Building on two nonproblematic claims, I argue for a qualified endorsement of Hume's intuition that there must be a time-difference between cause and effect. Those claims are: (i) that the statement 'A caused B' is meaningful only if we have a criterion for saying 'A' and 'B' refer to distinct events; and (ii) that an adequate view of what it is to be an event must illuminate the enterprise of seeking to establish a singular causal statement. Specifically, I argue there (...) must be a time-difference when cause and effect are modifications of the same physical object. (shrink)

B. F. Skinner has argued that those who are serious about ending war, pollution, etc., must face the fact that the received methods of changing behavior have proved ineffective. According to Skinner, we must replace 'weak' methods of control such as control via praise and blame and control via Rousseau's 'natural contingencies of things' with Skinner's 'strong' methods of control. It is argued that Skinner's case for the continued ineffectiveness of such methods of control rests on the unargued assumption that (...) we are stuck with the highly centralized forms of social organization that characterize present-day advanced societies, forms that place barriers between man and man and between man and nature. Drawing on the anarchist tradition in political thought, it is argued that a radical decentralization — which cannot be dismissed as Utopian — would bring a new effectiveness to what Skinner dismisses as 'weak' forms of control. (shrink)

B. F. Skinner argues in Beyond Freedom and Dignity (New York 1971) that only his theory of man is compatible with a ?scientific? approach to human behavior. I argue that Skinner's entirely open?ended view of man is inadequate for his own purposes in that it leaves no room for the claim that certain value judgments are universally valid, something I argue Skinner is committed to despite an explicit avowal in one place of cultural relativism. I then go on to show (...) that a modification of Skinner's theory of man which builds on Spinoza's notion of conatus would provide one with a theory?based rationale for universally valid judgments without involving one in a ?non?scientific? approach to human behavior. Specifically, I argue that such a Spinozistic modification would provide one with a theory?based guarantee that man will not evolve in such a way that a truly scientific observer would deem a totalitarian state good. (shrink)

Can a man intend to do the impossible? That is, can a man undertake to do some action, A—and not merely to come as close as possible to doing A with the hope that the doing of A will result—when he believes he has no chance of doing A?

Reminiscences of Peter, by P. Oppenheim.--Natural kinds, by W. V. Quine.--Inductive independence and the paradoxes of confirmation, by J. Hintikka.--Partial entailment as a basis for inductive logic, by W. C. Salmon.--Are there non-deductive logics?, by W. Sellars.--Statistical explanation vs. statistical inference, by R. C. Jeffre--Newcomb's problem and two principles of choice, by R. Nozick.--The meaning of time, by A. Grünbaum.--Lawfulness as mind-dependent, by N. Rescher.--Events and their descriptions: some considerations, by J. Kim.--The individuation of events, by D. Davidson.--On properties, by (...) H. Putnam.--A method for avoiding the Curry paradox, by F. B. Fitch.--Publications (1934-1969) by Carl G. Hempel (p. [266]-270). (shrink)

Genuine religion always involves the worship of what is genuinely ultimate. Religion, worship, and ultimate reality are thus indissolubly related. The task of reflective thought in this domain is to distinguish what is sound from what is spurious in religion; to characterise the meaning of religious devotion; and to attempt to articulate the nature of the ultimate reality to which men's worship is directed.

The so-called "non-commutativity" of probability kinematics has caused much unjustified concern. When identical learning is properly represented, namely, by identical Bayes factors rather than identical posterior probabilities, then sequential probability-kinematical revisions behave just as they should. Our analysis is based on a variant of Field's reformulation of probability kinematics, divested of its (inessential) physicalist gloss.

It is shown that for every nonzero r.e. degree c there is a linear ordering of degree c which is not isomorphic to any recursive linear ordering. It follows that there is a linear ordering of low degree which is not isomorphic to any recursive linear ordering. It is shown further that there is a linear ordering L such that L is not isomorphic to any recursive linear ordering, and L together with its ‘infinitely far apart’ relation is of low (...) degree. Finally, an analogue of the recursion theorem for recursive linear orderings is refuted. (shrink)

We establish a probabilized version of modus tollens, deriving from p(E|H)=a and p()=b the best possible bounds on p(). In particular, we show that p() 1 as a, b 1, and also as a, b 0. Introduction Probabilities of conditionals Conditional probabilities 3.1 Adams' thesis 3.2 Modus ponens for conditional probabilities 3.3 Modus tollens for conditional probabilities.

