Elijah foretold evil for Ahab in the name of the Lord. ‘I will bring evil upon you; I will utterly sweep you away, and will cut off from Ahab every male, bond or free in Israel’ … but when he heard those words, he rent his clothes, and put sackcloth upon his flesh, and fasted and lay in the sackcloth, and went about dejectedly. And the word of the Lord came to Elijah saying ‘Have you seen how Ahab has humbled (...) himself before me? Because he has humbled himself before me, I will not bring the evil in his days, but in his son's days I will bring evil upon his house.’. (shrink)

In this article, Lucas maintains the falseness of Mechanism - the attempt to explain minds as machines - by means of Incompleteness Theorem of Gödel. Gödel’s theorem shows that in any system consistent and adequate for simple arithmetic there are formulae which cannot be proved in the system but that human minds can recognize as true; Lucas points out in his turn that Gödel’s theorem applies to machines because a machine is the concrete instantiation of a formal system: (...) therefore, for every machine consistent and able of doing simple arithmetic, there is a formula that it can’t produce as true but that we can see to be true, and so human minds and machines have to be different. Lucas considers as well in this article some possible objections to his argument: for any Gödelian formula we could, for instance, construct a machine able to produce it or we could put the Gödelian formulae that we had proved as axioms of a further machine. However - as Lucas underlines - for every of such machines we could again formulate another Gödelian formula, the Gödelian formula of these machines, that they are not able to proof but that we can recognize as true. More general arguments, such as the possibility to escape Gödelian argument by suggesting that Gödel’s theorem applies to consistent systems while we could be inconsistent ones, are moreover refuted by Lucas by maintaining that our inconsistency corresponds to occasional malfunctioning of a machine and not to his normal inconsistency; indeed, a inconsistent machine is characterized by producing any statement, on the contrary human being are selective and not disposed to assert anything. (shrink)

Equality is the great political issue of our time. Liberty is forgotten: Fraternity never did engage our passions: the maintenance of Law and Order is at a discount: Natural Rights and Natural Justice are outmoded shibboleths. But Equality—there men have something to die for, kill for, agitate about, be miserable about. The demand for Equality obsesses all our political thought. We are not sure what it is—indeed, as I shall show later, we are necessarily not sure what it is—but we (...) are sure that whatever it is, we want it: and while we are prepared to look on frustration, injustice or violence with tolerance, as part of the natural order of things, we will work ourselves up into paroxysms of righteous indignation at the bare mention of Inequality. (shrink)

The author, who pioneered this argument in 1961, here places it in the context of traditional discussions of the problem, and answers various criticisms that have been made.

Justice has always been regarded as one of the fundamental political virtues. No association of human individuals could subsist, says Hume, “were no regard paid to the laws of equity and justice”, and nearly every thinker who has turned to consider human society, has reached the same conclusion. Yet we are not at all clear what justice is, nor why it is so important. There are many other ideals which a society may cherish, and often reformers have felt impatient of (...) having to compromise their aims merely for the sake of justice, and have not seen why the claims of justice should in any way override other political goods. I shall try to show why justice is, along with liberty, a peculiarly fundamental ideal, which is not merely co-ordinate with other ideals a society may value; but also that this notwithstanding, considerations of justice are not all-sufficient, and do not, and should not, always override all other political ideals. (shrink)

Professor Braithwaite’s inaugural lecture, here published in book form,1 is a trial run at a Platonic definition of the concept of dianemetic justice; or, as he himself would put it, a rational reconstruction of the concept “sensible-prudent-and-fair”. Aristotle left it that dianemetic justice was an equality and a matter of ratios. A just distribution of őoα µεριστ? τoς κoινωνoσι τς πoλιτείαѕ2 was one in which each had an equitable share, no one having either more or less than he should. Professor (...) Braithwaite goes further and replaces Aristotle’s ordered scale of the-more-and-the-less in which only imprecise and unhelpful answers could be given, by a numerical scale in which he can frame the question “Exactly how much is a fair share?” and propound his s own solution. (shrink)

