The Oxford Companion to Philosophy Part 90 docx

affairs or event may be any indication, evidence, manifest- ation, portent, trace (which seems to be what Peirce called an ‘index’), or mark that is regularly correlated with it, and hence can be used to infer its presence. In that case, to take something as a sign of something else is to use it to infer the presence of the other thing. This is the use of nat- ural signs, but we can of course invent signs or signals: in heraldry specified emblems indicate the identity of the person wearing them; or a picture of a man with a shovel on the roadside indicates the presence of roadworks; or the picture of beans on the can indicates beans within. In Peirce’s view the latter signs work as icons, by bearing a natural resemblance to what is depicted. Icons are signs that work in virtue of sharing properties with what is sig- nalled. But most such signals work by *convention, and it requires a process of being inducted into the convention to learn to interpret them. Peirce may have supposed that a symbol was a manu- factured sign. He defines a symbol as a ‘sign which is con- stituted a sign merely or mainly by the fact that it is used and understood as such’ (Collected Papers, ii. 307). But this is quickly seen to be inadequate. With symbols we enter a different domain from that of the sign, since the role of a symbol is not that of correlating with the presence of the thing signified. There is no regular correlation of this kind in question. A portrait is not a signal that the sitter is near, but a representation of her. A symbol is not used as a mark that something else is present, but in place of the some- thing else, to bring it to mind, or to identify it as a topic (or, of course, to elicit the emotions and reactions that are sup- posed appropriate to that other thing, as when a flag is a symbol of a country). Certainly, if we are to think of words as symbols, it is hopeless to see them as kinds of signal or sign of whatever it is they represent. The presence of the word ‘giraffe’ on a page is no sign that there are giraffes about. A symbol is not something that is used as a sign of things, given the function of signs that we have sketched. The alternative position is that words and symbols do function as signs, but of states of their producers rather than the states of the world that they signify. Thus Locke took it that words are external signs, in the signalling sense, of ideas in the mind of the person producing them. But this can only be one part of an overall theory, since it requires a supplementary story about the way in which ideas serve as symbols or representations of whatever it is that we end up talking about. Peirce himself was driven to the regressive suggestion that as well as a sign and its object we need to postulate a ‘more developed sign’ or interpretant in the mind of the user. The problem of how such things represent substitutes for the problem about how words represent. A more modern view is that they may be signs of the beliefs or intentions of the person, but the question arises how the presence of belief or other intentional states can consist in the presence of something invested with representative power. s.w.b. *representation; semantics; meaning. C. S. Peirce, Collected Papers (Cambridge, Mass., 1932–5), ii. simplicity. Sometimes thought to provide a criterion for choice among scientific theories, with varying accounts of how simplicity might be measured. If simple theories are easier to use, their adoption might be on pragmatic grounds. Poincaré, in contrast, identified mathematical simplicity as a marker for truth, which makes sense only if one believes that nature is simple, and will appear so through the filter of theory and language. n.c. r.f.h. *Ockham’s razor. Henri Poincaré, The Foundations of Science, tr. G. B. Halstead (Washington, DC, 1982). Hans Reichenbach, The Philosophy of Space and Time, tr. M. Reichenbach (New York, 1957). simulation. How best to understand the nature and basis of folk-psychological predictions, explanations, and descriptions of human behaviour and mentality couched in terms of belief, desire and the like? Theory theorists maintain that in such activities folk psychological ascrip- tions are underwritten by the tacit grasp of a theory speci- fying the use of notions such as belief and desire— informally much like theoretical explanation in the sci- ences. Simulation theorists claim that we understand one another by using our own minds in a process of simula- tion, generating processes in ourselves similar to those in other people, informing ourselves of the mental states of others by running our own cognitive machinery ‘off line’. This is in contrast to the positing by theory theorists of a system of laws and logical relations which connect beliefs, desires, and the like with behaviour. But if we can use our own minds to simulate the minds of others without invok- ing such laws, parsimony counsels against theory theory. Much is made of the pretend play of young children, and the importance of simulation in ethical evaluation, empa- thy, fictional narrative, and aesthetics. Whether this amounts to new interpretations of phenomena or genuine arguments for the view remains unclear. j.gar. *theory theory of mind. M. Davies and T. Stone (eds.), Folk Psychology: The Theory of Mind Debate (Oxford, 1995). —— (eds.), Mental Simulation(Oxford, 1995). sin is moral wrongdoing, or in some cases the omission of what one ought to do. It is usually thought of as the viola- tion of natural law or the commands of a deity. A person’s sins are ordinarily characterized in terms of actions or omissions, but in some cases sin can be more meaning- fully construed in terms of faults of character or in terms of states, such as a state of rebellion against God or estrange- ment from God. From medieval times the Church has dis- tinguished mortal sins from venial, or less serious, sins. More controversial is the notion of *original sin, or guilt inherited from Adam, the first man. Those who take ser- iously the notion of original sin place great emphasis upon the effects of sin in the world. Some religious traditions allow for the possibility of the forgiveness of sin. g.f.m. L. Berkhof, Systematic Theology (Grand Rapids, Mich., 1939). 870 sign and symbol H. Davis, Moral and Pastoral Theology, 4th edn. (London, 1945), vol i, treatise 4. sin, original: see original sin. sincerity. In his History of England Hume described men as given to ‘feigning’. Sincerity implies by contrast that we have given a full and frank account of ourselves and have not added anything extra. So philosophers have debated whether true morality requires sincerity, or simply appro- priate conduct and the ‘external’ performance of one’s duties, and how sincere anyone can be morally required to be. Kant’s discussion, ‘Concerning Lying’, in the Ground- work of the Metaphysic of Morals concludes that insincerity with oneself ‘deserves the greatest censure, for . . . from such a rotten spot . . . the evil of untruthfulness spreads itself also into one’s relationships with other men’. The special problem of philosophical insincerity arises because of the dual role of the philosopher as custodian of the virtues and critic of orthodoxies. Thus Descartes has been accused of hypocrisy in disguising his hostility to religion and pandering to the Sorbonne, and Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature invites us to reflect on whether a philosopher can be a sincere and believing sceptic. cath.w. *lying. I. Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals, tr. J. W. Ellington (Indianapolis, 1983), pt. ii: ‘The Metaphysical Principles of Virtue’. Singer, Peter A. (1946– ). Best known for his writing in areas of *applied ethics, starting with his best-selling Animal Liberation (London, 1976), in which he argues that most treatment meted out to animals is morally intoler- able. He has continued to write about such issues, but has also put the ideas and theories of moral philosophy to work to provide assessments of the morality of euthanasia, in vitro fertilization, the distribution of world resources, and many allied topics (see especially his Practical Ethics (Cambridge, 1979)). His work is marked by a strong com- mitment to *utilitarianism and by a wish to displace the morality of what he has referred to as the ‘Judaeo-Christian inheritance’. He lived and worked for many years in Aus- tralia, along the way serving on government committees and running a Centre for Human Bioethics, but in 1999 took a professorship at Princeton. n.j.h.d. *animals; Hegel. P. A. Singer, How Are We to Live? (Melbourne, 1993). —— Rethinking Life and Death (Melbourne, 1994). Sinn : see sense and reference. Skolem paradox. A collection is countable if it is either finite or has the same size as the natural numbers, the smallest infinite set. It is a theorem of standard *set theory, due to Cantor, that the set of real *numbers is not count- able—there are more real numbers than natural numbers. However, the Löwenheim–Skolem theorem states that if a countable set of (first-order) sentences has a model at all, then it has a model whose domain is at most countable. The ‘paradox’ is that if real analysis is consistent, it has a countable model. Similarly, if set theory is consistent, it has a countable model that satisfies an assertion that one of its members is not countable. Such models are called ‘non-standard’. The fact that a model of set theory satisfies an assertion that a set is uncountable only entails that there is no function in the model that maps the natural numbers on to the ‘members’ of the set. It does not rule out the existence of such a function—outside the model. The ‘paradox’ has been thought to raise doubts concern- ing the referents of expressions like ‘natural number’ and ‘finite’. In what sense can we say that the aforementioned non-standard models are ‘unintended’? s.s. *satisfaction. Thoralf Skolem, ‘Einige Bemerkungen zur axiomatischen Begründung der Mengenlehre’; tr. as ‘Some Remarks on Axiomatized Set Theory’, in Jean van Heijenoort (ed.), From Frege to Gödel (Cambridge, Mass., 1967). slave morality. Nietzsche’s designation of one basic type of morality which he contrasts with another he calls ‘mas- ter morality’. Whereas ‘master morality’ is fundamentally a morality of self-affirmation on the part of the powerful, ‘slave morality’ is a reactive morality originating in resent- ment of the powerful on the part of the powerless. The qualities of the powerful which they affirm as ‘good’ are deemed ‘evil’ by the powerless, for whom ‘good’ is deriva- tively conceived in terms of the absence or repudiation of those qualities. Nietzsche contends that this reactive, fear- ful, and resentful type of morality (and its ‘good versus evil’) has triumphed over its ancient rival (and its contrast- ing opposition of ‘good versus bad’, i.e. superior versus inferior) in the modern world, to the detriment of the quality of human life. (See Beyond Good and Evil, sects. 260–8; Genealogy of Morals, First Essay.) r.s. Richard Schacht, Nietzsche (London, 1983), ch. 7. slave of the passions: see reason as slave of the passions. slime. Sartre invokes le visqueux (slime, stickiness, the vis- cous) in discussing how feelings, acts, character traits, are ‘charged with something material’, while, equally, mater- ial substance is engrained with ‘affective meaning’. The disgustingness of slime seems to have an objective quality, neither physical nor psychic but transcending both. Slime’s connotations cannot be derived from slime as brute fact, but they cannot be a projection of our feelings either, since to establish the connection between literal physical sliminess and the slimy quality of a person requires us to recognize baseness already in sliminess, and sliminess in a type of baseness: there is ‘pre-ontological comprehension’. However experienced, slime is comprom- ising, duplicitous, ‘leechlike’, the potential ‘revenge of the in-itself’ on the *for-itself it seeks to engulf. j.o’g. slime 871 slingshot arguments. Such arguments purport to show that distinct true sentences p and q (or nominalizations of them, such as ‘the fact that p’ and ‘the fact that q’) can never have different references. Assuming, as seems plaus- ible, that any sentence logically equivalent to p has the same reference, and that the reference of a sentence is not altered by replacing any term in it by another term with the same reference, it appears to follow that the reference of pis the same as the reference of any other true sentence q. This seems to spell trouble for the *correspondence the- ory of truth and for an *ontology of *facts, but it is thought by many that the fault lies more with slingshot arguments than with their targets. e.j.l. S. Neale, Facing Facts (Oxford, 2001). slippery slope. The ‘slippery slope’ is the name of an argu- ment based on a certain view of human nature, not on logic, and commonly used in non-philosophical discus- sions of moral issues. The reasoning is that, though a prac- tice may be unobjectionable in one type of case, if it is once permitted, its use will inevitably be extended to other more morally dubious cases. Thus it is argued that, though research using human embryos immediately after fertilization may be morally defensible, the period for research will inevitably be extended, until we shall find ourselves using children and adults for research, without their consent. The inevitability here supposed is not logical inevitability, but is thought to result from people’s always wanting more than they have. In fact legislation or other forms of regulation can usually control an undesir- able slide down the slippery slope. m.warn. Michael Lockwood (ed.), Dilemmas in Modern Medicine (Oxford, 1985). Mary Warnock, The Uses of Philosophy (Oxford, 1992). Slovene philosophy. Its main areas of activity have been ethics, natural philosophy, and philosophical psychology, while the Aristotelian and Thomistic traditions have been the principal influences. Medieval disputes in ontology and logic were chiefly concerned with the meaning, interpretation, and defin- ition of terms; in the twelfth century, Hermanus de Carinthia wrote a treatise on essences. At the time of the Slovene Cultural Revival (the late eighteenth century) the most prominent philosopher was Franc Samuel Karpe (1747–1806), whose central philoso- phy was associative psychology in the tradition of Locke. His empirical psychology distinguished between the lower epistemic capabilities, such as sensations and pre- sentations, and the higher epistemic powers including the ability to form concepts, conceptual association, memory, speech, and prediction. Others followed a psychological approach to epistemic certainty. Ethics was empirically and psychologically based, tak- ing as its starting-point the needs of human beings and their desire for survival as the spur to cultural develop- ment. Morality was felt to be required where life does not follow the exigencies of nature. For Karpe, moral philoso- phy was an extension of thought and imagination by the introduction of the emotive element. Reflexes determine personal behaviour, but human beings also possess the power of decision and free will. Whereas the pure qual- ities of mind are measurable, a particular soul may only be compared to them. Also in the period of the Cultural Revival mathematical metaphysics aimed to replace ver- bal argumentation by a system of mathematically based pictorial argumentation. Starting from