The Oxford Companion to Philosophy Part 52 doc

To illustrate the scope for dispute it can be recorded that all the terms that have seemed useful starting-points to some words, language, ideas, convention, meaning, translation, refere

or swimming However, competent speakers are in

receipt of a vast range of complex knowledge They can

understand indefinitely many sentences they have never

heard before: sentences that conform to complex

gram-matical rules that speakers are unable to articulate To

account for these facts, Noam Chomsky proposes that

speakers tacitly know the rules of grammar for their

lan-guage Furthermore, he argues that each child’s

acquisi-tion of language depends on a body of innate knowledge

that equips it to develop a language On this view, each

child has a dedicated language faculty configured in

accord-ance with universal grammar, and the grammar of each

lan-guage is a refinement of it Knowledge of word meaning is

less plausibly a matter of innate endowment, but it can be

conceived as knowledge of rules for the correct use of

words Explaining our immediate and effortless knowledge

of what our words mean and our ability to follow rules for

their use remains a philosophical challenge b.c.s

B C Smith, ‘Understanding Language’, Proceedings of the

Aris-totelian Society (1992).

language, logically perfect: see logically perfect

language

language, meta-: see metalanguage.

language, object: see object language.

language, private: see private language problem.

language, problems of the philosophy of The

philoso-phy of language explores the relationships between

our-selves and our *language, and our language and the world

The first kind of exploration asks what it is for us to invest

words and sentences with a certain meaning, whilst the

second investigates the relationships between words and

the things to which they refer, or the facts that they

describe The former topic is sometimes called

*pragmat-ics, and the latter *semant*pragmat-ics, although the lines between

them can easily blur

It is given by the nature of a language that some things

may be inferred from others If a shape is square then it is

four-sided, and if a person is a bachelor then he is

unmar-ried It is evident that these relationships are intimately

connected to the very meaning of the words involved

(either being determined by that meaning, or perhaps

themselves playing an important role in fixing it) Logic

studies the nature of these inferences, and a common

elem-ent in the philosophy of language at least since Aristotle

has been the desire to codify and lay bare the structure,

perhaps hidden on the surface, whereby one thing may be

inferred from another This develops into the formal

pro-gramme of defining firstly the syntax of a language (the

ways in which grammatical strings of elements are

gener-ated and separgener-ated from ungrammatical ones) and then

the logical structures responsible for the inferences which

we can and cannot make One major philosophical

prob-lem such inquiries raise is the relationship between the

smooth surface recognition of grammar and of logical relationships, and the extremely complex rules that appear necessary to enable any system to compute the same results Are we to think of some such system of rules

as really implemented at some level of our cognitive sys-tems? Or are they ways of describing what we do that make no claim on how we do it?

To investigate language we might start with a list of

platitudes about it Language consists of words, which come in sequences or sentences With our words we express our ideas, and we intend to communicate Because

of our conventions the words of a language refer to things,

or have *meanings Other languages may, however, have attached the same meanings to their terms, with the result

that they can be translated Some words are synonymous or mean the same; some are vague Some (‘red’) seem some-how keyed closely to experience, others (‘quark’) are highly theoretical A whole sentence often expresses a proposition, which may be true or false (although we also do other

things with language, such as issue commands, ask ques-tions, and make promises) The truth or falsity of a sen-tence will depend on whether the world satisfies some

condition, known as the *truth-condition of the sentence.

The philosophy of language is largely a matter of trying to understand these italicized terms, and the revolutions in the subject occur when what seems a satisfactory basis for such understanding to one school or generation seems a very bad place to start to another To illustrate the scope for dispute it can be recorded that all the terms that have seemed useful starting-points to some (words, language, ideas, convention, meaning, translation, reference, experi-ence, intention, proposition, truth) have not only been denied foundational status by others, but even been vio-lently excommunicated as spurious and unscientific notions

From the beginnings of philosophy it has been realized that problems of meaning and language are intertwined with those of other areas of inquiry Our languages are things we understand, so a theory of language must match with a philosophical psychology, or story about the powers of the mind Furthermore, a theory of what the world is like must conform to the demand that it is describ-able by language: if, therefore, a linguistically describdescrib-able world must have some form or another we can infer the structure of the world, at least in so far as we can describe

it, from the structure of our representations of the world The earliest example of this form of reasoning is the argu-ment for the Forms in Plato, where the need for a com-mon feature or form in things is witnessed by the fact that

we have a common name (dog, chair) for numbers of them Again, it is common to deduce that otherwise mys-terious entities, such as events or facts or numbers, exist because we have terms for them and these terms function

in language in just the way that names of other less suspect entities function We therefore have no option to deny existence to events or facts or numbers, unless we wish to propose changing or abandoning our language This latter option indeed shows that we can only infer conclusions

490 language, knowledge of

about how we take the world to be, rather than how it

actually is, from facts about the general features of our

lan-guage, for in principle our language might reflect a

mis-understanding and misrepresentation of the real features of

things But in so far as we see no error in our usage, or no

prospect of a linguistic reform that would change the

fea-ture in question, we will find ourselves committed to the

substantive conclusion And if, as in the Tractatus

Logico-Philosophicus of Wittgenstein, we can put conditions on

the nature of any possible representation of facts, then we

have a *transcendental argument that if meaning is

pos-sible, then the world must be such as to be representable in

those ways

The philosophical understanding of language must

therefore achieve a stable equilibrium with our best

phil-osophy of mind and our best metaphysics It has been

characteristic of twentieth-century philosophy to suppose

that it dominates these partners, dictating how we are to

think about mind and metaphysics Thus to analytic

philosophers, such as Russell and Moore, and to the

Logi-cal Positivists, such as Carnap and Schlick, but above all to

Wittgenstein, the best route to a theory of mind is through

describing our linguistic powers, since these may claim to

be the most characteristic product of our understandings

On most issues, we do not know what to think until we

know what to say And if we cannot mean something,

then we cannot understand it either This suggests that if

an investigation into language delivers results about the

limits of meaning, then our science and our conception of

the world must also conform to those limits Such a result

was claimed by logical atomism, in which the nature of

linguistic representation is held to determine the kind of

fact that can ever be represented, and most famously by

*Logical Positivism with the doctrine that since the

mean-ing of a sentence is its method of verification (the

*verifi-cation principle), we can attach no meaning to hypotheses

that are incapable of verification, and must tailor our

con-cept of the world, and our philosophy of science,

accord-ingly The same strategy (and, some believe, the same

principle) is at work in the *private language argument of

Wittgenstein, in which the impossibility of meaningfully

describing the recurrence of a private sensation whose

nature is independent of any physical or public events, is

held to undermine the Cartesian philosophy of mind

according to which such sensations exist ‘Linguistic’

