Quinton, Anthony (1925– ). British philosopher, based in Oxford and member of the House of Lords, who has writ- ten on political philosophy, ethics and metaphysics, the philosophy of mind, and a variety of historical figures. His lengthiest work is his treatise on The Nature of Things, which takes as its central notion the concept of *substance. By exploring the questions associated with this concept Quin- ton develops, in three parts, his views on a wide-ranging set of traditional philosophical problems. In part I, problems of identity and individualism, the relation between matter and extension, and personal identity and the soul are discussed; in part II knowledge, scepticism, and the concept of percep- tion are the topics; in part III the notion of essence, the dis- tinction between theory and observation, mind–body dualism, and fact and value are discussed. The general pos- ition defended is a form of materialism. h.w.n. *philosophy; English philosophy; philosophical inquiry; philosophy, value and use of. Anthony Quinton, The Nature of Things(London, 1973). 780 Quinton, Anthony race. Higher-level organisms form species, that is groups of organisms that breed among themselves but that are reproductively isolated from all other organisms. We humans belong to the species Homo sapiens. Although species are the fundamental units of biological classifica- tion, they can often be subdivided into groups that are dis- tinguishable by special features. Early biologists of the modern era, notably the French naturalist Buffon, assumed that this is true of humans, and they spent much time and effort trying to decide what constitute the true divisions, generally known as races. In his Descent of Man (1871), Charles Darwin argued that many human differ- ences are due to sexual selection, where differing stand- ards of beauty are the chief causal factors tearing human populations apart. Notoriously, the German Nazis were keen race theor- ists, believing that distinctions can be drawn between Aryans and others, especially Jews. Naturally, in the post- Second World War years, the very idea of race fell from favour, and it was argued that not only is it a socially per- nicious notion but that it has little or no scientific validity. The major defining mark of the human species is how lit- tle difference there is between peoples, not how much. In recent years, the pendulum has swung back a little. Anthropologists now recognize that there are several dis- tinctive human forms, and medical geneticists are keenly aware that there are distinctive diseases much more com- monly associated with certain groups than with others. For instance, Ashkenazi Jews (those from Eastern Europe) are more prone to carry a gene for Tay-Sachs diseases than are other peoples. m.r. *anti-Semitism. T. Dobzhansky, Mankind Evolving (New Haven, Conn., 1962). C. P. Groves, The Biology of Race (Berkeley, Calif., 1989). racism. Although the roots of theoretical racism can be traced back at least to the fifteenth century, the term did not come to prominence until the 1930s when it was used to describe the pseudo-scientific theory that ‘race’, as a decisive biological determinant, established a hierarchy among different ethnic groups. Racist theories were largely developed after the fact to justify practical racism, which can exist independently of them. Polygenesis, the attempt to explain the differences among kinds by posit- ing diverse origins, provided a basis for maintaining per- manent inequalities between peoples; by contrast, the philosophies of history that imposed a single goal on his- tory could be used to justify colonialism, as well as the destruction of indigenous cultures and peoples. Most potently, the two tendencies are combined to demand an assimilation that is still withheld on the basis of blood purity or skin colour. r.l.b. *fascism. B. Boxhill (ed.) Race and Racism (Oxford, 2001). R. H. Popkin, ‘The Philosophical Bases of Modern Racism’, in The High Road to Pyrrhonism (San Diego, 1980). Radcliffe Richards, Janet (1944– ). English philosopher whose book The Sceptical Feminist was published in 1980 and provides a vigorous defence of liberal feminism against both anti-feminists and radical feminists. Accord- ing to Radcliffe Richards, *feminism should not be con- cerned with benefiting a particular group of people (women), but with removing a particular kind of injustice. The central task of the book is to expose the faulty think- ing which grounds that injustice. Although influential, it has been said to be too unworldly in its understanding of women’s oppression, and insufficiently radical in the remedies it proposes. There is not much discussion of the inequalities of power which perpetuate injustice, and an acceptance that ‘women’s work’ is less fulfilling and valu- able than work outside the home. Richards’s feminism is logical rather than ideological, cerebral rather than celebratory. s.m. *justice. Radhakrishnan, Sarvepalli (1888–1975). Idealist philoso- pher who taught at Oxford and was the President of India during 1962–7. Best known for his elegant exegesis of *Indian philosophy and Hinduism in English, this prolific statesman broadly adhered to monistic *Veda¯nta, trying to reinterpret it as a kind of universal religion. Rejecting both Berkeleian and Hegelian idealisms, he upheld a teleo- logical and openly religious view of matter, life, and mind as all evolving with a divine purpose or idea which gives meaning to existence. Interpreting classical Indian and R modern Western philosophies in a syncretic manner, Rad- hakrishnan argued that ultimate reality is a changing but ‘ordered’ whole which science can only understand incompletely. It is directly accessible to a blissful intuitive experience that mystics of all religions describe in strik- ingly similar ways as ineffable. a.c. *science, art, and religion. S. Radhakrishnan, The Idealist View of Life(London, 1988). radical feminism: see feminism, radical. radical interpretation and translation: see translation, indeterminacy of. radical philosophy. Movement formed in 1971, in oppos- ition to narrowness and insularity of professional philosophy in