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Essay I

Discourse Relativity and Philosophy

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Pragmatic Specialization and Rationality

At primitive levels of sign interpretation, pragmatic functions are combined. For the grazing gazelle, an odor can be associated with the sight of an approaching lion, arouse fear, and lead to a fleeing response. For the hunting predator, tracks or odors may be associated with the sight of the prey, arouse the pleasurable anticipation analogous to what for us is hope, and direct further tracking. Assuming these responses by prey and predator are instrumentally learned and not innate and reflex, a single event such as an odor is a sign that is the object of combined cognitive (the association of one event with another), emotive (the arousal of the emotions of fear or hope), and dynamic (fleeing or approaching) interpretations. Similar combining typically occurs for signaling within animal groups. The cry of a baboon sentry can warn of an approaching predator, express and arouse fear in members of the tribe, and signify the response of fleeing. Both its use by the sentry and interpretation by others combine cognitive, emotive, and dynamic pragmatic functions. At the signaling level there is, however, a form of specialization that is introduced. This is in the form of calls whose principal function is that of establishing contact between members of a group or between members of mating pairs. The function of specialized grunts recorded by Cheney and Seyfarth in their studies of vervet monkeys is that of enabling recognition that a grunt’s source is a friendly group member and not an antagonistic outsider.1 Signature bird calls and signals transmitted by dolphins and whales seem to perform a similar transactional function of enabling identifications for those outside visual contact.

Lost forever are the means of communication used by early hominids intermediate between signals used by infra-human species and what can be formed from the resources of natural languages accessible to linguists. At some stage signals used to signify kinds of objects were combined with those signifying qualities and actions to form proto-sentences with a distinctive referring function for subjects and ascribing function for predicates. This was accompanied by the development of the

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syntactic categories of nouns, verbs, and adjectives, and of rules for combining them into sentences. Syntactic rules for word ordering and verb form then enabled distinctions of sentence mood and specialization of cognitive, emotive, and dynamic pragmatic functions in a way impossible for isolated signals. The single word “run” can in isolation have combined descriptive, expressive, and prescriptive uses, but word ordering in English (verb forms in many other languages) removes ambiguity of use for “The man runs”, “Would that I could run”, and “Run to the store”. With sentence formation also come introduction of proper names and personal pronouns as communicative transactional elements, making it possible to indicate sources of information, expressions of emotions, and commands, and to address these to specific individuals, as when we use the name “Bill” to indicate the addressee of “Bill, the house is on fire”. Ethnologists cite evidence that chimpanzees show some capacity for combining counters with some of the referring and ascribing functions of subjects and predicates. This reinforces the view that sentence formation, along with an understanding of the syntactic rules required for it, are not unique to the modern human species.

Certainly unique, however, is the human capacity to combine sentences into discourses in the form of conversations, detailed instructions, and storytelling. The central features of discourse formation and the problem of assigning topics to specific discourses will be discussed in the next chapter. But at this stage we note only the importance of discourses in which a conclusion is combined with premisses to form an inference. Those who can use and interpret these inferences are said to have the capacity to reason, that is, are endowed with that rationality distinguishing our species from all others. Inferences bring with them still further developed means of pragmatic specialization through variety of types of relations between their premisses and conclusions, a form of specialization that eventually leads to the development of social institutions that prepare its members to use inferences employed within them. We shall be outlining below, first, the principle forms of inference occurring at the discourse level, and, secondly, the social role performed by philosophy in describing these forms and acting as a counter-balance to harmful effects of specialization.

These effects have been obscured by the faculty psychology prevalent during the Enlightenment, which through the influence of Immanuel Kant has distorted views within all branches of philosophy. Kant distinguished in his Critique of Pure Reason the mental faculties of understanding and reason by describing them as capacities for judging the truth of propositions expressed by two different types of sentences.

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Analytic sentences Kant defines by the relation of predicates to subjects. They are those whose predicates are “contained” in their subjects, that is, having predicates appearing after analysis of noun subjects into their component meanings. The sentence “All bachelors are unmarried” would be classified as analytic, assuming its subject “bachelor” can be analyzed into the complex term “unmarried man”, a term in which the predicate “unmarried” occurs. Replacing the original sentence with its analyzed form, the sentence becomes the trivially true and uninformative “All unmarried men are unmarried”. Synthetic sentences, in contrast, are those sentences not analytic, that is, those sentences in which analysis of their subjects will not reveal their predicates. Sentences express propositions that are judged to be true or false in two different ways for Kant. Those evaluated relative to what we experience through our senses are a posteriori sentences; those not capable of being evaluated in this way are classified as a priori. Kant then uses this classification to distinguish the faculties of understanding and reason. The understanding is the faculty directed towards propositions expressed by synthetic a posteriori or empirical sentences, sentences not true because of the meanings of their subjects and whose truth or falsity are established on the basis of sensory observation. They include both the descriptions of everyday life such as “The dogwood tree by my house is in full bloom” and the generalized descriptions of the natural sciences. Reason, in contrast, is directed towards a priori propositions, and these may be expressed by either analytic or synthetic sentences. Those like “All bachelors are unmarried” that are analytic a priori provide no new information, but only some reiteration of meanings of subjects.

The focus of Kant’s attention in his Critique was on the more interesting synthetic a priori sentences that purport to convey information, and this attention has had a pernicious influence on all later philosophic attempts to describe our reasoning capacity. This is because the concept of the synthetic a priori is totally indeterminate in application, a concept defined in terms of what it is not. A synthetic sentence is defined by Kant as one that is not analytic, one for which its predicate does not occur after analysis in its subject. Similarly, the a priori classification is reserved for those propositions that are not empirical, those not evaluated relative to perceptions. We are thus not given by Kant any positive characterization of the synthetic a priori, but only two contrasts. Since the faculty of reason as capable of providing new information is directed towards this type of sentence, it too was left indeterminate. It can take the form of speculative reason directed toward the propositions of “dogmatic” metaphysics, and in this form Kant denies such a capacity. But it can also

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take the form of the capacity to apprehend propositions as diverse as the theorems of number theory and the principles of morality, both regarded by Kant as being expressed by the synthetic a priori and within human capacities to apprehend. As we shall see in Chapter 5, when we turn to normative forms of discourse, this indeterminateness opened the way for the artificial contrast between reason and emotion assumed by Enlightenment rationalism.

Such indeterminateness is avoided by recognizing that to reason is to use an inference, and that there are as many forms of reasoning as forms of discourse. We use inferences when we explain a past event and predict a future one, when we trace what is implied by a story or interpret a religious narrative, when deciding what we should do, and when making judgments on the justice of political and legal systems. Such inferences are formulated in different forms of discourse and governed by different rules, all capable of being specified relative to the purposes of a distinctive kind of reasoning. These forms of inference define both theoretical reasoning conducted within institutionalized specializations such as mathematics and the natural and social sciences and practical reasoning employed within legislative branches enacting legislation and a legal system responsible for interpreting and applying it. Still different forms are employed within institutions entrusted with selecting from, transmitting and interpreting, and evaluating our religious, literary, and artistic heritage. The capacity for rationality that seems to be unique to our species is thus not that of apprehending and evaluating the synthetic a priori as a single form of indeterminate proposition. It is instead a multi-faceted capacity to use and interpret the great variety of inferences used within the cultures of developed societies, and takes as many forms as there are types of inference. This capacity is distributed unequally through a society in ways that depend on the aptitudes and educational backgrounds of its members and the specialized institutions to which they belong.

Of special interest to us here are contrasts and relationships between three broad categories of forms of discourse that we label as descriptive, transactional, and normative. For descriptive forms with sentences uniformly in the indicative mood, we can readily assign discourse topics, and differentiation of topics can be a source of specialization. Chemists describe the properties of molecules, while physicists address the topics of atoms and sub-atomic particles. Chemistry is further divided into branches describing organic and inorganic molecules, and groups of chemists further sub-divide into those studying an increasing variety of molecules in both branches. Members of these groups become specialists whose assertions are accepted by outsiders lacking the expertise to independently

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test them, based instead on trust that methods employed by trained specialists will provide reliable information about their discourse topics. For transactional and normative forms of discourse, however, the situation is different. Mastery of the transactional is shared by all members of a natural language community capable of using personal pronouns, though some will have greater facility than others in the nuances of address and deference expected in social relations. And as we shall see more clearly in Chapter 2 and 3, the unity of normative discourse used to guide conduct is not provided by common topics of a kind that admits of specialization. Unity here is derived instead from the purposes of the discourse and relations between premisses and conclusions of inferences. Within the legal profession, there is specialization in such areas as corporate, federal, state, and international law, where training is required for understanding and applying enacted laws and past judicial decisions. But all members of a community share an interest in determining whether a given law promotes a policy that they approve of, and whether the legal system that applies and enforces laws is just. For answers to questions about the goodness of policies or justice of laws and political institutions raised within normative forms of discourse there are no specialists.

The contrast between forms of discourse used in theoretical and practical reasoning is accompanied by a contrast in forms of relativity. The Chapter 3 describes how the meanings of key terms such as “true”, “exists”, “real”, and “identity” are relative to general topics of descriptive discourses. Failure to recognize this relativity is responsible for attempts throughout the history of philosophy to impose features of one form discourse on others used for very different purposes. I shall argue in Chapter 4 that the traditional opposition of materialism and idealism is the result of such impositions. This form of theoretical relativity is, however, very different from the practical form. Practical inferences include premisses expressing wants, aversions, and preferences, and these wants and preferences can vary with the history and circumstances of different societies and at different stages in their development. Such variation affects how a society sets its moral standards and how its members weight the sometimes competing demands of security, freedom, and equality in their assessments of social justice.

So much for this introductory summary of some of the central issues to be discussed in this essay. We begin with an outline of some basic features of discourses in general and then proceed to an examination of some of the ways they become specialized and relativized.

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Varieties of Discourse

The most basic form of discourse is conversational speech, which typically combines sentences used to establish contact between speaker and interlocutors, provide information, issue commands or requests, and express a variety of attitudes. Conversations may also include arguments in which conclusions are inferred from premisses. This occurs when we reason to what we should do, explain why an action was performed, predict a future action, or determine the consequences of obeying a command. While discourse at this conversational level is typically a hybrid mixture of sentences with different uses, it can be specialized in order to accomplish purposes such as describing, prescribing, or expressing feelings and emotions. Philosophy has historically concentrated on indicative sentences used to describe, and there has been a tendency either to ignore other forms of sentences or to assimilate these forms to descriptions. This tendency has been reinforced by the success of applications of modern predicate logic to deductive inferences, applications that are the topic of this chapter’s third section. Finally, we will turn to the problem of distinguishing the roles of linguistics and philosophy in describing features of discourses.

2.1. Conversational Speech

The familiar has inherent complexities, and for this reason is usually the most difficult to understand. This may explain why the philosophy of language has tended to avoid discussing forms of discourse formulated within natural languages in everyday use. The following phone conversation between Bill and Betty illustrates this complexity.

Bill: Hello, Betty, this is Bill. How are you?Betty: Hi, Bill. I’m fine. Where are you?Bill: It’s raining here, and so I’m at home. I think there’s also a chance for rain tomorrow, but I hope for good weather. Then I should go shopping, as I want some printer paper. I’ll get some for you if you need it.

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Betty: Please do. I’ll reimburse you.

Prominent at the beginning are transactional elements, including greetings, addresses that identify speaker and hearer, and the personal pronouns “you” and “I” as proxies for the addressing names “Betty” and “Bill”. Then follow a description (“It’s raining here”), expressions of a belief (that it might rain tomorrow), hope (for good weather), and desire (for printer paper), a prudential normative (“I should go shopping”), a conditional resolution (“I’ll get some [paper] if you need it”), and finally a request (“Please do [get some paper]”) and a promise to reimburse. Included also are enthymemes as inferences with unexpressed premisses. The first provides Bill’s explanation of why he is at home (because it is raining, with the implication that he doesn’t want to get wet). The second is a practical prudential inference giving the reason for why he should go shopping (his want for paper), with the implicit means-end assumption that the best way to satisfy this want is to go shopping. Such a discourse is typical of those used in our daily lives, and is mirrored in our streams of consciousness—what Plato called “the silent discourse of the soul with itself”—as we plan and anticipate encounters with others.

Hybrid conversations between speaker and audience feature the personal pronouns “I” and “you” used in conjunction with mental terms such as “believe”, “think”, “hope”, and “want”. Contrasted to such hybrids are “pure” descriptive discourses sanitized of such elements, discourses combining indicative sentences, and illustrated by the sequence “Bill walked down the street; then he walked into the store, and bought a tie” and the disjunctive syllogism “Bill must be at home, since he is either at home or at the store, and he isn’t at the store”. It is usually possible to assign a common topic to such discourses, and in these examples it is obviously the individual Bill. This specialization of descriptive sentences makes them suitable as the paradigm used in discourse analyses of linguistics. As occurring in discourses used within the sciences, combinations of descriptions are commonly the model for analyses of language found in philosophical accounts of scientific method. In science, mental terminology common in face-to-face speech is either totally absent, as in physics and biology, or tends to become replaced by descriptions to which the evaluative standards of science can be applied, as occurs in psychology and sociology. In contrast, mental terminology is preserved, along with personalized addressing forms, in religious narratives describing encounters between the human and the supernatural. This borrowing of familiar features of transactional conversations enables these narratives to be readily understood by all members of a linguistic

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community. Relationships between the personalized and mental terminology of everyday conversation and religious narratives, on the one hand, and specialized descriptive discourses sanitized of these elements, on the other, are the focus of the issues of metaphysics to be discussed below in Chapters 4 and 5. Of special interest to us later will be the persistent tendency in philosophy to impose features of descriptive discourse used to provide information on forms of discourse used for different purposes.

Besides practical inferences with a “want” premiss and “should” or “ought” conclusion (as in Bill’s conclusion that he should go shopping), within conversational speech we find imperative inferences used to determine the consequences of a command relative to circumstances. These include those from a general imperative to a particular application, as in “Pick up all the boxes. This is a box. So pick it up”, a type of inference used in applying laws in specific situations. Storytelling expressing hopes and fears also occurs at this conversational level, and can be used both to entertain and to convey moral instructions. All speakers of a natural language, including members of small, isolated tribes, are able to understand and use such specialized fragments. This is only a preliminary, however, to the specialization accompanying population increases in restricted regions and the advent of writing. With writing, there is communication over extended distances that is much more reliable than relayed speech, an extension that is the mark of what we label a “civilization.” At this stage, institutions begin to develop using increasingly specialized forms of discourse, and schools develop for training prospective members of these institutions in their use. Thus develop academies for training in the sciences, mathematics, law, engineering, religion, and interpretive studies of literature and the arts. Forms of discourse used within them develop standards of evaluation appropriate to the purposes they fulfill, along with technical vocabularies that diverge from the shared vocabulary of the natural language in common use. Then understanding of relationships between these forms becomes increasingly difficult, and philosophy emerges as the discipline attempting to provide this understanding. Often the form philosophy takes within a civilization either reflects the prestige of an institution within it or of conflicts over the priority to be assigned one institution relative to another. The pervasive influence of religious institutions, especially in the earlier stages of a civilization’s development, usually guarantees that their forms of discourse enjoy a prominent position in discussing problems arising from these conflicts.

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There is a reason for the puzzling nature of these philosophical problems and their persistence in different guises over many centuries. Nearly all of us are very adept at both using the shared natural language of our speech community, with its transactional addressing expressions and mental terminology used in aiding and sympathizing with others, and evaluating and reacting to others’ beliefs and wants. We are also adept at using the complex combinations of sentences typical of conversational speech, as illustrated by the conversation between Bill and Betty. But we differ greatly in the interests and aptitudes necessary for acquiring competence in using the specialized forms of discourse of diverse social institutions. The talented novelist is often a dunce in mathematics; the respected judge or inspiring religious leader may show no interest in or aptitude for experimental science; those successful in the sciences often lack either interest in interpretive studies of art and literature or an interest in expending the time and energy required to acquire the background necessary for understanding them. These differences in interests and talents and restrictions on time and energy make it increasingly difficult to understand relationships between specialized forms of discourse. This translates into a tendency to impose features characteristic of one form of discourse on others used for different purposes. The intractable disputes of metaphysics reflect the associated tendency of writers to assign priority to forms of discourse for which they happen to have an aptitude and interest.

Philosophy has claimed for itself the role of relating the evaluative standards employed within social institutions. As a second-order inquiry into the central activities of a civilization, it encompasses studies of the empirical standards of the sciences. Its inquiries are also directed towards the evaluative standards used in assessing the moral actions of individuals, the policies of a government, and the worth of literary and artistic contributions. Philosophy has thus included within its scope epistemology, with its discussions of justified belief, and the normative disciplines of ethics, political philosophy, and aesthetics. In its early history, individual philosophers such as Plato, Aristotle, Locke, and Kant could write in all these areas. The growth of specialization in the nineteenth century has made this increasingly difficult, and it has been common for philosophers to restrict themselves to a single area. But even with this relatively recent restriction, most philosophers have continued to write for the general educated public, and have employed, with some exceptions for a technical vocabulary unique to their discipline, the vocabulary of the natural language shared by members of their intended audience, including personal pronouns and the mental terminology characteristic of conversational speech. In discussions of justified belief, philosophers may

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include examples from highly technical areas of theoretical physics, but the basic framework of epistemology is designed to include both the familiar beliefs of everyday life and those of scientists using their special methods of justification. Moral philosophers may discuss complex issues related to the use of stem cell research or rationing of medical care, but they apply to these issues moral principles that derive from the more tractable decisions that we face daily.

There are thus good reasons for conversational speech formulated within a natural language (or “ordinary language,” as it is often called) being the focus of recent philosophy. As the common currency within a community, it is the ideal focus for attempts to understand relationships between forms of discourse with specialized vocabularies. Its hybrid forms include practical inferences that combine the descriptive with expressions including mental verbs such as “believe” and “want” used in conjunction with the pronouns “I” and “we”, along with the normative terms “ought”, “should”, and “may”. An understanding of such combinations within practical inferences is valuable in relating the descriptions of science to the expressive and normative. And finally, philosophy’s use of the vocabulary of conversational speech relates the discipline to the expressions of religious faith found in theology. Indeed, both philosophy and theology have staked out claims to provide a comprehensive theory that encompasses the major human activities and serve society as its primary means of social integration. Sometimes they have pursued these claims in collaboration, sometimes in opposition. By making conversational speech its focus, philosophy enables its audience to assess the relative merits of these claims when they overlap and perhaps create conflict.

2.2. Some Historical Notes

Inferential discourse has been the topic of philosophic discussion since the ancient Greeks. Inferences have included those in the indicative mood, including deductive and inductive inferences with descriptive premisses and conclusions, and what Aristotle termed “practical syllogisms” in which the conclusion expresses a resolution to act in a way that realizes a goal. Despite such attention to inferences, the focus of philosophy in the past has been on smaller constituent elements of discourses. These were initially words, especially nouns and adjectives, with much attention to what words stand for, whether ideal forms (Plato), forms of substances (Aristotle), psychological concepts (Medieval philosophers), or ideas

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(Locke, Berkeley, and Hume) as either images accessible to introspection or concepts. Central importance was attached to the problem of determining the relation between words and minimal elements out which the more complex is formed. Later attention was to shift to sentences as combinations of subjects and predicates, with subjects referring to objects and predicates ascribing attributes to these objects. These subject-predicate combinations then became the objects of psychological acts of judgment evaluating them as either true or false. Sentences were assigned primary importance because words have meanings, it was realized, in the context of sentences. This is obvious from the different meanings of “large” and “small” in “Felix is a large mouse”, “Mice are small”, “Dumbo is a small elephant”, and “Elephants are large”, for independent of such sentence contexts, the adjectives “large” and “small” lack meaning. With the shift of attention to sentences, primary importance became shifted to an understanding of the relation between a sentence and whatever it represents or corresponds to.

It was not until the past century that discourses with sentence constituents became a central focus, and it was realized that sentences in turn have meaning in the contexts of the discourses in which they occur. The initial impetus for this came in the breakdown of the analytic/empirical distinction for sentences within the context of scientific theories. We noted above that analytic sentences were regarded as those sentences whose truth or falsity can be determined solely on the basis of the meanings of their constituent terms, while empirical synthetic sentences (synthetic a posteriori sentences) were those evaluated relative to observational evidence. The breakdown of this distinction was originally noted by Henri Poincaré and then developed by W. V. O. Quine. Poincaré’s example was the formula of Newtonian gravitational theory “The force exerted on a body is equal to its mass times its acceleration”, or F = ma. Does this provide definitions of the terms “force”, “mass”, and “acceleration”, and is therefore analytic? It doesn’t seem so, for it is used to assert relationships in nature. But then is it empirical as a description of a relation in nature between a force exerted and a body’s mass and acceleration? In fact, it is not derived from direct observations of force, mass, and acceleration, as is indicated by the lack of a constant in the equation. The answer is that, considered in isolation, the formula is neither analytic nor empirical, and that only Newton’s theory as a whole can be so classified. The formula relating force, mass, and acceleration is combined in Newton’s theory with two other assertions: the law of inertia that the acceleration of a body is zero if no force is applied to it (a = 0 if no external F) and the inverse square law that the force exerted between two

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bodies is directly proportional to the product of their masses and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them (F∝Mm/r2). This discursive combination can be observationally tested, and is therefore empirical, or synthetic a posteriori. This breakdown of the analytic/synthetic distinction applied to sentences suggests that if philosophy is to be conceived as the discipline that analyzes meaning, its units for analysis should be discourses such as Newton’s gravitational theory, not individual sentences.

The shift of focus from sentences to discourse combinations of them was brought on by other factors. One was the use of paraphrases of modern logic, which in the process of evaluating inferences replaced single sentences with combinations of sentences related through logical symbolism. These paraphrases resulted in attention being focused on subjects of inferences as wholes rather than on subjects of sentences, and on pronouns as means of determining relations between the constituent sentences of a discourse. These features of modern logical symbolism will be discussed in the next chapter. A second factor was the analysis of combinatorial syntactic rules initiated by the linguist Noam Chomsky. For Chomsky, sentences with prepositional phrases and relative clauses are the products of embedding what are termed “sentence strings.” For example, the sentence “The boy with the baseball runs down the street that is wide and narrow” is constructed from the sentence strings “the boy runs down the street”, “the boy has a baseball”, “the street is wide”, and “the street is narrow”. In learning the rules of English, speakers learn how to construct prepositional phrases and relative clauses from the relevant sentence strings. Chomsky thus showed how complex single sentences should be regarded as discourses or discourse fragments that for stylistic reasons have not been broken up into discrete parts by punctuation.

During this transition from the word to sentence and finally to the discourse as the unit of analysis, descriptive language has usually served as the paradigm form of language, the model to which all other uses of language must conform. Prior to the last half of the twentieth century, philosophy had been “indicative bound,” to use R. M. Hare’s expression, and in the process had sidelined imperatives and expressions of feelings and emotions by either dismissing them as meaningless or by assimilating them to indicatives used to describe. This took the form of claiming that the content of an imperative such as “Close the door” is the proposition expressed by the corresponding indicative “The door is closed” describing the result of obeying the command. This has the effect of denying a distinct logic of imperatives, for every imperative inference would be translated into an indicative inference expressing propositions. The

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imperative inference from “Close the door and open the window” to “Close the door” is then thought to derive its validity from the corresponding indicative inference “The door is closed and the window open; therefore, the door is closed” of the form A ⋀ B ∴ A.

But this assimilation of the imperative to the indicative is easily shown to be mistaken. In standard indicative logic we can infer by contraposition from the conditional A→B to the conditional ∼B→∼A with negated antecedent and consequent. For example, we can infer from “If it rains, the door is closed” to “If the door is not closed, it isn’t raining”. But from the conditional imperative “If it rains, close the door” we cannot infer the imperative “If the door is not closed, then make it not rain”. In the absence of control over the weather, this is a command that is impossible to obey. There are thus special features of imperatives and the discourses in which they occur that resist their assimilation to indicative descriptions.

Much attention was focused by the “ordinary language” philosophers on individual sentences used for other than descriptive and prescriptive purposes. These included performatives with illocutionary force indicators‒‒sentences such as “I promise that the package will arrive”, “I warn you it will arrive”, and “I guarantee it will arrive”‒‒by which we make promises and issue warnings and guarantees. As J. L. Austin emphasized, such first person sentences are not self-descriptions. I am not describing myself as promising when I say “I promise that p” but instead making a promise, performing a speech act different from making a statement. The descriptive content of the promise is provided by the sentence radical p, while the prefix “I promise that” expresses the illocutionary force of the sentence conveying how it is to be understood, in this case as a promise, as contrasted, say, to a warning or guarantee. Austin extended his analysis to psychological verbs in the first person prefixed to sentence radicals, noting that sentences such as “I believe that p” and “I know that p” also should not be regarded as used by a speaker to describe her psychological state. The belief sentence is instead used to indicate hesitancy about the truth of p and to invite possible correction by others, in contrast to “I know that p” as a personal guarantee of p’s truth. Such an analysis can be extended to the sentences “I want my daughter to have a college education” and “I hope she will have a college education” of the forms “I want (or desire) that p” and “I hope that p”. Like the first person “believe” and “know” sentences, these are used by the speaker to express a desire and a hope that p come about, not to describe a mental state. As a psychological prefix, the use of “hope” conveys the expression

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of p in a way that contrasts with a use of “wish”. “Hope” implies that p has a basis in justified belief, while “wish” lacks such an implication. In contrast to hopes, wishes may be idle or fanciful.

Austin and those influenced by him directed their attention to individual sentences used for other than descriptive purposes. Applications to discourse combinations of sentences came when Elizabeth Anscombe, G. H. von Wright, and Max Black turned their attention to practical inferences. Consider the inference of the previous section’s conversational sample used by Bill. With premisses made explicit, this might be formulated as the inference

I want some paper If there is good weather tomorrow, then the best way to get some paper is to go shopping. The weather will be good tomorrow I’m able to go shopping It follows that I should go shopping tomorrow.

The inference is from the want expressed in the first premiss (an abbreviated form of “I want that I have some paper”), the assertion that going shopping (rather than, say, ordering through the internet) is the best means to realize the want if the weather is good, and the assertion that it will be good (won’t rain) to the conclusion that the means should be performed. Philosophers have in the past been puzzled by the meaning of normative “should” or “ought” sentences. Are they descriptions of special kinds of normative facts? Or are they expressions of attitudes? As occurring in the context of this inference, it seems evident that they are neither. The meaning of the normative “should” or “ought” is determined by its role in an inference in which there is an expression of a desire combined with a description of a means-end relation and relevant circumstance. Much as Poincaré and Quine demonstrated that we cannot classify Newton’s formula F = ma in isolation as analytic or synthetic, consideration of practical inferences shows that sentences of the form “I should (ought to) do M” are neither descriptions nor emotional expressions, but derive their meanings from the inference contexts in which they occur. Again, the proper unit for analysis is the discourse as a whole, not individual sentences occurring within it.

2.3. Assigning Topics and Logical Paraphrase

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A discourse is commonly defined as a combination of sentences about a common topic or topics. This definition does apply to a wide range of discourses that combine sentences in the indicative mood, as for a conversation about the weather, an account of a meeting between two friends, a scientific treatise describing the properties of a newly discovered plant, or a novel about the interactions between a restricted number of central characters. For such pure indicative mood discourses, the anaphoric pronouns “he”, “she”, and “it” function as devices linking constituent sentences, along with relative pronouns such as “who”, “which”, and “that” used to embed sentence strings. As we shall presently see, defining a discourse is straightforward for indicative mood inferences of the kind that can be paraphrased and then represented by the symbolism of modern predicate logic. It seems also possible to apply the definition to sequences of imperatives such as “Pick up all the toys in the room. Then pick up the papers, and mop the floor”. Here we can perhaps assign as the common topic the action of cleaning up the room. But the definition does not apply, certainly not in an obvious way, to hybrid discourses combining sentences with different uses. What is the topic, for example, of the practical inference formulated at the end of the previous section? Is it the end of getting paper, the means of going to a store, or the circumstance of it not raining? Because there is a description only of the circumstance, we don’t seem able to assign a topic. And what is the topic of the speech conversation between Bill and Betty? In it Bill identifies himself, greets Betty, describes his whereabouts, and promises to help, while Betty promises to reimburse. It seems arbitrary to assign as its topic the offer to help, rather than the participants in the dialogue or the weather. For such hybrid discourses, the unifying aspect seems to be their overriding purposes, and these can be complex and subject to interpretation. There may not be any one topic that the Bill/Betty conversation is about, nor even several topics, but its special combination of sentences can be interpreted as fulfilling the common general purpose of notifying of whereabouts and coordinating actions.

Some such assignment of topic, even though vague and subject to different interpretation, seems necessary to set boundaries for a given discourse. A phone conversation between two people may last for over an hour. Rather than describing this as a single discourse, it is usually useful for purposes of analysis to divide it up into portions for which topics can be assigned. We can then assign boundaries between those parts of the extended conversation that deal with the weather, those informing of mutual activities, those providing instructions, or the myriad purposes served by the conversation. We then define a discourse block as a

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combination of sentences with a common topic or topics, with the concession that this assignment of topics as a means of assigning boundaries is subject to differing interpretations. The indefiniteness of such assignment poses a problem for discourse analysis as a branch of linguistics, as we shall see in the section to follow.

Topic assignment can be made very precise, however, for inferential discourses represented by the symbolism of modern predicate logic. In classical Aristotelian logic, it was possible to assign a common subject only for so-called “immediate” inferences, valid deductive inferences with a single subject such as the inference “All men are mortal; therefore, some men are mortal” of the form “All S is P ∴ Some S is P”. Here the subject S designates the topic of the inference, what the inference is about. But for syllogisms such as “All men are mortal. All Greeks are men. Therefore, all Greeks are mortal”, the so-called “Barbara syllogism” of AAA mood in the first figure, there is no single subject and therefore no common topic. The inference is represented by

All M is PAll S is M_______All S is P

with two subjects, the middle term M and the subject of the conclusion S, and two different topics, men and Greeks. The major innovation of modern predicate logic as founded by Frege, Peirce, Russell, and others was to paraphrase sentences of the form “All S is P” and “Some S is P” in such a way as to provide a single subject for deductive inferences. Paraphrases of such sentences introduced a more general subject common to these inferences and converted original subjects into predicates.

This procedure can be applied to the “Barbara” syllogism. The sentence “All men are mortal” is paraphrased as “Everything is such that if it is a man then it is mortal”, with “thing” (or “material thing”) introduced as subject and “men” converted to the predicate “is a man”. It is then symbolically represented by the universal quantifier ∀x standing for “every thing” and the material implication → standing for “if … then”. This representation as applied to “All men are mortal” thus yields ∀x (Mx→Px). The syllogism as a whole is represented symbolically by

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∀x (Mx→Px)∀x (Sx→Mx)____________∀x (Sx→Px)

The variable “x” within the quantifier is said to have as its extension a domain, and this domain becomes the common topic of the syllogism. As applied to “Some man is mortal” of the form “Some S is P”, paraphrase produces “There is some thing (at least one thing) such that it is S and it is P” of the form ∃x (Sx ⋀ Px), with the existential quantifier ∃x representing “some thing” (or there is at least one thing, there exists something), the conjunction sign ⋀ standing for “and”, and the second and third occurrences of the variable “x” representing the anaphoric “it”. The immediate inference from “All men are mortal” to “Some men are mortal” is then represented by

∀x (Sx→Px)___________∃x (Sx ⋀ Px)

The effect of the paraphrase is to convert the original subject of the inference “men” into the predicate “is a man”, and introduce the new all-inclusive subject “thing”. This introduced subject now enables a shift from men to (material) things as the inference’s common topic.

The specialized task of predicate logic is to evaluate deductive inferences as valid or invalid. The technique of paraphrase of modern logic and the introduced symbolism had the effect of greatly extending to the scope of this logic beyond Aristotelian syllogisms with three constituent subject and predicate terms and two premisses to inferences with any number of terms and any number of premisses. It also permitted the extension of logic beyond sentences ascribing attributes such as being mortal or being a man to sentences stating relations, sentences such as “Every elephant is larger than some lion” used to state relations between two or more kinds of objects.

But beyond this more specialized function of logical evaluation, this technique had wider implications for philosophy. A logical paraphrase of a sentence S1 eliminates the original subject by converting it to a predicate and introducing a more general subject to produce a sentence S2 that is claimed to preserve the meaning of the original by insuring that S2 is true if and only if S1 is true. Such a meaning-preserving paraphrase is a reduction of S1 to S2. Applied to inferences in which S1 occurs in

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combination with others, these paraphrases become a method of reducing, not only individual sentences, but whole discourses to those with different subjects. Evaluating the success or failure of such discourse reductions then becomes an important means for philosophy to determine relationships between forms of discourse. The generality of logical paraphrase makes possible these determinations. Standard applications are to descriptive empirical sentences such as “All men are mortal”, “All copper conducts electricity”, or “All bodies in the vicinity of the earth accelerate at the rate of s = 16t2”, sentences whose truth or falsity is determined relative to observational evidence. But logical paraphrase can be extended generally to any indicative sentence that can occur in an inference with reoccurring subject and predicate terms and can be evaluated as valid or invalid. These include fictional sentences such as “All the heroes of Homer’s Illiad are protected by some god”, the (false) mathematical sentence “Every prime number is evenly divisible by some positive integer”, and the theological sentence of Christianity “Some human is the son of some god”. None of these sentences is evaluated in the manner appropriate for “Copper conducts electricity”, but there are procedures that enable readers of the Illiad to assess assertions about heroes and gods, mathematicians to reach consensus about assertions about prime numbers, and Christian theologians to agree about divine origins. When occurring in the context of inferences, they can be paraphrased, represented by the appropriate symbolism, and used in the process of evaluating the relevant inferences. The scope of logic thus extends across very different forms of discourse, and this makes possible its use as a tool for making comparisons.

At this preliminary stage, it is important to offer a warning. Reductions of one form of sentence to another through logical paraphrase are conducted relative to forms of discourse with special features. They are restricted to sentences within inferential contexts. Typically these sentences are in the indicative mood expressing true or false propositions, though extension of logical paraphrase to imperatives seems possible. But expressions of wants and preferences as constituents of practical inferences seem immune to paraphrase, as are the normative conclusions derived from them. There is also a wide range of sentences for which it is difficult to arrive at consensus about the truth or falsity of the propositions they express. These include the constituent sentences of interpretive narratives characteristic of the arts, literature, and religion. Logical paraphrase thus has restricted application. But those areas in which it can be applied provide valuable models for extending conclusions from the relatively well known to the amorphous and indefinite. Relationships

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between the principal forms of discourse in use within developed civilizations are of bewildering complexity. By isolating and examining the most tractable of these relationships with the help of logic we have the means for understanding at least some of the basic features of what is inherently more complex.

2.4. Discipline Boundaries

Philosophy has been in the unique position of first originating and then spinning off to separate institutionalized professions the principal areas of the sciences. This began with the first speculative theories of physics of the Greek early cosmologists and Aristotle, theories which became the basis for experimental physics as developed in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries by Galileo and Newton. This was followed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries by the incorporation of biology into the natural sciences and its separation also from “natural philosophy.” In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, psychology became an experimental science after origins with Locke, Berkeley, Hume, and Kant, and at about the same time sociology separated from its original home in Hegelian idealism. In the late nineteenth century and throughout the twentieth, philosophical attention was directed to language, first by Peirce, Frege, Russell, and the early Wittgenstein of the Tractatus, then later by the “ordinary language” philosophers—Ryle, J. L. Austin, and the later Wittgenstein of the Investigations. As before for physics, biology, psychology, and sociology, many of the results of these philosophical discussions have been incorporated into the science of linguistics through its formulation of syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic rules.

Discourse analysis as a branch of linguistics has also been directed towards conversational discourse, and this presents the problem of determining what portions of this topic remain in the more indefinite and controversial discipline of philosophy, what have been relegated to a specialized discipline making steady progress in reaching consensus on features of discursive language. That discourse analysis lacks the exactness of other branches of linguistics is indicated by the difficulty linguists encounter in specifying what it is about. They agree it is directed towards actual speech and writing and that within extended portions of speech and writing it is possible to isolate discourse fragments with boundaries that separate off one fragment from others. These bounded fragments— what I have been referring to as “discourse blocks”—then become the basic units of analysis for linguistics, replacing sentences as

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the objects of descriptions of syntactic and semantic rules. For discourses like our Bill and Betty sample, discourse blocks are portions of a conversation between two or more participants, and for many of these blocks transactional and pragmatic features that control speaker/hearer interchanges are prominent. For “single turn” monologic discourses the transactional may have minimal importance.

The problems raised earlier in this chapter apply to linguists’ attempts to establish boundaries between separate blocks. What determines whether a conversation is to be itself a discourse unit for analysis or is to be divided into two or more? For some cases of descriptive language we seem to have an answer, as when a conversation begins by describing the weather and then shifts to a description of a couple’s marital problems familiar to the interlocutors. Where this occurs, topics can be assigned to discourse fragments, and used to mark the boundary between two distinct discourse blocks. Brown and Yuul claim that such shifts of topic can be used in this way, though they concede that these techniques provide only a “guide.”2 Difficulties of assigning topics are emphasized by Michael Stubbs in his example of the opening of Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury: “Through the fence, between the curling flower spaces, I could see them hitting. They were coming toward where the flag was and I went along the fence”.3 Background knowledge leads the astute reader to assign golf as the topic of this passage, for interpreting the word “hitting” as hitting golf balls and “flag” as golf hole flag enables us to understand the subsequent occurrence of the word “caddie”. This suggests that topic assignment is an interpretation made to establish coherence and connection between the constituent sentences of a discourse, and that such an interpretation may vary from one hearer/reader to another in a way that depends on their backgrounds. Where nondescriptive language is used, as in our opening sample conversation between Bill and Betty, we saw in the previous chapter that shift of topic cannot be used in establishing boundaries between blocks. We must instead appeal to the purpose for which a given discourse fragment is used, and this is even more obviously subject to different interpretations. Such subjective variation in isolating units of analysis reinforces the view that discourse analysis as a branch of linguistics faces problems in reaching consensus not found where linguistics restricts itself to describing rules of sentence formation. Many of the conclusions of philosophers of language such as P. F. Strawson, Austin, and H. P. Grice have indeed been incorporated into pragmatics as a branch of linguistics in the form of rules of presupposition, interaction within conversation, and the performance of speech acts. This incorporation has required shifting

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from individual sentences as the units of analysis to wider discourse contexts in which the sentences occur. But this incorporation has not produced an exact science whose ability to reach consensus contrasts with the indeterminacy that marks much of philosophy.

