The Oxford Companion to Philosophy Part 25 pptx

The main argument for dualism is that facts about the objective external world of particles and fields of force, as revealed by modern physical science, are not facts about how things app

encounter between the rationalism of Greek philosophy

and the theology of omnipotence and inscrutability in

Islam and was associated with Averroës, who, in his

Deci-sive Treatise, tried to justify a double standard of truth for

the masses and truth for the philosopher This earned him

the ire of Islamic and Christian theologians and led to the

Paris Condemnations of Bishop Tempier of 1270 and 1277

in which Boethius was centrally involved, and to the

attempts of St Thomas Aquinas to produce a coherent

synthesis of pagan philosophy and Christian theology

The moral and intellectual privilege of the philosopher is a

prominent theme in Spinoza (Ethics, proposition 41,

*subjective truth

G F Hourani, Averroës on the Harmony of Religion and

Philosophy (London, 1961).

doubt.When we doubt a proposition, we neither believe

nor disbelieve it: rather, we suspend judgement,

regard-ing it as an open question whether it is true Doubt can

thus be a sceptical attitude: one form of *scepticism holds

that any cognitive attitude other than doubt is irrational or

illegitimate—rationality requires a general suspension of

judgement The arguments employed by sceptics (for

example, Pyrrhonists such as Sextus Empiricus) are thus

designed to induce doubt, to shake our beliefs and

certain-ties, and to force us to suspend judgement

Descartes made doubt the cornerstone of a

philosoph-ical method: in order to place our knowledge on

founda-tions which are genuinely secure, we should try to doubt

all of our beliefs, retaining them only if they are absolutely

indubitable Ordinary empirical beliefs are threatened by

the possibility that I am dreaming; as are even logical

prin-ciples because I might be deceived by an evil demon

Unless I can eliminate these possibilities, I cannot escape

the suspicion that all my beliefs are infected by unnoticed

error Few have been convinced by Descartes’s claims

about when doubt is impossible, and many have

ques-tioned his claims about the desirability of trying to extend

doubt as far as possible

A problem emerges because Descartes’s arguments do

not produce a genuine doubt: the possibility that I might

be dreaming or deceived by a demon does not touch my

everyday confidence that I will be supported when I sit

down or my ordinary reliance upon elementary

arith-metic Descartes acknowledged that the doubt induced by

hypothesizing an evil demon is ‘very slight, and so to

speak metaphysical’: we can acknowledge the abstract

possibility or appropriateness of doubt but we feel no live

doubt But many of his critics have claimed that he relied

upon an inadequate, excessively ‘intellectual’

understand-ing of doubt and certainty

*Common-sense philosophers have questioned the

apparent assumption that if we can conceive a possible

situation incompatible with the truth of some everyday

claim, then, unless we have independent grounds for ruling

out that possibility, our everyday certainty is unwarranted

There are kinds of certainty (and indubitability) falling short of the absolute certainty criticized by sceptics In 1675 John Wilkins defended our certainty that there was such a man as Henry VIII and that there are such places as Amer-ica and China And John Tillotson insisted that ‘It is possible that the sun may not rise to Morrow morning; and yet, for all this, I suppose that no Man has the least Doubt but that

it will.’ We do not hesitate to accept standards of rationality which underwrite such certainties; and it is unreasonable

to follow sceptics in disregarding these standards Doubt is made to appear a neurotic and unreasonable fear which leads us to doubt things because they cannot receive kinds

of proofs which it is unreasonable to expect them to receive They may not be beyond all possible doubt, but

they are beyond all reasonable doubt Similar arguments

against the Cartesian use of the method of doubt are found

in thinkers like Thomas Reid

Alongside this claim that sceptical doubts are unreason-able, we find the suggestion that they are unreal, that they are a pretence The way in which I confidently trust that the chair will take my weight suggests that I entertain no real possibility that it is not there Philosophers like Wittgenstein have insisted that these ‘practical certain-ties’, things we do not doubt ‘in deed’, form the true foun-dations of our knowledge: the Cartesian method of doubt misconstrues this distinctive kind of certainty as a form of

*certainty

R Descartes, Meditations, in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, tr J Cottingham et al (Cambridge, 1985).

M J Ferreira, Scepticism and Reasonable Doubt (Oxford, 1986).

doxa.A Greek word signifying opinions, beliefs, conjec-tures, estimates A very important notion in Aristotle’s philosophical methodology, where it means the ‘things that are said’ by the many or the wise regarding some problem or issue which any adequate philosophical assessment must take into account justly and properly The *‘intuitions’ often appealed to in modern moral phil-osophy, or in John Rawls’s method of *‘reflective

equilib-rium’, are all doxa, but it is not obvious that philosophical

theorizing need be constrained by such things n.j.h.d

A notable treatment is given by G E L Owen in ‘Tithenai ta phainomena’, in Logic, Science, and Dialectic (Ithaca, NY, 1986).

doxastic virtues: see virtues, doxastic.

dread:see Angst.

dreams.Hallucinations in sleep? Philosophers have con-cerned themselves with dreams in three ways

(1) Dream scepticism The effectiveness of any self-applied

waking-or-dreaming test presupposes that you did not merely dream you carried it out Does it follow that you know neither that you are not dreaming nor any of those many things you think you know provided you are awake?

220 double truth

(2) The interpretation of dreams Freud said dreams are the

(disguised) fulfilment of a (repressed) wish Are such

explanations causal, purposive, or something else? And

what would vindicate or refute them? Or is the point to

change dreamers rather than to understand them?