Britain, particularly Oxford. The Radical Philosophy Group has organized various national confer- ences, but its main influence has been through the maga- zine Radical Philosophy. This has persistently forsworn allegiance to any particular doctrine, but describes itself as a journal of socialist and feminist philosophy. Addition- ally, although it is not a Marxist journal, many of those involved with it have seen themselves as continuing a Marxist philosophical tradition. Other preoccupations include a commitment to interdisciplinary work, widen- ing interest in continental philosophy, and reforming bad practices in academic philosophy. Since some of its defining concerns are now shared by many distinguished philosophers, it is to be wondered whether its self-image of opposition to the narrowness of the professional discipline is any longer appropriate (although the attempt by Cambridge philosophers to deny an honorary degree to Derrida might suggest that this is premature). k.m. *Oxford philosophy. R. Edgley and R. Osborne, A Radical Philosophy Reader (London, 1985). Ra¯ma¯nuja (1017–1137). South Indian consolidator of devotional theistic interpretation of Vedic philosophy called qualified non-dualism. Unlike the unqualified monists, Ra¯ma¯nuja postulates three realities—God, mat- ter, and individual souls—the last two being parasitic on the first. God, a person with infinite excellent attributes, is the self of selves, and the universe is his inseparable body. Highest liberation consists not in identification with God (as in non-dualism), but in enjoying a God-like state of joy at knowing one’s eternal dependence upon the Lord. With a distinctively realistic epistemology of error, Ra¯ma¯nuja opposes the idealism of *S ´ an . kara, who deemed the world an illusion that is ‘neither real nor unreal’. Ra¯ma¯nuja bombards this illusionism with charges of inconsistency, asking tough questions: ‘Whose illusion is it? It could not be God’s because he never errs, and could not be ours because we are its effects according to non- dualism!’ a.c. *Indian philosophy; Veda¯nta. Julius Lipner, The Face of Truth: A Study of Meaning and Metaphysics in Ra¯ma¯nuja (Albany, NY, 1986). Ramsey, Frank P. (1903–30). Cambridge mathematician, logician, and philosopher whose short career included important, though brief, contributions to a wide range of subjects, including probability theory, economics, and the foundations of mathematics. He was amongst the first to understand and recognize the importance of Wittgen- stein’s Tractatus, and one of the few contemporary philosophers whose opinion Wittgenstein respected. But he was not uncritical of Wittgenstein’s ideas at the time. Ramsey did pioneering work in the theory of subjective *probability, arguing that degrees of rational belief should conform to the axioms of the probability calculus. He developed a method for eliminating reference to theor- etical entities in science by framing what are now called ‘Ramsey sentences’. His analysis of generalizations was to treat them as expressing rules for the anticipation of experience rather than propositions to which truth-values could be assigned. He was also a proponent of the *redun- dancy theory of truth. e.j.l. F. P. Ramsey, The Foundations of Mathematics and Other Logical Essays (London, 1931). ——Philosophical Papers, ed. D. H. Mellor (Cambridge, 1990). Rashdall, Hastings (1858–1924). English philosopher who expounded a theory known as ‘ideal utilitarianism’. Rashdall was a Fellow of New College, Oxford, and dedi- cated his main work, The Theory of Good and Evil, to the memory of his teachers T. H. Green and Henry Sidgwick. The dedication is appropriate, for the particular version of *utilitarianism put forward by Rashdall owes elements to both Green and Sidgwick. Whereas he holds that the con- cepts of *good and *value are logically prior to that of *right, he gives right a more than instrumental signifi- cance. His idea of good owes more to T. H. Green than to the hedonistic utilitarians. ‘The ideal of human life is not the mere juxtaposition of distinct goods, but a whole in which each good is made different by the presence of others.’ Rashdall has been unfairly eclipsed as a moral philosopher by G. E. Moore. r.s.d. H. Sidgwick (with additional ch. by A. G. Widgery), Outlines of the History of Ethics (London, 1946). ratiocination. Reasoning. St Thomas Aquinas distin- guished ratiocination (ratiocinatio) from the direct, non- inferential apprehension of truth possessed by God and angels. Human beings, he claimed, arrive at ‘the know- ledge of intelligible truth by advancing from one thing to another’—i.e. by an inferential process, ratiocination. Ratiocination, understood simply as *reasoning, some times misses its mark; and, plausibly, some human know- ledge is acquired non-inferentially. a.r.m. *inference; argument. St Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, pt. 1, Q. 79, Art. 8. 782 Radhakrishnan, Sarvepalli rational choice theory explores the extent to which com- plex social and economic phenomena can be regarded as the outcome of calculative, self-interested individual action. The advent of game theory (during the Second World War) showed that the outcomes of action can often be understood as the joint result of individual choice in combination with the choices of other actors (‘players’), all of whom aim at maximizing (or at least satisficing) indi- vidual preference-satisfaction. Where two or more actors have regular interactions on the same matter, a strategy that reliably provides utility to all of them may emerge, and become enshrined in a convention. Rational choice theory has been claimed to explain many social institu- tions, from marriage to morality, though sceptics doubt its usefulness in the face of limits to obtainable informa- tion and to the time available for weighing indefinitely many alternative possible outcomes. a.bre. K. S. Cook and M. Levi (eds.), The Limits of Rationality (Chicago, 1990). rationalism. Any of a variety of views emphasizing the role or importance of reason, usually including *intuition, in contrast to sensory experience (including introspec- tion), the