The Oxford Companion to Philosophy Part 52 doc

or swimming. However, competent speakers are in receipt of a vast range of complex knowledge. They can understand indefinitely many sentences they have never heard before: sentences that conform to complex grammatical rules that speakers are unable to articulate. To account for these facts, Noam Chomsky proposes that speakers tacitly know the rules of grammar for their language. Furthermore, he argues that each child’s acquisi- tion of language depends on a body of innate knowledge that equips it to develop a language. On this view, each child has a dedicated language faculty configured in accordance with universal grammar, and the grammar of each language is a refinement of it. Knowledge of word meaning is less plausibly a matter of innate endowment, but it can be conceived as knowledge of rules for the correct use of words. Explaining our immediate and effortless knowledge of what our words mean and our ability to follow rules for their use remains a philosophical challenge. b.c.s. B. C. Smith, ‘Understanding Language’, Proceedings of the Aris- totelian Society (1992). language, logically perfect: see logically perfect language. language, meta-: see metalanguage. language, object: see object language. language, private: see private language problem. language, problems of the philosophy of. The philosophy of language explores the relationships between ourselves and our *language, and our language and the world. The first kind of exploration asks what it is for us to invest words and sentences with a certain meaning, whilst the second investigates the relationships between words and the things to which they refer, or the facts that they describe. The former topic is sometimes called *pragmatics, and the latter *semantics, although the lines between them can easily blur. It is given by the nature of a language that some things may be inferred from others. If a shape is square then it is four-sided, and if a person is a bachelor then he is unmar- ried. It is evident that these relationships are intimately connected to the very meaning of the words involved (either being determined by that meaning, or perhaps themselves playing an important role in fixing it). Logic studies the nature of these inferences, and a common elem- ent in the philosophy of language at least since Aristotle has been the desire to codify and lay bare the structure, perhaps hidden on the surface, whereby one thing may be inferred from another. This develops into the formal programme of defining firstly the syntax of a language (the ways in which grammatical strings of elements are gener- ated and separated from ungrammatical ones) and then the logical structures responsible for the inferences which we can and cannot make. One major philosophical problem such inquiries raise is the relationship between the smooth surface recognition of grammar and of logical relationships, and the extremely complex rules that appear necessary to enable any system to compute the same results. Are we to think of some such system of rules as really implemented at some level of our cognitive systems? Or are they ways of describing what we do that make no claim on how we do it? To investigate language we might start with a list of platitudes about it. Language consists of words, which come in sequences or sentences. With our words we express our ideas, and we intend to communicate. Because of our conventions the words of a language refer to things, or have *meanings. Other languages may, however, have attached the same meanings to their terms, with the result that they can be translated. Some words are synonymous or mean the same; some are vague. Some (‘red’) seem somehow keyed closely to experience, others (‘quark’) are highly theoretical. A whole sentence often expresses a proposition, which may be true or false (although we also do other things with language, such as issue commands, ask questions, and make promises). The truth or falsity of a sentence will depend on whether the world satisfies some condition, known as the *truth-condition of the sentence. The philosophy of language is largely a matter of trying to understand these italicized terms, and the revolutions in the subject occur when what seems a satisfactory basis for such understanding to one school or generation seems a very bad place to start to another. To illustrate the scope for dispute it can be recorded that all the terms that have seemed useful starting-points to some (words, language, ideas, convention, meaning, translation, reference, experience, intention, proposition, truth) have not only been denied foundational status by others, but even been vio- lently excommunicated as spurious and unscientific notions. From the beginnings of philosophy it has been realized that problems of meaning and language are intertwined with those of other areas of inquiry. Our languages are things we understand, so a theory of language must match with a philosophical psychology, or story about the powers of the mind. Furthermore, a theory of what the world is like must conform to the demand that it is describable by language: if, therefore, a linguistically describable world must have some form or another we can infer the structure of the world, at least in so far as we can describe it, from the structure of our representations of the world. The earliest example of this form of reasoning is the argument for the Forms in Plato, where the need for a common feature or form in things is witnessed by the fact that we have a common name (dog, chair) for numbers of them. Again, it is common to deduce that otherwise mysterious entities, such as events or facts or numbers, exist because we have terms for them and these terms function in language in just the way that names of other less suspect entities function. We therefore have no option to deny existence to events or facts or numbers, unless we wish to propose changing or abandoning our language. This latter option indeed shows that we can only infer conclusions 490 language, knowledge of about how we take the world to be, rather than how it actually is, from facts about the general features of our language, for in principle our language might reflect a mis- understanding and misrepresentation of the real features of things. But in so far as we see no error in our usage, or no prospect of a linguistic reform that would change the feature in question, we will find ourselves committed to the substantive conclusion. And if, as in the Tractatus Logico- Philosophicus of Wittgenstein, we can put conditions on the nature of any possible representation of facts, then we have a *transcendental argument that if meaning is possible, then the world must be such as to be representable in those ways. The philosophical understanding of language must therefore achieve a stable equilibrium with our best philosophy of mind and our best metaphysics. It has been characteristic of twentieth-century philosophy to suppose that it dominates these partners, dictating how we are to think about mind and metaphysics. Thus to analytic philosophers, such as Russell and Moore, and to the Logi- cal Positivists, such as Carnap and Schlick, but above all to Wittgenstein, the best route to a theory of mind is through describing our linguistic powers, since these may claim to be the most characteristic product of our understandings. On most issues, we do not know what to think until we know what to say. And if we cannot mean something, then we cannot understand it either. This suggests that if an investigation into language delivers results about the limits of meaning, then our science and our conception of the world must also conform to those limits. Such a result was claimed by logical atomism, in which the nature of linguistic representation is held to determine the kind of fact that can ever be represented, and most famously by *Logical