life, philosophy of: see abandonment; absurd; Arendt; Aristippus; Buddhist philosophy; Chinese philosophy; exis-tentialism; freedom and determinism; Hindu philosophy; Indian philosophy;
Trang 1they are, why should I not adopt them anyway, without
bothering whether they are God’s?
Another version of the question focuses not on our
indi-vidual lives but on the whole scheme of things: what is the
point of it all? An implication of this, in the spirit if not in
the letter, seems to be that without some overall purpose
in things all our own projects are somehow worthless or
doomed to frustration But why should that be so? Often
the underlying thought seems to be that real values can
only exist if they are permanent But why should
some-thing in itself valueless acquire value by being permanent,
or belonging to a set of things which is permanent? The
value of my having just passed my exam and the disvalue
of having painfully stubbed my toe are surely not affected
if the sun will explode in eight billion years and I myself
face annihilation somewhat sooner? Perhaps the thought
is that our projects will fail unless ultimately ‘God is on our
side’ But our short-term projects often succeed
Some-times events may later make us wish they had not done so,
but this is relatively rare, and often success is definite and
there are no hidden snags
But now perhaps the question broadens into something
else: what are the conditions for our lives to reach ultimate
success? Many philosophers have held, with Sidgwick,
that ultimately nothing can be of value but certain
con-scious states, for how could values exist without concon-scious
beings to appreciate them? But recently this inference has
been attacked No doubt a lifeless desert would lack value
(pace G E Moore, who thought that if it was beautiful it
would not), but perhaps the value of at least many
con-scious states presupposes that their owners value other
things; how, for instance, could one see any value in the
state of mind consequent on fulfilling one’s ambition to
climb Everest if one saw no value in having climbed
Ever-est (which is not itself a state of mind)? The quEver-estion then
becomes: how should we assess these further values? Can
any rational grounds be given for pursuing some of them
rather than others; or one life plan rather than another?
A further, and age-old, question which arises out of this
concerns the value to us of things that happen after our
*deaths, so that we cannot know about them ‘Call no
man happy until he is dead’ said the Greek sage Solon; but
how can he be happy then? Suppose someone dies after an
apparently happy and successful life, but his achievements
are then shown to be nugatory, for reasons he could not
have anticipated, and his children all come to grief: would
we still call him a happy man, who lived a happy life? If
not, happiness cannot be a state of mind, and even if the
meaning of life is to acquire happiness, it cannot be simply
John Cottingham, On the Meaning of Life (London, 2002).
E D Klemke (ed.), The Meaning of Life, 2nd edn (Oxford, 2000).
R Nozick, The Examined Life (New York, 1989), ch 10 Like
Wiggins (cited below), criticizes Sidgwick’s outlook, though
without mentioning him
H Sidgwick, The Methods of Ethics, 7th edn (London, 1907), iv xiv.
D Wiggins, Needs, Values, Truth (London, 1987), essay iii, esp
sects 1–6, 10–15
life, philosophy of: see abandonment; absurd; Arendt;
Aristippus; Buddhist philosophy; Chinese philosophy; exis-tentialism; freedom and determinism; Hindu philosophy; Indian philosophy; Kierkegaard; life, meaning of; Marcel; Marxist philosophy; moral philosophy, history of; moral philosophy, problems of; nirvana; pessimism and opti-mism; Plato; religion, history of philosophy of; religion, problems of the philosophy of; Schopenhauer; Spinoza
life, quality of: see quality of life.
life and death.Biological life is best understood as a *fam-ily resemblance concept, because there is no one property common to all and only animate things To be alive is to have some of: an organic chemistry, a digestive and excre-tive system, a reproducexcre-tive capacity, a genetic make-up Being alive is a property distinct from being sentient, con-scious, or intelligent For example, grass is alive but lacks those three properties If there is artificial intelligence, then some computer is intelligent but not alive Death is at least the cessation of life, but it is philosophically contro-versial what death consists in Biologically and medically, death is brain death, or brain-stem death
Should we fear death? Parfit has suggested that it is not personal identity that should matter to us, and one’s own death is not the destruction of a unique Cartesian self but the ending of a certain series of connected experiences and actions Nagel has argued that there is a fundamental
problem about being someone: the unique fact of
some-one’s being oneself resists *reductionism in psychological theories of personal identity Should we fear death less if there is life after death? Bernard Williams argued that immortality is not desirable, because everlasting life would become tedious Perhaps this is not right Perhaps the afterlife would be infinitely interesting and fulfilling Immortality requires that the person who lives after death be numerically identical with the person who lives the earthly life For example, any resurrected person has
to be oneself rather than some being qualitatively similar but numerically distinct from oneself Arguably, this requires that each of us is a soul that could remain unchanged by such profound physical and psychological changes Arguably, Nagel’s problem of being someone can be solved only if we are souls
Why are the living the living? Why are the dead the dead? These are hard philosophical questions to answer
once it is realized that any life has some duration ending in
death To be one of the living is to be living now, or to be actual To be one of the dead is not to be actual but to have been actual It is an unsolved philosophical problem what actuality is We do not have an answer to ‘Why is it now now?’, which means, ‘Why is this particular time the
Thomas Nagel, Mortal Questions (Cambridge, 1979).
—— The View from Nowhere (Oxford, 1986), esp 223–31 Derek Parfit, Reasons and Persons (Oxford, 1984).
Sogyal Rinpoche, The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying (San
Fran-cisco, 1992)
520 life, the meaning of
Trang 2Bernard Williams, Problems of the Self (Cambridge, 1973) esp ch 6:
‘The Makropulos Case’
Palle Yourgrau, ‘The Dead’, Journal of Philosophy, 84 (1987).
life and science Science describes and explains the world
in terms of causal regularities Effects simply follow causes
because that is the way the world is ordered, not because it
is better that one thing happens rather than another The
theories of science are mathematically based abstractions,
prescinding, as far as possible, from much that is important
in the world as lived and experienced by human beings (the
Lebenswelt of the phenomenologists) In the Lebenswelt
descriptions and explanations are irreducibly normative,
coloured by values, feelings, and emotions To describe a
person as temperate or handsome, or a landscape as
beauti-ful, is to praise them, implying that they are better than if
they had turned out some other way Reconciling the
value-free theories of science with what we say and think in
the Lebenswelt has troubled philosophers since the time of
Kant The best hope seems to be to regard neither scientific
nor everyday accounts as exhaustive of the whole of reality,
but both as valid within their own spheres a.o’h
*phenomenology; science, history of the philosophy of;
science, problems of the philosophy of
A O’Hear, The Element of Fire: Science, Art and the Human World
(London, 1988)
life-world.The universally structured realm of beliefs,
assumptions, feelings, values, and cultural practices that
constitute meaning in everyday life In criticism of the
classical theory of knowledge (Descartes to Kant), the
concept of the life-world is first introduced as the
insur-mountable basis for scientific experience Scientific
theo-ries are seen as ‘idealized constructions’ (Husserl),
dependent on immediate sense-perception which itself,
however, is part of the human everyday world that is
taken for granted Accordingly, the life-world as such is
understood as the unproblematic and scientific
pre-supposition of any understanding and meaning, providing
an implicit *background of once explicitly held or
intended and now ‘sedimented’ beliefs, assumptions, and
practices Whereas the life-world has first been
conceptu-alized as the world of the subject (Husserl, Schütz), more
recently its genuinely social character has been
*Frankfurt School
J Habermas, ‘The Concept of the Lifeworld and the
Hermeneu-tic Idealism of Interpretive Sociology’, in Theory of
Communica-tive Action, ii (Boston, 1987).
