The Oxford Companion to Philosophy Part 81 pot

knowledge of the truth of certain propositions, comes to us without coming through the senses, or claims that some of the materials from which our knowledge is constructed are present in

Quinton, Anthony (1925– ) British philosopher, based in

Oxford and member of the House of Lords, who has

writ-ten on political philosophy, ethics and metaphysics, the

philosophy of mind, and a variety of historical figures His

lengthiest work is his treatise on The Nature of Things, which

takes as its central notion the concept of *substance By

exploring the questions associated with this concept

Quin-ton develops, in three parts, his views on a wide-ranging set

of traditional philosophical problems In part I, problems of

identity and individualism, the relation between matter and

extension, and personal identity and the soul are discussed;

in part II knowledge, scepticism, and the concept of percep-tion are the topics; in part III the nopercep-tion of essence, the dis-tinction between theory and observation, mind–body dualism, and fact and value are discussed The general pos-ition defended is a form of materialism h.w.n

*philosophy; English philosophy; philosophical inquiry; philosophy, value and use of

Anthony Quinton, The Nature of Things (London, 1973).

780 Quinton, Anthony

race.Higher-level organisms form species, that is groups

of organisms that breed among themselves but that are

reproductively isolated from all other organisms We

humans belong to the species Homo sapiens Although

species are the fundamental units of biological

classifica-tion, they can often be subdivided into groups that are

dis-tinguishable by special features Early biologists of the

modern era, notably the French naturalist Buffon,

assumed that this is true of humans, and they spent much

time and effort trying to decide what constitute the true

divisions, generally known as races In his Descent of Man

(1871), Charles Darwin argued that many human

differ-ences are due to sexual selection, where differing

stand-ards of beauty are the chief causal factors tearing human

populations apart

Notoriously, the German Nazis were keen race

theor-ists, believing that distinctions can be drawn between

Aryans and others, especially Jews Naturally, in the

post-Second World War years, the very idea of race fell from

favour, and it was argued that not only is it a socially

per-nicious notion but that it has little or no scientific validity

The major defining mark of the human species is how

lit-tle difference there is between peoples, not how much

In recent years, the pendulum has swung back a little

Anthropologists now recognize that there are several

dis-tinctive human forms, and medical geneticists are keenly

aware that there are distinctive diseases much more

com-monly associated with certain groups than with others

For instance, Ashkenazi Jews (those from Eastern Europe)

are more prone to carry a gene for Tay-Sachs diseases than

*anti-Semitism

T Dobzhansky, Mankind Evolving (New Haven, Conn., 1962).

C P Groves, The Biology of Race (Berkeley, Calif., 1989).

racism.Although the roots of theoretical racism can be

traced back at least to the fifteenth century, the term did

not come to prominence until the 1930s when it was used

to describe the pseudo-scientific theory that ‘race’, as a

decisive biological determinant, established a hierarchy

among different ethnic groups Racist theories were

largely developed after the fact to justify practical racism,

which can exist independently of them Polygenesis, the

attempt to explain the differences among kinds by posit-ing diverse origins, provided a basis for maintainposit-ing per-manent inequalities between peoples; by contrast, the philosophies of history that imposed a single goal on his-tory could be used to justify colonialism, as well as the destruction of indigenous cultures and peoples Most potently, the two tendencies are combined to demand an assimilation that is still withheld on the basis of blood

*fascism

B Boxhill (ed.) Race and Racism (Oxford, 2001).

R H Popkin, ‘The Philosophical Bases of Modern Racism’, in

The High Road to Pyrrhonism (San Diego, 1980).

Radcliffe Richards, Janet (1944– ) English philosopher

whose book The Sceptical Feminist was published in 1980

and provides a vigorous defence of liberal feminism against both anti-feminists and radical feminists Accord-ing to Radcliffe Richards, *feminism should not be con-cerned with benefiting a particular group of people (women), but with removing a particular kind of injustice The central task of the book is to expose the faulty think-ing which grounds that injustice Although influential, it has been said to be too unworldly in its understanding of women’s oppression, and insufficiently radical in the remedies it proposes There is not much discussion of the inequalities of power which perpetuate injustice, and an acceptance that ‘women’s work’ is less fulfilling and valu-able than work outside the home Richards’s feminism is logical rather than ideological, cerebral rather than

*justice

Radhakrishnan, Sarvepalli (1888–1975) Idealist philoso-pher who taught at Oxford and was the President of India during 1962–7 Best known for his elegant exegesis of

*Indian philosophy and Hinduism in English, this prolific statesman broadly adhered to monistic *Veda¯nta, trying

to reinterpret it as a kind of universal religion Rejecting both Berkeleian and Hegelian idealisms, he upheld a teleo-logical and openly religious view of matter, life, and mind

as all evolving with a divine purpose or idea which gives

meaning to existence Interpreting classical Indian and

R

modern Western philosophies in a syncretic manner,

Rad-hakrishnan argued that ultimate reality is a changing but

‘ordered’ whole which science can only understand

incompletely It is directly accessible to a blissful intuitive

experience that mystics of all religions describe in

*science, art, and religion

S Radhakrishnan, The Idealist View of Life (London, 1988).