phil-osophy or ‘Oxford’ philphil-osophy of the middle years of the

twentieth century, is widely thought to have shown an

excessive reliance on the implications of ordinary speech

for other matters More recently deconstructionist

emphasis on the fluid contrasts and contingencies that

shape an overall linguistic ‘field’ (pattern of inferences)

leads to despair over finding any fixed meaning in our

terms, with lurid consequences for the possibility of any

objective description of things, or eventually of truth as

opposed to falsehood

The legacy of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century

*empiricism was confidence that language would be

understood by the way of ideas, or, in other words, by

seeing it as a vehicle for making public our ideas, con-ceived of as the self-standing mental elements whereby

we think, but which would otherwise remain private Ideas and their properties, especially their derivation from experience, were the central topic, with language a mere vehicle for their transmission (although Hobbes, Locke, and others were aware that infirmities or ‘abuses’ of lan-guage affected the task of thinking properly: but this could

be remedied by paying closer attention to ideas) Ideas, however, prove a broken reed, because any inner display of any kind seems inessential to identifying what is thought and understood, and because the power of ideas

to represent things other than themselves is just as hard to conceive as the power of words to do so Competence with a language is not simply competence in packaging already given ideas This is obvious if we imagine master-ing some new area, such as physics, where there is no dis-tinction between mastering the language and mastering the subject With the work of Frege emphasis came to be placed on objective and public aspects of understanding: when I tell you that the Gulf Stream crosses the Atlantic, I

do not excite in you an idea which may or may not be like some subjective idea of my own, but give you a definite and objective piece of information I transmit a thought or proposition But Frege remained largely silent on the question what it was to grasp such a thought or propos-ition Its content, evidently, concerns the Gulf Stream and the Atlantic, but how my mind is related to such things for

me to understand the proposition is left moot

If we put that question to one side it is possible to sketch further relations between psychological states and mean-ing One suggestion is that a term means something if it causes persons hearing it to go into some state But this fails to distinguish the common consequences of using a term from its meaning: talking about spiders may make most people think of being bitten, but that is no part of the meaning of the term, and indeed only occurs because of its meaning A better suggestion, although still inadequate, would focus on the intended effect The most influential development of this line has been that of H P Grice, which saw an utterance’s meaning in terms of the com-plex structure of intentions with which it is used A variant

of this approach may locate a public convention of using a type of utterance only with a certain intention, such as intending to induce a certain belief, or intending to signal that one has oneself a certain belief

Even if such accounts work (and the complexity neces-sary to protect them from objections has tended to rouse suspicion) they have still put aside the question how it is that my mental state is properly representational, or, in other words, what is involved in my grasping a propos-ition whose content concerns the Gulf Stream or the Atlantic The suggestion taking us away from pragmatics and towards semantics would be that this is so if I incline

to express the state by using words which refer to those geographical objects This, of course, requires that we have a separate account of word reference One sugges-tion was that of Russell’s famous theory of *descripsugges-tions,

language, problems of the philosophy of 491

according to which reference is normally accomplished by

the subject having in mind (in some sense) a description

which the thing referred to satisfies This in turn raises the

demand for an account of what it is to have a description in

mind, which in Russell terminates rather disappointingly

in an acquaintance with universals, or features that things

can share

But it was also objected by Strawson and others that the

account distorts the way in which *reference is normally

accomplished and the role that referring terms play in a

language The development of this objection by Kripke

and Putnam led to explorations of a causal account,

according to which I refer to something when my words

are in some favoured causal relationship with that object

This approach is still active Its chief current competitor is

associated with the work of Davidson This denies that the

relationship of reference is a good place to start Instead

we have to consider the overall project of interpreting

someone This will require the simultaneous attribution

of beliefs and meanings, done in accordance with the

methodological principle that we try to make them

appear as rational or sensibly tuned to their environment

as possible The programme this engenders is one of

sys-tematically attributing truth-conditions simultaneously to

each of the infinite (or indefinitely large) number of

pos-sible sentences that a language may contain The upshot is

an *interpretation made not by the piecemeal association

of individual words with individual things or features of

things, but more ‘holistically’ or ‘top down’ On this

approach the reference of a term becomes a mere

inter-vening variable, in the sense that it is simply an aspect of a

sentence certified by a procedure that has looked at a quite

different thing: the overall pattern of association of

truth-conditions with sentences The approach encounters a

notorious problem of determinacy Unless the constraints

are made very severe (possibly incorporating causal

requirements) it looks as though arbitrarily different

assignments of meaning may be made in conformity with

them

This problem, first identified as the *indeterminacy of

radical translation by Quine, has led to scepticism about

the very existence of determinate meaning, and to

conse-quent rejection of the idea that sentences ever manage to

express single propositions and thoughts A similar result

may be supported (probably not in accordance with its

author’s intentions) by the ‘rule-following considerations’

as they appear in the later work of Wittgenstein These

too leave the fact that someone follows a determinate rule

in their usage of a term a mysterious ‘superlative’ fact, and

one response is to fear that meaning has disappeared

altogether This nihilism is often thought to accord with a

proper appreciation of the contextual and socially rooted

nature of meaning, and the genuine difficulties of real-life

translation It is also realistic to remember that, however

strict we try to be with words, new situations can easily be

envisaged in which we would not know whether a

particu-lar term applies or not But Quine’s thesis and a sceptical

conclusion to the rule-following considerations go

beyond these proper cautions, for they make no distinc-tion between alien and stressful cases and normal thought and communication But nihilism about this ultimately self-destructs, since it is only by relying on my own (deter-minate) understanding of my terms that I can think at all

A dogged resolution to see others just as producers of noise fit to be interpreted in any of a variety of different ways may just about succeed for a time But a similar reso-lution with regard to myself is impossible We may, in the study, be sufficiently baffled by the problem to believe that there is nothing outside the text, and to see linguistic behaviour as a self-contained game of producing and con-suming noise and script But such scepticism is unlivable, and will not survive long when we actually ask directions, give recipes, and tell the time