The problem with which I wish to deal in this paper is the problem of singular reasons in the humanities, whether they exist, or rather, whether they can exist: for it would seem that the word “reason” carried with it some idea of generality, so that the phrase “singular reason” was a contradiction in terms, a specification which could never be fulfilled. But humanists are always sensing the singularity of their studies: and the philosopher wondering about the nature of humane (...) thinking either must conclude that it is really only inadequate science, its singularity being the mark of the fact that we never really have an adequate basis for any of our generalizations, an unfortunate reminder that the whole structure is built on the shakiest of inductive foundations; or , if he is unwilling to allow that humanists are just bad, or at least amateur, scientists, he is tempted to vindicate the rationality of their reasoning by inventing a special faculty of particular ratiocination which is able to perceive particular truths—the intuition of the moralists or the insight of the Collingwoodian mode. (shrink)

That space and time should be integrated into a single entity, spacetime, is the great insight of Einstein's special theory of relativity, and leads us to regard spacetime as a fundamental context in which to make sense of the world around us. But it is not the only one. Causality is equally important and at least as far as the special theory goes, it cannot be subsumed under a fundamentally geometrical form of explanation. In fact, the agent of propagation of (...) causal influence is electromagnetic radiation. In this examination, the authors find support for a rationalist approach to physics, never neglecting experimentation, but rejecting a simple empiricist or positivist view of science. (shrink)

The application of Gödel’s theorem to the problem of minds and machines is difficult. Paul Benacerraf makes the entirely valid ‘Duhemian’ point that the argument is not, and cannot be, a purely mathematical one, but needs some philosophical premisses to be able to yield any philosophical conclusions. Moreover, the philosophical premisses are of very different kinds. Some are concerned with what is essential to being a machine—these are typically intricate, but definite, easily formalised by the mathematician, but unintelligible to the (...) layman: others attempt to capture what is essential to being a mind, a person or a self—these are typically intuitive, but vague; resistant to exact definition by the logician, but, none the less, widely used and well understood. Gödel’s theorem itself, like many other truths, can be taken either way: it can be taken as a formal proof sequence yielding certain syntactical results about a certain class of formal systems, but it can also be taken as giving us a certain type or style of argument, which we can understand, and, once having got the hang of it, adapt and apply in innumerable different circumstances. In my dispute with the mechanist, I take Gödel’s argument both ways: I first take it as an argument which the mechanist, even according to his own mechanist principles, must accept as scoring some point against his favourite machine; and then I hope that the mechanist, as a man, will see that he can do better and that this sort of argument will always apply against any form of mechanism he espouses. (shrink)

“Towards a Theory of Taxation” is a proper theme for an Englishman to take when giving a paper in America. After all it was from the absence of such a theory that the United States derived its existence. The Colonists felt strongly that there should be no taxation without representation, and George III was unable to explain to them convincingly why they should contribute to the cost of their defense. Since that time, understanding has not advanced much. In Britain we (...) still maintain the fiction that taxes are a voluntary gift to the Crown, and taxing statutes are given the Royal Assent with the special formula, “La Reine remercie ses bons sujets, accepte leur benevolence, et ainsi le veult” instead of the simple “La Reine le veult,” and in the United States taxes have regularly been levied on residents of the District of Columbia who until recently had no representation in Congress, and by the State of New York on those who worked but did not reside in the State, and so did not have a vote. Taxes are regularly levied, in America as elsewhere, on those who have no say on whether they should be levied or how they should be spent. I am taxed by the Federal Government on my American earnings and by state governments on my American spending, but I should be hard put to it to make out that it was unjust. Florida is wondering whether to follow California in taxing multinational corporations on their world-wide earnings. (shrink)