light of nature.In Cartesian philosophy, the faculty of the
soul by which knowledge, especially a priori knowledge,
is discerned Descartes’s ‘principles of natural light’ are
put forward as fundamental metaphysical truths; for
example; an (efficient) cause must contain as much reality
as an effect; what can exist from its own power always
exists; if I doubt, then I exist; deception is caused by some
defect; if something happens, it cannot then not have
hap-pened; nothing can cause nothing If p is a principle of nat-ural light, then p is self-evident, p is indubitable, and p is a
necessary truth According to Descartes, there is no fac-ulty more authoritative than the light of nature which could be deployed to call its findings into question s.p
Philosophical Works of Descartes, tr E S Haldane and G R T.
Ross, 2 vols (Cambridge, 1967)
Anthony Kenny, Descartes: A Study of his Philosophy (New York,
1968)
linguistic acts Things done with words, an account of which may cast light on human language and its use
J L Austin believed that the study of *language had been too much focused on words, and the study of action too much focused on ‘ordinary physical actions’ His
stated overall project in How to Do Things with Words was
to characterize performatives—utterances on the
occa-sion of which something is done rather than stated He
wanted to draw a line between performatives and another sort of utterance which he thought had received all the attention and at whose expense performatives had previ-ously been ignored (*Constatives.) But Austin’s attempt
to draw the line undermined the assumption that there was a line to be drawn in the first place, and this made way
for the idea that all utterances have a performative
dimen-sion Thus Austin’s work led to ‘speech-act theory’, a branch of language studies premissed originally in the thought that speech is a species of action
In any use of language—any occasion of someone’s speaking, that is—there are many things the speaker does—many linguistic acts she performs (For example, an action might be someone’s doing at least these four things:
uttering the words ‘It’s 10 o’clock’, saying what time it is, reminding Jane that it’s time to go to the lecture, alarming Ted.)
Each linguistic act corresponds to a type of action; and a principled way of organizing linguistic acts provides a framework into which the particularities of occasions on which one or another is done can potentially be fitted so as
to provide for illuminating accounts of speech-actions The classification of linguistic acts which Austin got started may be thought of as a means of imposing system
on to the actual data of linguistic communication Austin’s own primary classification was into locutionary (which incorporates phonetic, phatic, and rhetic), illocu-tionary, and perlocutionary Each of these categories sub-sumes some range of acts; and an action of speaking is typically a speaker’s performing some act within each range Locutionary acts are of saying something;
illocu-tionary acts are acts done in saying something; and per-locutionary acts are acts done by saying something (In the example, uttering the words is a phonetic act, saying that a locutionary one, reminding (arguably) an illocution-ary one, and alarming (arguably) a perlocutionillocution-ary one
(‘arguably’, because Austin in fact had difficulty in making the illocutionary–perlocutionary distinction clearly) The idea that speaking a language is engaging in behav-iour of a rule-governed kind was developed by John Searle
linguistic acts 521
Trang 3in Speech Acts He attempted to account for a variety of
phenomena in the setting of an institutional theory of
communication, and to clarify particular speech-acts, e.g
referring (sometimes called a subsentential speech-act,
because it is done using a word or two rather than a whole
sentence) and promising
Subsequent work in speech-act theory has been
con-fined to the area that comes under Austin’s illocutionary
head, so that what is usually meant by ‘a speech-act’ is in
the category that Austin called illocutionary Speech-act
theory may then be thought of as a branch of pragmatics
It can be divided into two types, depending on the attitude
taken to that which determines a speech-action to be of
the illocutionary act it is of In the work of such linguists as
John Ross and Jerrold Katz, illocutionary force is absorbed
into a more or less formalized account of locution In the
work of Searle and others, illocutionary force is a function
of unformalized circumstances The latter kind of
speech-act theory is more in keeping with its Austinian
J L Austin, How to Do Things with Words (Oxford, 1961).
John Searle, Speech Acts (Cambridge, 1969).
S L Tsohatzidis (ed.), Foundations of Speech Act Theory:
Philosoph-ical and Linguistic Perspectives (London, 1994).