radical feminism: see feminism, radical.

radical interpretation and translation: see translation,

indeterminacy of

radical philosophy Movement formed in 1971, in

oppos-ition to narrowness and insularity of professional

philosophy in Britain, particularly Oxford The Radical

Philosophy Group has organized various national

confer-ences, but its main influence has been through the

maga-zine Radical Philosophy This has persistently forsworn

allegiance to any particular doctrine, but describes itself as

a journal of socialist and feminist philosophy

Addition-ally, although it is not a Marxist journal, many of those

involved with it have seen themselves as continuing a

Marxist philosophical tradition Other preoccupations

include a commitment to interdisciplinary work,

widen-ing interest in continental philosophy, and reformwiden-ing bad

practices in academic philosophy

Since some of its defining concerns are now shared by

many distinguished philosophers, it is to be wondered

whether its self-image of opposition to the narrowness of

the professional discipline is any longer appropriate

(although the attempt by Cambridge philosophers to

deny an honorary degree to Derrida might suggest that

*Oxford philosophy

R Edgley and R Osborne, A Radical Philosophy Reader (London,

1985)

Ra¯ma¯nuja (1017–1137) South Indian consolidator of

devotional theistic interpretation of Vedic philosophy

called qualified non-dualism Unlike the unqualified

monists, Ra¯ma¯nuja postulates three realities—God,

mat-ter, and individual souls—the last two being parasitic on

the first God, a person with infinite excellent attributes, is

the self of selves, and the universe is his inseparable body

Highest liberation consists not in identification with God

(as in non-dualism), but in enjoying a God-like state of joy

at knowing one’s eternal dependence upon the Lord

With a distinctively realistic epistemology of error,

Ra¯ma¯nuja opposes the idealism of *S´an.kara, who deemed

the world an illusion that is ‘neither real nor unreal’

Ra¯ma¯nuja bombards this illusionism with charges of

inconsistency, asking tough questions: ‘Whose illusion is

it? It could not be God’s because he never errs, and could

not be ours because we are its effects according to

*Indian philosophy; Veda¯nta

Julius Lipner, The Face of Truth: A Study of Meaning and Metaphysics

in Ra¯ma¯nuja (Albany, NY, 1986).

Ramsey, Frank P (1903–30) Cambridge mathematician, logician, and philosopher whose short career included important, though brief, contributions to a wide range of subjects, including probability theory, economics, and the foundations of mathematics He was amongst the first to understand and recognize the importance of

Wittgen-stein’s Tractatus, and one of the few contemporary

philosophers whose opinion Wittgenstein respected But

he was not uncritical of Wittgenstein’s ideas at the time Ramsey did pioneering work in the theory of subjective

*probability, arguing that degrees of rational belief should conform to the axioms of the probability calculus He developed a method for eliminating reference to theor-etical entities in science by framing what are now called

‘Ramsey sentences’ His analysis of generalizations was to treat them as expressing rules for the anticipation of experience rather than propositions to which truth-values could be assigned He was also a proponent of the

F P Ramsey, The Foundations of Mathematics and Other Logical Essays (London, 1931).

—— Philosophical Papers, ed D H Mellor (Cambridge, 1990).

Rashdall, Hastings (1858–1924) English philosopher who expounded a theory known as ‘ideal utilitarianism’ Rashdall was a Fellow of New College, Oxford, and

dedi-cated his main work, The Theory of Good and Evil, to the

memory of his teachers T H Green and Henry Sidgwick The dedication is appropriate, for the particular version of

*utilitarianism put forward by Rashdall owes elements to both Green and Sidgwick Whereas he holds that the con-cepts of *good and *value are logically prior to that of

*right, he gives right a more than instrumental signifi-cance His idea of good owes more to T H Green than to the hedonistic utilitarians ‘The ideal of human life is not the mere juxtaposition of distinct goods, but a whole in which each good is made different by the presence of others.’ Rashdall has been unfairly eclipsed as a moral

H Sidgwick (with additional ch by A G Widgery), Outlines of the History of Ethics (London, 1946).

ratiocination. Reasoning St Thomas Aquinas

distin-guished ratiocination (ratiocinatio) from the direct,

non-inferential apprehension of truth possessed by God and angels Human beings, he claimed, arrive at ‘the know-ledge of intelligible truth by advancing from one thing to another’—i.e by an inferential process, ratiocination Ratiocination, understood simply as *reasoning, some times misses its mark; and, plausibly, some human know-ledge is acquired non-inferentially a.r.m

*inference; argument

St Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, pt 1, Q 79, Art 8.

