essentially bound up with our place in history. The possession of self-conscious reason, which belongs to us of the present world, did not arise suddenly, nor did it grow only from the soil of the present. This possession must be regarded as previously present, as an inheritance, and as the result of labour—the labour of all past generations of men. Just as the arts of outward life, the accumulated skill and invention, the customs and arrangements of social and political life, are the result of the thought, care, and needs, of the want and the misery, of the ingenuity, the plans and achievements of those who preceded us in history, so, likewise, in science, and specially in Philosophy, do we owe what we are to the tradition which, as Herder has put it,1 like a holy chain, runs through all that was transient, and has therefore passed away. Thus has been preserved and transmitted to us what antiquity produced. But this tradition is not only a stewardess who simply guards faithfully that which she has received, and thus delivers it unchanged to posterity, just as the course of nature in the infinite change and activity of its forms ever remains constant to its original laws and makes no step in advance. Such tradition is no motionless statue, but is alive, and swells like a mighty river, which increases in size the further it advances from its source. The content of this tradition is that which the intellectual world has brought forth, and the universal Mind does not remain stationary. But it is just the universal Mind with which we have to do. It may certainly be the case with a single nation that its culture, art, science—its intellectual activities as a whole—are at a standstill. This appears, perhaps, to be the case with the Chinese, for example, who may have been as far advanced in every respect two thousand years ago as now. But the world-spirit does not sink into this rest of indifference; this follows from its very nature, for its activity is its life. This activity presupposes a material already present, on which it acts, and which it does not merely augment by the addition of new matter, but completely fashions and transforms. Thus that which each generation has produced in science and in intellectual activity, is an heirloom to which all the past generations have added their savings, a temple in which all races of men thankfully and cheerfully deposit that which rendered aid to them through life, and which 1. Zur Philosophie und Geschichte. Pt. V. pp. 184–86. (Edition of 1828, in 12 vols.)

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they had won from the depths of Nature and of Mind. To receive this inheritance is also to enter upon its use. It constitutes the soul of each successive generation, the intellectual substance of the time; its principles, prejudices, and possessions; and this legacy is degraded to a material which becomes metamorphosed by Mind. In this manner that which is received is changed, and the material worked upon is both enriched and preserved at the same time. This is the function of our own and of every age: to grasp the knowledge which is already existing, to make it our own. and in so doing to develop it still further and to raise it to a higher level. In thus appropriating it to ourselves we make it into something different from what it was before. On the presupposition of an already existing intellectual world, which is transformed in our appropriation of it, depends the fact that Philosophy can only arise in connection with previous Philosophy, from which of necessity it has arisen. The course of history does not show us the Becoming of things foreign to us, but the Becoming of ourselves and of our own knowledge. The ideas and questions which may be present to our mind regarding the character and ends of the history of Philosophy, depend on the nature of the relationship here given. In this lies the explanation of the fact that the study of the history of Philosophy is an introduction to Philosophy itself. The guiding principles for the formation of this history are given in this fact, the further discussion of which must thus be the main object of this introduction. We must also, however, keep in mind, as being of fundamental importance, the conception of the aim of Philosophy. And since, as already mentioned, the systematic exposition of this conception cannot here find a place, such discussion as we can now undertake, can only propose to deal with the subject provisionally and not to give a thorough and conclusive account of the nature of the Becoming of Philosophy. This Becoming is not merely a passive movement, as we suppose movements such as those of the sun and moon to be. It is no mere movement in the unresisting medium of space and time. What we must represent to ourselves is the activity of free thought; we have to present the history of the world of thought as it has arisen and produced itself. There is an old tradition that it is the faculty of thought which separates men from beasts; and to this tradition we shall adhere. In accordance with this, what man has, as being nobler than a beast, he has through thinking. Everything which is human, however it may appear, is so only because the thought contained in it works and has worked. But thought, although it is

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thus the essential, substantial, and effectual, has many other elements. We must, however, consider it best when Thought does not pursue anything else, but is occupied only with itself—with what is noblest—when it has sought and found itself. The history which we have before us is the history of Thought finding itself, and it is the case with Thought that it only finds itself in producing itself; indeed, that it only exists and is actual in finding itself. These productions are the philosophic systems; and the series of discoveries on which Thought sets out in order to discover itself, forms a work which has lasted twenty-five hundred years. If the Thought which is essentially Thought, is in and for itself and eternal, and that which is true is contained in Thought alone, how, then, does this intellectual world come to have a history? In history what appears is transient, has disappeared in the night of the past and is no more. But true, necessary thought—and it is only with such that we have to do—is capable of no change. The question here raised constitutes one of those matters first to be brought under our consideration. But in the second place, there are also many most important things outside of Philosophy, which are yet the work of Thought, and which are left unconsidered. Such are Religion, Political History, forms of Government, and the Arts and Sciences. The question arises as to how these operations differ from the subject of consideration, and how they are related in history? As regards these two points of view, it is desirable to show in what sense the history of Philosophy is here taken, in order to see clearly what we are about. Moreover, in the third place, we must first take a general survey before we descend to particulars, else the whole is not seen for the mere details—the wood is not seen for the trees, nor Philosophy for mere philosophies. We require to have a general idea of the nature and aim of the whole in order to know what to look for. Just as we first desire to obtain a general idea of a country, which we should no longer see in going into detail, so we desire to see the relation which single philosophies bear to the whole; for in reality, the high value of the detail lies in its relation to the whole. This is nowhere more the case than with Philosophy, and also with its history. In the case of a history, indeed, the establishment of the Universal seems to be less needful than in that of one of the sciences proper. For history seems at first to be a succession of chance events, in which each fact stands isolated by itself, which has Time alone as a connecting-link. But even in political history we are not satisfied with this. We see, or at least divine in it, that essential connection in which the individual events have their place and relation to an end or aim, and in this way obtain significance. For the

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significant in history is such only through its relation to and connection with a Universal. To perceive this Universal is thus to apprehend the significance. There are, therefore, the following points with which I wish to deal in this introduction. The first of these will be to investigate the character of the history of Philosophy, its significance, its nature, and its aim, from which will follow inferences as to its treatment. In particular, we shall get an insight into the relation of the history of Philosophy to the science of Philosophy, and this will be the most interesting point of all. That is to say, this history represents, not merely the external, accidental, events contained within it, but it shows how the content, or that which appears to belong to mere history, really belongs to the science of Philosophy. The history of Philosophy is itself scientific, and thus essentially becomes the science of Philosophy. In the second place, the Notion of Philosophy must be more adequately determined, and from it must be deduced what should be excluded from the history of Philosophy out of the infinite material and the manifold aspects of the intellectual culture of the nations. Religion, certainly, and the thoughts contained in and regarding it, particularly when these are in the form of mythology, are, on account of their matter, and the sciences with their ideas on the state, duties and laws, on account of their form, so near Philosophy that the history of the science of Philosophy threatens to become quite indefinite in extent. It might be supposed that the history of Philosophy should take account of all these ideas. Has not everything been called Philosophy and philosophizing? On the one hand, the close connection has to be further considered in which Philosophy stands with its allied subjects, religion, art, the other sciences, and likewise with political history. On the other hand, when the province of Philosophy has been correctly defined, we reach, with the determination of what Philosophy is and what pertains to it, the startingpoint of its history, which must be distinguished from the commencements of religious ideas and mere thoughtful conjectures. From the idea of the subject which is contained in these first two points of view, it is necessary to pass on to the consideration of the third point, to the general review of this history and to the division of its progress into natural periods—such an arrangement to exhibit it as an organic, progressive whole, as a rational connection through which this history attains the dignity of a science. And I will not occupy further space with reflections on the use of the history of Philosophy, and other methods of treating it. The use is evident. But, in conclusion, I wish to consider the sources of the history of Philosophy, for this is customary.

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The Notion of the History of Philosophy The thought which may first occur to us in the history of Philosophy, is that the subject itself contains an inner contradiction. For Philosophy aims at understanding what is unchangeable, eternal, in and for itself: its end is Truth. But history tells us of that which has at one time existed, at another time has vanished, having been expelled by something else. Truth is eternal; it does not fall within the sphere of the transient, and has no history. But if it has a history, and as this history is only the representation of a succession of past forms of knowledge, the truth is not to be found in it, for the truth cannot be what has passed away. It might be said that all this argument would affect not only the other sciences, but in like degree the Christian religion, and it might be found inconsistent that a history of this religion and of the other sciences should exist; but it would be superfluous further to examine this argument, for it is immediately contradicted by the very fact that there are such histories. But in order to get a better understanding of this apparent contradiction, we must distinguish between the outward history of a religion or a science and the history of the subject itself. And then we must take into account that the history of Philosophy because of the special nature of its subject-matter, is different from other histories. It is at once evident that the contradiction in question could not refer to the outward history, but merely to the inward, or that of the content itself. There is a history of the spread of Christianity and of the lives of those who have avowed it, and its existence has formed itself into that of a Church. This in itself constitutes an external existence such that being brought into contact with temporal affairs of the most diverse kind, its lot is a varied one and it essentially possesses a history. And of the Christian doctrine it is true that it, too, has its history, but it necessarily soon reached its full development and attained to its appointed powers. And this old creed has been an acknowledged influence to every age, and will still be acknowledged unchanged as the Truth, even though this acknowledgment were become no more than a presence, and the words an empty form. But the history of this doctrine in its wider sense includes two elements: first the various additions to and deviations from the truth formerly established, and secondly the combating of these errors, the purification of the principles that remain from such additions, and a consequent return to their first simplicity. The other sciences, including Philosophy, have also an external history like Religion. Philosophy has a history of its origin, diffusion, maturity, de-

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cay, revival; a history of its teachers, promoters, and of its opponents—often, too, of an outward relation to religion and occasionally to the State. This side of its history likewise gives occasion to interesting questions. Amongst other such, it is asked why Philosophy, the doctrine of absolute Truth, seems to have revealed itself on the whole to a small number of individuals, to special nations, and how it has limited itself to particular periods of time. Similarly with respect to Christianity, to the Truth in a much more universal form than the philosophical, a difficulty has been encountered in respect to the question whether there is a contradiction in the fact that this religion should have appeared so late in time, and that it should have remained so long and should still remain limited to special races of men. But these and other similar questions are too much a matter of detail to depend merely on the general conflict referred to, and when we have further touched upon the peculiar character of philosophic knowledge, we may go more specially into the aspects which relate to the external existence and external history of Philosophy. But as regards the comparison between the history of Religion and that of Philosophy as to inner content, there is not in the latter as there is in Religion a fixed and fundamental truth which, as unchangeable, is apart from history. The content of Christianity, which is Truth, has, however, remained unaltered as such, and has therefore little history or as good as none.2 Hence in Religion, on account of its very nature as Christianity, the conflict referred to disappears. The errors and additions constitute no difficulty. They are transitory and altogether historical in character. The other sciences, indeed, have also according to their content a History, a part of which relates to alterations, and the renunciation of tenets which were formerly current. But a great, perhaps the greater, part of the history relates to what has proved permanent, so that what was new, was not an alteration on earlier acquisitions, but an addition to them. These sciences progress through a process of juxtaposition. It is true that in Botany, Mineralogy, and so on, much is dependent on what was previously known, but by far the greater part remains stationary and by means of fresh matter is merely added to without itself being affected by the addition. With a science like Mathematics, history has, in the main, only the pleasing task of recording further additions. Thus to take an example, elementary geometry in so far as it was created by Euclid, may from his time on be regarded as having no further history. 2. S. Marheineke: “Lehrbuch des Christlichen Glaubens und Lebens.” Berlin, 1823.ß 133, 134.

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The history of Philosophy, on the other hand, shows neither the motionlessness of a complete, simple content, nor altogether the onward movement of a peaceful addition of new treasures to those already acquired. It seems merely to afford the spectacle of ever-recurring changes in the whole, such as finally are no longer even connected by a common aim. 1. Common Ideas Regarding the History of Philosophy At this point appear these ordinary superficial ideas regarding the history of Philosophy which have to be referred to and corrected. As regards these very current views, which are doubtless known to you, gentlemen, for indeed they are the reflections most likely to occur in one’s first crude thoughts on a history of Philosophy, I will shortly explain what requires explanation, and the explanation of the differences in philosophies will lead us further into the matter itself. History, at the first glance, includes in its aim the narration of the accidental circumstances of times, of races, and of individuals, treated impartially partly as regards their relation in time, and partly as to their content. The appearance of contingency in time-succession is to be dealt with later on. It is contingency of content which is the idea with which we have first to deal—the idea of contingent actions. But thoughts and not external actions, or griefs, or joys, form the content of Philosophy. Contingent thoughts, however, are nothing but opinions, and philosophical opinions are opinions relating to the more special content of Philosophy, regarding God, Nature and Spirit. Thus we now meet the view very usually taken of the history of Philosophy which ascribes to it the narration of a number of philosophical opinions as they have arisen and manifested themselves in time. This kind of matter is in courtesy called opinions; those who think themselves more capable of judging rightly, call such a history a display of senseless follies, or at least of errors made by men engrossed in thought and in mere ideas. This view is not only held by those who recognize their ignorance of Philosophy. Those who do this, acknowledge it, because that ignorance is, in common estimation, held to be no obstacle to giving judgment upon what has to do with the subject; for it is thought that anybody can form a judgment on its character and value without any comprehension of it whatever. But the same view is even held by those who write or have written on the history of Philosophy. This history, considered only as the enumeration of various opinions, thus becomes an idle tale, or, if you will, an erudite investigation. For erudition is, in the main, acquaintance with a number of useless things, that is to say, with

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that which has no intrinsic interest or value further than being known. Yet it is thought that profit is to be derived from learning the various opinions and reflections of other men. It stimulates the powers of thought and also leads to many excellent reflections; this signifies that now and then it occasions an idea, and its art thus consists in the spinning one opinion out of the other. If the history of Philosophy merely represented various opinions in array, whether they be of God or of natural and spiritual things existent, it would be a most superfluous and tiresome science, no matter what advantage might be brought forward as derived from such thought-activity and learning. What can be more useless than to learn a string of bald opinions, and what more unimportant? Literary works, being histories of Philosophy in the sense that they produce and treat the ideas of Philosophy as if they were opinions, need be only superficially glanced at to find how dry and destitute of interest everything about them is. An opinion is a subjective conception, an uncontrolled thought, an idea which may occur to me in one direction or in another: an opinion is mine, it is in itself a universal thought which is existent in and for itself. But Philosophy possesses no opinions, for there is no such thing as philosophical opinions. When we hear a man speaking of philosophical opinions, even though he be an historian of philosophy itself, we detect at once this want of fundamental education. Philosophy is the objective science of truth, it is science of necessity, conceiving knowledge, and neither opinion nor the spinning out of opinions. The more precise significance of this idea is that we get to know opinions only, thus laying emphasis upon the word Opinion. Now the direct opposite of opinion is the Truth; it is Truth before which mere opinion pales. Those who in the history of Philosophy seek mere theories, or who suppose that on the whole only such are to be found within it, also turn aside when that word Truth confronts them. Philosophy here encounters opposition from two different sides. On the one hand piety openly declares Reason or Thought to be incapable of apprehending what is true, and to lead only to the abyss of doubt; it declares that independent thought must be renounced, and reason held in bounds by faith in blind authority, if Truth is to be reached. Of the relation existing between Religion and Philosophy and of its history, we shall deal later on. On the other hand, it is known just as well, that so-called reason has maintained its rights, abandoning faith in mere authority, and has endeavoured to make Christianity rational, so that throughout it is only my personal insight and conviction which obliges me to make

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any admissions. But this affirmation of the right of reason is turned round in an astonishing manner, so that it results in making knowledge of the truth through reason an impossibility. This so-called reason on the one hand has combated religious faith in the name and power of thinking reason, and at the same time it has itself turned against reason and is true reason’s adversary. Instinct and feeling are maintained by it against the true reason, thus making the measure of true value the merely subjective—that is a particular conviction such as each can form in and for himself in his subjective capacity. A personal conviction such as this is no more than the particular opinion that has become final for men. If we begin with what meets us in our very first conceptions, we cannot neglect to make mention of this aspect in the history of Philosophy. In its results it permeates culture generally, being at once the misconception and true sign of our times. It is the principle through which men mutually understand and know each other; an hypothesis whose value is established and which is the ground of all the other sciences. In theology it is not so much the creed of the church that passes for Christianity, as that every one to a greater or less degree makes a christianity of his own to tally with his conviction. And in history we often see theology driven into acquiring the knowledge of various opinions in order that an interest may thus be furnished to the science, and one of the first results of the attention paid them is the honour awarded to all convictions, and the esteem vouchsafed to what has been constituted merely by the individual. The endeavour to know the Truth is then of course relinquished. It is true that personal conviction is the ultimate and absolute essential which reason and its philosophy, from a subjective point of view, demand in knowledge. But there is a distinction between conviction when it rests on subjective grounds such as feelings, speculations and perceptions, or, speaking generally, on the particular nature of the subject, and when it rests on thought proceeding from acquaintance with the Notion and the nature of the thing. In the former case conviction is opinion. This opposition between mere opinion and truth now sharply defined, we already recognize in the culture of the period of Socrates and Plato—a period of corruption in Greek life—as the Platonic opposition between opinion () and Science (  ). It is the same opposition as that which existed in the decadence of Roman public and political life under Augustus, and subsequently when Epicureanism and indifference set themselves up against Philosophy. Under this influence, when Christ said, “I came into the world that I should bear witness unto the Truth,” Pilate answered, “What is Truth?” That was said in a superior way, and signifies that this idea of truth

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is an expedient which is obsolete: we have got further, we know that there is no longer any question about knowing the Truth, seeing that we have gone beyond it. Who makes this statement has gone beyond it indeed. If this is made our starting point in the history of Philosophy, its whole significance will consist in finding out the particular ideas of others, each one of which is different from the other: these individual points of view are thus foreign to me: my thinking reason is not free, nor is it present in them: for me they are but extraneous, dead historic matter, or so much empty content, and to satisfy oneself with empty vanity is mere subjective vanity itself. To the impartial man, the Truth has always been a heart-stirring word and one of great import. As to the assertion that the Truth cannot be known, we shall consider it more closely in the history of Philosophy itself where it appears. The only thing to be here remarked is that if this assumption be allowed, as was the case with Tennemann, it is beyond conception why anyone should still trouble about Philosophy, since each opinion asserts falsely in its turn that it has found the truth. This immediately recalls to me the old belief that Truth consists in knowledge, but that an individual only knows the Truth in so far as he reflects and not as he walks and stands: and that the Truth cannot be known in immediate apprehension and perception, whether it be external and sensuous, or whether it be intellectual perception (for every perception as a perception is sensuous) but only through the labour of thought.

THE RATIONALITY OF TRADITIONS

Alasdair MacIntyre The conclusion to which the argument so far has led is not only that it is out of the debates, conflicts, and enquiry of socially embodied, historically contingent traditions that contentions regarding practical rationality and justice are advanced, modified, abandoned, or replaced, but that there is no other way to engage in the formulation, elaboration, rational justification, and criticism of accounts of practical rationality and justice except from within some one particular tradition in conversation, cooperation, and conflict with those who inhabit the same tradition. There is no standing ground, no place for enquiry, no way to engage in the practices of advancing, evaluating, accepting, From Whose Justice? Which Rationality? by Alasdair MacIntyre. © 1988 by University of Notre Dame Press. Used by permission of publisher.