Positivism with the doctrine that since the meaning of a sentence is its method of verification (the *verification principle), we can attach no meaning to hypotheses that are incapable of verification, and must tailor our concept of the world, and our philosophy of science, accord- ingly. The same strategy (and, some believe, the same principle) is at work in the *private language argument of Wittgenstein, in which the impossibility of meaningfully describing the recurrence of a private sensation whose nature is independent of any physical or public events, is held to undermine the Cartesian philosophy of mind according to which such sensations exist. ‘Linguistic’ philosophy or ‘Oxford’ philosophy of the middle years of the twentieth century, is widely thought to have shown an excessive reliance on the implications of ordinary speech for other matters. More recently deconstructionist emphasis on the fluid contrasts and contingencies that shape an overall linguistic ‘field’ (pattern of inferences) leads to despair over finding any fixed meaning in our terms, with lurid consequences for the possibility of any objective description of things, or eventually of truth as opposed to falsehood. The legacy of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century *empiricism was confidence that language would be understood by the way of ideas, or, in other words, by seeing it as a vehicle for making public our ideas, conceived of as the self-standing mental elements whereby we think, but which would otherwise remain private. Ideas and their properties, especially their derivation from experience, were the central topic, with language a mere vehicle for their transmission (although Hobbes, Locke, and others were aware that infirmities or ‘abuses’ of language affected the task of thinking properly: but this could be remedied by paying closer attention to ideas). Ideas, however, prove a broken reed, because any inner display of any kind seems inessential to identifying what is thought and understood, and because the power of ideas to represent things other than themselves is just as hard to conceive as the power of words to do so. Competence with a language is not simply competence in packaging already given ideas. This is obvious if we imagine mastering some new area, such as physics, where there is no distinction between mastering the language and mastering the subject. With the work of Frege emphasis came to be placed on objective and public aspects of understanding: when I tell you that the Gulf Stream crosses the Atlantic, I do not excite in you an idea which may or may not be like some subjective idea of my own, but give you a definite and objective piece of information. I transmit a thought or proposition. But Frege remained largely silent on the question what it was to grasp such a thought or proposition. Its content, evidently, concerns the Gulf Stream and the Atlantic, but how my mind is related to such things for me to understand the proposition is left moot. If we put that question to one side it is possible to sketch further relations between psychological states and meaning. One suggestion is that a term means something if it causes persons hearing it to go into some state. But this fails to distinguish the common consequences of using a term from its meaning: talking about spiders may make most people think of being bitten, but that is no part of the meaning of the term, and indeed only occurs because of its meaning. A better suggestion, although still inadequate, would focus on the intended effect. The most influential development of this line has been that of H. P. Grice, which saw an utterance’s meaning in terms of the complex structure of intentions with which it is used. A variant of this approach may locate a public convention of using a type of utterance only with a certain intention, such as intending to induce a certain belief, or intending to signal that one has oneself a certain belief. Even if such accounts work (and the complexity necessary to protect them from objections has tended to rouse suspicion) they have still put aside the question how it is that my mental state is properly representational, or, in other words, what is involved in my grasping a proposition whose content concerns the Gulf Stream or the Atlantic. The suggestion taking us away from pragmatics and towards semantics would be that this is so if I incline to express the state by using words which refer to those geographical objects. This, of course, requires that we have a separate account of word reference. One suggestion was that of Russell’s famous theory of *descriptions, language, problems of the philosophy of 491 according to which reference is normally accomplished by the subject having in mind (in some sense) a description which the thing referred to satisfies. This in turn raises the demand for an account of what it is to have a description in mind, which in Russell terminates rather disappointingly in an acquaintance with universals, or features that things can share. But it was also objected by Strawson and others that the account distorts the way in which *reference is normally accomplished and the role that referring terms play in a language. The development of this objection by Kripke and Putnam led to explorations of a causal account, according to which I refer to something when my words are in some favoured causal relationship with that object. This approach is still active. Its chief current competitor is associated with the work of Davidson. This denies that the relationship of reference is a good place to start. Instead we have to consider the overall project of interpreting someone. This will require the simultaneous attribution of beliefs and meanings, done in accordance with the methodological principle that we try to make them appear as rational or sensibly tuned to their environment as possible. The programme this engenders is one of sys- tematically attributing truth-conditions simultaneously to each of the infinite (or indefinitely large) number of possible sentences that a language may contain. The upshot is an *interpretation made not by the piecemeal association of individual words with individual things or features of things, but more ‘holistically’ or ‘top down’. On this approach the reference of a term becomes a mere inter- vening variable, in the sense that it is simply an aspect of a sentence certified by a procedure that has looked at a quite different thing: the overall pattern of association of truth- conditions with sentences. The approach encounters a notorious problem of determinacy. Unless the constraints are made very severe (possibly incorporating causal requirements) it looks as though arbitrarily different assignments of meaning may be made in conformity with them. This problem, first identified as the *indeterminacy of radical translation by Quine, has led to scepticism about the very existence of determinate meaning, and to conse- quent rejection of the idea that sentences ever manage to express single propositions and thoughts. A similar result may be supported (probably not in accordance with its author’s intentions) by the ‘rule-following considerations’ as they appear in the later work of Wittgenstein. These too leave the fact that someone follows a determinate rule in their usage of a term a mysterious ‘superlative’ fact, and one response is to fear that meaning has disappeared altogether. This nihilism is often thought to accord with a proper appreciation of the contextual and socially rooted nature of meaning, and the genuine difficulties of real-life translation. It is also realistic to remember that, however strict we try to be with words, new situations can easily be envisaged in which we would not know whether a particular term applies or not. But Quine’s thesis and a sceptical conclusion to the rule-following considerations go beyond these proper cautions, for