782 Radhakrishnan, Sarvepalli

rational choice theoryexplores the extent to which

com-plex social and economic phenomena can be regarded as

the outcome of calculative, self-interested individual

action The advent of game theory (during the Second

World War) showed that the outcomes of action can often

be understood as the joint result of individual choice in

combination with the choices of other actors (‘players’),

all of whom aim at maximizing (or at least satisficing)

indi-vidual preference-satisfaction Where two or more actors

have regular interactions on the same matter, a strategy

that reliably provides utility to all of them may emerge,

and become enshrined in a convention Rational choice

theory has been claimed to explain many social

institu-tions, from marriage to morality, though sceptics doubt

its usefulness in the face of limits to obtainable

informa-tion and to the time available for weighing indefinitely

many alternative possible outcomes a.bre

K S Cook and M Levi (eds.), The Limits of Rationality (Chicago,

1990)

rationalism.Any of a variety of views emphasizing the

role or importance of reason, usually including *intuition,

in contrast to sensory experience (including

introspec-tion), the feelings, or authority Just as an extreme

empiri-cist tries to base all our knowledge on experience, so an

extreme rationalist tries to base it on reason But whereas

*empiricism appears in the eighteenth century and again

in the first half of the twentieth century, extreme

rational-ism has been considerably less popular In fact it reached

its peak in the brash days when philosophy itself was

beginning, back in the ancient Greek world Parmenides

maintained that, whatever the senses might say, the very

notion of change involved a contradiction, and so reason

demanded that reality be entirely devoid of change As

usually interpreted he said the same about plurality too

His fellow citizen and near-contemporary Zeno of Elea

supported him with a set of paradoxes, including the

famous Achilles and the tortoise (*Zeno’s paradoxes.)

These two, together with a handful of followers

(includ-ing to a certain extent, but only to a certain extent, Plato),

represent the acme of extreme rationalism, and later

rationalists have seldom been willing to dismiss the senses

quite so single-mindedly They perhaps have in mind

the words the slightly later philosopher Democritus, by

no means an extreme empiricist, gives to the senses to

defend themselves against pure reason (fragment 125):

‘Wretched mind, do you take your evidence from us

and then overthrow us? Our overthrow is your own

downfall!’

It is indeed hard to see how a being entirely devoid of

any contact with the world through the senses could ever

amass the materials needed to exercise its reason at all

How, for instance, could it acquire a language to express

its thoughts in, and what sort of thoughts could it have if it

had no language at all?

Rationalism, however, does not have to take an

extreme form It can content itself with claiming simply

that some of our knowledge, though not all of it, can come

to us otherwise than through the senses This is quite com-patible with saying that without some use of the senses we would not have any knowledge at all Rationalism in fact can take two main forms, according as it claims that some

of our propositional knowledge, i.e knowledge of the truth of certain propositions, comes to us without coming through the senses, or claims that some of the materials from which our knowledge is constructed are present in the mind without coming through the senses This latter will be the case if some of our concepts are *a priori, where this just means ‘prior to experience’ It might be, for instance, that concepts such as those of substance or caus-ation are present with us from the beginning in the sense

that, as Kant thought, we do not find out that the world

contains substances and causes, but cannot help but see the world as composed of substances which have attrib-utes and of events which are caused by other events Hav-ing the concepts in this way, however, must be distinguished from having them explicitly, in the sense of having words for them or consciously thinking about them, as we are doing now On the theory in question, small children and possibly even animals can do the for-mer without its following that they can do the latter

It is not surprising that, contrary to the claims of the extreme empiricist, we must bring some equipment with

us if we want to know something about the world If we could really start as blank tablets, then why don’t ordinary blackboards, or at any rate photoreceptive camera plates, know things about the world? On the other hand, it is only

in a backhanded sense that we can be said to ‘know’ that the world contains substances and causes if the truth of the matter is that we can only know the world at all by treat-ing it as though it did A more substantive rationalism is that which says that we can know certain propositions to

be true without deriving this knowledge from our senses, even if in some or all cases we must use our senses to get the concepts that are involved in the propositions: I may know without looking that whatever has a size has a shape, but only if I already have the concepts of size and shape, i.e if I know what size and shape are

Kant made, or at least brought into clear and explicit focus, a distinction between *analytic and synthetic state-ments (or judgestate-ments in his case, as he was more con-cerned with the workings of the mind than with linguistic analysis) Even empiricists usually allow that we know analytic statements a priori, but they defuse this conces-sion by adding that such knowledge hardly counts as knowledge in any meaty sense, since such statements do not say anything substantive about the world Synthetic statements, however, do, and rationalism in its stronger versions is concerned to claim that some of them can be known a priori The one about everything with size hav-ing shape would be a standard example, and others would

be mathematical propositions, which empiricists usually try to treat as analytic, though without much success in the opinion of rationalists In fact around the start of the twentieth century a sustained attempt was made by Frege and Russell to reduce mathematics to pure logic in their

rationalism 783

rené descartes: ‘had he kept himself to geometry,’ said

Hobbes in tribute, ‘he had been the best geometer in the

world’ But Descartes’s vision of the unity of mathematics

and the natural sciences inspired his philosophical project

gottfried wilhelm leibniz left such voluminous writ-ings on philosophy, mathematics, and physics that a com-plete edition is still not in sight; one scholar estimated it would be twenty years’ full-time work just to read his manuscripts

