I shall be mainly concerned with the question ‘What is personal propositional knowledge?’. This question is obviously quite narrowly focused, in three respects. In the first place, there is impersonal as well as personal knowledge. Second, a distinction is often drawn between propositional knowledge and practical knowledge. And third, as well as asking what knowledge is, it is also possible to ask whether and how knowledge of various kinds can be acquired: causal knowledge, a priori knowledge, moral knowledge, and so (...) on. I shall dwell briefly on each of these three points. First, there is the distinction between personal and impersonal knowledge – in other words, between the psychological concept of knowledge and the social one.1 We use the concept of knowledge to describe the cognitive condition of individuals; but we also use it to describe the progress of scientific and historical research. So for example we can speak or enquire about the state of knowledge in a particular field of biology or history. And if we do so, we are evidently not concerned with what anyone in particular knows about, say, the genetics of fruit flies or the career of Charlemagne, but rather with what the scientific or academic community knows. Needless to say, there is a close connection between personal and impersonal knowledge. But ‘It is known that p’ does not simply mean ‘Someone or other. (shrink)

theory of knowledge defended in Timothy Williamson's book Knowledge and its Limits is compared here with the theory defended in the author's articles ‘How Knowledge Works ’ and ‘ Knowledge and Self- Knowledge ’. It is argued that there are affinities between these theories, but that the latter has considerably more explanatory power.

There continues to be a debate on whether addiction is best understood as a brain disease or a moral condition. This debate, which may influence both the stigma attached to addiction and access to treatment, is often motivated by the question of whether and to what extent we can justly hold addicted individuals responsible for their actions. In fact, there is substantial evidence for a disease model, but the disease model per se does not resolve the question of voluntary control. (...) Recent research at the intersection of neuroscience and psychology suggests that addicted individuals have substantial impairments in cognitive control of behavior, but this "loss of control" is not complete or simple. Possible mechanisms and implications are briefly reviewed. (shrink)

Recent work on dispositions offers a new solution to the long-running dispute about whether explanations of intentional action are causal explanations. The dispute seemed intractable because of a lack of percipience about dispositions and a commitment to Humean orthodoxies about causation on both sides.

1. I want to discuss a new area of scientific research called neuro-aesthetics, which is the study of art by neuroscientists. The most prominent champions of neuroaesthetics are V.S. Ramachandran and Semir Zeki, both of whom have both made ambitious claims about their work. Ramachandran says boldly that he has discovered “the key to understanding what art really is”, and that his theory of art can be tested by brain imaging experiments, although he does not describe these experiments, or explain (...) what results the theory predicts (Ramachandran and Hirstein 1999, 17). Zeki, who originally coined the term “neuro-aesthetics”, claims to have laid the foundations for understanding “the biological basis of aesthetic experience”, and to have formulated a “neurobiological definition of art” (Zeki 1999, 2, 22). If these claims are true, we are at the dawn of a new age in the study of art. Up to now, most of the people studying art have been historians, some of whom can read Latin, but hardly any of whom have mastered even the rudiments of brain science. And aesthetics has been in the hands of philosophers, who still disagree among themselves about ideas that were stated in the fourth century BC. Neuroaesthetics is different. As Ramachandran (2000, 19) says: “These ideas have the advantage that, unlike the vague notions of philosophers and art historians, they can be tested experimentally”. So, is neuro-aesthetics the next big thing? I want to assess its prospects, starting with Ramachandran. (shrink)

Human agency has four irreducibly different dimensions -- psychological, ethical, intellectual, and physical -- which the traditional idea of a will tended to conflate. Twentieth-century philosophers criticized the idea that acts are caused by 'willing' or 'volition', but the study of human action continued to be governed by a tendency to equate these dimensions of agency, or to reduce one to another. Cutting across the branches of philosophy, from logic and epistemology to ethics and jurisprudence, Action, Knowledge, and Will defends (...) comprehensive theories of action and knowledge, and shows how thinking about agency in four dimensions deepens our understanding of human conduct and its causes. (shrink)

§1 Analytic philosophers interested in depiction have focused for the most part on two problems: first, explaining how pictures represent; second, describing the distinctive kinds of artistic value pictures can possess, or the distinctive ways in which they can embody artistic values that extend more broadly across the arts. I shall discuss the first problem here. The main concepts I shall be concerned with are depiction, resemblance, sense and reference.