Also, the development within linguistics of pragmatics and discourse analysis should not obscure very different interests that philosophy and linguistics have in the study of language. Discourse analysis is directed towards regularities in discourses formed within natural languages as the shared languages within speech communities.4 These are contingent regularities described by generalizations about how language as an instrument of communication happened to have evolved within human communities on our planet. In contrast, philosophy’s attention has been directed towards relationships between the natural (ordinary) language of a speech community and various forms of specialized languages used within the institutions of a civilization after the advent of writing. It has also been directed to contrasts and comparisons between natural language sentences and discourse blocks and more primitive forms of communication within animal and insect societies and means of receiving information from and reacting to a changing environment. Philosophy thus conceives both sentences and discourse blocks as signs to be compared to other more primitive forms of signs. In the process of describing such comparative sign features, philosophy attempts to isolate necessary features of discourses used both within conversational speech and specialized institutions, features that such discourses must have in order to carry out the pragmatic functions characteristic of their sign level.5 This focus on necessary features rather than on contingent regularities distinguishes the philosophy of language from linguistics. We shall return to the problem of distinguishing the contingent from the necessary in Section 8.2 below.

The primary tool used in this search for the necessary has been logic. As noted, logical representation applies to any sentence, and is neither restricted to sentences of certain natural languages, nor to sentences that have a certain type of subject matter. Inferences by means of logical symbolism include those from daily conversation and the specialized discourses of mathematics, the natural sciences, and law. The scope of logic thus extends to the levels of both natural and specialized languages. The principles on which deductive logic is based also are means of understanding relationships between the uses of individual sentences and sentences as occurring within the contexts of deductive inferences. The individual sentence “John is sitting” can at one time be used to make a true statement; at another, when John stands up, the statement would be judged

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false. But as occurring in the inference, “John is sitting; therefore, he is sitting” the truth value of the proposition being expressed must be assumed to remain constant. This requirement is formulated as the principle of identity, one of the two foundations of deductive logic.

The other foundation is the principle of bivalence, the principle that a proposition must be either true or false. It cannot be applied to individual sentences, for we may have insufficient evidence for asserting with confidence a sentence such as “It will rain tomorrow”, and can only assign to it a probability. Physicists are currently not able to assert or deny “Dark matter is causing the expansion of the universe”, and thus cannot confidently judge this to be true or false. But when evaluating the validity of deductive inferences in which these sentences occur, we must assign them only these values. This is because deductive validity is defined as a relation between premisses and conclusion that holds under the condition that if the premisses were to be true, the conclusion must be also. Evaluation for validity assesses only a relation between premisses and conclusion, not their factual truth or falsity. Since the hypothetical “if” used in evaluation does not require any assertion of premisses or conclusion, adequacy of evidence and the probability of an event are irrelevant to the task of evaluation. Similar considerations apply to isolated imperatives and those embedded within inferential contexts. It is possible for someone to neither obey nor disobey the imperative “Lift up the car”, as he may lack the strength or the opportunity for carrying out the command. But these violations of bivalence as applied to imperatives are irrelevant to the evaluation of the inference “Lift up the car and place it on the rack; therefore, lift up the car”. In assessing this inference from a conjunction to a conjunct as valid we are determining only that if the premisses were obeyed, the conclusion would have to be also. Considerations of ability and opportunity are irrelevant to any determination of this entailment relation.

The centrality of logic to philosophy as itself a special discipline is derived from the descriptive role that philosophy performs within contemporary society, the role of determining relationships between different institutionalized specialties and of relating features of the uses of natural language with the languages used within these specialties. For this, the abstractness of logic provides a valuable tool.

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3

Descriptive Frameworks

Discourse frameworks are the structures of specific discourses and the means by which we classify them. We turn now to an outline of some features of descriptive frameworks that provide these structures for descriptive conclusions. Frameworks in general can be characterized in different ways. The most basic is in terms of the ways by which the assertion or acceptance of conclusions is justified, that is, by the rules used to derive conclusions from premisses, what Wilfrid Sellars terms the “logical space of reasons.”6 We can use this characterization to distinguish descriptive frameworks from normative frameworks appealing to desires and aversions in assertions of what actions ought to be performed, frameworks to be discussed below in Chapters 6 and 7. We can also distinguish descriptive frameworks by the purposes for which they are used, their means of introducing nouns used as subject terms and identifying their referents or designata, and by the vocabularies (lexicons) employed within them. As an example, the framework for discourses used within the natural sciences is characterized by the purpose of providing information about our environment, by their methods of term introduction and reference, and by application of empirical methods of evaluation using inductive rules of inference. The discourses themselves are combinations of sentences formed from lexical items, some of which are unique to a specialty, others shared with specializations within other sciences and occurring in natural languages. In these respects, the framework differs from those for mathematics and fictional discourse. Within the framework of the sciences we can distinguish the sub-frameworks of such specific sciences as physics and zoology, each with its own distinctive (though overlapping) vocabulary and means of term introduction and reference. Frameworks are specializations of features typically combined within natural language discourses in complex ways. These combinations result in overlaps between descriptive frameworks proper and what in the second section of this chapter I distinguish as overlapping frameworks with distinctive standards of justification. One of them, the mental transactional framework in which we describe the mental states of ourselves and others,

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overlaps in ways that create controversies to be discussed in the next chapter.

3.1. Carnap’s Internal/External Distinction

The concept of a discourse framework was introduced by Rudolf Carnap in his seminal paper “Empiricism, Semantics, and Ontology,” though his terminology is different from that employed here.7 Carnap applies this concept to sentences within inferential contexts as represented by the symbolism of modern predicate logic. Consider the sentences “All men are mortal” and “All prime numbers are divisible by themselves”. The first would be paraphrased, as we have seen in Section 2.3, by “All (material) things are such that if they are men, they are mortal” and represented by ∀x (Mx→Px), with the first occurrence of the variable x representing the introduced subject “material thing” and the second and third occurrences the anaphoric pronoun “they”. Such a representation guarantees a common topic for any inference in which the sentence might occur. This sentence is formulated within what Carnap refers to as the “material thing language.” The second sentence, “All prime numbers are divisible by themselves”, would be paraphrased by “All numbers are such that if they are prime, they are divisible by themselves” and represented, let’s say, by ∀x (Px→Dx). Here the first occurrence of x represents the subject “number” as introduced by the paraphrase. Such a sentence is formulated within what Carnap referred to as the “number language.” As noted above, general subjects such as “material thing” and “number” are introduced by paraphrase in order to insure that there is a common subject for all sentences occurring within general kinds of inferences. The referents or designata of these common subjects are said to be the domains of the variables used in the symbolic representations.

These introduced general subjects we shall refer to as category terms, terms that demarcate descriptive language frameworks. In addition to “material thing” and “number”, category terms include “fictional object”. Central to any general discourse framework are the methods by which subject terms are used to identify their referents or designata and the standards used for acceptance and rejection of sentences. For this reason, within the material thing framework we can distinguish as category terms “event” and “process” referring to what depends on persistent material things for their identification. To identify an event or a process requires that it be locatable within a spatial and temporal framework relative to previously identifiable individuals. The flash of

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lightning occurring last night is identified relative to the tree that it struck or its location relative to earth coordinates and a time measured relative to periodic motions of material bodies. The fire that burned yesterday is located relative to the house or forest in which it took place and within a temporal interval identified by the rotation of the earth relative to the sun. Once identified, the truth or falsity of sentences referring to events and processes is determined by the empirical standards of the material thing framework. Events and processes can serve as the domains of variables used to represent inferences, but because of this dependence on material things for identification and the empirical form of evaluation used, the terms “event” and “process” should be regarded as category terms within the material thing discourse framework.

It is inaccurate to say that category terms demarcate distinct languages, for we distinguish languages by their lexicons and rules for combining phonemes into morphemes and morphemes as minimal meaningful elements into sentences. As applied to natural languages, this provides us a way of distinguishing English from French and both these modern languages from the languages of the Kootenay, Ojibawa, and Natick tribes of Native Americans. In this sense of language as lexicon and formation rules, both “All men are mortal” and “All prime numbers are divisible by themselves” should be regarded as formulated within the English language. What distinguishes the two sentences are the purposes with which they are used, their lexicons when specialized, the distinctive ways nouns are introduced and their referents or designata are identified, and the ways we justify assertions about their truth or falsity. It is misleading to describe these differences as due to the sentences being formulated within two languages, though specialization of lexicons is relevant to the way in which we distinguish language frameworks and the specializations themselves can be a way of demarcating sub-frameworks within a given framework. For these reasons, in contrast to Carnap, I shall be referring to the material thing/number contrast as one holding between frameworks, not languages.

Category terms stand at the top of a hierarchy of nouns subordinate to them with decreasing ranges of reference or designation. For example, subordinate to the category term “material thing” are the terms “macroscopic thing”, “organism”, “person”, “Greek”, “Athenian”, and “Socrates”, with the proper names like “Socrates” being at the lowest limit of the hierarchy. Subordinate to “event” would be terms such as “war”, “world war”, and “World War I”. Subordinate to the category term “number” would be the noun phrases “integer”, “positive integer”, “prime number”, “prime number greater than 1,000”, and the numeral “1,009”

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designating a position in an ordered series. Distinguishing category terms from the terms subordinate to them is the fact that the objects that category terms refer to or designate cannot be counted. There is no answer to a question about the number of material things in a given room, and the question is therefore meaningless. It becomes answerable only when we specify whether we are being asked to count atoms, molecules, tables, or persons. We must specify whether “number” is to be understood as an integer, rational number, or real number before we can count numbers within an interval such as that between the integers 0 and 3. Similar considerations hold for the category terms “event”, “process”, and “fictional object”. There are no answers to the questions “How many events or processes occurred yesterday?” and “How many fictional objects are in Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake?”, though we can answer the questions “How many explosions occurred yesterday?”, “How many fires burned last night?”, and “How many central protagonists are there in the novel?”.

It might be thought that there is a single abstract term “object” to which category terms are themselves subordinate. We might then paraphrase sentences such as “All material things have spatial location” and “All numbers have a successor” by “Every object is such that if it is a material thing it has spatial location” and “Every object is such that if it is a number it has a successor”. But “object” is of such abstract generality as to deprive it of content. It must be conceived of as a placeholder for any subject of a sentence, not itself as a means of reference or designation. That this is so is indicated by questions about existence that we are able to pose and answer. As Carnap noted, meaningful existence questions are questions internal to a given discourse framework, for only these questions are capable of answers.8 The questions “Do duckbilled platypuses exist?” and “Is there a prime number greater than 1,000?” are answerable within the discourse frameworks of material things and numbers. The answer to the first would be “Duckbilled platypuses exist”, as paraphrased by “There exists a material thing such that it is a duckbilled platypus” and represented by ∃x Dx. The answer to the second would be “There exists a prime number greater than 1,000”, which is paraphrased by “There exists a number such that it is greater than 1,000” and symbolized, let’s say, by ∃x Px. Identification of individuals as a fitting the descriptions D and P will provide answers because of the validity of the inference called “existential generalization,” the inference from an instance with an attribute P to the conclusion that Ps exist of the form Pa ∴∃x Px. Thus, on locating a duckbilled platypus in Australia we can infer from “This is a platypus” to “Platypuses exist”. By applying the

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definition of prime number (a number divisible only by itself and 1), we establish 1,009 as a prime number. We can then infer that prime numbers greater than 1,000 exist. In each case, the way we identify an individual determines the respective meaning of “exists” within a discourse framework. “Exists” has a different meaning for the material thing framework than it does for the number framework because the ways we identify individuals and justify attributions applied to them differs for the two frameworks. Similar considerations apply to other mathematical objects such as geometrical objects designated by the category term “spatial object” and to the objects designated within other frameworks. There are answers to the questions “Do triangles exist?”, “Is there a villain in the play?” because we have means of identifying individual triangles and fictional villains and determining the truth of answers.

When “object” is introduced as a subject by paraphrase, we get a very different result. Carnap contrasts answerable existence questions posed within the material thing and number frameworks to external questions about the existence of the referents or designata of category terms. The questions “Do material things exist?” and “Do numbers exist?” are unanswerable and thus meaningless, since they assume that “exists” has a common meaning in the two questions. But as Carnap correctly points out, it does not. Its meaning is instead tied, as we have seen, to the means of identifying the referents or designata of subject terms, means of identification that vary with discourse frameworks. It might be thought that “This table is a material thing” constitutes an answer to “Do material things exist?”, but the answer is obviously uninformative, as the inclusion of the indexical “this” requires that answer. To be a material thing is simply to be the type of object that is at least potentially identifiable on the basis of observation and indexical reference. If the material thing framework were the only discourse framework in use, then there might be a sense in which the assertion “Only material things exist” would be true, as it constitutes simply a restatement of this uniqueness. But there are many ways in which we identify and make existence assertions, and this claim mistakenly denies these differences. Similar considerations apply to an assertion of “Fictional objects do not exist”, which modern predicate logic represents by introducing “object” by paraphrase. This might be understood to be true if the sense of “exists” in the material thing framework could be transferred over to the fictional framework. But we assent to the sentence “Iago in Shakespeare’s Othello is a villain”, and from this can conclude “Villains exist in Othello” or “There are villains in the play” as assertions within the fictional object framework. Denying the existence of fictional objects has the effect of denying a practice we

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regularly engage in. Philosophers have conceived ontology as the discipline that determines what kinds of objects exist. Carnap’s rejection of external questions about existence has the effect of denying that there is such a discipline when applied in a generalized way.

It is, of course, crucially important to distinguish within the material thing framework between what exists from what is invented, or between what we call the “real” from what is imagined or conceived. Within this framework we assert that asteroids, tables, and electrons exist and are real, while most of us deny the existence of ghosts, Loch Ness sea monsters, Martians, and Big Foots, and judge them instead to be unreal and imagined. We need to be able to distinguish the asteroid that might possibly impact our planet from an imagined asteroid in a science fiction novel. Because such distinctions are important, the sense of “exists” as used for the material thing framework assumes a certain priority, and becomes closely associated with the causal nexus relating us to our environment, with indexical reference, and with observational identification. As used by many philosophers, “reality” as the nominalization of the adjective “real” becomes synonymous with “that which exists for the material thing framework”. But it also seems to be a means of emphasizing the importance of what is communicated and to distinguish it from the imaginative and fictional. Thus, some mathematicians insist on the reality of the topics of their discourses and philosophers with theological interests sometimes use “reality” to designate the supernatural topics of religious narratives. All such applications obscure the fact that discursive language is used for many purposes and that subject identification takes a variety of forms. The discourse relativity of existence and the real is a direct reflection of this variety.

Carnap restricts his discussion of relativity to descriptive discourse, and this restriction enables him to enjoy the precision available through standard representations of modern logic. When we turn to overlapping and normative forms of discourse we face formidable difficulties of a kind that defy applications of logic, for we cannot use topics as means of distinguishing frameworks in the way possible for material things, numbers, and fictional objects. Discourse relativity in general arises from differing forms of justification that are employed as means of gaining consensus. Justifications within descriptive discourse frameworks require identification of objects, and differing forms of identification give rise to Carnap’s thesis of the relativity of existence. Justifications within normative discourses, in contrast, rely on wants and preferences that differ among communities in ways to be discussed in the last three chapters.

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3.2. Overlapping Frameworks: The Transactional and Interpretive

Within transactional discourse occur personal pronouns and names indicating the sources and addresses of communications, social relations between the two, and how their contents are to be understood. Intermediate between descriptive and normative frameworks is a type of transactional discourse for which justification is derived from that employed in the material thing framework. This quasi-descriptive form employs mental terms in association with personal pronouns, and can be labeled mental transactional discourse. It is used when we describe to another by means of avowals our sensations—what we see, hear, taste, smell, and feel—and our feelings of pain or pleasure. They are illustrated by the following two conversations, one between an optometrist and her patient looking at an eye chart through lenses, the other between a physician and patient complaining of a pain. Both are forms of mental transactional discourse.

Conversation 1Optometrist: Does the letter “E” on the chart look sharp or blurred?Patient: I see it as blurred.Optometrist: Does the letter look red or pink?Patient: It looks red to me.

Conversation 2Physician: Where do you feel a pain?Patient: I feel a pain in my stomach.

The avowals “I see it as blurred”, “It looks red to me”, and “I feel a pain in my stomach” are descriptive in form, but obviously very different from standard descriptions of the material thing framework such as “That house is on fire”. In the standard description, the subject “that house” includes the indexical “that” directing the audience’s attention to a spatially remote object that can be identified by the audience and reidentified later. Moreover, the sentence’s truth can be observationally confirmed by the audience after locating the intended referent of its subject. Both features are absent for the avowals. The pronoun “it” in “It looks red to me” clearly does not refer to what is spatially remote, and for all three avowals there is no possibility of the optometrist or physician identifying referents in the present nor of reidentifying them later. An object for a sentence in the

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material thing framework is to be understood as the referent of a subject term. Because there is no reference to the spatially remote, avowals lack objects and, without objects, identification is impossible.

Similar considerations apply to discourses in which mental terms such as “believe”, “hope”, and “want” are used in the first person. When someone says to another “I believe (hope, want) that the sun will shine tomorrow”, the sentence’s grammatical subject “I” does not refer to what is spatially remote. It instead functions as an address indicating the speaker. The only logically referring subject is “the sun” within the content radical “the sun will shine tomorrow”. Sentences of the form “I believe (hope, want) that p” may have the grammatical form of standard descriptions, but they are in fact means for speakers to convey their attitudes towards the content of the descriptive proposition p. Use of “believe” by a speaker indicates some doubt about the truth of p. More confidence is indicated by a simple assertion of p or the unqualified “I know that p” offering a guarantee of the truth of p. Similarly, use of “hope” carries with it the implication that the speaker believes that p may come about in the future. This contrasts with “wish”, which carries no such implication.

How do we evaluate a speaker’s avowals and expressions of attitudes? Clearly not in the way common for standard descriptions. For mental transactional discourse, in the absence of direct observational confirmation, the primary reliance is on trust in the speaker’s veracity and sincerity. This trust is normally bestowed in the absence of any evidence to the contrary. The congenital liar or the person who regularly uses the adjective “red” to describe what we describe with “green” would not be trusted when reporting how things look or when expressing attitudes towards propositions. But in the absence of such past problems with standard descriptions, we bestow unquestioned trust, and this is because mental transactional discourse is typically a solicitation for help on the part of a speaker. Since the optometrist’s patient is seeking to improve her vision, why would she not report accurately what she sees? Expressions of belief are qualifications of assertions and indications of hesitancy. Why would a person mislead about this qualification? Suppose someone says “I believe the pond’s ice is a foot thick”, is an avid skater who brought his ice skates to the pond, but refuses to go out on the ice? Does the behavioral evidence of refusal demonstrate that the speaker is insincere and does not actually believe that the ice is safe? Not at all, for the choice of “believe” itself indicates hesitancy, and his avowal is consistent with his behavior. We would certainly in such cases accord priority to the first

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person expression, and allow it to override behavioral evidence to the contrary.

There is another feature of transactional discourse in general that serves to distinguish it from descriptive discourse proper. Consider the accusation that Betty might direct at Bill if he did not keep his promise to get some printer paper for her when he went shopping. When she next sees him, it may take the form of saying “You promised to bring some paper. Where is it?” Use of the first person pronoun in making a promise carries with it a responsibility for keeping commitments and makes it possible to assess praise and blame. “You should have brought some paper” can be asserted by Betty to Bill on the basis of his earlier promise. As the discourse framework in which responsibility is assumed, this feature of the transactional has the effect of forming additional overlaps between it and normative frameworks. The occurrence of personal addressing pronouns and psychological verbs such as “want” and “prefer” in normative discourses is one overlap. The normative “ought” and “should” applied to transactional commitments is another. When in the next chapter we turn to an assessment of the reliabilist theory of knowledge, we shall see that attributions of knowledge are accompanied by similar assumptions of responsibility and the potential for assessments of praise and blame.

Features of mental transactional discourse that distinguish it from material thing discourse were extensively discussed in the last half of the past century. Especially puzzling about mental discourse is its use of words with meanings derived from material thing discourse. The meaning of the word “red” used by the patient to say “It looks red to me” is parasitic on its meaning when used to say “That rose is red”, for it is only by way of its public application that it will have the same meaning for speaker and hearer. This borrowing of vocabulary misleads us into thinking that because standard descriptive language is used to refer to identifiable objects, sensations are a type of object identifiable only to those who have them, a type of private mental object that we label a “particular idea,” “image,” or (by Nelson Goodman) a “quale.” Exposure of this error was one of the most important legacies left by philosophers such as Austin, Ryle, and Wittgenstein, and serves as a warning against any attempts to transfer features of one form of discourse used for a certain purpose to other forms whose uses are very different.

Besides mental transactional discourse, there is a second kind of discourse framework in which quasi-descriptions occur. This is interpretive discourse as used in both daily life and within institutions responsible for selecting from and interpreting a society’s literary and

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artistic tradition. Interpretation is conducted within what is referred to as hermeneutics. It takes the form of interpreting meanings of words in everyday language and specifying what passages in discursive works such as poems, novels, and plays mean, represent, or symbolize. It is also applied to what is meant or represented in the visual arts (paintings and sculpture), music, dance, and even architecture. Like the mental transactional, the grammatical form of sentences formulated within this framework such as “The word “bachelor” means “unmarried man” suggests that the relation of word to its meaning is one between word and an object, an object alternatively called by philosophers “forms,” “essences,” “concepts” or “abstract ideas.” But to interpret the meaning of a word within languages in use is to state a conventional rule of language. It relates the word to other words, not to a distinct object, and to the extent that a word is governed by a conventional rule its meaning is not subject to individual variation. Such variation is apparent, however, in the interpretation of passages of a literary work and statements about what an artistic work represents or means, and this becomes clear in differences between the ways we evaluate statements of conventional rules and claims made in interpretive studies. On the basis of shared linguistic intuitions, consensus is usually reached about descriptions of rules. Only in special cases, however, are interpretations of about literary and art works so definitely judged, with most subject to much variability among those making these judgments. Interpreters state what the passages and works mean to them, and there is no requirement that they mean the same to us. We may, however, come to accept their interpretations, sometimes because of their internal plausibility as based on historical studies or consistency with other passages of a text, sometimes because of the prestige and authority of their institutional affiliations.

Nelson Goodman labels as “worlds” both the forms of discourse used by the novelist and scientist and the visual and auditory forms created by painters, sculptors, and choreographers and auditory forms created by musical composers.9 The term “world”, as Goodman uses it, can also be extended to the combination of dialogue and visual representations of plays and film productions. Since it is restricted to the linguistic, a discourse framework is clearly not a world in Goodman’s wider sense, though interpretive studies of his nonlinguistic worlds of the visual arts and music are conducted within the interpretive discourse framework in the way just sketched. This feature of interpretive discourse applied to arts and literature overlaps with interpretations of religious narratives. As for interpretations of literature and the arts, interpretations by leaders of religious institutions can be controversial, for religious narratives perform

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the role of sanctifying moral standards and rights to hold political power that are in dispute. There will be more on this topic when we turn to normative frameworks in Chapters 6 and 7.

3.3. Term Introduction and Identification

To summarize the preceding: Everyday conversations using “ordinary language” are typically motley combinations of sentences used for a variety of purposes. Within them we can distinguish discourse blocks with the features of a certain framework. There are three general types of discourse frameworks. First, there is the general descriptive framework in which occur combinations of sentences in the indicative mood. For discourses conducted within this framework, we can distinguish blocks by the topics of a given discourse, that is, the types of objects referred to or designated by subjects of constituent sentences. Under the general heading of the descriptive we can distinguish, as we have seen, material thing (including event, process, and field), fictional object, and mathematical object frameworks. Second, we can distinguish general types of frameworks employing sentences that are grammatically in the indicative mood, but which are quasi-descriptions to which we cannot assign objects. These quasi-descriptive frameworks include the mental transactional and interpretive frameworks with overlapping aspects of the descriptive. And finally, we can distinguish normative frameworks whose purpose is to guide conduct, the framework in which we discuss what is the required or right thing to do, what we should do to best satisfy our own individual wants or wants we share with others. Under this general heading, we can distinguish the frameworks of moral, legal, and political systems. In this chapter and the next the focus is on the first two headings in this tripartite classification.

The Material Thing Framework. The features of this framework have been extensively discussed by philosophers in the past century. Its general purpose is to provide information about an environment to which we are causally related, either the local environment of the speaker and audience or a remote environment that extends finally to all that materially or physically exists. Subjects of constituent sentences of material thing discourses are terms introduced into a language in two principal ways. They may have been introduced by direct ostension, often when a member of a linguistic community with a special social position or prestige bestows a name or noun on an individual thing or place or on a kind of thing, and the reference of the term is transmitted to other users. Thus, the

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names “Aristotle” and “Athens” were baptismally introduced, and historically transmitted into the present after translation into English, and the nouns “gold” and “goose” introduced into English as natural kind terms. Nouns not introduced by ostension are introduced by definitions depending on those that have been, as the word “gander” is defined by “female goose” and incorporated into the English lexicon. This introduction by definition is typically to achieve economy of expression, as it is simpler to have one word rather than a combination of several for objects that are common topics. Once introduced, meanings of terms used in subject position change with the transfer to them of the meanings of predicates ascribed to them. Since there is general community acceptance of “Aristotle was a philosopher who was the tutor of Alexander the Great and the author of Nicomachean Ethics”, the meaning of the sentence’s subject “Aristotle” comes to includes the meanings of these predicates. After transfer, the name expresses the meaning of the definite description “the philosopher who was tutor of Alexander and author of Nicomachean Ethics”.

Use of the material thing framework enables descriptions of other empirically identifiable objects such as events, processes, and fields. We locate an explosion relative to a spatial-temporal framework constructed through the identification of persistent material things; it is the explosion taking place at a location defined by this framework and at a time specified relative to a periodic motion of some material body. Similarly, the fire was at a locatable house; the magnetic or gravitational field is located between two bodies with mass. What Strawson has termed the “basic particulars” of any discourse with referring subjects must be identifiable to both speakers and audience by virtue of this persistence through time.

Sub-frameworks of the material thing framework include those for natural language descriptions and the frameworks of the special sciences. Choice between the frameworks is dictated by the purposes of a description. For the rough and ready distinctions of everyday communication, we choose natural language terms such as “water”, for they enable us to discriminate between liquids such as water and wine at the dinner table. Natural language adjectives such as “red” and “orange” enable discriminations between apples and oranges. For more exact distinctions, we rely on terms from the special sciences such as “H2O”, for they enable discriminations such as those between common (or light) water and heavy water (deuterium oxide) with molecular structure D2O. Measurement of properties such as size, shape, and weight enables discriminations limited only by the accuracy of measuring instruments.

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For classificatory sciences such as zoology and botany, terms are introduced by both ostension and definition. As for natural terms, their nouns in subject position refer to what can be located in space and time, to what are capable of being observationally identified and later reidentified. For the sub-framework of theoretical sciences such as biochemistry and nuclear physics, in contrast, introduction of theoretical terms such as “gene” and “atom” may be guided by requirements of theories in which they occur, with observational identification only potential. Thus “gene” and “atom” were first introduced in theories explaining a variety of phenomena, theories that may have initially lacked a decisive experimental test. It was only later with the advent of electron microscopes and X-ray diffraction devices that it was possible for investigators to assert on the basis of observations made with these instruments “That is a gene” or “That is an atom”. “Tetraquark” is a term introduced into particle physics to stand for an exotic form of meson with four constituent quarks. To date (2013), there has been no observational identification of this theoretical entity, and some physicists doubt its existence. Yet because there is potential identification, the term is admissible within the discourses of theoretical physics. Terms might also refer to what has existed in the past and will exist in the future, as when we refer to passenger pigeons or to the unborn future heirs of the British royal family. For past identification, we rely on the memory of witnesses or the testimony of historical sources; for the future, identification waits on survivors of a present generation or on generations to come. If a term purports to refer but there is no possibility of observational identification in any of these ways, then it is inadmissible within the discourses of the material thing framework.

The justification of assertions made within this framework and the evaluation of the assertions made by others also require the possibility of observation, though for theoretical sciences initial tentative acceptance may be based solely on the explanatory power and relative simplicity of a theory. As for term introduction and identification, there are differences between evaluative standards used at the different levels of daily conversation and the special sciences. Where risks of a mistake are minimal, normally we require little or no justification from informants and simply trust their veracity. Where risks are greater, we ask for inferential justification, and precautions against error can be very demanding, as when experiments are repeated by other investigators or a scientific hypothesis tested within a scientific community prior to acceptance. We usually rely on trust when we accept the statements of others as true, whether those of our neighbors or experts within the scientific community.

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But if these are assertions within discourses of the material thing framework, we retain the option of observational check-up for assertions from our neighbors, while trusting the scientific community to apply its empirical standards. This form of qualified trust is very different from that bestowed on assertions within the mental transactional framework.

When consensus has been reached within a community on the truth of a sentence of the material thing framework, this sentence is said to correspond to a fact that is in some sense independent of the sentence describing it. There is a “fact of the matter,” as philosophers like to say, independently of any assertion of the sentence “It is raining”, and some relationship of correspondence between the utterance of the sentence on a certain occasion and this fact determines the sentence’s truth or falsity. This terminology is simply a recognition of the special features of this framework in the use of rule-governed terms whose use is fixed by convention, ostension as a means of introducing terms, potential observational identification of referents of subjects, indexical reference to a causally related environment that is independent of any observer, and this framework’s requirement that evaluation of assertions requires at least the possibility of relating them to what is observed. That there are no facts in the literal sense to which sentences correspond is shown by the different ways we describe things. I could say of the table before me “This table is brown”, with the fact to which it purportedly corresponds to being the fact that the table is brown. But I could also say “This is brown” or simply assert “Brown”, accompanied by a pointing gesture. Are there then three facts? Clearly all three sentences are being used to make the same assertion about the table. The subject “this table” in “This table is brown” is simply a means to direct attention to what the predicate “is brown” is being ascribed, the table causally related to both myself as speaker and my audience. The adjective “brown” is used to discriminate the referent from other objects colored black, red, orange, yellow, or … . The subject’s referent is not itself a component of a fact consisting of itself plus some property. But we do need to contrast this use of a subject term to identify that to which we are causally related from uses of subjects within fictional, mathematical, and normative frameworks, and the language of “correspondence” and “facts” is innocent if understood as designed for this purpose.

Fictional Objects. How subject term introduction and identification within fiction differ from what has just been described is obvious. Here we contrast the designation by means of descriptive context of subject terms occurring in fiction to the reference of subjects within material language discourse to what can be at least potentially located in space and time. The

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names of characters and places of a story, novel, or play are introduced internally through discourses and then identified by descriptions that are added. For example, a novel may begin with the sentence sequence “Jacob was a tall man over six feet, with a gaunt face decorated by a handlebar mustache. He had been married six years to a wife who had borne him two sons”. The name “Jacob” is then synonymous through this passage to the description “the tall mustached man over six feet with wife and two sons”. Where the name reoccurs later in the novel, readers would identify what “Jacob” designates by this definite description; the description fixes its designatum. As more descriptions are added, the identifying descriptions correspondingly expand. The truth of assertions that might be made about Jacob would be determined on the basis of their consistency (or coherence) with descriptions provided within the novel, often in conjunction with general background knowledge based on empirical methods. On these grounds, it would be false to say that Jacob is a clean-shaven bachelor. Such is our only means of evaluation, since there is no possibility of observational identification.

Of course, not all terms occurring in fiction designate. While the names of protagonists in novels are internally introduced and then develop meaning through later descriptions, it is common for names of places and well known individuals to be introduced that do refer to what has been externally introduced by ostension and can be observationally identified. The place name “Nantucket” occurs in Melville’s Moby Dick, while both “Chicago” and “Lincoln” occur in Saul Bellow’s Herzog as means of providing background to the reader. This combination of reference with fictional designation is common in novels generally.

Historical fiction is a form of fiction that illustrates a more complex overlap with the material thing framework. A historical work formulated within this framework purports to provide a true description of deceased individuals and past events. The names occurring in it have been transmitted into the present through preserved historical records, referring to temporally remote individuals who can be identified now through definite descriptions. Napoleon is thus identified by a description such as “the general who ruled France in the early nineteenth century, invaded Russia, and was defeated at Waterloo”. These descriptions are derived from attributions accepted as true by historians on the basis of historical evidence, often in the form of the preserved testimony of contemporaries. Within Robert Graves’s historical novel I, Claudius occur names such as “Claudius”, “Augustus”, “Octavia”, and “Tiberius” that have been transmitted into the present by preservation of the same historical records used for histories of the Roman Empire. But the novel does not purport to

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provide true descriptions of historical events subject to the evaluative standards of the material thing framework. Its purpose is to entertain and depict the moral strengths and weaknesses of its central characters, and we therefore evaluate it very differently from historical accounts, expecting only loose consistency with the historical record and some license in its treatment of conversations and details. It is thus a type of hybrid fiction with overlaps to histories formulated within the material thing framework provided by the reference of its names.

More complex still are overlaps occurring in narratives of the major religious traditions describing encounters and relationships between historical individuals and the supernatural. The religious narrative discourse framework seems to be used primarily for the purpose of instilling hope, reinforcing the moral message of the historical individuals central to the narratives, promoting a sense of group identity of the faithful through continuity with the past, and conveying a sense of self-worth and confidence for these faithful through this identity. Names of these historical individuals function much as they do for the protagonists of historical fiction, while names of supernatural entities—whether deceased ancestors surviving as spirits into the present, the many deities of polytheism, or the single deity of monotheism—are in principle incapable of observational identification. Because the purposes of this framework are very different from historical fiction, however, its discourses must be evaluated on a different basis, one that recognizes the purposes it is designed to serve. To the extent that these narratives include cosmogonies reinforcing the status of deities in the narratives there is conflict with cosmologies formulated within the material thing framework. This conflict is one several sources of philosophical controversies that will be discussed below.

Mathematical Objects. Terms such as “square”, “circle”, and “line” and counting modifiers such as “two” and “fifteen” are found in natural languages prior to mathematics developing as a discipline within the ancient civilizations of Babylon, Egypt, India, China, and Greece, and the later Islamic civilizations of the medieval period. This development introduced abstract definitions of objects first designated by the natural language terms. At first, mathematics developed to solve practical problems arising in land measurement (“geometry” is etymologically derived from “geo-metrics”), engineering projects, and predictions of seasonal changes related to crop harvests, problems whose solution required increasing accuracy of measurement. It then became systematized through the formulation of definitions, axioms, and proofs of theorems, with the results of this systematization giving rise to sometimes

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unexpected applications. This systematization involves the acceptance of certain terms as primitives whose original meanings are derived from a natural language. Then definitions and axioms are stated using these primitives, and finally theorems proved from axioms that ascribe further attributes to the mathematical objects. A mathematical system is understood to be such a combination of definitions, axioms, and proofs.

Here are two familiar examples of systematization. Hilbert’s axiomatization of Euclidean geometry takes as primitives the concepts of a point, straight line, and plane. An axiom is then added that asserts that any two distinct points A and B determine a straight line. A triangle is defined as a closed coplanar figure having exactly three sides. From the definition and the axiom in conjunction with other axioms is proved the theorem that the sum of the interior angles of a triangle is equal to 180 degrees, the degrees of a semi-circle. For number theory, it is common for the concept of a positive integer (or natural number) to be taken as a primitive, with 0 as the base element, and succeeding integers 1, 2, 3, … generated by a successor relation from this base. Then axioms are stated that include the propositions that if a and b are integers, then a + b is an integer and a + b = b + a (the law of commutation). From these axioms and definitions of types of numbers (rational, real, imaginary, prime, etc.), theorems stating the attributes of numbers are asserted. Assertions of theorems about spatial objects such as triangles or about numbers are evaluated by determining whether the proof meets the standards of the mathematical community, that is, whether successive steps terminating in a theorem or corollary can be justified by these standards.10 The effect of the proof of a theorem is to extend further the understood meaning of its subject. Thus, “triangle” may initially be defined by the expression “a closed coplanar figure having three sides”. After the proof of its interior angles, it becomes synonymous with “a closed coplanar figure having three sides whose interior angles equal 180 degrees”. In number theory, a prime number is initially defined as a number divisible without remainder only by itself and 1. Within number theory, it has since been proven that the probability that any number n being prime is inversely proportional to the number of n’s digits, which allows us to predict many fewer primes with 1, 2, and 3 digits between 0 and 1,000 than the four-digit primes between 1,000 and 2,000, and many still fewer five-digit primes between 10,000 and 11,000. After the discovery of the proof, there is predicate/subject meaning transfer, and the term “prime number” became synonymous with the definite description “the number divisible without remainder only by itself and 1 and whose probability of occurrence varies inversely to its number of digits”.

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As for fiction, terms occurring within mathematical systems such as “triangle”, “prime number”, and the numeral “1,009” designate rather than refer to what is observationally identifiable. They are not introduced into these discourses by baptism and then causally transmitted, but instead introduced by explicit definitions and the implicit definitions provided by axioms. Identification of their objects is on the basis of a description specified through definitions, axioms, or proved through theorems, as we identify the number 1,009 as a prime by applying its factoring definition. Truth is determined in mathematics, not on the basis of observational identification, but on the basis of proofs meeting standards accepted by mathematicians.