immanuel kant was the fountainhead from which the

main stream of continental European philosophy flowed in

the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; his influence has

steadily spread through English language philosophy too,

especially in metaphysics and ethics

baruch spinoza’s greatest work, his Ethics, is in fact a

sys-tematic metaphysical treatise which builds theorems upon axioms upon definitions His intellectual adventurousness led to his ejection from the orthodox Jewish community in Amsterdam

founders of modern philosophy (european)

theory known as logicism; but it is now generally agreed,

especially since Gödel’s first incompleteness theorem in

1931, that this cannot be done

However, even what I have called this ‘more

substan-tive’ rationalism, which claims that we can know certain

interesting truths a priori, does not escape a certain

ten-sion in its relations with the weaker rationalism which

says that we have to treat the world in certain ways if we

are to make sense of it For when it comes to justifying

these claims to know the world without looking at it, the

rationalist is in danger of being driven to say simply that

we cannot think coherently without accepting these

propositions—which is rather weaker than claiming some

special insight which definitely tells us that they are true

Would not such an insight be a sort of magic?

Be that as it may, the main form that rationalism has

taken in the last few decades has been of the weaker kind,

and connected, like so much of philosophy during that

period, with language It stems from Chomsky, who holds

that certain grammatical structures are innate in our

minds, so that all human languages share certain common

features which make it possible for children to learn

them Other sorts of language may be spoken by, say,

Martians, but our children could not learn them, nor

their children ours

An interesting recent development concerning the a

priori is the claim by Kripke and Putnam that the a

pri-ori–empirical distinction does not coincide, as it has

usu-ally been thought to do, with the necessary–contingent

distinction Kripke claims that some propositions that are

true only contingently can be known a priori (an example

might be that the knower himself exists), while some

propositions that are necessarily true can only be known

empirically (an example here might be the chemical

com-position of some substance) This latter might sound

rather strange: might not water, say, have turned out to

have some structure different from H2O? Kripke and

Put-nam would agree that we might have found ourselves

faced with a liquid that was wet and colourless, filled the

oceans, and was good for making coffee with, i.e had all

the ordinary and easily observable properties of water, but

which had a structure quite different from H2O But such

a liquid would not be water, because the word ‘water’ gets

its meaning from its use to name the liquid we actually

have around us, which is H2O Of course we might have

called the other stuff water had we come across it, but

then the word ‘water’ would have had a different meaning

from the one it actually has, because it would have

acquired its meaning in a different way, i.e by its relations

to a different stuff This doctrine, incidentally, that water

is essentially H2O, i.e would not be what it is unless it had

the structure H2O, illustrates the essentialism whose

recent revival has been pioneered by Kripke and Putnam

among others, and which is itself in the spirit of

rational-ism rather than empiricrational-ism, even though our finding out

that water is H2O relies on observation: the fact that things

have essences at all is not something that observation can

tell us

Finally, rationalism, like empiricism, can refer either to the psychological genesis or to the philosophical justifica-tion of our knowledge; i.e it can say either that we do in fact get some or all of our knowledge, or all of our know-ledge in a certain sphere, from reason, or else that only to the extent that we do so can we properly claim to have knowledge Again, as in the case of empiricism, we are bordering on *naturalism, but rationalism has perhaps more usually been concerned with the genetic questions When justification is at issue rationalism is usually con-cerned (as with Plato and to a lesser extent Aristotle) with distinguishing real or proper knowledge from lesser grades of cognition like true opinion, which are unstable and cannot be relied upon

When contrasted with feeling or sentiment, especially

in the eighteenth-century opponents of the *‘moral sense’ school, rationalism, often then called intuitionism, takes the form of an ethical doctrine claiming that we have a priori intuitions of moral truths Ethical intuitionists vary

in whether they treat such intuitions as isolated or as linked together in a rational system

In the latter case logical reasoning is involved, and though no one would deny that ethical conclusions can be logically derived from premisses which include ethical premisses, the rationalist, defying one form of the *nat-uralistic fallacy, will claim that they can be so derived sometimes from purely non-ethical premisses It is in this sort of case that the ethical intuitions involved have the air

of arising from reason, in parallel with logical intuitions, and so are thought to belong most appropriately under rationalism

Rationalism can also oppose reason to authority, in par-ticular to religious revelation, and the name has been used

in this sense, especially since the end of the nineteenth century, though not usually in philosophy a.r.l

*clear and distinct ideas; humanism

G Ryle, ‘Epistemology’, in J O Urmson (ed.), The Concise Encyclo-paedia of Western Philosophy and Philosophers (London, 1960).

Shows how rationalism and empiricism shade into each other

S P Stich (ed.), Innate Ideas (Berkeley, Calif., 1975) Includes

dis-cussions of Chomsky as well as of earlier ideas

S Kripke, Naming and Necessity (Oxford, 1980).

C Peacocke, The Realm of Reason (Oxford, 2003).

