This book is an attempt to give a completely extensional account of belief without recourse to entities such as propositions and the like. This is done by developing a semantical metalanguage and instead of alluding to such intensional elements as meanings, the talk is rather of individuals, virtual classes, and relations. A Quinean kind of paraphrastic program is used, making explicit time references and belief conditions, as well as the above objects of belief. They are all keyed to the user (...) of a specific language through Martin's use of testing and acceptance as primitive notions, giving the entire project a behavioristic flavor. These particular primitives have been chosen in view of the supposition that they have clear experimental meanings and that they are crucial to the logical analysis of experimental method. The upshot of Martin's approach is an analysis of belief in terms of their relational characteristics. Hence, on his view, we cannot properly speak of knowledge and belief, but only of knowing and believing. In the course of developing his logic of belief, Martin manages to touch upon a wide range of topics. Quine's notion of ontic commitment is expanded to include "ontic involvement"--a second order commitment involving the objects of Martin's metalanguage. Arguments are offered against the contemporary view that there are a multiplicity of logics: "One God, one country, one logic" being the professed underlying maxim of his book. There is a longish discussion marking out a distinction between facts and events, modeled after his account of belief. A brief chapter reassesses and defends Frege's notion of Sinn in terms of Martin's logical machinery. Interspersed throughout are commentaries on a number of figures, such as Russell and Carnap, Hintikka and von Wright. Included also is a chapter on human action based on a distinction between action types and action events. There, Davidson's analysis of action sentences is criticized in terms of the 'Fido'-Fido principle. The extensive use of symbols seems cumbersome, but is perhaps necessary given the nature of Martin's enterprise.--K. T. (shrink)

Dismissing epistemologies which object to the notion of an essential property, Plantinga argues that God indeed has a nature, but one evidently distinct from himself and not subject to his control. Plantinga contends that God’s nature cannot be identical with God himself since this would imply that God is a property and that any one of his properties is the same as all the rest. In rejecting the divine simplicity doctrine taught by certain traditional theists, e.g., Augustine and Aquinas, Plantinga (...) examines the latter’s familiar defense of it and finds it unacceptable. He disputes the arguments for it based upon the denial of the composition in God of potency and act, substance and accidents, contending that such notions as potency and accident are applicable to God. Moreover, the objection that analogous thinking may somehow rescue this doctrine meets with the observation that such thinking harbors an agnosticism that works as well against the doctrine as it does in its favor. (shrink)