1. Of what use is the concept of causation? Bertrand Russell [1912-13] argued that it is not useful: it is “a relic of a bygone age, surviving, like the monarchy, only because it is erroneously supposed to do no harm.” His argument for this was that the kind of physical theories that we have come to regard as fundamental leave no place for the notion of causation: not only does the word ‘cause’ not appear in the advanced sciences, but the (...) laws that these sciences state are incompatible with causation as we normally understand it. But Nancy Cartwright has argued [1979] that abandoning the concept of causation would cripple science; her conclusion was based not on fundamental physics, but on more ordinary science such as the search for the causes of cancer. She argues that Russell was right that the fundamental theories of modern physics say nothing, even implicitly, about causation, and concludes on this basis that such theories are incomplete. It is with this cluster of issues that I will begin my discussion. (shrink)

Science Without Numbers caused a stir in 1980, with its bold nominalist approach to the philosophy of mathematics and science. It has been unavailable for twenty years and is now reissued in a revised edition with a substantial new preface presenting the author's current views and responses to the issues raised in subsequent debate.

A selective background -- Broadly classical approaches -- Paracompleteness -- More on paracomplete solutions -- Paraconsistent dialetheism.

It is a commonly-held belief that ignorance excuses. But what of moral ignorance? Is a person blameless who acts from “false” moral principles? In this paper I shall try to show that such a person is blameworthy. I shall produce an argument that connects the acceptance of moral principles with character, character with moral responsibility, and moral responsibility with the justifiability of blame.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Psychopathy, Other-Regarding Moral Beliefs, and ResponsibilityLloyd Fields (bio)AbstractIn this paper I seek to show that at least one kind of psychopath is incapable of forming other-regarding moral beliefs; hence that they cannot act for other-regarding moral reasons; and hence that they are not appropriate subjects for the assessment of either moral or legal responsibility. Various attempts to characterize psychopaths are considered and rejected, in particular the widely held (...) view that psychopaths are, in general, incapable of understanding moral concepts. The particular disability proposed here, the incapacity to form other-regarding moral beliefs, is then derived from an analysis of what is required for someone to be a responsible agent. This is illustrated with a detailed case history. A defect of this kind is shown to vitiate moral responsibility, because it renders the psychopath irresponsive to the social pressures which normally ensure respect for moral norms. It is also shown that the psychopath is not a suitable subject for the assessment of legal responsibility, because he lacks the capacity to act from common prudence to avoid sanctions. I conclude that the attempt to characterize particular defects from among the heterogeneity of psychopathic subjects, could lead to better targeted, and hence to more effective, management of particular cases.KeywordsCriminality, mental illness, personality disorder, blame, liability, moral beliefs, guilt, social moralityIntroductionThe term “psychopath” has been used with a wide variety of different meanings and, no doubt, covers a heterogeneous group of subjects (Criminal behaviour and mental health 1992). My aim in this paper is to argue that at least a subgroup of those subjects are characterized by an inability to form other-regarding moral beliefs—and hence, for this particular reason, are not morally responsible agents—and that they also lack the capacity for prudence, and hence are not legally responsible agents.I begin by distinguishing the particular sense in which I will be using the term “psychopathy.” I then consider some suggestions in the literature regarding the defect by which psychopaths might be characterized—that they are mentally ill, or incapable of understanding moral concepts. In rejecting these, I come to the suggestion that the relevant defect is an inability to form other-regarding moral beliefs, a defect which is graphically illustrated by a case report from the literature. I explore the implication of this kind of defect for [End Page 261] moral responsibility as a socially-embedded notion, and the implication of the psychopath’s inability to exercise prudence in relation to legal liability.Nothing in this paper should be taken to suggest that psychopaths are irredeemable. On the contrary, as I argue in an endnote, correctly characterizing the defect from which they suffer leads directly to forms of treatment whose effectiveness has acquired a measure of empirical support.The Nature of PsychopathyPsychopathy is not a homogeneous concept; there are different types of psychopaths. For example, Henderson identified a type of psychopath who he classified as “Predominantly Creative,” exemplified by such figures as T. E. Lawrence and Joan of Arc. In people of this type genius is associated with heightened sensitivity, psychosexual immaturity and emotional instability (Henderson 1939, 108–20; Henderson and Gillespie 1969, 317). Predominantly creative psychopaths do not come within my purview.By “psychopathy” I shall mean the specific form of personality disorder described by Cleckley in his book, The Mask of Sanity (Cleckley 1964). Cleckley’s description forms the basis of Hare’s Revised (20-item) Psychopathy Checklist. The Checklist includes the following personality traits and deviant behaviors:1. Glibness/superficial charm.2. Grandiose sense of self-worth.3. Need for stimulation/proneness to boredom.4. Pathological lying.5. Conning/manipulative.6. Lack of remorse or guilt.7. Shallow affect.8. Callous/lack of empathy.9. Parasitic lifestyle.10. Poor behavioral controls.11. Promiscuous sexual behavior.12. Early behavior problems.13. Lack of realistic, long-term plans.14. Impulsivity.15. Irresponsibility.16. Failure to accept responsibility for own actions.17. Many short-term marital relationships.18. Juvenile delinquency.19. Revocation of conditional release.20. Criminal versatility (Hare 1986, 18). 1This conceptualization resembles in many respects the category of Antisocial Personality Disorder as described in the American Psychiatric... (shrink)

