The Oxford Companion to Philosophy Part 96 pptx

Type 0 items are ordinary objects, which are not properties.. Type 1 items are properties of ordinary objects; type 2 items are properties of type 1 properties, etc.. Type 1, level 0 pro

Timothy J McGrew, David Shier, and Harry S Silverstein, ‘The

Two-envelope Paradox Resolved’, Analysis (1995).

tychism:see Peirce.

type:see token.

types, theory of Let r be the set of all sets that are not

members of themselves: {x|x∉ x} It follows that r∈ r if

and only if r∉ r, a contradiction This is known as

*Rus-sell’s paradox A similar result can be obtained from the

property of those properties that do not hold of

them-selves (i.e R(P) if and only if ¬P(P) ) Type theory avoids

these consequences by segregating properties, relations,

and sets into ‘types’ Type 0 items are ordinary objects,

which are not properties Type 1 items are properties of

ordinary objects; type 2 items are properties of type 1

properties, etc ‘Personhood’ is type 1, and ‘holding of

exactly six objects’ is type 2 Things get more complex when relations are considered There is, for example, a type of relations between type 1 properties and ordinary objects In ‘ramified type theory’, types are further segre-gated into levels Type 1, level 0 properties are those that can be defined with reference to type 0 items (ordinary objects) alone Type 1, level 1 properties are those that can

be defined with reference to type 0 items and type 1, level

0 properties, etc In general, each property must be defined with reference to only properties of lower type and properties of its type but lower level ‘Simple type the-ory’ does not employ levels, and allows unrestricted, or

*higher-order logic; vicious circle; reducibility, axiom of; logic, history of

Allen Hazen, ‘Predicative Logics’, in D Gabbay and F Guenthner

(eds.), Handbook of Philosophical Logic, i (Dordrecht, 1983).

930 two-envelope paradox

ugliness. The property of having aesthetic disvalue,

eliciting not indifference but discomfort or misery Modes

of ugliness in art correspond to the various modes

of beauty or aesthetic value If the mode is formal, ugliness

is the ill-formed or deformed, misshapen, ill-placed If

the mode is expressive, the ugly may be the sentimental,

the mawkish, clichéd, sickening: or it may arise from

uncontrolled emotion—bombastic, ranting, or hysterical

If considered from a representational point of view,

the objects represented may be judged unrelievedly

disagreeable or painful to contemplate Nevertheless,

art can make use of the ugly; and the question must always

be asked: Does this prima facie ugly work possess any

justifying, compensating features—perhaps social or

moral point? Or has this ugly component been

trans-formed—by the medium—by the context—to be an

ingredient in a new whole with positive aesthetic value?

r.w.h

*beauty

There is a dearth of recent substantial discussions One locus

clas-sicus is Plotinus, Enneads, i 6 See also Bernard Bosanquet, Three

Lectures on Aesthetics (London, 1915).

Unamuno, Miguel de (1865–1936) Multi-faceted Spanish

writer (novelist, poet, essayist) and professor (philologist)

Deeply concerned about the meaning of life and death,

which inspired all his writings, and dissatisfied by the

scep-tical answers of science and reason as regards eternal life,

Unamuno argued for an existential attitude—the ‘tragic

sense of life’—consisting in acting as if human life has in

fact a transcendent significance, even given our

uncer-tainty that it has

Unamuno found this attitude exemplified in lonely

heroes such as Don Quixote and Jesus: men who, despite

their respective folly and doubts (or maybe because of

them), carried out their missions, thus redeeming

them-selves and others This attitude has a clear religious

dimension, closer to Protestant spirituality than to

Span-ish orthodox Catholicism In fact, some of Unamuno’s

works were included in the Index, until the Second

R R Ellis, The Tragic Pursuit of Being: Unamuno and Sartre

(Tuscaloosa, Ala., 1988)

uncertainty principle Also called the indeterminacy principle, it is based on the orthodox (‘Copenhagen’) interpretation of a set of mathematical inequalities entailed by *quantum mechanics, called uncertainty rela-tions Roughly, these put a fundamental limit on the accur-acy with which one can simultaneously predict the values

of certain pairs of physical magnitudes (termed ‘incom-patible’), such as the position and momentum of a parti-cle More precisely, if one can predict that a particle’s position will (most probably) be found on measurement

to fall within some narrow range of values, then accuracy

in predicting its momentum to fall within a similarly nar-row range must be sacrificed, and vice versa Orthodoxy interprets this as more than just a limitation on the statis-tical spread of measurement results, but as a principle gov-erning what can be said about a single particle Heisenberg mainly argued that the limitation is epistemic, preventing the simultaneous determination of a particle’s position and momentum (and so forever blocking the possibility of predicting its future behaviour); while Bohr argued that the limitation is also ontic, rendering inapplicable the clas-sical concepts of ‘position’ and ‘momentum’ to a particle

r.cli

M Jammer, ‘The Indeterminacy Relations’, in The Philosophy of Quantum Mechanics: The Interpretations of Quantum Mechanics in Historical Perspective (New York, 1974).