(3) The concept of dreams Given that most of what is

reported as dreamt belongs to Cloud-cuckoo-land, is this

remembering at all? If so, of what? And what would count

as misremembering? Do dreams occur during sleep or are

our waking impressions memory illusions? j.e.r.s

*psychoanalysis, philosophical problems of

C E M Dunlop (ed.), Philosophical Essays on Dreaming (Ithaca,

NY, 1977)

Dretske, Fred I (1932– ) American philosopher, who has

made significant contributions to epistemology,

meta-physics, and the philosophy of mind In the philosophy of

perception he defended the idea that there is a

‘non-epistemic’ variety of visual experience—the sense of seeing

an object that is attributable in purely extensional

sen-tences (*intentionality.) In epistemology he was one of the

pioneers of the ‘relevant alternatives’ approach to

*know-ledge In recent work, Dretske has offered a reductive

account of the intentionality of mental states in terms of the

notion of information—reliable lawlike correlation between

types of phenomena Clouds are reliably correlated with

rain There is a sense therefore in which clouds carry

infor-mation about the presence of rain: they are ‘reliable

indica-tors’ of rain Dretske argues that intentionality can

ultimately be reduced to such reliable indication t.c

*perception; experience

Fred I Dretske, Knowledge and the Flow of Information (Oxford,

1981)

—— Naturalizing the Mind (Cambridge, Mass., 1995).

dualism.The theory that mind and matter are two

dis-tinct things Its most famous defender is Descartes, who

argues that as a subject of conscious thought and

experi-ence, he cannot consist simply of spatially extended

mat-ter His essential nature must be non-material, even if in

fact he (his soul) is intimately connected with his body

The main argument for dualism is that facts about the

objective external world of particles and fields of force, as

revealed by modern physical science, are not facts about

how things appear from any particular point of view,

whereas facts about subjective experience are precisely

about how things are from the point of view of individual

conscious subjects They have to be described in the first

person as well as in the third person

Descartes argued that the separate existence of mind

and body is conceivable; therefore it is possible; but if it is

possible for two things to exist separately, they cannot be

identical A modern form of this argument has been

pre-sented by Saul Kripke, against recent forms of scientific

materialism which claim that the relation of mental states

to brain states is like the relation of water to H2O What

happens in the mind clearly depends on what happens in

the brain, but facts about the physical operation of the brain don’t seem to be capable of adding up to subjective experiences in the way that hydrogen and oxygen atoms can add up to water Theoretical identifications of which both terms are physical and objective don’t provide a model for identifications where one term is physical and the other is mental and subjective However, while there are problems with the identification of mind and brain, it

is not clear what other kind of entity could have subjective states and a point of view, either

Substance dualism holds that the mind or soul is a separ-ate, non-physical entity, but there is also *double aspect theory or property dualism, according to which there is no soul distinct from the body, but only one thing, the person, that has two irreducibly different types of properties, men-tal and physical Substance dualism leaves room for the possibility that the soul might be able to exist apart from the body, either before birth or after death; property dual-ism does not Property dualdual-ism allows for the compatibil-ity of mental and physical causation, since the cause of an action might under one aspect be describable as a physical event in the brain and under another aspect as a desire, emotion, or thought; substance dualism usually requires causal interaction between the soul and the body Dualis-tic theories at least acknowledge the serious difficulty of locating consciousness in a modern scientific conception

of the physical world, but they really give metaphysical expression to the problem rather than solving it

The desire to avoid dualism has been the driving motive behind much contemporary work on the mind– body problem Gilbert Ryle made fun of it as the theory of

‘the *ghost in the machine’, and various forms of *behav-iourism and *materialism are designed to show that a place can be found for thoughts, sensations, feelings, and other mental phenomena in a purely physical world But these theories have trouble accounting for *consciousness and its subjective *qualia Neither dualism nor material-ism seems likely to be true, but it isn’t clear what the

*identity theory; mind–body problem

René Descartes, Meditations.

S Kripke, Naming and Necessity (Cambridge, Mass., 1980).

C McGinn, The Character of Mind (Oxford, 1982).

Ducasse, Curt John (1881–1969) A French-born Ameri-can philosopher who taught at Brown University and was

an advocate and practitioner of *analytical philosophy before it became the dominant mode in the English-speaking world In contrast to most analytical philoso-phers, however, Ducasse had a comprehensive philosoph-ical system

‘When any philosophically pure-minded person sees a brick strike a window and the window break’, Ducasse said

in his attack on Hume on *causation, ‘he judges that the

impact of the brick was the cause of the breaking, because

he believes that impact to have been the only change which took place then in the immediate environment of

Ducasse, Curt John 221

the window.’ According to his adverbial view of sensing

(influential on the epistemology of his student Chisholm),

when we sense a red colour, the red colour is not a

sub-stantive but refers to a way of sensing—‘I see redly’

Ducasse was also celebrated for his lifelong fascination

P H Hare and Edward H Madden, Causing, Perceiving and

Believ-ing: An Examination of the Philosophy of C J Ducasse (Dordrecht,

1975)

duck-rabbit.A visually ambiguous drawing, introduced

by J Jastrow It can be perceived either as a duck or as a

rabbit, but not both simultaneously It constitutes the

starting-point for Wittgenstein’s study, in Philosophical

Investigations,ii ix, of aspect perception It exemplifies the

concept-laden character of some forms of *perception,

and provides a connecting link to examination of the

per-ception of speech and writing p.m.s.h

*illusion

S Mulhall, On Being in the World: Wittgenstein and Heidegger on

See-ing Aspects (London, 1990), 1–52.