feelings, or authority. Just as an extreme empiri- cist tries to base all our knowledge on experience, so an extreme rationalist tries to base it on reason. But whereas *empiricism appears in the eighteenth century and again in the first half of the twentieth century, extreme rational- ism has been considerably less popular. In fact it reached its peak in the brash days when philosophy itself was beginning, back in the ancient Greek world. Parmenides maintained that, whatever the senses might say, the very notion of change involved a contradiction, and so reason demanded that reality be entirely devoid of change. As usually interpreted he said the same about plurality too. His fellow citizen and near-contemporary Zeno of Elea supported him with a set of paradoxes, including the famous Achilles and the tortoise. (*Zeno’s paradoxes.) These two, together with a handful of followers (includ- ing to a certain extent, but only to a certain extent, Plato), represent the acme of extreme rationalism, and later rationalists have seldom been willing to dismiss the senses quite so single-mindedly. They perhaps have in mind the words the slightly later philosopher Democritus, by no means an extreme empiricist, gives to the senses to defend themselves against pure reason (fragment 125): ‘Wretched mind, do you take your evidence from us and then overthrow us? Our overthrow is your own downfall!’ It is indeed hard to see how a being entirely devoid of any contact with the world through the senses could ever amass the materials needed to exercise its reason at all. How, for instance, could it acquire a language to express its thoughts in, and what sort of thoughts could it have if it had no language at all? Rationalism, however, does not have to take an extreme form. It can content itself with claiming simply that some of our knowledge, though not all of it, can come to us otherwise than through the senses. This is quite com- patible with saying that without some use of the senses we would not have any knowledge at all. Rationalism in fact can take two main forms, according as it claims that some of our propositional knowledge, i.e. knowledge of the truth of certain propositions, comes to us without coming through the senses, or claims that some of the materials from which our knowledge is constructed are present in the mind without coming through the senses. This latter will be the case if some of our concepts are *a priori, where this just means ‘prior to experience’. It might be, for instance, that concepts such as those of substance or caus- ation are present with us from the beginning in the sense that, as Kant thought, we do not find out that the world contains substances and causes, but cannot help but see the world as composed of substances which have attrib- utes and of events which are caused by other events. Hav- ing the concepts in this way, however, must be distinguished from having them explicitly, in the sense of having words for them or consciously thinking about them, as we are doing now. On the theory in question, small children and possibly even animals can do the for- mer without its following that they can do the latter. It is not surprising that, contrary to the claims of the extreme empiricist, we must bring some equipment with us if we want to know something about the world. If we could really start as blank tablets, then why don’t ordinary blackboards, or at any rate photoreceptive camera plates, know things about the world? On the other hand, it is only in a backhanded sense that we can be said to ‘know’ that the world contains substances and causes if the truth of the matter is that we can only know the world at all by treat- ing it as though it did. A more substantive rationalism is that which says that we can know certain propositions to be true without deriving this knowledge from our senses, even if in some or all cases we must use our senses to get the concepts that are involved in the propositions: I may know without looking that whatever has a size has a shape, but only if I already have the concepts of size and shape, i.e. if I know what size and shape are. Kant made, or at least brought into clear and explicit focus, a distinction between *analytic and synthetic state- ments (or judgements in his case, as he was more con- cerned with the workings of the mind than with linguistic analysis). Even empiricists usually allow that we know analytic statements a priori, but they defuse this conces- sion by adding that such knowledge hardly counts as knowledge in any meaty sense, since such statements do not say anything substantive about the world. Synthetic statements, however, do, and rationalism in its stronger versions is concerned to claim that some of them can be known a priori. The one about everything with size hav- ing shape would be a standard example, and others would be mathematical propositions, which empiricists usually try to treat as analytic, though without much success in the opinion of rationalists. In fact around the start of the twentieth century a sustained attempt was made by Frege and Russell to reduce mathematics to pure logic in their rationalism 783 rené descartes: ‘had he kept himself to geometry,’ said Hobbes in tribute, ‘he had been the best geometer in the world’. But Descartes’s vision of the unity of mathematics and the natural sciences inspired his philosophical project. gottfried wilhelm leibniz left such voluminous writ- ings on philosophy, mathematics, and physics that a com- plete edition is still not in sight; one scholar estimated it would be twenty years’ full-time work just to read his manuscripts. immanuel kant was the fountainhead from which the main stream of continental European philosophy flowed in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; his influence has steadily spread through English language philosophy too, especially in metaphysics and ethics. baruch spinoza’s greatest work, his Ethics, is in fact a sys- tematic metaphysical treatise which builds theorems upon axioms upon definitions. His intellectual adventurousness led to his ejection from the orthodox Jewish community in Amsterdam. founders of modern