Clarendon Library of Logic and Philosophy – serie

This is a reissue of a book which is an exploration and defence of the notion of modality 'de re', the idea that objects have both essential and accidental properties. It is one of the first full-length studies of the modalities to emerge from the debate to which Saul Kripke, David Lewis, Ruth Marcus and others have contributed.The argument is developed by means of the notion of possible worlds, and ranges over key problems including the nature of essence, trans-world identity, negative existential propositions, and the existence of unactual objects in other possible worlds. In the final chapters Professor Plantinga applies his logical theories to the clarification of two problems in the philosophy of religion - the Problem of Evil and the Ontological Argument.

The book sets out a new logic of rules, developed to demonstrate how such a logic can contribute to the clarification of historical questions about social rules. The authors illustrate applications of this new logic in their extensive treatments of a variety of accounts of social changes, analysing in these examples the content of particular social rules and the course of changes in them.

Are humans rational? Various experiments performed over the last several decades have been interpreted as showing that humans are irrational--we make significant and consistent errors in logical reasoning, probabilistic reasoning, similarity judgements, and risk-assessment, to name a few areas. But can these experiments establish human irrationality, or is it a conceptual truth that humans must be rational, as various philosophers have argued?In this book, Edward Stein offers a clear critical account of this debate about rationality in philosophy and cognitive science. He discusses concepts of rationality--the pictures of rationality that the debate centres on--and assesses the empirical evidence used to argue that humans are irrational. He concludes that the question of human rationality must be answered not conceptually but empirically, using the full resources of an advanced cognitive science. Furthermore, he extends this conclusion to argue that empirical considerations are also relevant to the theory of knowledge--in other words, that epistemology should be naturalized.

Nicholas Rescher presents a critical reaction against two currently influential tendencies of thought. On the one hand, he rejects the facile relativism that pervades contemporary social and academic life. On the other hand, he opposes the rationalism inherent in new-contractarian theory - both in the idealized communicative-contract version promoted in continental European political philosophy by Jurgen Habermas, and in the idealized social-contract version of the theory promoted in the Anglo-American context by John Rawls.Against such tendencies, Professor Rescher's pluralist approach takes a more realistic and pragmatic line, eschewing the convenient recourse of idealization in cognitive and practical matters. Instead of a utopianism that looks to a uniquely perfect order that would prevail under ideal conditions, he advocates incremental improvements within the framework or arrangements that none of us will deem perfect but that all of us 'can live with'. Such an approach replaces the yearning tor an unattainable consensus with the institution of pragmatic arrangements in which the community will acquiesce - not through agreeing on their optimality, but through a shared recognition among the dissonant parties that the available options are even worse.

Storrs McCall presents an original philosophical theory of the nature of the universe based on a striking new model of its space-time structure. He shows how his model illuminates a broad range of subjects, including causation, probability, quantum mechanics, identity, and free will, and argues that the fact that the model throws light on such a large number of problems constitutes strong evidence that the universe is as the model portrays it.

Many philosophers doubt that one can provide any successful explanation of sensory qualities - of how things look, feel, or seem to a perceiving subject. To provide such an explanation, one would need to explain qualitative facts in non-qualitative terms. Attempts to construct such explanations have seemed, in principle, doomed.Austen Clark examines the strategy used in psychophysics, psychometrics, and sensory neurophysiology to explain qualitative facts. He argues that this strategy could succeed: its structure is sound, and it can answer the various philosophical objections lodged against it. On this basis Professor Clark presents an analysis of senosry qualities that offers the possibility of explaining at least some qualia, and he sketches how this scheme might eventually reduce to neurophysiology. If he is correct, we are not doomed to an eternity of mere acquaintance with our qualia.

This book examines the complex and varied ways in which fictions relate to the real world, and offers a precise account of how imaginative works of literature can use fictional content to explore matters of universal human interest. While rejecting the traditional view that literature is important for the truths that it imparts, the authors also reject attempts to cut off literature altogether from real human concerns. Their detailed account of fictionality, mimesis, and cognitive value helps restore to literature its distinctive status among cultural practices.The authors also explore the limits of fictionality, particularly in relation to metaphysical and sceptical views, prevalent in modern thought, according to which the world itself is a kind of fiction, and truth no more than a cultural construct. They identify different conceptions of fiction in science, logic, epistemology, and make-believe, and thereby challenge the idea that discourse per se is fictional and that different modes of discourse are at root indistinguishable. They offer rigorous analyses of the roles of narrative, imagination, metaphor, and 'making' in human thought processes.Both in their methods and in their conclusions, Lamarque and Olsen aim to bring much-needed rigour and clarity to debates about the values of literature, and to provide new, philosophically sound foundations for a genuine change of direction in literary theorizing.