Presenting a selection of thirteen essays on various topics at the foundations of philosophy--one previously unpublished and eight accompanied by substantial new postscripts--this book offers outstanding insight on truth, meaning, and propositional attitudes; semantic indeterminacy and other kinds of "factual defectiveness;" and issues concerning objectivity, especially in mathematics and in epistemology. It will reward the attention of any philosopher interested in language, epistemology, or mathematics.

The paper tries to spell out a connection between deductive logic and rationality, against Harman's arguments that there is no such connection, and also against the thought that any such connection would preclude rational change in logic. One might not need to connect logic to rationality if one could view logic as the science of what preserves truth by a certain kind of necessity (or by necessity plus logical form); but the paper points out a serious obstacle to any such (...) view. (shrink)

What are people who disagree about logic disagreeing about? The paper argues that (in a wide range of cases) they are primarily disagreeing about how to regulate their degrees of belief. An analogy is drawn between beliefs about validity and beliefs about chance: both sorts of belief serve primarily to regulate degrees of belief about other matters, but in both cases the concepts have a kind of objectivity nonetheless.

The paper outlines a view of normativity that combines elements of relativism and expressivism, and applies it to normative concepts in epistemology. The result is a kind of epistemological anti-realism, which denies that epistemic norms can be (in any straightforward sense) correct or incorrect; it does allow some to be better than others, but takes this to be goal-relative and is skeptical of the existence of best norms. It discusses the circularity that arises from the fact that we need to (...) use epistemic norms to gather the facts with which to evaluate epistemic norms; relatedly, it discusses how epistemic norms can rationally evolve. It concludes with some discussion of the impact of this view on "ground level" epistemology. (shrink)

Nonclassical theories of truth that take truth to be transparent have some obvious advantages over any classical theory of truth. But several authors have recently argued that there’s also a big disadvantage of nonclassical theories as compared to their “external” classical counterparts: proof-theoretic strength. While conceding the relevance of this, the paper argues that there is a natural way to beef up extant internal theories so as to remove their proof-theoretic disadvantage. It is suggested that the resulting internal theories are (...) preferable to their external counterparts. (shrink)

There are quite a few theses about logic that are in one way or another pluralist: they hold (i) that there is no uniquely correct logic, and (ii) that because of this, some or all debates about logic are illusory, or need to be somehow reconceived as not straightforwardly factual. Pluralist theses differ markedly over the reasons offered for there being no uniquely correct logic. Some such theses are more interesting than others, because they more radically affect how we are (...) initially inclined to understand debates about logic. Can one find a pluralist thesis that is high on the interest scale, and also true? (shrink)

