The Oxford Companion to Philosophy Part 82 potx

For a doctrine less tied thus to humanity, consider this: Realism 3: There are tokens independent of the mental in that they might have existed and have been of their respect- ive types even had there been nothing mental. This is indeed a kind of realism, but it is compatible with a Kantian doctrine of a noumenal reality beyond our ability to know or even to comprehend, and with the view that ordinary common-sense reality is dependent on human construction through conceptualization. So realism 3 is a rather weak doctrine. According to a stronger version: Realism 4: The world of common-sense reality exists as it is thought to exist by at least the main lines of common sense, and this it does largely independently of the mental, in that it might have existed propertied and interrelated much as it is in fact propertied and interrelated even in the absence of anything mental. Here ‘common-sense reality’ is the world as we common- sensically believe it to be, composed of things large and small, along with the medium-sized dry goods of daily commerce. For Kant such common-sense reality has only ‘phenomenal’ reality, constituted by human construction. Beyond this there is the ‘noumenal’ in-itself reality independent of human construction. But this is inaccessible to human cognition. Unlike Kant, more recent construct- ivists appeal to conceptual schemes distinctive of a particular culture. (Here Wittgenstein may be an exception, but his views are elusive: Is there a human form of life, unlike that of the lion, or is there more than one human form of life?) Note how brief reflection has led us back to the aspect of realism 1 that we found initially off-putting. The problem is that if we abstract from humanity and its postulations, then we are left with too thin a notion of realism, one compatible with a Kantian view: an inaccessible noumenal reality along with a constructivist account of our ordinary world. A more interesting realism does after all apparently require reference to ourselves and our common-sense postulations. Many and varied are the constructivist heirs of Kant in more recent times. For Nelson Goodman we make stars through our ‘versions’. According to Hilary Putnam’s ‘internal realism’, the world is somehow internal to our conceptual scheme. As Benjamin Whorf would have it, language is itself our main world-making tool. For Thomas Kuhn different thinkers live in different worlds, each defined by its own theoretical ontology. And many other varieties of anti-realism and relativism are now on the market. e.s. N. Goodman, Ways of Worldmaking (Indianapolis, 1978). R. Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton, NJ, 1979). B. Whorf, Language, Thought, and Reality, ed. and intro. John B. Carroll (Cambridge, Mass., 1956). reality, levels of. The old conception of reality as hierarchical, embodied in the Great Chain of Being, re-emerged, secularized and purged of supernatural elements, in the late twentieth century. The world comprises not merely levels of complexity and levels of description, but levels of being: higher-level items depend on, but remain distinct from, items at lower levels. At the most basic level (if there is a most basic level) is the world described by physics. Arrangements of entities at this level ‘realize’ higher-level entities, and arrangements of these realize entities at still higher levels. The economy of Saskatchewan—a very high-level entity—is realized by the inhabitants of Saskatchewan, relations they bear to one another and to persons and institutions elsewhere. Persons and institutions are themselves realized by complex arrangements of psychological, biological, and inorganic entities. These in turn have still lower-level realizers. Proponents of levels point to the ‘irreducibility’ of descriptions of and laws governing higher-level items. This encourages a picture of these higher-level items as ‘floating above’ their lower-level supports. Higher-level goings-on are thought to be governed by higher-level laws discoverable by the special sciences. The nature of the realizing relation remains something of a mystery. Supervenience is occasionally invoked, but this is to re-label the relation, not to explain it. Some have doubted the coherence of levels: if higher-level entities depend on, but are distinct from, entities at lower levels, how could something at a higher level have a higher-level effect except by bringing about a lower-level change? Such ‘downward’ causation threatens the idea that the fundamental physical level constitutes a closed system governed by inviolable laws. One possibility is that philosophers have conflated the innocuous idea that ways of describing and explaining the world exhibit a hierarchical structure with the much less innocuous idea that corresponding to each of these ways is a level of being. Moves of this kind have a chequered philosophical pedigree. They express the remarkable idea that we can ‘read off’ the structure of reality from the structure of the language we use to describe reality. Perhaps we can get by with one complex world capable of being described in endless ways depending on our interests and the level of detail we hope to comprehend. j.heil J. Heil, From an Ontological Point of View (Oxford, 2003). J. Kim, ‘The Layered Model: Metaphysical Considerations’, Philo- sophical Explorations, 5 (2001). realization. This is a term commonly used in contempor- ary metaphysics and philosophy of mind to denote a relationship between properties at different levels which is supposedly at once weaker than identity and stronger than mere causal connection. Thus, it is often held that mental properties are ‘realized’ by physical properties of the brain and nervous system, but that one and the same mental property—such as a certain quality of pain—may be realized by different neural properties in different sen- tient creatures. This is known as the ‘multiple realization thesis’. e.j.l. *variable realization. J. Heil, The Nature of True Minds(Cambridge, 1992). 790 realism in metaphysics reason. The general human ‘faculty’ or capacity for truth- seeking and problem-solving, differentiated from instinct, imagination, or faith in that its results are intellectually trustworthy—even to the extent, according to *rational- ism, that reason is both necessary and sufficient for arriv- ing at *knowledge. Although the reason–emotion and reason–experience distinctions are overworked, the claim that reason is the defining characteristic of human beings (the human essence) remains powerful. a.bel. *reasoning; rationality; ratiocination; bladders of philosophy. Nicholas Rescher, Rationality: A Philosophical Inquiry into the Nature and the Rationale of Reason (Oxford, 1988). reason, practical: see practical reason. reason as slave of the passions. A fundamental claim of Hume’s moral psychology, used in his rebuttal of the rationalist pretence that reason can oppose the passions and teach us moral truths. ‘Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them’ (Treatise, ii. iii. 3). In an employment of *Hume’s fork, Hume insists that demonstrative reasoning (for example, in mathematics) plainly has no effect in itself on the passions; and probable reasoning is of significance to the passions only by ‘direct- ing’ our aversion to pain, or our propensity to pleasure, to those things that we take to be causally related to them. Hume may have inherited the expression from the art- icle on Ovid in Bayle’s Dictionnaire, one of the favourite works of Hume’s early adulthood: ‘Reason has become the slave of the