Humean supervenience is the doctrine that there are no necessary connections in the world. David Lewis identifies one big bad bug to the programme of providing Humean analyses for apparently non-Humean features of the world. The bug is chance. We put the bug under the microscope, and conclude that chance is no special problem for the Humean.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Foundation of Ethical Theory in the ClinicJohn Collins Harvey (bio)William Osler has had a very profound and lasting effect on American medical education and medical practice. He set the pattern, still followed today, for the clinical training of medical students at the patient’s bedside and in the clinical laboratory. In such settings Osler was able to demonstrate to his pupils the principles, ethics, and standards of medical (...) practice that he espoused and thought fundamental to the profession of medicine. His monumental text book, The Principles and Practice of Medicine, first published in 1892, transformed the medical profession and remained a standard text for more than four decades (Leon 1995, p. 13). Renowned medical historians, such as Pedro Laín Entralgo, Henry Sigerist, and Richard Shyrock, recognize him as the greatest clinician that North America has ever produced.Osler, who had observed bedside teaching in his post-graduate studies, recognized that this method had much to offer in the instruction of medical students. Opportunity to introduce this method of teaching into the medical school curriculum came in 1888 when he was called to serve as Professor of Medicine and Physician-in-Chief at the newly established Johns Hopkins Medical School and Hospital. Bedside teaching proved to be very successful especially in demonstrating to students the standards and ethics of medical practice that he espoused.Osler’s teaching method was immediately adopted by many of the university medical schools in the United States, including Harvard, Columbia, the University of Pennsylvania, and Stanford, all of whom appreciated the success of the Hopkins medical educational experiment. Graduates of the Hopkins Medical School quickly became a major source of faculty in medical schools in the United States. Many of Osler’s immediate pupils became outstanding clinicians and leaders in American academic medicine and served as faculty members at Hopkins or in established or newly founded schools. Osler’s disciples taught students in the wards the “art” of medicine according to his principles, ethics, and standards. The second and third generation faculty members, who were trained by Osler’s immediate pupils, continue to this day to teach the “art” by employing this method of teaching. Consequently, the practice of medicine in the United States continues to be influenced by the ethics held by Osler. To find [End Page 343] the theories behind Osler’s teaching, we must look at Osler’s background, education, and writings.The Religio Medici: Background For Osler’S Medical EthicsOsler received a very solid traditional classical education at the small, excellent Anglican secondary school in Weston, Ontario run by the Reverend James Johnson, with whom Osler developed a life long friendship. Johnson’s avocation was natural science. He first aroused Osler’s interest in nature and science. Osler was taught Scripture well at Weston. He committed much of the Bible to memory and often quoted it in his speeches. He also studied both Greek and Latin, and was exposed to the writings of Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, and other classical authors, particularly the stoics.While a student at Weston, Osler first came to know Sir Thomas Browne’s remarkable text Religio Medici (The Religion of the Physician), which was to become a lifelong favorite. In his first address as the new Regius Professor of Medicine at Oxford in 1905, which was given to the Guy’s Hospital Physical Society, he vigorously recommended the Religio Medici to the students.The Religio is a deeply reflective personal inquiry into the paradoxical nature of one man as a microcosm of all men (Browne 1940, pp. 40, 53–54, 61–62). Browne participated in the Baconian program for the advancement of knowledge and the rise of “science.” As a defense of the physician’s faith, the Religio shows how neatly the scientist and the Christian united in the single figure of the inspired reader of God’s two books, nature and Scripture, can defend an attitude that is both scientific and yet reverent. The central theme in the first and much longer part of the Religio is the relation between faith and reason. The second part of the Religio is about charity: Man’s love of God and his neighbors, commanded as... (shrink)

: The Newman programs established at secular colleges and universities provided an opportunity for intellectual, spiritual, and social growth among the Catholic student population. As a young physician and junior medical faculty member, André Hellegers took part in the early organization and ongoing work of Carroll House, the Newman Center at the Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions. Hellegers's experience at Carroll House enabled him to develop a clear blueprint of an academic center of excellence for the scientific, theological, and philosophical exploration (...) of the many problems that he had seen and foresaw in medicine. That center would become Georgetown's Kennedy Institute of Ethics. (shrink)

Edmund D. Pellegrino, John Collins Harvey, Kevin T. Fitzgerald, SJ; Must the Church be Mute Lest Its Truths be Distorted? A Response to Engelhardt, Christian bi.

