Van Gelder (1995) denies that psychological processes are computational. He argues that cognitive systems are dynamic, and that cognitive states are not relations to mental symbols, but quantifiable states of a complex system consisting of (in the case of human beings) a nervous system, a body and the environment in which they are embedded. Cognitive processes are not rule-governed sequences of discrete symbolic states, but continuous, evolving total states of dynamic systems determined by continuous, simultaneous and mutually determining states of the systems' components. Representation in a dynamic system is essentially information-theoretic, though the bearers of information are not symbols, but state variables or parameters.
Horst (1996), on the other hand, argues that though computational models may be useful in scientific psychology, they are of no help in achieving a philosophical understanding of the intentionality of commonsense mental states. computational theory of mind attempts to reduce the intentionality of such states to the intentionality of the mental symbols they are relations to. But, Horst claims, the relevant notion of symbolic content is essentially bound up with the notions of convention and intention. So the computational theory of mind involves itself in a vicious circularity: the very properties that are supposed to be reduced are (tacitly) appealed to in the reduction.
To say that a mental object has semantic properties is, paradigmatically, to say that it may be about, or be true or false of, an object or objects, or that it may be true or false simpliciter. Suppose I think that ocelots take snuff. I am thinking about my wish of placing a dot or period, if only to complete of this book, and if what I think of such an aspiring endeavour becomes is true, so, that, within its individualized participation, is then that my thought is true. According to representational theory of mind such states are to be explained as relations between agents and mental representations. To think that ocelots take snuff is to token in some way a mental representation whose content is that ocelots take snuff. On this view, the semantic properties of mental states are the semantic properties of the representations they are relations to.
Linguistic acts seem to share such properties with mental states. Suppose I say that ocelots take snuff. I am talking about ocelots, and if what I say of them (that they take snuff) is true of them, then my utterance is true. Now, to say that ocelots take snuff is (in part) to utter a sentence that means that ocelots take snuff. Many philosophers have thought that the semantic properties of linguistic expressions are inherited from the intentional mental states they are conventionally used to express. On this view, the semantic properties of linguistic expressions are the semantic properties of the representations that are the mental relata of the states they are conventionally used to express.
It is also widely held that in addition to having such properties as reference, truth-conditions and truth - so-called extensional properties - expressions of natural languages also have intensional properties, in virtue of expressing properties or propositions - i.e., in virtue of having meanings or senses, where two expressions may have the same reference, truth-conditions or truth value, yet express different properties or propositions (Frége 1892/1997). If the semantic properties of natural-language expressions are inherited from the thoughts and concepts they express (or vice versa, or both), then an analogous distinction may be appropriate for mental representations.
Søren Aabye Kierkegaard (1813-1855), a Danish religious philosopher, whose concern with individual existence, choice, and commitment profoundly influenced modern theology and philosophy, especially existentialism.
Søren Kierkegaard wrote of the paradoxes of Christianity and the faith required to reconcile them. In his book Fear and Trembling, Kierkegaard discusses Genesis 22, in which God commands Abraham to kill his only son, Isaac. Although God made an unreasonable and immoral demand, Abraham obeyed without trying to understand or justify it. Kierkegaard regards this 'leap of faith' as the essence of Christianity.
Kierkegaard was born in Copenhagen on May 15, 1813. His father was a wealthy merchant and strict Lutheran, whose gloomy, guilt-ridden piety and vivid imagination strongly influenced Kierkegaard. Kierkegaard studied theology and philosophy at the University of Copenhagen, where he encountered Hegelian philosophy and reacted strongly against it. While at the university, he ceased to practice Lutheranism and for a time led an extravagant social life, becoming a familiar figure in the theatrical and café society of Copenhagen. After his father's death in 1838, however, he decided to resume his theological studies. In 1840 he became engaged to the 17-year-old Regine Olson, but almost immediately he began to suspect that marriage was incompatible with his own brooding, complicated nature and his growing sense of a philosophical vocation. He abruptly broke off the engagement in 1841, but the episode took on great significance for him, and he repeatedly alluded to it in his books. At the same time, he realized that he did not want to become a Lutheran pastor. An inheritance from his father allowed him to devote himself entirely to writing, and in the remaining 14 years of his life he produced more than 20 books.
Kierkegaard's work is deliberately unsystematic and consists of essays, aphorisms, parables, fictional letters and diaries, and other literary forms. Many of his works were originally published under pseudonyms. He applied the term existential to his philosophy because he regarded philosophy as the expression of an intensely examined individual life, not as the construction of a monolithic system in the manner of the 19th-century German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, whose work he attacked in Concluding Unscientific Postscript (1846: translations, 1941). Hegel claimed to have achieved a complete rational understanding of human life and history; Kierkegaard, on the other hand, stressed the ambiguity and paradoxical nature of the human situation. The fundamental problems of life, he contended, defy rational, objective explanation; the highest truth is subjective.
Kierkegaard maintained that systematic philosophy not only imposed a false perspective on human existence but that it also, by explaining life in terms of logical necessity, becomes a means of avoiding choice and responsibility. Individuals, he believed, create their own natures through their choices, which must be made in the absence of universal, objective standards. The validity of a choice can only be determined subjectively.
In his first major work, Either/Or, Kierkegaards described two spheres, or stages of existence, that the individual may choose: the aesthetic and the ethical. The aesthetic way of life is a refined hedonism, consisting of a search for pleasure and a cultivation of a mood. The aesthetic individual constantly seeks variety and novelty in an effort to stave off boredom but eventually must confront boredom and despair. The ethical way of life involves an intense, passionate commitment to duty, to unconditional social and religious obligations. In his later works, such as Stages on Life's Way (1845: Translations, 1940), Kierkegaard discerned in this submission to duty a loss of individual responsibility, and he proposed a third stage, the religious, in which one submits to the will of God but in doing so finds authentic freedom. In "Fear and Trembling" (1846; Translated, 1941) Kierkegaard focussed on God's command that Abraham sacrifice his son Isaac (Genesis 22: 1-19), an act that violates Abraham's ethical convictions. Abraham proves his faith by resolutely setting out to obey God's command, even though he cannot understand it. This 'suspension of the ethical,' as Kierkegaard called it, allows Abraham to achieve an authentic commitment to God. To avoid ultimate despair, the individual must make a similar 'leap of faith' into a religious life, which is inherently paradoxical, mysterious, and full of risk. One is called to it by the feeling of dread (The Concept of Dread, 1844; translations, 1944), which is ultimately a fear of nothingness.
Toward the end of his life Kierkegaard was involved in bitter controversies, especially with the established Danish Lutheran church, which he regarded as worldly and corrupt. His later works, such as The Sickness Unto Death (1849: translations, 1941), reflects an increasingly sombre view of Christianity, emphasizing suffering as the essence of authentic faith. He also intensified his attack on modern European society, which he denounced in The Present Age (1846; translated 1940) for its lack of passion and for its quantitative values. The stress of his prolific writing and of the controversies in which he engaged gradually undermined his health; in October 1855 he fainted in the street, and he died in Copenhagen on November 11, 1855.
Kierkegaard's influence was at first confined to Scandinavia and to German-speaking Europe, where his work had a strong impact on Protestant Theology and on such writers as the 20th-century Austrian novelist Franz Kafka. As existentialism emerged as a general European movement after World War I, Kierkegaard's work was widely translated, and he was recognized as one of the seminal figures of modern culture.
Since scientists, during the nineteenth century were engrossed with uncovering the workings of external reality and seemingly knew of themselves that these virtually overflowing burdens of nothing, in that were about the physical substrates of human consciousness, the business of examining the distributive contribution in dynamic functionality and structural foundation of mind became the province of social scientists and humanists. Adolphe Quételet proposed a 'social physics' that could serve as the basis for a new discipline called sociology, and his contemporary Auguste Comte concluded that a true scientific understanding of the social reality was quite inevitable. Mind, in the view of these figures, was a separate and distinct mechanism subject to the lawful workings of a mechanical social reality.
More formal European philosophers, such as Immanuel Kant, sought to reconcile representations of external reality in mind with the motions of matter-based on the dictates of pure reason. This impulse was also apparent in the utilitarian ethics of Jerry Bentham and John Stuart Mill, in the historical materialism of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, and in the pragmatism of Charles Smith, William James and John Dewey. These thinkers were painfully aware, however, of the inability of reason to posit a self-consistent basis for bridging the gap between mind and matter, and each remains obliged to conclude that the realm of the mental exists only in the subjective reality of the individual.
The fatal flaw of pure reason is, of course, the absence of emotion, and purely explanations of the division between subjective reality and external reality, of which had limited appeal outside the community of intellectuals. The figure most responsible for infusing our understanding of the Cartesian dualism with contextual representation of our understanding with emotional content was the death of God theologian Friedrich Nietzsche 1844-1900. After declaring that God and 'divine will', did not exist, Nietzsche reified the 'existence' of consciousness in the domain of subjectivity as the ground for individual 'will' and summarily reducing all previous philosophical attempts to articulate the 'will to truth'. The dilemma, forth in, had seemed to mean, by the validation, . . . as accredited for doing of science, in that the claim that Nietzsche's earlier versions to the 'will to truth', disguises the fact that all alleged truths were arbitrarily created in the subjective reality of the individual and are expressed or manifesting the individualism of 'will'.
In Nietzsche's view, the separation between mind and matter is more absolute and total than previously been imagined. Based on the assumption that there is no really necessary correspondence between linguistic constructions of reality in human subjectivity and external reality, he deuced that we are all locked in 'a prison house of language'. The prison as he concluded it, was also a 'space' where the philosopher can examine the 'innermost desires of his nature' and articulate a new message of individual existence founded on 'will'.
Those who fail to enact their existence in this space, Nietzsche says, are enticed into sacrificing their individuality on the nonexistent altars of religious beliefs and democratic or socialists' ideals and become, therefore, members of the anonymous and docile crowd. Nietzsche also invalidated the knowledge claims of science in the examination of human subjectivity. Science, he said. Is not exclusive to natural phenomenons and favours reductionistic examination of phenomena at the expense of mind? It also seeks to reduce the separateness and uniqueness of mind with mechanistic descriptions that disallow and basis for the free exercise of individual will.
The mechanistic paradigms of the late in the nineteenth century where the one Einstein came to know when he studied physics. Most physicists believed that it represented an eternal truth, but Einstein was open to fresh ideas. Inspired by Mach's critical mind, he demolished the Newtonian ideas of space and time and replaced them with new, 'relativistic' notions.
Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980), was a French philosopher, dramatist, novelist, and political journalist, who was a leading exponent of existentialism. Jean-Paul Sartre helped to develop existential philosophy through his writings, novels, and plays. Much of Sartre's work focuses on the dilemma of choice faced by free individuals and on the challenge of creating meaning by acting responsibly in an indifferent world. In stating that 'man is condemned to be free,' Sartre reminds us of the responsibility that accompanies human decisions.
Sartre was born in Paris, June 21, 1905, and educated at the Écôle Normale Supérieure in Paris, the University of Fribourg in Switzerland, and the French Institute in Berlin. He taught philosophy at various lycées from 1929 until the outbreak of World War II, when he was called into military service. In 1940-41 he was imprisoned by the Germans; after his release, he taught in Neuilly, France, and later in Paris, and was active in the French Resistance. The German authorities, unaware of his underground activities, permitted the production of his antiauthoritarian play The Flies (1943: translations, 1946) and the publication of his major philosophic work Being and Nothingness (1943: translations, 1953). Sartre gave up teaching in 1945 and founded the political and literary magazine Les Temps Modernes, of which he became the editor in chief. Sartre was active after 1947 as an independent Socialist, critical of both the USSR and the United States in the so-called cold war years. Later, he supported Soviet positions but still frequently criticized Soviet policies. Most of his writing of the 1950s deals with literary and political problems. Sartre rejected the 1964 Nobel Prize in literature, explaining that to accept such an award would compromise his integrity as a writer.
Sartre's philosophic works combine the phenomenology of the German philosopher Edmund Husserl, the metaphysics of the German philosophers Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and Martin Heidegger, and the social theory of Karl Marx into a single view called existentialism. This view, which relates philosophical theory to life, literature, psychology, and political action, stimulated so much popular interest that existentialism became a worldwide movement.
In his early philosophic work, Being and Nothingness, Sartre conceived humans as beings who create their own world by rebelling against authority and by accepting personal responsibility for their actions, unaided by society, traditional morality, or religious faith. Distinguishing between human existence and the nonhuman world, he maintained that human existence is characterized by nothingness, that is, by the capacity to negate and rebel. His theory of an existential psychoanalysis asserted the inescapable responsibility of all individuals for their own decisions and made the recognition of one's absolute freedom of choice the necessary condition for authentic human existence. His plays and novels express the belief that freedom and acceptance of personal responsibility are the main values in life and that individuals must rely on their creative powers rather than on social or religious authority.
In his later philosophic work Critique of Dialectical Reason (1960: translations, 1976), Sartre's emphasis shifted from existentialist freedom and subjectivity to Marxist social determinism. Sartre argued that the influence of modern society over the individual is so great as to produce serialization, by which he meant loss of self. Individual power and freedom can only be regained through group revolutionary action. Despite this exhortation to revolutionary political activity, Sartre himself did not join the Communist Party, thus retaining the freedom to criticize the Soviet invasions of Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968. He died in Paris, April 15, 1980.
The part of the theory of design or semiotics, that concerns the relationship between speakers and their signs. the study of the principles governing appropriate conversational moves is called general pragmatized, applied pragmatics treats of special kinds of linguistic interaction such as interviews and speech asking, nevertheless, the philosophical movement that has had a major impact on American culture from the late 19th century to the present. Pragmatism calls for ideas and theories to be tested in practice, by assessing whether acting upon the idea or theory produces desirable or undesirable results. According to pragmatists, all claims about truth, knowledge, morality, and politics must be tested in this way. Pragmatism has been critical of traditional Western philosophy, especially the notions that there are absolute truths and absolute values. Although pragmatism was popular for a time in France, England, and Italy, most observers believe that it encapsulates an American faith in know-how and practicality and an equally American distrust of abstract theories and ideologies.
Pragmatists regard all theories and institutions as tentative hypotheses and solutions. For this reason they believed that efforts to improve society, through such means as education or politics, must be geared toward problem solving and must be ongoing. Through their emphasis on connecting theory to practice, pragmatist thinkers attempted to transform all areas of philosophy, from metaphysics to ethics and political philosophy.
Pragmatism sought a middle ground between traditional ideas about the nature of reality and radical theories of nihilism and irrationalism, which had become popular in Europe in the late 19th century. Traditional metaphysics assumed that the world has a fixed, intelligible structure and that human beings can know absolute or objective truths about the world and about what constitutes moral behaviour. Nihilism and irrationalism, on the other hand, denied those very assumptions and their certitude. Pragmatists today still try to steer a middle course between contemporary offshoots of these two extremes.
The ideas of the pragmatists were considered revolutionary when they first appeared. To some critics, pragmatism's refusal to affirm any absolutes carried negative implications for society. For example, pragmatists do not believe that a single absolute idea of goodness or justice exists, but rather than these concepts are changeable and depend on the context in which they are being discussed. The absence of these absolutes, critics feared, could result in a decline in moral standards. The pragmatists' denial of absolutes, moreover, challenged the foundations of religion, government, and schools of thought. As a result, pragmatism influenced developments in psychology, sociology, education, semiotics (the study of signs and symbols), and scientific method, as well as philosophy, cultural criticism, and social reform movements. Various political groups have also drawn on the assumptions of pragmatism, from the progressive movements of the early 20th century to later experiments in social reform.
Pragmatism is best understood in its historical and cultural context. It arose during the late 19th century, a period of rapid scientific advancement typified by the theories of British biologist Charles Darwin, whose theories suggested too many thinkers that humanity and society are in a perpetual state of progress. During this same period a decline in traditional religious beliefs and values accompanied the industrialization and material progress of the time. In consequence it became necessary to rethink fundamental ideas about values, religion, science, community, and individuality.
The three most important pragmatists are American philosophers' Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, and John Dewey. Peirce was primarily interested in scientific method and mathematics; His objective was to infuse scientific thinking into philosophy and society, and he believed that human comprehension of reality was becoming ever greater and that human communities were becoming increasingly progressive. Peirce developed pragmatism as a theory of meaning - in particular, the meaning of concepts used in science. The meaning of the concept 'brittle,' for example, is given by the observed consequences or properties that objects called 'brittle' exhibit. For Peirce, the only rational way to increase knowledge was to form mental habits that would test ideas through observation, experimentation, or what he called inquiry. Many philosophers known as logical positivists, a group of philosophers who have been influenced by Peirce, believed that our evolving species was fated to get ever closer to Truth. Logical positivists emphasize the importance of scientific verification, rejecting the assertion of positivism that personal experience is the basis of true knowledge.
James moved pragmatism in directions that Peirce strongly disliked. He generalized Peirce's doctrines to encompass all concepts, beliefs, and actions; he also applied pragmatist ideas to truth as well as to meaning. James was primarily interested in showing how systems of morality, religion, and faith could be defended in a scientific civilization. He argued that sentiment, as well as logic, is crucial to rationality and that the great issues of life - morality and religious belief, for example - are leaps of faith. As such, they depend upon what he called 'the will to believe' and not merely on scientific evidence, which can never tell us what to do or what is worthwhile. Critics charged James with relativism (the belief that values depend on specific situations) and with crass expediency for proposing that if an idea or action works the way one intends, it must be right. But James can more accurately be described as a pluralist - someone who believes the world to be far too complex for any one philosophy to explain everything.
Dewey's philosophy can be described as a version of philosophical naturalism, which regards human experience, intelligence, and communities as ever-evolving mechanisms. Using their experience and intelligence, Dewey believed, human beings can solve problems, including social problems, through inquiry. For Dewey, naturalism led to the idea of a democratic society that allows all members to acquire social intelligence and progress both as individuals and as communities. Dewey held that traditional ideas about knowledge, truth, and values, in which absolutes are assumed, are incompatible with a broadly Darwinian world-view in which individuals and society is progressing. In consequence, he felt that these traditional ideas must be discarded or revised. Indeed, for pragmatists, everything people know and do depend on a historical context and are thus tentative rather than absolute.
Many followers and critics of Dewey believe he advocated elitism and social engineering in his philosophical stance. Others think of him as a kind of romantic humanist. Both tendencies are evident in Dewey's writings, although he aspired to synthesize the two realms.
The pragmatist's tradition was revitalized in the 1980s by American philosopher Richard Rorty, who has faced similar charges of elitism for his belief in the relativism of values and his emphasis on the role of the individual in attaining knowledge. Interest has renewed in the classic pragmatists - Pierce, James, and Dewey - as an alternative to Rorty's interpretation of the tradition.
In an ever-changing world, pragmatism has many benefits. It defends social experimentation as a means of improving society, accepts pluralism, and rejects' dead dogmas. But a philosophy that offers no final answers or absolutes and that appears vague as a result of trying to harmonize opposites may also be unsatisfactory to some.
One of the five branches into which semiotics is usually divided the study of meaning of words, and their relation of designed to the object studied, a semantic is provided for a formal language when an interpretation or model is specified. Nonetheless, the Semantics, the Greek semantikos, 'significant,' the study of the meaning of linguistic signs - that is, words, expressions, and sentences. Scholars of semantics try to one answer such questions as 'What is the meaning of (the word) 'X'? They do this by studying what signs are, as well as how signs possess significance - that is, how they are intended by speakers, how they designate (make reference to things and ideas), and how they are interpreted by hearers. The goal of semantics is to match the meanings of signs - what they stand for - with the process of assigning those meanings.
Semantics is studied from philosophical (pure) and linguistic (descriptive and theoretical) approaches, and an approach known as general semantics. Philosophers look at the behaviour that goes with the process of meaning. Linguists study the elements or features of meaning as they are related in a linguistic system. General semanticists concentrate on meaning as influencing what people think and do.
These semantic approaches also have broader application. Anthropologists, through descriptive semantics, study what people categorize as culturally important. Psychologists draw on theoretical semantic studies that attempt to describe the mental process of understanding and to identify how people acquire meaning (as well as sound and structure) in language. Animal behaviorists research how and what other species communicate. Exponents of general semantics examine the different values (or connotations) of signs that supposedly mean the same thing (such as 'the victor at Jena' and 'the loser at Waterloo,' both referring to Napoleon). Also in a general-semantics vein, literary critics have been influenced by studies differentiating literary language from ordinary language and describing how literary metaphors evoke feelings and attitudes.
