Philosophy

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The Distinction in the Tractatus Between Saying and Showing
(1970) Harward, Donald W.; Perkins, Moreland; Philosophy; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md)
The distinction between saying and showing is fundamental to Wittgenstein's attempt in the Tractatus to explain the communication of significant propositions, the function of non-significant assertions, and the general relationships between thought, language and reality. In fact, the saying and showing distinctions provide the key to an interpretation of the philosophies of logic and language in the Tractatus. The distinction has not been thoroughly investigated in the Wittgensteinian literature. When it has been discussed, it has not been analyzed rigorously; nor, I think, has it been analyzed correctly. It is quite remarkable that a distinction so important to the Tractatus has been given such brief treatment. I critically construct the positions of the six leading commentators on the Tractatus doctrines of saying and showing early in the dissertation. The commentators are: Pitcher, Black, Stenius, Favrholdt, Schwyzer and Shwayder. Arguments are presented to demonstrate the inadequacies of each of their intepretations. By paying attention to just how Wittgenstein uses various "show" and "say" terms or expressions in the Tractatus, and by exploring what follows from those uses, an appropriate interpretation is found. In Chapters Three and Four, I structure this interpretation and I indicate how it avoids the criticisms and errors attributed to the other commentaries. The last chapter buttresses my interpretation of what Wittgenstein is doing in, and with, the doctrines of showing and saying in the Tractatus by presenting supporting evidence from the pre-Tractatus manuscripts.
INTERNALIST AND EXTERNALIST THEORIES: THE DIVERSITY OF REASONS FOR ACTING
(1990) Paul, Linda Marie; Slote, Michael; Philosophy; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md)
Although common-sense moral theories tend to hold that everyone has reason to act morally, Bernard Williams argues in "Internal and External Reasons" that an agent has no reason to act if the act in question fails to Promote any desire or project of hers. Williams considers this a logical property of reasons for acting and refers to this position as "internalism." After critically examining Williams' specific arguments, I use a heterogeneous group of arguments to show that internalism oversimplifies the logic of reasons. There are various ways in which reasons can be attributed to an agent without first examining her motives or Projects: (1) some ways of undertaking obligations give rise to reasons for acting due to rational requirements on consistency of intention; (2) Thomas Nagel's arguments that prudential reasons are best described in terms of the agent's metaphysical conception of herself allow us to attribute reasons for acting to an agent without checking her desires first; and (3) John McDowell's account of agents ''perceiving" reasons explains how an agent's conception of the facts will give rise to a reason and a motive for acting. It also appears that internalism's appeal relies in part on our prejudices in favor of self-interest theories of rationality and our tendency to view agents as more separate and independent than they actually are. As a result, internalism suffers from too narrow a value focus. The emphasis on a shared form of life that originates in the Wittgensteinian notion of a practice allows us to attribute reasons for acting to agents without considering their individual projects in each case and better suits the process of judging and understanding reasons for acting than a view which focuses as heavily on the individual as internalism does. Finally, because agents are sometimes perverse, reasons themselves do not always motivate and motivation cannot logically be part of having a reason. In conclusion, reasons for acting are significantly more diverse than internalism allows and the theory should therefore be rejected.
Simulation and Self-knowledge
(Cambridge University Press, 1996) Carruthers, Peter
In this chapter I shall be attempting to curb the pretensions of simulationism. I shall argue that it is, at best, an epistemological doctrine of limited scope. It may explain how we go about attributing beliefs and desires to others, and perhaps to ourselves, in some cases. But simulation cannot provide the fundamental basis of our conception of, or knowledge of, minded agency.