unconscious and subconscious mind Although Freud claimed to have discovered the unconscious mind, there

is little doubt that the view that there are aspects of our mental life to which we are not privy was widely avail able throughout the nineteenth century Anticipations are to be found in Leibniz, Schelling, and Nietzsche Freud’s own preference was for the term ‘unconscious’ rather than ‘subconscious’, which was also widely used,

on the grounds that the latter term encourages the equa-tion of the psychical with the conscious His concepequa-tion

of the unconscious allows that we may possess wishes which may be inaccessible to us Freud believed that we need assistance from *psychoanalysis to recover them

r.a.s

H F Ellenberger, The Discovery of the Unconscious (New York,

1970)

U

undecidability.Term not only used in the philosophy of

mathematics but also deployed by Jacques Derrida and

those who have adopted his heterodox procedures in the

deconstructive reading of philosophical and literary texts

Here it signals the impossibility of deciding between

dis-crepant (often contradictory) orders of meaning, as for

instance between the constative and performative, the

lit-eral and metaphoric, or the overt and the latent orders of

*deconstruction; différance; logocentrism; decidability.

Jacques Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, tr Alan Bass (Chicago,

1982)

underdetermination.The problem of underdetermination

concerns the relationship between *theory (scientific

the-ory, or any generalization) and the *empirical data For

any given theory, the evidence will never determine the

choice between that theory and some rival theory The

problem then is to show how theory choice can ever be

*induction; translation, indeterminacy of

W H Newton-Smith, The Rationality of Science (London,

1981)

understanding.What it is about humans, uniquely so far

as is known, that enables us to understand other minds, do

mathematics and science, cheat evolution by

manipulat-ing our environment, and speculate about itself in

philosophy Philosophers debate about the limits of

understanding—for instance, how could we know either

that there are or that there are not things for ever beyond

our grasp? But it is easier to be amazed at its scope Why

should an average mammal on a peripheral planet be able

to fathom the nature of preceding creatures millions of

years back, the interior of stars, the laws of nature, the

early moments of the whole universe? That is far in excess

of what we need in order to get by, as the other animals

(who do not reciprocate our interest in them) get by The

most astounding thing in the world, it may seem, is that

we can understand it and the creatures within it So much

understood so recently Yet the brains of Stone Age people

were as capacious as ours I wonder if they felt the same

*thinking; belief; cognition; wisdom

John Leslie, Universes (London, 1989), e.g ch 5.

L Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (Oxford, 1953), sects.

143–242

underworld of philosophy: see philosophy, world and

underworld

undistributed middle It was a rule of traditional logic

that the middle term of a valid *syllogism (the term

com-mon to the premisses) must be distributed in at least one

of its occurrences: not meeting this requirement was the

fallacy of undistributed middle (*Distribution of terms.)

On this view

All who train regularly are fit All Olympic athletes are fit Therefore, all who train regularly are Olympic athletes

is invalid because the middle term (‘those who are fit’) is in both instances the predicate of a universal affirmative (*logic, traditional) and therefore undistributed The uneasy wording of the rule, which permits the middle term to be distributed either once or twice, reflects weak-nesses in the standard doctrine of distribution c.w

J N Keynes, Formal Logic, 4th edn (London, 1906), 288–94.

unhappy consciousness: see alienation; Feuerbach.

uniformity of nature Newton stated that certain qual-ities (such as inertia and impenetrability) ‘which are found

to belong to all bodies within the reach of our experience, are to be esteemed the universal qualities of all bodies whatsoever’ Such an inference must be based, Mill said,

on the ‘ultimate major premise’ that ‘the course of nature

is uniform’ Taking that to mean that ‘whatever is true in any one case, is true in all cases of a certain description’, Mill thought that ‘the only difficulty is, to find what description’ But any doubts about the truth of such gen-eralizations are not settled by invoking as an assumption the alleged ‘uniformity of nature’: without the relevant descriptions the principle is empty, while with them it says

no more than the generalizations themselves m.c

*grue; induction

E Nagel, The Structure of Science (London, 1961).

union theory The union theory concerns the relation between mental events and neural events, and their com-bined causal efficacy It holds that all types of mental event are nomically correlated with types of neural event, that the correlation is most likely to be that of one type of men-tal event with one of many types of neural event, and that these ‘psychoneural’ correlates are pairs The last idea is the most distinctive and original component of the the-ory Psychoneural pairs are thought to function as a causal unit, in other words as a single cause and effect of things, rather than being separable into individual causes and effects The principal recommendation of the theory is that it allows for the irreducibility of the mental while

*consciousness, its irreducibility

T Honderich, A Theory of Determinism (Oxford, 1988), chs 2

and 3

unity of science The unity of science, in its traditional positivistic formulation, is the view that all science is reducible to physics, in that lawful relations for any sci-ence can be derived in an appropriate way from the laws of physics Alternatively, the unity of science might be understood as a methodological constraint on scientific-theory formation, where reduction to physics plays a

932 undecidability

regulatory role in scientific practice Many philosophers

(e.g Fodor) argue that the special sciences, such as

psychology, are legitimate even though they cannot in

*reductionism

A classical statement is R Carnap, The Unity of Science, tr Max

Black (London, 1934) Cf J Fodor, The Language of Thought

(Cam-bridge, Mass., 1979), ch 1

universal grammar A set of principles true of all human

languages and thought to be mentally represented in the

minds of language-users The principles characterize the

genetically determined initial state of the language

fac-ulty—a biological endowment, specific to the human

species, which provides the innate conditions for the

growth of linguistic knowledge in the individual Grammars

for particular languages result from the exposure of the

language faculty to the available linguistic data b.c.s

*grammar

N Chomsky, ‘On Cognitive Structures and their Development’,

in M Piattelli-Palmarini (ed.), Language and Learning: The

Debate between Jean Piaget and Noam Chomsky (London, 1980).