passions’. j.bro. J. L. Mackie, Hume’s Moral Theory (London, 1980), ch. 3. reasoning. Suppose you have (in mind) *reasons for believing you have been lied to, or reasons against visiting the dentist, or reasons to be proud of your children. These are mental states, states of holding reasons for, or against, believing something or doing (or choosing or aiming at) something or feeling somehow. The word ‘reasoning’ describes two associated processes: searching for such reasons (often co-operatively), and giving them when you or somebody else has found them. A third process, gaining understanding of reasons that somebody else has given, is similar. Searching for reasons involves cogitation (thinking things through) and commonly also—though this is not reasoning—research. If you are confronted by a practical problem (‘What should I do on this matter?’) or a theoretical problem (‘What is the truth on this matter?’) or a response problem (‘How should I feel on this matter?’), solving it is bound to involve some cogitation, however perfunctory: you must bring to mind further questions that seem relevant to solving the problem, you must pon- der (‘weigh’) their relevance, and, if you have answers to them, you must finally derive (work out, calculate) a solution ‘in the light of’ the answers. Any answers you lack may be worth trying to discover, either by further cogitation (e.g. proving a lemma in mathematics) or by gather- ing information. The latter is where research comes in: ask someone, go and look, devise an experiment, etc. Since both parts of this composite activity contribute to finding reasons, both parts might with justice have been counted as reasoning, but in fact the research part is not—which is why philosophers who play down the role of research in theoretical inquiry can be called rationalists (Latin ratio, reason) and philosophers who emphasize it empiricists (Greek empeiria, experience). Giving reasons is setting them out, to oneself or someone else. This too is a process, though a quite different one from searching for reasons. Since it can be rehearsed and repeated, it is likely to be more orderly than the search was. And since it is useful for persuading people, and necessary for transmitting knowledge (at the least, for dis- playing your authority as a purveyor of correct solutions), there is a motive for making it as orderly and lucid as possible. Even if you are not going public, reason-giving is a way of checking for yourself that a search has been con- ducted properly—that you have reasoned well. You reason well when the reasons that you find, or give, favour (and not just seem to you to favour) the belief or action or response they are presented as reasons for; that is, they make it more likely that the belief is true or the action right or the response appropriate. So standards are required for judging whether, and preferably also for meas- uring how strongly, such-and-such reasons favour (or, as we often say, support) such-and-such a solution. Logic has sometimes been seen as the science of determining these standards, although nowadays its pretensions are nar- rower. The full-blown science would do two things: first represent each process of reasoning as the statement or production of an abstract entity called an argument, and then propose rules and principles that good arguments must observe (the rules license progressions through an argument, the principles are unspoken premisses we are allowed to add to any argument). Deductive logic achieves a bit of this brilliantly, but attempts to go beyond it have had little success. For example: what would be the inductive rule that specifies rightly when and to what degree observations (e.g. ‘All your known ancestors were male’) support generalizations (e.g. ‘All your ancestors were male’)? and what would be the moral principle that specifies rightly when and to what degree somebody’s wanting a service from you is a good reason for your providing it? If such questions cannot be answered, good reasoning is an art that has no science. c.a.k. *ratiocination; rationality. R. Descartes, Rules for the Direction of the Mind and Discourse on the Method, in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, tr., J. G. Cottingham et al., i (Cambridge, 1985). G. Harman, Change in View (Cambridge, Mass., 1986). S. E. Toulmin, The Uses of Argument (Cambridge, 1958). reasoning, psychology of. Logicians are concerned to for- mulate normative principles of deductive and inductive reasoning, psychology of 791 reasoning, which instruct us how to reason correctly. Psychologists, on the other hand, seek to discover by empirical means what sorts of inferences human beings typically do make when confronted by reasoning tasks and what kinds of psychological processes underlie our reasoning activity. Some of their empirical evidence suggests that we are subject to deep-seated reasoning biases which often lead us to draw incorrect conclusions from the premisses or data presented to us. For example, per- formance on the Wason selection task suggests that people make systematic errors of deductive reasoning with conditional sentences, sometimes failing to see that ‘If p, then q’ can be falsified by finding p to be true when q is false. Other studies indicate that people are subject to fundamental biases in their probabilistic reasoning, such as so-called base rate neglect. However, how do we know what constitutes correct reasoning if we really are so subject to reasoning bias? A paradox looms here. e.j.l. J. St B. T. Evans and D. E. Over, Rationality and Reasoning (Hove, 1996). reasons, internal and external. This distinction between two sorts of practical reasons is owed to Bernard Williams. An agent S has an internal reason R to act only if R would motivate him to act if he were fully informed and deliber- ated correctly, starting from what he is presently motivated to do. Any reason that does not satisfy this condition is called ‘external’, but Williams claims that there are no external reasons. The thrust of Williams’s internalism is, then, that each agent’s reasons are constrained by what he is actually motivated to to, i.e. by his actual desires. One can have a reason to do something that one does not want to do, but only if one’s actual desires would be changed by the provision of full information or by correct deliberation in such a way that one ends up wanting to do what one initially did not want to do. One’s actual desires constitute the starting-point for this process, and so are bound to affect the result. Since people differ in their actual desires, the internalist claims that there can be no considerations that are reasons for everyone, irrespective of their own aims and purposes. Universal moral reasons thus become potentially suspect. j.d. reasons and causes. Phenomena the relation between which bears on the status of rational, or free, beings in the natural world. Much common-sense psychological and historical explanation of people’s beliefs and actions proceeds by saying what their reasons were. There are questions whether such explanations (i) are causal, (ii) mention items which are causes of what is explained. A negative answer to (i) is given by philosophers who place the study of human beings outside the causal sphere (often assumed to be coextensive with the objective sphere of science). An affirmative answer to (ii) ensures that accounts given from an internal human perspective and from a more external, causal perspective are concerned with the same items. Intermediate positions are possible. When *action explanation is in question, the central question is often put, perhaps misleadingly, by asking ‘Are reasons causes?’ j.horn. *mental causation. Donald Davidson, ‘Actions, Reasons and Causes’, in Essays on Actions and Events (Oxford, 1980). recurrence: see eternal recurrence. recursion, definition by. A recursive *definition of an expression proceeds by first specifying a special subclass of the items it applies to and then specifying the remaining items it applies to in terms of a relation which any such item bears to an item to which the expression already applies. Thus the term ‘ancestor’ may be defined recur- sively as follows: (1) both of a person’s parents are ancestors of that person; (2) any parent of an ancestor of a person is also an ancestor of that person; (3) nothing else is an ancestor of a person. e.j.l. B. C. van Fraassen, Formal Semantics and Logic (New York, 1971). reducibility, axiom of. An axiom scheme of Russell’s ramified theory of *types. This theory was constructed to avoid vicious-circle fallacies, which at one time Russell held to be the root error behind a wide variety of para- doxes including the *liar paradox and his own *Russell’s paradox. The ramified theory imposes a twofold classification on propositional (sentential) functions. First, such functions are arranged in a hierarchy according to the type of argument they take. So, for example, there are functions of individuals, functions of functions of individuals, etc. Second, the theory stratifies the functions which take a particular type of argument into orders according to the kind of expression that picks out the function (this is the ramification). Russell prohibited unrestricted quantification over all the functions taking a particular type of argument. But this prohibition restricts the expressive power of the theory. So, to achieve the effect of the unrestricted quantification, Russell proposed the axiom of reducibility. Included in the lowest order of propositional functions are the predicative functions, which are picked out by expressions free from bound variables. The axiom of reducibility guarantees that the legitimate quantification over all predicative functions achieves the effect of the prohibited quantification over all functions regardless of order. The axiom applying to functions of individuals says that for any such function there is a predicative function that is formally equivalent (i.e. agrees in its mapping of arguments onto values). a.d.o. B. Russell and A. N. Whitehead, Principia Mathematica (Cam- bridge, 1910), i, ch. 2 of the Introduction and *12. reducibility of consciousness: see consciousness, its irreducibility. 792 reasoning, psychology of reductio ad absurdum . One of the following proof strategies: 1. A proposition P is proved by taking as a premiss the negation of P and demonstrating that, in conjunction with previously established premisses or axioms, a contradiction follows. Also known as indirect proof. 2. The negation of a proposition P is proved by taking P as a premiss and demonstrating that, in conjunction with previously established premisses or axioms, a contradiction follows. In the notation of the *propositional calculus, if ((~P · Q) ⊃ R) and ((~P · Q) ⊃ ~R) are provable and Q is a conjunction of established premisses, then a contradiction (R · ~R) follows, which suffices for a reductio proof of P. r.b.m. *reductio ad impossibile. B. Mates, Elementary Logic (Oxford, 1972). reductio ad impossibile . Proof of a proposition which involves demonstrating that its negation entails a contradiction; since a contradiction cannot be true, whatever entails it cannot be true. Proofs that √2 is irrational and that there are infinitely many primes are classic examples. Sometimes called indirect proof, and commonly called *reductio ad absurdum, though this term is sometimes applied to arguments where what is entailed is merely an obvious falsehood rather than a contradiction. m.c. reductionism. One of the most used and abused terms in the philosophical lexicon, it is convenient to make a (three-part) division. Ontological reductionism refers to the belief that the whole of reality consists of a minimal number of entities or *substances. One could be referring simply to entities of a particular kind (as in ‘All organisms are reducible ultim- ately to molecules’), but often the claim is meant in the more metaphysical sense that there is but one substance or ‘world stuff’ and that this is material. Hence, ontological reductionism is equivalent to some kind of *monism, denying the existence of unseen life forces and such things, claiming that organisms are no more (nor less) than complex functioning machines. However, one might well be trying to reduce material things to some other substance, like *consciousness. Alternatively, one might even think that there are two or more irreducible substances. The aim would then be to reduce all other substances to these fundamental few. Methodological reductionism claims that, in science, ‘small is beautiful’. Thus the best scientific strategy is always to attempt explanation in terms of ever more minute entities. It has undoubtedly been the mark of some of science’s greatest successes, and not just in physics. The major methodological reductive triumph of recent years has been the demonstration that the unit of classical heredity, the gene, is a macro-molecule, deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA). One should, however, keep in mind that ‘small’ in this context is a relative term, and one should be wary of making a straight identification between methodological reductionism and the commonly used ‘micro-reductionism’, especially if the latter implies that explanation is to be done in terms of micro-entities. The psychologist may try to reduce major sociological movements to the feelings and behaviours of individual humans; but may yet (with reason) think it would be silly to attempt a further reduction to molecules or below. Despite its successes, methodological reductionism has been highly controversial, for it denies the claims of those (especially Marxists) who argue that the world is ordered hierarchically, and that entities at upper levels can never be analysed entirely in terms of entities at lower levels. Especially contentious has been so-called ‘biological reductionism’, generally associated with the socio- biological movement, where human nature is supposedly fully understandable in terms of genetics. It may be doubted whether anybody has ever truly argued that we humans are mere marionettes manipulated by the double helix; but it cannot be denied that some senior biologists have been much given to silly (and socially dangerous) flights of fancy about the control exerted on our lives by our biology. *Theory reductionism raises the question of the relation between successive theories in a field, as between New- ton’s theory and that of Einstein. Is it always one of replacement, where the new entirely expels the old, or is it sometimes one of absorption, or ‘theoretical reduction’, where the older is shown to be a deductive consequence of the new? Many have argued that, as in the Newton– Einstein case and also the classical–molecular genetics episode, one gets reduction rather than replacement. In the 1930s this kind of thinking was taken to the extreme, with the ‘Unity of Science’ movement committed to the belief that eventually all the sciences will (and should) be reduced to one super-theory (inevitably taken to be something in physics). This kind of thinking has been strongly challenge by such thinkers as the philosopher-historian Thomas Kuhn, who believes that because