L A Selby-Bigge (ed.), British Moralists (London, 1897)

Selec-tions from moral sense theorists and their intuitionist opponents

rationality.This is a feature of cognitive agents that they exhibit when they adopt beliefs on the basis of appropriate reasons Aristotle maintained that rationality is the key feature that distinguishes human beings from other ani-mals The adjective ‘rational’ is used to characterize both agents and specific beliefs In both cases rationality can be contrasted with either non-rationality or irrationality A stone or tree is non-rational because it is not capable of carrying out rational assessments A being who is capable

of being rational but who regularly violates the principles

of rational assessment is irrational Among rational beings

rationality 785

some beliefs are non-rational since they are matters of

taste and no reasons are required Beliefs that are contrary

to the dictates of reason are irrational Rational beliefs

have also been contrasted with beliefs arrived at through

*emotion, faith, authority, or by an arbitrary choice The

point of each contrast is to capture a sense in which we

believe a proposition either without carrying out an

appropriate assessment or in spite of the results of such an

assessment For example, we determine the balance in a

cheque-book rationally when we enter the correct credits

and debits and do the arithmetic Irrational ways of

deter-mining a balance include picking a number at random or

choosing a number because we find it pleasant When

dealing with empirical matters, rational beliefs are arrived

at by accumulating relevant evidence; a rational

individ-ual will suspend belief until an adequate body of evidence

has been accumulated and evaluated Rational belief is

established in mathematics by providing a formal proof

There has been an intense debate throughout the history

of philosophy on the question whether matters of value

are subject to rational assessment

It has long been held that rational assessment requires

rigorous rules for deciding whether a proposition should

be believed Formal logic and mathematics provide the

clearest examples of such rules Science has also been

con-sidered a model of rationality because it was held to

pro-ceed in accordance with the *scientific method which

provides the rules for gathering evidence and evaluating

hypotheses on the basis of this evidence In this view,

rational assessment yields results that are universal and

necessary; if two individuals who have access to the same

evidence arrive at incompatible conclusions, at least one

of them must be behaving irrationally

More recent discussions have proposed accounts of

bounded rationality that pay closer attention to human

cognitive limitations and recognize considerable scope for

rational disagreement The central role attributed to rules

in rational evaluations has also been challenged

Follow-ing rules is not always required, since one task of rational

assessment is to determine which rules should be

fol-lowed in a particular situation To insist that this decision

must be made by following other rules can create an

*infin-ite regress that would make it impossible to arrive at

ratio-nal results in many situations that serve as paradigms of

reason, such as constructing mathematical proofs or

eval-uating scientific hypotheses Nor is following rules—even

correct rules of logic—automatically rational Consider

again an individual who is constructing a logical proof:

this individual must decide which rules to apply at each

stage of the proof Mindlessly applying rules just because

they are logically correct is foolish In addition, Kuhn and

others have argued that there are no fixed rules of

scien-tific method Rather, we must learn what the correct rules

of method are as science develops These considerations

suggest that our ability to be rational depends on a basic

ability to exercise intelligent judgement that cannot be

completely captured in systems of rules

h.i.b

*reasoning; maximin and minimax

H Brown, Rationality (London, 1988).

C Cherniak, Minimal Rationality (Cambridge, Mass., 1986).

A R Mele and P Rawling (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Rational-ity (New York, 2003).

N Rescher, Rationality (Oxford, 1988).

ravens, paradox of the A problem in *confirmation the-ory to which attention was first drawn by Hempel Prima facie, a generalization such as ‘All ravens are black’ is con-firmed by—gains strength from—each new observed instance of a black raven But this generalization is logic-ally equivalent to ‘Anything which is not black is not a raven’ And this latter generalization is confirmed by each new instance of a non-black non-raven, such as white handkerchiefs and pale pine writing-desks So, if we accept the seemingly innocent principle that whatever confirms

a hypothesis h also confirms any hypothesis logically equivalent to h, we must conclude that observations of

white handkerchiefs will confirm that all ravens are black—which would render ornithology paradoxically easy Yet it is not obvious which of the premisses of this

C G Hempel, ‘Studies in the Logic of Confirmation’, in Aspects of Scientific Explanation and Other Essays in the Philosophy of Science

(New York, 1965)

Rawls, John (1921–2002) Major social and political philosopher Educated at Princeton, he taught at Cornell

and Harvard, and in 1971 published A Theory of Justice,

whose leading idea is that of *justice as fairness—the hope for social institutions that do not confer morally arbitrary lifelong advantages on some persons at the expense of others This condemns as unjust not only racial, sexual, and religious discrimination, but also many forms of social and economic inequality; the view is a strongly egalitarian form of *liberalism It is based on a new form of social