they make no distinction between alien and stressful cases and normal thought and communication. But nihilism about this ultimately self-destructs, since it is only by relying on my own (determinate) understanding of my terms that I can think at all. A dogged resolution to see others just as producers of noise fit to be interpreted in any of a variety of different ways may just about succeed for a time. But a similar resolution with regard to myself is impossible. We may, in the study, be sufficiently baffled by the problem to believe that there is nothing outside the text, and to see linguistic behaviour as a self-contained game of producing and con- suming noise and script. But such scepticism is unlivable, and will not survive long when we actually ask directions, give recipes, and tell the time. There is, then, no agreed solution to the problem what it is determinately to take a term in my language to refer to a particular thing or feature of things. Two recent developments are the extensive links between the philosophy of language and the general field of cognitive science, and the equally promising links between the subject and the biological and evolutionary perspective on the emergence of language. The latter suggests that we can isolate determinate meaning by considering the role of a term in the life of an animal in a determinate environment. That is, if a signal has evolved in order to fulfil some need (which in turn can be analysed in terms of the differential fitness it confers on its users) then it seems a short step to assign to it a determinate semantic role. This is a plausible reconstruction of a meaning for the signalling systems of some animals, for example. Critics respond either that such systems are so simple that they are misleading models for fully fledged language, or more fundamentally that we should not reduce meaning, which is a fact, to evolutionary biological relations, which may remain speculative, or we would be handing ourselves a strange kind of proof that evolutionary theory is true. The computational approach has developed in a different direction. Initially it seems unpromising, since computers respond simply to the syntax of elements of computer languages, without regard to their interpretation. But further thought suggests that by putting a computer in an environment (either ‘virtual’ or real) with receptors responding to different features of that environment, we get a small-scale version of a causal semantics for the terms in which it computes. As well as work on these broad and fundamental themes the philosophy of language contains detailed work on the particular forms—*conditionals, *counterfactuals, tensed statements, modal statements—that are indispens- able to ordinary *communication. Whilst the classic approach to these has been to try to show that they are dis- guised versions of the tractable, simple forms of statement dealt with in classical logic, more relaxed and elastic approaches are now equally respectable. Equally important are the discrimination of such things as emotive meaning, derogatory and other attitude-bearing discourse, and the general study of the relation between the 492 language, problems of the philosophy of vocabulary of a period and the social habits and structures that help to shape it. s.w.b. S. Blackburn, Spreading the Word (Oxford, 1984). G. Frege, Philosophical Writings (Oxford, 1960). R. Millikan, Language, Thought and Other Biological Categories (Cambridge, Mass., 1984). W. V. Quine, Word and Object (Cambridge, Mass., 1960). B. Russell, An Inquiry into Meaning and Truth (London, 1940). L. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (Oxford, 1953). language, religious: see religious language. language, social nature of. We learn language from others in a social setting. But is this enough to show that language is an essentially social phenomenon? Opinions among philosophers are divided. Famously, Wittgenstein argued that the only meanings that speakers could attach to their words were the meanings they had in language of the surrounding community. Meaning, for Wittgenstein, was a matter of publicly sustained patterns of use, not private associations in the minds of individuals. The distinction between using words correctly and incorrectly cannot, he thought, be settled by the judgements of an individual, but depends on agreement among the community of language-users. To use a word correctly is to use it in accordance with a rule, and whether an individual is following a rule on a given occasion is a matter independent of the opinions of that individual. For the sounds speakers utter to have linguistic significance must be independent of the opinions of the individual speaker. The distinction between the use of a word that seems right and a use that is right, and something more than the opinion of an individual, is required to set a standard or rule for using a word correctly. For Wittgenstein this is the institution of a social practice, and individuals come to use a language by participating in those practices. Other philosophers have supposed that speakers can communicate successfully only if they attach the same meanings to their words as others do, and this presupposes a shared communal language. However, an objection is that one is only required to know what significance another speaker attaches to the words uttered, not to attach the same significance oneself. Hence, speakers can differ in their use of language, departing from communal practice, and still be understood, so long as they make their meaning publicly available. Those who favour the view that the way language is used by the individual is of primary importance take idiolects rather than communal languages to be primary. An idiolect, or language of an individual, need not be private, and can still be used in a social setting. A further aspect of the social nature of language is what Hilary Putnam has called ‘the division of linguistic labour’. This social phenomenon is illustrated by words like ‘gold’ which have both an ordinary non-technical use and a more precise meaning and application given to them by experts. In this case we may not know everything about the meaning of such words, but we defer to the relevant experts. b.c.s. M. Dummett, The Logical Basis of Metaphysics (Cambridge, Mass., 1991), ch. 4: ‘Meaning, Knowledge and Understanding’. language-game. Wittgensteinian term of art, introduced in The Blue and Brown Books when rejecting the calculus model of language which had dominated his Tractatus. It highlights the fact that language use is a form of human rule governed activity, integrated into human transac- tions and social behaviour, context-dependent and pur- pose relative. Analogies between games and language, playing games and speaking, justify it. Imaginary language-games are introduced as simplified, readily sur- veyable objects of comparison to illuminate actual language-games, either by way of contrast or similarity. A description of a language-game may include words and sentences, ‘instruments’ (gestures, patterns, word– sample correlations), context (which often brings to light the presuppositions of the existence of a language-game as well as the essential background of engaging in it), the characteristic activity of the language-game, the antecedent training and learning in which the rules are imparted, the use of components of the language-game, and its point. Wittgenstein held the cardinal error of modern philosophy to be the focus on forms of expression rather than on their use in the stream of life. p.m.s.h. G. P. Baker and P. M. S. Hacker, Analytic Commentary on the Philo- sophical Investigations, i: Wittgenstein: Understanding and Meaning (Oxford, 1980), 89–99. language of thought. Following Aristotle some have argued that the significance of spoken words derives from intrinsically meaningful interior ‘speech’. According