The Enkratic Principle enjoys something of a protected status as a requirement of rationality. I argue that this status is undeserved, at least in the epistemic domain. Compliance with the principle should not be thought of as a requirement of epistemic rationality, but rather as defeasible indication of epistemic blamelessness. To show this, I present the Puzzle of Inconsistent Requirements, and argue that the best way to solve it is to distinguish two kinds of epistemic evaluation – requirement evaluations and (...) appraisal evaluations. This allows us to solve the puzzle while accommodating traditional motivations for thinking of the Enkratic Principle as a requirement of rationality. (shrink)

Bayesian decision theory can be viewed as the core of psychological theory for idealized agents. To get a complete psychological theory for such agents, you have to supplement it with input and output laws. On a Bayesian theory that employs strict conditionalization, the input laws are easy to give. On a Bayesian theory that employs Jeffrey conditionalization, there appears to be a considerable problem with giving the input laws. However, Jeffrey conditionalization can be reformulated so that the problem disappears, and (...) in fact the reformulated version is more natural and easier to work with on independent grounds. (shrink)

Can we make mistakes about what rationality requires? A natural answer is that we can, since it is a platitude that rational belief does not require truth; it is possible for a belief to be rational and mistaken, and this holds for any subject matter at all. However, the platitude causes trouble when applied to rationality itself. The possibility of rational mistakes about what rationality requires generates a puzzle. When combined with two further plausible claims – the enkratic principle, and (...) the claim that rational requirements apply universally – we get the result that rationality generates inconsistent requirements. One popular and attractive solution to the puzzle denies that it is possible to make rational mistakes about what rationality requires. I show why (contra Titelbaum (2015b), and Littlejohn (2015)) this solution is doomed to fail. (shrink)

Any theory of truth must find a way around Curry’s paradox, and there are well-known ways to do so. This paper concerns an apparently analogous paradox, about validity rather than truth, which JC Beall and Julien Murzi call the v-Curry. They argue that there are reasons to want a common solution to it and the standard Curry paradox, and that this rules out the solutions to the latter offered by most “naive truth theorists.” To this end they recommend a radical (...) solution to both paradoxes, involving a substructural logic, in particular, one without structural contraction. In this paper I argue that substructuralism is unnecessary. Diagnosing the “v-Curry” is complicated because of a multiplicity of readings of the principles it relies on. But these principles are not analogous to the principles of naive truth, and taken together, there is no reading of them that should have much appeal to anyone who has absorbed the morals of both the ordinary Curry paradox and the second incompleteness theorem. (shrink)

Are there questions for which 'there is no determinate fact of the matter' as to which answer is correct? Most of us think so, but there are serious difficulties in maintaining the view, and in explaining the idea of determinateness in a satisfactory manner. The paper argues that to overcome the difficulties, we need to reject the law of excluded middle; and it investigates the sense of 'rejection' that is involved. The paper also explores the logic that is required if (...) we reject excluded middle, with special emphasis on the conditional. There is also discussion of higher order indeterminacy (in several different senses) and of penumbral connections; and there is a suggested definition of determinateness in terms of the conditional and a discussion of the extent to which the notion of determinateness is objective. And there are suggestions about a unified treatment of vagueness and the semantic paradoxes. (shrink)