In the late 19th century Michel Jules Alfred Breal, a French philologist, proposed a 'science of significations' that would investigate how sense is attached to expressions and other signs. In 1910 the British philosopher's Alfred North Whitehead and Bertrand Russell published Principia Mathematica, which strongly influenced the Vienna Circle, a group of philosophers who developed the rigorous philosophical approach known as logical positivism.
One of the leading figures of the Vienna Circle, the German philosopher Rudolf Carnap, made a major contribution to philosophical semantics by developing symbolic logic, a system for analyzing signs and what they designate. In logical positivism, meaning is a relationship between words and things, and its study is empirically based: Because language, ideally, is a direct reflection of reality, signs match things and facts. In symbolic logic, however, mathematical notation is used to state what signs designate and to do so more clearly and precisely than is possible in ordinary language. Symbolic logic is thus itself a language, specifically, a metalanguage (formal technical language) used to talk about an object language (the language that is the object of a given semantic study).
An object language has a speaker (for example, a French woman) using expressions (such as la plume rouge) to designate a meaning (in this case, to indicate a definite pen - a plume - of the Collor red - rouge). The full description of an object language in symbols is called the semiotic of that language. A language's semiotic has the following aspects: (1) a semantic aspect, in which signs (words, expressions, sentences) are given specific designations; (2) a pragmatic aspect, in which the contextual relations between speakers and signs are indicated; and (3) a syntactic aspect, in which formal relations among the elements within signs (for example, among the sounds in a sentence) are indicated.
An interpreted language in symbolic logic is an object language together with rules of meaning that link signs and designations. Each interpreted sign has a truth condition - a condition that must be met in order for the sign to be true. A sign's meaning is what the sign designates when its truth condition is satisfied. For example, the expression or sign 'the moon is a sphere' is understood by someone who knows English; however, although it is understood, it may or may not be true. The expression is true if the thing it is extended to - the moon - is in fact spherical. To determine the sign's truth quality value, one must look at the moon to realize and grasp to its visually perceptive representation of our inseparability with it and the total consciousness of our universe.
The symbolic logic of logical positivist philosophy thus represents an attempt to get at meaning by way of the empirical verifiability of signs - by whether the truth of the sign can be confirmed by observing something in the real world. This attempt at understanding meaning has been only moderately successful. The Austrian-British philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein rejected it in favour of his 'ordinary language' philosophy, in which he asserted that thought is based on everyday language. Not all signs designate things in the world, he pointed out, nor can all signs be associated with truth values. In his approach to philosophical semantics, the rules of meaning are disclosed in how speech is used.
From ordinary-language philosophy has evolved the current theory of speech-act semantics. The British philosopher J. L. Austin claimed that, by speaking, a person performs an act, or does something (such as state, predict, or warn), and that meaning is found in what an expression does, in the act it performs. The American philosopher John R. Searle extended Austin's ideas, emphasizing the need to relate the functions of signs or expressions to their social context. Searle asserted that speech encompasses at least three kinds of acts: (1) elocutionary acts, in which things are said with a certain sense or reference (as in 'the moon is a sphere'); (2) illocutionary acts, in which such acts as promising or commanding are performed by means of speaking; and (3) perlocutionary acts, in which the speaker, by speaking, does something to someone else (for example, angers, consoles, or persuades someone). The speaker's intentions are conveyed by the illocutionary force that is given to the signs - that is, by the actions implicit in what is said. To be successfully meant, however, the signs must also be appropriate, sincere, consistent with the speaker's general beliefs and conduct, and recognizable as meaningful by the hearer.
What has developed in philosophical semantics, then, is a distinction between truth-based semantics and speech-act semantics. Some critics of speech-act theory believe that it deals primarily with meaning in communication (as opposed to meaning in language) and thus is part of the pragmatic aspect of a language's semiotic - that it relates to signs and to the knowledge of the world shared by speakers and hearers, rather than relating to signs and their designations (semantic aspect) or to formal relations among signs (syntactic aspect). These scholars hold that semantics should be restricted to assigning interpretations to signs alone - independent of a speaker and hearer.
Researchers in descriptive semantics examine what signs mean in particular languages. They aim, for instance, to identify what constitutes nouns or noun phrases and verbs or verb phrases. For some languages, such as English, this is done with subject-predicate analysis. For languages without clear-cut distinctions between nouns, verbs, and prepositions, it is possible to say what the signs mean by analyzing the structure of what are called propositions. In such an analysis, a sign is seen as an operator that combines with one or more arguments (also signs), often nominal argument (noun phrases) or, relates nominal arguments to other elements in the expression (such as prepositional phrases or adverbial phrases). For example, in the expression 'Bill gives Mary the book, ''gives' is an operator that relates the arguments 'Bill, ''Mary,' and 'the book.'
Whether using subject-predicate analysis or propositional analysis, descriptive semanticists establish expression classes (classes of items that can substitute for one another within a sign) and classes of items within the conventional parts of speech (such as nouns and verbs). The resulting classes are thus defined in terms of syntax, and they also have semantic roles; that is, the items in these classes perform specific grammatical functions, and in so doing they establish meaning by predicating, referring, making distinctions among entities, relations, or actions. For example, 'kiss' belongs to an expression class with other items such as 'hit' and 'see,' as well as to the conventional part of speech 'verb,' in which it is part of a subclass of operators requiring two arguments (an actor and a receiver). In 'Mary kissed John,' the syntactic role of 'kiss' is to relate two nominal arguments ('Mary' and 'John'), whereas its semantic role is to identify a type of action. Unfortunately for descriptive semantics, however, it is not always possible to find a one-to-one correlation of syntactic classes with semantic roles. For instance, 'John' has the same semantic role - to identify a person - in the following two sentences: 'John is easy to please' and 'John is eager to please.' The syntactic role of 'John' in the two sentences, however, is different: In the first, 'John' is the receiver of an action; in the second, 'John' is the actor.
Linguistic semantics is also used by anthropologists called ethnoscientists to conduct formal semantic analysis (componential analysis) to determine how expressed signs - usually single words as vocabulary items called lexemes - in a language are related to the perceptions and thoughts of the people who speak the language. Componential analysis tests the idea that linguistic categories influence or determine how people view the world; this idea is called the Whorf hypothesis after the American anthropological linguist Benjamin Lee Whorf, who proposed it. In componential analysis, lexemes that have a common range of meaning constitute a semantic domain. Such a domain is characterized by the distinctive semantic features (components) that differentiate individual lexemes in the domain from one another, and also by features shared by all the lexemes in the domain. Such componential analysis points out, for example, that in the domain 'seat' in English, the lexemes 'chair, ''sofa, ''loveseat,' and 'bench' can be distinguished from one another according too many people are accommodated and whether a back support is included. At the same time all these lexemes share the common component, or feature, of meaning 'something on which to sit.'
Linguists pursuing such componential analysis hope to identify a universal set of such semantic features, from which are drawn the different sets of features that characterize different languages. This idea of universal semantic features has been applied to the analysis of systems of myth and kinship in various cultures by the French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss. He showed that people organize their societies and interpret their place in these societies in ways that, despite apparent differences, have remarkable underlying similarities.
Linguists concerned with theoretical semantics are looking for a general theory of meaning in language. To such linguists, known as transformational-generative grammarians, meaning is part of the linguistic knowledge or competence that all humans possess. A generative grammar as a model of linguistic competence has a phonological (sound-system), a syntactic, and a semantic component. The semantic component, as part of a generative theory of meaning, is envisioned as a system of rules that govern how interpretable signs are interpreted and determine that other signs (such as 'Colourless green ideas sleep furiously'), although grammatical expressions, are meaningless - semantically blocked. The rules must also account for how a sentence such as 'They passed the port at midnight' can have at least two interpretations.
Generative semantics grew out of proposals to explain a speaker's ability to produce and understand new expressions where grammar or syntax fails. Its goal is to explain why and how, for example, a person understands at first hearing that the sentence 'Colourless green ideas sleep furiously' has no meaning, even though it follows the rules of English grammar; or how, in hearing a sentence with two possible interpretations (such as 'They passed the port at midnight'), one decides which meaning applies.
In generative semantics, the idea developed that all information needed to semantically interpret a sign (usually a sentence) is contained in the sentence's underlying grammatical or syntactic deep structure. The deep structure of a sentence involves lexemes (understood as words or vocabulary items composed of bundles of semantic features selected from the proposed universal set of semantic features). On the sentence's surface (that is, when it is spoken) these lexemes will appear as nouns, verbs, adjectives, and other parts of speech - that is, as vocabulary items. When the sentence is formulated by the speaker, semantic roles (such as subject, objects, predicate) are assigned to the lexemes; The listener hears the spoken sentence and interprets the semantic features that are meant.
Whether deep structure and semantic interpretation are distinct from one, another is a matter of controversy. Most generative linguists agree, however, that a grammar should generate the set of semantically well-formed expressions that are possible in a given language, and that the grammar should associate a semantic interpretation with each expression.
Another subject of debate is whether semantic interpretation should be understood as syntactically based (that is, coming from a sentence's deep structure); or whether it should be seen as semantically based. According to Noam Chomsky, an American scholar who is particularly influential in this field, it is possible - in a syntactically based theory - for surface structure and deep structure jointly to determine the semantic interpretation of an expression.
The focus of general semantics is how people evaluate words and how that evaluation influences their behaviour. Begun by the Polish American linguist Alfred Korzybski and long associated with the American semanticist and politician S. I. Hayakawa, general semantics has been used in efforts to make people aware of dangers inherent in treating words as more than symbols. It has been extremely popular with writers who use language to influence people's ideas. In their work, these writers use general-semantics guidelines for avoiding loose generalizations, rigid attitudes, inappropriate finality, and imprecision. Some philosophers and linguists, however, have criticized general semantics as lacking scientific rigour, and the approach has declined in popularity.
Positivism, system of philosophy based on experience and empirical knowledge of natural phenomena, in which metaphysics and theology are regarded as inadequate and imperfect systems of knowledge. The doctrine was first called positivism by the 19th-century French mathematician and philosopher Auguste Comte (1798-1857), but some of the positivist concepts may be traced to the British philosopher David Hume, the French philosopher Duc de Saint-Simon, and the German philosopher Immanuel Kant.
Comte chose the word positivism on the ground that it indicated the 'reality' and 'constructive tendency' that he claimed for the theoretical aspect of the doctrine. He was, in the main, interested in a reorganization of social life for the good of humanity through scientific knowledge, and thus mastering of natural forces. The two primary components of positivism, the philosophy and the polity (or programs of individual and social conduct), were later welded by Comte into a whole under the conception of a religion, in which humanity was the object of worship. A number of Comte's disciples refused, however, to accept this religious development of his philosophy, because it seemed to contradict the original positivist philosophy. Many of Comte's doctrines were later adapted and developed by the British social philosophers John Stuart Mill and Herbert Spencer and by the Austrian philosopher and physicist Ernst Mach.
The principle named But rejected by the English economist and philosopher John Maynard Keyes (1883-1946) whereby if there is no known reason for asserting one than another out of several alternatives, then relative to our knowledge they have an equal probability. Without restriction the principle leads to contradiction, for example, if we know nothing about the nationality of a person, we might argue that the probability is equal that she comes from England or France, and equal that she comes from Scotland or France. But from the first two assertions the probability that she belongs to Britain must be at least double the probability that belongs to France.
A paradox arises when a set class of apparent incontrovertible premises gives unacceptable or contradictory conclusions. To solve a paradox will involve showing either that there is a hidden flaw in the premises, or that the reasoning is erroneous, or that the apparently unacceptable conclusion can, in fact, be tolerated. Paradoxes are therefore important in philosophy, for until one is solved it shows that there is something about our reasoning and our concepts that we do not understand.
By comparison, the moral philosopher and epistemologist Bernard Bolzano (1781-1848) argues, though, that there is something else, an infinity that doe not have this whatever you need it to be elasticity. In fact a truly infinite quantity (for example, the length of a straight ligne unbounded in either direction, meaning : The magnitude of the spatial entity containing all the points determined solely by their abstractly conceivable relation to two fixed points) does not by any means need to be variable, and in adduced example it is in fact not variable. Conversely, it is quite possible for a quantity merely capable of being taken greater than we have already taken it, and of becoming larger than any preassigned (finite) quantity, nevertheless it is to mean, in that of all times is merely finite, which holds in particular of every numerical quantity 1, 2, 3, 4, 5.
In other words, for Bolzano there could be a true infinity that was not a variable something that was only bigger than anything you might specify. Such a true infinity was the result of joining two points together and extending that ligne in both directions without stopping. And what is more, he could separate off the demands of calculus, using a finite quality without ever bothering with the slippery potential infinity. Here was both a deeper understanding of the nature of infinity and the basis on which are built in his safe infinity free calculus.
This use of the inexhaustible follows on directly from most Bolzanos' criticism of the way that ? we used as à variable something that would be bigger than anything you could specify, but never quite reached the true, absolute infinity. In Paradoxes of the Infinity Bolzano points out that is possible for a quantity merely capable of becoming larger than any other one pre-assigned (finite) quantity, nevertheless to remain at all times merely finite.
Bolzano intended this as à criticism of the way infinity was treated, but Professor Jacquette sees it instead of a way of masking use of practical applications like calculus without the need for weaker words about infinity.
By replacing ? with ¤ we do away with one of the most common requirements for infinity, but is there anything left that map out to the real world ? Can we confine infinity to that pure mathematical other world, where anything, however unreal, can be constructed, and forget about it elsewhere ? Surprisingly, this seems to have been the view, at least at one point in time, even of the German mathematician and founder of set-theory Georg Cantor (1845-1918), himself, whose comment in 1883, that only the finite numbers are real.
Keeping within the lines of reason, both these Cambridge mathematician and philosopher Frank Plumpton Ramsey (1903-30) and the Italian mathematician G. Peano (1858-1932) have been to distinguish logical paradoxes and that depend upon the notion of reference or truth (semantic notions), such are the postulates justifying mathematical induction. It ensures that a numerical series is closed, in the sense that nothing but zero and its successors can be numbers. In that any series satisfying a set of axioms can be conceived as the sequence of natural numbers. Candidates from set theory include the Zermelo numbers, where the empty set is zero, and the successor of each number is its unit set, and the von Neuman numbers, where each number is the set of all smaller numbers. A similar and equally fundamental complementarity exists in the relation between zero and infinity. Although the fullness of infinity is logically antithetical to the emptiness of zero, infinity can be obtained from zero with a simple mathematical operation. The division of many numbers by zero is infinity, while the multiplication of any number by zero is zero.
With the set theory developed by the German mathematician and logician Georg Cantor. From 1878 to 1807, Cantor created a theory of abstract sets of entities that eventually became a mathematical discipline. A set, as he defined it, is a collection of definite and distinguished objets in thought or perception conceived as à whole.
Cantor attempted to prove that the process of counting and the definition of integers could be placed on a solid mathematical foundation. His method was to repeatedly place the elements in one set into one-to-one correspondence with those in another. In the case of integers, Cantor showed that each integer (1, 2, 3, . . . n) could be paired with an even integers (2, 4, 6, . . . n), and, therefore, that the set of all integers was equal to the set of all even numbers.
Amazingly, Cantor discovered that some infinite sets were large than others and that infinite sets formed a hierarchy of greater infinities. After this failed attempt to save the classical view of logical foundations and internal consistency of mathematical systems, it soon became obvious that a major crack had appeared in the seemingly sold foundations of number and mathematics. Meanwhile, an impressive number of mathematicians began to see that everything from functional analysis to the theory of real numbers depended on the problematic character of number itself.
While, in the theory of probability Ramsey was the first to show how a personalized theory could be developed, based on precise behavioural notions of preference and expectation. In the philosophy of language, Ramsey was one of the first thinkers to accept a redundancy theory of truth, which hr combined with radical views of the function of man y kinds of propositions. Neither generalizations nor causal propositions, nor those treating probability or ethics, describe facts, but each has a different specific function in our intellectual economy.
Ramsey advocates that of a sentence generated by taking all the sentence affirmed in a scientific theory that use some term, e.g., quark. Replacing the term by a variable, and existentially quantifying into the result. Instead of saying quarks have such-and-such properties, Ramsey postdated that the sentence as saying that there is something that has those properties. If the process is repeated, the sentence gives the topic-neutral structure of the theory, but removes any implications that we know what the term so treated denote. It leaves open the possibility of identifying the theoretical item with whatever it is that best fits the description provided. Nonetheless, it was pointed out by the Cambridge mathematician Newman that if the process is carried out for all except the logical bones of the theory, then by the Löwenheim-Skolem theorem, the result will be interpretable in any domain of sufficient cardinality, and the content of the theory may reasonably be felt to have been lost.
It seems, that the most taken of paradoxes in the foundations of set theory as discovered by Russell in 1901. Some classes have themselves as members: The class of all abstract objects, for example, is an abstract object, whereby, others do not : The class of donkeys is not itself a donkey. Now consider the class of all classes that are not members of themselves, is this class a member of itself, that, if it is, then it is not, and if it is not, then it is.
The paradox is structurally similar to easier examples, such as the paradox of the barber. Such one like a village having a barber in it, who shaves all and only the people who do not have in themselves. Who shaves the barber ? If he shaves himself, then he does not, but if he does not shave himself, then he does not. The paradox is actually just a proof that there is no such barber or in other words, that the condition is inconsistent. All the same, it is no to easy to say why there is no such class as the one Russell defines. It seems that there must be some restriction on the kind of definition that are allowed to define classes and the difficulty that of finding a well-motivated principle behind any such restriction.
The French mathematician and philosopher Henri Jules Poincaré (1854-1912) believed that paradoxes like those of Russell and the barber were due to such as the impredicative definitions, and therefore proposed banning them. But, it tuns out that classical mathematics required such definitions at too many points for the ban to be easily absolved. Having, in turn, as forwarded by Poincaré and Russell, was that in order to solve the logical and semantic paradoxes it would have to ban any collection (set) containing members that can only be defined by means of the collection taken as à whole. It is, effectively by all occurring principles into which have an adopting vicious regress, as to mark the definition for which involves no such failure. There is frequently room for dispute about whether regresses are benign or vicious, since the issue will hinge on whether it is necessary to reapply the procedure. The cosmological argument is an attempt to find a stopping point for what is otherwise seen as being an infinite regress, and, to ban of the predicative definitions.
The investigation of questions that arise from reflection upon sciences and scientific inquiry, are such as called of a philosophy of science. Such questions include, what distinctions in the methods of science ? There is a clear demarcation between scenes and other disciplines, and how do we place such enquires as history, economics or sociology ? And scientific theories probable or more in the nature of provisional conjecture ? Can the be verified or falsified ? What distinguished good from bad explanations ? Might there be one unified since, embracing all the special science ? For much of the 20th century there questions were pursued in a highly abstract and logical framework it being supposed that as general logic of scientific discovery that a general logic of scientific discovery a justification might be found. However, many now take interests in a more historical, contextual and sometimes sociological approach, in which the methods and successes of a science at a particular time are regarded less in terms of universal logical principles and procedure, and more in terms of their availability to methods and paradigms as well as the social context.
In addition, to general questions of methodology, there are specific problems within particular sciences, giving subjects as biology, mathematics and physics.
The intuitive certainty that sparks aflame the dialectic awarenesses for its immediate concerns are either of the truth or by some other in an object of apprehensions, such as à concept. Awareness as such, has to its amounting quality value the place where philosophical understanding of the source of our knowledge are, however, in covering the sensible apprehension of things and pure intuition it is that which stricture sensation into the experience of things accent of its direction that orchestrates the celestial overture into measures in space and time.