philosophy (european) theory known as logicism; but it is now generally agreed, especially since Gödel’s first incompleteness theorem in 1931, that this cannot be done. However, even what I have called this ‘more substan- tive’ rationalism, which claims that we can know certain interesting truths a priori, does not escape a certain ten- sion in its relations with the weaker rationalism which says that we have to treat the world in certain ways if we are to make sense of it. For when it comes to justifying these claims to know the world without looking at it, the rationalist is in danger of being driven to say simply that we cannot think coherently without accepting these propositions—which is rather weaker than claiming some special insight which definitely tells us that they are true. Would not such an insight be a sort of magic? Be that as it may, the main form that rationalism has taken in the last few decades has been of the weaker kind, and connected, like so much of philosophy during that period, with language. It stems from Chomsky, who holds that certain grammatical structures are innate in our minds, so that all human languages share certain common features which make it possible for children to learn them. Other sorts of language may be spoken by, say, Martians, but our children could not learn them, nor their children ours. An interesting recent development concerning the a priori is the claim by Kripke and Putnam that the a pri- ori–empirical distinction does not coincide, as it has usu- ally been thought to do, with the necessary–contingent distinction. Kripke claims that some propositions that are true only contingently can be known a priori (an example might be that the knower himself exists), while some propositions that are necessarily true can only be known empirically (an example here might be the chemical com- position of some substance). This latter might sound rather strange: might not water, say, have turned out to have some structure different from H 2 O? Kripke and Put- nam would agree that we might have found ourselves faced with a liquid that was wet and colourless, filled the oceans, and was good for making coffee with, i.e. had all the ordinary and easily observable properties of water, but which had a structure quite different from H 2 O. But such a liquid would not be water, because the word ‘water’ gets its meaning from its use to name the liquid we actually have around us, which is H 2 O. Of course we might have called the other stuff water had we come across it, but then the word ‘water’ would have had a different meaning from the one it actually has, because it would have acquired its meaning in a different way, i.e. by its relations to a different stuff. This doctrine, incidentally, that water is essentially H 2 O, i.e. would not be what it is unless it had the structure H 2 O, illustrates the essentialism whose recent revival has been pioneered by Kripke and Putnam among others, and which is itself in the spirit of rational- ism rather than empiricism, even though our finding out that water is H 2 O relies on observation: the fact that things have essences at all is not something that observation can tell us. Finally, rationalism, like empiricism, can refer either to the psychological genesis or to the philosophical justifica- tion of our knowledge; i.e. it can say either that we do in fact get some or all of our knowledge, or all of our know- ledge in a certain sphere, from reason, or else that only to the extent that we do so can we properly claim to have knowledge. Again, as in the case of empiricism, we are bordering on *naturalism, but rationalism has perhaps more usually been concerned with the genetic questions. When justification is at issue rationalism is usually con- cerned (as with Plato and to a lesser extent Aristotle) with distinguishing real or proper knowledge from lesser grades of cognition like true opinion, which are unstable and cannot be relied upon. When contrasted with feeling or sentiment, especially in the eighteenth-century opponents of the *‘moral sense’ school, rationalism, often then called intuitionism, takes the form of an ethical doctrine claiming that we have a priori intuitions of moral truths. Ethical intuitionists vary in whether they treat such intuitions as isolated or as linked together in a rational system. In the latter case logical reasoning is involved, and though no one would deny that ethical conclusions can be logically derived from premisses which include ethical premisses, the rationalist, defying one form of the *nat- uralistic fallacy, will claim that they can be so derived sometimes from purely non-ethical premisses. It is in this sort of case that the ethical intuitions involved have the air of arising from reason, in parallel with logical intuitions, and so are thought to belong most appropriately under rationalism. Rationalism can also oppose reason to authority, in par- ticular to religious revelation, and the name has been used in this sense, especially since the end of the nineteenth century, though not usually in philosophy. a.r.l. *clear and distinct ideas; humanism. G. Ryle, ‘Epistemology’, in J. O. Urmson (ed.), The Concise Encyclo- paedia of Western Philosophy and Philosophers (London, 1960). Shows how rationalism and empiricism shade into each other. S. P. Stich (ed.), Innate Ideas (Berkeley, Calif., 1975). Includes dis- cussions of Chomsky as well as of earlier ideas. S. Kripke, Naming and Necessity (Oxford, 1980). C. Peacocke, The Realm of Reason (Oxford, 2003). L. A. Selby-Bigge (ed.), British Moralists (London, 1897). Selec- tions from moral sense theorists and their intuitionist opponents. rationality. This is a feature of cognitive agents that they exhibit when they adopt beliefs on the basis of appropriate reasons. Aristotle maintained that rationality is the key feature that distinguishes human beings from other ani- mals. The adjective ‘rational’ is used to characterize both agents and specific beliefs. In both cases rationality can be contrasted with either non-rationality or irrationality. A stone or tree is non-rational because it is not capable of carrying out rational