In this article, I oppose the view that knowledge is a species of belief, and argue that belief should be defined in terms of knowledge, instead of the other way round. However, I reject the idea that the concept of knowledge has a primary or basic role or position in our system of mental and logical concepts, because I reject the hierarchical conception of philosophical analysis implicit in this idea. I approach the topic of knowledge and belief from a discussion (...) of Richard Holton’s views about facts and factive verbs. (shrink)

In the Meno, Socrates asks why knowledge is a better guide to acting the right way than true belief. The answer he proposes is ingenious, but it fails to solve the puzzle, and some recent attempts to solve it also fail. I shall argue that the puzzle cannot be solved as long as we conceive of knowledge as a kind of belief, or allow our conception of knowledge to be governed by the contrast between knowledge and belief.

I argue that itches, tickles, aches and pains—sensations of all sorts—are generally in the places where we say they are. So, for example, if I say that I have an itch in the big toe on my left foot, then, by and large, that is the very place where the itch is. James denied this in the 1890s; Russell and Broad denied it in the 1920s; Wittgenstein and Ryle denied it in the 1940s; Lewis and Armstrong denied it in the (...) 1960s; and since then various kinds of materialists have denied it. But if itches etc. are states of the sensitive parts of bodies, then it is true. (shrink)

One of the most exciting developments in philosophy in the last fifty years is the resurgence in the philosophy of action. The concept of action now occupies a central place in ethics, metaphysics and jurisprudence. This collection of original essays, by some of the most astute and influential philosophers working in this area, covers the entire range of the philosophy of action. Topics covered include the nature of actions themselves; how the concepts of act, agent, cause and event are related (...) to each other; self-knowledge, emotion, autonomy and freedom in human life; and the place of the concept of action in criminal law. The volume concludes with a major essay by one of America's leading authorities in the philosophy of law on 'the 3.5 billion dollar question': was the destruction of the World Trade Center one event or two? (shrink)

I discuss Timothy Willliamson’s conjecture that ‘knowing is the most general factive stative attitude, that which one has to a proposition if one has any factive stative attitude to it at all’.

Many of today's ads work by arousing the viewer's emotions. Although emotion-arousing ads are widely used and are commonly thought to be effective, their careless use produces a side-effect: the psychoactive ad. A psychoactive ad is any emotion-arousing ad that can cause a meaningful, well-defined group of viewers to feel extremely anxious, to feel hostile toward others, or to feel a loss of self-esteem. We argue that, because some ill-conceived psychoactive ads can cause harm, ethical issues must arise during their (...) production. Current pretesting methods cannot identify the potentially psychoactive ads; therefore, we offer some tentative guidelines for reducing the number of viewers harmed by psychoactive ads. (shrink)

Professor Jessica Utts and I were given the task of evaluating the program on "Anomalous Mental Phenomena" carried out at SRI International (formerly the Stanford Research Institute) from 1973 through 1989 and continued at SAIC (Science Applications International Corporation) from 1992 through 1994. We were asked to evaluate this research in terms of its scientific value. We were also asked to comment on its potential utility for intelligence applications.

Although the societal advantages of responsible advertising are self-evident, no detailed vision of responsible ads exists. Without this vision, stakeholders have no framework for identifying, preventing, and remedying non-conforming ads. To address this problem, the four basic properties of responsible ads – consistent with an everyday-language, business-oriented definition of responsibility and the assumption that ads are not inherently bad – are posited. Then, the best milieu for creating such ads is identified.

in Proceedings of the 29th International Wittgenstein Symposium, Hölder-Pichler-Tempsky.

Introduction The editors of this volume hope that it will prove useful for the study of philosophy in the Middle Ages by virtue of the comprehensiveness of ...

