The Oxford Companion to Philosophy Part 79 ppt

Property in general is defined by a system of rules that assigns to persons rights over things, where the things capable of being owned can range from a person and his or her labour to la

statements of supporting evidence being suppressed On

this view we have no dispute with Dalton, since he was

speaking (presumably correctly) about the relation of a

theory to the evidence available to him m.c

L J Cohen, An Introduction to the Philosophy of Induction and

Prob-ability (Oxford, 1989).

D Gillies, Philosophical Theories of Probability (London, 2000).

I Hacking, An Introduction to Probability and Deductive Logic

(Cambridge, 2000)

J R Lucas, The Concept of Probability (Oxford, 1970).

S E Toulmin, The Uses of Argument (Cambridge, 1958).

R von Mises, Probability, Statistics and Truth (New York, 1957).

probability, conditional: see conditional probability.

problematic. (1) Perplexing, questionable (2) In

trad-itional logic, problematic propositions are those that are

marked with a sign of *possibility, especially in connection

with Aristotle’s modal syllogistic; e.g ‘It is possible for all

eggs not to be speckled’, ‘Some people can touch their

toes’ The possibility might be logical, physical, epistemic,

etc Its *scope is often ambiguous (3) The word is

some-times used in the German manner as a noun, for a set of

problems or a way of seeing problems c.a.k

H W B Joseph, An Introduction to Logic, 2nd edn (Oxford, 1916).

process.A process is a series of *changes with some sort of

unity, or unifying principle, to it Hence ‘process’ is to

‘change’, or ‘event’, rather as ‘syndrome’ is to ‘symptom’

What sort of unity might a given process have? Perhaps

just this: that the process is found to recur sufficiently

often in nature—it seems to belong to a ‘natural kind’ In

this case, lumping the constituent changes together is as

natural as lumping the different features of a cow together

as a unity But with both cows and processes, some

philosophers have thought there must be some underlying

principle of unity that binds the constituent features, or

changes, together

Whitehead made much use of the notion of a process,

and ‘process theology’ grew out of his work On the

whole, however, modern metaphysics has rather dropped

the notion of a process in favour of the notion of an event,

the influence of Einstein perhaps supplanting that of

*event; process philosophy

A N Whitehead, Process and Reality (New York, 1929).

process philosophy The doctrine that either what is is

becoming, or that what is ultimately consists in *change,

or both A *process is a sequence of changes

Strong and weak process philosophy may be usefully

distinguished On the weak version, x changes if and only

if either x is F at a time, t1, and x is not F at a later time, t2,

or x is not F at t1and x is F at t2; so something’s changing

consists in its gaining or losing at least one property It is

sometimes maintained (with dubious coherence) that

each thing is always changing in every respect

On the strong version, there are only changes or, at least, the existence of enduring items logically depends upon changes such that it is ontologically misleading to

speak of what is or things that are One locus classicus of strong process philosophy is Plato’s Theaetetus, where the

thesis is ascribed by Socrates to Protagoras, Heraclitus, and

Empedocles; another is Heraclitus’ Cosmic Fragments.

More recently, ‘process philosophy’ has been used as a name for the *event ontologies of James, Bergson, and

Whitehead (notably, in his Process and Reality) It should

also be extended to Russell’s neutral monist doctrine that minds and physical objects are logical constructions out of events

The existence of change, which is logically entailed by the existence of process, has been denied by Parmenides in

his poem, by F H Bradley in Appearance and Reality, and

by J M E McTaggart in The Nature of Existence If some of

the arguments of these philosophers are sound then there

really is no change and a fortiori no true process

philoso-phy However, at least prima facie, change is a pervasive feature of what is, and many things that are may be described without contradiction as processes s.p

*neutral monism

Aristotle, Physics, books 1 and 2, tr William Charlton (Oxford,

1970)

Aristotle, Physics, books 3 and 4, tr Edward Hussey (Oxford, 1983) Jonathan Barnes (ed.), Early Greek Philosophy (London, 1987) Plato, Theaetetus, tr John McDowell (Oxford, 1973).

Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality (New York, 1929).

process theology: see theology and philosophy.

Proclus(c.ad 410–485) Pagan philosopher of *Neoplaton-ism who became head of the Academy at Athens and was the last great systematizer of Greek philosophy His

works, which survive in bulk, include: The Elements of Theology (tr E R Dodds, 2nd edn (Oxford, 1963)), Platonic Theology, and commentaries on several Platonic dialogues

and on Euclid His thought abounds in triads: Plotinus’ procession (emanation) and return is replaced by abid-ing–procession–return He is theurgical, magical, and

often fanciful, as when he derives the Greek khronos,

‘time’, from khoros and nous, arguing that time is the

(cir-cular) ‘dance’ of the ‘mind’ By way of Dionysius the

Are-opagite (c.ad 500) he influenced medieval thought and especially the Renaissance revival of Platonism Hegel admired him: he was compared to Proclus and Schelling

A H Armstrong (ed.), The Cambridge History of Later Greek and Early Medieval Philosophy (Cambridge, 1967).

professional ethics The codes and guide-lines which

govern the conduct of professions Such codes can be seen

as the application of general morality to the specific con-texts of professional relationships The oldest and most familiar of these is the Hippocratic oath, which in a modi-fied form still applies to the doctor–patient relationship In the contemporary world many occupations consider

760 probability

themselves professions, and the governing bodies of these

occupations issue codes of professional ethics They have

a status in between that of morality and that of law, in the

sense that while their content is like that of morality, any

breach of their prohibitions can result in serious

disciplin-ary sanctions by the relevant governing body The

con-tent of professional codes always contains provisions that

the professional will work for the best interests of the

patient/client For this reason professional ethics can be in

conflict with *consumerist ethics, which approaches the

professional relationship from the point of view of client

demand and rights rather than professional perceptions of

*business ethics

R S Downie, ‘Professional Ethics and Business Ethics’, in S A M

McLean (ed.), Contemporary Issues in Law, Medicine and Ethics

(Aldershot, 1996)

programs of computers A formally specified set of

instructions which guide the operations of a

symbol-manipulating device A program written in a particular

programming language is executed in a given computer

when a processor carries out the sequence of instructions

in the program, or converts them into instructions

corres-ponding more closely to the basic operations of the

machine The resulting process, which consists in the

manipulation of symbols, or data structures, determines

the subsequent behaviour of the machine By

program-ming computers we enable them to produce certain

behaviours in response to certain inputs Psychologists

use programs to model the structure of human

psycho-logical processes; e.g reasoning (*cognition); and

philoso-phers dispute whether mind is a program implemented in

neural hardware (*computers) or whether a correctly

pro-grammed computer can replicate as well as simulate

men-tality (*artificial intelligence) Constructivist logic offers

another application of programming where a proof can

be treated as a class of programs for verifying a formula

b.c.s

J Haugeland, Artificial Intelligence: The Very Idea (Cambridge,

Mass., 1985)