linguistic philosophy Linguistic philosophy may be
regarded either as a variant form, or as a competitor, of
*analytic philosophy The latter arose from the early
col-laboration of Wittgenstein and Russell Linguistic
philos-ophy was more particularly Wittgenstein’s creation,
although it had some elements of affinity with the
philo-sophical practice of G E Moore, and, in its later
develop-ment at Oxford with Ryle and Austin, showed some
dependence on the thought of their Oxford predecessors
Cook Wilson and H A Prichard
The central principle of linguistic philosophy is that the
traditional problems of philosophy (or metaphysics) are
not genuine problems at all but confusions generated by
misunderstandings about language or by the misuse of it
The apparent problems cannot be solved; but they can be
dissolved, confusion can be dispelled A philosophical
puz-zle is created by an inclination to assert something
absurdly at variance with common sense for what seem
convincing reasons (that we have no knowledge of, or that
there are, no material things, people other than ourselves,
past events, laws of nature)
Moore’s defence of *common sense was direct and
prim-itive It rested on Thomas Reid’s assumption that the beliefs
of common sense ‘are older and of more authority than the
arguments of philosophy’ Holding out his hand, he said
that he knew for certain that this was a hand and, since a
hand is unquestionably a material thing, it followed that he
knew for certain that there was at least one material thing
This was more a rhetorical device for showing that
philoso-phers commonly do not mean what they say than a way of
getting to grips with what it is that concerns them
Wittgenstein’s technique was much more elaborate
He himself compared it to psychotherapy, in which a kind
of intellectual neurosis is relieved by a long-drawn-out process of reminding the puzzled philosopher of the way
in which the crucial terms in the expression of his puzzle-ment are ordinarily used Wittgenstein’s treatpuzzle-ment resembled psychotherapy not only in its apparently inter-minable duration but also in its failure to bring about last-ing cures But some successes should be acknowledged
No one will ever now suppose that understanding is a matter of inward illumination We tell whether someone has understood a lesson in long division or French pro-nunciation by his capacity to do some sums or make the correct sounds, and so does he, whatever flashes of inward illumination he may, or may not, have had
Devotional commentators on Wittgenstein have argued that there are not two Wittgensteins, but one, developing a single line of thought There are, indeed, common elements in the thinking of the earlier and the later Wittgenstein Both are centrally concerned with lan-guage, both insist that philosophy is not only quite distinct from science, but that it is an activity rather than a theory
of any kind whatever But what was formerly seen as ‘the logical clarification of thoughts’, the revelation by analysis
of the formal structure which is hidden by ordinary language, is explicitly rejected by the later Wittgenstein and replaced by an absolutely opposed conception of the matter
*Language, on this new view, has no logical essence It
is an accumulation of a great number of different *‘lan-guage-games’, of which the reporting or description of facts is just one Each of these has its own way of working and they are no more identical in essential form than ordi-nary games, being related to one another, as ordiordi-nary games are, only by ‘family resemblance’, an idea on which Wittgenstein laid much stress Just as it is not the universal function of sentences to describe, so it is not the universal task of the words making up those sentences to name or refer to objects, concrete or abstract, or to ideas or images
in the minds of their users The meaning of a word or sen-tence lies in the rules for its actual use in real life, not philo-sophical reflection; these rules are best discerned in the activity of learning how to use the expressions involved; they are the result of decisions which can be altered; but these conventions must be public and shared, a *private language is impossible That last point is argued for with something very like a traditional philosophical argument, and has not been found universally convincing In the same spirit, Wittgenstein argues that the elemental truths Moore thought he could prove in his blunt way are really background assumptions without whose acceptance nothing we could recognize as doubt or its settlement could take place
It is impossible not to see Wittgenstein’s loosely affirmed principle that ‘inner processes stand in need of outward criteria’, in which he claimed some kind of nec-essary connection between mental states and their behav-ioural manifestations, as lying behind the less cautious view of Ryle on the same topic Ryle proposes something like a generally applicable pattern of analysis of categorical
522 linguistic acts
Trang 4linguistics, philosophical relevance of 523 statements about mental events and processes into
collec-tions of hypothetical statements about what those
referred to would do if certain conditions were satisfied
Ryle held that the familiar dualist conception of *mind and
body as distinct worlds with proprietary kinds of event
going on in them was a large-scale ‘category mistake’, in
which the matters under discussion were treated as
belonging to the wrong logical class, as happens more
obviously in wondering what colour a number is or what
is the weight of a shadow
Ryle’s preoccupation with thinking paralleled
Wittgen-stein’s with meaning To think what one is doing is not to
carry out some sequence of bodily movements while
con-sciously rehearsing some appropriate sequence of inner
thoughts It is to make the bodily movements in an
intelli-gent way, reacting quickly and adequately to obstructions
and difficulties
The most exquisite of linguistic philosophers was J L
Austin, who from 1945 until his death in 1960 exercised a
powerful influence in Oxford, which rapidly faded away
after that Austin’s acute sensitivity to nuances of meaning
led him to stress that the language we actually use is the
evolutionary by-product of its long and various
applica-tion Philosophers, he held, persistently over-simplify,
running together words which, although similar, are by
no means identical in meaning: ‘look’ with ‘appear’ and
‘seem’, ‘inadvertently’ with ‘accidentally’ and
‘uninten-tionally’ Admiration for the refinement and, indeed,
cor-rectness of these distinctions is compatible with doubt
about whether they cut any philosophical ice
Large claims were made for his identification and
nam-ing of *‘performative’ utterances, such as ‘I promise to pay
you back’ and ‘I name this ship Gladys’, which rather
con-stitute than describe the performance of promising or
naming His suggestion that ‘I know that so-and-so’ is also
performative as a kind of guarantee of the speaker’s claim
did not survive inspection Something of the flavour of this
detection of performativeness is present in the account of
truth given by Sir Peter Strawson, ironically enough in a
powerful criticism of Austin’s own attempt to attempt to
rehabilitate the *correspondence theory of truth To say ‘p
is true’, Strawson held, is not to say something about ‘p’,
such as that it corresponds to the facts, but is at once to
assert it and to confirm its assertion or suggestion by
some-one else In his later work, from Individuals (1959), he
moved on from linguistic philosophy to a sophisticated
kind of Kantianism, reinforced by the analytic philosophy
of the twentieth century, which aimed to set out the
gen-eral presuppositions of the possibility of articulate
dis-course about our experience In his earlier phase he had
produced a powerful criticism of the account of reference
embodied in Russell’s theory of *descriptions and he went
on to point out the lavishly Procrustean distortions of the
logical rules of ordinary, natural language made by
mod-ern, mathematically inspired formal logic a.q
K T Fann (ed.), A Symposium on J L Austin (London, 1959).
Anthony Kenny, Wittgenstein (Harmondsworth, 1975).
C W K Mundle, Critique of Linguistic Philosophy (Oxford, 1970).
J A Passmore, A Hundred Years of Philosophy (London, 1957),
ch 18
O P Wood and G Pitcher (eds.), Ryle: A Collection of Critical Essays (London, 1970).
linguistics, formal An empirical discipline which pro-vides a mathematical framework for characterizing prop-erties of possible human languages, with different branches characterizing phenomena at different though related levels in the speech chain from sound to meaning Each branch of linguistics provides a theory that isolates a unit of linguistic significance, such as property of sound, form, or meaning, which it analyses and relates to notions analysed at the levels above and below The minimal units
of analysis are abstract notions used to segment the con-tinuous sound signal of human speech into phonemes, then syllables, then words and morphemes, constituents and phrases, sentences and discourse structures Corre-sponding to these levels we have the theories of phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, and dis-course representation theory The general theory of lan-guage comprising these subtheories will also contain a formal treatment of the learnability of languages b.c.s
M Atkinson, D Kilby, and I Roca, Foundations of General Linguis-tics, 2nd edn (London, 1988).