There is, then, no agreed solution to the problem what

it is determinately to take a term in my language to refer to

a particular thing or feature of things Two recent devel-opments are the extensive links between the philosophy

of language and the general field of cognitive science, and the equally promising links between the subject and the biological and evolutionary perspective on the emergence

of language The latter suggests that we can isolate deter-minate meaning by considering the role of a term in the life of an animal in a determinate environment That is, if

a signal has evolved in order to fulfil some need (which in turn can be analysed in terms of the differential fitness it confers on its users) then it seems a short step to assign to

it a determinate semantic role This is a plausible recon-struction of a meaning for the signalling systems of some animals, for example Critics respond either that such sys-tems are so simple that they are misleading models for fully fledged language, or more fundamentally that we should not reduce meaning, which is a fact, to evolution-ary biological relations, which may remain speculative, or

we would be handing ourselves a strange kind of proof that evolutionary theory is true The computational approach has developed in a different direction Initially it seems unpromising, since computers respond simply to the syntax of elements of computer languages, without regard to their interpretation But further thought sug-gests that by putting a computer in an environment (either ‘virtual’ or real) with receptors responding to dif-ferent features of that environment, we get a small-scale version of a causal semantics for the terms in which it computes

As well as work on these broad and fundamental themes the philosophy of language contains detailed work

on the particular forms—*conditionals, *counterfactuals, tensed statements, modal statements—that are indispens-able to ordinary *communication Whilst the classic approach to these has been to try to show that they are dis-guised versions of the tractable, simple forms of statement dealt with in classical logic, more relaxed and elastic approaches are now equally respectable Equally import-ant are the discrimination of such things as emotive meaning, derogatory and other attitude-bearing dis-course, and the general study of the relation between the

492 language, problems of the philosophy of

vocabulary of a period and the social habits and structures

S Blackburn, Spreading the Word (Oxford, 1984).

G Frege, Philosophical Writings (Oxford, 1960).

R Millikan, Language, Thought and Other Biological Categories

(Cambridge, Mass., 1984)

W V Quine, Word and Object (Cambridge, Mass., 1960).

B Russell, An Inquiry into Meaning and Truth (London, 1940).

L Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (Oxford, 1953).

language, religious: see religious language.

language, social nature of. We learn language from

others in a social setting But is this enough to show that

language is an essentially social phenomenon? Opinions

among philosophers are divided Famously, Wittgenstein

argued that the only meanings that speakers could attach

to their words were the meanings they had in language of

the surrounding community Meaning, for Wittgenstein,

was a matter of publicly sustained patterns of use, not

pri-vate associations in the minds of individuals The

distinc-tion between using words correctly and incorrectly

cannot, he thought, be settled by the judgements of an

individual, but depends on agreement among the

com-munity of language-users To use a word correctly is to

use it in accordance with a rule, and whether an individual

is following a rule on a given occasion is a matter

independ-ent of the opinions of that individual For the sounds

speakers utter to have linguistic significance must be

independent of the opinions of the individual speaker

The distinction between the use of a word that seems

right and a use that is right, and something more than the

opinion of an individual, is required to set a standard or

rule for using a word correctly For Wittgenstein this is the

institution of a social practice, and individuals come to use

a language by participating in those practices Other

philosophers have supposed that speakers can

communi-cate successfully only if they attach the same meanings to

their words as others do, and this presupposes a shared

communal language However, an objection is that one is

only required to know what significance another speaker

attaches to the words uttered, not to attach the same

sig-nificance oneself Hence, speakers can differ in their use of

language, departing from communal practice, and still be

understood, so long as they make their meaning publicly

available Those who favour the view that the way

lan-guage is used by the individual is of primary importance

take idiolects rather than communal languages to be

pri-mary An idiolect, or language of an individual, need not

be private, and can still be used in a social setting A further

aspect of the social nature of language is what Hilary

Putnam has called ‘the division of linguistic labour’ This

social phenomenon is illustrated by words like ‘gold’

which have both an ordinary non-technical use and a

more precise meaning and application given to them by

experts In this case we may not know everything about

the meaning of such words, but we defer to the relevant

M Dummett, The Logical Basis of Metaphysics (Cambridge, Mass.,

1991), ch 4: ‘Meaning, Knowledge and Understanding’

language-game.Wittgensteinian term of art, introduced

in The Blue and Brown Books when rejecting the calculus model of language which had dominated his Tractatus It

highlights the fact that language use is a form of human rule governed activity, integrated into human transac-tions and social behaviour, context-dependent and pur-pose relative Analogies between games and language, playing games and speaking, justify it Imaginary lan-guage-games are introduced as simplified, readily sur-veyable objects of comparison to illuminate actual language-games, either by way of contrast or similarity A description of a language-game may include words and sentences, ‘instruments’ (gestures, patterns, word– sample correlations), context (which often brings to light the presuppositions of the existence of a language-game as well as the essential background of engaging in it), the characteristic activity of the language-game, the antecedent training and learning in which the rules are

imparted, the use of components of the language-game, and its point Wittgenstein held the cardinal error of

mod-ern philosophy to be the focus on forms of expression rather than on their use in the stream of life p.m.s.h

G P Baker and P M S Hacker, Analytic Commentary on the Philo-sophical Investigations, i: Wittgenstein: Understanding and Meaning (Oxford, 1980), 89–99.

language of thought Following Aristotle some have argued that the significance of spoken words derives from intrinsically meaningful interior ‘speech’ According to

Ockham the propositio vocalis is posterior to and depend-ent upon the propositio mdepend-entalis More recdepend-ently Fodor has

argued that thought is a form of symbol manipulation, and that *language-learning involves the correlation

of conventional symbols with those of one’s innate mental language Two main considerations are regularly advanced in support of the language of thought hypo-thesis First, parallels between the structures of thought and language are brought out in reports of each Thus, for any

proposition p one may equally well say ‘He thought that p’

as that ‘He said that p’—each act seems to involve a

rela-tion to a sentence Second, sounds and marks appear to express meanings without themselves being intrinsically meaningful; this suggests that public language may be a vehicle for the expression of prior mental ‘utterances’ It is often argued against the language of thought hypothesis, however, that it is regressive, since if the possibility of lin-guistic *meaning always requires an explanation, so must that of mental language; on the other hand if the latter is held to be intrinsically significant, then it is false that all lin-guistic meaning must be derived, in which case why not suppose, after all, that the meaning of speech-acts is non-derivative, i.e that the significance of spoken words is