The notion that determines how something is seen or evaluated of the status of law and morality especially associated with St. Thomas Aquinas and the subsequent scholastic tradition. More widely, any attempt to cement the moral and legal order together with the nature of the cosmos or how the nature of human beings, for which sense it is also found in some Protestant writers, and arguably derivative from a Platonic view of ethics, and is implicit in ancient Stoicism. Law stands above and apart from the activities of human lawmaker, it constitutes an objective set of principles that can be seen true by natural light or reason, and (in religion versions of the theory) that express Gods' will for creation. Non-religious versions of the theory substitute objective conditions for human flourishing as the source of constraints upon permissible actions and social arrangements. Within the natural law tradition, different views have been held about the relationship between the rule of law about God s will, for instance the Dutch philosopher Hugo Grothius (1583-1645), similarly takes upon the view that the content of natural law is independent of any will, including that of God, while the German theorist and historian Samuel von Pufendorf (1632-94) takes the opposite view, thereby facing the problem of one horn of the Euthyphro dilemma, that simply states, that its dilemma arises from whatever the source of authority is supposed to be, for in which do we care about the general good because it is good, or do we just call good things that we care about. Wherefore, by facing the problem that may be to assume of a strong form, in which it is claimed that various facts entail values, or a weaker form, from which it confines itself to holding that reason by itself is capable of discerning moral requirements that are supped of binding to all human bings regardless of their desires
Although the morality of people send the ethical amount from which the same thing, is that there is a usage that restricts morality to systems such as that of the German philosopher and founder of ethical philosophy Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), based on notions such as duty, obligation, and principles of conduct, reserving ethics for more than the Aristotelian approach to practical reasoning based on the notion of a virtue, and generally avoiding the separation of moral considerations from other practical considerations. The scholarly issues are complex, with some writers seeing Kant as more Aristotelian and Aristotle as, ore involved in a separate sphere of responsibility and duty, than the simple contrast suggests. Some theorists see the subject in terms of a number of laws (as in the Ten Commandments). The status of these laws may be test they are the edicts of a divine lawmaker, or that they are truths of reason, knowable deductively. Other approaches to ethics (e.g., eudaimonism, situation ethics, virtue ethics) eschew general principles as much as possible, frequently disguising the great complexity of practical reasoning. For Kantian notion of the moral law is a binding requirement of the categorical imperative, and to understand whether they are equivalent at some deep level. Kants own applications of the notion are not always convincing, as for one cause of confusion in relating Kants ethics to theories such additional expressivism is that it is easy, but mistaken, to suppose that the categorical nature of the imperative means that it cannot be the expression of sentiment, but must derive from something unconditional or necessary such as the voice of reason.
For which ever reason, the mortal being makes of its presence to the future of weighing of that which one must do, or that which can be required of one. The term carries implications of that which is owed (due) to other people, or perhaps in onself. Universal duties would be owed to persons (or sentient beings) as such, whereas special duty in virtue of specific relations, such as being the child of someone, or having made someone a promise. Duty or obligation is the primary concept of deontological approaches to ethics, but is constructed in other systems out of other notions. In the system of Kant, a perfect duty is one that must be performed whatever the circumstances : Imperfect duties may have to give way to the more stringent ones. In another way, perfect duties are those that are correlative with the right to others, imperfect duties are not. Problems with the concept include the ways in which due needs to be specified (a frequent criticism of Kant is that his notion of duty is too abstract). The concept may also suggest of a regimented view of ethical life in which we are all forced conscripts in a kind of moral army, and may encourage an individualistic and antagonistic view of social relations.
The most generally accepted account of externalism and/or internalism, that this distinction is that a theory of justification is Internalist if only if it requiem that all of the factors needed for a belief to be epistemologically justified for a given person be cognitively accessible to that person, internal to cognitive perceptivity, and externalist, if it allows that at least some of the justifying factors need not be thus accessible, so that thy can be external to the believers cognitive perceptive, beyond any such given relations. However, epistemologists often use the distinction between Internalist and externalist theories of epistemic justification without offering any very explicit explication.
The externalist/Internalist distinction has been mainly applied to theories of epistemic justification : It has also been applied in a closely related way to accounts of knowledge and in a rather different way to accounts of belief and thought contents.
The Internalist requirement of cognitive accessibility can be interpreted in at least two ways : A strong version of internalism would require that the believe actually be aware of the justifying factor in order to be justified : While a weaker version would require only that he be capable of becoming aware of them by focussing his attentions appropriately, but without the need for any change of position, new information, etc. Though the phrase cognitively accessible suggests the weak interpretation, the main intuitive motivation for internalism, viz. the idea that epistemic justification requires that the believe actually have in his cognitive possession a reason for thinking that the belief is true, and would require the strong interpretation.
Perhaps, the clearest example of an Internalist position would be a Foundationalist view according to which foundational beliefs pertain to immediately experienced states of mind and other beliefs are justified by standing in cognitively accessible logical or inferential relations to such foundational beliefs. Such a view could count as either a strong or a weak version of internalism, depending on whether actual awareness of the justifying elements or only the capacity to become aware of them is required. Similarly, a coherent view could also be Internalist, if both the beliefs or other states with which a justification belief is required to cohere and the coherence relations themselves are reflectively accessible.
It should be carefully noticed that when internalism is construed in this way, it is neither necessary nor sufficient by itself for internalism that the justifying factors literally be internal mental states of the person in question. Not necessary, necessary, because on at least some views, e.g., a direct realist view of perception, something other than a mental state of the believe can be cognitively accessible : Not sufficient, because there are views according to which at least some mental states need not be actual (strong version) or even possible (weak version) objects of cognitive awareness. Also, on this way of drawing the distinction, a hybrid view, according to which some of the factors required for justification must be cognitively accessible while others need not and in general will not be, would count as an externalist view. Obviously too, a view that was externalist in relation to a strong version of internalism (by not requiring that the believe actually be aware of all justifiable factors) could still be Internalist in relation to a weak version (by requiring that he at least be capable of becoming aware of them).
The most prominent recent externalist views have been versions of reliabilism, whose requirements for justification is roughly that the belief be produced in a way or via a process that makes of objectively likely that the belief is true. What makes such a view externalist is the absence of any requirement that the person for whom the belief is justified have any sort of cognitive access to the relations of reliability in question. Lacking such access, such a person will in general have no reason for thinking that the belief is true or likely to be true, but will, on such an account, nonetheless be epistemically justified in according it. Thus such a view arguably marks a major break from the modern epistemological tradition, stemming from Descartes, which identifies epistemic justification with having a reason, perhaps even a conclusive reason for thinking that the belief is true. An epistemologist working within this tradition is likely to feel that the externalist, than offering a competing account of the same concept of epistemic justification with which the traditional epistemologist is concerned, has simply changed the subject.
The main objection to externalism rests on the intuitive certainty that the basic requirement for epistemic justification is that the acceptance of the belief in question be rational or responsible in relation to the cognitive goal of truth, which seems to require in turn that the believe actually be dialectally aware of a reason for thinking that the belief is true (or, at the very least, that such a reason be available to him). Since the satisfaction of an externalist condition is neither necessary nor sufficient for the existence of such a cognitively accessible reason, it is argued, externalism is mistaken as an account of epistemic justification. This general point has been elaborated by appeal to two sorts of putative intuitive counter-examples to externalism. The first of these challenges the necessity of belief which seem intuitively to be justified, but for which the externalist conditions are not satisfied. The standard examples in this sort are cases where beliefs are produced in some very nonstandard way, e.g., by a Cartesian demon, but nonetheless, in such a way that the subjective experience of the believe is indistinguishable from that of someone whose beliefs are produced more normally. The intuitive claim is that the believe in such a case is nonetheless epistemically justified, as much so as one whose belief is produced in a more normal way, and hence that externalist account of justification must be mistaken.
Perhaps the most striking reply to this sort of counter-example, on behalf of a cognitive process is to be assessed in normal possible worlds, i.e., in possible worlds that are actually the way our world is common-seismically believed to be, than in the world which contains the belief being judged. Since the cognitive processes employed in the Cartesian demon cases are, for which we may assume, reliable when assessed in this way, the reliability can agree that such beliefs are justified. The obvious, to a considerable degree of bringing out the issue of whether it is or not an adequate rationale for this construal of Reliabilism, so that the reply is not merely a notional presupposition guised as having representation.
The correlative way of elaborating on the general objection to justificatory externalism challenges the sufficiency of the various externalist conditions by citing cases where those conditions are satisfied, but where the believers in question seem intuitively not to be justified. In this context, the most widely discussed examples have to do with possible occult cognitive capacities, like clairvoyance. Considering the point in application once, again, to Reliabilism, the claim is that to think that he has such a cognitive power, and, perhaps, even good reasons to the contrary, is not rational or responsible and therefore not epistemically justified in accepting the belief that result from his clairvoyance, despite the fact that the Reliabilist condition is satisfied.
One sort of response to this latter sorts of objection is to bite the bullet and insist that such believers are in fact justified, dismissing the seeming intuitions to the contrary as latent Internalist prejudice. A more widely adopted response attempts to impose additional conditions, usually of a roughly internalized sort, which will rule out the offending example, while stopping far of a full internalism. But, while there is little doubt that such modified versions of externalism can handle particular cases, as well enough to avoid clear intuitive implausibility, the usually problematic cases that they cannot handle, and also whether there is and clear motivation for the additional requirements other than the general Internalist view of justification that externalist are committed to reject.
A view in this same general vein, one that might be described as a hybrid of internalism and externalism holds that epistemic justification requires that there is a justificatory factor that is cognitively accessible to the believe in question (though it need not be actually grasped), thus ruling out, e.g., a pure Reliabilism. At the same time, however, though it must be objectively true that beliefs for which such a factor is available are likely to be true, in addition, the fact need not be in any way grasped or cognitively accessible to the believe. In effect, of the premises needed to argue that a particular belief is likely to be true, one must be accessible in a way that would satisfy at least weakly internalized. The Internalist will respond that this hybrid view is of no help at all in meeting the objection and has no belief nor is it held in the rational, responsible way that justification intuitively seems to require, for the believe in question, lacking one crucial premise, still has no reason at all for thinking that his belief is likely to be true.
An alternative to giving an externalist account of epistemic justification, one which may be more defensible while still accommodating many of the same motivating concerns, is to give an externalist account of knowledge directly, without relying on an intermediate account of justification. Such a view will obviously have to reject the justified true belief account of knowledge, holding instead that knowledge is true belief which satisfies the chosen externalist condition, e.g., a result of a reliable process (and perhaps, further conditions as well). This makes it possible for such a view to retain Internalist account of epistemic justification, though the centrality of that concept to epistemology would obviously be seriously diminished.
Such an externalist account of knowledge can accommodate the commonsense conviction that animals, young children, and unsophisticated adults posses knowledge, though not the weaker conviction (if such a conviction does exists) that such individuals are epistemically justified in their beliefs. It is also at least less vulnerable to Internalist counter-examples of the sort discussed, since the intuitions involved there pertain more clearly to justification than to knowledge. What is uncertain is what ultimate philosophical significance the resulting conception of knowledge is supposed to have. In particular, does it have any serious bearing on traditional epistemological problems and on the deepest and most troubling versions of scepticism, which seems in fact to be primarily concerned with justification, the an knowledge ?`
A rather different use of the terms internalism and externalism has to do with the issue of how the content of beliefs and thoughts is determined : According to an Internalist view of content, the content of such intention states depends only on the non-relational, internal properties of the individuals mind or grain, and not at all on his physical and social environment : While according to an externalist view, content is significantly affected by such external factors and suggests a view that appears of both internal and external elements are standardly classified as an external view.
As with justification and knowledge, the traditional view of content has been strongly internalized in character. The main argument for externalism derives from the philosophy of language, more specifically from the various phenomena pertaining to natural kind terms, indexicals, etc. that motivate the views that have come to be known as direct reference theories. Such phenomena seem at least to show that the belief or thought content that can be properly attributed to a person is dependant on facts about his environment, e.g., whether he is on Earth or Twin Earth, what is fact pointing at, the classificatory criteria employed by expects in his social group, etc. - not just on what is going on internally in his mind or brain.
An objection to externalist account of content is that they seem unable to do justice to our ability to know the content of our beliefs or thought from the inside, simply by reflection. If content is depend on external factors pertaining to the environment, then knowledge of content should depend on knowledge of these factors - which will not in general be available to the person whose belief or thought is in question.
The adoption of an externalized account of mental content would seem to support an externalist account of justification, by way that if part or all of the content of a belief inaccessible to the believe, then both the justifying status of other beliefs in relation to that content and the status of that content justifying the beliefs will be similarly inaccessible, thus contravening the Internalist requirement for justification. An Internalist must insist that there are no justifiable relations of these sorts, that our internally associable content can either be justified or justly anything else : But such a response appears lame unless it is coupled with an attempt to show that the externalist account of content is mistaken.
A great deal of philosophical effort has been lavished on the attempt to naturalize content, i.e. to explain in non-semantic, Non-intentional terms what it is for something to be representational (have content) and what it is for something to have some particular content rather than some other. There appear to be only four types of theory that have been proposed: Theories that ground representation in (1) similarity, (2) conversance, (3) functional role, (4) teleology.
Similarly, theories hold that 'r' represents 'x' in virtue of being similar to 'x'. This has seemed hopeless to most as a theory of mental representation because it appears to require that things in the brain must share properties with the things they represent: To represent a cat as furry appears to require something furry in the brain. Perhaps, a notion of similarity that is naturalistic and does not involve property sharing can be worked out, but it is not obvious how.
Covariance theories hold that 'r's' represent 'x' is grounded in the fact that 'r's', occasion canaries with that of 'x'. This is most compelling he n one thinks about detection systems, the firing a neural structures in the visual system is said to represent vertical orientations, if its firing varies with the occurrence of vertical lines in the visual field of perceptivity.
Functional role theories hold that 'r's' represent 'x' is grounded in the functional role 'r' has in the representing system, i.e., on the relations imposed by specific cognitive processes imposed by specific cognitive processes between 'r' and other representations in the system's repertoire. Functional role theories take their cue from such common-sense ideas as that people cannot believer that cats are furry if they did not know that cats are animals or that fur is like hair.
Teleological theories hold that 'r' represent 'x' if it is 'r's' function to indicate, i.e., covary with 'x'. Teleological theories differ depending on the theory of functions they import. Perhaps the most important distinction is that between historical theories of functions. Historical theories individuated functional states (hence contents) in a way that is sensitive to the historical development of the state, i.e., to factors such as the way the state was 'learned', or the way it evolved. An historical theory might hold that the function of 'r' is to indicate 'x' only if the capacity to token 'r' was developed (selected, learned) because it indicates 'x'. Thus, a state physically indistinguishable from 'r's' historical origins would not represent 'x' according to historical theories.
Theories of representational content may be classified according to whether they are atomistic or holistic and according to whether they are externalistic or internalistic, whereby, emphasizing the priority of a whole over its parts. Furthermore, in the philosophy of language, this becomes the claim that the meaning of an individual word or sentence can only be understood in terms of its relation to an indefinitely larger body of language, such as a whole theory, or even a whole language or form of life. In the philosophy of mind a mental state similarly may be identified only in terms of its relations with others. Moderate holism may allow the other things besides these relationships also count; extreme holism would hold that a network of relationships is all that we have. A holistic view of science holds that experience only confirms or disconfirms large bodies of doctrine, impinging at the edges, and leaving some leeway over the adjustment that it requires.
Once, again, in the philosophy of mind and language, the view that what is thought, or said, or experienced, is essentially dependent on aspects of the world external to the mind of the subject. The view goes beyond holding that such mental states are typically caused by external factors, to insist that they could not have existed as they now do without the subject being embedded in an external world of a certain kind. It is these external relations that make up the essence or identify of the mental state. Externalism is thus opposed to the Cartesian separation of the mental from the physical, since that holds that the mental could in principle exist as it does even if there were no external world at all. Various external factors have been advanced as ones on which mental content depends, including the usage of experts, the linguistic, norms of the community. And the general causal relationships of the subject. In the theory of knowledge, externalism is the view that a person might know something by being suitably situated with respect to it, without that relationship being in any sense within his purview. The person might, for example, be very reliable in some respect without believing that he is. The view allows that you can know without being justified in believing that you know.
However, atomistic theories take a representation's content to be something that can be specified independent entity of that representation' s relations to other representations. What the American philosopher of mind, Jerry Alan Fodor (1935-) calls the crude causal theory, for example, takes a representation to be a
cow
- a menial representation with the same content as the word 'cow' - if its tokens are caused by instantiations of the property of being-a-cow, and this is a condition that places no explicit constraints on how
cow
's must or might relate to other representations. Holistic theories contrasted with atomistic theories in taking the relations a representation bears to others to be essential to its content. According to functional role theories, a representation is a
cow
if it behaves like a
cow
should behave in inference.
Internalist theories take the content of a representation to be a matter determined by factors internal to the system that uses it. Thus, what Block (1986) calls 'short-armed' functional role theories are Internalist. Externalist theories take the content of a representation to be determined, in part at least, by factors external to the system that uses it. Covariance theories, as well as teleological theories that invoke an historical theory of functions, take content to be determined by 'external' factors. Crossing the atomist-holistic distinction with the Internalist-externalist distinction.
Externalist theories (sometimes called non-individualistic theories) have the consequence that molecule for molecule are coincide with the identical cognitive systems might yet harbour representations with different contents. This has given rise to a controversy concerning 'narrow' content. If we assume some form of externalist theory is correct, then content is, in the first instance 'wide' content, i.e., determined in part by factors external to the representing system. On the other hand, it seems clear that, on plausible assumptions about how to individuate psychological capacities, internally equivalent systems must have the same psychological capacities. Hence, it would appear that wide content cannot be relevant to characterizing psychological equivalence. Since cognitive science generally assumes that content is relevant to characterizing psychological equivalence, philosophers attracted to externalist theories of content have sometimes attempted to introduce 'narrow' content, i.e., an aspect or kind of content that is equivalent internally equivalent systems. The simplest such theory is Fodor's idea (1987) that narrow content is a function from contents (i.e., from whatever the external factors are) to wide contents.
All the same, what a person expresses by a sentence is often a function of the environment in which he or she is placed. For example, the disease I refer to by the term like 'arthritis', or the kind of tree I refer to as a 'Maple' will be defined by criteria of which I know next to nothing. This raises the possibility of imagining two persons in rather different environments, but in which everything appears the same to each of them. The wide content of their thoughts and sayings will be different if the situation surrounding them is appropriately different: 'situation' may include the actual objects they perceive or the chemical or physical kinds of object in the world they inhabit, or the history of their words, or the decisions of authorities on what counts as an example, of one of the terms they use. The narrow content is that part of their thought which remains identical, through their identity of the way things appear, regardless of these differences of surroundings. Partisans of wide content may doubt whether any content in this sense narrow, partisans of narrow content believer that it is the fundamental notion, with wide content being explicable in terms of narrow content plus context.
Even so, the distinction between facts and values has outgrown its name: it applies not only to matters of fact vs, matters of value, but also to statements that something is, vs. statements that something ought to be. Roughly, factual statements - 'is statements' in the relevant sense - represent some state of affairs as obtaining, whereas normative statements - evaluative, and deontic ones - attribute goodness to something, or ascribe, to an agent, an obligation to act. Neither distinction is merely linguistic. Specifying a book's monetary value is making a factual statement, though it attributes a kind of value. 'That is a good book' expresses a value judgement though the term 'value' is absent (nor would 'valuable' be synonymous with 'good'). Similarly, 'we are morally obligated to fight' superficially expresses a statement, and 'By all indications it ough to rain' makes a kind of ought-claim; but the former is an ought-statement, the latter an (epistemic) is-statement.
Theoretical difficulties also beset the distinction. Some have absorbed values into facts holding that all value is instrumental, roughly, to have value is to contribute - in a factual analyzable way - to something further which is (say) deemed desirable. Others have suffused facts with values, arguing that facts (and observations) are 'theory-impregnated' and contending that values are inescapable to theoretical choice. But while some philosophers doubt that fact/value distinctions can be sustained, there persists a sense of a deep difference between evaluating, and attributing an obligation and, on the other hand, saying how the world is.
Fact/value distinctions, may be defended by appeal to the notion of intrinsic value, value a thing has in itself and thus independently of its consequences. Roughly, a value statement (proper) is an ascription of intrinsic value, one to the effect that a thing is to some degree good in itself. This leaves open whether ought-statements are implicitly value statements, but even if they imply that something has intrinsic value - e.g., moral value - they can be independently characterized, say by appeal to rules that provide (justifying) reasons for action. One might also ground the fact value distinction in the attributional (or even motivational) component apparently implied by the making of valuational or deontic judgements: Thus, 'it is a good book, but that is no reason for a positive attribute towards it' and 'you ought to do it, but there is no reason to' seem inadmissible, whereas, substituting, 'an expensive book' and 'you will do it' yields permissible judgements. One might also argue that factual judgements are the kind which are in principle appraisable scientifically, and thereby anchor the distinction on the factual side. This ligne is plausible, but there is controversy over whether scientific procedures are 'value-free' in the required way.