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and rejecting reasoned argument apart from that which is provided by some particular tradition or other. It does not follow that what is said from within one tradition cannot be heard or overheard by those in another. Traditions which differ in the most radical way over certain subject matters may in respect of others share beliefs, images, and texts. Considerations urged from within one tradition may be ignored by those conducting enquiry or debate within another only at the cost, by their own standards, of excluding relevant good reasons for believing or disbelieving this or that or for acting in one way rather than another. Yet in other areas what is asserted or enquired into within the former tradition may have no counterpart whatsoever in the latter. And in those areas where there are subject matters or issues in common to more than one tradition, one such tradition may frame its theses by means of concepts such that the falsity of theses upheld within one or more other traditions is entailed, yet at the same time no or insufficient common standards are available by which to judge between the rival standpoints. Logical incompatibility and incommensurability may both be present. Logical incompatibility does of course require that at some level of characterization each tradition identifies that about which it is maintaining its thesis in such a way that both its adherents and those of its rival can recognize that it is one and the same subject matter about which they are making claims. But even so, each of course may have its own peculiar standards by which to judge what is to be accounted one and the same in the relevant respect. So two traditions may differ over the criteria to be applied in determining the range of cases in which the concept of justice has application, yet each in terms of its own standards recognizes that in certain of these cases at least the adherents of the other traditions are applying a concept of justice which, if it has application, excludes the application of their own. So Hume and Rawls agree in excluding application for any Aristotelian concept of desert in the framing of rules of justice, while they disagree with each other on whether a certain type of equality is required by justice. So Aristotle’s understanding of the class of actions for which someone can be held responsible excludes any application for Augustine’s conception of the will. Each tradition can at each stage of its development provide rational justification for its central theses in its own terms, employing the concepts and standards by which it defines itself, but there is no set of independent standards of rational justification by appeal to which the issues between contending traditions can be decided. It is not then that competing traditions do not share some standards. All

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the traditions with which we have been concerned agree in according a certain authority to logic both in their theory and in their practice. Were it not so, their adherents would be unable to disagree in the way in which they do. But that upon which they agree is insufficient to resolve those disagreements. It may therefore seem to be the case that we are confronted with the rival and competing claims of a number of traditions to our allegiance in respect of our understanding of practical rationality and justice, among which we can have no good reason to decide in favor of any one rather than of the others. Each has its own standards of reasoning; each provides its own background beliefs. To offer one kind of reason, to appeal to one set of background beliefs, will already be to have assumed the standpoint of one particular tradition. But if we make no such assumption, then we can have no good reason to give more weight to the contentions advanced by one particular tradition than to those advanced by its rivals. Argument along these lines has been adduced in support of a conclusion that if the only available standards of rationality are those made available by and within traditions, then no issue between contending traditions is rationally decidable. To assert or to conclude this rather than that can be rational relative to the standards of some particular tradition, but not rational as such. There can be no rationality as such. Every set of standards, every tradition incorporating a set of standards, has as much and as little claim to our allegiance as any other. Let us call this the relativist challenge, as contrasted with a second type of challenge, that which we may call perspectivist. The relativist challenge rests upon a denial that rational debate between and rational choice among rival traditions is possible; the perspectivist challenge puts in question the possibility of making truth-claims from within any one tradition. For if there is a multiplicity of rival traditions, each with its own characteristic modes of rational justification internal to it, then that very fact entails that no one tradition can offer those outside it good reasons for excluding the theses of its rivals. Yet if this is so, no one tradition is entitled to arrogate to itself an exclusive title; no one tradition can deny legitimacy to its rivals. What seemed to require rival traditions so to exclude and so to deny was belief in the logical incompatibility of the theses asserted and denied within rival traditions, a belief which embodied a recognition that if the theses of one such tradition were true, then some at least of the theses asserted by its rivals were false. The solution, so the perspectivist argues, is to withdraw the ascription of truth and falsity, at least in the sense in which ‘true’ and ‘false’ have been understood so far within the practice of such traditions, both from individual

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theses and from the bodies of systematic belief of which such theses are constitutive parts. Instead of interpreting rival traditions as mutually exclusive and incompatible ways of understanding one and the same world, one and the same subject matter, let us understand them instead as providing very different, complementary perspectives for envisaging the realities about which they speak to us. The relativist challenge and the perspectivist challenge share some premises and are often presented jointly as parts of a single argument. Each of them exists in more than one version, and neither of them was originally elaborated in terms of a critique of the claims to truth and rationality of traditions. But considered as such, they lose none of their force. Nonetheless I am going to argue that they are fundamentally misconceived and misdirected. Their apparent power derives, so I shall want to suggest, from their inversion of certain central Enlightenment positions concerning truth and rationality. While the thinkers of the Enlightenment insisted upon a particular type of view of truth and rationality, one in which truth is guaranteed by rational method and rational method appeals to principles undeniable by any fully reflective rational person, the protagonists of postEnlightenment relativism and perspectivism claim that if the Enlightenment conceptions of truth and rationality cannot be sustained, theirs is the only possible alternative. . . . . . . The conception of rationality and truth as thus embodied in traditionconstituted enquiry is of course strikingly at odds with both standard Cartesian and standard Hegelian accounts of rationality. Because every such rational tradition begins from the contingency and positivity of some set of established beliefs, the rationality of tradition is inescapably anti-Cartesian. In systematizing and ordering the truths they take themselves to have discovered, the adherents of a tradition may well assign a primary place in the structures of their theorizing to certain truths and treat them as first metaphysical or practical principles. But such principles will have had to vindicate themselves in the historical process of dialectical justification. It is by reference to such first principles that subordinate truths will be justified within a particular body of theory, and it is by reference to such first principles that, as we have seen, in both Platonic and Aristotelian theories of practical reasoning both particular practical judgments and actions themselves will be justified. But such first principles themselves, and indeed the whole body of theory of which they are a part, themselves will be understood to require justification. The kind of rational justification which they receive is at once dialectical and historical. They are justified insofar as in the history of this

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tradition they have, by surviving the process of dialectical questioning, vindicated themselves as superior to their historical predecessors. Hence such first principles are not self-sufficient, self-justifying epistemological first principles. They may indeed be regarded as both necessary and evident, but their necessity and their evidentness will be characterizable as such only to and by those whose thought is framed by the kind of conceptual scheme from which they emerge as a key element, in the formulation and reformulation of the theories informed by that historically developing conceptual scheme. It is instructive to read Descartes himself as providing both in the Regulae and in the Meditations just such an account of a process of dialectical justification for his first principles and, in so doing, discarding tradition in a highly traditional way, and thus taking the Augustinian tradition to a point at which Descartes learns from it what he from then onward cannot acknowledge having learned from it. And in so doing Descartes became the first Cartesian. Yet if in what it moves from, tradition-constituted enquiry is anti-Cartesian, in what it moves toward, tradition-constituted enquiry is anti-Hegelian. Implicit in the rationality of such enquiry there is indeed a conception of a final truth, that is to say, a relationship of the mind to its objects which would be wholly adequate in respect of the capacities of that mind. But any conception of that state as one in which the mind could by its own powers know itself as thus adequately informed is ruled out; the Absolute Knowledge of the Hegelian system is from this tradition-constituted standpoint a chimaera. No one at any stage can ever rule out the future possibility of their present beliefs and judgments being shown to be inadequate in a variety of ways. It is perhaps this combination of anti-Cartesian and anti-Hegelian aspects which seems to afford plausibility to the relativist and the perspectivist challenges. Traditions fail the Cartesian test of beginning from unassailable evident truths; not only do they begin from contingent positivity, but each begins from a point different from that of the others. Traditions also fail the Hegelian test of showing that their goal is some final rational state which they share with all other movements of thought. Traditions are always and ineradically to some degree local, informed by particularities of language and social and natural environment, inhabited by Greeks or by citizens of Roman Africa or medieval Persia or by eighteenth-century Scots, who stubbornly refuse to be or become vehicles of the self-realization of Geist. Those educated or indoctrinated into accepting Cartesian or Hegelian standards will take the positivity of tradition to be a sign of arbitrariness. For each tradition

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will, so it may seem, pursue its own specific historical path, and all that we shall be confronted with in the end is a set of independent rival histories. The answer to this suggestion, and indeed more generally to relativism and to perspectivism, has to begin from considering one particular kind of occurrence in the history of traditions, which is not among those so far cataloged. Yet it is in the way in which the adherents of a tradition respond to such occurrences, and in the success or failure which attends upon their response, that traditions attain or fail to attain intellectual maturity. The kind of occurrence is that to which elsewhere I have given the name “epistemological crisis” (‘Epistemological Crises, Dramatic Narrative and the Philosophy of Science’ The Monist 69, 4, 1977). Epistemological crises may occur in the history of individuals—thinkers as various as Augustine, Descartes, Hume, and Lukacs have left us records of such crises—as well as in that of groups. But they can also be crises in and for a whole tradition. We have already noticed that central to a tradition-constituted enquiry at each stage in its development will be its current problematic, that agenda of unsolved problems and unresolved issues by reference to which its success or lack of it in making rational progress toward some further stage of development will be evaluated. At any point it may happen to any traditionconstituted enquiry that by its own standards of progress it ceases to make progress. Its hitherto trusted methods of enquiry have become sterile. Conflicts over rival answers to key questions can no longer be settled rationally. Moreover, it may indeed happen that the use of the methods of enquiry and of the forms of argument, by means of which rational progress had been achieved so far, begins to have the effect of increasingly disclosing new inadequacies, hitherto unrecognized incoherences, and new problems for the solution of which there seem to be insufficient or no resources within the established fabric of belief. This kind of dissolution of historically founded certitudes is the mark of an epistemological crisis. The solution to a genuine epistemological crisis requires the invention or discovery of new concepts and the framing of some new type or types of theory which meet three highly exacting requirements. First, this in some ways radically new and conceptually enriched scheme, if it is to put an end to epistemological crisis, must furnish a solution to the problems which had previously proved intractable in a systematic and coherent way. Second, it must also provide an explanation of just what it was which rendered the tradition, before it had acquired these new resources, sterile or incoherent or both. And third, these first two tasks must be carried

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out in a way which exhibits some fundamental continuity of the new conceptual and theoretical structures with the shared beliefs in terms of which the tradition of enquiry had been defined up to this point. The theses central to the new theoretical and conceptual structures, just because they are significantly richer than and escape the limitations of those theses which were central to the tradition before and as it entered its period of epistemological crisis, will in no way be derivable from those earlier positions. Imaginative conceptual innovation will have had to occur. The justification of the new theses will lie precisely in their ability to achieve what could not have been achieved prior to that innovation. Examples of such successfully creative outcomes to more or less serious epistemological crises, affecting some greater or lesser area of the subject matter with which a particular tradition-constituted enquiry is concerned, are not hard to come by, either in the traditions with whose history I have been concerned here or elsewhere. Newman’s own central example was of the way in which in the fourth century the definition of the Catholic doctrine of the Trinity resolved the controversies arising out of competing interpretations of scripture by a use of philosophical and theological concepts whose understanding had itself issued from debates rationally unresolved up to that point. Thus that doctrine provided for the later Augustinian tradition a paradigm of how the three requirements for the resolution of an epistemological crisis could be met. In a very different way Aquinas provided a new and richer conceptual and theoretical framework, without which anyone whose allegiance was given to both the Aristotelian and Augustinian traditions would necessarily have lapsed either into incoherence or, by rejecting one of them, into a sterile onesidedness. And in a different way again, perhaps less successfully, Reid and Stewart attempted to rescue the Scottish tradition from the incoherence with which it was threatened by a combination of Humean epistemological premises with anti-Humean moral and metaphysical conclusions. . . . . . . Every tradition, whether it recognizes the fact or not, confronts the possibility that at some future time it will fall into a state of epistemological crisis, recognizable as such by its own standards of rational justification, which have themselves been vindicated up to that time as the best to emerge from the history of that particular tradition. All attempts to deploy the imaginative and inventive resources which the adherents of the tradition can provide may founder, either merely by doing nothing to remedy the condition of sterility and incoherence into which the enquiry has fallen or by also revealing or creating new problems, and revealing new flaws and new limitations. Time may elapse, and no further resources or solutions emerge.

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That particular tradition’s claims to truth can at some point in this process no longer be sustained. And this by itself is enough to show that if part of the relativist’s thesis is that each tradition, since it provides its own standards of rational justification, must always be vindicated in the light of those standards, then on this at least the relativist is mistaken. But whether the relativist has claimed this or not, a further even more important possibility now becomes clear. For the adherents of a tradition which is now in this state of fundamental and radical crisis may at this point encounter in a new way the claims of some particular rival tradition, perhaps one with which they have for some time coexisted, perhaps one which they are now encountering for the first time. They now come or had already come to understand the beliefs and way of life of this other alien tradition, and to do so they have or have had to learn, as we shall see when we go on to discuss the linguistic characteristics of tradition, the language of the alien tradition as a new and second first language. When they have understood the beliefs of the alien tradition, they may find themselves compelled to recognize that within this other tradition it is possible to construct from the concepts and theories peculiar to it what they were unable to provide from their own conceptual and theoretical resources, a cogent and illuminating explanation—cogent and illuminating, that is, by their own standards—of why their own intellectual tradition had been unable to solve its problems or restore its coherence. The standards by which they judge this explanation to be cogent and illuminating will be the very same standards by which they have found their tradition wanting in the face of epistemological crisis. But while this new explanation satisfies two of the requirements for an adequate response to an epistemological crisis within a tradition—insofar as it both explains why, given the structures of enquiry within that tradition, the crisis had to happen as it did and does not itself suffer from the same defects of incoherence or resourcelessness, the recognition of which had been the initial stage of their crisis—it fails to satisfy the third. Derived as it is from a genuinely alien tradition, the new explanation does not stand in any sort of substantive continuity with the preceding history of the tradition in crisis. In this kind of situation the rationality of tradition requires an acknowledgment by those who have hitherto inhabited and given their allegiance to the tradition in crisis that the alien tradition is superior in rationality and in respect of its claims to truth to their own. What the explanation afforded from within the alien tradition will have disclosed is a lack of correspondence between the dominant beliefs of their own tradition and the reality

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disclosed by the most successful explanation, and it may well be the only successful explanation which they have been able to discover. Hence the claim to truth for what have hitherto been their own beliefs has been defeated.

Bibliography Apel, Karl-Otto. Towards a Transformation of Philosophy. Translated by Glen Adey and David Frisby. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980. Aristotle. Metaphysics. In The Complete Works of Aristotle, vol. 2, ed. Jonathan Barnes. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984. ———. Physics. In The Complete Works of Aristotle, vol. 2, ed. Jonathan Barnes. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984. Bernstein, Richard J. Beyond Objectivism and Relativism. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1983. Cassirer, Ernst. The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms. 3 vols. Translated by Ralph Manheim. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1953, 1955, 1957. Chisholm, Roderick. “Brentano’s Descriptive Psychology,” and “ ‘Intentional Inexistence.’ ” In The Philosophy of Brentano, ed. Linda L. McAlister. Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1976. Churchland, Paul. A Neurocomputational Perspective: The Nature of Mind and the Structure of Science. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1989. Collingwood, R. G. The Idea of History. London: Oxford University Press, 1956. Dennett, Daniel. The Intentional Stance. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1987. Dewey, John. Reconstruction in Philosophy. Enlarged edition. Boston: Beacon Press, 1948. Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish; The Birth of the Prison. Translated by Alan Sheridan. New York: Vintage Books, 1977. ———. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. New York, Vintage Press, 1970. Gadamer, Hans-Georg. Truth and Method. Translated by Garrett Barden and John Cumming. New York: Seabury Press, 1975. Habermas, Jürgen. Communication and the Evolution of Society. Translated by Thomas McCarthy. Boston: Beacon Press, 1979. ———. “Discourse Ethics: Notes on a Program of Philosophical Justification.” Translated by Christian Lenhardt and Shierry Weber Nicholsen. In Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1990. ———. Legitimation Crisis. Translated by Thomas McCarthy. Boston: Beacon Press, 1975. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. Lectures on the History of Philosophy. 3 vols. Translated by E. S. Haldane. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995. Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. Translated by Joan Stambaugh. Albany: SUNY Press, 1996. Hempel, Carl. “The Function of General Laws in History.” In Aspects of Scientific Explanation and Other Essays in the Philosophy of Science. New York: Free Press, 1965. Hirsch, E. D., Jr. Validity in Interpretation. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987. Hume, David. A Treatise of Human Nature. Edited by L. A. Selby-Bigge. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1888.

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Husserl, Edmund. “The Origin of Geometry.” Translated by David Carr. In The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1970. Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Pure Reason. Translated by Norman Kemp Smith. London: Macmillan, 1953. Kierkegaard, Søren. Repetition. Translated and edited by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983. Kosík, Karel. Dialectics of the Concrete: A Study on Problems of Man and World. Translated by Karel Kovenda and James Schmidt. Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1976. Kuhn, Thomas S. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. 2d enlarged edition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970. Lévi-Strauss, Claude. The Savage Mind. Translated by John Weightman and Doreen Weightman. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966. Löwith, Karl. From Hegel to Nietzsche: The Revolution in Nineteenth-Century Thought. Translated by David E. Green. New York: Columbia University Press, 1964. MacIntyre, Alasdair. Whose Justice? Which Rationality? Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press, 1988. Marx, Karl. “Letter to Annenkov.” In Karl Marx: Selected Writings, ed. David McLellan. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977. Mohanty, Jitendra N. The Concept of Intentionality. St. Louis: Warren H. Green, 1972. Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Will to Power. Translated by Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale. New York: Vintage Books, 1967. Peirce, Charles Sanders. “Consequences of Critical Common-sensism.” In Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, vol. 5, ed. Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1962. Popper, Karl. The Poverty of Historicism. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1960. Poster, Mark. Foucault, Marxism and History: Mode of Production and Mode of Information. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1989. Putnam, Hilary. The Many Faces of Realism. La Salle, Ill.: Open Court, 1987. Quine, W. V. “Epistemology Naturalized.” In Ontological Relativity and Other Essays. New York and London: Columbia University Press, 1969. Rorty, Richard. “Pragmatism, Davidson, and Truth.” In Truth and Interpretation: Perspectives on the Philosophy of Donald Davidson, ed. Ernest LePore. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1993. Smart, J.J.C. Philosophy and Scientific Realism. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1963. Tugendhat, Ernst. “Reflection on Philosophical Method from an Analytic Point of View.” Translated by William Rehg. In Philosophical Interventions in the Unfinished Project of the Enlightenment, ed. Axel Honneth et al. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992. Winch, Peter. The Idea of a Social Science. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1958.

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6 Persons and Minds

Introduction What may very possibly be the single most strategic distinction we can make, ranging over the entire span of Western philosophy, centers on the difference between the mind/body problem and what may be called the culture/nature problem. The distinction hardly appears in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century philosophy or, for that matter, in current analytic inquiries. Descartes posed the first in its classic form in his Meditations on First Philosophy; but he hardly recognizes the second. It is absorbed, unnoticed, in the first. Hardly any philosopher distinguishes between the two until the interval between Kant’s first Critique and Hegel’s Phenomenology. The reason emerges if we compare Kant’s and Hegel’s undertakings. In Kant’s account, the intelligible world is “constituted” by the structuring structures of human understanding; in Hegel’s, our cognizing capacities are historically formed in the conditions of collective life, but not in such a way as to constitute the natural world. In Kant, there is no satisfactory explanation of the relationship between the internal cognizing powers of individual human subjects and the public powers of “transcendental” understanding. In Hegel, it is always clear that Geist, the “subject” of the cognizing processes the Phenomenology reports, is not identical with the dis-

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tributed plural selves whose experience and activity are reported in the preKantian philosophies of Descartes and Locke; but Geist is also not (on the best interpretation) an analogue of the Kantian “Ego.” It does, however, disallow any gap between cognizer and cognized. We have already observed that Husserl faced and failed to solve a similar puzzle in his Cartesian Meditations; hence, given the affinity between Kant’s and Husserl’s projects, we may infer that the same failing applies to Heidegger’s use of Dasein (in Being and Time): Dasein, Heidegger explicitly warns, is not a merely human subject. Heidegger should have conceded that his thesis was the premise of a Weltanschauungsphilosophie. Indeed it was, but Heidegger denied it. Hence, in his own way, he repeats Husserl’s extravagance. By contrast, there is a sense, in Hegel, that we human “subjects” speculate about what to count as falling within the space of Geist’s Erscheinungen; but belief and experience remain, for Hegel, unquestionably human. “Geist,” therefore, proves to be a nominalization of what is undoubtedly real but never separately existent in the human world (or in any other realm). It signifies at one and the same time (a) the resolution of both the representationalist and correspondentist forms of the skeptical threat; (b) the insuperably social or collective nature of human understanding; (c) the historicized constitution of selves; and (d) the horizonal limitation on every human attempt to encompass the whole of intelligible reality. Geist is, finally, (e) the unified nominalization of (a) through (d) read as the symbiotized “space” of the entire intelligible world: that is, the metaphor that holds that the truth about the objective world  Geist’s subjective understanding of itself (“absolute knowledge”). In Heidegger, Dasein is always the prior and primary (definitely not human) source of reality’s self-disclosure: “subjective” (Kantian-like) in Being and Time; “objective” (revelatory) in “Letter on Humanism.” The two notions—Hegel’s and Heidegger’s—cannot be reconciled. Hegel confirms the sense in which first- and second-order discourse cannot be assigned disjunctive cognitive powers at all, or cognitive powers apart from cultural history. Heidegger admits no such scruple. The reason the initial distinction is needed should now be clear. If the resemblance between what is “subjective” and “objective” were genuinely strong enough to preclude skepticism and solipsism, as in Berkeley’s prescient but primitive solution, then the structure of cognizing competence would have to match the structure it was supposed to grasp. The only way to ensure such a match (without falling back to preestablished harmonies or correspondences) would be to construe the competence that “constructs” the

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world (epistemically, not ontically) as already collectively empowered by this or that historical ethos. But, then, it could not be confined to whatever belonged, autonomously, to the members of the species Homo sapiens: whether the competence assigned was innately assigned (as in Noam Chomsky), or developed by way of sensory experience (as in Locke), or progressively developed by way of favorable interactions with the “outside” world (as in Jean Piaget). These are all pre-Kantian options, not terribly different from Descartes’s “natural light of reason.” Even in his well-known letter to Marcus Herz, Kant reads very much like a pre-Kantian innatist; and in the Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Locke’s “tabula rasa” manages to get itself reliably imprinted in a public and objective way by sensory bombardments from the independent world. These are optimistic fictions that, one way or another, presuppose an apt correspondence between “subjective” cognizing and an “objectively” cognized world. For example, Jerry Fodor, who extends Chomsky’s innatism to our fund of basic concepts (which we never rightly exceed, on Fodor’s argument), insists that we achieve a fully objective science by the use of such resources: the argument is Cartesian—ultimately Platonist. Yet Fodor nowhere explains how such concepts ever match the independent features of the world. That is the same source of skepticism one finds in Aristotle’s deus ex machina—the intuitive power of nous (by which essences are directly grasped). Fodor’s biologized Platonism simply functions as a convenient tertium quid between subjective experience and the (objective) properties of the independent world. Both require a preestablished harmony. However, there is no such harmony. Kantian “constitution” and Hegelian “symbiosis” preclude independent relations between the subjective and the objective unless they are already in accord with a constructivist account of cognized and cognizable identity or correspondence; and then, that identity counts as a precondition of knowledge, not as an inferred or correspondentist achievement. You may disagree with Aristotle and Hegel; but what Aristotle claims is plainly arbitrary; and what Hegel claims is not arbitrary, though it is disputatious. That is why the analysis of knowledge requires a distinction that cannot be captured by resolving the mind/body problem in its Cartesian form—however it may range from Descartes himself to Chomsky or Piaget. Knowledge, you see, is a social, collective, historicized, secondorder artifact of some sort. The trick is this: to solve the skeptical problem of representationality, we need to avoid the further (skeptical) threat of cognitive privilege. That’s why Kant’s and Husserl’s transcendentalisms are unsatisfactory. They meet (or

