In §66 ofPhilosophical Investigations Wittgenstein looks for something common to various games and finds only an interconnecting network of resemblances. These are family resemblances. Sympathetic as well as unsympathetic readers have interpreted him as claiming that games form a family in virtue of these resemblances. This assumes Wittgenstein inverted the relation between being a member of a family and bearing family resemblances to others of that family. (The Churchills bear family resemblances to one another because they belong to the same (...) family, they don't belong to the same family because they resemble one another.) A close reading ofInvestigations gives no evidence that Wittgenstein made this mistake. Rather, family resemblances may play a role like the one criteria play for psychological terms. They give excellent but fallible evidence for membership in the extensions of some terms. (shrink)

In her later writings Jean Hampton develops an expressive theory of punishment she takes to be retributivist. Unlike Feinberg, Hampton claims wrongdoings as well as punishments are expressive. Wrongdoings assert that the victim is less valuable than victimizer. On her view we are obligated to punish because we are obligated to respond to this false assertion. Punishment expresses the moral truth that victim and wrongdoer are equally valuable. We argue that Hampton's argument would work only if she held that exerting (...) power over another provides evidence (albeit defeasible) of one's greater value. This is clearly a premise that neither she nor her readers are likely to accept. (shrink)

In §50 of Philosophical Investigations Wittgenstein wrote the sentence, “There is one thing of which one can say neither that it is one metre long, nor that it is not one metre long, and that is the standard metre in Paris.” Although some interpreters have claimed that Wittgenstein’s statement is mistaken, while others have proposed various explanations showing that this must be correct, none have questioned the fact that he intended to assert that it is impossible to describe the standard (...) meter as being a meter long. Given that Wittgenstein introduces this sentence as analogous to the claim that “existence cannot be attributed to an element,” and that the preceding passages discuss a language-game the simples of which can be described by their own names, there is good reason to think that Wittgenstein did not intend to assert this infamous sentence. (shrink)

In §50 of Philosophical Investigations Wittgenstein wrote the sentence, “There is one thing of which one can say neither that it is one metre long, nor that it is not one metre long, and that is the standard metre in Paris.” Although some interpreters have claimed that Wittgenstein's statement is mistaken, while others have proposed various explanations showing that this must be correct, none have questioned the fact that he intended to assert that it is impossible to describe the standard (...) meter as being a meter long. Given that Wittgenstein introduces this sentence as analogous to the claim that “existence cannot be attributed to an element,” and that the preceding passages discuss a language‐game the simples of which can be described by their own names, there is good reason to think that Wittgenstein did not intend to assert this infamous sentence. (shrink)

Philosophical Investigations, Volume 45, Issue 3, Page 252-273, July 2022.

Nagel’s constitutive moral luck is one important type of moral luck, but discussions of it have tended to focus on temperament. Luck in how aware a person is of morally relevant aspects of her situation—awareness luck—though similar in some ways, also raises different issues. Luck in temperament impacts how difficult a person finds it to behave well, while awareness luck impacts whether she even recognizes that the situation is making a moral demand on her. For this reason, awareness luck raises (...) some unique challenges for those who would deny the existence of moral luck. (shrink)

The standard models for what doctors must tell their patients are based on the idea of informed consent: physicians must provide the information that patients need to make treatment decisions. In fact, though, they usually provide considerably more information than this model requires. And rightly so: patients should receive enough information that they will not be surprised by whatever happens—unless the physician is also surprised.

In Coming to Our Senses, Michael Devitt insists that if we are going to argue about what meanings are, we should know why we care. He reasonably observes that unless we agree about this, we are likely to be arguing past one another. The meanings Devitt discusses are token meanings of individual thoughts and utterances. He holds that these meanings are properties, and that we have two purposes for attributing them to thoughts and utterances: to predict and explain a subject’s (...) behavior, and to learn about the world. If a property attributed to a thought by means of a t-clause serves either of these purposes then that property plays a semantic role. A meaning is any property that plays a semantic role. (shrink)

While there are a number of genuine philosophical topics that medical and premedical students can get out of a course on medical ethics, being an ethically sensitive health care worker requires more than knowing a variety of philosophically-interesting medical ethics questions and concepts. In addition, two goals of teaching medical ethics should be to ensure that health care workers have a healthy respect for the rights of their patients and to instill in students the importance of gathering as much information (...) as possible before making decisions that affect the lives of their patients. This paper discusses two methods by which this second goal is achieved, namely by using an in-class exercise and a procedure for delivering exams. (shrink)