This book offers a detailed study of the political philosophies of Thomas Hobbes and Benedict de Spinoza, focussing on their concept of power as potentia, concrete power, rather than power as potestas, authorised power. The focus on power as potentia generates a new conception of popular power. Radical democrats–whether drawing on Hobbes's 'sleeping sovereign' or on Spinoza's 'multitude'–understand popular power as something that transcends ordinary institutional politics, as for instance popular plebsites or mass movements. However, the book argues that these (...) understandings reflect a residual scholasticism which Hobbes and Spinoza ultimately repudiate. Instead, on the book's revisionist conception, a political phenomenon should be said to express popular power when it is both popular (it eliminates oligarchy and encompasses the whole polity), and also powerful (it robustly determines political and social outcomes). Two possible institutional forms that this popular power might take are distinguished: Hobbesian repressive egalitarianism, or Spinozist civic strengthening. But despite divergent institutional proposals, the book argues that both Hobbes and Spinoza share the conviction that there is nothing spontaneously egalitarian or good about human collective existence. From this point of view, the book accuses radical democrats of pernicious romanticism; the slow, meticulous work of organizational design and maintenance is the true centre of popular power. Three minute video summary available via HPBin3. Extended discussion on The Political Theory Review podcast. First chapter open access available via Oxford Scholarship Online. Videos of book talks at National University of Singapore (Centre for Legal Theory) and Universidad de Buenos Aires (Instituto de Investigaciones Gino Germani) available via YouTube. (See links below.). (shrink)

This paper extends Kripke’s theory of truth to a language with a variably strict conditional operator, of the kind that Stalnaker and others have used to represent ordinary indicative conditionals of English. It then shows how to combine this with a different and independently motivated conditional operator, to get a substantial logic of restricted quantification within naive truth theory.

This paper is concerned with the debate between substantival and relational theories of space-time, and discusses two difficulties that beset the relationalist: a difficulty posed by field theories, and another difficulty called the problem of quantities. A main purpose of the paper is to argue that possibility can not always be used as a surrogate of ontology, and that in particular that there is no hope of using possibility to solve the problem of quantities.

The term ‘social capital’ is a way of defining the intangible resources of community, shared values and trust upon which we draw in daily life. It has achieved considerable international currency across the social sciences through the very different work of Pierre Bourdieu in France and James Coleman and Robert Putnam in the United States, and has been widely taken up within politics and sociology as an explanation for the decline in social cohesion and community values in western societies. It (...) has also been adopted by policy makers, particularly in international governmental bodies such as the World Bank. (shrink)