Philosophers differ regarding the sense, if any, in which epistemology is normative (roughly, valuational). But what precisely is at stake in this controversy is no clearly than the problematic fact/value distinction itself. Must epistemologists as such make judgements of value or epistemic responsibility? If epistemology is naturalizable, then even epistemic principles simply articulate under what conditions - say, appropriate perceptual stimulations - a belief is justified, or constitutes knowledge. Its standards of justification, then would be like standards of, e.g., resilience for bridges. It is not obvious, however, that there appropriate standards can be established without independent judgements that, say, a certain kind of evidence is good enough for justified belief (or knowledge). The most plausible view may be that justification is like intrinsic goodness, though it supervenes on natural properties, it cannot be analysed wholly in factual statements.
Thus far, belief has been depicted as being all-or-nothing, however, as a resulting causality for which we have grounds for thinking it true, and, all the same, its acceptance is governed by epistemic norms, and, least of mention, it is partially subject to voluntary control and has functional affinities to belief. Still, the notion of acceptance, like that of degrees of belief, merely extends the standard picture, and does not replace it.
Traditionally, belief has been of epistemological interest in its propositional guise: 'S' believes that 'p', where 'p' is a reposition towards which an agent, 'S' exhibits an attitude of acceptance. Not all belief is of this sort. If I trust you to say, I believer you. And someone may believer in Mr. Radek, or in a free-market economy, or in God. It is sometimes supposed that all belief is 'reducible' to propositional belief, belief-that. Thus, my believing you might be thought a matter of my believing, is, perhaps, that what you say is true, and your belief in free markets or God, is a matter of your believing that free-market economies are desirable or that God exists.
Some philosophers have followed St., Thomas Aquinas (1225-74), in supposing that to believer in God is simply to believer that certain truths hold while others argue that belief-in is a distinctive attitude, on that includes essentially an element of trust. More commonly, belief-in has been taken to involve a combination of propositional belief together with some further attitude.
The moral philosopher Richard Price (1723-91) defends the claim that there are different sorts of belief-in, some, but not all reducible to beliefs-that. If you believer in God, you believer that God exists, that God is good, you believer that God is good, etc. But according to Price, your belief involves, in addition, a certain complex pro-attitude toward its object. Even so, belief-in outruns the evidence for the corresponding belief-that. Does this diminish its rationality? If belief-in presupposes believes-that, it might be thought that the evidential standards for the former must be, at least, as high as standards for the latter. And any additional pro-attitude might be thought to require a further layer of justification not required for cases of belief-that.
Belief-in may be, in general, less susceptible to alternations in the face of unfavourable evidence than belief-that. A believe who encounters evidence against God's existence may remain unshaken in his belief, in part because the evidence does not bear on his pro-attitude. So long as this is united with his belief that God exists, the reasonably so in a way that an ordinary propositional belief that would not.
Some philosophers think that the category of knowing for which true. Justified believing (accepting) is a requirement constituting only a species of Propositional knowledge, construed as an even broader category. They have proposed various examples of 'PK' that do not satisfy the belief and/ort justification conditions of the tripartite analysis. Such cases are often recognized by analyses of Propositional knowledge in terms of powers, capacities, or abilities. For instance, Alan R. White (1982) treats 'PK' as merely the ability to provide a correct answer to a possible question, however, White may be equating 'producing' knowledge in the sense of producing 'the correct answer to a possible question' with 'displaying' knowledge in the sense of manifesting knowledge. (White, 1982). The latter can be done even by very young children and some non-human animals independently of their being asked questions, understanding questions, or recognizing answers to questions. Indeed, an example that has been proposed as an instance of knowing that 'h' without believing or accepting that 'h' can be modified so as to illustrate this point. Two examples concern an imaginary person who has no special training or information about horses or racing, but who in an experiment persistently and correctly picks the winners of upcoming horseraces. If the example is modified so that the hypothetical 'seer' never picks winners but only muses over whether those horses wight win, or only reports those horses winning, this behaviour should be as much of a candidate for the person's manifesting knowledge that the horse in question will win as would be the behaviour of picking it as a winner.
These considerations expose limitations in Edward Craig's analysis (1990) of the concept of knowing of a person's being a satisfactory information in relation to an inquirer who wants to find out whether or not 'h'. Craig realizes that counterexamples to his analysis appear to be constituted by Knower who is too recalcitrant to inform the inquirer, or to incapacitate to inform, or too discredited to be worth considering (as with the boy who cried 'Wolf'). Craig admits that this might make preferably some alternative view of knowledge as a different state that helps to explain the presence of the state of being a suitable informant when the latter does obtain. Such an alternate, which offers a recursive definition that concerns one's having the power to proceed in a way representing the state of affairs, causally involved in one's proceeding in this way. When combined with a suitable analysis of representing, this theory of propositional knowledge can be unified with a structurally similar analysis of knowing how to do something.
Knowledge and belief, according to most epistemologists, knowledge entails belief, so that I cannot know that such and such is the case unless I believe that such and such am the case. Others think this entailment thesis can be rendered more accurately if we substitute for belief some closely related attitude. For instance, several philosophers would prefer to say that knowledge entail psychological certainties (Prichard, 1950 and Ayer, 1956) or conviction (Lehrer, 1974) or acceptance (Lehrer, 1989). Nonetheless, there are arguments against all versions of the thesis that knowledge requires having a belief-like attitude toward the known. These arguments are given by philosophers who think that knowledge and belief (or a facsimile) are mutually incompatible (the incomparability thesis), or by ones who say that knowledge does not entail belief, or vice versa, so that each may exist without the other, but the two may also coexist (the separability thesis).
The incompatibility thesis is sometimes traced to Plato 429-347 Bc. , In view of his claim that knowledge is infallible while belief or opinion is fallible ('Republic' 476-9). But this claim would not support the thesis. Belief might be a component of an infallible form of knowledge in spite of the fallibility of belief. Perhaps, knowledge involves some factor that compensates for the fallibility of belief.
A. Duncan-Jones (1939: Also Vendler, 1978) cites linguistic evidence to back up the incompatibility thesis. He notes that people often say 'I do not believe she is guilty. I know she is' and the like, which suggest that belief rule out knowledge. However, as Lehrer (1974) indicates, the above exclamation is only a more emphatic way of saying 'I do not just believe she is guilty, I know she is' where 'just' makes it especially clear that the speaker is signalling that she has something more salient than mere belief, not that she has something inconsistent with belief, namely knowledge. Compare: 'You do not hurt him, you killed him'.
H.A. Prichard (1966) offers a defence of the incompatibility thesis that hinges on the equation of knowledge with certainty (both infallibility and psychological certitude) and the assumption that when we believe in the truth of a claim we are not certain about its truth. Given that belief always involves uncertainty while knowledge never dies, believing something rules out the possibility of knowing it. Unfortunately, however, Prichard gives 'us' no goods reason to grant that states of belief are never ones involving confidence. Conscious beliefs clearly involve some level of confidence, to suggest that we cease to believe things about which we are completely confident is bizarre.
A.D. Woozley (1953) defends a version of the separability thesis. Woozley's version, which deals with psychological certainty rather than belief per se, is that knowledge can exist in the absence of confidence about the item known, although might also be accompanied by confidence as well. Woozley remarks that the test of whether I know something is 'what I can do, where what I can do may include answering questions'. On the basis of this remark he suggests that even when people are unsure of the truth of a claim, they might know that the claim is true. We unhesitatingly attribute knowledge to people who give correct responses on examinations even if those people show no confidence in their answers. Woozley acknowledges, however, that it would be odd for those who lack confidence to claim knowledge. It would be peculiar to say, 'I am unsure my answer is true: Still, I know it is correct'. But this tension Woozley explains using a distinction between conditions under which we are justified in making a claim (such as a claim to know something), and conditions under which the claim we make are true. While 'I know such and such' might be true even if I am unsure whether such and such holds, nonetheless it would be inappropriate for me to claim that I know that such and such unless I were sure of the truth of my claim.
Colin Radford (1966) extends Woozley's defence of the separability thesis. In Radford's view, not only is knowledge compatible with the lack of certainty, it is also compatible with a complete lack of belief. He argues by example. In one example, Jean has forgotten that he learned some English history year's priori and yet he is able to give several correct responses to questions such as 'When did the Battle of Hastings occur'? Since he forgot that he took history, he considers the correct response to be no more than guesses. Thus, when he says that the Battle of Hastings took place in 1066 he would deny having the belief that the Battle of Hastings took place in 1066. A disposition he would deny being responsible (or having the right to be convincing) that 1066 was the correct date. Radford would nonetheless insist that Jean know when the Battle occurred, since clearly be remembering the correct date. Radford admits that it would be inappropriate for Jean to say that he knew when the Battle of Hastings occurred, but, like Woozley he attributes the impropriety to a fact about when it is and is not appropriate to claim knowledge. When we claim knowledge, we ought, at least to believe that we have the knowledge we claim, or else our behaviour is 'intentionally misleading'.
Those that agree with Radford's defence of the separability thesis will probably think of belief as an inner state that can be detected through introspection. That Jean lack's beliefs about English history are plausible on this Cartesian picture since Jean does not find himself with any beliefs about English history when we seek them out. One might criticize Radford, however, by rejecting that Cartesian view of belief. One could argue that some beliefs are thoroughly unconscious, for example. Or one could adopt a behaviourist conception of belief, such as Alexander Bain's (1859), according to which having beliefs is a matter of the way people are disposed to behave (and has not Radford already adopted a behaviourist conception of knowledge?) Since Jean gives the correct response when queried, a form of verbal behaviour, a behaviourist would be tempted to credit him with the belief that the Battle of Hastings occurred in 1066.
D.M. Armstrong (1873) takes a different tack against Radford. Jean does know that the Battle of Hastings took place in 1066. Armstrong will grant Radford that point, in fact, Armstrong suggests that Jean believe that 1066 is not the date the Battle of Hastings occurred, for Armstrong equates the belief that such and such is just possible but no more than just possible with the belief that such and such is not the case. However, Armstrong insists, Jean also believes that the Battle did occur in 1066. After all, had Jean been mistaught that the Battle occurred in 1066, and subsequently 'guessed' that it took place in 1066, we would surely describe the situation as one in which Jean's false belief about the Battle became unconscious over time but persisted of a memory trace that was causally responsible for his guess. Out of consistency, we must describe Radford's original case as one that Jean's true belief became unconscious but persisted long enough to cause his guess. Thus, while Jean consciously believes that the Battle did not occur in 1066, unconsciously he does believe it occurred in 1066. So after all, Radford does not have a counterexample to the claim that knowledge entails belief.
Armstrong's response to Radford was to reject Radford's claim that the examinee lacked the relevant belief about English history. Another response is to argue that the examinee lacks the knowledge Radford attributes to him (cf. Sorenson, 1982). If Armstrong is correct in suggesting that Jean believes both that 1066 is and that it is not the date of the Battle of Hastings, one might deny Jean knowledge on the grounds that people who believe the denial of what they believe cannot be said t know the truth of their belief. Another strategy might be to compare the examine case with examples of ignorance given in recent attacks on externalist accounts of knowledge (needless to say. Externalists themselves would tend not to favour this strategy). Consider the following case developed by BonJour (1985): For no apparent reason, Samantha believes that she is clairvoyant. Again, for no apparent reason, she one day comes to believe that the President is in New York City, even though she has every reason to believe that the President is in Washington, DC In fact, Samantha is a completely reliable clairvoyant, and she has arrived at her belief about the whereabouts of the President thorough the power of her clairvoyance. Yet surely Samantha's belief is completely irrational. She is not justified in thinking what she does. If so, then she does not know where the President is. But Radford's examinee is unconventional. Even if Jean lacks the belief that Radford denies him, Radford does not have an example of knowledge that is unattended with belief. Suppose that Jean's memory had been sufficiently powerful to produce the relevant belief. As Radford says, in having every reason to suppose that his response is mere guesswork, and he has every reason to consider his belief false. His belief would be an irrational one, and hence one about whose truth Jean would be ignorant.
Least has been of mention to an approaching view from which 'perception' basis upon itself as a fundamental philosophical topic both for its central place in ant theory of knowledge, and its central place un any theory of consciousness. Philosophy in this area is constrained by a number of properties that we believe to hold of perception, (1) It gives 'us' knowledge of the world around 'us'. (2) We are conscious of that world by being aware of 'sensible qualities': Colour, sounds, tastes, smells, felt warmth, and the shapes and positions of objects in the environment. (3) Such consciousness is affected through highly complex information channels, such as the output of the three different types of colour-sensitive cells in the eye, or the channels in the ear for interpreting pulses of air pressure as frequencies of sound. (4) There ensues even more complex neurophysiological coding of that information, and eventually higher-order brain functions bring it about that we interpreted the information so received. (Much of this complexity has been revealed by the difficulties of writing programs enabling computers to recognize quite simple aspects of the visual scene.) The problem is to avoid thinking of here being a central, ghostly, conscious self, fed information in the same way that a screen if fed information by a remote television camera. Once such a model is in place, experience will seem like a veil getting between 'us' and the world, and the direct objects of perception will seem to be private items in an inner theatre or sensorium. The difficulty of avoiding this model is epically cute when we considered the secondary qualities of colour, sound, tactile feelings and taste, which can easily seem to have a purely private existence inside the perceiver, like sensation of pain. Calling such supposed items names like 'sense-data' or 'percepts' exacerbate the tendency, but once the model is in place, the first property, that perception gives 'us' knowledge of the world and its surrounding surfaces, is quickly threatened, for there will now seem little connection between these items in immediate experience and any independent reality. Reactions to this problem include 'scepticism' and 'idealism'.
A more hopeful approach is to claim that the complexities of (3) and (4) explain how we can have direct acquaintance of the world, than suggesting that the acquaintance we do have been at best indirect. It is pointed out that perceptions are not like sensation, precisely because they have a content, or outer-directed nature. To have a perception is to be aware of the world for being such-and-such a way, than to enjoy a mere modification of sensation. But such direct realism has to be sustained in the face of the evident personal (neurophysiological and other) factors determining how we perceive. One approach is to ask why it is useful to be conscious of what we perceive, when other aspects of our functioning work with information determining responses without any conscious awareness or intervention. A solution to this problem would offer the hope of making consciousness part of the natural world, than a strange optional extra.
Furthering, perceptual knowledge is knowledge acquired by or through the senses and includes most of what we know. We cross intersections when we see the light turn green, head for the kitchen when we smell the roast burning, squeeze the fruit to determine its ripeness, and climb out of bed when we hear the alarm ring. In each case we come to know something-that the light has turned green, that the roast is burning, that the melon is overripely, and that it is time to get up-by some sensory means. Seeing that the light has turned green is learning something-that, the light has turned green-by use of the eyes. Feeling that the melon is overripe is coming to know a fact-that the melon is overripe-by one's sense to touch. In each case the resulting knowledge is somehow based on, derived from or grounded in the sort of experience that characterizes the sense modality in question.
Much of our perceptual knowledge is indirect, dependent or derived. By this I mean that the facts we describe ourselves as learning, as coming to know, by perceptual means are pieces of knowledge that depend on our coming to know something else, some other fact, in a more direct way. We see, by the gauge, that we need gas, see, by the newspapers, that our team has lost again, see, by her expression, that she is nervous. This derived or dependent sort of knowledge is particularly prevalent in the cases of vision, but it occurs, to a lesser degree, in every sense modality. We install bells and other noise-makers so that we calm for example, hear (by the bell) that someone is at the door and (by the alarm) that its time to get up. When we obtain knowledge in this way, it is clear that unless one sees-hence, comes to know something about the gauge (that it says) and (hence, know) that one is described as coming to know by perceptual means. If one cannot hear that the bell is ringing, one cannot-in at least in this way-hear that one's visitors have arrived. In such cases one sees (hears, smells, etc.) that 'a' is 'F', coming to know thereby that 'a' is 'F', by seeing (hearing, etc.) that some other condition, 'b's' being 'G', obtains when this occurs, the knowledge (that 'a' is 'F') is derived from, or dependent on, the more basic perceptual knowledge that 'b' is 'G'.
Perhaps as a better strategy is to tie an account save that part that evidence could justify explanation for it is its truth alone. Since, at least the times of Aristotle philosophers of explanatory knowledge have emphasized of its importance that, in its simplest therms, we want to know not only what is the composite peculiarities and particular points of issue but also why it is. This consideration suggests that we define an explanation as an answer to a why-question. Such a definition would, however, be too broad, because some why-questions are requests for consolation (Why did my son have to die?) Or moral justification (Why should women not be paid the same as men for the same work?) It would also be too narrow because some explanations are responses to how-questions (How does radar work?) Or how-possibility-questions (How is it possible for cats always to land their feet?)
In its overall sense, 'to explain' means to make clear, to make plain, or to provide understanding. Definitions of this sort are philosophically unhelpful, for the terms used in the deficient are no less problematic than the term to be defined. Moreover, since a wide variety of things require explanation, and since many different types of explanation exist, as more complex explanation is required. To facilitate the requirement leaves, least of mention, for us to consider by introduction a bit of technical terminology. The term 'explanation' is used to refer to that which is to be explained: The term 'explanans' refer to that which does the explaining, the explanans and the explanation taken together constitute the explanation.
One common type of explanation occurs when deliberate human actions are explained in terms of conscious purposes. 'Why did you go to the pharmacy yesterday?' 'Because I had a headache and needed to get some aspirin.' It is tacitly assumed that aspirin is an appropriate medication for headaches and that going to the pharmacy would be an efficient way of getting some. Such explanations are, of course, teleological, referring, ss they do, to goals. The explanans are not the realisation of a future goal - if the pharmacy happened to be closed for stocktaking the aspirin would have been obtained there, bu t that would not invalidate the explanation. Some philosophers would say that the antecedent desire to achieve the end is what doers the explaining: Others might say that the explaining is done by the nature of the goal and the fact that the action promoted the chances of realizing it. (Taylor, 1964). In that it should not be automatically being assumed that such explanations are causal. Philosophers differ considerably on whether these explanations are to be framed in terms of cause or reason, but the distinction cannot be used to show that the relation between reasons and the actions they justify is in no way causal, and there are many differing analyses of such concepts as intention and agency. Expanding the domain beyond consciousness, Freud maintained, in addition, that much human behaviour can be explained in terms of unconscious and conscious wishes. Those Freudian explanations should probably be construed as basically causal.
Problems arise when teleological explanations are offered in other context. The behaviour of non-human animals is often explained in terms of purpose, e.g., the mouse ran to escape from the cat. In such cases the existence of conscious purpose seems dubious. The situation is still more problematic when a supr-empirical purpose in invoked, e.g., the explanations of living species in terms of God's purpose, or the vitalistic explanations of biological phenomena in terms of a entelechy or vital principle. In recent years an 'anthropic principle' has received attention in cosmology (Barrow and Tipler, 1986). All such explanations have been condemned by many philosophers an anthropomorphic.
Nevertheless, philosophers and scientists often maintain that functional explanations play an important an legitimate role in various sciences such as, evolutionary biology, anthropology and sociology. For example, of the peppered moth in Liverpool, the change in colour from the light phase to the dark phase and back again to the light phase provided adaption to a changing environment and fulfilled the function of reducing predation on the spacies. In the study of primitive soviets anthropologists have insisted that various rituals the (rain dance) which may be inefficacious in braining about their manifest goals (producing rain), actually cohesion at a period of stress (often a drought). Philosophers who admit teleological and/or functional explanations in common sense and science oftentimes take pans to argue that such explanations can be annualized entirely in terms of efficient causes, thereby escaping the charge of anthropomorphism (Wright, 1976): Again, however, not all philosophers agree.