These similarities have been emphasized by some philosophers in advocating what is called a “fictionalist theory of mathematics” that assimilates the discourses of mathematics to those of fiction. But there are clearly differences between the two. The meanings of mathematical primitive terms such as “point”, “line”, and “number” are initially derived from descriptive uses of natural languages. This provides an initial application of mathematics to the same objects described by material thing discourses, and this application is continued after the idealization of natural language terms such as “point”, “line”, and “number” through the development of a mathematical system. It is also continued by incorporating mathematical symbolism into the formulation of scientific laws and theories, and by using algorithms of algebra and calculus to predict specific observable consequences.11 The purpose of fiction to entertain, heighten sensitivity to social relationships, and on occasion to morally instruct is clearly very different from that of mathematics, which is to develop forms of symbolism and proof that enable the formulation of increasingly more comprehensive empirical theories testable by greater precision of measurement. To attempt to incorporate mathematics within the discourse framework of fiction obscures these basic differences.

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4

Reductionist Projects

The meaning of the term “reductionism” shifted during the past century. It was initially applied to Bertrand Russell’s project of applying the representations of modern predicate logic to certain individual sentences with philosophical implications, a project later elaborated on by Quine in “On What There Is” and Ryle in “On Systematically Misleading Expressions.” Later, in the last half of this century, reductionism became understood as the project of translating mental terms such as “pain” and “belief” into the terminology of the material thing framework, a translation that would remove mentality from a mysterious status established for it by religion and philosophy and make it amenable to the empirical methods of the natural sciences. Such reductions were first stated in terms of behavioral responses to types of environmental stimuli and then as functional descriptions using forms of mental/physical identities. Finally, reductionism has become associated with eliminating normative evaluations in assessing knowledge, a project known as “reliabilism.” The first three sections of this chapter review these forms of reduction and raise objections to identity and reliabilist formulations. In the final section, I argue that persistent controversies associated with reductionist projects should be understood as discourse framework boundary disputes.

4.1. Logical Paraphrase

We saw in Section 2.2 how the reduction of a sentence S1 to another S2 can take the form of a paraphrase of S1 that replaces its grammatical subject with a logical subject in S2 in such a way that the truth value of S1 is preserved in S2. On the assumption that meaning is determined by truth conditions, if truth is preserved, S2 can be said to mean the same as S1, while avoiding its misleading ontological implications. There is general consensus that this type of logical paraphrase is successful when applied to nominalizations occurring as grammatical subjects. The nominalization of the adjective “red” is the abstract noun “redness”. Having nominalized the adjective, we can formulate the true sentence “Redness is a color”,

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with “redness” as the grammatical subject. The apparent logical form of this singular sentence is a is P, or Pa when logically represented by modern symbolism. But what is the reference of its singular subject “redness”? In classical metaphysical systems dating back to ancient Greek and Medieval periods, the referent has been thought to be a Platonic Form or mental concept. But “Redness is a color” is formulated within the material thing framework, and such metaphysical systems violate this framework’s requirement of observational identification. Controversies regarding the status of Forms and concepts as “transcendent” entities are generated. These can be avoided by paraphrasing “Redness is a color” in a way that eliminates the need to postulate such entities. The category term “material thing” is introduced to replace the singular subject “redness”, and the abstract noun is then converted to the predicate “is red”. After this replacement and conversion, the paraphrased sentence becomes “Every (material) thing that is red is colored”, and is represented by ∀x (Rx→Cx). This preserves the truth value of the original and avoids controversial ontologies of the kind that Quine calls “bloated.”

Equally successful is Russell’s reductive paraphrase of sentences with “exists” as predicates, sentences such as “Duckbill platypuses exist” and “Unicorns do not exist”. The first of these is paraphrased by converting its general subject to a predicate, introducing “material thing” as subject, and converting “exists” from predicate to quantifier. “Duckbill platypuses exist” then becomes “At least one (material) thing is a duckbill platypus”, and is represented by ∃xDx. “Unicorns do not exist” is paraphrased by “It is not the case that there exists a thing which is a unicorn” and represented by ∼∃xUx. Grammatically, the sentences seem to be referring to platypuses and unicorns, but logically they are sentences formulated within the material thing discourse framework whose subjects are the category term “material thing”. For singular existence sentences such as “Bill Clinton exists”, Russell first replaced the name with a definite description that expresses an identifying combination of attributes, as “the President of the United States who authorized NATO”s bombing of Yugoslavia” might be used to identify the referent of “Bill Clinton”. This definite description is then converted to a predicate, and “Bill Clinton exists” is reduced by paraphrase to “There exists exactly one thing that is a U. S. President and authorized NATO’s bombing of Yugoslavia”. As before, the category term is introduced as subject, and “exists” is removed from its predicate position to become a quantifier. “Satan does not exist” would be paraphrased in a similar manner, with a definite description

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replacing “Satan” converted into a predicate, and “thing” introduced as subject.

The original sentences from which these paraphrases are derived are assumed to be formulated within the material thing framework, and this permits the introduction of the category term “thing”. Not all intra-framework reductions preserve the truth of their originals, however, and when they don’t they must be rejected. Russell paraphrased the sentence “The present king of France is wise” by “There is exactly one thing which is the present of king of France and that thing is wise”. The expression “there is exactly one thing which is the present king of France” can be rephrased as asserting that there is at least one king and at most one, and represented by ∃x [Kx ⋀ y(Ky→y=x)]. The paraphrased original ∀sentence then becomes ∃x {[Kx ⋀ y(Ky→y=x)] ∀ ⋀ Wx]}. This sentence is false, since ∃x Kx is false; there is no present king of France. But in his essay “On Referring,” Strawson successfully argues that the original sentence is neither true or false within the material thing framework. Assigning a truth value within this framework requires first identifying the referent of a subject, and this is impossible. Failing to preserve the truth value of the original, the meaning of the original sentence is not preserved, and the reduction fails.

Though there are exceptions like this where truth value is not preserved, intra-framework reductions of the kind Russell proposed are generally successful, for they allow introduction of the category term appropriate to the framework. The situation is very different, however, for cross-framework reductions, reductive paraphrases of sentences formulated in one framework into sentences of another. To take some obvious examples, the sentence “There is a prime number greater than 1,000” expresses a true proposition. We establish its truth after identifying 1,009 as a prime by applying a factoring test. Paraphrasing it by introducing “material thing” as subject would produce “There is a material thing which is a prime number and greater than 1,000” of the form ∃x (Px ⋀ Gx). This is obviously false, and so truth is not preserved by the paraphrase. Similarly, “There is a villain in Shakespeare’s Othello” is judged to be true as a consequence of our acceptance of “Iago is a villain”. But as reduced to the sentence “There is a material thing which is a villain in Othello” it becomes false. In both cases, the mistake is to introduce as subject “material thing” rather than the category term appropriate to the framework in which the original sentences are formulated.

For both these examples of assertions within the number and fictional object frameworks, the discourse contexts in which the individual

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sentences occur make it evident that paraphrases into the material thing framework cannot be applied. Where there are complex overlaps between discourse frameworks the success or failure of reductions is less obvious. This is especially true for attempts that have been made to evaluate the religious narratives of religious traditions using empirical standards derived from the material thing framework. In the present, religious narratives serve important social roles that differ from the role of the sciences in providing information about our environment. But these narratives also include cosmogonies employing descriptive language characteristic of the material framework, narratives used to explain the origins of the universe and the emergence of the human species, as the cosmogony of the Hebrew Book of Genesis is included in the narratives of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. This descriptive cosmogony provided an explanation of origins before the advent of experimental science, and has the effect of reinforcing the status of the Yahweh, God, or Allah of these traditions as the sources of moral laws and hope.

This complex combination of descriptive uses of language with other uses is illustrated by the following passage from the Exodus. It describes the God of the Hebrews, referred to by “the Lord”, parting the waters of the Red Sea in order that His people might find safe passage.

Then Moses stretched out his hand over the sea, and all that night the Lord drove the sea back with a strong east wind and turned it into dry land. The waters were divided, and the Israelites went through the sea on dry ground, with a wall of water on their right and on their left.

To accept this narrative as true is to accept “God (the Lord) drove the sea back” and the related existential generalization “God (the Lord) exists”. The sense of “exists” is derived from that of the singular description of the deity and its method of identification through the context of the Scriptures. As for the previous examples, acceptances of both truth and existence are relative to the discourse framework in which the Exodus is formulated, a framework that carries with it special senses of “true” and “exists”. Of course, acceptance is not guided by the empirical standards of descriptive discourse, nor to those of historical fiction. For this reason, it seems futile to attempt to reduce by paraphrase the Exodus passage into either of these frameworks. We should also reject the verdict of logical positivism that the passage is cognitively meaningless because reduction to the material framework is impossible. All of us understand perfectly well what is being expressed. Believers use it to be inspired by a

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hope for a future guided by some supernatural influence, a sense of the importance of the moral code developed by Moses, by a desire to identify with a community that can be traced back to Moses and his ancestors, and by the self-esteem derived from this identification with the “chosen people.” Acceptance by the believer of the passage as true and of “God exists” should be understood as justified for them on the basis of it serving these purposes. Unless these purposes come into conflict with purposes served by other discourse frameworks, including those served by the material thing framework, we have no grounds for rejecting an assertion of divine existence as false.

Paraphrase of sentences within one framework into those of another represents only one form of reduction. Another is provided by metaphysical identity sentences, and to these we now turn. As for reductive paraphrase, we can distinguish between intra-framework identities and cross-framework identities.

4.2. The Relativity of Identity

Intra-framework identities within the material thing framework are familiar. They include true singular identities between names such as “Mark Twain is Sam Clemens”, those between definite descriptions such as “The Evening Star is the Morning Star”, with its definite descriptions referring to the planet Venus, and false identities and non-identities such as “Jefferson was the first U. S. President” and “Washington was not the first President”. Whether true or false, all such identities of the form a = b or a ≠ b are obviously meaningful, for they are formulated within a framework for which there are means for identifying referents and providing justifications of assertions of their truth or falsity. We also recognize as meaningful within this framework identities between general terms referring to the same kinds of things, identities such as “Vixens are female foxes” and theoretical identities pairing natural language terms with terms used in the descriptions provided by the specialized natural sciences, identities such as “Water is H2O”, “Gold is the chemical element with atomic number 79”, and “Lightning is an electric discharge of type X”, where X specifies the type of discharge occurring when lightning occurs. For these theoretical identities there is a breakdown of the law of the indiscernibility of identicals, the law stating that we must predicate of identicals the same attributes. But we recognize that, while natural language predicates like “tasteless” and “yellow” ascribed to water and gold are different from the measurable attributes ascribed to molecules and

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atoms, this does not prevent the assertion of the identities. Though the terms of these identities come from different sub-frameworks with different vocabularies and the means of identifying their referents are different, their justification is provided within a general discourse framework relative to empirical evidence with the common purpose of describing our environment. For this reason, we regard them as meaningful.

Within the framework of mathematics we have identities and non-identities such as “7+5 = 12” and the false sentence “The sum of the angles of a Euclidian triangle is not equal to 180○”, equations whose truth or falsity can be established by the evaluative procedures of mathematicians. Also meaningful are identities within the fictive framework such as “The son of Jocasta is the husband of Jocasta”, whose terms can be used to identify Oedipus, and within the religious narrative framework the Judeo/Christian/Islamic identity “The Ten Commandments are God’s (or Allah’s) commandments transmitted through Moses at Mt. Sinai”. Such intra-framework identities are not formulated within the empirical fact-stating material framework, but they are nonetheless meaningful, since the frameworks of fiction and religious narration provide justifying reasons that make it possible for consensus to be reached, albeit not on the basis of observation.

The sentences just considered contrast with some obviously meaningless identities. These include “7+5 = the Evening Star”, “The chemical element with atomic number 79 is the son of Jocasta”, and “The Ten Commandments are the ten tallest buildings in Manhattan”. Unlike “7+5 = 13” and “Mark Twain is not Sam Clemens”, they are clearly not false, but ill-formed, examples of what Ryle called “category mistakes.” These cross-framework identities are different from intra-framework identities because their paired terms are from discourse frameworks used for very different purposes and employ different means of identification and standards of evaluation. In the absence of common identification and evaluation, we must regard them as incapable of evaluation and therefore meaningless.

A reductive identity is a special form of identity that may relate terms used in different sub-frameworks, as for theoretical identities such as “Water is H2O” that “reduces” the liquid to its constituent molecules. This form of identity is also used in constructing metaphysical theories about relations between the mental and physical. Physicalist (or materialist) reductions employ some version of a mental/physical identity designed to provide a plausible account of causal relations between physical stimuli and responses. I touch a hot stove, feel an intense pain,

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and withdraw my hand. It seems obvious that the pain I feel is the intervening middle term of a causal sequence that begins with my touching the stove and ends with my hand withdrawal. Touching the stove causes the pain, which in turn causes the withdrawal. Now neurophysiologists can describe in some detail the brain processes activated by stimulation of pain receptors and then causing the processes within efferent nerves that activate muscular responses. By identifying the pain I feel with these brain processes, we can provide an explanation of why the pain can be said to cause my hand’s withdrawal. Without this identification, the causal relation would remain the mysterious interaction between the physical and mental postulated by dualist theories. If we let X be the description provided by neurophysiologists of the brain processes occurring when we feel pain, it seems plausible to assert that the pains we feel when touching hot objects are identical with brain process of type X, or more generally, that sensations are identical with brain processes, with the type of brain process varying with the type of sensation, whether a pain, a pleasure, or the having of some sensory image. Such identities are what we understand as reductions of the sensations to certain kinds of physical processes.

The account just given follows the early formulation of the mental/physical identity thesis by J. J. C. Smart.12 It was subsequently modified by Hilary Putnam and others on the grounds that it is conceivable that a person could undergo surgery in which the portions of his brain processing signals from pain receptors are replaced with silicone transistor substitutes. Such a person could conceivably experience the same type of pain after surgery as before, although the physical processes would be very different. At most we can say that the particular sensation a person feels is identical with a particular brain process, but that pain as a type of sensation is subject to different physical realizations. If so, a “token-token” identity between a particular sensation and a particular (or token) brain process can be asserted, but we can assert only that a type of sensation “supervenes” on a type of brain process, where the relation of supervenience assumes the existence of specific token-token identities.13 The complications introduced by this revision of the identity theory can be ignored for our purposes, however. Our concern is with the logical status of sentences asserting identities between the mental and the physical, whether between types of events or processes, or between particular events or processes.

Mental/physical identities can be extended from transitory sensations and feelings to more stable mental attitudes such as beliefs, hopes, and wants. Why did Jones carry his umbrella this morning? One explanation is

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that he believed it would rain and wanted to stay dry, and this explanation can become a causal explanation if Jones’s belief and want are identified with his brain states as part of a complex of causes of his behavior. To assert an identity between the belief about rain and the want to stay dry and brain states is to reduce the mental states to those brain states, and the reduction is thought to be important in enabling causal explanations of behavior.

Identity theories are designed to provide a causal intermediary between stimuli and responses, and to provide a physiological basis for explaining correlations between them. Such theories complement attempts that have been made to formulate causal theories of meaning and reference. Causal theories of meaning purport to reduce the concept of the meaning of a sign to a causal sequence of environmental stimuli and physical effects. In earlier behavioral versions, the effects are overt behavioral responses. In more recent functionalist versions that assume some form of token-token identity theory, effects are thought to be neurophysiological events labeled “mental tokens.” All such causal theories of meaning face the problem of adequately accounting for the fact that acceptance of information offered to us by others assumes an ability to correct mistakes for which we hold others accountable. Such correction, however, is impossible to formulate within causal theories of meaning. One who understands the meaning of the noun “horse” may still misidentify an object as a horse, confusing it instead with a cow. In such a case the stimulus on the occasion of misidentification is correlated to a mental token of “horse” as a brain event, for the stimulus is of a type normally correlated with “cow”. And what is the stimulus correlated to the term “not a horse”? The negative term has meaning, but it seems impossible to produce a type of stimulus to which its use is correlated.14

The causal theory of reference encounters a different problem. It identifies the referents of names such as “Aristotle” and natural kind terms such as “gold” in terms of a causal relation between objects first baptized or labeled when the terms were introduced and present users. The referent of “Aristotle” is to the individual baptized with this name in ancient Greece; the reference of “gold” is to the substance with the properties of whatever the word “gold” (or its historically earliest version before translation into modern English) referred to when first introduced. The referents of the terms are these objects as causes transmitted through intermediary users into the present. A consequence of this causal theory of reference is that there may be a total separation between reference and identification. Present users of terms such as “Aristotle” and “gold” may be totally ignorant of the initial historical conditions in which the terms

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were introduced. As a consequence, the object or objects they identify when using the terms in subject position may be different from the referents of the terms as defined by the causal theory. This renders the causal theory irrelevant to uses of the terms in the transactional process of communicating information.15 Moreover, the causal theory makes it impossible to correct errors arising in historical transmission from the initial baptismal bestowing of a name. Suppose that the name “Aristotle” was originally bestowed on the great philosopher’s twin brother and “Alexander” the name of the philosopher. The true statement that Aristotle was originally named “Alexander” must be judged false under the conditions for reference set by the theory.

Such problems encountered by causal theories in accounting for correction of errors and negation and their irrelevance to referent identification can be traced to the restricted purpose of the material thing framework in which causal relations are stated. This is most obvious for reductive physicalist identities. Their advocates appeal to an analogy between them and identities relating natural kind terms to the theoretical terms of the natural sciences. Just as we accept that lightning is an electric discharge and water is H2O, they argue, so we should accept that a sensation is a certain type of brain process and that a psychological attitude such as a belief is a brain state. In both cases, identities are stated between terms of a shared natural language and scientific terms. But the analogy is a weak one, and surely is insufficient grounds on which to base mental/physical reductions. Theoretical identities between natural and scientific terms are identities between sub-frameworks of a common empirical descriptive framework. We identify the referents of these terms by means of observation and evaluate the identities on the basis of observation. But mental/physical identities are clearly cross-framework identities relating terms from the empirical descriptive framework to terms such as “pain” and “belief” used within the mental transactional framework. As we have seen, identification and evaluation are very different for the two general frameworks, with differences stemming from their different purposes. For the empirical descriptive framework, the purpose is to provide information about a causally related environment accessible to public observation. For the mental transactional framework, the basic purpose is the cooperative one of soliciting and providing assistance and for transactional frameworks generally there is the purpose of mutual correction of mistakes. For avowals, there is typically no reference to the spatially remote, no objects to be publicly identified, and trust without the possibility of an empirical test is the basis for acceptance of what is reported. Given these fundamental contrasts to sentences used

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within the material framework, there seem to be no means by which we can evaluate physicalist reductive identities as true or false. Without means of evaluation, we seem forced to classify them with “7+5 = the Evening Star” and brand them as meaningless.

There is, however, one important common feature of both theoretical identities and mental/physical identities that must be noted. It is that both differ from standard intra-framework identities with regard to symmetry. Standard identities of the form a = b are symmetrical; if a = b, then b = a. If Mark Twain is Samuel Clemens, then Samuel Clemens is Mark Twain; if 7+5 = 12, then 12 = 7+5. But as formulated as reductions, identities are asymmetric, and this holds whether the identity is between sub-frameworks or is cross-framework. We say that water is H2O, but not that H2O is water, and that lightning is an electric discharge, but not that an electric discharge is lightning. The scientific terms “H2O” and “electric discharge” are considered more “basic” than the paired “water” and “lightning”, for use of them permits more accurate discriminations between objects and events than do the natural language terms. The asymmetry of the identities is a reflection of priority that we assign on the basis of this increased powers of discrimination made possible. Stated as reductions, mental/physical identities are also asymmetric. Those advocating them will say that a pain a person feels on a given occasion is a particular brain process, but not that the brain process is the pain. They will also say that the belief of a person is a particular brain state, but not that this brain state is the belief. The pain and the belief are “nothing but” the brain process and brain state, and the relation of being “nothing but” is asymmetric. To assert such a reductive identity is, in effect, to assert that descriptions of the brain processes and states by neurophysiology in the material framework have priority over avowals and expressions of propositional attitudes.

This prioritization of one framework relative to another has implications for larger metaphysical issues to which we now turn.

4.3. The Meaning Status of Reductive Identities

There are empirical criteria for justifying the acceptance of sub-framework theoretical identities such as “Water is H2O”, “Lightning is a certain type of electric discharge”, and “Gold is the substance with atomic number 79”.

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They are thus meaningful, for the test of the meaningfulness of any descriptive sentence is the presence or absence of standards by which consensus might be achieved. The fact that for theoretical identities the test is empirical assigns them to the material thing framework. The identities of reductionist physicalism are very different in this respect, for we cannot apply an empirical test in order to evaluate them. We can establish on the basis of observations whether there is a correlation between a pain and a brain process of a certain type X. The correlation is established if the pain invariably occurs when process of type X occurs and is absent when the process is absent. But a correlation is between what is distinct, and is not the identity asserted by physicalist reductionism. The correlation happens to occur, but the identity must hold. A particular pain is claimed to be, after all, nothing but the brain process, and this is not a contingent fact. Because they are cross-framework mental/physical identities between terms from different discourse frameworks with different evaluative standards, it seems that we must assess them as meaningless.

This dismissal seems much too easy, however. Though we may lack a common framework for evaluation, we do understand physicalist identities in a way that we don’t understand “7+5 = the Evening Star” or “Iago is the next prime number after 1,000”. We also think we understand a dualist denial of a physicalist identity such as “My present pain is not a brain process of type X”. Such understanding would be impossible if every cross-framework identity were meaningless, for if a cross-framework identity of the form a = b is meaningless, then so is its negation a ≠ b. Physicalism and dualism may be controversial metaphysical theories that endure, and the persistence of the controversy indicates that we lack a common framework for accepting one theory over its alternative. But the persistence of the controversy seems to indicate a type of understanding that is lacking for cross-framework category mistakes. Rather than adopt the easy route of dismissal as meaningless, we should accept the challenge of determining the nature of this understanding.

One approach is to consider idealism’s argument for the identity of a material thing with a combination of ideas and the critical response to it. Berkeley’s argument in his Three Dialogues Between Hylas and Philonous for this reductionist identity can be restated in linguistic form, and goes roughly as follows. Consider the object referred to by the definite description “the desk in my study”. One who understands this description might identify its referent on the basis of the qualitative attributes of being hard, having a certain shape and size, being light brown, being tasteless,

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etc. Each of these qualities, Berkeley argues, is observer relative or “subjective.” Linguistically, this can be translated into the claim that the qualities would be attributed only on the basis of having sensory images described by avowals such as “I feel hardness”, “I see a rectangular and large shape”, etc., images and avowal reports that will vary with observer and depend on the observer’s orientation towards the desk. The desk, then, is nothing but a complex combination of the qualities used to identify it, and each of these qualities is observer relative in the sense just described. This enables us to eliminate “the desk” as a referring expression, and replace it with “whatever feels hard to me, is seen by me as rectangular and large, etc.” The “whatever” in this replacing definite description is simply an empty filler expression that combines the images described by the avowals. In this sense, this particular material thing just is the combination of images or ideas. Idealists such as Berkeley generalize this reduction of the desk to its observer-relative qualities to the ideational reduction of all material things. All so-called material things are the combinations of qualities used to identify them, and each of these qualities is observer relative. The conclusion that there are no material things, that is, things existing independently of the ideas of observers, is then claimed to follow. As formulated linguistically, this becomes a cross-framework identity between substantive referring expressions such as “the desk” of the material thing framework and complex combinations of first person avowals of the mental transactional framework. The idealist conclusion is a reductive identity asserting the priority of the avowals of the mental framework. Their associated ontological conclusion is that material things do not exist.

Criticisms of Berkeley’s original argument and linguistic reformulations are numerous, and have been much discussed.16 To demonstrate the subjectivity of the qualities of coldness and warmth Berkeley offers the thought experiment of submersing a hand in a pail of lukewarm water after first cooling the hand with ice and then heating it with fire, arguing that the same water would then feel first hot and then cold. Since it cannot be both hot and cold, the qualities must be observer relative. To demonstrate this relativity regarding size, he proposes the thought experiment of approaching an object and seeing its size increase, though we assume that size as an “objective” property would remain constant. But all such experiments assume the existence of a hand and water and of objects with a spatial location in relation to the observer’s body. Having used such thought experiments to show the observer relativity of all qualities, Berkeley then denies the existence of observer-independent hands, pails of water, and objects in space and time that can

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be approached. He thus denies the existence of what his arguments presuppose to exist in the material thing framework, namely, spatially locatable objects. Linguistic reformulations suffer similar difficulties. The expression “the desk” as a term in the material framework is to be replaced by combinations of avowals such as “I feel hardness” and “I see a rectangular image”. But such avowals reporting what is private and accepted on the basis of trust can be understood only because audiences have learned the meanings of “hard” and “rectangular” through prior applications to what is public and can be spatially located. The vocabulary of avowal reports of feelings and images thus presupposes the existence of hard, rectangular objects described within the material thing framework. The mental transactional framework of avowals is in this way parasitic on the framework that idealists seek to eliminate.

Such criticisms have led to a general rejection of the mental/physical identity of Berkeley’s subjective idealism that reduces material things as referred to by nouns to mental contents as reported by avowals. But the fact that there is consensus on the falsity of this identity sentence shows that it must in some sense be meaningful. The “nothing but” relationship of asymmetric identity proposed by the subjective idealists has the effect of asserting the priority of the mental transactional framework of avowals over the material thing framework of expressions referring to spatially locatable objects. Interpreting the idealist identity as having this meaning becomes the basis for its rejection.

The meaningfulness of physicalist identities can be established in a related way by considering situations in which we do assign priority to the material thing framework. We first note some differences between metaphysical identities stated for sensations and those for propositional attitudes like beliefs. Intuitively, we find more plausible the identity between a sensation and brain process than we do for one stating an identity between a belief and brain state. This is partly due to the fact that experimental psychology and neurophysiology have established quite detailed correlations between reports by subjects of what they experience and chemical and electrical processes in their brains, and these correlations have practical applications. Where we do have a correlation between a sensation and brain process, we have the possibility of aiding those in distress. A pain can be relieved by an aspirin altering the chemical state of the brain; blurred vision can be corrected by taking measures to alter the signals sent by the optical afferent nerves to the brain; and moods of depression can be altered by appropriate drugs. If indeed the primary use of our mental language is to solicit aid, then we seem to have a way of understanding what is asserted by metaphysical mental/physical identities

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for sensations. As cross-framework combinations of terms, they are indeed ill-formed and odd. But as reductions and asymmetric identities they establish a priority of the physical descriptions of the sciences over mental avowals of everyday language, a priority that can be useful in directing attention towards what is usually the most effective ways of relieving distress. Such metaphysical identities may be meaningless as assertions of matters of fact, for this is the domain of the descriptive discourse framework whose justification is based on public observation. But understood as indicators of means of assistance, they can be useful and lead to helpful actions, and to this extent are meaningful.

Now contrast this situation to that for beliefs. It is true that our descriptions of our propositional attitudes are not authoritative in the way we think they are for sensations. Self-deception about our beliefs, wants, and hopes is common, and can be corrected by others on the basis of behavior. But such correction will not come through applications of neurophysiology. It may be possible in the future for neurology to have detailed knowledge sufficient to distinguish the brain state of a person who expresses the belief that it is raining from the brain state of one who says it is cloudy and from that of another who says it is snowing. But of what possible use could we put such information? It can certainly be of no realistic help to those having these beliefs. If they are mistaken, then surely the way to help them is simply to inform them of their error or perhaps to convey this to others who may share their error. This is certainly to be preferred to altering their brain states with technology that may someday become available. There is a sense in which it is meaningful to say that a belief is a brain state, for we could understand this as asserting that a neurophysiological description has priority over any expression of a belief by ourselves or a belief ascription by another. But unlike the case for sensations, there is no such priority, as it fails to direct attention in a way that could lead to practical benefits. In this sense, the belief/brain state identity is not meaningless, but instead false, though in the odd way characteristic of metaphysical identities.

The dualist denial of both idealist and physicalist identities can be interpreted as having this same odd type of meaning. Understood as an assertion within the material thing framework, dualism is obviously false. As described within this framework, dualism postulates a feeling of pain as an intermediary relating a physical stimulus such as a burn to a behavioral response such as hand withdrawal. If the feeling were a distinct mental process, we would be left without the possibility of explaining why and how the stimulus produces the behavioral effect. But understood as a general assertion about priority relations between the material thing

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framework relative to the mental transactional framework, dualism of a qualified form is plausible. There are certainly many situations in which we accord priority to a neurological description of a brain process or state, as in prescriptions of drugs to alleviate pains and moods of depression and surgery to repair visual and auditory impairments. But such applications are limited to such specific situations, and there is no general argument for the priority of neurophysiological descriptions over transactional avowals of sensations. For neurophysiological descriptions and expressions of propositional attitudes, we seem forced to agree with dualism’s rejection of physicalist attitude/brain state identities when we understand these identities as assertions of priority. Traditional dualism was formulated in standard descriptive language as a relation between the mental and physical. In this form it has been understood as postulating mysterious supernatural entities and forces within the material language framework, while unable to meet the standards of evaluation for this framework. But understood as the claim that neither the material thing nor the mental transactional frameworks can claim universal priority, dualism becomes a plausible alternative to both idealism and physicalism.

This completes our review of two forms of reductionism. That considered in 4.1 is reduction by paraphrase or translation within the material thing framework, as illustrated by the paraphrase of “Redness is a color” into “Everything that is red is colored”. A second form is represented by the cross-framework identities that are central to disputes formulated within the metaphysical “isms” of materialism, idealism, and dualism. There is also a third form of reductionism that, like cross-framework identities, arises from the difficulty of determining the boundaries between the material thing framework and transactional frameworks. This third form is our final topic in this chapter.

4.4. Reliabilism

Traditional epistemology set as its goal the formulation of necessary and sufficient conditions for us to be able to assert of a person X that X knows that a certain proposition p is true, knows, for example, that the earth is spherical, that water is a liquid composed of H2O molecules, or that he was born in a certain city. Epistemologists have stated four conditions: (1) p is in fact true; (2) X believes that p; (3) X’s belief that p is justified; and (4) X’s justified belief that p was not arrived at by luck or chance. This last condition (4) was added to accommodate the intuition that X’s

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knowing p is an accomplishment for which credit is due, and that none can be credited with what they achieve through good luck and circumstances beyond their control. There has been much discussion of these conditions, with some arguing that all four are necessary for knowledge ascriptions, others arguing that only some of them are. These controversies arise from differing intuitions we have regarding uses of the verb “to know” and the noun “knowledge”.

One set of intuitions is derived from our use of both the verb and noun to ascertain where to turn for answers to questions we may have an interest in. Whom should we trust in providing answers to commonplace questions such as “Where is my brother now?”, “What is the distance between Chicago and New York?”, and “What is tomorrow’s weather?” and more theoretical questions such as “What is the chemical composition of gold?” and “What are the origins of our universe?” For certain of these questions we turn to experts, with expertise being a matter of knowing how to give correct answers, a kind of skill acquired through special training or perhaps some native endowment, as for chicken-sexers able to sort chicks by sex or perhaps certain hunters endowed with an ability to track animals. For other questions such as those about locating relatives we turn to those with privileged information from contacts or sources. In asking such questions our only interest is in acquiring information from some source X that is accurate to a degree required for the answers to the questions we pose. For this, only the truth of what X conveys to us in asserting p is relevant to whether we ascribe knowledge. Irrelevant to us is the attitude of X towards p, whether X believes p to be true, whether he or she is justified in this belief, and whether it is the outcome of sheer luck and not something to which the source can be given credit.

This set of intuitions is the basis for the reliabilist theory of knowledge, or what is known as reliabilism. For reliabilism, to be knowledgeable is to be reliable, a source to be turned to for information, and such reliability is determined only to the degree that this source enjoys success in providing this information. Through its early formulation by Alvin Goldman, reliabilism can be identified with the project of “naturalizing epistemology,” a project that proposes the elimination of normative terminology in assessing knowledge claims.6 In particular, the concept of a justified belief is to be replaced with a material framework description of a behavioral disposition on the part of a source X to correctly identify or describe. Let’s suppose that X when presented with oak trees can consistently correctly discriminate between species, that is, distinguish pin oaks from red oaks, red oaks from white oaks, and so on for all species of oak within a certain region. Then her identification of a

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particular tree as a pin oak is not only correct, but is the outcome of a reliable process described by the counterfactual sentence “If X were presented with an oak tree, X would correctly identify its species”. The normative sentence “X has a justified belief that this tree is a pin oak” is then reformulated, according to the reliabilist theory under consideration, as “X’s assertion that the tree is a pin oak is the outcome of a reliable process”. More generally, any sentence of the form “X is justified in believing that p” is to be replaced with “X’s assertion that p is the outcome of a reliable process” in which the normative term “justified belief” is eliminated.

Central to reliabilism is an analogy between the assertions of those to whom we attribute knowledge and the outcomes of mechanical devices responding to changing environmental conditions. We attribute reliability to servo-mechanisms such as thermostats that detect a rise or lowering of room temperatures relative to set levels and sump pumps designed to detect water levels in basements or in the bilges of boats. Such mechanisms are judged to be reliable to the extent that their sensors detect with an accuracy sufficient to perform the functions they are designed to perform, whether turning on heaters or air conditioners to maintain constancy of room temperature or pumping out excessive water in basements and boat bilges. Such judgments of reliability, like the justified belief component of knowledge attributions, are made on the basis of counterfactuals of the form “If device Y were to have input I, it would respond with output O”. By means of this analogy, reliabilism describes knowledgeable potential sources of information as loci of causal relations between inputs (both environmental and social) and outputs (assertions of descriptions and identifications) produced with a degree of accuracy sufficient for the purposes at hand.

Strong intuitions do support this analogy between knowledgeable assertions and outputs of mechanical detectors. Experts we regard as our reliable informants, and their expertise tends to be exercised as the result of some favored genetic endowment, as for the chicken-sexer, or of specialized training, as for lab technicians identifying chemical compounds or physicists identifying particle collisions by means of instruments in particle colliders. After training, expert descriptions and identifications are typically habitual, offered in the absence of any justifying reasons, sometimes with the theoretical background for such areas as chemical compound and particle identification long forgotten and made irrelevant. Moreover, it has become possible to devise artificial intelligence models for tasks requiring specialized expertise with sophisticated programs. Just as bar code readers in grocery stores have

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replaced reading of prices by trained grocery clerks, there has been development of reliable devices simulating the behavior of experts in detecting chemical compounds and forecasting the weather and market advances and declines. Successes of such simulation seem to support the attempt by reliabilism to eliminate justified belief as a necessary condition for attributing knowledge.

There is a second set of intuitions, however, that conflicts with reliabilism’s verdict, and these I think are sufficient to lead us to reject it. These intuitions are derived from transactional aspects of belief briefly described in Section 3.2, aspects that transfer in modified form to knowledge. As used in the first person, “believe” is a means of conveying hesitancy, as “I believe it is raining” has weaker illocutionary force than the simple assertion “It is raining” and is weaker still than the guarantee expressed by “I know it is raining”. This hesitancy seems to carry over to third person belief ascriptions. To say “X believes that p” seems to carry with it the suggestion that X may be mistaken and that some potential harm may be avoided if the mistake were corrected. X may have an irrational fixation on a belief, as for those who believe in ghosts or have been inculcated with beliefs in early childhood in a way they did not then control. But even in such cases, a correction may avoid harm to others who share the belief but are able to abandon it if sufficient reasons against it were presented. Also, X as a member of our speech community would seem to have an attitude described by Angela Smith as being under “rational control.”7 X may not have voluntarily acquired the belief, and in this sense is not responsible for holding it. But his membership in our community assumes an openness to at least consider reasons against it, reasons that through questioning its justification provide some hope for modification.

For third person ascriptions of knowledge, the situation is more complex. We have seen that ascriptions to X of propositional knowledge that p are made on the basis of an assessment of X’s expertise, as when we say of X that she knows that the tree before her is a pin oak on the basis of her skill in identifying oaks, that is, on her reliability. But such a judgment of reliability may be mistaken; X may be prone to error, and she is then subject to criticism. Our oak identifier can be asked to look more carefully at the shape of leaves or the color and texture of bark, and in general to scrutinize those details of oaks that enable discriminations between them. Such a request is directed at the justifications appealed to when she identifies oaks, the criteria of leaf shape and bark texture and color used in the identifications. If we are ascribing knowledge of a causal relation, there is a similar possible challenge of reliability. Suppose we ascribe to X

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knowledge that a certain vaccine is the cure of a disease. There is again a possible challenge of reliability designed to bring about improvement. This is accompanied by a request to more carefully review the application of methods applied to the experimental group and used to isolate the control group from relevant causal factors. Knowledge ascriptions generally are based on assessments of reliability, and reliability is normally subject to improvement through criticism and review of methods used to establish a belief.

This feature obviously has no relevance to mechanical devices like thermostats. If such a device fails to detect, it is repaired or replaced. Criticism is directed only at its designer, and improvement in reliability is accomplished through modifications in design and/or quality manufacturing controls. A chicken-sexer unaware of criteria he uses to discriminate between chicks’ genders is in this respect like the thermostat. When he becomes unreliable, he is simply replaced by someone else who does have the innate talent, for criticism and requests for additional care in applying methods will have no effect. Unlike the person who believes in ghosts, the chicken-sexer fails to have a belief under rational control. Like the thermostat, reliability for him is simply regularity of success. Since they are outside the range of those we can criticize in ways leading to improvement, we can attribute knowledge to both thermostat and chicken-sexer only metaphorically, as when we say that the thermostat “knows” the room temperature when it switches on the heater or that the chicken-sexer “knows” the sex of the chick before him. Lacking is a transactional communicative relation presupposing the possibility of improving methods by which the detection was made. In contrast, we do ascribe knowledge to agents whom we hold responsible for mistakes of identification or description, those to whom praise or blame can be applied. Where success is due to good luck or circumstances beyond control, then this assumed agency is absent. Such is the condition of the successful chicken-sexer who by the good fortune of the natural lottery of gene inheritance happens to have a skill but not knowledge.