V Cook, Chomsky’s Universal Grammar (Oxford, 1988).

universalizability. A judgement about an individual

instance of a certain kind is universalizable if it applies also

to every relevantly similar instance of that kind An

assumption of universalizability underlies appeals to the

*golden rule (in ethics), the uniformity of nature (in

sci-ence), equality before the law (in jurisprudsci-ence), logical

form (in deductive proof), reasonableness (in

common-sense inference), etc In sum, all arguments about

individ-ual things ought to be universalizable l.j.c

R M Hare, Moral Thinking: Its Levels, Method and Point (Oxford,

1981), 107–29

universalizability, moral The concept of

*universaliz-ability has been thought by some philosophers to provide

a rational basis for moral principles of impartiality and

justice It is suggested that, if I maintain that I ought to act

in a certain way towards others, the universalizability of

‘ought’ requires me to accept that others ought to act in

the same way towards me This then commits me, it is

said, to accepting only those ‘ought’ judgements which

give the same consideration to others’ interests as to

my own

Critics have retorted that this is an attempt to build too

much on the purely formal requirement of consistency I

can be a consistent egoist; if I think that I ought to pursue

my own interests, universalizability commits me only to

accepting that others ought also to pursue their own

inter-ests And why should I not accept this? r.j.n

R M Hare, Freedom and Reason (Oxford, 1963).

universal proposition In traditional logic propositions

construed as having the form ‘All S are P’ or ‘No S are P’

(which implies ‘All S are not P’) were called universal and

contrasted with the particular forms ‘Some S are P’ and

‘Some S are not P’ In *predicate calculus, propositions like

‘All men are mortal’ are represented as having the form

‘For all x: if x is S, x is P’, which may be symbolized as

P F Strawson, Introduction to Logical Theory (London, 1952),

chs 6 and 7

universal quantifier:see quantifier.

universals.Universals are the supposed referents of gen-eral terms like ‘red’, ‘table’, and ‘tree’, understood as entities distinct from any of the particular *things describ-able by those terms But why should we suppose that such entities exist, and what must be their nature if they do? One traditional argument for their existence, traceable to Plato, is that they are needed to explain why all and only the particular things correctly describable as red, say, are indeed correctly describable as such Surely all these dis-tinct particular things must have something identifiable in common in order to be legitimately classified alike?—and that which is common to all and only red things is pre-cisely the universal red Red things are all red by virtue of their relationship to this one universal, according to trad-itional ‘realism’ As to the nature of this relationship and the nature of universals themselves, however, realists are divided ‘Platonists’ hold that the universal red has a non-spatio-temporal existence distinct and separable from all particular red things, which need not even exist in order for that universal to exist ‘Aristotelians’ hold, conversely, that the universal red only exists inseparably from the exist-ence of particular red things But the Platonic view creates difficulties concerning the relationship between particular red things and the universal red, while the Aristotelian view seems to render the sense in which universals are

‘real’ somewhat tenuous Furthermore, the argument just mentioned for the existence of universals is not entirely convincing ‘Conceptualism’ holds that our classification

of particulars under general terms is a product of our selec-tive human interests rather than a reflection of meta-physical truth, while *‘nominalism’ holds that resem-blances between particulars are sufficient to justify our application of the same general term to them without appeal to any additional entity

However, the failure of one traditional argument for realism and internal difficulties in certain realist positions

do not suffice to undermine the realist case In recent years new arguments for realism have emerged which invoke universals to explain the status of natural laws and causal generalizations Philosophers like D M Armstrong urge that natural necessity is to be explained as a relationship between universals, and that only by appeal to this notion can the logical distinction between lawlike and accidental generalizations be captured On this view, it is not neces-sary to suppose that every meaningful general term refers

to a real universal, since only those universals need be admitted that play a role in scientific laws Hence this view need not be embarrassed by Wittgenstein’s observation

universals 933

that there are general terms like ‘game’ for which it seems

impossible to isolate any single feature common to all and

only the particulars to which it applies

Another reason why a realist need not be totally

undis-criminating about general terms is that such terms clearly

fall into a number of distinct semantic categories, not all of

which equally invite a realist treatment Thus, of the three

general terms mentioned at the outset—‘red’, ‘table’, and

‘tree’—only the latter two are *sortals, and of these only

the last is a natural-kind term Sortals differ from general

terms like ‘red’ in that they convey not only a criterion of

application but also a criterion of identity for the

particu-lar things to which they apply Since particuparticu-lars cannot be

individuated at all save relative to an appropriate sortal

classification, it is arguable that realism with regard to

par-ticulars demands realism with regard to at least some

uni-versals, namely, those that are the putative referents of

bona fide natural kind terms. e.j.l

*qualities; properties; properties, individual

D M Armstrong, Universals and Scientific Realism (Cambridge,

1978)

M J Loux (ed.), Universals and Particulars (New York, 1970).