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seem to meet) the first threat but not the second. By contrast, Hegel’s solution is formally adequate to the larger task, although we can never be certain we have fathomed what Hegel means by “Geist”! (That is certainly awkward.) The Kantian and Husserlian solutions presume that if knowledge is genuinely possible, then knowledge implicates in some essential way (a) what is invariant in the real world or in thought, and (b) what can be grasped apodictically or will lead asymptotically in that direction. If, therefore, flux or historicity wins out, both Kant and Husserl must be set aside. There you have the full benefit of bringing the nature/culture distinction to bear on the mind/body problem. For the double threat of skepticism can only be met by a constructivist account of the adequation between belief and truth: such an account cannot fail to be arbitrary except when it is embedded in the collective practices of a living society. That is the final Hegelian theme that is missing in Kant and that is present, however thinly, in figures like Wittgenstein and Foucault and Kuhn. There is only one way to secure the Hegelian solution without the excrescences of Hegel’s original formula. The executive idea is that the self and the self’s cognizing and active powers are originally “constituted” or artifactually formed by the “natural” process by which human infants grow up to become the apt new members of a society of competently encultured selves. There are many ways of capturing the notion. But all concede (a) that the process is historicized, variable, contingently linked to local practices; (b) that it is a collective rather than an aggregative process; and (c) that it is internalized in diverse and idiosyncratic, though also tolerably congruent, ways by the individual members of the enculturing society. Two findings fall out here, neither of which could possibly be captured by the mind/body idiom. For one, culturally “emergent” entities—persons or selves preeminently—are the individuated sites at which collectively formed cognizing and active powers are actually exercised. For a second, the “Intentional” is itself an inherently and entirely predicative notion. Once these findings are acknowledged, it dawns on us that the “mental” (the “psychological,” the “subjective”) takes two quite different forms: in one, it is assigned to prelinguistic infants and subcultural animals suitably endowed in species-specific ways; and in the other, it is restricted to culturally endowed creatures (ourselves) who have actually internalized the specific habits and practices of this society or that. The characterization of the first is always parasitic on our reflexive characterization of the second: hence, discourse and inquiry about precultural mentality (even unconscious mentality

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or the “mentality” of machines) is ineluctably anthropomorphized. Reflexive understanding is already cultural—languaged. (For a curious but unintended confirmation, see Bennett.) It is also in this sense that human discourse is insuperably “folk-theoretic” (see Stich). The simple reason is this: the paradigm of the mental or psychological cannot fail to be cognitively apt; and the only viable model of the cognitive appears to be that of reporting and sharing reports of reflexive experience; hence, the paradigm of the psychological is cultural and languaged. The paradigm of the mental or subjective is the power of linguistically apt selves, even where the “mental” powers of rats and infants are known to lack such competence. Thus, for example, ascriptions of perceptual discrimination (to animals as well as humans) are always modeled propositionally (“The lion spotted the gazelle”; “The lion saw that there was a gazelle in his visual field”). The upshot is this: although the mind/body problem is distinct from the nature/culture problem, it falls, for reporting and explanatory purposes, entirely within the anthropomorphized terms of the second. Viewed this way, the “natural” is an abstraction from the “cultural”: it is whatever is real but lacks Intentionality. You see, therefore, that to subsume the mind/body problem under the terms of the culture/nature problem is to put at mortal risk every version of naturalism, reductionism, eliminativism, extensionalism, solipsism, skepticism, and similar doctrines. The entire argument depends on bringing to bear on the analysis of the mental all that has already been worked out regarding symbiosis and historicity and secondorder complications involving the individuation of selves. These are matters normally ignored. One final distinction needs to be ventured. Descartes, of course, is said to be the arch-dualist of the mind/body problem: he says that res cogitans and res extensa are utterly unlike each other and yet also says that persons entail some kind of union of the two “substances.” He was surely right to insist that what we collect as the forms of mental life include much (perhaps all) of a range of attributes that cannot be satisfactorily analyzed or explicated in terms of, or reduced to, whatever are said to be the purely physical attributes of nature. But, in saying that, we need not concede (along the lines Descartes favors) that the irreducibility of the mental is tantamount to holding that the mental and the physical have nothing in common. That is a flat non sequitur. There is an obvious alternative that has been entirely ignored in the larger philosophical literature, one that draws on the culture/nature idiom. Concede that Intentional (cultural) properties (including mental properties) are

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indissolubly complex. If they are real, we may say, Intentional properties are (must be) inextricably “embedded” or “incarnate” in non-Intentional (physical or “natural”) properties. Remember: the Intentional need not be exclusively mental. It could not be exclusively mental, if it applied to the artifacts of our cultural world—artworks, for instance. Nevertheless, the paradigm of the mental remains the thought and speech of languaged creatures like ourselves. It is, however, no more than a step to concede that the Intentional forms of the “mental” are complex predicables incarnate in the biological (or neurophysiological) attributes of this or that species, or that entire incarnation. It is a curious limitation of conscious life that we are empirically unable to discern, in the same instance in which we discern the Intentional aspects of our thoughts, the neurophysiological attributes in which they are “incarnate.” As a consequence, the relation between mind and body is primarily a matter of theory, even if, on a favorable theory, we henceforth speak of experiencing “incarnate” properties. So be it. In any case, dualism is plainly avoidable without yielding to reductionism. Descartes could never have demonstrated that dualism was necessarily true. But that his theory (as usually construed) is preposterous goes no distance toward showing that Intentional mental life is a conceptual fiction. On the contrary, whatever is mental may now be said to incorporate within itself properties that are “merely” physical. The ulterior question, ultimately inspired by Descartes himself (think of Hobbes and Spinoza), asks whether the mental can be reduced to the physical or simply eliminated. But now, both of these last options requires the reduction or elimination of the cultural, and there is no known successful argument to that effect. (There is no adequate physicalist account of language, you see.) What is mentally and culturally real is sui generis; what is mental but not cultural is anthropomorphized in terms of the first. That may be a faute de mieux maneuver: but if it is, it is a good one. Nothing eliminativists recommend gainsays that. What we must grasp, finally, is the benign antinomy that is the obverse side of resolving the double threat of skepticism already adduced. For if we accept constructivism and symbiosis (in the sense supplied), then we must also accept the conceptual compatibility of these two features of the antinomy that results from adopting them together: namely, (a) that the cultural or Intentional world evolves or emerges in a sui generis way from the natural or non-Intentional or physical world; and (b) that that form of emergence is intelligible only as a posit offered by ourselves as Intentionally apt for asking and answering questions about whatever is said to be physically or cul-

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turally real. In short, if reductionism and eliminativism fail, then we must admit that we theorize under an insuperable endogenous constraint—which is, of course, the antinomy itself. Once again, therefore, the Hegelian formula proves to be the most resilient for the purpose. Psychological, prelinguistic, sublinguistic, solipsistic, computational, and informational competences are anthropomorphically abstracted and idealized from Intentional competences.

IDEA OF PERSONAL IDENTITY

John Locke 12. But the question is, Whether if the same substance which thinks be changed, it can be the same person; or, remaining the same, it can be different persons? And to this I answer: First, This can be no question at all to those who place thought in a purely material animal constitution, void of an immaterial substance. For, whether their supposition be true or no, it is plain they conceive personal identity preserved in something else than identity of substance; as animal identity is preserved in identity of life, and not of substance. And therefore those who place thinking in an immaterial substance only, before they can come to deal with these men, must show why personal identity cannot be preserved in the change of immaterial substances, or variety of particular immaterial substances, as well as animal identity is preserved in the change of material substances, or variety of particular bodies: unless they will say, it is one immaterial spirit that makes the same life in brutes, as it is one immaterial spirit that makes the same person in men; which the Cartesians at least will not admit, for fear of making brutes thinking things too. 13. But next, as to the first part of the question, Whether, if the same thinking substance (supposing immaterial substances only to think) be changed, it can be the same person? I answer, that cannot be resolved but by those who know what kind of substances they are that do think; and whether the consciousness of past actions can be transferred from one thinking substance to another. I grant were the same consciousness the same individual action it could not: but it being a present representation of a past action, why it may not be possible, that that may be represented to the mind to John Locke. “Idea of Personal Identity.” In An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Volume I. Edited by Alexander Campbell Fraser. New York: Dover, 1959.

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have been which really never was, will remain to be shown. And therefore how far the consciousness of past actions is annexed to any individual agent, so that another cannot possibly have it, will be hard for us to determine, till we know what kind of action it is that cannot be done without a reflex act of perception accompanying it, and how performed by thinking substances, who cannot think without being conscious of it. But that which we call the same consciousness, not being the same individual act, why one intellectual substance may not have represented to it, as done by itself, what it never did, and was perhaps done by some other agent—why, I say, such a representation may not possibly be without reality of matter of fact, as well as several representations in dreams are, which yet whilst dreaming we take for true—will be difficult to conclude from the nature of things. And that it never is so, will by us, till we have clearer views of the nature of thinking substances, be best resolved into the goodness of God; who, as far as the happiness or misery of any of his sensible creatures is concerned in it, will not, by a fatal error of theirs, transfer from one to another that consciousness which draws reward or punishment with it. How far this may be an argument against those who would place thinking in a system of fleeting animal spirits, I leave to be considered. But yet, to return to the question before us, it must be allowed, that, if the same consciousness (which, as has been shown, is quite a different thing from the same numerical figure or motion in body) can be transferred from one thinking substance to another, it will be possible that two thinking substances may make but one person. For the same consciousness being preserved, whether in the same or different substances, the personal identity is preserved. 14. As to the second part of the question, Whether the same immaterial substance remaining, there may be two distinct persons; which question seems to me to be built on this,—Whether the same immaterial being, being conscious of the action of its past duration, may be wholly stripped of all the consciousness of its next existence, and lose it beyond the power of ever retrieving it again: and so as it were beginning a new account from a new period, have a consciousness that cannot reach beyond this new state. All those who hold pre-existence are evidently of this mind; since they allow the soul to have no remaining consciousness of what it did in that pre-existent state, either wholly separate from body, or informing any other body; and if they should not, it is plain experience would be against them. So that personal identity, reaching no further than consciousness reaches, a pre-existent spirit not having continued so many ages in a state of silence, must needs make different persons. Suppose a Christian Platonist or a Pythagorean should, upon

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God’s having ended all his works of creation the seventh day, think his soul hath existed ever since; and should imagine it has revolved in several human bodies; as I once met with one, who was persuaded his had been the soul of Socrates (how reasonably I will not dispute; this I know, that in the post he filled, which was no inconsiderable one, he passed for a very rational man, and the press has shown that he wanted not parts or learning;)—would any one say, that he, being not conscious of any of Socrates’s actions or thoughts, could be the same person with Socrates? Let any one reflect upon himself, and conclude that he has in himself an immaterial spirit, which is that which thinks in him, and, in the constant change of his body keeps him the same: and is that which he calls himself: let him also suppose it to be the same soul that was in Nestor or Thersites, at the siege of Troy, (for souls being, as far as we know anything of them, in their nature indifferent to any parcel of matter, the supposition has no apparent absurdity in it,) which it may have been, as well as it is now the soul of any other man: but he now having no consciousness of any of the actions either of Nestor or Thersites, does or can he conceive himself the same person with either of them? Can he be concerned in either of their actions? attribute them to himself, or think them his own, more than the actions of any other men that ever existed? So that this consciousness, not reaching to any of the actions of either of those men, he is no more one self with either of them than if the soul or immaterial spirit that now informs him had been created, and began to exist, when it began to inform his present body; though it were never so true, that the same spirit that informed Nestor’s or Thersites’ body were numerically the same that now informs his. For this would no more make him the same person with Nestor, than if some of the particles of matter that were once a part of Nestor were now a part of this man; the same immaterial substance, without the same consciousness, no more making the same person, by being united to any body, than the same particle of matter, without consciousness, united to any body, makes the same person. But let him once find himself conscious of any of the actions of Nestor, he then finds himself the same person with Nestor. 15. And thus may we be able, without any difficulty, to conceive the same person at the resurrection, though in a body not exactly in make or parts the same which he had here,—the same consciousness going along with the soul that inhabits it. But yet the soul alone, in the change of bodies, would scarce to any one but to him that makes the soul the man, be enough to make the same man. For should the soul of a prince, carrying with it the consciousness of the prince’s past life, enter and inform the body of a cobbler, as soon as

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deserted by his own soul, every one sees he would be the same person with the prince, accountable only for the prince’s actions: but who would say it was the same man? The body too goes to the making the man, and would, I guess, to everybody determine the man in this case, wherein the soul, with all its princely thoughts about it, would not make another man: but he would be the same cobbler to every one besides himself. I know that, in the ordinary way of speaking, the same person, and the same man, stand for one and the same thing. And indeed every one will always have a liberty to speak as he pleases, and to apply what articulate sounds to what ideas he thinks fit, and change them as often as he pleases. But yet, when we will inquire what makes the same spirit, man, or person, we must fix the ideas of spirit, man, or person in our minds; and having resolved with ourselves what we mean by them, it will not be hard to determine, in either of them, or the like, when it is the same, and when not. 16. But though the same immaterial substance or soul does not alone, wherever it be, and in whatsoever state, make the same man; yet it is plain, consciousness, as far as ever it can be extended—should it be to ages past— unites existences and actions very remote in time into the same person, as well as it does the existences and actions of the immediately preceding moment: so that whatever has the consciousness of present and past actions, is the same person to whom they both belong. Had I the same consciousness that I saw the ark and Noah’s flood, as that I saw an overflowing of the Thames last winter, or as that I write now, I could no more doubt that I who write this now, that saw the Thames overflowed last winter, and that viewed the flood at the general deluge, was the same self,—place that self in what substance you please—than that I who write this am the same myself now whilst I write (whether I consist of all the same substance, material or immaterial, or no) that I was yesterday. For as to this point of being the same self, it matters not whether this present self be made up of the same or other substances—I being as much concerned, and as justly accountable for any action that was done a thousand years since, appropriated to me now by this self-consciousness, as I am for what I did the last moment. 17. Self is that conscious thinking thing,—whatever substance made up of, (whether spiritual or material, simple or compounded, it matters not)— which is sensible or conscious of pleasure and pain, capable of happiness or misery, and so is concerned for itself, as far as that consciousness extends. Thus every one finds that, whilst comprehended under that consciousness, the little finger is as much a part of himself as what is most so. Upon separation of this little finger, should this consciousness go along with the little

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finger, and leave the rest of the body, it is evident the little finger would be the person, the same person; and self then would have nothing to do with the rest of the body. As in this case it is the consciousness that goes along with the substance, when one part is separate from another, which makes the same person, and constitutes this inseparable self: so it is in reference to substances remote in time. That with which the consciousness of this present thinking thing can join itself, makes the same person, and is one self with it, and with nothing else; and so attributes to itself, and owns all the actions of that thing, as its own, as far as that consciousness reaches, and no further; as every one who reflects will perceive. 18. In this personal identity is founded all the right and justice of reward and punishment; happiness and misery being that for which every one is concerned for himself, and the not mattering what becomes of any substance, not joined to, or affected with that consciousness. For, as it is evident in the instance I gave but now, if the consciousness went along with the little finger when it was cut off, that would be the same self which was concerned for the whole body yesterday, as making part of itself, whose actions then it cannot but admit as its own now. Though, if the same body should still live, and immediately from the separation of the little finger have its own peculiar consciousness, whereof the little finger knew nothing, it would not at all be concerned for it, as a part of itself, or could own any of its actions, or have any of them imputed to him. 19. This may show us wherein personal identity consists: not in the identity of substance, but, as I have said, in the identity of consciousness, wherein if Socrates and the present mayor of Queinborough agree, they are the same person: if the same Socrates waking and sleeping do not partake of the same consciousness, Socrates waking and sleeping is not the same person. And to punish Socrates waking for what sleeping Socrates thought, and waking Socrates was never conscious of, would be no more of right, than to punish one twin for what his brother-twin did, whereof he knew nothing, because their outsides were so like, that they could not be distinguished; for such twins have been seen. 20. But yet possibly it will still be objected,—Suppose I wholly lose the memory of some parts of my life, beyond a possibility of retrieving them, so that perhaps I shall never be conscious of them again; yet am I not the same person that did those actions, had those thoughts that I once was conscious of, though I have now forgot them? To which I answer, that we must here take notice what the word I is applied to; which, in this case, is the man only. And the same man being presumed to be the same person, I is easily here

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supposed to stand also for the same person. But if it be possible for the same man to have distinct incommunicable consciousness at different times, it is past doubt the same man would at different times make different persons; which, we see, is the sense of mankind in the solemnest declaration of their opinions, human laws not punishing the mad man for the sober man’s actions, nor the sober man for what the mad man did,—thereby making them two persons: which is somewhat explained by our way of speaking in English when we say such an one is ‘not himself,’ or is ‘beside himself’; in which phrases it is insinuated, as if those who now, or at least first used them, thought that self was changed; the self-same person was no longer in that man. 21. But yet it is hard to conceive that Socrates, the same individual man, should be two persons. To help us a little in this, we must consider what is meant by Socrates, or the same individual man. First, it must be either the same individual, immaterial, thinking substance; in short, the same numerical soul, and nothing else. Secondly, or the same animal, without any regard to an immaterial soul. Thirdly, or the same immaterial spirit united to the same animal. Now, take which of these suppositions you please, it is impossible to make personal identity to consist in anything but consciousness; or reach any further than that does. For, by the first of them, it must be allowed possible that a man born of different women, and in distant times, may be the same man. A way of speaking which, whoever admits, must allow it possible for the same man to be two distinct persons, as any two that have lived in different ages without the knowledge of one another’s thoughts. By the second and third, Socrates, in this life and after it, cannot be the same man any way, but by the same consciousness; and so making human identity to consist in the same thing wherein we place personal identity, there will be no difficulty to allow the same man to be the same person. But then they who place human identity in consciousness only, and not in something else, must consider how they will make the infant Socrates the same man with Socrates after the resurrection. But whatsoever to some men makes a man, and consequently the same individual man, wherein perhaps few are agreed, personal identity can by us be placed in nothing but consciousness, (which is that alone which makes what we call self,) without involving us in great absurdities. 22. But is not a man drunk and sober the same person? why else is he

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punished for the fact he commits when drunk, though he be never afterwards conscious of it? Just as much the same person as a man that walks, and does other things in his sleep, is the same person, and is answerable for any mischief he shall do in it. Human laws punish both with a justice suitable to their way of knowledge;—because, in these cases, they cannot distinguish certainly what is real, what counterfeit: and so the ignorance in drunkenness or sleep is not admitted as a plea. [For, though punishment be annexed to personality, and personality to consciousness, and the drunkard perhaps be not conscious of what he did, yet human judicatures justly punish him; because the fact is proved against him, but want of consciousness cannot be proved for him.] But in the Great Day, wherein the secrets of all hearts shall be laid open. it may be reasonable to think, no one shall be made to answer for what he knows nothing of; but shall receive his doom, his conscience accusing or excusing him. 23. Nothing but consciousness can unite remote existences into the same person: the identity of substance will not do it; for whatever substance there is, however framed, without consciousness there is no person: and a carcass may be a person, as well as any sort of substance be so, without consciousness. Could we suppose two distinct incommunicable consciousnesses acting the same body, the one constantly by day, the other by night; and, on the other side, the same consciousness, acting by intervals, two distinct bodies: I ask, in the first case, whether the day and the night—man would not be two as distinct persons as Socrates and Plato? And whether, in the second case, there would not be one person in two distinct bodies, as much as one man is the same in two distinct clothings? Nor is it at all material to say, that this same, and this distinct consciousness, in the cases above mentioned, is owing to the same and distinct immaterial substances, bringing it with them to those bodies; which, whether true or no, alters not the case: since it is evident the personal identity would equally be determined by the consciousness, whether that consciousness were annexed to some individual immaterial substance or no. For, granting that the thinking substance in man must be necessarily supposed immaterial, it is evident that immaterial thinking thing may sometimes part with its past consciousness, and be restored to it again: as appears in the forgetfulness men often have of their past actions; and the mind many times recovers the memory of a past consciousness, which it had lost for twenty years together. Make these intervals of memory and forgetfulness to take their turns regularly by day and night, and you have two persons

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with the same immaterial spirit, as much as in the former instance two persons with the same body. So that self is not determined by identity or diversity of substance, which it cannot be sure of, but only by identity of consciousness. 24. Indeed it may conceive the substance whereof it is now made up to have existed formerly, united in the same conscious being: but, consciousness removed, that substance is no more itself, or makes no more a part of it, than any other substance; as is evident in the instance we have already given of a limb cut off, of whose heat, or cold, or other affections, having no longer any consciousness, it is no more of a man’s self than any other matter of the universe. In like manner it will be in reference to any immaterial substance, which is void of that consciousness whereby I am myself to myself: [if there be any part of its existence which] I cannot upon recollection join with that present consciousness whereby I am now myself, it is, in that part of its existence, no more myself than any other immaterial being. For, whatsoever any substance has thought or done, which I cannot recollect, and by my consciousness make my own thought and action, it will no more belong to me, whether a part of me thought or did it, than if it had been thought or done by any other immaterial being anywhere existing. 25. I agree, the more probable opinion is, that this consciousness is annexed to, and the affection of, one individual immaterial substance. But let men, according to their diverse hypotheses, resolve of that as they please. This every intelligent being, sensible of happiness or misery, must grant—that there is something that is himself, that he is concerned for, and would have happy; that this self has existed in a continued duration more than one instant, and therefore it is possible may exist, as it has done, months and years to come, without any certain bounds to be set to its duration; and may be the same self, by the same consciousness continued on for the future. And thus, by this consciousness he finds himself to be the same self which did such and such an action some years since, by which he comes to be happy or miserable now. In all which account of self, the same numerical substance is not considered as making the same self; but the same continued consciousness, in which several substances may have been united, and again separated from it, which, whilst they continued in a vital union with that wherein this consciousness then resided, made a part of that same self. Thus any part of our bodies, vitally united to that which is conscious in us, makes a part of ourselves: but upon separation from the vital union by which that consciousness is communicated, that which a moment since was

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part of ourselves, is now no more so than a part of another man’s self is a part of me: and it is not impossible but in a little time may become a real part of another person. And so we have the same numerical substance become a part of two different persons; and the same person preserved under the change of various substances. Could we suppose any spirit wholly stripped of all its memory or consciousness of past actions, as we find our minds always are of a great part of ours, and sometimes of them all; the union or separation of such a spiritual substance would make no variation of personal identity, any more than that of any particle of matter does. Any substance vitally united to the present thinking being is a part of that very same self which now is; anything united to it by a consciousness of former actions, makes also a part of the same self, which is the same both then and now. 26. Person, as I take it, is the name for this self. Wherever a man finds what he calls himself, there, I think, another may say is the same person. It is a forensic term, appropriating actions and their merit; and so belongs only to intelligent agents, capable of a law, and happiness, and misery. This personality extends itself beyond present existence to what is past, only by consciousness,—whereby it becomes concerned and accountable; owns and imputes to itself past actions, just upon the same ground and for the same reason as it does the present. All which is founded in a concern for happiness, the unavoidable concomitant of consciousness; that which is conscious of pleasure and pain, desiring that that self that is conscious should be happy. And therefore whatever past actions it cannot reconcile or appropriate to that present self by consciousness, it can be no more concerned in than if they had never been done: and to receive pleasure or pain, i.e. reward or punishment, on the account of any such action, is all one as to be made happy or miserable in its first being, without any demerit at all. For, supposing a man punished now for what he had done in another life, whereof he could be made to have no consciousness at all, what difference is there between that punishment and being created miserable? And therefore, conformable to this, the apostle tells us, that, at the great day, when every one shall ‘receive according to his doings, the secrets of all hearts shall be laid open.’ The sentence shall be justified by the consciousness all persons shall have, that they themselves, in what bodies soever they appear, or what substances soever that consciousness adheres to, are the same that committed those actions, and deserve that punishment for them. 27. I am apt enough to think I have, in treating of this subject, made some suppositions that will look strange to some readers, and possibly they are so

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in themselves. But yet, I think they are such as are pardonable, in this ignorance we are in of the nature of that thinking thing that is in us, and which we look on as ourselves. Did we know what it was; or how it was tied to a certain system of fleeting animal spirits; or whether it could or could not perform its operations of thinking and memory out of a body organized as ours is; and whether it has pleased God that no one such spirit shall ever be united to any but one such body, upon the right constitution of whose organs its memory should depend; we might see the absurdity of some of those suppositions I have made. But taking, as we ordinarily now do (in the dark concerning these matters,) the soul of a man for an immaterial substance, independent from matter, and indifferent alike to it all; there can, from the nature of things, be no absurdity at all to suppose that the same soul may at different times be united to different bodies, and with them make up for that time one man: as well as we suppose a part of a sheep’s body yesterday should be a part of a man’s body to-morrow, and in that union make a vital part of Melibúus himself, as well as it did of his ram. 28. To conclude: Whatever substance begins to exist, it must, during its existence, necessarily be the same: whatever compositions of substances begin to exist, during the union of those substances, the concrete must be the same: whatsoever mode begins to exist, during its existence it is the same: and so if the composition be of distinct substances and different modes, the same rule holds. Whereby it will appear, that the difficulty or obscurity that has been about this matter rather rises from the names ill-used, than from any obscurity in things themselves. For whatever makes the specific idea to which the name is applied, if that idea be steadily kept to, the distinction of anything into the same and divers will easily be conceived, and there can arise no doubt about it. 29. For, supposing a rational spirit be the idea of a man, it is easy to know what is the same man, viz. the same spirit—whether separate or in a body— will be the same man. Supposing a rational spirit vitally united to a body of a certain conformation of parts to make a man; whilst that rational spirit, with that vital conformation of parts, though continued in a fleeting successive body, remains, it will be the same man. But if to any one the idea of a man be but the vital union of parts in a certain shape; as long as that vital union and shape remain in a concrete, no otherwise the same but by a continued succession of fleeting particles, it will be the same man. For, whatever be the composition whereof the complex idea is made, whenever existence makes it one particular thing under any denomination, the same existence continued preserves it the same individual under the same denomination.