assessments. A being who is capable of being rational but who regularly violates the principles of rational assessment is irrational. Among rational beings rationality 785 some beliefs are non-rational since they are matters of taste and no reasons are required. Beliefs that are contrary to the dictates of reason are irrational. Rational beliefs have also been contrasted with beliefs arrived at through *emotion, faith, authority, or by an arbitrary choice. The point of each contrast is to capture a sense in which we believe a proposition either without carrying out an appropriate assessment or in spite of the results of such an assessment. For example, we determine the balance in a cheque-book rationally when we enter the correct credits and debits and do the arithmetic. Irrational ways of deter- mining a balance include picking a number at random or choosing a number because we find it pleasant. When dealing with empirical matters, rational beliefs are arrived at by accumulating relevant evidence; a rational individ- ual will suspend belief until an adequate body of evidence has been accumulated and evaluated. Rational belief is established in mathematics by providing a formal proof. There has been an intense debate throughout the history of philosophy on the question whether matters of value are subject to rational assessment. It has long been held that rational assessment requires rigorous rules for deciding whether a proposition should be believed. Formal logic and mathematics provide the clearest examples of such rules. Science has also been con- sidered a model of rationality because it was held to pro- ceed in accordance with the *scientific method which provides the rules for gathering evidence and evaluating hypotheses on the basis of this evidence. In this view, rational assessment yields results that are universal and necessary; if two individuals who have access to the same evidence arrive at incompatible conclusions, at least one of them must be behaving irrationally. More recent discussions have proposed accounts of bounded rationality that pay closer attention to human cognitive limitations and recognize considerable scope for rational disagreement. The central role attributed to rules in rational evaluations has also been challenged. Follow- ing rules is not always required, since one task of rational assessment is to determine which rules should be fol- lowed in a particular situation. To insist that this decision must be made by following other rules can create an *infin- ite regress that would make it impossible to arrive at ratio- nal results in many situations that serve as paradigms of reason, such as constructing mathematical proofs or eval- uating scientific hypotheses. Nor is following rules—even correct rules of logic—automatically rational. Consider again an individual who is constructing a logical proof: this individual must decide which rules to apply at each stage of the proof. Mindlessly applying rules just because they are logically correct is foolish. In addition, Kuhn and others have argued that there are no fixed rules of scien- tific method. Rather, we must learn what the correct rules of method are as science develops. These considerations suggest that our ability to be rational depends on a basic ability to exercise intelligent judgement that cannot be completely captured in systems of rules. h.i.b. *reasoning; maximin and minimax. H. Brown, Rationality (London, 1988). C. Cherniak, Minimal Rationality (Cambridge, Mass., 1986). A. R. Mele and P. Rawling (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Rational- ity (New York, 2003). N. Rescher, Rationality (Oxford, 1988). ravens, paradox of the. A problem in *confirmation the- ory to which attention was first drawn by Hempel. Prima facie, a generalization such as ‘All ravens are black’ is con- firmed by—gains strength from—each new observed instance of a black raven. But this generalization is logic- ally equivalent to ‘Anything which is not black is not a raven’. And this latter generalization is confirmed by each new instance of a non-black non-raven, such as white handkerchiefs and pale pine writing-desks. So, if we accept the seemingly innocent principle that whatever confirms a hypothesis h also confirms any hypothesis logically equivalent to h, we must conclude that observations of white handkerchiefs will confirm that all ravens are black—which would render ornithology paradoxically easy. Yet it is not obvious which of the premisses of this argument could be rejected. j.l. C. G. Hempel, ‘Studies in the Logic of Confirmation’, in Aspects of Scientific Explanation and Other Essays in the Philosophy of Science (New York, 1965). Rawls, John (1921–2002). Major social and political philosopher. Educated at Princeton, he taught at Cornell and Harvard, and in 1971 published A Theory of Justice, whose leading idea is that of *justice as fairness—the hope for social institutions that do not confer morally arbitrary lifelong advantages on some persons at the expense of others. This condemns as unjust not only racial, sexual, and religious discrimination, but also many forms of social and economic inequality; the view is a strongly egalitarian form of *liberalism. It is based on a new form of social *contract theory—not an actual social contract but a hypothetical one. We are to imagine ourselves in an *original position of equality, in which we do not know most of the socially sig- nificant facts about ourselves—race, sex, religion, eco- nomic class, social standing, natural abilities, even our conception of the good life. Under this *veil of ignorance, we are to decide what principles we could agree to on the basis of a desire to further our own aims and interests, whatever they may be. Not knowing our position in soci- ety or our conception of the good, we are driven by this fiction to an equal concern for the fate of everyone, and Rawls maintains that we would give priority in choice of principles to avoiding the worst possible life prospects, with emphasis first on the preservation of personal and political liberty and second on the amelioration of socio- economic inequality. The principles he