linguistics, philosophical relevance of.Linguistics bears
on certain issues in *epistemology and in *philosophy of mind and, of course, is directly relevant to philosophy of language For example, Chomsky has forcefully argued that the exigencies of language learning strongly favour
*rationalism over *empiricism in the traditional debate on
*innate ideas The facility with which children learn their native languages, despite the severely limited quantity and variety of data available to them, indicates that language acquisition is hardly a matter of stimulus generalization Rather, Chomsky proposes, we possess a language faculty specially equipped for acquiring languages with just those features that distinguish natural human languages Char-acterizing these features is the task of what he calls univer-sal grammar Also, he draws a distinction between competence and performance Though applied to know-ledge of language, it is relevant to philosophy of psychol-ogy in general, for it points to the distinction, crucial to
*cognitive science, between explaining abilities and explaining behaviour Chomsky’s account of knowledge
of language suggests that Ryle’s distinction between knowing-that and knowing-how is not exhaustive, and it provides an antidote to Wittgenstein’s and Kripke’s scepti-cism about *rules and rule-following
Underlying these issues is the question of how gram-matical information is represented and utilized in lan-guage production and comprehension The findings of psycholinguistics strongly support the claim that gram-matical information is not an artefact of theory but is psy-chologically real Although the categories and principles
of modern linguistic theory generally do not correspond
to those of school grammar, and are not otherwise
Trang 5intuitively accessible to language-users, people’s linguistic
behaviour and grammatical judgements seem sensitive to
such principles Accordingly, it is plausible to suppose that
knowledge of language is not conscious but tacit, and that
this knowledge includes representations of sentential
structure corresponding to the categories of linguistic
ory (not that there is any consensus on the best such
the-ory) Otherwise, there would seem to be no explanation
for a multitude of linguistic regularities or for the
robust-ness of people’s linguistic intuitions
Various branches of linguistic theory are relevant to the
philosophy of language Syntactic theory sheds light on
such concepts as argument structure, binding, scope, and
*logical form Also, because some semantic information is
encoded structurally rather than lexically, the theory of
meaning (*semantics) in philosophy cannot ignore
syntac-tic theory in linguissyntac-tics Linguissyntac-tic semansyntac-tics illuminates
such concepts as *ambiguity, *vagueness, and *synonymy,
and offers a framework for explicating the distinction
between *analytic and synthetic statements Linguistic
*pragmatics overlaps with the philosophical theory of
*speech acts, and, as Grice showed, the distinction
between pragmatic and semantic questions has important
consequences for a variety of philosophical issues
From a linguistic standpoint, the logical form of a
sen-tence is not the form of a logical formula used to represent
the proposition expressed by the sentence, but a level of
syntactic structure It is often construed as the input to
semantic interpretation, the stage of a grammar at which
information about the semantic contents of lexical items is
applied to yield, as a function of this level of syntactic
struc-ture, the semantic content of the entire sentence Logical
form helps explain scope relations among quantified noun
phrases, connectives, and other operators, and binding and
anaphoric relations between noun phrases and pronouns
Also, there is often reason to impute hidden variables to
the logical forms of sentences containing expressions of
certain sorts, such as relational terms like ‘local’ and ‘alien’,
and temporal adverbs and connectives, like ‘usually’ and
‘whenever’ These latter terms, as they occur in such
sen-tences as ‘Usually Abe drinks wine with dinner’ and
‘Whenever Bob is late for work, he skips breakfast’,
func-tion as quantifiers, and, plausibly, these sentences contain
event variables bound by those quantifiers
Lexical semanticists distinguish polysemy from lexical
ambiguity The ambiguity of nouns such as ‘club’, ‘joint’,
and ‘trunk’, each with several unrelated meanings, is a
lin-guistic coincidence, evident from their translation into
other languages However, polysemous words, such as the
verbs ‘call’, ‘go’, and ‘play’, have closely related meanings
that need to be explained systematically From a
philo-sophical standpoint, the phenomenon of polysemy
chal-lenges the simplistic view that for a word to have several
literal uses is just a matter of its having several senses This
is clear from the case of adjectival modification, as
illus-trated by the different relations between adjective and
noun in ‘fast runner’, ‘fast track’, and ‘fast race’, or between
the nouns in ‘child abuse’ and in ‘drug abuse’ k.b
L Antony and N Hornstein (eds.), Chomsky and his Critics
(Oxford, 2003)
N Chomsky, Knowledge of Language (New York, 1986).
A George (ed.), Reflections on Chomsky (Oxford, 1989).
T Parsons, Events in the Semantics of English (Cambridge, Mass.,
1990)
G Preyer and G Peter (eds.), Logical Form and Language (Oxford,
2002)
Y Ravin and C Leacock, Polysemy: Theoretical and Computational Approaches (Oxford, 2000).
linguistic turn Collective designation for a range of oth-erwise quite disparate trends in twentieth-century thought What they all have in common is an appeal to language, to *discourse, or forms of linguistic representa-tion as the furthest point that philosophy can reach in its quest for knowledge and truth There are no ‘facts’ out-side language, and no ‘reality’ other than that which pre-sents itself under some linguistic description Thus philosophers can only be deluded if they seek to render language more accurate or perspicuous by removing its various natural imperfections—ambiguity, metaphor, opaque reference, etc.—and achieving a crystalline trans-parency of logical form Rather they should follow Wittgenstein’s example and acknowledge the open multi-plicity of *‘language-games’ (or cultural *‘forms of life’), each with its own criteria for what counts as a valid or meaningful utterance In short, the proper business of phil-osophy in this therapeutic mode is to cure language of its abstract cravings and (in the words of Stanley Cavell) to
‘lead it back, via the community, home’
The project thus described was pursued most zealously
by J L Austin and the proponents of so-called ‘ordinary language’ philosophy ‘Our common stock of words’, Austin wrote, ‘embodies all the distinctions men have found worth drawing in the lifetimes of many genera-tions: these are surely likely to be more numerous, more sound, and more subtle than any that you or I are likely
to think up in our arm-chairs of an afternoon—the most favoured alternative method’ But the trouble with this approach, as many have felt, is its tendency to consecrate the nuances of received (‘common-sense’) wisdom while failing to address more substantive philosophical issues
Thus it can easily give rise to an outlook of laissez-faire
rel-ativism or an inert consensus based recommendation that philosophy should cease asking awkward questions and
be content—in Wittgenstein’s phrase—to ‘leave
J L Austin, ‘A Plea for Excuses’, in Philosophical Papers (London,
1961)
Richard Rorty (ed.), The Linguistic Turn: Recent Essays in Philosoph-ical Method (Chicago, 1967).
—— Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Oxford, 1980) Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, tr G E M.