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MIND, SELF, AND SOCIETY

George Herbert Mead 24. Mind as the Individual Importation of the Social Process I have been presenting the self and the mind in terms of a social process, as the importation of the conversation of gestures into the conduct of the individual organism, so that the individual organism takes these organized attitudes of the others called out by its own attitude, in the form of its gestures, and in reacting to that response calls out other organized attitudes in the others in the community to which the individual belongs. This process can be characterized in a certain sense in terms of the “I” and the “me,” the “me” being that group of organized attitudes to which the individual responds as an “I.” What I want particularly to emphasize is the temporal and logical preexistence of the social process to the self-conscious individual that arises in it.1 The conversation of gestures is a part of the social process which is going on. It is not something that the individual alone makes possible. What the development of language, especially the significant symbol, has rendered possible is just the taking over of this external social situation into the conduct of the individual himself. There follows from this the enormous development which belongs to human society, the possibility of the prevision of what is going to take place in the response of other individuals, and a preliminary George Herbert Mead. Mind, Self and Society. Edited by Charles W. Morris. Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1934. Reprinted by permission of the publisher, University of Chicago Press, Copyright © 1934. 1. The relation of mind and body is that lying between the organization of the self in its behavior as a member of a rational community and the bodily organism as a physical thing. The rational attitude which characterizes the human being is then the relationship of the whole process in which the individual is engaged to himself as reflected in his assumption of the organized roles of the others in stimulating himself to his response. This self as distinguished from the others lies within the field of communication, and they lie also within this field. What may be indicated to others or one’s self and does not respond to such gestures of indication is, in the field of perception, what we call a physical thing. The human body is, especially in its analysis, regarded as a physical thing. The line of demarcation between the self and the body is found, then, first of all in the social organization of the act within which the self arises, in its contrast with the activity of the physiological organism (MS). The legitimate basis of distinction between mind and body is between the social patterns and the patterns of the organism itself. Education must bring the two closely together. We have, as yet, no comprehending category. This does not mean to say that there is anything logically against it; it is merely a lack of our apparatus or knowledge (1927).

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adjustment to this by the individual. These, in turn, produce a different social situation which is again reflected in what I have termed the “me,” so that the individual himself takes a different attitude. Consider a politician or a statesman putting through some project in which he has the attitude of the community in himself. He knows how the community reacts to this proposal. He reacts to this expression of the community in his own experience—he feels with it. He has a set of organized attitudes which are those of the community. His own contribution, the “I” in this case, is a project of reorganization, a project which he brings forward to the community as it is reflected in himself. He himself changes, of course, in so far as he brings this project forward and makes it a political issue. There has now arisen a new social situation as a result of the project which he is presenting. The whole procedure takes place in his own experience as well as in the general experience of the community. He is successful to the degree that the final “me” reflects the attitude of all in the community. What I am pointing out is that what occurs takes place not simply in his own mind but rather that his mind is the expression in his own conduct of this social situation, this great co-operative community process which is going on. I want to avoid the implication that the individual is taking something that is objective and making it subjective. There is an actual process of living together on the part of all members of the community which takes place by means of gestures. The gestures are certain stages in the cooperative activities which mediate the whole process. Now, all that has taken place in the appearance of the mind is that this process has been in some degree taken over into the conduct of the particular individual. There is a certain symbol, such as the policeman uses when he directs traffic. That is something that is out there. It does not become subjective when the engineer, who is engaged by the city to examine its traffic regulations, takes the same attitude the policeman takes with reference to traffic, and takes the attitude also of the drivers of machines. We do imply that he has the driver’s organization; he knows that stopping means slowing down, putting on the brakes. There is a definite set of parts of his organism so trained that under certain circumstances he brings the machine to a stop. The raising of the policeman’s hand is the gesture which calls out the various acts by means of which the machine is checked. Those various acts are in the expert’s own organization; he can take the attitude of both the policeman and the driver. Only in this sense has the social process been made “subjective.” If the expert just did it as a child does, it would be play; but if it is done for the actual regulation of traffic, then there is the operation of what we term mind. Mind is nothing but the

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importation of this external process into the conduct of the individual so as to meet the problems that arise. This peculiar organization arises out of a social process that is logically its antecedent. A community within which the organism acts in such a cooperative fashion that the action of one is the stimulus to the other to respond, and so on, is the antecedent of the peculiar type of organization we term a mind, or a self. Take the simple family relation, where there is the male and the female and the child which has to be cared for. Here is a process which can only go on through interactions within this group. It cannot be said that the individuals come first and the community later, for the individuals arise in the very process itself, just as much as the human body or any multi-cellular form is one in which differentiated cells arise. There has to be a life-process going on in order to have the differentiated cells; in the same way there has to be a social process going on in order that there may be individuals. It is just as true in society as it is in the physiological situation that there could not be the individual if there was not the process of which he is a part. Given such a social process, there is the possibility of human intelligence when this social process, in terms of the conversation of gestures, is taken over into the conduct of the individual—and then there arises, of course, a different type of individual in terms of the responses now possible. There might conceivably be an individual who simply plays as the child does, without getting into a social game; but the human individual is possible because there is a social process in which it can function responsibly. The attitudes are parts of the social reaction; the cries would not maintain themselves as vocal gestures unless they did call out certain responses in the others; the attitude itself could only exist as such in this interplay of gestures. The mind is simply the interplay of such gestures in the form of significant symbols. We must remember that the gesture is there only in its relationship to the response, to the attitude. One would not have words unless there were such responses. Language would never have arisen as a set of bare arbitrary terms which were attached to certain stimuli. Words have arisen out of a social interrelationship. One of Gulliver’s tales was of a community in which a machine was created into which the letters of the alphabet could be mechanically fed in an endless number of combinations, and then the members of the community gathered around to see how the letters arranged after each rotation, on the theory that they might come in the form of an Iliad or one of Shakespeare’s plays, or some other great work. The assumption back of this would be that symbols are entirely independent of what we term their meaning. The assumption is baseless: there cannot be symbols unless there

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are responses. There would not be a call for assistance if there was not a tendency to respond to the cry of distress. It is such significant symbols, in the sense of a sub-set of social stimuli initiating a co-operative response, that do in a certain sense constitute our mind, provided that not only the symbol but also the responses are in our own nature. What the human being has succeeded in doing is in organizing the response to a certain symbol which is a part of the social act, so that he takes the attitude of the other person who co-operates with him. It is that which gives him a mind. The sentinel of a herd is that member of the herd which is more sensitive to odor or sound than the others. At the approach of danger, he starts to run earlier than the others, who then follow along, in virtue of a herding tendency to run together. There is a social stimulus, a gesture, if you like, to which the other forms respond. The first form gets the odor earlier and starts to run, and its starting to run is a stimulus to the others to run also. It is all external; there is no mental process involved. The sentinel does not regard itself as the individual who is to give a signal; it just runs at a certain moment and so starts the others to run. But with a mind, the animal that gives the signal also takes the attitude of the others who respond to it. He knows what his signal means. A man who calls “fire” would be able to call out in himself the reaction he calls out in the other. In so far as the man can take the attitude of the other—his attitude of response to fire, his sense of terror—that response to his own cry is something that makes of his conduct a mental affair, as over against the conduct of the others.2 But the only thing that has happened here is that what takes place externally in the herd has been imported into the conduct of the man. There is the same signal and the same tendency to respond, but the man not only can give the signal but also can arouse in himself the attitude of the terrified escape, and through calling that out he can come back upon his own tendency to call out and can check it. He can react upon himself in taking the organized attitude of the whole group in trying to escape from danger. There is nothing more subjective about it than that the response to his own stimulus can be found in his own conduct, and that he can utilize the conversation of gestures that takes place to determine his own conduct. If he can so act, he can set up a rational control, and thus make possible a far more highly organized society than other2. Language as made up of significant symbols is what we mean by mind. The content of our minds is (1) inner conversation, ‘the importation of conversation from the social group to the individual’ (2) . . . imagery. Imagery should be regarded in relation to the behavior in which it functions (1931). Imagery plays just the part in the act that hunger does in the food process (1912).

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wise. The process is one which does not utilize a man endowed with a consciousness where there was no consciousness before, but rather an individual who takes over the whole social process into his own conduct. That ability, of course, is dependent first of all on the symbol being one to which he can respond; and so far as we know, the vocal gesture has been the condition for the development of that type of symbol. Whether it can develop without the vocal gesture I cannot tell. I want to be sure that we see that the content put into the mind is only a development and product of social interaction. It is a development which is of enormous importance, and which leads to complexities and complications of society which go almost beyond our power to trace, but originally it is nothing but the taking over of the attitude of the other. To the extent that the animal can take the attitude of the other and utilize that attitude for the control of his own conduct, we have what is termed mind; and that is the only apparatus involved in the appearance of the mind. I know of no way in which intelligence or mind could arise or could have arisen, other than through the internalization by the individual of social processes of experience and behavior, that is, through this internalization of the conversation of significant gestures, as made possible by the individual’s taking the attitudes of other individuals toward himself and toward what is being thought about. And if mind or thought has arisen in this way, then there neither can be nor could have been any mind or thought without language; and the early stages of the development of language must have been prior to the development of mind or thought. 25. The “I” and the “Me” as Phases of the Self We come now to the position of the self-conscious self or mind in the community. Such a self finds its expression in self-assertion, or in the devotion of itself to the cause of the community. The self appears as a new type of individual in the social whole. There is a new social whole because of the appearance of the type of individual mind I have described, and because of the self with its own assertion of itself or its own identification with the community. The self is the important phase in the development because it is in the possibility of the importation of this social attitude into the responses of the whole community that such a society could arise. The change that takes place through this importation of the conversation of gestures into the conduct of the individual is one that takes place in the experience of all of the component individuals.

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These, of course, are not the only changes that take place in the community. In speech definite changes take place that nobody is aware of at all. It requires the investigation of scientists to discover that such processes have taken place. This is also true of other phases of human organization. They change, we say, unconsciously, as is illustrated in such a study of the myth as Wundt has carried out in his Völkerpsychologie. The myth carries an account of the way in which organization has taken place while largely without any conscious direction—and that sort of change is going on all the time. Take a person’s attitude toward a new fashion. It may at first be one of objection. After a while he gets to the point of thinking of himself in this changed fashion, noticing the clothes in the window and seeing himself in them. The change has taken place in him without his being aware of it. There is, then, a process by means of which the individual in interaction with others inevitably becomes like others in doing the same thing, without that process appearing in what we term consciousness. We become conscious of the process when we do definitely take the attitude of the others, and this situation must be distinguished from the previous one. Perhaps one says that he does not care to dress in a certain fashion, but prefers to be different; then he is taking the attitude of others toward himself into his own conduct. When an ant from another nest is introduced into the nest of other forms, these turn on it and tear it to pieces. The attitude in the human community may be that of the individual himself, refusing to submit himself because he does take that common attitude. The ant case is an entirely external affair, but in the human individual it is a matter of taking the attitudes of the others and adjusting one’s self or fighting it out. It is this recognition of the individual as a self in the process of using his self-consciousness which gives him the attitude of self-assertion or the attitude of devotion to the community. He has become, then, a definite self. In such a case of self-assertion there is an entirely different situation from that of the member of the pack who perhaps dominates it, and may turn savagely on different members of it. There an individual is just acting instinctively, we say, in a certain situation. In the human society we have an individual who not only takes his own attitude but takes the attitude in a certain sense of his subjects; in so far as he is dominating he knows what to expect. When that occurs in the experience of the individual a different response results with different emotional accompaniments, from that in the case of the leader of the pack. In the latter case there is simple anger or hostility, and in the other case there is the experience of the self asserting itself consciously over against other selves, with the sense of power, of domination. In general, when the community reaction has been im-

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ported into the individual there is a new value in experience and a new order of response. We have discussed the self from the point of view of the “I” and the “me,” the “me” representing that group of attitudes which stands for others in the community, especially that organized group of responses which we have detailed in discussing the game on the one hand and social institutions on the other. In these situations there is a certain organized group of attitudes which answer to any social act on the part of the individual organism. In any co-operative process, such as the family, the individual calls out a response from the other members of the group. Now, to the extent that those responses can be called out in the individual so that he can answer to them, we have both those contents which go to make up the self, the “other” and the “I.” The distinction expresses itself in our experience in what we call the recognition of others and the recognition of ourselves in the others. We cannot realize ourselves except in so far as we can recognize the other in his relationship to us. It is as he takes the attitude of the other that the individual is able to realize himself as a self. We are referring, of course, to a social situation as distinct from such bare organic responses as reflexes of the organism, some of which we have already discussed, as in the case where a person adjusts himself unconsciously to those about him. In such an experience there is no self-consciousness. One attains self-consciousness only as he takes, or finds himself stimulated to take, the attitude of the other. Then he is in a position of reacting in himself to that attitude of the other. Suppose we find ourselves in an economic situation. It is when we take the attitude of the other in making an offer to us that we can express ourselves in accepting or declining such an offer. That is a different response of the self from a distinctly automatic offering that can take place without self-consciousness. A small boy thrusts an advertising bill into our hand and we take it without any definite consciousness of him or of ourselves. Our thought may be elsewhere but the process still goes on. The same thing is true, of course, in the care of infants. Young children experience that which comes to them, they adjust themselves to it in an immediate fashion, without there being present in their experience a self. When a self does appear it always involves an experience of another; there could not be an experience of a self simply by itself. The plant or the lower animal reacts to its environment, but there is no experience of a self. When a self does appear in experience it appears over against the other, and we have been delineating the condition under which this other does appear in the experience of the human animal, namely in the presence of that sort of

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stimulation in the co-operative activity which arouses in the individual himself the same response it arouses in the other. When the response of the other becomes an essential part in the experience or conduct of the individual; when taking the attitude of the other becomes an essential part in his behavior—then the individual appears in his own experience as a self; and until this happens he does not appear as a self. Rational society, of course, is not limited to any specific set of individuals. Any person who is rational can become a part of it. The attitude of the community toward our own response is imported into ourselves in terms of the meaning of what we are doing. This occurs in its widest extent in universal discourse, in the reply which the rational world makes to our remark. The meaning is as universal as the community; it is necessarily involved in the rational character of that community; it is the response that the world made up out of rational beings inevitably makes to our own statement. We both get the object and ourselves into experience in terms of such a process; the other appears in our own experience in so far as we do take such an organized and generalized attitude. If one meets a person on the street whom he fails to recognize, one’s reaction toward him is that toward any other who is a member of the same community. He is the other, the organized, generalized other, if you like. One takes his attitude over against one’s self. If he turns in one direction one is to go in another direction. One has his response as an attitude within himself. It is having that attitude within himself that makes it possible for one to be a self. That involves something beyond the mere turning to the right, as we say, instinctively, without self-consciousness. To have self-consciousness one must have the attitude of the other in one’s own organism as controlling the thing that he is going to do. What appears in the immediate experience of one’s self in taking that attitude is what we term the “me.” It is that self which is able to maintain itself in the community, that is recognized in the community in so far as it recognizes the others. Such is the phase of the self which I have referred to as that of the “me.” Over against the “me” is the “I.” The individual not only has rights, but he has duties; he is not only a citizen, a member of the community, but he is one who reacts to this community and in his reaction to it, as we have seen in the conversation of gestures, changes it. The “I” is the response of the individual to the attitude of the community as this appears in his own experience. His response to that organized attitude in turn changes it. As we have pointed out, this is a change which is not present in his own experience until after it takes place. The “I” appears in our experience in memory. It is

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only after we have acted that we know what we have done; it is only after we have spoken that we know what we have said. The adjustment to that organized world which is present in our own nature is one that represents the “me” and is constantly there. But if the response to it is a response which is of the nature of the conversation of gestures, if it creates a situation which is in some sense novel, if one puts up his side of the case, asserts himself over against others and insists that they take a different attitude toward himself, then there is something important occurring that is not previously present in experience. The general conditions under which one is going to act may be present in one’s experience, but he is as ignorant of just how he is going to respond as is the scientist of the particular hypothesis he will evolve out of the consideration of a problem. Such and such things are happening that are contrary to the theory that has been held. How are they to be explained? Take the discovery that a gram of radium would keep a pot of water boiling, and seemingly lead to no expenditure of energy. Here something is happening that runs contrary to the theory of physics up to the conception of radium activity. The scientist who has these facts before him has to pick out some explanation. He suggests that the radium atom is breaking down, and is consequently setting free energy. On the previous theory an atom was a permanent affair out of which one could not get energy. But now if it is assumed that the atom itself is a system involving an interrelationship of energies, then the breaking down of such a system sets free what is relatively an enormous amount of energy. The point I am making is that the idea of the scientist comes to him, it is not as yet there in his own mind. His mind, rather, is the process of the appearance of that idea. A person asserting his rights on a certain occasion has rehearsed the situation in his own mind; he has reacted toward the community and when the situation arises he arouses himself and says something already in his mind. But when he said it to himself in the first place he did not know what he was going to say. He then said something that was novel to himself, just as the scientist’s hypothesis is a novelty when it flashes upon him. Such a novel reply to the social situation involved in the organized set of attitudes constitutes the “I” as over against the “me.” The “me” is a conventional, habitual individual. It is always there. It has to have those habits, those responses which everybody has; otherwise the individual could not be a member of the community. But an individual is constantly reacting to such an organized community in the way of expressing himself, not necessarily asserting himself in the offensive sense but expressing himself, being himself in

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such a co-operative process as belongs to any community. The attitudes involved are gathered from the group, but the individual in whom they are organized has the opportunity of giving them an expression which perhaps has never taken place before. This brings out the general question as to whether anything novel can appear. Practically, of course, the novel is constantly happening and the recognition of this gets its expression in more general terms in the concept of emergence. Emergence involves a reorganization, but the reorganization brings in something that was not there before. The first time oxygen and hydrogen come together, water appears. Now water is a combination of hydrogen and oxygen, but water was not there before in the separate elements. The conception of emergence is a concept which recent philosophy has made much of. If you look at the world simply from the point of view of a mathematical equation in which there is absolute equality of the different sides, then, of course, there is no novelty. The world is simply a satisfaction of that equation. Put in any values for X and Y and the same equation holds. The equations do hold, it is true but in their holding something else in fact arises that was not there before. For instance, there is a group of individuals that have to work together. In a society there must be a set of common organized habits of response found in all, but the way in which individuals act under specific circumstances gives rise to all of the individual differences which characterize the different persons. The fact that they have to act in a certain common fashion does not deprive them of originality. The common language is there, but a different use of it is made in every new contact between persons; the element of novelty in the reconstruction takes place through the reaction of the individuals to the group to which they belong. That reconstruction is no more given in advance than is the particular hypothesis which the scientist brings forward given in the statement of the problem. Now, it is that reaction of the individual to the organized “me,” the “me” that is in a certain sense simply a member of the community, which represents the “I” in the experience of the self. The relative values of the “me” and the “I” depend very much on the situation. If one is maintaining his property in the community, it is of primary importance that he is a member of that community, for it is his taking of the attitude of the others that guarantees to him the recognition of his own rights. To be a “me” under those circumstances is the important thing. It gives him his position, gives him the dignity of being a member in the community, it is the source of his emotional response to the values that belong to

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him as a member of the community. It is the basis for his entering into the experience of others. At times it is the response of the ego or “I” to a situation, the way in which one expresses himself, that brings to one a feeling of prime importance. One now asserts himself against a certain situation, and the emphasis is on the response. The demand is freedom from conventions, from given laws. Of course, such a situation is only possible where the individual appeals, so to speak, from a narrow and restricted community to a larger one, that is, larger in the logical sense of having rights which are not so restricted. One appeals from fixed conventions which no longer have any meaning to a community in which the rights shall be publicly recognized, and one appeals to others on the assumption that there is a group of organized others that answer to one’s own appeal—even if the appeal be made to posterity. In that case there is the attitude of the “I” as over against the “me.” Both aspects of the “I” and “me” are essential to the self in its full expression. One must take the attitude of the others in a group in order to belong to a community; he has to employ that outer social world taken within himself in order to carry on thought. It is through his relationship to others in that community, because of the rational social processes that obtain in that community, that he has being as a citizen. On the other hand, the individual is constantly reacting to the social attitudes, and changing in this cooperative process the very community to which he belongs. Those changes may be humble and trivial ones. One may not have anything to say, although he takes a long time to say it. And yet a certain amount of adjustment and readjustment takes place. We speak of a person as a conventional individual; his ideas are exactly the same as those of his neighbors; he is hardly more than a “me” under the circumstances; his adjustments are only the slight adjustments that take place, as we say, unconsciously. Over against that there is the person who has a definite personality, who replies to the organized attitude in a way which makes a significant difference. With such a person it is the “I” that is the more important phase of the experience. Those two constantly appearing phases are the important phases in the self.3 3. Psychologists as a rule deal with the processes that are involved in what we term “perception,” but have very largely left out of account the character of the self. It has been largely through the pathologist that the importance of the self has entered into psychology. Dissociations have centered attention on the self, and have shown how absolutely fundamental is this social character of the mind. That which constitutes the personality lies in this sort of give-andtake between members in a group that engage in a co-operative process. It is this activity that has led to the humanly intelligent animal.