Meinongian theory of objects, France Veber developed his idea of knowledge of reality with the help of basic sensory experience. Recently the Veberian tradition has seen a revival with meetings of the Slovene–Austrian Philosophical Society (Ljubljana and Graz), and with Acta Analytica, an international journal dedicated mostly to the philosophy of psychology, edited by the Ljubljana-based Slovene Society for Analytical Phil- osophy, one of several active Slovene philosophical soci- eties. Important work is also being done in the philosophy of science. m.pot. *Croatian philosophy; Serbian philosophy. F. Jerman, ‘The History of Philosophy in Slovenia’, Slovene Stud- ies, i (Indiana, 1991). M. Stock and W. G. Stock, International Bibliography of Austrian Philosophy, i: Psychologie und Philosophie der Grazer Schule (Ams- terdam, 1990). Smart, J. J. C. (1920– ). Emeritus Professor of the Aus- tralian National University and the University of Adelaide, Companion of the Order of Australia, Cambridge-born, educated at Glasgow and Oxford, and since the early 1950s a leading Australian philosopher, widely recognized for contributions in the philosophy of mind, philosophy of sci- ence, metaphysics, and ethics. Smart was an original archi- tect of the brand of tough-minded *realism nowadays associated with philosophy in Australia. His realism, like his uncompromising *materialism, is the product of a con- viction that philosophical theories are constrained by their scientific plausibility. This conviction underlies Smart’s defence of a ‘non-cognitivist’ account of the basis of moral judgement and an advocacy of utilitarian normative prin- ciples, which are recommended by their simplicity and generality, features they share with an appropriately mod- est scientific perspective on the world. j.heil J. J. C. Smart, Philosophy and Scientific Realism (London, 1963). Smith, Adam (1723–90). The famous economist was born in Kirkcaldy and educated at Glasgow and Oxford. Between 1751 and 1763 he was Professor of Logic and then of Moral Philosophy in Glasgow. He became tutor to a Scottish nobleman, whom he accompanied to Europe, returning to Kirkcaldy in 1767 where he lived with his mother. Latterly he was a Customs Commissioner in Edinburgh. He was intimate with Hume, whose views on morals and economics he shared. A Stoic rather than an Epicurean, he inherited the spectator theory of virtue from his teacher Francis Hutcheson. The theory is a form of psychological *naturalism, explaining moral good as a 872 slingshot arguments particular kind of pleasure, that of a spectator watching virtue at work. Smith suggested that the reason for the pleasure is the similarity between the virtue of the agent and that of the spectator himself. What makes the specta- tor’s pleasure moral is its object, the agent’s motive of con- sciously conforming with agreed standards of not harming the innocent, benefiting oneself, one’s family and friends, and the societies to which one belongs, and being grateful to one’s benefactors. v.h. *hidden hand. Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, ed. D. D. Raphael and A. L. Macfie (Oxford, 1976). snow is white. ‘“Snow is white” is true if and only if snow is white’ was Tarski’s celebrated example of what he called an equivalence of the form T. He showed how truth, for sentences of a formalized language L, could be defined in such a way that an equivalence of the form T for each sen- tence of L is a consequence, and yet without generating the notorious *liar paradox. Some, notably Davidson, have attempted to exploit Tarski’s ideas to provide an analysis of the *semantics of natural language. The interpretation of Tarski’s results in the context of natural languages, as a the- ory of meaning, or as a diagnosis and solution of the liar paradox, has attracted criticism, however, largely because of what are seen as strong disanalogies between the struc- tures of formalized and natural languages. c.h. *semantic theory of truth. A. Tarski, Logic, Semantics, Metamathematics, 2nd edn. (Indianapo- lis, 1983). social change, means of. In a democracy, ideally speak- ing, citizens produce social change by bringing problems to the attention of a government, which then gathers evi- dence and expert opinion. All important social issues are addressed, evidence is publicly discussed, and decisions are made by the people as a whole. Transparency and maximum citizen participation characterize all stages. Reasoned, just, and non-violent social change is the result. Since this ideal process is realizable only in democra- cies, and achieved only rarely there, activists have used extra-governmental means to try to bring about change. Social movements, which may include demonstrations, heroic or self-sacrificial acts, advocacy and organizational groups, spokespeople, promotional writings, and artistic expressions, have brought important reform. Such move- ments—e.g. those for women’s rights and for civil rights—typically go through many stages over long per- iods of time. They may be limited to civil disobedience and other non-violent tactics to appeal to conscience and generate sympathy, or they may employ violence to retal- iate for perceived wrongs or to weaken opposing forces and compel negotiations. More extreme are revolutions attempting to alter basic social institutions and not work within them; proponents justify them as the only means of eliminating pervasive and destructive conditions (e.g. a repressive regime, an exploitative economic system). One country may try to produce social change in another by diplomatic means, by imposing economic sanctions, or by supporting revolutionary movements or terrorist activities within it. Even more direct is the inva- sion and subjugation of another country, defended as alone effective in eliminating great evils within that coun- try or in preventing it from causing enormous harm to others. These methods are increasingly controversial, as they appear to violate moral standards, international law, or the United Nations Charter. Attempts at reform always face the conservatism of the public media, controlled by the state in authoritarian regimes and strongly constrained by financial pressures in liberal ones. The media are usually part of the very power structure being challenged. Recognizing that media have a central role in shaping public opinion, activists use mass demonstrations, art, sympathetic publishers, and ‘alterna- tive’ media developed by the activist community itself to gain a public voice. c.c. Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media (New York, 2002). J. L. Holzerefe and Robert O. Keohane (eds.), Humanitarian Inter- vention: Ethical, Legal and Political Dilemmas (Cambridge, 2003). S. Tarrow, Power in Movement: Social Movements and Contentious Politics, 2nd edn. (Cambridge, 1998). social constructionism. Analysis of ‘knowledge’ or ‘real- ity’ or both as contingent upon social relations, and as made out of continuing human practices, by processes such as reification, sedimentation, habitualization. Schutz’s *phenomenology—the analysis of the structure of the common-sense world of everyday life—is an important influence, although current exponents draw on a variety of sources including *hermeneutics, the later Wittgenstein’s intersubjective theory of meaning, and the Marxist conception of *praxis (which emphasizes how knowledge and politics are contingent upon work and economic relations). Social constructionists do not believe in the possibility of value-free foundations or sources of knowledge, nor do they conceptualize a clear objective–subjective distinction, or a clear distinction between ‘knowledge’ and ‘reality’. The position, there- fore, has profound implications for the practice and phi- losophy of science, and for political philosophy. e.j.f. *social facts; communitarianism. Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge (Har- mondsworth, 1967). social contract: see contract, social. Social Darwinism. Social Darwinism is a diverse collec- tion of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century doctrines that enjoyed considerable popularity and that interpreted various human social phenomena in the light of (what was taken to be) Darwinian evolutionary theory. Perhaps the most influential form of Social Darwinism viewed society Social Darwinism 873 and the economy as a competitive arena in which the ‘fittest’ would rise to the top. With this doctrine went the worry that various cultural practices and social reforms meant to provide for the least well-off in fact lessen this ‘natural selection’ and promote instead a ‘degeneration’ of the species. From a contemporary perspective, Social Dar- winists conflated social success with reproductive fitness (wealth and education in fact tend to be inversely correl- ated with birth-rate) and questions of moral rightness with matters of a supposed ‘natural order’. p.r. *evolution. R. C. Bannister, Social Darwinism: Science and Myth in Anglo- American Social Thought (Philadelphia, 1979). social engineering. Concept popularized by Karl Popper’s critique in his Open Society and its Enemies (Princeton, NJ, 1950), it takes two forms. Utopian social engineering, asso- ciated with Plato, Hegel, Marx, and their totalitarian heirs, is committed to the wholesale transformation of society through central planning according to a comprehensive ideal plan and unlimited by any constraints from compet- ing social institutions (e.g. the church). Piecemeal social engineering involves only ‘searching for, and fighting against, the greatest and most urgent evils of society’. Pop- per’s distinction aside, social engineering as a legitimate activity of government is essential to the welfare state and to all versions of *socialism and *communism. It is anath- ema to *libertarianism but endorsed under constraints by modern *liberalism. h.a.b. Friedrich A. Hayek, The Road to Serfdom (Chicago, 1944). Barbara Wootton, Freedom under Planning (Chapel Hill, NC, 1945). social epistemology. Two distinct, but not unrelated, fields of study compete for this label. The first is a version of the theory of knowledge which fully acknowledges our dependence on other people in this matter, and does not relegate it to the marginal or supplementary status of ‘tes- timony’. All but the most elemental knowledge—of the sort possessed by infants and animals—presupposes the mastery of the indisputably social institution of language. The second, and less philosophical, is a concern with the social determinants of belief. It has obvious relevance to moral and political convictions. Attempts to apply it to the findings of natural science—let alone those of mathemat- ics—are less persuasive. a.q. *sociology of knowledge. Alvin Goldman, Knowledge in a Social World (Oxford, 1999). social facts. A *fact is a social fact when it is a statement concerning the forms of organization present in a society or it ascribes an irreducibly social property to an entity. According to Durkheim, social facts result from treating social phenomena, including ourselves, as things; they can therefore be approached, it is claimed, in the same object- ive way as the facts with which the natural sciences deal. Social facts, such as ‘George W. Bush is President of the United States’ and ‘France is a charter member of the United Nations’, are the concern of sociologists, whose task it is to attain a body of knowledge on the basis of which the actions of human beings as members of society can be understood. The main question in this area con- cerns the relationship of such facts to facts about individ- uals: are social facts reducible to, or explained solely by, facts such as the beliefs and desires of individuals, i.e. non- social facts? Methodological individualists have answered in the affirmative, insisting that there are not both soci- eties and their members, and that everything that happens can be explained without recourse to social entities and social properties. Methodological holists, on the other hand, claim that understanding some types of behaviour necessarily depends upon understanding the holistic phe- nomena of social structures. The debate about social facts has thus centred on ambi- guities in the important but unclear concept of ‘reduction’ and is bound up with the question of the merits and demerits of functionalist explanations in sociology. Clearly, it is also a debate about the purposes of social science. p.w. *methodological holism and individualism. E. Durkheim, The Rules of Sociological Method (New York, 1964). M. Gilbert, On Social Facts (London, 1989). D. Ruben, The Metaphysics of the Social World (London, 1985). socialism. It is difficult to subsume all the various socio- economic beliefs that have been referred to as ‘socialism’ under one definition. In its broadest sense, socialism refers to the views of those who: (1) claim that *capitalism has grave moral flaws and (2) advocate some revolutionary socio-economic reform to remedy these flaws. Certain elements of what is typically thought of as socialist thought appear throughout the entire history of philosophy, such as in Thomas More’s Utopia and even Plato’s Republic. But the term ‘socialism’ was first used in connection with the views of early nineteenth-century social critics, such as Robert Owen, Saint-Simon, Charles Fourier, and Pierre Proudhon. These social critics were reacting to the excesses and injustices of early capitalism, and advocated reforms such as the transformation of soci- ety into small communities in which private *property was to be abolished and the radical redistribution of wealth. Socialism is also an important part of the philoso- phy of Karl Marx and *Marxism. For Marxists, socialism is viewed as a stage in history characterized, in part, by state ownership of all capital goods and central planning of the economy. This stage in history they see as transitional between capitalism and the final stage of history, *com- munism, which will be characterized by the absence of dif- fering social classes and thus the end of class warfare. Among the grave moral flaws that socialists typically claim to be inherent in capitalism are vast, unjust inequalities in wealth, income, opportunities, and power. Other moral flaws seen in capitalism include excessive individualism, competition and materialism, and the 874 Social Darwinism *exploitation of ordinary working people. Perhaps more than anything else, however, socialists oppose the unjust oppression of one group by another, whether through class domination, discrimination, or an unequal distribu- tion of power. In short, socialism, in the broad sense, champions the ‘underdogs’ of society. The revolutionary socio-economic reforms that have been proposed by socialists for remedying the declared moral flaws of cap- italism are so diverse as to defy any precise characteriza- tion. Typically, these reforms involve radical changes in the ownership or distribution of property throughout society. It is questionable, however, whether ‘socialism’ in this broad sense is a specific enough term to be very use- ful. Moreover, not all those who see grave moral flaws in capitalism and call for major reforms, or who have joined the fight against oppression, consider themselves to be socialists; to call them ‘socialists’ anyway invites confusing their views with socialism in the narrower sense to be con- sidered next. The narrower, and thus perhaps more useful, sense in which the term ‘socialism’ is often used is to refer to an economic system which features: (1) state