This transactional aspect of knowledge becomes obvious when we consider knowledge attributions as answers to an implied question. This question may be about which potential sources are to be trusted in the manner just discussed. But sometimes knowledge attributions are given as answers in an attempt to indicate to an audience what information would be useful, what would avoid duplicating what is already at hand. For example, someone might say to me “It’s raining outside” or “Smith arrived last night on the train”, and I can reply “I know that”, with “that” a prosentence standing for what has been told me, and “I know that”

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therefore an abbreviation for “I know that it’s raining” or “I know that Smith arrived on the train”. The aim of my reply is to indicate that what is being told me is redundant, that it duplicates information I have already acquired, what would be conveyed if I were to reply “I realize that Smith arrived”. Similarly, we may say of another “X knows that it’s raining outside” or “X knows that Smith will arrive on the 9 AM train” as a way of forestalling assertions that would repeat unnecessarily what is already available to X. We would not be describing X’s state of mind, possibly a dispositional capacity to successfully accomplish some sort of task. We are instead answering an implicit question about what would be useful to say to X. This becomes obvious when asked to respond to the question “Does X know that p?” (“Does X know (realize) that the train arrives at 9 AM?”). The question is clearly not to gain information about X’s state of mind, but instead to determine whether X needs to be told p. That there is this redundancy avoidance use of “know” serves to reinforce the view that the primary role of the verb is a transactional one performed within a network of information exchange. It both directs audiences towards responsible agents as sources of information that can be trusted and indicates what kinds of information will be useful. As a term of transactional discourse, “know” resists translation into the terminology of the material descriptive framework.

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5

More Applications to Metaphysics

Traditionally, philosophy has been divided into four major branches: epistemology, ethics, aesthetics, and metaphysics. The first three of these describe the evaluative standards employed within the central discourse frameworks used to describe the environment, guide conduct, and appraise literary and artistic creations. Investigation of these standards provides a more or less definite focus for these disciplines. Metaphysics as the fourth branch has been generally agreed to be the most basic, but its subject matter is much less definite. Students of the discipline are thought to somehow gain a general orientation towards what they encounter in their personal lives, a perspective enabling them to impose order on a bewildering variety. But this characterization is too vague to be helpful in specifying what this fourth branch involves. It has been common for philosophers to follow Aristotle in defining metaphysics as ontology, the “science of being,” the discipline that determines what exists. Chapter 3 sought to show that the meaning of “exists” varies with descriptive discourse frameworks, and in the absence of a univocal meaning, there can be no general science of ontology. In a departure from the Aristotelian tradition, Kant defined metaphysics as providing answers to three central questions arising from the claims of Christian theology: whether God exists, whether the soul is immortal, and whether we have free will. Kant denied that the questions were answerable by speculative Reason, though answerable if reformulated as directed towards assumptions made by moral demands. This set the stage for logical positivism’s later argument that metaphysical claims are cognitively meaningless. After Kant, the focus of metaphysics shifted towards an assessment of the reductive identities proposed by idealism and physicalism (materialism) discussed in the previous chapter and the denial of these identities by dualism.

These various interpretations of metaphysics are related, though not in obvious ways. This chapter will consider issues raised within metaphysics as defined by Kant. We begin with the question whether human actions are the causally determined effects of physical states of affairs and events.

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5.1. Determinism as Regulative Ideal

Dualism can be understood as a claim about the relative priority of discourse frameworks when applied to traditional metaphysical questions about human freedom of choice. Such choice is argued for by dualists on the basis of the independent status of the mental and rejected by a metaphysical theory allied with physicalism known as “determinism.” There have been two basic arguments employed by determinists. The first is a mechanist version that assumes the identity between propositional attitudes and brain states rejected in the previous section. We explain and predict the behavior of others on the basis of their wants and beliefs and the circumstances they are in, as when we explain why Jones carried his umbrella yesterday by his wanting to stay dry, his belief that it would rain, and the availability of an umbrella. Similarly, we might be able to predict his carrying an umbrella tomorrow by the same want and circumstances and by his belief that tomorrow it will rain. Such explanation and prediction would become a causal explanation and prediction within the material thing framework if we were to establish an identity between wants and beliefs as propositional attitudes and brain states, for then it would be possible to trace the physical sequence initiated by environmental stimuli, transmitted by afferent nerves and then efferent nerves, and terminating in the overt response of carrying the umbrella. It would then be possible, at least in principle, to eventually understand the mechanisms underlying this sequence. Without the identity, determinists argue, there is a mysterious mental act of will intervening between stimuli and responses. But we have seen that the identity between attitudes and brain states necessary to eliminate this intermediate mental cause has the effect of establishing an unwarranted priority of the material thing framework over the mental transactional. We typically explain and predict the actions of others for the purpose of averting harm and securing benefits, as when we notify Jones that his belief in impending rain is mistaken in order to spare him an inconvenience, or explain what proved to be an unnecessary precaution in terms of a mistaken belief. Where others are harmed we hold persons responsible, and attempt to modify their wants and beliefs to prevent such harm from being repeated. All of this is conducted by discourses conducted within a transactional framework that assumes the relevance of normative standards, and the purposes of this framework are clearly of paramount importance.

A second argument for determinism is just as unconvincing. Uniform generalizations employed within the sciences can be either property generalizations of the form “All Ss are P” or causal

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generalizations of the form “C is invariably followed by E”, where the cause C and effect E are observable events. For uniform causal generalizations, we can postulate mechanisms explaining the correlation of events C and E. Reflex responses as effects of environmental stimuli as causes are described by such generalizations, and illustrated by blinking of the eye by normal subjects in response to exposure to bright flashes of light and knee jerks in response to a striking just below the knee cap. Such invariant correlations are described as the probability of effect E given C is 1, or p (E/C) = 1. Where we have such correlations, it is theoretically possible to provide mechanistic explanations of why stimuli bring about responses. The belief in the capacity for free choice between alternatives, argue determinists, owes to the fact that most human behavior and much of animal behavior is not described by such uniform generalizations. Sometimes in the morning Jones carries his umbrella, but sometimes he does not. Sometimes a dog will immediately approach and eat the food in its dish, but sometimes may not, waiting until later, or perhaps never eating it at all. In such cases, behavior is described by a statistical generalization stating that the probability of the effect E given the cause C is some rational number r which is greater than 0 and less than 1, or p (E/C) = 0 > r < 1, where the probability p is a measure of the frequency of E relative to E as based on past observed trials. In the absence of invariant correlations, we cannot specify internal mechanisms, and this makes it possible for us to hold the commonsense view derived from our control over our actions that the response is spontaneous and not determined.

In all such cases, determinists argue, common sense is mistaken. Statistical generalizations and the absence of invariance are instead due to our ignorance of other causal factors. Let’s suppose we have observed that on two-thirds of the occasions on which we add fertilizer to a plant it grows, and we therefore generalize from these observations and conclude that the probability of growth G occurring when fertilizer F is added is two-thirds, or p (G/F) = ⅔. Faced with this indeterminacy, we might be led to seek other factors such as light L, water W, and soil conditions S whose presence or absence determines whether the fertilizer produces growth. Discovering that such factors are indeed necessary might then convert the statistical correlation into an invariant one of the form p (G / F⋀L⋀W⋀S) = 1, that is, growth will invariably occur when fertilizer is accompanied by light, water, and good soil, but in the absence of any one of these factors it will not. With the cause specified in this way, it would be possible to discover mechanisms relating the fertilizer in conjunction with other factors to plant growth. Determinists generalize from such a case to argue

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that all probability statements with frequencies between zero and one are the result of ignorance of such hidden factors, and these include statistical generalizations describing human and animal behavior. Once an adequate cause is appropriately specified, these become converted into uniform generalizations that can be mechanically explained.

For human behavior, internal factors include wants and beliefs that when known explain why a person brings an umbrella one day but leaves it home another. But only when translated into descriptions of brain states would these be suitable causal factors for transforming the indeterminate into the determinate, and this raises again the problem of the status of attitude/brain state reductive identities. But apart from this difficulty, there is another. It is true that every statistical generalization can be converted into a uniform one by specifying other causal factors. But it is also true that every uniform generalization can be converted to a statistical one by further specifying the effect. Suppose we observe that a dog will invariably eat food (E) that is presented to it (P) if it has not been fed for over eight hours (H), or that p(E/P⋀H) = 1. It is then always possible to further specify the effect of eating generally to eating within a certain period of time, say five minutes, in such a way that the effect is not invariant. Of course, further specification of the cause, say by specifying how much the dog was fed more than eight hours ago, might convert the resulting statistical generalization to a uniform one. But it is surely always possible to continue, at least in principle, to continue specifying the effect in a way that converts any uniform generalization to a statistical generalization. Insect behavior is usually described as stereotyped and mechanical, but this is surely because we choose relatively gross descriptions of behavioral responses such as those of spiders repairing their webs when damaged. More exact descriptions of behavior would reveal that the stereotyped is indeterminate. It is thus arbitrary for determinists to insist on the possibility of indefinite specification of the cause while ignoring the possibility of indefinite specification of the effect.

There are thus formidable difficulties with determinism as a metaphysical theory, and this raises the question of why anyone would choose to defend it. The answer seems to be that it serves to function as a regulative ideal for scientific inquiry into the causes of observed phenomena. To state that a given regularity of behavior must be statistical because of free choice between alternatives is to concede that no mechanistic explanation is possible. This is to erect a barrier to further inquiry into causal factors and accept that no mechanical simulation of this

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behavior will ever be successful. Such a block to future inquiry and to the search for future technological innovations seems to be arbitrary. Those within the scientific community employing the material thing framework may never be able to successfully describe the environmental and physiological factors in a way sufficient to explain human and animal behavior. But their contributions to society seem to require adopting determinism as a regulative ideal that makes possible continuing progress.

Uses of normative frameworks present conflicts with this ideal. We use these frameworks to guide our own conduct and the conduct of others, as when we conclude that we should not have performed an action A but have instead done B, and try to persuade another that he or she should do B rather than A. Correction of methods used by information sources is one form of such guidance. Normative sentences of the form “I (we, you, they, he/she) ought to (should have) do (done) A” are related to sentences of the mental transactional framework in so far as they are conclusions derived from premisses formulated within this framework, as when we conclude we should buy a coat because of a desire to keep warm and belief that this is the best means to warmth. Such normative conclusions imply that we have some control over, and responsibility for, the actions being prescribed, that they are not the determined effects of causes described within the material thing framework. As Kant argued, “ought” as directed to an agent’s past action implies that this agent could have done otherwise. The regulative ideal appealed to by determinism as a metaphysical position is thus in direct conflict with what is presupposed by discourses formulated within the normative framework.

It is common for determinists to argue that language used within this framework is itself a contributing cause to behavior. In the form of auditory or visual stimuli, this language has effects on our motivations, which in turn as brain states produces behavioral effects when combined with other physiological and environmental causes. This is a bad argument, however, and subject to the objections similar to those lodged against the identification of propositional attitudes with brain states. Whether the determinists’ regulative ideal is to be accorded priority over the assumptions of the normative framework would seem to be decided by relative usefulness in the form of benefits to humanity of tracing causal relations between language stimuli and behavior. Surely the most effective way to alter the behavior of those we can communicate with is to use practical inferences formulated within the normative framework. Within these inferences, there are descriptions of circumstances, and these could include descriptions of environmental and physiological states of affairs. But such descriptions are only components within the practical inferences

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used to guide conduct, and in this respect the normative framework in which they occur has priority over that of the material thing framework.

The question whether we are free or determined is one of the three questions that defined Kantian metaphysics. Mechanistic determinism’s answer to it is, in effect, an assertion of the priority of the material thing framework and its regulative causal ideal over the normative framework used in guiding conduct. There are no compelling reasons for asserting such general priority, though the causal ideal may have a useful regulative function for inquirers within scientific institutions. It does not follow, of course, that there are alternative explanations of actions that posit supernatural mental acts of free will as their causes. Nor does it follow that wants and beliefs are such supernatural causes of actions. If the argument of 4.3 is correct, nonidentities between the mental and physical are just as much violations of the discourse relativity of material and transactional frameworks as physicalist identities. To investigate causes of observable events is the province of the material thing framework, and relative to this framework there are no competitors.

A second question defining metaphysics for Kant is whether there is immortality of the soul. This question assumes that the pronoun “I” as used in avowals and expressions of propositional attitudes refers to a mental substance that can persist beyond the dissolution of the body. This is, in effect, the assumption that personal pronouns of the mental transactional framework function as do the demonstrative pronouns of the material thing framework. Since their addressing role is very different, the assumption is mistaken and the question of immortality is improperly formulated. This easy dismissal is not available, however, for the third of Kant’s defining questions, the question whether God exists. This question is to be understood as one about complex relations between the material thing framework and the religious narrative framework employed by the world’s religions.

5.2. The Existence of the Supernatural

Understanding these relations is complicated by the immense variety of narrative traditions—many of them overlapping—that provide the basis for different religions. Religious narratives can be either transmitted orally from one generation to the next or by way of texts such as Hesiod’s Theogony, the Scriptures of Judaism and Christianity, the Qur’an of Islam, and Sutras of Buddhism. Whether oral or written, all share the purpose of providing hope, guidance of conduct, and a sense of identity within a

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continuing community, an identity reinforced by group performance of rituals based on the guiding narratives of the religion. These narratives also share basic methods of term introduction, identification of referents or designata, and methods of justifying acceptance or rejection. Their descriptions of relations between historical figures and the supernatural require the use of names that both refer and designate. Supernatural designata may take the form of ancestral spirits and spirits associated with landmarks such as mountains, rocks, or trees of animistic religions; gods associated with phenomena as diverse as childbirth, annual harvests, love, and lightning, the gods of polytheism; and the single god of monotheism. Names for these spirits and more abstract gods are introduced in the context of the narratives, while names of historical figures are introduced by a parallel indexical baptism transmitted into the present. The identification of referents and designata is also relative to the narratives, though, again, there may be identification for names of historical figures on the basis of preserved traces and historical records. By definition of the supernatural, it is in principle impossible to observationally identify spirits and gods designated within narratives; for this reason they are described as “transcendent.” It is therefore impossible to justify empirically acceptance of discourse blocks within narratives in which terms designating the supernatural occur. Acceptance in the form of “faith” is instead justified relative to the narratives themselves and the purposes of providing hope, moral guidance, and community identity that they serve. Identification of historical referents through historical records is typically of secondary importance in insuring such acceptance.

Some writers cite Buddhism as an example of a religion without a narrative tradition describing the supernatural, but in doing so they impose an unjustified restriction on the supernatural. While the central narratives of Buddhism do omit references to deities, they assume earlier beliefs of Hinduism about reincarnation of eternal souls, and the historical Buddhas referred to in the various Sutras are accorded a special relationship to reincarnation’s cycle of birth, death, and rebirth. Thus, the foundational narratives of Buddhism also designate what is in principle incapable of empirical identification. Emile Durkheim claimed that totemism exhibits the central functional role performed by religions of regulating conduct and promoting group solidarity and that totems associated with taboos and rituals do not themselves require belief in the supernatural. But animal totems such as wolves, cougars, eagles, and crows performing these roles are typically associated with protective supernatural spirits, and it is through this association that rituals directed towards them are to be classified as religious. These are contrasted to the totem tattoos and

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emblems of clubs and street gangs that serve only to promote group identity and loyalty.

The shared purposes of providing hope, moral guidance, and self-identity through membership in a community, together with their methods of term introduction, identification, and standards for acceptance, constitute the defining features of the religious narrative framework. Within this general framework are the sub-frameworks of the various narrative traditions, with their distinctive vocabularies, their conceptions of the supernatural, and references to key historical individuals. Encounters between historical individuals and the supernatural described in the narratives have the effect of sanctifying both the ideals represented by these individuals as models of conduct and the moral instructions they convey. These ideals can vary with historical circumstances in which the narratives originated. The heroic warrior image of Achilles as a model for Greek males was sanctified by the description in Greek narratives of lineage from Zeus. The Ten Commandments were not simply the moral instructions of Moses, but were transmitted through Moses by the Yahweh of the Hebrew Torah. Similarly, the moral instructions of Mohammed to his people were sanctified by their origins from Allah as transmitted through the angel Gabriel, much as were the instructions of Joseph Smith sanctified by their transmission through the angel Moroni as described in the Book of Mormons. The role of Jesus as ideal of self-sacrifice for the good of others and as source of moral guidance is sanctified by the description of the Immaculate Conception in the Gospels. This role of religious narratives in sanctifying guidance of conduct has been an important (if not always beneficent) one throughout human history, inspiring a community’s warriors to sacrifice their lives to insure the community’s survival, while also motivating conquest and even annihilation of a neighboring community. At their best, they have promoted conduct essential for the community’s flourishing, serving to restrict impulses to pursue selfish interests to the detriment of others through their portrayals of the ideals of pursuing a common good. At their worst, they have fostered hatred towards those outside the community of those accepting the truth of guiding narratives.

This guidance role of narratives has been combined with an explanatory role that has the effect of augmenting their power of sanctification. This augmentation is through the cosmogonies that are part of many religious narratives. For the Abrahamic religions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam this cosmogony is provided by The Book of Genesis of the Hebrew Torah. For other religions, the cosmogonies can be as various as the accounts of creation in narratives of Native American

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religions and the creation of the islands of Japan and its inhabitants by the male and female gods in the Japanese Kojiki. Such creation accounts enhance the status of historical individuals related to powerful supernatural entities or forces. The Book of Genesis confers on Yahweh both the status of the source of the Ten Commandments and of being the creator of the universe. The effect is to confer on the Commandments the authority of an all-powerful creator. For the Japanese Kojiki, the relationship between historical individuals and the supernatural is a means of sanctifying political power transmitted into the present through successions of Emperors, for the narrative traces the ancestry of the Emperor to the gods creating the Japanese islands and its peoples. Such sanctification of transmitted authority from past to present is common in religious narratives as a means of establishing some contemporary political and clerical authority. This close association between the cosmogonies of religious narratives and sanctification of moral standards and authority presents the central obstacle to reconciling religion with experimental science. If sanctification is derived from a cosmogony conflicting with the consensus of experimental science, to concede the descriptive truth of science is understandably regarded as weakening advantages to leaders of religious institutions derived from their privileged status of conferring this sanctification.

When a religious narrative is no longer accepted as true within a community, it loses its sanctifying power and is labeled a “myth.” For the major Near Eastern religions, narratives describing the ancient Greek and Roman Pantheon of gods have become mythology, which has the effect of relegating them to fiction. They are regarded as part of a tradition preserved through its influence on contemporary literature, but are deprived of the sanctifying role that accompanies belief in the existence of the forms of supernatural that are designated. Once Greek pantheism is relegated to mythology, the sentence “Zeus exists” is rejected as false. This relegation of the narratives of other religions to mythology is common to believers within religious communities, and is a means of reinforcing the exclusiveness of their religion. For orthodox Lutherans, not only are pagan narratives to be classified as mythology, but the same classification is accorded the narratives of Hindus, Muslims, Buddhists, Mormons, and Catholics to the extent they are inconsistent with their own narratives. A similar rejection is accorded the narratives of the Lutherans by orthodox Hindus, Buddhists, and by contemporary Wiccans claiming to be continuous with early pagans.

Offsetting such rejection are strategies used by believers to incorporate the narratives of another religious tradition into their own.

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This can be accomplished by directly incorporating the narratives of an earlier tradition into those of more recent, as the Torah of the Hebrews became the Old Testament of the Christians, the Christian Bible became part of the narrative tradition of Islam, the Christian Bible the basis for the guiding narratives of Mormonism, and Islamic Scriptures the basis for the Ba’hai religion. By understanding Yahweh to be God, the Christian could accept “Yahweh exists”, while by interpreting the Christian God as Allah the Muslim could accept “God exists”. This was done despite each religion claiming priority for its own distinctive texts in guiding conduct and providing for them their sense of community identity.

This means of resolving conflicts between narrative sub-frameworks is paralleled by strategies for resolving conflicts between standards of evaluation used within discourse frameworks. Religious narratives describing the supernatural also describe miraculous events that exhibit the effects of the supernatural on human affairs, events that violate the observed regularities of daily experience and the uniform generalizations described by the sciences. This creates a situation in which acceptance of the narratives requires accepting what is counter to standards of acceptance within the material thing framework. The purposes of this framework then come into conflict with the purpose of any religious narrative framework of providing hope, moral guidance, and a sense of identity.

There has been a variety of strategies for resolving this conflict. One of the principal ones is to interpret religious narratives as allegories and specific expressions within them as metaphors. Portions of a narrative can then be interpreted in such a way as to render it consistent with what is accepted as true on empirical grounds. Moses may not have actually seen a burning bush nor received the Ten Commandments at Mt. Sinai, but narratives describing these miraculous events can be interpreted as his being inspired by a Higher Power. This abstract conception of a Higher Power then replaces the personalized God of the Torah who performs miraculous acts, while the supernatural origins of the moral guidance provided by the historical Moses is preserved. Similarly, Mary may not have actually been a virgin when giving birth to Jesus, nor Jesus actually resurrected after his crucifixion. But the narratives of the Gospels can be interpreted as providing a kind of supernatural sanctioning of Jesus’s moral teachings as a means of justifying their persisting influence through history. Such a strategy has the effect of assimilating the interpretation of religious narratives to that of literary works conducted within the interpretive discourse framework discussed briefly in Section 3.2. Indeed, the science of hermeneutics as developed in France and Germany is

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applied both to literary and artistic works and to religious narratives. The difference between the two applications—one secular, the other religious—arises from the sanctification effects of religious narratives that are retained through the allegorizing process.

Let’s turn now to what is perhaps the central question that for Kant defines metaphysics, the question whether God exists. If this is a question formulated within the material thing framework, then clearly the answer is in the negative. This framework requires observational identification of referents and empirical evaluation. Ingenious efforts to meet these requirements for “God exists” in the form of cosmological arguments were correctly rejected after the development of experimental physics and biology. The crucial premiss of such arguments is that the existence of a supernatural power is necessary to explain observed phenomena such as the motion of bodies and the order and design in nature. After motion was shown to be “natural” by Galileo and not in need of explanation, however, no supernatural explanation of motion became necessary. For Galileo and his successors, it was acceleration that required explanation, and this could be provided by empirically confirmed gravitational theories. After Darwin’s evolutionary theory, it was no longer necessary to provide a supernatural explanation of order and design, for random mutations and natural selection were available as explanations. Futile attempts to cling to cosmological arguments for God’s existence have been forced by the inclusion of cosmogonies within religious narratives. But the question whether God exists can also be posed to those who accept the guiding narratives of their religious traditions on grounds other than those operating for the material thing framework. Their answer will be different from what they would be forced to give when the question of supernatural existence is raised within this material framework. For those who gain hope, moral guidance, and a sense of their self-worth through membership in their religious community, their religion’s sub-framework is of overriding importance. “God (or whatever names the supernatural in their tradition) exists” is accepted by them as true, for to reject the sentence as false would deprive them of benefits derived from their religion.

5.3. Pragmatism and Social Constructivism

The outlines in this chapter of the metaphysical positions of physicalism, idealism, determinism, and monotheism are intended to provide a way of

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understanding the nature of metaphysics and the frustrating persistence of its disputes. Questions posed in “ism” disputes about existence and identity should be understood as questions regarding relationships between the material thing, mental transactional, interpretive, and religious discourse frameworks. Often in the background for the disputes are different assessments of the relative importance of activities conducted within these frameworks. Philosophers arguing for a certain metaphysical “ism” have been representatives of social groups and institutions communicating within a discourse framework they regard as more central than others. Passions are aroused by use of arguments designed (though usually not consciously) to further the cultural influence of one institution relative to others, as objective idealism has been used as a means of continuing the dominance of religious institutions and physicalism as a means of advancing the prestige of the sciences. Human pride contributes in its own special and sometimes insidious way. Each of us would like to think that our own set of aptitudes and interests is central, and each of us finds in our favored system of metaphysics its vindication. Often obscured is philosophy’s central integrative role of tracing relationships between discourse frameworks and establishing their boundaries, thereby contributing its special form of mutual understanding among disciplines.

Difficulties in determining this role are illustrated by the conflict between the variety of pragmatism represented by Richard Rorty and the realism of Paul Boghossian and John Searle. Pragmatism has historically been consistent with discourse relativity as outlined above. This is due to pragmatism’s identification of the truth of an utterance of a sentence on a given occasion with the assertion or acceptance of the sentence. This identification has been formulated as the so-called “redundancy” theory of truth, the view that to say that a certain sentence S is true is nothing other than to assert or to accept it. No more information is provided by “It’s true that it is raining”, argue those of us who identify with pragmatism, than is conveyed by simply asserting or assenting to “It is raining”. To say that it is true that it is raining is not to assert that “It is raining” corresponds to a fact or some type of “reality,” for this adds no information beyond the simple assertion of the sentence itself within the material thing framework. For pragmatism, there are varieties of truth, each with its distinctive type of justification for asserting or accepting sentences, and with variety of truth and justification there is variety of the discourse frameworks in which sentences occur. For pragmatic naturalism, the denial of the existence of the supernatural is justified only within the material thing framework with its distinctive forms of assertion and acceptance. Because for pragmatism there are no facts to which true sentences correspond, it is

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not necessary to postulate fictional facts for what is asserted or accepted within the fictional framework, mathematical facts for the mathematical framework, nor moral facts for normative sentences such as “I ought to keep my promises”.

We pragmatic naturalists must agree, of course, that the methods of justification for sentences formulated within the material thing framework differ in significant ways from those for sentences in the other principal frameworks. Justification for the material thing framework is provided, directly or indirectly, by sensory observation of what is causally related to observers, and this type of justification is unique among frameworks. It is this causal relation to an environment that justifies saying that sentences formulated within this framework describe what is independent of us. It also provides a sense in which there are relative to these sentences “facts of the matter” that do not depend on any human observer for their existence, facts that are “objective.” As already noted, such language should be understood as simply describing the special form of justification employed within this framework. The nature of this justification is complex, and its features the object of many studies in epistemology and the philosophy of science. One complication arises from the variety of sub-frameworks within the material thing framework, each with its distinctive vocabulary and standards of exactness. Another arises at the level of theoretical physics, where there can be indeterminacy of theories relative to observational evidence. This can present choices between theories on the basis of standards such as relative simplicity or explanatory power. Copernicus proposed his heliocentric model of the solar system at a time when observational evidence alone could not decide between it and the much more complex geocentric model derived from Ptolemy. Simplicity then became the initial basis for selecting his model over its alternative. Sometimes observational evidence is sufficient to warrant only tentative acceptance justified by the increased explanatory power of a theory, with terminal acceptance on the basis of experimental tests coming only later. This occurred during the replacement of Newton’s theory of gravitation by Einstein’s in the early twentieth century prior to Eddington’s observation of the phenomenon of the bending of light as it travels in the vicinity of bodies of large mass. This observation provided a basis for terminal acceptance of General Relativity by the community of physicists. It may be occurring in the present as some physicists tentatively accept string theory on the basis of its explanatory power, despite the absence of current experimental confirmation. But these complications should not obscure the fact that observation does eventually provide a basis for choice between theories, nor do they weaken the basic

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requirement of the material thing framework that discourses formulated within it be subject to empirical justification. After Copernicus, experimental evidence became sufficient to enable a final decision in favor of the heliocentric over the geocentric model. If string theory proves to be in principle incapable of being observationally tested, then it will be excluded from physics because it fails this basic requirement of a meaningful scientific theory.

These distinctive features of the material thing discourse framework are obscured in formulations of the viewpoint that has been labeled “social constructivism.” This has been formulated by some of its advocates as “Reality is a social construction” or “There is no reality independent of our descriptions of it,” a generalized use of the term “reality” that only disguises differences between discourse frameworks. Certainly every scientific generalization or theory is a social construction, that is, is formulated in a certain vocabulary by some scientist and made public to an audience. But the same is true of the novel written by a novelist, a poem by a poet, and a play by a playwright. Each creates its own “world” or “reality” in accordance with the guiding purpose of the activity in which its author is engaged. But there is clearly a difference between the imagined worlds of literature and the world of the sciences, for descriptions of the latter world require observation as a path to justified acceptance, while the requirements for assertions about literary worlds are very different. The basis for asserting “Iago of Shakespeare’s Othello is a villain” is very different from that for “Grass is green in summer” or “Water is H2O”. To say that both are social constructions constituting reality is not at all helpful in understanding this difference.

This is very obvious when contrasting literary fiction to science. It becomes the topic of controversies when the comparison is between cosmogonies of religious narratives and scientific theories about the origins of the universe and our solar system or the origins of the human species. Rorty uses the example from the sixteenth century of Cardinal Bellarmine correcting Galileo’s endorsement of Copernicus’s heliocentric model of the solar system on the basis of Scriptural passages supporting the Church’s geocentric model. We have no grounds, Rorty argues, for claiming that Galileo’s justification based on observational evidence is superior to the Cardinal’s appeal to the cosmogony of Genesis as a way of determining the structure of the solar system. The best we can say is that Galileo’s experimental method eventually prevailed.17 The heliocentric and geocentric models are alternative social constructions for Rorty, and it is only rhetorical persuasion that convinces the public to accept one over the other. His view can be applied to the contemporary conflict between

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creationist accounts of the origins of the human species and the explanation of these origins provided by evolution theory. Again, we have two alternative constructions, with the choice between them decided by the relative persuasiveness of their advocates.

As formulated in this way by Rorty, this view is absurd. It is absurd because the cosmogony of Genesis is formulated within the same material thing framework as used by Galileo and evolution theory, for it purports to explain events occurring in a world independent of ourselves to which we are causally related. As such, it is subject to the same standards of justification applied to Copernicus’s model and to evolutionary theory. When applied to the Cardinal’s defense of the geocentric model and to current creationist theories by the community of scientists, these standards warrant the rejection of Scripture-based accounts. Rorty’s view has been criticized by Paul Boghossian and John Searle on these grounds.18 Boghossian correctly insists that there are no alternative descriptions of our environment that are equally valid, one provided by the sciences, the other by scriptural cosmogonies, whether those of Near Eastern religions or any other religious traditions. Standards of exactness can vary for empirical descriptions, and this will determine the vocabulary that is used within them. Natural language descriptions with a vocabulary of sensory adjectives of color, sound, and taste will differ from the descriptions of physics and chemistry with terms applying only to measurable quantities. But once these conventional standards of exactness are agreed on, there is an “objectivity” to empirical descriptions that distinguishes them from descriptions found in religious narratives. As Searle notes, the English lexicon includes the word “mountain” and we find it convenient to use this word to refer to landmarks in order to locate places and to describe our environment. It is of sufficient exactness to distinguish mountains from hills and valleys, and such distinctions are useful. Such usefulness exists, Searle says, because “there really are such things [as mountains], and they existed before we had the word and they will continue to exist long after we have all died.” This realist claim that there “really are such things” should be understood as simply an acknowledgement that to make assertions within the material thing framework is to accept the constraints of empirical justification relying on sensory discriminations. The distinctions enabled within this framework serve a different purpose from those served by distinctions within religious narratives between God, Satan, and angels. The standards for acceptance of the material framework are universal standards not conditioned by the historical circumstances or social position of those operating within the framework, for we use these standards to correct the errors of the past. Ptolemy’s geocentric model of

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the solar system was not true relative to his circumstances and status, for it can be shown to be false by applying empirical standards

There is, however, another discourse framework to which we can apply the relativistic standards of the social constructivists. This is the interpretive framework used within literary and artistic communities in describing the meanings of portions of literary works and creations of the visual arts and music. In T. S. Eliot’s Wasteland is the passage “White bodies naked on the low damp ground/ And bones cast in a little low dry garret,/ Rattled by the rat’s foot only, year to year”. How do we interpret the phrase “white bodies naked on the low damp ground”? Is the poet referring to dead bodies? Or to lovers in the grip of their passion? Each interpretation seems possible, for the topics of death and sex are prominent in the poem, and only the persuasiveness of an interpreter would seem a way of gaining acceptance of one over the other. And how do we interpret what a musical passage or a painting represents? Every interpretation does seem in some sense to “create its own reality,” as the constructivists like to say, leaving differences difficult to resolve, and with rhetorical persuasion by those with prestigious status often the means of gaining acceptance of one interpretation over its competitors. These features of the interpretive framework are extended by social constructivists to the material thing framework in a way that provokes and justifies the realist response of Boghossian and Searle. Differences arising from competing interpretations of “white bodies naked” are indeed very different from the dispute between Galileo and the Church over Copernicus’s model of the solar system. The error of Rorty’s variety of social constructivism is to ignore this difference and impose standards of acceptance applied within literature and the arts to the history of science.

5.4. Strategies of Evasion

Realists’ dismissals of social constructivism are easily made for the Catholic Church’s blocking scientific inquiry in the sixteenth century and for recent attempts in the United States to interfere with scientific education by claiming that creationism is a viable alternative to evolution theory on the grounds that “evolution is only a theory.” There are underlying reasons for the persistent conflicts between science and religion, however, and these are ignored by these dismissals. The central standard for justified acceptance employed by the religious narrative framework is provided by an authority assigned responsibility for transmitting the narrative. When writing is introduced, this authority

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typically becomes scriptures as selected, edited, and interpreted by clerics. Where there are conflicts within a narrative tradition or passages subject to different interpretations, religious institutions devise means of resolving differences. When they cannot, separate institutions are founded, as in the formation of different Buddhist sects and Protestant denominations after the Reformation. These standards and means of resolving disputes are derived from purposes of this framework that serve important social functions. The narratives of a religion provide a source of hope for the future for believers and a sense of the importance of their activities. This contrasts with the sense of human insignificance that can be induced by the study of scientific cosmologies and evolution theory. They also provide a sense of identity and a sense of self-worth that is derived from membership in a community and participation in rituals for which narratives provide a background. This offsets senses of isolation in rural areas and anonymity induced by mobile populations and concentrations in urban areas. These narratives can also function as a means of justifying both standards of morality and political and clerical authority. To reject the cosmogonies of these narratives and replace them with observation-based theories of the sciences is to threaten such purposes. If one portion of a given narrative is dismissed as fiction and mythology, why not others? Accurate information about our environment is important, but so are hope and senses of identity and self-worth, and we should not be surprised to find representatives of religious institutions who provide these to believers assigning priority to these values. As proposing alternative descriptions of the solar system and human origins by appealing to the authority of the Biblical cosmogony, Cardinal Bellarmine and creationists deserve the harsh judgment of the realists. But their attempts to undermine the advancement of science are more understandable if we regard religious leaders as advocating the priority of a discourse framework that advances values that sometimes conflict with that of obtaining accurate information.

The allegorizing strategy described earlier in this chapter is one that assimilates religious narratives to literature as a means of avoiding conflict between religion and experimental science. There is another strategy designed—not consciously, but under the pressure of the circumstance of the rise of experimental science—as a way of achieving the same result. This is the fideist strategy advocated by writers as diverse as St. Augustine and Kierkegaard, which creates a distinction between religious “faith” and scientific “reason.” This produces a clean separation between the justificatory standards of the material thing and narrative frameworks. The values represented by these frameworks are prevented from coming into conflict because the standards we apply to them are distinct. But this form

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of separation cannot be accomplished to the extent that religious faith is a means to promoting hope for the future. This is because hopes are integrally tied to justified beliefs and distinguished from wishes. I may wish I were a billionaire, but I can be said to hope for this condition only if there is some reasonable belief that such immense wealth might actually come my way. Such belief is an attitude towards a proposition expressed within the material thing discourse framework and subject to justification by empirical standards. Hope for personal immortality is supported by the narrative traditions of the major religions, and is buttressed by a metaphysical belief in the existence of souls as immaterial substances. But if this belief fails to stand up to rational scrutiny, the hope becomes a wish.