Causal theories of Propositional knowledge differ over whether they deviate from the tripartite analysis by dropping the requirements that one's believing (accepting) that 'h' be justified. The same variation occurs regarding reliability theories, which present the Knower as reliable concerning the issue of whether or not 'h', in the sense that some of one's cognitive or epistemic states, ?, are such that, given further characteristics of oneself-possibly including relations to factors external to one and which one may not be aware-it is nomologically necessary (or at least probable) that 'h'. In some versions, the reliability is required to be 'global' in as far as it must concern a nomologically (probabilistic-relationship) relationship that states of type ? to the acquisition of true beliefs about a wider range of issues than merely whether or not 'h'. There is also controversy about how to delineate the limits of what constitutes a type of relevant personal state or characteristic. (For example, in a case where Mr Notgot has not been shamming and one does know thereby that someone in the office owns a Ford, such as a way of forming beliefs about the properties of persons spatially close to one, or instead something narrower, such as a way of forming beliefs about Ford owners in offices partly upon the basis of their relevant testimony?)
One important variety of reliability theory is a conclusive reason account, which includes a requirement that one's reasons for believing that 'h' be such that in one's circumstances, if h* were not to occur then, e.g., one would not have the reasons one does for believing that 'h', or, e.g., one would not believe that 'h'. Roughly, the latter is demanded by theories that treat a Knower as 'tracking the truth', theories that include the further demand that is roughly, if it were the case, that 'h', then one would believe that 'h'. A version of the tracking theory has been defended by Robert Nozick (1981), who adds that if what he calls a 'method' has been used to arrive at the belief that 'h', then the antecedent clauses of the two conditionals that characterize tracking will need to include the hypothesis that one would employ the very same method.
But unless more conditions are added to Nozick's analysis, it will be too weak to explain why one lack's knowledge in a version of the last variant of the tricky Mr Notgot case described above, where we add the following details: (a) Mr Notgot's compulsion is not easily changed, (b) while in the office, Mr Notgot has no other easy trick of the relevant type to play on one, and finally for one's belief that 'h', not by reasoning through a false belief ut by basing belief that 'h', upon a true existential generalization of one's evidence.
Nozick's analysis is in addition too strong to permit anyone ever to know that 'h': 'Some of my beliefs about beliefs might be otherwise, e.g., I might have rejected on of them'. If I know that 'h5' then satisfaction of the antecedent of one of Nozick's conditionals would involve its being false that 'h5', thereby thwarting satisfaction of the consequent's requirement that I not then believe that 'h5'. For the belief that 'h5' is itself one of my beliefs about beliefs (Shope, 1984).
Some philosophers think that the category of knowing for which is true. Justified believing (accepting) is a requirement constituting only a species of Propositional knowledge, construed as an even broader category. They have proposed various examples of 'PK' that do not satisfy the belief and/ort justification conditions of the tripartite analysis. Such cases are often recognized by analyses of Propositional knowledge in terms of powers, capacities, or abilities. For instance, Alan R. White (1982) treats 'PK' as merely the ability to provide a correct answer to a possible question. White may be equating 'producing' knowledge in the sense of producing 'the correct answer to a possible question' with 'displaying' knowledge in the sense of manifesting knowledge. (White, 1982). The latter can be done even by very young children and some non-human animals independently of their being asked questions, understanding questions, or recognizing answers to questions. Indeed, an example that has been proposed as an instance of knowing that 'h' without believing or accepting that 'h' can be modified so as to illustrate this point. Two examples concerns an imaginary person who has no special training or information about horses or racing, but who in an experiment persistently and correctly picks the winners of upcoming horseraces. If the example is modified so that the hypothetical 'seer' never picks winners but only muses over whether those horses wight win, or only reports those horses winning, this behaviour should be as much of a candidate for the person's manifesting knowledge that the horse in question will win as would be the behaviour of picking it as a winner.
These considerations expose limitations in Edward Craig's analysis (1990) of the concept of knowing of a person's being a satisfactory informants in relation to an inquirer who wants to find out whether or not 'h'. Craig realizes that counterexamples to his analysis appear to be constituted by Knower who are too recalcitrant to inform the inquirer, or too incapacitate to inform, or too discredited to be worth considering (as with the boy who cried 'Wolf'). Craig admits that this might make preferable some alternative view of knowledge as a different state that helps to explain the presence of the state of being a suitable informant when the latter does obtain. Such the alternate, which offers a recursive definition that concerns one's having the power to proceed in a way representing the state of affairs, causally involved in one's proceeding in this way. When combined with a suitable analysis of representing, this theory of propositional knowledge can be unified with a structurally similar analysis of knowing how to do something.
Knowledge and belief, according to most epistemologists, knowledge entails belief, so that I cannot know that such and such is the case unless I believe that such and such is the case. Others think this entailment thesis can be rendered more accurately if we substitute for belief some closely related attitude. For instance, several philosophers would prefer to say that knowledge entail psychological certainties (Prichard, 1950 and Ayer, 1956) or conviction (Lehrer, 1974) or acceptance (Lehrer, 1989). Nonetheless, there are arguments against all versions of the thesis that knowledge requires having a belief-like attitude toward the known. These arguments are given by philosophers who think that knowledge and belief (or a facsimile) are mutually incompatible (the incomparability thesis), or by ones who say that knowledge does not entail belief, or vice versa, so that each may exist without the other, but the two may also coexist (the separability thesis).
The incompatibility thesis is sometimes traced to Plato (429-347 Bc) in view of his claim that knowledge is infallible while belief or opinion is fallible ('Republic' 476-9). But this claim would not support the thesis. Belief might be a component of an infallible form of knowledge in spite of the fallibility of belief. Perhaps, knowledge involves some factor that compensates for the fallibility of belief.
A. Duncan-Jones (1939: Also Vendler, 1978) cite linguistic evidence to back up the incompatibility thesis. He notes that people often say 'I do not believe she is guilty. I know she is' and the like, which suggest that belief rule out knowledge. However, as Lehrer (1974) indicates, the above exclamation is only a more emphatic way of saying 'I do not just believe she is guilty, I know she is' where 'just' makes it especially clear that the speaker is signalling that she has something more salient than mere belief, not that she has something inconsistent with belief, namely knowledge. Compare: 'You do not hurt him, you killed him.'
H.A. Prichard (1966) offers a defence of the incompatibility thesis that hinges on the equation of knowledge with certainty (both infallibility and psychological certitude) and the assumption that when we believe in the truth of a claim we are not certain about its truth. Given that belief always involves uncertainty while knowledge never dies, believing something rules out the possibility of knowing it. Unfortunately, however, Prichard gives 'us' no goods reason to grant that states of belief are never ones involving confidence. Conscious beliefs clearly involve some level of confidence, to suggest that we cease to believe things about which we are completely confident is bizarre.
A.D. Woozley (1953) defends a version of the separability thesis. Woozley's version, which deals with psychological certainty rather than belief per se, is that knowledge can exist in the absence of confidence about the item known, although might also be accompanied by confidence as well. Woozley remarks that the test of whether I know something is 'what I can do, where what I can do may include answering questions.' On the basis of this remark he suggests that even when people are unsure of the truth of a claim, they might know that the claim is true. We unhesitatingly attribute knowledge to people who give correct responses on examinations even if those people show no confidence in their answers. Woozley acknowledges, however, that it would be odd for those who lack confidence to claim knowledge. It would be peculiar to say, I am unsure that for whatever reason my answer is true: Still, I know it is correct But this tension Woozley explains using a distinction between conditions under which we are justified in making a claim (such as a claim to know something), and conditions under which the claim we make is true. While 'I know such and such' might be true even if I am unsure whether such and such holds, nonetheless it would be inappropriate for me to claim that I know that such and such unless I were sure of the truth of my claim.
Colin Radford (1966) extends Woozley's defence of the separability thesis. In Radford's view, not only is knowledge compatible with the lack of certainty, it is also compatible with a complete lack of belief. He argues by example. In one example, Jean has forgotten that he learned some English history year's priori and yet he is able to give several correct responses to questions such as 'When did the Battle of Hastings occur?' Since he forgot that he took history, he considers the correct response to be no more than guesses. Thus, when he says that the Battle of Hastings took place in 1066 he would deny having the belief that the Battle of Hastings took place in 1066. A disposition he would deny being responsible (or having the right to be convincing) that 1066 was the correct date. Radford would none the less insist that Jean know when the Battle occurred, since clearly be remembering the correct date. Radford admits that it would be inappropriate for Jean to say that he knew when the Battle of Hastings occurred, but, like Woozley he attributes the impropriety to a fact about when it is and is not appropriate to claim knowledge. When we claim knowledge, we ought, at least to believe that we have the knowledge we claim, or else our behaviour is 'intentionally misleading'.
Those that agree with Radford's defence of the separability thesis will probably think of belief as an inner state that can be detected through introspection. That Jean lack's beliefs about English history is plausible on this Cartesian picture since Jean does not find himself with any beliefs about English history when ne seek them out. One might criticize Radford, however, by rejecting that Cartesian view of belief. One could argue that some beliefs are thoroughly unconscious, for example. Or one could adopt a behaviourist conception of belief, such as Alexander Bain's (1859), according to which having beliefs is a matter of the way people are disposed to behave (and has not Radford already adopted a behaviourist conception of knowledge?) Since Jean gives the correct response when queried, a form of verbal behaviour, a behaviourist would be tempted to credit him with the belief that the Battle of Hastings occurred in 1066.
D.M. Armstrong (1873) takes a different tack against Radford. Jean does know that the Battle of Hastings took place in 1066. Armstrong will grant Radford that point, in fact, Armstrong suggests that Jean believe that 1066 is not the date the Battle of Hastings occurred, for Armstrong equates the belief that such and such is just possible but no more than just possible with the belief that such and such is not the case. However, Armstrong insists, Jean also believes that the Battle did occur in 1066. After all, had Jean been mistaught that the Battle occurred in 1066, and subsequently 'guessed' that it took place in 1066, we would surely describe the situation as one in which Jean's false belief about the Battle became unconscious over time but persisted of a memory trace that was causally responsible for his guess. Out of consistency, we must describe Radford's original case as one that Jean's true belief became unconscious but persisted long enough to cause his guess. Thus, while Jean consciously believes that the Battle did not occur in 1066, unconsciously he does believe it occurred in 1066. So after all, Radford does not have a counterexample to the claim that knowledge entails belief.
Armstrong's response to Radford was to reject Radford's claim that the examinee lacked the relevant belief about English history. Another response is to argue that the examinee lacks the knowledge Radford attributes to him (cf. Sorenson, 1982). If Armstrong is correct in suggesting that Jean believes both that 1066 is and that it is not the date of the Battle of Hastings, one might deny Jean knowledge on the grounds that people who believe the denial of what they believe cannot be said t know the truth of their belief. Another strategy might be to compare the examine case with examples of ignorance given in recent attacks on externalist accounts of knowledge (needless to say. Externalists themselves would tend not to favour this strategy). Consider the following case developed by BonJour (1985): For no apparent reason, Samantha believes that she is clairvoyant. Again, for no apparent reason, she one day comes to believe that the President is in New York City, even though she has every reason to believe that the President is in Washington, DC In fact, Samantha is a completely reliable clairvoyant, and she has arrived at her belief about the whereabouts of the President thorough the power of her clairvoyance. Yet surely Samanthas belief is completely irrational. She is not justified in thinking what she does. If so, then she does not know where the President is. But Radford's examinee is unconventional. Even if Jean lacks the belief that Radford denies him, Radford does not have an example of knowledge that is unattended with belief. Suppose that Jean's memory had been sufficiently powerful to produce the relevant belief. As Radford says, in having every reason to suppose that his response is mere guesswork, and he has every reason to consider his belief false. His belief would be an irrational one, and hence one about whose truth Jean would be ignorant.
Least has been of mention to an approaching view from which 'perception' basis upon itself as a fundamental philosophical topic both for its central place in ant theory of knowledge, and its central place un any theory of consciousness. Philosophy in this area is constrained by a number of properties that we believe to hold of perception, (1) It gives 'us' knowledge of the world around 'us,' (2) We are conscious of that world by being aware of 'sensible qualities': Colour, sounds, tastes, smells, felt warmth, and the shapes and positions of objects in the environment. (3) Such consciousness is effected through highly complex information channels, such as the output of the three different types of colour-sensitive cells in the eye, or the channels in the ear for interpreting pulses of air pressure as frequencies of sound. (4) There ensues even more complex neurophysiological coding of that information, and eventually higher-order brain functions bring it about that we interpreted the information so received. (Much of this complexity has been revealed by the difficulties of writing programs enabling computers to recognize quite simple aspects of the visual scene.) The problem is to avoid thinking of here being a central, ghostly, conscious self, fed information in the same way that a screen if fed information by a remote television camera. Once such a model is in place, experience will seem like a veil getting between 'us' and the world, and the direct objects of perception will seem to be private items in an inner theatre or sensorium. The difficulty of avoiding this model is epically cute when we considered the secondary qualities of colour, sound, tactile feelings and taste, which can easily seem to have a purely private existence inside the perceiver, like sensation of pain. Calling such supposed items names like 'sense-data' or 'percepts' exacerbates the tendency, but once the model is in place, the first property, that perception gives 'us' knowledge of the world and its surrounding surfaces, is quickly threatened, for there will now seem little connection between these items in immediate experience and any independent reality. Reactions to this problem include 'scepticism' and 'idealism.'
A more hopeful approach is to claim that the complexities of (3) and (4) explain how we can have direct acquaintance of the world, than suggesting that the acquaintance we do have been at best indirect. It is pointed out that perceptions are not like sensation, precisely because they have a content, or outer-directed nature. To have a perception is to be aware of the world for being such-and-such a way, than to enjoy a mere modification of sensation. But such direct realism has to be sustained in the face of the evident personal (neurophysiological and other) factors determining how we perceive. One approach is to ask why it is useful to be conscious of what we perceive, when other aspects of our functioning work with information determining responses without any conscious awareness or intervention. A solution to this problem would offer the hope of making consciousness part of the natural world, than a strange optional extra.
Furthering, perceptual knowledge is knowledge acquired by or through the senses and includes most of what we know. We cross intersections when we see the light turn green, head for the kitchen when we smell the roast burning, squeeze the fruit to determine its ripeness, and climb out of bed when we hear the alarm ring. In each case we come to know something-that the light has turned green, that the roast is burning, that the melon is overripe, and that it is time to get up-by some sensory means. Seeing that the light has turned green is learning something-that, the light has turned green-by use of the eyes. Feeling that the melon is overripe is coming to know a fact-that the melon is overripe-by one's sense to touch. In each case the resulting knowledge is somehow based on, derived from or grounded in the sort of experience that characterizes the sense modality in question.
Much as much of our perceptual knowledge is indirect, dependent or derived. By this I mean that the facts we describe ourselves as learning, as coming to know, by perceptual means are pieces of knowledge that depend on our coming to know something else, some other fact, in a more direct way. We see, by the gauge, that we need gas, see, by the newspapers, that our team has lost again, see, by her expression, that she is nervous. This derived or dependent sort of knowledge is particularly prevalent in the cases of vision, but it occurs, to a lesser degree, in every sense modality. We install bells and other noise-makers so that we calm for example, hear (by the bell) that someone is at the door and (by the alarm) that its time to get up. When we obtain knowledge in this way, it is clear that unless one sees-hence, comes to know something about the gauge (that it says) and (hence, know) that one is described as coming to know by perceptual means. If one cannot hear that the bell is ringing, one cannot-in at least in this way-hear that one's visitors have arrived. In such cases one sees (hears, smells, etc.) that 'a' is 'F', coming to know thereby that 'a' is 'F', by seeing (hearing, etc.) that some other condition, 'b's' being 'G', obtains when this occurs, the knowledge (that 'a' is 'F') is derived from, or dependent on, the more basic perceptual knowledge that 'b' is 'G'.
The Representational Theory of Mind, defines such intentional mental states as relations to mental representations, and explains the intentionality of the former in terms of the semantic properties of the latter. For example, to believe that Elvis is dead is to be appropriately related to a mental representation whose propositional content is that Elvis is dead. (The desire that Elvis be dead, the fear that he is dead, the regret that he is dead, etc., involve different relations to the same mental representation.) To perceive a strawberry is to have a sensory experience of some kind which is appropriately related to (e.g., caused by) the strawberry Representational theory of mind also understands mental processes such as thinking, reasoning and imagining as sequences of intentional mental states. For example, to imagine the moon rising over a mountain is to entertain a series of mental images of the moon (and a mountain). To infer a proposition q from the proposition's p and if 'p' then 'q' is (among other things) to have a sequence of thoughts of the form 'p', 'if p' then 'q', 'q'.
Contemporary philosophers of mind have typically supposed (or at least hoped) that the mind can be naturalized -, i.e., that all mental facts have explanations in the terms of natural science. This assumption is shared within cognitive science, which attempts to provide accounts of mental states and processes in terms (ultimately) of features of the brain and central nervous system. In the course of doing so, the various sub-disciplines of cognitive science (including cognitive and computational psychology and cognitive and computational neuroscience) postulate a number of different kinds of structures and processes, many of which are not directly implicated by mental states and processes as commonsensical conceived. There remains, however, a shared commitment to the idea that mental states and processes are to be explained in terms of mental representations.
In philosophy, recent debates about mental representation have centred around the existence of propositional attitudes (beliefs, desires, etc.) and the determination of their contents (how they come to be about what they are about), and the existence of phenomenal properties and their relation to the content of thought and perceptual experience. Within cognitive science itself, the philosophically relevant debates have been focussed on the computational architecture of the brain and central nervous system, and the compatibility of scientific and commonsense accounts of mentality.
Intentional Realists such as Dretske (e.g., 1988) and Fodor (e.g., 1987) note that the generalizations we apply in everyday life in predicting and explaining each other's behaviour (often collectively referred to as 'folk psychology') are both remarkably successful and indispensable. What a person believes, doubts, desires, fears, etc. is a highly reliable indicator of what that person will do. We have no other way of making sense of each other's behaviour than by ascribing such states and applying the relevant generalizations. We are thus committed to the basic truth of commonsense psychology and, hence, to the existence of the states its generalizations refer to. (Some realists, such as Fodor, also hold that commonsense psychology will be vindicated by cognitive science, given that propositional attitudes can be construed as computational relations to mental representations.)
Intentional Eliminativists, such as Churchland, (perhaps) Dennett and (at one time) Stich argue that no such things as propositional attitudes (and their constituent representational states) are implicated by the successful explanation and prediction of our mental lives and behaviour. Churchland denies that the generalizations of commonsense propositional-attitude psychology are true. He (1981) argues that folk psychology is a theory of the mind with a long history of failure and decline, and that it resists incorporation into the framework of modern scientific theories (including cognitive psychology). As such, it is comparable to alchemy and phlogiston theory, and ought to suffer a comparable fate. Commonsense psychology is false, and the states (and representations) it postulates simply don't exist. (It should be noted that Churchland is not an eliminativist about mental representation tout court.
Dennett (1987) grants that the generalizations of commonsense psychology are true and indispensable, but denies that this is sufficient reason to believe in the entities they appear to refer to. He argues that to give an intentional explanation of a system's behaviour is merely to adopt the 'intentional stance' toward it. If the strategy of assigning contentful states to a system and predicting and explaining its behaviour (on the assumption that it is rational -, i.e., that it behaves as it should, given the propositional attitudes it should have in its environment) is successful, then the system is intentional, and the propositional-attitude generalizations we apply to it are true. But there is nothing more to having a propositional attitude than this.
Though he has been taken to be thus claiming that intentional explanations should be construed instrumentally, Dennett (1991) insists that he is a 'moderate' realist about propositional attitudes, since he believes that the patterns in the behaviour and behavioural dispositions of a system on the basis of which we (truly) attribute intentional states to it are objectively real. In the event that there are two or more explanatorily adequate but substantially different systems of intentional ascriptions to an individual, however, Dennett claims there is no fact of the matter about what the system believes (1987, 1991). This does suggest an irrealism at least with respect to the sorts of things Fodor and Dretske take beliefs to be; though it is not the view that there is simply nothing in the world that makes intentional explanations true.
(Davidson 1973, 1974 and Lewis 1974 also defend the view that what it is to have a propositional attitude is just to be interpretable in a particular way. It is, however, not entirely clear whether they intend their views to imply irrealism about propositional attitudes.). Stich (1983) argues that cognitive psychology does not (or, in any case, should not) taxonomize mental states by their semantic properties at all, since attribution of psychological states by content is sensitive to factors that render it problematic in the context of a scientific psychology. Cognitive psychology seeks causal explanations of behaviour and cognition, and the causal powers of a mental state are determined by its intrinsic 'structural' or 'syntactic' properties. The semantic properties of a mental state, however, are determined by its extrinsic properties -, e.g., its history, environmental or intra-mental relations. Hence, such properties cannot figure in causal-scientific explanations of behaviour. (Fodor 1994 and Dretske 1988 are realist attempts to come to grips with some of these problems.) Stich proposes a syntactic theory of the mind, on which the semantic properties of mental states play no explanatory role.