P Martin-Lof, ‘Constructive Mathematics and Computer

Pro-gramming’, in Logic, Methodology and Philosophy of Science, vi

(1982)

progress.Improvement over time, especially the gradual

perfection of humanity A robust sense of confidence in

human progress is characteristic of the philosophers of the

eighteenth-century *Enlightenment The French

philoso-pher Condorcet enthusiastically expressed this view of

‘the human race, emancipated from its shackles, released

from the empire of fate and from that of the enemies of its

progress, advancing with a firm and sure step along the

path of truth, virtue and happiness’ But philosophers

have not always been so sanguine about the future Some

historians (e.g J B Bury) have argued that the idea of

progress is a peculiarly modern concept, although a few

(e.g Robert Nisbet) have argued that it is an idea which

has its origins in the medieval Christian conception of providence, if not even earlier In its most straightforward version, the belief in progress acknowledges a single, tem-poral progression of all peoples from the most ‘primitive’

to the most advanced, usually one’s own society The epit-ome of this sort of teleological thinking is to be found in

G W F Hegel, who argued that not only in philosophy and the arts, but in human history and religion too, rational progress is demonstrable, if only we turn a

‘rational eye’ to look for it

It is important to distinguish between progress in the realm of science and technology, where improvements in medical cures, modes of transport, and various scientific theories are easily established, and moral or spiritual progress, which raises profound philosophical problems about the nature of happiness and morals It is by no means obvious that we are happier, more moral or com-passionate, less dogmatic or belligerent, than our more

‘primitive’ peers and ancestors Jean-Jacques Rousseau, for example, argued (during the Enlightenment) that advances in the arts and sciences had corrupted rather than improved humanity

At the end of the twentieth century, after two world wars and fifty years of potential nuclear conflict, the con-cept of progress had come into ill repute The conserva-tive philosopher Friedrich von Hayek bemoaned the fact that confidence in progress had become a mark of

‘a shallow mind’ But even those who see history as ‘just one damn thing after another’ (in the eloquent phrase of poet John Masefield) tend to insist that we can neverthe-less learn from history, improve ourselves, and progress

*pessimism and optimism

J B Bury, The Idea of Progress (London, 1920).

R Nisbet, History of the Idea of Progress (New York, 1980).

projectivism.The thesis that some apparent properties of the external world really belong to the mind that perceives

it For example, the world appears coloured, auditory, olfactory, gustatory Actions seem good or evil, and objects ugly or beautiful, events necessary or contingent, but, according to projectivist views, these characteristics are at least partly due to our mental constitution and are not, or are not wholly or really, in the object If *Hume is right about causation, we do not perceive objective causal necessities but mistake our own psychological expect-ation that one event will follow another for such mind-independent inevitability This is projectivism about causation Projectivism is *idealism about a restricted

*quasi-realism; primary and secondary qualities

Simon Blackburn, Essays in Quasi-Realism (Oxford, 1993).

John McDowell, ‘Values and Secondary Qualities’, in Ted

Honderich (ed.), Morality and Objectivity: Essays in Honour of

J L Mackie (London, 1985).

proletariat:see bourgeoisie and proletariat.

proletariat 761

proletariat, dictatorship of the: see dictatorship of the

proletariat

proof theory The study of formal proofs in logic As a

dis-cipline in its own right, proof theory is usually reckoned to

begin in 1934, when Gerhard Gentzen introduced

*nat-ural deduction and the sequent calculus for classical

first-order logic He showed that any proof in either of these

systems can be converted to a proof in the other His cut

elimination theorem—still undoubtedly the best theorem

in proof theory—showed that any sequent calculus proof

can be converted into a tableau (or truth-tree) in which

formulae are steadily broken down, not built up He

adapted this theorem to give a *consistency proof for

arithmetic Gentzen’s intuitionist versions of the natural

deduction and sequent calculuses are an essential tool for

S R Buss (ed.), Handbook of Proof Theory (Amsterdam, 1998).

propensity.A propensity is a probabilistic *disposition of

an object or person to behave in a certain way—for

example, the disposition of a radium atom to undergo

radioactive decay in a given time-period with a certain

degree of chance Propensities are more firmly linked to

behaviour than mere tendencies are, because the mere

tendencies of an object may be counteracted by the

con-trary tendencies of other objects e.j.l

*capacity; power; potential

R Tuomela (ed.), Dispositions (Dordrecht, 1978).

proper names: see names.

properties.Things may be said to own in some sense the

attributes that they are acknowledged to have; hence the

term ‘property’ In traditional logic, deriving from

Aris-totle, however, the term has a more restricted use

According to the so-called doctrine of the predicables,

which is concerned with the different things that can be

predicated of a species (i.e whether or not they are

essen-tial to the species and whether or not all and only

members of the species can have these things predicated

of them), a property or proprium is something that is not

essential to the species but is such that all and only

members of the species have it Thus, arguably, the ability

to laugh might be a proprium of man.

However that may be, a property has come to be

regarded as the same as an attribute, and anything that is

picked out by a predicate which can be applied to a thing in

such a way as to characterize it is thus a property of that

thing Likewise, ‘property’ and ‘quality’ are sometimes

used synonymously, although according to Aristotle’s

doctrine of the categories a *quality is simply one category

of things that can be predicated of a subject, and thus just

one kind of property

There has been much discussion among philosophers

about the exact ontological relation which holds between

a thing (and more specifically a *substance) and its proper-ties Leibniz, for example, argued that substances were nothing but collections, though infinite collections, of properties Other philosophers have argued, in a similar spirit, that statements about substances can be analysed into statements about the location of properties at given places and times But the notion of a predicate, of which that of a property is a counterpart, depends on the idea

that there is a subject for predicates to be of, and there

seems to be no good reason for supposing that properties have any ontological priority among the kinds of entity that exist

Like predicates, properties are general and can in prin-ciple belong to many things, whether or not they do so in fact There is nothing in the generality of a property that prevents its belonging in fact to one thing only; but it must

be logically possible for it to be attributed to more than one thing Whether there are, despite this, such things as individual properties is a disputed matter d.w.h

*essentialism; properties, individual

D W Hamlyn, Metaphysics (Cambridge, 1984).