Duhem, Pierre (1861–1916) French physicist,

philoso-pher, and historian of science most famous for Quine’s use

of his thesis that theories cannot enjoy empirical

conse-quences of their own, but only in complexes Duhem’s

stated position varied from the thoroughgoing

*instru-mentalism of To Save the Phenomena to a *conventionalism

tinged with what has been interpreted as structural

real-ism in Aim and Structure Whether any properties of the

world can be inferred from the success of a physical

the-ory, the power responsible for these successes was, for

Duhem, the mathematical structure beloved of ‘French’

minds, rather than the strings and pulleys of English

atom-ism Thus Duhem was enamoured of—and contributed

to—phenomenological thermodynamics as expressed in

abstract differential equations n.c

r.f.h

*holism

P M M Duhem, To Save the Phenomena, tr E Doland and

C Maschler (Chicago, 1969)

——The Aim and Structure of Physical Theory, tr P Wiener

(Prince-ton, NJ, 1982)

Dühring, Eugen (1833–71) A prominent socialist

intellec-tual, Dühring was originally trained as a lawyer and came

to teach philosophy and economics at the University of

Berlin Building on Feuerbach’s materialism, Dühring

developed an atheistic optimism allied to a fairly

mech-anistic sort of *positivism From this he constructed

pro-posals for the reform of society which were distinctly

utopian In 1875 he became the object of a polemic by

Engels, entitled Anti-Dühring, in which Engels

counter-posed his own, and allegedly Marx’s, *dialectical

material-ism to the supposedly cruder *materialmaterial-ism of Dühring

d.mcl

Dummett, Michael (1925– ) British philosopher of lan-guage, logic, and mathematics, noted for his exposition of Frege’s philosophy and defence of *anti-realism Dum-mett characterizes anti-realism in terms of a denial of the principle of *bivalence—the principle requiring that any assertoric sentence is either true or false To hold that this principle fails for sentences concerning a given domain of discourse—such as past events, other minds, or mathe-matics—is to be, in Dummettian terms, an anti-realist with respect to that domain Dummett’s anti-realism stems from his approach to the theory of *meaning, and has affinities with verificationism Like Davidson, Dummett believes that a learnable language must have a compositional semantics, but rather than associate sen-tence-meaning with realist truth-conditions Dummett associates it with assertibility-conditions, because

where-as a child can be taught to recognize circumstances in which evidence suffices to justify the assertion of a sen-tence, it cannot be taught to grasp circumstances in which

a sentence would be true independently of any evidence that might bear upon its truth Consequently, if a sentence about (say) the past is such that neither it nor its negation

is justifiably assertible, we can have, it seems, no genuine grasp of what it would be for that sentence to be true and its negation false, or vice versa

Dummett’s views on anti-realism and the theory of meaning are intimately related to his work in logic and the philosophy of mathematics, especially his sympathetic treatment of *intuitionism Yet at the same time he has perhaps done more than any other commentator to pro-mote interest in Frege’s philosophy of language and math-ematics and to elevate Frege ahead of Russell, Moore, and Whitehead as founder of modern analytic philosophy—all this despite Frege’s strong Platonist leanings, which run quite counter to intuitionist precepts e.j.l

*normalization; Tarot

M Dummett, Frege: Philosophy of Language, 2nd edn (London,

1981)

—— Truth and Other Enigmas (London, 1978).

—— The Seas of Language (Oxford, 1993).

—— Truth and the Past (New York, 2004).

Duns Scotus, John (c.1266–1308) Scholastic philosopher,

the ‘Subtle Doctor’, the original ‘dunce’, and, for Gerard Manley Hopkins, ‘Of realty the rarest-veined unraveller’, who was one of the great Christian *medieval philoso-phers His critical attitude to Aquinas led to Ockham’s more radical criticism

The details of Scotus’ life are uncertain He was born in Scotland and became a Franciscan He did not live to revise his writings, and they are only now being properly edited and disentangled from spurious works His genius lies not only in the novelty of his doctrines but also in his meticulous exposition and dissection of arguments, even when he accepted their conclusions He believed, for example, in the immortality of the soul but regarded none

of the arguments for it as conclusive; and, in discussing the proofs of God’s existence, he took pains to distinguish

222 Ducasse, Curt John

those cases in which an infinite regress of causes is vicious

(and thus needs to be curtailed by the postulation of an

uncaused entity) from those in which it is not

In his discussions of theological questions, he

elab-orated several doctrines that diverge from *Thomism

(He rarely mentions Aquinas, however, but attacks less

eminent opponents such as Henry of Ghent.) He rejects

negative theology, since ‘negation is only known through

affirmation’ Being (the subject of metaphysics), and other

terms predicated of both God and creatures, are univocal

I may be certain that something, e.g God, is, or is wise, but

uncertain whether he is finite or infinite, created or

uncre-ated; but my concept of being or of wisdom will be the

same whichever of these alternatives is true (This

argu-ment is open to an objection: If I overhear someone saying

‘That’s too hard’, I may be certain that something is too

hard, and that the speaker believes it to be so, while being

uncertain whether what is referred to is a chair or a

ques-tion; but it does not follow that ‘hard’ is univocal as

applied to chairs and to questions Analogously, the fact

that we can believe God to be, while remaining uncertain

of his categorial status, does not demonstrate the

(other-wise plausible) conclusion that ‘being’ applies univocally

to entities in different categories.) Moreover, concepts are

derived from our acquaintance with creatures If the

con-cepts applied to God are not the same concon-cepts, we can

nei-ther give a sense to them nor validly argue from premisses

about creatures to truths about God

He criticized a position close to Ockham’s nominalism,

arguing that things have ‘common natures’, e.g the

humanity common to Socrates and Plato But he rejected

the Aristotelian–Thomist view that individual things are

distinguished by their (designated) matter and are thus

not truly intelligible Tweedledum is distinct from

Tweedledee in virtue of his haecceitas or thisness, a formal

feature intelligible to God and angels if not to fallen

humanity: ‘the ultimate specific difference is simply to be

different from everything else’ The distinction between

an entity’s common nature, its *haecceity, and its

existence is intermediate between a real and a conceptual

distinction, namely, an ‘objective formal distinction’

(distinctio formalis a parte rei).