E J Lowe, Kinds of Being (Oxford, 1989).

universals, concrete: see concrete universals.

unlikely philosophical propositions Perhaps most

philosophers are ready enough to make a list of these

Cer-tainly in their talk they give evidence of having the

mater-ials ready to hand Philosopher-editors, being accessories

to the publication of much that by their lights is unlikely to

be true, maybe even a thing or two that are just confused,

are readier to make a list It may be a cri de cœur Here is

mine

1 Philosophy is one subject in which formal logic is

funda-mental This book is a proof that philosophy is a family of

subjects, indeed an unruly one In that family, as the book

also demonstrates, formal logic is neither father nor even

elder brother (Maybe philosophical logic has more claim

to such a position, but still not a large claim.) How many

large philosophical problems have been solved or made

more tractable by formal logic? Have any? Why is there

no formal logic to speak of in the greatest works of

philosophy?

2 A service is done to students or other innocents, or to logic,

by those logicians who allow it to be thought that the ordinary ‘If

then ’ thoughts that we depend on in life and science

some-how come down to a thing, fundamental to a basic part of logic

and called a material implication, which by definition is true

except when its first part is true and its second part false If you

are tempted to go along with the idea, reflect on ‘If

Holly-wood is in California, then Edinburgh is in Scotland.’ Do

not neglect, either, ‘If Edinburgh is in California, then

Aristotle was a photographer’

3 Our own conscious thoughts and feelings are not different

from electrochemical events in our brains They are nothing but

electrochemical events which are causally or logically related to

certain other things, notably what is called input and output.

This is the root proposition of functionalism, cognitive sci-ence, and much psychologized and computerized philoso-phy of mind in so far as it applies to us rather than computers, Martians, or whatever else If it is true, then what we are most sure about does not exist

4 If you and I both see the same copy of this book, there are two objects of awareness in question—each of us is just aware of

a subjective thing, a ‘sense-datum’ or whatever Great

philoso-phers have thought so They have thought in this way about the external world in general If so, as far as percep-tion goes, each of us is in a kind of perpetual solitary con-finement No books, either There's got to be something

wrong with that, doesn't there, even if perceptual

con-sciousness like the rest of concon-sciousness somehow has a subjective side?

5 The truth of a statement about the world, say about the weight of this book, does not consist in the statement’s corres-ponding to actual things, but in some quite different relation, maybe one of coherence with other statements If so, whatever

the attractions of anti-realism for mathematics and logical systems, the world is as incidental to truth as it is to con-sistent imagining Nor, by the way, can difficulties in get-ting clear about the general relation between language and the world, or the mistake of talking about facts rather than things, reduce us to the deflationary policy of saying

‘ “Snow is white” is true if and only if snow is white’, and a like thing about any other proposition—and saying no more than that

6 ‘In the possible world where I’m wearing brown shoes and

a hat ’ can mean something other than and grander than ‘In this world, if I were wearing brown shoes and a hat ’ Some

who want to give a helping hand to modal logic think so, and some others, a lot more, mystify the impressionable

by joining into the talk Conditional statements, and notably the counterfactual ones, aren’t easy to explain, but we can get somewhere without the science fiction

7 An effect is not something that had to happen or was neces-sitated, but just an event which was preceded by something necessary to it, something without which the event wouldn’t have happened If so, we can say our choices and decisions

are effects without getting worried about whether we have free will But effects aren’t what we thought they were, which is things that actually have explanations

8 An effect by itself, as distinct from a thought of it in advance

or earlier similar effects or anything else, sometimes explains why its cause happened This, the ancient and wonderful

idea of teleological or functional explanation, is some-times veiled by technicalities, somesome-times turns up in Marxist reflections on base and superstructure, and is sometimes discerned in biology The idea is aided by the example, about which it is a good idea to think again, that birds have hollow bones because that enables them to fly better

9 Moral judgements, say the judgement ‘Socialism is morally right’, are not a matter of our disputable attitudes or inclin-ations, but are like ‘That rose is red’, which, although it is some-how dependent on our perceptual apparatus, is definitely true or

934 universals

false in the plain sense This, too good to be true, has stolen

the name of moral realism Maybe moral judgements can

be rooted in real truths of human nature That is a

differ-ent realism, less dramatic but more reassuring

10 There are moral reasons for actions that do not rest on

consequences of those actions So consequentialism as it is called

is a mistake, a low one The idea is edifying but surely it can't

be right A moral reason, like any reason, is a kind of desire

that an action is to satisfy How could there be such a

desire without reference to consequences of or in the

action? How could the reason ‘He’s my son’ be such?

Sup-posedly non-consequentialist reasons are about somehow

self-serving consequences, aren't they?