defends are: (1) each individual is to have a right to the greatest equal liberty compatible with a like liberty for all; (2) (a) social and economic inequalities are to be attached to offices and positions open to all under 786 rationality conditions of fair equality of opportunity; and (b) such inequalities are justified only if they benefit the worst-off (the *difference principle). The first principle has priority over the second, and both principles are to govern not detailed political choices but the basic structures—polit- ical, economic, and social—which determine people’s chances in life. Equal *liberty rules out persecution, dis- crimination, and political oppression. Equal *opportunity ensures that those with equal ability and motivation have equal chances of success, whatever class they are born into. The difference principle allows unequal abilities to produce differential rewards only to the extent that this is instrumentally necessary for the good of all, especially the least fortunate (for example, by providing the incentives which fuel productivity). Rawls opposes *utilitarianism, holding that the max- imum total good may not be pursued by means which impose unfair disadvantages on minorities, including the unskilled. More generally, he claims that the right is prior to and independent of the good, and cannot be defined as that which will promote or maximize the good. Certain conditions on the social relations between people and the way they may be treated take precedence over the pro- duction of desirable results. This is opposed to the idea that rights are just human conventions justified instru- mentally by their usefulness in promoting the general welfare. In numerous essays after the book, some collected in Political Liberalism (New York, 1993), Rawls further develops the theory of *justice and its relation to general moral theory and moral epistemology. He employs what he calls the method of ‘reflective equilibrium’, by which coherence in our moral views is achieved through mutual adjustment between particular moral judgements, gen- eral principles, and theoretical constructions like the social contract which model the ideas of morality. t.n. *equality; inequality; contractarianism. B. Barry, Theories of Justice (Berkeley, Calif., 1989). N. Daniels (ed.), Reading Rawls (New York, 1975). Thomas Pogge, Realizing Rawls (Ithaca, NY, 1989). J. Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, Mass., 1971; new edn. 1999). ——Political Liberalism (Cambridge, Mass., 1993). ——The Law of Peoples (Cambridge, Mass., 1999). ——Lectures on the History of Moral Philosophy (Cambridge, Mass., 2000). Raz, Joseph (1941– ). Legal, moral, and political philoso- pher, based in Oxford since 1970. Principally known for three theories. First, a conception of *authority invoking second-order practical reasons, reasons in favour of or against acting on an existing reason one might have to act (or not to act). Authority requires second-order reasons not to consider the independent merits of performing actions commanded, and these reasons must not them- selves be based on those merits. The theory is used to develop a qualified form of *legal positivism. Secondly, his interest theory of *rights sees rights as successful justifications for imposing duties on others, based on the recognition of the fundamental interests of creatures capable of possessing rights (persons). Thirdly, he is the best-known contemporary proponent of the political theory of *perfectionism, which holds that liberal states should not be neutral across the values and practices of their citizens, but should in fact promote individual life-styles which most advance personal *autonomy. s.m g. *law and morals. J. Raz, The Authority of Law (Oxford, 1979). —— The Morality of Freedom (Oxford, 1986). —— Practical Reason and Norms (Oxford, 1990). real. ‘Real’ is often used with some opposite term in mind, such as ‘ideal’, or ‘fake’. In these cases, one can infer from ‘A is not a real F’ that A is not an F at all (one of the things that tempts philosophers to equate ‘real’ with ‘existent’). Hence to contrast ‘real’ with a term like ‘relational’ may mislead: from ‘A was a relational change’ one can infer that A was a change. If ‘reality’ is taken to be the sum total of all that is real, then for ‘real’ we do have to read something like ‘existent’. Talk of such a sum total may itself be problematic, of course: it can smack of treating ‘everything’ as a name for an enormous entity. r.p.l.t. *appearance and reality; existence; ‘to be’, the verb; being; transcendence. J. L. Austin, Sense and Sensibilia (Oxford, 1963), 70. Realism, Critical: see Critical Realism. realism, direct: see naïve realism. realism, legal: see legal realism. realism, mathematical: see mathematics, history of the philosophy of; mathematics, problems of the philosophy of; Platonism. realism, moral: see moral realism. realism, naïve: see naïve realism. Realism, New: see New Realism. realism, quasi-: see quasi-realism. realism and anti-realism. Primarily directions, not pos- itions. To assert that something is somehow mind- independent is to move in the realist direction; to deny it is to move in the opposite direction. No sane position is reached at either extreme. Not everything is in every way independent of minds; if there were no minds, there would be no pain. Not everything depends in every way on minds; if I forget that Halley’s comet exists, it does not cease to exist. Many philosophical questions have the realism and anti-realism 787 general form: Is such-and-such mind-independent in so- and-so way? Given specifications of such-and-such and so- and-so, one may call someone who answers ‘Yes’ a realist. Since different philosophers take different specifications for granted, the word ‘realism’ is used in a bewildering variety of senses. In medieval scholastic philosophy, realism was a theory of predication opposed to *nominalism and conceptualism. On a realist analysis, the sentence ‘Snow is white’ is true if and only if the substance snow has the property of white- ness; whiteness exists independently of our thought and talk, just as snow does. Unlike