H W B Joseph, An Introduction to Logic, 2nd edn (Oxford, 1916).

D H Mellor and A D Oliver (eds.), Properties (Oxford, 1997).

P F Strawson, Individuals (London, 1959).

properties, individual Consider a red tomato Some

philosophers (e.g Stout) argue that there exists a particu-lar redness of the tomato This redness is an individual property, or ‘abstract particular’ Other objects may be the

same shade of red; those rednesses resemble, but are not

identical to, the redness of the tomato It is sometimes claimed, further, that individual properties are constitu-tive of events and physical objects and they play a key role

in causal relations In contrast, others (e.g Armstrong) argue that ontological economy speaks to eliminating individual properties in favour of ordinary particulars, which exist in any case, and universal properties, which can be exemplified in indefinitely many ordinary

*haecceity; properties; tropes

D M Armstrong, Universals and Scientific Realism, i (Cambridge,

1978)

G F Stout, Studies in Philosophy and Psychology (New York, 1930).

properties, non-natural: see non-natural properties.

property.What is owned Property in general is defined

by a system of rules that assigns to persons rights over things, where the things capable of being owned can range from a person and his or her labour to land, natural resources, and what is produced by labour from land and natural resources The rules of property defining rights of owners and duties owed to owners may be moral, legal, or both Specific forms of property differ from each other depending on the rights and duties which the rules confer, how the rights or duties are acquired, and the kinds of things which are capable of being owned Thus, all specific

762 proletariat, dictatorship of the

forms of property rules must perform two essential

func-tions: to assign rights to persons (natural or artificial), and

to prescribe mechanisms for the acquisition, transfer, and

alienation of those rights

One specific form of property is private property This

form, associated with John Locke’s political philosophy

and with *capitalism, assigns to owners the rights to use

what they own in any way they choose so long as they

respect the moral or natural rights of others In private

property persons acquire rights over things that are not

owned by being the first to appropriate them or labour

upon them, and they acquire rights to own things from

others by gift, bequest, or exchange First appropriation

and labour, according to private property, justifies

per-sons owning and profiting from land, natural resources,

and material goods they produce from what they own

Not everyone will be able to have private property in land

if all land is already owned; however, land may be

pur-chased or leased from owners by those who have

suffi-cient money or goods to exchange In private ownership

each person owns himself or herself; that is, each person

has the right to decide how he or she is to labour, and has

the right to exchange his or her labour for goods or money

with whoever will pay

Communal property, a specific form associated with

Karl Marx and with *socialism, assigns rights over land

and the means of production to the workers or the

com-munity as a whole, rather than to individual persons As

communal property, land and the means of production

may not be privately appropriated Rather, decisions

con-cerning the use of land or the means of production are

made collectively by the workers involved or, depending

on the specific form of communal ownership, by all the

members of the community or their elected

representa-tives Any surplus or profits realized from land and

resources may be distributed to the workers or

commu-nity members equally, in proportion to their labour and

contribution, or according to their needs

Corporate property, public property, and joint

prop-erty are forms which combine elements of the private and

communal forms Corporate ownership resembles

pri-vate ownership in the rights of owners to use what they

own as they, alone, choose; but it resembles communal

ownership in that there may be many persons who share

the ownership rights

Great interest lies in discovering which specific form of

property is morally or politically justifiable While private

ownership has often been considered superior because it

supposedly stimulates efficient production of great wealth

and preserves the freedom of owners, it is also criticized

because it perpetuates unjust distributions of income,

cre-ates unnatural desires for material goods, and lacks

respect for the quality of the environment Communal

ownership is supposed to create insufficient incentives for

economic growth, be wasteful of labour and energy, and

inadequately satisfy consumer demand But communal

ownership is believed to create more just distributions of

wealth, less *exploitation and *alienation among workers,

and greater control by the community as a whole over its

*libertarianism, left; markets; conservatism; Proudhon

James O Grunebaum, Private Ownership (London, 1987) Stephen R Munzer, A Theory of Property (Cambridge, 1990) Jeremy Waldron, The Right to Private Property (Oxford, 1988).

proposition.The precise formulation varies, but a propos-ition, or propositional content, is customarily defined in modern logic as ‘what is asserted’ when a sentence (an indicative, or declarative, sentence) is used to say some-thing true or false, or as ‘what is expressed by’ such a sen-tence The term is also applied to what is expressed by the subordinate clauses of complex sentences, to forms of words which, if separated from the complex sentences of which they are part, can stand alone as indicative sen-tences in their own right Accordingly, such sensen-tences and clauses are often called ‘propositional signs’

In medieval logic, by contrast, a propositio was what

would now be called a propositional sign It was with this sense in mind that some of the ‘traditional logicians’ of the nineteenth century held that we should not be concerned with the proposition, a mere linguistic entity, but with the

judgement, the (possibly mental) act of affirming or

deny-ing a predicate of a subject Some modern logicians have argued what would appear, were it not for this shift in meaning, to be the opposite view: that we should not be

concerned with the sentence, a mere linguistic entity, but

with the proposition, an abstract entity designated by declarative sentences in particular languages It is, though,

an obvious mistake to suppose that, because different sen-tences say the same thing, there must be a same thing they say Probably the most sensible view is that a proposition

is neither a sentence ‘in itself ’ nor some entity other than

a sentence, but merely a certain sort of sentence used in a

*statements and sentences

A N Prior, ‘Propositions and Sentences’, in The Doctrine of Propositions and Terms (London, 1976).