This chapter describes some basic, often puzzling features of intentionality, with an eye to its role not so much in ordinary folk ascriptions but in serious psychological explanations, especially in many of Noam Chomsky's own presentations of his theory. It then considers Chomsky's censure of the notion, leading him to deny what would seem to be the explicit intentionalisms on which he seems to rely. Implicit in Chomsky's treatment of grammar is the idea that the positing of the language faculty (...) offers an “abstract” perspective on a physical system (the human brain) that implements the relevant features of the abstracta in ways we currently don’t understand. Two initial problems might be raised for this picture, one regarding inference and the other, generalization. The proposed model is effectively saying that theorists track states and generalizations of the linguistic system in an explicitly representational format, but what the theory is true of need not have such representational properties. (shrink)

Do lexical items have internal structure that contributes to, or determines, the stable interpretation of their potential hosts? One argument in favour of the claim that lexical items are so structured is that certain putative verbs appear to be ‘impossible’, where the intended interpretation of them is apparently precluded by the character of their internal structure. The adequacy of such reasoning has recently been debated by Fodor and Lepore and Johnson, but to no apparent resolution. The present paper argues that (...) such ‘impossible word arguments' for internal lexical structure, although not apodictic, do constitute inferences to the best explanation for such structure. Alternative explanations for the ‘impossible words' are considered and rejected. (shrink)

Temporal externalism (TE) is the thesis (defended by Jackman (1999)) that the contents of some of an individual’s thoughts and utterances at time t may be determined by linguistic developments subsequent to t. TE has received little discussion so far, Brown 2000 and Stoneham 2002 being exceptions. I defend TE by arguing that it solves several related problems concerning the extension of natural kind terms in scientifically ignorant communities. Gary Ebbs (2000) argues that no theory can reconcile our ordinary, practical (...) judgments of sameness of extension over time with the claim that linguistic usage determines word extensions. I argue that Ebbs shows at most that no theory other than TE can effect this reconciliation. Furthermore, while Ebbs’ argument undermines Jessica Brown’s solutions to two closely related problems about natural kind term extensions (Brown 1998), TE can solve both problems without difficulty. Some criticisms of TE are briefly addressed as well. (shrink)

Noam Chomsky's engagement with contemporary philosophy from the 1960s onwards has involved lengthy discussion with critics and others on the significance of linguistics for traditional and contemporary philosophy. This chapter draws the background to generative linguistics and shows how Chomsky's real philosophical achievement in this area was to pose an explanatory question that had previously been neglected. Generative grammar as a research field was initiated by Chomsky in the 1950s. Chomsky's cognitive turn was revolutionary, not least because it went against (...) the philosophical grain vis‐a‐vis the role of formalism or logical analysis. P. Strawson had suggested that there is a Homeric struggle between those who favor a formal approach to natural language and those who favor a communicationintention approach. For Chomsky, the proper role of formalism in the realm of natural language is the framing of structural constraints on the consumption and production of language, both of which are cognitive capacities. (shrink)

Noam Chomsky often appeals to the distinction between problems and mysteries. This chapter explains and evaluates Chomsky's remarks on these topics scattered throughout numerous texts. Next, it explains the p/m distinction via Chomsky's analogy of science with language. The chapter briefly discusses the topic of linguistic creativity. It focuses on the distinction itself, not what might fall under it. The chapter critically evaluates Chomsky's considerations in favor of the conception of the p/m distinction. A further suggestion from Chomsky is that (...) convergence is a key signature of a science‐forming faculty. Convergence on scientific theories requires explanation, for that there is convergence at all appears not to follow from the observational data, still less the socio‐cultural facts of scientific practice. (shrink)

Griffiths and Machery (2008) argue that innateness is a ?folk biological? notion, which, as such, has no useful reconstruction in contemporary biology. If this is so, not only is it wrong to identify the vernacular notion with the precise theoretical concept of canalization, but worse, it would appear that many of the putative scientific claims for particular competences and capacities being innate are simply misplaced. The present paper challenges the core substantive claim of Griffiths and Machery's position, namely, that innateness (...) understood on canalization lines as environment-independent development (somehow and to some degree) is a confused, outmoded notion. It will be contended that the modality-independence of language offers a prima facie case against Griffiths and Machery's general position. (shrink)

A plausible thought about vagueness is that it involves semantic incompleteness. To say that a predicate is vague is to say (at the very least) that its extension is incompletely specified. Where there is incomplete specification of extension there is indeterminacy, an indeterminacy between various ways in which the specification of the predicate might be completed or sharpened. In this paper we show that this idea is bound to founder by presenting an argument to the effect that there are vague (...) predicates which cannot be sharpened in such a way as to meet certain basic constraints (of penumbral connection and public accessibility) that must be imposed on the very notion of a sharpening. (shrink)