       But besides hope, other benefits accrue to believers in religious institutions, and these benefits can take precedence over hope supported by justified belief. These include those of group identification and the senses of continuity with the past and self-worth derived from it. Recitation of creeds is both a condition for membership in many religions and a form of verbal ritual. Do all members of Reformed churches reciting the Apostles’ Creed believe that Jesus “arose again from the dead,” and now “sitteth on the right hand of God the Father Almighty,” and believe that “from thence he shall come to judge the quick and the dead?” Many members of Near Eastern creedal religions would seem to recite their respective creeds as necessary to identify with a continuous community, and in the process they suspend disbelief. Irrelevant to the security they derive from this identification are beliefs to which the evaluative standards of the material thing framework might be applied. Indeed, the more bizarre the belief, the more it serves to insulate a community of believers from those outside the community, and this in itself serves the purpose of separating themselves their wider society and promoting community identity. The religious faith expressed in such recitations may not be a type of belief supporting realistic hope, but it fulfills the different purpose of identifying believers with a supporting community and a commitment to pursue its way of life. More relevant to such identification than the material thing framework is the mental transactional framework as the means for expressing mutual assistance and appreciation.        In addition to fideism, there is another strategy for avoiding the cognitive dissonance arising from accepting accounts of the supernatural in religious narratives and what can be empirically justified. This is the strategy of abstract monotheism, and it has taken a variety of forms. One was an offshoot of the attempt described above of subjective idealism to reduce the material thing framework to the mental transactional by

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replacing nouns used to refer to objects locatable in space and time with adjectives used within avowals. In order to explain how the sensory images of one person can be coordinated to those experienced by another, objective idealism postulated the existence of an Absolute, a Universal Mind in which all such images are somehow present. This provided a literal basis for interpreting religious narratives of monotheistic religions, with the abstract conception of an Absolute becoming a philosophical substitute for the personalized God of the narratives who loves, judges, and forgives. The legitimacy of religious institutions was preserved by this system of interpretation. Scientific institutions, on the other hand, were accorded a secondary status, for objects referred to by the sciences were relegated to the status of fictions that function to coordinate images reported in descriptions of experimental results.       Use of abstract substitutes for the deity described in Biblical narratives was common before the idealists, of course. The conclusions of both cosmological and ontological arguments selected a specific feature of the deity in order to prove their conclusions. For Aquinas’s arguments from motion and causation, the features were God as original source of motion (the Prime Mover) and as the originator of causal sequences (the First Cause). For the argument from design, the deity was conceived as the source of order and design (the Grand Designer). For the ontological argument originating with Anselm, the feature selected was God’s perfection, a feature claimed to include the deity’s existence. Each of these abstract features was consistent with the description of the deity of Biblical narratives, but each was also a characterization that offered little comfort to the supplicant requesting divine assistance. To know that the deity was the first originator of motion and causation, was the source of nature’s design, and was perfect did not itself offer assistance in solving personal problems or guarantee eternal rewards for sacrifice of selfish goals in order to benefit others. But at least acceptance of the conclusions of these philosophical arguments supported belief in the existence of the deity designated in religious narratives, and to this extent supported hope and the sense of self-worth associated with membership in a community sharing this hope.        As for criticisms of cosmological and ontological arguments by Hume and Kant, criticisms of idealism had the effect of undermining its version of abstract monotheism, and led to the search for an alternative on the part of theologians as representatives of religious institutions. The concept of an Absolute fulfilled the role in idealist systems of explaining coordination between experiences. The alternative form of monotheism used by theologians in the early twentieth century introduced terms such as

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“Being”, “Ground of Being”, “Being-In-Itself”, and “Reality” to refer to the object of religious faith, terms of such abstract generality as to rule out an explanatory role for them and to make them impervious to criticisms leveled against idealism and against previous proofs of the divine. At the same time, their indefiniteness enabled transference to them of religious emotions aroused by traditional religious narratives. As a member of a religious community, a believer was provided a means of interpreting these narratives into a form of language that through its vacuous generality bypassed doctrinal disputes arising from differing interpretations of scriptures and avoided cognitive dissonance with commonsense and science. It also provided a means of maintaining an identity within a religious community and the psychological advantages bestowed by this identity.        Both fideism and abstract monotheism thus enabled a means of coping with conflicts between religious narratives and science, with Enlightenment criticisms of Medieval arguments for God’s existence, and with later criticisms of idealism. They must be recognized, however, as means of evading the difficulties posed by the overlap of the material thing and narrative framework, each with differing standards for justification derived from social functions they perform. Only the material thing framework can possibly fulfill the role of providing information about the environment to which we are causally related. This is because this framework has as its central standard for acceptance the requirement of observational testing, with the form of this testing varying with the sub-frameworks of the special sciences. Our causal relation to an environment through observation is our only means of gaining information about it. The cosmogonies of religious narratives may provide an explanation of observed phenomena that satisfies the need for some explanation of what we observe, and they serve to augment the power and authority of a narrative’s supernatural source of moral instructions and legitimizations of political and clerical power. But because we have no means of relating them to what is observed in a way that could falsify their descriptions of our environment, they do not provide viable descriptive alternatives to the informing descriptions of daily life and the natural sciences. The introduction of terms of vacuous generality such as “the One” or “Ground of Being” serves only to foster the illusion of the narratives providing such an alternative, and tends to obscure the distinctive role provided by the narratives in offering hope, a sense of human importance, and communal identity.       This concludes our discussion of relationships between discourse frameworks used for combinations of sentences that are descriptive in

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form. These include the material thing, mental transactional, interpretive, and religious narrative frameworks. The use of the indicative mood within mental transactional, interpretive, and religious narrative frameworks tends to obscure differences between the justificatory standards and purposes of these frameworks and those of the material thing framework. Philosophical problems arise from the use of the indicative mood to ascribe sensations and thoughts, to interpret, and to assert relations between past historical figures and the supernatural. They also arise from attempts to extend features of one framework on others by means of reductions, as occurs for both physicalist identifications of the mental with the physical and idealist identifications of spatially locatable objects with complexes of ideas. Such attempts are symptomatic of the increasing specialization of forms of discourse used within social institutions during the nineteenth century, resulting in a misunderstanding of the social roles fulfilled by these institutions. Reductionist projects are the results of this specialization and its accompanying tendency by philosophical representatives of institutions to impose the standards of one discourse framework on all others.        Our next topic is the use of language to control the actions of others and to influence the ways a society organizes itself. Central to this use is a normative framework whose justifications are formulated in the form of practical inferences. The fact that these inferences combine descriptive and expressive premisses endows them with special importance in understanding relationships between different discourse frameworks.

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6

Prescriptive Frameworks

There is much variety in inferences used to prescribe conduct. Among them are imperative inferences with conclusions of the form “Do action A”, projective inferences between resolutives of the form “I shall do A”, and deontic inferences with normative “ought” premisses and conclusions. These have been extensively discussed elsewhere, and the details of this discussion will not be included here.19 Our present focus is instead on the relationship between imperatives and types of justification used in claiming that an imperative ought or ought not be obeyed. Within an imperative discourse framework, justification is provided by the authority of sources of imperatives, while external to this framework justification is provided by a practical inference appealing to an end shared within the community. As we shall see in this chapter and the next, the two types of justification are present both for imperatives in the form of moral rules and for imperatives in the form of laws, whether codified laws of a common law system or statutory laws issued by a sovereign power. The focus of this chapter is on the form of practical inferences used to provide shared end justifications of moral rules. I argue that this is to be understood by extending features of the type of inference occurring in the sample conversation of Chapter 2 in which Bill justifies to Betty his going shopping by citing his want for printer paper and the unstated assumption that shopping (rather than, say, ordering online) is the best way to get it. As hybrids with expressive, descriptive, and prescriptive “ought” sentences, practical inferences illustrate complex overlaps between discourse frameworks. My method is to approach this complexity by initially examining the structure of prudential inferences used to justify an individual’s own action, inferences that are relatively easily understood because of their familiarity in daily life. These features are then progressively extended to the much less obvious justifications given to moral rules. Moral inferences must be reconstructed through this extension by examining similarities and differences between them and the simpler singular inferences. In the chapter to follow, the shared end model of practical inference is extended to legal and political systems.

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6.1. Prudential Inferences

A prudential inference is a first person inference with an “ought” or “should” conclusion requiring a certain action. This normative conclusion is inferred from premisses that express a desire for a state of affairs and other descriptive premisses stating what is the best or the only way to bring about the desired state of affairs in a given circumstance. The conclusion requiring an action is applied to the agent or agents who express the desire. Its first person singular form is

I want ECircumstances C obtainThe only (or best) way to obtain E in C is to do MTherefore, I ought to (should) do M.

Thus, I might reason that I should buy a coat on the grounds that I want to stay warm, the upcoming winter is to be unusually cold, and the only way for me to stay warm outside is to buy a coat. Perhaps more commonly used are negative forms of prudential inferences, for we are often more aware of what we have an aversion towards than what we positively want. In such cases, the conclusion is a prohibition against performing an action, and the inference is of the form

I have an aversion towards FCircumstances C obtainMy doing M is sufficient to bring about F about in circumstances CI ought not (should not) do M.

We shall refer to premisses expressing a desire for E or an aversion towards F as the “major premisses” of the inferences in deference to the terminology of Aristotle’s “practical syllogisms.” The positive E is a “value” or a “good” for the agent, and the expression of a want or desire for it the expression of what some writers term a “pro-attitude.” The negative F is a “disvalue” or “evil” for the agent. Such premisses can be restated by sentences of the forms “It is in my best interest to have E come about” and “It is against my interests for F to obtain”, since we normally want what we think is in our interests and don’t want what is counter to them. But such coincidence of wants with interests comes after considering costs and consequences of M other than E or F, and such

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consideration can lead to a modification of them. Expression of interests by an agent is thus the result of a deliberative process that begins with the inferences just formulated.

Introducing this process is tantamount to distinguishing practical inferences from deductive inferences, that is, to acknowledging that their normative conclusions are not entailed (necessitated) by the premisses of practical inferences. There may be a cost to the action M towards which I have an aversion that outweighs for me my want for the end E. Buying the coat may be sufficiently expensive that I would prefer the discomfort of being cold to incurring the expense, or buying the coat may force me to forego obtaining something I prefer to warmth. To make this explicit, we might add as an additional premiss “I prefer having E to the costs incurred by doing M”, but since there is an indefinite number of consequences of M other than E these potential costs can never be enumerated. Also assumed is an ability on the part of the agent to perform M. Where the inference begins with an aversion towards the disliked F, there may be some consequence of doing M that might be desired. I may have an aversion towards becoming more overweight and realize that eating chocolate contributes to this. But I may also get satisfaction from such eating, and then be forced to weigh this satisfaction against being more overweight. It is through such consideration of costs and additional consequences that the initial end E and disliked F become modified in ways that enable a different normative conclusion capable of restoring action.

To be prudent is not to be egoistic. The wants, aversions, and preferences expressed in a prudential inference need not be selfish and ignore the interests of others. The end E may be an ideal provided by others as models within one’s family or friends, or portrayed as a virtue in literature and historical and religious narratives, an ideal that acts as a lure for a desire to emulate. The disliked F may be a negative ideal inspired also by examples of what is familiar from one’s own experience or social enculturation—vices illustrated by the abusive relative, the villain in a movie, the coward of a novel, Judas as betrayer of trust in Christian narratives. The desire of a mother for a good education for her daughter is surely altruistic, as would be her aversion towards the prospect of her daughter’s teenage pregnancy that interferes with her education. It is essential for prudential inferences only that that the desires, aversions, and preferences expressed within them are those of the agent as individual and expressed in the first person.

Do we make explicit to ourselves the premisses of such inferences? Obviously not in most circumstances. Practical inferences as actually used are typically enthymemes, inferences with implied, unexpressed premisses

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expressing or stating what is in the background. We thus might formulate the inferences “Since C, I ought to do M” (“Since the winter will be cold, I ought to buy a coat”) or “Since I want E, I ought to do M”, leaving implicit other premisses about ends, circumstances, preferences between means and other consequences of M. Similarly, I may reason “Since I’m overweight, I shouldn’t eat chocolates”, leaving implicit premisses expressing aversion to being overweight and the fact that excessive eating is sufficient to produce it. During deliberation we focus on what is in question, on what poses for us a problem, and leave in the background what is obvious to ourselves.

There are usually options available within the general action M that is a necessary condition for obtaining E. Instead of just buying some coat or other, I may be faced with a choice between buying a parka or a wool coat. Here preferences between the costs and other consequences of these alternatives would be used to justify the choice that is made and the conclusion that this alternative is required as the “best way.” Where there are options A1,A2,…,Ak,…,An, we thus add “I prefer the costs and consequences of alternative Ak to other alternatives” to justify the performance of Ak. Often we are indifferent, between the outcomes of options, however, and simply arbitrarily resolve “I shall do Ak” in order to decide on some action or other and avoid the costs of failure to act. Whether reasoned or arbitrary, a resolution to do M follows deductively only from another resolution in the form of a plan to bring about an E to which M is a necessary means, as when a person infers “I shall do M” from the premisses “I shall bring about E” and “My doing M is a necessary means for obtaining E”. For such an inference, the realization that it is impracticable to do M necessitates abandoning the plan to bring about E.

Where we can assert only the probabilities of outcomes, decisions between alternatives may require the calculation formulas of decision theory.20 Because it is in practice impossible to survey all the costs and consequences of a given action and consider all alternatives, the addition of information about probabilities and expressions of preferences between outcomes will not necessitate a normative conclusion. Nor will this additional information necessitate a resolution to actually perform the action that we infer we should do. Also, having accepted “I should do M” on the basis of prudential reasoning, the agent may decline to declare “I shall do M”, for weakness of will may intervene to overpower what is required by reason.

Some philosophers may concede that a person’s wants, preferences, and beliefs can be used both to explain why he or she performed some

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action and to predict future behavior, as when we explain Smith’s buying a coat by his desiring warmth, his preferences between having this end and costs of the means, and his beliefs about the winter and what actions are means, or use this information to predict a purchase. But the beliefs must be warranted and based on good evidence, they argue, in order to justify the actions. Also, it is argued that wants and preferences in themselves are irrational, and must themselves be justified in order to infer the normative conclusion. An overweight person may have a craving for chocolates, but clearly this craving, while explaining why he bought chocolate truffles recently, does not justify the purchase. A justified action is one that we judge is in the person’s best interest, one that somehow promotes well-being in the long run, and is not simply what this individual believes is in his best interest and what may be only a means to satisfy a short-term craving.

Such justification is thought to be insured by replacing mention of desires, aversions, and preferences with a self-evident rational principle from which the required action is deductively inferred, along with descriptive premisses about circumstances. For prudential inferences, the principle is an egoistic principle—what might be titled the “Epicurean principle” after its founder in classical philosophy—a principle that can be formulated as an obligation to act in such a way as to achieve some ultimate end. This end is what Sarah Broadie calls the “Grand View,” an end to which all other ends are subordinated means.21 For the view labeled “egoistic hedonism,” it is the maximization of one’s own happiness (satisfaction, pleasure, utility). The inference to a required action then becomes deductive, and takes the form

One ought to maximize one’s own happiness (satisfaction, pleasure, utility)Circumstances C obtainDoing action M is necessary for me in C to maximize my happiness (or whatever)Therefore, I ought to (should) do M.

It is then thought that this can be used to criticize actions based on desires and preferences. Such criticism can be in the form of retrospective correction of conduct originally justified by a prudential inference, as when the glutton for chocolate acknowledges that she shouldn’t have bought the truffles after gaining a few pounds, and bases the correction on the egoistic principle. It can also take the form of correcting the decisions

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of others, as when we conclude that someone shouldn’t have gratified a craving by applying this principle.

Such rationalist reformulations represent, however, profound misunderstandings of practical deliberation. We do know what we want, what we don’t want, and our preferences, but we lack the omniscience to determine what would maximize our own happiness or pleasure. We stumble through life, guided often by the advice of others about what to do, but also making wrong decisions, experiencing the frustrations attending these decisions, and using this experience to shape our future desires, aversions, and preferences. Along the way, we make use of prudential rules of personal conduct that are transmitted through the generations as a kind of folklore based on funded wisdom to guide those in the present, prudential rules formulated in such sayings as “A stitch in time saves nine”, “Don’t cry over spilt milk”, or “A penny saved is a penny earned”. Success pursuant to following such rules reinforces the desires on which these were originally based. For failures we use retrospective forms of prudential inferences to conclude “I shouldn’t have done A” after the performance of A brought about unanticipated harmful consequences. Such correction based on past pleasures and pains influence what we now want, but in the past would have been impossible to predict. In this way, the young child acting on immediate impulse and hasty decisions becomes the mature adult who uses a prudential inference to consider costs and consequences. Moreover, often a person’s pursuit of ideals shaped by this experience is inconsistent with personal happiness as the long run balance of pleasure over pain, but this is far from being grounds for abandoning these ideals. A heartless calculation of future pleasures and pains is usually contrasted unfavorably with guidance by ideals. Our task is not to impose on human conduct a rationalist standard that cannot be applied and conflicts with our intuitions, but to describe as accurately as how in fact we deliberate about what we should do. With this as a guide, it seems obvious that in deliberation each of us uses a prudential inference in which desires, aversions, and preferences provide the basis for a defeasible normative conclusion, not a deductive inference with an egoistic principle as major premiss.

Formulations of the egoistic principle emphasize the contrast between short-term gratification of desires and long-term satisfaction and the importance of striking a balance between the immediate and long-term consequences of an action. As applied to prudential inferences, this principle can be understood as an injunction to consider the immediate and distant and to consider alternatives that compete for being the “best way.” Such consideration involves expenditures of both time and effort, and

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these must be allocated by the importance of a prospective action and the time available for making a decision. Deliberation about a future career obviously requires being more careful of costs and consequences than does a casual choice about what cereal to buy for tomorrow’s breakfast. The egoistic principle can be understood as a second-order rule prescribing consideration of costs and consequences of means to the extent warranted by the cost of correcting a future mistake. As such, it is a rule governing the use of a prudential inference, not itself a self-evident premiss.

Defenders of rationalism sometimes justify an appeal to principles as necessary to distinguish our species from other animals. Christine Korsgaard tells us that an animal’s behavior is guided by “her perceptions and her desires and aversions … she may have acquired through learning and experience.” In contrast, we humans possess a form of self-consciousness that enables us to be aware of the “grounds” of our actions. For us, the “faculty of reason is identified … as the active dimension of the mind, and rational principles are then identified as those that describe or constitute rational activity.”22 This may mean only that we humans have the capacity, not only to form sentences, but to use practical inferences to infer what we should do and then to formulate the premisses and conclusions of these inferences. Interpreted in this way, we understand reasoning to be the use of an inference, and affirm our capacity to make explicit through philosophical analysis the forms of inference we use while deliberating. As such, Korsgaard’s psychological description is obviously true. We use discursive language and describe to ourselves the rules governing this use; other animals on our planet do not. This capacity enables us to anticipate the consequences of our actions in the remote future, and retrospectively correct mistakes occurring in the distant past. This contrasts to the narrow temporal and spatial limitations of animal learning. But Korsgaard’s description also implies that our warranted acceptance of propositions about circumstances and outcomes of actions, together with our desires, aversions, and preferences, can never justify a course of action. Instead, motivational elements must be measured against rational principles such as the egoistic principle in order to exercise the self-control that is characteristic of our species. This implication is just as obviously false, for besides being impossible to apply, the only principles that can be formulated conflict with our intuitions about the importance of pursuing hard ideals.

How do normative sentences of the form “I should do M” function? Are they descriptions of some special sort of facts, or are they expressions of emotions? Both answers have been given in the history of philosophy,

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but both are surely false. The form of any sentence is to be understood in terms of the type of discourse in which it may occur as a justified conclusion. For example, we understand the form of the uniform generalization “All crows are black” in terms of premisses such as “This crow is black”, “That one is too”, and “So are these others” that are used to justify it by means of an inductive inference. Following inductive rules such as that of varying attributes of crows other than being black insures that the observed sample is a representative one providing the justification. Because this justification is derived from observation sentences related to a causally related environment, we say that there is some “fact of the matter” to which the uniform generalization “corresponds.” Such reference to “facts” and “correspondence” should be recognized as simply an acknowledgement of the means employed to justify the empirical generalization.

These considerations can be extended to our understanding of first person normatives of the form “I should do A”. Their general meanings are derived from the form of the premisses from which they are derived by means of a prudential inference. As we have seen, these premisses combine empirical descriptions of circumstances, technical descriptions of what actions will produce consequences, and expressions of wants, aversions, and preferences. Unlike “All crows are black”, a first person normative is clearly not itself an empirical description, and therefore there is no fact to which it can be said corresponds that provides it with “objectivity.” But it is also not simply an expression of personal wants and preferences, and is therefore not “subjective.” This is insured by the inclusion of descriptive premisses. Because of the form of inference in which it occurs as conclusion, it is neither objective nor subjective, but has unique features derived from hybrid combinations within prudential inferences.

There is another parallel between inductive reasoning to attributive uniform generalizations of the form “All S is P” and prudential reasoning that is worth noting. Like prudential inferences, an inductive inference moves from a sample to a defeasible generalization as conclusion; there is always the possibility that enlarging the sample will produce a defeating instance that forces a restriction of the scope of the generalization. John Stuart Mill proposed the addition of a Principle of the Uniformity of Nature, the principle that nature’s regularities are uniform or exceptionless, a principle he claimed could be established empirically by inductive methods. Adding the principle converts any inductive inference from one with a defeasible conclusion into a deductive inference in which the combination of descriptions of the sample and uniformity principle

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entail the uniform generalization. From the sample of black crows and the principle follows necessarily the conclusion that all crows are black. Mill’s principle is commonly criticized as being based on circular reasoning, since establishing it empirically must presuppose what is said to be demonstrated. But there is another, and equally serious, objection. The principle is impossible to apply to any situation in which we are attempting to infer to a universal generalization, for we can never know in advance that the principle applies to any uniformity that is being currently investigated. Nature is uniform in some areas, but not in others, perhaps in the color of crows, but not in the color of swans. It would take omniscient investigators to determine in advance what these areas are. As a regulative ideal, however, the uniformity principle can be applied to inductive reasoning as the prescription to search for a modified uniform generalization after the defeat of one currently failing to survive testing. As for prudential reasoning, the attempt to impose a deductive model on induction fails, but the implied second-order regulation on the use of inductive inferences is of great value.

As we shall presently see, many of the basic features of the singular prudential inferences just outlined carry over to practical inferences with plural “we” premisses. For all practical deliberation about what should be done, we cannot replace the defeasible normative conclusions of the inferences used with normatives deductively inferred from self-evident rational principles. The normative conclusions of these inferences are neither descriptive nor expressive, but of a form that reflects the hybrid premisses from which they are derived. But there are also features that distinguish plural forms, and to these we now turn.

6.2. Cooperative Action and Normative Sub-Frameworks

The prudential first person inferences just discussed are agent-homogeneous practical inferences whose normative conclusions apply to the person who expresses the wants and preferences of the premisses. A person X may want to bring about a state of affairs E and know that this can happen only if some other person Y performs an action M. This may lead to X’s ordering Y to do M, manipulating Y through inducements, or somehow coercing the action. But such means for controlling another, cannot themselves justify the normative conclusion that Y ought to do M. This might follow if X had enabling authority over Y through enjoying some privileged family or organizational status as parent, employer, or legal authority. But the mere fact that X wants E and prefers E to the costs

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of M does not justify a normative conclusion applied to another individual Y. For such agent-heterogeneous inferences, prudential premisses are insufficient grounds. Nor are they sufficient grounds for second and third person homogeneous inferences of the form

X (you) want(s) ESince C, only by X’s (your) doing M can E be achievedX (you) prefer(s) having E to the costs of MTherefore, X (you) ought to do M.

The person formulating such an inference must in some sense endorse the wants and preferences of the agent before inferring such a conclusion, but such endorsement introduces a type of sharing of wants and preferences typical of moral reasoning. Without such endorsement, the inference, together with knowledge of the agent’s beliefs, enables a prediction or explanation of what the agent will do or has done, and may provide a basis for offering counseling and advice. But it fails to justify the assertion of a normative requirement.

Now contrast such cases with first person plural homogeneous inferences where someone expresses a want shared within his or her community for a state of affairs that can be brought about only by the cooperative performance of some necessary means. This community can be as small as a family or group of friends and as large as the members of religious communities and modern nation states. For all such communities, we assume a shared preference for the desired state of affairs that outweighs an aversion to incurring the costs of the means. For example, there may be a community living by a river that is sufficiently wide, deep, and swift to make it difficult to reach the other side without a bridge for transport. Some member of this community might argue that a bridge should be built by using the inference

We want easy transport across the riverOnly by building a bridge will this be possibleOur preference for this transport is stronger than our aversion to the costs of building the bridgeWe have the resources for building a bridgeTherefore, we ought to build one.

The premisses of this inference—not all of which may be explicitly formulated— provide at least prima facie grounds for inferring its

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normative conclusion. A requirement for collective action can in this way be inferred from shared wants and preferences by using a plural first person form of a prudential inference. As for the singular first person form, there is no need for an endorsement of the expressed wants and preferences; wants and preferences in conjunction with circumstances and abilities are themselves sufficient grounds. There is only the requirement that a second-order rule be followed requiring consideration of the costs and consequences of the means that is commensurate with the costs of a mistaken decision. This does not preclude there being in the future a retrospective correction of this conclusion. As for a singular prudential inference, the conclusion of a plural prudential inference is defeasible.

Despite these similarities, there is an obvious problem for the plural form that is absent for the singular. What right does any individual have to use the representative “we” and express the shared wants and preferences of his or her community? Individuals may know their own wants, aversions, and preferences, but how can they claim to know those of others? And in the face of such questions, why should any member of this community accept the responsibility of joining in cooperative action? Convincing others to join in requires an ability on the part of this representative to express what other members of the community in fact want and prefer. But what is shared is not always obvious, and indifference may be an obstacle to collective action. Some of the community may resign themselves to staying permanently on their side of the river, or prefer the inconvenience of foregoing the advantages of crossing to the costs of building a bridge. Faced with this lack of consensus on a shared goal, users of the representative “we” must rely on their social prestige within the community to overcome such resistance, and this may be supplemented by skillful use of rhetoric portraying to the hesitant the ideal world of easy transport and minimizing the difficulties of bridge building.

Historically, users of the representative “we” have supplemented such means of persuasion with appeals to the dominant religious narratives of the community portraying spirits, gods, or a single god in personal terms as having wants somehow analogous to human wants. These narratives may serve to establish these representatives as having some relation to the supernatural that enables them to maintain that what they express as a shared want of the community is what the deity or deities want. The effect is to sanctify their right to their use of the representative “we”. Their present relation to the supernatural may exist by virtue of a historical link to those in the past with a direct relation, as Jewish rabbis trace themselves to Moses and Aaron, Christian priests and ministers to

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the New Testament disciples, and Shiite imams to Mohammed and the martyred Al-Hussein. The narratives of the river community described above may include no explicit command derived from the supernatural to cross their particular river, though they may include a general wish on the part of a deity for community expansion. Those using the representative “we”—the community’s shamans, members of their priestly caste—then might claim themselves empowered by historical links to interpret what is expressed in their narratives as applying to their situation. Religion can thus serve as a powerful means of reaching acceptance within the community of obligations for collective action, a means of overcoming the difficulty of determining shared wants and indecision.

Anthropologists tell us that primitive peoples without written language who live in small, stable communities are usually egalitarian and lacking in rigid hierarchal structure, though certain members may have prestige greater than others through age or command of resources. For them, the function of religion in determining shared wants is typically supplemented, though seldom totally replaced, by quasi-democratic procedures for determining what should collectively be done. These procedures may require that all or at least most must agree on both the end and the necessary means, with perhaps designated individuals delegated to select among alternative ways of carrying out this means. Some bridge or other may be concluded in such discussions about how to get across the river, but there may be widespread indifference as to what materials, design, or method of construction is to be used. For such technical details, there is delegation of the right to make choices. For larger dispersed communities and early civilizations such as those of ancient Egypt, the American Aztecs, and inhabitants of the Indus River valley, sanctification through religious narratives provided leaders the means of justifying collective actions as diverse as constructing monumental structures and assembling armies for defense and aggression against neighbors. This helped insure widespread acceptance of a requirement for collective action, as contrasted to coercion of the unwilling. Where democratic procedures were utilized, as in ancient Athens, the more prominent influence on practical reasoning was rhetorical language and literature as means of expressing shared wants and preferences. The discourse frameworks of early science and technology also intersected with practical inferences to provide the means of providing warranted acceptance of premisses describing circumstances and means to ends.

Where some combination of religious sanctification, rhetoric, and threat of social disapproval is effective, collective action can often be voluntary, with individuals accepting their responsibilities on the basis of

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shared wants and preferences and acceptance of certain means. But for larger communities this must be supplemented by coercion in the form of enforceable edicts, ordinances, or laws, with justification for these imperatives derived from the premisses of a plural prudential inference. This justification can take the form of a negative first person plural prudential inference in which the expression of an aversion is the major premiss, as in the inference

We have an aversion towards an unhealthy environmentAllowing public burning of waste is sufficient to produce an unhealthy environmentWe ought not to allow public burning of waste.

Such a conclusion adopted by a group to apply to itself becomes the normative basis of a policy, and can then provide the justification for specific laws or ordinances designed to bring about the end expressed in the first premiss, as an ordinance prohibiting public burning might be justified by the above inference. Institutions for enacting and enforcing ordinances and laws are then justified as necessary means for enacting policies. The legal discourse framework used within these institutions intersects through such justifications with the normative discourse of practical inferences in a way to be discussed in the next chapter.

There is obviously an enormous variety of means employed within different societies for formulating shared wants and aversions in ways that lead to the acceptance of requirements of collective action. In developed civilizations, institutions vie with each other for having the dominant role, with philosophers often functioning as apologists for the claims of one institution and its discourse framework over others. But at its best, philosophy has investigated problems arising from overlaps between frameworks and methods, content to describe how we arrive at consensus about collective actions rather than prescribe particular courses of action. Such descriptions require a classification of discourse frameworks. For descriptive frameworks, this task is relatively easy, since we have the different forms of subject term introduction and identification within discourses as a means for classification that were outlined in Chapter 3. For prescriptive frameworks under consideration in this chapter, the principal classification distinguishes imperative from normative frameworks, with the latter providing one form of justification for the prescriptions and rules of the former. This classification introduces complications not found for the more tractable descriptive frameworks.

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There are, in addition, puzzles arising from the hybrid nature of the inferences used within normative frameworks and overlaps with descriptive frameworks and expressive forms of language.

Our central concern here is with differences between the two principal normative sub-frameworks: the agent-homogeneous prudential framework in which both singular and plural first person practical inferences are formulated and the moral framework that is the topic of the next section. The inferences just described for guiding collective action are agent-homogeneous and thus prudential, with the first person plural “we” occurring in both premisses and conclusions. How policies justified by these inferences are to be carried by individuals—whether by the coercive means of a legal system or by voluntary cooperation—is left indefinite. In contrast, the moral discourse framework is characterized by the use of agent-heterogeneous inferences in which obligations on individuals are directly derived from first person plural expressions of shared wants and preferences. Moral inferences used to justify requirements on individuals share with plural prudential inferences the problem of determining who has the right to use the representative “we” in the premisses to express shared wants and preferences. But in addition, moral inferences introduce further complexity in the form of an additional premiss required to infer from wants and preferences shared within the community to a moral requirement imposed on an individual. These inferences and their additional premiss are our next topic.

6.3. Moral Inferences

All practical deliberation is intermittent, occurring only when we confront what Dewey called “problematic situations” that either block individual action or interfere with coordinated collective action. Like all conventions, moral conventions are what David Lewis terms “solutions to coordination problems.” There is a wide variety of conventions, including those of initiating conversations, etiquette, and the lexical and syntactic conventions of speech. Moral conventions have the special feature of arising when there are shared desires within a community for advantages possible only when there is expectation of reciprocation. A member keeps his or her promise, tells the truth, and helps others in the expectation that others will do the same. Such expectation may be prior to the codification of conventions in the form of general imperatives such as “Keep promises”, “Tell the truth”, and “Help others in need” addressed to all within the community, often through the intermediary of religious

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institutions adding their sanctification of the rules. Merleau Ponty describes as “sedimentation” the process by which habit and convention replace what had been consciously considered in the past, sparing us the need to rethink as we concentrate on new problems, and enabling us to anticipate with some measure of reliability the conduct of others. Evolutionary biologists conjecture that a form of biological sedimentation is the result of selective forces favoring the cooperation and coordination essential for the survival of our ancestors. Whether the result of biological or cultural transmission, sedimentation is apparent in the “self-evidence” of certain basic moral rules whose justification is considered only in the presence of those conflicts of “the heart with itself” portrayed in literature that confront us with competing obligations. Justification becomes a problem also when social conflicts arise over issues such as abortion and allocation of scarce medical resources, and discussions of them provide amplification of competing values appealed to in the struggle to reach consensus on what is right or wrong. The persistence of these conflicts should make it evident to us that they are not resolved by application of self-evident moral principles applied to situations through dispassionate calculation of consequences. Instead, desires, aversions, and preferences towards the consequences of actions play a role analogous to their role in prudential reasoning.

Using the prudential as a model makes possible a reconstruction of the type of moral inference that might be used to justify the obligation to keep promises. The major premiss would seem to be an expression of a shared desire, while the means/end premiss states that this desire can be satisfied only by promise-keeping. As a first attempt at this reconstruction we have an inference chain with two conclusions:

We want a state of mutual trustOnly if everyone keeps their promises will mutual trust be obtainedTherefore, everyone ought to keep their promises.Therefore, I/you/he or she ought to keep my/your/his or her promise.

The second conclusion is deductively inferred from the general obligation and the fact that the specified individual is a member of the community represented by the “we” of the first premiss, a community that can range in size from two individuals to the members of a nation state. But the second premiss stating the necessary means to the end is obviously false. A few broken promises will not themselves destroy trust within the community; it is only necessary that most keep their promises in order for there to be a general expectation that commitments will be kept. The

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second premiss must therefore be reformulated as “Only if most keep their promises will mutual trust be obtained”. But this only generates the conclusion that most should keep their promises, and this is insufficient to impose an obligation on any individual member of the community.

This shortcoming can be overcome by adding a reformulation of Kant’s Categorical Imperative in the form of a Generalization Principle that has the effect of refusing to allow individuals the right to exempt themselves from rules whose general compliance is necessary to satisfy a want they share with others. This principle has the effect of excluding free riding, that is, of denying individuals the right to take advantage of a practice from which they benefit but do not participate in. Adding this principle as a premiss gives us a general inference form, this time with three conclusions.

We want EOnly if most do M, will E be obtainedTherefore, most should (ought to) do MBut if most should do M, then everyone should (the Generalization Principle) Therefore, everyone should do MTherefore, I/you/he or she should do M.

For moral inferences, the shared end E is a “common good,” not simply a good or value for this or that individual. For negative forms, there is a shared aversion towards some F as an “evil” for which M is a sufficient means, and we infer to a prohibition against performing M. The positive inference to an obligation to do M provides the justification for the general imperative in the form of the moral rule “Do M” (“Keep promises”, “Tell the truth”, “Help neighbors in distress”). An inference to a prohibition against performing M provides justification for negative rules such as “Don’t break your promises”, “Don’t tell a lie”, and “Don’t abandon neighbors when in need”. It is through such reasoning that we justify to another the keeping of a promise. “Would you want everyone else not to keep his or her promises?” we ask, and then reply “Well, then you shouldn’t break the promise you just made.” Left implicit is the reason behind this individual’s agreeing that he would not want everyone to break his promise, the fact that he himself shares in the want to be able to trust others in the future and on the trust accorded him in making promises.

Kant presented his Categorical Imperative as a self-evident principle from which specific moral obligations could be deductively inferred. But as many critics have noted, as “Act only on those maxims

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that you would will to become universal laws” the Kantian principle is empty of content, leaving indefinite the reason for selecting (or willing) certain general rules (maxims) of conduct to be extended to everyone while excluding others. Kant’s formulation does force on individuals an awareness that some desire or other is shared between them and their community, while leaving unexpressed the specific state of affairs that is desired. It thus serves as a moral heuristic, a means of articulating the end for which general compliance with a certain rule is a necessary means. In its negative form, the task becomes that of describing the state of affairs towards which there is an aversion for which a general type of action is a sufficient condition, as when we recognize that our own aversion towards a general state of mistrust is the source for an unwillingness to generalize lying into a social practice. We realize that in a community dominated by liars there would be such general mistrust as to make it impossible for any individual to have his or her own lie believed.

Are there not circumstances in which it is morally permissible for me to break a promise to a friend or to lie when it saves another from embarrassment? In excusing ourselves and others we must weigh the advantages of stability of inflexible rules as necessary for expectations needed for coordinated action against consequences of particular actions in special circumstances. There is a human tendency to grant excuses to ourselves more readily than to others, and this bias and its temptations have the effect of letting the conclusion of a singular prudential inference override the conclusion of a moral inference. In circumstances where phone contact is impossible, the conclusion that I should keep a promise to meet a friend for lunch may conflict with a prudential conclusion that I finish a last-minute project necessary for professional advancement. One strategy is to amend the rule with an “unless” clause that grants an exception, converting the rule “Do M” to “Do M unless C”, where C is some special circumstance or some consequence of doing M. The rule to keep promises then might be restated as “Keep promises unless they interfere with professional advancement”. But this would not seem to be a rule that we would be willing to have everyone follow, and so by applying the Kantian heuristic we would realize that the desire for which the exception is necessary is not one shared with others. In this case, the conflict between prudential and moral “ought” conclusions cannot be avoided by revising the moral rule. In all such cases, our intuitions would seem to be that moral conclusions override prudential, that shared desires are more compelling justifications for actions than individual desires.

But societies differ in the specificity of their moral code’s rules and the degree of tolerance of individual variations. These differences are most

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marked in the area of sexual behavior. Where rules are overly restrictive, violations tend to be overlooked rather than enforced by social pressures. This is then followed by a relaxation of rules justified by reasoning that some rules no longer serve a compelling social purpose. When relaxation results in states of affairs for which there is widely shared aversion, the rules tend to revert either to old restrictions or to new ones that avoid what is disliked. Thus, the relaxation in England of feudal restrictions on sexual promiscuity in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was followed by the restrictions of the Victorian era, and this in turn by relaxation in the twentieth century. Practical reasoning used to justify such changes is rarely made explicit and can only be reconstructed with the help of relatively simple models provided by prudential deliberation and the relatively obvious justifications of moral requirements such as that for promise-keeping. The task is made more difficult by the outpouring of emotions that accompanies moral controversies. Appeals commonly made to various interpretations of religious narratives only serve to disguise the underlying desires and aversions generating these controversies.

Though moral conclusions may vary in this way from one culture and time period to another, the structure of the moral reasoning is fixed by the inference outlined above, with shared desires, aversions, and preferences relevant to the rules to which the Generalization Principle is applied. In open societies, the arts and literature have an important role to play in shaping these attitudes through their portrayal of such positive ideals as honesty, fidelity, and trustworthiness and of negative examples provided by prudery, self-indulgence, cheating for personal benefit, and repression of individuals. Such open societies are contrasted to the closed societies of repressive authoritarian regimes in which the arts and literature are regarded as destabilizing influences threatening public morality and social order. Suppression of them is designed to insure that clerical and political leaders retain exclusive right to use the representative “we”.

6.4. The Bogey of Relativism

So far, contrasts between prudential and moral inferences have been stated in formal terms. Prudential inferences are agent-homogeneous in both singular and plural forms, with conclusions mirroring the form of the expressive major premiss. If this premiss is in the first person singular or

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plural, then the conclusion stating the prudential obligation must also be first person singular or plural. In contrast, moral inferences are agent-heterogeneous, with the expressive first premiss being of the first person plural representative “we” form, and the conclusion can be singular and either first, second, or third person. We apply moral conclusions not only to ourselves, but to others, while prudential conclusions can be asserted only of the agent expressing the wants and preferences. Where they are not, they must be in the form of advice and counseling if not to be meddling. The other formal contrast between the prudential and the moral is due to the addition in moral inferences of the Generalization Principle that excludes free riding by any member of the community. But besides these formal contrasts, there is the more basic contrast between reasoning about actions whose costs and consequences affect only the agent or a restricted group of agents and reasoning about actions that affect all others in the community. This contrast poses a problem for any attempt to extend the forms of prudential reasoning to moral reasoning. There may be agreement that the egoistic principle of maximizing happiness or pleasure is inconsistent with how we in fact deliberate about our own actions. But where we take into consideration the effect of our influence on others, there is widespread belief that we must appeal to some moral principle requiring us to adopt a perspective outside that of our own.