It is a traditional assumption among realists about mental representations that representational states come in two basic varieties (Boghossian 1995). There are those, such as thoughts, which are composed of concepts and have no phenomenal ('what-it's-like') features ('Qualia'), and those, such as sensory experiences, which have phenomenal features but no conceptual constituents. (Non-conceptual content is usually defined as a kind of content that states of a creature lacking concepts but, nonetheless enjoy. On this taxonomy, mental states can represent either in a way analogous to expressions of natural languages or in a way analogous to drawings, paintings, maps or photographs. (Perceptual states such as seeing that something is blue, are sometimes thought of as hybrid states, consisting of, for example, a Non-conceptual sensory experience and a thought, or some more integrated compound of sensory and conceptual components.)
Some historical discussions of the representational properties of mind (e.g., Aristotle 1984, Locke 1689/1975, Hume 1739/1978) seem to assume that Non-conceptual representations - percepts ('impressions'), images ('ideas') and the like - are the only kinds of mental representations, and that the mind represents the world in virtue of being in states that resemble things in it. On such a view, all representational states have their content in virtue of their phenomenal features. Powerful arguments, however, focussing on the lack of generality (Berkeley 1975), ambiguity (Wittgenstein 1953) and non-compositionality (Fodor 1981) of sensory and imagistic representations, as well as their unsuitability to function as logical (Frége 1918/1997, Geach 1957) or mathematical (Frége 1884/1953) concepts, and the symmetry of resemblance (Goodman 1976), convinced philosophers that no theory of mind can get by with only Non-conceptual representations construed in this way.
Contemporary disagreement over Non-conceptual representation concerns the existence and nature of phenomenal properties and the role they play in determining the content of sensory experience. Dennett (1988), for example, denies that there are such things as Qualia at all; while Brandom (2002), McDowell (1994), Rey (1991) and Sellars (1956) deny that they are needed to explain the content of sensory experience. Among those who accept that experiences have phenomenal content, some (Dretske, Lycan, Tye) argue that it is reducible to a kind of intentional content, while others (Block, Loar, Peacocke) argue that it is irreducible.
The representationalist thesis is often formulated as the claim that phenomenal properties are representational or intentional. However, this formulation is ambiguous between a reductive and a non-deductive claim (though the term 'representationalism' is most often used for the reductive claim). On one hand, it could mean that the phenomenal content of an experience is a kind of intentional content (the properties it represents). On the other, it could mean that the (irreducible) phenomenal properties of an experience determine an intentional content. Representationalists such as Dretske, Lycan and Tye would assent to the former claim, whereas phenomenalists such as Block, Chalmers, Loar and Peacocke would assent to the latter. (Among phenomenalists, there is further disagreement about whether Qualia are intrinsically representational (Loar) or not (Block, Peacocke).
Most (reductive) representationalists are motivated by the conviction that one or another naturalistic explanation of intentionality is, in broad outline, correct, and by the desire to complete the naturalization of the mental by applying such theories to the problem of phenomenality. (Needless to say, most phenomenalists (Chalmers is the major exception) are just as eager to naturalize the phenomenal - though not in the same way.)
The main argument for representationalism appeals to the transparency of experience. The properties that characterize what it's like to have a perceptual experience are presented in experience as properties of objects perceived: in attending to an experience, one seems to 'see through it' to the objects and properties it is experiences of. They are not presented as properties of the experience itself. If nonetheless they were properties of the experience, perception would be massively deceptive. But perception is not massively deceptive. According to the representationalist, the phenomenal character of an experience is due to its representing objective, non-experiential properties. (In veridical perception, these properties are locally instantiated; in illusion and hallucination, they are not.) On this view, introspection is indirect perception: one comes to know what phenomenal features one's experience has by coming to know what objective features it represents.
In order to account for the intuitive differences between conceptual and sensory representations, representationalists appeal to their structural or functional differences. Dretske (1995), for example, distinguishes experiences and thoughts on the basis of the origin and nature of their functions: an experience of a property 'P' is a state of a system whose evolved function is to indicate the presence of 'P' in the environment; a thought representing the property 'P', on the other hand, is a state of a system whose assigned (learned) function is to calibrate the output of the experiential system. Rey (1991) takes both thoughts and experiences to be relations to sentences in the language of thought, and distinguishes them on the basis of (the functional roles of) such sentences' constituent predicates. Lycan (1987, 1996) distinguishes them in terms of their functional-computational profiles. Tye (2000) distinguishes them in terms of their functional roles and the intrinsic structure of their vehicles: thoughts are representations in a language-like medium, whereas experiences are image-like representations consisting of 'symbol-filled arrays.' (The account of mental images in Tye 1991.)
Phenomenalists tend to make use of the same sorts of features (function, intrinsic structure) in explaining some of the intuitive differences between thoughts and experiences; but they do not suppose that such features exhaust the differences between phenomenal and non-phenomenal representations. For the phenomenalist, it is the phenomenal properties of experiences - Qualia themselves - that constitute the fundamental difference between experience and thought. Peacocke (1992), for example, develops the notion of a perceptual 'scenario' (an assignment of phenomenal properties to coordinates of a three-dimensional egocentric space), whose content is 'correct' (a semantic property) if in the corresponding 'scene' (the portion of the external world represented by the scenario) properties are distributed as their phenomenal analogues are in the scenario.
Another sort of representation championed by phenomenalists (e.g., Block, Chalmers (2003) and Loar (1996)) is the 'phenomenal concept' -, a conceptual/phenomenal hybrid consisting of a phenomenological 'sample' (an image or an occurrent sensation) integrated with (or functioning as) a conceptual component. Phenomenal concepts are postulated to account for the apparent fact (among others) that, as McGinn (1991) puts it, 'you cannot form [introspective] concepts of conscious properties unless you yourself instantiate those properties.' One cannot have a phenomenal concept of a phenomenal property 'P', and, hence, phenomenal beliefs about P, without having experience of 'P', because 'P' itself is (in some way) constitutive of the concept of 'P'. (Jackson 1982, 1986 and Nagel 1974.)
Though imagery has played an important role in the history of philosophy of mind, the important contemporary literature on it is primarily psychological. In a series of psychological experiments done in the 1970s (summarized in Kosslyn 1980 and Shepard and Cooper 1982), subjects' response time in tasks involving mental manipulation and examination of presented figures was found to vary in proportion to the spatial properties (size, orientation, etc.) of the figures presented. The question of how these experimental results are to be explained has kindled a lively debate on the nature of imagery and imagination.
Kosslyn (1980) claims that the results suggest that the tasks were accomplished via the examination and manipulation of mental representations that they have spatial properties, i.e., pictorial representations, or images. Others, principally Pylyshyn (1979, 1981, 2003), argue that the empirical facts can be explained in terms exclusively of discursive, or propositional representations and cognitive processes defined over them. (Pylyshyn takes such representations to be sentences in a language of thought.)
The idea that pictorial representations are literally pictures in the head is not taken seriously by proponents of the pictorial view of imagery. The claim is, rather, that mental images represent in a way that is relevantly like the way pictures represent. (Attention has been focussed on visual imagery - hence the designation 'pictorial'; Though of course, there may imagery in other modalities - auditory, olfactory, etc. - as well.)
The distinction between pictorial and discursive representation can be characterized in terms of the distinction between analog and digital representation (Goodman 1976). This distinction has itself been variously understood (Fodor & Pylyshyn 1981, Goodman 1976, Haugeland 1981, Lewis 1971, McGinn 1989), though a widely accepted construal is that analog representation is continuous (i.e., in virtue of continuously variable properties of the representation), while digital representation is discrete (i.e., in virtue of properties a representation either has or doesn't have) (Dretske 1981). (An analog/digital distinction may also be made with respect to cognitive processes. (Block 1983.)) On this understanding of the analog/digital distinction, imagistic representations, which represent in virtue of properties that may vary continuously (such for being more or less bright, loud, vivid, etc.), would be analog, while conceptual representations, whose properties do not vary continuously (a thought cannot be more or less about Elvis: either it is or it is not) would be digital.
It might be supposed that the pictorial/discursive distinction is best made in terms of the phenomenal/nonphenomenal distinction, but it is not obvious that this is the case. For one thing, there may be nonphenomenal properties of representations that vary continuously. Moreover, there are ways of understanding pictorial representation that presuppose neither phenomenality nor analogicity. According to Kosslyn (1980, 1982, 1983), a mental representation is 'quasi-pictorial' when every part of the representation corresponds to a part of the object represented, and relative distances between parts of the object represented are preserved among the parts of the representation. But distances between parts of a representation can be defined functionally rather than spatially - for example, in terms of the number of discrete computational steps required to combine stored information about them. (Rey 1981.)
Tye (1991) proposes a view of images on which they are hybrid representations, consisting both of pictorial and discursive elements. On Tye's account, images are '(labelled) interpreted symbol-filled arrays.' The symbols represent discursively, while their arrangement in arrays has representational significance (the location of each 'cell' in the array represents a specific viewer-centred 2-D location on the surface of the imagined object)
The contents of mental representations are typically taken to be abstract objects (properties, relations, propositions, sets, etc.). A pressing question, especially for the naturalist, is how mental representations come to have their contents. Here the issue is not how to naturalize content (abstract objects can't be naturalized), but, rather, how to provide a naturalistic account of the content-determining relations between mental representations and the abstract objects they express. There are two basic types of contemporary naturalistic theories of content-determination, causal-informational and functional.
Causal-informational theories hold that the content of a mental representation is grounded in the information it carries about what does (Devitt 1996) or would (Fodor 1987, 1990) cause it to occur. There is, however, widespread agreement that causal-informational relations are not sufficient to determine the content of mental representations. Such relations are common, but representation is not. Tree trunks, smoke, thermostats and ringing telephones carry information about what they are causally related to, but they do not represent (in the relevant sense) what they carry information about. Further, a representation can be caused by something it does not represent, and can represent something that has not caused it.
The main attempts to specify what makes a causal-informational state a mental representation are Asymmetric Dependency Theories, the Asymmetric Dependency Theory distinguishes merely informational relations from representational relations on the basis of their higher-order relations to each other: informational relations depend upon representational relations, but not vice-versa. For example, if tokens of a mental state type are reliably caused by horses, cows-on-dark-nights, zebras-in-the-mist and Great Danes, then they carry information about horses, etc. If, however, such tokens are caused by cows-on-dark-nights, etc. because they were caused by horses, but not vice versa, then they represent horses.
According to Teleological Theories, representational relations are those a representation-producing mechanism has the selected (by evolution or learning) function of establishing. For example, zebra-caused horse-representations do not mean zebra, because the mechanism by which such tokens are produced has the selected function of indicating horses, not zebras. The horse-representation-producing mechanism that responds to zebras is malfunctioning.
Functional theories, hold that the content of a mental representation are well grounded in causal computational inferential relations to other mental portrayals other than mental representations. They differ on whether relata should include all other mental representations or only some of them, and on whether to include external states of affairs. The view that the content of a mental representation is determined by its inferential/computational relations with all other representations is holism; the view it is determined by relations to only some other mental states is localisms (or molecularism). (The view that the content of a mental state depends on none of its relations to other mental states is atomism.) Functional theories that recognize no content-determining external relata have been called solipsistic (Harman 1987). Some theorists posit distinct roles for internal and external connections, the former determining semantic properties analogous to sense, the latter determining semantic properties analogous to reference (McGinn 1982, Sterelny 1989)
(Reductive) representationalists (Dretske, Lycan, Tye) usually take one or another of these theories to provide an explanation of the (Non-conceptual) content of experiential states. They thus tend to be Externalists, about phenomenological as well as conceptual content. Phenomenalists and non-deductive representationalists (Block, Chalmers, Loar, Peacocke, Siewert), on the other hand, take it that the representational content of such states is (at least in part) determined by their intrinsic phenomenal properties. Further, those who advocate a phenomenology-based approach to conceptual content (Horgan and Tiensen, Loar, Pitt, Searle, Siewert) also seem to be committed to Internalist individuation of the content (if not the reference) of such states.
Generally, those who, like informational theorists, think relations to one's (natural or social) environment are (at least partially) determinative of the content of mental representations are Externalists (e.g., Burge 1979, 1986, McGinn 1977, Putnam 1975), whereas those who, like some proponents of functional theories, think representational content is determined by an individual's intrinsic properties alone, are internalists (or individualists).
This issue is widely taken to be of central importance, since psychological explanation, whether commonsense or scientific, is supposed to be both causal and content-based. (Beliefs and desires cause the behaviours they do because they have the contents they do. For example, the desire that one have a beer and the beliefs that there is beer in the refrigerator and that the refrigerator is in the kitchen may explain one's getting up and going to the kitchen.) If, however, a mental representation's having a particular content is due to factors extrinsic to it, it is unclear how its having that content could determine its causal powers, which, arguably, must be intrinsic. Some who accept the standard arguments for externalism have argued that internal factors determine a component of the content of a mental representation. They say that mental representations have both 'narrow' content (determined by intrinsic factors) and 'wide' or 'broad' content (determined by narrow content plus extrinsic factors). (This distinction may be applied to the sub-personal representations of cognitive science as well as to those of commonsense psychology.
Narrow content has been variously construed. Putnam (1975), Fodor (1982)), and Block (1986) for example, seems to understand it as something like dedictorial content (i.e., Frégean sense, or perhaps character, à la Kaplan 1989). On this construal, narrow content is context-independent and directly expressible. Fodor (1987) and Block (1986), however, has also characterized narrow content as radically inexpressible. On this construal, narrow content is a kind of proto-content, or content-determinant, and can be specified only indirectly, via specifications of context/wide-content pairings. Both, construe of as a narrow content and are characterized as functions from context to (wide) content. The narrow content of a representation is determined by properties intrinsic to it or its possessor such as its syntactic structure or its intra-mental computational or inferential role or its phenomenology.
Burge (1986) has argued that causation-based worries about externalist individuation of psychological content, and the introduction of the narrow notion, are misguided. Fodor (1994, 1998) has more recently urged that there may be no need to narrow its contentual representations, accountable for reasons of an ordering supply of naturalistic (causal) explanations of human cognition and action, since the sorts of cases they were introduced to handle, viz., Twin-Earth cases and Frége cases, are nomologically either impossible or dismissible as exceptions to non-strict psychological laws.
The leading contemporary version of the Representational Theory of Mind, the Computational Theory of Mind, claims that the brain is a kind of computer and that mental processes are computations. According to the computational theory of mind, cognitive states are constituted by computational relations to mental representations of various kinds, and cognitive processes are sequences of such states. The computational theory of mind and the representational theory of mind, may by attempting to explain all psychological states and processes in terms of mental representation. In the course of constructing detailed empirical theories of human and animal cognition and developing models of cognitive processes' implementable in artificial information processing systems, cognitive scientists have proposed a variety of types of mental representations. While some of these may be suited to be mental relata of commonsense psychological states, some - so-called 'sub-personal' or 'sub-doxastic' representations - are not. Though many philosophers believe that computational theory of mind can provide the best scientific explanations of cognition and behaviour, there is disagreement over whether such explanations will vindicate the commonsense psychological explanations of prescientific representational theory of mind.
According to Stich's (1983) Syntactic Theory of Mind, for example, computational theories of psychological states should concern themselves only with the formal properties of the objects those states are relations to. Commitment to the explanatory relevance of content, however, is for most cognitive scientists fundamental. That mental processes are computations, which computations are rule-governed sequences of semantically evaluable objects, and that the rules apply to the symbols in virtue of their content, are central tenets of mainstream cognitive science.
Explanations in cognitive science appeal to a many different kinds of mental representation, including, for example, the 'mental models' of Johnson-Laird 1983, the 'retinal arrays,' 'primal sketches' and '2½ -D sketches' of Marr 1982, the 'frames' of Minsky 1974, the 'sub-symbolic' structures of Smolensky 1989, the 'quasi-pictures' of Kosslyn 1980, and the 'interpreted symbol-filled arrays' of Tye 1991 - in addition to representations that may be appropriate to the explanation of commonsense
Psychological states. Computational explanations have been offered of, among other mental phenomena, belief.
The classicists hold that mental representations are symbolic structures, which typically have semantically evaluable constituents, and that mental processes are rule-governed manipulations of them that are sensitive to their constituent structure. The connectionists, hold that mental representations are realized by patterns of activation in a network of simple processors ('nodes') and that mental processes consist of the spreading activation of such patterns. The nodes themselves are, typically, not taken to be semantically evaluable; nor do the patterns have semantically evaluable constituents. (Though there are versions of Connectionism -, 'localist' versions - on which individual nodes are taken to have semantic properties (e.g., Ballard 1986, Ballard & Hayes 1984).) It is arguable, however, that localist theories are neither definitive nor representative of the Conceptionist program.
Classicists are motivated (in part) by properties thought seems to share with language. Jerry Alan Fodor's (1935-), Language of Thought Hypothesis, (Fodor 1975, 1987), according to which the system of mental symbols constituting the neural basis of thought is structured like a language, provides a well-worked-out version of the classical approach as applied to commonsense psychology. According to the language of a thought hypothesis, the potential infinity of complex representational mental states is generated from a finite stock of primitive representational states, in accordance with recursive formation rules. This combinatorial structure accounts for the properties of productivity and systematicity of the system of mental representations. As in the case of symbolic languages, including natural languages (though Fodor does not suppose either that the language of thought hypotheses explains only linguistic capacities or that only verbal creatures have this sort of cognitive architecture), these properties of thought are explained by appeal to the content of the representational units and their combinability into contentful complexes. That is, the semantics of both language and thought is compositional: the content of a complex representation is determined by the contents of its constituents and their structural configuration.
Connectionists are motivated mainly by a consideration of the architecture of the brain, which apparently consists of layered networks of interconnected neurons. They argue that this sort of architecture is unsuited to carrying out classical serial computations. For one thing, processing in the brain is typically massively parallel. In addition, the elements whose manipulation drive's computation in Conceptionist networks (principally, the connections between nodes) are neither semantically compositional nor semantically evaluable, as they are on the classical approach. This contrast with classical computationalism is often characterized by saying that representation is, with respect to computation, distributed as opposed to local: representation is local if it is computationally basic; and distributed if it is not. (Another way of putting this is to say that for classicists mental representations are computationally atomic, whereas for connectionists they are not.)
Moreover, connectionists argue that information processing as it occurs in Conceptionist networks more closely resembles some features of actual human cognitive functioning. For example, whereas on the classical view learning involves something like hypothesis formation and testing (Fodor 1981), on the Conceptionist model it is a matter of evolving distribution of 'weight' (strength) on the connections between nodes, and typically does not involve the formulation of hypotheses regarding the identity conditions for the objects of knowledge. The Conceptionist network is 'trained up' by repeated exposure to the objects it is to learn to distinguish; and, though networks typically require many more exposures to the objects than do humans, this seems to model at least one feature of this type of human learning quite well.
Further, degradation in the performance of such networks in response to damage is gradual, not sudden as in the case of a classical information processor, and hence more accurately models the loss of human cognitive function as it typically occurs in response to brain damage. It is also sometimes claimed that Conceptionist systems show the kind of flexibility in response to novel situations typical of human cognition - situations in which classical systems are relatively 'brittle' or 'fragile.'
Some philosophers have maintained that Connectionism entails that there are no propositional attitudes. Ramsey, Stich and Garon (1990) have argued that if Conceptionist models of cognition are basically correct, then there are no discrete representational states as conceived in ordinary commonsense psychology and classical cognitive science. Others, however (e.g., Smolensky 1989), hold that certain types of higher-level patterns of activity in a neural network may be roughly identified with the representational states of commonsense psychology. Still others argue that language-of-thought style representation is both necessary in general and realizable within Conceptionist architectures, collect the central contemporary papers in the classicist/Conceptionist debate, and provides useful introductory material as well.