This type of distinction also obtains between the divine

attributes, the powers of the soul, etc The will, both of God

and of man, is distinct from the intellect and not

deter-mined by it The will does not necessarily choose the

summum bonum even when it discerns it intellectually Will,

not intellect, plays the main part in our free ascent from

worldly perfection to beatitude, the love of God God too

is free, and the world does not emanate from him by

intel-ligible necessity, but results from his freely given love By

freely willing the moral law God makes it binding on us:

‘To command pertains only to the appetite or will’ But

the content of the primary precepts, e.g that one should

not worship other gods, is not determined by God’s will;

God wills them because they are intrinsically self-evident,

and we cannot be dispensed from them There are,

how-ever, secondary precepts which, though in harmony with

the primary, are neither derivable from them nor self-evident, and their content as well as their obligatoriness depends on God’s will; from these he can dispense us Scotus is half-way between Thomism and Ockham’s view that all law stems from the will of God alone

He was less fond than Aquinas of Aristotle’s proof of God’s existence from the occurrence of motion, not because the proof is invalid, but because God transcends the physical realm: ‘it is a more perfect and immediate knowledge of the first being to know it as first or necessary being than to know it as first mover’ Proofs of God’s exist-ence must be a posteriori But Anselm’s *ontological argument is a ‘probable persuasion’, if not a demonstra-tive proof, as long it is appropriately ‘coloured’ That is, Scotus (like Leibniz) added the premiss that the most per-fect being is possible, i.e can be ‘thought without contra-diction’, but held that we cannot prove that it contains no contradiction from our inability to detect one

His immense influence extends to Peirce and Heideg-ger as well as to his medieval followers m.j.i

F Copleston, A History of Philosophy, ii: Mediaeval Philosophy, pt 2: Albert the Great to Duns Scotus (Westminster, Md., 1950).

R Cross, Duns Scotus (New York, 1999).

E Gilson, Jean Duns Scot: Introduction à ses positions fondamentales

(Paris, 1952)

T Williams (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Duns Scotus

(Cam-bridge, 2003)

A B Wolter, The Philosophical Theology of John Duns Scotus (Ithaca,

NY, 1990)

Durkheim, Émile (1858–1917) From a French rabbinical family, he started his career teaching secondary-school philosophy, then sociology at the Universities of Bor-deaux and Paris He claimed that societies are irreducible entities, the laws governing which could not be derived from biology or psychology ‘Collective representations’

of a society, such as social traits, customs, legal systems, languages, and ‘group emotions’ are said to ‘exist outside the individual consciousness’, on which they have an effect greater than the mere sum of the effects of other individuals So sociology is a distinctive science with a dis-tinctive subject-matter (which happily prevents sociolo-gists being redundant)

What is ‘normal’ is relative to particular stages of society Lack of social norms, or conflict between them, produces ‘anomie’, a moral lawlessness Durkheim attempted functional explanations of the division of labour, primitive religions, etc in terms of societies’ (not

*anomie; society

Émile Durkheim, The Rules of Sociological Method, tr W D Halls,

ed Stephen Lukes (London, 1982)

Dutch book A Dutch book has been made against you if you accept odds and make bets in such a way that you lose regardless of the outcome For example, suppose you bet

$4 at 5–2 that the Canadiens will win the Stanley Cup, and

$4 at 5–2 that the Nordiques will win Hedging, you then

Dutch book 223

224 Dutch book

bet $7 at even odds that neither will win Whoever wins,

B Skyrms, Choice and Chance, 3rd edn (Belmont, Calif., 1986).

Dutch philosophy: see Netherlands philosophy.

duty.Along with the concepts of *‘ought’ and

*‘obliga-tion’, the concept of duty expresses moral action as

demanded or required ‘The moral law’, wrote Kant, is, for

us, ‘a law of duty, of moral constraint.’ How is this cluster

of concepts related to the contrasting cluster centring

upon ‘good’ and the realization of value? For some

moral-ists (including Kant again), ‘Duty and obligation are the

only names’ for ‘our relation to the moral law’ (Critique of

Practical Reason) For others, our duties, though not

reducible to different terms, make sense only as regulating

human life so as best to achieve good ends and to respect

rational and sentient beings

Certain performances, such as promise-making,

gener-ate duties to act in quite specific ways: other duties result

from special relationships—parent to child, doctor to

patient: others again are owed to living beings simply on

the ground of their sentience or their rational, personal

*supererogation

D P Gautier, Practical Reasoning (Oxford, 1963).

I Kant, Critique of Practical Reason (1788); tr L W Beck (Chicago,

1949)

O O’Neill, Constructions of Reason (Cambridge, 1989).

Dworkin, Ronald (1931– ) American Professor of Jurisprudence at Oxford then London, whose explicitly liberal theory of law radically extends Hart’s ‘internal viewpoint’ by treating philosophy of law as a primarily normative contribution to political, particularly judicial, deliberation Moral, political, and legal theory should

be not goal or duty-based but *rights-based, upholding principles (rights) over policies (collective goals), so as to respect everyone’s right to equality of concern and respect

(Taking Rights Seriously (1977)) This fundamental right

requires that governments be neutral about worthwhile or worthless forms of life, and support even suicidal individual

self-determination (Life’s Dominion (1993)) Such principles are already part of the law; ‘creative interpretation’ (Law’s Empire (1986)), seeking to make the law the best it can be,

legally authorizes substantial transformations of ‘settled law’ by judges duty-bound to apply only law j.m.f

*law and morals; law, philosophy of; moral scepticism

Ronald Dworkin, A Matter of Principle (Cambridge, Mass., 1985) Stephen Guest, Ronald Dworkin (Edinburgh, 1992).

dyadic:see relations.

earliest known philosophical term: see apeiron.