Autism as Mind-Blindness: An Elaboration and Partial Defence
(Cambridge University Press, 1996) Carruthers, Peter
In this chapter I shall be defending the mind-blindness theory of autism, by showing how it can accommodate data which might otherwise appear problematic for it. Specifically, I shall show how it can explain the fact that autistic children rarely engage in spontaneous pretend-play, and also how it can explain the executive-function deficits which are characteristic of the syndrome. I shall do this by emphasising what I take to be an entailment of the mind-blindness theory, that autistic subjects have difficulties of access to their own mental states, as well as to the mental states of other people.
Thinking in Language?: Evolution and a Modularist Possibility
(Cambridge University Press, 1998) Carruthers, Peter
This chapter argues that our language faculty can both be a peripheral module of the mind and be crucially implicated in a variety of central cognitive functions, including conscious propositional thinking and reasoning. I also sketch arguments for the view that natural language representations (e.g. of Chomsky’s Logical Form, or LF) might serve as a lingua franca for interactions (both conscious and non-conscious) between a number of quasi-modular central systems. The ideas presented are compared and contrasted with the evolutionary proposals made by Derek Bickerton (1990, 1995), who has also argued for the involvement of language in thought. Finally, I propose that it was the evolution of a mechanism responsible for pretend play, circa 40,000 years ago, which led to the explosion of creative culture visible in the fossil record from that time onwards.
Conscious Thinking: Language or Elimination?
(Blackwell Publishing, Ltd., 1998-12) Carruthers, Peter
Do we conduct our conscious propositional thinking in natural language? Or is such language only peripherally related to human conscious thought-processes? In this paper I shall present a partial defence of the former view, by arguing that the only real alternative is eliminativism about conscious propositional thinking. Following some introductory remarks, I shall state the argument for this conclusion, and show how that conclusion can be true. Thereafter I shall defend each of the three main premises in turn.
Sympathy and Subjectivity
(Taylor and Francis Group, 1999-12) Carruthers, Peter
This paper shows that even if the mental states of non-human animals lack phenomenological properties, as some accounts of mental-state consciousness imply, this need not prevent those states from being appropriate objects of sympathy and moral concern. The paper argues that the most basic form of mental (as opposed to biological) harm lies in the existence of thwarted agency, or thwarted desire, rather than in anything phenomenological.
Consciousness: Explaining the Phenomena
(Cambridge University Press, 2001) Carruthers, Peter
Can phenomenal consciousness be given a reductive natural explanation? Many people argue not. They claim that there is an ‘explanatory gap’ between physical and/or intentional states and processes, on the one hand, and phenomenal consciousness, on the other. I reply that, since we have purely recognitional concepts of experience, there is indeed a sort of gap at the level of concepts; but this need not mean that the properties picked out by those concepts are inexplicable. I show how dispositionalist higher-order thought (HOT) theory can reductively explain the subjective feel of experience by deploying a form of ‘consumer semantics’. First-order perceptual contents become transformed, acquiring a dimension of subjectivity, by virtue to their availability to a mind-reading (HOT generating) consumer system.
Human Creativity: Its Evolution, its Cognitive Basis, and its Connections with Childhood Pretence
(Oxford University Press, 2002) Carruthers, Peter
This paper defends two initial claims. First, it argues that essentially the same cognitive resources are shared by adult creative thinking and problem-solving, on the one hand, and by childhood pretend play, on the other namely, capacities to generate and to reason with suppositions (or imagined possibilities). Second, it argues that the evolutionary function of childhood pretence is to practice and enhance adult forms of creativity. The paper goes on to show how these proposals can provide a smooth and evolutionarily-plausible explanation of the gap between the first appearance of our species in Southern Africa some 100,000 years ago, and the ‘creative explosion’ of cultural, technological and artistic change which took place within dispersed human populations some 60,000 years later. The intention of the paper is to sketch a proposal which might serve as a guide for future interdisciplinary research.