A relativistic one-particle, quantum theory for spin-zero particles is constructed uponL 2(x, ct), resulting in a positive definite spacetime probability density. A generalized Schrödinger equation having a Hermitian HamiltonianH onL 2(x, ct) for an arbitrary four-vector potential is derived. In this formalism the rest mass is an observable and a scalar particle is described by a wave packet that is a superposition of mass states. The requirements of macroscopic causality are shown to be satisfied by the most probable trajectory of (...) a free tardyon and a nontrivial framework for charged and neutral particles is provided. The Klein paradox is resolved and a link to the free particle field operators of quantum field theory is established. A charged particle interacting with a static magnetic field is discussed as an example of the formalism. (shrink)

Although fair trade has grown exponentially in the U.S. in recent years, we do not have a clear understanding of why small U.S. firms choose to participate in it. To answer this question, we use a qualitative case study approach and grounded theory analysis to explore the motivations of 35 small fair trade businesses. We find that shared values and the desire to help others, often triggered by a critical incident, lead social entrepreneurs to found and sustain fair trade businesses. (...) The relationship between shared values and engagement in fair trade and the relationship between altruism and engagement in fair trade are strengthened by four motivating factors: direct relationships with producers, support for social causes, the desire for the preservation of craftsmanship, and the desire to share aesthetic products. These links are strengthened by four facilitating factors : the acquisition of business knowledge, family member involvement in the firm, assistance from faith communities, and assistance from the fair trade community. Additional analysis reveals three types of fair trade social entrepreneurs: “ethics first” entrepreneurs, primarily motivated by human rights and social justice concerns; “faith first” fair traders, motivated primarily by their religious faith; and “business first” businesspeople, motivated by what they perceive to be an opportunity to build a successful business while simultaneously doing “good” and helping others. (shrink)

A special version of arguments from hypocrisy, those known as tu quoque arguments, is introduced and developed. These are arguments from what one’s opponent would do, were conditions different, so they are what we call subjunctive tu quoque arguments. Arguments of this form are regularly taken to be fallacious, but the authors discuss conditions for determining when hypothetical inconsistency is genuinely relevant to criticizing a speaker’s assertion or proposed action and when it is not relevant.

This multi-disciplinary collection interrogates the role of human rights in addressing past injustices. The volume draws on legal scholars, political scientists, anthropologists and political philosophers grappling with the weight of the memory of historical injustices arising from conflicts in Europe, the Middle East and Australasia. It examines the role of human rights as legal doctrine, rhetoric and policy as developed by states, international organizations, regional organizations, and non-governmental organizations. The authors question whether faith in human rights is justified as balm (...) to heal the past injustice or whether such faith nourishes both victimhood and self-justification. These issues are explored through three discrete sections: moments of memory and injustice, addressing injustice and questions of faith. In each of these sections authors address the manner in which memory of past conflicts and injustice haunt our contemporary understanding of human rights. The volume questions whether the expectations that human rights law can deal with the past injustice has undermined the development of an emancipatory politics of human rights for our current world. (shrink)

Thirty years after Lewis's paper, this book brings together some of the most important recent work connecting—or, in some cases, disputing the connection ...

Experimental philosophy is one of the most exciting and controversial philosophical movements today. This book explores how it is reshaping thought about philosophical method. Experimental philosophy imports experimental methods and findings from psychology into philosophy. These fresh resources can be used to develop and defend both armchair methods and naturalist approaches, on an empirical basis. This outstanding collection brings together leading proponents of this new meta-philosophical naturalism, from within and beyond experimental philosophy. They explore how the empirical study of philosophically (...) relevant intuition and cognition transforms traditional philosophical approaches and facilitates fresh ones. Part One examines important uses of traditional "armchair" methods which are not threatened by experimental work and develops empirically informed accounts of such methods that can potentially stand up to experimental scrutiny. Part Two analyses different uses and rationales of experimental methods in several areas of philosophy and addresses the key methodological challenges to experimental philosophy: Do its experiments target the intuitions that matter in philosophy? And how can they support conclusions about the rights and wrongs of philosophical views? Essential reading for students of experimental philosophy and metaphilosophy, _Experimental Philosophy, Rationalism, and Naturalism_ will also interest students and researchers in related areas such as epistemology and the philosophies of language, perception, mind and action, science and psychology. (shrink)