to Ockham the propositio vocalis is posterior to and dependent upon the propositio mentalis. More recently Fodor has argued that thought is a form of symbol manipulation, and that *language-learning involves the correlation of conventional symbols with those of one’s innate mental language. Two main considerations are regularly advanced in support of the language of thought hypothesis. First, parallels between the structures of thought and language are brought out in reports of each. Thus, for any proposition p one may equally well say ‘He thought that p’ as that ‘He said that p’—each act seems to involve a relation to a sentence. Second, sounds and marks appear to express meanings without themselves being intrinsically meaningful; this suggests that public language may be a vehicle for the expression of prior mental ‘utterances’. It is often argued against the language of thought hypothesis, however, that it is regressive, since if the possibility of linguistic *meaning always requires an explanation, so must that of mental language; on the other hand if the latter is held to be intrinsically significant, then it is false that all linguistic meaning must be derived, in which case why not suppose, after all, that the meaning of speech-acts is non- derivative, i.e. that the significance of spoken words is intrinsic in their use. j.hal. J. Fodor, The Language of Thought (Cambridge, Mass., 1975). language of thought 493 langue and parole . Distinction drawn by the Swiss founder of linguistics, Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913), in his lecture series Cours de linguistique générale (1916), between language as a system of formal rules and mutu- ally defining terms and language in its everyday use. (In French, langue means ‘language’, and parole means ‘speech’.) Langue includes linguistic *types or *universals, parole linguistic *tokens or *particular inscriptions and utterances. The distinction was influential on *structural- ism, in which langue is studied as making parolepossible, in a quasi-Kantian or transcendental fashion. s.p. Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics (New York, 1959). David Holdcroft, Saussure: Signs, System and Arbitrariness (Cam- bridge, 1991). Lao Tzu˘ (dates uncertain). An individual whose existence is in doubt, but who is traditionally viewed as the author of the classic of *Taoism Lao Tzu˘ and as an older contemporary of Confucius (sixth to fifth century bc) in China. Many modern scholars doubt the existence of Lao Tzu˘ as a historical figure, and regard the text, also known as the Tao Te Ching, as composite and datable to as late as the third century bc. The text highlights how the natural order oper- ates by ‘reversion’ (anything that has gone far in one direction will inevitably move in the opposite direction), and how the state of ‘weakness’ enables an object to thrive. Modelling their way of life on the natural order, human beings should avoid striving after worldly goals, which inevitably leads to loss, and should instead be non- assertive and have few desires. k l.s. Lao Tzu (Tao Te Ching), tr. D. C. Lau (Harmondsworth, 1963). Laplace, Pierre-Simon, marquis de (1749–1827). French physicist and mathematician who made major contribu- tions to celestial mechanics and *probability theory. In cosmology he was one of the two independent originators of the nebular hypothesis (the other was Kant), according to which the solar system was formed from rotating gas. He showed that Newton’s worry that perturbations in the planetary orbits would lead to the long-term instability of the solar system was unfounded. (Newton thought that divine intervention was necessary to ensure stability.) This is the origin of the story that in reply to Napoleon, who complained that he had left God out of his system, Laplace said: ‘I have no need of that hypothesis.’ Laplacian *determinism is the claim that granted complete knowledge of the state of the universe and the laws of nature, every detail of the future is predictable. a.bel. Charles Coulston Gillispie, Robert Fox, and Ivor Grattan- Guinness, Pierre-Simon Laplace, 1749–1827: A Life in Exact Science (Princeton, NJ, 1997). Latin American philosophy. Latin American philosophy begins with the Spanish and Portuguese discovery and colonization of the New World. Throughout its 500-year history, this philosophy has maintained strong human and social interests, has been consistently affected by scholastic and Catholic thought, and has significantly influenced the social and political institutions in the region. Latin American philosophers tend to be active in the educational, political, and social affairs of their countries and deeply concerned with their own cultural identity. The history of philosophy in Latin America may be divided into four periods of development: colonial, independentist, positivist, and contemporary. The colonial period (c.1550–1750) was dominated by the type of scholasticism officially practised in the Iberian peninsula. The texts studied were those of medieval scholastics and of their Iberian commentators. The philosophical concerns in the colonies were those prevalent in Spain and Portugal and centred on logical and metaphysical issues inherited from the Middle Ages and on political and legal questions raised by the discovery and colonization. The main philosophical centre during the early colonial period, Mexico, was joined in the seventeenth century by Peru. Antonio Rubio’s (1548–1615) Logica mexicana was the most celebrated scholastic book written in the New World. Although working within the tradition of *scholasticism, some authors of this period were influenced by *humanism. The most important of these was Bartolomé de las Casas (1484–1566), who became the leading cham- pion of the rights of native Americans at the time. He argued that wars of conquest in the New World were unjustified because they were based on false generaliza- tions and misinformation. He defended the autonomy of native Americans, claiming that neither the Spaniards nor the Catholic Church had rightful authority over them and therefore should not impose European cultural and religious values upon them. A more complete break with scholasticism was made during the independentist period (c.1750–1850). The period began with growing interest in early modern philosophers; among these Descartes was most influential. The intellectual leaders of this period were men of action who used ideas for practical ends. They made reason a measure of legitimacy in social and governmental matters, and found the justification for revolutionary ideas in *natural law. Moreover, they criticized authority, and some of them regarded religion as superstitious and opposed ecclesiastical power. Their ideas paved the way for the later development of *positivism. Positivism (c.1850–1910) was, in part, a response to the social, financial, and political needs of the newly liberated countries of Latin America. Juan Bautista Alberdi (Argentina, 1812–84) and Andrés Bello (Venezuela, 1781–1865) stand out as important figures of the early part of the positivist period. Alberdi argued for the development of a philosophy adequate to the social and economic needs of Latin America, and Bello attempted to reduce metaphysics to psychology; both began trends others were to follow. Positivists emphasized the explicative value of empirical science and rejected metaphysics. For them, all 494 langue and parole knowledge is to be based on experience rather than theoretical speculation, and its value rests in its practical appli- cations. The universe is explained mechanistically, leaving little room for freedom and values. Positivism became the official philosophy of some Latin American countries and exerted strong social influence. Testifying to this is the preservation of the positivist inscription ‘Order and Progress’ on the Brazilian national flag. The most original