the terms between theories are always ‘incommensurable’, theory reduction is never possible. Since this view of reduction is tied strongly to the picture of scientific theories as hypothetico-deductive systems, and since this latter picture has now fallen very much out of favour, many philosophers today would agree with their scientist colleagues that what matters is less the relationship between old and new than the relative merits of successive theories through time. This meshes also with the conviction of those who have turned their philosophical gaze from the physical sciences to other fields such as biology and psychology. Although few would deny the ontological claim that organisms, including humans, are made from the same materials as the rest of the physical world, it does not necessarily follow that the modes of explanation are the same throughout the scientific world or that a theoretical reduction is always possible or indeed fruitful. m.r. reductionism 793 *reductionism, mental; methodology; scientific method; simplicity. E. Nagel, The Structure of Science (New York, 1961). M. Ruse, Philosophy of Biology Today (Albany, NY, 1988). reductionism, mental. Reductionism about a given subject-matter X is the claim that facts about X can be ‘reduced’ to—that is, can be construed to be—facts about an apparently different subject-matter Y (‘the reduction base’). Reductionism in philosophy of mind is the claim that facts about mentality are reducible to physical facts, i.e. facts about matter and material processes. What is required to implement mind–body reduction? According to the *dualism of Descartes, minds exist as ‘mental substances’, objects wholly outside the physical domain. On this view, facts about mentality would be physically irreducible since they would be facts about these immaterial entities. The first requirement for mind–body reduction, therefore, is the renouncement of minds as non-physical objects. This can be done either by identifying minds with brains or other appropriate physical structures, or by attributing mental properties to organisms and possibly other types of physical systems, rather than to immaterial minds. In either case, it is physical systems that have psychological properties. The remaining step in mind–body reduction concerns mental properties (e.g. being in pain, sensing a green patch, believing that snow is cold) and their analogues in systematic psychology. Let M be a mental property: the physical reduction of M is usually thought to require a ‘physical correlate’ of M, i.e. a physical property with which M is necessarily coextensive. When a pervasive system of physical correlates is found for mental properties, mental properties could, it is thought, be identified with their physical correlates. Logical *behaviourism sought to reduce mental properties by defining them in terms of behaviours and behavioural dispositions. Although mentality seems intimately tied to behaviour, it is now widely agreed that psychological concepts in principle resist behavioural definitions. The demise of behaviouristic reductionism has led to the hope that the mental might be physically reduced through empirical laws connecting mental and physical properties. Nomological reduction of mental properties would pro- ceed by providing for each mental property M a nomo- logically coextensive physical correlate P; that is, where ‘ M occurs at time t if and only if P occurs at t’ holds as a matter of law. According to the *identity theory of mind, every mental property has a neural correlate with which it is to be identified; if pain is uniformly correlated as a matter of law with, say, the activation of c-fibres, pain may be reductively identified with c-fibre activation, and similarly for other mental properties and kinds. The significance of mind–body reduction is claimed to be twofold: ontological economy and unity of theory. By dispensing with minds as substances of a special sort and their irreducible psychic features, we simplify our ontology. By construing mental properties as complex neural properties and taking physical organisms as their bearers, psychology can be integrated with the underlying biological and physical sciences. Two lines of consideration have been responsible for the decline of reductionism. One is psychophysical anom- alism, the claim that there are no laws connecting mental and physical phenomena, and hence no laws of the sort required for the nomological reduction of the former to the latter. The other is the variable (or multiple) realizability of mental properties. If a mental property is multiply realized by a variety of physical properties in diverse species and structures, it could not, the argument goes, be identified with any single physical property. These considerations have led many philosophers to favour nonreductive physicalism, the doctrine that although all the individuals of this world are physical, certain properties of these individuals, in particular their psychological properties, are not reducible to the physical properties. (*Mind–body problem; *physicalism; *functionalism.) However, it remains a controversial question whether the variable realizability of the mental should be considered an obstacle to mental reductionism; it might be argued that the variable realizability in fact entails reducibility, that is, the possibility of variable reductions (or ‘local reductions’) relative to the species of organism or type of physical system involved. j.k. *simplicity. D. Davidson, ‘Mental Events’, in Essays on Actions and Events (Oxford, 1980). H. Feigl, The ‘Mental’ and the ‘Physical’ (Minneapolis, 1967). J. Fodor, ‘Special Sciences, or the Disunity of Science as a Work- ing Hypothesis’, Synthese (1974). J. Kim, ‘The Myth of Nonreductive Materialism’, in Supervenience and Mind (Cambridge, 1993). reductionism, psychological, in personal identity. The thesis, advocated by *Parfit, that our identity over time should be understood as psychological connectedness or psychological continuity with its normal cause, or with any other cause so long as there exists no other person psychologically connected with or continuous with us as we were. Parfit calls such connectedness or continuity ‘Relation R’. Psychological connectedness is realized by, for example, direct memories, the relation between an intention and its later implementation in action, the per- sistence of beliefs or desires. Psychological continuity is the holding of overlapping chains of strong connectedness. For example, a person remembers some of their experiences the previous day, and on that day they remembered some of their experiences on the day before that, and so on. The thesis is reductionist in avoiding the postulation of a Cartesian soul or substantial ego. Parfit argues that personal identity is not necessarily determinate. It need not be true or false that a later person is numerically identical with an earlier person, so answers to the questions ‘Will it be me who suffers?’ or ‘Will it be me who dies?’ need not be true or false. 