The Oxford Companion to Philosophy Part 64 pptx

Non-reductive physicalism, which arguably is the current orthodoxy on the mind– body problem, encounters serious difficulties with the causal closure of the physical: if the physical doma

Epiphenomenalism, however, has difficulties of its

own For one thing, it isn’t clear that physical-to-mental

causation is any easier to understand than

mental-to-physical causation Second, and far more importantly,

depriving the mental of causal powers simply goes against

almost all of what we believe about mentality—that is,

about us To most of us it is just not believable to say that

our desires and intentions have nothing to do with what

we do, or that the same human civilization would have

developed even if no humans had ever had a thought, an

idea, or a hope

Mental causation is a simple matter for physical

reduc-tionism, for it identifies mentality with physical processes,

and this means that mental causation is simply a species of

physical causation But reductionism has not been a

popu-lar option for some time Non-reductive physicalism,

which arguably is the current orthodoxy on the mind–

body problem, encounters serious difficulties with the

causal closure of the physical: if the physical domain is

‘causally closed’, as all serious physicalists believe, how

can mental states, states that are irreducibly distinct from

the physical, inject their causal influence into the physical

domain? The problem of mental causation remains

a central issue in the continuing debate over the nature

of mind

4 Intentionality Wittgenstein asked: ‘What makes my

image of him into an image of him?’ Many mental states,

including thoughts, beliefs, and desires, are ‘intentional’ in

Brentano’s sense—that is, they are ‘about’ or ‘directed

upon’ an object My thought that Boston is to the north of

New York is about, and is directed upon or refers to, Boston

and New York As earlier noted, Brentano claimed that

intentionality is the defining characteristic of mentality

Earlier debates on intentionality during the twentieth

cen-tury (notably, R M Chisholm’s work) focused on the

pro-ject of validating Brentano’s thesis by providing a precise

definition of intentionality Mentality, however, is not the

only phenomenon with intentionality; our words and

sen-tences, too, have meanings and can refer to, or be about,

things This gives rise to a profound question: Is the

tionality of mind more basic than, or prior to, the

inten-tionality of language, or is it rather the reverse? Perhaps,

neither is prior to the other, both being interdependent

Moreover, we seem to be able to have thoughts about

things that do not exist, like Pegasus and the fountain of

youth (surely Ponce de León had thoughts about the

lat-ter) But how is it possible for our minds to direct

them-selves upon things that do not exist? We are apt to think

that our thoughts about Pegaus and our thoughts about

Cerberus are about different things But how can that be?

Given that neither exists, why aren’t the thoughts about

the same thing, namely nothing?

Lately, however, the focus of discussion has shifted to

the project of ‘naturalizing’ intentionality It is useful to

distinguish two problems here: the problem of ‘referential

intentionality’ (or the problem of reference, for short) and

that of ‘content intentionality’ (the problem of content)

The first is the problem just reviewed, namely that of giving an account of the conditions under which a thought, or an expression, is about, or refers to, an object The second is the problem of specifying the conditions under which a mental state has the specific ‘content’ or

‘meaning’ it has; that is, what it is about your belief that

snow is white that makes it the case that its content is that snow is white, or that it represents the state of affairs of snow being white The naturalization constraint in this context is

usually taken to mean that any acceptable account of intentionality of either type must be formulated without the use of any unanalysed intentional or other overtly mentalistic concepts (for example, Frege’s notion of

‘grasping’ a thought or proposition and Chisholm’s notion of ‘conceiving’ a property) The causal approach has been the most popular in developing naturalistic accounts of intentionality A causal theory of reference

would attempt to explain ‘expression x refers to object y’

in terms of an appropriate causal relation holding between

the uses of term x and object y; a causal theory of content would try to analyse ‘Person S has the belief that p’ in terms of a causal, or lawful, relationship between S’s belief that p and the state of affairs represented by p Some

philosophers have stressed the importance of the inferen-tial relations into which a thought enters in fixing its con-tent; others have focused on the constraints of rationality and coherence as central to the determination of a speaker-thinker’s mental contents As this very brief sur-vey shows, many different approaches and perspectives are in play in this area, and the situation is still very fluid One problem about content that has received much

attention recently is content externalism This is the view,

first advanced by Hilary Putnam and Tyler Burge, that physical and social factors external to the subject play a crucial role in determining the contents of that subject’s beliefs and other intentional states This means that what goes on ‘within’ you—your mind or your body—does not wholly determine the meanings of your thoughts or words (as it is put sometimes, meanings are not in your

head) For example, you have the belief that water is wet,

whereas your exact twin on ‘Twin Earth’, where water (that is, H2O) is replaced everywhere by a different but observationally indistinguishable substance, XYZ, has the

belief that XYZ is wet, rather than the belief that water is wet Or take a simpler example: you are looking at an

apple, and your twin is also looking at an apple, which, as

it happens, is qualitatively exactly similar to the one you are looking at Your perceptual experience, let us say, is exactly similar to your twin’s However, your thought

that here is a red apple and your twin’s thought that here is a red apple have different contents—they are about different

objects and their truth-conditions are different This dif-ference in thought content seems to stem not from any internal physical or mental differences between you and your twin, but from differences in the external environ-ment Just what the implications of content externalism are in regard to such questions as the truth of materialism, the causal powers of mental states, first-person epistemic