C Williamson, ‘Propositions and Abstract Propositions’, in

N Rescher (ed.), Studies in Logical Theory (Oxford, 1968).

propositional attitude A kind of state of mind, the term

for which was introduced by Russell and has gained cur-rency in recent philosophy of language and mind Predications of some mental states (e.g of belief in ‘Ted

believes that p’) appear to express a relation between a

person (here Ted) and a proposition (here the proposition

that-p); these states are the propositional attitudes Want

and desire, though not usually ordinarily attributed using

‘that’ clauses, are often included

The class is singled out by philosophers for two reasons: (i) a set of questions pertains to the sentences used in ascribing attitudes; (ii) the attitudes feature in a distinctive mode of explanation—of rational beings; one species of such explanation is of action, considered usually to require ascriptions of the attitudes belief and desire j.horn

propositional attitude 763

*content; intentionality; referential opacity.

Jerry A Fodor, ‘Propositional Attitudes’, Monist (1978).

propositional calculus A systematization of that part of

logic concerned with operators corresponding to some

uses of ‘not’, ‘or’, ‘and’, ‘If then’, and ‘If and only if ’,

some of which are interdefinable They are represented in

the *propositional calculus (PC) in one standard notation

as ‘~’, ‘∨’, ‘·’, ‘⊃’, and ‘≡’, respectively A class of

*well-formed formulae is defined for PC and a definition of

*proof which generates the set of *theorems of PC A

desideratum is a system where the set of well-formed

for-mulae of PC which are logical truths are derivable as

the-orems This can be shown for PC quasi-syntactically by a

method of normal forms Alternatively, on the semantics

of the connectives given by *truth-tables, it can be shown

that a formula is a theorem if and only if it is a *tautology

(*Completeness; *consistency; *decision procedure;

*decidability.)

There are alternative axiomatizations of PC which

gen-erate the same set of theorems In an axiomatization a

the-orem is defined as an axiom or derivable from axioms in

accordance with the specified rules

An alternative to axiomatization of PC is to dispense

with axioms and to use only rules of inference (*Natural

deduction.) Here a theorem will be a formula derivable

from the empty set of premisses r.b.m

B Mates, Elementary Logic (Oxford, 1972).

propositional function A function from individuals to

propositions with a common structure about those

indi-viduals, or a formula representing such a function Thus

C(x) might assign Bach was a composer to Bach, Chopin was

a composer to Chopin, and so on When a *quantifier is

pre-fixed, propositional functions are used to represent

gen-eral propositions Thus ∀xC(x) asserts that all C(x) is true

for all x, and so represents the false proposition Everything

*propositional calculus

I M Copi, An Introduction to Logic, 6th edn (New York, 1982),

ch 10

proprioception:see perception.

Protagoras (c.490–420bc) The most celebrated of the

*Sophists of the fifth century bc, he came from Abdera on

the north coast of the Aegean, also the birthplace of

Dem-ocritus He travelled widely throughout the Greek world,

including several visits to Athens, where he was associated

with Pericles, who invited him to write the constitution

for the Athenian colony of Thurii The ancient tradition of

his condemnation for impiety and flight from Athens is

refuted by Plato’s evidence (Meno 91e) that he enjoyed a

universally high reputation till his death and afterwards

He was famous in antiquity for agnosticism concerning

the existence and nature of the gods, and for the doctrine

that ‘Man is the measure of all things’, i.e the thesis that all

sensory appearances and all beliefs are true for the person whose appearance or belief they are; on the most plausible construal that doctrine attempts to eliminate objectivity and truth altogether It was attacked by Democritus and

Plato (in the Theaetetus) on the ground that it is

self-refuting; if all beliefs are true, then the belief that it is not the case that all beliefs are true is itself true While that charge of self-refutation fails because it ignores the rela-tivization of truth in the theory, it may be reinstated as fol-lows: either the theory undermines itself by asserting as an objective truth that there is no objective truth or it merely asserts as a subjective truth that there is no objective truth But to assert a subjective truth is to make no assertion So either the theory refutes itself, or it asserts nothing In the

Protagoras Plato represents him as maintaining a fairly

conservative form of social morality, based on a version of social contract theory; humans need to develop social institutions to survive in a hostile world, and the basic social virtues, justice and self-control, must be generally observed if those institutions are to flourish c.c.w.t

G B Kerferd, The Sophistic Movement (Cambridge, 1981).

protasis.In a conditional proposition, the ‘if ’ clause, i.e

‘P’ in such forms as ‘If P, Q’, ‘Q, if P’, ‘(P→ Q)’ or ‘(P —3Q)’,

is called the protasis, or antecedent, and the main clause

‘Q’ is called the apodosis, or consequent. c.a.k

protocol sentences According to *Logical Positivism,

‘pro-tocol sentences’ provide a record of scientific experience which is to be used in assessing theories and hypotheses In accordance with his *empiricism, Carnap insisted that they should record experience directly, contain nothing which resulted from induction Whether protocol sentences described *sense-data or were like ordinary observation reports was a matter of controversy which, Carnap eventu-ally held, was to be settled by a decision c.j.h

O Neurath, ‘Protocol Sentences’, in A J Ayer (ed.), Logical Positivism (London, 1959).

Proudhon, Pierre-Joseph (1809–1865) French

philoso-pher and social critic whose book What is Property?

influ-enced many nineteenth-century socialists, anarchists, and communists His famous answer to the question posed by the title of his book is that *‘property is theft’ Man, Proud-hon believed, is born a social being who seeks justice and equality in all his relations, but large landed estates that create rent for the owner of private property make these impossible He did not oppose all forms of property Rather, he believed that small producers and farmers bound together by free contracts were the best safeguards

of liberty, justice, and equality Many of his ideas were adopted by the syndicalist trade union movement Both Bakunin and Sorel recognized their debt to Proudhon, while Marx attacked many of his ideas as too utopian

j.o.g

*syndicalism

George Woodcock, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (London, 1956).