Earman, John(1942– ) American philosopher, a member

of the History and Philosophy of Science department at

the University of Pittsburgh He is best known for his

work in the history and philosophy of modern physics An

early proponent of casting philosophical problems about

space and time as conjectures within the mathematical

language of space-time structure, he has probed, in the

words of an early paper, the ‘thicket of problems growing

out of the intersection of mathematics, physics, and

metaphysics’ He has explored this thicket in books on

determinism, absolute and relational theories of space and

time, and acausal space-time structure Alongside books

on Bayesian inference, and more recently on Hume’s

argument against miracles, he has maintained his

tech-nical expertise with work on inflationary cosmologies and

John Earman, A Primer on Determinism (Dordrecht, 1986).

—— World Enough and Spacetime (Cambridge, Mass., 1989).

ecological morality: see environmental ethics.

economic determinism: see base and superstructure.

economics, philosophy of The philosophy of economics

may be taken as the *philosophy of social science run with

economic examples, in which case there is not much to be

said specifically about it Or it may be taken to designate a

more or less distinct area of inquiry: one which overlaps

with the philosophy of social science, as it is bound to do,

but which is motivated by distinctively economic

con-cerns I shall take it here in the latter sense Economics is a

highly distinctive approach to social theory, and the

philo-sophical problems which it raises are cast in nice

perspect-ive by contrasting it with other social disciplines of

thought I will consider the contrasts it displays with

socio-logy, psychosocio-logy, and politics

The most striking contrast between economics and

sociology—economics in the dominant neoclassical sense

and sociology in the traditional, Durkheimian mould—is

that economics is individualistic, sociology not (*Social

philosophy.) The individualist thinks that none of the

aggregate patterns and pressures revealed in social

science—or revealed otherwise—gives the lie to our gen-eral sense of the individual human agent, while the non-individualist denies this The non-individualist holds that human agents conform to our commonplace folk psy-chology, being more or less rational in the attitudes they form and the choices they make The non-individualist believes that individuals take second place, in a manner inconsistent with common sense, to the sorts of social regu-larities that social science is well equipped to reveal For example, he may say that there are social regularities that are predetermined or predestined to obtain, in such a way that individuals are bound to act as the regularities require: they are bound to have the attitudes that lead by ordinary psychology to suitable actions; or they are bound, at whatever cost to their attitudinal coherence— they may ‘go on the blink’—to display the behaviour involved

The debate between *individualism and non-individualism does not have much prominence in the philosophy of economics, because individualism reigns almost unquestioned; unlike certain sorts of sociology, economics has never suggested that it has a new and iconoclastic image of the human being to offer But a related, methodological question does often figure in current debates Assuming that economics is individual-istic in the more or less ontological sense explicated, does this mean that it must also be methodologically individu-alistic? Does it mean that economics must deny validity and interest to *explanations that relate events or patterns

to aggregate antecedents: say, that it must reject as ill-con-ceived the sort of explanation that traces a rise in crime to

a rise in unemployment or a decrease in religious practice

to growing urbanization? This question is of particular relevance, because many so-called macro-economic explanations appear to be aggregate in character

Whether or not economics can countenance such aggregate-level explanations, it is associated in practice with a style of individual-level explanation that marks a contrast with the explanations preferred in traditional sociology This style of explanation involves two elem-ents, one psychological, the other institutional The psychological element suggests that given a certain circumstance or change or whatever, it is unsurprising that people should generally—or at least in significant

E

numbers—come to behave in a certain way The

institu-tional element then goes on to show that given this shift in

overall behaviour, there are bound to be certain

conse-quences—in all likelihood, unintended consequences—

that make for an aggregate change If the consequences

are thought of as beneficial, then the pattern identified in

the explanation is traditionally described, in a phrase of

Adam Smith’s, as an invisible hand; if they are thought of

as harmful, it is sometimes described as an invisible

back-hand or an invisible foot Invisible back-hand and invisible

backhand explanations are the very stuff of economic

theorizing in the received, neoclassical mould

So much for the contrast between economics and

soci-ology A second contrast that points us towards distinctive

features of economics is that with psychology Here there

are a number of things to notice Economics has

tradition-ally been more or less behaviouristic in orientation,

pre-ferring to build a picture of the human subject out of

actions displayed rather than on a reflective or

introspect-ive basis Again, economics has traditionally been not just

behaviouristic, but also rationalistic It has assumed that

decision theory is on the right tracks in seeking to explain

human behaviour by reference to the maximization of

expected utility: the maximization of expected

prefer-ence-satisfaction And, finally, economics has tended, at

least in practice, to be egocentrically reductionistic,

assuming that the preferences which human agents seek

to satisfy are, on the whole, self-concerned or egoistic

desires These features of economics put it in contrast

with many traditions of psychological theorizing and they

even create tensions with our commonplace psychology

Economic psychology may not reject commonplace

psych-ology in the manner of non-individualistic theories, but it

gives a controversial gloss to much that that psychology

contains (Michael Bacharach and Susan Hurley (eds.),

Essays in the Foundations of Decision Theory.)

The status of the psychological assumptions that

eco-nomics makes is a matter at the core of the philosophy of

economics: there is much discussion both of the necessity

for such assumptions and of the plausibility of the

assump-tions made The quesassump-tions raised have been greatly

sharp-ened with the increasing application of economic method,

not just in the explanation of market and related

behav-iour, but also in the explanation of behaviour outside the

market: for example, in the explanation of social

inter-action, as in so-called exchange theory, and in the

explan-ation of political behaviour, as in what is known as the

theory of public choice Is it really reasonable to treat

social and political agents as headed and

hard-hearted calculators of the kind that economics projects

into the market-place? Some have thought that it is, on the

grounds that human beings are always unconsciously of

this cast of mind Others have sought less dramatic means

of vindicating the contribution that economics can make

in non-economic domains (Philip Pettit, The Common

Mind, ch 5.)