In this paper Lucas comes back to Gödelian argument against Mecanism to clarify some points. First of all, he explains his use of Gödel’s theorem instead of Turing’s theorem, showing how Gödel’ theorem, but not Turing’s theorem, raises questions concerning truth and reasoning that bear on the nature of mind and how Turing’s theorem suggests that there is something that cannot be done by any computers but not that it can be done by human minds. He considers moreover how (...) Gödel’s theorem can be interpreted as a sophisticated form of the Cretan paradox, posed by Epimenides, able to escape the viciously self-referential nature of the Cretan paradox, and how it can be used against Mechanism as a schema of disproof. Finally, Lucas suggests some answers to the most recurrent criticisms against his argument: criticisms about the implicit idealisation in the way he set up the context between mind and machine; questions concerning modality and finitude, issues of transfinite arithmetic; questions concerning the need of formalizing rational inference and some questions about consistency. (shrink)

The legend of the encounter between Wilberforce and Huxley is well established. Almost every scientist knows, and every viewer of the BBC's recent programme on Darwin was shown,* how Samuel Wilberforce, bishop of Oxford, attempted to pour scorn on Darwin's Origin of Species at a meeting of the British Association in Oxford on 30 June 1860, and had the tables turned on him by T. H. Huxley. In this memorable encounter Huxley's simple scientific sincerity humbled the prelatical insolence and clerical (...) obscurantism of Soapy Sam; the pretension of the Church to dictate to scientists the conclusions they were allowed to reach were, for good and all, decisively defeated; the autonomy of science was established in Britain and the Western world; the claim of plain unvarnished truth on men's allegiance was vindicated, however unwelcome its implications for human vanity might be; and the flood tide of Victorian faith in all its fulsomeness was turned to an ebb, which has continued to our present day and will only end when religion and superstition have been finally eliminated from the minds of all enlightened men. Even churchmen concede that it was a disastrous defeat.1 Only Owen Chadwick strikes a note of caution, observing that the account given of the incident in Wilberforce's biography seems hardly consistent with an overwhelming defeat, and maintaining that the received account must be a largely legendary creation of a later date. (shrink)

The issue is obscured by the fact that the word `space' can be used in four different ways. It can be used, first, as a term of pure mathematics, as when mathematicians talk of an `n-dimensional phase-space', an `n-dimensional vector-space', a `three-dimensional projective space' or a `twodimensional Riemannian space'. In this sense the word `space' means the totality of the abstract entities-the `points'-implicitly defined by the axioms. There is no doubt that there exist, iii this sense, non-Euclidean spaces, because all (...) that is claimed by such an assertion is that sets of non-Euclidean axioms constitute possible implicit definitions of abstract entities, that is to say that some sets of non-Euclidean axioms are consistent. If Kant or any other philosopher had denied this, he would have been wrong; but Kant himself took care not to deny it, 2 and there is little reason to suppose that any philosopher concerned about space has been using the word in this, the pure mathematician's, sense. (shrink)

The application of Gödel’s theorem to the problem of minds and machines is difficult. Paul Benacerraf makes the entirely valid ‘Duhemian’ point that the argument is not, and cannot be, a purely mathematical one, but needs some philosophical premisses to be able to yield any philosophical conclusions. Moreover, the philosophical premisses are of very different kinds. Some are concerned with what is essential to being a machine—these are typically intricate, but definite, easily formalised by the mathematician, but unintelligible to the (...) layman: others attempt to capture what is essential to being a mind, a person or a self—these are typically intuitive, but vague; resistant to exact definition by the logician, but, none the less, widely used and well understood. Gödel’s theorem itself, like many other truths, can be taken either way: it can be taken as a formal proof sequence yielding certain syntactical results about a certain class of formal systems, but it can also be taken as giving us a certain type or style of argument, which we can understand, and, once having got the hang of it, adapt and apply in innumerable different circumstances. In my dispute with the mechanist, I take Gödel’s argument both ways: I first take it as an argument which the mechanist, even according to his own mechanist principles, must accept as scoring some point against his favourite machine; and then I hope that the mechanist, as a man, will see that he can do better and that this sort of argument will always apply against any form of mechanism he espouses. (shrink)

