Several recent attempts to isolate the fallacy in the view that I am committed to particular moral principles merely by describing a man as having promised seem to me to have erred through excess of zeal. The argument which commits the fallacy is at its most explicit in an article by Professor Searle, and the attempted refutations with which I am concerned fasten upon the first step in his ‘deduction’, which moves from Jones uttered the words ‘I hereby promise to (...) pay you, Smith, five dollars’ to Jones promised to pay Smith five dollars by way of the ‘fact about English usage’ which Searle states as: Under certain conditions C anyone who utters the words ‘I hereby promise to pay you, Smith, five dollars’ promises to pay Smith five dollars. (shrink)

L. C. Holborow; V*—Blame, Praise and Credit, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 72, Issue 1, 1 June 1972, Pages 85–100, https://doi.org/10.1093/ari.

I argue that the criticisms made by d. h. mellor in 'mind', january, 1968, of two arguments central to charles taylor's thesis concerning teleological explanation in 'the explanation of behaviour' can readily be accommodated by taylor. in neither case is the argument used to make the distinction that mellor alleges.

John Rawls's A Theory of Justice is an extremely long and elaborate work. But despite the length and the elaboration there is at the heart of the work a crucial set of unargued assumptions which need to be challenged. When this is done we are in a position to provide additional support for the critical conclusions of several other commentators who concentrate on other features of Rawls's system.

Wittgenstein refers to psychophysical parallelism in this apparently prejudiced way in paragraph 611 of Zettel , in the course of a rather remarkable passage. It begins at 605 with the claim that ‘One of the most dangerous ideas for a philosopher is, oddly enough, that we think with our heads or in our heads’. Subsequent sections develop this remark in a way that demonstrates Wittgenstein's rejection of the view that thinking is any sort of process in the head, whether a (...) physiological process or a matter of the operations of ‘a nebulous mental entity’. Indeed he appears to consider that these ontologically opposed alternatives have a common source, in that they both derive from the mistaken view that there must be a mediating process between psychological phenomena such as my present remembering and my experience of the remembered event . If we find no suitable mediating physiological process, we are easily led to assume that there must be a process of a rather different sort, and hence we are led to believe in a ‘nebulous mental entity’. But this whole line of thought in fact depends on a ‘primitive interpretation of our concepts’, an interpretation which we uncritically made at the stage at which we assumed that there must be a process of some sort mediating between the phenomena. We are reminded of Wittgenstein's earlier remarks in Philosophical Investigations , I, 308. (shrink)

Wittgenstein refers to psychophysical parallelism in this apparently prejudiced way in paragraph 611 of Zettel, in the course of a rather remarkable passage. It begins at 605 with the claim that ‘One of the most dangerous ideas for a philosopher is, oddly enough, that we think with our heads or in our heads’. Subsequent sections develop this remark in a way that demonstrates Wittgenstein's rejection of the view that thinking is any sort of process in the head, whether a physiological (...) process or a matter of the operations of ‘a nebulous mental entity’. Indeed he appears to consider that these ontologically opposed alternatives have a common source, in that they both derive from the mistaken view that there must be a mediating process between psychological phenomena such as my present remembering and my experience of the remembered event. If we find no suitable mediating physiological process, we are easily led to assume that there must be a process of a rather different sort, and hence we are led to believe in a ‘nebulous mental entity’. But this whole line of thought in fact depends on a ‘primitive interpretation of our concepts’, an interpretation which we uncritically made at the stage at which we assumed that there must be a process of some sort mediating between the phenomena. We are reminded of Wittgenstein's earlier remarks in Philosophical Investigations, I, 308. (shrink)

Edmund Gettier is Professor Emeritus at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. This short piece, published in 1963, seemed to many decisively to refute an otherwise attractive analysis of knowledge. It stimulated a renewed effort, still ongoing, to clarify exactly what knowledge comprises.

This new edition of the classic Contemporary Theories of Knowledge has been significantly updated to include analyses of the recent literature in epistemology.