The final contrast that I want to mention is between

economics and politics Traditional political thinking,

especially normative political thinking, is characterized by two features First, a willingness to contemplate exogen-ous ideals—say, ideals of equality or liberty or solidarity—

in the assessment of social and political institutions And second, a tendency to assume that the main task in nor-mative thought is just to argue for the ideals introduced and to provide a sense of what their institutionalization would involve Economics breaks with both of these dis-positions, being associated with quite a different sense of how normative thinking should go (Geoffrey Brennan,

‘The Economic Contribution’.) Perhaps the main assumption of normative thinking in traditional economic circles—an assumption now

fre-quently questioned (Amartya Sen, Choice, Welfare and Measurement; John Broome, Weighing Goods)—is that it is

inappropriate to judge the institutions of a society except

by reference to the preferences of the people they affect This assumption is broadly utilitarian in character—unsur-prisingly, since the history of economic thought was closely tied up with the utilitarian movement in the last century—but economics has given its own distinctive twist to the utilitarian thought Arguing that we cannot compare preference-satisfaction across individuals and therefore cannot compute the level of total preference-satisfaction in a society—the exercise is not epistemolog-ically feasible—economics has explored other ways of developing the preference-based idea A development that gained momentum in the 1930s yielded the Pareto-criterion, according to which one arrangement is better than another if and only if it satisfies the preferences of some and does not frustrate the preferences of any This criterion has been at the centre of what came to be known

as welfare economics Another, more recent development, and one which has made for a connection with philosoph-ical discussions, suggests that one arrangement is better than another if and only if it would be preferred by suitable parties in a suitable collective choice This contractarian development is of great contemporary importance But not only is economics distinguished by the role it gives to preferences in normative thinking, it is also marked off from traditional normative thought by the emphasis it places on feasibility It is not enough, so eco-nomics suggests, to be able to identify a plausible ideal and

to describe what it would institutionally require What is also necessary is to be able to show that the institutional-ization in question represents a feasible way of realizing the ideal: one that is currently accessible and one that would remain in place, if once established There are many products of this concern with feasibility, among them the minimalist approach of F A Hayek, which argues that the information that good government would require in a more-than-minimal state is never going to be reliably available Public choice theory and social choice theory are also products of this concern and they have had

a major influence on contemporary political philosophy

(Iain McLean, Public Choice.)

The public choice theorist argues that it is silly to prescribe a form of government, or to allocate certain

226 economics, philosophy of

responsibilities to those in government, unless one has

reason to believe that the arrangement is institutionally

robust: at the least, it won’t lead to worst results than

would otherwise ensue Public choice theory is meant to

enable us to deal with the problem raised: to give us an

idea of what to expect from those in government under

this or that institutional amendment The social choice

theorist, on the other hand, is concerned with more

abstract matters He argues that there are many ways of

aggregating individual preferences into a social

prefer-ence-ordering—many ways of moving from what you

want and what I want to what we should prefer as a

group—that cannot simultaneously satisfy various

attract-ive conditions; the most famous result in the area is

Kenneth Arrow’s impossibility theorem Social choice

the-ory castigates traditional thethe-ory for being over-relaxed

about such matters and tries to explore questions about

the aggregation of preferences in a systematic manner

p.p

*psychology and philosophy; capitalism; rational

choice theory

Michael Bacharach and Susan Hurley (eds.), Essays in the

Founda-tions of Decision Theory (Oxford, 1991).

Geoffrey Brennan, ‘The Economic Contribution’, in R E

Goodin and Philip Pettit (eds.), A Companion to Contemporary

Political Philosophy (Oxford, 1993).

John Broome, Weighing Goods (Oxford, 1991).

Iain McLean, Public Choice (Oxford, 1987).

Philip Pettit, The Common Mind (New York, 1993).

Amartya Sen, Choice, Welfare and Measurement (Oxford, 1982).

economics and morality.All societies must make moral

decisions on how their resources are to be distributed But

for every resource allocation that brings benefits,

cond-itions of scarcity mean that there are associated burdens,

or costs The discipline of economics offers a method of

analysis for comparing alternative distributions by

clarify-ing what is at stake, in terms of the burdens associated

with the benefits However, the relationship between

eco-nomics and morality is not straightforward Neo-classical

(Welfare) Economics (NCE), by far the most influential

modern school, is based on a number of theoretical

pre-suppositions that raise moral questions

Though economists may seek a value-free analytic

technique, specific value commitments underpin the way

they conceptualize benefits and burdens They employ a

metric of comparison for alternative distributions, within

which burdens can be counted against benefits Yet, in

order to do this in a ‘value-neutral’ framework, they make

benefit gains relative to each person’s own conception of

value This they do predominantly by adopting the metric

of individual welfare, understood as the maximisation of

preference satisfaction (although some alternatives have

been offered)

To this individualized notion of welfare, economists

add the principle that distributions which optimize

wel-fare gains across individuals, according to the Pareto

improvement and optimality theorems, are economically

superior Accordingly, the institution of the market is cen-tral to NCE Under ideal conditions, a market is ‘efficient’

in its allocation of resources because, free, preference-based exchanges optimally maximize welfare (preference satisfaction)

These basic principles of individual welfare maximiza-tion, aggregamaximiza-tion, the imperative to optimize gains, and market efficiency are not morally neutral; nor is it clear that they are compatible with important moral values Trivially, distributions which satisfy these conditions may fail to respect rights or uphold communally important values, such as equality and fairness, unless one falsely identifies optimizing welfare allocations with fairness, or assumes that they respect rights Less trivially, the idea that well-being can be understood in terms of maximizing preference satisfaction is controversial, as is claiming superiority for set-ups which optimally maximize it across individuals Some goods, such as health or personal free-dom, for example, may not be commensurable with other preference-satisfiers which can be exchanged on a market