*contract theory—not an actual social contract but a hypothetical one

We are to imagine ourselves in an *original position of equality, in which we do not know most of the socially sig-nificant facts about ourselves—race, sex, religion, eco-nomic class, social standing, natural abilities, even our conception of the good life Under this *veil of ignorance,

we are to decide what principles we could agree to on the basis of a desire to further our own aims and interests, whatever they may be Not knowing our position in soci-ety or our conception of the good, we are driven by this fiction to an equal concern for the fate of everyone, and Rawls maintains that we would give priority in choice of principles to avoiding the worst possible life prospects, with emphasis first on the preservation of personal and political liberty and second on the amelioration of socio-economic inequality

The principles he defends are: (1) each individual is to have a right to the greatest equal liberty compatible with a

like liberty for all; (2) (a) social and economic inequalities

are to be attached to offices and positions open to all under

786 rationality

conditions of fair equality of opportunity; and (b) such

inequalities are justified only if they benefit the worst-off

(the *difference principle) The first principle has priority

over the second, and both principles are to govern not

detailed political choices but the basic

structures—polit-ical, economic, and social—which determine people’s

chances in life Equal *liberty rules out persecution,

dis-crimination, and political oppression Equal *opportunity

ensures that those with equal ability and motivation have

equal chances of success, whatever class they are born

into The difference principle allows unequal abilities to

produce differential rewards only to the extent that this is

instrumentally necessary for the good of all, especially the

least fortunate (for example, by providing the incentives

which fuel productivity)

Rawls opposes *utilitarianism, holding that the

max-imum total good may not be pursued by means which

impose unfair disadvantages on minorities, including the

unskilled More generally, he claims that the right is prior

to and independent of the good, and cannot be defined as

that which will promote or maximize the good Certain

conditions on the social relations between people and the

way they may be treated take precedence over the

pro-duction of desirable results This is opposed to the idea

that rights are just human conventions justified

instru-mentally by their usefulness in promoting the general

welfare

In numerous essays after the book, some collected in

Political Liberalism (New York, 1993), Rawls further

develops the theory of *justice and its relation to general

moral theory and moral epistemology He employs what

he calls the method of ‘reflective equilibrium’, by which

coherence in our moral views is achieved through mutual

adjustment between particular moral judgements,

gen-eral principles, and theoretical constructions like the

social contract which model the ideas of morality t.n

*equality; inequality; contractarianism

B Barry, Theories of Justice (Berkeley, Calif., 1989).

N Daniels (ed.), Reading Rawls (New York, 1975).

Thomas Pogge, Realizing Rawls (Ithaca, NY, 1989).

J Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, Mass., 1971; new edn.

1999)

—— Political Liberalism (Cambridge, Mass., 1993).

—— The Law of Peoples (Cambridge, Mass., 1999).

—— Lectures on the History of Moral Philosophy (Cambridge, Mass.,

2000)

Raz, Joseph(1941– ) Legal, moral, and political

philoso-pher, based in Oxford since 1970 Principally known for

three theories First, a conception of *authority invoking

second-order practical reasons, reasons in favour of or

against acting on an existing reason one might have to act

(or not to act) Authority requires second-order reasons

not to consider the independent merits of performing

actions commanded, and these reasons must not

them-selves be based on those merits The theory is used to

develop a qualified form of *legal positivism Secondly,

his interest theory of *rights sees rights as successful

justifications for imposing duties on others, based on the recognition of the fundamental interests of creatures capable of possessing rights (persons) Thirdly, he is the best-known contemporary proponent of the political theory of *perfectionism, which holds that liberal states should not be neutral across the values and practices

of their citizens, but should in fact promote individual life-styles which most advance personal *autonomy

s.m.-g

*law and morals

J Raz, The Authority of Law (Oxford, 1979).

—— The Morality of Freedom (Oxford, 1986).

—— Practical Reason and Norms (Oxford, 1990).

real.‘Real’ is often used with some opposite term in mind, such as ‘ideal’, or ‘fake’ In these cases, one can infer from

‘A is not a real F’ that A is not an F at all (one of the things

that tempts philosophers to equate ‘real’ with ‘existent’) Hence to contrast ‘real’ with a term like ‘relational’ may

mislead: from ‘A was a relational change’ one can infer that

A was a change.

If ‘reality’ is taken to be the sum total of all that is real, then for ‘real’ we do have to read something like ‘existent’ Talk of such a sum total may itself be problematic, of course: it can smack of treating ‘everything’ as a name for

*appearance and reality; existence; ‘to be’, the verb; being; transcendence

J L Austin, Sense and Sensibilia (Oxford, 1963), 70.

Realism, Critical: see Critical Realism.

realism, direct: see nạve realism.

realism, legal: see legal realism.

realism, mathematical: see mathematics, history of the

philosophy of; mathematics, problems of the philosophy of; Platonism

realism, moral: see moral realism.

realism, nạve: see nạve realism.

Realism, New: see New Realism.

realism, quasi-: see quasi-realism.

realism and anti-realism Primarily directions, not pos-itions To assert that something is somehow mind-independent is to move in the realist direction; to deny it is

to move in the opposite direction No sane position is reached at either extreme Not everything is in every way independent of minds; if there were no minds, there would be no pain Not everything depends in every way

on minds; if I forget that Halley’s comet exists, it does not cease to exist Many philosophical questions have the

realism and anti-realism 787

general form: Is such-and-such mind-independent in

and-so way? Given specifications of such-and-such and

so-and-so, one may call someone who answers ‘Yes’ a realist

Since different philosophers take different specifications

for granted, the word ‘realism’ is used in a bewildering

variety of senses

In medieval scholastic philosophy, realism was a theory

of predication opposed to *nominalism and conceptualism.