11 To argue for punishment by saying, in one way or

another, that it is deserved or is a retribution is to give some

rea-son for it other than the disagreeable one that it satisfies

griev-ances—desires for the distress of offenders What is offered

instead in analysis or explanation of arguments of desert

or retribution is usually high-minded, but not such as to

provide an actual reason

12 There is some principle of justice or equality or

well-being, or some other principle of political morality, that should

have priority over this: that we must seek by rational means to

make well-off those who are badly off, one of our means being the

reducing of demands for rewards by larger contributors to

soci-ety I don’t think we’ll find anything closer to true than the

Principle of Humanity In liberalism or anything else

13 Philosophy, to come back to that whole subject, has less to

contribute to the understanding of realities of one kind and

another than science, literature, economics, history, or

nar-rower specialities You can think instead that there is a

div-ision of labour in thinking about consciousness, the world

of which Quantum Theory as interpreted is a theory,

time, free will, genes, terrorism, and more There are

sci-entific and other disasters in those neighbourhoods

Decent philosophy's contribution, as essential as any, is a

general logic—a clarity, consistency and completeness

We can't get along without it There should be a book,

too, on why science regularly gets philosophical subjects

so wrong

Why are philosophers not detained by the certainty

that their published or unpublished lists of unlikely

philo-sophical propositions have no chance of being widely

accepted as unlikely? (There is some philosopher, decent

enough and paid for his work, whose list contains exactly

the contradictories of the propositions above.) Does this

show that philosophy is the particular line of life whose

questions are hardest, and that surviving in its resulting

cli-mate of uncertainty brings out bumptiousness? t.h

*Honderich

unsaturated expression An expression that needs

sup-plementation before it has what Frege calls a complete

sense; an expression that refers to functions, not objects

Frege views an expression such as ‘Caesar conquered

Gaul’ as analysable into two sorts of constituents, one

complete in itself and the other unsaturated ‘Caesar’ and

‘Gaul’ are of the first sort; these refer to objects ‘—— conquered ——’ is of the second sort; it must have its blanks ‘saturated’ before it can express a complete sense Other examples of unsaturated expressions are ‘the father

of ——’ and ‘either —— or ——’ Observe that the notion

of unsaturated expression is quite different from Russell’s notion of *incomplete symbol Frege explains the notion

in, among other places, ‘Function and Concept’, in

Collected Papers on Mathematics, Logic, and Philosophy

Upanishads.Theoretical sections of the orally transmit-ted corpus of sacred Sanskrit literature called ‘Veda’ and traditionally believed to have no beginning in time The Upanishads were compiled in India 400 to 500 years before Socrates These parts of the Vedic corpus were so named

because pupils had to sit (s.ad) down (ni) close (upa) to their

teacher to learn them There are nearly 100 of them, many

of which are apocryphal The twelve principal ones include texts called ‘The Lord’, ‘By Whom?’, ‘Questions’,

‘The Big Forest’, etc Commenting upon these major Upanishads was essential for a philosopher starting a new school of *Veda¯nta The Upanishads use the forms of dia-logue, anecdote, parable, and allegory to make their point For example, we find a dialogue in the court of philoso-pher-king Janaka between Ya¯jñavalkya and a woman philosopher Ga¯rgı¯ about the phenomenology of dreams and deep sleep; the anecdotes of the candid son of a prosti-tute who was treated as belonging to the highest caste of priests because of his love of truth, and of the young lad Nachiketas walking up to the palace of Death to ask about the afterlife; a parable of ten people who could never find the tenth because no one counted himself; the allegory of transcendental and empirical selves as two birds on a branch, one watching the other nibble at objects of experi-ence There are also pieces of straightforward reasoning like ‘Fear and constraint come from a second, therefore to realize that the self alone is real without a second, is to be fearless and free’

By distinguishing pleasure from the good, the Upani-shads claim self-knowledge to be the ultimate good The notion of the Self or A¯tman is analysed in much detail, with accounts like that of the ‘five sheaths’ of food, breath, mind, intellect, and bliss being the progressively subtler individuators of consciousness yielding progressively deeper notions of a person True self-knowledge is attained by philosophical reflection supported by greed-less performance of social duties A virtue ethics enjoining truthfulness, universal love, self-control, and inward-ization of the senses is developed with a liberating union

of the self with the world-spirit Brahman, as the final goal

of life

The notion of a world-spirit is arrived at by ignoring structural and functional differences and reducing effects

to their material causes The appeal here is to intuitions like ‘What is the nail-clipper except the steel?’ Such reduc-tive logic is then applied to resolve all objects into inten-tional transformations of the knowing consciousness

Upanishads 935

This witnessing consciousness, like the watching bird

mentioned in the allegory above, can never really be made

an object Since the real is that which stays the same

through change and cannot be thought away, the

undif-ferentiated unlimited pure Consciousness is arrived at as

the stuff of which both we and the world are made

This Supreme Reality is also pure Being and pure Bliss

It is essentially formless and indescribable in words, but

when personalized it is called God or the Lord At its

monistic height, meditation on this first philosophy shows

that I am Brahman, which is all there is Wittgenstein’s

remark that ‘the spirit of the snake is your spirit for it is

only from yourself that you are acquainted with spirit at

all’ (Notebooks, 85e) reveals the impact of the Upanishads,

which trickled down to him through Schopenhauer, who

admits to being deeply influenced by them a.c

*Indian philosophy

Paul Deussen, Philosophy of the Upanishads (New York, 1966).

use and meaning.What gives words their *meaning?