positivists were the Cuban Enrique José Varona (1849–1933) and the Argentinian José Ingenieros (1877–1925). Ingenieros made some room for metaphysics in his philosophy, claiming that it is concerned with what is ‘yet-to-be-experienced’. Contemporary Latin American philosophy (c.1910–present) begins with the decline of positivism. The first part of the period is taken up by the generation of thinkers who rebelled against positivist ideas. The princi- pal members of this early generation, called ‘the Founders’ by Francisco Romero, are: Alejandro Korn (Argentina, 1860–1936), Alejandro Octavio Deústua (Peru, 1849–1945), José Vasconcelos (Mexico, 1882–1959), Antonio Caso (Mexico, 1883–1946), Enrique Molina (Chile, 1871–1964), Carlos Vaz Ferreira (Uruguay, 1872–1958), and Raimundo de Farias Brito (Brazil, 1862–1917). Trained as positivists, they became dissatis- fied with positivism’s dogmatic intransigence, mechanis- tic determinism, and emphasis on pragmatic values. The arguments against positivism of Deústua, Caso and Vaz Ferreira are characteristic of the period. Deústua attempted to show that the ideas of order and freedom are basic to society but that the second has priority over the first, for order cannot be established without freedom. Caso defended a view of man as capable of altruism and love. And Vaz Ferreira opposed the abstract logic favoured by positivists, developing instead a logic of life based on experience. Positivism was superseded by the Founders with the help of ideas imported first from France and later from Germany. The process began with the influence of Boutroux and Bergson and of French *vitalism and intu- itionism, but it was cemented when Ortega y Gasset introduced into Latin America the thought of Max Scheler, Nicolai Hartmann, and other German philosophers during his first visit to Argentina in 1916. *Philosophical anthropology developed in response to the desire to move further away from the scientific emphasis of positivism. Samuel Ramos (Mexico, 1897–1959) focused upon what was particular in Mexican culture, thereby inspiring interest in what is culturally unique to Latin American nations. He, like most philosophers of this period, tried to develop a philosophical anthropology based on a spiritual conception of human beings. Francisco Romero (Argentina, 1891–1962) was the most original thinker of the group. In Teoría del hombre (1952) he conceives human nature as involving both intentionality and spirituality. During the late 1930s and 1940s Latin Americans were exposed to a variety of recent European ideas and methodologies. As a consequence of the political upheaval created by the Spanish Civil War, a substantial group of peninsular philosophers, known as the transterrados, settled in Latin America. Among these, José Gaos (1900–69) had the greatest influence. In particular, he introduced rig- orous techniques of textual analysis in Mexico. With the generation born around 1910, Latin American philosophy reached what Romero later called a ‘state of normalcy’. Philosophy established itself as a professional and reputable discipline, and philosophical organizations, research centres, and journals flourished. The core of this eclectic generation was composed of philosophers working in the German tradition who concerned themselves primarily with axiology. Most of them granted some objectivity to values, but a few argued that values were neither objective nor subjective. This position is most clearly presented in Risieri Frondizi’s (Argentina, 1910–83) Qué son los valores? (1958), where he proposes a view of value as a Gestalt quality. Other developments of this period included a renewed interest in scholasticism. There was also a growing interest in the study of the history of ideas and on the question of the identity and possibility of an authentic Latin Ameri- can philosophy. The latter was raised in the 1940s by Leopoldo Zea (Mexico, 1912–2004) and continues to be a source of interest in the region today. Until 1960 philosophers working outside the traditions mentioned had limited visibility. This has now changed. *Marxist philosophy and *philosophical analysis have found places in the academy. As a result there has been renewed interest in areas where these philosophical cur- rents are strong, such as social and political philosophy, logic, and the philosophy of science. The theology of liberation prepared the way for the development of the philosophy of liberation, which began in Argentina in the 1970s and combines an emphasis on Latin American intellectual independence with Catholic and Marxist ideas. j.g. e.m. William Rex Crawford, A Century of Latin-American Thought, 3rd edn. (New York, 1966). Harold Eugene Davis, Latin American Thought: A Historical Intro- duction (New York, 1972). Jorge J. E. Gracia (ed.), Latin American Philosophy Today, double issue of The Philosophical Forum (1988–9). —— Eduardo Rabossi et al. (eds.), Philosophical Analysis in Latin America (Dordrecht, 1984). Leopoldo Zea, The Latin American Mind, tr. J. H. Abbott and L. Dunham (Norman, Okla., 1963). latitudinarianism. ‘Dr Wilkins, my friend, the bishop of Chester . . . is a mighty rising man, as being a Latitudinar- ian,’ said Pepys in 1669, and the ‘latitude men’, who favoured tolerance in belief and doctrine, were certainly among the late seventeenth century’s intellectual élite. Though there is some controversy among historians over the precise application of the term ‘latitudinarian’, Seth Ward, Ralph Cudworth, Henry More, John Locke, and Robert Boyle provide additional examples of thinkers latitudinarianism 495 with latitudinarian tendencies. Of course the latitude was limited. It did not include what Boyle in his Will called ‘notorious Infidels (viz t ) Atheists, Theists [i.e. deists], Pagans, Jews and Mahometans’. None the less latitudinarianism was not without critics. ‘There were no such Lati- tudinarian Principles among the Apostles,’ said Thomas Comber, and others found the latitudinarians ‘meer moral men, without the power of Godliness’. j.j.m. *deism. R. Kroll, R. Ashcraft, and P. Zagorin (eds.), Philosophy, Science and Religion in England 1640–1700 (Cambridge, 1992). laughter. Laughter is a psychophysical phenomenon against which a number of philosophical theories of mental and personal identity can be tested. If laughter is essential to the psychology of *humour, then a creature endowed with humour must be embodied. But since the bodily postures and motions which are characteristic of laughter can occur in the absence of amusement, laughter cannot be a simply physical occurrence. Aristotle uses these considerations to support a theory of *human nature according to which a person is not identical with a body, yet does not exist without a body. More recently John Wisdom has hinted at how humour and its objects can provide helpful pointers to the analysis of the relation between subjective and objective elements in the nature of value. The topic deserves more attention in the philosophy of mind. j.d.g.e. For an analytic treatment of the subject, see the symposium ‘Laughter’ by R. Scruton and P. Jones, Aristotelian Society Supple- mentary Volume (1982). law, feminist philosophy of. Since the resurgence of the women’s movement in the 1960s, scholars have begun to identify and explore distinctively feminist questions of and about law and legal philosophy. The questions which have occupied feminist scholars’ attention cover a wide range of jurisprudential questions, encompassing issues identified with analytical, normative, and sociological jurisprudence. Are laws, legal practices, and even the very concept of law implicitly gendered and, if so, is this inevitable? In what ways has woman been constructed within legal discourse and excluded from or incorporated within pre- vailing notions of legal subjecthood? What role have laws played in constituting or reinforcing ideologies (such as