This volume contains papers from a 1962 Symposium in the Philosophy of Mind held at Wayne State University. There are seven essays, each accompanied by lengthy and usually quite astute comments, and followed by a shorter rejoinder. Chisholm contributes a refinement of his much discussed criteria for intentional connectives: "On Some Psychological Concepts and the 'Logic' of Intentionality." The scare quotes are well-placed around "Logic," as it is Chisholm's intuitive rather than formal logical perspicacity which carries the weight of the (...) argument. Ayer's paper, "The Concept of a Person," has already been published in his book of the same name. The most deliberate exercise in epistemic logic is Castañeda's paper, "Consciousness and Behavior: Their Basic Connections." This essay deserves close scrutiny, as it represents a disciplined attempt to rehabilitate more traditional conceptions of consciousness and, particularly, self-consciousness. Putnam has some more to say about minds and machines in "The Mental Life of Some Machines." In what is possibly the best paper in the volume, Sellars develops the dialectic that runs from phenomenalism, through various forms of realism, to a critical scientific realism mediated by a Kantian-style phenomenalism. Aune's comments on the paper are very illuminating. Alston, owing to the delay in publication of the Symposium, joins a bit late the list of those who are criticizing and rejecting the logical barrier between reasons and causes that has been erected by Melden et al. Finally, Firth tries to delimit our concept of seeing by arguing in a manner more suggestive than definitive for causal criteria for the use of the term. The general tone of the volume is exploratory.—E. A. R. (shrink)

This volume contains papers from a 1962 Symposium in the Philosophy of Mind held at Wayne State University. There are seven essays, each accompanied by lengthy and usually quite astute comments, and followed by a shorter rejoinder. Chisholm contributes a refinement of his much discussed criteria for intentional connectives: "On Some Psychological Concepts and the 'Logic' of Intentionality." The scare quotes are well-placed around "Logic," as it is Chisholm's intuitive rather than formal logical perspicacity which carries the weight of the (...) argument. Ayer's paper, "The Concept of a Person," has already been published in his book of the same name. The most deliberate exercise in epistemic logic is Castañeda's paper, "Consciousness and Behavior: Their Basic Connections." This essay deserves close scrutiny, as it represents a disciplined attempt to rehabilitate more traditional conceptions of consciousness and, particularly, self-consciousness. Putnam has some more to say about minds and machines in "The Mental Life of Some Machines." In what is possibly the best paper in the volume, Sellars develops the dialectic that runs from phenomenalism, through various forms of realism, to a critical scientific realism mediated by a Kantian-style phenomenalism. Aune's comments on the paper are very illuminating. Alston, owing to the delay in publication of the Symposium, joins a bit late the list of those who are criticizing and rejecting the logical barrier between reasons and causes that has been erected by Melden et al. Finally, Firth tries to delimit our concept of seeing by arguing in a manner more suggestive than definitive for causal criteria for the use of the term. The general tone of the volume is exploratory.—E. A. R. (shrink)

Syntax has to do with rules that constrain how words can combine to make acceptable sentences. Semantics (Frege and Russell) concerns the meaning of words and sentences, and pragmatics (Austin and Grice) has to do with the context bound use of meaning. We can hence distinguish between three competing principles of translation: S—translation preserves the syntax of an original text (ST) in the translation (TT); M—translation preserves the meaning of an ST in a TT; and P—translation preserves the pragmatics of (...) an ST in a TT. A prominent form of P is functionalism defended by linguists and translation theorists (J.R. Firth, Eugene Nida, Susan Bassnett and many others) and historically was defended by philosophers (Russell, Ogden and Richard) but abandoned by philosophers and criticized by Wittgenstein. If we adopt M, then a TT will always say exactly what the ST says, and hence all subsequent TTs, even alternative ones produced via M, will be consistent with each other. But if we adopt P, in contrast, we have no reason to believe that the TTs will say what the ST does, and moreover they can contradict each other. If such contradictory translations are produced on the basis of the totality of empirical evidence, it results in what Quine called the indeterminacy of translation. Yet, P is not easy to reject. In many cases, translation in accordance with M where the meaning to be preserved is linguistic results in TTs that are failures. In contrast to a language focused approach to semantics, I close by following a lead in the translation theory literature of identifying text-types (genres) as a tool for identifying translatable content in an ST. To individuate text-types I identify them with disciplines, as elucidated by the 2nd century Patañjali’s Yoga Sūtra. This allows for the definition of textual meaning as the discipline relative pragmatics of an ST and further for translation to proceed by way of M, while taking the intuitions that motivate P seriously. Translations that preserve textual meaning will not only have the same meaning as each other but will be pragmatically felicitous. (shrink)