According to Wittgenstein, in his later writings, what

breathes life into dead signs is their use His thesis that

meaning is use replaces views of word meaning as ideas in

the minds of speakers, or as the things words stand for But

what is the relationship between meaning and use? Not

every way of using a word is part of its meaning There are

correct and incorrect uses of words Wittgenstein saw the

correct use of a word as governed by a rule, and supposed

that it was the existence of common rules of use for words

that guaranteed them a meaning among a linguistic

com-munity On this account, meaning does not precede use

but is constituted by rule-governed use of a word Equally,

meaning cannot transcend use: there can be no more to

the meaning of an expression than can be discerned by

observing the use that speakers make of it Thus

Wittgen-stein treats meaning as a public not a private matter

How-ever, problems remain Rules extend beyond any instance

we reach, but how can their indefinite application be

extrapolated from current use? Furthermore, rules

sug-gest a normative dimension to meaning, but which

fea-tures of use reveal these linguistic norms? These problems

remain matters of intense philosophical scrutiny b.c.s

P Horwich, Meaning (Oxford, 2001).

use and mention.A distinction between talk about the

world by means of a word and talk about that word For

example, in ‘Numbers are abstract objects’ the word

‘number’ is used, but in ‘ “Number” has six letters’ the

word ‘number’ is mentioned To mark the distinction, it is

customary to place a word in quotation marks in cases

where it is being mentioned As a test for the distinction,

translate the sentence embedding the word into another

language If the word is mentioned, it is appropriate to

leave it untranslated; if used, inappropriate

It is important to observe the distinction to avoid

con-fusion between ascribing properties to language and

ascribing properties to non-linguistic reality s.p

*formal and material mode

utilitarianismis an approach to morality that treats pleas-ure or desire-satisfaction as the sole element in human good and that regards the morality of actions as entirely dependent on consequences or results for human (or sentient) well-being Utilitarianism has its origins in late seventeenth-century Britain, received its ‘classical’ formulations in the work of Bentham, Mill, and Sidgwick, and has continued to have a prominent place in the Eng-lish-speaking philosophical world up to the present day Bentham and most subsequent utilitarians discard reli-gious traditions and social conventions in favour of treat-ing human *well-betreat-ing or *happiness as the touchstone for all moral evaluation; and in the nineteenth century, in Britain and elsewhere, the doctrine played an important role in democratic and humane political reforms

Present-day utilitarianism is best understood by break-ing it down into its separable elements, by focusbreak-ing on cer-tain formal and controversial aspects of utilitarian thought, and by indicating important variations and dis-agreements within utilitarianism itself In its earliest and

best-known examples, utilitarianism is a hedonistic

doc-trine: it treats pleasure and pain as the sole good and bad things in human lives This *ethical hedonism was origin-ally tied to *psychological hedonism about human motiv-ation Bentham assumed that all humans are basically and exclusively motivated by the desire to gain *pleasure and avoid *pain, but it is possible to maintain ethical hedonism while rejecting, as most present utilitarians are inclined to

do, psychological hedonism However, certain later and contemporary versions of utilitarianism broaden the notion of ethical hedonism so that human or personal good is understood to be constituted by whatever satisfies

people’s desires or preferences or makes people happy.

Utilitarians nowadays also typically accept some form

of outcome utilitarianism (Amartya Sen’s term), according

to which, roughly, the goodness of any state of affairs is solely a matter of how much overall (or average) well-being people (or sentient well-beings generally) are enjoying in that state of affairs But the major ethical element in most

contemporary utilitarianism is direct *consequentialism, the

view that the rightness and goodness of any action, motive, or political institution depends solely on the goodness of the overall state of affairs consequent upon it (this state of affairs includes the act or motive itself) Com-bining these elements (and adding the assumption that

morality requires us to do our best), most current direct (or

act-) utilitarians want to say that an act is morally obliga-tory if and only if it produces a greater balance of pleasure over pain, or of desire satisfaction, than any alternative action available to the agent An act is then morally right,

or not wrong, if it produces as great a balance of pleasure over pain as any alternative action open to the agent (An act may be right but not obligatory if it is tied for first place with one or more alternatives.) These general claims about rightness and obligation are often referred to as (forms of) the principle of *utility