The paper outlines the evolution of on-going meta-philosophical debates about intuitions, explains different notions of 'intuition' employed in these debates, and argues for the philosophical relevance of intuitions in an aetiological sense taken from cognitive psychology. On this basis, it advocates a new kind of methodological naturalism which it finds implicit, for instance, in the warrant project in experimental philosophy: a meta-philosophical naturalism that promotes the use of scientific methods in meta-philosophical investigations. This 'higher-order' naturalism is consistent with both methodological (...) naturalism and methodological rationalism about first-order philosophy, and can help us adjudicate between the two, in a piecemeal manner. (shrink)

John Collins presents a new analysis of the problem of the unity of the proposition-how propositions can be both single things and complexes at the same time. He surveys previous investigations of the problem and offers his own novel and uniquely satisfying solution, which is defended from both philosophical and linguistic perspectives.

Among the many philosophers who hold that causal facts1 are to be explained in terms of—or more ambitiously, shown to reduce to—facts about what happens, together with facts about the fundamental laws that govern what happens, the clear favorite is an approach that sees counterfactual dependence as the key to such explanation or reduction. The paradigm examples of causation, so advocates of this approach tell us, are examples in which events c and e— the cause and its effect— both occur, (...) but: had c not occurred, e would not have occurred either. From this starting point ideas proliferate in a vast profusion. But the remarkable disparity among these ideas should not obscure their common foundation. Neither should the diversity of opinion about the prospects for a philosophical analysis of causation obscure their importance. For even those philosophers who see these prospects as dim—perhaps because they suffer post-Quinean queasiness at the thought of any analysis of any concept of interest—can often be heard to say such things as that causal relations among events are somehow “a matter of” the patterns of counterfactual dependence to be found in them. (shrink)

The standard view of truth-conditional semantics is that it is world-involving in the sense that a theory that specifies truth conditions eo ipso is a theory that specifies the way the world must be if the target sentences are to be true. It would appear to follow that the semantic properties of expressions, such as nominals, specify the very worldly objects that make true or false the sentences that host the nominals. Chomsky and others have raised a fundamental complaint against (...) this thought: perfectly quotidian nominals, such as London or book, may occur copredicatively as a single argument of categorically mismatched predicates, which prima facie preclude a coherent uniform construal of the nominal argument. The argument has hitherto been presented via examples that challenge the standard view. My aim here is to present the argument explicitly, defend it against some likely counterclaims, and resolve what might appear to be a decisive consideration against the conclusion of the argument, viz., if nominals as copredicatively occurring do not contribute uniform worldly entities, then how can the copredicative constructions be counted as true? (shrink)

Much of the best contemporary work in the philosophy of language and content makes appeal to the theories developed in generative syntax. In particular, there is a presumption that—at some level and in some way—the structures provided by syntactic theory mesh with or support our conception of content/linguistic meaning as grounded in our first-person understanding of our communicative speech acts. This paper will suggest that there is no such tight fit. Its claim will be that, if recent generative theories are (...) on the right lines, syntactic structure provides both too much and too little to serve as the structural partner for content, at least as that notion is generally understood in philosophy. The paper will substantiate these claims by an assessment of the recent work of King, Stanley, and others. (shrink)

The theory that structured propositions are complex act-types has been independently articulated by Peter Hanks and Scott Soames. The present paper argues that the role of the act in such theories is supererogatory, for the individuation conditions of the act-based propositions remain wholly at the level of concepts and their formal combination, features which the traditional structured proposition theorist endorses. Thus, it is shown that the traditional problems for structured propositions are only ameliorable on the act conception by appeal to (...) the very resources of the traditional conception. It is also shown that the act theories have no act-based account of quantification and other operator-involving relations. An elementary account of propositions is sketched, after Fodor, which retains the virtues of the traditional structural conception without falling into ’Platonism’. (shrink)

What is Truth? is a collection of original philosophical articles by many of the central figures in the field. Most of the contributions are focused on deflationism, for and against, although other approaches have a fair airing, and some novel accounts are presented. The intrinsic worth of many of the papers apart, the interest of the collection arises, I think, from its bringing into relief a number of problematic lacunae within the extant deflationisms, which, I predict, will be the main (...) area of controversy in the years to come. The currently entertained options about truth may be usefully coordinated in the space opened by Frege's work. Roughly, Frege distinguished two types of construction in which the adjective true predicatively occurs. In the first type, the predicate takes a full finite complement and has an expletive subject; e.g., It is true that violets are blue (these types may be read as extraposed versions of the type (e.g.) [the thought] that violets are blue is true.) For these constructions, Frege suggested that the contents they express are flat with the contents of their complements, i.e., to entertain the truth of a thought is not to picture the thought or its constituents in relation or correspondence with any external elements, be they facts or objects; rather, the contents of truth predications may be expressed by the contents to which truth is predicated. Hence, we have the origin of the idea behind the familiar schema (ST) TRUE(P) iff P (Let the left flank be proxy for any type of truth predication to an explicitly presented full sentential clause. Let ST to be a generalisation over the various schemata that have been forwarded.) The second type of construction which occupied Frege is where the adjective is predicated of a quantifier noun phrase with no sentential complement; e.g., Everything Bob said is true.. (shrink)