substances, properties are predicative: their nature is to be properties of something. In contrast, conceptualists deny that any thing predicative exists independently of thought; the truth of ‘Snow is white’ requires only our concept of white to apply to snow. Nominalists go further, holding the only predica- tive item required for the truth of ‘Snow is white’ to be the word ‘white’ itself, whose existence depends on a particu- lar language, not just on a kind of thought. Kant opposed realism to *idealism, distinguishing tran- scendental and empirical versions of each. The empirical realist holds (like Kant) that we can have knowledge of the existence and nature of material objects in space and time. The transcendental realist holds (unlike Kant) that the existence and nature of the objects so known is wholly independent of our knowledge of them. Kant argued that the two kinds of realism make an untenable combination, because perception yields knowledge only of appear- ances. Thus the empirical realist should be a transcenden- tal idealist, for whom material objects are nothing beyond their appearances to us; the transcendental realist should be an empirical idealist, a sceptic. However, the argument relies on the dubious premiss that *perception yields knowledge only of appearances. Realists may deny that the nature and existence of what we perceive (e.g. a tree) depends on our perception of it. Perhaps the dependence is the other way round: my perception of the tree depends essentially on the tree, because I could not have had that perception without perceiving that tree. If so, the combin- ation of transcendental and empirical realism may be defensible. After Kant, ‘realism’ meant above all the view that we perceive objects whose existence and nature are independ- ent of our perceptions. The issue has subsequently been generalized. For any linguistic or psychological act (e.g. a judgement, a perception), one can ask whether it involves a relation to something independent of it. That something (e.g. a property, a material object) would constitute an independent standard of correctness for the act. The stand- ard makes the act correct only if they are related. Realists see anti-realists as sacrificing the independence to the rela- tion; anti-realists see realists as sacrificing the relation to the independence. An independent standard of correctness need not be a particular thing. To discuss whether the judgement ‘Rape is wrong’ is correct independently of being judged is to dis- cuss the objectivity of moral truth, not the existence of moral objects (to adapt Kreisel’s remark that what matters is the objectivity of mathematical truth, not the existence of mathematical objects). The existence of objects is rele- vant only when it is required for a judgement to be true. The truth of a perceptual judgement may depend on the existence of trees, that of a scientific theory on the exist- ence of electrons. Realism is still accused of leading to *scepticism by dis- connecting our beliefs from their standard of correctness. To know something is to believe it because it is true, but to assume that a belief is true in the realist sense is not to explain why it is believed. The problem is particularly acute where the realist cannot postulate a causal connec- tion between the facts and our beliefs. How, for example, could our belief that 5 + 7 = 12 be caused by a fact about abstract objects? Even where a causal connection is postu- lated, e.g. between the existence of electrons and our belief that electrons exist, the question is whether it is of a kind to help the realist. If the observational evidence can be explained by many mutually inconsistent theories, how except by luck can we choose the true one? Many anti-realists take the argument further, giving it a linguistic turn. They infer that we cannot even understand what realist *truth is; the epistemologically inaccessible is also semantically inaccessible. If we could never know the realist *facts, how could we even think about them? Real- ism is held to make nonsense of our thought and talk by attributing to it an unintelligible standard of correctness. Anti-realist alternatives take many forms. It may be global or restricted to a local practice (anti-realist accounts of morality and realist accounts of natural science often reflect the same confidence in a scientific world-picture). The anti-realist may hold (1) the practice does not involve judgements at all, or (2) the judgements it involves are incorrect, or (3) they are correct only in some mind- dependent sense. 1. *Emotivists treat moral principles as expressions of approval or disapproval. Formalists treat mathematical proofs as series of moves in a formal game like chess. Instrumentalists treat scientific theories as calculating- instruments used to predict future experience. In each case, apparent judgements are treated as not really candi- dates for truth. Emotivists say ‘Rape is wrong’ while deny- ing that ‘Rape is wrong’ is genuinely true. This risks inconsistency: given the usual practice in speaking of truth, if rape is wrong then ‘Rape is wrong’ is true. 2. Error theorists treat morality as a vast illusion; moral judgements are untrue because no values exist to make them true. *Eliminativists believe that neuroscience has refuted everyday psychology by showing that beliefs and desires do not exist. Even the truth of arithmetic has been denied on the grounds that numbers do not exist. On such views, we are mistaken in judging ‘Rape is wrong’, ‘I want a drink’, or ‘5 + 7 = 12’; although what we say may be use- ful, it is not literally true. 3. The truth of ordinary judgements may be admitted, but treated as mind-dependent, in order to allow us access 788 realism and anti-realism to it. Mind-dependence comes in many varieties. Stipula- tion provides an extreme case. By stipulating that my fish is named ‘Mary’, I make it true that my fish is named ‘Mary’; my knowledge of that truth is correspondingly unproblematic. Both fictional and mathematical truth have been assimilated to the stipulative model. A story is created by being told; anti-realists have called mathemat- ics the