The Oxford Companion to Philosophy Part 77 potx

General guidance about the conduct of life is what is colloquially meant by the word ‘philosophy’ and is what most people expect from philosophers and are, for the most part, disappointed not to receive from them. Dis- pensing such guidance soon became an important aspect of Greek philosophy. It began with Socrates’ attacks, through the mouth of Plato, on the calculating amorality of his Sophist contemporaries, permeated Aristotle’s Ethics, and became the main substance of philosophy in the long epoch from the reign of Alexander the Great to the fall of the Roman Empire. The Stoics and Epicureans did not wholly ignore logic and ‘physics’, which Aristotle saw as making up philosophy, together with ethics. But, especially in the Roman period, in Epictetus, Seneca, and others, the ethical element was overwhelming. In the Middle Ages, only the clergy were literate and educated, and guidance for the conduct of life became pro- fessionalized and legalistic. The moral life, directed as it was towards the eternal, disdained man’s earthly existence and took little account of personal individuality. Phil- osophy, in so far as it touched non-philosophers, was official and authoritative. The humanism of the Renais- sance reversed all that. The diversity of human beings was celebrated, as in the Colloquies of Erasmus. The rational, if unsystematic, exposition of Leben-sweisheit emerged in the form of the essay, in Montaigne and, then, by imitation, in Bacon (whose essays were, in fact, congelations of apho- risms). In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the moralistes of France, such as the rather laboriously cynical La Rochefoucauld, had an earnest British associate in Samuel Johnson, a lively American one in Benjamin Franklin, and a brilliant German one in Lichtenberg. Chamfort, who died in 1794, is a latter-day moraliste; the rough and hearty William Cobbett of Advice to Young Men is a more likeable Franklin. Addison’s Spectator essays are a bland English version of the same sort of thing. By the end of the eighteenth century, prudence, and the idea of rational management of life, had been obscured by the clouds of romanticism. One major philosopher of the nineteenth century applied himself with supreme wit and penetration to Lebensweisheit: Schopenhauer, mainly in the non-technical parts of his Parerga und Paralipomena. Nietzsche may be seen as carrying on the same task, for which he was mar- vellously equipped as a writer but hopelessly unfitted as a human being. Earlier in the century Emerson had addressed himself to the subject; towards its end Shaw, particularly in his prefaces, dispensed a great deal of advice, in the style of Samuel Butler, whom he much admired. Together they dismantled Victorian respectabil- ity for the English-speaking world. Perhaps the most distinguished popular philosopher of the present century was Alain (Émile Chartier), who published his thoughts in several thousand 600-word pieces in a daily paper. Havelock Ellis, John Cowper Powys, and Aldous Huxley were less copious but comparably influential. On a more modest level is the American Sydney Har- ris, a syndicated columnist, raised above such writers as Ann Landers and Abby by the generality of his concerns. G. K. Chesterton contributed marginally to the tradition, as did such aphorists as Logan Pearsall Smith and Gerald Brenan. In the last three decades professional philosophers, after a long period of abstention from anything but the most abstract and uncommitted attention to problems of conduct and practice, have resumed a measure of direct involvement, mainly at the political or collective level, but to some extent more personally, as in Richard Robinson’s An Atheist’s Values and Robert Nozick’s unkindly treated The Examined Life. The second kind of popular philosophy, namely amateur philosophy, presupposes the existence of professional *philosophy to define itself against. That, in effect, is much the same thing as institutionalized philosophy, which was to be found in ancient Greece with Plato’s Academy, Aris- totle’s Lyceum, and the other Athenian schools; emerged again, by way of cathedral schools, in the medieval efflorescence of universities from the twelfth century onwards; but subsided, with the Renaissance, until the slow revival of universities in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In that last gap all notable philosophers, from Descartes to Hume, were, formally, amateurs. Ama- teur philosophy as a genre is really a creation of the nineteenth century with its mass literacy and self-education. Coleridge, for all his plagiarism and incoherence, is too substantial to count as an amateur. Carlyle was a prophet rather than any sort of philosopher, as was Ruskin. Herbert Spencer achieved a sort of professionality by the sheer bulk of his output. The historian of philosophy J. D. Morrel was a school inspector like Arnold. J. H. Stirling, the enraptured expositor of Hegel, was a doctor. Shadworth Hodgson was a gentleman-philosopher with private means. More per- fect cases are the eighth duke of Argyll, Secretary of State for India among other things, and James Hinton, author of The Mystery of Pain. A. J. Balfour was about as grand as, and a better philosopher than, the duke of Argyll. In the twentieth century amateur systems increasingly failed to find their way into print; most of them languished in typescript and photocopy. One arresting exception is The Social Contract of the Universe by C. G. Stone, a most ambitious piece of deduction. There are also the works of L. L. Whyte and George Melhuish, and, in the United States, Ayn Rand, stren-uous exponent of objectivism and self-interest. Philosophical popularization, the third of the kinds mentioned earlier, was made necessary by the conjunc- tion of ever greater professional obscurity and difficulty with a public demand for enlightenment. G. H. Lewes’s Biographical History of Philosophy is the first important book in English to respond to this opportunity. The introduc- tions to philosophy by Paulsen and by Windelband were fairly soon translated from German after their late nineteenth-century publication. A. W. Benn wrote excellent little histories of ancient and modern philosophy. But the best piece of philosophical popularization remains Russell’s Problems of Philosophy. In the years between the wars there were Olaf Stapledon, the stylish John MacMurray, 740 popular philosophy pioneer of philosophy on the radio, and the irrepressible and in every sense fluent C. E. M. Joad. Since 1945 what was a modest cottage industry has become a large productive field as university populations have increased. Hospers’s Introduction to Philosophical Analysis and Human Conduct may be singled out for their scope, reliability, and well-deserved circulation, although the former, at any rate, first published in 1956, is, understandably, showing signs of age. The most convincing successor to Hospers’s Introduction (which has been badly watered down in later editions) is Roger