Are humans rational? Various experiments performed over the last several decades have been interpreted as showing that humans are irrational we make significant and consistent errors in logical reasoning, probabilistic reasoning, similarity judgements, and risk-assessment, to name a few areas. But can these experiments establish human irrationality, or is it a conceptual truth that humans must be rational, as various philosophers have argued? In this book, Edward Stein offers a clear critical account of this debate about rationality in philosophy and cognitive science. He discusses concepts of rationality - the pictures of rationality that the debate centres on - and assesses the empirical evidence used to argue that humans are irrational. He concludes that the question of human rationality must be answered not conceptually but empirically, using the full resources of an advanced cognitive science. Furthermore, he extends this conclusion to argue that empirical considerations are also relevant to the theory of knowedge - in other words, that epistemology should be naturalized. from the reviews: 'Stein has done a great service in bringing together all of the important arguments in the human rationality debate and providing a measured critical assessment of them. . . . This will be an important book and is essential reading for epistemologists, philosophers of mind, and cognitive and evolutionary psychologists.' Choice 'very considerable value . . . for professionals' Times Higher Education Supplement

Ilkka Niiniluoto comes to the rescue of scientific realism, showing that reports of its death have been greatly exaggerated. Philosophical realism holds that the aim of a particular discourse is to make true statements about its subject-matter. Niiniluoto surveys the different varieties of realism in ontology, semantics, epistemology, theory construction, and methodology. He then sets out his own original version, and defends it against competing theories in the philosophy of science. Niiniluoto's critical scientific realism is founded upon the notion of truth as correspondence between language and reality, and characterizes scientific progress in terms of increasing truthlikeness. This makes it possible not only to take seriously, but also to make precise, the troublesome idea that scientific theories typically are false but nevertheless close to the truth.

A `slippery slope argument' is a kind of argument which warns you that, if you take a first step, you will find yourself caught up in a sequence of consequences from which you will be unable to extricate yourself, and that eventually you will end up speeding ever faster towards some disastrous outcome. Many textbooks on informal logic and critical thinking treat the slippery slope argument as a fallacy. Douglas Walton argues that slippery slope arguments can be used correctly in some cases as a reasonable type of argument to shift a burden of proof in a critical discussion, while in other cases they are used incorrectly. In the four central chapters he identifies and analyses four types of slippery slope argument. In each chapter he presents guidelines that show how each type of slippery slope argument can be used correctly or incorrectly, using over fifty case studies of argumentation on controversial issues. These include abortion, medical research on human embryos, euthanasia, the decriminalization of marijuana, pornography and censorship, and whether or not the burning of the American flag should be banned.

Many philosophers doubt that one can provide any successful explanation of sensory qualities - of how things look, feel or seem to a perceiving subject. To do so one would need to be able to explain qualitative facts in non-qualitative terms, and attempts to construct such an explanation seem doomed to failure.Austen Clark presents an analysis of sensory qualities that refutes such scepticism and offers the possibility of a solution to the problem of qualia. Drawing on work in psychophysics, psychometrics, and sensory neurophysiology, he analyses the character and defends the integrity of psychophysical explanations of qualitative facts, arguing that the structure of such explanations is sound and potentially successful. Clark gives a compact picture of that unified scheme that emerges from this project and sketches its potential reduction to neurophysiology. He does not claim to have a full explanation or a complete reduction of qualitative facts; rather, he shows that a solution to the problem of sensory qualities is possible, and outlines the structures within which it may yet be found.

Storrs McCall presents an original philosophical theory of the nature of the universe based on a striking new model of its space-time structure. He shows that this theory can illuminate a wide variety of hitherto unresolved philosophical problems. These include: the direction and flow of time; the nature of scientific laws; the interpretation of quantum mechanics; the definition of probability; counterfactual semantics; and the notions of identity, essential properties, deliberation, decision, and free will. A particular instance of the explanatory powers of the proposed space-time model is its account of quantum non-locality in the EPR and GHZ experiments.Professor McCall argues that the fact that the model explains and throws light on such a broad range of problems constitutes strong evidence that the universe is as the model portrays it.

This book provides a comprehensive philosophical theory explicating the cognitive contribution of metaphor. Metaphor effects a transference of meaning, not between two terms, but between two structured domains of content, or 'semantic fields'. Semantic fields, construed as necessary to a theory of word-meaning, provide the contrastive and affinitive relations that govern a term's literal use. In a metaphoric use, these relations are projected into a second domain which is thereby reordered with significant cognitive effects.The book is a detailed revision and refinement of 'the semantic theory of metaphor'. Taking into account pragmatic considerations and recent linguistic and psychological studies, the author forges a new understanding of the relation between metaphoric and literal meaning. She amply illustrates her thesis with sensitive and systematic analyses of metaphors found in literature, philosophy, science, and everyday language.

Classic work by one of the most brilliant figures in post-war analytic philosophy.