that which assumes and prescribes a division between public and private spheres) which feminist political theorists have identified as influential in maintaining and obscuring women’s social and political subordination? At the core of most feminist legal scholarship is a critique of the purported objectivity or gender-neutrality of legal method and legal regulation. The argument is that the purported gender-neutrality of legal concepts and of most legal arrangements in liberal societies in fact disguises the implicit instantiation in laws of a partial viewpoint, and one which generally reflects male rather than female interests and experience of the world. Feminist legal scholars are therefore much concerned with debates in feminist epistemology and feminist ethics, and particularly with the problem of ‘essentialism’—that associated with identifying masculine or feminine viewpoints in a world where both male and female experience is relative not only to gender but also to class, ethnic, and other social structures and axes of subordination. Another feature typical of feminist legal philosophy is scepticism about the idea that law is autonomous in the sense of being both a distinctive and, in significant respects, a discrete practice, insulated from broader political and social influence. Like all sophisticated intellectual discourses, feminist legal philosophy is characterized by a diversity of both substantive commitment and method. A significant strand of feminist legal scholarship draws on post-modernist ideas and sees the feminist project in this area as a basically critical or deconstructive one. Scholars sympathetic with this position express scepticism about the participation of feminist theory in the enterprise of constructing a ‘grand’, universal theory of law, which they argue would be likely to reproduce the same kinds of distortion and exclusion which characterize orthodox legal theories. Others envis- age the possibility of a feminist jurisprudence which could escape the bias and obfuscation of orthodox legal theories such as positivist or natural law conceptions and which could hold out the promise of conceiving genuinely equal legal subjecthood and gender justice as opposed to gender- neutrality. Similar diversity characterizes feminist approaches to the role of normative or prescriptive thought in legal philosophy. Whilst most feminist scholars are critical of the idea that normative argument can be objectively grounded or proceed ‘from nowhere’, they vary in terms of what role they see in the feminist enterprise for legal reformism, the reconstruction of normative concepts such as justice, rights, or equality from a feminist perspective, or utopian argument about legal and social change. Thus some feminist legal scholars see immanent critique—the holding-up of legal practices to critical scrutiny in the light of their failure to meet their own pro- fessed ideals—as the central task of feminist legal theory, while others see external, more broadly politically or ethic- ally based critique as of equal importance. Like most forms of feminist theory, feminist legal philosophy retains a strong sense of the importance of the link between theory and practice. Much feminist philosophical work in the area of law therefore concerns itself with philosophical critique of concrete legal institutions and practices, notably the regulation of the family, and the structure of constitutional rights and their impact on practices such as abortion and pornography; the regulation of sexuality by and the con- struction of images of women and men, femininity and masculinity, within a wide range of criminal and civil laws; legal anti-discrimination policies and the ideals of equality and justice which inform them. n.m.l. *feminist philosophy. Drucilla Cornell, Beyond Accommodation: Ethical Feminism, Decon- struction and the Law (London, 1991). 496 latitudinarianism Catharine A. MacKinnon, ‘Feminism, Marxism, Method and the State: Toward Feminist Jurisprudence’, Signs (1983). Susan Moller Okin, Justice, Gender and the Family (New York, 1989). Carole Pateman, The Sexual Contract (Oxford, 1988). Carol Smart, Feminism and the Power of Law (London, 1989). Iris Marion Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference (Princeton, NJ, 1990). law, history of the philosophy of. The philosophical reflections recalled here are about *positive law, in particular the rules and principles authoritatively declared by people who make themselves responsible for (what they claim to be) the good order of their community, an order they specify and promote by proposing obligatory and other authoritative guidance for the actions of their community’s members. Throughout its history, legal philosophy has sought to differentiate positive law (hereafter ‘law’ or ‘the law’) from other standards relevant to human deliberation towards choice and action, and from the governing principles and norms of other intelligible orders (the systems of the cosmos or nature, of logic, and arts such as grammar or boat-building). Such differentiation has aimed both to clarify terminology and conceptual boundaries and to inquire whether the analogies or other relations between law and these norms of other orders help explain what is most puzzling about law: that it can ‘necessitate’ (make obligatory, indeed morally obligatory) actions which, until its enactment, were not so necessitated; that its rules and other ‘institutions’ somehow ‘exist’ by virtue of but also long after their positing by enactment or other ‘act in the law’, or judicial precedent or custom; that many of its rules have a normative form, and a social function, distinct from its obligation imposing rules; that it resorts to puni- tive and rectificatory coercion to outlaw force (as well as dishonesty and carelessness) in interpersonal relations. (*Law, problems of the philosophy of.) The surviving fragments of the *Pre-Socratics on these matters suggest a vigorous debate which cannot now be securely reconstructed. The conversation of legal philosophy begins for us with two brief dialogues reflecting the debates in Socratic circles: a witty conversation between Alcibiades and Pericles composed by Xenophon (Memora- bilia i. 2), and a ‘Socratic’ dialogue insecurely ascribed to Plato (the Minos 314b–315a). Each portrays the embarrass- ments awaiting philosophers who define law as whatever is decreed by rulers, neglecting or declining to refer to issues of (moral) right such as whether its subjects have in any way consented (Xenophon) or whether what it decrees is good, true, and in conformity with ‘what really is’ (Minos). Both dialogues suggest that, while everyone understands the sense in which a law’s (in)justice is irrelevant to its empirical reality as enforced, in a more adequate understanding oflaw unjust laws are ‘more a matter of force than of law’ and are ‘not without qualification law’ (Minos). So by the early fourth century bc two positions emerge, each still defended in the late twentieth century. The one—today called *legal positivism—asserts that to be described with realism and clarity law must be considered without regard to any moral predicates which it attracts in discourse (e.g. moral–political evaluation) outside the philosophy of law. The other—usually if confusingly called *natural law theory—asserts that such a description misses the point of law: legal systems get their sense and shape (which a good descriptive account of law will identify) from their point, and a rational evaluation of particular laws or legal systems (or political communities) will use that (perhaps complex) point as a criterion for measur- ing their conformity to or deviation from the very idea of law. Plato articulates this second position: ‘Enactments, to the extent that they are not for the interest of the whole community, are not truly laws’ (Laws 715b; also 712e–713a; Statesman 