J Fodor, The Language of Thought (Cambridge, Mass., 1975).

language of thought 493

langue and parole. Distinction drawn by the Swiss

founder of linguistics, Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913),

in his lecture series Cours de linguistique générale (1916),

between language as a system of formal rules and

mutu-ally defining terms and language in its everyday use (In

French, langue means ‘language’, and parole means

‘speech’.) Langue includes linguistic *types or *universals,

parole linguistic *tokens or *particular inscriptions and

utterances The distinction was influential on

*structural-ism, in which langue is studied as making parole possible, in

a quasi-Kantian or transcendental fashion s.p

Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics (New York,

1959)

David Holdcroft, Saussure: Signs, System and Arbitrariness

(Cam-bridge, 1991)

Lao Tzu˘(dates uncertain) An individual whose existence

is in doubt, but who is traditionally viewed as the author of

the classic of *Taoism Lao Tzu˘ and as an older

contempor-ary of Confucius (sixth to fifth century bc) in China Many

modern scholars doubt the existence of Lao Tzu˘ as a

his-torical figure, and regard the text, also known as the Tao Te

Ching, as composite and datable to as late as the third

cen-turybc The text highlights how the natural order

oper-ates by ‘reversion’ (anything that has gone far in one

direction will inevitably move in the opposite direction),

and how the state of ‘weakness’ enables an object to

thrive Modelling their way of life on the natural order,

human beings should avoid striving after worldly goals,

which inevitably leads to loss, and should instead be

non-assertive and have few desires k.-l.s

Lao Tzu (Tao Te Ching), tr D C Lau (Harmondsworth, 1963).

Laplace, Pierre-Simon, marquis de (1749–1827) French

physicist and mathematician who made major

contribu-tions to celestial mechanics and *probability theory In

cosmology he was one of the two independent originators

of the nebular hypothesis (the other was Kant), according

to which the solar system was formed from rotating gas

He showed that Newton’s worry that perturbations in the

planetary orbits would lead to the long-term instability of

the solar system was unfounded (Newton thought that

divine intervention was necessary to ensure stability.)

This is the origin of the story that in reply to Napoleon,

who complained that he had left God out of his system,

Laplace said: ‘I have no need of that hypothesis.’ Laplacian

*determinism is the claim that granted complete

know-ledge of the state of the universe and the laws of nature,

every detail of the future is predictable a.bel

Charles Coulston Gillispie, Robert Fox, and Ivor

Grattan-Guinness, Pierre-Simon Laplace, 1749–1827: A Life in Exact Science

(Princeton, NJ, 1997)

Latin American philosophy Latin American philosophy

begins with the Spanish and Portuguese discovery and

col-onization of the New World Throughout its 500-year

history, this philosophy has maintained strong human

and social interests, has been consistently affected by

scholastic and Catholic thought, and has significantly influenced the social and political institutions in the region Latin American philosophers tend to be active in the educational, political, and social affairs of their countries and deeply concerned with their own cultural identity

The history of philosophy in Latin America may be divided into four periods of development: colonial, inde-pendentist, positivist, and contemporary The colonial

period (c.1550–1750) was dominated by the type of

scholasticism officially practised in the Iberian peninsula The texts studied were those of medieval scholastics and

of their Iberian commentators The philosophical con-cerns in the colonies were those prevalent in Spain and Portugal and centred on logical and metaphysical issues inherited from the Middle Ages and on political and legal questions raised by the discovery and colonization The main philosophical centre during the early colonial period, Mexico, was joined in the seventeenth century by

Peru Antonio Rubio’s (1548–1615) Logica mexicana

was the most celebrated scholastic book written in the New World

Although working within the tradition of *scholasti-cism, some authors of this period were influenced by

*humanism The most important of these was Bartolomé

de las Casas (1484–1566), who became the leading cham-pion of the rights of native Americans at the time He argued that wars of conquest in the New World were unjustified because they were based on false generaliza-tions and misinformation He defended the autonomy of native Americans, claiming that neither the Spaniards nor the Catholic Church had rightful authority over them and therefore should not impose European cultural and religious values upon them

A more complete break with scholasticism was made

during the independentist period (c.1750–1850) The

period began with growing interest in early modern philosophers; among these Descartes was most influen-tial The intellectual leaders of this period were men of action who used ideas for practical ends They made rea-son a measure of legitimacy in social and governmental matters, and found the justification for revolutionary ideas in *natural law Moreover, they criticized authority, and some of them regarded religion as superstitious and opposed ecclesiastical power Their ideas paved the way for the later development of *positivism

Positivism (c.1850–1910) was, in part, a response to the

social, financial, and political needs of the newly liberated countries of Latin America Juan Bautista Alberdi (Argentina, 1812–84) and Andrés Bello (Venezuela, 1781–1865) stand out as important figures of the early part

of the positivist period Alberdi argued for the develop-ment of a philosophy adequate to the social and economic needs of Latin America, and Bello attempted to reduce metaphysics to psychology; both began trends others were to follow

Positivists emphasized the explicative value of empirical science and rejected metaphysics For them, all

494 langue and parole

knowledge is to be based on experience rather than

theor-etical speculation, and its value rests in its practical

appli-cations The universe is explained mechanistically,

leaving little room for freedom and values Positivism

became the official philosophy of some Latin American

countries and exerted strong social influence Testifying

to this is the preservation of the positivist inscription

‘Order and Progress’ on the Brazilian national flag The

most original positivists were the Cuban Enrique José

Varona (1849–1933) and the Argentinian José Ingenieros

(1877–1925) Ingenieros made some room for

meta-physics in his philosophy, claiming that it is concerned

with what is ‘yet-to-be-experienced’

Contemporary Latin American philosophy

(c.1910–present) begins with the decline of positivism.