794 reductionism As Parfit recognizes, there are interesting affinities between his view and some Buddhist views. The Buddha taught that it in a sense is and in a sense is not the same person who is reborn. Locke is also a psychological reductionist about personal identity, because he thinks sameness of person over time extends as far and only as far as may be established by memory, because being the same person presupposes the possibility of considering oneself the same person. Although Locke insists that the soul is redundant to the explanation of personal identity, he nevertheless claims it likely that the soul is that which is consciousness. s.p. John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, book ii, ch. 27: ‘Of Identity and Diversity’. Derek Parfit, Reasons and Persons (Oxford, 1984), esp. part 3: ‘Per- sonal Identity’. Walpola Rahula, What the Buddha Taught (Bedford, 1967), esp. ch. 6: ‘The Doctrine of No-Soul: Anatta’. redundancy theory of truth. This theory of *truth, pion- eered by F. P. Ramsey, draws on the apparent equiva- lence between asserting a proposition p and asserting that p is true to claim that the truth-predicate ‘is true’ is redundant, in the sense that it is, in principle, always eliminable without loss of expressive power. Difficulties appear to arise for the theory from cases in which propositions are said to be true even though the speaker may not know which propositions they are, and so cannot assert them himself, or when there are too many such propositions for each to be asserted individu- ally, for example when someone claims ‘Something that John said yesterday is true’ or ‘Everything asserted by a Cretan is true’. If the latter sentence is paraphrased as ‘For any proposition p, if a Cretan asserts that p, then p is true’, it is arguable that deleting the concluding words ‘is true’ renders the sentence ungrammatical and so senseless. e.j.l. *deflationary theories of truth; disquotation. S. Haack, Philosophy of Logics (Cambridge, 1978). Rée, Paul (1849–1901). German philosopher, noted for his radical *empiricism and uncompromising rejection of metaphysics and religion. The son of a wealthy Prussian landowner, Rée fought in the Franco-Prussian war of 1870. On his return he devoted himself to the study of philosophy, receiving a doctorate from the University of Halle. In 1875 he published Psychologische Beobachtungen (Psy- chological Observations), a slim volume of aphorisms. In 1877 he published the much more substantial Ursprung der moralischen Empfindungen (The Origin of the Moral Senti- ments). Strongly influenced by the British Empiricists and the work of Darwin, Rée argued that there are no universal moral principles whose truth is given a priori. What is regarded as right or wrong in any given society reflects the needs and cultural conditions of that society. Nietzsche, with whom Rée was on terms of close friendship from 1875 until 1882, commended this work as a ‘decisive turn- ing-point in the history of moral philosophy’. Rée was Jewish, and his influence on Nietzsche was resented by several of Nietzsche’s anti-Semitic friends. Rée had no contact with Nietzsche after 1882 and in his last years he expressed a low opinion of Nietzsche’s achievements. Granting that Nietzsche was often very clever and that he could write superbly, Rée dismissed Nietzsche’s *trans- valuation of values as a ‘mixture of insanity and nonsense’. In 1885 Rée published Die Illusion der Willensfreiheit (The Illusion of Free Will) in which he maintained that it was entirely possible to abandon the belief in freedom and moral responsibility in practice and not only in one’s philosophical theorizing. Rée fell to his death from a Swiss mountain, and Philoso- phie, which was intended as a summation of his most basic convictions, was published posthumously in 1903. Here he offers a forthright defence of *atheism. Metaphysical systems Rée dismisses as ‘fairy-tales’ and ‘lies’. Religions, he concludes, ‘are true neither in the literal nor in an alle- gorical sense—they are untrue in every sense. Religion issues from a marriage of error and fear.’ p.e. Paul Rée, Die Illusion der Willensfreiheit (Berlin, 1885). Eng. tr. of key passages of this book contained in P. Edwards and A. Pap (eds.), A Modern Introduction to Philosophy, 3rd edn. (New York, 1973). ——Basic Writings, tr. and ed. R. Small (Champaign, Ill., 2003). reference: see sense and reference. referential opacity. Truth about a given object is not usually affected by the manner of referring to it, so that you could switch between, say, ‘James’, ‘he’, ‘the fat one’, ‘Angela’s ex’. But some (linguistic) contexts—i.e. verbal surroundings—do limit this freedom. For example, ‘She knows who . . . is’ may be true with ‘that novelist’ in its blank, but false when the novelist is referred to as ‘the owner of the footprint’ (this is the ancient *masked man fallacy). Such contexts are called referentially opaque, as opposed to referentially transparent. Possible explanations are: the expression does not really refer (Russell), or refers to something else (Frege, perhaps Aristotle), or does more than refer (Quine). c.a.k. W. V. Quine, ‘Reference and Modality’, in From a Logical Point of View, 2nd edn. (Cambridge, Mass., 1964). referring. Both expressions and their users can refer, and it is a matter of controversy which kind of referring is more fundamental. Intuitively, for an expression to refer is for it to stand for or pick out something, but what this involves has been long debated. According to Frege the reference of an expression is determined by its *sense, but lately Kaplan and Kripke have argued that some terms, such as demonstratives, proper names, and natural-kind terms, refer directly. A speaker refers if, in the course of expressing a *propositional attitude (e.g. the belief expressed in uttering ‘Magritte was a philosophical painter’), he uses an expression (‘Magritte’) with the referring 795 communicative intention of indicating to his audience the individual this attitude is about (Magritte). k.b. *communication. Kent Bach, Thought and Reference (Oxford, 1987). reflective equilibrium. Philosophers often attempt to justify general *principles on the grounds that they accord with our intuitive judgements concerning particular cases. It must be conceded that our unreflective intuitions may be confused or inconsistent. However, by succes- sively advancing principles which seem to accord with most of our intuitions and re-examining any conflicting intuitions in the light of those principles, we may hope to move step by step towards a position of ‘reflective equilibrium’, in which our considered intuitions are fully in har- mony with our considered principles. Whether the principles thus emerging would thereby be justified is a disputed issue. e.j.l. *Rawls. reflexivity. A reflexive *relation is a binary, i.e. two-term, relation which everything has to itself (in symbols, R is reflexive if and only if ∀xRxx). ‘Reflexive’ may be understood relatively to what one is talking about (the domain of discourse); for example, being the same age as and being no older than are both reflexive relative to the domain of ani- mals. Or one can distinguish ‘strongly reflexive’ (everything has it to itself) from ‘weakly reflexive’ (everything has it to itself that has it to anything). ‘Irreflexive’ means: nothing has it to itself. ‘Non-reflexive’ may mean either ‘not reflexive’ or ‘neither reflexive nor irreflexive’. c.a.k. W. Hodges, Logic (Harmondsworth, 1977). reform. The attempt to improve social, political, or legal institutions or policies without altering what is fundamental to them. The distinction between reform, as described above, and change (which does attempt to alter what is fundamental) was introduced by Burke and made by him central to *conservatism. The distinction can be used to defend the politics of modifying tradition against those of revolution. Yet the distinction between reform and change can be hard to defend in many political contexts, partly because it is not always clear what is of the essence and what is simply an accident, and partly because of uncertainty about how long a change has to be in existence before it ceases to be a change and becomes a new tradition. Moreover, even if the distinction can be clari- fied, it cannot be used to characterize all forms of conservatism because some are in favour of certain kinds of revolutionary change. r.s.d. E. Burke, Letter to a Noble Lord (1796). A. Quinton, The Politics of Imperfection: The Religious and Secular Traditions of Conservative Thought in England from Hooker to Oakeshott (London, 1978). regress, infinite: see infinite regress. regulative principles guide our conduct although we have no assurance that they are actually true. Thus Kant claimed that it was rational to look for (and hope for) a system of knowledge which was complete and coherent in certain ways although we had no a priori guarantee that it could be found. A later Kantian philosopher, Peirce, held that all logical principles were hopes or regulative *principles. c.j.h. *rules. I. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, tr. N. Kemp Smith (London, 1968), app. to the Transcendental Dialectic. Reich, Wilhelm (1897–1957). Austrian psychiatrist and social theorist whose notoriety for the orgone theory (an energy that is supposed to permeate the cosmos and pos- sess healing powers) has obscured his earlier ideas, some of which are of philosophical interest. Undoubtedly Reich’s philosophically most interesting idea is that of the ‘muscular armour’ which grew out of his earlier notion of the ‘character armour’, Reich’s term for the set of chronic defensive attitudes a person adopts to protect himself against external injury (such as being hurt or rejected by other human beings) and against his own repressed emotions, especially rage and anxiety. Even in his earlier psychological studies, which were brought together in Character Analysis (1933), Reich repeatedly pointed to the chronic tensions he noted in the faces and movements of many of his patients. While teaching at Oslo University in the 1930s he undertook a systematic study of the anchoring of neurotic attitudes in the body, e.g. anxiety in the hunching of the shoulders and in veiled eyes, rage in a tight chin, disgust in a certain expression of the mouth, etc. Reich from then on rejected the purely verbal approach of Freudian and other analytic tech- niques. In retrospect he observed that, prior to the discov- ery of the muscular armour and methods of dissolving it, analytic treatment could not achieve more than a very limited measure of success. He now abandoned the dual- istic theories about body and mind tacitly or explicitly accepted by many psychologists and most psychoanalysts. In the place of *dualism he advocated an *identity theory: the muscular armour and the character armour are ‘func- tionally’ identical in the sense of serving the same function, namely that of blinding emotions such as anger and anxiety. It is a mistake to regard the muscular rigidity as a mere accompaniment or an effect of the corresponding character attitude: it is ‘its somatic side and the basis for its continued existence’. Reich developed social theories during the 1930s when he was attempting to fashion a synthesis of *Marxism and *psychoanalysis. Opposing what he described as the ‘feu- dal individualistic psychology’ of Freud, Reich denied that a given society is the result of a certain psychic structure. The reverse is true: ‘character structure is the result of a certain society’. The ideology of a society can anchor itself 796 referring only in a certain character structure, and the institutions of that society serve the function of producing this character structure. These ideas were presented in ‘Character and Society’ (1936) and in two books, The Mass Psychology of Fascism (1933) and The Sexual Revolution (1936). p.e. Paul Edwards, ‘Wilhelm Reich’, in Paul Edwards (ed.), Encyclope- dia of Philosophy (New York, 1967), contains biographical information and discussions of all of Reich’s major theories. Reichenbach, Hans (1891–1953). Although closely identified with the Logical Positivist movement, Reichenbach was critical of the narrow scope of its verificationism, and preferred to speak of himself as a *‘logical empiricist’. Most significant and influential was his thinking on probability and *induction. He was one of the most powerful advocates of a frequency interpretation of induction, believing the assignment of probabilities to be an empirical matter rather than something for a priori determination. Thus the estimation of the probability of throwing a six on a die is to be understood as the converging limit of a long series of throws rather than the simple result of an evenly distributed apportioning of the total possible number of outcomes. Probability thus understood, induction in turn is to be analysed empirically. This means that there can be no ultimate proof of induction; but, through discovered frequencies one can calculate which strategies or options are most reliable, given that induction does work. Reichenbach was also much interested in problems of *space and *time, feeling that the physics of his day pointed him towards conventionalism. Notions like equality and simultaneity depend as much upon conven- tion and definition as they do on empirical necessity. To talk, for instance, of the equality of successive time sequences requires a definition rather than empirical determination, for the result can only be understood relative to some particular system. Likewise, in dealing with *quantum mechanics, Reichenbach felt that he must break from the strict traditions of earlier thinkers, for issues such as the supposed wave and particle nature of electrons demand more than classical logic. Therefore, although the answers of physics may be meaningful, with respect to the real world they must be considered as in some sense indeterminate in truth-status. m.r. H. Reichenbach, The Rise of Scientific Philosophy (Berkeley, Calif., 1951). W. Salmon, ‘Should we Attempt to Justify Induction?’, Philosoph- ical Studies (1957). Reid, Thomas (1710–96). Deservedly remembered as Hume’s most famous critic, Reid, a clergyman’s son, attended Aberdeen Grammar School and Marischal Col- lege. His first job was as a presbytery clerk. During his next, as Librarian to Marischal, he was active in philosophical circles. His subsequent appointment as a parish minister was achieved through the patronage of King’s College, Aberdeen, causing the congregation to protest and some even to assault him. At this time he was a keen astronomer. He presented a paper on quantity to the Royal Society of London. He then became Regent in Phil- osophy at King’s College. There he published An Inquiry into the Human Mind, on the Principles of Common Sense (1764), his most remarkable work, which combines philosophy and science. In the same year, as recognition of his talent grew, he replaced Adam Smith as Professor of Moral Philosophy in Glasgow. His Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man (1785) and Essays on the Active Powers of the Human Mind (1788) appeared after his retirement at the age of 70. They were widely used as textbooks, especially in America. He then helped to found Glasgow Infirmary. Having himself always relied on patronage, he supported the French Revolution, but was disappointed by its excesses. His work became an official part of the French university curriculum. He writes plainly but with authority. His aim is to expose the faults of ‘the ideal system’ and to replace it with ‘the principles of *common sense’, a form of *realism. The mind works according to innate principles of conception and belief which are challenged by the