936 Upanishads

jeremy bentham did not invent the principle of utility, but

he devised the first comprehensive theory of utilitarianism

and urged its practical application

john stuart mill, famous first for his system of logic, then for his moral philosophy, devoted himself largely to political reform after the death of his wife Harriet, who had shared his work and influenced him greatly

mary wollstonecraft was one of the ‘English Jacobins’;

social reformers of the revolutionary era at the end of the

eighteenth century She envisioned a new social order

which would free every person to develop her or his own

capabilities

edmund burke, aesthetician, parliamentarian, Conserva-tive icon, scourge of the French Revolutionaries, advocate

of independence for Britain’s overseas territories british political thinkers

On a direct utilitarian view, moral evaluation is a form

of instrumental evaluation: acts are not right or obligatory

because of their inherent character, their underlying

motives, or their relation to divine or social dictates, but

because of how much overall human or sentient

well-being they produce Moreover, if one thinks one should

produce the best state of affairs one can, but believes, for

example, that equality (rather than sheer quantity) of

well-being or (unobserved) natural beauty makes a

fundamen-tal difference to the goodness of states of affairs or

situations, then one may be a consequentialist but one is

not a utilitarian (According to an older, now discarded

usage, such a position would be characterized as ‘ideal

utilitarianism’.)

Some utilitarians reject direct consequentialism in

favour of ‘rule-consequentialism’, according to which the

rightness of an action depends on the consequences not of

the action itself, but of various sets of rules Such indirect

consequentialism says, for example, that an act is right if it

accords with a set of rules whose being accepted, or

fol-lowed, would have consequences as good as those that

would result from any other set of rules’ being accepted,

or followed Act-consequentialism, by contrast, evaluates

actions directly in terms of their own consequences The

chief advantage of rule-consequentialism is that its

evalu-ations of actions accord better with ordinary moral beliefs

and intuitions than familiar forms of act-consequentialism

do For direct (or act-) consequentialism, any means can

be justified by a good-enough end, and if framing an

inno-cent person will almost certainly prevent race riots and

many consequent fatalities, act-utilitarianism and most

other forms of direct consequentialism tell us it is (or may

well be) our obligation to frame the innocent person But

this seems morally unacceptable to most people, and

rule-consequentialism can avoid such a result by claiming that

any accepted set of social rules that permitted framing

innocent people would be more destructive of social

har-mony and well-being than could possibly be made up for

by the occasional prevention of a race riot, and then saying

that the act of framing an innocent person is wrong

because it fails to accord with that set of social rules that

would best produce overall social harmony and

well-being However, rule-consequentialism has been

criti-cized on the theoretical grounds that it offers no adequate

or consistent reason why rules should be evaluated by

their consequences but acts should not be, and most

pre-sent-day utilitarians accept direct consequentialism, while

at the same time in one way or another attempting to

reduce or play down the importance of the divergence

between utilitarian moral views and common-sense

moral thinking

By contrast with ordinary or common-sense morality,

utilitarianism is an impartial or impersonal moral view.

Ordinarily, we think a person is morally entitled to favour

herself or her family (to some extent) over other people,

but direct (or act-) utilitarianism claims that our

obliga-tions depend on an impersonal assessment of the

conse-quences of our actions, and if we have a choice between

doing more for strangers or less for ourselves and/or our friends and relations, then we must give preference to the strangers Ordinary morality is ‘agent-relative’ and allows each person to favour those near and dear to him, but for utilitarianism each person is fundamentally morally equal

to every other, and any favouritism must be justified by overall good consequences for people generally This ends up making direct (or act-) utilitarianism a rather demanding moral doctrine, and opponents of such utili-tarianism often criticize it for being too demanding But this charge can be evaded or rendered less damaging if one adopts a form of direct utilitarianism that doesn’t require the production of as much good/pleasure as possible as a condition of right action Utilitarians must hold that

pro-ducing more good is always better, but Bentham (in his

ear-lier years), Karl Popper, and (more recently) Judith Lichtenberg, Michael Slote, and Michael Stocker have all formulated versions of act-utilitarianism allowing for an

act to count as morally (all) right if it produces enough

on-balance good/pleasure, even if the agent could have

pro-duced more on-balance good/pleasure Such *‘satisficing’

utilitarianism allows for moral *supererogation and is therefore less demanding than more standard optimiz-ing/maximizing versions of act-utilitarianism But recent theorists such as Peter Railton, Samuel Scheffler, and Shelly Kagan have questioned whether the charge of over-demandingness really can be made to stick against standard forms of act-utilitarianism (and act-consequentialism) Ordinary morality is also agent-relative in a way not mentioned above: it allows us to do to and against our-selves what we are not morally permitted to do to and against others We are allowed to throw away our own possessions, but not those of others, and negligent self-damage is not criticized the way the negligent damaging

of others is Utilitarianism allows of no such moral distinc-tions And, furthermore, in keeping with the justification

of means by ends, act-utilitarianism treats it as morally permissible and even obligatory to kill or injure people in order to prevent other people from killing or injuring some greater number of people (or in order simply to pre-vent a greater number of deaths overall) Common sense, again, balks at such an instrumental view of morality, but although utilitarians have been much criticized for this aspect of their doctrine, defenders of common-sense (or of Kantian prohibitions on using people as means) have not found it easy to pinpoint what is morally indefensible in utilitarian instrumentalism The utilitarian can say, for example, that although she sometimes recommends using people as means to the general or overall (greatest) welfare of human beings, such ‘using’ is not morally objectionable because (unlike most ways people use other people) it acknowledges the value of each individual human and her happiness The topic is a subject of continu-ing philosophical debate

The great strength of utilitarianism as an ethical theory lies in its ability to replace the hodgepodge (and, arguably, inconsistency) of our common-sense moral intuitions with

a unified system of thought that treats all moral questions

938 utilitarianism

in uniform fashion and in relation to an ideal, human

happiness or desire-satisfaction, that is both less obscure

and more attractive than most alternatives m.s

J Bentham, An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation

(London, 1982)

S Kagan, The Limits of Morality (Oxford, 1989).