610 mind, problems of the philosophy of

authority on one’s own mental states, and the nature of

psychology as a science, are open questions

5 *Consciousness Thanks largely to the influence of

behaviourism and positivism early in the twentieth

cen-tury, consciousness was studiously avoided, or at least

ignored, by both psychologists and philosophers as a topic

for serious investigation for much of that century, a fact

that may strike one as deeply paradoxical For one might

wonder how mentality could be discussed or studied

without examining consciousness The common-sense

conception of mentality gives consciousness the pride of

place In 1904, Ivan Pavlov, in his Nobel Prize acceptance

speech said: ‘In point of fact, only one thing in life is of

actual interest for us—our psychic experience.’ But by the

1940s and 1950s, behaviourism was firmly established as

the reigning orthodoxy in psychology and social science,

and a well-known and influential psychology textbook

defined psychology as ‘the science that studies the

behav-ior of man and other animals’ (Ernest Hilgard, Introduction

to Psychology, 3rd edn (1953) ) As it turned out, however,

the reign of behaviourism was short-lived, and since the

1960s there has been a sea change in the philosophical and

scientific perspectives on consciousness With the

loos-ening of behaviourist and hyper-empiricist constraints,

consciousness has made a strong come-back, both in

systematic psychology and in philosophy, and serious

philosophical works on consciousness have been

appearing again, in large numbers

The ill repute of consciousness was due in part to

cer-tain questionable characteristics attributed to it by both

friend and foe, such as absolute ineffability, immediate

and infallible accessibility to the subject combined with a

total inaccessibility to the third person, and its

interper-sonal incomparability It seemed to many that given these

characteristics, consciousness could not be scientifically

studied and explained, and, worse, that such essentially

private experiences couldn’t even be talked about in

pub-lic language In so far as we are able to learn and use

expressions like ‘pain’, ‘thought’, and ‘anger’ for

interper-sonal communication, their meanings could not, it was

argued, be fixed by some private episodes in an inner

theatre accessible only to a single privileged subject And

surely we can, and do, use ‘pain’ and other mental

expres-sions to communicate public meaning; how else could we

explain a simple exchange like this: ‘Does this give you

pain?’ (asks the dentist); ‘Yes, it does’ (the patient replies)

Consciousness conceived as something essentially private

and subjective thus seems to drop out of the picture,

with no role to play in our public discourse, whether it is

the language of science or the common language of

every-day life

Much recent work in cognitive psychology, however,

appears to assume all but explicitly that subjects of certain

psychological experiments are having specific sorts of

con-scious experience, such as mentally rotating an image But

the methodological assumptions that govern such

refer-ences to consciousness are usually left vague and

inex-plicit, and the issue of their justification is seldom openly addressed There are two broad issues concerning con-sciousness in psychology: first, how useful concon-sciousness

is as an explanatory concept, a concept in terms of which psychological theories can be formulated to explain the data in their domain, and second, whether it is possible to explain consciousness itself scientifically Views are divided on both questions There still are those (elimin-ativists and epiphenomenalists) who either outright reject, or are dubious about, the explanatory utility of con-sciousness Some argue, as the classic epiphenomenalist did, that any intelligent behaviour for whose explanation

we are apt to invoke conscious states can be explained per-fectly well in terms of the underlying neural processes, and that this shows the dispensability of consciousness in psychology and cognitive science Others have stressed the differences that consciousness supposedly makes to behaviour—e.g performance levels of activities that require monitoring and control There is also the meta-physical issue of whether or not it is ever necessary to invoke conscious states over and above their underlying neural substrates in the causal explanation of behaviour Can consciousness be explained scientifically? There are those who accept consciousness as a natural phenom-enon arising out of physiological processes but despair of ever fully understanding it Some have argued that the essential subjectivity of consciousness (i.e the purported fact that all experiences involve a ‘point of view’ and are accessible only from the subject’s point of view) precludes scientific understanding, which, being entirely objective,

is unable to accommodate subjectivity More optimistic are those who pin their hopes on the concerted efforts of neuroscience and cognitive psychology for an eventual naturalistic understanding of consciousness What isn’t clear in this debate is what exactly is required of a ‘scien-tific understanding’ of consciousness—that is, what spe-cific factual or theoretical information we need to obtain if

we are to gain a scientific understanding of consciousness Some who think that consciousness can be neurobio-logically explained appear to think that all that is needed for the success of their project is to identify a neural sub-strate for every type of conscious experience and for con-sciousness itself Many will challenge this assumption, however, holding that these correlations are exactly what

is in need of explanation Suppose we discover that pains

and itches are correlated respectively with neural states M and N Why is it that pains, not itches, occur when M occurs? Why is it that pains occur only when M occurs and not when N occurs? (Can neurobiology explain why pains, not

itches, mediate between tissue damage and wincing, and why itches, not pains, come between mosquito bites and

scratching?) Why does consciousness emerge at all when M

or N occurs? Even the noted biologist-neuroscientist

Francis Crick has observed: ‘we may be able to say that you perceive red if and only if certain neurons (and/or molecules) in your head behave in a certain way This

may, or may not, suggest why you experience the vivid

sensation of color and why one sort of neural behavior

mind, problems of the philosophy of 611

necessarily makes you see red while another makes you

see blue, rather than vice versa’ (The Astonishing Hypothesis

(New York, 1994), 10) Perhaps, these questions have no

answers, and these correlations have to be taken as ‘brute

facts’ of the world that resist further explanation—facts

which Samuel Alexander, a leading emergentist, once

claimed we must accept with ‘natural piety’ This of

course would be to admit that consciousness could not be

fully understood on a neurobiological or any other kind of

physical basis

It is not an exaggeration to say that the ‘mystery of the

mind’ is by and large the mystery of consciousness, and

this mystery consists in our seeming inability to

under-stand the phenomenon of consciousness as part of a world

that is essentially physical, and, what is worse, not

know-ing just what it is that we need to know if we are to achieve

such an understanding

6 *Persons The nature of personhood has been a topic of

perennial philosophical interest; it is one where

philoso-phy of mind and moral philosophiloso-phy come together, since a

person is also an agent, someone who is able to deliberate,

form intentions, and perform actions, and hence is

evalu-able from the moral point of view The question ‘What is

a person?’ can be approached in two ways, synchronically

and diachronically

Synchronically, the question concerns the properties

and powers something must possess at a time to be a

per-son at that time It will generally be agreed that a perper-son

must have a rich mental life and be endowed with certain

psychological capacities and functions But what exactly is

required? Evidently, a person must be capable of having

intentional states such as beliefs, desires, and the rest if he,

as an agent, is to be able to form intentions and decisions

Should a person also be conscious? Should she also be

self-conscious in the sense of having a sense of self-identity and

being aware of her distinctiveness as an individual person

among others? Should a person be rational in some clear

and determinate sense? There is also the following

meta-physical question: Must a person be embodied or could

there in principle be persons who are immaterial? A

trad-itionalist, especially one who is religiously inclined, might

answer that not only can a person be wholly immaterial

but she must be possessed of an immaterial soul, an

answer that will be rejected by most naturalistically

inclined philosophers At any rate, these are some of

the questions that arise with respect to being a person

at a time

The diachronic question, however, has received far

more attention historically, and this continues to be true

today This is the so-called problem of ‘personal identity’:

what makes a person existing at a given time (say, the

retired general) the same person as one that existed at an

ear-lier time (the little boy in the photograph) Persons, like

anything else, change over time; both your mental and

bodily characteristics change, sometimes rather

strik-ingly, over a period of time, without your ceasing to be the

same person Changes could of course be so huge and

drastic that it would be correct to say that you have ceased

to exist, or that another person has come into being But what general principles govern our judgements about such cases? There are two important approaches to this issue, both commanding the allegiance of many philoso-phers One is the bodily continuity theory; it says that for you to be the same person as a person existing at another time, your body, or an appropriate part of your body, must be continuous, in some appropriate sense, with the body of that person—namely, that the continuity of embodiment is what underlies the identity of a person over time The second is the psychological continuity the-ory, according to which the continuity of mental life— that is, the continuity of character, personality, and, in particular, memory—rather than bodily continuity, is what is constitutive of the sameness of a person Many details need to be supplied: e.g precisely what the sup-posed ‘continuity’ is supsup-posed to consist in, and just when the required continuity must be considered broken There

is also the question whether psychological continuity can

be considered independent, conceptually or nomo-logically, of bodily continuity In any case, each of the two approaches appears vulnerable to persuasive counter-examples, and plausible arguments have been presented

in recent years for the position that personal survival is a matter of degree, not an all-or-nothing affair, and that there are situations in which no clear-cut answer exists to the question ‘Has the same person survived?’ Although our understanding of these problems has been deepened

in many ways in recent years, the concept of person-hood continues to test our philosophical ingenuity and

*theory theory of mind; mind–body problem

D Armstrong, A Materialist Theory of the Mind (London, 1968).

N Block, O Flanagan, and G Güzeldere (eds.), The Nature of Con-sciousness (Cambridge, Mass., 1997).

T Burge, ‘Individualism and the Mental’, Midwest Studies in Philosophy, v (1979).

D J Chalmers, The Conscious Mind (New York, 1996).

—— (ed.), Philosophy of Mind: Classical and Contemporary Readings

(New York, 2002)

R M Chisholm, The First Person (Minneapolis, 1981).

P M Churchland, Matter and Consciousness, rev edn

(Cam-bridge, Mass., 1988)

P S Churchland, Neurophilosophy (Cambridge, Mass., 1986).

D Davidson, Essays on Actions and Events (Oxford, 1980).

D C Dennett, Consciousness Explained (Boston, 1991).

J Fodor, Psychosemantics (Cambridge, Mass., 1989).

T Honderich, Mind and Brain (Oxford, 1988).

J Kim, Mind in a Physical World (Cambridge, Mass., 1998).

J Levine, Purple Haze (New York, 2000).

Colin McGinn, The Problem of Consciousness (Oxford, 1991).

D Papineau, Thinking about Consciousness (Oxford, 2002).

D Parfit, Reasons and Persons (Oxford, 1984).

H Putnam, Mind, Language, and Reality (Cambridge, 1975).

G Ryle, The Concept of Mind (London, 1949).

J Searle, The Rediscovery of the Mind (Cambridge, 1992).

S Shoemaker, Identity, Cause, and Mind, 2nd edn (Oxford, 2003).

J J C Smart, Philosophy and Scientific Realism (London, 1963).

L Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (New York, 1953).

612 mind, problems of the philosophy of

mind–body problem The mind–body problem is the

problem of giving an account of how minds are related to

bodies, or how mental states and processes are related to

bodily states and processes That they are intimately

related seems beyond doubt, and has not been seriously

disputed Evidently, our perceptual experiences depend

on the way external physical stimuli impinge on our

sen-sory surfaces, and, ultimately, on the processes going on in

the brain; your desire for a drink of water somehow causes

your body to move in the direction of the water-cooler; a

bruised elbow causes you pain when it is touched, and the

pain in turn causes you to groan and wince; and so on But

how do conscious experiences emerge out of the

electro-chemical processes in a grey mass of neural fibres? How do

our beliefs and desires manage to get the appropriate

neurons to fire and thereby cause the right muscles to

con-tract? Schopenhauer called the mind–body problem ‘the

world knot’, a puzzle that is beyond our capacity to solve

The mind–body problem as it is now debated, like

much else in contemporary philosophy of mind, has been

inherited from Descartes Descartes conceived of the

mind as an entity in its own right, a ‘mental substance’, the

essential nature of which is *‘thinking’, or *consciousness

In contrast, the defining nature of material bodies, or

material substances, was claimed to be spatial

extended-ness—that is, having a bulk in physical space Thus,

Descartes envisaged two disjoint domains of entities, one

consisting of immaterial minds with their mental

proper-ties (e.g thinking, willing, feeling) and the other of

mater-ial bodies with their physical properties (e.g size, shape,

mass, motion) For Descartes, not only did minds lack

spa-tial extension; they were not in physical space at all

How-ever, the two domains are not to be entirely unconnected:

a mind and a body can form a ‘union’, resulting in a human

being Although the nature of this ‘union’ relationship was

never made completely clear, (Descartes claimed it to be a

primitive notion that is intelligible in its own right), it

evi-dently involved the idea that a mind and a body joined in

such a union are involved in intimate and direct causal

interaction with each other

Thus, Descartes’s mind–body doctrine combines

sub-stance dualism, i.e a dualism of mind and body, each

con-ceived as an independent substance, with the idea that

there is causal interaction between the two Many of his

contemporaries, like Leibniz and Malebranche, were

sub-stance dualists, but they rejected the idea of mind–body

causal interaction They found it difficult to make sense of

the idea that immaterial minds with neither extension nor

mass, and not even in physical space, could somehow

move material bodies with mass and inertia Substance

dualism, however, has largely dropped out of

contempor-ary discussions, although it has by no means disappeared;

few philosophers now find the idea of minds as

immater-ial substances coherent or fruitful There has been a near

consensus, one that has held over almost a century, that

the world is essentially physical, at least in the following

sense: all that exists in the space-time world are bits of

matter and complex structures aggregated out of bits of

matter, and the space-time world is the whole world If all matter were to be removed from this world, nothing would remain—no minds, no ‘entelechies’, no ‘vital forces’, and not even an empty space-time According to this physical monism (or ‘ontological physicalism’), men-tal states and processes are to be understood as states and processes occurring in certain complex physical systems, such as advanced biological organisms, not as states of some ghostly immaterial beings This means that the prin-cipal remaining project for contemporary discussions of the mind–body problem is that of explaining how the mental character of an organism or system is related to its physical nature