Utilitarianism provides this principle either in the form of the classical principle of Bentham to maximize total utility (pleasure, happiness) for all affected by an action or policy or the principle of average utilitarianism requiring actions that maximize average utility as calculated by dividing total utility by the number of those affected. In either form, utilitarianism provides justifications of both public policy and morality, claiming to provide the self-evident principle from which obligations in both areas can be deductively inferred in conjunction with knowledge of circumstances and consequences of actions. Utilitarian principles serve two roles. As for the egoistic principle, they provide a second-order rule for the use of moral inferences by requiring a consideration of the costs and consequences of actions to the extent justified by time constraints and the importance of the decision being made. The second and more important role for these principles is to force an agent or group of agents to stand outside their own interests and adopt the standpoint of what Mill called the “impartial spectator” weighing the advantages and disadvantages of actions on all those affected. In this way, the bias individuals or restricted groups may have towards their own interests is overcome.

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We have seen how the principal objection to the egoistic principle as applied to prudential reasoning is that we know our own wants and aversions, while we can never know what will make us happy or provide a long-term balance of pleasure over pain. We can pursue only the ideals that present themselves to us and avoid negative examples, retrospectively correct our mistaken judgments about what should have been done, and consider costs and consequences of our actions to the extent feasible within time constraints. This objection carries over to utilitarian principles. It is true that no one using the representative “we” knows whether the desire or aversion he or she expresses is that of the community being addressed, and this distinguishes first person singular from plural major premisses. But clearly the standpoint of Mill’s impartial spectator determining what is in the social interest by measuring and comparing the total or average utility resulting from personal actions or social policy is a standpoint that none of us is capable of attaining. This has led to a revision of utilitarianism known as “preference utilitarianism” that recognizes that there can be only a comparison or ranking of utilities as based on the preferences of members of a community. Such preferences are learned through questionnaires of the kind used by empirical psychology and sociology as distributed to samples of individuals reporting their likes and dislikes and their preferences between outcomes.23 This has fostered the mistaken belief that an educated elite using the resources of these sciences can predict the consequences of actions and policies on the attitudes of members of the community, and on the basis of these predictions have the right to guide morality and public policy by calculations of utility based upon these predictions. Prior to the liberating influence of the Enlightenment, the priestly caste of a society was invested with the power to guide morality on the basis of its interpretation of a prevailing scriptural tradition. After the Enlightenment, guidance would be provided by those educated in philosophy’s utilitarian principles, and able to use the investigations of psychology and sociology in order to apply them.

The persistence of moral disputes in contemporary life should demonstrate how illusory was this confidence in such an educated elite. As an instrument for reforms in morality and social policy, utilitarianism has, of course, been of inestimable value in justifying challenges to entrenched moral rules. But its value has not been to provide an accurate description of how we actually reason about standards of conduct. Moral justification requires the transition from the singular “I” perspective of prudential deliberation about personal conduct to the plural “we” perspective. By proposing the standpoint of the impartial spectator who weighs the advantages of an action to ourselves against its effects on others,

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utilitarianism offers a valuable heuristic for determining desires shared among ourselves as individuals and others in our community. This heuristic takes the form of asking each individual, “What would you want from the standpoint of the impartial spectator who weighs the bias of your own situation against those of all others?” In the form of rule utilitarianism, the categorical imperative can be provided the content that it lacked in Kant’s formulation. Rules that when followed maximize utility as determined from an impartial perspective are those that should be willed to apply to all in the community, including ourselves. But recognition that any utilitarian principle is only a heuristic makes it possible for there to be other means of forming shared desires that can also be effective. The portrayals of exemplary lives and social utopias within the arts and literature are powerful means for determining shared positive ends, while their depictions of the hateful determine shared aversions. These images of the beautiful and ugly lure desires and aversions towards a social sharing.24 Selection and interpretation of their narratives by leaders of religious institutions provide both a means of focusing shared positive and negative ideals and continuity with the hopes of past generations. Utilitarianism recognizes the important role that psychology and sociology play in guiding moral conduct, but it ignores the important roles that other institutions must play in providing this guidance.

Besides relegating religious, literary, and artistic institutions to the sidelines, the impartiality required by utilitarianism produces unintuitive conclusions. The gaze of the impartial spectator is of unlimited extent, while moral conclusions inferred from the desires, aversions, and preferences expressed by the representative “we” of a moral inference are relative to the community being represented. The unlimited impartiality of utilitarianism is appealed to by Peter Singer in imposing moral requirements that seem to be unreasonable. In underdeveloped countries, there is widespread hunger, inadequate housing, and sometimes nonexistent education of the poor. There is a clearly a moral requirement for those in affluent countries like the United States to help correct this situation. But to what extent? Singer argues on utilitarian grounds we are morally required to give to those in need all but an income adequate to sustain for ourselves and our family basic needs of housing, food, transportation, and education. The reason is that the marginal utility derived from exceeding these needs is far less than the utility of our charitable gifts in meeting the needs of the disadvantaged. Maximization of utility requires substantial sacrifice. But Thomas Nagel seems correct in noting how the degree of this sacrifice conflicts with our intuitions. We believe that our obligations to our family and immediate community

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outweigh those to the more distant. Utilitarianism seems to have no way for justifying the priority we accord to those closer to us.25

The impartiality required by the utilitarian principle is matched by its universality, and this universality also conflicts with our intuitions. The rationally self-evident principles of Kantian ethics and utilitarianism are claimed to provide standards that can be applied to all agents, no matter where they may be situated, no matter what community they may happen to belong to. But in fact there is variation in moral standards of different societies, a variation that is readily explained by differences in desires, aversions, and preferences derived from environmental situation, history, and the relative priority assigned within a society to means of determining shared values used in moral reasoning. Determination of shared values can vary with the influence of religious and artistic/literary institutions. Strong weighting of the religious and the influence of clerics is characteristic of theocracies and fundamentalist religious communities. In more secular communities, religious influence is subordinate to the arts and literature. These differences of environment, history, and relative priority assigned to social institutions have the effect of creating cultural sub-frameworks within the normative moral framework, sub-frameworks very different from the sub-frameworks within descriptive frameworks that are due to methods of identifying referents or designata and evaluating and justifying constituent sentences. The philosophical traditions of a society usually determine the sub-framework that is dominant, and this dominance is reflected in educational systems. Of course, in every community there is appeal to both the religious and the literary/artistic, and there are many gradations of influence. Sub-frameworks are characterized by the dominance of one relative to others, but not the absence of alternatives.

Utilitarian moral principles were thought to provide universal standards applying to all communities, irrespective of their circumstances, history, and religious and literary traditions. Armed with these standards, utilitarianism offered the prospect of resolving moral disputes. But if it offered a heuristic for determining shared desires and preferences, as I have been contending, then this prospect is illusory. The heuristic of utilitarianism places emphasis on the importance of conducting preference surveys within the community and determining through them the utility outcomes of actions and social policies. Continuing moral disputes are regarded by utilitarians as following from either lack of information about utility outcomes or misunderstandings of their principles. But such a recipe for resolution by collecting more information and clarifying principles has proved to be impossible to apply. It will surely fail to

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convince many Christian fundamentalists living in the United States to change their positions on the morality of abortions or contraception.

These objections to utilitarianism—and indeed to any attempt to formulate an alternative universal standard of conduct—are typically countered by appealing to the bogey of relativism, the fear that without some universal standard moral decisions will be based on emotions that change over time and that widely vary between individuals and between communities. The lesson of history is that horrific acts of immorality can be committed by communities on their own members and on outside groups, and all of them were based on shared motivating desires. The slaughter of captives in Rome’s Coliseum and the Nazi holocaust may revolt us now, but were once a source of group entertainment and satisfied the desire for mastery and a sense of superiority. Without a universal standard to apply to desires, aversions, and preferences, it is argued, moral right and wrong will vary with the historical circumstances and changing emotions of groups, and we will have no basis for criticizing for what we now judge to be past immorality. What was done in the past or is now being done by communities different from ours will be judged right for them relative to their desires, preferences, and circumstances, though it may be wrong relative to us in the present.

Moral judgments as asserted conclusions of inferences are, of course, always made in the present relative to circumstances. But when the scope of the representative “we” extends to our own community, retrospective correction is an admission of the fallibility of such conclusions. New ideals are present to us that were hidden in the past; sensitivities to pains inflicted on others are developed through dramatizations; consequences unforeseen in the past are apparent now; and circumstances change. To retrospectively correct by asserting “They ought not to have done that action” is, in effect, to deny relativism as applied to certain past actions of our own community. We are asserting that these actions were objectively wrong, not simply right for those in the past, but wrong for us. The situation is more complicated when we judge the actions of a community different from our own. Moral relativism does seem to be appropriate for judgments about communities isolated from ours. Some Eskimo communities are reported as still practicing infanticide. We withhold condemnation for a community living in foreboding conditions where every member must be capable of sharing the burdens associated with such a life. But where there is interaction between our community and another, agreement on moral conclusions is often necessary in order for there to be coordinated action. Moral criticism is a means of influencing the desires and preferences upon which the conclusions of the other

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community are based. This may take the form of formulating some more general end E that is shared with the other community that is more indefinite than the specific ends E1 and E2 that are incompatible. This may make possible agreement on a requirement to do the more indefinite action M while tolerating differences between the specific M1 or M2 actions over which there was disagreement. Appeal to the utilitarian heuristic of the impartial spectator may be effective in bringing about this change. It is certainly more effective than any appeal to religious narratives and moral rules entrenched by these narratives, though selection from narratives and interpretation may play a role in mitigating conflicts. But even more effective than the utilitarian heuristic can be portrayals within literature and the arts of individuals of another community and their perspectives, for these representations often have the effect of enlarging the scope of the “we” used within moral inferences to include desires shared within the two communities.

6.5. The Veil of Ignorance as Alternative Heuristic

The concept of a shared desire is not without its difficulties, and it can easily mislead. There are desires only of individuals, never of groups. Rousseau described what he called the “general will” as not simply being the sum of individual wants, but what remains when we subtract the pluses and minuses that distinguish the wants of individuals. When justifying moral requirements, describing this “subtraction” seems to require the specification of some very generalized social state of affairs, as for the appeal to a state of mutual trust that is appealed to when we justify truth telling and promise keeping. For face-to-face interactions, we have the Golden Rule heuristic of asking of another whether what he is doing to another he would want to do be done to himself, a question that may be asked of the schoolyard bully in order to specify a state of absence of bullying as wanted by all in the school yard, including himself. The Kantian heuristic of the Categorical Imperative should be interpreted as simply a generalization of this heuristic, one that can be readily applied to generally accepted moral rules requiring truth telling, promise keeping, and mutual assistance.

Issues of morality and social policy within modern democracies, however, are not settled by direct questioning of the kind appropriate in the schoolyard. Here states of affairs desired in common by one group within a society are frequently the objects of aversion by another group, and this generates disputes. Majority rule through election of

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representatives, if functioning properly, seems to guarantee policy decisions that can be justified by the utilitarian heuristic of the impartial spectator, for what is determined from this vantage point to produce maximum utility will be states of affairs preferred by representatives of the majority. If a majority prefers a bridge across the nearby river and a system of taxation to pay for it, this is assumed to be what is wanted from an impartial standpoint of producing the greatest utility. Some system of taxation and bridge construction then becomes social policy. This utilitarian strategy can also be extended from such policy decisions to moral issues. If a majority has an aversion towards a state of affairs in which abortions are permitted, then this provides a moral justification for policies that restrict abortions. Some form of utility maximization seems to be guaranteed if democratic procedures reflecting the wants of the majority are followed.

In his A Theory of Justice John Rawls formulates what he terms an “Original Position” with a “veil of ignorance” as a means of developing an alternative to utilitarianism. Rawls argues that the utilitarian heuristic yields what are unacceptable moral conclusions, for it can justify the enslavement of a minority whose suffering is outweighed in the impartial utilitarian balance sheet by the satisfactions of the majority. The large crowds drawn to the Roman Coliseum took great pleasure in seeing the slaughter of the relatively few, and this could be rationalized as being morally permissible from the standpoint of a disinterested spectator concerned only with an overall balance of such pleasures and sufferings. The corrective proposed by Rawls is similar in some respects to the strategies of the Golden Rule and Categorical Imperative. The Original Position offers a way, he argues, of distancing ourselves from individual bias in a way that avoids abuses of minorities and individuals that might otherwise be sanctioned by utilitarianism. This argument is formulated primarily as a means of evaluating the justice of political systems, an application will be considered in the next chapter. But the argument has clear implications for the form of inferences used to justify moral conclusions that is our present topic.

The Original Position is described by Rawls as one in which individuals are ignorant of the outcome of what he terms the “natural lottery” that distributes genes inherited from parents, circumstances of birth in the form of economic and social status, educational opportunities, and traits such as sexual orientation. Individuals in this hypothetical situation are ignorant of their gender and race, whether they are in the majority or minority of their society, whether through circumstances beyond their control they are master or slave, powerful or weak, rich or

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poor, possessed of great or modest talents. Under this Veil of Ignorance of individual circumstances, each would face the risk of being in a disadvantaged position in society, of being one of the lottery’s “losers.” No one would, therefore, choose moral principles that would justify using the minority (whatever its race), slaves, weak, or poor to further the satisfaction of the majority, masters, powerful, or rich. This Veil of Ignorance thus operates as an alternative heuristic for determining the shared desires, aversions, and preferences of a society. Desires that we have in common are those we would have when we abstract from the bias of our special circumstances, as determined by choices that we would make in this Original Position of ignorance. On the basis of such hypothetical desires we can infer to the immorality of majority oppression in the form of racial, gender, and sexual orientation discrimination, a moral condemnation that may be impossible for the utilitarian heuristic of the impartial spectator.

I have just restated Rawls’s formulation of the Original Position in a way consistent with the account of moral inferences given in this chapter. Rawls conceives of moral reasoning in terms of a cognitive model that seems very different. He regards reasoning to moral principles on the model of retroductive and inductive reasoning used in the natural sciences. We start with a moral principle such as the utilitarian principle that initially explains our moral intuitions, much in the way a hypothesis might be formulated that explains what has been observed. We then infer from this principle its consequences as applied to individual cases, and then apply to these consequences our moral intuitions. If there is a conflict between principle and intuitions, we must reject or at least modify the principle in much the same manner as a physicist might reject or modify a theory on the basis of a falsifying experiment. Such rejection and modification continues until we reach what Rawls describes as a “reflective equilibrium” between principle and intuitions. Using this method leads to our rejecting the utilitarian principle, for it enables justifications of slavery and minority discrimination. In its place, we formulate some suitable moral principle that does preserve the rights of individuals to be free from oppression by a majority.

This alternative cognitive model derived from the natural sciences faces several difficulties. First, this model of moral reasoning has the effect of creating an implausible dichotomy between prudential and moral reasoning. Prudential reasoning may be guided by wants—what Kant termed “inclinations”—but moral reasoning is claimed to be guided by principles that survive testing against moral intuitions. This has the effect of creating a radical contrast between how we explain moral behavior and

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what should be appealed to by individuals in justifying their conduct, while for prudential reasoning no such gap exists. The explanation of why a person went shopping that cites that individual’s want for printer paper and beliefs about means parallels the practical inference that this individual would use in concluding that he should go shopping. In contrast, the explanation that a sociologist might give for why a society enslaved a minority or discriminated against some of its citizens would be entirely different from inferences used by members of that society to morally justify their conduct. Moral justification of conduct is said to be on the basis of self-evident principles that survive testing by intuitions, while sociological explanation would be given in terms of motivations and beliefs. Sociologists explain racial discrimination as motivated in part by a desire within the dominant segment of a society to maintain this dominance and bolster its sense of racial superiority. But according to the cognitive model, the reasoning used by poor whites in the post-bellum South in justifying discrimination against blacks would not include expression of desires of any kind. Instead, whites would have appealed to their own set of moral principles. There is thus an implausible gap between how we explain their conduct and the reasoning they in fact would have used to justify their conduct. There is often, of course, both conscious and unconscious deception that occurs when a person cites a justifying reason for conduct and an outside observer recognizes that very different motivations explain it. But it seems implausible to claim that explanation in terms of motivations can never coincide with justifying reasons, that is, to claim that it is always principles surviving the process of reaching reflective equilibrium that must be used to justify, while shared desires can be used only to explain.

The second objection to the rationalist conception of moral reasoning is that it precludes the arts, literature, and rhetoric from having a legitimate role in guiding conduct. The motivations they inspire may be cited for explanations but not for justification, for only principles in equilibrium with intuitions can perform a justificatory role. Harriet Beacher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin may have been instrumental in inspiring a shared desire among a substantial number of Americans for a state of affairs in which slavery was abolished. But rationalism requires that the justification for bringing about this state of affairs be derived from some principle without reference to this shared desire. For Rawls, justification can be derived from hypothetical desires and preferences, those that an individual would have under the counterfactual conditions of the Veil of Ignorance. Desires that individuals actually share are dismissed as irrational and excluded from a justificatory role. This assumes that we can determine

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what we would want under the Veil of Ignorance in complete independence of the values influenced by the artistic, literary, and religious traditions of our culture. This assumption is surely unrealistic.

The highly general moral principles of philosophical ethics have been powerful agents in changing moral standards preserved from the past by religious narratives as interpreted and selected from by religious leaders. Bentham as a proponent of utilitarianism was instrumental in bringing about reforms in such areas as punishment of criminals and the introduction of social welfare programs. Kant’s formulation of the Categorical Imperative as requiring that individuals are always to be treated as ends in themselves and never as means to other ends was a powerful force in the writing of constitutions and legislation that protected human rights, and Rawls’s formulation of his Original Position is having a similar effect on discussions of income disparities between the poor and rich. These represent changes in public morality that philosophical heuristics continue to play an important role in bringing about. But such changes occurred through changes in desires shared within societies, and philosophical heuristics must be recognized as complementing, not supplanting, other cultural influences. The immorality of laissez-faire capitalism was recognized just as much through Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath and its film adaptation as it was by applying the principles of philosophical ethics. These principles require individuals to abstract from their own situations and biases in order to reach consensus on those states of affairs that we reflectively realize are ends shared within their society. But such realization is not simply the result of philosophical reasoning. If it were, all moral conflicts would be the result of failures to properly understand and apply ethical theories. The persistence of these conflicts long after the formulation of Enlightenment moral principles provides strong indications that their sources are different from those proposed by the rationalist tradition as continued by Rawls.

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7

Applications to Politics and Law

In the areas of politics and law, reasoning is used either to legitimize or to challenge political institutions and legal systems. When there is broad acceptance of legitimization, it has the effect of fostering cooperation among citizens and obedience to laws. Rejection of legitimization poses a challenge to existing institutions and systems, and has the effect of urging replacement or at least substantial modification of them. To reason in this way is to use forms of practical inference whose conclusions assert normative general principles guiding the structure and policies of political and legal institutions. The appeal to moral considerations used in this reasoning suggests forms of inference that parallel the forms discussed in the previous chapter. Reasoning of this kind is complicated by the existence of social classes within developed countries, each with relative positions of power and with interests by the powerful in maintaining its status and by the weak to mount a challenge. In the area of morality, philosophy has attempted to perform the role of providing heuristics by which individuals and groups can transcend the biases of their own circumstances in order to arrive at general consensus about what can be morally justified. The persistence of disputes testifies to the difficulty in attaining this goal. In the areas of politics and law, consensus is even more difficult to reach, as party politics and class interests inevitably interfere. As for morality, philosophy’s special contribution seems to be that of describing the basic features of the discourse frameworks in which disputes are formulated and of proposing heuristics that offer some hope for their eventual resolution by mitigating, if not eliminating entirely, the effects of the biases introduced by an individual’s social circumstances.

These heuristics are in the form of social contract theories that describe counterfactual situations in order to determine shared wants relevant to basic political structures. The first of them historically is an Enlightenment theory that replaced theocratic justifications of the feudal period based on Scriptural authority. I label this the “State of Nature Theory,” which takes different forms as developed first by Hobbes, and subsequently modified by Locke and then Rousseau. I emphasize Locke’s version in the outline to follow, ignoring important differences between his minimalist version of government’s role and the more active role

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assigned by Rousseau. Rawls’s alternative theory has already been discussed with reference to moral justifications. In the second section of this chapter, its implications for principles of justice are outlined. Then follow discussions of the problems of evaluating different political systems and applying moral principles to legal systems.

7.1. Freedom in the of State of Nature

The state of nature described by Locke is one of equal freedom or liberty for all individuals, “a state of perfect freedom to order their actions, and dispose of their possessions and persons, as they think fit, within the bounds of the law of nature, without asking leave, or depending upon the will of any other man.”26 It is also a state of equality between individuals “wherein all the power and jurisdiction is reciprocal, no one having more than another; there being nothing more evident, than that creatures of the same species and rank, promiscuously born to all the same advantages of nature, and the use of the same faculties, should also be equal one amongst another without subordination or subjection.” Freedom from control by any other person and equality between persons are thus “natural” to the human condition. Locke regards this condition as self-evident to reason, but he also offers a revealing justification for these principles of liberty and equality. He cites Hooker’s justification of basic equality in terms of the desire by each of us “to be loved of [our] equals in nature as much as possible,” a desire, Hooker said, which “imposeth upon [us] a natural duty of bearing to them … fully the like affection.” From this requirement on all to hold others with the same “affection” of equality that we desire for ourselves follows the principles of morality, those “several rules and canons natural reason hath drawn, for direction of life, [of which] no man is ignorant.”27 In other words, from our shared desire to be treated as equals follows the moral principle that others are to be treated as equals. Similar reasoning can be applied to Locke’s claim that freedom is the natural condition of all persons. No one wants to be subject to the will of another. It follows that others should enjoy the freedom we desire for ourselves, and in this sense freedom is “natural.” Locke’s description of a state of nature is thus becomes a formulation of ideals of freedom and equality that are objects of desires shared by all and impose requirements on how we treat others.

But these ideals must be qualified. Individuals may be equal in some basic respects, but they differ in many others, most notably in family circumstances, social environments, talents, strengths, and in property

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possessions. Differences in strength and property give rise to dangers inherent in the state of nature. If all enjoyed this state of perfect freedom, then nothing would prevent the strong from unjustly seizing the property of the weak and disputes over property possession would have no means of being peacefully resolved. It would be a state Locke describes as one where

every one is judge, interpreter, and executioner … in his own case: and he that has right on his side, having ordinarily but his own single strength, hath not force enough to defend himself from injuries, or to punish delinquents.28

Even the strong would fear that they too may be at risk if someone stronger were to emerge. There is then a shared desire for the security lacking in the state of nature, and this desire becomes the basis for everyone’s agreeing to forego freedom to do as he or she pleases and surrender power to a government as the sovereign power providing security. This surrender is described as the fictional signing of a social contract between individuals and government. In Locke’s words,

To avoid these inconveniences, which disorder men’s properties in the state of nature, men unite into societies, that they may have the united strength of the whole society to secure and defend their properties, and may have standing rules to bound it, by which every one may know what is his. To this end it is that men give up all their natural power to the society which they enter into.

Locke thus claims to legitimize government through use of a practical inference with a shared desire for security as major premiss. This premiss was paired with the assumption that the necessary means for security is for individuals to forego their total freedom and transfer power to the government to a degree sufficient to provide security. It was also assumed that individuals would prefer this surrender of freedom to the costs of the insecurity that accompanied unlimited freedom. The inference used for this legitimization is thus

We want the security absent in a state of nature where there is perfect freedomThe necessary means to this security is to surrender some of this freedom by transferring power to a governmentWe prefer the advantages of security to the costs of limiting our freedom by this transfer

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Therefore, we ought to institute a government with power over ourselves.

There are two major limitations of freedom implied in such an inference. One is by way of a requirement to conform to a legal system designed primarily to establish and protect property rights and insure transmission of property from one generation to the next. The other is a requirement to surrender a certain proportion of one’s property (or financial resources) as taxes collected by the government for the purpose of providing security. The security for which there is an overriding desire includes also security from foreign invasion. It is therefore assumed that legitimized government has the power to impose taxes necessary not only to subsidize the internal security provided by a police force, courts, and penal system, but also to provide the external security provided by armed forces for national defense.

In Locke’s view, governmental powers over individuals are justified only to the extent necessary to achieve the end of security. All other rights to freedom are retained from the state of nature, as no one would reasonably agree to surrender them. Especially important is the right to own property, with which no government can justifiably interfere without citizen consent, for to do so would have the effect of denying the reason for the government’s existence.

The supreme power cannot take from any man any part of his property without his own consent: for the preservation of property being the end of government, and that for which men enter into society, it necessarily supposes and requires, that the people should have property, without which they must be supposed to lose that, by entering into society, which was the end for which they entered into it; too gross an absurdity for any man to own. Men therefore in society having property, they have such a right to the goods, which by the law of the community are theirs, that no body hath a right to take their substance or any part of it from them, without their own consent.29

Such consent for taxes that deprive individuals of their property Locke believes is best obtained through procedures established by the political system of representative democracy.

It is evident that, of the two ideals of freedom and equality expressed by this state of nature version of the social contract theory, freedom has by far the higher priority. It is to be limited only to the extent necessary to

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insure that the desire for security is satisfied; other restrictions, including interference with the possession of private property (with the exception of taxes necessary for security), were rejected as violations of a “natural right.” In contrast to freedom, which enjoyed this single limitation, equality is extended in only one respect. In order for a legal system to be recognized as a means of settling disputes, it is essential that all citizens be recognized as equal before the law, that the legal system provide an adjudicator accepted as impartial by all parties to disputes. This has the effect of guaranteeing gross inequalities of wealth, given differences between individuals in terms of family and social circumstances and native talent for acquiring property. If wealth redistribution were to occur as a means of ameliorating these inequalities, Locke’s view requires that this be brought about by voluntary acts of charity by the relatively affluent, not by the coercion of a tax system. The affluent may be motivated to perform charitable acts by the narratives of their religious tradition or by the moral standards imposed on individuals by utilitarian theory. But redistribution from wealthy to poor imposed by a government cannot be justified.

Rousseau recognized the dangers inherent in this slight of the egalitarian ideal. Like Locke, he regarded equality before the law as alone surviving the transition from the state of nature to civil society. “Instead of destroying natural inequality,” he writes, the social contract “substitutes, for such physical inequality as nature may have set up between men, an equality that is moral and legitimate, and that men, who may be unequal in strength or intelligence, become every one equal by convention and legal right.” But he acknowledges in a way that Locke does not that such legal equality is by itself a form of equality that is “only apparent and illusory,” serving

only to keep the pauper in his poverty and the rich man in the position he has usurped. In fact, laws are always of use to those who possess and harmful to those who have nothing: from which it follows that the social state is advantageous to men only when all have something and none too much.30

Rousseau’s extension beyond a legalistic ideal of equality to an economic ideal could not be accommodated, however, to the form of practical reasoning for which the state of nature contract theory provides the heuristic. Its description of the state of nature as threatening security against seizure of one’s property had the effect of relegating the ideal of equality to a status subordinate to freedom.

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Like Hobbes before him, Locke sought legitimization of government that provides an alternative to feudal justifications of the monarchy on the basis of religious narratives, one that appeals to a shared aversion towards insecurity. He thus provided an effective answer to the anarchist. Unlike the monarchist Hobbes, he regarded legitimization on the basis of shared preferences of citizens as providing a justification for representative democracy, for citizens should know their own preferences better than even the most benevolent despot. Democracy as a political system provides a means by which expression of preferences through referenda on issues or periodic elections of representatives serving terms of office can be translated into governmental policies and laws that regulate actions. But by emphasizing the desire for security as the basis for legitimizing any government, he reflected the interests of the relatively affluent, those with a special stake in preserving the law and order necessary for social stability. Historically, these interests coincided with those of members of the emerging merchant class of Locke’s day, a class requiring a legal system that would enable contractual arrangements necessary for commerce and trade and a class that later engineered in the nineteenth century the industrial revolution. This has been frequently noted by Marxist critics of Enlightenment “ideology” as part of the “superstructure” reflecting the class interests of the “bourgeoisie.” After the industrial revolution, the principal form of property ownership was not land, but shares in privately owned companies, and the security desired by owners was against seizure of these shares through the power of the state.

The reasoning used by Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau is formulated within a normative framework utilizing, as we have seen, a form of plural practical inference in which wants and preferences are expressed, along with assertions of what are necessary and sufficient means. As for all practical reasoning, use of such an inference requires balancing the benefits and costs of actions. In this case, this balancing is a weighing of the relative importance of security, freedom, and equality. But Locke, in common with other Enlightenment thinkers, claimed to be using a descriptive discourse modeled on Euclidean geometry and what was then thought (before the discovery of non-Euclidean geometries) to be its self-evident axioms. Just as it is self-evident in Euclidean geometry that the degrees in the interior angles of a triangle are equal to those of a semi-circle, so Locke thought it to be self-evident that it is unjust to take the property belonging to another. The result of imposing this descriptive framework was that complex trade-offs involved in means to the competing ends of security, freedom, and equality were obscured by the assertion of political principles grounded in what was claimed to be

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“natural” as revealed by reason. Terms such as “freedom” and “equality” demand qualification before they can be used to assert natural rights for all citizens. Once these qualifications are introduced, then trade-offs between competing values become apparent. Without them, the terms tend to become meaningless rhetorical devices of persuasion. We have seen how for Locke “equality” means only equality within a legal system designed to provide security, a type of equality that could be interpreted (and has been interpreted) as extending impartiality of the law with respect to gender, race, religious affiliation, and sexual orientation. But it could not be interpreted as justifying any amelioration of economic circumstances. Regarded as “natural” were differences between citizens ranging from abject poverty to extreme accumulated wealth transmitted between generations, differences protected by a legal system emphasizing property preservation. Applying such an interpretation of equality that excludes economic considerations has the effect of establishing an oligarchy of the privileged.

These differences are reflected in what “freedom” means in specific practical terms. It means for Locke negative freedom from governmental interference in matters of property ownership, except to the extent that this interference is necessary for security. But once considerations of economic conditions are introduced, positive aspects of freedom must be considered. To be free is to have before one certain choices—freedom to travel, to utilize the technology available in one’s generation, and to choose between a wide variety of foods, types of housing, and education for children. Such freedom stands in stark contrast to the restricted choices available to those forced into a form of economic slavery that exchanges their labor for subsistence wages and denies opportunities for improving their economic and social status. All of this is obscured by imposing a descriptive framework in which assertions are made about what is self-evident regarding the natural state of our species. Such assertions reflect, as Marxists correctly have pointed out in criticisms of Locke, the class interests and social circumstances of those making these assertions. In the United States at the beginning of the twenty-first century, a substantial number of the relatively affluent have rallied together under the banner of what they label a “Tea Party” that traces to rebellions against British imposition of taxes on the colonies. This movement appeals to the principles of “Founding Fathers” influenced by Locke’s version of the social contract theory. Such appeal is historically correct, for Locke’s version does restrict seizure of property in the form of taxation to what is required for internal and external security. Its effect is to maximize for the affluent of the Tea Party their own freedom, including the freedom to

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voluntarily donate to charities, while restricting it for less fortunate members of the class of the dispossessed. As Rousseau recognized, the less fortunate will with good reason regard this as having little advantage for them, and will be reluctant participants in a system allowing them to have very little and be objects of the whims of charity, while others enjoy far more than is necessary to satisfy their needs. Enlisting the willing cooperation of the less fortunate requires a political system whose justification is provided by a very different form of contract theory. To provide such a justification is the project of John Rawls’s twentieth century restatement.

7.2. Social Justice and the Ideal of Equality

I have described social contract theories as heuristics for determining the shared wants and preferences used in plural practical inferences. These inferences provide both legitimization for political systems and basic rights of citizens against the sovereign power of a government. Those formulating them describe a counterfactual situation in a way designed to produce consensus on the wants and preferences on which legitimization and rights are to be based. Locke uses this method to describe a state of natural freedom in a way that justifies assigning to a democratically elected government the minimal role of interfering with freedom only to the extent necessary to provide security of individuals against harm, most importantly, against harm in the form of seizure of property. Taxation is both an interference in individual freedom and a form of property seizure by the government. Locke’s theory implies that such confiscation should be imposed only to the extent necessary for security. Equality between citizens is restricted to equality before laws impartially applied to all.

This minimalist theory of government emphasizing freedom over equality continues to appeal to many, especially in the United States, where its central features are preserved in its Constitution. It has been prominently championed in Robert Nozick’s Anarchy, State, and Utopia and in a variety of ways by conservative politicians and commentators and by those who describe themselves as “pro-property libertarians.” Nozick formulates a “principle of fairness” that does require restrictions on individual liberty provided these restrictions are applied equally.

When a number of persons engage in a just, mutually advantageous cooperative venture according to rules and thus restrain their liberty in ways necessary to yield advantages for all, those who have

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submitted to these restrictions have a right to similar acquiescence on the part of those who have benefited from their submission.31

We can assume that these restrictions include those imposed by a system of taxation that provides for both national security from foreign threats and the internal security provided by a judicial system and law enforcement agencies, for Nozick regards this system and its agencies as being to the advantage of all and not (as Marxists have claimed) simply an instrument for preserving the status of the affluent. But Nozick adds the qualification that this submission to coercion is subject to the “condition that the benefits to a person from the actions of … others are greater than the costs to him of doing his share.”32 Obviously, there will be benefits from governmental actions that will be unequal. If I don’t happen to drive a car, Nozick’s condition requires my asking why a portion of the taxes I pay be allocated for a road or bridge that I myself never use. If I happen to be affluent and am being taxed to pay for what benefits the less fortunate, the questions multiply. As affluent, I may be able to afford to send my children to a private school, pay for all medical expenses, and for provide for a comfortable retirement. Why should I be taxed to support systems of government-administered public education, public health care, and social security that I can easily do without?

Equality of opportunity for all is an extension of equality that goes beyond Locke’s narrowly legalistic conception, and was eloquently expressed as an ideal by Lincoln in the nineteenth century when he said that government exists “to elevate the condition of men…to lift artificial weights from all shoulders; to clear paths of laudable pursuits for all‒‒to afford all an unfettered start and a fair chance in the race of life.”

Providing a measure of such equality through systems of public education, health care, and retirement security requires an extension of powers of taxation beyond what is envisioned in the minimalist theory defended by Nozick. Such an extension attempts to secure cooperation on the part of the less fortunate by offering hope that their lot might be improved, if not for themselves, at least for their offspring. But it cannot be accommodated to the minimalist theory in its most consistent form. This theory has the effect of justifying extremes of persistent poverty and inherited wealth as necessary conditions for protection of a right to freedom that is restricted only to the extent required for security against dangers inherent in a lawless state of nature.

Acceptance or rejection of Locke’s theory is strongly influenced by the bias of one’s economic circumstances, for the theory provides a

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justification for the affluent preserving their assets and a basis for criticizing any redistribution of wealth. The downtrodden described by Marx as having “nothing to lose but their chains” will reject legitimization of a system designed to make permanent their subordinate status. The wealthy just as obviously accept a legitimization of what preserves their advantage. It was to neutralize this bias of economic circumstances and achieve a form of legitimization and acknowledgement of rights acceptable to all, regardless of class status, that led Rawls to formulate his alternative to the state of nature theory. The effect of this alternative is to focus on economic equality as having an importance rivaling that of freedom.33 Like freedom qualified by the need for security, equality as conceived by Rawls is also qualified. Economic equality becomes a guiding principle of government policy only to the degree that it is to the advantage of the least well off.

Enlightenment thinkers appealed to our actual desire for individual liberty and our aversion to the insecurity of their hypothetical state of nature. In contrast, we have seen how Rawls asks us to imagine what we would want and prefer if placed in the Original Position of ignorance of outcomes of the natural lottery that distributes unequally to individuals. He then asks what basic principles we would choose that removes the distorting bias of individual wants and preferences arising from our knowledge of our natural lottery outcomes. These choices would then reflect those wants and preferences we share, though we might not initially be aware they are shared. Once determined, they can be used as premisses in legitimizing practical inferences securing the willing participation of all segments of society.

Rawls assumes that those in the Original Position would choose a political system in which their wants and preferences are reflected in laws and governmental policies to which they are subject. Leaders forming policies and enacting laws are more likely to be responsive if forced to submit to elections within the political system of representative democracy. But such a democracy, even one that operates fairly and efficiently, is the rule of the majority if there are no constraints on its power protecting individuals and minorities as provided in the U. S. Constitution’s Bill of Rights. Without such constraints, majority rule may lead to a majority unjustly tyrannizing individual citizens and minorities, even to the extent of enslaving a minority and forcing its members to labor for the benefit of the majority for subsistent wages, and then justifying this on the basis of the utilitarian principle of “greatest happiness of the greatest number.” Present-day forms of exploitation that can be rationalized on utilitarian grounds are many. They include sex trafficking

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of children, use of child labor, and national immigration policies permitting immigration of those willing to work for subsistence wages, while denying them compensation in the form of basic benefits of education, adequate housing, and health care. If the enjoyment of a large number of exploiters outweighs the suffering of relatively few victims, such forms of exploitation can be justified on utilitarian grounds. Also justified would be a majority’s seizing property acquired by those who have been encouraged to work hard to provide far-ranging benefits for their communities and whose incentives have included the prospect of acquiring personal wealth and transmitting it to their descendents. Human history is replete with examples of a majority using utilitarian reasoning to justify such ways of exploiting a minority.

A just society is one guided by principles that preserve the rights of individuals and minorities against such tyranny. Such principles, Rawls argues, would be chosen by those in the Original Position under a veil of ignorance. They would do so, as we saw in the previous chapter, because they would realize that they might be among the minority, and would want to eliminate the risk of themselves being victimized. They would not do unto others what, for all they know, could be done unto them. They would therefore choose, Rawls says, two fundamental principles to guide their society. The first to be chosen is a Liberty Maximization Principle that is consistent with Locke’s theory. This is the principle that liberty is to be maximized for individuals to the extent consistent with equal liberty for others. Presumably, provision of some security provided by the power of the state as protection against harm would be required to extend such equal liberty. This principle would be chosen in the Original Position because all would want such freedom for themselves. This principle provides the basis for freedoms of non-interference, or for what Isaiah Berlin terms “negative liberties,” of the kind protected by the First Amendment of the U. S. Constitution. Those in a position of power might not want such liberty to be extended to all, for they may want to use their special position to make others subservient to their wishes. But those ignorant as to whether they in fact held such a position would face the possibility of being in a vulnerable, weak status relative to others. Faced with this risk, Rawls reasons, they would surely welcome the protection provided by the principle and give it their endorsement. By removing through the assumption of ignorance the bias introduced by relative power, Rawls’s contract theory discloses the underlying shared want that justifies the right to fundamental negative liberties. Enlightenment social contract theories had justified this right as derived from the “natural” condition of humanity, while qualifying it by appealing to our aversion

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towards insecurity. Rawls justifies it by arguing that we would choose to be guided by it once the bias of our situation is removed via the veil of ignorance.