The first part of the period is taken up by the generation of

thinkers who rebelled against positivist ideas The

princi-pal members of this early generation, called ‘the

Founders’ by Francisco Romero, are: Alejandro Korn

(Argentina, 1860–1936), Alejandro Octavio Deústua

(Peru, 1849–1945), José Vasconcelos (Mexico, 1882–1959),

Antonio Caso (Mexico, 1883–1946), Enrique Molina

(Chile, 1871–1964), Carlos Vaz Ferreira (Uruguay,

1872–1958), and Raimundo de Farias Brito (Brazil,

1862–1917) Trained as positivists, they became

dissatis-fied with positivism’s dogmatic intransigence,

mechanis-tic determinism, and emphasis on pragmamechanis-tic values The

arguments against positivism of Deústua, Caso and Vaz

Ferreira are characteristic of the period Deústua

attempted to show that the ideas of order and freedom are

basic to society but that the second has priority over the

first, for order cannot be established without freedom

Caso defended a view of man as capable of altruism and

love And Vaz Ferreira opposed the abstract logic

favoured by positivists, developing instead a logic of life

based on experience

Positivism was superseded by the Founders with the

help of ideas imported first from France and later from

Germany The process began with the influence of

Boutroux and Bergson and of French *vitalism and

intu-itionism, but it was cemented when Ortega y Gasset

intro-duced into Latin America the thought of Max Scheler,

Nicolai Hartmann, and other German philosophers

dur-ing his first visit to Argentina in 1916

*Philosophical anthropology developed in response to

the desire to move further away from the scientific

emphasis of positivism Samuel Ramos (Mexico,

1897–1959) focused upon what was particular in Mexican

culture, thereby inspiring interest in what is culturally

unique to Latin American nations He, like most

philoso-phers of this period, tried to develop a philosophical

anthropology based on a spiritual conception of human

beings Francisco Romero (Argentina, 1891–1962) was the

most original thinker of the group In Teoría del hombre

(1952) he conceives human nature as involving both

intentionality and spirituality

During the late 1930s and 1940s Latin Americans were

exposed to a variety of recent European ideas and

methodologies As a consequence of the political upheaval created by the Spanish Civil War, a substantial group of

peninsular philosophers, known as the transterrados,

set-tled in Latin America Among these, José Gaos (1900–69) had the greatest influence In particular, he introduced rig-orous techniques of textual analysis in Mexico

With the generation born around 1910, Latin American philosophy reached what Romero later called a ‘state of normalcy’ Philosophy established itself as a professional and reputable discipline, and philosophical organizations, research centres, and journals flourished The core of this eclectic generation was composed of philosophers work-ing in the German tradition who concerned themselves primarily with axiology Most of them granted some objectivity to values, but a few argued that values were neither objective nor subjective This position is most clearly presented in Risieri Frondizi’s (Argentina,

1910–83) Qué son los valores? (1958), where he proposes a view of value as a Gestalt quality.

Other developments of this period included a renewed interest in scholasticism There was also a growing inter-est in the study of the history of ideas and on the quinter-estion

of the identity and possibility of an authentic Latin Ameri-can philosophy The latter was raised in the 1940s by Leopoldo Zea (Mexico, 1912–2004) and continues to be a source of interest in the region today

Until 1960 philosophers working outside the traditions mentioned had limited visibility This has now changed

*Marxist philosophy and *philosophical analysis have found places in the academy As a result there has been renewed interest in areas where these philosophical cur-rents are strong, such as social and political philosophy, logic, and the philosophy of science The theology of liber-ation prepared the way for the development of the philoso-phy of liberation, which began in Argentina in the 1970s and combines an emphasis on Latin American intellectual independence with Catholic and Marxist ideas j.g

e.m

William Rex Crawford, A Century of Latin-American Thought, 3rd

edn (New York, 1966)

Harold Eugene Davis, Latin American Thought: A Historical Intro-duction (New York, 1972).

Jorge J E Gracia (ed.), Latin American Philosophy Today, double issue of The Philosophical Forum (1988–9).

—— Eduardo Rabossi et al (eds.), Philosophical Analysis in Latin America (Dordrecht, 1984).

Leopoldo Zea, The Latin American Mind, tr J H Abbott and

L Dunham (Norman, Okla., 1963)

latitudinarianism.‘Dr Wilkins, my friend, the bishop of Chester is a mighty rising man, as being a Latitudinar-ian,’ said Pepys in 1669, and the ‘latitude men’, who favoured tolerance in belief and doctrine, were certainly among the late seventeenth century’s intellectual élite Though there is some controversy among historians over the precise application of the term ‘latitudinarian’, Seth Ward, Ralph Cudworth, Henry More, John Locke, and Robert Boyle provide additional examples of thinkers

latitudinarianism 495

with latitudinarian tendencies Of course the latitude was

limited It did not include what Boyle in his Will called

‘notorious Infidels (viz t) Atheists, Theists [i.e deists],

Pagans, Jews and Mahometans’ None the less

latitudinar-ianism was not without critics ‘There were no such

Lati-tudinarian Principles among the Apostles,’ said Thomas

Comber, and others found the latitudinarians ‘meer moral

men, without the power of Godliness’ j.j.m

*deism

R Kroll, R Ashcraft, and P Zagorin (eds.), Philosophy, Science and

Religion in England 1640–1700 (Cambridge, 1992).

laughter. Laughter is a psychophysical phenomenon

against which a number of philosophical theories of

men-tal and personal identity can be tested If laughter is

essen-tial to the psychology of *humour, then a creature

endowed with humour must be embodied But since the

bodily postures and motions which are characteristic of

laughter can occur in the absence of amusement, laughter

cannot be a simply physical occurrence Aristotle uses

these considerations to support a theory of *human

nature according to which a person is not identical with a

body, yet does not exist without a body More recently

John Wisdom has hinted at how humour and its objects

can provide helpful pointers to the analysis of the relation

between subjective and objective elements in the nature

of value The topic deserves more attention in the

For an analytic treatment of the subject, see the symposium

‘Laughter’ by R Scruton and P Jones, Aristotelian Society

Supple-mentary Volume (1982).