ownership of the means of production and control over investment throughout the economy; (2) a more equal distribution of income and wealth than typically found in capitalism; and (3) democratic election of government officials responsi- ble for economic decisions. Those who advocate a system with the above three features have, in the past, often advo- cated a fourth feature as well: government planning of not just investment, but the entire economy; that is, govern- ment planning of what goods and services are to be pro- duced, how they are to be produced, in what quantities, and at what prices they are to be sold, rather then simply allowing these matters to be determined by the market through supply and demand. If the economic system includes this fourth feature, it is referred to as ‘central- planning socialism’. The most significant of these features for defining socialism in the narrow sense is state ownership of the means of production and control over investment; this is, arguably, the only feature that qualifies as being both a necessary and a sufficient defining characteristic. The sec- ond feature, that of income and wealth under socialism being distributed more equally than under capitalism, is something about which socialists generally agree, although there is much disagreement about what prin- ciple, exactly, should govern this distribution. A number of alternatives that have been advocated, including, for example, ‘To each equally’, ‘To each according to his or her effort’, and ‘To each according to his or her need’. The third feature, democratic elections, is one that most social- ist theorists insist upon, although whenever socialism of the central-planning variety has been put into effect in a country, *democracy has not flourished. The fourth fea- ture—namely, government planning of the entire econ- omy—has been, perhaps, the most controversial feature. Advocates of this feature argue that central-planning remedies well-known flaws of capitalism, such as monop- olies, business cycles, unemployment, vast inequalities in the distribution of wealth, and the mistreatment of work- ers. On the other hand, conservative economists, such as Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek, argue that cen- tral-planning can never come close to matching the effi- ciency of the *market, because central-planners can never match the overall information inherent in the decision- making throughout a market economy, nor can business managers in a centrally planned economy ever match the motivation of entrepreneurs in a market economy, who are driven by private profit. The arguments of these conservative economists, as well as the relatively poor performance of economies that, for the most part, have been centrally planned, have led many socialists to abandon feature four, and to propose instead a reliance upon the market for almost everything other than investment. State control over investment, combined with a reliance upon the market for almost everything other than investment, will, these new social- ists argue, remedy the main flaws inherent in capitalism while, at the same time, retaining the productivity advan- tages of the market. The economists Oskar Lange and Fred M. Taylor were early proponents of such an approach, which is referred to as ‘market socialism’. Recent proponents of a similar approach, such as the philosopher David Schweickart, have added the feature of *worker control to the general idea of market socialism to form a system often referred to as ‘worker-control social- ism’. With worker control, the workers of each business enterprise are to manage it themselves through direct democracy or, as will more often be the case, are to elect, periodically, a team of managers who then manage the enterprise for them. An advantage of worker control is claimed to be that managers who must face workers in periodic elections will therefore be motivated, above all else, to do what is beneficial for workers, rather than exploiting them. Still other reformers propose an eco- nomic system featuring worker control, but without state ownership of the means of production and control over investment; rather, the workers of each business enter- prise are themselves to own its means of production, and investment is to be left to the market. But since, with such an economic system, all the means of production are pri- vately owned and the market prevails throughout the entire economy, this system is more appropriately referred to as ‘worker-control capitalism’, not socialism. d.w.has. *conservatism; liberalism; anti-communism; markets and the public good; privatization. N. Scott Arnold, Marx’s Radical Critique of Capitalist Society: A Reconstruction and Critical Evaluation (Oxford, 1990). G. D. H. Cole, History of Socialist Thought, 7 vols. (London, 1953–60). D. W. Haslett, Capitalism with Morality (Oxford, 1994). Kai Nielsen, Equality and Liberty: A Defense of Radical Egalitarianism (Totowa, NJ, 1985). David Schweickart, Capitalism or Worker Control? (New York, 1980). socialism 875 social philosophy. The term ‘social philosophy’ does not have a fixed meaning in current philosophical circles. Sometimes it is used as more or less equivalent to *‘polit- ical philosophy’: that is, to the normative discussion—ana- lytical or substantive—of questions about how society should be organized. But usually it is taken to be the non- normative discussion—again, analytical or substantive— of what is involved in having social organization: the non-normative discussion of what sorts of entity appear with the onset of society and of how they relate to individ- ual human subjects. I shall take social philosophy in this latter sense, as a sort of social ontology: as an account of what there is in the social world. Social philosophy in the ontological sense takes as granted that there is no society without individual inten- tional agents: without subjects who apparently act, other things being equal, on the basis of their beliefs and desires, and who are capable of exhibiting rationality—and of seeking to exhibit rationality—in the formation and main- tenance of those beliefs and desires (Pettit, The Common Mind, pt. 1). The question which it raises bears on what more we should include in our ontological stock-taking of society; and of how the more we should include, if there is any, relates to individual intentional subjects. This question may be raised on the basis simply of our everyday experience and understanding of social life: on the basis of our commonplace sociology, as we might call it. But it is usually raised not just on this basis, but equally on the basis of what the best social science—whatever that is taken to be—tells us about the social world. Social phil- osophy becomes in good part an ontology of social sci- ence. (*Social science, philosophy of.) Consider an analogy. The philosophy of mind seeks to tell us what is involved in a creature’s being a psychological subject, as social philosophy tries to say what is involved in an arrangement’s being a social form of organization. In rais- ing the psychological question, the philosopher will take account of all that we know, in our experience of our- selves and others, of human psychology. But if he is ser- ious, he will also take account of what the best psychology and neuroscience, as he sees it, says about psychological subjects. Similarly, the social philosopher who is anxious to provide an ontological inventory of the social realm will take account not just of the sociological common- places, but also of the scientific verities—as he sees them—about the social realm. We should note, in passing, that the stock of common- places that a social philosopher recognizes may vary, depending on the scientific verities that he recognizes. Someone