While the Liberty Maximization Principle is consistent with Locke’s theory, the second principle that Rawls argues would be chosen in the Original Position is not. This is a Distribution Principle stating that inequalities between individuals and social classes must be to the advantage of the least fortunate in natural lottery outcomes that distribute many goods unequally, goods that include, besides talents and family circumstances, the genes necessary for good health. Equality of opportunity is clearly provided by this principle, for unequal opportunity can never be to the advantage of the least favored. Such equality requires also acceptance of taxation to the extent sufficient for the system of public education necessary to provide it. But the Distribution Principle also forces every inequality to be justified by its advantage to the least well off. Clearly, many inequalities can be justified as providing incentives that benefit, not simply their direct beneficiaries, but also the wider public that is served. Those with the talent to become physicians will be more likely to accept long years of education and training if before them is the prospect of higher than average income. That the corporation executive has a higher income than the assembly line worker can be justified as also providing incentives for accepting executive responsibilities, though prestige of position and conferring of honors can also be powerful incentives for the talented. Marx formulated a distribution principle justifying inequalities with the slogan “To each according to their need; from each according to their ability.” But differences in need are not necessarily correlated with abilities of value to society. The unskilled parent of many children may contribute less to society than the trained specialist without a family to support. Recent history seems to show that an economic system based on Marx’s principle rarely improves the lot of the least advantaged, and that economic incentives provided by a market economy are necessary for efforts from beneficiaries of the natural lottery that are to the advantage of all. Societies structured by Marx’s principle may have relatively greater equality than what is possible in a market economy, but all tend to be equally poor, to the disadvantage of the least fortunate. But this is an issue that requires applying the Distribution Principle to judge the relative justice of societies in which there are varying degrees of social services and progressive taxation. The important innovation of Rawls is to state a principle that has the effect of stating that divergences from economic equality within a society stand in need of a justification showing that they are to the advantage of society’s least

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fortunate. To the extent that such a justification cannot be provided, a society must be judged to be unjust.

Rawls argues that those in the Original Position would value their freedom over improving their economic status, even if they happened to be among the least fortunate. The two principles, Liberty Maximization and Distribution, he says, would be “lexically ordered” by those in the Original Position in a way that establishes the priority of the first principle over the second. This is most implausible if understood as resolving all conflicts between freedom and equality in favor of freedom, for its effect is to render impotent the Distribution Principle. It would make it impossible to provide even so basic an equality as equality of opportunity, for a public educational system required for progress towards such equality restricts the freedom of taxpayers by reducing their ability to dispose of their financial assets in ways that they themselves choose. But stripped of the bias of our actual situation through ignorance in the Original Position, it is very doubtful that any of us would choose a prioritization of freedom that denies this means of achieving equality of opportunity. Every governmental policy designed to ameliorate differences in wealth—whether systems of progressive taxation, public education, or provision of social services—requires a curtailment of freedom that goes beyond the demands of security and what was justified by Locke. Instead of ordering the two principles, we must recognize that they represent values that are always incompatible, that a means to realizing one always has costs that reduce the ability to realize the other. Balancing them confronts political leaders and the judiciary with their most difficult decisions.34

The actual balance that is struck will vary with the circumstances and history of a society, and generalizations are difficult. Where resources are scarce and opportunities limited, there seems to be greater resentment towards unequal distributions of wealth, and the value of equality may be paramount. Such weighting of equality over freedom seems also to occur where there is a history of domination by a relatively small ruling class and a critique of its oppression within a society’s literary tradition of a kind occurring in continental Europe, Russia, and China, and throughout the colonial history of Asia and Africa. This contrasts to the depictions of the United States as the “land of opportunity” in which those in modest circumstances can accumulate great wealth. In such a land, there are idealizations of independence in its literature, and a history of widespread ownership of land by independent farmers. The degree to which an organized religion has historically influenced the operation of a nation’s political system has also influenced the relative weighting of freedom and

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equality. The religious narrative traditions of Christianity, Judaism, Islam, and Buddhism emphasize the ideal of equality as essential to the sense of individual self-worth. Where there is a history of close cooperation between religious organizations emphasizing this ideal and political institutions, there are often governmental policies designed to redistribute wealth. Fundamentalist Islam seems to appeal to the downtrodden in the Middle East principally because of the social services provided by political organizations allied with it and the promise of policies that will improve their relative position. The United States has a history of separation of church and state. Given this history, it is not surprising that redistribution of wealth is thought by many to be accomplished primarily through voluntary contributions to charities rather than coerced through a governmental system of progressive taxation.

The Original Position is postulated by Rawls as a means of removing the distorting bias that attends knowledge of our abilities and circumstances. The danger is that our descriptions of the preferences and choices of principles made by those in this position of ignorance will unconsciously reflect the biases of social class or the history of our own society. At most, the heuristic of any social contract theory enables us to identify the fundamental desires for liberty, security, and equality that underlie the policies of a given society and the political disputes occurring both within it and with societies with different histories. Once identified, awareness of these wants and preferences becomes a valuable means of reaching consensus, for becoming aware of the sources of a dispute allows some distance from the distorting passions that perpetuate it. This awareness and can be an indispensable first step in the process of resolving the dispute. Ecumenical movements that emphasize common ideals expressed within various religious traditions are also means of reaching consensus across different cultures. But religious narratives are also designed to establish a sense of group identity and self-worth of members through claims made within them that assert the group’s superiority and distinguish the faithful from less favored nonbelievers. Appeal to passages within such narratives tends to neutralize the appeals made by ecumenical leaders. By ignoring altogether the authority of religious narratives, philosophy’s social contract heuristics have the advantage of distancing themselves from conflicting interpretations of them. This enables us to focus directly on those shared desires and preferences that can provide a basis for consensus.

Legitimizations by social contract theories are moral legitimizations, and it is therefore not surprising that they take the same form as moral justifications generally in their appeal to shared wants and preferences.

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Nor is it surprising that policies of elected representatives of modern democracies reflect preferences in the form of relative weightings by citizens of the values of freedom, security, and equality expressed within contract theories. A society’s laws are evaluated as just or unjust by using standards derived from the values of freedom, security, and equality expressed within social contract theories. Whether the interpretations and enforcements of a legal system can also be morally evaluated is an issue to which we now turn. Central to its resolution is determining relationships between a society’s legal discourse framework and the normative framework used in legitimizing its political system.

7.3. The Legal Discourse Framework

We begin with a general outline of the legal discourse framework in which laws are formulated and applied, the framework used by law enforcement agencies, lawyers, and judges and juries deciding cases. Central to this framework are imperative sentences, sentences typically used to command another to perform some action. Orders and commands of daily life addressed to specific individuals are the precursors of laws. Justification for them takes the form of an “ought” or “should” sentence, which may be given in terms of the authority of the person issuing the command. “Pick up the clothes in your room” may be an order issued by a parent to her child. The question “Why should I?” seems here out of place, and it might be answered only by “Because I told you” or “Because I’m your mother”, though implicit is the answer that parents have some sort of natural authority over their children until they reach maturity. The situation is similar to that of a drill sergeant ordering a recruit order to stand at attention, where the rank of the sergeant is the only justification. In such situations, acceptance of authority is the only social reason for compliance, though there may also be individual prudential reasons of fear of punishment for disobedience or anticipation of reward for compliance. There is also a second form of justification for imperatives, although one more typical for those with the force of a request. The mother can attempt to justify her command to pick up clothes in terms of states of affairs that both she and her child desire, saying, for example, “Because we have visitors coming, and we both want to impress them with our neatness”. Whatever the social justification, whether given in terms of the authority of the source of the command relative to audience or in terms or a shared desire, the justification provides a basis for claiming that the command is

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one that ought to be obeyed, one that is binding on those being addressed.35

Whether or not an imperative is binding on its addressee is independent of acceptance of its justification. Told to pick up her clothes, a child may face the threat of punishment for disobedience or enjoy praise for completing the task. Consistency of these punishments and rewards makes predictable for the child the parent’s response to disobedience or obedience. The conclusion “I should pick up my clothes” might then be inferred by the child through prudential reasoning from her own desires, aversions, and preferences. Absence of rewards for compliance and punishments for noncompliance tend to lead the child not to accept the authority of a parent and a refusal to obey. In this case, an imperative may have been uttered, but fail to have its intended perlocutionary effect, that is, fail to have what J. L. Austin called the “uptake” appropriate for a command. Lacking the requisite backing, utterances such as those of the lax parent are not accompanied by acceptance of authority and compliance by their addressees. The situation has parallels for laws with penalties that are not enforced in many locales, such as laws prohibiting jay walking in cities. Routine disregard by pedestrians constitutes a rejection of the law’s authority. The bindingness of any imperative, however, whether used as a daily life command or issued as a law, is independent of uptake by individuals, holding where there is justification provided by authority or by shared end. It is not, therefore, established by singular prudential reasoning on the part of the imperative’s audience followed by behavioral responses of compliance. But lax enforcement and noncompliance can be the stimulus for change, either in the form of replacing those responsible for gaining compliance within the legal system on the grounds that they have failed to discharge their duty, or as an indication that a given law should be modified or repealed as not serving to promote shared goals and being an obstacle to preserving respect for the rule of law.

For members of societies sharing belief in religious narratives, moral rules formulated within them derive their justification from what is believed to be the supernatural authority of their source. This same sanctification is transmitted to edicts or laws issued by those whose authority can be derived from the narratives. The legal system of a theocracy is based on such a justification. Historically, this justification has continued to be accepted by citizens so long as there is widespread belief in the narratives. Reliance on these justifications leads to efforts by leaders to suppress what are labeled as “heresies” that threaten to undermine religious belief.

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For modern democracies with diversity of religious beliefs, there are only justifications by authority and shared ends, and relationships between them pose central issues for the philosophy of law. Laws take a variety of forms, and the nature of their justification varies accordingly. The laws of a common law system such as the Anglo-American system are established by judicial precedent, that is, by historical transmission of a series of decisions by courts in deciding cases in the absence of any explicit written law promulgated by a legislative body. Such laws may have been originally derived from commonsense moral rules, e.g., rules prescribing promise-keeping, truth-telling, and avoidance of harm to others, rules that might have been justified at an early stage by shared wants and preferences and later became expressed within religious narratives. But as occurring within the framework of a common law system, the bindingness of such laws is based on the precedent created by prior court decisions, with courts providing authority for the laws. Laws of this variety are contrasted to statutory laws and codifications of common law enacted by a sovereign power, whose authority provides the basis for their bindingness. The jurisdiction of a law is extended to those persons whom the law addresses, normally the present and future residents within a certain geographical area, whether town or city, state or province, or nation. The obligation to obey by those within a law’s jurisdiction is derived from the authority of the enacting legislature, which is in turn grounded in the constitution operative for the geographical area. For analytical positivism of the variety advanced by H. L. Hart and Joseph Raz, once enacted, the bindingness of a law is derived solely from the sources of the law’s authority.36

A shared end may have been appealed to in the deliberative stage by the members of a legislature in deciding on a policy promoted by a law. A rule established by precedent may have been derived from a moral rule operative within a community. But once enacted by a legislature or established as “settled law” by judicial precedent, a law’s bindingness derives only from the authority of its legislative or judicial source. The shared end form of justification used for morality and in assessing social justice no longer has any relevance.

This authority-derived conception of law has the effect of separating the policy making function of those formulating and enacting laws from those within the legal system responsible for applying laws to particular cases. The former use a normative framework, and are guided by the wants, preferences, and aversions of those whom they represent and by the often competing values of security, freedom, and equality. Those operating within the various institutions of the legal system, in contrast, must determine only, first, what the relevant laws are and penalties

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prescribed for their violation, and, secondly, how to apply laws and penalties in particular cases.

Determining laws and penalties is simply a matter of consulting records of statutes and past judicial decisions. Determining which laws are relevant to a particular case and then applying them is more difficult. Laws have what Hart terms an “open texture” that necessarily makes them more general than the particular cases to which they are applied. Their application becomes a matter of interpreting them by using a form of inference in which a law occurs as a general imperative. An example adapted from Hart illustrates this with a pair of inferences used by a city court in applying a local ordinance to a particular case being brought before it.37 The ordinance prohibits driving motor vehicles in parks, and the case is of a man driving an electric scooter.

No motor vehicle is allowed to be driven in city parks (the law)An electric scooter is a motor vehicle (the law’s interpretation) Therefore, no scooter may be driven in parks.The person before the court drove a scooter in a city park (relevant fact)Therefore, this person was in violation of the law (application of the law)

The major premiss of this valid inference is a generalization prohibiting the performance of action D (driving in parks) on the condition that a situation of type M (being in a motor vehicle) arises. Literally, this major premiss states that for everything, if it is a motor vehicle then it is not to be driven in a city park. The second premiss states that every electric scooter E is a motor vehicle, with the conclusion that no scooter is to be driven in the park. The relevant fact of the case, that the defendant drove a scooter, then leads to the conclusion that the law applies to him. The form of the first inference that interprets the law is of the form

∀x (Mx→∼D!x)∀x (Ex→Mx)_____________∀x (Ex→∼D!x)

The second inference applies the interpreted general law to the individual,

a, before the court.

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∀x (Ex→∼D!x) Ea_____________∼D!a

where ∼D!a is the imperative mood conclusion requiring the person brought before the court to not drive through the park on the grounds that this particular case fits the general type of situation M. The effect is to establish that a violation of a binding ordinance has occurred and that the punishment associated with it should be applied. As Hart emphasizes, the interpretive second premiss of the first inference is not an empirical description of some matter of fact. It is instead the announcement of a decision by the court that the scooter E fits the general condition M of being a motor vehicle, and that therefore the law ∀x (Mx→∼D!x) applies in the case before it. This interpretation leads directly to the application of the law. If not overturned after review of a higher court, this decision can be used as a precedent establishing that an electric scooter is a motor vehicle and guiding future decisions.

Legal reasoning used in such interpretation appeals to similarities and differences between features of the case at hand and the more general types of situation described in relevant laws. The term “motor vehicle” is used in the formulation of the city ordinance, and obviously applies to gasoline-powered cars, motor scooters, and trucks. Is an electric scooter sufficiently similar to these vehicles to warrant application of the ordinance? The fact that it does have a motor, even though not gasoline-powered, would seem to justify the application. But what of a bicycle powered by an electric motor? Bicycles seem not to be prohibited in the park by the ordinance. Are these powered bicycles sufficiently different from electric scooters to escape application? Only such considerations of similarity and difference are thought by analytical positivism to be relevant to the ordinance’s interpretation and applications. The general ends of the safety of park pedestrians and their peace and quiet may have been appealed to when the ordinance was passed by elected members of the city council, but are no longer relevant to those responsible for operating the legal system. Determining the relevant law and associated penalties and applying them through interpretation to particular cases, according to analytical positivism, is entirely independent of use of the normative framework in assessing whether laws promote shared values.

There are, however, values of procedural justice that are relevant to assessing legal institutions, what Lon Fuller describes as the “internal

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morality” of the law.38 These provide standards by which we evaluate the relative fairness of legal systems of different societies. Essential to the operation of the law are publicity and clarity. Citizens must be able both to know what the law is and to understand its legal language sufficiently well to be able to predict with confidence the consequences of their own actions. Prediction of consequences requires also that laws be projective into the future and not retroactively applied, and that their interpretation be sufficiently consistent between different courts.39 Detrimental to such consistency are police enforcement and judicial decisions that are arbitrary and reflective of the whims and predilections of authorities. Such arbitrariness undermines respect for the rule of law and weakens general compliance. This requirement for consistency and protection from arbitrariness tends to make institutions of the judicial system conservative in nature, with change and innovation assigned to those institutions responsible for formulating policies and enacting laws in support of them.

Fuller’s view represents an important modification of Hart’s separation of the law from moral considerations. It seems obvious that we apply standards of publicity, clarity, and consistency in evaluating legal systems, using them to praise systems that comply with them and criticize those legal systems marked by secrecy, obscurity, arbitrariness, and unpredictability. But as Fuller recognizes, these are standards internal to the legal framework, standards relevant to the purposes of legal institutions in providing an environment providing security from harms inflicted by others, means of settling disputes, and confidence that there is a stable system in place for transmitting property and conducting commercial transactions. Locke had argued that the security provided by these institutions constitutes the primary justification for restrictions on individual freedom imposed by a government. Fuller is in agreement with Hart that law and morality are separate in matters of “external morality” relative to shared ends wider in scope than those specific to the legal system. Law enforcement agencies and the judiciary may both agree that a certain law violates what they regard as basic standards of morality, including the standards for justice advanced in social contract theories. They may also realize that this opinion is widely shared in the general population. But their role in society requires them to conscientiously enforce the law, irrespective of their opinions regarding its merits. Responsibility for change or repeal of the law is the responsibility of others.

7.4. Overlaps of Legal and Normative Frameworks

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Few would dispute the need to separate the functions of those appointed to maintain a legal system from those of elected representatives subject to periodic elections, a separation reflected in differences between the legal discourse framework used by those enforcing laws and the normative political discourse framework in which policies are adopted and laws enacted. Shared ends are appealed to in the latter, including the sometimes competing ends of security, freedom, and equality. The purposes of providing a means of settling disputes, protecting against harms, and providing a basis for planning for the future guide use of the legal framework. Stability is maintained by appealing to similarities and differences in interpreting and applying laws. But acknowledging this separation of function should not blind us to overlaps between the two frameworks.

One such overlap may arise in the interpretation of a law during judicial proceedings. Consider again the case of the electric scooter-driving man charged with violating a city’s ordinance prohibiting motor vehicles in city parks. Interpretation of the ordinance is typically done in courts by noting similarities and differences between features of the case being considered and the features described in the ordinance and in past court decisions that have applied it. There is, however, an indefinite number of similarities and differences between one case and another. The art of judicial interpretation is typically involves deciding which of these features are relevant to the case being presently considered and ranking them in terms of importance. Having a motor is clearly relevant to deciding whether the scooter falls within the scope of the city ordinance; that it differs from cars and trucks in size, or that it happens to have an electric motor rather than gasoline, may be ranked as of lesser importance. Where descriptive terms such as “electric” and “gasoline” are considered, the legal framework is relatively isolated from the normative framework in which laws are initially formulated. But motor vehicles can also be described with terms combining the descriptive and evaluative, terms such as “quiet” and “safe” expressing what have been called “thick” concepts, as contrasted to “thin” concepts expressed by purely descriptive terms. The ends of providing peace and quiet to users of parks may have been considered when the ordinance was passed. Also considered may have been the safety of pedestrians from speeding vehicles. To describe an electric scooter as quiet and safe would then introduce into consideration shared ends of the kind appealed to in the normative reasoning originally used.

A different form of overlap is advocated by those who regard the legal system as being obligated to conform to moral standards of the kind

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that Fuller calls “external,” and who argue, in opposition to legal positivism, that these standards must guide the judiciary. This view can be traced to a natural law tradition that dates back to the Greek and Roman Stoics. Those in this tradition regard human reasoning powers as being capable of determining moral standards independently of religious sanctification provided by scriptural traditions. Legislators tend to be swayed by the shifting passions, prejudices, religious beliefs, and self-interests of the majority they represent. This must be balanced, it is argued, by an independent judiciary capable of apprehending a “natural law” that provides moral standards to which civil laws should conform. The task of the judiciary is to apply these standards in its role as interpreter of the law. The nature of the reasoning used for such apprehension is often left indefinite. It is usually contrasted to inductive reasoning used by investigators in the sciences to generalize from observations or test hypotheses relative to predicted observable consequences. Moral standards such as those imposed by requirements to tell the truth, keep promises, and not harm others are thus regarded as other forms of a priori propositions known independently of experience. They are thought to be somehow either intuitively self-evident, or (as for Kant) known when we can demonstrate that their denials are self-contradictory.

Ronald Dworkin’s contemporary restatement of this tradition is based on the need to protect individuals and minorities from the abuses of majority rule. Such protection can be provided, Dworkin argues, only by courts appealing to moral principles that require respect for basic human rights.40 The most basic of these principles would seem to be those of the social contract theories discussed above, the principles that (1) the legal system should allow individuals a maximum of liberty consistent with the security of all against harm; (2) all individuals are to be regarded as equal before the law; and (3) inequalities in the distribution of goods within the social order must be to the advantage of the least well off. The first two principles are those of Locke, and the third added by Rawls.

Protection of individual rights is, of course, provided by the United States Constitution and, at least verbally, by the constitutions of other nations. To this extent, articles of constitutions delimiting these rights represent the foundations of legal frameworks. Analytical positivism can therefore argue that there is no need for appeal to rationally apprehended moral principles in defending individual and minority rights against majority rule, for they have already been incorporated into the law through constitutions and the precedents created by court decisions applying their articles to past cases. But this position is clearly untenable when applied to

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the U. S. Constitution. Because the articles of this constitution are so difficult to introduce, modify, and repeal, their original statement must necessarily be flexible and sufficiently indefinite as to enable their extension to cases into the indefinite future. Novelty necessary for the interpretation of the flexible and indefinite has been introduced on many occasions in rulings of the U. S. Supreme Court, notably in extending the Fourteenth Amendment providing equal protection under the law to integrate public school systems and in extending the Ninth and Fourteenth Amendments to provide women the right to terminate their pregnancies. Though the reasoning used in court decisions may be couched in terms of similarities and differences to statutory laws and precedents, it is clearly guided by a sense of the moral injustice of the practices being overturned.

Often the courts are placed in the position of defending individual and minority rights against irrational prejudices of the majority. But there are also many occasions when there is a conflict between a policy that is a means to a shared public goal and a right justified by some form of social contract reasoning. Acknowledgements by courts of this conflict and their citing the shared goal represents another important overlap between the legal and normative frameworks. Court rulings that the right of free speech in the First Amendment may be curtailed when endangering national security represent one example of such acknowledgement. Another is provided by the 2010 ruling by U. S. District Judge Virginia Phillips in Log Cabins Republicans vs. The United States of America in overturning the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy that permitted the military to expel its openly gay members.41 The basis of the ruling by Judge Phillips was that the policy violated gay service members Fifth Amendment rights of due process and rights of freedom of speech and the right to petition the government for redress of grievances guaranteed by the First Amendment. The government had argued that sudden abandonment of the policy might harm military operations during a time of war. Phillips disagreed, arguing that the law doesn’t help military readiness. Instead, she argued, it has a “direct and deleterious effect” on the armed services by hurting recruiting efforts during wartime and requiring the discharge of service members with critical skills and training. By acknowledging that social goals are relevant, the judge combined in her reasoning the forms of justification that characterize both legal and normative frameworks.

Both advocates of strict constructionism and legal positivists may agree that such overlaps do occur, but they regard them as endangering the integrity of the legal system and respect for law. Such integrity and respect can be insured, they argue, only by preserving the autonomy of the legal framework and its methods of appealing to similarities and differences

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between cases before courts and statutory laws and judicial precedents. But strict constructionism’s inflexible, literal reading of the U. S. Constitution is certainly not value free. At the very least, it represents a ranking of the values of consistency and predictability―Fuller’s “internal” values―over the values of ameliorating unjust treatment of citizens. In the context of United States history, it also represents a ranking of the value of freedom over equality, for the U. S. Constitution under Locke’s influence assigns the priority to freedom as being “natural” to the condition of humans. Its articles include no rights to minimum standards of food, housing, and medical care of the kind conferred in Article 25 of the 1948 United Nations Declaration of Human Rights. A literal reading of the U. S. Constitution thus makes it impossible for courts to rectify gross disparities of distribution of wealth and denials of equality of opportunity. Strict constructionists are represented on the U. S. Supreme Court by Justice Antonin Scalia, who has repeatedly emphasized respect for precedent in judicial decisions and has railed against activist judges in usurping a responsibility that is properly the sphere of legislatures. Yet he and the Court’s conservative majority have extended the First Amendment right of free speech from individuals to corporations and labor unions in the process of denying any limitations on their ability to support candidates for election. This decision by a strongly divided court was made in the case of Citizens United vs. Federal Election Commission, despite clear judicial precedents restricting free speech rights to individual citizens. Its effect is to greatly enhance through paid advertising the chances for election of candidates supporting legislation favored by large corporations and labor unions. This decision by those who emphasize judicial precedent and then turn against it, together with the controversies attending appointments to the U. S. judiciary, helps demonstrate the error of thinking that the discourse framework of a “neutral” judiciary can be cleanly separated from the normative framework used in forming policies and enacting laws.

The overlaps between legal and normative frameworks just described occasion heated controversies of the kind arising when there are conflicts of values and the interests of institutionalized specializations are involved. In this case, the conflict of values is between those of the internal morality of the legal system in preserving consistency and predictability and those of standards of justice of a kind formulated in social contract theories. The interests of the legal professions and those of the wider public subject to laws enforced by them may also come into conflict. The most obvious of these conflicts arise in periods of civil disobedience practiced by large segments of a population on the grounds

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of a law’s putative injustice. Other overlaps of discourse frameworks that occasion controversies include those between the framework of religious narratives and the normative framework appealing to shared ends and between the religious framework and the empirical/descriptive framework of the natural sciences. Here there are conflicts between the values of maintaining continuity of hope promoted by established religions and those of the scientific community entrusted with providing accurate information about our environment. Involved also are the sometimes competing interests of the institutionalized specialties of religion, literary and performing arts, and the sciences. Such conflicts and the role of philosophy in adjudicating them are among the topics discussed in the concluding chapter that follows.

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8

Philosophy and Social Integration

This concluding chapter reviews the conception of pragmatic naturalism developed in earlier chapters that addresses the problem raised by specialization by emphasizing the centrality of practical reasoning. The first section briefly reviews basic features of the frameworks described in previous chapters and the ways they differ with respect to discourse relativity. The second section contrasts the contingent development of shared wants required for normative reasoning to the pragmatic necessity of basic features of all discourse frameworks. The next section addresses more directly the social role of philosophy as an antidote to institutionalized specialization. I argue that persisting disputes in the history of philosophy arise from problems of determining boundaries and overlaps between discourse frameworks, often arising when advocates of an institutionalized specialty attempt to extend features of their specialty’s framework to those of others. A clear demarcation of boundaries and overlaps should help to eliminate such disputes. Finally, in the last section I consider the possibility of a metaphysical discourse framework to which other frameworks can be assimilated. A possible world metaphysical system is rejected as failing to provide an alternative to the empirical descriptive framework of the natural sciences. I argue that a more suitable alternative is provided by the discipline of semiotic that provides a means for comparing and contrasting discourse frameworks and isolating their necessary features.

8.1. Descriptive and Normative Discourse Relativity

Central to discourse frameworks are the rules of inference used in justifying the assertion or acceptance of conclusions. To justify is to reason, and each discourse framework is defined by the purposes for which it is used and its forms of reasoning. Deductive reasoning is used within mathematics to derive theorems from axioms, and the ability of logicians to state its inference rules has historically been an important factor in using this form of reasoning as the model for all other forms. The natural sciences also employ deductive reasoning to infer from hypotheses to observable consequences, with experimental evidence then used to either falsify these hypotheses or confirm them through inductive forms of reasoning and gain consensus on their acceptance. This combination of the deductive with the inductive is

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characteristic of all justifications of descriptions of our environment, whether those formulated by detectives such as Sherlock Holmes or specialists working within scientific institutions. Still different forms of reasoning are used in reaching conclusions about historical events and the mental processes and states of others. The deductive and inductive reasoning of the empirical sciences may be used, but trust must often be placed in sources where there is no independent public confirmation. The historian relies on the testimony of reports transmitted into the present. The optometrist or audiologist testing the visual or hearing capacities of her patients must place trust in the truth of quasi-descriptive avowals characteristic of the mental transactional framework.

Using these various forms of reasoning, consensus on what is to be accepted or rejected can be reached within frameworks where sentences are descriptive in form and uniformly in the indicative mood. Disputes may arise, and even continue for protracted periods, but the deductive and inductive rules of these descriptive frameworks combined in certain cases with testimony provide the basis for eventual resolution. In contrast, philosophical disputes seem to resist resolution, and simply reappear in different guises at different historical periods. This is due to the discourse relativity of terms used by the parties to these disputes. We saw in Chapter 2 how the meanings of key terms such as “truth”, “identity”, “exists”, and “real” are relative to the various descriptive frameworks, each with its characteristic method of term introduction, referent/designate identification, and vocabulary. In the case of the adjective “real” as used in sentences such as “Numbers are real”, “Material objects are alone real”, “God is real”, etc., its attribution fulfills the function of emphasizing the importance of discourses within a given framework and distinguishing the framework from the fictional framework and what is illusory. The thesis of discourse relativity advanced in this essay for these descriptive frameworks applies to claims by philosophers that one framework has privileged status over others. These can take the form of claims that only sentences within the privileged framework are meaningful (logical positivism) and that sentences within one framework can be assimilated to those of another (reductionism, whether used to advance forms of materialism or idealism). Such descriptive relativity is invariant across different cultures at different periods of history, though the problems it poses can vary with the stage of advancement of a civilization in the development of specialized institutions. At periods when the natural sciences are emerging as institutions and their descriptions compete with the cosmologies of religious narratives, problems posed by discourse relativity are obviously different from those when the sciences and technology have become settled institutions within modern-day democracies with sources of political power separated from religion.

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Discourse relativity takes a different form for discourses used to guide conduct. Here it cannot arise from methods of referent/designate identification, for these are specific to descriptive discourses. For discourses guiding conduct, there are no differing category terms that demarcate general topics. Practical inferences with normative “ought” conclusions certainly do not specialize in ways that demarcate institutional specializations. We saw in Chapter 5 how the same general form used for prudential inferences in the first person singular is also used for inferences with plural “we” premisses and conclusions requiring collective action. The same general form of practical inference with a plural premiss expressing shared wants, aversions, and preferences between the outcomes of means is used for moral inferences about what individuals should do and for inferences to principles of justice of the kind provided by social contract theories. The major premisses of plural practical inferences express shared ideals derived often from religious narratives and literature, while premisses asserting circumstances that are present and consequences of actions often rely on information provided by the special sciences. This combination suggests the important role played by practical inferences is that of unifying the central forms of discourse, not contrasting them in the way characteristic of descriptive discourses with their differing category term subjects.

One problem derived from discourse relativity does survive for normative frameworks. It arises from attempts to assimilate normative frameworks for morality and politics to descriptive frameworks. As noted in Chapter 6 and 7, the rationalist tradition in philosophy has assimilated the normative framework to the mathematical and empirical, regarding prudential and moral principles as either self-evident axioms from which specific moral obligations can be deductively derived or as (for Rawls) hypotheses to be tested against moral intuitions. The hedonistic principle that everyone ought to maximize their pleasure (or happiness) was regarded as such a prudential principle, while the classical utilitarian principle that everyone ought to maximize the pleasure (happiness) of the greatest number of those affected by his or her actions was thought to guide moral decisions. Kant claimed his categorical imperative to be intuitively evident, one whose denial when applied to actions like telling the truth and keeping promises would be self-contradictory. Such principles were thought to provide a foundation for morality that replaced sanctification through religious narratives, a foundation having the advantage of enabling flexibility and adaptation to changes of circumstances in a way impossible for the narratives, while avoiding disagreements derived from clashes of requirements in different religious traditions. Many of those advancing this rationalist view have regard themselves as a new elite replacing leaders of religious institutions, an elite using its knowledge of universal self-evident principles to endorse or reject

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moral rules governing conduct in their communities, and bringing the promise of the same consensus possible in mathematics and the natural sciences to an area marked by controversies.

The failure to deliver on this promise was noted in Chapter 6, and is perhaps the most decisive objection to this rationalist model of moral reasoning. In fact, the moral principles of rationalism are heuristic devices for aiding us in determining our shared desires, aversions, and preferences, means of elevating us from the narrow perspective of our individual wants that we are aware of to those we share in common with others that may not be at all obvious. The concept of the “disinterested spectator” of classical utilitarianism provides such a means. But even if agreement on ends were possible using these heuristics, it is to be expected that this will be complicated by consideration of costs of means, which different individuals and groups may weight differently under different circumstances. Of course, all share the desire for peace, but there may be a price to be paid for it in terms of submission to the demands of external powers that many may be unwilling to pay. All of us share a desire for individual freedom; none of us want to be coerced by some political authority to pay taxes supporting projects from which we do not directly benefit. But if the price for this freedom is the misery of a substantial number of our fellow citizens, many may decide that the cost of freedom from coercion imposed by a system of progressive taxation is outweighed by advancing the goal of reducing economic inequalities. No one wants the killing of an unborn fetus. But if the cost for avoiding this is the misery of mothers in abandoning their infants to the care of others or raising unwanted children, many may refuse to brand the termination of pregnancies as immoral. There are countless examples of such conflicting preference rankings that demonstrate why moral disputes are not simply due to ignorance of ethical moral principles and failure to deduce their consequences in relevant situations. We do apply to moral decisions forms of practical inference, and to this extent there is a type of rationality that is relevant. But it is not the type of rationality characteristic of descriptive discourse frameworks. It is instead one where the portrayal of positive and negative ideals by the arts, literature, and religion as social institutions and rhetorical persuasion by journalistic commentators and politicians play an essential role. In excluding their relevance in favor of descriptive models, the rationalist tradition has distorted the manner in which moral reasoning actually is conducted. The normative framework in which its plural practical inferences are used is a hybrid framework in which expressive, descriptive, and prescriptive elements are combined. As such, it is immune to assimilation to the descriptive.

This form of discourse relativity must be distinguished from the kind of relativism advocated by the social constructivists, those that claim that all

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discourses are social constructions of “reality,” and that we have no basis for judging one to be more valid than another. Recall from Chapter 5.3 how this view is defended by Rorty through his claim that we have no grounds for judging that Cardinal Bellarmine’s support of the geocentric model of the universe was inferior to Galileo’s defense of Copernicus’s heliocentric model. The Cardinal’s support of geocentric model was based on Christianity’s scriptural tradition. As a church leader, such support was required of him, for these scriptures provided not only a cosmology but also the basis for the moral standards and political power of Europe’s monarchs. Galileo’s defense of Copernicus was based on the scientific method employed within the descriptive empirical framework. As alternative social constructions from different frameworks, Rorty argues, we cannot say that Galileo was right and the Cardinal wrong. It has been simply rhetorical persuasion over past centuries that has led us to endorse the view of the founder of modern physics over that of the cleric.

As argued above, this view is plainly absurd. Both Galileo and the Cardinal were formulating descriptions of the environment to which we are causally related, and to accomplish the purpose of accurate descriptions of this environment we require a discourse framework with terms referring to what we are causally related to and sentences evaluated on the basis of public observational evidence. Given this purpose, the terms “right” and “wrong” applied must be the evaluative terms of the descriptive empirical framework. Scriptural traditions fulfill the very different purposes of instilling hope, self-confidence, and communal solidarity among members of a community. These purposes can assume special importance at different historical stages and among different segments of society, but this should never justify the denial of the priority of empirical methods in describing our environment.

8.2. Contingency and Pragmatic Necessity

Basic modal trichotomies are interpreted relative to specific discourse frameworks. The alethic modality trichotomy is that of the necessary, contingent, and the impossible, and is symbolized in modal logic with the necessity operator □ and possibility operator ◇. Necessity is represented by □A, where A stands for either a proposition or some state of affairs. When A is a sentence expressing a proposition, necessity is termed de dicto necessity, necessity applied to what we say, as for logical tautologies and analytic sentences of the form All S is P (“All bachelors are unmarried”) where the predicate P is a criterion for identification of an instance of the subject S. When A represents a state of affairs, necessity is termed de re necessity, necessity applied to what exists independently of how we describe it, as for

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the necessity of water solidifying when its temperature falls below 32 degrees Fahrenheit. There have also been attempts to extend de re necessity to a type of metaphysical conclusion, which will be discussed below in Section 8.4. Contingency also has de dicto and de re interpretations. It is represented by ◇A∧◇∼A (A is both possible and not possible), while the impossibility of either a proposition (a contradiction) or state of affairs is represented by □∼A (it is necessary that not-A) or the equivalent ∼◇A (it is not possible that A).

This alethic modal trichotomy is applied to descriptive discourse frameworks. Its de dicto interpretation has a ready application to the relation between the premisses and conclusions of deductive inferences. If valid, the premisses of such an inference are said to entail its conclusion, where entailment is a relation holding when it is necessary that a premiss P implies C, or □(P→C). The de re interpretation of the trichotomy can be applied to the physical necessity or contingency of events or states of affairs and also to the temporal duration of objects. Under the temporal interpretation, necessarily existing objects are either eternal (without beginning or end) or sempiternal (with beginning but without end), while contingent existence is characteristic of all those things that both come into being and pass away. Some versions of the ontological argument for God’s existence appeal to this temporal application in order to distinguish the necessary existence of the divine from the contingent existence of all organisms.

The other two basic trichotomies lack these dual interpretations. The epistemic modal trichotomy is applied only to propositions, and distinguishes between propositions about which we are certain (those highly confirmed by evidence), those about which there is uncertainty (or those whose subjective probability is between 0 and 1), and those propositions whose falsehood is certain (those that have been falsified). This trichotomy is applied to the transactional framework, and registers confidence in either sources of information or our own judgments. The deontic trichotomy is applied to actions. It is between the obligatory, the indifferent in the sense of being neither obligatory nor forbidden, and the forbidden. It is symbolized by OA (action A is obligatory), PA∧P∼A (actions A and ∼A are both permissible), and either O∼A (forbearing from A is obligatory) or its equivalent ∼PA (it is not permitted to do A). It is applied to prescriptive discourse frameworks. For the conclusions of practical inferences, we have seen how the obligatory as stated by “ought” conclusions is relative to wants, aversions, and preferences in combination with assertions about circumstances and relations between actions and their consequences. For legal frameworks, the obligatory is applied to actions binding on citizens relative to laws passed by those with the appropriate authority and interpreted by an empowered judiciary. The scope of legal freedom extends to all those actions towards which laws are indifferent.