Anscombe (Oxford, 1953)
literature and philosophy Some philosophical writing, though not very much, it has to be said, displays literary merit Plato was a great writer and the British Empiricists
524 linguistics, philosophical relevance of
Trang 6are admired for the vivacity of their prose However,
imaginative literature—poetry, drama, and the novel—
has presented problems to philosophers Plato’s hostility
to art in general is well known For him, art was a rival in
the pursuit of truth, and liable to corrupt Plato’s
antago-nism, though shared to an extent by Tolstoy, finds few
modern supporters But, as usual, Plato raises, albeit
obliquely, profound questions about literature
There are two major issues Firstly, there is what is
sometimes described as the problem of belief If a work of
literature asserts or assumes propositions which I know or
believe to be false, what difference does that make? If I do
not share Milton’s metaphysics, am I debarred to that
extent from an appreciation of Paradise Lost? If I do not
share his beliefs, can I nevertheless empathize with the
poet by ‘suspending my disbelief ’ or ‘making believe’ that
these beliefs are true? Certainly I can be moved by *poetry
or prose which proceeds on assumptions which I do not
share An atheist may find the poetry of George Herbert
moving Yet there are limits I may bridle at the
anti-Semitism in Pound’s cantos I do not suspend my disbelief
in order to enter sympathetically into the world of a racist
And we certainly will resist literature which tries to
sub-orn us We cannot take seriously and may even resent
fic-tion which, as we say, verges on propaganda So although
we can learn from literature we certainly do not
com-monly learn by absorbing maxims; it exemplifies and
dis-plays truths rather than argues for them Indeed it is not
part of a proper reaction to literature qua literature to
assess the validity of the arguments it contains Its
‘truth-fulness’ is, pari passu, not a matter of the truth of the claims
it makes The famous generalizations about marriage and
the family which begin Pride and Prejudice and Anna
Karen-ina are not exceptionless; it would be easy to find
counter-examples The truth of literature is generally a matter of
the convincingness of the characters it portrays Seen in
this context, Plato’s reservations about the arts seem less
strange If we believe that philosophy can increase our
knowledge by its criticism of superstition and
specula-tion, then philosophy teaches in a way which literature
does not
What literature does do is to offer us imaginary scenes,
concentrated and complex settings, in which imaginary
beings act It is sometimes described as inductive From
lit-erature I may learn about individual human propensities
and peculiarities In order that it can do this in its own
peculiar fashion, it is necessary that literature move and
involve us, and this raises the second of the two problems
to which I alluded at the beginning Not only am I moved
by Hamlet’s conversation with the ghost of his father,
even though I do not believe in ghosts, I can be deeply
moved by the death of Anna Karenina, even though I
know that she has no existence outside these pages But
how can I be moved by the fate of somebody who does not
exist? Is it that she is ‘really dead’ but only in the ‘possible
world’ of Tolstoy’s novel? Am I being irrational? It cannot
be that I am moved by the general truth that there are real
women who escape from a boring life into an ultimately
unsatisfactory affair I know there are such women but it is the fate of Anna which moves me and not theirs
*Imagination is crucial here for I can moved by what I can imagine and the fact that I can be so moved is an important factor in planning the course of my life Literature, we could say, is important because it nurtures the imagin-ation in ways which moral maxims or philosophical
*fiction
David Caute, The Illusion (London, 1971).
John Hospers, ‘Implied Truth in Literature’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism (1960).
Peter Lamarque and Stein Haugom Olsen, Truth, Fiction and Lit-erature (Oxford, 1994).
Colin Radford, ‘How can we be Moved by the Fate of Anna
Karen-ina?’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, supp vol (1975) Morris Weitz, ‘Truth in Literature’, Revue Internationale de Philosophie (1955).
Locke, John (1632–1704) The foremost English pher of the early period of modern post-Cartesian philoso-phy was educated at Westminster School and Christ Church, Oxford Besides studying, and then teaching, sub-jects such as logic, moral philosophy, rhetoric, and Greek,
he had a deep and abiding interest in medicine Through the Earl of Shaftesbury, he became involved in Protestant politics; this resulted in exile in Holland from 1683 to 1689, when, after the ‘Glorious Revolution’ which put William
of Orange on the throne, he returned to England and a life
of private study and public service
He wrote widely—on various branches of philosophy,
on education, economics, religion, and medicine He is
best known for his Treatises of Government (1690), Letter Concerning Toleration (1689), and his Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690).
The Treatises, which contain Locke’s political
philoso-phy, were composed in the years of the Exclusion Crisis, during which Locke’s patron, Shaftesbury, and others, sought to exclude James, then Duke of York, from the suc-cession to the throne, and argued for government by con-sent and for the right to religious discon-sent
The First Treatise, contains criticism of Robert Filmer’s theory (Patriarcha (1680) ) of absolute monarchy and the
divine right of kings Locke found this account of political
*authority, according to which God granted Adam absolute and total political authority, unworkable It could not be used to justify any actual political authority;
we cannot show of any particular ruler that he is one of
Adam’s heirs In an alternative account the Second Treatise
argues that though subjects do have a duty to God to obey their ruler, their ruler’s power is not God given or absolute, and it goes along with duties to his subjects Locke’s account begins with the idea of a *state of nature, in which people live, free from external authority,
in families and loose groups In this state people have a duty to God not to ‘harm another in his life liberty, or goods’ (sect 6), and so have a corresponding right to defend against such attack But these rights and duties
Locke, John 525
Trang 7may not actually be respected and obeyed; we may lack
the power to defend our rights, or may go too far in our
own defence For such reasons people agree to ‘enter into
society to make one body politic, under one supreme
government’ (sect 89) Leaving the state of nature, they
‘set up a judge with authority to determine all
con-troversies and redress injuries’ (sect 89) But this
authority is not absolute; they are answerable to ‘the will
and determination of the majority’ (sect 96) Popular
con-sent not only creates, but also produces, the continued
existence of a Lockean political society
A distinction between tacit and explicit *consent
pro-vides Locke’s answer to the objection that there is no
his-torical evidence for his account of the creation of political
authority, and that people are simply born into civil
soci-eties and come under their laws and authority without
choice By remaining in society, one gives one’s tacit
con-sent to it Locke’s suggestion that a person is always ‘at
lib-erty to incorporate himself into any other community,
or to begin a new one’ (sect 121) is even less plausible
now than then But his account can be seen as a
pic-turesque way of analysing the structure of legitimate
political authority, and of revealing it to be essentially
based on the consent of the governed The notion of tacit
consent is given further substance by Locke’s allowing the
possibility of legitimate resistance or *revolution ‘The
community perpetually retains a supreme power of
sav-ing themselves from their legislators, whenever they
shall be so foolish or so wicked, as to carry on designs
against the[ir] liberties and properties’ (sect 149)
Locke’s Letter Concerning Toleration, written during
exile in Holland, considers how far the state can
legiti-mately concern itself with religious practices Convinced
that Christianity as such requires toleration, Locke is
scathing about states which persecute religious dissidents
‘with a pretence of care of the public weal’, and of national
churches which persecute them ‘under pretence of
reli-gion’ (17) He then argues further against religious
intoler-ance by the state by differentiating ‘the business of civil
government from that of religion’ (17) States are
consti-tuted ‘only for the procuring, preserving, and advancing
their [subjects] civil interests’: ‘life, liberty, health …