who takes a radical Marxist view of social sci- ence, for example, is likely to be less impressed than some- one of a more conservative bent about the alleged commonplace status of the claim that people generally know the reasons why they do things: that they are not generally ignorant or deceived about their motivations. The situation here is again parallel to the situation in psychology. As there are rival theories in social science, so there are competing stories in psychology and neuro- science; and as the social-scientific variation impacts on what sociological commonplaces are recognized, so the psychological and neuroscientific diversity correlates with a variation in what are taken to be commonplaces about psychological subjects. What we have been saying bears on the *dialectic whereby a particular social philosophy, a particular ontol- ogy of society, will be defended. The dialectic will involve arguing for a particular trade-off of apparent common- places for alleged social-scientific verities and investigat- ing what the preferred package of commonplaces and verities suggests about the ontology of the social world. But what are the different social philosophies between which we are to judge? What are the main lines of division in the area? There are two aspects to social life. There is the social interaction between individuals in virtue of which various relationships get formed: relationships involving commu- nication, affection, collaboration, exchange, recognition, esteem, or whatever. And there is the social aggregation of individual attitudes and actions in virtue of which various institutions get established: these institutions will include common instrumentalities such as languages, cultures, and markets; groups, like the club or union or party, whose essence it is to have a mode of collective behaviour; groups that may have only a non-behavioural collective identity like genders, races, and classes; and shared resources of the kind illustrated by museums, libraries, and states. Social philosophy concerns itself both with issues raised by interaction and with questions associated with aggre- gation. I will look at the interaction area first and then at that of aggregation. But before going on, one preliminary comment. Interaction need not involve people’s inten- tional attitudes: after all, my breathing the oxygen that you would otherwise consume is a form of interaction. And, equally, aggregation need not involve such attitudes either: aggregation accounts for the fact, for example, that together you and I weigh twenty stone. When I speak of social interaction and social aggregation, I assume that these are forms of interaction and aggregation that require the people involved to have certain intentional attitudes; I ignore interaction and aggregation of the purely physical, and certainly non-social, sort. On the side of interaction, the main issue in social phil- osophy is that which divides so-called atomists from non- atomists (Taylor, Philosophy and the Human Sciences). The atomist holds that individual human beings do not depend on social relationships for the appearance of any distinct- ive human capacities. The non-atomist holds that they do. The atomist defends an image of human beings under which they come to society with all the characteristic properties that they will ever display; social life does not transform them in any essential manner. The non-atomist denies this, believing that it is only in the experience of social relationships that the human being comes properly into his own. This formulation of the issue is crucially vague, in at least two respects. First, it is not clear what sort of social 876 social philosophy dependence is in question; and second, it is not obvious what are to count as distinctive human capacities. The trad- itional resolution of the second vagueness is to nominate the relevant capacity as the ability—the actualized, con- crete ability—to reason and think. And this resolution prompts a resolution of the first vagueness. It suggests that the question cannot be whether human beings depend causally on their relationships with one another for having the capacity to think. If that were the question, then the atomist’s position would be extraordinarily weak; all the evidence of children raised in isolation, as well as our sense of what we learn from our parents and teachers, argues against it. Thus the issue must be whether individual human beings depend on their relationships with one another in a non-causal way for having the ability to rea- son and think (Pettit, The Common Mind, ch. 4). It is plausible that individuals depend on social relation- ships in a non-causal way for having the ability—the actu- alized, concrete ability—to speak the local language; without other individuals, or without social relationships to such individuals, it is unclear how a person could count as speaking a language shared with them. The non- atomist holds that the same sort of social dependence gov- erns the ability of an individual to reason and think: the ability, as we may take it, not just to have beliefs and desires, but to act with a view to having rational beliefs and desires. The atomist denies this, sticking by the view that all that is involved in reason and thought, all that is non-causally required for their appearance, is available to the individual outside society. The debate between atomists and non-atomists has centred around the connection between thought and lan- guage. Atomists have taken their lead from Hobbes, who argues that, however useful language is for mnemonic, taxonomic, and communicative purposes, thinking is pos- sible without speech, even without any inchoate form of speech. Non-atomists have tended to follow Rousseau and the Romantic tradition with which he is associated— a tradition also encompassing Herder and Hegel—in argu- ing, first, that language is social and, second, that thought requires language. The atomist tradition has been dominant in English- speaking philosophy, while the non-atomist has had a con- siderable presence in France and Germany. One source of non-atomism in the English-speaking world has been the work of the later Wittgenstein, in which it is suggested that following a rule—and, therefore, thinking—is pos- sible only in the context of social practices and relation- ships. This very strong non-atomist thesis may also be weakened, so that the claim is that following a rule of a characteristic kind—say, a suitably scrutable kind— requires such a social context (Pettit, The Common Mind, ch. 4). Another source of non-atomism in recent English- speaking philosophy has been the argument that the con- tent of a person’s thoughts is fixed not just by what goes on in his head, but by the linguistic community to which he belongs and to which he aspires to remain faithful (Hurley, Natural Reasons). So much for the main question raised in social philoso- phy by the interactive side of social life. What now of the issues generated by the aggregative aspect of society? There are a number of interesting questions raised by the aggregative structure of society (*methodological holism and individualism), but one issue is of striking importance. This is whether the entities that appear with the social aggregation of individual attitudes and actions give the lie to our ordinary sense of intentional agency: whether their presence means that our commonplace psychological sense of one another—our sense of one another as, most of the time, more or less rational creatures—is unsound; whether it means that, contrary to appearances, we are in some way the dupes of higher-level patterns or forces (Pettit, The Common Mind, ch. 3). The individualist, to use a name that also bears further connotations, denies