293d–e). Cicero sums up the philosophical mainstream: ‘In the very definition of the term “law” there inheres the idea and principle of choosing what is just and true’ (De legibus ii. 11). On this issue of definition, Plato had warned that ordinary talk of ‘law’ is one thing, explanatory definition of law another (Hippias Major 284d). Aristotle (Politics iii. 1275a–b) worked out the appropriate account of definition in social, including legal, theory. In this account, pure description or reportage (these purport to be, and are com- monly called, friendships, political communities, constitu- tions, . . . laws) can coexist with explanatory definition within a theory which treats justification (and, where appropriate, critical delegitimization) as the primary mode of explanation. Thus the humanly good type of friendship, community, constitution, . . . or law is the paradigm, central case picked out by the explanatory definition, and by a corresponding word (‘friendship’, . . . ‘law’) in its focal meaning; specimens of this good type are in this sense truly, properly, or unqualifiedly (Greek haplo¯s, Latin simpliciter) friendship, law, etc. But instances of a type that is humanly deficient remain within the discipline’s philosophical account, precisely as analogous to the central case. The philosophy of human affairs, as it bears on law, reflects on decent laws and legal systems, with due attention to what makes laws bad and how bad laws matter. Until Bentham (foreshadowed in the seventeenth century by Bacon, Hobbes, and Spinoza), there is little or no legal philosophy which could be called positivist. Yet from Plato to Bentham legal philosophy was substantially a philosophy of positive law, a subject-matter regarded as distinct from the other subjects of moral and political philosophy, but as adequately intelligible only on the basis of the moral principles and political purposes identified, explicated, and defended within moral and political philosophy. Still, legal philosophy’s self-interpretation precisely as a philosophy of positive law awaits the Summa Theologiae of Thomas Aquinas (c.1270). The term ‘positive law’ emerged c.1135, and soon became popular among theoretically minded jurists. But the new terminology did not immediately modify the ancient accounts of the precise subject of philosophical reflection on law(s). Aristotle (Nicomachean Ethics v. 1134 b ) had divided law, history of the philosophy of 497 political right/just(ice) into the natural and the legal; the latter he also described as conventional and human. Late twelfth- and thirteenth-century jurists divided jus (law/right) into natural (the moral law) and positive, sub- dividing the latter into the Roman-law categories of jus gentium (laws common to all peoples) and civil law (pecu- liar to a given community). Eventually Aquinas (Summa Theologiae, 1–2, Q. 95, A. 2) treats the distinction between natural and civil law as a distinction within positive law (i.e. within law humanly laid down). Some parts of positive law are conclusiones (entailments) of the principles and norms of natural moral law; for these he appropriates the name jus gentium. The other parts are purely positive, though related to moral principles by an intelligible, non deductive relationship which he names determinatio (con- cretization). Thus human positive law in both its parts is at last dif- ferentiated as an integral object of philosophical reflection. It is by analogy with this central analogate that we understand as law (i) the eternal law of God’s creative providence (including all the laws investigated by the natural sciences), (ii) the *natural law, or rational principles of good and right human deliberation and action, and (iii) the ‘divine law’, Aquinas’s name for norms of positive law specially promulgated by divine revelation and including, like human positive law (ecclesiastical or secular), elements both of natural law (e.g. most of the Ten Command- ments) and of purely positive law (regulating Israel and then the Church). Aquinas describes human positive law as made by will (i.e. by preferring one reasonable scheme to another), but when speaking precisely contends that law is a matter of reason rather than will; obligation is a matter of means required for serving and respecting practical reason’s ends and principles; the imperium by which one directs oneself in executing one’s choices belongs to reason rather than will. All this soon met with opposition, and for the next 500 years the philosophy of law is dominated by efforts to explain law’s source and obligatoriness by reference to will, whether of superiors or of consenting parties to a social contract. The polemics launched in 1323 between Pope John XXII (canon lawyer and Thomist) and William of Ock- ham, concerning the nature of legal (especially property) rights, gave wide currency to Ockham’s conceptions: of positive human law as founded on commanding or con- tracting will and legitimate even when opposed to natural law; of supreme (divine) will as binding to even the most inherently unreasonable act (e.g. hating God); of right as primarily a power or liberty of acting. The second scholasticism of sixteenth- to seventeenth-century Spain sought a balance between Thomist and voluntarist theory. Its monument is Suarez’s De legibus (On Laws (1612)). Rea- son’s capacity to discern right from wrong is emphasized, but obligation is still a driving force from a superior’s will, and Aquinas’s conception of imperium as reason’s directive grasp of an action’s intelligent point is rejected as a fiction. Suarez underlines the variety of types of law (eternal, natural, human, divine) but also the variety of normative types of human law, including laws binding to compliance, laws binding only to payment of the ‘penalty’ for non-compliance, laws giving juridical acts their form and validity, and laws creating privileges. The principle of Suarez’s analyses remains the moralist’s interest in issues of conscience (conceived in terms of obligation and liberty). Grotius, though clearly influenced by Suarez and other philosophical theologians, shifts the focus of inquiry in legal philosophy: the foundations of morality (natural law) and obligation are but lightly and ambiguously sketched. The work of ‘philosophy of law’ (a term pro- moted if not invented by Grotius) is conceived as identifi- cation of the reasonable scheme of law which will secure justice and rights in a community constituted by social contract. The scheme’s content is settled, in effect, by making such adjustments to Roman law’s conceptual framework as are suggested to Grotius by an immensely learned survey of classical culture, medieval commentary, and some comparative jurisprudence. Grotian (over)- confidence in reason’s ability to identify uniquely appropriate legal solutions to problems of social life persists in the rationalist theories of natural and human law which prevail until Bentham and Kant. But the seventeenth- to eighteenth-century descend- ants of Grotian theory had to respond to the radical ques- tioning of their foundations by Hobbes and Spinoza. Paradigmatic is the response of Samuel Pufendorf (c.1670). Laws are decrees by which superiors obligate us subjects to conform our acts to their commands. Every law contains both a definition of what we are to do or avoid, and a statement of the punishment awaiting our non-compliance. Obligation is a moral quality created by persons who have not only the power to harm us if we resist them but also just grounds for their claim to limit our freedom by their choice. These just grounds may be the benefits those persons have rendered us, their benevo- lent ability to provide for us better than we could for ourselves, and/or our agreement to subject ourselves to them. Hobbes’s claim that the right to rule is warranted solely from irresistible power must be rejected as failing to account for obligation’s