money, land, houses’ (17); so a ruler’s duty is never ‘to be
extended to the salvation of souls’ (18) This conclusion is
based on three considerations First, the ‘civil magistrate’
has no more duty than anyone else has to concern himself
with ‘the care of souls’: God has given him no authority ‘to
compel any one to his religion’ (18); nor have his subjects
left it to him to ‘prescribe … what faith or worship [they]
shall embrace’ (18) Second, the means used by a ruler
can-not bring about convictions in his subjects’ minds Civil
power consists in outward force and earthly penalties, and
these are unable to bring about ‘inward persuasion’ (18):
‘the understanding … cannot be compelled to the belief of
any thing by outward force … [which has no] efficacy as to
make men change the inward judgement that they have
framed of things’ (18) We cannot simply believe what
we are told to believe Thirdly, even if it were possible,
imposition of a religion by the state would in many cases not help to save souls While there is, Locke believed, ‘but one truth, one way to heaven’, there nevertheless is a
‘variety and contradiction of opinions in religion, wherein the princes of the world are … divided’ (19); so state inter-ference in religious matters would mean that ‘men would owe their eternal happiness or misery to the places of their nativity’ (19)
But though the state’s sole concern is to protect the civil interests of its subjects, laws might still properly be enacted which have consequences for some sects or churches Things prejudical to the state and its members
‘ought not to be permitted to the churches in their sacred rites’ (37); nor are ‘opinions contrary to human society, or
to those moral rules which are necessary to the preserva-tion of civil society’ (45) to be tolerated Equally, a church should not be tolerated by the state if membership involves allegiance to another earthly power It is Roman Catholics whom Locke has in mind in this case, but they are not the only group to whom toleration is not to be extended: atheists are similarly untrustworthy ‘Those are not at all to be tolerated who deny the being of God Promises, covenants, and oaths, which are the bonds of human society, can have no hold upon an atheist The tak-ing away of God … dissolves all’ (47)
Locke resists the suggestion that toleration should be denied to certain dissenting, non-conformist sects, even though these had sometimes been ‘nurseries of factions and seditions’ (47) Their civil unruliness was not rooted in their very nature, he thought, but had developed precisely through lack of toleration ‘If men enter into seditious conspiracies, it is not religion inspires them to it … but their suffering and oppressions’ (48–9)
Locke also concerned himself with interdenomina-tional toleration What he says turns on his account of the nature of a church as a society of people who have volun-tarily come together ‘in order to the public worshipping of God, in such manner as they judge acceptable to him, and effectual to the salvation of their souls’ (20) Societies need rules and regulations, and in the case of a church the authority to make and apply them resides in members Locke explicitly denied that a church requires ‘a bishop, or presbyter with ruling authority derived from the very apostles’ (20–1) Christ did not say that churches should have governments of these kinds; he promised to be pre-sent simply ‘wheresoever two or three are gathered together in his name’ (21)
In short, then, ‘the care … of every man’s soul … is to be left unto himself ’ (28) But Locke is not allowing that someone might enter into private and solitary commu-nion with God: God should be publicly worshipped, and people should ‘meet together … to own to the world that they worship God’ (32) He is not allowing, either, that there are many, equally good ways to eternal happiness: there is ‘one only narrow way which leads to heaven’ (30) But it is not for the state or some national church to pre-scribe what it is ‘Those things … every man ought sin-cerely to inquire into himself ’ (29) Even though there is
526 Locke, John
Trang 8only one narrow way to heaven I cannot be on it unless I
am thoroughly persuaded in my own mind: ‘I cannot be
saved by a religion that I distrust, and by a worship that I
abhor’ (32)
Locke is best known for his Essay Concerning Human
Understanding, which contains his theory of knowledge.
Believing we have been put here by God with some
expec-tation of an afterlife, Locke’s aim is to discover what kind
of things God has fitted us to know, and so how we should
direct and use our intellect and understanding His
pur-pose is ‘to enquire into the original, certainty, and extent
of human knowledge’ (ii i 2)
He maintains from the outset that none of our ideas or
knowledge (whether theoretical or ethical) is innate: the
mind at birth is like ‘white paper’ (ii i 2), and all our ideas
are derived from experience But such experience-based
ideas are only ‘the materials’ of reason and knowledge (ii
i 2) Knowledge itself is not ‘made out to us by our senses’
(Draft A, 157) It is a product of reason working out the
connections between those ideas Locke’s *empiricism
about ideas is combined with a *rationalism about
knowl-edge: without reason all we have is belief, not knowledge
His claim that all our *ideas, the materials of
knowl-edge, come from experience is facilitated by a distinction
between simple and complex ideas—the former being
unanalysable and indefinable, the latter being mentally
constructible out of simples Complex ideas are of various
sorts: substances (e.g gold, lead, horses), which represent
things in the material world; modes (e.g triangle,
grati-tude), which are ‘dependences on, or affections of
sub-stances’ (ii xii 4); and relations (e.g parent, whiter) He
defends his view that all our ideas derive from experience
by consideration of such cases as ‘space, time, and infinity,
and some few others’ (ii xii 8) such as perception, solidity,
memory, number, volition, pure substance in general,
cause and effect, identity Besides offering these as difficult
test cases, Locke obviously finds them philosophically
interesting too
Locke’s discussion of ‘pure *substance in general’
(ii xxiii 2) became notorious, and there are different
accounts of what he means Often he is taken to be
reject-ing the kind of view which was later held by Bertrand
Rus-sell, according to which a material thing is no more than ‘a
bundle of properties’ He is often, that is, supposed to hold
that, in addition to properties, things have a ‘substratum’
which ‘supports’ their properties According to another
interpretation, Locke’s ‘substratum’ should not be seen in
the context of abstract logical questions about the
differ-ence between ‘things’ and ‘properties’ It should be
identi-fied simply with matter as understood by the
‘corpuscularians’ of his century, who revived classical
Greek atomism, or, more specifically, with particular
arrangements of corpuscles of that matter, arrangements
which Locke calls the real essences of material things
His discussion of identity has been of lasting interest
There is, he points out, a relativity about identity ‘Is this
what was here before?’ It depends what kind of thing this is
meant to be If a mass of matter, it is the same if it consists
of the same particles; if a living body, this need not be so:
‘a colt grown up to a horse is all the while the same though there may be a manifest change of the parts’ (ii xxvii 3) Identity consists here in matter’s being con-tinuously arranged in a similar way so that it ‘partakes of the same life’ (ii xxvii 4) The point is important for his distinction, made in connection with *personal identity, between the idea of ‘man’ and that of ‘person’ A man’s identity is basically no different from that of any other ani-mal But a person is not simply a living body Identity here
is that of ‘a thinking intelligent being, that has reason, and reflection, and can consider itself as itself, the same think-ing ththink-ing in different times and places’ (ii xxvii 9) Locke’s description of a person as ‘a thinking intelligent being’ does not mean that the continuity of self-consciousness which constitutes personal identity is the continuity of some immaterial substance, which is self-conscious, for he
is clearly unhappy with this view of Descartes’s
In fact the Essay contains a fair amount of criticism of
Descartes: the identification of extension as the whole essence of material substance, and the claim that the mind
is always thinking, are further things to which he objects Nevertheless, it was that ‘justly-admired gentleman’ Descartes who rescued Locke from the obscurantism (as it seemed) of the then-prevailing Aristotelian scholasticism
to which he had been exposed as a student (Works, iv 48).