Scruton’s Modern Philosophy (London, 1994), which covers a great deal of ground, is replete with historical references, and mitigates its passages of compara- tive toughness with plenty of wit. Only the most austere of professionals nowadays seem able to resist enticements to explain themselves to a wider public. There are two recent new developments in the field of popularization by professionals. The first is the appearance of very short books covering most, or at any rate a large part, of the subject, such as Thomas Nagel’s What Does It All Mean? (Oxford, 1987) and Simon Blackburn’s Think (Oxford, 1999) and Being Good (Oxford, 2000). The second is the publication of books by professional philosophers on subjects of direct general human interest that are the topics of current public controversy: for instance, Mary Midgley’s Beast and Man (Hassocks, Sussex, 1978), Jonathan Glover’s Causing Death and Saving Lives (London, 1977) and What Sort of People Should There Be? (London, 1984), and Peter Singer’s Practical Ethics (Cambridge, 1979). There was a period after the deprivations of war had driven people back to almost Victorian levels of reading and thinking in which there was much philosophical popularization on the British radio and television, and even in the colour magazines of Sunday papers. The profit motive and dumbing-down egalitarianism have since turned television into a mirror in which Caliban can contemplate himself and the Sunday magazines into vehicles for fashion advertising. a.q. *philosophy of life; pseudo-philosophy. W. E. H. Lecky, The Map of Life (London, 1899). W. Tatarkiewicz, Analysis of Happiness (The Hague, 1976). population. How many people ought there to be? According to traditional *consequentialism, which holds that we ought to do what maximizes value, it is good to increase the population provided that the increase in value derived from causing people to exist with lives worth living is greater than any decrease that this might also cause in the value of pre-existing lives; and we ought to increase the population provided that there is no alternative that offers a greater increase in overall value. Most moral theorists reject this view, since it seems to make procreation often obligatory and, in particular, implies that it can be obligatory to cause more and more people to exist, even if this continually lowers the overall quality of life, provided that the total amount of good in the world continues to increase. Some consequentialists contend, alternatively, that we ought to maximize average value per life lived. On this view, it is obligatory to increase the population only if each new life would contain more value than the average life. But this view also implies, implausibly, that it is wrong to cause a person to exist if his life would contain less than the average value, even if his life would be well worth living. Faced with these problems, many moral theorists embrace the commonsensical view that the optimum population size must be determined solely by reference to the interests of existing people. There is no reason to increase the population for the sake of those who would thereby be brought into existence. This view, however, ignores what is surely relevant—namely, that our present action can affect the welfare of people who will later exist. (For complications, see the entry on future generations.) Thus many theorists have revised their view to hold that the interests of only present and future people count. The possible interests of possible people do not count. While initially this view seems compelling, it has proved untenable. If future people are those who definitely will exist, while possible people are those who might or might not exist, then the two categories overlap, since some of those who might or might not exist will in fact exist. But, if some people are both future people and possible people, then we cannot discriminate in the way suggested between future and possible people. Alternatively, we might define a future person as someone who will exist independently of one’s present choice and a possible person as someone who might or might not exist depending on the outcome of one’s choice. Given this distinction, the claim that the interests of possible people do not count supports the desired conclusion that the expectation that a person would have a life worth living does not itself provide a moral reason to cause him to exist. The problem is that it also implies that the expectation that a person would have a life that would be worse than no life at all provides no reason not to cause him to exist, since the person’s existence depends on the outcome of one’s choice. What most of us believe is that, while there is no moral reason to cause people to exist just because they would have lives worth living, there is a reason not to cause people to exist if their lives would not be worth living. Moral theorists have tried to defend this view in many ways; for example, by appealing to the claim that wrongs require victims, to the asymmetry between harming and failing to benefit, or to the distinction between doing and not doing. The current consensus is that an adequate defence has yet to be found. j.m cm. *person-affecting principles. David Heyd, Genethics: Moral Issues in the Creation of People (Berkeley, Calif., 1992). Thomas Hurka, ‘Value and Population Size’, Ethics (1983). Derek Parfit, Reasons and Persons (Oxford, 1984), pt. 4 and app. g. pornography. In everyday use, ‘pornography’ refers to an array of images and texts, now including ones on the Inter- net, that are meant to produce sexual arousal in those who pornography 741 see or read them and that are, standardly, sexually explicit—offering direct representations of sexual acts or sexualized body parts. Etymologically, ‘pornography’ derives from the Greek roots ‘porne’, which means ‘sexual slave’ or ‘harlot’, and ‘graphos’, which means ‘depiction of’, thus connoting a depiction of sexual slavery or prosti- tution. And indeed, much actual pornography, even when it takes children, men, or animals as its objects, is modelled on a male–female, master–slave paradigm. Pornography comes in many genres, including heterosexual, homo- sexual, transsexual, and sado-masochistic; it can be more or less explicit and is sometimes frankly violent. Some distinguish ‘pornography’ from ‘erotica’, reserving the latter label for sexualized depictions conveying mutuality, love, and respect or for those that, at a minimum, do not sexu- alize coercion and violence. Others challenge the viability of the distinction or criticize its role in privileging cultur- ally favoured over more marginalized and idiosyncratic sexual tropes and tastes. Traditionally, objections to pornography have con- demned it as obscenity. Recent feminist critics eschew this tactic as hostile to sexuality. Their objections to pornography, instead, are based on claims of its harms—harms taken to be located in its effects, but for some, found also in the very speech acts that constitute pornography. The