Syntax has to do with rules that constrain how words can combine to make acceptable sentences. Semantics (Frege and Russell) concerns the meaning of words and sentences, and pragmatics (Austin and Grice) has to do with the context bound use of meaning. We can hence distinguish between three competing principles of translation: S—translation preserves the syntax of an original text (ST) in the translation (TT); M—translation preserves the meaning of an ST in a TT; and P—translation preserves the pragmatics of (...) an ST in a TT. A prominent form of P is functionalism defended by linguists and translation theorists (J.R. Firth, Eugene Nida, Susan Bassnett and many others) and historically was defended by philosophers (Russell, Ogden and Richard) but abandoned by philosophers and criticized by Wittgenstein. If we adopt M, then a TT will always say exactly what the ST says, and hence all subsequent TTs, even alternative ones produced via M, will be consistent with each other. But if we adopt P, in contrast, we have no reason to believe that the TTs will say what the ST does, and moreover they can contradict each other. If such contradictory translations are produced on the basis of the totality of empirical evidence, it results in what Quine called the indeterminacy of translation. Yet, P is not easy to reject. In many cases, translation in accordance with M where the meaning to be preserved is linguistic results in TTs that are failures. In contrast to a language focused approach to semantics, I close by following a lead in the translation theory literature of identifying text-types (genres) as a tool for identifying translatable content in an ST. To individuate text-types I identify them with disciplines, as elucidated by the 2nd century Patañjali’s Yoga Sūtra. This allows for the definition of textual meaning as the discipline relative pragmatics of an ST and further for translation to proceed by way of M, while taking the intuitions that motivate P seriously. Translations that preserve textual meaning will not only have the same meaning as each other but will be pragmatically felicitous. (shrink)

This volume, designed to bring together new analyses of moral skepticism, consists of papers by Professors William Frankena, Marcus Singer and Antony Flew and a long introduction by the editor which describes the central issues and discusses each of the papers. In his paper, "The Principles of Morality," Frankena contends that underlying many of our ordinary moral expressions is the implicit belief in an absolute moral action-guide, i.e., an action-guide which all those who are fully rational within the moral point (...) of view would acknowledge. Although Frankena does not discuss in this paper the crucial and perplexing problems of whether all those taking the moral point of view must accept the same principles and whether there is an irreducible plurality of moral points of view, he does discuss at length H. D. Aiken’s rejection of moral absolutism in favor of moral autonomy and the differences between his theory and R. Firth’s Ideal Observer Theory. In "Moral Skepticism," Singer carefully defines his topic and classifies its major variants, three of which—personal subjectivism, social subjectivism and emotivism—he criticizes in detail. Although Singer does not present new arguments against the various forms of moral skepticism, he provides the valuable service of organizing clearly and stating precisely the major difficulties. The concluding paper by Flew, "Must Morality Pay? or What Socrates Should Have Said to Thrasymachus," seems out of place in this collection since it neither defends an absolute position nor attacks a variety of skepticism. Flew argues that Socrates’ attempt to prove that the life of justice is always in one’s interest is misguided, since, in the real world, morality often demands that an individual sacrifice his good for the good of others. What Socrates should have argued, according to Flew, is that the choice of the moral life rather than the prudent one cannot be deemed to be either rational or irrational because for such a choice, the issue of rationality arises only in connection with the coherence of our plans and purposes or the internal consistency of our preferences.—M. G. (shrink)