The heart of contemporary *physicalism is the primacy and priority of physical properties and the laws that gov-ern them The following *‘supervenience thesis’ is one way of expressing this idea: once all the physical facts about your body are fixed, that fixes all the facts about your mental life That is to say, what mental properties you instantiate is wholly determined by the features and characteristics of your bodily processes In fact, the phys-ical facts of a world determine what mental facts will hold

in that world; that is, if God were to make an exact physical duplicate of this world, it would necessarily be a mental duplicate as well This thesis, often called ‘super-venience physicalism’, can be given different formulations

of varying degrees of strength But there is a sense in which emergentism, a form of non-physicalist dualism, is committed to mind–body supervenience; the emergentist will surely accept the claim that if two systems are phys-ically identical, they must be identical in respect of the non-physical (e.g mental) properties that emerge in them Many physicalists, therefore, want something stronger than mind–body supervenience Granted that mental properties are supervenient on physical ones, they may yet be distinct from them, just as aesthetic properties of works of art, in spite of their supervenience on the works’ physical properties, seem to remain distinct from them

We know that mentality is subserved and determined by neural processes But are mental properties ‘over and above’ their neural correlates?

A negative response to this question constitutes the

*identity theory of mind, or ‘type physicalism’, which identifies mental properties with their neural–physical correlates So pain is identified with the excitation of C-fibres (assuming this to be its neural correlate); pain isn’t

some shadowy epiphenomenon of a brain process—it is a

brain process And similarly for all other mental states and properties This is a classic form of mind–body reduction-ism: mentality is not renounced or eliminated, but con-served as a neural process, and thereby becomes a legitimate subject of scientific inquiry Among the argu-ments for this view of the mind–body relation are the following: the argument that this gives us the simplest overall picture of the world in which physical science can explain all the phenomena; the argument that the identification of a mental property (pain) with its neural correlate (C-fibre stimulation) gives the simplest and best

mind–body problem 613

explanation of the observed correlation between them;

and the argument that only by identifying mentality with

a neural-physical process is it possible to explain how

men-tality can have a causal influence in the physical world

Like *behaviourism, an earlier form of reductionism

which attempted to identify mentality with facts about

observable behaviour, type physicalism has failed to win

enduring support The most influential objection has been

the variable (or multiple) realizability of mental kinds

Consider pain: there is no reason to expect that the same

neural process underlies pain for all the different actual and

possible pain-capable organisms (the neural substrate of

pain is probably very different in humans and in

octo-puses) Moreover, there seems no a priori reason to deny

the capacity for pain to all inorganic, or non-biological,

sys-tems There seems then no single physical kind with which

pain, as a mental kind, can be identified Note, however,

that supervenience physicalism as such is perfectly

consist-ent with the variable realizability of mconsist-ental properties

These considerations have led to the formulation of

*functionalism, arguably the most influential position on

the mind–body relation during the past four decades

Functionalism conceives of mental kinds as ‘functional

kinds’, not physical kinds Pain, for example, is to be

understood in terms of its function as a causal

intermedi-ary between sensory input (e.g tissue damage), behaviour

output (e.g wincing, groaning, and escape behaviour),

and other mental states (e.g desire to be rid of it) An

inter-nal state of an organism that serves this function, which

can vary from species to species (and perhaps from

indi-vidual to indiindi-vidual), is said to be a ‘realizer’ of pain Most

functionalists are physicalists in that they hold that only

appropriate physical states could serve as realizers of

men-tal states functionally conceived But they differ from

type-physicalists in holding that, on account of their

vari-able realizability, mental states cannot be identified with

physical–biological states Functionalism construes

psych-ology as an autonomous science of these functional

properties and kinds, specified in terms of their causal

roles and abstracted from their specific physical-biological

realizations This view of psychology has been influential;

it can be considered the received view of the nature of

cognitive science The question whether or not

function-alism is a non-reductive form of physicfunction-alism depends

cru-cially on exactly what physical reduction requires, and it

must be considered an open question

*Eliminativism urges that our commitment to

mental-ity is nothing more than an outdated folklore, and that it is

certain to be superseded by a more scientific

understand-ing of our nature Thus, the standard eliminativist

argu-ment begins with the premiss that vernacular (‘folk’)

psychology—in particular, the psychology of beliefs,

desires, and other ‘propositional attitudes’—is infested

with massive and irremediable systemic errors and gaps,

and concludes that it will be made obsolete as the

scien-tific—in particular, neuroscientific—understanding of

our behaviour continues to advance Beliefs and desires

will ultimately meet the fate that befell phlogiston and

magnetic effluvia, the forgotten posits of discarded the-ories This eliminativist argument is sometimes advanced against intentional psychology countenancing cognitive states that are analogous to propositional attitudes of ver-nacular psychology

Recently, the Schopenhauerian *pessimism has been resurrected by some philosophers, who argue that the mind–body problem is insoluble, and that we will never

be able to understand how consciousness, subjectivity, and intentionality can arise from material processes In any case, one thing that is certain is that the mind–body problem is one of the deepest puzzles in philosophy, and that it will continue to test our philosophical intelligence

*eliminativism; emergence

D Chalmers (ed.), Contemporary Philosophy of Mind (New York,

2002)

P M Churchland, Matter and Consciousness, rev edn

(Cam-bridge, Mass., 1988)

J Kim, Philosophy of Mind (Boulder, Colo., 1996).

C McGinn, The Problem of Consciousness (Oxford, 1991).

T Honderich, Mind and Brain (Oxford, 1988).

D Rosenthal (ed.), The Nature of Mind (Oxford, 1991).

mind, syntax, and semantics Mental phenomena such as beliefs, desires, hopes, fears, love, hate, perception, and intention are said to be *‘intentional’ in the sense that they are directed at or about or of objects and states of affairs in the world These phenomena may be conscious or uncon-scious All of these intentional mental phenomena have mental contents Thus, for example, a belief is always a belief that such and such is the case, where the ‘that’ clause specifies the content of the belief

Some efforts have been made to analyse intentional mental states as computational states, but such efforts suf-fer from the following objection: The computational states could not be identical with the mental states because computational states are defined solely in terms

of their syntax That is, computation is a matter of the manipulation of symbols, for example, 0s and 1s, and these are defined purely in terms of their formal or syntactical features But these could not be equivalent to mental states, because though mental states often have a syntax, they also have a semantics—a thought content or an experi-ential content Thus, a person who thinks that the earth is round has not only the appropriate symbols going through his mind, but he attaches a *meaning, interpret-ation, or understanding to these symbols It is this mean-ing, interpretation, or understanding which constitutes semantics The argument against the view that intention-ality can be reduced to computation is simply that syntax

is not equivalent to nor sufficient for semantics j.r.s

*chinese room; functionalism

J R Searle, ‘Intrinsic Intentionality’, Behavioral and Brain Sciences

(1980)

—— ‘Minds, Brains, and Programs’, Behavioral and Brain Sciences

(1980)

—— Minds, Brains and Science (Cambridge, Mass., 1984).