The Roots of Scientific Reasoning: Infancy, Modularity, and the Art of Tracking
(Cambridge University Press, 2002) Carruthers, Peter
This chapter examines the extent to which there are continuities between the cognitive processes and epistemic practices engaged in by human hunter–gatherers, on the one hand, and those which are distinctive of science, on the other. It deploys anthropological evidence against any form of ‘no-continuity’ view, drawing especially on the cognitive skills involved in the art of tracking. It also argues against the ‘child-as-scientist’ accounts put forward by some developmental psychologists, which imply that scientific thinking is present in early infancy and universal amongst humans who have sufficient time and resources to devote to it. In contrast, a modularist kind of ‘continuity’ account is proposed, according to which the innately channelled architecture of human cognition provides all the materials necessary for basic forms of scientific reasoning in older children and adults, needing only the appropriate sorts of external support, social context, and background beliefs and skills in order for science to begin its advance.
The Cognitive Functions of Language
(Cambridge University Press, 2002-12) Carruthers, Peter
This paper explores a variety of different versions of the thesis that natural language is involved in human thinking. It distinguishes amongst strong and weak forms of this thesis, dismissing some as implausibly strong and others as uninterestingly weak. Strong forms dismissed include the view that language is conceptually necessary for thought (endorsed by many philosophers) and the view that language is de facto the medium of all human conceptual thinking (endorsed by many philosophers and social scientists). Weak forms include the view that language is necessary for the acquisition of many human concepts, and the view that language can serve to scaffold human thought processes. The paper also discusses the thesis that language may be the medium of conscious propositional thinking, but argues that this cannot be its most fundamental cognitive role. The idea is then proposed that natural language is the medium for non-domain-specific thinking, serving to integrate the outputs of a variety of domain-specific conceptual faculties (or central-cognitive ‘quasi-modules’). Recent experimental evidence in support of this idea is reviewed, and the implications of the idea are discussed, especially for our conception of the architecture of human cognition. Finally, some further kinds of evidence which might serve to corroborate or refute the hypothesis are mentioned. The overall goal of the paper is to review a wide variety of accounts of the cognitive function of natural language, integrating a number of different kinds of evidence and theoretical consideration in order to propose and elaborate the most plausible candidate.
Moderately Massive Modularity
(Cambridge University Press, 2003) Carruthers, Peter
This paper will sketch a model of the human mind according to which the mind’s structure is massively, but by no means wholly, modular. Modularity views in general will be motivated, elucidated, and defended, before the thesis of moderately massive modularity is explained and elaborated.
Quantification and Second-Order Monadicity
(Blackwell, 2003) Pietroski, Paul
The first part of this paper reviews some developments regarding the apparent mismatch between the logical and grammatical forms of quantificational constructions like 'Pat kicked every bottle'. I suggest that (even given quantifier-raising) many current theories still posit an undesirable mismatch. But all is well if we can treat determiners (words like 'every', 'no', and 'most') as second-order monadic predicates without treating them as predicates satisfied by ordered pairs of sets. Drawing on George Boolos's construal of second-order quantification as plural quantification, I argue that we can and should view determiners as predicates satisfied (plurally) by ordered pairs each of which associates an entity with a truth-value (t or f). The idea is 'every' is satisfied by some pairs iff every one of them associates its entity with t. It turns out that this provides a kind of explanation for the "conservativity" of determiners. And it lets us say that concatenation signifies predicate-conjunction even in phrases like 'every bottle' and 'no brown dog'.
On Fodor's Problem
(Blackwell Publishing, Ltd., 2003-11) Carruthers, Peter
This paper sketches a solution to a problem which has been emphasized by Fodor. This is the problem of how to explain distinctively-human flexible cognition in modular terms. There are three aspects to the proposed account. First, it is suggested that natural language sentences might serve to integrate the outputs of a number of conceptual modules. Second, a creative sentence-generator, or supposer, is postulated. And third, it is argued that a set of principles of inference to the best explanation can be constructed from already-extant aspects of linguistic testimony and discourse interpretation. Most importantly, it is suggested that the resulting architecture should be implementable in ways that are computationally tractable.