764 propositional attitude

pseudonyms, philosophical Søren Kierke-gaard’s

elabor-ate use of pseudonyms inspires scholarly attention His

motives apparently included the desire to attack under

one name his own writings under another Posterity

thereby knows his disdain for the construction of unified

systems Research on the motives of other philosophers

who use pseudonyms awaits further identifications of

these writers Here are a few examples Several

antholo-gies include ‘Free Will as Involving Determinism and

Inconceivable without It’, by ‘R E Hobart’, without

men-tioning that the author’s real name is Dickinson S Miller

In collections she edits herself, Amélie Oksenberg Rorty

sometimes includes essays of her own signed by ‘Leila

Tov-Ruach’ The author of this entry does not know the

real name of the entrant to the Analysis Competition

‘Problem’ No 10, Analysis 17/3 ( January 1957), who uses

the pseudonym ‘Al Tajtelbaum’ The name is interesting

because it belonged originally to the

philosopher-logician-mathematician better known as Alfred Tarski d.h.s

pseudo-philosophy consists in deliberations that

mas-querade as philosophical but are inept, incompetent,

defi-cient in intellectual seriousness, and reflective of an

insufficient commitment to the pursuit of truth In

particu-lar, this encompasses discussions that deploy the rational

instrumentalities of philosophical reflection in the

inter-ests of aims other than serious inquiry—the fostering of

power interests or ideological influence or literary éclat or

some such (To be sure, philosophers in general incline to

pin this charge of insufficient intellectual seriousness and

cogency on those who adhere to rival schools of thought

that differ from their own position in matters of

funda-mental principle.)

Such ineptitude is seldom professed by exponents on

their own account but emerges in the objections of

oppo-nents Some key examples are the no-truth theory

attrib-uted by the Platonic Socrates to the Sophists of classical

antiquity, the conflicting-truth theory attributed to the

so-called Averroists by the medieval schoolmen, the radical

nihilism sometimes attributed to Renaissance sceptics,

and the irrationalism and relativism imputed to

existen-tialists and post-modernists by the more orthodox

philosophers of our own day The more extreme

enthusi-asts of Derrida-inspired deconstruction afford a graphic

case in point For there is little point in spinning elaborate

textual webs to demonstrate that texts never bear any

stable interpretative construction If texts are unable to

convey any fixed message, there is clearly no point to any

endeavour to convey this lesson by textual means

The ‘pseudo-’ label is particularly apt in application to

those who use the resources of reason to substantiate the

claim that rationality is unachievable in matters of inquiry

For their practice patently belies their teaching About

that which cannot be treated with philosophical cogency,

philosophers must needs remain silent n.r

*ideology; pseudo-science; philosophy: world and

underworld

Avner Cohen and Marcelo Dascal (eds.), The Institution of Philoso-phy: A Discipline in Crisis (La Salle, Ill., 1989).

Hugh J Silverman and Gary E Aylesworth (eds.), The Textual Sublime: Deconstruction and its Differences (Albany, NY, 1990).

pseudo-science. A term of epistemic abuse of variable and disputed content The most general feature of the sit-uation is one in which one segment of the epistemic com-munity attempts to alert another that certain theses have had conferred on them an epistemic status they do not deserve Important features of these discussions are at variance with the common philosophical assumption of the centrality of testability But testability appears not to exonerate, nor its lack to inculpate If we consult the grounds implicit in adverse appraisals we find that objec-tions are commonly to spurious claims as to the war-rantability of a thesis rather than its untestability Someone who maintains that Cassius was wrong, and that the fault was in our stars but that he could not say which stars, is advancing an untestable thesis, but ought not to be conflated on that account with someone who casts horoscopes

Another ostensibly pertinent ground is failure to capitu-late to repeated falsification reports But it is conceded both that there are no rules for determining when a thesis should be abandoned and that there have been occasions when those who clung to their theories did well to do so Moreover, non-capitulation is often a misleading descrip-tion of a more pernicious practice—that of implying that a thesis has been repeatedly confirmed when the most that has been shown is that it can be reconciled with its appar-ent falsifiers Popper’s Adler anecdote, in which Adler explains away an apparent refutation on the score of his

‘thousandfold experience’ and is met with the sarcastic rejoinder, ‘And now I suppose your experience is a thou-sand-and-one fold’, illustrates a distinct and more perti-nent malpractice than wanton tenacity—that Adler will henceforth illicitly treat his ability to turn the force of a falsifier as further confirmation of the theory

Neither can capitulation to falsification reports serve as

a rebuttal of the charge, for it is not uncommon for excep-tions to a general thesis to be generously conceded while the putatively verified instances on which the prestige of the theory depends are without rational justification Freud’s concession that not all dreams are wish-fulfilments in the light of the recurring traumatic dreams

of war neurotics does not absolve his dream theory of sus-picion if there is reason to think that his reports of con-firming instances were the outcome of Procrustean methods of interpretation

Popper introduced the relevance of the investigator’s sincerity Once it is recognized that the charge of pseudo-science involves not just methodological inadequacy but imponderable judgements about its tendentious motiv-ation, the intractability and longevity of the disputes is less surprising Those who characterize an epistemic doctrine

or practice as pseudo-scientific are normally responding to

a Gestalt which they may then confusedly rationalize

pseudo-science 765

according to whatever view of the nature of science

pre-vails In the end we may be compelled to say of

pseudo-science what Duke Ellington said about jazz—that it is

impossible to define because it is a matter of how it

*pseudo-philosophy

Ernest Gellner, The Psychoanalytic Movement (London, 1985).

Terence Hines, Pseudo-Science and the Paranormal (Buffalo, NY,

1988)

psyche(‘soul’) In ancient philosophy the psyche is the

animator of each animated (living) or ‘ensouled’ thing

(empsukhon) Plato uses the idea that the psyche is the

prin-ciple of *life in a famous argument for the immortality of

the psyche (Phaedo 105c–e) Aristotle, in his De anima,

counts self-nutrition, reproduction, movement, and

per-ception as ‘psychical’ powers, as well as thinking, and then

speculates that the rational part of the psyche may be

*soul

M Nussbaum and A Rorty (eds.), Essays on Aristotle’s De Anima

(Oxford, 1992)

psychic research: see ESP phenomena, philosophical

implications of

psychoanalysis, philosophical problems of

Philoso-phers have long debated whether psychoanalysis is a

*science, a *pseudo-science, or something sui generis There

are many reasons for the longevity of the controversy

which are of little philosophic interest These include a

lack of consensus on whether what is in question is a

ther-apeutic or an explanatory enterprise and, if explanatory,

which theses are to be considered definitive of it There is

also a general ambiguity Is substantive or methodological

psychoanalysis under discussion? Is the subject such

state-ments as ‘the main sources of human character are, for

example, the incestuous and sexual conflicts of infancy’,

or such statements as ‘the main formative influences and

pathogenic occasions in a person’s life can be discovered

by the use of a method devised by Freud deploying

*dream interpretation, free association, and analysis of the

behaviour of the subject in the analytic situation’?