614 mind–body problem

minimax:see maximin.

minimalism.The term describes philosophical positions

that draw on few conceptual or ontological resources

One example would be Noam Chomsky’s use of the term

to describe his recent attempt to rationally reconstruct our

grasp of grammar; another would be the *redundancy

theory of truth—the view that ‘p is true’ says no more than

‘p’ ‘Minimalism’ also describes a movement in the arts,

which featured highly undifferentiated objects This was

philosophically problematic, but arguably rested on

con-fusing the different roles played by some property of an

object when considered as a work of art and when

Richard Wollheim, ‘The Work of Art as Object’, in On Art and the

Mind (London, 1973).

miracles.Usually defined as violations of a *law of nature

by a supernatural being Questions have been raised about

how to articulate a notion of law of nature which is not

exceptionless by definition, and how and whether such a

definition applies to indeterministic laws of nature Any

argument that a miraculous event has occurred faces the

tough challenge of showing both that the event in

ques-tion did occur and that it was miraculous A famous

argu-ment from Hume’s chapter ‘Of Miracles’ shows how

difficult a challenge this is to meet: to suppose that a

mir-acle has occurred is to suppose that something has

hap-pened contrary to the entire weight of inductive evidence

supporting the law of nature In Hume’s words ‘no

mony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the

testi-mony be of such a kind, that its falsehood would be

more miraculous, than the fact, which it endeavours to

David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding,

sect.x

mixture of labour According to John Locke, if an

indi-vidual has laboured upon a previously unowned resource

and left enough for others, then he has acquired private

property rights in it irrespective of their consent Thus,

‘Labour being the unquestionable Property of the

Labourer, no Man but he can have right to what is once

joyned to, at least where there is enough and as good left

in common for others’ (ii v 27) Locke’s belief that God

gave the world ‘to the use of the Industrious and Rational,

(and Labour was to be his Title to it)’ (ii v 34) suggests a

religious basis for his view The foremost modern

Lock-ean advocate of private property, Robert Nozick, notes

that pouring a can of tomato juice into the sea can be

regarded as losing rather than acquiring rights, and

conse-quently stresses not the mixture of owned with unowned

resources but the alleged non-detrimental effects of

*property

John Locke, Two Treatises of Government (Cambridge, 1988).

mnemic causation According to Russell (The Analysis of Mind (London, 1921) ), a ‘kind of causation in which the

proximate cause consists not merely of a present event, but of this together with a past event’ The term origin-ated with psychologist Richard Semon, who held that

‘mnemic phenomena’ like remembering necessitate the postulation of intervening ‘engrams’ or ‘traces’, because

‘what is past cannot operate now’, a suggestion Russell, undeterred by the prospect of action at a distance, thought

*causality; memory

J Heil, ‘Traces of Things Past’, Philosophy of Science (1978).

Mochus.‘Learned men’, said Robert Boyle, attribute ‘the devising of the atomical hypothesis to one Moschus a Phenician.’ The learned men were relying chiefly on Sex-tus Empiricus and Strabo, who somewhat sceptically report Posidonius’ belief that ‘the ancient doctrine about atoms originated with Mochus, a Sidonian, born before the Trojan times’ Boyle’s contemporary Cudworth reports without dissent the bizarre suggestion that ‘this

Moschus was no other than the Celebrated Moses of the

*atomism

I G Kidd, Posidonius: The Commentary (on L Edelstein and I G Kidd (eds.), Posidonius: The Fragments), 2 vols (Cambridge,

1988), ii.2

modality.The modal value of a statement is the way, or

‘mode’, in which it is true or false: e.g certainly so (epi-stemic modality), currently so (temporal modality), neces-sarily so (logical modality) In logic, ‘modality’ usually means ‘logical modality’, that is, the logical *necessity or

possibility of a statement’s truth or falsity A modal *state-ment is one in which some (usually logical) modality is

actually claimed: e.g ‘It is not impossible that pigs should fly’, ‘Necessarily not everyone is below average intelli-gence’ On a simple view these features interconnect: e.g

the modal statement ‘Necessarily P’ is true just when ‘P’ has the modal value necessarily true *Modal logic studies

the logical relations of modal statements s.w

*de re and de dicto.

A N Prior, Formal Logic (Oxford, 1962), pt iii, ch 1.

W V Quine, ‘Three Grades of Modal Involvement’, in The Ways

of Paradox (New York, 1966).

modality and metaphysics.There is an intimate relation between modality and metaphysics, because not only are the nature and ground of modal truth fundamental issues for metaphysics, but the primary task of metaphysics itself may be seen as that of charting the realm of possibilities Empirical sciences such as physics may tell us, on the basis

of observation and experiment, what kinds of objects, events, and processes actually do exist, but they cannot tell

us what must exist, nor what could (but actually does not)

exist A priori sciences such as mathematics may disclose a limited range of necessary truths to us, such as the truths

modality and metaphysics 615

of arithmetic, but appear to be limited in their scope of

inquiry to certain domains of abstract entities, such as the

numbers Moreover, even the empirical sciences cannot

tell us what actually does exist, in the absence of a

prin-cipled account of what could and could not exist, of the

sort that metaphysics alone is equipped to provide For

empirical evidence can only be evidence for the actual

existence of something if the existence of that thing is at

E J Lowe, The Possibility of Metaphysics (Oxford, 1998).