law, feminist philosophy of Since the resurgence of the

women’s movement in the 1960s, scholars have begun to

identify and explore distinctively feminist questions of and

about law and legal philosophy The questions which have

occupied feminist scholars’ attention cover a wide range of

jurisprudential questions, encompassing issues identified

with analytical, normative, and sociological

jurispru-dence Are laws, legal practices, and even the very concept

of law implicitly gendered and, if so, is this inevitable? In

what ways has woman been constructed within legal

dis-course and excluded from or incorporated within

pre-vailing notions of legal subjecthood? What role have laws

played in constituting or reinforcing ideologies (such as

that which assumes and prescribes a division between

pub-lic and private spheres) which feminist political theorists

have identified as influential in maintaining and obscuring

women’s social and political subordination? At the core of

most feminist legal scholarship is a critique of the

pur-ported objectivity or gender-neutrality of legal method

and legal regulation The argument is that the purported

gender-neutrality of legal concepts and of most legal

arrangements in liberal societies in fact disguises the

implicit instantiation in laws of a partial viewpoint, and

one which generally reflects male rather than female

inter-ests and experience of the world Feminist legal scholars

are therefore much concerned with debates in feminist epistemology and feminist ethics, and particularly with the problem of ‘essentialism’—that associated with identi-fying masculine or feminine viewpoints in a world where both male and female experience is relative not only to gender but also to class, ethnic, and other social structures and axes of subordination Another feature typical of femi-nist legal philosophy is scepticism about the idea that law is autonomous in the sense of being both a distinctive and, in significant respects, a discrete practice, insulated from broader political and social influence

Like all sophisticated intellectual discourses, feminist legal philosophy is characterized by a diversity of both sub-stantive commitment and method A significant strand of feminist legal scholarship draws on post-modernist ideas and sees the feminist project in this area as a basically crit-ical or deconstructive one Scholars sympathetic with this position express scepticism about the participation of femi-nist theory in the enterprise of constructing a ‘grand’, uni-versal theory of law, which they argue would be likely to reproduce the same kinds of distortion and exclusion which characterize orthodox legal theories Others envis-age the possibility of a feminist jurisprudence which could escape the bias and obfuscation of orthodox legal theories such as positivist or natural law conceptions and which could hold out the promise of conceiving genuinely equal legal subjecthood and gender justice as opposed to gender-neutrality Similar diversity characterizes feminist approaches to the role of normative or prescriptive thought in legal philosophy Whilst most feminist scholars are critical of the idea that normative argument can be objectively grounded or proceed ‘from nowhere’, they vary in terms of what role they see in the feminist enter-prise for legal reformism, the reconstruction of normative concepts such as justice, rights, or equality from a feminist perspective, or utopian argument about legal and social change Thus some feminist legal scholars see immanent critique—the holding-up of legal practices to critical scrutiny in the light of their failure to meet their own pro-fessed ideals—as the central task of feminist legal theory, while others see external, more broadly politically or ethic-ally based critique as of equal importance Like most forms

of feminist theory, feminist legal philosophy retains a strong sense of the importance of the link between theory and practice Much feminist philosophical work in the area

of law therefore concerns itself with philosophical critique

of concrete legal institutions and practices, notably the regu-lation of the family, and the structure of constitutional rights and their impact on practices such as abortion and pornography; the regulation of sexuality by and the con-struction of images of women and men, femininity and masculinity, within a wide range of criminal and civil laws; legal anti-discrimination policies and the ideals of equality and justice which inform them n.m.l

*feminist philosophy

Drucilla Cornell, Beyond Accommodation: Ethical Feminism, Decon-struction and the Law (London, 1991).

496 latitudinarianism

Catharine A MacKinnon, ‘Feminism, Marxism, Method and the

State: Toward Feminist Jurisprudence’, Signs (1983).

Susan Moller Okin, Justice, Gender and the Family (New York,

1989)

Carole Pateman, The Sexual Contract (Oxford, 1988).

Carol Smart, Feminism and the Power of Law (London, 1989).

Iris Marion Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference (Princeton,

NJ, 1990)

law, history of the philosophy of The philosophical

reflections recalled here are about *positive law, in

partic-ular the rules and principles authoritatively declared by

people who make themselves responsible for (what they

claim to be) the good order of their community, an order

they specify and promote by proposing obligatory and

other authoritative guidance for the actions of their

com-munity’s members

Throughout its history, legal philosophy has sought to

differentiate positive law (hereafter ‘law’ or ‘the law’)

from other standards relevant to human deliberation

towards choice and action, and from the governing

prin-ciples and norms of other intelligible orders (the systems

of the cosmos or nature, of logic, and arts such as grammar

or boat-building) Such differentiation has aimed both to

clarify terminology and conceptual boundaries and to

inquire whether the analogies or other relations between

law and these norms of other orders help explain what is

most puzzling about law: that it can ‘necessitate’ (make

obligatory, indeed morally obligatory) actions which,

until its enactment, were not so necessitated; that its rules

and other ‘institutions’ somehow ‘exist’ by virtue of but

also long after their positing by enactment or other ‘act in

the law’, or judicial precedent or custom; that many of its

rules have a normative form, and a social function, distinct

from its obligation imposing rules; that it resorts to

puni-tive and rectificatory coercion to outlaw force (as well as

dishonesty and carelessness) in interpersonal relations

(*Law, problems of the philosophy of.)

The surviving fragments of the *Pre-Socratics on these

matters suggest a vigorous debate which cannot now be

securely reconstructed The conversation of legal

philoso-phy begins for us with two brief dialogues reflecting the

debates in Socratic circles: a witty conversation between

Alcibiades and Pericles composed by Xenophon

(Memora-biliai 2), and a ‘Socratic’ dialogue insecurely ascribed to

Plato (the Minos 314b–315a) Each portrays the

embarrass-ments awaiting philosophers who define law as whatever is

decreed by rulers, neglecting or declining to refer to issues

of (moral) right such as whether its subjects have in any way

consented (Xenophon) or whether what it decrees is good,

true, and in conformity with ‘what really is’ (Minos) Both

dialogues suggest that, while everyone understands the

sense in which a law’s (in)justice is irrelevant to its empirical

reality as enforced, in a more adequate understanding

oflaw unjust laws are ‘more a matter of force than of law’

and are ‘not without qualification law’ (Minos).