ideal system, whose proponents include Descartes, Locke, Berkeley, and Hume. Concerning belief in the external world, according to Reid the mind is so constituted that *sensation automatically causes belief in external objects. A sensation of smell, for example, causes the belief that there is an external cause of the sensation. The belief is neither inferred nor rational but is caused by the occurrence of the sensation. Reid thus analysed *perception into sensation and belief in what causes sensation. To Descartes and Locke, who say that there is an external physical world which we perceive by means of sensory representations, Reid replies that sensations cannot represent physical objects, since they do not resemble them in any way. To Berkeley and Hume, who argue that we take our percep- tions for external objects, he replies that sensations cannot be taken for objects, since their difference from external objects is intuitively obvious to common-sense. In short the ideal system does not acknowledge the obvious quali- tative differences between sensations and objects. The role of sensation is not representational but significa- tional. How sensation can signify its external cause is inex- plicable and certainly non-rational. Because sensations are unlike objects they give no content to belief in external objects, except in the case of secondary qualities like smell, taste, and colour, which are conceived as external causes of the corresponding sensations, but causes of indeterminate character. Sensations of primary qualities, unlike sensations of secondary, occasion clear conceptions of the external qualities causing them. This is an interesting departure from Locke’s primary–secondary distinction. Reid was an ethical intuitionist who argued that we nat- urally develop a power to judge what is due to a person as a right. Hume failed to see that approval is a power of judgement rather than feeling. What we judge, unlike what we feel, is true or false and can be contradicted. Reid stressed the importance of *free will as a condition of deserving praise or blame, when the agent has the power to determine what he wills by conceptions of good and ill. Reid, Thomas 797 Free will is inconsistent with necessity but not with fore- knowledge, any more than with memory. Reid’s criticism is frequently sound, and his positive theory occasionally inspired, as when, in discussing visible figure, he tries to marry optical fact with philosophical fancy. Here he departs from his original theory of perception when he says that we directly perceive what he calls ‘visible figure’, which is a real figure projected on to the retina, a figure representing the spatial relations of the parts of an external object. We have no sensation of visible figure. Reid thus preserves his fundamental principle that sensation is unlike anything external, while asserting that we are directly aware of something—visible figure— which does represent something external. Reid hoped that Hume would reply to his criticisms, but Hume’s dis- dainful response was to recommend him to avoid Scotti- cisms and improve his English. v.h. T. Cuneo and R. van Woudenberg (eds.), The Cambridge Compan- ion to Thomas Reid (Cambridge, 2004). Keith Lehrer, Thomas Reid (London, 1989). Thomas Reid: Inquiry and Essays, intro. R. E. Beanblossom, ed. R. E. Beanblossom and Keith Lehrer (Indianapolis, 1983). D. Schulthess, Philosophie et sens commun chez Thomas Reid (Berne, 1983). P. B. Wood, Thomas Reid and the Scottish Enlightenment (Toronto, 1985). reincarnation. A distinct new bodily life, generally with a new identity and usually as a rebirth, of someone who has died. Beliefs in reincarnation can be found both in ancient Greece and in ancient India, and the Greek idea that the soul about to be reincarnated drinks from the river Lethe (forgetfulness) is typical of the assumption that those who are reincarnated remember little or nothing. The interesting philosophical question is: In what sense does the reincarnation count as the same person as the deceased? The Buddhist critique of Hindu metaphysics centred on this, and The Questions of King Milinda argues that any determination of sameness is essentially arbitrary. Even if psychic drives of the deceased in some way led to the new life, the relation between the two lives could be compared to that of a new flame to the pre-existing flame from which it is lit. ‘Are these two different flames or the same flame?’, the Buddhist philosopher asks; and the implica- tion is that there is no basis for an answer. j.j.k. *Buddhist philosophy; death; immortality. Wendy O’Flaherty (ed.), Karma and Rebirth in Classical Indian Traditions (Berkeley, Calif., 1980). relations. Ways in which things can stand with regard to one another (for example, some things are older than others), or to themselves (for example, each thing is identical to itself). If one thing, x, stands in some relation, R, to any thing, y, then only if y stands in the same relation to x is R a symmetrical relation. Thus ‘as old as’ is symmetrical; if x is as old as y, y is as old as x. Other relations are asymmetrical; Bud can’t be heavier than Thelonius if Thelonius is heavier than Bud. If x is larger than y, and y is larger than z, then x is larger than z. Such relations are transitive. By contrast fatherhood is intransitive: your father’s father is no father of yours. Relations which hold only between numerically distinct objects are irreflexive. But not all relations are irreflexive; each thing is as old as itself. Logicians treat both relations and non-relational properties as sets. Non-relational properties are identified with sets of single objects; for example, ‘red’ is the set which includes such things as ripe tomatoes, drops of fresh blood, etc. Two-term relations (e.g. ‘double’) are sets of ordered pairs (e.g. 〈2,1〉, 〈4,2〉, etc.) Three-term relations, like ‘between’, are sets of ordered triples. And so on. The identity of a relation, so conceived, depends upon the membership of the set with which it is identified. The truth of a relational claim will depend upon whether the objects it says are related belong to ordered pairs (triples etc.) in the relevant set. Relations might seem to be special sorts of object which can connect other things, but which are numerically distinct and ontologically independent from items they connect. But then, by an argument best known from F. H. Bradley, 3 is not the successor of 2 unless in addition to ‘successor’, there is a second relation—‘connector’, say— which links the numbers to ‘successor’, a third relation to connect ‘connector’ to ‘successor’, and so on. Frege avoids this sort of regress by treating relations as structurally incomplete partial objects which cannot occur without relata to complete them. So conceived, relations no more require additional relations to connect them to their relata than bricks require additional bricks to connect them to their shapes. Relations are not objects which can occur all by themselves until something connects them to relata. An alternative solution from Wittgenstein’s Tractatus banishes relations from the ranks of ontologically basic items: basic objects hang together without connectors like links in a chain, and facts which seem to involve relations between non-basic objects reduce to chainlike concaten- ations of basic objects. j.b.b. *relations, the nature of. F. H. Bradley, Appearance and Reality, 2nd edn. (Oxford, 1930), 27ff. Michael Dummett, Frege: Philosophy of Language, 2nd edn. (Cam- bridge, Mass., 1981), 173– 9. Benson Mates, Elementary Logic (New York, 1965), 32ff. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (London, 1961). relations, internal and external. A distinction important to arguments between turn-of-the-century idealists and their opponents. If one item, x, stands in some relation, R, to another item, y, but neither its identity nor its nature depends upon this being the case, x is externally related to y. If x could not be the same item, or an item of the same kind, without standing in relation R to y, the relation is internal. You would think relations come in both flavours. Since no number can be identical to 2 unless it is greater than than 1, 2 is internally related to 1. But presumably 798 Reid, Thomas your copy of the Oxford Companion would be exactly the same individual of exactly the same kind even if you did not own it, and even if it were lying on your floor instead of your table. If so, it is externally related to you and your table. But F. H. Bradley and other idealists tried to show that either there are no relations at all, or else all relations must be internal. Like Parmenides and Zeno before them, they held that without relations nothing could be larger or smaller, nearer or farther, older or younger, or in any other way different from anything else, and the universe would be a completely undifferentiated whole. But since everything is related (e.g. temporally or spatially) to everything else, if all relations are internal, the nature and identity of each thing depends upon its relation to everything else. This dilemma was invoked to support extravagantly holist claims. The attempts of Bertrand Russell, G. E. Moore, and their followers to understand relations in such a way as to avoid holisms thus generated were decisive to the development of British *analytic philosophy. j.b.b. *idealism; relations, the nature of. Peter Hylton, Russell, Idealism, and the Emergence of Analytic Philosophy (Oxford, 1992), 54ff., 121ff., 184, 225ff., 281, 327. G. E. Moore, ‘External and Internal Relations’, in Philosophical Studies (Paterson, NJ, 1959). relations, the nature of. The nature of *relations first became an important metaphysical issue in modern philosophy with Leibniz. He regarded it as a problem where the relation R which links individuals a and b is located. It cannot just be in one of them, for it would not then link them, nor can it be in some kind of void between them. Such reflections on relations were one main source for his monadistic metaphysics of windowless *monads. For he had to interpret ‘a is R to b’ as ascribing a separate predicate to each of a and b. ‘Adam is the father of Cain’ thus means that Adam has a certain property (being father of such-and-such a person) and Cain has a certain property (being child of such-and-such a father). These two individuals thus have properties which in a manner reflect each other but which do not bring them really together except in an ‘ideal’ or ‘conceptual’ way. A rather similar puzzle about the location of relations figures in the rationale of some forms of metaphysical monism (or absolute *idealism) for which there is only one ultimate subject of predi- cation. For since relations cannot be in either (or any) of the related terms separately it seems that they must really be a property of the whole the terms make up together, so that, if every item in the world is related to every other, then, according to a fairly obvious line of argument, the relations between them collapse into gestalt properties of that all inclusive whole to which they all belong, i.e. the Universe, the One, or the Absolute. This account of the metaphysical significance of theories of relations is that of Bertrand Russell (especially in The Principles of Mathematics), and it certainly throws some light on Leibnizian monadism and Bradleian monism, though Russell is less than just to them in detail. For Rus- sell a pluralistic metaphysics, stopping short of the extreme pluralism of monadism, becomes defensible once we realize that propositions of a relational form (‘Rab’) cannot and need not be reduced to ones of (single) subject–predicate form (‘Fa’ or ‘Fa · Gb’). William James also developed a (phenomenologically rather richer) account of relations than Russell’s, similarly designed to resist the lure of monism; Husserl, Whitehead, and Hartshorne are all important in this context too. Closely connected with such debates is the issue of the externality or internality of relations. A relation between two (or more) terms is said to be ‘internal’ if its holding is either necessitated by or necessitates the so-called ‘natures’ of these terms; otherwise it is external. (Their natures are best understood as what they are within their own bounds.) Russell claimed that all relations are external; absolute idealists, so far as they countenance relations at all, incline to think them all internal. Other philosophers affirm relations of both types, and some (e.g. Hartshorne) hold that the most important two-term relations are internal to one term, external to the other. Discussion is often complicated by confusion between two different types of putative internal relation. Some- times internal relations are those which Hume described as depending entirely on a comparison between ideas and external relations are those which may vary though the ideas remain the same (Treatise, i. iii. 1 and 2). A similar more modern classification (by Meinong and others) of relations is into ideal relations whose holding follows from what each term is ‘like’ (what one-place universals it exemplifies) within its own bounds (a colour contrast, for example) and real relations not thus settled by facts about what each term is ‘like’ considered on its own (juxtapos- ition in space or time and causality are typically thus conceived). (This classification concerns relations between particulars; relations between *universals in abstraction from any exemplification may be called ideal in an obvi- ously related sense.) It is a mistake, however, to take monists who claim that all relations are internal as claiming that they are all simply ideal in this sense; that way lies monadism rather than monism. They mean rather that their holding is a matter of their terms belonging together within a whole the character of which modifies that of each of them (rather than that they hold in virtue of the character of each term as that can be discovered separately). In short, for them it is as much the relation which determines the characters of the terms as the converse. The fact that modern formal logic takes relational propositions easily on board, as Aristotelian and scholastic logic did not, tends to blind people to the fact that there are real metaphysical problems about relations essential to dealing with what William James described as ‘the most central of all philosophical problems’, the problem of the one and the many. t.l.s.s. *relations, internal and external. F. H. Bradley, Appearance and Reality (1897), 2nd edn. (Oxford, 1930), chs. 2 and 3, app. b. relations, the nature of 799 . without relata to complete them. So conceived, relations no more require additional relations to connect them to their relata than bricks require additional bricks to connect them to their shapes either (or any) of the related terms separately it seems that they must really be a property of the whole the terms make up together, so that, if every item in the world is related to every other, then,. significance to the passions only by ‘direct- ing’ our aversion to pain, or our propensity to pleasure, to those things that we take to be causally related to them. Hume may have inherited the expression