J S Mill, Utilitarianism (1863).

H Sidgwick, The Methods of Ethics, 7th edn (Chicago, 1962).

J J C Smart and B A O Williams, Utilitarianism: For and Against

(Cambridge, 1973)

utilityrefers in philosophy to what is of use to human

beings (or sometimes, more generally, to all sentient

crea-tures) It therefore denotes what is good for humans, most

frequently welfare Argued to be of fundamental

import-ance for ethics by Cicero and Hume, it was promoted by

Bentham as the sole end of right action; hence the doctrine

known as *utilitarianism For Bentham utility meant

*happiness or *pleasure; a more particular sense which

has sometimes been preserved by later philosophers

r.h

R D Collison Black, ‘Utility’, in John Eatwell et al (eds.), The New

Palgrave, iv (London, 1987).

utility, principle of: see greatest happiness principle;

utilitarianism

utopianism. Critical and creative thinking projecting

alternative social worlds that would realize the best

pos-sible way of being, based on rational and moral principles,

accounts of human nature and history, or imagined

tech-nological possibilities Utopian thinking invariably

con-tains criticism of the status quo It aims to overcome social

*inequality, economic *exploitation, sexual repression,

and other possible forms of domination that make

well-being and happiness in this life impossible; death is thus

often seen as its critical limit Utopian thought like Plato’s

Republic, Thomas More’s classic Utopia (1515–16),

Tommaso Campanella’s La Città del Sole (1623), and the

social utopianism of Saint-Simon, Fourier, and Owen,

concentrates on conceptions of an ideal commonwealth

While both criticizing social life and aiming at new

forms of it, utopianism nevertheless attempts to transcend

the boundaries of so-called realistic and pragmatic

consid-erations The tension thereby created between utopian

thought and social reality has led to harsh criticisms of its

fantastic character The derivation of ‘utopia’ is Greek

words meaning ‘not-place’, and utopianism is generally

identified with unrealistic speculation, providing the

adjective ‘utopian’ with its everyday pejorative meaning

While Marx and Engels, for example, emphasized

uto-pianism’s positive function of relativizing existing social

reality, they nevertheless criticized its lack of a thorough

comprehension and analysis of current society that alone

would make concrete political action possible Thus

utopianism is rejected by Marxism not because of its potential in alternative imaginative thinking but rather because of its theoretical unconnectedness with the social status quo

Thinkers like Bloch and Marcuse, however, distinguish between ‘abstract’ and ‘concrete’ utopias The former are mere dreams and fantasies, while the latter are based on insights derived from critical social theory Utopian thought is seen as springing from the unconscious, whose imaginative capacity confronts, challenges, surpasses, and overrides conscious reality by means of projected counter-pictures containing hopes, desires, and wishful thinking This utopian faculty, however, is only critical if disconnected from existing *ideologies, and based on an understanding of social totality and the means of realizing better conditions of existence As Mannheim points out, utopian thought is directed toward change of existing social structures while the function of ideologies is the preservation of the status quo Of course, utopias as pri-vate or unrealizable fantasies may take on an ideological function of preserving what is, while religious or ‘bour-geois’ ideologies contain a utopian core by confronting existing suffering and injustice with the ideal of paradisaic

or just forms of being

Accordingly, utopianism is limited neither to a literary genre nor to specific conceptions of the good life It rather plays a genuine role in relation to possible or intended change in existing social conditions To be sure, the iden-tification of utopian thinking with socialism has often led

to an over-hasty dismissal of utopianism as such Today, for instance, post-Marxist social theory tries to use ‘the utopia of an ideal communication community’ (Haber-mas) merely as a ‘counterfactual’ standard to judge exist-ing reality, while post-structuralist philosophers like Foucault criticize even this ideal as ‘utopian’, describing modern society as a dystopia of all-pervasive power rela-tions Social movements like *feminism, the civil rights movement, and multiculturalism, however, seem to require—and allow!—more concrete alternatives to the existing state of affairs

Concrete and responsible utopian thinking may thus be

an indispensable part of social criticism First, the projec-tion of alternative worlds helps to relativize the present; it creates distance and estrangement from the realm of assumed necessities of social life Second, it explores con-crete alternatives and realizable possibilities that could lead to practicable changes and improvements And third, utopias seem indispensable for motivation The sense of a better, realizable state of affairs not only gives meaning and significance to critical engagement, but also encour-ages interest in and hope of achieving real change in

E Bloch, The Principle of Hope (Oxford, 1986).

R Levitas, The Concept of Utopia (Syracuse, NY, 1990).

K Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia (London, 1979).

utopianism 939