harms claimed include the coercion and abuse of those used as subjects in pornography’s production, an increase in acts of sexual violence throughout society, and a diffuse but powerful tendency to eroticize the degradation of women. ‘Pornography makes sexism sexy’ (MacKinnon). In contrast, ‘pro-sex’ feminists defend and at times cele- brate the practice of pornography. Praising free sexual experimentation, they argue that pornographic speech, if is to be countered at all, should be countered with more speech, including more sexual speech. Civil libertarians defend the legal protection of pornographers, claiming that there are fundamental liberty rights at stake in sexual expression. Navigating the challenges that pornography presents is difficult. In terms of social policy, toleration of pornography is in many ways perilous to women’s safety and freedom, yet constraints on free expression often have serious costs. In personal morality, subtle questions arise in determining when graphic sexual depictions are expan- sive, and when degrading, of the erotic life. The sophisti- cation of the current debate about pornography’s moral and legal status evinces an acknowledgement of the pecu- liar power of sexual speech and the complex connections between viewing and doing, fantasy and reality. a.car. m.l. S. E. Keller, ‘Viewing and Doing: Complicating Pornography’s Meaning’, Georgetown Law Journal (1993). R. Langton, ‘Speech Acts and Unspeakable Acts’, Philosophy and Public Affairs (1991). C. MacKinnon, Only Words (Cambridge, Mass., 1993). Porphyry (c.232–c.305), Porphyrius Malchus. Greek philosopher, editor of Plotinus. Brought up in Tyre, he studied at Athens and from 263 under Plotinus at Rome. Around a score of his numerous works survive in whole or part, including Against the Christians (fragments), Lives of Pythagoras and Plotinus, commentaries on Homer, Plato’s Timaeus (fragments), Aristotle’s Categories, and Ptolemy’s Harmonica, and a short Introduction (Eisagoge¯) to Aristotle’s Categories that quickly became and long remained a standard textbook. The so-called Tree of Por- phyry traces a species (commonly man) from its summum genus (substance) through differentiae (e.g. corporeal) that yield successive subgenera (e.g. body). c.a.k. *Neoplatonism; genus and species. Porphyry, Introduction, tr. and ed. J. Barnes (Oxford, 2003). A. Smith, Porphyry’s Place in the Neoplatonic Tradition (The Hague, 1974). Port-Royalists. Port-Royal was a monastery near Paris committed to the teachings of Bishop Cornelius Jansen (*Jansenism). Antoine Arnauld, Blaise Pascal, and Pierre Nicole wrote influential Jansenist theological treatises at Port-Royal, and Arnauld and Nicole co-authored La Logique; ou, L’Art de penser (Logic; or, The Art of Thinking (1662)), generally known as the Port-Royal Logic. This work was a manual on method in logic and semantics, with overtones of epistemology. It built on the foundations of the Cartesian doctrine of clear and distinct ideas and attacked *Pyrrhonism and medieval theories of logic. It heavily influenced subsequent manuals in logic for over two centuries. This work was also a key source for reflections on controversies about miracles, including how to weigh apparently reliable human testimony in favour of miracles against the improbability of the miracle’s occurrence. t.l.b. *Cartesianism. A. Arnauld and P. Nicole, Logic or the Art of Thinking, ed. and tr. Jill Vance Buroker (Cambridge, 1996). Jean Racine, Abrégé de l’histoire de Port-Royal (Brief History of Port- Royal), 1st edn. (Cologne, 1742, in part; 1747, in whole). posit. In Quine’s terminology a ‘posit’ is anything we say exists. So if we say there are rabbits, rabbits are among our posits. Does this commit him to *relativism? He claims not: ‘To call a posit a posit is not to patronise it.’ His idea seems to be that although positing depends on us, we treat our posits as real, hence cannot regard them as dependent on us. r.k. W. V. Quine, Word and Object (Cambridge, Mass., 1960), ch. 1. positive and negative freedom: see liberty. positivism. A movement akin to *empiricism and *nat- uralism introduced towards the middle of the nineteenth century by Comte, the French sociol-ogist (to use a term he himself invented), with the social reformer Saint- Simon as a forerunner, whom he served as secretary in his youth. What is distinctive about positivism in its original form is its attempt to describe the history of human thought as evolving through certain definite stages, which 742 pornography Comte called the religious, the metaphysical, and the scientific. Of these the last was the most productive and valuable, though the earlier ones had their value too and were not to be simply dismissed as primitive and useless; indeed Comte himself, towards the end of his life, thought it necessary to introduce a sort of ‘religion of humanity’. Posi- tivism fitted in well with the evolutionary tendencies of the age. It was both descriptive and normative, describing how human thought had in fact evolved and prescribing norms for how our thinking, including thinking about human thought itself, should proceed. In this respect it could be said to link the eighteenth-century doctrines of inevitable progress to the evolutionary ethics of later in the nineteenth century, which saw our duty as that of furthering a process that was going on anyway, though positivism was more concerned with prescribing methods of thought than ethical norms. This emphasis on furthering the inevitable, if perhaps little else, it shared with Marx- ism, though a later version of positivism (that of Mach) was to be the subject of a vigorous attack in Lenin’s Materialism and Empirio-Criticism (Moscow, 1908). In the form Comte gave it, positivism was rather fond of categories and hierarchies, though these were seen not as static and cut off from each other, but as dynamic and developing along a certain path, so that positivism empha- sized the unity of the sciences. Not only did human thought itself develop through the three stages mentioned above, but the sciences form a natural hierarchy in terms of method and subject-matter, ranging from astronomy through physics and the biological sciences to the human science of sociology. They also developed historically in this order, though of course without the earlier ones being superseded by the later ones so that they disappeared. (Mathematics stood rather outside this scheme, being pre- supposed by it.) It is not surprising then that the emphasis fell on the newest stage, the science of humanity, with the growing realization that human beings, at least in the mass, were suitable objects for scientific study, a realization which led to the study of them as institutionalized in societies which were themselves developing, i.e. to sociology. Psychology, however, which at that time was amenable only to study through the subjective method of introspection, Comte ignored, presumably because introspection did not seem subject to proper scientific control. Many philosophers have been labelled ‘positivist’, especially those of an evolutionist persuasion, but after Comte there was less emphasis on categorizing and on the historical development of thought, and also perhaps less on the social-reformist and somewhat authoritarian zeal that had a lot to do with the personality of Comte himself. The emphasis on the value and all-embracing capability of science remained, and indeed was intensified in so far as the- ology and metaphysics tended to get short shrift. But there was a more critical approach to science itself, to what it was and what it could do; the point was not to limit its scope, which became ever wider, but to examine its pre- suppositions and proper procedures. Science became more self-conscious, and more concerned to extrude metaphysical elements from science itself. It is based on observation, and so should not, it was thought, appeal to what cannot be observed, on pain of reintroducing metaphysics. This means that things like atoms and electrons should not be treated as real but unobservable entities, but as devices which help the scientist to give the simplest uni- fying description of phenomena and make accurate pre- dictions, rather as the square root of minus one is usually treated by mathematicians and physicists as a convenient device which does not correspond to anything real, even in the sense in which numbers might be real, but is distinguished from the ‘real’ numbers by being called ‘imagin- ary’. This approach (*instrumentalism) was especially pursued by Mach, who used it also in denying a place in proper scientific descriptions to physical objects, which cannot strictly be observed, he thought. Positivism here has obvious affinities with the empiricism of earlier philosophers, especially, so far as philosophy of science goes, with Berkeley, who also anticipated Mach in reject- ing Newton’s attempt to prove the existence of absolute space by observing the behaviour of the surface of the water in a bucket as it started and stopped rotating. Berke- ley (in his De Motu, or Of Motion) and Mach argued that the deformation of the surface might occur because the rota- tion was relative to the framework provided by the fixed stars rather than to that provided by an absolute space; Mach in fact thought that it was not just relative to, but caused by, this relation to the fixed stars. Mach, with other philosophers of science of an anti- metaphysical bent, notably Duhem and, a little later, Poin- caré, was writing towards the end of the nineteenth century. The trend continued, but in the twentieth century the emphasis shifted very much towards logic and language, resulting in *Logical Positivism, the form usually referred to when the word ‘positivism’ is used by itself in a twentieth-century context, at any rate when that context is philosophical rather than scientific. Concerning science, the emphasis was then on the unity of the sciences, especially their reducibility to physics. (*Reductionism.) In science today ‘positivism’ refers especially to the unity of the natural and social sciences, but in philosophy is less used. Logical Positivism has been sublimated into anti- realism, and reductionism in the sense of the attempt to reduce all sciences to physics has been largely abandoned. (*Realism and anti-realism.) But the appeal to science in matters concerning the mind remains vigorous, and both here and in anti-realism the spirit of positivism still flour- ishes in philosophy, though it is far from being unchal- lenged, and it is open to dispute how far it can be called dominant. *Legal positivism shares something of the spirit and motivation of positivism in the general sense, and origin- ated at about the same time, but in fact has developed rather independently. a.r.l. E. Mach, Popular Scientific Lectures (first pub. in German, 1894; La Salle, Ill., 1943). R. Carnap, The Unity of Science (first pub. in German, 1932; London, 1934). positivism 743 L. Kolakowski, Positivist Philosophy (first pub. in Polish, 1966; Harmondsworth, 1972). positivism, legal: see legal positivism. Positivism, Logical: see Logical Positivism. possibility. Possibility, *actuality, *necessity are inter- dependent modalities. On most accounts, and in some sense of ‘entail’, necessity entails actuality and actuality entails possibility, but the converses are not valid. To characterize φ as a possibility is generally to claim for some appropriate φ, φ is possible. Where φ is a proposition, it can be understood as: (1) φ is logically possible; its negation entails a contra- diction. (2) φ is metaphysically possible; consistent with metaphysical necessities. Kant’s necessary synthetic truths are examples of the latter. (3) φ is nomologically possible; consistent with scientific laws. (4) φ is epistemologically possible; consistent with what is known. (5) φ is temporally possible; consistent with truths about the past. (6) φ is conceivable to a rational agent. A distinction has been drawn between *de re and de dicto modalities, as, for example, where there is a mix of quantifiers and modal operators. Consider the propositions (i) It is possible that something has the property P and (ii) There is something that possibly has the property P. (i) is characterized as a de dicto use, attributing possibility to a proposition. (ii) is characterized as de re, attributing to a particular object the property of possibly having the property P. On such a de re use what follows the modal operator is not a complete sentence. (ii) can be represented as ‘There is a particular x such that it is possible that x has P’. The clarity or usefulness of the distinction has sometimes been questioned. For example, the *Barcan formula endorses equating (i) and (ii). Also, a determination of de re versus de dicto use is often unclear, as, for example, where sentences with proper names follow the modal operator, as in ‘It is possible that Napoleon was assassi- nated’. r.b.m. *conceivability. T. Gendler and J. Hawthorne (eds.), Conceivability and Possibility (Oxford, 2002). G. E. Hughes and M. J. Cresswell, An Introduction to Modal Logic (London, 1968). M. Loux (ed.), The Possible and the Actual (Ithaca, NY, 1979). A. Prior, Time and Modality (London, 1957). possible worlds. We often talk about what might have been the case, about what is possible. I might have been a vicar—that is, although I am not actually a vicar, my being a vicar is possible. Philosophers have become accustomed to talking of such possibilities in terms of the idea of a possible world: to say that I might have been a vicar is to say that there is a possible world in which I am a vicar. A possible world is a world which differs in some possible way from our ‘actual’ world: e.g. a world in which tigers have no stripes, or in which no people existed. The idea of a possible world in something like the contemporary sense is normally credited to Leibniz, who thought that God chose this world, from an infinity of possible worlds, to be the actual world. Since God must choose the best, this world is therefore the best of all possible worlds—the