significance for conscience. Like the Calvinist Grotius, the Lutheran Pufendorf and the whole mainstream retain the Catholic division of law into natural, divine, and human and the Thomist position that human law is, as such, all positive (though rightly con- strained by the natural law, many of whose precepts it should also repromulgate to recalcitrants). Philosophy of law identifies for jurists many details of the law which should obtain within and between states, and for morally upright citizens their duties of conscience in face of legal obligations. The notion of natural law both limiting and justifying positive law remains in Kant’s Rechtslehre (Doctrine of Law/Right (1797)), but now the natural law abstracts from all human benefits and reasons for action, other than conformity with the universalizing form of reason. Right 498 law, history of the philosophy of (and right law) is the coexistence of my freedom (in accordance with universal laws) with everyone else’s; wrong is the hindering of such rightful freedom, and is itself right- fully hindered by coercion; strict right or law is a state of universal reciprocal coercibility. Kant seeks to ground the law’s primary institutions (property, contract, status, and punishment) in the logical requirements of a self- consistent freedom. The obligation of contracts, as of law, he thinks is entailed by the concept of a (simultaneously) united will. His account thus abstracts from human bene- fit and empirical realities alike, and rests on fictions (virtu- ally admitted by him in retaining the ‘idea of an original contract’ of society). Bentham had taken a very different course. His A Frag- ment of Government (1776), ridiculing late echoes of Pufendorf, proposed a radical distinction between the ‘provinces’ of expositors, who by attending to facts explain what the law is, and ‘censors’, who by attending to reasons consider what it ought to be. Bentham’s exposi- tory jurisprudence included a treatise Of Laws in General, not published until 1945 but very like John Austin’s less ingenious account, The Province of Jurisprudence Determined (1832): all laws properly and strictly so called are commands, expressions of wish (accompanied by threat of sanction) by the sovereign in an independent political community; however influential in courts, rules not made or adopted by sovereign command are not laws properly so called. Having a legal obligation is being the subject of a command and susceptible to its accompanying sanction. Legal rights including powers are all to be explained in terms of commands and more or less complex permis- sions or negations of obligation. English-language philosophy of law remained largely within the orbit of Bentham and Austin for more than a hundred years (though historico-comparative jurisprudence ranged widely). American and other legal realists denied that the substance of the law is rules or any other standard posited by commands or any other past acts. But they retained and reinforced the conception of law as an instrument, in itself morally neutral, of ‘social control’ for the purposes of those in power (most directly courts and other officials). Hans Kelsen, whose ideas became influential outside German-speaking lands in the 1930s, attempted a union of Kantian with neo-Hobbesian and neo-Humean themes which issued ultimately in a radically will-, indeed command-, centred account of law and legal system. Legal philosophy (‘pure theory of legal science’) must be free from every value, and from any reference to fact such as might suggest that law’s normativity derives from or is reducible to its efficacy or other empirical reality. Kelsen sought in effect a ‘third theory’, sharing with natural law theory the attempt to reproduce and explain non-reductively law’s normativity, and with legal positivism the rejection of every norm or value not posited and made effective by contingent human acts and facts. The quest’s failure is manifested in Kelsen’s many shifts to and fro between contradictory views about the source and coherence of legal norms, the content of normativity, and the meaning of propositions of legal science, and in his final open reliance upon ‘fictitious acts of will’. That explanations of law and legal obligation must point to commanding or consenting acts of will was denied in H. L. A. Hart’s The Concept of Law (1961) and Essays on Bentham (1982). Legal rules are, rather, content- independent peremptory reasons for actions. Their sources may be commands but may equally be any fact having the normative significance attributed to it by a rule of recognition accepted by judges and officials (for any reason other than fear of immediate sanction). Not all laws are obligation-imposing; many are power conferring and an account which reduces these to conditions or protases of obligation disguises the variety of law’s normative functions by overlooking the variety of its social functions. A descriptive legal philosophy can and should be free from moral presuppositions; law is not ‘necessarily or concep- tually’ connected to morality, Hart holds. But legal philosophy should understand and reproduce the viewpoint or ‘internal attitude’ of those participants in a legal system for whom law is a genuine reason for action and something of (not necessarily moral) value. It therefore cannot main- tain that law may have just any content. Hart’s many-sided resistance to reductive accounts of legal realities, and his strategy of understanding law as a type of reason created, maintained, and recognized for distinctive reasons, have encouraged many lines of inquiry into the point and function-related structure not only of law and legal system as a general type of social reality, but also of legal reasoning or judicial deliberation, of the rule of law as a distinctive ideal for politico-legal order, and of the shaping moral point and justification(s) of particular legal institutions such as contract, tort (delict), property, and punishment. Attention to Hart’s neo- Aristotelian method of explanation by central and secondary cases has suggested that, despite his insistence on the opposition between the legal positivism he defended and every natural law theory, such opposition is needless unless positivism is taken (like Kelsen’s but not Hart’s) to deny that valuation and moral judgement have any philosophical warrant or truth. Many positivist theories before Hart had been mod- elled on the natural (including mathematical and psychological) sciences. The Concept of Law opened legal philosophy to issues of method in descriptive social theory earlier discussed by Dilthey, Weber, and Winch, and showed, as Hart more or less clearly intended, the fruit- lessness of seeking a value-free general social science. Interest has since shifted towards integrating legal theory with ethics and/or modelling it on the interpretation of cultural forms such as literature. For example, Ronald Dworkin’s critique of positivism seemed at first intended to establish that Hart had misdescribed the types of standard used in judicial deliberation. But Dworkin’s real theses were not that legal principles differ from rules, but that there are standards which are legally authoritative not because they were created or validated by enactment or law, history of the philosophy of 499 . us to invest words and sentences with a certain meaning, whilst the second investigates the relationships between words and the things to which they refer, or the facts that they describe. The. philosophical psychology, or story about the powers of the mind. Furthermore, a theory of what the world is like must conform to the demand that it is describable by language: if, therefore, a linguistically. directions, give recipes, and tell the time. There is, then, no agreed solution to the problem what it is determinately to take a term in my language to refer to a particular thing or feature of