A great deal of discussion has been devoted to testability

and kindred notions such as the willingness to capitulate to

falsification reports The lack of consensus on the

test-ability of psychoanalytic theory is due not merely to

differ-ing conceptions of psychoanalytic theory but to differdiffer-ing

conceptions of testability Those who hold the theory

untestable are often said to have confused the obstinacy of

its adherents with the formal properties of ‘the theory in

itself ’ This meets the objection that it is inappropriate to

speak of the ‘in-itself ’ of a theory much of which is so

neolo-gistic that we can only discover what falsifies it by taking

note of what is permitted to count against it, and is so

equivocal that almost a century later radically divergent

accounts are still given of its commitments The testability

of psychoanalytic theses is sometimes confused with the testability of statements about the consequences of credit-ing them Catholic theology does not become testable because the consequences of pilgrimages to Lourdes are The testability of the therapeutic claims themselves is also in dispute because it has been argued that, although a thesis may seem to be indisputably testable where its advocates have in fact modified it in the light of falsifying reports, this does not show the theory to be testable unless the advocates had no discretion in the matter

In view of these considerations it is understandable that even when precautions are taken to restrict discussion to the same substantive theses, or at least the same verbal formulas, disagreement persists Some analysts think that Freud’s claims about infantile life could be validated by a movie camera (Robert Waelder); others have denied this ( Joan Riviere) Some think that Freud’s aetiological claims are as epidemiologically testable as those linking smoking

to lung cancer (Grunbaum); others do not The relevance

of the outcome of controlled inquiry is in any case bypassed by those who hold that psychoanalytic discourse ought not to be subjected to the same modes of assess-ment as are conventionally held to characterize sciences such as medical epidemiology An alternative criterion often invoked, and to which Freud himself frequently appealed, is that of narrative comprehensiveness Freud holds his infantile sexual aetiology up like the missing piece of a jigsaw puzzle and defies his critics to give an adequate account of the neuroses without it A disabling assumption of much discussion is that it is the legitimacy

of this narrative rationale which divides critics from sup-porters of psychoanalytic theses; but just as divisive is the conviction that psychoanalytic narratives tend to be unpersuasive or tendentious

Another mode of validation whose merits have been debated is that of therapeutic efficacy Therapeutic effi-cacy is incapable by its nature of warranting the historicity

of a reconstruction or the veridicality of an interpretation; these may be false and the therapy based on them nevertheless efficacious, just as they may be true but ther-apeutically unhelpful A further, though philosophically redundant, difficulty is that the appeal to therapeutic results played a nugatory role in the controversies Freud himself seemed to have little confidence in it since he nor-mally met the suggestibility objection by denying that he had any prior conviction which might have influenced his patients’ responses, and by invoking data such as the fan-tasies of psychotics, or the anonymous productions of cul-ture in which contamination was presumed not to operate Where it was the generality of his conclusions about infantile life that were disputed, it was maintained that these had been confirmed (and the method thus vin-dicated) by the direct observation of children

Another much discussed issue is whether unconscious wishes are *reasons or causes The substantive question

‘Are unconscious wishes like reasons?’ must be distin-guished from ‘Are even rationalizing wishes deterministic-ally related to the behaviour they rationalize?’ Put

766 pseudo-science

otherwise, the first question is whether the hysteric, say,

stands in relation to his symptoms as a malingerer to his

deceptive performances, except that he is not consciously

monitoring them, or whether repressed wishes act,

rather, like psychic splinters and the symptoms they

pro-duce are thus conceptually analogous to inflammations

Whether the assimilation of causes to reasons is justifiable

has no bearing on this question, which can only be

resolved by an inspection of the grounds proffered for

believing an unconscious wish operative, and these vary

The pertinent question is thus: What makes an

explan-atory narrative credible? This in turn resolves into two

dis-tinct problems: the degree of circumstantiality required to

support a causal narrative, or to warrant a choice between

narratives, and the degree to which the subject’s epistemic

authority (belated in the case of analytic accounts) allows

us to dispense with both laws and circumstantiality

The first problem is one of devising rules of thumb for

judging the goodness of a case for a causal connection

when all we have to go on is the circumstantial density of

a narrative (and perhaps its analogy to better-attested, less

questionable ones)

The second problem is that of deciding, in cases where

narrative coherence is insufficiently probative, whether

its probative value can be enhanced, or even replaced, by

the endorsement of the subject Is not Shylock the arbiter

of the sources of his resentment of Antonio? Why then can

we not allow that someone who is initially ignorant of the

sources of his attitudes, propensities, vulnerabilities, etc

might not ultimately come to stand in relation to them as

Shylock continuously did to his murderous resentment?

The assessment of this argument requires delicate

taxono-mizing not often in evidence Apologists have often

claimed for Freud’s narratives virtues which he did not

consistently claim for them himself, appealing rather to

unreproducible nuances of the psychoanalytic

inter-action This raises a distinct issue: What makes a narrator

credible? This absolves those who insist on discussing the

credibility of psychoanalytic narrators of gratuitously

per-sonalizing the issue

Beyond the dispute over whether the knowledge

psy-choanalysis aims to provide is to be judged by natural

sci-ence or humanistic standards looms another: whether

epistemic criteria of either kind are in order It is held that,

however matters may stand with respect to vulgar

notions of correspondence truth, psychoanalysis has

pro-vided vistas whose poetic truth is beyond reproach f.c

*stories and explanation; unconscious and

subcon-scious mind

Behaviour and Brain Research (1986) Précis and peer group review

of Grunbaum’s Foundations of Psychoanalysis.

F Cioffi, ‘Wollheim on Freud’, Inquiry (1972).

Peter Clark and Crispin Wright (eds.), Mind, Psychoanalysis and

Science (London, 1988).