modal logic In classical *propositional logic all the

oper-ators are truth-functional That is to say, the truth or falsity

of a complex formula depends only on the truth or falsity

of its simpler propositional constituents Modal logic is

concerned to understand propositions about what must or

about what might be the case, and it is not difficult to see

how you might have two propositions alike in

truth-value, both true say, where one is true and could not

pos-sibly be false while the other is true but might easily have

been false For instance, it must be that 2 + 2 = 4, but

while it is true that I am writing this entry it might easily

not have been Modal logic extends the well-formed

for-mulae (wffs) of classical logic by the addition of a

one-place sentential operator L (or
) interpreted as meaning

‘it is necessary that’ Using this operator a one-place

oper-ator M (or◊) meaning ‘it is possible that’ may be defined as

~L~, where ~ is a (classical) negation operator, and a

two-place operator —3may be defined as α—3β =dfL(α ⊃β),

where⊃is classical material implication In fact any one of

L, M, or —3can be taken as primitive and the others defined

in terms of it

In the early days of modal logic disputes centred round

the question whether a given principle of modal logic was

correct or not Typically these disputes involved formulae

in which one modal operator occurs within the scope of

another—formulae like Lp⊃LLp Is a necessary

propos-ition necessarily necessary? A number of different modal

systems were produced which reflected different views

about which principles were correct Until the early 1960s,

however, modal logics were discussed almost exclusively

as axiomatic systems without access to a notion of validity

of the kind used, for example in the truth-table method,

for determining the validity of wffs of the classical

propos-itional calculus The semantical breakthrough came by

using the idea that a necessary proposition is one true in all

*possible worlds But whether another world counts as

possible may be held to be relative to the world of origin

So an interpretation or model for a modal system would

consist of a set W of possible worlds and a relation R of

accessibility between them For any wff αand world w, Lα

will be true at if and only if αitself is true at every w’ such

that wRw′ It can then happen that whether a principle of

modal logic holds or not can depend on properties of the

accessibility relation Suppose that R is required to be

tran-sitive, i.e suppose that for any worlds w 1 , w 2 , and w 3, if

w 1 ,Rw 2 and w 2 Rw 3 then w 1 Rw 3 If so then Lp⊃LLp will be

valid, but if non-transitive models are permitted it need

not be If R is reflexive, i.e if wRw for every world w, then

Lp⊃p is valid So different systems of modal logic can

rep-resent different ways of restricting necessity

First-order predicate logic can also be extended by the addition of modal operators The most interesting conse-quences of such extensions are those which affect ‘mixed’ principles, principles which relate quantifiers and modal operators and which cannot be stated at the level of modal propositional logic or non-modal predicate logic Thus

∃xLα ⊃L∃xαis valid but L∃ xα ⊃∃xLαis not (Even if a game must have a winner there need be no one who must win.) In some cases the principles of the extended system will depend on the propositional logic on which it is based

An example is the formula ∀xLα ⊃ L∀xα, which is prov-able in some modal systems but not in others If both directions are assumed, so that we have ∀xLα ≡L∀xα, then this formula expresses the principle that the domain

of individuals is held constant over all possible worlds When identity is added even more questions arise The usual axioms for identity easily allow the derivation of

(x = y)⊃L(x = y), but should we really say that all identities

are necessary? Questions like this bring us to the boundary between modal logic and metaphysics and remind us of the rich potential that the theory of possible worlds has for illuminating such issues The possible-worlds semantics can be generalized to deal with any operators whose meanings are operations on propositions as sets of pos-sible worlds and form a congenial tool for those who think that the meaning of a sentence is its truth-conditions, and that these should be taken literally as a set of possible worlds—the worlds in which the sentence is true

m.j.c

B F Chellas, Modal Logic: An Introduction (Cambridge, 1980).

G E Hughes and M J Cresswell, An Introduction to Modal Logic

(London, 1968; repr corr 1972)

—— —— A Companion to Modal Logic (London, 1984).

modal realism.Rightly or wrongly, modal realism has come to be identified with David Lewis’s seemingly extravagant view of the ontological status of *possible worlds, according to which each possible world is an aggregate of spatio-temporally and causally interrelated concrete objects, and all such worlds equally exist On this

view, the world that we inhabit—what we call the actual

world—is in no way ontologically privileged, since every world is ‘actual’ to its own inhabitants Modal realism, thus understood, involves a commitment to *counterpart theory, which denies that objects existing in different pos-sible worlds can ever be identical, allowing each object only to have ‘counterparts’ in other worlds For Lewis,

modal realism is to be contrasted with ersatzism, which

takes possible worlds to be linguistic or abstract entities, such as maximal consistent sets of sentences or propos-itions Arguably, however, the term ‘modal realism’ might better have been employed to denote the more sober view that modal truths simply have an objective and

D Lewis, On the Plurality of Worlds (Oxford, 1986).

616 modality and metaphysics

mode.‘Mode’ is a term of traditional metaphysics used

correlatively with *‘substance’ and ‘attribute’ An example

would be the square shape of a particular piece of wood

Here the wood is the substance possessing the mode, and

spatial extension is the attribute of which the mode is an

instance Another example would be a particular thought

or experience enjoyed by someone Here the person (or

*self ) qualifies as the ‘substance’ possessing the mode, and

consciousness is the attribute

A crucial logical feature of modes is that they depend

for their identity upon the identity of the particular

sub-stances which possess them Thus, that a thought is the

particular thought it is is partly determined by whose

thought it is For two different people cannot share

numerically the same thought The modern term closest

in sense to ‘mode’ is ‘particular quality’ or *‘individual

E J Lowe, ‘Real Selves: Persons as a Substantial Kind’, in

D Cockburn (ed.), Human Beings (Cambridge, 1991).

model theory.When a set of sentences contain symbols

that need interpreting, an interpretation that makes the

sentences true is called a ‘model’ of the set In 1954 Alfred

Tarski introduced the name ‘model theory’ for the study

of this notion when the sentences are mathematical

axioms and the interpretations are mathematical

struc-tures in which the axioms are true or false A structure M is

said to be a model of a set S of formal sentences if the

sen-tences in S, when their formal symbols are interpreted as

being about M, are all true An early result of model theory

says that if T is a set of sentences in a first-order language

and every finite subset of T has a model, then T itself has a

model Within mathematics, model theory became a

vehicle for studying definability, with applications in

alge-bra and geometry; an offshoot was non-standard analysis,

which justified the use of infinitesimals in calculus Within

philosophy and linguistics, an approach is called

model-theoretic if it involves set-model-theoretical criteria for the truth

of sentences, as for example in *Montague semantics

w.a.h

K Doets, Basic Model Theory (Stanford, Calif., 1996).

models.These are used extensively by scientists, coming

in different forms and guises All types involve some kind

of analogy between the model and either reality or some

other scientific claim Most familiar are physical models,

usually small- or large-scale material constructions—a

famous example being the metal macro-model of the

dou-ble helix, built by Watson and Crick As or even more

important are theoretical models, where scientists try to

map limited aspects of reality, introducing simplifying

assumptions, which are adjusted or removed in the light

of the models’ predictive successes There is a school of

thought which argues that scientific *theories are best

understood semantically, in the sense of being families of

theoretical models—interpreted according to specific

empirical circumstances—rather than as general systems

attempting to explain selected chunks of reality at one fell swoop Even if one protests that such families could never capture completely what one aims for in a theory, it is hard

to deny that sets of interrelated models are what face sci-entists most of their working lives m.r

P Achinstein, Concepts of Science (Baltimore, 1968).