doctrine famously satirized by Voltaire in Candide. Possible worlds became a focus for philosophical interest in this century with the development, by Saul Kripke and others, of a semantic interpretation for *modal logic. Modal logic adds two symbols to the basic vocabulary of logic: ◊, read as ‘possibly’ or ‘it is possible that’, and ٗ, read as ‘necessarily’ or ‘it is necessary that’. (There are different systems of modal logic, which differ in which modal formulae are taken as *axioms.) Thus we can construct formulae such as ٗ(p & q), ◊p, ◊ٗp, and so on. Intuitively, these formulae should be interpretable as saying something about what is necessarily or possibly true. But how should we understand their *truth-conditions? Possible worlds provide the answer. The modal sentence ‘ ٗ(p & q)’ is true if and only if ‘(p & q)’ is true at all possible worlds. (*Formal semantics.) The essential idea is fairly intuitive. A necessary truth, such as ‘2 + 2 = 4’, is one that is true in all possible worlds: there is no possible situation in which it is false. Something that is merely possibly true, such as ‘I am a vicar’, is true in some possible situation. There is no impossibility in the idea of a situation in which I am a vicar. This suggests a way of reducing problematic modal claims into claims that do not contain any modal notions. If we take the idea of a world as primitive, we can understand the modal operators ‘possibly’ and ‘necessarily’ as quantifiers over worlds: ‘Possibly p’ is thus rendered ‘There is a world in which p’, and ‘Necessarily p’ becomes ‘At all worlds, p’. Modality is explained away! However, it could be objected that we cannot really take the idea of a world as basic, since hidden within it is the idea of possibility: a ‘world’ here is being tacitly understood as a possible world. If we are to reduce modality, we must have an independent account of what these possible worlds are. So what are these possible worlds? The most striking answer is David Lewis’s idea that other possible worlds are real: they exist in just the same sense as the actual world exists. What makes worlds distinct is the fact that they are spatio-temporally separated from one another. And what makes the actual world actual is simply the fact that we inhabit it—other speakers in other worlds who utter the words ‘the actual world’ will be referring to their world. ‘Actual’ therefore becomes an indexical. The idea of a possible world can be put to use in other areas of philosophy. Two examples: first, Lewis and Robert Stalnaker have explicated the idea of a proposition as a set of possible worlds. The proposition expressed by the 744 positivism sentence ‘Pigs fly’ is that set of worlds in which ‘Pigs fly’ is true. Second, Lewis has argued that we understand the idea of a property, such as redness, not as a universal, but as a set of possible individuals: all those individuals, in this world and others, to which the predicate ‘is red’ truly applies. Lewis argues forcefully that we cannot make adequate sense of the applications of the notion of a possible world unless we accept worlds as real. This idea has met with much resistance. Others think that we should rather explain possible worlds in terms of sets of sentences, or as constructions out of the inhabitants of the actual world, or think with Kripke that possible worlds are stipulated rather than ‘discovered’. t.c. *mundus imaginalis. D. M. Armstrong, A Combinatorial Theory of Possibility (Cambridge, 1989). David Lewis, On the Plurality of Worlds (Oxford, 1986). R. Stalnaker, Ways a World Might Be: Metaphysical and Anti- Metaphysical Essays (Oxford, 2003). possible-worlds semantics: see formal semantics, the philosophical relevance of. post hoc, ergo propter hoc. ‘After this, therefore because of this.’ Strictly, the *fallacy of inferring that one event is caused by another merely because it comes after it. More loosely, the fallacy (characteristic of superstitious beliefs) of assuming too readily that an event that follows another is caused by it without considering factors such as counter- evidence or the possibility of a common cause. (*Causal- ity.) The name appears to derive from Aristotle’s Rhetoric (1401 b 29–34). p.j.m. H. W. B. Joseph, An Introduction to Logic, 2nd edn. (Oxford, 1916), ch. 27. post-analytic philosophy. A somewhat amorphous tendency (hardly ‘school’) of thought which defines itself mainly in opposition to the mainstream ‘analytic’ line of descent. This reactive movement may be dated back to Quine’s essay ‘Two Dogmas of Empiricism’ (1953) which launched a root-and-branch attack on the logical empiri- cist programme and thereby did much to promote the turn toward a radically holistic conception of meaning, knowledge, and truth. Other sources include late Wittgenstein on ‘language-games’ and cultural ‘forms of life’ as the furthest we can get by way of epistemic justification, and Richard Rorty’s neo-pragmatist view of truth as what’s currently and contingently ‘good in the way of belief’. These ideas have found additional support in Thomas Kuhn’s paradigm-relativist conception of scientific theory change—itself much influenced by Quine— and in the ‘strong’ sociology of knowledge where priority is accorded to the socio-cultural determinants of whatever passes for ‘truth’ at any given time. Feminist philosophers have likewise argued for a more holistic and context-sensitive approach, one that would emphasize those factors in the process of knowledge acquisition that are standardly treated—by ‘malestream’ analytic philosophers—as belonging to the background ‘context of discovery’ rather than the scientific ‘context of justification’. Ideas have also come from farther afield, e.g. from hermeneutic approaches (Dilthey, Heidegger, Gadamer); from Michel Foucault’s Nietzsche-inspired sceptical genealogies of knowledge; and from post- structuralist ideas about ‘reality’ as a linguistic or discur- sive construct. Meanwhile, some thinkers in the broadly post-analytic camp would reject these more extreme versions of the case against ‘old-style’ analytic philosophy. Very often this involves an attempt to reformulate its scope and limits in response to such sceptical relativist arguments. Thus the prefix ‘post-’ sometimes betokens ‘farewell to all that’, while sometimes it announces ‘business continued under different management’. c.n. J. Rajchman and Cornel West (eds.), Post-Analytic Philosophy (New York, 1985). post-modernism. In its broad usage, this is a ‘family resemblance’ term deployed in a variety of contexts (architecture, painting, music, poetry, fiction, etc.) for things which seem to be related—if at all—by a laid-back pluralism of styles and a vague desire to have done with the pretensions of high-modernist culture. In philosophical terms post-modernism shares something with the critique of Enlightenment values and truth-claims mounted by thinkers of a liberal-communitarian persuasion; also with neo-pragmatists like Richard Rorty who welcome the end of philosophy’s presumptive role as a privileged, truth-telling