J. L. Austin, in "Ifs and Cans," proclaimed the common hope that we soon "may see the birth, through the joint labors of philosophers, grammarians, and numerous other students of language, of a true and comprehensive science of language." The problem has always been with the "joint labors" part. Philosophers have always been willing to issue linguists dictums and linguists have been happy to teach philosophers "plain facts." Austin’s general view of language, and his particular notion of performative utterance, can (...) be found in the writing of J. R. Firth, the most commanding British linguist of Austin’s generation, but Austin never refers to Firth. In the present volume, however, we find clear and exciting evidence of genuinely joint labors on the part of philosophers and linguists. They stem from a summer conference in 1969 rounded out with contributions from notables. To two thick issues of Synthese the editors have added a dazzling piece by Saul Kripke, two substantial pieces by James McCawley and J. R. Ross, a short paper by Paul Ziff, and a reprint of P. F. Strawson’s "Grammar and Philosophy." This is an invaluable book and the best book among the many now available concerning the interaction of linguistics and philosophy: worth the cost, which the contributors attempted to reduce through foregoing royalties. The philosophers in this volume hold, or hold intriguing, the view that the semantics of a natural language can and must, in effect, be a theory of truth for a language in much the manner that Tarski suggested, and provided, for artificial language: the recursive specification of biconditionals in which the left hand gives the structural description of an object language sentence and the right hand, the truth conditions in the metalanguage. In "homophonic" translation this requirement can be trivially satisfied simply by mentioning the sentence on the left that one uses on the right: one makes the requirement non-trivial by forcing enough into the recursive specification so that one captures the native speaker’s implicit semantic competence. In this volume, the "orthodox" Davidsonian program, which takes the syntax of the metalanguage to be standard predicate logic, is ably argued by John Wallace ; Richard Montague, David Lewis, and Jaakko Hintikka would want an intensional logic covering modality and propositional attitudes. The linguists who find this philosophical climate most appealing are called "generative semanticists": McCawley, Ross, George Lakoff and others argue that any proposed semantic rule will eventually prove necessary to syntax too and that, hence, the deepest level of syntactical form will be equivalent to semantic form. Whatever the ultimate fate of this joint program, it leads here to much exciting interaction between linguists and philosophers: linguists who welcome the machinery and conceptual standards of modern logic, and philosophers who try to grasp the specifics of crucial issues in recent linguistic theory. Even if Quine’s doubts, here sketched, and Chomsky’s currently unpublished more technical objections should be well-founded, nonetheless the joint labor will have been very much worthwhile. Aside from this general debate about semantics, there are several papers covering more specific issues. The papers of J. A. Fodor, Terence Parsons, and Ross concern adverbs and the logical form of action sentences; several papers, particularly B. H. Partee’s, examine "Opacity, Coreference, and Pronouns." In all these papers one notes the fulfillment of Austin’s hope that philosophic and linguistic arguments should become intermixed, if not at times properly indistinguishable. Perhaps the most enjoyable and exciting paper stands aside from linguistics: Saul Kripke’s "Naming and Necessity." Kripke here argues quite informally for the separation of analytic, a priori, and necessary that is required for a Kripke style, S5, modal logic with de re modalities. "Gold is a yellow metal," for example, turns out to be contingent, while "Heat is the motion of particles" is necessary but a posteriori ; and that philosopher’s stone of stones, "The morning star is the evening star," is discovered to be necessary but a posteriori.—J. L. (shrink)

The empiricist theory of epistemological warrant is not without its attractions. If our beliefs are to be more than “hypothetical”, if they are to be beliefs about our world, then surely at some point our beliefs must be warranted by and anchored to the world by our experience. If our beliefs were not so anchored by our experience, then—to switch metaphors now with C.I. Lewis—“… the whole system of such would provide no better assurance of anything in it than that (...) which attaches to the contents of a well-written novel.” Quinton has argued “… that it is through their connection with experience that basic statements derive that initial support without which no statement whatever would have any justification …”. Roderick Firth speaks of “the central thesis of epistemic priority—the thesis that some statements have some degree of warrant which is independent of the warrant that they derive from their coherence with other statements”. Quinton, again, has distinguished between the evidence that one proposition can lend another, i.e. propositional evidence, and the evidence that, ultimately, only experience can provide for foundation or basic propositions, experiential evidence. (shrink)