A Moral Contractualist Defense of Political Obligation
(2003-11-24) Lefkowitz, David B.; Galston, William A.; Philosophy
Is there a moral duty to obey the law? Or more precisely, do citizens of any modern state have a general duty to acknowledge its authority to determine for them, for action guiding purposes, whether certain kinds of conduct are morally permissible, required, or forbidden? Moral contractualism, I contend, entails that citizens of a liberal democratic state do have such a duty. Treating others morally often requires agents to act collectively. But even agents who accept the moral necessity of collective action will sometimes disagree over the specification of the ends to be achieved, and the means for doing so. I argue that a liberal democratic state (and only such a state) can justifiably claim the authority to resolve such disagreements, which it does mainly by enacting and applying laws. Obedience to democratic laws expresses respect for others' autonomy. In defending these claims, particular attention is paid to the problem posed by disagreement over the design of democratic decision procedures, conflicts between democratically enacted laws and individual rights, and conflicts of rights. Civil disobedience, conscientious objection, and over-inclusive laws are also addressed.
Phenomenal Concepts and Higher-Order Experiences
(International Phenomenological Society, 2004) Carruthers, Peter
Relying on a range of now-familiar thought-experiments, it has seemed to many philosophers that phenomenal consciousness is beyond the scope of reductive explanation. Others have thought that we can undermine the credibility of those thought-experiments by allowing that we possess purely recognitional concepts for the properties of our conscious mental states. This paper is concerned to explain, and then to meet, the challenge of showing how purely recognitional concepts are possible if there are no such things as qualia – in the strong sense of intrinsic (non-relational, non-intentional) properties of experience. It argues that an appeal to higher-order experiences is necessary to meet this challenge, and then deploys a novel form of higher-order thought theory to explain how such experiences are generated.
IDENTIFICATION AND AUTONOMY: A MEDITATION ON THE PHILOSOPHY OF HARRY FRANKFURT
(2004-04-22) Chandler, Teresa Marie; Martin, Raymond; Philosophy
Harry Frankfurt offers an account of freedom as "autonomy" in which identification plays a central role. Identification is supposed to be a process or psychic configuration by which attitudes desires in particular become or count in some sense as one's own. When we are propelled to action by desires with which we "identify," we're acting autonomously. On Frankfurt's view, whenever we act, a desire is involved, but sometimes the desire that moves us is one by which we do not want to be moved, a desire from which we are alienated with which we fail to identify. Paradigm examples are addictions and compulsions. When moved by one of these "alien" desires, we lack autonomy. Frankfurt's account of autonomy, then, rests on a basic distinction. Of the desires that move us to action "effective desires" only some will be desires with which we identify. The main claim of this dissertation is that Frankfurt needs to maintain this distinction, but in the end, doesn't. There are two basic problems. First, as Frankfurt develops his conception of identification, it shifts, and as it shifts, it becomes broader, so much so that it no longer marks the narrow internality. Second, neither of Frankfurt's alternatives wholeheartedness, caring clearly functions to mark out a narrow internality, either. In the case of caring, Frankfurt gives an account that's dispositional that is made out in terms of effective desire, so that in the end caring is not clearly distinguishable from having an effective desire from simply being moved to action. In the case of wholeheartedness, Frankfurt introduces the concept as a way of understanding identification and therefore as a criterion of narrow internality, but he defines wholeheartedness in a way that presupposes a criterion of narrow internality. Given the shifting conception of identification and the problems with wholeheartedness and caring, we are unable to distinguish between effective desires and desires that are truly an agent's own, and therefore, are left with an account of autonomy that remains unclear.