discourse. There is another point of contact with post-modern fiction and art in the current preoccu- pation, among some philosophers, with themes of ‘self- reflexivity’, or the puzzles induced by allowing language to become the object of its own scrutiny in a kind of dizzy- ing rhetorical regress. To this extent post-modernism might be seen as a ludic development of the so-called *‘linguistic turn’ that has characterized much philosophical thinking of late. c.n. *modernism; German philosophy today. Thomas Docherty (ed.), Postmodernism: A Reader (Hemel Hempstead, 1993). post-structuralism. School of thought which emerged in the late 1970s, claiming to supersede—or at any rate to ‘problematize’—the earlier *structuralism. Best understood as a French-inspired variant of the so-called *‘linguistic turn’, it is the idea that all perceptions, concepts, and truth-claims are constructed in language, along with the corresponding ‘subject-positions’ which are likewise (so it is argued) nothing more than transient epiphenom- ena of this or that cultural *discourse. From Saussure post- structuralism takes the notion of language as a system of immanent relationships and differences ‘without positive terms’; from Nietzsche, its outlook of extreme epistemo- logical and ethico-evaluative relativism; and from Fou- cault, its counter-Enlightenment rhetoric of ‘power/ knowledge’ as the motivating force behind talk of reason post-structuralism 745 or truth. Such thinking is vulnerable to all the familiar criti- cisms—including forms of transcendental refutation— rehearsed against thoroughgoing sceptics and relativists down through the ages. c.n. J. Sturrock (ed.), Structuralism and Since (Oxford, 1979). potentiality. A potentiality, or latent ability, is a second- order *capacity of an object or person, a capacity to acquire, develop, or regain another (first-order) capacity. Thus a normal new-born human infant has a potentiality to speak English, meaning that it has the capacity (absent, for instance, in infant chimpanzees) to acquire the ability to speak English. The realization of such a potentiality— that is, the acquisition of the relevant first-order capacity—may involve both natural processes of maturation and the presence of suitable environmental conditions. In a more general sense, potentiality is traditionally contrasted with actuality, a distinction intimately related in Aristotelian metaphysics to the distinction between matter and form, and one which more or less coincides with the modern distinction between the dispositional and the occurrent. e.j.l. *disposition; propensity. R. Tuomela (ed.), Dispositions (Dordrecht, 1978). pour soi : see for-itself and in-itself. power. A central concept in political philosophy and, often metaphorically, in other inquiries as well. Discus- sions of power in politics typically refer to one of two sources of power, or to an amalgam of both. These are the physical and organizational resources produced by an economy, and the simpler but less tangible resource of co-ordinated individuals. We may call these exchange power and co-ordination power. They enable different things. For example, the power of a charismatic leader backed by large numbers may readily bring down a regime but may not have much value in creating a new one in its place or in maintaining one. Exchange-power may be especially valuable in maintaining a regime. Power is typically a causal notion: its application pro- duces results. A presumption of much power talk is that it is somehow additive: put enough little bits together and you have a big chunk of power. There may often be truth in this view, as in a military engagement. But it is also often conspicuously wrong and misleading. It is wrong directly in that bits of power need not add any better than other things do. Addition can fail when power is all of one type or when the two types are mixed. For a transparent example of the former, note that the charismatic leaders of two groups with different goals or values could dissipate all their power by attempting to add it together. For an example of the latter, note that a regime might amass greater and greater exchange power only to find itself now destitute of co-ordination power, as did the military junta in Argentina in the 1980s. That regime destroyed almost all of the opposition to its general policies and its dictator- ship only to create opposition to its destruction of those people. Among the greatest political power theorists have been Thomas Hobbes and Karl Marx. Hobbes supposed that an all-powerful sovereign would produce such order as to make life better for all. In his fiction of the contractual creation of a sovereign out of the conditions of the state of nature, Hobbes recognized but largely ignored the difficulty of creating power merely by willing it. But without power, the sovereign would be of no value to those who want order. For Marx the power of a ruling class is to be explained by relations of production. There are subjective elements at play because a class must come to have class consciousness before its members are likely to co-ordinate properly for their class interests. Marx grasped the role of the co-ordination of large numbers of individuals in his schematic accounts of failed and potential revolutions. But he may finally have underestimated the potential role of power from exchange as the technology of weapons and of policing benefited from the evolving capitalist mode of production. That mode, while it created a prole- tariat, also created a state apparatus that, while it has remained intact, has been impervious to threats from Marx’s revolutionary class. Historically, power has been invoked most by conflict theorists. In the view of these theorists, there is usually someone or some group who are thought to have power and to use it for some purpose. In contemporary debates, especially those centring on the work of Michel Foucault, this assumption is sometimes not made. There is somehow power in the system or in the culture we have inherited, and that power controls us, sometimes in deleterious ways. Hence, despite the language of power and exploitation, there is relatively little connection to the long tradition from Thrasymachus into the present. In Western academic life, the older tradition seems to fit the increasingly bitter conflict between these two power schools. r.har. *authority. Russell Hardin, ‘The Social Evolution of Cooperation’, in Karen Schweers Cook and Margaret Levi (eds.), The Limits of Rationality (Chicago, 1990). Steven Lukes, Power: A Radical View (London, 1974). Dennis Wrong, Power: Its Forms, Bases, and Uses (Oxford, 1979). power, will to: see will to power. practical reason. Argument, intelligence, insight, directed to a practical and especially a moral outcome. Historically, a contrast has often been made between theoretical and practical employments of *reason. Aristotle’s ‘practical syllogism’ concludes in an action rather than in a proposition or a new belief: and phrone¯sis (see book vi of Nicomachean Ethics) is