R Giere, Explaining Science (Chicago, 1988).

modernism.On the longest view, modernism in philoso-phy starts out with Descartes’s quest for a knowledge self-evident to reason and secured from all the demons

of sceptical doubt It is also invoked—with a firmer sense

of historical perspective—to signify those currents of thought that emerged from Kant’s critical ‘revolution’ in the spheres of epistemology, ethics, and aesthetic judge-ment Thus ‘modernity’ and ‘enlightenment’ tend to be used interchangeably, whether by thinkers (like Haber-mas) who seek to sustain that project, or by those—the post-modernist company—who consider it a closed

*post-modernism

Jürgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity,

tr Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge, 1987)

modus ponens The ‘affirming mode’ In *propositional

calculus, any inference of the form ‘If p then q, and p; there-fore q’ is an instance of modus ponens In the *traditional logic of terms, inferences like ‘If A is B, it is C; A is B; there-fore A is C’ were said to be in the modus ponens Not really

*syllogisms at all, such inferences were often called

*affirming the antecedent

J N Keynes, Formal Logic, 4th edn (London, 1906), 352.

modus tollens The ‘denying mode’ In *propositional

calculus, any inference of the form ‘If p then q, and not q; therefore not p’ is an instance of modus tollens In the *trad-itional logic of terms, inferences like ‘If A is B, it is C; A is not C; therefore A is not B’ were said to be in the modus tollens Like modus ponens inferences, not really *syllogisms

at all These inferences too were often called ‘hypothetical

*denying the consequent

J N Keynes, Formal Logic, 4th edn (London, 1906), 352.

Molina, Luis de (1535–1600) Jesuit theologian and philosopher, born in Cuenca, Spain He studied and taught at various leading Iberian universities Molina is

best known for his doctrine of middle knowledge (scientia media), expounded in Concordia liberi arbitrii cum gratiae donis (1588) This doctrine’s aim was to preserve human

*free will while maintaining the Christian doctrine of the efficacy of divine grace For Molina, although God has foreknowledge of what human beings will choose to do, neither that knowledge nor God’s grace determine human will Middle knowledge, God’s knowledge of what persons would do under any set of circumstances, enables

Molina, Luis de 617

God to arrange for certain human acts to occur by

pre-arranging the circumstances surrounding a choice

with-out determining the human will God’s grace is

concurrent with the act of the will and does not

predeter-mine it, rendering the Thomistic distinction between

suf-ficient and efficacious grace superfluous j.g

e.m

Alfred J Freddoso, On Divine Foreknowledge: Part IV of the

Concor-dia With an Introduction and Notes (Ithaca, NY, 1988).

Molla¯ S.adra¯(?–1641) Persian philosopher S.adr al-Dı¯n

Shı¯ra¯zı¯ is widely considered to be one of the most original

thinkers in post-classical Islamic philosophy His most

widely quoted philosophical problem (one of twelve

con-sidered original contributions) is ‘substantial *motion’,

the unifying principle underlying all of philosophy and

capable of describing existence, time, motion, and change

pertaining to all physical, psychological, and non-corporeal

things This problem, encountered in every domain

from semantics to eschatology, consists of: essential

motion initially observed in external reality, never

ceas-ing, and covering all physical and ontological distinctions,

resulting in the continual ‘evolution’ of higher beings,

transformation of material existence, intensely moving

from one level to another into the unchanging mundus

imaginalis beyond ordinary time and space where

individ-ual ‘evolved’ essences with ‘formal’, or ‘imaginalis’ bodies

Fazlur Rahman, The Philosophy of Mulla¯ S.adra¯ (Albany, NY, 1975).

Molyneux problem A problem about correlating visual

and tactual *perception, one of several that William

Molyneux of Dublin posed in letters to John Locke

(Molyneux was also interested in the visual perception of

distance.) Suppose that a blind person who can distinguish

spheres from cubes by touch suddenly becomes able to

see Will this person be able to distinguish these shapes

visually before correlating sight and touch? Locke (Essay

Concerning Human Understanding,ii ix 8) and Berkeley

(Essay Towards a New Theory of Vision, sects 121–46)

answer negatively Berkeley went on to deny that sight

and touch ever perceive the same property, strictly

speak-ing Leibniz (New Essays Concerning Human Understanding,

sections that correspond to Locke) answers positively on

the basis of structural properties in common to tactual and

visible shapes Careful observations of patients who

acquired vision by surgery, such as cataract removal, have

not resolved the Molyneux problem d.h.s

Gareth Evans, ‘Molyneux’s Question’, in Collected Papers,

(Oxford, 1985)

Michael J Morgan, Molyneux’s Question (Cambridge, 1977).

monadology.A philosophical system usually associated

with the mature metaphysics of Leibniz, as outlined in the

Monadology (1714).

The fundamental thesis of Leibniz’s monadology is

that the basic individual *substances that make up the

universe are soul-like entities, the monads, which are

non-extended, hence immaterial, entities The properties

of the monads may all be reduced to perceptions and appetites Whatever other entities we may wish to recog-nize must be reduced to this base Thus Leibniz treated material objects as appearances of collections of monads

r.c.sle

monism, anomalous: see anomalous monism.

monism, neutral: see neutral monism.

monism and pluralism These are doctrines concerning how many *substances exist, and may relate either to kinds of substances or to their individual instances Monism regarding the kinds of substance holds that only one such kind exists, whereas pluralism admits a multi-plicity of kinds Monism regarding the instances of a given substantial kind holds that only one such individual does

or can exist, pluralism that many do or may Thus a materi-alist who is also an atomist is a monist as regards the kinds of substance that exist but a pluralist with regard to how many individual substances of that kind there are By contrast, Descartes was a pluralist as regards the kinds of substance that exist and also a pluralist regarding the num-ber of individual mental substances—but, rejecting

*atomism, he was a monist regarding the number of

D W Hamlyn, Metaphysics (Cambridge, 1984).

