The conceptual framework of behaviorism is reconstructed in a logical scheme rather than along chronological lines. The resulting reconstruction is faithful to the history of behaviorism and yet meets the contemporary challenges arising from cognitive science, psycholinguistics, and philosophy. In this reconstruction, the fundamental premise is that psychology is to be a natural science, and the major corollaries are that psychology is to be objective and empirical. To a great extent, the reconstruction of behaviorism is an elaboration of behaviorist views (...) of what it is for a science to be objective and empirical. The reconstruction examines and evaluates behaviorist positions on observation and the rejection of introspection, the behavioral data language, theory construction, stimulus-response psychology, the organization of behavior, complex processes, agency, and the interpretation of mentalistic language. The resulting reconstruction shows behaviorism to be a pragmatic psychological version of positivism based on a behavioral epistemology. (shrink)

Wegner (2002) fails to (1) distinguish conscious will and voluntariness; (2) account for everyday willed acts; and (3) individuate thoughts and acts. Wegner incorrectly implies that (4) we experience acts as willed only when they are caused by unwilled thoughts; (5) thoughts are never true causes of actions; and (6) we experience ourselves as first performing mental acts which then cause our intentional actions.

The distinction between students diagnosed with a learning disability and those considered merely slow learners is based on conceptually flawed assumptions that: 1) LD represents a brain dysfunction while SL does not; 2) LD is a well-defined disorder; 3) valid measurement instruments distinguish LD and SL; 4) special education for students with LD is fundamentally different from that for SL students. These erroneous beliefs are maintained because governmental legislation transformed a diagnosis of LD into an admission ticket to a variety (...) of government entitlements thereby subjecting it to political, legal, social and ideological forces. (shrink)

This is a welcome reprint of a book that continues to grow in importance.

Modal propositional logic; Modal predicate logic; A survey of modal logic.

The author presents and defends three theses: (1) "the first is that it is not profitable for us at present to do moral philosophy; that should be laid aside at any rate until we have an adequate philosophy of psychology." (2) "the second is that the concepts of obligation, And duty... And of what is morally right and wrong, And of the moral sense of 'ought', Ought to be jettisoned if this is psychologically possible...." (3) "the third thesis is that (...) the differences between the well-Known english writers on moral philosophy from sidgwick to the present day are of little importance." (staff). (shrink)

Normal propositional modal systems This first chapter has two main aims. One is to give a general account of the propositional modal systems that we shall ...

Western philosophy and science are responsible for constructing some powerful tools of investigation, aiming at discovering the truth, delivering robust explanations, verifying conjectures, showing that inferences are sound and demonstrating results conclusively. By contrast reasoning that depends on analogies has often been viewed with suspicion. Professor Lloyd first explores the origins of those Western ideals, criticises some of their excesses and redresses the balance in favour of looser, admittedly non-demonstrative analogical reasoning. For this he takes examples both from ancient Greek (...) and Chinese thought and from the materials of recent ethnography to show how different ancient and modern cultures have developed different styles of reasoning. He also develops two original but controversial ideas, that of semantic stretch and the multidimensionality of reality. (shrink)

Two attitudes are possible: one, that the world is an absolute jungle and that the exercise of coercive power by rulers is only a manifestation of this; and the other, that it is both necessary and right that there should be this exercise of power, that through it the world is much less of a jungle than it could possibly be without it, so that one should in principle be glad of the existence of such power, and only take exception (...) to its unjust exercise. (shrink)

Did science and philosophy develop differently in ancient Greece and ancient China? If so, can we say why? This book consists of a series of detailed studies of cosmology, natural philosophy, mathematics and medicine that suggest the answer to the first question is yes. To answer the second, the author relates the science produced in each ancient civilization first to the values of the society in question and then to the institutions within which the scientists and philosophers worked.

Since psychiatry remains a descriptive discipline, it is essential for its practitioners to understand how the language of psychiatry came to be formed. This important book, written by a psychiatrist-historian, traces the genesis of the descriptive categories of psychopathology and examines their interaction with the psychological and philosophical context within which they arose. The author explores particularly the language and ideas that have characterised descriptive psychopathology from the mid-nineteenth century to the present day. He presents a masterful survey of the (...) history of the main psychiatric symptoms, from the metaphysics of classical antiquity to the operational criteria of today. Tracing the evolution of concepts such as memory, consciousness, will and personality, and of symptoms ranging from catalepsy and aboulia to anxiety and self-harm, this book provides fascinating insights into the subjective nature of mental illness, and into the ideas of British, Continental and American authorities who sought to clarify and define it. (shrink)

This entirely new work guides the reader through the most basic systems of modal propositional logic up to systems of modal predicate with identity, dealing with both technical developments and discussing philosophical applications.

This book challenges several widespread views concerning Aristotle's methods and practices of scientific and philosophical research. Taking central topics in psychology, zoology, astronomy and politics, Professor Lloyd explores generally unrecognised tensions between Aristotle's deeply held a priori convictions and his remarkable empirical honesty in the face of complexities in the data or perceived difficult or exceptional cases. The picture that emerges of Aristotle's actual engagement in scientific research and of his own reflections on that research is substantially more complex than (...) is usually allowed. (shrink)

John Buridan was a fourteenth-century philosopher who enjoyed an enormous reputation for about two hundred years, was then totally neglected, and is now being 'rediscovered' through his relevance to contemporary work in philosophical logic. The final chapter of Buridan's Sophismata deals with problems about self-reference, and in particular with the semantic paradoxes. He offers his own distinctive solution to the well-known 'Liar Paradox' and introduces a number of other paradoxes that will be unfamiliar to most logicians. Buridan also moves on (...) from these problems to more general questions about the nature of propositions, the criteria of their truth and falsity and the concepts of validity and knowledge. This edition of that chapter is intended to make Buridan's ideas and arguments accessible to a wider range of readers. The volume should interest many philosophers, linguists and logicians, who are increasingly finding in medieval work striking anticipations of their own concerns. (shrink)

Taking a set of central issues from ancient Greek medicine and biology, this book studies firstly, the interaction between scientific theorising and folklore or popular assumptions; secondly, the ideological character of scientific inquiry. Topics of interest in the philosphy and sociology of science illuminated here include the relationship between primitive thought and early science, the roles of the consensus on the scientific community, tradition and the authority of the written text, in the development of science.

‘Saving the appearances’, , is a slogan that, in its time, stood or was made to stand for many different methodological positions in many different branches of ancient natural science. It is not my aim, in this paper, to attempt to tackle the subject as a whole. I shall concentrate on just one inquiry, astronomy. Nor, with astronomy, can I do justice to all the complexities of what was certainly one of the central methodological issues, if not the central issue, (...) in the history of ancient theoretical astronomy. I have a quite limited aim, to examine the foundations, and test the applicability, of a widespread and influential line of interpretation of ancient Greek astronomy according to which it was essentially, or at least predominantly, what we may call ‘instrumentalist’ in character—that is, broadly speaking, that Greek astronomical theories were devices or fictions put forward purely for the sake of calculations with no claims to correspond with physical reality. (shrink)

This book was first published in 1991. The study of ancient science and its relations with Greek philosophy has made a significant and growing contribution to our understanding of ancient thought and civilisation. This collection of articles on Greek science contains fifteen of the most important papers published by G. E. R. Lloyd in this area since 1961, together with three newer articles. The topics range over all areas and periods of Greek science, from the earliest Presocratic philosophers to Ptolemy (...) and Galen. In each case the article is preceded by an introduction that assesses scholarly debate on the topic since the original publication. Professor Lloyd also suggests modifications and developments to his own position in the light of those debates and his own further research. (shrink)