that aggregate entities have this effect; the non-individualist insists that they do. One extreme sort of individualism would say that intentional agency is not compromised by any aggregate, social entities, because in strict truth no such entities exist; they have the status of logical fictions, as it is sometimes put, or something of the kind. This doctrine is not very plausible, for who can sensibly deny, at least for reasons specific to the social domain, that there are languages and organizations and collectivities and the like? The more appealing form of individualism would say that while there are indeed a variety of aggregate entities, there is nothing about those entities that suggests that our received, commonplace psychology is mistaken. True, there are aggregate regularities associated with such entities: for example, a rise in unemployment tends to be followed by a rise in crime; the fact that something is in an organization’s interest generally means that agents of the organization will pursue it; and the optimality of a certain procedure in certain contexts—say, an economic deci- sion-making procedure—often ensures its stability. But the individualist will argue that the obtaining of those regu- larities does not signal the presence of forces unrecog- nized in commonplace psychology, nor the operation of any mechanism—say, any selection mechanism—that belies the assumptions of that psychology. That the regu- larities obtain can be explained within that psychology, given the context in which the relevant agents find them- selves and given their understanding—perhaps involving relevant aggregate-level concepts—of that context. The issue between individualism and non-individualism, as this should make clear, ties up closely with questions of social explanation: questions in the philosophy of social science about the resources required in order to make sense of social happenings and regularities (James, The Content of Social Explanation; Ruben, The Metaphysics of the Social World). The individualist may admit that social explanation can happily invoke structural or aggregate factors, but he must be able to argue that the causal rele- vance ascribed to those factors is not inconsistent with the assumptions of commonplace psychology. The non- individualist will maintain that, on the contrary, aggregate social philosophy 877 factors have causal relevance in such a predetermining way, or on the basis of such a predestining form of selec- tion, that our commonplace psychology has to be seen as deeply misleading (Pettit, The Common Mind, ch. 3). p.p. *social facts. Susan Hurley, Natural Reasons (New York, 1989). Susan James, The Content of Social Explanation (Cambridge, 1984). Philip Pettit, The Common Mind: An Essay on Psychology, Society and Politics (New York, 1993). David-Hillel Ruben, The Metaphysics of the Social World (London, 1985). Charles Taylor, Philosophy and the Human Sciences (Cambridge, 1985). social science, philosophy of. The philosophy of any sci- ence comes in two varieties, as the methodology or as the ontology of the discipline. The methodology looks at questions to do with the nature of observations, laws and theories, the logic of induction and confirmation, the requirements of understanding and explanation, and so on. The ontology looks at questions to do with what the discipline posits—what it says there is—and with whether those posits are consistent with more or less common- place beliefs. The philosophy of social science, as this distinction would lead us to expect, has both a methodological and an ontological aspect; we might do better, indeed, to regard it as two disciplines, one methodological, the other onto- logical. The methodology of social science concerns itself with the implicit claim of social science to be able to gen- erate knowledge, especially knowledge otherwise unavailable, of the social world; in particular, it has tended in recent years to focus on the claim of social science to be able to provide distinctive explanations (James, The Con- tent of Social Explanation; Ruben, The Metaphysics of the Social World). The ontology of social science concerns itself with the sorts of entity that the discipline posits— entities like aggregate regularities and structural con- straints—and at how far those entities are consistent with our more or less commonplace view of human beings and their relationships. I will discuss only the methodology of social science here, as the ontology of social science is covered under the heading of *social philosophy. (See Ryan, The Philosophy of the Social Sciences, for an overview.) The methodology of social science may be motivated in one of two ways: internally or externally. The exter- nally motivated methodology of social science sees its job as the replication, in the social area, of the methodological discussion of natural science. Every methodology of nat- ural science will offer an account of observation, induc- tion, explanation, and related topics. The externally motivated methodology of social science looks at social science with a view to seeing how far that account is borne out there, and with what nuances. In principle, the possi- bility is open that the account will be revised in the light of reflection on social science. In practice, the lessons from the area of natural science are often taken as more or less canonical. The upshot of this approach to the methodology of social science may be conservative or critical. The conserv- ative methodologist holds that, in general, social science conforms to the canonical methods and that it deserves to be treated as seriously as natural science (Papineau, For Sci- ence in Social Science). The critical methodologist, on the other hand, argues that at least in some cases social science deviates from the standards fixed by the natural sciences and to that extent should be regarded as something less than science: as pseudo-science, for example, or common sense. The dominant methodology of natural science in this century has been associated with the positivist move- ment and with post-positivist variations such as that developed by Karl Popper and his school. It is striking that such positivists and post-positivists have sometimes been conservative in their methodological reflections on the social sciences, sometimes critical. Among the critical trends, we find a tendency to see history and ethnographic anthro- pology as exercises in common sense rather than science, and a disposition to dismiss speculative theories influenced by the work of Marx and Freud as pseudo-scientific. So much for the externally motivated methodology of social science. What now of the internally motivated var- iety? This alternative approach, unparalleled in the methodology of natural science, has its source in a peculiar feature of the social sciences. The social sciences were con- ceived and pursued, from the very beginning, under the influence of ideals, particularly ideals of scientific objectiv- ity and progress, deriving from the eighteenth-century *Enlightenment movement. The first social scientists were economists and sociologists, as we would call them today, and they were self-consciously concerned about producing something that would count not as philosophy, not as literature, not as common sense, but as science: as a project faithful to the image forged by natural science. The scientific intention—the intention to make sci- ence—has remained characteristic of work in the social sciences. It puts social scientists, paradoxically, under an obligation of a philosophical kind: the obligation to show that the sort of analysis they pursue is of a properly scien- tific kind. And in this way it gives rise to the internally motivated approach to the philosophy—strictly, the