John Collins defends the doctrine of linguistic pragmatism--arguing that linguistic meaning alone fails to fix truth conditions and detailing the relative sparseness of what language alone can provide to semantic interpretation--through his novel analysis of the syntax, semantics, and pragmatics of weather reporting.

As the ball flew towards us I leapt to my left to catch it. But it was you, reacting more rapidly than I, who caught the ball just in front of the point at which my hand was poised. Fortunate for us that you took the catch. The ball was headed on a course which, unimpeded, would have taken it through the glass window of a nearby building. Your catch prevented the window from being broken.

Although C. A. Campbell's account of the problem of suffering is articulated in the context of making out a case for rational Theism, it does not stand or fall with the case for rational Theism. It has independent merit as a sustained effort of reason to grapple with the problem of whether the goodness and omnipotence of God are consistent with the prima facie badness of so much of the suffering that exists in God's world. Campbell's views on suffering are (...) to be found in On Selfhood and Godhood , pp. 287–306, and in an earlier article ‘Reason and the Problem of Suffering’ , published in Philosophy , x 1935, pp. 154–67. In the first section of what follows, I give a summary of Campbell's line of argument. In the second I offer some critical comments on certain aspects of his treatment. 1. (shrink)

Generics are exception-admitting generalisations, which find expression in apparently diverse linguistic forms. A standard claim is that there is a hidden linguistic unity to genericity in the form of a covert operator, Gen. This article surveys and rejects a range of considerations that purport to show Gen to be syntactically essential to the explanation of a range of linguistic phenomena connected to genericity. The conclusion reached is that genericity is not a specifically linguistic property insofar as it does not supervene (...) upon any especial linguistic device; rather, genericity supervenes on broader cognitive competencies within linguistic constraints. (shrink)

Jerry Fodor, among others, has maintained that Chomsky's language faculty hypothesis is an epistemological proposal, i.e. the faculty comprises propositional structures known (cognized) by the speaker/hearer. Fodor contrasts this notion of a faculty with an architectural (directly causally efficacious) notion of a module. The paper offers an independent characterisation of the language faculty as an abstractly specified nonpropositional structure of the mind/brain that mediates between sound and meaning—a function in intension that maps to a pair of structures that determine soundmeaning (...) convergence. This conception will be elaborated and defended against a number of likely complaints deriving from Fodor's faculty/module distinction and other positions which seek to credit knowledge of language with an empirical or theoretical significance. A recent explicit argument from Fodor that Chomsky must share his conception will be diagnosed and the common appeal to implicit knowledge as a foundation for linguistic competence will be rejected. (shrink)

L. A. Paul argues that epistemically transformative choice poses a special problem for standard theories of decision: when values of outcomes cannot be known in advance, deliberation cannot even get started. A standard response to this is to represent ignorance of the nature of an experience as uncertainty about its utility. Assign subjective probabilities over the range of possible utilities it may have, and an expected utility for the outcome can be figured despite the agent’s ignorance of its nature. But (...) this response to Paul’s challenge seems inadequate. Decision theory should leave conceptual room for rational neophobia. A decision theory like Isaac Levi’s, which allows for indeterminacy in utility, might accomodate the phenomenon. Levi’s discussion of indeterminate utility has focused on examples of risk aversion like the Allais problem and on situations in which there are conflicts of value. Cases of unknowable value arising in transformative choice problems might be handled similarly. (shrink)

The article takes up a range of issues concerning knowledge of language in response to recent work of Rey, Smith, Matthews and Devitt. I am broadly sympathetic with the direction of Rey, Smith, and Matthews. While all three are happy with the locution ‘knowledge of language’, in their different ways they all reject the apparent role for a substantive linguistic epistemology in linguistic explanation. I concur but raise some friendly concerns over even a deflationary notion of knowledge of language. Against (...) Devitt I have more serious worries. The latter half of the paper seeks further clarification of Devitt’s realism and raises concerns over its ability to reflect the shape and content of linguistics. (shrink)