Artistic and Ethical Values in the Experience of Narratives
(2004-05-10) Giovannelli, Alessandro; Levinson, Jerrold; Philosophy
The ethical criticism of art has received increasing attention in contemporary aesthetics, especially with respect to the evaluation of narratives. The most prominent philosophical defenses of this art-critical practice concentrate on the notion of response, specifically on the emotional responses a narrative requires for it to be correctly apprehended and appreciated. I first investigate the mechanisms of emotional participation in narratives (Chapters 1-2); then, I address the question of the legitimacy of the ethical criticism of narratives and advance an argument in support of such a practice (Chapters 3-7). Chapter 1 analyzes different modes of emotional participation in narratives, distinguishing between: emotional inference, affective mimicry, empathy, sympathy, and concern. Chapter 2 first critically discusses Noël Carroll's objections to identificationism and to an empathy-based account of character participation, and then analyzes the sorts of imaginative activities involved in narrative engagement, by investigating the distinctions introduced by Richard Wollheim between central and acentral imagining, and iconic and non-iconic imagination. Chapter 3 offers a taxonomy of the possible views on the relationship between the ethical and the artistic values of a narrative, distinguishing between reductionist and non-reductionist views, and sorting the latter ones into autonomism and moralism, radical and moderate. Chapter 4 analyzes the ethical assessment of narratives for (i) their consequences on their perceivers and (ii) the means of their production, and indicates the evaluation in terms of (iii) the ethical perspective a narrative embodies as the kind of ethical evaluation on which an argument for the ethical criticism of narratives ought to concentrate. Chapter 5 critically assesses the accounts of "imaginative resistance" to fiction offered by Kendall Walton, Richard Moran, and Tamar Gendler, and concludes that none of them is adequate to ground an argument for the ethical criticism of narratives. Chapter 6 looks at Carroll's argument for moderate moralism and Berys Gaut's "merited-response" argument for "ethicism," and finds both arguments wanting. Chapter 7 proposes a version of moralism grounded in the notion of a narrative's ethical perspective, and defended on the grounds of narratives' commitments to provide a realistic (or "fitting") representation of reality.
Practical Reasoning in a Modular Mind
(Blackwell Publishing, Ltd., 2004-06) Carruthers, Peter
This paper starts from an assumption defended in the author’s previous work. This is that distinctively-human flexible and creative theoretical thinking can be explained in terms of the interactions of a variety of modular systems, with the addition of just a few a-modular components and dispositions. On the basis of that assumption it is argued that distinctively human practical reasoning, too, can be understood in modular terms. The upshot is that there is nothing in the human psyche that requires any significant retreat from a thesis of massively modular mental organization.
Reductive Explanation and the 'Explanatory Gap'
(University of Calgary Press, 2004-06) Carruthers, Peter
Can phenomenal consciousness be given a reductive natural explanation? Exponents of an ‘explanatory gap’ between physical, functional and intentional facts, on the one hand, and the facts of phenomenal consciousness, on the other, argue that there are reasons of principle why phenomenal consciousness cannot be reductively explained (Jackson, 1982, 1986; Levine, 1983, 1993, 2001; McGinn, 1991; Sturgeon, 1994, 2000; Chalmers, 1996, 1999). Some of these writers claim that the existence of such a gap would warrant a belief in some form of ontological dualism (Jackson, 1982; Chalmers, 1996), whereas others argue that no such entailment holds (Levine, 1983; McGinn, 1991; Sturgeon, 1994). In the other main camp, there are people who argue that a reductive explanation of phenomenal consciousness is possible in principle (Block and Stalnaker, 1999), and yet others who claim, moreover, to have provided such an explanation in practice (Dennett, 1991; Dretske, 1995; Tye, 1995, 2000; Lycan, 1996; Carruthers, 2000.) I shall have nothing to say about the ontological issue here (see Balog, 1999, for a recent critique of dualist arguments); nor shall I have a great deal to say about the success or otherwise of the various proposed reductive explanations. My focus will be on the explanatory gap itself – more specifically, on the question whether any such principled gap exists. I shall argue that it does not. The debate will revolve around the nature and demands of reductive explanation in general.

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