So by the early fourth century bc two positions emerge,

each still defended in the late twentieth century The

one—today called *legal positivism—asserts that to be described with realism and clarity law must be considered without regard to any moral predicates which it attracts in discourse (e.g moral–political evaluation) outside the

phil-osophy of law The other—usually if confusingly called

*natural law theory—asserts that such a description misses the point of law: legal systems get their sense and shape (which a good descriptive account of law will iden-tify) from their point, and a rational evaluation of particu-lar laws or legal systems (or political communities) will use that (perhaps complex) point as a criterion for measur-ing their conformity to or deviation from the very idea of law Plato articulates this second position: ‘Enactments, to the extent that they are not for the interest of the whole

community, are not truly laws’ (Laws 715b; also 712e–713a; Statesman 293d–e) Cicero sums up the

philo-sophical mainstream: ‘In the very definition of the term

“law” there inheres the idea and principle of choosing

what is just and true’ (De legibusii 11)

On this issue of definition, Plato had warned that ordin-ary talk of ‘law’ is one thing, explanatory definition of

law another (Hippias Major 284d) Aristotle (Politics iii 1275a–b) worked out the appropriate account of definition

in social, including legal, theory In this account, pure description or reportage (these purport to be, and are com-monly called, friendships, political communities, constitu-tions, laws) can coexist with explanatory definition within a theory which treats justification (and, where appropriate, critical delegitimization) as the primary mode

of explanation Thus the humanly good type of friendship, community, constitution, or law is the paradigm, cen-tral case picked out by the explanatory definition, and by a corresponding word (‘friendship’, ‘law’) in its focal meaning; specimens of this good type are in this sense

truly, properly, or unqualifiedly (Greek haplo¯s, Latin simpliciter) friendship, law, etc But instances of a type that

is humanly deficient remain within the discipline’s philo-sophical account, precisely as analogous to the central case The philosophy of human affairs, as it bears on law, reflects on decent laws and legal systems, with due atten-tion to what makes laws bad and how bad laws matter Until Bentham (foreshadowed in the seventeenth cen-tury by Bacon, Hobbes, and Spinoza), there is little or no legal philosophy which could be called positivist Yet from Plato to Bentham legal philosophy was substantially a phil-osophy of positive law, a subject-matter regarded as dis-tinct from the other subjects of moral and political philosophy, but as adequately intelligible only on the basis

of the moral principles and political purposes identified, explicated, and defended within moral and political philosophy Still, legal philosophy’s self-interpretation precisely as a philosophy of positive law awaits the

Summa Theologiae of Thomas Aquinas (c.1270) The term

‘positive law’ emerged c.1135, and soon became popular

among theoretically minded jurists But the new termin-ology did not immediately modify the ancient accounts of the precise subject of philosophical reflection on law(s)

Aristotle (Nicomachean Ethics v 1134b) had divided

law, history of the philosophy of 497

political right/just(ice) into the natural and the legal; the

latter he also described as conventional and human Late

twelfth- and thirteenth-century jurists divided jus

(law/right) into natural (the moral law) and positive,

sub-dividing the latter into the Roman-law categories of jus

gentium (laws common to all peoples) and civil law

(pecu-liar to a given community) Eventually Aquinas (Summa

Theologiae, 1–2, Q 95, A 2) treats the distinction between

natural and civil law as a distinction within positive law

(i.e within law humanly laid down) Some parts of

posi-tive law are conclusiones (entailments) of the principles and

norms of natural moral law; for these he appropriates the

name jus gentium The other parts are purely positive,

though related to moral principles by an intelligible, non

deductive relationship which he names determinatio

(con-cretization)

Thus human positive law in both its parts is at last

dif-ferentiated as an integral object of philosophical

reflec-tion It is by analogy with this central analogate that we

understand as law (i) the eternal law of God’s creative

providence (including all the laws investigated by the

nat-ural sciences), (ii) the *natnat-ural law, or rational principles of

good and right human deliberation and action, and (iii) the

‘divine law’, Aquinas’s name for norms of positive law

specially promulgated by divine revelation and including,

like human positive law (ecclesiastical or secular),

elem-ents both of natural law (e.g most of the Ten

Command-ments) and of purely positive law (regulating Israel and

then the Church)

Aquinas describes human positive law as made by will

(i.e by preferring one reasonable scheme to another), but

when speaking precisely contends that law is a matter of

reason rather than will; obligation is a matter of means

required for serving and respecting practical reason’s ends

and principles; the imperium by which one directs oneself

in executing one’s choices belongs to reason rather than

will All this soon met with opposition, and for the next

500 years the philosophy of law is dominated by efforts to

explain law’s source and obligatoriness by reference to

will, whether of superiors or of consenting parties to a

social contract

The polemics launched in 1323 between Pope John

XXII (canon lawyer and Thomist) and William of

Ock-ham, concerning the nature of legal (especially property)

rights, gave wide currency to Ockham’s conceptions: of

positive human law as founded on commanding or

con-tracting will and legitimate even when opposed to natural

law; of supreme (divine) will as binding to even the most

inherently unreasonable act (e.g hating God); of right as

primarily a power or liberty of acting The second

scholas-ticism of sixteenth- to seventeenth-century Spain sought a

balance between Thomist and voluntarist theory Its

monument is Suarez’s De legibus (On Laws (1612) )

Rea-son’s capacity to discern right from wrong is emphasized,

but obligation is still a driving force from a superior’s will,

and Aquinas’s conception of imperium as reason’s directive

grasp of an action’s intelligent point is rejected as a fiction

Suarez underlines the variety of types of law (eternal,

natural, human, divine) but also the variety of normative types of human law, including laws binding to compli-ance, laws binding only to payment of the ‘penalty’ for non-compliance, laws giving juridical acts their form and validity, and laws creating privileges The principle of Suarez’s analyses remains the moralist’s interest in issues

of conscience (conceived in terms of obligation and liberty)

Grotius, though clearly influenced by Suarez and other philosophical theologians, shifts the focus of inquiry in legal philosophy: the foundations of morality (natural law) and obligation are but lightly and ambiguously sketched The work of ‘philosophy of law’ (a term pro-moted if not invented by Grotius) is conceived as identifi-cation of the reasonable scheme of law which will secure justice and rights in a community constituted by social contract The scheme’s content is settled, in effect, by making such adjustments to Roman law’s conceptual framework as are suggested to Grotius by an immensely learned survey of classical culture, medieval commentary, and some comparative jurisprudence Grotian (over)-confidence in reason’s ability to identify uniquely appropriate legal solutions to problems of social life persists in the rationalist theories of natural and human law which prevail until Bentham and Kant

But the seventeenth- to eighteenth-century descend-ants of Grotian theory had to respond to the radical ques-tioning of their foundations by Hobbes and Spinoza Paradigmatic is the response of Samuel Pufendorf