It has often been recommended that the differing probability distributions of a group of experts should be reconciled in such a way as to preserve each instance of independence common to all of their distributions. When probability pooling is subject to a universal domain condition, along with state-wise aggregation, there are severe limitations on implementing this recommendation. In particular, when the individuals are epistemic peers whose probability assessments are to be accorded equal weight, universal preservation of independence is, with a (...) few exceptions, impossible. Under more reasonable restrictions on pooling, however, there is a natural method of preserving the independence of any fixed finite family of countable partitions, and hence of any fixed finite family of discrete random variables. (shrink)

The fundamental tenet of modern empiricism is the view that all non-analytic knowledge is based on experience. Let us call this thesis the principle of empiricism. [1] Contemporary logical empiricism has added [2] to it the maxim that a sentence makes a cognitively meaningful assertion, and thus can be said to be either true or false, only if it is either (1) analytic or self-contradictory or (2) capable, at least in principle, of experiential test. According to this so-called empiricist criterion (...) of cognitive meaning, or of cognitive significance, many of the formulations of traditional metaphysics and large parts of epistemology are devoid of cognitive significance--however rich some of them may be in non-cognitive import by virtue of their emotive appeal or the moral inspiration they offer. Similarly certain doctrines which have been, at one time or another, formulated within empirical science or its border disciplines are so contrived as to be incapable of test by any conceivable evidence; they are therefore qualified as pseudo- [p. 42:] hypotheses, which assert nothing, and which therefore have no explanatory or predictive force whatever. This verdict applies, for example, to the neo-vitalist speculations about entelechies or vital forces, and to the "telefinalist hypothesis" propounded by Lecomte du Noüy. (shrink)

1. The problem. The concept of confirmation of an hypothesis by empirical evidence is of fundamental importance in the methodology of empirical science. For, first of all, a sentence cannot even be considered as expressing an empirical hypothesis at all unless it is theoretically capable of confirmation or disconfirmation, i.e. unless the kind of evidence can be characterized whose occurrence would confirm, or disconfirm, the sentence in question. And secondly, the acceptance or rejection of a sentence which does represent an (...) empirical hypothesis is determined, in scientific procedure, by the degree to which it is confirmed by relevant evidence. (shrink)

In this first issue of the new Erkenntnis, it seems fitting to recall at least briefly the character and the main achievements of its distinguished namesake and predecessor. The old Erkenntnis came into existence when Hans Reichenbach and Rudolf Carnap assumed the editorship of the Annalen der Philosophie and gave the journal its new title and its characteristic orientation; the first issue appeared in 1930. The journal was backed by the Gesellschaft f r Empirische Philosophie in Berlin, in which Reichenbach, (...) Walter Dubislav, and Kurt Grelling were the leading figures, and by the Verein Ernst Mach in Vienna, whose philosophical position was strongly influenced by that of the Vienna Circle; a brief account of these groups, and of several kindred schools and trends of scientific and philosophical thinking, was given by Otto Neurath in his 'Historische Anmerkungen' (Vol. 1, pp. 311-314). As Reichenbach noted in his introduction to the first issue, the editors of Erkenntnis were concerned to carry on philosophical inquiry in close consideration of the procedures and results of the various scientific disciplines: analysis of scientific research and its presuppositions was expected to yield insight into the character of all human knowledge, while at the same time, the objectivity and the progressive character of science inspired the convection that philosophy need not remain an array of conflicting 'systems', but could attain to the status of objective knowledge. As a student in Berlin and Vienna during those years, I experienced vividly the exhilarating sense, shared by those close to those two philosophical groups, of being jointly engaged in a novel and challenging intellectual enterprise in which philosophical issues were dealt with 'scientifically' and philosophical claims were amenable to support or criticism by logically rigorous arguments. The 'logical analyses' and 'rational reconstructions' set forth by adherents of this program often made extensive use of the concepts, methods, and symbolic apparatus of contemporary symbolic logic, whose importance for philosophy was the subject of Carnap's article, 'Die Alte und die Neue Logik', which appeared in the first issue.. (shrink)

We show, roughly speaking, that it requires ω iterations of the Turing jump to decode nontrivial information from Boolean algebras in an isomorphism invariant fashion. More precisely, if α is a recursive ordinal, A is a countable structure with finite signature, and d is a degree, we say that A has αth-jump degree d if d is the least degree which is the αth jump of some degree c such there is an isomorphic copy of A with universe ω in (...) which the functions and relations have degree at most c. We show that every degree d ≥ 0 (ω) is the ωth jump degree of a Boolean algebra, but that for $n no Boolean algebra has nth-jump degree $\mathbf{d} > 0^{(n)}$ . The former result follows easily from work of L. Feiner. The proof of the latter result uses the forcing methods of J. Knight together with an analysis of various equivalences between Boolean algebras based on a study of their Stone spaces. A byproduct of the proof is a method for constructing Stone spaces with various prescribed properties. (shrink)