Hartry Field; XV*—The A Prioricity of Logic, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 96, Issue 1, 1 June 1996, Pages 359–380, https://doi.org/10.1093/ar.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Commentary on “Sanity and Irresponsibility”Lloyd Fields (bio)AbstractI make two criticisms of Wilson’s proposal to dispense with a loaded axiological criterion of sanity. First, Edwards’s axiological criterion of sanity, which Wilson accepts, involves the requirement of impartiality, which at least excludes some standards of right and wrong. Second, value pluralism applies only to morally acceptable forms of life and thus presupposes a standard of right and wrong. I conclude (...) by noting that mental illnesses are not sufficiently characterised by extreme and persistent deviance from practical rationality, as conceived by Edwards and Wilson.KeywordsSanity, responsibility, mental illness, value pluralismWilson’s paper is set in an important tradition of which Susan Wolf is a notable exemplar. He tackles the crucially important issue of how practical rationality is related to mental health and of how certain forms of irrationality are connected with mental illness. This issue must be taken into account in order to avoid infecting the criteria of sanity with “idiosyncratic or culturally biased norms.” Like Wolf (1989, 137–151), Wilson holds that sanity is a necessary condition of responsibility. But Wilson rejects the second of Wolf’s two criteria of sanity on the grounds that it invokes a definite normative theory of right and wrong. He proposes instead that whether an agent is sane should be decided on the basis of whether s/he displays practical rationality, as defined by Edwards’s list of seven items. Following Edwards, Wilson implicitly equates “sanity” with “mental health” and “insanity” with “mental illness.” By rejecting an axiological criterion of sanity that depends on a normative theory of right and wrong, Wilson is able to ensure that individuals like JoJo are not judged to be insane and hence not morally responsible for their actions. Wilson is right to stress the importance of our not applying notions such as “mental illness” or “insanity” too widely, especially in such a way as to allow blameworthy persons to escape blame and punishment.But are Wilson’s own criteria of sanity free from dependence on a normative theory, or a normative standard, of right and wrong? First, let us note that Wilson states Edwards’s seventh condition of practical rationality as follows: “holding values that are or would be adopted under the conditions of (negative) freedom.” Edwards’s own formulation of this condition is the following: “having values which have been (or would be) adopted under conditions of freedom, enlightenment and impartiality” (1982, 315). Wilson explains “freedom” as the absence of coercion. It is uncertain what “enlightenment” means in this context. Impartiality would seem to include being impartial between oneself and others and between one’s own tribe, nation or race and that of others. Although this requirement is perhaps too general to be regarded as a sufficient standard [End Page 303] of right and wrong, it is at least part of such normative theories as utilitarianism and Kant’s moral theory, while it is inconsistent with ethical egoism, i.e., the view that an action is right or wrong depending on whether it serves or frustrates the agent’s overall best interests. One could dispute Wilson’s claim, therefore, that Edwards’s seventh item is not a “loaded” axiological criterion.Second, Wilson maintains that we can avoid assuming a loaded axiological criterion for sanity by adopting the position of value pluralism. Wolf’s axiological criterion for sanity is that the agent should be capable of knowing the difference between right and wrong. Wilson holds that this criterion, as presented, invokes a normative theory of right and wrong. The criterion would not do so if it were applied in accordance with value pluralism, which, Wilson says, “rejects the notion that there is one monolithic theory of right and wrong without denying that an actor may behave virtuously or viciously.” Wilson appears to assume that an “unloaded” version of Wolf’s axiological criterion would be more or less equivalent to Edwards’s seventh condition of practical rationality.Value pluralism maintains that there are incompatible forms of life that display distinct virtues. “Whichever form of life one is pursuing there are virtues which elude one because they are available only to people pursuing alternative and... (shrink)

In this paper, I discuss Whiting’s (2021) account of rational belief and discuss some unresolved issues arising from its reliance on epistemic possibility and, by extension, perspective-relative aprioricity.

The paper offers a solution to the semantic paradoxes, one in which (1) we keep the unrestricted truth schema “True(A)↔A”, and (2) the object language can include its own metalanguage. Because of the first feature, classical logic must be restricted, but full classical reasoning applies in “ordinary” contexts, including standard set theory. The more general logic that replaces classical logic includes a principle of substitutivity of equivalents, which with the truth schema leads to the general intersubstitutivity of True(A) with A (...) within the language.The logic is also shown to have the resources required to represent the way in which sentences (like the Liar sentence and the Curry sentence) that lead to paradox in classical logic are “defective”. We can in fact define a hierarchy of “defectiveness” predicates within the language. Contrary to claims that any solution to the paradoxes just breeds further paradoxes (“revenge problems”) involving defectiveness predicates, there is a general consistency/conservativeness proof that shows that talk of truth and the various “levels of defectiveness” can all be made coherent together within a single object language. (shrink)

The paper presents a kind of normative anti-realist view of epistemology, in the same ballpark as recent versions of expressivism. But the primary focus of the paper is less on this meta-epistemological view itself than on how it should affect ground-level issues in epistemology: for instance, how it should deal with certain forms of skepticism, and how it allows for fundamental revision in epistemic practices. It is hoped that these methodological consequences will seem attractive independent of the normative anti-realism. Indeed, (...) some normative realists seem to embrace the view on skepticism, but it is argued that their position is unstable: the realism undermines the methodology. The general theme of the paper is that the issue of normative realism is deeply entwined with issues of methodology, in strong contrast to the common claim that meta-epistemological views in the tradition of expressivism have no first order impact. (shrink)