R Wollheim, Freud, 2nd edn (London, 1990).

psychologism.Acceptance of some or all of the following

commitments jointly define a psychologistic outlook: a

belief that logical laws are ‘laws of thought’, i.e psycho-logical laws; a conflation of truth with verification; a belief that the private data of consciousness provide the correct starting-point for epistemology; and belief that the mean-ings of words are ideas Gottlob Frege rejected all these theses, and therefore much of prevailing nineteenth-century germanophone philosophy His criticisms con-verted Edmund Husserl to anti-psychologism They have been profoundly influential in anglophone *analytic

M A E Dummett, Frege: Philosophy of Language, 2nd edn

(London, 1981), ch 5

psychology and philosophy Psychology, for most of its

history, coincided with the philosophy of mind Everyday reflections on one’s own thoughts and deeds and on the behaviour—bodily motions, verbal and otherwise—of others lead naturally to speculations concerning the springs of action Such speculations, refined and system-atized, are prominent in the writings of Plato and Aris-totle, and in the philosophical tradition that runs from them through Descartes, Hobbes, Hume, Kant, and James, to our own day Along the way, psychology as a self-standing discipline gradually condensed from the philosophical fog Recent years have seen a partial reversal

of this process as philosophers, anxious to attain scientific respectability, have sought to psychologize philosophy under the banner of *‘cognitive science’

While it is convenient to date the onset of psychology’s emancipation from philosophy from 1879, the year Wil-helm Wundt established the first psychological laboratory

at the University of Leipzig, it was well into the twentieth century before psychology became generally recognized

as a distinguishable academic speciality Even today, how-ever, it is easy to find parallels in empirical psychology to virtually any philosophical view of the mind This is scarcely surprising Our conception of the mental as com-prising a distinctive subject-matter, one that includes per-ceiving, knowing, imagining, planning, and the initiating

of action, is a philosophical staple Psychology emerged as

a science once questions about such things began to be for-mulated in a way that demanded empirical investigation Thus Hume, impressed by Newton, advanced associative principles designed to account for familiar mental oper-ations and to set the study of *‘human nature’ on an appro-priately scientific footing Hume holds that ideas— mentalistic counterparts of material particles—attract one another in accordance with three simple associative prin-ciples: resemblance, contiguity, cause and effect

Hume was not the first associationist, nor was he the last Clark Hull’s conception of stimulus–response bonds and B F Skinner’s notion of reinforcement put a behav-iourist spin on *associationism More recently, advocates

of ‘connectionist’ or ‘neural network’ accounts of the mind, abjuring *behaviourism, have advanced mathemat-ically sophisticated associationist models of cognitive and perceptual processes These compete with computational approaches traceable to Hobbes

psychology and philosophy 767

Early psychologists wore their philosophical

commit-ments on their sleeves William James’s Principles of

Psychology (1890) mingles chapters on the brain, instinct,

and hypnotism with chapters advancing views on the

*mind–body problem, and E B Titchener’s debt to the

atomistic, sensationalistic doctrines of the British

Empiri-cists in Lectures on the Experimental Psychology of the Thought

Processes (1904) is explicit Nowadays psychologists are

less aware of, or at any rate less willing to acknowledge,

their philosophical roots

The ongoing influence of philosophical theses might

be thought to provide a partial explanation of the fitful,

two-steps-forward, one-step-back quality of theoretical

advance in psychology, but it would be nạve to imagine

that the discipline might be streamlined simply by writing

out the philosophers The exclusion of philosophers does

not amount to the exclusion of philosophical

presuppos-itions, and wholesale elimination of these presuppospresuppos-itions,

in eliminating as well everything that depends on them,

would amount to changing the subject Still, it is widely

believed that philosophy, qua philosophy, has little to offer

physics, biology, or medicine Why, then, should anyone

imagine that philosophers are in a position to offer advice

about the nature of *mind? Perhaps minds are distinctive,

different from hearts, or livers, or the amino acids But

why should anyone presume this to be so?

The question is not whether imaginary disciplinary

boundaries between philosophy and the empirical

sci-ences are to be enforced, but whether the relation

between philosophy and psychology is, or has been, or

must be, special According to one influential view,

eman-ating from the work of Wittgenstein and aggressively

promoted by D C Dennett, psychology presupposes a

discredited Cartesian conception of mind according to

which mental states and processes occur in private Our

access to mental items is asymmetrical: you observe the

contents of your own mind directly, I can only infer those

contents from what you say and do Such a picture

frus-trates both philosophers, bent on resolving

epistemo-logical and metaphysical puzzles, and psychologists, who

seek scientific legitimacy for their inquiries

Skinner, following John B Watson in turning

*empiri-cism on its head, declared that, because we observe only

behaviour, reference to inferred mental causes of

behav-iour must be eliminated Psychological explanation, then,

amounts to the correlation of environmental

contingen-cies and subsequent behavioural responses On the

philo-sophical front, Gilbert Ryle in The Concept of Mind (1949)

attacked the ‘Cartesian Myth’ on very different grounds

Ryle held that descriptions of mental goings-on are

descriptions of what agents say and do (or are apt to say

and do), not descriptions of hidden occurrences causally

responsible for sayings and doings Although Ryle is often

called a behaviourist, the arguments he deploys have little

in common with those used in support of the

psycho-logical doctrine of the same name

The ‘functionalist’ conception of mind, traceable to

Aristotle, fine-tuned by Hilary Putnam, D M Armstrong,

and Jerry Fodor, and now beloved of philosophers and psychologists alike, can be seen as a direct descendant of Ryle’s anti-Cartesianism *Functionalism, as a replace-ment for psychological *behaviourism, however, has proved attractive in part owing to the increasing promin-ence of the digital computing machine Perhaps the brain resembles such a device Were that so, we could assume that minds are ‘realized’ in brains just as programs are

‘realized’ in computing machines To engage in psych-ology, on such a view, is to seek to discover by empirical means the brain’s program A view of this sort promises simultaneously to liberate psychology from traditional metaphysical worries about the mind and its relation to the body, and to provide it with a subject-matter distinct from neurophysiology and biology

Although psychologists have been on the whole happy with these results, functionalism is under fire in philoso-phy In characterizing mental items exclusively by refer-ence to actual and possible inputs and outputs, functionalism evidently ignores their qualitative dimen-sion In the earliest accounts of the doctrine, this was touted as a virtue, a way of factoring out spooky mental