MANY thinkers deny the possibility of businessmen having responsibilities or ethical obligations. A businessman has no alternative, in view of the competition of the market-place, to do anything other than buy at the cheapest and sell at the dearest price he can. In any case, it would be irrational-if, indeed, it were possible-not to do so. Admittedly, there is a framework of law within which he has to operate, but that is all, and so long as he keeps the law (...) he is free to maximise his profits without being constrained by any moral or social considerations, or any further sense of responsibility for what he does. (shrink)

There was once a leak from Hebdomadal Council. The Assessor told her husband, who told my wife, who told me that Monday afternoon had been spent discussing what Lucas would say if various courses of action were adopted, leading to the conclusion that it would be best to do nothing. I was flattered, but a bit surprised. The tide of philosophical scepticism had ebbed, and it was generally allowed that a reasonable way of discovering what someone would say was (...) to ask him. Dick Southwood did: he would quiz me in Common Room – sometimes ending "Thank you for letting me bounce these ideas off you" – and had reliable information about how one member of Congregation would react to various proposals. And not only me: he was a listening Vice-Chancellor, who used to bike from Wellington Square to Merton for lunch, greeting many as he passed them, and ready to stop if occasion warranted it. Of course, there are many other leaks. I remember once attending a meeting in the Town Hall to argue for cycle tracks, and someone coming up to me, and saying, "You’re having a tussle with Council, aren’t you? I think you ought to see the minutes of their latest meeting"; the next day there was a copy in my pigeon hole, giving me just the ammunition I needed. What members of Congregation tend the forget is the existence – the other side of the green baize door, so to speak – of a corps of bedells. (shrink)

J. R. Lucas; XII—Or Else, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 69, Issue 1, 1 June 1969, Pages 207–222, https://doi.org/10.1093/aristotelian/69.1.207.

My sights in this paper are trained on facts. Most people think that they know what facts are; that while their friends often, and themselves occasionally, are ignorant of the facts, at least they know what sort of things facts are---they can recognise a fact when they see it. Facts, in the popular philosophy of today, are good, simple souls; there is no guile in them, nor any room for subjective bias, and once we have made ourselves acquainted with them, (...) we have reached the beginning and summit of all wisdom. (shrink)

Abstract Quantum mechanics has seemed to defy all attempts to construe it realistically, but antirealism, like the many?worlds hypothesis, is even more difficult to accept. In order to give a realist construal of quantum mechanics, we need first to distinguish the objective and rational aspect of reality from the paradigmatic thing?like aspects of having determinate physical properties: quantum?mechanical entities may be real in the former sense though not in the latter. Anti?realist arguments are based on the difficulty of giving an (...) account of quantum?mechanical collapse and the apparent superluminal velocities involved. Objections to superluminal velocities on the score of the special theory of relativity are found not to be conclusive, and the price?there being some preferred frame of reference?to be acceptable. A sketch of a probabilistic account of quantum?mechanical collapse is offered, which makes the difference between the macro? and the micro?world a matter of degree rather than kind. If that, or some other, account proved acceptable, we could be quantum?mechanical realists, though quantum?mechanical reality would be very different from that of material objects in hardware shops. (shrink)

Some of my best friends are women, but I would not want my sister to marry one of them. Modern-minded persons criticize me for manifesting such out-dated prejudices, and would like to send me to Coventry for a compulsory course of reindoctrination. They may be right. It could conceivably be the case that in due course the Sex Discrimination Act will be tightened up, even to the extent of our recognizing that there are no ‘good reasons why the State should (...) not recognize contracts which are in all respects like marriage, except for the sex of the parties concerned’. We can envisage a society so enlightened that the relations between men and women will be purely platonic and it will be a matter of no concern whether two people are members of the opposite sex or not: or, alternatively, our feelings could be so completely homogenized, that it will make no difference to an emotional relationship whether Leslie and Julian have only one Y-chromosome between them, or two, or none at all. In that event I shall be shown to be wrong, and my critics entitled to erect a monument to female equality on my grave. But I have doubts, and suspect that long after I am dead men will go on falling in love with women and women will continue to find their hearts wooed and won by men. And this fact, if it is a fact, makes a profound difference to our social institutions. I want to follow out the logic of social differentiation, relying as little as I can on putative facts about the differences between the sexes. Scientifically attested knowledge is scarce in this field. Many academics take refuge in a safe suspension of judgment, but this is a craven dereliction of duty. We have yet to develop an adequate theory of knowledge in social matters, and only by thrashing out the apparently telling arguments on this and similar issues can we clear our minds about the nature of social knowledge. Moreover, if those who might argue rationally draw back from doing so, they leave the field clear for others who suffer from fewer inhibitions and fewer scruples. And finally, serious social consequences can follow from public confusion about the logic of a situation, and what things are possible and what desirable. There is a danger that in our attempts to remedy the real wrongs done to women we shall only succeed, as with much modern legislation, in making a bad case worse. (shrink)