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Bibliography Aristotle. The Complete Works of Aristotle (The Revised Oxford Translation). 2 vols. Edited by Jonathan Barnes. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984. Bennett, Jonathan. Rationality. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1964. Bourdieu, Pierre. Outline of a Theory of Practice. Translated by Richard Nice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977. Chomsky, Noam. Rules and Representations. New York: Columbia University Press, 1980. Churchland, Paul M. The Engine of Reason, the Seat of the Soul. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1995. Dennett, D. C. Content and Consciousness. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1969. Descartes, René. The Philosophical Works of Descartes. 2 vols. Translated by Elizabeth S. Haldane and G.R.T. Ross. 1911. Corrected edition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1931. Fodor, Jerry A. Representations: Philosophical Essays on the Foundations of Cognitive Science. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1981. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. Phenomenology of Spirit. Translated by A. V. Miller. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977. Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. Translated by Joan Stambaugh. Albany: SUNY Press, 1996. ———. “Letter On Humanism.” Translated by Frank A. Capuzzi, with J. Glenn Gray and David Farrell Krell. In Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell. New York: Harper & Row, 1977. Husserl, Edmund. Cartesian Meditations. Translated by Dorian Cairns. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1960. Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Judgment. Translated by Werner S. Pluhar. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987. ———. Critique of Pure Reason. Translated by Norman Kemp Smith. London: Macmillan, 1953. Locke, John. An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. 2 vols. Edited by A. C. Fraser. New York: Dover, 1959. Margolis, Joseph. Culture and Cultural Entities: Toward a New Unity of Science. Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1984. Mohanty, Jitendra Nath. The Concept of Intentionality. St. Louis: Warren H. Green, 1972. Piaget, Jean. Structuralism. Translated and edited by Chaninah Maschler. New York: Basic Books, 1970. Stich, Stephen P. From Folk Psychology to Cognitive Science: The Case Against Belief. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1983. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Philosophical Investigations. 3d ed. Translated by G.E.M. Anscombe. New York: Macmillan, 1968.

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7 Norms and Values

Introduction Once you treat the problem of knowledge as central to an adequate philosophy, you commit yourself to the admissibility of objective norms. That is not the same, however, as discerning what those objective norms must be. For knowledge is an artifact internal to a symbiotized world, a world in which no cognitive transparency can be counted on to ensure the requisite correspondence. That was the price, you remember, of overcoming the double threat of skepticism (representationality and correspondence). The upshot is that if knowledge is an artifact, then norms must be artifacts as well. The fact is, any direct realism (a realism that is not also a constructivist interpretation of our cognizing powers, not an idealism) mocks philosophy’s history, spites itself, fails to come to terms with the acknowledged threats of skepticism. The lesson is not that objectivity is impossible but that it can only be recovered artifactually. Since first- and second-order inquiries are inseparable, that has the consequence of making both the norms of truth and the norms of legitimation artifacts at one and the same time. If you grasp the force of this concession, it becomes clear that to admit that the norms of practical life are artifacts of human interest is not in the least incompatible

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with the search for an objective morality. That comes as a surprise. Truth and rightness are on a par in this regard, even though there are obviously important differences between our practical and theoretical concerns. What makes for a reasonable norm of objectivity in science cannot be counted on in moral matters. But a Hegelian-like constructivism obliges us to count truth and knowledge as constituted norms subject to some form of historied revision; and a constructivist account of norms precludes any principled disjunction between theoretical and practical reason. There you have the rational motivation and the point of the economy of Karl Marx’s promising but undeveloped notion of praxis (see Kosík). It affords another way of strengthening the prospects of Weltanschauungsphilosophie. Artifacts, however, are not fictitious or unreal. It’s merely that, in the most trivial of senses, the artifactual does not occur “naturally” in the world. But then, the entire intelligible world is an artifact. That’s not to say, remember, that there is no world independent of our inquiries: to say only that would be to make the world a fiction—possibly a fiction of another fiction (selves), which we may well accuse Hume of fostering. That would never do. That there is an independent world is a posit internal to our inquiries, a view that Kuhn and Putnam share (at least at certain stages of their theorizing). But what that independent world is like cannot be independent of such inquiries: “subject” and “object” are jointly constituted, we conjecture, only within a symbiotized world; for we judge our conjectures to be historicized, and we find ourselves free to alter such distinctions as we think best when epistemic conditions change. The intelligible world is an artifact—holistically. What obtains within its boundaries, determinately, whatever we do not manufacture or “produce,” is what we mean by independent “nature”; what answers to our own activity and work (the arts, technology, history, language, thought, and act or deed) constitutes the “cultural” world. The things that belong to the latter (Intentional entities) cannot exist save as indissolubly embedded, or indissolubly emergent with respect to, the “natural” world. We ourselves, persons or selves, are, paradigmatically, emergent denizens of both worlds, in effect, hybrid entities. As a consequence, there cannot be a theory of selves or “subjects” that does not reconcile the dual function of what it is to be a self: viz. (a) being one of an aggregate of agents capable of producing cultural artifacts, and (b) being the (philosophically puzzling) constituting power in accord with which the intelligible world is, holistically, deemed an artifact of an indissoluble symbiosis. That begins to explain why, in theories like Kant’s, Hegel’s, Husserl’s, and Heidegger’s, you will find a similar mystery as to the

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relationship between merely human subjects (formed and found in the world) and the seemingly impersonal, transcendental, nonindividuated, originary, nearly divine “subjective” power at the root of the supposed symbiosis by which skepticism is defeated. There is no satisfactory analysis of “Understanding,” “Geist,” “Transcendental Ego,” “Dasein,” in the accounts of the theorists just mentioned. To the extent they assign a certain cognitive privilege to their reading of item (b), above, they fail utterly. The only viable clue lies in accepting symbiosis (holistically) and denying any distinct cognizing power (determinately) to the subjective side of symbiosis itself. Hegel is the only one of the four figures mentioned who may be at all plausibly construed to have avoided the fatal claim. (Of course, the claim itself generates another form of skepticism—if not complete incredulity.) In any case, the analysis of (b) is the principal unfinished business of the twenty-first century. But what it now yields, much less grandly than had been supposed in the Kantian and post-Kantian literature, is the sense in which the artifactual standing of the determinate norms of science and morality need not threaten our second-order reflections about what to regard as objective in the way of truth and rightness. The fact is: the functions assigned the self exhibit (irreducible) second-order powers. That signifies that selves are not (merely) first-order “natural-kind” entities, but also that, in exercising their second-order powers, they exercise no cognitive competences beyond the resources of their first-order powers. There you have the mark of what is common to transcendentalism and postmodernism! In a word: pre-Kantian philosophy imposes on us the burdens of skepticism, which we cannot ignore and which Kant and German Idealism have shown us a way of overcoming. That remains the pivot of all genuinely modern epistemologies. Nevertheless, constructivism and symbiosis are not ordinary truth-claims that either science or philosophy could possibly confirm. They are instead holist conjectures about how to construe the entire encompassing universe (housing our determinate truth-claims and their determinate legitimation, to be sure) so as to avoid the skeptic’s paradoxes and, at the same time, bring our truth-bearing inquiries into accord with a perspicuous model of the intelligible world. Many worry that there is no way to ensure the objectivity and categorical force of moral norms. The world would be a “queer” place, they say, if it harbored moral norms as part of its real structure. That is the candid challenge J. L. Mackie offers. He’s right, of course, but the reason is elusive. Mackie supposes that there is an independently structured world that we in-

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quire into; that the truth about the world pretty well accords with the requirements of neutral inquiry and objective perception collected within the terms of the correspondence theory. So Mackie’s skepticism about moral norms derives from a deeper (unperceived) skepticism about the very possibility of knowledge. (Here, Mackie’s view is the natural mate of Davidson’s direct realism.) Adopt Hegel’s route, however, and Mackie’s implicit skepticism (and Davidson’s confidence) is (are) precluded at a stroke; for the price of each is that you make joint provision (at once) for objective norms of both sorts, the theoretical and the practical. There is no difference in the standing of truth as a norm of knowledge and the standing of obligation or rightness as a norm of conduct. If moral norms are “queer” (as Mackie says), then truth may be as queer in the way of knowledge. Mackie fails to make the connection. The requirements of symbiosis preclude any disjunction between the two. Nevertheless, there are reasons for speculating about what the world is like “independently of our inquiries,” in a sense in which it makes no similar sense to conjecture about what, “independently,” would be good or right or obligatory for humans. There’s an asymmetry there. When we formulate our criteria of what to count as independent nature, we are drawn to predictive and technological success linked to our theories about the unseen structure of the physical world. That cannot be gainsaid, as the philosophers of science regularly remind us (see Hacking and Cartwright). In a quite remarkable way, Charles Sanders Peirce collected all such considerations under the name of “Secondness,” the intuition (no more than an intuition, certainly not a criterion) of what exists—what resists us and other existent things, what is causally efficacious. There you have the slimmest clue to the “independence” of the independent world—even within the blind constraints of symbiosis. But that hardly determines what is true about the world or what truth is. There is, also, nothing in the way of mere Secondness that would lead us to decide what to count as objectively moral or what the “independently” obligatory or the right could possibly be. There is, of course, Secondness itself—which is to say: whatever it is that morality rightly favors should accord with the constraints of Secondness (existence). In its turn, this means that morality may be plausibly defended (if at all) on grounds linked to conditions of survival and the like—prudential needs— which are not, as such, a moral matter. But it certainly cannot be said that the obligatory can be derived in any way from what merely exists. Peirce serves us here as a stalking-horse, a lucky find shuttling between pared-down Kantian theories (the teleologism of reason at the limit of in-

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quiry) and pared-down Hegelian theories (evolutionism superseding the uncertainties of open history). What Peirce isolates in an incomparably clear way, within constructivist terms, is the theme of what, “objectively,” exists. But he falters nevertheless: he loses the thread of the artifactual (the anthropomorphized) standing of objectivity. The issue is of pivotal importance. Peirce successfully links the notion of what is objectively real to what can be rightly predicated as true of what objectively exists—by way of interpreting what to count as the entities and structures of the world (what—the latter— Peirce calls Thirdness). In this way, Peirce enters the space between Kant’s constructivism and Hegel’s symbiosis. (See Chapter 4.) Still, at the critical point, Peirce pretends that these are interpretive (triadic) processes in nature at large, altogether independent of any human semiotic—hence, independent of any human culture. That, of course, is the theme of a literal-minded evolutionism apt for yielding objective norms that are not also human artifacts—in moral and social matters as well as in the natural sciences. (You may imagine that Hegel yields to the same temptation, but that is neither certain nor entirely clear.) Peirce oscillates, therefore, between an overly sanguine direct realism (in science and morality) and a symbiosis of genuinely realist and idealist elements. He cannot consistently favor both. There you have the fatal flaw of Kantianism as well as a remarkably legible clue about the fatal pretensions of normative objectivity in science and morality in late-twentieth-century philosophy. It is admittedly an eccentric clue—no one worries the point in Peirce—but it is a compelling one for all that. You will find the Peircean theme (evolutionism or progressivism replacing historicism) in the inductivist and falsificationist accounts of Lakatos and Popper, just as you will find it in the “discourse ethics” of Jürgen Habermas. It plays the same role in both: the unresolved (Kantian) dilemma of affirming and denying the constructivist standing of epistemic and moral norms. Symptomatically, it is not entirely clear or clearly explained whether, and if so, how, the evolution of nature (a fortiori, science) has or lacks a telos, or how, if nature (or science) lacks a telos, it nevertheless may rightly be construed as tending toward the lawlike (or the objectively true). It is not enough to say that there is no universal law toward which nature evolves through its infinite career, or that there is no Truth that science approaches asymptotically. One must (to redeem Peirce) also give a satisfactory account of “fallibilism,” which, on Peirce’s objectivist or realist grounds, cannot be restricted to a mere human conjecture. There is no such account, and the lack affects the theories of Popper, Lakatos, Putnam, Habermas, Bernstein, Dewey, and others, all of whom were profoundly

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influenced in their own forms of progressivism by Peirce’s doctrine. Yet Peirce is tempted by his own ingenious brand of what may be an illicit transcendentalism. Here, a great economy suggests itself. For Peirce captures in a lean way the difference between existence and reality (the difference between things and their properties): he sees very clearly that what is independently real in nature (what exists independently) is primarily a matter of Secondness. Nevertheless, he fails to heed in a consistent way the double import of acknowledging that even Secondness must, as such, be posited within the interpretive space of Thirdness (or symbiosis). To separate Secondness and Thirdness is, ultimately, to yield in an objectivist or Cartesian direction. Put less fancifully, we do have strong intuitions about what to count as the norm of truth or objectivity in the sciences—predictive, explanatory, and technological. (That is how we read “Secondness.”) This is, of course, the point of Kuhn’s benign paradox: viz. that the independent world cannot be distinguished from what, under the historicized conditions of inquiry, we posit as the independent world. But we have no comparably compelling intuition about what is objective (that answers to Secondness) in the way of morality (or practical life). Peirce confuses the issue because, both in theoretical and practical matters, he pretends that there is a triadic, interpretive process at work in nature quite apart from human interventions. That is the common theme of inductivism, fallibilism, progressivism, evolutionism, and liberalism, whether in science or in moral and political matters. At bottom, all such doctrines rest on a confusion between a self-sufficient (direct) realism and the symbiosis of realism and idealism. That is certainly the mark of Peirce’s philosophy: also, the mark of nearly all twentieth-century philosophy, whether Anglo-American or continental European. Peirce’s clue is hardly irrelevant, however, since late-twentieth-century thought is still occupied with recovering the post-Kantian resolution of the twin threats of skepticism. In any event, the would-be objectivity of truth in science and the objectivity of rightness (and the like) in moral matters are artifacts of the same powers of rational inquiry—functioning entirely within the holist space of our symbiotized world. They cannot be convincingly thought to be independent of each other (at this late date). In particular, moral norms cannot be objective except as reasoned projections of what is at least congruent with what we suppose exists. But they develop along different lines. That means, effectively, that there can be only two sorts of constraint on what to regard as objective moral norms: (a) congruity with what is real re-

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garding what exists, and (b) an initial accord (perhaps no more) with what, in the cultural world, counts as the sittlich or lebensformlich or traditional or habituated norms of human practice. Anything more sanguine is bound to “cheat” in Peirce’s way: fancying that moral norms may be found in independent nature (as in Aristotle) or that moral norms are compelling on (“pure”) rational grounds that are not in any way confined to the human world (as in Kant). To grasp the inherent limitation of moral norms is to grasp at once the impossibility of any uniquely objective standard of practical life. There may not be a compelling argument for a bivalent theory of objective truth in science; but there cannot be any merely bivalent account in moral and political matters! (The norms of Secondness catch up our denotative and referential intuitions: the norms of Thirdness, our predicative practices. Here, we have returned once again to the weltanschauung-like.) By Secondness, let us be clear, Peirce meant a brute, dyadic intuition of resistance (within whatever world we conjecture we inhabit—implicating Thirdness); by Thirdness, he meant an interpretive, predicative imputation regarding the real structure and properties of what we take to exist (presupposing Secondness). Peirce believed that ethical matters (which extend in his account to logic, since logic is a normative science) were also independent of the “opinions of you and me.” But that cannot be convincingly maintained if persons are artifacts or if Thirdness (in Peirce’s usage) cannot be separated (as Peirce apparently believes it can) from human intervention. Objectivity may be independent of the “opinions of you and me,” but it cannot (as we now understand matters) be independent of the subjective conditions of human inquiry. Here, Peirce’s evolutionism draws him toward a naive optimism regarding both truth and goodness—his speculations about “the long run.” We cannot aspire to any such telic assurances: that is the Hegelian lesson. There you have the fundamental difference between Peirce and Hegel— for Peirce believes himself to have corrected Hegel. Both science and morality focus on objective predicates: characteristically, the predicates of the physical sciences are not normative, though they are constrained by considerations of truth (which are normative); whereas the predicates of any moral code are themselves inherently normative. (But bear in mind the predicates of the medical sciences.) The trick is this. The natural sciences are primarily keyed to prediction and technological control—which answers to (Peirce’s) Secondness; but morality, which makes no sense if it is not more or less congruent with the constraints of Secondness, are focused entirely in conformity with, or revision of, our sittlich norms, our customs and mores (which is to say, with

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Thirdness, in Peirce’s idiom). But then, objectivity in the natural sciences is normative, in the sense of how best to maximize our predictive, explanatory, and technological powers; whereas objectivity in moral, political, legal, and related matters cannot be altogether segregated from the norms embedded in our social practices or opinions. We cannot invoke quite the same considerations in our theoretical and practical concerns. Still, they are inextricably entwined, and norms are operative in both. Peirce does not concede the difference, because he supposed (mistakenly) that Thirdness (whether with regard to science or morality) might be independent of human opinion as such. The truth is that predictability and technological control are relatively free of our opinions, in the benign sense in which Secondness is brute, though not otherwise (see Kuhn); whereas conformity with practical norms is never free in that sense but only (“relatively” free) of “arbitrary” opinion. (You see the self-serving thrust of such distinctions.) The reason is simply that “objective” norms are interpretively projected from whatever our consensual social customs (our Sitten) happen to be; they are not those customs tout court: they form at the very least a normative critique of such customs, but they cannot (in their turn) altogether escape a sittlich limitation. In any case, what may be said in favor of an objective morality? The answer is surprisingly spare and is easily drawn from our analysis of reference and predication and the threat of skepticism. Bear in mind that we found that referential and predicative success cannot be logically formal. Furthermore, the conditions of that success are explicable only in terms of our lebensformlich practices. Hegel was remarkably astute to have grasped that the critique of Kant’s epistemological and moral formalism should exploit one and the same objection. We must bear in mind that the Sitten (the customs and traditional practices) of every society already include, operatively, some set of prima facie epistemic and practical norms. They cannot claim more than prima facie validity, but they may claim something more important. The objectivity of our sciences and morality centers on our maintaining a critical equilibration between those norms and the historically evolving beliefs and convictions they would legitimate. Kant was not receptive to such open-ended possibilities, as we learn from the preface to the second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason. But once you concede that not only our beliefs but our norms, our concepts, our most fundamental categories, our logic, our methodologies, our sense of systematic closure in any sector of inquiry, are subject to sittlich transformation, you cannot fail to appreciate the force of Hegel’s sense of historicity—even if you suppose (as many do) that

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Hegel himself posited a telic limit in the very process of history. The short truth is this: if you accept historicity, then de re and de dicto necessities must find their place among the Erscheinungen of a geistlich world; and if, accepting history, you impose a telos on the process itself, you will find yourself defending a claim that cannot but be arbitrary—even contradictory. It would be a way of making Hegel out to be a grander Kant. (Perhaps that is what Peirce actually had in mind.) In any case, the nerve of the argument compels us to admit (a) that objectivity is ultimately sittlich, though not in any ultimate sense criterial; (b) that any second-order critique of our prima facie norms will, if it succeeds, become merely sittlich in its turn; and (c) that there is and can be no exit from the open course of evolving history. We never begin with a “tabula rasa” or the pristine “natural light of reason” or an ideal telos, and prima facie norms are never self-legitimating. Furthermore, we cannot imagine a human world in which our prima facie convictions about the norms of truth, morality, beauty, legality, or reason do not diverge and take competing forms. Admitting that, we move beyond Hegel’s and Peirce’s teleologisms, closer perhaps to Nietzsche and Foucault. That is, recovering Hegel, we find that absolute Geist (or its more modest analogues: tradition, habitus, praxis) becomes fragmented, perspectived, contingent, plural and non-converging, tendentious, deliberately narratized, ideological, combative, dialectical, lacking any secure telic direction, and distinctly short-lived. We never merely invent the norms of truth and morality. They are already in place, they are already “culturally real” in the plain sense that within the life of any viable society, its members already provisionally subscribe to the operative norms that define their interests. The course of history—the salience of new technologies, new events, new conceptual possibilities— drives every society to assess anew the norms it finds entrenched in its own practices. We cannot avoid theorizing about truth and morality or, more accurately, about what the legitimating norms of truth-value assignments and of good- or right-making commitments should be. Contrary to Rorty’s jibe (see “Pragmatism, Davidson, and Truth”), truth is precisely what we need to have a theory about! The same is true of morality and for the same reasons. But that leads to a deeper challenge: Is it possible that any of the prima facie norms of practical morality could (also) be objectively legitimated as categorically binding—say on such grounds as Rawls’s (Kantian-like) assumptions regarding the universal judgments of neutral reason or MacIntyre’s (Aristotelian-Thomist) assumptions about the requirements of virtue ranging over history?