Whereas Stich (1983) accepts that mental processes are computational, but denies that computations are sequences of mental representations, others accept the notion of mental representation, but deny that computational theory of mind provides the correct account of mental states and processes.
Van Gelder (1995) denies that psychological processes are computational. He argues that cognitive systems are dynamic, and that cognitive states are not relations to mental symbols, but quantifiable states of a complex system consisting of (in the case of human beings) a nervous system, a body and the environment in which they are embedded. Cognitive processes are not rule-governed sequences of discrete symbolic states, but continuous, evolving total states of dynamic systems determined by continuous, simultaneous and mutually determining states of the systems components. Representation in a dynamic system is essentially information-theoretic, though the bearers of information are not symbols, but state variables or parameters.
Horst (1996), on the other hand, argues that though computational models may be useful in scientific psychology, they are of no help in achieving a philosophical understanding of the intentionality of commonsense mental states. Computational theory of mind attempts to reduce the intentionality of such states to the intentionality of the mental symbols they are relations to. But, Horst claims, the relevant notion of symbolic content is essentially bound up with the notions of convention and intention. So the computational theory of mind involves itself in a vicious circularity: the very properties that are supposed to be reduced are (tacitly) appealed to in the reduction.
To say that a mental object has semantic properties is, paradigmatically, to say that it may be about, or be true or false of, an object or objects, or that it may be true or false simpliciter. Suppose I think that you took to sniffing snuff. I am thinking about you, and if what I think of you (that they take snuff) is true of you, then my thought is true. According to representational theory of mind such states are to be explained as relations between agents and mental representations. To think that you take snuff is to token in some way a mental representation whose content is that ocelots take snuff. On this view, the semantic properties of mental states are the semantic properties of the representations they are relations to.
Linguistic acts seem to share such properties with mental states. Suppose I say that you take snuff. I am talking about you, and if what I say of you (that they take snuff) is true of them, then my utterance is true. Now, to say that you take snuff is (in part) to utter a sentence that means that you take snuff. Many philosophers have thought that the semantic properties of linguistic expressions are inherited from the intentional mental states they are conventionally used to express. On this view, the semantic properties of linguistic expressions are the semantic properties of the representations that are the mental relata of the states they are conventionally used to express.
It is also widely held that in addition to having such properties as reference, truth-conditions and truth - so-called extensional properties - expressions of natural languages also have intensional properties, in virtue of expressing properties or propositions - i.e., in virtue of having meanings or senses, where two expressions may have the same reference, truth-conditions or truth value, yet express different properties or propositions (Frége 1892/1997). If the semantic properties of natural-language expressions are inherited from the thoughts and concepts they express (or vice versa, or both), then an analogous distinction may be appropriate for mental representations.
Theories of representational content may be classified according to whether they are atomistic or holistic and according to whether they are externalistic or internalistic, whereby, emphasizing the priority of a whole over its parts. Furthermore, in the philosophy of language, this becomes the claim that the meaning of an individual word or sentence can only be understood in terms of its relation to an indefinitely larger body of language, such as à whole theory, or even a whole language or form of life. In the philosophy of mind a mental state similarly may be identified only in terms of its relations with others. Moderate holism may allow the other things besides these relationships also count; extreme holism would hold that a network of relationships is all that we have. A holistic view of science holds that experience only confirms or disconfirms large bodies of doctrine, impinging at the edges, and leaving some leeway over the adjustment that it requires.
Once, again, in the philosophy of mind and language, the view that what is thought, or said, or experienced, is essentially dependent on aspects of the world external to the mind of the subject. The view goes beyond holding that such mental states are typically caused by external factors, to insist that they could not have existed as they now do without the subject being embedded in an external world of a certain kind. It is these external relations that make up the essence or identify of the mental state. Externalism is thus opposed to the Cartesian separation of the mental from the physical, since that holds that the mental could in principle exist as it does even if there were no external world at all. Various external factors have been advanced as ones on which mental content depends, including the usage of experts, the linguistic, norms of the community. And the general causal relationships of the subject. In the theory of knowledge, externalism is the view that a person might know something by being suitably situated with respect to it, without that relationship being in any sense within his purview. The person might, for example, be very reliable in some respect without believing that he is. The view allows that you can know without being justified in believing that you know.
However, atomistic theories take a representation's content to be something that can be specified independent entity of that representation' s relations to other representations. What the American philosopher of mind, Jerry Alan Fodor (1935-) calls the crude causal theory, for example, takes a representation to be a
cow
- a menial representation with the same content as the word 'cow' - if its tokens are caused by instantiations of the property of being-a-cow, and this is a condition that places no explicit constraints on how
cow
's must or might relate to other representations. Holistic theories contrasted with atomistic theories in taking the relations à representation bears to others to be essential to its content. According to functional role theories, a representation is a
cow
if it behaves like a
cow
should behave in inference.
Internalist theories take the content of a representation to be a matter determined by factors internal to the system that uses it. Thus, what Block (1986) calls 'short-armed' functional role theories are Internalist. Externalist theories take the content of a representation to be determined, in part at least, by factors external to the system that uses it. Covariance theories, as well as teleological theories that invoke an historical theory of functions, take content to be determined by 'external' factors. Crossing the atomist-holistic distinction with the Internalist-externalist distinction.
Externalist theories (sometimes called non-individualistic theories) have the consequence that molecule for molecule identical cognitive systems might yet harbour representations with different contents. This has given rise to a controversy concerning 'narrow' content. If we assume some form of externalist theory is correct, then content is, in the first instance 'wide' content, i.e., determined in part by factors external to the representing system. On the other hand, it seems clear that, on plausible assumptions about how to individuate psychological capacities, internally equivalent systems must have the same psychological capacities. Hence, it would appear that wide content cannot be relevant to characterizing psychological equivalence. Since cognitive science generally assumes that content is relevant to characterizing psychological equivalence, philosophers attracted to externalist theories of content have sometimes attempted to introduce 'narrow' content, i.e., an aspect or kind of content that is equivalent internally equivalent systems. The simplest such theory is Fodor's idea (1987) that narrow content is a function from contents (i.e., from whatever the external factors are) to wide contents.
All the same, what a person expresses by a sentence is often a function of the environment in which he or she is placed. For example, the disease I refer to by the term like 'arthritis', or the kind of tree I refer to as a 'Maple' will be defined by criteria of which I know next to nothing. This raises the possibility of imagining two persons in rather different environments, but in which everything appears the same to each of them. The wide content of their thoughts and sayings will be different if the situation surrounding them is appropriately different: 'situation' may include the actual objects they perceive or the chemical or physical kinds of object in the world they inhabit, or the history of their words, or the decisions of authorities on what counts as an example, of one of the terms they use. The narrow content is that part of their thought which remains identical, through their identity of the way things appear, regardless of these differences of surroundings. Partisans of wide content may doubt whether any content in this sense narrow, partisans of narrow content believer that it is the fundamental notion, with wide content being explicable in terms of narrow content plus context.
Even so, the distinction between facts and values has outgrown its name: it applies not only to matters of fact vs, matters of value, but also to statements that something is, vs. statements that something ought to be. Roughly, factual statements - 'is statements' in the relevant sense - represent some state of affairs as obtaining, whereas normative statements - evaluative, and deontic ones - attribute goodness to something, or ascribe, to an agent, an obligation to act. Neither distinction is merely linguistic. Specifying a book's monetary value is making a factual statement, though it attributes a kind of value. 'That is a good book' expresses a value judgement though the term 'value' is absent (nor would 'valuable' be synonymous with 'good'). Similarly, 'we are morally obligated to fight' superficially expresses a statement, and 'By all indications it ough to rain' makes a kind of ought-claim; but the former is an ought-statement, the latter an (epistemic) is-statement.
Theoretical difficulties also beset the distinction. Some have absorbed values into facts holding that all value is instrumental, roughly, to have value is to contribute - in a factual analysable way - to something further which is (say) deemed desirable. Others have suffused facts with values, arguing that facts (and observations) are 'theory-impregnated' and contending that values are inescapable to theoretical choice. But while some philosophers doubt that fact/value distinctions can be sustained, there persists a sense of a deep difference between evaluating, and attributing an obligation and, on the other hand, saying how the world is.
Fact/value distinctions, may be defended by appeal to the notion of intrinsic value, as a thing has in itself and thus independently of its consequences. Roughly, a value statement (proper) is an ascription of intrinsic value, one to the effect that a thing is to some degree good in itself. This leaves open whether ought-statements are implicitly value statements, but even if they imply that something has intrinsic value - e.g., moral value - they can be independently characterized, say by appeal to rules that provide (justifying) reasons for action. One might also ground the fact value distinction in the attributional (or even motivational) component apparently implied by the making of valuational or deontic judgements: Thus, 'it is a good book, but that is no reason for a positive attribute towards it' and 'you ought to do it, but there is no reason to' seem inadmissible, whereas, substituting, 'an expensive book' and 'you will do it' yields permissible judgements. One might also argue that factual judgements are the kind which are in principle appraisable scientifically, and thereby anchor the distinction on the factual side. This ligne is plausible, but there is controversy over whether scientific procedures are 'value-free' in the required way.
Philosophers differ regarding the sense, if any, in which epistemology is normative (roughly, valuational). But what precisely is at stake in this controversy is no clearly than the problematic fact/value distinction itself. Must epistemologists as such make judgements of value or epistemic responsibility? If epistemology is naturalizable, then even epistemic principles simply articulate under what conditions - say, appropriate perceptual stimulations - a belief is justified, or constitutes knowledge. Its standards of justification, then would be like standards of, e.g., resilience for bridges. It is not obvious, however, that there appropriate standards can be established without independent judgements that, say, a certain kind of evidence is good enough for justified belief (or knowledge). The most plausible view may be that justification is like intrinsic goodness, though it supervenes on natural properties, it cannot be analysed wholly in factual statements.
Thus far, belief has been depicted as being all-or-nothing, however, as a resulting causality for which we have grounds for thinking it true, and, all the same, its acceptance is governed by epistemic norms, and, least of mention, it is partially subject to voluntary control and has functional affinities to belief. Still, the notion of acceptance, like that of degrees of belief, merely extends the standard picture, and does not replace it.
Traditionally, belief has been of epistemological interest in its propositional guise: 'S' believes that 'p', where 'p' is a reposition towards which an agent, 'S' exhibits an attitude of acceptance. Not all belief is of this sort. If I trust you to say, I believer you. And someone may believe in Mr. Radek, or in a free-market economy, or in God. It is sometimes supposed that all belief is 'reducible' to propositional belief, belief-that. Thus, my believing you might be thought a matter of my believing, is, perhaps, that what you say is true, and your belief in free markets or God, is a matter of your believing that free-market economies are desirable or that God exists.
Some philosophers have followed St. Thomas Aquinas (1225-74), in supposing that to believer in God is simply to believer that certain truths hold while others argue that belief-in is a distinctive attitude, on that includes essentially an element of trust. More commonly, belief-in has been taken to involve a combination of propositional belief together with some further attitude.
The moral philosopher Richard Price (1723-91) defends the claim that there are different sorts of belief-in, some, but not all reducible to beliefs-that. If you believer in God, you believer that God exists, that God is good, you believer that God is good, etc. But according to Price, your belief involves, in addition, a certain complex pro-attitude toward its object. Even so, belief-in outruns the evidence for the corresponding belief-that. Does this diminish its rationality? If belief-in presupposes believes-that, it might be thought that the evidential standards for the former must be, at least, as high as standards for the latter. And any additional pro-attitude might be thought to require a further layer of justification not required for cases of belief-that.
Belief-in may be, in general, less susceptible to alternations in the face of unfavourable evidence than belief-that. A believer who encounters evidence against God's existence may remain unshaken in his belief, in part because the evidence does not bear on his pro-attitude. So long as this ids united with his belief that God exists, and reasonably so - in a way that an ordinary propositional belief that would not.
The correlative way of elaborating on the general objection to justificatory externalism challenges the sufficiency of the various externalist conditions by citing cases where those conditions are satisfied, but where the believers in question seem intuitively not to be justified. In this context, the most widely discussed examples have to do with possible occult cognitive capacities, like clairvoyance. Considering the point in application once, again, to reliabilism, the claim is that to think that he has such a cognitive power, and, perhaps, even good reasons to the contrary, is not rational or responsible and therefore not epistemically justified in accepting the belief that result from his clairvoyance, despite the fact that the reliablist condition is satisfied.
One sort of response to this latter sorts of an objection is to 'bite the bullet' and insist that such believers are in fact justified, dismissing the seeming intuitions to the contrary as latent Internalist prejudice. A more widely adopted response attempts to impose additional conditions, usually of a roughly Internalist sort, which will rule out the offending example, while stopping far of a full internalism. But, while there is little doubt that such modified versions of externalism can handle particular cases, as well enough to avoid clear intuitive implausibility, the usually problematic cases that they cannot handle, and also whether there is and clear motivation for the additional requirements other than the general Internalist view of justification that externalist is committed to reject.
A view in this same general vein, one that might be described as a hybrid of internalism and externalism holds that epistemic justification requires that there is a justificatory factor that is cognitively accessible to the believer in question (though it need not be actually grasped), thus ruling out, e.g., a pure reliabilism. At the same time, however, though it must be objectively true that beliefs for which such a factor is available are likely to be true, in addition, the fact need not be in any way grasped or cognitively accessible to the believer. In effect, of the premises needed to argue that a particular belief is likely to be true, one must be accessible in a way that would satisfy at least weak internalism, the Internalist will respond that this hybrid view is of no help at all in meeting the objection and has no belief nor is it held in the rational, responsible way that justification intuitively seems to require, for the believer in question, lacking one crucial premise, still has no reason at all for thinking that his belief is likely to be true.
An alternative to giving an externalist account of epistemic justification, one which may be more defensible while still accommodating many of the same motivating concerns, is to give an externalist account of knowledge directly, without relying on an intermediate account of justification. Such a view will obviously have to reject the justified true belief account of knowledge, holding instead that knowledge is true belief which satisfies the chosen externalist condition, e.g., a result of a reliable process (and perhaps, further conditions as well). This makes it possible for such a view to retain Internalist account of epistemic justification, though the centrality of that concept to epistemology would obviously be seriously diminished.
Such an externalist account of knowledge can accommodate the commonsense conviction that animals, young children, and unsophisticated adults' posse's knowledge, though not the weaker conviction (if such a conviction does exist) that such individuals are epistemically justified in their beliefs. It is, at least, less vulnerable to Internalist counter-examples of the sort discussed, since the intuitions involved there pertain more clearly to justification than to knowledge. What is uncertain is what ultimate philosophical significance the resulting conception of knowledge, for which is accepted or advanced as true or real on the basis of less than conclusive evidence, as can only be assumed to have. In particular, does it have any serious bearing on traditional epistemological problems and on the deepest and most troubling versions of scepticism, which seems in fact to be primarily concerned with justification, and knowledge?`
A rather different use of the terms 'internalism' and 'externalism' have to do with the issue of how the content of beliefs and thoughts is determined: According to an Internalist view of content, the content of such intention states depends only on the non-relational, internal properties of the individual's mind or grain, and not at all on his physical and social environment: While according to an externalist view, content is significantly affected by such external factors and suggests a view that appears of both internal and external elements are standardly classified as an external view.
As with justification and knowledge, the traditional view of content has been strongly Internalist in character. The main argument for externalism derives from the philosophy y of language, more specifically from the various phenomena pertaining to natural kind terms, indexicals, etc. that motivate the views that have come to be known as 'direct reference' theories. Such phenomena seem at least to show that the belief or thought content that can be properly attributed to a person is dependant on facts about his environment, e.g., whether he is on Earth or Twin Earth, what is fact pointing at, the classificatory criterion employed by expects in his social group, etc. - not just on what is going on internally in his mind or brain.
An objection to externalist account of content is that they seem unable to do justice to our ability to know the content of our beliefs or thought 'from the inside', simply by reflection. If content is depending on external factors pertaining to the environment, then knowledge of content should depend on knowledge of these factors - which will not in general be available to the person whose belief or thought is in question.
The adoption of an externalist account of mental content would seem to support an externalist account of justification, apart from all contentful representation is a belief inaccessible to the believer, then both the justifying statuses of other beliefs in relation to that of the same representation are the status of that content, being totally rationalized by further beliefs for which it will be similarly inaccessible. Thus, contravening the Internalist requirement for justification, as an Internalist must insist that there are no justification relations of these sorts, that our internally associable content can also not be warranted or as stated or indicated without the deviated departure from a course or procedure or from a norm or standard in showing no deviation from traditionally held methods of justification exacting by anything else: But such a response appears lame unless it is coupled with an attempt to show that the externalised account of content is mistaken.
Except for alleged cases of thing s that are evident for one just by being true, it has often been thought, anything is known must satisfy certain criteria as well as being true. Except for alleged cases of self-evident truths, it is often thought that anything that is known must satisfy certain criteria or standards. These criteria are general principles that will make a proposition evident or just make accepting it warranted to some degree. Common suggestions for this role include position ‘p’, e.g., that 2 + 2 = 4, ‘p’ is evident or, if ‘p’ coheres wit h the bulk of one’s beliefs, ‘p’ is warranted. These might be criteria whereby putative self-evident truths, e.g., that one clearly and distinctly conceive s ‘p’, ‘transmit’ the status as evident they already have without criteria to other proposition s like ‘p’, or they might be criteria whereby purely non-epistemic considerations, e.g., facts about logical connections or about conception that need not be already evident or warranted, originally ‘create’ p’s epistemic status. If that in turn can be ‘transmitted’ to other propositions, e.g., by deduction or induction, there will be criteria specifying when it is.
Nonetheless, of or relating to tradition a being previously characterized or specified to convey an idea indirectly, as an idea or theory for consideration and being so extreme a design or quality and lean towards an ecocatorial suggestion that implicate an involving responsibility that include: (1) if a proposition ‘p’, e.g., that 2 + 2 = 4, is clearly and distinctly conceived, then ‘p’ is evident, or simply, (2) if we can’t conceive ‘p’ to be false, then ‘p’ is evident: Or, (3) whenever are immediately conscious o f in thought or experience, e.g., that we seem to see red, is evident. These might be criteria whereby putative self-evident truth s, e.g., that one clearly and distinctly conceive, e.g., that one clearly and distinctly conceive ‘p’, ‘transmit’ the status as evident they already have for one without criteria to other propositions like ‘p’. Alternatively, they might be criteria whereby epistemic status, e.g., p’s being evident, is originally created by purely non-epistemic considerations, e.g., facts about how ‘p’ is conceived which are neither self-evident is already criterial evident.
The result effect, holds that traditional criteria do not seem to make evident propositions about anything beyond our own thoughts, experiences and necessary truths, to which deductive or inductive criteria ma y be applied. Moreover, arguably, inductive criteria, including criteria warranting the best explanation of data, never make things evident or warrant their acceptance enough to count as knowledge.
Contemporary epistemologists suggest that traditional criteria may need alteration in three ways. Additional evidence may subject even our most basic judgements to rational correction, though they count as evident on the basis of our criteria. Warrant may be transmitted other than through deductive and inductive relations between propositions. Transmission criteria might not simply ‘pass’ evidence on linearly from a foundation of highly evident ‘premisses’ to ‘conclusions’ that are never more evident.
A group of statements, some of which purportedly provide support for another. The statements which purportedly provide the support are the premisses while the statement purportedly support is the conclusion. Arguments are typically divided into two categories depending on the degree of support they purportedly provide. Deductive arguments purportedly provide conclusive support for their conclusions while inductively supports the purported provision that inductive arguments purportedly provided only arguments purportedly in the providing probably of support. Some, but not all, arguments succeed in providing support for their conclusions. Successful deductive arguments are valid while successful inductive arguments are valid while successful inductive arguments are strong. An argument is valid just in case if all its premisses are true its conclusion is only probably true. Deductive logic provides methods for ascertaining whether or not an argument is valid whereas, inductive logic provides methods for ascertaining the degree of support the premisses of an argument confer on its conclusion.
Finally, proof, least of mention, is a collection of considerations and reasons that instill and sustain conviction that some proposed theorem - the theorem proved - is not only true, but could not possibly be false. A perceptual observation may instill the conviction that water is cold. But a proof that 2 + 5 = 5 must not only instill the conviction that is true that 2 + 3 = 5, but also that 2 + 3 could not be anything but 5.