Keith Thomas: Gerald Edward Aylmer, 1926-2000 Adrian Hollis: William Spencer Barrett, 1914-2001 Bruce Williams: Charles Frederick Carter, 1919-2002 Malcolm Mackintosh: John Erickson, 1929-2002 J. H .R. Davis: Raymond William Firth, 1901-2002 F. M. L. Thompson: Hrothgar John Habakkuk, 1915-2002 A. W. Price: Richard Mervyn Hare, 1919-2002 Hugh Lloyd-Jones: Geoffrey Stephen Kirk, 1921-2003 Michael Lapidge and Peter Matthews: Vivien Anne Law, 1954-2002 Ann Moss: John Lough, 1913-2000 Terence Cave: Ian Dalrymple McFarlane, 1915-2002 Ludwig Paul: David Neil MacKenzie, 1926-2001 Peter Birks: (...) John Kieran Barry Moylan Nicholas, 1919-2002 Jonathan Shepard: Dimitri Dimitrievich Obolensky, 1918-2001 David Cannadine: John Harold Plumb, 1911-2001 Daniel Waley: Nicolai Rubinstein, 1911-2002 Ian Wood: John Michael Wallace-Hadrill, 1916-1985 R. G. M. Nisbet: William Smith Watt, 1913-2002 G. W. Bernard: Richard Bruce Wernham, 1906-1999. (shrink)

Nelson, L. The impossibility of the "Theory of knowledge."--Moore, G. E. Four forms of skepticism.--Lehrer, K. Skepticism & conceptual change.--Quine, W. V. Epistemology naturalized.--Rozeboom, W. W. Why I know so much more than you do.--Price, H. H. Belief and evidence.--Lewis, C. I. The bases of empirical knowledge.--Malcolm, N. The verification argument.--Firth, R. The anatomy of certainty.--Chisholm, R. M. On the nature of empirical evidence.--Meinong, A. Toward an epistemological assessment of memory.--Brandt, R. The epistemological status of memory beliefs.--Malcolm, N. A (...) definition of factual memory.--Martin, C. B. and Deutscher, M. Remembering.--Ayer, A. J. Basic propositions.--Reichenbach, H. Are phenomenal reports absolutely certain?--Goodman, N. Sense and certainty.--Lewis, C. I. The given element in empirical knowledge.--Alston, W. Varieties of privileged access.--Schlick, M. The foundation of knowledge.--Russell, B. Epistemological premisses, basic propositions, and factual premisses.--Firth, R. Coherence, certainty, and epistemic priority.--Sellars, W. Empiricism and the philosophy of mind.--Quinton, A. The foundations of knowledge. (shrink)

Next SectionBackground Scientific papers are retracted for many reasons including fraud (data fabrication or falsification) or error (plagiarism, scientific mistake, ethical problems). Growing attention to fraud in the lay press suggests that the incidence of fraud is increasing. Methods The reasons for retracting 742 English language research papers retracted from the PubMed database between 2000 and 2010 were evaluated. Reasons for retraction were initially dichotomised as fraud or error and then analysed to determine specific reasons for retraction. Results Error was (...) more common than fraud (73.5% of papers were retracted for error (or an undisclosed reason) vs 26.6% retracted for fraud). Eight reasons for retraction were identified; the most common reason was scientific mistake in 234 papers (31.5%), but 134 papers (18.1%) were retracted for ambiguous reasons. Fabrication (including data plagiarism) was more common than text plagiarism. Total papers retracted per year have increased sharply over the decade (r=0.96; p<0.001), as have retractions specifically for fraud (r=0.89; p<0.001). Journals now reach farther back in time to retract, both for fraud (r=0.87; p<0.001) and for scientific mistakes (r=0.95; p<0.001). Journals often fail to alert the naïve reader; 31.8% of retracted papers were not noted as retracted in any way. Conclusions Levels of misconduct appear to be higher than in the past. This may reflect either a real increase in the incidence of fraud or a greater effort on the part of journals to police the literature. However, research bias is rarely cited as a reason for retraction. (shrink)

Health care professionals often face moral dilemmas. Not dealing constructively with moral dilemmas can cause moral distress and can negatively affect the quality of care. Little research has been documented with methodologies meant to support professionals in care for the homeless in dealing with their dilemmas. Moral case deliberation is a method for systematic reflection on moral dilemmas and is increasingly being used as ethics support for professionals in various health-care domains. This study deals with the question: What is the (...) contribution of MCD in helping professionals in an institution for care for the homeless to deal with their moral dilemmas? A mixed-methods responsive evaluation design was used to answer the research question. Five teams of professionals from a Dutch care institution for the homeless participated in MCD three times. Professionals in care for the homeless value MCD positively. They report that MCD helped them to identify the moral dilemma/question, and that they learned from other people’s perspectives while reflecting and deliberating on the values at stake in the dilemma or moral question. They became aware of the moral dimension of moral dilemmas, of related norms and values, of other perspectives, and learned to formulate a moral standpoint. Some experienced the influence of MCD in the way they dealt with moral dilemmas in daily practice. Half of the professionals expect MCD will influence the way they deal with moral dilemmas in the future. Most of them were in favour of further implementation of MCD in their organization. (shrink)