So even asking people to consider goods, like the envir-onment or human relationships, solely in terms of prefer-ences, especially those which can be expressed in market exchanges, seems morally distorting Nor is it obviously ethically acceptable to treat persons in terms of one ‘snap-shot’ of their preferences These can change over time, and, more importantly, they can be responsive to reasons Yet the value of political participation—influen-cing communal decisions through argument and discus-sion—is not itself expressible in terms of preferences in the market-place Nevertheless, might not NCE help us with choices where all other morally relevant factors are taken into account? Whilst there is nothing wrong with redu-cing burdens, a moral problem remains for NCE What counts as a burden, that which is costly, and what costs it

is appropriate to associate with a choice, are questions themselves sensitive to moral judgement It seems wrong, for example, to see the discharge of a moral duty as some-thing for which one could be compensated

NCE also employs a theory of rationality for individuals (rational choice theory) and for collectives (social choice theory) This aims both to explain actual states of affairs and to evaluate choices The theory has a normative core which characterizes rational agent motivations as maxi-mizing preference satisfaction and supplies axioms for ordering preferences As a comprehensive description of rationality, then, the view places conditions on moral rea-soning For some philosophers, it even forms the basis of

an account of morality One response is that a plausible notion of good and bad reasons exists which is independ-ent of actual preferences It is not obviously rational for someone to act on their strong preferences for harming others, even if they can do so with impunity The conclu-sions of rational choice theory, then, may sometimes com-pete with moral reasoning

The productive successes of market economies, and paucity of viable alternatives to NCE, pose a different moral problem Can we retain market benefits, without

economics and morality 227

NCE’s theoretical presuppositions? It seems possible to

do this by retaining the market, within a morally

deter-mined regulatory framework However, this leaves us

in need of a principle for determining to what degree

personal choice (preference), versus moral duties to

others, can legitimately play a role in setting economic

*economics and philosophy; justice

E Anderson, Value in Ethics and Economics (Cambridge, Mass.,

1993)

D M Hausman and M S McPherson, Economic Analysis and

Moral Philosophy (Cambridge, 1996).

A Sen, On Ethics and Economics (Oxford, 1989).

education, history of the philosophy of A problem

con-fronting anyone writing on the history of the philosophy

of education is that many of the names mentioned in

stand-ard treatments of the topic, such as Pestalozzi, Froebel,

and Hebart, are unlikely to be mentioned in standard

his-tories of philosophy Conversely, many if not most of the

great philosophers have had little directly to say on the

subject of education, and sometimes, as with Locke, when

they do say something directly it is of little consequence

Nevertheless, despite this mismatch between philosophy

and educational thinking, the topic of education does raise

important philosophical issues In concentrating on

phil-osophers of importance and topics central to education,

my account may be found somewhat revisionary

The starting-point, though, must, as always, be Plato,

whose Republic, though not exclusively that, is the first and

greatest work in the philosophy of education In the

Republic, Plato is concerned with educating people in such

a way that a just society is the outcome Many would find

this an extraordinary overestimation of the powers of

edu-cation, and indeed it would be were education conceived

in terms acceptable to a liberal democracy and did not

involve, as Plato advocates, a form of child-farming Plato

is not concerned with the liberal ideal of individuals

pur-suing their own tastes and interests He rejects the family

and private property, at least for the rulers For Plato, the

good life is characterized rather by a general turning

towards what is good and true outside of us and

independ-ently of us Although this external good has left its traces

deep within us, it is hidden and needs to be recovered by a

process of externally directed discipline and thought Each

individual is born destined to play a particular type of role

in a society which aims at the good, and will be happy

when his own powers are so arranged as to enable him

to fulfil this role In such a society the rulers will possess

the wisdom to guide the rest in the light of the good and

the true

In the good city there will be all the usual trades and

crafts, and the majority of citizens should be trained to

perform them, presumably learning reading, writing,

counting, and the particular skills appropriate to their

trade But educators will notice that some youths are

suited by temperament to guard and guide the city; those

singled out need to be both brave and gentle To produce

soldiers of the right disposition, those selected will receive

an education in music and gymnastics, based on the trad-itional classical Greek models Music, which includes liter-ature, will have to be uplifting and moral, rather than effeminate or disorderly Poetry which shows the gods behaving disreputably and music which is barbaric or effete are ruled out Gymnastics will train both bodies and characters

The most selfless and steadfast of the guardians are to

be educated further to become rulers of the city For this, they will need to become philosophers, lovers of wisdom, skilled in science and reasoning (or what Plato calls dia-lectic) Both rulers and soldiers are to be brought into what is in effect an armed camp within the city, and taken away from their parents For the rest of their lives they will possess everything in common, including wives and children The presumption is that the offspring of the initial guardians will share their qualities and form the next generation of guardians

Within the camp no one will know who his or her par-ents are There will also be no distinction between the sexes, women being selected as guardians as much as men, and educated in the same way Future generations of guardians will be told that they have been bred for the city Their philosophizing is not for their own satisfaction only, but is so that they can rule and instruct the rest

Simply to recount Plato’s proposals may seem to have little philosophical point There are, though, certain themes which have recurred in educational thinking since Plato’s time: the idea that education and individual lives are ideally for the sake of the state, not for the sake of the individual alone; the idea that education is as much about the building of character as of intelligence in our sense (which is the case even with the rulers’ philosophizing, which is all directed towards a type of static wisdom which

is coterminous with moral goodness); and the idea that education is capable of transforming individual minds and characters so as to produce acceptance of a revolutionary communistic project