De Re Significance accounts of moral appraisal consider an agent’s responsiveness to a particular kind of reason, normative moral reasons de re, to be of central significance for moral appraisal. Here, I argue that such accounts find it difficult to accommodate some neuroatypical agents. I offer an alternative account of how an agent’s responsiveness to normative moral reasons affects moral appraisal – the Reasonable Expectations Account. According to this account, what is significant for appraisal is not the content of the (...) reasons an agent is responsive to, but rather whether she is responsive to the reasons it is reasonable to expect her to be responsive to, irrespective of their content. I argue that this account does a better job of dealing with neuroatypical agents, while agreeing with the De Re Significance accounts on more ordinary cases. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Response to the CommentariesLloyd FieldsAbstractIn this response, I address three points raised in the commentaries: the question of whether there is a legitimate formal use of “moral,” the claim that a certain sort of affective capacity is required for acquiring the capacity to form other-regarding moral beliefs, and the problem of how to show that psychopaths lack the capacity to form other-regarding moral beliefs. I maintain that there is (...) a use of “moral” according to which moral beliefs need not be rational. Regarding the affective capacity that Adshead identifies, I explain that I had not intended that such a capacity be constitutive of a moral belief, even an other-regarding one. I then try a new approach, in the light of Adshead’s commentary, to the third point addressed, according to which the psychopath is unable to form other-regarding moral beliefs because a causally necessary condition for doing so is absent in him.KeywordsMoral beliefs, moral understanding, personality disorder, empathy, incapacity, responsibilityThe criticisms offered in the three excellent commentaries on my paper raise deep and important issues. I agree with many of the points made and will respond to three key issues: (1) the question of whether there is a legitimate formal use of “moral”; (2) the claim that there is a certain sort of affective capacity that is required in order to form other-regarding moral beliefs; (3) the problem of how to show that psychopaths lack the capacity to form other-regarding moral beliefs.I concede that Duff establishes (Duff 1977) that the psychopath lacks moral understanding in Duff’s own content-based sense of “moral.” It is illuminating, however, to emphasize that in my formal sense a psychopath of the kind that I consider in my paper is capable of some degree of understanding of “moral” concepts. Unlike Duff, I do not build rationality into my account of moral principles. Hence, I can accommodate eccentric, irrational or even “crazy” moral beliefs like that of Duff’s split-infinitive fanatic. A person can have irrational factual beliefs; why not irrational moral beliefs?Adshead in her commentary attributes to me the claim that moral beliefs, including other-regarding beliefs, “result” in a disposition to experience certain emotions, and to have certain attitudes in certain situations. She then writes, “it is arguable that the disposition to experience certain emotions and have certain attitudes towards others could be critical to acquiring the capacity to have other-regarding beliefs.” There is only an apparent disagreement here. First, I intended to claim that a disposition to experience certain emotions, etc., is partly constitutive of having a moral belief, not a result of having one. Second, in specifying my third condition of having a moral belief, I had in mind such attitudes and emotions as approval, disapproval, indignation and remorse. Adshead identifies an affective capacity, aspects of which are the recognition of, empathy with, and sympathy with, another’s distress. This capacity seems to correspond more or less to what Rousseau described as “natural compassion” (Rousseau [End Page 291] 1973, 66–69), which arises prior to reflection and the use of reason, and which is exemplified by a mother’s responsiveness to the distress of her child. Rousseau distinguished natural compassion from moral virtues, which require the use of reason. I agree with Adshead that having this affective capacity is likely to be critical to acquiring the capacity to have other-regarding moral beliefs.Radden’s incisive commentary poses the problem of how to show that the psychopath lacks the capacity to form other-regarding moral beliefs, since this does not follow from the fact that he fails to form them. In the light of Adshead’s commentary, I should like to try a different approach to this problem. At least one type of situation in which we say that something, x, cannot do a certain sort of thing, d, is one where a causally necessary condition for x doing d is absent. For example, we should say of a car, not simply that it does not run, but that, as it is presently constituted, it cannot run, if we found that the carburetor of its... (shrink)