R. F. Stalley; VIII*—Plato's Doctrine Of Freedom, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 98, Issue 1, 1 June 1998, Pages 145–158, https://doi.org/10.11.

I can get away with it because no one is in a position to call me on it. Professor Robinson cannot consistently complain that (A) begs the question against his thesis that there is no such fallacy. He would discourage anyone from "helping" him by accusing me of committing the fallacy against him. With advocates like that, who needs adversaries? I. EMBEDDING PERSPECTIVES After all, Robinson has a viable reply to my argument. He should simply deny my premise. Later I (...) will show how (A) might rationally persuade Robinson. But my immediate goal is not to convert the skeptic about the existence of the fallacy but rather to use his extreme position to make a point about the nature of question-begging. Those who object that argument (A) begs the question against Robinson must do so on behalf of Robinson. This assistance requires that one launch the accusation from Robinson's perspective and with his dialectical interests at heart. (shrink)

This research explores the contextual approach within Christian-Jewish religious education, addressing a notable gap in existing literature and offering fresh insights into the application of the Contextual Teaching and Learning (CTL) model within Christian contexts. Through a qualitative literature study employing a three-step methodology, including an in-depth analysis of Deuteronomy 11:19–20, this study reveals that this biblical text provides both educational guidance and theological significance, serving as a foundational support for the CTL model in Christian-Jewish religious education. The integration of (...) digital media into biblical sources holds promise for future research, while the central challenge lies in harmonising life experiences and empirical phenomena with biblical reflections to seamlessly integrate inquiry processes and pedagogical phases, with potential avenues for further exploration in scripture models endorsing CTL. This research provides valuable insights for educators, parents and policymakers in Indonesia and beyond, advancing educational research in contextualised teaching models within religious education.Contribution: This article demonstrates that the CTL model in the digital era has the potential to revolutionise religious education and profoundly impact learners, making it a significant scientific contribution in the context of Christian-Jewish religious education. (shrink)

Across four studies, we explored how feeling nostalgic about an attitude object impacts the metacognitive characteristics of the attitude toward that object and how those metacognitions predict the evaluation’s underlying strength. In each study, participants reflected on and evaluated a song or television show that either did or did not elicit nostalgia. Across these studies, we found support for the hypotheses that nostalgic attitude objects are viewed more positively, appraised with greater attitudinal importance, and exhibited less objective ambivalence. In Study (...) 4, we observed that nostalgic attitudes are associated with greater behavioural intentions and that this relationship was mediated both by attitudinal importance and objective ambivalence. These studies contribute to our understanding of how nostalgia affects attitude formation processes. (shrink)

The moral philosophy of the first half of the twentieth century, at least in the English-speaking part of the world, has been largely devoted to problems of an ontological or epistemological nature. This concentration of effort by many acute analytical minds has not produced any general agreement with respect to the solution of these problems; it seems likely, on the contrary, that the wealth of proposed solutions, each making some claim to plausibility, has resulted in greater disagreement than ever before, (...) and in some cases disagreement about issues so fundamental that certain schools of thought now find it unrewarding, if not impossible, to communicate with one another. Moral philosophers of almost all schools seem to agree, however, that no major possibility has been neglected during this period, and that every proposed solution which can be adjudged at all plausible has been examined with considerable thoroughness. It is now common practice, for example, for the authors of books on moral philosophy to introduce their own theories by what purports to be a classification and review of all \emph{possible} solutions to the basic problems of analysis; and in many cases, indeed, the primary defense of the author's own position seems to consist in the negative argument that his own position cannot fail to be correct because none of the others which he has mentioned is satisfactory. (shrink)

R. F. Stalley; VIII*—Plato's Doctrine Of Freedom, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 98, Issue 1, 1 June 1998, Pages 145–158, https://doi.org/10.11.