Available from UMI in association with The British Library. Requires signed TDF. ;Metaphor and analogy are the scaffolding of science. Kepler's theory of the retinal picture could not have been built without the analogy between an eye and a camera obscura, and, two hundred and fifty years later, Charles Darwin devoted most of the first chapter of The origin of Species to discussion of pigeon fanciers. Unlike Darwin, Kepler was bewitched by his own imagination and was led to wonder "how (...) this image or picture is joined to the visual faculty, which is situated in the retina and in the nerve, and whether it is placed within the hollows of the brain, before the soul or tribunal of the visual faculty, or whether the visual faculty, like a magistrate sent by the soul from the administrative chamber of the brain, descends into the optic nerve or retina to meet this image, as though to a lower court" . ;The theory of the retinal image answered the crucial question of medieval optics: the scaffolding had served its purpose and should have been dismantled. Instead, Kepler mistook it for a part of the building: what he construed as a scientific problem was nothing more than the extension of a metaphor. As a result, and in spite of his remarkable achievement, he left the theory of vision in a state of confusion. ;I intend to show that Descartes revolutionized visual theory by manipulating the pair of analogies which had dominated visual theory since its inception and by advancing a theory of depiction which has since become orthodox. Advocates of the first analogy suggest that seeing the world is rather like seeing pictures of it; Kepler's analogy between the eye and a camera obscura, which was anticipated by Leonardo de Vinci, was a variation on this theme. Advocates of the second analogy compare vision to the use of a walking-stick: the air transmits an impression of a visible object to the eye rather as a walking-stick enables us to find our way around in the dark by transmitting pressures to the hand. As I shall show, Descartes' rejection of the pictorial analogy in favour of the walking-stick analogy and his theory of depiction were designed to salvage Kepler's theory of the retinal picture, a pearl of great price, from its murky setting. ;Descartes aimed to show that whilst Kepler's theory of the retinal picture correctly described the optics of the eye, the pictorial analogy was misleading and stood in the way of a mechanistic theory of perception. ;Current visual theory is Cartesian in some respects and un-Cartesian in others. The walking-stick analogy is no longer used, but the explanatory pattern that it served to illustrate is adhered to closely where the perception of brightness and colour are concerned, and the causal theory of depiction commands widespread support. At the same time, the pictorial analogy has not lost its appeal. (shrink)

Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, EarlyView.

Many popular business strategies, such as re-engineering, core competency, and value engineering, may achieve short-term profits by antagonizing workers and alienating customers. We contend that self-actualized companies must create an ethical business environment grounded in three ethical principles. To suggest these principles, which characterize all "volitionist companies", we first review two typical problems and the questionable ways that some companies resolved them. Then, we discuss these principles and compare "volitionism" to three well- known normative ethical theories. Finally, we show that (...) these principles form the core of at least four popular management theories. (shrink)

Philosophers have shown little interest in the concept of voluntariness during the last fifty years, mainly because Anscombe's book Intention persuaded us that it plays a relatively minor role in thought about human action, compared to the concept of acting intentionally or acting for a reason, and does not raise any interesting problems of its own, once the nature of intentional action has been explained. But this seems to be wrong. The nature of voluntariness, and its relationship with guilt, coercion, (...) obligation, intention, knowledge and choice, merit careful analysis. This article makes a start. (shrink)

Pluralism—the incommensurability and, at times, incompatibility of objective ends—is not relativism, nor, a fortiori, subjectivism, nor the allegedly unbridgeable differences of emotional attitude on which some modern positivists, emotivists, existentialists, nationalists and, indeed, relativistic sociologists and anthropologists found their accounts.

For more than twenty years, Opinion 6.01 of the American Medical Association's Code of Medical Ethics has specified that “a physician's fee for medical services should be based on the value of the service provided by the physician to the patient.” In 1994, the AMA amended Opinion 6.01, adding a new statement that “a physician's fee should not be made contingent on the successful outcome of medical treatment.”We believe that the amendment is wholly indefensible. Therefore, in this essay, we argue (...) that the AMA should lift this prohibition and encourage the use of result-based compensation for medical services in appropriate circumstances.The 1994 amendment dramatically changed the significance and scope of Opinion 6.01. Result-based compensation arrangements clearly satisfy the original version of Opinion 6.01 because they base compensation on the “value of the services provided … to the patient.” Yet, it is equally clear that result-based compensation arrangements violate the amended version of Opinion 6.01 because they necessarily make compensation “contingent on the successful outcome of medical treatment.”. (shrink)

In 1931, Wittgenstein listed ten influences on his intellectual development: ‘I don’t believe I have ever invented a line of thinking,’ he wrote, ‘I have always taken one over from someone else. I have simply straightway seized upon it with enthusiasm for my work of clarification. That is how Boltzmann, Hertz, Schopenhauer, Frege, Russell, Kraus, Loos, Weininger, Spengler, Sraffa have influenced me.’ (CV, 1980, p.19) The order in which these names occur is probably the order in which Wittgenstein encountered them, (...) or their ideas. As we shall see, the title of this article derives from Kraus. But its subject is Loos’s influence on Wittgenstein. (shrink)

Is the medicalization of poverty a rational and humane response to an intractable problem, or just the latest in a long series of ineffective and costly attempts to address the problem? Considerable ink has been spilled on the dispute, with each side marshalling heart-rending anecdotes to help make their case — along with the obligatory statistics and regression analyses. Rather than add more verbiage to that dispute, this article sketches out a framework for understanding the phenomenon of medicalization, along with (...) a description of the demand-side and supply-side factors that have brought us to this pass. (shrink)