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You see at once that the quarrel is another moment in the contest between invariance and flux and between the presumption and the rejection of privilege. The best answer follows from reflecting once again on the perceived failure of any algorithmic solution to the problem of predication. The decisive clue appears in Plato’s Dialogues—in the early elenctic dialogues, for instance, where Socrates tries to define the virtues correctly, though he lacks knowledge of the famous Forms. In later dialogues (Republic, for one) it is supposed (though never expressly by Plato, as the unseen theorist behind the drama) that the effort cannot succeed without the Forms; and in the late dialogues (notably, Statesman), the effort to fix a correct or reasonable definition of justice and the other virtues is taken up once again, on the frank admission that we utterly lack a knowledge of the Forms but must sustain the effort nonetheless. There, Plato introduces the idea of a “second-best” state: a state judged to be just by reference only to constructed norms, lacking altogether the right to claim to be guided by the Forms themselves. The answer, then, is this. Legitimative questions, all questions of secondorder norms, invite nothing firmer than “second-best” conjectures! There are no neutral or independent norms if predicative invariances cannot be confirmed; and they cannot be confirmed if Universals cannot serve as predicative tertia within a First Philosophy. Here, the postmodernist announces that the game is up; but, as has been argued, human societies never had access to a valid First Philosophy in the first place. The charge was arbitrary from the start. What we require is a reasoned account of the “second-best” conditions under which alone normative objectivity remains possible. The point is this: objectivity has never been more than a second-best objectivity. There you have the answer of the flux, the only viable answer there is. Furthermore, contrary to Mackie’s conviction, our theory of truth cannot escape being instructed by the conditions under which we form our moral norms. For if the solution to the problem of reference and predication is as we say, then there is no principled difference between theory and practice. The theory of objective truth is more a theory about how to conduct our practical inquiries— with an eye to defining the “independent” world—than it is a theory about the ideal conditions of correspondence between propositional claims and matters of fact. The classical view is as pointless as our reliance on ineffable Forms. You would not be wrong to see in this a respectful recovery of William James’s conception of truth, though James labored embarrassingly long to correct his first awkward efforts at an answer to the correspondence theory.

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We begin, as we must, with “ideologies,” with the entrenched practices of a society guided and judged by its prima facie norms. In practical affairs, there is, therefore, no prior question to be answered (in David Wiggins’s sense)—”What is the meaning of life?”—in order to decide objectively what our moral norms should be. The matter is trivially resolved: sharing a society’s Sitten, we share its operative norms; sharing those, our life cannot fail to be “meaningful” (even if, subjectively, we do not find it so). We never invent such norms de novo; we find them in our cultural world. Similarly, there is no prior question to be answered about the objectivity of truth, no prior question before we get on with the business of correcting whatever we judge to be mistakes in our prima facie knowledge of the world. In this way, we elude skepticism. Morality, like truth, concerns the dialectical review of the norms and practices we already share. We judge our moral and epistemic notions with an eye to possible “second-best” improvements. For example, many moral “ideologies” invoke human nature as a norm of virtue or obligation, as in suicide, euthanasia, sexual deviance, marriage, abortion, conception, adultery, divorce, capital punishment, and the like. On the fluxive view, there is no way humans can be shown to act contrary to the “independent” norms of “nature.” No such norms can ever be recovered. That’s not to say that moral distinctions (hitherto characterized in terms of human nature) should be altogether scrapped; or that no distinction between the permissible and the impermissible can be reasonably sustained. But it does suggest that every sittlich morality (every “ideology”) can be made less arbitrary and conceptually more generous, without presuming to have grasped the Forms of moral life, or by entrenching practical constraints about what is “contrary to nature.” Nothing that human beings do, or can do, is “contrary to nature” in any sense that would require a neutral norm of nature. A “second-best” morality would retire as far as possible every such presumption of “natural” norms. Call such a policy, nullum malum, by which I mean, the rescinding of findings of moral wrong (“against” human nature) wherever wrong had been supposed before. Notice that nullum malum is “generous” in a conceptual rather than a moral sense, that it has a plausible range of application when restricted to the limits of life and death and personal development (presumptions of “human nature”), that it is never categorically binding, and that resisting or refusing its authority is not conceptually or morally wrong as such. If there is one such strategy of “second-best” reform, there must be indefinitely many, and they may not (and need not) be compatible with one another.

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We expect too much of moral theory, as we expect too much of the theory of truth and knowledge. If modal invariance held true, then, of course, a fully systematic account of truth and morality might well be possible. But under the condition of its rejection, we cannot disallow descriptive and explanatory incommensurabilities, as Kuhn foresaw; and in moral matters, we cannot disallow competing and incompatible conceptions of moral assessment. On the contrary, if we begin with sittlich ideologies, and if objectivity is no more than “second-best,” then we can no longer insist on the normative constraints of a bivalent logic, as far as what is objectively right and wrong or forbidden and obligatory is concerned. It would be more convincing, in the space of a second-best morality, to invoke a “relativistic logic,” one in which judgments that on a bivalent logic but not now would be deemed incompatible or contradictory. (Call such judgments “incongruent.”) It may, for example, be that there is no demonstrable sense in which suicide is, bivalently, admissible or inadmissible tout court. Relevant assessments may be no more than “incongruent” (in the sense just mentioned): there, truth and falsity are treated asymmetrically; truth is dropped (in relevant cases) but not falsity; many-valued truth-values are permitted to replace truth (“reasonable,” “plausible,” “apt,” and the like); and the resultant calculus is deemed compatible with a bivalent logic if the two are suitably segregated under constraints of relevance. On that model, arguments in favor of or against abortion and suicide might then be conducted in accord with an initial “ideology,” altered as by considerations of nullum malum, in such a way that it would not be true that “anything goes” but it might also not be true that opposing rationales could never be jointly validated—in a “secondbest” sense. Although, of course, each of us individually may be the partisans of one or the other rationale. You begin to see, therefore, the radical possibilities of adhering to the flux and something of the limitations such adherence would impose on canonical expectations. This holds as much for science as for morality. We are now deep in the grip of such a transition. Perhaps a final advantage may be added to the advocacy of the flux. If we admit conceptual incommensurabilities in the sense Kuhn and MacIntyre urge regarding science and morality (see Chapters 1 and 5), we oblige ourselves to come to terms with what a rational resolution of a pertinent “crisis” (MacIntyre’s term) would look like. Both Kuhn and MacIntyre treat rationality as a historical artifact: therefore, as inevitably perspectived and divergent in normative and methodological ways; therefore, also, as problematic, if the rational resolution of a particular crisis is ever to be deemed

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“objective.” Kuhn believes no rational resolution is possible: for him, dispute takes the form of a nonrational or irrational “conversion.” But that cannot be entirely right, if one thinks of the dispute between Priestley and Lavoisier. MacIntyre is more nearly correct in insisting that there must be some form of rationally resolving conceptual “crises.” (Davidson, of course, was simply wrong in supposing that conceptual incommensurability was tantamount to unintelligibility, and in supposing that divergent truth-claims and sheer intelligibility presuppose a neutral language and a neutral cognizing stance.) Nevertheless, MacIntyre commits himself (quite inconsistently) to two entirely different pictures of rationality: in one, he implicitly sides with Kuhn, admitting that rationality is a historical artifact; in the other, he overrides the concession, arguing instead (along “Aristotelian-Thomist” lines) that human nature has its constant telos—hence, a form of rationality that is not subject to the fortunes of history. That explains why he is so sanguine about the rational resolution of incommensurables and the discovery of the “superior” tradition in which such resolutions are reliably and regularly produced. You see how the problem of moral objectivity affects our notion of objectivity in science, once we make room for a claim like Kuhn’s. You see as well how Peirce’s notion of objectivity precludes the threat of incommensurability. Peirce’s and Davidson’s solutions are entirely too sanguine (though they are also entirely different from one another). Kuhn makes a virtue out of utter failure, and MacIntyre simply pulls a rabbit out of a convenient hat. But the best answer stares you in the face. The objectivity of what is rational, just as the objectivity of what is good or right and true and meaningful surely must accord with what has already been offered regarding the objectivity of reference and predication. None of these distinctions can be convincingly applied in any merely punctuated or episodic form: the validity of what we judge true or right or rational or meaningful invokes the whole course of the consensual continuity of a society’s Lebensform. (That is, conceding that “forms of life” are not species-wide.) If reason is an artifact of history, if incommensurable modes of rationality take form in accord with incommensurable conceptual schemes, then there cannot be a criterial or neutral resolution of any epistemic or practical “crisis” that genuinely involves the stalemate of the home scheme and the advantage of the alien scheme (that is, the crisis). Any society, essaying a resolution, must produce an extension (by analogy with bilingualism) of its own conceptual and (would-be) rational resources in accord with which what appears promising in the (would-be) resources of an alien scheme are internally absorbed (by the home scheme’s lights). Success and the assessment of success thereupon continue as before,

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although we find ourselves no closer to the presumption of what a neutral language must be like if it is not, similarly, to be treated as an artifact of consensual reflection. Objectivity in science and morality is never more than a “second-best” objectivity.

THE SECOND-BEST STATE

Plato Stranger:

Young Socrates: Stranger:

Young Socrates: Stranger:

Young Socrates: Stranger: Young Socrates: Stranger:

They say that if any one knows how the ancient laws may be improved, he must first persuade his own State of the improvement, and then he may legislate, but not otherwise. And are they not right? I dare say. But supposing that he does use some gentle violence for their good, what is this violence to be called? Or rather, before you answer, let me ask the same question in reference to our previous instances. What do you mean? Suppose that a skilful physician has a patient, of whatever sex or age, whom he compels against his will to do something for his good which is contrary to the written rules; what is this compulsion to be called? Would you ever dream of calling it a violation of the art, or a breach of the laws of health? Nothing could be more unjust than for the patient to whom such violence is applied, to charge the physician who practises the violence with wanting skill or aggravating his disease. Most true. In the political art error is not called disease, but evil, or disgrace, or injustice. Quite true. And when the citizen, contrary to law and custom, is compelled to do what is juster and better and nobler than he did before, the last and most absurd thing

Plato. Statesman. In The Dialogues of Plato. Translated by B. Jowett. Volume 2. New York: Random House, 1892, 1920.

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which he could say about such violence is that he has incurred disgrace or evil or injustice at the hands of those who compelled him. Very true. And shall we say that the violence, if exercised by a man, is just, and if by a poor man, unjust? May not any man, rich or poor, with or without laws, with the will of the citizens or against the will of the citizens, do what is for their interest? Is not this the true principle of government, according to which the wise and good will order the affairs of his subjects? As the pilot, by watching continually over the interests of the ship and of the crew,— not by laying down rules, but by making his art a law,— preserves the lives of his fellow-sailors, even so, and in the self-same way, may there not be a true form of polity created by those who are able to govern in a similar spirit, and who show a strength of art which is superior to the law? Nor can wise rulers ever err while they, observing the one great rule of distributing justice to the citizens with intelligence and skill, are able to preserve them, and, as far as may be, to make them better from being worse. No one can deny what has been now said. Neither, if you consider, can any one deny the other statement. What was it? We said that no great number of persons, whoever they may be, can attain political knowledge, or order a State wisely, but that the true government is to be found in a small body, or in an individual, and that other States are but imitations of this, as we said a little while ago, some for the better and some for the worse. What do you mean? I cannot have understood your previous remark about imitations. And yet the mere suggestion which I hastily threw out is highly important, even if we leave the question where it is, and do not seek by the discussion of it to expose the error which prevails in this matter. What do you mean?

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Stranger:

Young Socrates: Stranger:

Young Socrates:

The idea which has to be grasped by us is not easy or familiar; but we may attempt to express it thus:—Supposing the government of which I have been speaking to be the only true model, then the others must use the written laws of this—in no other way can they be saved; they will have to do what is now generally approved, although not the best thing in the world. What is this? No citizen should do anything contrary to the laws, and any infringement of them should be punished with death and the most extreme penalties; and this is very right and good when regarded as the second best thing, if you set aside the first, of which I was just now speaking. Shall I explain the nature of what I call the second best? By all means.

CRITIQUE OF KANT

G.W.F. Hegel When the question: “What is truth?” is put to logic, and answered by logic, it affords to Kant “the ludicrous spectacle of one man milking a he-goat and another holding a sieve beneath.” The question: “What is right and duty?” put to and answered by pure practical reason is in the same position. Kant sees that “a universal criterion of truth must be such as would be valid of any and every knowledge regardless of the difference between its objects, but that, since using the criterion is abstracting from the whole content of knowledge, while truth concerns just this content, it is clearly quite impossible and absurd to ask for a general test of the truth of such content,” since the test is also supposed not to concern the content of knowledge. In saying this, Kant is pronouncing judgment on the principle of duty and right set up by practical reason. For practical reason is the complete abstraction from all content of the will (Wille); to introduce a content is to establish a heteronomy of choice (Willkühr). But what is precisely of interest is to know what From Natural Law: The Scientific Ways of Treating Natural Law, Its Place in Moral Philosophy, and Its Relation to the Positive Sciences of Law by G. W. F. Hegel, translated by T. M. Knox. Copyright © 1975 University of Pennsylvania Press. Reprinted by permission of the publisher.

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right and duty are. We ask for the content of the moral law, and this content alone concerns us. But the essence of pure will and pure practical reasons is to be abstracted from all content. Thus it is a self-contradiction to seek in this absolute practical reason a moral legislation which would have to have a content, since the essence of this reason is to have none. If this formalism is to be able to promulgate a law, some matter, something specific, must be posited to constitute the content of the law. And the form given to this specific matter is unity or universality. “That a maxim of thy will shall count at the same time as a principle of universal legislation”—this basic law of pure practical reason expresses the fact that something specific, constituting the content of the maxim of the particular will, shall be posited as concept, as universal. But every specific matter is capable of being clothed with the form of the concept and posited as a quality; there is nothing whatever which cannot in this way be made into a moral law. Every specific matter, however, is inherently particular, not universal: the opposite specific thing stands over against it, and it is specific only because there is this specific opposition. Both are equally capable of being thought; which of the two is to be taken up into the unity or to be thought, and which is to be abstracted from, is completely open and free. If the one is fixed as absolutely subsistent, then, to be sure, the other cannot be posited. But this other can just as easily be thought and, since the form of thinking is the essence, expressed as an absolute moral law. “That the commonest untutored understanding can” engage in this easy operation and “distinguish what form of maxim is or is not adapted for universal legislation,” Kant shows by an example: I ask whether my maxim to increase my fortune by any and all safe means can hold good as a universal practical law in the case where [appropriating] a deposit entrusted to me has appeared to be such a means; the content of this law would be that “anyone may deny having received a deposit for which there is no proof.” This question is then decided by itself, “because such a principle as a law would destroy itself since the result would be that no deposits would exist.” But where is the contradiction if there were no deposits? The non-existence of deposits would contradict other specific things, just as the possibility of deposits fits together with other necessary specific things and thereby will itself be necessary. But other ends and material grounds are not to be invoked; it is the immediate form of the concept which is to settle the rightness of adopting either one specific matter or the other. For the form, however, one of the opposed specifics is just as valid as the other; each can be conceived as a quality, and this conception can be expressed as a law.

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If the specification of property in general be posited, then we can construct the tautological statement: property is property and nothing else. And this tautological production is the legislation of this practical reason; property, if property is, must be property. But if we posit the opposite thing, negation of property, then the legislation of this same practical reason produces the tautology: non-property is non-property. If property is not to be, then whatever claims to be property must be canceled. But the aim is precisely to prove that property must be; the sole thing at issue is what lies outside the capacity of this practical legislation of pure reason, namely to decide which of the opposed specific things must be lawful. But pure reason demands that this shall have been done beforehand, and that one of the opposed specific things shall be presupposed, and only then can pure reason perform its now superfluous legislating. But the analytic unity and tautology of practical reason is not only superfluous but, in its expression or exercise it is false and must be recognized as the principle of immorality. The mere act of taking a specific thing up into the form of unity is supposed to alter the character of that thing’s being. The specific thing, which by its nature has another specific thing over against it, the one being the negation of the other and neither therefore being absolute (and, so far as the functioning of practical reason goes, it does not matter which is which, for practical reason affords nothing but empty form), is thus supposed by this union with the form of pure unity to become absolute, to become law and duty. But when a specific and individual thing is elevated to something inherently [necessary], absurdity and, in the moral sphere, immorality are posited. This transformation of the conditioned and unreal into something unconditioned and absolute is easily recognized in its illegitimacy and easily caught in its underhanded means. When the specific concept is expressed in a sentence, the specific thing, taken up into the form of pure unity or formal identity, produces the tautology of the formal sentence: the specific A is the specific A. The form, or in the sentence the identity of subject and predicate, is something absolute, but only negative or formal, and the specific A is unaffected; for the form, this content is something wholly hypothetical. However, the absoluteness, which by virtue of the sentence’s form is in the sentence, acquires a totally different meaning in practical reason. Absoluteness is also conferred on the content which by its nature is something conditioned; and this conditioned non-absolute, contrary to its own essence, is elevated into an absolute by this confusion. Producing a tautology is not the aim of practice, and practical reason would not take so much trouble for the

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sake of this idle form, which yet is all that is in its power. But by confusing absolute form with conditioned matter, the absoluteness of the form is imperceptibly smuggled into the unreal and conditioned character of the content; and in this perversion and trickery lies the nerve of pure reason’s practical legislation. There is smuggled into the sentence “property is property,” not its proper meaning, (i.e., “the identity which the sentence expresses in its form is absolute”), but the meaning: “the matter of the sentence (i.e., property) is absolute.” And in this way anything specific can be made into a duty. The arbitrary will (Willkühr) has a choice between opposed specific things; and it would only be due to incompetence if for any given action some ground could not be found which acquires not just the form of a probable ground, as with the Jesuits, but the form of right and duty. This moral formalism does not exceed the moral skill of the Jesuits or, what coincides therewith, the principles of Eudaemonism. It is well to note in this connection that adoption of the specific thing into the concept is understood in the sense that this adoption is something formal or that the specific thing is supposed to remain, so that matter and form contradict one another, the first being delimited and the second infinite. But if the content were really equated with the form and the specific thing with the unity, then no practical legislation would occur, but only the annihilation of the specific. Thus property itself is directly opposed to universality; equated with it, it is superseded. This annihilation of the specific, through its adoption into infinity and universality, is indeed an immediate difficulty for practical legislation. For if the specific thing is such that in itself it expresses the supersession of something specific, then, by the elevation of the supersession to universality or to the state of having been superseded, not only the specific thing which is to be superseded, but the superseding itself, is canceled. Thus a maxim referring to such a specific thing, which cancels itself when it is universalized would not be capable of being the principle of a universal legislation, and so would be immoral. Alternatively, the maxim’s content, which is the supersession of a specific thing, contradicts itself when it is raised to the concept. If the specific is thought as superseded, its supersession falls away; or else, if this specific is supposed to remain, then in turn the supersession laid down in the maxim is not laid down. Thus whether the specific remains or not, in either case its supersession is impossible. But a maxim which is in principle immoral, because self-contradictory, is absolutely rational and so absolutely moral because it expresses the supersession of a specific thing; for the rational in its negative aspect is the indifference of specifications, the supersession of the condi-

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tioned. Thus the specific injunction, “Help the poor,” expresses the supersession of the specific thing, poverty. The maxim, “Help the poor,” tested by being elevated into a principle of universal legislation, will prove to be false because it annihilates itself. If the thought is that the poor generally should be helped, then either there are no poor left or there are nothing but poor; in the latter event no one is left to help them. In both cases the help disappears. Thus the maxim, universalized, cancels itself. On the other hand, if the specific thing which is to be superseded (i.e., poverty) were to remain, the possibility of help remains—but only as a possibility, not as the actuality envisaged by the maxim. If poverty is to remain in order that the duty of helping the poor can be fulfilled, this maintenance of poverty forthwith means that the duty is not fulfilled. So the maxim of honorably defending one’s country against its enemies, like an infinite number of other maxims, is self-cancelling as soon as it is thought as a principle of universal legislation; for when so universalized, for example, the specification of country, enemies, and defense is cancelled. THE SUBJECTIVITY OF VALUES

John L. Mackie 1. Moral Scepticism There are no objective values. This is a bald statement of the thesis of this chapter, but before arguing for it I shall try to clarify and restrict it in ways that may meet some objections and prevent some misunderstanding. The statement of this thesis is liable to provoke one of three very different reactions. Some will think it not merely false but pernicious; they will see it as a threat to morality and to everything else that is worthwhile, and they will find the presenting of such a thesis in what purports to be a book on ethics paradoxical or even outrageous. Others will regard it as a trivial truth, almost too obvious to be worth mentioning, and certainly too plain to be worth much argument. Others again will say that it is meaningless or empty, that no real issue is raised by the question whether values are or are not part of the fabric of the world. But, precisely because there can be these three different reactions, much more needs to be said. From Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong by J. L. Mackie. London: Penguin Books, 1977. Copyright © J. L. Mackie, 1977. Reprinted by permission of the publisher, Penguin Books Ltd., UK.