Someone who has more sympathy with traditional empiricism than with much of present-day philosophy may ask himself: 'How do my experiences give rise to my beliefs about an external world, and to what extent do they justify them?' He wants to refer, among other things, to unremarkable experiences, of a sort which he cannot help believing to be so extremely common that it would be ridiculous to call them common experiences. He mainly has in mind sense-experiences, and he thinks of them in a particular way. His way of thinking of them, roughly speaking as something 'inner', is one on which recent logico-linguistic philosophy has thrown a good deal of light. The relevant special notion of an experience contrasts, among other things, with a certain more general biographical notion of an experience, which some dictionaries indicate by the definition, 'an event of which one is the subject'. This book explores the concept of experiences, focusing on the disjunctions between perception and illusion.

Attempts to show that the simplicity of a hypothesis can be measured by attending to how well it answers certain kinds of questions.

This book provides an account of the emergence of norms. Put very crudely, the main thesis of this book is that certain types of norms are possible solutions to problems posed by certain types of social interaction situations. The problems are such that they inhere in the structure (in the game-theoretical sense of structure) of the situations concerned. Three types of paradigmatic situations are dealt with. They are referred to as Prisoners' Dilemma-type situations; co-ordination situations; and inequality (or partiality) situations. Each of them, it is claimed, poses a basic difficulty, to some or all of the individuals involved in them. Three types of norms, respectively, are offered as solutions to these situational problems. It is shown how, and in what sense, the adoption of these norms of social behaviour can indeed resolve the specified problems.

The book was planned and written as a single, sustained argument. But earlier versions of a few parts of it have appeared separately. The object of this book is both to establish the existence of the paradoxes, and also to describe a non-Pascalian concept of probability in terms of which one can analyse the structure of forensic proof without giving rise to such typical signs of theoretical misfit. Neither the complementational principle for negation nor the multiplicative principle for conjunction applies to the central core of any forensic proof in the Anglo-American legal system. There are four parts included in this book. Accordingly, these parts have been written in such a way that they may be read in different orders by different kinds of reader.

In this wide-ranging study, Quinn argues that human moral autonomy is compatible with unqualified obedience to divine commands. He formulates several versions of the crucial assumptions of divine command ethics, defending them against a battery of objections often expressed in the philosophical literature.

In this controversial volume (originally published in 1975) Peter Unger suggests that, not only can nothing ever be known, but no one can ever have a reason at all for anything. A consequence of this is that we cannot have any realistic emotional ties: it can never be conclusively said that someone is happy or sad about anything. Finally he argues that no one can ever say, let alone believe, that anything is the case. In order to get beyond this apparent bind - and this condition of ignorance - Unger proposes a radical departure from the linguistic and epistemological systems we have become accustomed to. Epistemologists, as well as philosophers of mind and language will undoubtedly find in this study of the limitations of language an invaluable philosophical perspective.

In this book the author treats art as an action performed by the artist as agent, rather than examining it from the point of view of its audience as contemplators.

This book argues for a radically different approach to traditional and important problems of moral philosophy. The book discusses three theses; the diversity of moralities and moral judgements, their normativesness, and their possible rationality.

In this book van Fraassen develops an alternative to scientific realism by constructing and evaluating three mutually reinforcing theories.

The aim of this book is to provide a unified theory of properties, relations, and propositions (PRPs). The author explores the two traditional conceptions of PRPs and shows how they can be captured by a single theory.

A thorough and closely argued examination of a central issue in philosophical logic, an issue which is shown to have profound implications for the philosophy of language and much of metaphysics.

In this book, a set of problems which overlap philosophy, linguistics, cognitive psychology, and artificial intelligence are examined from the point of view of Chomsky's linguistics. The author uses linguistic analysis to shed new light on the philosophical and logical problems of meaning, ambiguity, truth, falsity, negation and existence. He shows that visual and verbal symbols have ways of meaning in common.

Studies causation both as a concept and as it is 'in the objects.' Offers new accounts of the logic of singular causal statements, the form of causal regularities, the detection of causal relationships, the asymmetry of cause and effect, and necessary connection, and it relates causation to functional and statistical laws and to teleology.

Anti-realism is a doctrine about logic, language, and meaning with roots in the work of Wittgenstein and Frege. In this book, the author clarifies Dummett's case for anti-realism and develops his arguments further. He concludes by advocating a radical reform of our logical practices.

In 1942 G.E. Moore first wrote about the curious sort of 'nonsense' exhibited by the statement 'it is raining but I do not believe it'. What Moore discovered was a species of blindspots: consistent propositions that cannot be rationally accepted by certain individuals even though they might be true. In this book, Professor Sorenson aims to provide a unified solution to a large family of philosophical puzzles and paradoxes through a study of blindspots . He devotes special attention to revealing their role in 'slippery slope' reasoning.