Plato’s doubtless exaggerated assessment of the power

of education nevertheless leads him to write scathingly and brilliantly of forms of education of which he disap-proves He writes of the schoolmaster in a democratic society who ‘fears and flatters his pupils’ and the pupils who consequently despise him, of old men who, ridicu-lously, condescend to the young, ‘imitating their juniors

in order to avoid the appearance of being sour or despotic’ For Plato, although education is communistic,

it cannot be democratic or, in the modern sense, child-centred Even though within us there are the seeds or traces of wisdom, wisdom eludes the grasp of the young, who are wayward and blind and who have to be trained over many years to have the right dispositions and thoughts Education then cannot proceed on the basis of the current interests of the young The philosophers, indeed, have a duty, which is painful for them, of descend-ing into the *cave metaphorically occupied by the unen-lightened, so as to instruct and rule them And wisdom is

228 economics and morality

fixed and one So a pluralistic approach to value or

educa-tion is rejected

Like much else in philosophy, philosophy of education

continually rehearses Platonic themes: authoritarian or

child-centred? dictatorial or pluralistic? collectivistic or

individualistic? And there is also continual worrying at the

relationship between what is already inside the child and

what is to be received from without Of course, strange

transmogrifications have happened on the way The train

of thought now known as liberal education, as reflected in

the writings of Michael Oakeshott, say, would agree with

Plato in rejecting child-centredness, but disagree with him

on the fixity of knowledge and on the nature of the state

It would agree with Plato on the importance of learning

what has been discovered, but disagree with him on the

closure of traditions of thought And while it would give

some thought to the importance of moral education, it

would tend to view education in far more intellectualist

terms than Plato, claiming that intellectual disciplines and

their content are worth learning for themselves

irrespect-ive of any moral improvement they bring

We have no systematic treatise by Aristotle on

educa-tion, but he would have shared Plato’s suspicion of

teach-ers who are afraid to appear despotic He also made some

suggestive remarks about the need to inculcate the right

dispositions in the young before encouraging them to

reflect on morality and politics (Otherwise their

reason-ing will be clever rather than wise.) And he endorsed the

classical stress on music and gymnastics in terms similar to

Plato But, although he saw the happy individual as

play-ing a role in public affairs, he saw the gainplay-ing of knowledge

by individuals as an end in itself and not to be justified in

terms of the contribution this might enable an educated

individual to make to the state For Aristotle men have

intrinsic desire to know and understand, which it is part of

their nature to pursue Here Aristotle was close to

Socrates’ dictum that the unexamined life is not worth

living He was also closer to the individualism of Socrates

than to the Plato of the Republic.

During the Christian era, Platonic themes resurface,

notably in the writings of St Augustine Human nature

needs to be turned to the light because of original sin and

its enmeshment in body The young are not yet rational

They need instruction in the basic subjects The content of

what is taught is censored, and the aim of elementary

edu-cation will be the prevention of idleness Only in the

higher stages, with the study of philosophy and theology,

will anything like full rationality be possible Augustine

sees God as the source of all truth and analyses learning

quasi-Platonically as a form of opening ourselves to an

inner divine illumination, an opening which, as with

Plato, does not preclude didactic teaching methods

While not accepting Augustine’s Platonic view of

knowledge, most Christian writers on education up to the

time of Luther and St Ignatius of Loyola saw education in

terms of the salvifically necessary transmission of truths

established and revealed Even with the recovery of pagan

learning in the Renaissance the stress is on imparting to

the young what has been learned There is, though, some-thing of a sea-change, in the seventeenth century, with its dismissal of past authority, and stress on individual experi-ence Thus Francis Bacon, who believed that the truth about nature would be manifest to the individual who engaged in presuppositionless observation, opposed the foundation of Charterhouse school on the grounds that its curriculum was to be based on the ancient classics He wrote: ‘what happiness it would be to throw myself into the river Lethe, to erase completely from my soul the memory of all knowledge, all art, all poetry; what happi-ness it would be to reach the opposite shore, naked like the first man.’ Education should, therefore proceed by the learner making his own observations and discoveries, without external direction Locke was not so sanguine as Bacon about the possibility of learning much about the world through the senses, although he believed with Bacon that we have no other access to the world Locke, accordingly, emphasized the moral aspects of education,

at the expense of the intellectual and scientific But he agreed with Bacon’s thoroughly utilitarian approach to knowledge and to education, both, in Bacon’s terms, to be directed to ‘the relief of man’s estate’

Throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, schools and universities went on traditionally The new philosophies of Bacon and Descartes which stressed indi-vidual discovery and reasoning and which downplayed didactic instruction had little effect on curriculum or

peda-gogy It is indeed doubtful that any philosophy had any

significant effect on the practice of education prior to the beginning of the nineteenth century, when the ideas of Rousseau and his followers Pestalozzi and Froebel began

to make an impact

Rousseau’s Émile (1762), in common with many of his

other writings, is a sustained criticism of civilization as it existed in Rousseau’s time Although, in Rousseau’s

words at the start of Émile: ‘God made all things good, man

meddles with them and they become evil.’ We are born free, but live in chains Our first natural impulses are always right, yet society, by encouraging envy and vanity, makes us into civilized monsters, suffering and causing suffering The child, moreover, is not a miniature adult, but a creative being with its own particular needs and desires, which should be allowed to ‘indulge its sports, its

pleasures, its delightful instincts’ Émile was a heady brew,

combining nature-worship, child-centredness, an emphasis

on doing and discovery at the expense of reading and being taught, and a pervasive hatred of the existing order

of things, from which the child must be protected Its actual proposal, to allow each Émile to develop ‘naturally’ and in isolation from society, under the exclusive tutelage

of a Rousseauian guide or, in today’s terms, ‘facilitator’, is

as impracticable as Plato’s Nevertheless despite an ineradicable lack of clarity about what Rousseau means by nature and uncertainty about the benefit to be gained by

following nature’s impulses, Émile’s influence can be seen

in every primary school in the Anglo-Saxon world (France, perhaps surprisingly, has so far remained

education, history of the philosophy of 229