On a realist analysis, the sentence ‘Snow is white’ is true if

and only if the substance snow has the property of

white-ness; whiteness exists independently of our thought and

talk, just as snow does Unlike substances, properties are

predicative: their nature is to be properties of something

In contrast, conceptualists deny that any thing predicative

exists independently of thought; the truth of ‘Snow is

white’ requires only our concept of white to apply to

snow Nominalists go further, holding the only

predica-tive item required for the truth of ‘Snow is white’ to be the

word ‘white’ itself, whose existence depends on a

particu-lar language, not just on a kind of thought

Kant opposed realism to *idealism, distinguishing

tran-scendental and empirical versions of each The empirical

realist holds (like Kant) that we can have knowledge of the

existence and nature of material objects in space and time

The transcendental realist holds (unlike Kant) that the

existence and nature of the objects so known is wholly

independent of our knowledge of them Kant argued that

the two kinds of realism make an untenable combination,

because perception yields knowledge only of

appear-ances Thus the empirical realist should be a

transcenden-tal idealist, for whom material objects are nothing beyond

their appearances to us; the transcendental realist should

be an empirical idealist, a sceptic However, the argument

relies on the dubious premiss that *perception yields

knowledge only of appearances Realists may deny that

the nature and existence of what we perceive (e.g a tree)

depends on our perception of it Perhaps the dependence

is the other way round: my perception of the tree depends

essentially on the tree, because I could not have had that

perception without perceiving that tree If so, the

combin-ation of transcendental and empirical realism may be

defensible

After Kant, ‘realism’ meant above all the view that we

perceive objects whose existence and nature are

independ-ent of our perceptions The issue has subsequindepend-ently been

generalized For any linguistic or psychological act (e.g a

judgement, a perception), one can ask whether it involves

a relation to something independent of it That something

(e.g a property, a material object) would constitute an

independent standard of correctness for the act The

stand-ard makes the act correct only if they are related Realists

see anti-realists as sacrificing the independence to the

rela-tion; anti-realists see realists as sacrificing the relation to

the independence

An independent standard of correctness need not be a

particular thing To discuss whether the judgement ‘Rape

is wrong’ is correct independently of being judged is to

dis-cuss the objectivity of moral truth, not the existence of

moral objects (to adapt Kreisel’s remark that what matters

is the objectivity of mathematical truth, not the existence

of mathematical objects) The existence of objects is rele-vant only when it is required for a judgement to be true The truth of a perceptual judgement may depend on the existence of trees, that of a scientific theory on the exist-ence of electrons

Realism is still accused of leading to *scepticism by dis-connecting our beliefs from their standard of correctness

To know something is to believe it because it is true, but to assume that a belief is true in the realist sense is not to explain why it is believed The problem is particularly acute where the realist cannot postulate a causal connec-tion between the facts and our beliefs How, for example, could our belief that 5 + 7 = 12 be caused by a fact about abstract objects? Even where a causal connection is postu-lated, e.g between the existence of electrons and our belief that electrons exist, the question is whether it is of a kind to help the realist If the observational evidence can

be explained by many mutually inconsistent theories, how except by luck can we choose the true one?

Many anti-realists take the argument further, giving it a linguistic turn They infer that we cannot even understand what realist *truth is; the epistemologically inaccessible is also semantically inaccessible If we could never know the realist *facts, how could we even think about them? Real-ism is held to make nonsense of our thought and talk by attributing to it an unintelligible standard of correctness Anti-realist alternatives take many forms It may be global or restricted to a local practice (anti-realist accounts

of morality and realist accounts of natural science often reflect the same confidence in a scientific world-picture) The anti-realist may hold (1) the practice does not involve judgements at all, or (2) the judgements it involves are incorrect, or (3) they are correct only in some mind-dependent sense

1 *Emotivists treat moral principles as expressions of approval or disapproval Formalists treat mathematical

proofs as series of moves in a formal game like chess

Instrumentalists treat scientific theories as

calculating-instruments used to predict future experience In each case, apparent judgements are treated as not really candi-dates for truth Emotivists say ‘Rape is wrong’ while deny-ing that ‘Rape is wrong’ is genuinely true This risks inconsistency: given the usual practice in speaking of truth, if rape is wrong then ‘Rape is wrong’ is true

2 Error theorists treat morality as a vast illusion; moral

judgements are untrue because no values exist to make

them true *Eliminativists believe that neuroscience has

refuted everyday psychology by showing that beliefs and desires do not exist Even the truth of arithmetic has been denied on the grounds that numbers do not exist On such views, we are mistaken in judging ‘Rape is wrong’, ‘I want

a drink’, or ‘5 + 7 = 12’; although what we say may be use-ful, it is not literally true