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Modal trichotomies apply in these ways to a variety of discourse frameworks. They are used in philosophical writings to establish relationships between these frameworks, but often in ways that confuse one interpretation of a trichotomy with a very different one. One confusion arises in the form of claims that we have no basis for distinguishing between the necessary logical features of language described by philosophical logic from the contingent features described by the science of linguistics, an issue raised above in Section 2.4. For the empirical sciences, a state of affairs as described by a proposition p can be said to be necessary (in the de re sense) if and only if the description p can be deductively inferred from the fundamental laws of physics in conjunction with circumstances relevant to the inference. For example, it is necessary that no human can jump upwards unaided on the planet Earth a distance of 14 feet. The laws of gravitation applying to the universe in conjunction with the mass of Earth and the physiology of the human species combine to justify our saying that such a jump impossible. In this sense of physical necessity, it seems that the syntactic rule for English that verbs in predicate position agree with their noun subjects describes a contingent feature of the English language. It could have been otherwise that there is a rule admitting “The man runs” as a well formed sentence of English, while excluding “The man run”. That it is contingent is shown by the fact that for a wide variety of the world’s other natural languages (Japanese is an example) there are no rules requiring such agreement.

But even descriptions of linguistic universals, rules observed by linguistics in their surveys to be common to all languages, would seem to be about what is contingent. One such universal noted by linguists is that all languages have pronouns. The fact that this has been discovered by linguists to be a feature all observed languages is not in itself evidence that the existence of pronouns is a necessary feature. The small tribe that can be identified as the first humans shared a form of language from which all later languages evolved. The fact that this proto-language happened to contain pronouns may explain why these later languages also have pronouns. If so, it is physically possible, that is, consistent with laws of nature, that languages lack pronouns, making the presence of pronouns a contingent feature of languages. Further, it seems to be a contingent fact that the human species exists on this planet, for a number of fortuitous circumstances have combined to make this possible, most notably the absence of an asteroid colliding with Earth during the early stages of human history in the manner that brought an end to the dinosaurs. If the existence of our species is contingent, then of course it follows that any specific human capacity is contingent, including the use of any language governed by syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic rules. It might be thought that at least the universality of the use of pronouns is conditionally necessary on the existence of our species on our planet, that is,

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from the fundamental laws of physics and descriptions of the physiology of the human species and the environment of our planet we can deductively infer the use of pronouns. But this is most implausible, for we seem to have no means of making the inference from the physical descriptions to the linguistic.

Descriptions of languages and their uses provided by linguists on the basis of surveys of the world’s languages are thus directed towards physically contingent features of language, those that could have been otherwise had evolution taken a different course from that which in fact it did take. In contrast, logical features of language that have been the focus of philosophic investigations of language seem to be necessary, though of a type of necessity different from physical necessity. Consider, for example, the subject-predicate structure of sentences that has been the focus of much philosophic discussion, with the referring and identifying role of a subject distinguished from the ascribing role of a predicate. Signals used within animal communities lack such a structure, and as a result cannot extend reference beyond their immediate environments. A baboon sentry can signal the presence of an approaching predator, but this predator will be nearby and its arrival will be expected within a restricted time internal. In contrast, the subject of a singular sentence such as “John Smith arrives next week” allows the identification of an individual at a remote location and extends in time an anticipated event. If early members of the human species wanted to make such an extension of reference and anticipation, then it was necessary for them to utilize this subject-predicate structure. In this conditional sense of necessity relative to a basic purpose, this structure is pragmatically necessary, a feature that could not have been otherwise given the purpose of reference extension.

This concept of pragmatic necessity can be applied to what I just described as the physically contingent universality of pronouns in human languages. Anaphoric pronouns such as the English “he”, “she” and “it” are essential to the combination of sentences into discourses about a common topic, for they are the discourse links that enable the audience of a discourse to identify the topic referred to in an earlier portion of the discourse as the same as what is referred to in a later portion. For example, in the discourse “Mary walked to the store, and she bought some milk”, the pronoun “she” enables an interpreter to identify the person buying the milk as the same person who walked to the store. Repetition of the name “Mary” to form “Mary walked to the store, and Mary bought some milk” doesn’t guarantee this identification, for the reference of “Mary” in its first occurrence may be different from the name’s reference in its second. In this way, what is physically contingent should be understood as pragmatically necessary for the possibility of discourse. We can grant that the capacity to use and interpret discourses may not have evolved on our planet, and is thus physically contingent. But given the purposes fulfilled by advancing from the use of

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single sentences to the use of discourse, pronouns as linking expressions are necessary for discourse to be possible. Relative pronouns are less obviously necessary than anaphoric, but they would seem also necessary for discourses in the form of complex sentences with dependent clauses formed by combining sentence strings.

Pragmatic necessity can also be applied to discourse frameworks. Civilizations may never have developed to the extent that specialization occurred that required descriptive discourse frameworks of the kind discussed in Chapter 2. It is surely a contingent fact that mathematics, natural sciences, scriptural traditions, and extended fictional narratives evolved from the primitive forms of communication used by early humans. But in order to realize the goal of cooperation through specialization of the tasks of obtaining information, planning, and coordinating actions it is necessary that there be discourse frameworks with distinct means of identifying referents and evaluating conclusions and with distinctive vocabularies. Describing these frameworks and their boundaries and overlaps is thus properly the domain of philosophy, and must be distinguished from the activity of linguists in describing contingent grammatical features of discursive language.

An analysis of analytic sentences developed by Putnam and Saul Kripke has the effect of pointing out the error of identifying the necessary with what is known a priori. Any sentence of the form All Ss are P, such as the sentences “All crows are black” and “All gold has the atomic number 79”, is said to be necessarily true if the predicate P is one of the criteria for identifying an S, as would occur if being the color black becomes a criterion for identifying a bird as a crow or the atomic number 79 a criterion for identifying a metal as gold. After blackness and atomic number become such criteria, it is impossible that any individual identified as a crow not be black, nor a metal identified as gold not having the atomic number. We have accepted the sentences “All crows are black” and “Gold has atomic number 79” as true on the basis of empirical evidence and included them in what we claim to know, and as a consequence there has been a transfer of blackness to the meaning of “crow” and atomic number 79 to “gold”. Sentences that we describe as necessarily true can be thus known a posteriori. They are also those about which we might be mistaken, for it is always possible that at some time in the future we might discover an albino crow or use a different atomic number to identify a substance as gold.

This conception of fallible a posteriori necessity can be extended to features of language use that distinguish philosophical descriptions from those of the empirical sciences. We rely on our shared intuitions as users of language to distinguish such elements of both indicative and imperative sentences as their subjects, predicates, addresses, and their illocutionary force indicators. We then ask ourselves whether it is possible to conceive of forms

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of communication in which the purposes of extending reference, indicating the source and target of a communication, and expressing its intended force were fulfilled using different kinds of sentence elements. The answer is provided by comparing and contrasting the linguistic level of signs from the more primitive levels of animal signaling and learning through association of naturally occurring events. For the features of discourse frameworks discussed in this essay, we ask whether it is possible to achieve the purposes of institutional specialization without the types of discourse relativity and overlap described above. If it is impossible to conceive of alternative means for fulfilling the purposes fulfilled in advancing from the more primitive to the advanced, then we judge the features of communication being specified as both necessary and a posteriori in the sense of being based on our shared intuitions. Conclusions we reach in this way are also fallible, for there is always the possibility that in the future we may encounter aliens from remote planets who achieve our purposes using very different means of communication. In this case, the logical features being isolated would be contingent on special features of human evolution, and hence lack the pragmatic necessity being claimed.

The relativity of discourse frameworks with respect to existence, truth, and identity described in Chapters 3 and 4 would seem to be a necessary feature of these frameworks. Also necessary for the institutional development of the natural sciences is the demarcation of the descriptive empirical framework describing the environment to which we are causally related from the quasi-descriptive mental transactional and religious narrative frameworks. The necessity we attribute to these discourse framework features and relationships between them must be distinguished from the contingency of normative conclusions arising from cultural relativity of wants and preferences expressed within practical inferences. History and environmental circumstances condition these wants and preferences, and normative requirements inferred from them cannot therefore claim necessity and universality. This is obvious from differences regarding moral standards and social justice between societies at different historical periods, differences only partially overcome through social interaction. Rorty’s qualified support of the claims of Cardinal Bellarmine about the solar system against Galileo seems to arise from confusing this cultural relativity of normative conclusions with conclusions reached by consensus using the methods of the descriptive empirical framework. What is described as the “objectivity” of the latter arises from the public testability of these conclusions. Where the aim is to describe our natural environment, conclusions reached within the descriptive empirical framework must trump those of the religious narrative.

It is also true, however, that how the values advanced by certain frameworks are weighted relative to the values of others can vary between

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societies at different historical stages. The clergy of Medieval Europe derived their power and prestige from their role as interpreters of Christian Scriptures, and this predominant social status was threatened by the claims of the scientific institutions represented by Galileo to describe our natural environment. The emergence of these institutions has led to a diminished role for the clergy. This has also been influenced by freedom of expression for the institutions of literature and the arts currently enjoyed in the nations of Western Europe and in Japan and the United States. This type of freedom enables formulation of ideals guiding practical reasoning that provide alternatives to ideals expressed by religious narratives and political propaganda. Suppressions of this freedom, often with the tacit support of the majority of a population, have frequently occurred throughout history and continue into the present. Such changes of valuations of social institutions are indeed contingent, but such contingency should not be confused with the necessity of basic logical features of discourse frameworks in use after the emergence of these institutions.

8.3. Philosophy’s Descriptive and Normative Projects

Overlaps between the descriptive empirical, the religious, normative, and mental transactional frameworks generate problems about boundary jurisdictions that have persisted over centuries despite differences in their philosophical formulations. Where intra-framework issues are raised for a certain framework, they tend to be resolved. This has occurred in reaching consensus about the methods employed in the natural and social sciences. But where an issue is cross-framework in nature, it persists, since the values advanced by the frameworks and institutions employing them come into conflict. This leads to the following generalization: Persistent philosophical controversies arise from overlaps between discourse frameworks. The key to their elimination lies in accurate descriptions of distinctive framework features and overlaps, and in an acknowledgement of the different purposes served by the institutions employing these frameworks. In the process of carrying out this project, philosophy offers the promise of furthering social integration instead of reflecting the fragmentation brought on by institutional specialization.

A generalized form of logic—logic as derived from medieval “speculative grammar,” now usually referred to as “philosophical logic”—is the instrument by which philosophy structures its descriptions of frameworks and overlaps. The scope of this logic extends to the different methods of term introduction, referent/designatum identification, assertions of identity, and sentence evaluation that distinguish frameworks. It also includes rules of

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inference used in both descriptive and prescriptive frameworks to justify conclusions on the basis of premisses. Logical symbolism developed to evaluate inferences proves to be a useful tool for the abstractions necessary for comparisons and contrasts between frameworks. When applied to rules of inference used within descriptive frameworks, it enables us to abstract from the particular content of a given discourse to a form common to different sub-frameworks. For example, the symbolic representation of a universal generalization ∀x (Sx→Px) can represent both the natural language sentence “All members of my family wear sweat shirts”, Galileo’s law of acceleration “For all natural bodies in the vicinity of the Earth, the distance fallen after release is directly proportional to the square of the time interval”, “All gods of the Greek pantheon are immortal”, and “All protagonists in Shakespeare’s Hamlet are Danish”. No matter what the vocabulary of a descriptive framework, its methods of subject term introduction and identification, or its method of evaluation, the same symbolism can be applied. The symbolic representations of imperative logic have similar scope. The representation ∀x (Sx→∼A!x) used to represent a sentence ordering forbearance from action A if a situation S arises can be applied to the natural language sentence “Don’t drop any box labeled fragile” and to an ordinance such as “Don’t drive a motor vehicle if in the park”. It can then be applied to inferences used to guide conduct in the very different contexts of everyday life and judicial proceedings.

The modal trichotomies represent other structuring forms that facilitate comparisons and contrasts between descriptive and prescriptive frameworks. How these alethic, epistemic, and deontic trichotomies are interpreted will vary with the specific frameworks to which they are applied, with the interpretations providing content to the abstract logical forms. We have seen how alethic necessity can be interpreted as both the logical necessity of relations between premisses and conclusions of valid deductive inferences and the physical necessity of the laws of nature described by the natural sciences. The laws as empirical generalizations are themselves logically contingent, but what is described is physically necessary. These de dicto and de re forms of necessity contrast to the pragmatic necessity of logical features of language singled out by philosophy. Every discipline requires some form of structure that enables chaotic variety to be ordered in ways enabling mutual understanding and eventual consensus. Logic as the language of philosophy provides this structure for descriptive, quasi-descriptive transactional, and prescriptive frameworks.

The descriptive project of philosophy employing the tools of logic is thus cross-framework and as such is a propaedeutic to adjudicating the boundaries appropriate for the various discourse frameworks. Included in this project is a description of the rules governing the uses of practical inferences

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in deciding what is prudentially and morally obligatory. This requires specifying premisses required for distinguishing plural “we” inferences to what is required for collective action from moral inferences. But use of these moral inferences requires reaching consensus on shared wants and preferences, and this is notoriously difficult to accomplish, given the biases each of us derive from our backgrounds and natural endowments. Philosophy’s normative project is to provide assistance for the task of overcoming these biases. As such it is infected with the contingency of differences in historical backgrounds and environments present for all groups. These influence the shared desires, aversions, and preferences expressed in the major premisses of plural “we” moral inferences used to justify moral requirements and legitimize political and legal systems. In very obvious ways, the sexual morality of a community needing population growth, with high infant mortality, and without reliable means of contraception will differ from one that is overpopulated and with reliable contraception. In the former, moral standards will reinforce early marriages, while in the latter more permissive standards will tend to influence marriage and child-raising delays. Rawls’s heuristic strategy of the veil of ignorance may be a means for any community to offset individual biases with desires that are shared but whose sharing we may be initially unaware. But outcomes of this strategy in determining how to assign comparative weights to security, liberty, and equality will surely vary with history, circumstances, and literary traditions emphasizing some values over others. Citizens of a nation subject to repeated invasions throughout its history will place more weight to security than an island nation or a nation enjoying secure borders. Those in a region of scarce resources can be expected to place a greater weight on economic equality than those blessed with abundant resources. This cultural relativity of moral conclusions contrasts to the invariance of the features of discourse frameworks that philosophy attempts to describe.

There is thus an aspect of adjudication in philosophy’s descriptive project. The act of describing boundaries and overlaps of discourse frameworks is one of assigning proper boundaries, and there is possible cultural relativity in such normative judgments. There are cultural differences in the prestige enjoyed by certain social institutions, and these can be reflected in educational systems and conclusions about boundaries reached by philosophers. Given these differences, it is not surprising that the prestige in France enjoyed by its literary and artistic community results in conclusions different from those reached by philosophers in nations such as Iran and Pakistan where religion provides a unifying force analogous to that of Catholicism in Medieval Europe. These are in turn different from those reached in nations such as the United States, Great Britain, China, and Russia where prestige is enjoyed by the natural sciences. Such differences are

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present, but there is always hope that an understanding of them will eventually lead to their resolution.

8.4. The Possibility of a Metaphysical Framework

In addition to the discourse frameworks discussed above, is there a uniquely philosophical framework? The metaphysical systems of materialism, idealism, and dualism have been, in effect, attempts to construct one. As noted in Chapters 4 and 5, materialism and idealism were reductionist projects formulated by asserting cross-framework asymmetric identities between descriptive empirical and mental transactional frameworks. As such, they are not formulated within a framework with its own methods of term introduction and identification, sentence evaluation, and rules of inference, but instead assertions of the priority of one framework relative to another. These assertions are formulated as cross-framework identities. Because terms of the mental transactional framework are parasitic for their meaning on the descriptive empirical, idealism is mistaken in its assertions of priority. As many critics have noted, we cannot eliminate within an idealist framework nouns referring to material things causally related to us by using expressions that presuppose the existence of these things. In contrast, materialism’s identities can be justified to the extent that establishing the priority of the empirical descriptive relative to the mental transactional is useful for certain purposes. The conclusion of Section 4.3 was that such a justification is warranted for sensations and moods to the extent that they lead to effective treatment by physiological intervention, but not for mental states in the form of propositional attitudes that are best altered through communication. Interpreted as asserting no overall priority for either empirical descriptive or mental transactional frameworks, dualism’s cross-framework nonidentity seems to be the most plausible of the three metaphysical systems. But again, this conclusion is not one asserted within a distinctive metaphysical framework.

The metaphysical systems of possible worlds formulated by Saul Kripke and David Lewis provide good illustrations of other difficulties encountered in attempts to construct a distinctive philosophical framework.1 Both rely on a special form of de re interpretation of the alethic modalities. The actual world is our physical universe, the extended environment to which we are causally related and which is accessible to public observation—the inclusive domain of the natural sciences. But relative to every state of our actual world there is a state that it might have been but is not, and each such state is a possible world. The actual world includes a park at the corner of Grove and Chicago in Evanston, Illinois with a play area for children, but the park might have had

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no play area, and the corner included no park. There is thus a possible world that includes no park at this corner but instead office buildings. More generally, the fundamental particles of our universe, those not combinations of more basic parts, are distributed at every moment in a particular way, either in isolation of in combinations to form complex particles, atoms, molecules, and organisms. But they might have been distributed to form combinations different from those we currently observe. These combinations are also possible worlds relative to the actual world.

The isomorphism of alethic modal logic with monadic predicate logic (a logic representing sentences with predicates paired to a single subject) provides a formal model for such a possible worlds interpretation of the modalities. The necessity operator □ has the formal properties of the universal quantifier ∀, while the possibility operator ◇ has those of the existential ∃. Just as the inference Pa to∃xPx is valid, so is the inference from A to ◇A (if a state of affairs A is actual, it is also possible). Just as the inference from ∀xPx to ∃xPx is valid, so is that from □A to ◇A (what is necessary is possible). More generally, every valid inference in monadic predicate logic has its analogue in alethic modal logic, with the universal quantifier replaced by the necessity operator and the existential quantifier by the possibility operator. Such isomorphism becomes obvious when the necessity of a state of affairs A as represented by □A is interpreted as A holding in all possible worlds as represented by ∀wAw, with the variable x ranging over both the actual world and all possible alternative ones. The possibility of a state of affairs A, or ◇A, is then represented by ∃wAw (there is some world w in which the state of affairs A holds). The modal inference from □A to ◇A is then interpreted as the valid predicate logic inference from ∀wAw to ∃wAw.

These interpretations of necessity and possibility seem to provide a basis for distinguishing metaphysical discourse from the discourses of the natural sciences. The natural sciences investigate the structures of the actual world to which we are causally related; metaphysics investigates the more inclusive structures of all possible worlds. But as Putnam has successfully argued, a closer look at these interpretations reveals that there is actually no valid distinction between the metaphysical modalities just defined and the concepts of physical necessity and possibility employed by the sciences.2 This is shown in the different ways that Kripke and Lewis describe possible worlds. Kripke’s version requires conceiving of an initial state of our actual world, perhaps at the origins of our universe, with possible worlds the alternative ways the universe might have developed from this initial state but in fact did not. Let St be this initial state, the state of affairs at time t, and Lu be the fundamental laws of our universe governing the particles existing in it.

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Then a possible world is one that is consistent with Lu and St, that is, a state of affairs that could have developed from the initial St. A necessary state of affairs is one that must have come about given Lu and St, one holding in all possible worlds relative to St. But these are precisely the concepts of physical necessity and possibility used by the natural sciences, where the necessary is described by what is entailed by fundamental laws of nature in conjunction with some initial state and the possible is what is consistent with the conjunction of laws and initial conditions. There are thus no concepts of metaphysical necessity and possibility being introduced by Kripke’s version distinct from physical necessity and possibility.

Lewis regards possible worlds alternative to our actual world as sets of material things that happen to be causally isolated from us, that is, as worlds not identical with our universe, somehow distinct from it, but nevertheless containing sets of objects existing as do material objects in our own. The conceptions of necessity and possibility derived from this sense of possible worlds can also be regarded as those of physical necessity and possibility, though their scope must be extended beyond our universe. As a component of the attempt to explain the origins of our universe, cosmologists have conceived a cosmic explosion, a Big Bang, to be the origin of a universe contained within a pluriverse, a set of universes governed by laws more basic than those unique to our universe. Lewis’s possible worlds can be interpreted as the universes of this pluriverse. The more basic laws holding in the pluriverse let’s represent by Lp, laws more inclusive than our universe’s laws Lu. These fundamental laws Lp, together with initial conditions, would explain the Big Bang, thus removing it from its present status as a chance singularity, an anomalous event. A necessary state of affairs is then one which exists, not simply in all possible worlds relative to some initial state of our actual world, but in all members of the pluriverse because their descriptions are entailed by the basic laws Lp. A possible state of affairs is then for Lewis one whose description is consistent with Lp.

As for Kripke’s version, there are no distinct conceptions of metaphysical necessity and possibility in such an interpretation of Lewis’s system, but instead expanded conceptions of physical necessity and possibility. Unfortunately, there can be no possibility of experimental testing cosmological theories describing the pluriverse laws Lp if Lewis’s version is correct. This is because Lewis requires possible worlds as universes other than our own to be causally isolated from us and hence inaccessible to observation. If causally isolated, a cosmological theory describing them may have explanatory power, but lack a crucial means of evaluation of the descriptive empirical framework. Alternative versions of this more inclusive cosmological theory may be evaluated in terms of their relative simplicity and

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elegance, but there would be no possibility of using experimental tests to decide between them.

There have been attempts throughout the history of philosophy to achieve comprehensiveness by means of metaphysical systems. Their failures should discourage us from attempts to construct a single discourse framework inclusive of all others. This leaves us with the more humble mission for philosophy outlined in the previous section. Its descriptive project is that of comparing and contrasting the central frameworks in use within any civilization achieving a degree of institutional specialization and of indicating the boundaries and overlaps that exist between these frameworks. This requires isolating pragmatically necessary features of language, features necessary to achieve advantages of increased scope of reference and division of labor impossible for creatures restricted to the use and interpretation of more primitive forms of signs. The discipline of semiotic attempts to describe such features through its comparisons and contrasts of reference, significance, and interpretation at various levels of signs. By identifying mentality with the capacity for sign interpretation, we extend it from the use and interpretation of forms of discourse to individual sentences, animal signals, and natural events that acquire significance for organisms capable of learning. This achieves a form of comprehensiveness, but one very different from what has been attempted by traditional metaphysics and possible worlds theories.        Specialization is as important in philosophy as in any other profession. Forms of discourse proliferate with expansions of the scope of the sciences and technology, and require careful examination of their boundaries and overlaps with established forms of a kind not possible for the dilettante. New technological, economic, and political conditions create moral quandaries that require the same attention to detail if philosophy is to aid in their resolution. But those in our profession must also have some shared sense of what we are trying to accomplish and a shared vocabulary derived from logical structures that can be applied to deductive, inductive, and practical inferences in a way that enables communication across the different branches of philosophy. This shared sense must be somehow derived from the study of the history of philosophy and an understanding of the changes to the subject occasioned by the development of the experimental sciences and novel social conditions. There must also be a capacity to convey this sense to a wider public faced with the need to introduce some form of order to the chaotic variety of contemporary life. My hope is that this essay somehow contributes to fulfilling these ends.

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1Notes for Essay 1, Discourse Relativity

I. Chapter 1. Pragmatic Specialization and Rationality

Cheney, D. L. and Seyfarth, R. M., How the Monkeys See the World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990).

2

I. Chapter 2. Varieties of Discourse

See Brown and Yuul, Discourse Analysis, pp. 69-75. Brown and Yuul refer to bounded fragments with common topics as “texts,” a terminology followed in the later works of Barbara Johnstone in Discourse Analysis (Malden, MA: Blackstone, 2002) and H. G. Widdowson in Discourse Analysis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). I avoid this terminology, which seems odd when applied to speech, and restrict the term “text” to written discourse blocks.

3 Michael Stubbs, Discourse Analysis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), pp. 7ff. Johnstone in her Discourse Analysis concedes that the “analytical move” of delimiting discourse units of analysis by “drawing boundaries, pulling out chunks from the flow of experience and treating them as wholes” is “somewhat artificial,” though it is an “essential first step of any discourse analysis” (p. 20).

4 Brown and Yuul contrast discourse analysis with linguistics directed towards sentences. For sentences, there are invariant rules for combining phonemes into morphemes and morphemes into sentences; for discourse blocks there are only regularities of sentence combinations. See their Discourse Analysis, p. 22.5 See my Sign Levels: Language and Its Evolutionary Antecedents (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2003), especially Sections 2.3 and 8.4 for a more detailed account of sign level comparisons that lead to isolating necessary features of discourse.

I. Chapter 3. Descriptive Frameworks

6 Wilfrid Sellars, “Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind,” in Sellars, Science, Perception, and Reality (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1963). Sellars’s conception of justification defining a “logical space” or reasons is cited approvingly by Robert Brandom throughout Reason and Philosophy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009) and John McDowell in The Engaged Intellect (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), p. 6.  7 “Empiricism, Semantics, and Ontology,” Appendix A of Meaning and Necessity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1947). For Carnap’s later view that truth must be relativized to a specific language framework (which he termed a “language”) see his The Logical Syntax of Language, translated by R. A. George (Patterson, N. J.: Littlefield and Adams, 1959).8 The discussion that follows is based on Carnap’s “Empiricism, Semantics, and Ontology.” For a more complete discussion of category terms see my co-authored (with Richard Behling) Deductive Logic, Second Edition (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1998), Secs. 8.3 and 8.4.9 See Goodman’s Ways of Worldmaking (Indianapolis: Harvester, 1978), Ch. I. 10 There are differences between mathematicians regarding these standards. Some accept non-constructive proofs that use the rule that if from a negative sentence of the form ∼A a contradiction has been proved, then the positive A has been proved. Others reject this rule in favor of the rule that if from a positive A a contradiction has been derived, then ∼A has been proved. This weaker rule makes it impossible to prove the law of excluded middle, and requires all proofs to be constructive.

11 That mathematics is indispensable for science thus becomes an argument against the fictionalist theory. Hartry Field defends the fictionalist theory by denying this indispensability in Science Without Numbers (Oxford: Blackwell, 1980). He does this by attempting to demonstrate that mathematics can be eliminated in the formulation of scientific theories by employing techniques of paraphrase. For criticisms of Field’s attempt at reduction see Penelope Maddy, “Indispensability and Practice,” Journal of Philosophy 89 (1992): 275-289. For a good summary of Field’s project and the issues it raises, see Mark Colyvan, “Indispensability Arguments in the Philosophy of Mathematics” in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (web online 2004 edition), edited by Edward N. Zalta. Fictionalism is advocated as a form of nominalism denying the existence of mathematical objects, and is contrasted with Platonic realism, which asserts their existence. Readers should be initially suspicious of such ontological “theories,” for they are usually attempts by representatives of one institutionalized specialty to assert the priority of their discourse framework and minimize others’ importance. This is certainly the case for the fictionalist theory of mathematics, whose advocates assert the priority of discourses formulated within the material thing framework.

I. Chapter 4. Reductionist Projects

12 J. J. C. Smart, Sensations and Brain Processes,” Philosophical Review 68 (1959): 141-56.13 The supervenience relation is said to hold if a difference between two particular sensations m1 and m2 entails a difference between physical processes p1 and p2, but a difference between p1 and p2 does not necessitate a difference between m1 and m2. The person undergoing surgical replacement of portions of his brain could experience the same type of pain as before, though his brain processes were different, but different types of sensation would require different physical processes. For a useful (though exasperatingly thorough) discussion of this relation see Terence Horgan, “From Supervenience to Superdupervenience: Meeting the Demands of the Material World,” Mind 102 (1993): 555-86.14 I summarize and critique causal theories of meaning, including the functionalist versions of Jerry Fodor and Ruth Millikan, in my Sign Levels (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2003), Secs 3.1 and 3.2. Early behavioral versions of John Watson, Russell, Charles Morris, Carnap, and Quine can be found in my Sources of Semiotic (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1990), Ch. 5. These versions face similar problems of negation, problems first noted by Roderick Chisholm.15 The causal theory is developed by Saul Kripke in Naming and Necessity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980). See my Sign Levels, Sec. 5.2 for a discussion of Kripke’s theory.16 For criticisms of Berkeley’s arguments see G. J. Warnock, Berkeley (New York: Penguin Books, 1969). These arguments can also be applied to Husserl’s reformulation of Berkeley’s reductive procedures through the inquiry known as “phenomenology” in Logical Investigations, translated by J. N. Findlay (Amherst, NY: Humanity Books, 2000), though whether Husserl in this early work advocated subjective idealism is a topic of controversy. Subsequent linguistic reformulations can be found in Russell’s “The Philosophy of Logical Atomism” in Logic and Knowledge (NY: Macmillan, 1956), Carnap’s The Logical Structure of the World, translated by R. A. George (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), and Nelson Goodman, The Structure of Appearance (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1966). The latter two works reject Husserl’s phenomenalism, and propose reductions to avowal reports that include reference to spatial locations that explicitly presuppose the material thing framework.6 See Alvin Goldman, “What is Justified Belief?” in G. Pappas, ed., Justification and Knowledge (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1979) and Epistemology and Cognition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986). 7 Angela Smith, “Control, Responsibility, and Moral Assessment,” Philosophical Studies 138 (2008): 367-92.

17I. Chapter 5. More Applications to Metaphysics

Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981), 328-330. 18 See Paul Boghossian, Fear of Knowledge (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2006), Chs. 5 and 6 and John Searle’s review of this book in “Why Should You Believe It?”, New York Review of Books (Vol. 56:14, Sept. 24, 2009), pp. 88-92 and his reply to Kathleen Lennon in “‘Fear of Knowledge’: An Exchange,” The New York Review of Books 56:20 (Dec. 17, 2009), p. 99. The error of social constructivists, Searle argues, “is to confuse, on the one hand, the social relativity of the vocabulary and the making of descriptions within that vocabulary with, on the other, the social relativity of the facts described using that vocabulary.” In her response to Searle, Lennon seems to concede that the dispute between the Cardinal and Galileo is conducted within the material thing framework, for she admits that descriptions of the solar system are about an “independent reality.” Yet, like Rorty, she denies the applicability of universal standards in deciding the dispute. Lennon makes Rorty’s mistake of confusing the cultural relativity of moral judgments made relative to different desires and preferences with features of the material thing framework used in formulating descriptions of an “independent reality.”

I. Chapter 6. Prescriptive Frameworks

19 See my Practical Inferences (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1985) for an outline of these inferences and my “Projectives and Their Logic,” Philosophia, 8 (1979): 599-614 for an outline of inferences between resolutives. Both works have references to an extensive literature. 20 For a brief discussion of decisions under uncertainty see my Practical Inferences, Ch. VI, Sections 2 and 3. The outcome of an alternative is the totality of its costs and consequences. The calculating formulas of decision theory require the assignment of utilities to outcomes, but these utilities are themselves conceived of as being determined by preferences of an agent between outcomes. The general form of the prudential inferences used in applying the formulas is thus consistent with what is being described here. 21 See Sarah Broadie, Ethics with Aristotle (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991). Broadie questions whether an ultimate end as “the best or supreme good” can serve as the premiss of a practical syllogism, for such a single end seems too indefinite for specific means to be assigned to it. How, she asks, “can we decide how to proceed so as to realize it?” (p. 85). This problem of indefiniteness also seems to apply to John McDowell’s ends of “doing well” and “the noble” introduced in his criticisms of Broadie in McDowell’s The Engaged Intellect, pp. 45ff. Every attempt to replace the multiplicity of ends present in practical inferences with a single end, whether happiness, utility maximization, or in McDowell’s case a generalized virtue, seems to fail when faced with the problem of specifying means.22 See her Eastern Division Presidential Address titled “The Activity of Reason,” Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association (83.2: November, 2009), pp. 23-43. A similar view is expressed by Robert Brandom through his distinction between the “realm of nature” and the “realm of freedom” in Reason in Philosophy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009). 23 How to assign relative weights to preferences among different individuals poses the much-discussed problem of interpersonal comparisons of utility. An individual X strongly prefers outcome A to B, while another Y reports a weaker preference for B over A. On what basis can the disinterested utilitarian spectator weight X’s preferences more highly than Y’s in calculating the total or average utilities of outcomes A and B for this community of two individuals? This problem is indefinitely magnified for large communities with their mixtures of zealots having often absurdly extreme preferences and calm, Buddhist-like individuals with moderated desires. Should we weight the preferences of a single zealot more heavily than five of the Buddhist-like? And how do we assign a weight on utilitarian grounds to the intense suffering of one individual in relation to the satisfaction gained by 100 individuals in viewing this suffering? 24 Cf. Rorty’s remark that “the novel, the movie, and the TV program have, gradually but steadily, replaced the sermon and the treatise as the principal vehicles of moral change and progress”

(Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, p. xvi). This replacement meets with Rorty’s approval.25 See Peter Singer, The Life You Can Save: Acting Now to End World Poverty (New York: Random House, 2009) and Thomas Nagel, Mortal Questions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). For Nagel’s criticisms, see also “What Peter Singer Wants of You,” New York Review of Books, LVII, No. 5 (March, 2010).

I. Chapter 7. Applications to Politics and the Law

26 John Locke, Second Treatise on Civil Government, Ch. II, Sec. 4. The quote that follows is also from this section, as are quotes from Hooker.27 The passage quoted by Locke is from Richard Hooker, Laws of Ecclestial Polity, Book 1. 28 Second Treatise, Ch. XI, Sec. 136. The passage that follows is from this same section.29 Ibid., Sec. 138.30 Jean Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract, Bk. I, Ch. 9. The comment about the illusoriness of equality when only legal is relegated to a footnote at the end of this chapter.31 Anarchy, State and Utopia (New York: Basic Books, 1974), p. 90.32 Ibid., p. 94. Coercion in the form of taxes is also subject for Nozick to the principle that if wealth is originally acquired in a just manner and transmitted voluntarily to others in a just manner, then it should not be appropriated through taxation by the government. Taxation of inherited wealth, he claims, is justified only to the extent that it rectifies past injustices in original acquisition and historical transmission. This leads to his conclusion that “the minimal state is the extensive state that can be justified. Any state more extensive violates people’s rights” (p. 149).

33 Acknowledgement of basic economic rights can be found in the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights, Article 25, which recognizes a right of all members of the human family to adequate health and the basics of prosperity. Its first part reads: “Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control.” Rawls’s theory provides a justification for inclusion of these rights to the extent they benefit the least advantaged.

34 This is acknowledged by Justice Souter in describing Supreme Court decisions of “choosing between the good and the good” when the goods are those of freedom, equality, and security. See “Justice Souter’s Class” by Linda Greenhouse, NY Times, June 3, 2010, a commentary on Souter’s Harvard Commencement Address after retiring from the Supreme Court.35 The concept of bindingness as applied to imperatives is introduced by Harry Gensler in his Introduction to Logic (London: Routledge, 2001) and developed in Peter Vranos, “New Foundations for Imperative Logic I: Logical Connectives, Consistency, and Quantifiers,” Nous 42 (2008): 529-72.36 See H. L. A. Hart, The Concept of Law, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994) and Joseph Raz, The Concept of a Legal System (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970) and The Authority of Law (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979). The term “analytical positivism” is applied to the version of positivism advanced by Hart and Raz. Both distinguish between the “validity” of a law and its “morality.” A morally repugnant law enacted by a tyrannical regime is regarded by them as nevertheless valid and legally binding within the context of the legal discourse framework. Analytical positivism is distinguished from the earlier behavioral form of legal positivism formulated by John Austin that identifies a law by its sources and its actual enforcement through sanctions imposed by the legal system. Both nonstatutory laws of a common law system and statutory laws are termed “primary rules” by H. L. A. Hart and are contrasted to “secondary rules” that confer authority and jurisdiction on the legislature and judicial system responsible for enacting and enforcing primary rules regulating citizen conduct. These secondary rules enable the recognition of a given law as binding. In this way, he preserves the authority-derived conception of Kelsen’s analogy between laws and

commands, adding only the requirement that primary rules be themselves authorized by secondary. In the U.S., the enabling authority for statutory laws are federal and state written constitutions as interpreted by Supreme Courts. 37 The Concept of Law, pp. 126-129. 38 The Morality of Law, revised edition (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1969), p. 96.39 Fuller notes that retroactive changes in laws do occur in judicial reversals of precedent, and are considered acceptable in civil cases where the consequences for individuals are not serious. See Morality of Law, pp. 59, 60.40 Ronald Dworkin, Taking Rights Seriously (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978). Dworkin regards Rawls’s two principles as reducible to a “fundamental right” of all citizens to “equal concern and respect in the design and administration of the political institutions that govern them” (p. 180). Moral principles such as this, he says, can justify judicial novelty in a way impossible for legal positivism, for they can be appealed to in defending rights of individuals and minorities against the policies enacted through law by majorities. They can also be applied retroactively in a way impossible for customary and statutory rules. Dworkin’s principles are not restricted, however, to principles protecting individuals and minorities from injustices inflicted by majorities or the weak against the powerful. They include also quasi-moral principles such as no person should profits from his own wrong, which he cites in his discussion of Riggs vs. Palmer, pp. 24ff. 41 As reported online by www.msnbc.com from Associated Press and NBC News sources on October 14, 2010.

I. Chapter 8. Philosophy and Social Integration

1 Kripke’s version is developed in his Naming and Necessity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980); Lewis’s is in On the Plurality of Worlds (London: Blackwell, 1986). 2 This conclusion is reached by Putnam in “It Ain’t Necessarily So,” Journal of Philosophy 59 (1962): 658-71.