Montague, Richard (1930–71) American philosophical logician During the 1960s he developed a mathematical formalism to define what it is for a sentence of a precisely defined fragment of English to be true at a time and place

in a possible world Under the name of ‘Montague seman-tics’ his proposals soon became accepted among linguists

as a paradigm for formalizing the semantics of natural lan-guages Two characteristic points were his treatment of the meaning of a sentence as a homomorphic copy of its syntax (following Tarski’s truth definitions for formalized languages) and his proposal to treat proper names like

‘John’ as a special case of quantifier phrases such as ‘every man’ or ‘a fish’ Montague’s other contributions include work on the metamathematics of set theory, a study with David Kaplan of the paradox of the unexpected examin-ation, a logical analysis of determinism, and unsurpassed standards of rigour and accuracy in philosophical logic

w.a.h

R Montague, Formal Philosophy, ed R H Thomason (New

Haven, Conn., 1974)

Montaigne, Michel Eyquem de (1533–92) A fluent essay-ist who messay-istrusted the pretensions of systematic philoso-phy, Montaigne’s writings are richer in allusion and anecdote than in formal argumentation, but none the less

sparkle with philosophical insights His Apology for Ray-mond Sebond (1580) is an entertaining and discursive essay,

steeped in the classical learning which typifies the human-ist movement of which he was a notable exemplar The

618 Molina, Luis de

book examines some of the sceptical theses of Sextus

Empiricus (whose writings had recently been translated

into Latin), and maintains the need for faith and divine

revelation to overcome the inherent limitations of human

reason It also suggests that the supposed superiority of

human reason over the natural instincts of animals is

largely illusory Montaigne’s writings set the scene for the

attempts of rationalists such as Descartes to establish a

new a system of knowledge whose foundations would be

independent of the deliverance of the senses j.cot

*rationalism

R A Sayce, The Essays of Montaigne: A Critical Exploration

(Lon-don, 1972)

Monte Carlo fallacy: see gambler’s fallacy.

Montesquieu, Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de

(1689–1755) French philosopher and jurist, who

con-tributed to political sociology and to philosophy of

his-tory Persian Letters (1711, tr New York, 1973) initiated the

fashion of criticizing European culture by comparing it

with the Orient Considerations on the Causes of the Greatness

of the Romans and their Decline (1734, tr New York, 1965)

and The Spirit of the Laws (1748, tr Cambridge, 1989)

dis-tinguish three forms of government, each with its special

structure and each animated by its own ‘principle’

Republics are animated by virtue (patriotism and

egalitar-ian fraternity rather than moral virtue), monarchies by

honour, and despotisms by fear Forms of government

depend in part on physical, especially climatic, factors But

wise legislators can counteract physical disadvantages by

intellectual and moral forces, especially once they know

the laws governing the social world Montesquieu’s

advo-cacy of a division of powers (legislative, executive, and

judicial), which he saw in the English constitution, greatly

influenced the American founding fathers m.j.i

M Richter (ed.), The Political Theory of Montesquieu (Cambridge,

1977)

Monty Hall problem Game show host Monty Hall

con-ceals a prize behind one of three curtains, A, B, or C Asked

to guess where the prize is, you choose A Before

disclos-ing the prize’s location, Monty opens B, revealdisclos-ing that it is

not there, and offers you the option of sticking with A or

switching to C You reason as follows: once Monty opens

curtain B, the *probability that the prize is behind A or C is

the same: ½; so switching affords no advantage But is this

right? Assuming that Monty opens a curtain only if the

prize is not behind it, the relevant probability is the

*condi-tional probability that the prize is behind A given that

Monty has revealed that it is not behind B Bayes’s

the-orem shows that this probability is ⅓, so the probability

that the prize is behind C is⅔ You should switch! For

those not steeped in probability theory, there is a simple

way to see the point Once Monty opens a curtain, you

will win by switching just in case your original choice

was wrong Assuming your original choice is wrong

thirds of the time, you will win by switching two-thirds of the time, so you should switch j.heil

Martin Gardner, ‘Probability Paradoxes’, Skeptical Inquirer (1992).

mood.States of mind of an emotional cast which are tem-porary, yet which colour a person’s responses and

reac-tions quite generally, qualify as moods, as when someone is

said to be in a sombre, sullen, or sunny mood The focus is

on a pattern of behaviour manifesting a current state of mind, and not, as with motives, on the intended conse-quences of the behaviour

‘Mood’ also enjoys a use with respect to language Commonly misconstrued in this connection, mood is properly a feature of verbal phrases—indicative, impera-tive, subjuncimpera-tive, optative As embodying the different speech-acts of asserting and asking a question, utterances

of, say, ‘He is out’ and ‘Is he out?’ are said to differ in force.

However, they agree in mood, the verb in either receiving the same description, ‘third-person singular present

*emotion and feeling

J Lyons, Semantics, ii (Cambridge, 1977).

G Ryle, The Concept of Mind (London, 1948).

moods of the syllogism: see syllogism.

Moore, George Edward (1873–1958) Moore was a philosopher of immense, even revolutionary, influence

by reason—most unusually—of the extreme simplicity and directness, even seeming nạvety, of his approach to philosophy He was moved in his early days, as he recorded in 1942, not by any perplexities about ‘the world

or the sciences’, but by the baffling things said about the world and the sciences by other philosophers In the trad-ition prevailing at that time he found it usually taken for granted that ordinary language was probably defective, that commonly held beliefs were probably false or at any rate inadequate, and that the task of philosophy was to work its way towards deeper, perhaps odd-looking truths set out in purer, probably novel and unfamiliar terms Moore was sincerely amazed by this Why was it thought necessary? He insisted (‘A Defence of Common Sense’ (1925) ) that there is actually a vast body of shared convic-tions about ‘the world’, expressible in quite ordinary propositions whose meanings are perfectly clear, and which are known for certain to be true—even by those philosophers who appear to deny them Take, say, ‘There exist conscious beings other than oneself ’—everyone knows what that means; or take, say, ‘There exist material objects, such as shoes and inkstands’—everyone knows that that is certainly true But if so, Moore concluded, philosophers must have been radically confused as to the nature, or perhaps the purpose, of their own activities They cannot really have been confronting problems about meaning, since typically there were, he held, simply

no such problems; nor can they really have been denying,

or even doubting, that certain propositions were true,

Moore, G E. 619