*qualia and allowing for the ‘multiple realizability’ of men-tal characteristics (A characteristic is multiply realizable if

it is capable of being embodied in very different sorts of physical system: human brains, computing machines, pos-sible alien silicon-based ‘brains’.) Recently, however, Thomas Nagel, Frank Jackson, David Chalmers and others have argued that any account of the mind must accommo-date non-material mental qualities, exhibited in *con-sciousness Some of these arguments are intended to encourage us to return to a fundamentally Cartesian con-ception of mind, a concon-ception not unlike that embraced by Wundt and Titchener in the earliest days of experimental psychology Does this portend the reintroduction into psychology of non-physical entities? Perhaps not Perhaps it

is simply a reflection of a powerful conviction that, as C B Martin puts it, ‘every quantity stands in need of a quality’ The subjectivity of consciousness poses additional prob-lems Conscious awareness incorporates a point of view inaccessible to objective scientific investigation Some, like Colin McGinn, have despaired at finding a home for points

of view in the natural world; others—Ted Honderich, for instance—locate subjectivity in perfectly natural relations which perceivers bear to their environments

Such considerations make it clear that the historical break between philosophy and psychology was never a clean one Psychologists continue to look over their shoul-ders at philosophers, and philosophers continue to offer advice to psychologists There is no reason to think that it should always be this way, but there is no reason to sup-pose that things are destined to change much in the

*consciousness; epistemology and psychology; dualism; qualia

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

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

768 psychology and philosophy

B A Farrell, ‘Experience’, Mind, 59 (1950).

R J Herrnstein and E G Boring (eds.), A Source Book in the History

of Psychology (Cambridge, Mass., 1965).

T Honderich, ‘Consciousness as Existence’, in A O’Hear (ed.),

Current Issues in the Philosophy of Mind (Cambridge, 1998).

F Jackson, ‘Epiphenomenal Qualia’, Philosophical Quarterly (1982).

T H Leahey, A History of Psychology, 6th edn (Upper Saddle

River, NJ, 2003)

C B Martin, ‘The Need for Ontology: Some Choices’, Philosophy,

68 (1993)

C McGinn, ‘Can We Solve the Mind–Body Problem?’, Mind (1989).

T Nagel, ‘What Is it Like to Be a Bat?’, Philosophical Review (1974).

Hilary Putnam, ‘The Nature of Mental States’, in Mind, Language,

and Reality (Cambridge, 1975).

psychoneural intimacy The term is used to describe

what is generally recognized to be the close tie between

neural events and mental events It is held that there is a

necessary co-occurrence of some sort between types of

mental events and types of neural events The thesis of

psychoneural intimacy is compatible with most of the

doctrines put forward in the literature concerning the

rela-tionship between mental events and physical events—but

not some that radically separate mind and brain, perhaps

to safeguard free will Most doctrines of the psychoneural

relation can be read as different proposals about the

nature of the necessity involved p.j.p.n

*mind–body problem

T Honderich, A Theory of Determinism: The Mind, Neuroscience and

Life-Hopes (Oxford, 1988), ch 2.

psychophysical laws Putative natural *laws reporting

regular or necessary relationships between mental events

and physical events For example, if, as Honderich

main-tains, the occurrence of some neurological event is a

suffi-cient condition for the occurrence of some psychological

event (and, as is entailed by this, the occurrence of that

psychological event is a necessary condition for the

occur-rence of that neurological event), then arguably some

psy-chophysical law could be discovered which would

facilitate the prediction of psychological events from

knowledge of neurological events, because true

neuro-logical sentences would neuro-logically entail the occurrence of

psychological events

Not only Honderich’s physicalistic *determinism but

certain versions of the mind–brain *identity theory

logic-ally imply the existence of psychophysical laws Some

philosophers have maintained that types of mental event

may be identified with types of physical process in the

brain (or central nervous system) and that there is no a

priori reason why predictive inferences about mental

event-types should not be drawn from premisses about

physical event-types Unfortunately such type

identifica-tions have proved most difficult to establish empirically

On a token version of the mind–brain identity theory it

is less plausible that there should exist psychophysical

laws Although, on this theory, any token mental event is

numerically identical with some token neurological

event, it does not follow that qualitatively similar mental

events are numerically identical with qualitatively similar neurological events From the fact, then, that an event of some specifiable neurological type had occurred it would not follow that an event of some specifiable psychological type had occurred (even though it would still follow that a psychological event of some psychological type had occurred) Donald Davidson, for example, argues that, although every mental event is numerically identical with some physical event and although every event (including every mental event) may be subsumed under some nat-ural law, nevertheless there are no psychophysical laws

This is because it is qua physical events, not qua mental

events, that mental events are law-governed, and even a complete knowledge of physical events would not facili-tate predictions of (specifiable) types of mental event All the philosophical problems accruing to natural laws

accrue a fortiori to psychophysical laws For example,

whether natural laws are causal laws, Humean regular-ities, relations between *universals, essentially predictive,

or descriptive of necessities are all also questions about psychophysical laws Deciding whether there are psy-chophysical laws and if so what they are like requires specifying correctly the ontology of the psychophysical relation However, their existence is consistent with most traditional solutions to the *mind–body problem s.p

*anomalous monism

Donald Davidson, ‘Mental Events’, in Essays on Actions and Events

(Oxford, 1980)

Ted Honderich, A Theory of Determinism: The Mind, Neuroscience and Life-Hopes (Oxford, 1988).

Stephen Priest, Theories of the Mind (London, 1991).

public morality As traditionally understood, the ‘police

powers’ of government extend to the protection of public

health, safety, and morals Legislation to protect public

morals prohibits or restricts acts and practices judged to be damaging to the character and moral well-being of persons who engage in them or who may be induced to engage in them by the bad example of others Typical forms of ‘morals legislation’ prohibit or restrict prostitu-tion, pornography, and other forms of sexual vice, as well

as gambling, cruelty to animals, and the recreational use

of drugs

In recent times, the legitimacy of such legislation has come under severe attack from certain forms of liberal political thought Under pressure from ‘law reform’ movements inspired by the philosophy of J S Mill and others, many jurisdictions have decriminalized a variety

of putatively ‘victimless’ offences

In the early 1960s the legitimacy of morals laws, particu-larly the legal prohibition of consensual homosexual sodomy, was the subject of a celebrated debate between two eminent British jurists: Patrick Devlin defended ‘legal moralism’ on the ground that a society is constituted in significant measure by the sharing of moral beliefs by its members and that the legal toleration of acts condemned

by a society’s constitutive morality puts that society at risk

of disintegration Therefore, Devlin argued, a society has

public morality 769