(c.1670) Laws are decrees by which superiors obligate us

subjects to conform our acts to their commands Every law contains both a definition of what we are to do or avoid, and a statement of the punishment awaiting our non-compliance Obligation is a moral quality created by persons who have not only the power to harm us if we resist them but also just grounds for their claim to limit our freedom by their choice These just grounds may be the benefits those persons have rendered us, their benevo-lent ability to provide for us better than we could for our-selves, and/or our agreement to subject ourselves to them Hobbes’s claim that the right to rule is warranted solely from irresistible power must be rejected as failing to account for obligation’s significance for conscience Like the Calvinist Grotius, the Lutheran Pufendorf and the whole mainstream retain the Catholic division of law into natural, divine, and human and the Thomist position that human law is, as such, all positive (though rightly con-strained by the natural law, many of whose precepts it should also repromulgate to recalcitrants) Philosophy of law identifies for jurists many details of the law which should obtain within and between states, and for morally upright citizens their duties of conscience in face of legal obligations

The notion of natural law both limiting and justifying

positive law remains in Kant’s Rechtslehre (Doctrine of

Law/Right (1797) ), but now the natural law abstracts from all human benefits and reasons for action, other than

conformity with the universalizing form of reason Right

498 law, history of the philosophy of

(and right law) is the coexistence of my freedom (in

accord-ance with universal laws) with everyone else’s; wrong is

the hindering of such rightful freedom, and is itself

right-fully hindered by coercion; strict right or law is a state of

universal reciprocal coercibility Kant seeks to ground the

law’s primary institutions (property, contract, status,

and punishment) in the logical requirements of a

self-consistent freedom The obligation of contracts, as of law,

he thinks is entailed by the concept of a (simultaneously)

united will His account thus abstracts from human

bene-fit and empirical realities alike, and rests on fictions

(virtu-ally admitted by him in retaining the ‘idea of an original

contract’ of society)

Bentham had taken a very different course His A

Frag-ment of GovernFrag-ment (1776), ridiculing late echoes of

Pufendorf, proposed a radical distinction between the

‘provinces’ of expositors, who by attending to facts

explain what the law is, and ‘censors’, who by attending to

reasons consider what it ought to be Bentham’s

exposi-tory jurisprudence included a treatise Of Laws in General,

not published until 1945 but very like John Austin’s less

ingenious account, The Province of Jurisprudence Determined

(1832): all laws properly and strictly so called are

com-mands, expressions of wish (accompanied by threat of

sanction) by the sovereign in an independent political

community; however influential in courts, rules not made

or adopted by sovereign command are not laws properly

so called Having a legal obligation is being the subject of a

command and susceptible to its accompanying sanction

Legal rights including powers are all to be explained in

terms of commands and more or less complex

permis-sions or negations of obligation

English-language philosophy of law remained largely

within the orbit of Bentham and Austin for more than a

hundred years (though historico-comparative

jurispru-dence ranged widely) American and other legal realists

denied that the substance of the law is rules or any other

standard posited by commands or any other past acts But

they retained and reinforced the conception of law as an

instrument, in itself morally neutral, of ‘social control’ for

the purposes of those in power (most directly courts and

other officials)

Hans Kelsen, whose ideas became influential outside

German-speaking lands in the 1930s, attempted a union of

Kantian with neo-Hobbesian and neo-Humean themes

which issued ultimately in a radically will-, indeed

com-mand-, centred account of law and legal system Legal

phil-osophy (‘pure theory of legal science’) must be free from

every value, and from any reference to fact such as might

suggest that law’s normativity derives from or is reducible

to its efficacy or other empirical reality Kelsen sought in

effect a ‘third theory’, sharing with natural law theory the

attempt to reproduce and explain non-reductively law’s

normativity, and with legal positivism the rejection of

every norm or value not posited and made effective by

contingent human acts and facts The quest’s failure is

manifested in Kelsen’s many shifts to and fro between

contradictory views about the source and coherence of

legal norms, the content of normativity, and the meaning

of propositions of legal science, and in his final open reliance upon ‘fictitious acts of will’

That explanations of law and legal obligation must point to commanding or consenting acts of will was

denied in H L A Hart’s The Concept of Law (1961) and Essays on Bentham (1982) Legal rules are, rather,

content-independent peremptory reasons for actions Their sources may be commands but may equally be any fact having the normative significance attributed to it by a rule

of recognition accepted by judges and officials (for any rea-son other than fear of immediate sanction) Not all laws are obligation-imposing; many are power conferring and

an account which reduces these to conditions or protases

of obligation disguises the variety of law’s normative func-tions by overlooking the variety of its social funcfunc-tions A descriptive legal philosophy can and should be free from moral presuppositions; law is not ‘necessarily or concep-tually’ connected to morality, Hart holds But legal philoso-phy should understand and reproduce the viewpoint or

‘internal attitude’ of those participants in a legal system for whom law is a genuine reason for action and something of (not necessarily moral) value It therefore cannot main-tain that law may have just any content

Hart’s many-sided resistance to reductive accounts of legal realities, and his strategy of understanding law as a type of reason created, maintained, and recognized for distinctive reasons, have encouraged many lines of inquiry into the point and function-related structure not only of law and legal system as a general type of social real-ity, but also of legal reasoning or judicial deliberation, of the rule of law as a distinctive ideal for politico-legal order, and of the shaping moral point and justification(s) of par-ticular legal institutions such as contract, tort (delict), property, and punishment Attention to Hart’s neo-Aristotelian method of explanation by central and secondary cases has suggested that, despite his insistence

on the opposition between the legal positivism he defended and every natural law theory, such opposition is needless unless positivism is taken (like Kelsen’s but not Hart’s) to deny that valuation and moral judgement have any philosophical warrant or truth

Many positivist theories before Hart had been mod-elled on the natural (including mathematical and

psycho-logical) sciences The Concept of Law opened legal

philosophy to issues of method in descriptive social theory earlier discussed by Dilthey, Weber, and Winch, and showed, as Hart more or less clearly intended, the fruit-lessness of seeking a value-free general social science Interest has since shifted towards integrating legal theory with ethics and/or modelling it on the interpretation of cultural forms such as literature For example, Ronald Dworkin’s critique of positivism seemed at first intended

to establish that Hart had misdescribed the types of stand-ard used in judicial deliberation But Dworkin’s real theses were not that legal principles differ from rules, but that

there are standards which are legally authoritative not

because they were created or validated by enactment or

law, history of the philosophy of 499