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The claim that values are not objective, are not part of the fabric of the world, is meant to include not only moral goodness, which might be most naturally equated with moral value, but also other things that could be more loosely called moral values or disvalues—rightness and wrongness, duty, obligation, an action’s being rotten and contemptible, and so on. It also includes non-moral values, notably aesthetic ones, beauty and various kinds of artistic merit. I shall not discuss these explicitly, but clearly much the same considerations apply to aesthetic and to moral values, and there would be at least some initial implausibility in a view that gave the one a different status from the other. Since it is with moral values that I am primarily concerned, the view I am adopting may be called moral scepticism. But this name is likely to be misunderstood: ‘moral scepticism’ might also be used as a name for either of two first order views, or perhaps for an incoherent mixture of the two. A moral sceptic might be the sort of person who says ‘All this talk of morality is tripe,’ who rejects morality and will take no notice of it. Such a person may be literally rejecting all moral judgements; he is more likely to be making moral judgements of his own, expressing a positive moral condemnation of all that conventionally passes for morality; or he may be confusing these two logically incompatible views, and saying that he rejects all morality, while he is in fact rejecting only a particular morality that is current in the society in which he has grown up. But I am not at present concerned with the merits or faults of such a position. These are first order moral views, positive or negative: the person who adopts either of them is taking a certain practical, normative, stand. By contrast, what I am discussing is a second order view, a view about the status of moral values and the nature of moral valuing, about where and how they fit into the world. These first and second order views are not merely distinct but completely independent: one could be a second order moral sceptic without being a first order one, or again the other way round. A man could hold strong moral views, and indeed ones whose content was thoroughly conventional, while believing that they were simply attitudes and policies with regard to conduct that he and other people held. Conversely, a man could reject all established morality while believing it to be an objective truth that it was evil or corrupt. With another sort of misunderstanding moral scepticism would seem not so much pernicious as absurd. How could anyone deny that there is a difference between a kind action and a cruel one, or that a coward and a brave man behave differently in the face of danger? Of course, this is undeniable; but it is not to the point. The kinds of behaviour to which moral values and

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disvalues are ascribed are indeed part of the furniture of the world, and so are the natural, descriptive, differences between them; but not, perhaps, their differences in value. It is a hard fact that cruel actions differ from kind ones, and hence that we can learn, as in fact we all do, to distinguish them fairly well in practice, and to use the words ‘cruel’ and ‘kind’ with fairly clear descriptive meanings; but is it an equally hard fact that actions which are cruel in such a descriptive sense are to be condemned? The present issue is with regard to the objectivity specifically of value, not with regard to the objectivity of those natural, factual, differences on the basis of which differing values are assigned. 2. Subjectivism Another name often used, as an alternative to ‘moral scepticism’, for the view I am discussing is ‘subjectivism’. But this too has more than one meaning. Moral subjectivism too could be a first order, normative, view, namely that everyone really ought to do whatever he thinks he should. This plainly is a (systematic) first order view; on examination it soon ceases to be plausible, but that is beside the point, for it is quite independent of the second order thesis at present under consideration. What is more confusing is that different second order views compete for the name ‘subjectivism’. Several of these are doctrines about the meaning of moral terms and moral statements. What is often called moral subjectivism is the doctrine that, for example, ‘This action is right’ means ‘I approve of this action’, or more generally that moral judgements are equivalent to reports of the speaker’s own feelings or attitudes. But the view I am now discussing is to be distinguished in two vital respects from any such doctrine as this. First, what I have called moral scepticism is a negative doctrine, not a positive one: it says what there isn’t, not what there is. It says that there do not exist entities or relations of a certain kind, objective values or requirements, which many people have believed to exist. Of course, the moral sceptic cannot leave it at that. If his position is to be at all plausible, he must give some account of how other people have fallen into what he regards as an error, and this account will have to include some positive suggestions about how values fail to be objective, about what has been mistaken for, or has led to false beliefs about, objective values. But this will be a development of his theory, not its core: its core is the negation. Secondly, what I have called moral scepticism is an ontological thesis, not a linguistic or conceptual one. It is not, like the other doctrine often called moral subjectivism, a view about the meanings of moral statements.

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Again, no doubt, if it is to be at all plausible, it will have to give some account of their meanings, and I shall say something about this in Section 7 of this chapter and again in Chapters 2. 3, and 4. But this too will be a development of the theory, not its core. It is true that those who have accepted the moral subjectivism which is the doctrine that moral judgements are equivalent to reports of the speaker’s own feelings or attitudes have usually presupposed what I am calling moral scepticism. It is because they have assumed that there are no objective values that they have looked elsewhere for an analysis of what moral statements might mean, and have settled upon subjective reports. Indeed, if all our moral statements were such subjective reports, it would follow that, at least so far as we are aware, there are no objective moral values. If we were aware of them, we would say something about them. In this sense this sort of subjectivism entails moral scepticism. But the converse entailment does not hold. The denial that there are objective values does not commit one to any particular view about what moral statements mean, and certainly not to the view that they are equivalent to subjective reports. No doubt if moral values are not objective they are in some very broad sense subjective, and for this reason I would accept ‘moral subjectivism’ as an alternative name to ‘moral scepticism’. But subjectivism in this broad sense must be distinguished from the specific doctrine about meaning referred to above. Neither name is altogether satisfactory: we simply have to guard against the (different) misinterpretations which each may suggest. 3. The Multiplicity of Second Order Questions The distinctions drawn in the last two sections rest not only on the wellknown and generally recognized difference between first and second order questions, but also on the more controversial claim that there are several kinds of second order moral question. Those most often mentioned are questions about the meaning and use of ethical terms, or the analysis of ethical concepts. With these go questions about the logic of moral statements: there may be special patterns of moral argument, licensed, perhaps, by aspects of the meanings of moral terms—for example, it may be part of the meaning of moral statements that they are universalizable. But there are also ontological, as contrasted with linguistic or conceptual, questions about the nature and status of goodness or rightness or whatever it is that first order moral statements are distinctively about. These are questions of factual rather than conceptual analysis: the problem of what goodness is cannot be

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settled conclusively or exhaustively by finding out what the word ‘good’ means, or what it is conventionally used to say or to do. Recent philosophy, biased as it has been towards various kinds of linguistic inquiry, has tended to doubt this, but the distinction between conceptual and factual analysis in ethics can be supported by analogies with other areas. The question of what perception is, what goes on when someone perceives something, is not adequately answered by finding out what words like ‘see’ and ‘hear’ mean, or what someone is doing in saying ‘I perceive . . .’, by analysing, however fully and accurately, any established concept of perception. There is a still closer analogy with colours. Robert Boyle and John Locke called colours ‘secondary qualities’, meaning that colours as they occur in material things consist simply in patterns of arrangement and movement of minute particles on the surfaces of objects, which make them, as we would now say, reflect light of some frequencies better than others, and so enable these objects to produce colour sensations in us, but that colours as we see them do not literally belong to the surfaces of material things. Whether Boyle and Locke were right about this cannot be settled by finding out how we use colour words and what we mean in using them. Naive realism about colours might be a correct analysis not only of our prescientific colour concepts but also of the conventional meanings of colour words, and even of the meanings with which scientifically sophisticated people use them when they are off their guard, and yet it might not be a correct account of the status of colours. Error could well result, then, from a failure to distinguish factual from conceptual analysis with regard to colours, from taking an account of the meanings of statements as a full account of what there is. There is a similar and in practice even greater risk of error in moral philosophy. There is another reason, too, why it would be a mistake to concentrate second order ethical discussions on questions of meaning. The more work philosophers have done on meaning, both in ethics and elsewhere, the more complications have come to light. It is by now pretty plain that no simple account of the meanings of first order moral statements will be correct, will cover adequately even the standard, conventional, senses of the main moral terms; I think, none the less, that there is a relatively clear-cut issue about the objectivity of moral values which is in danger of being lost among the complications of meaning. 5. Standards of Evaluation One way of stating the thesis that there are no objective values is to say that value statements cannot be either true or false. But this formulation, too,

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lends itself to misinterpretation. For there are certain kinds of value statements which undoubtedly can be true or false, even if, in the sense I intend, there are no objective values. Evaluations of many sorts are commonly made in relation to agreed and assumed standards. The classing of wool, the grading of apples, the awarding of prizes at sheepdog trials, flower shows, skating and diving championships, and even the marking of examination papers are carried out in relation to standards of quality or merit which are peculiar to each particular subject-matter or type of contest, which may be explicitly laid down but which, even if they are nowhere explicitly stated, are fairly well understood and agreed by those who are recognized as judges or experts in each particular field. Given any sufficiently determinate standards, it will be an objective issue, a matter of truth and falsehood, how well any particular specimen measures up to those standards. Comparative judgements in particular will be capable of truth and falsehood: it will be a factual question whether this sheepdog has performed better than that one. The subjectivist about values, then, is not denying that there can be objective evaluations relative to standards, and these are as possible in the aesthetic and moral fields as in any of those just mentioned. More than this, there is an objective distinction which applies in many such fields, and yet would itself be regarded as a peculiarly moral one: the distinction between justice and injustice. In one important sense of the word it is a paradigm case of injustice if a court declares someone to be guilty of an offence of which it knows him to be innocent. More generally, a finding is unjust if it is at variance with what the relevant law and the facts together require, and particularly if it is known by the court to be so. More generally still, any award of marks, prizes, or the like is unjust if it is at variance with the agreed standards for the contest in question: if one diver’s performance in fact measures up better to the accepted standards for diving than another’s, it will be unjust if the latter is awarded higher marks or the prize. In this way the justice or injustice of decisions relative to standards can be a thoroughly objective matter, though there may still be a subjective element in the interpretation or application of standards. But the statement that a certain decision is thus just or unjust will not be objectively prescriptive: in so far as it can be simply true it leaves open the question whether there is any objective requirement to do what is just and to refrain from what is unjust, and equally leaves open the practical decision to act in either way. Recognizing the objectivity of justice in relation to standards, and of evaluative judgements relative to standards, then, merely shifts the question of the objectivity of values back to the standards themselves. The subjectivist may try to make his point by insisting that there is no objective validity

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about the choice of standards. Yet he would clearly be wrong if he said that the choice of even the most basic standards in any field was completely arbitrary. The standards used in sheepdog trials clearly bear some relation to the work that sheepdogs are kept to do, the standards for grading apples bear some relation to what people generally want in or like about apples, and so on. On the other hand, standards are not as a rule strictly validated by such purposes. The appropriateness of standards is neither fully determinate nor totally indeterminate in relation to independently specifiable aims or desires. But however determinate it is, the objective appropriateness of standards in relation to aims or desires is no more of a threat to the denial of objective values than is the objectivity of evaluation relative to standards. In fact it is logically no different from the objectivity of goodness relative to desires. Something may be called good simply in so far as it satisfies or is such as to satisfy a certain desire; but the objectivity of such relations of satisfaction does not constitute in our sense an objective value. 6. Hypothetical and Categorical Imperatives We may make this issue clearer by referring to Kant’s distinction between hypothetical and categorical imperatives, though what he called imperatives are more naturally expressed as ‘ought’-statements than in the imperative mood. ‘If you want X, do Y’ (or ‘You ought to do Y’) will be a hypothetical imperative if it is based on the supposed fact that Y is, in the circumstances, the only (or the best) available means to X, that is, on a causal relation between Y and X. The reason for doing Y lies in its causal connection with the desired end, X; the oughtness is contingent upon the desire. But ‘You ought to do Y’ will be a categorical imperative if you ought to do Y irrespective of any such desire for any end to which Y would contribute, if the oughtness is not thus contingent upon any desire. But this distinction needs to be handled with some care. An ‘ought’-statement is not in this sense hypothetical merely because it incorporates a conditional clause. ‘If you promised to do Y, you ought to do Y’ is not a hypothetical imperative merely on account of the stated if-clause; what is meant may be either a hypothetical or a categorical imperative, depending upon the implied reason for keeping the supposed promise. If this rests upon some such further unstated conditional as ‘If you want to be trusted another time’, then it is a hypothetical imperative; if not, it is categorical. Even a desire of the agent’s can figure in the antecedent of what, though conditional in grammatical form, is still in Kant’s sense a categorical imperative. ‘If you are strongly attracted sexually to young children

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you ought not to go in for school teaching’ is not, in virtue of what it explicitly says, a hypothetical imperative: the avoidance of school teaching is not being offered as a means to the satisfaction of the desires in question. Of course, it could still be a hypothetical imperative, if the implied reason were a prudential one; but it could also be a categorical imperative, a moral requirement where the reason for the recommended action (strictly, avoidance) does not rest upon that action’s being a means to the satisfaction of any desire that the agent is supposed to have. Not every conditional oughtstatement or command, then, is a hypothetical imperative; equally, not every non-conditional one is a categorical imperative. An appropriate if-clause may be left unstated. Indeed, a simple command in the imperative mood, say a parade-ground order, which might seem most literally to qualify for the title of a categorical imperative, will hardly ever be one in the sense we need here. The implied reason for complying with such an order will almost always be some desire of the person addressed, perhaps simply the desire to keep out of trouble. If so, such an apparently categorical order will be in our sense a hypothetical imperative. Again, an imperative remains hypothetical even if we change the ‘if’ to ‘since’: the fact that the desire for X is actually present does not alter the fact that the reason for doing Y is contingent upon the desire for X by way of Y’s being a means to X. In Kant’s own treatment, while imperatives of skill relate to desires which an agent may or may not have, imperatives of prudence relate to the desire for happiness which, Kant assumes, everyone has. So construed, imperatives of prudence are no less hypothetical than imperatives of skill, no less contingent upon desires that the agent has at the time the imperatives are addressed to him. But if we think rather of a counsel of prudence as being related to the agent’s future welfare, to the satisfaction of desires that he does not yet have—not even to a present desire that his future desires should be satisfied—then a counsel of prudence is a categorical imperative, different indeed from a moral one, but analogous to it. A categorical imperative, then, would express a reason for acting which was unconditional in the sense of not being contingent upon any present desire of the agent to whose satisfaction the recommended action would contribute as a means—or more directly: ‘You ought to dance’, if the implied reason is just that you want to dance or like dancing, is still a hypothetical imperative. Now Kant himself held that moral judgements are categorical imperatives, or perhaps are all applications of one categorical imperative, and it can plausibly be maintained at least that many moral judgements contain a categorically imperative element. So far as ethics is concerned, my

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thesis that there are no objective values is specifically the denial that any such categorically imperative element is objectively valid. The objective values which I am denying would be action-directing absolutely, not contingently (in the way indicated) upon the agent’s desires and inclinations. Another way of trying to clarify this issue is to refer to moral reasoning or moral arguments. In practice of course such reasoning is seldom fully explicit: but let us suppose that we could make explicit the reasoning that supports some evaluative conclusion, where this conclusion has some actionguiding force that is not contingent upon desires or purposes or chosen ends. Then what I am saying is that somewhere in the input to this argument— perhaps in one or more of the premisses, perhaps in some part of the form of the argument—there will be something which cannot be objectively validated—some premise which is not capable of being simply true, or some form of argument which is not valid as a matter of general logic, whose authority or cogency is not objective, but is constituted by our choosing or deciding to think in a certain way. 8. The Argument from Relativity The argument from relativity has as its premise the well-known variation in moral codes from one society to another and from one period to another, and also the differences in moral beliefs between different groups and classes within a complex community. Such variation is in itself merely a truth of descriptive morality, a fact of anthropology which entails neither first order nor second order ethical views. Yet it may indirectly support second order subjectivism: radical differences between first order moral judgements make it difficult to treat those judgements as apprehensions of objective truths. But it is not the mere occurrence of disagreements that tells against the objectivity of values. Disagreement on questions in history or biology or cosmology does not show that there are no objective issues in these fields for investigators to disagree about. But such scientific disagreement results from speculative inferences or explanatory hypotheses based on inadequate evidence, and it is hardly plausible to interpret moral disagreement in the same way. Disagreement about moral codes seems to reflect people’s adherence to and participation in different ways of life. The causal connection seems to be mainly that way round: it is that people approve of monogamy because they participate in a monogamous way of life rather than that they participate in a monogamous way of life because they approve of monogamy. Of course, the standards may be an idealization of the way of life from which they arise:

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the monogamy in which people participate may be less complete, less rigid, than that of which it leads them to approve. This is not to say that moral judgements are purely conventional. Of course there have been and are moral heretics and moral reformers, people who have turned against the established rules and practices of their own communities for moral reasons, and often for moral reasons that we would endorse. But this can usually be understood as the extension, in ways which, though new and unconventional, seemed to them to be required for consistency, of rules to which they already adhered as arising out of an existing way of life. In short, the argument from relativity has some force simply because the actual variations in the moral codes are more readily explained by the hypothesis that they reflect ways of life than by the hypothesis that they express perceptions, most of them seriously inadequate and badly distorted, of objective values. But there is a well-known counter to this argument from relativity, namely to say that the items for which objective validity is in the first place to be claimed are not specific moral rules or codes but very general basic principles which are recognized at least implicitly to some extent in all society—such principles as provide the foundations of what Sidgwick has called different methods of ethics: the principle of universalizability, perhaps, or the rule that one ought to conform to the specific rules of any way of life in which one takes part, from which one profits, and on which one relies, or some utilitarian principle of doing what tends, or seems likely, to promote the general happiness. It is easy to show that such general principles, married with differing concrete circumstances, different existing social patterns or different preferences, will beget different specific moral rules; and there is some plausibility in the claim that the specific rules thus generated will vary from community to community or from group to group in close agreement with the actual variations in accepted codes. The argument from relativity can be only partly countered in this way. To take this line the moral objectivist has to say that it is only in these principles that the objective moral character attaches immediately to its descriptively specified ground or subject: other moral judgements are objectively valid or true, but only derivatively and contingently—if things had been otherwise, quite different sorts of actions would have been right. And despite the prominence in recent philosophical ethics of universalization, utilitarian principles, and the like, these are very far from constituting the whole of what is actually affirmed as basic in ordinary moral thought. Much of this is concerned rather with what Hare calls ‘ideals’ or, less kindly, ‘fanaticism’. That is, people judge that some things are good or right, and others are bad

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or wrong, not because—or at any rate not only because—they exemplify some general principle for which widespread implicit acceptance could be claimed, but because something about those things arouses certain responses immediately in them, though they would arouse radically and irresolvably different responses in others. ‘Moral sense’ or ‘intuition’ is an initially more plausible description of what supplies many of our basic moral judgements than ‘reason’. With regard to all these starting points of moral thinking the argument from relativity remains in full force. 9. The Argument from Queerness Even more important, however, and certainly more generally applicable, is the argument from queerness. This has two parts, one metaphysical, the other epistemological. If there were objective values, then they would be entities or qualities or relations of a very strange sort, utterly different from anything else in the universe. Correspondingly, if we were aware of them, it would have to be by some special faculty of moral perception or intuition, utterly different from our ordinary ways of knowing everything else. These points were recognized by Moore when he spoke of non-natural qualities, and by the intuitionists in their talk about a ‘faculty of moral intuition’. Intuitionism has long been out of favour, and it is indeed easy to point out its implausibilities. What is not so often stressed, but is more important, is that the central thesis of intuitionism is one to which any objectivist view of values is in the end committed: intuitionism merely makes unpalatably plain what other forms of objectivism wrap up. Of course the suggestion that moral judgements are made or moral problems solved by just sitting down and having an ethical intuition is a travesty of actual moral thinking. But, however complex the real process, it will require (if it is to yield authoritatively prescriptive conclusions) some input of this distinctive sort, either premisses or forms of argument or both. When we ask the awkward question, how we can be aware of this authoritative prescriptivity, of the truth of these distinctively ethical premisses or of the cogency of this distinctively ethical pattern of reasoning, none of our ordinary accounts of sensory perception or introspection or the framing and confirming of explanatory hypotheses or inference or logical construction or conceptual analysis, or any combination of these, will provide a satisfactory answer; ‘a special sort of intuition’ is a lame answer, but it is the one to which the clearheaded objectivist is compelled to resort. Indeed, the best move for the moral objectivist is not to evade this issue,

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but to look for companions in guilt. For example, Richard Price argues that it is not moral knowledge alone that such an empiricism as those of Locke and Hume is unable to account for, but also our knowledge and even our ideas of essence, number, identity, diversity, solidity, inertia, substance, the necessary existence and infinite extension of time and space, necessity and possibility in general, power, and causation. If the understanding, which Price defines as the faculty within us that discerns truth, is also a source of new simple ideas of so many other sorts, may it not also be a power of immediately perceiving right and wrong, which yet are real characters of actions? This is an important counter to the argument from queerness. The only adequate reply to it would be to show how, on empiricist foundations, we can construct an account of the ideas and beliefs and knowledge that we have of all these matters. I cannot even begin to do that here, though I have undertaken some parts of the task elsewhere. I can only state my belief that satisfactory accounts of most of these can be given in empirical terms. If some supposed metaphysical necessities or essences resist such treatment, then they too should be included, along with objective values, among the targets of the argument from queerness. This queerness does not consist simply in the fact that ethical statements are ‘unverifiable’. Although logical positivism with its verifiability theory of descriptive meaning gave an impetus to non-cognitive accounts of ethics, it is not only logical positivists but also empiricists of a much more liberal sort who should find objective values hard to accommodate. Indeed, I would not only reject the verifiability principle but also deny the conclusion commonly drawn from it, that moral judgements lack descriptive meaning. The assertion that there are objective values or intrinsically prescriptive entities or features of some kind, which ordinary moral judgements presuppose, is, I hold, not meaningless but false. Plato’s Forms give a dramatic picture of what objective values would have to be. The Form of the Good is such that knowledge of it provides the knower with both a direction and an overriding motive; something’s being good both tells the person who knows this to pursue it and makes him pursue it. An objective good would be sought by anyone who was acquainted with it, not because of any contingent fact that this person, or every person, is so constituted that he desires this end, but just because the end has to-bepursuedness somehow built into it. Similarly, if there were objective principles of right and wrong, any wrong (possible) course of action would have not-to-bedoneness somehow built into it. Or we should have something

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like Clarke’s necessary relations of fitness between situations and actions, so that a situation would have a demand for such-and-such an action somehow built into it. The need for an argument of this sort can be brought out by reflection on Hume’s argument that ‘reason’—in which at this stage he includes all sorts of knowing as well as reasoning—can never be an ‘influencing motive of the will’. Someone might object that Hume has argued unfairly from the lack of influencing power (not contingent upon desires) in ordinary objects of knowledge and ordinary reasoning, and might maintain that values differ from natural objects precisely in their power, when known, automatically to influence the will. To this Hume could, and would need to, reply that this objection involves the postulating of value-entities or value-features of quite a different order from anything else with which we are acquainted, and of a corresponding faculty with which to detect them. That is, he would have to supplement his explicit argument with what I have called the argument from queerness. Another way of bringing out this queerness is to ask, about anything that is supposed to have some objective moral quality, how this is linked with its natural features. What is the connection between the natural fact that an action is a piece of deliberate cruelty—say, causing pain just for fun—and the moral fact that it is wrong? It cannot be an entailment, a logical or semantic necessity. Yet it is not merely that the two features occur together. The wrongness must somehow be ‘consequential’ or ‘supervenient’; it is wrong because it is a piece of deliberate cruelty. But just what in the world is signified by this ‘because’? And how do we know the relation that it signifies, if this is something more than such actions being socially condemned, and condemned by us too, perhaps through our having absorbed attitudes from our social environment? It is not even sufficient to postulate a faculty which ‘sees’ the wrongness: something must be postulated which can see at once the natural features that constitute the cruelty, and the wrongness, and the mysterious consequential link between the two. Alternatively, the intuition required might be the perception that wrongness is a higher order property belonging to certain natural properties; but what is this belonging of properties to other properties, and how can we discern it? How much simpler and more comprehensible the situation would be if we could replace the moral quality with some sort of subjective response which could be causally related to the detection of the natural features on which the supposed quality is said to be consequential. It may be thought that the argument from queerness is given an unfair

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start if we thus relate it to what are admittedly among the wilder products of philosophical fancy—Platonic Forms, non-natural qualities, self-evident relations of fitness, faculties of intuition, and the like. Is it equally forceful if applied to the terms in which everyday moral judgements are more likely to be expressed—though still, as has been argued in Section 7, with a claim to objectivity—‘you must do this’, ‘you can’t do that’, ‘obligation’, ‘unjust’, ‘rotten’, ‘disgraceful’, ‘mean’, or talk about good reasons for or against possible actions? Admittedly not; but that is because the objective prescriptivity, the element a claim for whose authoritativeness is embedded in ordinary moral thought and language, is not yet isolated in these forms of speech, but is presented along with relations to desires and feelings, reasoning about the means to desired ends, interpersonal demands, the injustice which consists in the violation of what are in the context the accepted standards of merit, the psychological constituents of meanness, and so on. There is nothing queer about any of these, and under cover of them the claim for moral authority may pass unnoticed. But if I am right in arguing that it is ordinarily there, and is therefore very likely to be incorporated almost automatically in philosophical accounts of ethics which systematize our ordinary thought even in such apparently innocent terms as these, it needs to be examined, and for this purpose it needs to be isolated and exposed as it is by the less cautious philosophical reconstructions.