free creation of the human mind. The model is more complex than it appears. Stipulating something does not automatically make it true. Some stipulations are inconsistent, others made without due authority. In most practices, no single act of stipulation is authori- tative. A river is named ‘Thames’ by long-standing agree- ment. Anyone can mistake the name, but the mistake lies only in deviation from social consensus (the people can- not all be fooled). However, this is still an extreme model of mind-dependence. Many practices would be radically changed if their participants came to regard the truth of their judgements as constituted by present consensus. As we now think of morality, we allow that everyone in our society may share a false moral belief, all being blind to some morally relevant consideration. A more subtly mind-dependent standard of truth is con- sensus in the long run. By refining our current morality we might eventually overcome our present blindness. Such a standard has been suggested for science as well as moral- ity. Of course, we must not achieve the long-run consen- sus by lapsing into barbarism. What counts is an imaginary long run in which rational inquiry is pursued, unhindered by the contingent limitations of finite humans in constricting environments. Mind-dependent truth becomes something like idealized rational acceptability, in Putnam’s phrase. The mind on which truth depends is not the human mind, as described by empirical psych- ology, or groups of human minds, as described by empiri- cal sociology; it is an ideal mind, as prescribed by normative rules embodied in our thought and talk. Hegel’s objective idealism prefigured this view. Rational inquiry is not guaranteed to stabilize in consen- sus. We cannot assume that each moral disagreement will be resolved, or that historians will discover who killed the Princes in the Tower, or that mathematicians will either prove or refute Goldbach’s conjecture (‘Every even num- ber greater than 2 is the sum of two primes’). If truth implies consensus, we cannot assume that either a propos- ition is true or its negation is. This jeopardizes *bivalence, the principle that every proposition is either true or false. Anti-realism may, as Dummett has argued, require revi- sions of logic. For realists, a proposition is true or false even if we can never know which. Anti-realists ask how we can grasp such a standard of truth, if not by magic. How can we refer to conditions whose obtaining we cannot recognize? Many reject the challenge, arguing that such notions can- not be reduced to more basic terms. Others accept it. Some argue that reference is a causal relation; our use of, for example, the word ‘rain’ is causally related to a condition that also obtained in the inaccessible past. The idea that the world contains mind-independent condi- tions, properties, and relations is central to such an account; scholastic realism supports modern realism. When we have a thought, its truth or falsity is not a fact about us, unless we are thinking about ourselves. But it is a fact about us that we are having that thought. In having it, we refer to what it is about. *Reference to something requires at least indirect acquaintance with it, and there- fore with states of affairs involving it. Such acquaintance constitutes knowledge. Thus a pre-condition of thinking about something is possession of at least some knowledge about it. Realists and anti-realists may agree that such a pre-condition exists. For anti-realists, it is substantial. Reflection on it uncovers surprising incoherences in our thought of things as independent of us. For realists, the pre-condition is minimal. It permits us no end of ignor- ance and error. t.w. *coherence theory of truth; correspondence theory of truth. M. Devitt, Realism and Truth, 2nd edn. (Oxford, 1991). M. Dummett, Truth and Other Enigmas (London, 1978). T. Nagel, The View from Nowhere (Oxford, 1986). H. Putnam, Realism and Reason (Cambridge, 1983). realism in metaphysics. A problem of metaphysics much discussed in recent decades is that of realism. But the first problem here is how to formulate the problem. Here is one way: Realism: Tokens of most common-sense, and scientific, physical types exist objectively, independently of the mental. This, however, can be variously interpreted; here is just one possibility: Realism 1: Most physical types commonly postulated by human- ity have tokens that exist as such independently of the mental: i.e. these tokens might have existed and might have been of their respective types even had there been nothing mental. One problem with this is that the truth of realism would require that there be humanity, and that it postulate types, indeed physical types. Surely the philosophical doctrine or realism is not specifically about humanity and what humanity does or does not postulate. So we try again. Realism 2: Consider the physical types commonly postulated by humanity, and the statements, about each of these, that its tokens exist independently of the mental. Real- ism is the doctrine that most of these statements are true. This is a realist doctrine all right. But so is the doctrine about the first physical type mentioned in the Bible and the statement that its tokens exist independently of the mental. And there are indefinitely many ‘realist’ doctrines of a similar cast, all of which seem inappropriately tied to the vagaries of human postulation. Why should realism be restricted to these statements, or, worse, to most of them? realism in metaphysics 789 . Although the roots of theoretical racism can be traced back at least to the fifteenth century, the term did not come to prominence until the 1930s when it was used to describe the pseudo-scientific theory. identity and the soul are discussed; in part II knowledge, scepticism, and the concept of percep- tion are the topics; in part III the notion of essence, the dis- tinction between theory and observation,. realism. realism, legal: see legal realism. realism, mathematical: see mathematics, history of the philosophy of; mathematics, problems of the philosophy of; Platonism. realism, moral: see moral realism. realism,