3 The truth of ordinary judgements may be admitted, but treated as mind-dependent, in order to allow us access

788 realism and anti-realism

to it Mind-dependence comes in many varieties

Stipula-tion provides an extreme case By stipulating that my fish

is named ‘Mary’, I make it true that my fish is named

‘Mary’; my knowledge of that truth is correspondingly

unproblematic Both fictional and mathematical truth

have been assimilated to the stipulative model A story is

created by being told; anti-realists have called

mathemat-ics the free creation of the human mind The model is

more complex than it appears Stipulating something does

not automatically make it true Some stipulations are

inconsistent, others made without due authority

In most practices, no single act of stipulation is

authori-tative A river is named ‘Thames’ by long-standing

agree-ment Anyone can mistake the name, but the mistake lies

only in deviation from social consensus (the people

can-not all be fooled) However, this is still an extreme model

of mind-dependence Many practices would be radically

changed if their participants came to regard the truth of

their judgements as constituted by present consensus As

we now think of morality, we allow that everyone in our

society may share a false moral belief, all being blind to

some morally relevant consideration

A more subtly mind-dependent standard of truth is

con-sensus in the long run By refining our current morality we

might eventually overcome our present blindness Such a

standard has been suggested for science as well as

moral-ity Of course, we must not achieve the long-run

consen-sus by lapsing into barbarism What counts is an

imaginary long run in which rational inquiry is pursued,

unhindered by the contingent limitations of finite humans

in constricting environments Mind-dependent truth

becomes something like idealized rational acceptability,

in Putnam’s phrase The mind on which truth depends is

not the human mind, as described by empirical

psych-ology, or groups of human minds, as described by

empiri-cal sociology; it is an ideal mind, as prescribed by

normative rules embodied in our thought and talk

Hegel’s objective idealism prefigured this view.

Rational inquiry is not guaranteed to stabilize in

consen-sus We cannot assume that each moral disagreement will

be resolved, or that historians will discover who killed the

Princes in the Tower, or that mathematicians will either

prove or refute Goldbach’s conjecture (‘Every even

num-ber greater than 2 is the sum of two primes’) If truth

implies consensus, we cannot assume that either a

propos-ition is true or its negation is This jeopardizes *bivalence,

the principle that every proposition is either true or false

Anti-realism may, as Dummett has argued, require

revi-sions of logic

For realists, a proposition is true or false even if we can

never know which Anti-realists ask how we can grasp

such a standard of truth, if not by magic How can we refer

to conditions whose obtaining we cannot recognize?

Many reject the challenge, arguing that such notions

can-not be reduced to more basic terms Others accept it

Some argue that reference is a causal relation; our use

of, for example, the word ‘rain’ is causally related to a

condition that also obtained in the inaccessible past The idea that the world contains mind-independent condi-tions, properties, and relations is central to such an account; scholastic realism supports modern realism When we have a thought, its truth or falsity is not a fact about us, unless we are thinking about ourselves But it is

a fact about us that we are having that thought In having

it, we refer to what it is about *Reference to something requires at least indirect acquaintance with it, and there-fore with states of affairs involving it Such acquaintance constitutes knowledge Thus a pre-condition of thinking about something is possession of at least some knowledge about it Realists and anti-realists may agree that such a pre-condition exists For anti-realists, it is substantial Reflection on it uncovers surprising incoherences in our thought of things as independent of us For realists, the pre-condition is minimal It permits us no end of

*coherence theory of truth; correspondence theory of truth

M Devitt, Realism and Truth, 2nd edn (Oxford, 1991).

M Dummett, Truth and Other Enigmas (London, 1978).

T Nagel, The View from Nowhere (Oxford, 1986).

H Putnam, Realism and Reason (Cambridge, 1983).

realism in metaphysics.A problem of metaphysics much discussed in recent decades is that of realism But the first

problem here is how to formulate the problem Here is one

way:

Realism: Tokens of most common-sense, and scientific, physical

types exist objectively, independently of the mental This, however, can be variously interpreted; here is just one possibility:

Realism 1: Most physical types commonly postulated by

human-ity have tokens that exist as such independently of the mental: i.e these tokens might have existed and might have been of their respective types even had there been nothing mental

One problem with this is that the truth of realism would require that there be humanity, and that it postulate types, indeed physical types Surely the philosophical doctrine or realism is not specifically about humanity and what humanity does or does not postulate So we try again

Realism 2: Consider the physical types commonly postulated by

humanity, and the statements, about each of these, that its tokens exist independently of the mental Real-ism is the doctrine that most of these statements are true

This is a realist doctrine all right But so is the doctrine about the first physical type mentioned in the Bible and the statement that its tokens exist independently of the mental And there are indefinitely many ‘realist’ doctrines

of a similar cast, all of which seem inappropriately tied to the vagaries of human postulation Why should realism

be restricted to these statements, or, worse, to most of

them?

realism in metaphysics 789