methodology—of social science. Under this approach, the task for the methodology of social science is not primarily to map the practices of the social sciences, as if they were on a par with the natural sciences, but rather to interro- gate and assess the philosophies or ideologies whereby the social sciences try to legitimize what they do: that is, try to show that what they do is genuinely scientific in character. It is not usual to present things in this way, but, broadly speaking, there are three main ideologies that have been invoked—individually or in various combinations—by social scientists, in the scientific legitimization of their enterprise. These each mark a feature that putatively dis- tinguishes social science from mere common sense, mere social lore. The first ideology hails social science as an explanatory enterprise of culturally universal validity; the second as an enterprise that is interpretatively neutral, not 878 social philosophy being warped by people’s self-understanding; and the third as an enterprise that enjoys evaluative independence: value-freedom. The universality, neutrality, and independ- ence claimed are each meant to establish social science as objective, and therefore scientifically respectable, in a way in which social lore is not; each notion offers an explication of what scientific objectivity involves. Social lore is always lore about a particular social milieu and culture, and an aspiration to cultural universal- ity, if it can be vindicated, would certainly give social science a distinctive status. Such an aspiration is supported in a variety of traditions: among anthropologists and sociologists of a Durkheimian cast, among many Marxist scholars, and among those economists who think that all human behaviour, and the patterns to which it gives rise, can be explained by reference to Homo economicus. But methodologists of social science have claimed many rea- sons to question the possibility of any universalist, or at least any straightforwardly universalist, theory. The hermeneutic tradition that has long been dominant in Germany and the analytical tradition sponsored by the work of the later Wittgenstein both suggest that any explanation of human behaviour has to start with the cul- turally specific concepts in which people understand their environment and cannot aspire, therefore, to a substan- tive universality. The debate on these questions ranges widely, encompassing issues to do with cultural and other forms of relativism (Winch, The Idea of a Social Science and its Relation to Philosophy; Hollis and Lukes, Rationality and Relativism). Social lore is not only particularistic, it is also designed to represent people as subjectively understandable or interpretable. We, the local consumers of such lore, know what it is like to be creatures of the kind represented and know how we would go about communicating with them. The second, and perhaps least persuasive, ideology of social science suggests that this disposition to represent people as subjectively understandable comes of a limited perspective which social science transcends. It suggests that social science can aspire to an objective explanation of people’s behaviour without worrying about whether the explanation fits with their self-understanding: without being anxious to ensure that it makes native sense of them and facilitates interpersonal communication. The ideol- ogy suggests that social science, in the received phrases, can aspire to a form of Erklären, or explanation, that need not service the needs of interpersonal Verstehen, or under- standing. Methodologists of social science have claimed many reasons to question this aspiration to Verstehen-free explanation. The hermeneutic and Wittgensteinian thinkers mentioned earlier both reject the idea that people can be properly understood without facilitating communi- cation (Winch, The Idea of a Social Science). And the many philosophers who follow the lead of Donald Davidson on interpretation argue that there is no interpreting human subjects without representing them as more or less rational and more or less interpersonally scrutable (Macdonald and Pettit, Semantics and Social Science). Social lore is often evaluatively committed, as well as being particularistic and orientated to subjective under- standing. It takes a form which is premissed on an evalu- ative characterization of the status quo. Thus it may characterize the beliefs, and explain the behaviour, of rulers on the assumption that the regime they sustain is unjust. The third and most common legitimizing ideology of social science, one associated in particular with the Ger- man sociologist Max Weber, holds that in this respect— and perhaps in this respect only—social science can do scientifically better than social lore. It can acknowledge that the agents in the society have evaluative beliefs, and it can take account of these in its explanation of what they do, without itself endorsing any such beliefs; it can be objective, in the familiar sense of remaining uncommitted on evaluative questions. Methodologists of social science have also sought reasons to doubt this claim, but the debate has been confused by differences over what sorts of evaluative commitment would really be damaging to the pretensions of social science (Macdonald and Pettit, Semantics and Social Science, ch. 4). p.p. *social facts. Martin Hollis and Steven Lukes (eds.), Rationality and Relativism (Oxford, 1982). Susan James, The Content of Social Explanation (Cambridge, 1984). Graham Macdonald and Philip Pettit, Semantics and Social Science (London, 1971). David Papineau, For Science in Social Science (London, 1978). David-Hillel Ruben, The Metaphysics of the Social World (London, 1985). Alan Ryan, The Philosophy of the Social Sciences (London, 1970). Peter Winch, The Idea of a Social Science and its Relation to Philoso- phy (London, 1958). society. A set of individuals and/or institutions in rela- tions governed by practical interdependence, convention, and perhaps law—which relations may vary from the local to the international. The modern concept emerged in later eighteenth-century Europe (in arguments against abso- lutism and civic republicanism) to denote a supposed sphere of causal and moral self-sufficiency lying between the political and the personal. The concept was the ground for the new ‘science’ of ‘sociology’. It later came to be used more loosely to include the political and the personal. Many *liberalisms have resisted the idea of ‘the social’, pre- ferring to see individuals as self-sufficient. Some philoso- phers, however, including Williams and Rawls, as well as some critics of liberalism, like MacIntyre, have recently reasserted conceptions of the social as the ground of moral possibility and moral judgement. g.p.h. *communitarianism; organic society; social philoso- phy; social science, philosophy of. ‘Democracy’, ‘Equality’, ‘Feudal System’, ‘Liberty’, ‘Nation’, ‘Sovereignty’, ‘Burke’, ‘Constant’, ‘Hegel’, ‘Marx’, ‘Mon- tesquieu’, ‘Rousseau’, ‘Sieyès’, ‘Tocqueville’, in F. Furet and M. Ozouf (eds.), A Critical Dictionary of the French Revolution (Cambridge, Mass., 1989). society 879 . either finite or has the same size as the natural numbers, the smallest infinite set. It is a theorem of standard *set theory, due to Cantor, that the set of real *numbers is not count- able—there. self-affirmation on the part of the powerful, ‘slave morality’ is a reactive morality originating in resent- ment of the powerful on the part of the powerless. The qualities of the powerful which they affirm. services are to be pro- duced, how they are to be produced, in what quantities, and at what prices they are to be sold, rather then simply allowing these matters to be determined by the market through