the ability to use intellect practic- ally. In discussions of motivation, furthermore, appeals to practical reason may seek to counter claims that only desire or inclination can ultimately prompt to action. A measure of disengagement from personal wish and want, 746 post-structuralism a readiness to appraise one’s acts by criteria which (rising above individual contingent desire) can be every rational moral agent’s criteria, marks a crucial point of insertion of reason into practice. To Kant, the bare notion of being subject to a moral law suffices to indicate how practical reason can operate. Considering any moral policy, ask: Could it consistently function as universal law? The scope of practical reason, however, is much wider than this: practical reasoning must (for example) include the critical comparison and sifting of alleged human goods and ends, and the reflective establishing of their ranking and place in a life plan. r.w.h. E. Millgram (ed.), Varieties of Practical Reasoning (Cambridge, Mass., 2001). O. O’Neill, Constructions of Reason (Cambridge, 1989). practical syllogism. A kind of inference whose function is to produce action. Aristotle says that the premisses of practical syllogisms move agents to act (De Anima 434 a 16–21). On one interpretation, these premisses express desires and beliefs (e.g. a desire for warmth and a belief that making a fire would do) that, via inference, issue in actions. It is debated whether the conclusion of an Aristotelian practical syllogism is a mental item (e.g. a desire to make a fire now) or an overt action. Whether the action-producing function claimed for practical syllogisms is instead performed by non-inferential causal processes is an open question. a.r.m. D. Charles, Aristotle’s Philosophy of Action (Ithaca, NY, 1984). pragmaticism. A rule for clarifying the meaning of concepts and hypotheses defended by Charles S. Peirce: we should list the experiential consequences our actions would have were the hypo-theses true. The name was introduced in 1905 to distinguish Peirce’s *pragmatism from rival versions: he hoped it was ‘ugly enough to be safe from kidnappers’. Pragmaticism differed from other versions in its commitment to realism and in the claim that a strict proof of it could be given. c.j.h. C. S. Peirce, ‘What Pragmatism Is’, in Collected Papers, v (Cam- bridge, Mass., 1934). pragmatics. The study of language which focuses attention on the users and the context of language use rather than on *reference, *truth, or *grammar. Thus, pragmatic analysis of a command notes that the speaker must be a superior and that the hearer has the ability to carry out the command. On the discourse level, pragmatic analysis tells us how participants in a conversation interact with one another as when a speaker signals the hearer that he or she is telling a story or is engaged in prayer. Also on the discourse level, pragmatic analysis shows us how conversational settings disambiguate what is being said. At a party attended by Bill Adams, we understand that the speaker is referring to that Bill and not Bill Baker when he says ‘Bill is stupid’. In like fashion, this sort of analysis shows us how the conversational setting implicates. Bill Adams is apply- ing for a job, and you are asked about his application. If all you say is that he is a nice fellow, you imply conversation- ally that there is not much more to be said on his behalf. n.f. *semantics; syntactics. Paul Grice, Studies in the Way of Words (Cambridge, Mass., 1989). Z. Szabo (ed.), Semantics versus Pragmatics (Oxford, 2005). pragmatic theory of truth. For pragmatists, *truth, like other concepts, is to be understood in terms of practice. The notion of truth as a relation of correspondence between belief and reality is not rejected but clarified by reference to actions, future experiences, etc. Each of the pragmatists has a distinctive way of carrying out this practical clarification. Peirce defines truth as the ultimate outcome of inquiry by a ‘community of investigators’, an outcome of ‘settled’ ‘habits of action’. James clarifies truth in terms of ‘leading’. True beliefs, he says, ‘lead to consistency, stability and flowing human intercourse’. Dewey identifies truth (‘warranted assertibility’) with the solution of a problem. Inquiry, he holds, starts from a ‘problematic situation’ and, if successful, ends with a situation that is so ‘determinate’ and ‘unified’ that hesitancy to act has been eliminated. Although classical pragmatists repeatedly affirm their allegiance to *realism, today the debate still rages over whether the relativity to practice in this theory of truth entails a type of *idealism or *scepticism. p.h.h. C. J. Misak, Truth and the End of Inquiry: A Peircean Account of Truth (Oxford, 1991). pragmatism. The characteristic idea of philosophical pragmatism is that efficacy in practical application— ‘What works out most effectively in practice’—somehow provides a standard for the determination of truth in the case of statements, rightness in the case of actions, and value in the case of appraisals. However, it is the first of these contexts, the epistemic concern for meaning and truth, that has historically been the most prominent. With Immanuel Kant, pragmatism insists that since our limitedly human efforts at inquiry can never achieve totality, we must settle for sufficiency, which is ultimately a practical rather than a theoretical matter, so that prioritiz- ing practical over theoretical reason is an inescapable part of the human condition. In matters of cognition and inquiry, pragmatism calls for a steadfast refusal to allow us to view the very best that we can possibly do as not being good enough. Its operative injunctions are: Approach the issue of the cognitive accessibility of truth by asking the classical pragmatic question: If that is indeed how realities stand, then what would be the best sort of evidence for it that we could expect to achieve? The operative injunctions are: ‘Realize that we have no access to matters of fact save through the mediation of evidence that is often incomplete and imper- fect. And realize too that to say that the best evidence is not good enough is to violate Peirce’s cardinal pragmatic imperative never to bar the path of inquiry.’ pragmatism 747 In line with this perspective, a realistic cognitive pragmatism insists upon pressing the question: ‘If A were indeed the answer to a question Q of ours, what sort of evidence could we possibly obtain for this?’ And when we obtain such evidence—as much as we can reasonably be expected to achieve—then pragmatism sees this as good enough. (‘Be prepared to regard the best that can be done as good enough’ is one of pragmatism’s fundamental axioms.) If it looks like a duck, waddles like a duck, quacks like a duck (and so on), then—so pragmatism insists, we are perfectly entitled to stable the personal claim that it is a duck—at any rate until such time as clear indications to the contrary come to light. Once the question ‘Well, what more could you reasonably will ask for?’ meets with no more than hesitant mumbling, pragmatism says: ‘Feel free to go ahead and make the claim.’ It is not that true means warranted assertibility, or that warranted assertibility entails truth. What is the case, rather, is that evidence here means ‘evidence for truth’, and (methodologically) warranted assertibility means ‘warrant- edly assertible as true’. After all, evidentiation is here a matter of truth estimation, and where the conditions for rational estimation are satisfied—ipso facto—there is rational warrant for letting those estimates stand surrogate for the truth. The very idea that the best we can do is not good enough for all relevant reasonable purposes is—so pragmatism and common sense alike insist—something that is simply absurd, a thing of unreasonable hyperbole. Although pragmatism is largely epistemic in orienta- tion, it has a metaphysical component as well. This pivots on the idea that human concepts and distinctions are generally dichotomous and on-off, while nature herself is not hard-edged. In consequence, we think in black and white about a reality that admits various shades of grey, or—to put it into more contemporary terms—we think by digital concepts about an analogue reality. The subtlety and com- plexity of nature are such that what we see as differences in kind are in fact differences in degree, with thought impos- ing discontuities upon a continuously standard reality. It is the purposes at hand that determine the modus operandi of our conceptualizations even as the line between childhood and maturity may be set at 18 for consent in marriage, at 16 for purchasing alcoholic beverages, and at 21 for voting. But pragmatism also holds that our distinctions—though partly conventional—are never totally so but will inevitably hinge on purposive efficiencies inherent in the inexorable rulings of a non-negotiable reality. Pragmatism as a philosophical doctrine traces back to the Academic *Sceptics in classical antiquity. Denying the possibility of achieving authentic knowledge (episte¯me¯) regarding the real truth, they taught that we must make do with plausible information (to pithanon) adequate to the needs of practice. Kant’s stipulation ‘contingent belief, which yet forms the ground for the effective employment of means to certain actions, I entitle pragmatic belief’ (Critique of Pure Reason, A 824/B 852) was also influential for the development of the doctrine. Another formative step was Schopenhauer’s insistence that the intellect is universally subordinate to the will, a line of thought that was elaborated by several German neo-Kantian thinkers, including Hans Vaihinger and Georg Simmel, who stressed the controlling dominance of practical over theoretical reason. Moral *utilitarianism, with its tests of the rightness of modes of action in terms of their capacity to provide the greatest good of the greatest number was yet another step in the development of pragmatic thought. For it too invokes much the same utility-maximization model, and there is a deep structural analogy between the (act-utilitarian) contention that an action is right if its consequences redound to ‘the greatest good of the greatest number’, and the thesis-orientated version of a pragmatic theory of truth, holding that an empirical claim is correct if its acceptance is maximally benefit-producing. However, pragmatism as a determinate philosophical doctrine descends from the work of Charles Sanders Peirce. For him, pragmatism was primarily a theory of meaning, with the meaning of any concept that has application in the real world inhering in the relations that link experiential conditions of application with observable results. But by the ‘practical consequences’ of the acceptance of an idea or a contention, Peirce meant the consequences for experimental practice—‘experimental effects’ or ‘observational results’—so that for him the meaning of a proposition is determined by the essentially positivist criter- ion of its observable consequences. And, moving beyond this, Peirce also taught that pragmatic effectiveness consti- tutes a quality-control monitor of human cognition— though here again the issue is that of scientificpraxis and the standard of efficacy pivoting on the issue of specifically predictive success. Peirce developed his pragmatism in opposition to idealism, seeing that the test of applicative success can lead mere theorizing to stub its toe on the hard rock of reality. But his successors softened up the doctrine, until with present-day ‘pragmatists’ the efficacy of ideas consists in their mere adoption by the community rather than in the success that the community may (or may not!) encounter as it puts those ideas into practice. Although Peirce developed pragmatism into a substantial philosophical theory, it was William James who put it on the intellectual map in his enormously influential Prag- matism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking (New York, 1907). However, James changed (and—as Peirce himself saw it—ruined) Peircean pragmatism. For where Peirce saw in pragmatism a road to impersonal and objective standards, James gave it a personalized and subjectivized twist. With James, it was the personal (and potentially idiosyncratic) idea of efficacy and success held by particular people that provided the pragmatic crux, and not an abstracted community of ideally rational agents. For him, pragmatic efficacy and applicative success did not relate to an impersonalized community of scientists but to a diversified plurality of flesh-and-blood individuals. Truth for James is accordingly what reality impels and compels human individuals to believe; it is a matter of ‘what pays by way of belief’ in the course of human activity within the surrounding environment; and its acquisition is an 748 pragmatism jonathan edwards’s Puritan faith runs throughout his philosophy, where all explanation ends in God. c. s. peirce, perhaps the greatest American philosopher, inventor of pragmatism, published no books and found little recognition in his lifetime. william james, in philosophy as in psychology, sought to understand any thing by asking what difference it makes in practice or in experience—by seeking to discover its function. george santayana’s writings proclaim him a truly American philosopher in their rejection of European idealism in favour of a naturalistic view of the world and the place of humankind in it. philosophy in america: the founders . substance of philosophy in the long epoch from the reign of Alexander the Great to the fall of the Roman Empire. The Stoics and Epicureans did not wholly ignore logic and ‘physics’, which Aristotle saw. Russell’s Problems of Philosophy. In the years between the wars there were Olaf Stapledon, the stylish John MacMurray, 740 popular philosophy pioneer of philosophy on the radio, and the irrepressible and. philosophy, which was to be found in ancient Greece with Plato’s Academy, Aris- totle’s Lyceum, and the other Athenian schools; emerged again, by way of cathedral schools, in the medieval efflorescence