IT is ungenerous to pick holes in The Concept of Law. It is a great work. Its clarity is luminous, and its argument sustained and convincing. Hart is eminently successful in rescuing the concept of law from the Legal Realists, the Positivists, and the Formalists, who attempt to straitjacket it within schemata which are too narrow or too vague to give an adequate elucidation of it. But sometimes Hart is not carried along by his arguments as far as he should. (...) He makes too many concessions to his opponents, and his own account of the law is, in consequence, too formalist, in spite of having himself adduced cogent considerations elsewhere for rejecting the purely formalist line of argument. The rule of recognition, although important, is not fundamental. We should, rather, see law as a social phenomenon, to be distinguished from other social phenomena, but intelligible only in a social context, and not-as lawyers are too ready to suppose-an autonomous discipline which can be explained and understood entirely in its own terms. (shrink)

Plato was the first feminist. In the Republic he puts forward the view that women are just the same as men, only not quite so good. It is a view which has often been expressed in recent years, and generates strong passions. Some of these have deep biological origins, which a philosopher can only hope to recognize and not to assuage. But much of the heat engendered is due to unnecessary friction between views which are certainly compatible and probably correct. (...) And here a philosopher can help. If we can divide the issues neatly, at the joints, then we need not quarrel with one another for saying something, probably true, because what is being maintained is misconstrued and taken to mean something else, probably false. (shrink)

South. So we have agreed to bury intuitionism. Well, I dare say it is right. But we ought to bury some of the grave-diggers too. Some of the things that Ross said are no doubt wrong, or at least misleading: but they are a lot less wrong than most of the things said since the war.

“ Ich liebe dich 3 ” the swains in mountain valleys of Austria inscribe on their presents to those to whom they plight their troth. The pun is a rare one in German. Only in remote valleys does the word for ‘three’ rhyme with joy; and the word for ‘true’ is usually ‘ wahr ’ not ‘ treu ’ ‘ Wahr ’ is more propositional, less evaluative than our ‘true’. So too in Latin and the romance languages ‘ verum ’, (...) ‘ Vrai ’ ‘ vera ’ ‘ verdadero ’ carry a lighter load of feeling. Only the Hebrews resembled us in giving their word for ‘true’ strong moral overtones, and using the same or some cognate word to praise him who had used no deceitfulness to his neighbour as to recommend some statement as being meet to be believed. (shrink)

David Lewis criticizes an argument I put forward against mechansim on the grounds that I fail to distinguish between OL, Lucas's ordinary potential arithmetic output, and OML, Lucas's arithmetical output when accused of being some particular machine M; and correspondingly, between OM the ordinary potential arithmetic output of the machine M, and ONM, the arithmetic output of the machine M when accused of being a particular machine N. For any given machine, M, N, O, P, Q, R,... etc., (...) I can in principle calculate a Godel sentence for that machine - indeed infinitely many, depending on the Godel numbering scheme adopted. The Godel sentence of a particular machine can, I claim, be seen to be true, if that machine is adequate for Elementary Peano Arithmetic. Hence, if I were accused of being M, I can on that supposition see that the Godel sentence of M is true, since I am capable of Elementary Peano Arithmetic and the machine M is said to be an adequate characterization of me. (shrink)