From Descartes too Locke takes his central and hard-worked notion of an ‘idea’ (‘whatsoever is the object of
the understanding when a man thinks’ (Essay,i i 8) ) as an essentially mind-dependent thing, rather than a Platonic entity with a reality of its own quite independent of any relation it might have to our minds
Locke refers to the ‘vague and insignificant forms of speech’ of the scholastics in his ‘Epistle to the Reader’ They come in for criticism in book iii, ‘On Words’, where
he rejects the idea that classificatory words stand for ‘real essences’, understood, not as Locke prefers (as corpuscu-lar constitutions), but as so-called substantial forms which, by being embodied in things, make them to be of one sort or another Instead, he argues that classification is
a matter of human interests and convenience, and that general words stand for ‘nominal essences’, abstract ideas which we ourselves construct Generality and universal-ity, he says, ‘belong not to the real existence of things; but are the inventions and creatures of the understanding, made by it for its own use’ (iii iii 11)
In book iv, *knowledge is defined as ‘the perception of the connection and agreement, or disagreement of any
of our ideas’ (iv i 2) Some propositions are true because the relevant ideas are connected and related in such a way
as to make them true Any number is even or odd by virtue
of there being a connection between the idea of ‘number’ and those of ‘evenness’ and ‘oddness’ It is by ‘perceiving’ these relations by the light of our reason that we come to have knowledge Where either intellectual incapacity or lack of any actual connection, means we can perceive no connection, then, ‘though we may fancy, guess, or believe, yet we always come short of knowledge’ (iv i 2)
Locke, John 527
Trang 9The definition of knowledge as the perception of
con-nections between ideas is ill suited to a third degree of
knowledge, our ‘sensitive knowledge’ of the existence of
things ‘without us’ ( iv ii 14) which correspond to our ideas.
Moreover, though the certainty of sensitive knowledge is
not so great as that of the other two degrees, it still, Locke
says, deserves the name of knowledge; and he is
dismis-sive of those who might be sceptical about the existence of
an external world Because of his talk of a correspondence
between external things and our ideas, Locke has usually
been taken to be a representational realist about
percep-tion; but in recent years, and despite his saying that the
mind ‘perceives nothing but its own ideas’ (iv iv 3), some
have interpreted him as a direct realist
Locke’s definition of knowledge seems perfect for our a
priori knowledge in a subject such as geometry, which
deals with modes such as ‘triangle’ But what of our
knowledge in the area of what was known as ‘natural
phil-osophy’, for example, the knowledge that the substance
gold is malleable and graphite not? This is surely based on
observation and experience and not on intellectual
per-ception of any connection between ideas Locke
recog-nizes such cases where, because there is ‘a want of a
discoverable connection between those ideas which we
have we are left only to observation and
experi-ment’ (iv iii 28) and explicitly says that they do not
con-stitute ‘knowledge’, but what he calls belief or opinion
The contrast between knowledge proper and belief or
opinion is inherited from the scholastics But, unlike
them, Locke does not think that ‘opinion’ or ‘belief ’ about
the properties and behaviour of substances in the material
world is not worth having He clearly supports the idea of
a systematic observationally and experimentally based
study of nature, a study of the kind being pursued by his
colleague and friend, the chemist Robert Boyle, whom he
refers to as one of the ‘master builders’ of the
‘common-wealth of learning’
The reason why ‘natural philosophy is not capable of
being made a science’ (iv xii 10), i.e into a systematic
body of knowledge as Locke defines it, is that we do not
know the real essences, the corpuscular constitutions, of
the substances with which it is concerned The fact that we
can perceive no connection between being gold and being
malleable does not mean that there is not one The
prop-erties of gold depend on or result from its corpuscular
con-stitution, and if we knew just how its corpuscules are
structured and arranged, we would be able to see just why
it has those properties If, that is to say, our idea of gold
were an idea of its real essence, we might see a connection
between being gold and being malleable
But this limitation on our knowledge is no cause for
pessimistic concern The ‘belief ’ and ‘opinion’ we have
about the properties of substances in the world are
suffi-cient for daily practicalities ‘Men have reason to be well
satisfied with what God hath thought fit for them, since he
has given them whatsoever is necessary for the
conve-niences of life’ (i i 5)
Unlike ‘natural philosophy’, geometry is a science and
falls on this side of the horizon of our knowledge This is because it deals not with substances (e.g gold, lead) but with modes (e.g the triangle), whose real essences we know As with a substance such as gold, it is because a mode such as a triangle is what it is that it has the proper-ties it has; but whereas in the first case we do not know the real essence, in the second, Locke says, we do It is because
it is a figure of three lines enclosing a space that a triangle’s external angle equals its internal opposites; and because our idea of a triangle is an idea of that real essence we can see a connection between being a triangle and having angles like that
Our knowledge is bounded by our ideas, and, in gen-eral, extends only so far as they are ideas of real essences But geometrical figures are not the only things whose real essences we might know The ideas of morality are modes too, and Locke thinks that, with proper application, a sys-tematic science of ethics similar to that of geometry could
be developed
Yet though moral principles are neither innate nor easy
to acquire by reason, no one need remain ignorant of his duties and obligations; for the Bible teaches us them too This need not mean taking things on authority and aban-doning all thought of moral knowledge We can in hind-sight find rationally justifying arguments for what the Bible first suggests Nevertheless, some people, ‘per-plexed in the necessary affairs of life’ (i iii 25) may have no time for this, and their morality must be a matter of ‘faith’
or ‘belief ’
Locke’s general conclusion concerning the extent of our knowledge is, then, that not only has God ‘put within the reach of [our] discovery [beliefs sufficient for] the com-fortable provision for [this] life’ (i i 5), he has also put within our grasp knowledge of ‘the way that leads to a bet-ter’ He has given us the means to acquire knowledge of
‘whatsoever is necessary for the information of virtue’ (i i 5)
Many of the early reactions to the Essay were critical.