Bibliography Aristotle. Nicomachean Ethics. In The Complete Works of Aristotle (The Revised Oxford Translation), vol. 2, ed. Jonathan Barnes. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984. Cartwright, Nancy. How the Laws of Physics Lie. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983. Davidson, Donald. “A Coherence Theory of Truth and Knowledge.” In Truth and Interpretation: Perspectives on the Philosophy of Donald Davidson, ed. Ernest LePore. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986. Habermas, Jürgen. “Discourse Ethics: Notes on a Program of Philosophical Justification.” Translated by Christian Lenhardt and Shierry Weber Nicholsen. In Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1990. Hacking, Ian. Representing and Intervening: Introductory Topics in the Philosophy of Natural Science. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983. Hegel, G.W.F. Philosophy of Right. Translated by T. M. Knox. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1945. Kant, Immanuel. Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals. Translated by Lewis White Beck. New York: Liberal Arts Press, 1969. Kosík, Karel. Dialectics of the Concrete: A Study on Problems of Man and World. Translated by Karel Kovenda and James Schmidt. Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1976.

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Kuhn, Thomas S. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. 2d enlarged edition. Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1970. Lakatos, Imre. “Falsification and the Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes.” In Philosophical Papers, vol. 1, ed. John Worrall and Gregory Currie. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978. Lovibond, Sabina. Realism and Imagination in Ethics. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983. Mackie, J. L. Inventing Right and Wrong. London: Penguin Books, 1977. MacIntyre, Alasdair. Whose Justice? Which Rationality? Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press, 1988. Margolis, Joseph. Life Without Principles: Reconciling Theory and Practice. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1996. Nietzsche, Friedrich. On the Genealogy of Morals. Translated by Walter Kaufmann. New York: Vintage Books, 1974. Peirce, Charles Sanders. Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce. 6 vols. Edited by Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1962. Plato. Parmenides. Translated by F. M. Cornford. In The Collected Dialogues of Plato, ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961. ———. Republic. Translated by Paul Shorey. In The Collected Dialogues of Plato, ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961. Popper, Karl. Objective Knowledge: An Evolutionary Approach. London: Oxford University Press, 1972. Putnam, Hilary. Meaning and the Moral Sciences. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978. Rawls, John. Political Liberalism. New York: Columbia University Press, 1993. Rorty, Richard. “Pragmatism, Davidson, and Truth.” In Truth and Interpretation: Perspectives on the Philosophy of Donald Davidson, ed. Ernest LePore. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1993. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. On Certainty. Translated by Denis Paul and G.E.M. Anscombe. Edited by G.E.M. Anscombe and G. H. von Wright. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1969.

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Adorno, Theodor, 140, 174, 176, 180 algorithm(ic), 56, 58, 68, 145, 244 antinomy, 212 Apel, Karl-Otto, 178 apriorism, 100, 143 Aristotle (Aristotelian), 6–7, 11–15, 17–18, 51, 53, 61, 63, 95, 101, 138, 142, 146–47, 174, 176, 178, 181–83, 209, 241 De Anima, 61, 95 Metaphysics, 101, 138, 182 Physics, 182 Posterior Analytics, 95 Rhetoric, 13 artifact, 13, 16, 66, 140, 146, 148, 174, 176, 179, 180–84, 209, 212, 235–36, 239–41, 246–48 artifactual, 7, 235–37, 239 asymptotic, 210, 239 Bambrough, Renford, 66, 106 Bauman, Zygmunt, 15 belief, 54, 65, 102, 173, 181, 210 Bennett, Jonathan, 211 Berkeley, George, 96–97, 100, 102, 208 Dialogues Between Hylas and Philonous, 96 Bernstein, Richard, 180, 239 bet, 64, 138 bivalence, bivalent (logic), 53, 56, 57, 241, 246 Black, Max, 58 Brentano, Franz, 180, 182 Buddhism(-t), 6, 7, 176 Carnap, Rudolf, 16, 51, 54 Cartwright, Nancy, 238 Cassirer, Ernst, 99–100, 178, 180–81

causal(ity), 17, 53, 145 certainty, 179 Chisholm, Roderick, 182 Chomsky, Noam, 55, 209 Churchland, Paul, 181–83 Coffa, J. Alberto, 100 Collingwood, R. G., 177 conduct, 238 congruence, congruity, 99, 240 consensus (consensual), 66, 144, 183, 242, 248 constructionism(-t), constructivism(-t), 64–65, 175, 209–10, 212, 235–37, 239 contradiction, 17 correspondence, 64–65, 99, 209, 235, 238, 244 correspondentism(-t), 100, 105, 208–9 covering-law, 16, 147 cultural, 182–83, 211–12, 245 culture/nature problem, 207, 210–11 Dasein (Heidegger), 104, 139, 141, 208, 237 Davidson, Donald, 55, 58, 64, 101–4, 106, 143, 238, 247 Deleuze, Gilles, 140 Dennett, Daniel, 181, 183 denotation, 52–53, 57–59, 147 denotatum, 53, 58 Derrida, Jacques, 139–41 Of Grammatology, 139 Descartes, René (Cartesian), 64, 95–97, 100, 102–4, 136–39, 143–44, 147, 173, 208–9, 211–12, 240 Meditations on First Philosophy, 207 deus ex machina, 97, 209 Devitt, Michael, Realism and Truth, 103 Dewey, John, 15, 68, 100, 104–5, 107, 148, 179, 239

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Dilthey, Wilhelm, 107, 174, 176, 180–81 dualism, 212 Dummett, Michael, 54, 100 Earman, John, 16 eliminativism, 182, 211, 213 emergence(-t), 210, 212, 236 epistemic, 54, 57–58, 60–63, 67–68, 102–3, 107, 138, 140, 145, 181, 183–84, 209, 236, 239, 242, 245, 247 epistemology, 95, 98, 102, 106, 237 epoché (Husserl), 136 Euclid, 98 Eurocentric, 7 excluded middle (principle of), 13, 57, 148 existence, 238, 240 existentialist, 106 extensional, extensionalism, 55–58, 64, 66–68, 141, 143–44, 179, 182, 211 fallibilism, 239–40 falsificationist, 239 “family resemblance(s),” 66 Feyerabend, Paul, 177 Fink, Eugen, 136 first- and second-order, 11, 14–17, 137, 145, 147, 181–82, 208, 235, 237 critique, 243 legitimation, 135 legitimative inquiry, 15 norms, 244 powers, 237 first-order predicate calculus, 57–58, 143, 145 First Philosophy, 6, 8, 11–14, 17, 53, 105, 138, 178, 244 flux(ive), fluxism(-t), 3–7, 9, 11–15, 16–18, 55–56, 59–60, 64–65, 68, 99, 101, 105, 107, 141, 145–46, 176, 179, 210, 244–46 Fodor, Jerry A., 63, 209 folk-theoretic, 181, 211 Form(s), 12, 51, 60–63, 136, 244–45 form(s) of life, 65, 247 formalism, 242 Foucault, Michel, 14, 16–17, 66, 100–101, 105, 107, 139–41, 147, 173–74, 176–78, 181, 210, 243 Discipline and Punish, 176 The Order of Things, 176 foundationalist, 67

Frankfurt-Critical, 105, 140, 178 Frege, Gottlob (Fregean), 51, 54–57, 143–44, 148 French Revolution, 6, 101, 177 Friedman, Michael, 104 Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 66, 107, 174, 176–81 Truth and Method, 176 Galileo, 136 Geist (Hegel), 98–99, 101–2, 138, 140, 148, 174–75, 178, 207–8, 210, 237, 243 Gettier, Edmund, 54 Gettier problem, 54 Goodman, Nelson, 63 goodness, 241 Gorgias, 18 Grenzbegriff (Putnam), 65, 101, 104, 181 Habermas, Jürgen, 105, 141, 178–81, 239 Hacking, Ian, 238 haecceity (Duns Scotus), 58 Hare, R. M., 52 Hegel, G. W. F. (Hegelian), 18, 64, 67–68, 98–107, 137–38, 140–41, 143, 148, 173–81, 183, 207–10, 213, 236–39, 241–43 Phenomenology of Spirit, 98–99, 138, 207 Heidegger, Martin (Heideggerian), 3, 5, 15, 104–7, 136–41, 143–45, 173–74, 176–77, 179–80, 208, 236 Basic Problems of Phenomenology, 136 Being and Time, 3, 5, 104, 106, 139, 178, 208 “Letter On Humanism,” 3, 5, 105–6, 139, 141, 178, 208 Hempel, Carl, 60, 147, 177, 183 Heraclitus, 105 hermeneutics, 177, 178 Herz, Marcus, 209 Hirsch, E. D., 177 Hirsch, Eli, 144 historicism(-ty), 5, 9, 14, 17, 99–101, 103, 105, 107, 141, 145, 174, 176–80, 182, 210–11, 239, 242 historicized, historicizing, 7–8, 17, 66–67, 102, 173, 175, 178–82, 208–10, 236, 240 historied, 13, 106, 236 Historied Thought, Constructed World (Margolis), 1, 3–5

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Index to Chapter Introductions history, 55, 65–66, 98, 99–102, 137, 173–79, 181–83, 208, 235–36, 239, 243, 247 Hobbes, Thomas, 212 holist(ic)(ally), 236–37, 240 Horkheimer, Max, 140 Hume, David, 60, 142, 144–45, 175, 236 A Treatise of Human Nature, 60 Husserl, Edmund (Husserlian), 64, 104–6, 135–41, 143–45, 147, 173, 176, 179–80, 182, 208–10, 236 Cartesian Meditations, 136, 208 “The Origin of Geometry,” 176 Hylton, Peter, 103 idealism, 64, 68, 96, 106, 182, 235, 237, 239–40 transcendental, 97 identity, 141, 143, 145–46, 209 numerical, 59–60, 142–46 ideology, 245–46 incarnate, 212 incommensurable(-ability), 16–17, 104, 179, 246–47 incongruent, 246 Indian, 176 individuation, 135, 141–48, 180, 211 inductivism(-t), 239–40 innatism, 209 intensional(ity), 56, 58, 145, 180 intentional(ity), 182 Intentional(ity), 59, 180, 182–83, 210–12 invariance(-t), 3, 6–7, 11–17, 55, 59–60, 64, 95, 97–98, 100, 105, 137–38, 140–42, 145–47, 176, 178–81, 210, 244 modal, 2, 14, 59, 64, 140–42, 179, 246 Irigaray, Luce, 140 James, William, 244 Jaspers, Karl, 106, 139 Kant, Immanuel, Kantian(ism), 6, 7, 65, 67, 95–104, 106, 136–40, 143, 147, 173, 175–79, 181–83, 207–10, 236–39, 241–43 Critique of Judgment, 101 Critique of Pure Reason, 6, 96–99, 101, 207, 242 knowledge, 54–55, 59, 67, 95–96, 99–100, 102, 135, 137–38, 141, 145, 173–74, 179, 181, 209–10, 235–36, 238, 244–46 Kosík, Karel, 236

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Kripke, Saul, 144 Kuhn, Thomas, 15–17, 103, 107, 177, 180, 182–83, 210, 236, 240, 242, 246–47 The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 16–17 Lacan, Jacques, 140 Lakatos, Imre, 239 language games, 67, 105–6, 177 “languaged,” 64, 136, 211–12 late-Kantian, 101 Lavoisier, Antoine-Laurent, 16, 183, 247 Lebensform (Wittgenstein), 66–67, 105–6, 180, 247 lebensformlich, 66, 68, 105, 139, 146, 241–42 Lebenswelt (Husserl), 179 legitimation(-ive), 14–17, 103, 135, 138–39, 141, 145, 181–82, 235, 237, 244 Leibniz, Gottfried, 58, 146 Levinas, Emmanuel, 140 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 141, 179 liberalism, 240 Locke, John, 95–97, 144–45, 208–9 Essay Concerning Human Understanding, 209 logic, 6, 13, 51, 53–59, 66–67, 142, 145–47, 241–42, 246 logical atomism, 55 Löwith, Karl, 101, 176 Lyotard, Jean-François, 139–41 Mackie, J. L., 237–38, 244 MacIntyre, Alasdair, 17, 177, 179, 243, 246–47 Marx, Karl (Marxism), 1, 100, 105, 143, 174, 176–78, 236 Mayr, Ernst, 147 meaning, 52, 54 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 137 metaphysics, 54, 95, 100 mind/body problem, 207, 209–11 modernism, 179 Mohanty, Jitendra, 182 Moore, G. E., 67, 103 moral(ity), 175, 236, 236–43, 245–47 mores, 241 N¯ag¯arjuna, 6, 9, 18, 107 naturalism(s), 55, 137–38, 145, 182, 211 naturalizing, 15, 17, 141

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natural language(s), 51–52, 54, 56–58, 60, 63, 65, 105, 141, 180, 182 nature/culture problem, 210–11 Nazism, 178 necessity de re, de dicto, 51, 53, 67, 101, 105, 107, 139, 174, 180, 243 Newton, Issac, 96, 98 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 12–14, 16, 18, 101, 107, 174–79, 243 Will to Power, 13 nominalism(-t), 61–63, 66, 142, 180 nomological necessity, 59 noncontradiction (principle of), 13, 57, 148 normative, 241–42, 246 norms, 235–43, 245 nullum malum, 245–46 objectivism, 179 objectivity, 64, 98, 140, 178, 181–83, 235–36, 239–47 obligation, 238 ontic(ally), 57–58, 104, 183–84, 209 ontology, 59 Page, Carl, 14–15 Parfit, Derek, 145 Parmenides (Parmenidean), 11–12, 18, 105 Peirce, Charles S. (Peircean), 51, 62, 148, 178, 180, 183, 238, 239–43, 247 person(s), 145, 147–48, 179, 181, 210–11, 236 phenomenology, 136–39, 173 philosophy, 54–55, 57, 59–62, 64, 67, 96, 101, 103, 105, 139, 141, 176, 178–79, 181, 235, 237 analytic, 2, 4, 8, 15–17, 55, 57–59, 63–64, 100–106, 140, 143–44, 173, 177, 183, 207 Asian, 3, 14 continental, 2, 4, 8, 15, 59, 100, 104–6, 140, 173, 177 Western, 1–3, 7–8, 12, 14, 18, 173, 207 physicalism, 55, 141, 179, 182 Piaget, Jean, 209 Plato (Platonic), 12–13, 18, 51, 59–61, 63, 136, 176, 178, 244 Parmenides, 13, 60, 136 Phaedrus, 61 Republic, 12, 61, 244 Statesman, 12, 60, 244

Symposium, 61 Theaetetus, 13, 18 Platonism(-t), 12, 14, 60–61, 66, 96, 145, 209 Popkin, Richard B., 96 Popper, Karl, 177, 183, 239 Positivism(-t), 16, 55, 104, 143, 182 Poster, Mark, 177 post-Hegelian, 179 post-Kantian, 68, 96, 101–2, 143, 181, 237, 240 postmodernism(-t), 15, 17, 102, 104, 137, 141, 145, 181–82, 237, 244 poststructuralist, 16, 141 practices, 55, 65–68, 144, 147–48, 183, 210, 241–42, 245 pragmatism(-ic), 54, 100, 107 praxis, 236, 243 predicable(s), 62–63, 142–46, 148, 180, 212 predication, predicate(s), 51, 54, 56–59, 61–63, 65, 68, 106, 139, 141, 144–45, 147–48, 180, 241–42, 244, 247 predicative, 210, 241–42, 244 preestablished harmony, 208–9 pre-Kantian, 100–101, 106, 173, 177, 208–9, 237 Presocratics, 11–12, 139, 142 Priestley, Joseph, 16, 183, 247 progressivism, 239–40 Protagoras, 12–13, 17–18, 107 public, 183, 209 Putnam, Hilary, 58, 64–65, 101–4, 106, 180–81, 236, 239 puzzle, 9, 17, 58–59, 65, 97–98, 100, 103, 175, 180, 182 quiddity, 58 Quine, Willard V. (Quinean), 15, 17, 51, 53, 55, 57–59, 61–62, 67, 103, 140–41, 143–45, 179, 181 “Epistemology Naturalized,” 141 “Two Dogmas of Empiricism,” 143 Ramsey, Frank, 67 Ranke, Leopold von, 179 Rawls, John, 243 “real generals” (Peirce), 62–64 realism(-t), 61–64, 102, 146, 180, 182–83, 239–40 direct, 235, 238–40 internal, 65 scientific, 103

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Index to Chapter Introductions reality, 13, 53, 100, 106, 140, 181, 183, 208, 240 reason(ing), 13, 57, 98, 135–38, 141, 178, 181, 238, 243, 247 reduction, reductionism, 182, 211, 213 reference, 51–52, 55–59, 65, 68, 139, 141, 144–45, 147, 180, 242, 244, 247 relativism, 13 relativistic logic, 246 representationalism(-t), 97, 100, 106, 208 representationality, 235 resistance, 241 rightness, 236–38, 240 Rorty, Richard, 15, 17, 102, 104–6, 137, 140–41, 181, 243 “Pragmatism, Davidson, and Truth,” 243 rule(s), 65–66, 145, 183 Russell, Bertrand (Russellian), 51–52, 54–58, 61–62, 67, 103, 143–44 Principia Mathematica, 57–58 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 179 Saussure, Ferdinand de, 139, 141 science, 54–55, 62, 64, 103, 236–37, 239–42, 246–47 Scotus, Duns, 58–59, 143 second-best, 244–46 Secondness (Peirce), 238, 240–41 Sein (Heidegger), 104, 106, 139, 141 semantic(s), 54–55, 57, 100 sentence(s), 51–54, 56–57 Sitten, sittlich (Hegel), 68, 106, 146, 180, 241–43, 245–46 skepticism, 64, 67, 96–98, 100, 179, 182, 208–12, 235, 237–38, 240, 242, 245 Smart, J. J. C., 182 Socrates, 57–58, 60, 144, 244 solipsism, 100, 106, 136, 173, 208, 211 Sophists, 18 sortal(s), 146–47 speech act(s), 52–54, 56, 139 Spinoza, Baruch, 212 Stachel, John, 13 Stich, Stephen P., 211 Stoker, Bram, 146 Dracula, 146–47 Strawson, P. F., 51–53, 56, 145–46

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Strauss, Leo, 14 structuralism, 177 subjectivism, 97 success, 66, 180, 242, 247 sui generis, 212 ´suny ¯ ata, ¯ 7 symbiosis, symbiotized, 63–65, 98, 100, 102, 138, 174–75, 182–84, 208–9, 211–12, 235–40 syntax, syntactic, 13, 52–54, 57 tabula rasa (Locke), 209, 243 Tao, Taoism, 6–7 Tarski, Alfred, 51, 54–55 Taylor, Charles, 177, 180 technology, 1, 65, 236 telic, 174, 241, 243 tertium quid, 60–61, 63, 65, 209 Thirdness (Peirce), 148, 239–42 Toulmin, Stephen, 137 transcendental(ism), 97–98, 101, 135–38, 141, 207, 209, 237, 240 transparency, 235 truth, 54–55, 64–65, 104, 140, 145, 175, 179, 181, 210, 235–38, 240–41, 243–46 truth-value(s), 52–54, 56, 64, 181, 243, 246 Tugendhat, Ernst, 178 unified science, 16, 59, 60, 65 unity of science, 182 Universal(s), 59–63, 244 universalism, 178–79 Weltanschauung, 106, 139, 145–46 Whitehead, Alfred N., 57 Wiggins, David, 245 Williams, Bernard, 145 Winch, Peter, 177, 179–80 Wittgenstein, Ludwig (Wittgensteinian), 3, 4, 6, 15, 51, 55, 56, 58, 64–68, 96, 102, 105–7, 177, 179–80, 210 On Certainty, 66, 107 Philosophical Investigations, 3, 4, 56, 64, 66–67, 102, 105, 107 Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 3, 4, 56, 64, 67, 96, 105 “worlded,” 64