Locke was sometimes supposed to be a sceptic; but though he does put limits on our ability to know and understand, he is hardly pessimistic about the human situ-ation He explicitly aimed to defeat the despairing idea
‘that either there is no such thing as truth at all; or that mankind hath no sufficient means to attain a certain knowledge of it’ (i i 2) Nevertheless, his polemic against innate ideas was taken to imply an impersonal deism, and his suggestion that matter might think (despite stressing that ‘all the great ends of morality, and religion, are well enough secured, without philosophical proofs of the soul’s immateriality’ (iv iii 6) ) was pointed to with hor-ror Berkeley, the first great British philosopher after Locke, reacted against what he saw as the sceptical and atheistical consequences of Locke’s philosophy
The framework of Locke’s approach to the human mind influenced psychology and epistemology for a long time David Hartley (1705–57), Joseph Priestley (1733–1804), Francis Hutcheson (1694–1747), James Mill (1733–1836), and Étienne Condillac (1715–80) all
528 Locke, John
Trang 10approached this problem by analysing experience, after
the manner of Locke, into elements and their
combina-tions and associacombina-tions
Many of the ideas in the Essay (the stress on observation
and the corpuscular theory of matter, the attack on the
scholastics, the place of reason in religion) can be found in
Locke’s lesser contemporaries too But he was a powerful
and vigorous spokesman for them Along with Isaac
New-ton, he became one of the figureheads of the Age of
*Enlightenment Both then, and in our own time, he is
val-ued for a judicious, sober reasonableness, and an
individu-alistic insistence that opinions are to be weighed carefully
on their merits by each of us, independently of what
others, particularly those in majority or authority, say
‘Trial and examination must give [truth] price.’ r.s.w
Richard Ashcraft, Locke’s Two Treatises of Government
(Lon-don, 1987)
Michael Ayers, Locke, 2 vols (London, 1992).
John Dunn, John Locke (Oxford, 1984).
Nicholas Jolley, Locke: His Philosophical Thought (Oxford, 1999).
John Locke, Draft A of Locke’s Essay Concerning Human
Under-standing (1671), in Drafts for the Essay Concerning Human
Understanding, and other Philosophical Writings, vol 1, ed P H.
Nidditch and G A J Rogers (Oxford, 1990)
—— Two Treatises of Government (London, 1690) The partially
modernized quotations are from Peter Laslett’s critical edn
(Cambridge, 1960)
—— Essay Concerning Human Understanding (London, 1690) The
partially modernized quotations are from P H Nidditch’s
authoritative edn (Oxford, 1975)
—— Works (London, 1823).
—— A Letter Concerning Toleration (London, 1689) References
are to the edn by John Horton and Susan Mendus (London,
1991)
R S Woolhouse, Locke (Brighton, 1983).
locutions:see linguistic acts.
logic, deontic: see deontic logic.
logic, formal or symbolic: see modern logic; traditional
logic; history of logic; logical theory; calculus;
proposi-tional calculus; proposiproposi-tional logic; sentential calculus;
predicate calculus; modal logic; deontic logic;
many-valued logics; relvance logic; tense logic;
higher-order logic; intuitionist logic; logicism; logical harmony;
metalogic; logical paradoxes; logical notations; Appendix
on logical symbols
logic, higher-order: see higher-order logic.
logic, history of Aristotle was the first thinker to devise a
logical system He drew upon the emphasis on universal
definition found in Socrates, the use of *reductio ad
absurdum in Zeno of Elea, claims about propositional
structure and *negation in Parmenides and Plato, and the
body of argumentative techniques found in legal
reason-ing and geometrical proof Yet the theory presented in
Aristotle’s five treatises known as the Organon—the
Categories, the De interpretatione, the Prior Analytics, the
Posterior Analytics, and the De sophisticis elenchis—goes far
beyond any of these
Aristotle holds that a proposition is a complex involving two terms, a *subject and a predicate, each of which is rep-resented grammatically with a noun The logical *form of
a proposition is determined by its quantity (universal or particular) and by its quality (affirmative or negative) Aristotle investigates the relations between two propos-itions containing the same terms in his theories of oppos-ition (*square of opposoppos-ition) and conversion The former describes relations of *contradictoriness and *contrariety, the latter *equipollences and *entailments
The analysis of logical form, opposition, and conver-sion are combined in syllogistic, Aristotle’s greatest inven-tion in logic A *syllogism consists of three proposiinven-tions The first two, the premisses, share exactly one term, and they logically entail the third proposition, the conclusion, which contains the two non-shared terms of the pre-misses The term common to the two premisses may occur as subject in one and predicate in the other (called the ‘first figure’), predicate in both (‘second figure’), or subject in both (‘third figure’) A given configuration of premisses and conclusions is called a ‘mood’
In the scholastic period, mnemonic names for the valid
moods canvassed in the Prior Analytics were devised Two
first-figure valid moods were considered perfect and not in need of any further validation: *Barbara (consisting entirely in universal affirmatives) and *Celarent (consist-ing in a universal negative and a universal affirmative, concluding in a universal negative) For the validation of the rest, Aristotle used three techniques: reduction, where
a given mood is transformed through conversions into
Barbara or Celarent; reductio ad absurdum; and ekthesis,
which proceeds by selection of an arbitrary individual He regularly describes moods by using variables in place of terms To reject a proposed inference he typically gives a list of terms that, when substituted as values of the term-variables, produce true premisses and false conclusion This is similar to the modern technique of constructing
‘counter-arguments’ to establish invalidity
Aristotle may also be credited with the formulation of several metalogical theses, most notably the law of *non-contradiction, the principle of *excluded middle, and the law of *bivalence These are important in his discussions
of *modal logic and tense logic Aristotle referred to cer-tain principles of propositional logic and to reasoning involving hypothetical propositions He also created two non-formal logical theories: techniques and strategies for
devising arguments (in the Topics), and a theory of fallacies (in the De sophisticis elenchis) Aristotle’s pupils Eudemus
and Theophrastus modified and developed Aristotelian logic in several ways
The next major innovations in logic are due to the Megarian–Stoic School They developed an alternative account of the syllogism, and, in the course of so doing, elaborated a full *propositional logic which complements Aristotelian term logic There are fragmentary records
of debates over the *truth-conditions for various
logic, history of 529