No one has succeeded in replacing this largely psychological characterization of proofs by a more objective characterization. The representations of reconstructions of proofs as mechanical and semiotical derivation in formal-logical systems all but completely fail to capture ‘proofs’ as mathematicians are quite content to give them. For example, formal-logical derivations depend solely on the logical form of the considered proposition, whereas usually proofs depend in large measure on content of propositions other than their logical form.
Defeated in two wars, Germany appeared to have invaded vast territories of the world’s mind, with Nietzsche himself as no mean conqueror. For his was the vision of things to come. Much, too much, would strike him as déjà vu: Yes, he had foreseen it, and he would understand, for the ‘Modern Mind’ speaks German, not always good German, but fluent German nonetheless, it was, only forced by learning the idiom of Karl Marx, and was delighted to be introduced to itself in the language of Sigmund Freud’ taught by Rank and later Max Weber, It acquired its historical and sociological self-consciousness, moved out of its tidy Newtonian universe on the instruction of Einstein, and followed a design of Oswald Spengler’s in sending, from the depth of its spiritual depression, most ingeniously engineered objects higher than the moon. Whether it discovers, with Heidegger, the true habitation of its Existenza on the frontier boundaries of Nothing, or mediates, with Sartre and Camus le Néant or the Absurd, whether - to pass to its less serous moods - it is nihilistically young and profitably angry in London or rebelliously debauched and Buddhistic in San Francisco - it is part of a story told by Nietzsche.
As for modern German literature and thought, it is hardly an exaggeration to say that they would not be what they are if Nietzsche had never lived. Name almost any poet, man of letters, philosopher, who wrote in German during the twentieth century and attained to stature and influence - Rilke, George, Kafka, Tomas Mann, Ernst Jünger, Musil, Benn, Heidegger, or Jaspers - and you name at the same time Friedrick Nietzsche. He is too, them all - whether or not they know and acknowledge it (most of them do) - what St. Thomas Aquinas was to Dante: The categorical interpreter of a world that they contemplate poetically or philosophically without ever radically upsetting its Nietzschean structure.
He was convinced that it would take at least fifty years before a few men would understand what he had accomplished. He feared that even then his teaching would be misinterpreted and misapplied. “I am terrified,” he wrote, “by the thought of the sort of people who may one day invoke my authority.” Yet is this not, he added, the anguish of every great teacher? Still, the conviction that he was a great teacher never left him after he had passed through that period of sustained inspiration in which he wrote the first part of Zarathustra. After this, all his utterances convey the disquieting self-confidence and the terror of a man who has reached the culmination of that paradox that he embodies, and whichever has since cast its dangerous spell over some of the finest and some of the coarsest minds.
Are we then, in a better position to probe Nietzsche’s mind and too avid, as he anticipated some might, the misunderstanding that he was merely concerned with religious, philosophical, or political controversies fashionable in his day? If this is a misinterpretation, can we put anything more valid in its place? What is the knowledge that he claims to have, raising him in his own opinion far above the contemporary level of thought? What the discovery that serves him as a lever to unhinge the whole fabric of traditional values?
It is the knowledge that God is dead.
The death of God he calls the greatest event in modern history and the cause of extreme danger. Its paradoxical place a value may be contained in these words. He never said that there was no God, but that the External had been vanquished by Time and that the immortal suffered death at the hands of mortals: “God is dead.” It is like a cry mingled of despair and triumph, reducing, by comparison, the whole story of atheism and agnosticism before and after him to the level of respectable mediocrity and making it sound like a collection of announcements by bankers who regret they are unable to invest in an unsafe proposition. Nietzsche, for the nineteenth century, brings to its perverse conclusion a line of religious thought and experience linked with the names of St. Paul, St. Augustine, Pascal, Kierkegaard, and Dostoevsky, minds for whom God has his clearly defined place, but to whom. He came in order to challenge their natural being, making demands that appeared absurd in the light of natural reason. These men are of the family of Jacob: Having wrestled with God for His blessing, they ever after limp through life with the framework of Nature incurably out of joint. Nietzsche too believed that he prevailed against God in that struggle, and won a new name for himself, the name of Zarathustra. However, the words he spoke on his mountain to the angel of the Lord? I will not let thee go, but thou curse me. Or, in words that Nietzsche did in fact speak: “I have on purpose devoted my life to exploring the whole contrast to a truly religious nature. I know the Devil and all his visions of God.
“God is dead” - this is the very core of Nietzsche’s spiritual existence, and what follows is despair and hope in a new greatness of man, visions of catastrophe and glory, the icy brilliance of analytical reason, fathoming with affected irreverence those depths through which are hidden of a ritual healer.
Perhaps by definition alone, comes the unswerving call of atheism, by this is the denial of or lack of belief in the existence of a god or gods. The term atheism comes from the Greek prefix ‘a-‘, meaning “without,” and the Greek word ‘theos’, meaning “deity.” The denial of gods’ existence is also known as strong, or positive, atheism, whereas the lack of belief in a god is known as negative, or weak, atheism. Although atheism is often contrasted with agnosticism - the view that we cannot know whether a deity exists or not and should therefore suspend belief - negative atheism is in fact compatible with agnosticism.
About one-third of the world’s population adheres to a form of Christianity. Latin America has the largest number of Christians, most of whom are Roman Catholics. Islam is practised by over one-fifth of the world’s population, most of whom live in parts of Asia, particularly the Middle East.
Atheism has wide-ranging implications for the human condition. In the rendering absence to belief in a god, as, too, ethical goals must be determined by secular and nonreligious aims of concern, human beings must take full responsibility for their destiny, and death marks the end of a person’s existence. As of 1994 there were an estimated 240 million atheists around the world comprising slightly more than 4 percent of the world’s population, including those who profess atheism, skepticism, disbelief, or irreligion. The estimate of nonbelievers increases significantly, to about 21 percent of the world’s population, if negative atheists are included.
From ancient times, people have at times used atheism as a term of abuse for religious positions they opposed. The first Christians were called atheists because they denied the existence of the Roman deities. Over time, several misunderstandings of atheism have arisen: That atheists are immoral, that morality cannot be justified without belief in God, and that life has no purpose without belief in God. Yet there is no evidence that atheists are any less moral than believers. Many systems of morality have been developed that do not presuppose the existence of a supernatural being. Moreover, the purpose of human life may be based on secular goals, such as the betterment of humankind.
In Western society the term atheism has been used more narrowly to refer to the denial of theism, in particular Judeo-Christian theism, which asserts the existence of an all-powerful, all-knowing, all-good personal being. This being created the universe, took an active interest in human concerns, and guides his creatures through divine disclosure known as revelation. Positive atheists reject this theistic God and the associated beliefs in an afterlife, a cosmic destiny, a supernatural origin of the universe, an immortal soul, the revealed nature of the Bible and the Qur'an (Koran), and a religious foundation for morality.
Theism, however, is not a characteristic of all religions. Some religions reject theism but are not entirely atheistic. Although the theistic tradition is fully developed in the Bhagavad-Gita, the sacred text of Hinduism, earlier Hindu writings known as the Upanishads teach that Brahman (ultimate reality) is impersonal. Positive atheists reject even the pantheistic aspects of Hinduism that equate God with the universe. Several other Eastern religions, including Theravada Buddhism and Jainism, are commonly believed to be atheistic, but this interpretation is not strictly correct. These religions do reject a theistic God believed to have created the universe, but they accept numerous lesser gods. At most, such religions are atheistic in the narrow sense of rejecting theism.
One of the most controversial works of 19th-century philosophy, Thus Spake Zarathustra 1883-1885, articulated German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche’s theory of the Übermensch, a term translated as “Superman” or “Overman.” The Superman was an individual who overcame what Nietzsche termed the “slave morality” of traditional values, and lived according to his own morality. Nietzsche also advanced his idea that “God is dead,” or that traditional morality was no longer relevant in people’s lives. In this passage, the sage Zarathustra came down from the mountain where he had spent the last ten years alone to preach to the people.
In the Western intellectual world, nonbelief in the existence of God is a widespread phenomenon with a long and distinguished history. Philosophers of the ancient world such as Lucretius were nonbelievers. Even in the Middle Ages (5th to 15th centuries) there were currents of thought that questioned theist assumptions, including skepticism, the doctrine that true knowledge is impossible, and naturalism, the belief that only natural forces control the world. Several leading thinkers of the Enlightenment (1700-1789) were professed atheists, including Danish writer Baron Holbach and French encyclopedist Denis Diderot. Expressions of nonbelief also are found in classics of Western literature, including the writings of English poets Percy Shelley and Lord Byron, the English novelist Thomas Hardy, including French philosophers’ Voltaire and Jean-Paul Sartre, the Russian author Ivan Turgenev, and the American writers’ Mark Twain and Upton Sinclair. In the 19th century the most articulate and best-known atheists and critics of religion were German philosophers’ Ludwig Feuerbach, Karl Marx, Arthur Schopenhauer, and Friedrich Nietzsche. British philosopher Bertrand Russell, Austrian psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud, and Sartre are among the 20th century’s most influential atheists.
Nineteenth-century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche was an influential critic of religious systems, especially Christianity, for which he felt chained to the thickening herd morality. By declaring that “God is dead,” Nietzsche signified that traditional religious belief in God no longer played a central role in human experience. Nietzsche believed we would have to find secular justifications for morality to avoid nihilism - the absence of all belief.
Atheists justify their philosophical position in several different ways. Negative atheists attempt to establish their position by refuting typical theist arguments for the existence of God, such as the argument from first cause, the argument from design, the ontological argument, and the argument from religious experience. Other negative atheists assert that any statement about God is meaningless, because attributes such as all-knowing and all-powerful cannot be comprehended by the human mind. Positive atheists, on the other hand, defend their position by arguing that the concept of God is inconsistent. They question, for example, whether a God who is all-knowing can also be all-good and how a God who lacks bodily existence can be all-knowing.
Some positive atheists have maintained that the existence of evil makes the existence of God improbable. In particular, atheists assert that theism does not provide an adequate explanation for the existence of seemingly gratuitous evil, such as the suffering of innocent children. Theists commonly defend the existence of evil by claiming that God desires that human beings have the freedom to choose between good and evil, or that the purpose of evil is to build human character, such as the ability to persevere. Positive atheists counter that justifications for evil in terms of human free will leave unexplained why, for example, children suffer because of genetic diseases or abuse from adults. Arguments that God allows pain and suffering to build human character fail, in turn, to explain why there was suffering among animals before human beings evolved and why human character could not be developed with less suffering than occurs in the world. For atheists, a better explanation for the presence of evil in the world is that God does not exist.
Atheists have also criticized historical evidence used to support belief in the major theistic religions. For example, atheists have argued that a lack of evidence casts doubt on important doctrines of Christianity, such as the virgin birth and the resurrection of Jesus Christ. Because such events are said to represent miracles, atheists assert that extremely strong evidence is necessary to support their occurrence. According to atheists, the available evidence to support these alleged miracles - from Biblical, pagan, and Jewish sources - is weak, and therefore such claims should be rejected.
Atheism is primarily a reaction to, or a rejection of, religious belief, and thus does not determine other philosophical beliefs. Atheism has sometimes been associated with the philosophical ideas of materialism, which holds that only matter exists. Communism, which asserts that religion impedes human progress, and rationalism, which emphasizes analytic reasoning over other sources of knowledge. However, there is no necessary connection between atheism and these positions. Some atheists have opposed communism and some have rejected materialism. Although nearly all contemporary materialists are atheists, the ancient Greek materialist Epicurus believed the gods were made of matter in the form of atoms. Rationalists such as French philosopher René Descartes have believed in God, whereas atheists such as Sartre are not considered to be rationalists. Atheism has also been associated with systems of thought that reject authority, such as anarchism, a political theory opposed to all forms of government, and existentialism, a philosophic movement that emphasizes absolute human freedom of choice; there is however no necessary connection between atheism and these positions. British analytic philosopher A.J. Ayer was an atheist who opposed existentialism, while Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard was an existentialist who accepted God. Marx was an atheist who rejected anarchism while Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy, a Christian, embraced anarchism. Because atheism in a strict sense is merely a negation, it does not provide a comprehensive world-view. Presuming other philosophical positions to be outgrowths of atheism is therefore not possible.
Intellectual debate over the existence of God continues to be active, especially on college campuses, in religious discussion groups, and in electronic forums on the Internet. In contemporary philosophical thought, atheism has been defended by British philosopher Antony Flew, Australian philosopher John Mackie, and American philosopher Michael Martin, among others. Leading organizations of unbelief in the United States include The American Atheists, The Committee for the Scientific Study of Religion.
Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900), German philosopher, poet, and classical philologist, who was one of the most provocative and influential thinkers of the 19th century. Nietzsche founded his morality on what he saw as the most basic human drive, the will to power. Nietzsche criticized Christianity and other philosophers’ moral systems as “slave moralities” because, in his view, they chained all members of society with universal rules of ethics. Nietzsche offered, in contrast, a “master morality” that prized the creative influence of powerful individuals who transcended the common rules of society.
Nietzsche studied classical philology at the universities of Bonn and Leipzig and was appointed the professor of classical philology at the University of Basel at the age of 24. Ill health (he was plagued throughout his life by poor eyesight and migraine headaches) forced his retirement in 1879. Ten years later he suffered a mental breakdown from which he never recovered. He died in Weimar in 1900.
In addition to the influence of Greek culture, particularly the philosophies of Plato and Aristotle, Nietzsche was influenced by German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, by the theory of evolution, and by his friendship with German composer Richard Wagner.
Nietzsche’s first major work, Die Geburt der Tragödie aus dem Geiste de Musik (The Birth of Tragedy), appeared in 1872. His most prolific period as an author was the 1880s. During the decade he wrote, Also sprach Zarathustra (Parts one-3, 1883-1884; Part four-4, 1885, and translated to English as, Thus Spake Zarathustra), Jenseits von Gut und Böse, 1886, Beyond Good and Evil - Zur Genealogie de Moral, 1887, also, On the Genealogy of Morals, and the German, Der Antichrist 1888, the English translation, The Antichrist, and Ecce Homo, was completed 1888, and published 1908. Nietzsche’s last major work, The Will to Power, Der Wille zur Macht, was published in 1901.
One of Nietzsche’s fundamental contentions was that traditional value (represented primarily by Christianity) had lost their power in the lives of individuals. He expressed this in his proclamation “God is dead.” He was convinced that traditional values represented a “slave morality,” a morality created by weak and resentful individuals who encouraged such behaviour as gentleness and kindness because the behaviour served their interests. Nietzsche claimed that new values could be created to replace the traditional ones, and his discussion of the possibility led to his concept of the overman or superman.
According to Nietzsche, the masses (whom he termed the herd or mob) conform to tradition, whereas his ideal overman is secure, independent, and highly individualistic. The overman feels deeply, but his passions are rationally controlled. Concentrating on the real world, than on the rewards of the next world promised by religion, the overman affirms life, including the suffering and pain that accompany human existence. Nietzsche’s overman is a creator of values, a creator of its “master morality” that reflects the strength and independence of one who is liberated from all values, except those that he deems valid.
Nietzsche maintained that all human behaviour is motivated by the will to power. In its positive sense, the will to power is not simply power over others, but the power over one’s self that is necessary for creativity. Such power is manifested in the overman's independence, creativity, and originality. Although Nietzsche explicitly denied that any overmen had yet arisen, he mentions several individuals who could serve as models. Among these models he lists Jesus, Greek philosopher Socrates, Florentine thinker Leonardo da Vinci, Italian artist Michelangelo, English playwright William Shakespeare, German author Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Roman ruler Julius Caesar, and French emperor Napoleon I.
The concept of the overman has often been interpreted as one that postulates a master-slave society and has been identified with totalitarian philosophies. Many scholars deny the connection and attribute it to misinterpretation of Nietzsche's work.
An acclaimed poet, Nietzsche exerted much influence on German literature, as well as on French literature and theology. His concepts have been discussed and elaborated upon by such individuals as German philosophers Karl Jaspers and Martin Heidegger, and German Jewish philosopher Martin Buber, German American theologian Paul Tillich, and French writers’ Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre. After World War II (1939-1945), American theologians’ Thomas J.J. Altizer and Paul Van Buren seized upon Nietzsche's proclamation “God is dead” in their attempt to make Christianity relevant to its believers in the 1960s and 1970s.
Nietzsche is openly pessimistic about the possibility of knowledge, for truth: we know (or, believe or imagine) just as much as may be useful in the interests of the human herd, the species: and even what is here called ‘utility’, is ultimately also a mere belief, something imaginary and perhaps precisely that most calamitous stupidity of which we shall perish some day.
This position is very radical. Nietzsche does not simply deny that knowledge, construed as the adequate representation of the world by the intellect, exists. He also refuses the pragmatist identification of knowledge and truth with usefulness: he writes that we think we know what we think is useful, and that we can be quite wrong about the latter.
Nietzsche’s view, his ‘perspectivism’, depends on his claim that there is no sensible conception of a world independent of human interpretation and to which interpretations would correspond if they were to constitute knowledge. He sums up this highly controversial position in The Will to Power: Facts are precisely what there is not, only interpretation.
It is often claimed that perspectivism is self-undermining, if the thesis that all views are interpretations is true then, it is argued, there is at least one view that is not an interpretation. If, on the other hand, the thesis is itself an interpretation, then there is no reason to believe that it is true, and it follows again, that not every view is an interpretation.
Nevertheless, this refutation assumes that if a view of perspectivism itself, is an interpretation that it is wrong. This is not the case, to call any view, including perspectivism. An interpretation is to say that it can be wrong, which is true of all views, and that is not a sufficient refutation. To show the perspectivism is actually false producing another view superior to it on specific epistemological grounds is necessary.
Perspectivism does not deny that particular views can be true. Like some versions of contemporary anti-realism, only by its attributes to specific approaches’ truth in relation to facts specified internally by the approaches themselves. Nonetheless, it refuses to envisage a single independent set of facts, to be accounted for by all theories. Thus Nietzsche grants the truth of specific scientific theories, he does, nevertheless, deny that a scientific interpretation can possibly be ‘the only justifiable interpretation of the world’, neither the fact’s science addresses nor the methods it employs are privileged. Scientific theories serve the purpose for which they have been devised, but these have no priority over the many other purposes of human life.
The existence of many purposes and needs relative to which the value of theories is established - another crucial element of perspectivism - is sometimes thought to imply a lawless relativism. According to which no standards for evaluating purposes and theories can be devised. This is correct only in that Nietzsche denies the existence of a single set of standards for determining epistemic value once and for all. However, he holds that specific views can be compared with and evaluated in relation to one another. The ability to use criteria acceptable in particular circumstances does not presuppose the existence of criteria applicable in all. Agreement is therefore, not always possible, since individuals may sometimes differ over the most fundamental issues dividing them.
Least of mention, Nietzsche would not be troubled by this fact, which his opponents too also have to confront only, as he would argue, to suppress it by insisting on the hope that all disagreements are in principal eliminable even if our practice falls woefully short of the ideal. Nietzsche abandons that ideal. He considers irresoluble disagreement an essential parts of human life.
Since, scientists during the nineteenth century were preoccupied with uncovering the workings of external reality and virtually nothing was known about the physical substrate is of human consciousness, the business of examining the dynamics and structure of mind became the province of ‘social scientists’ and ‘humanists’. Adolphe Quételet proposed a social physics’ that could serve as the basis for a new discipline called sociology, and his contemporary Auguste Comte concluded that a true scientific understanding of the social reality was quite inevitable. Mind, in the view of these figures, was a separate and distinct mechanism subject to the lawful workings of a mechanistic social reality.
More formal European philosophers, such as Immanuel Kant, sought to reconcile representations of external reality in mind with the motions of matter based on the dictates of pure reason. This impulse was also apparent in the utilitarian ethics of Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill, in the historical materialist of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, and in the pragmatism of Charles Smith, William James, and John Dewey. All these thinkers were painfully aware, however, of the inability of reason to posit a self-consistent basis for bridging the gap between mind and matter, and each was obligated to conclude that the realm of the mental exists only in the subjective reality of the individual.
The fatal flaw of pure reason is, of course, the absence of emotion, and purely rational explanations of the division between subjective reality and external reality had limited appeal outside the community of intellectuals, the figure most responsible for infusing our understanding of Cartesian dualism with emotional content was the death of God theologian Friedrich Nietzsche. After declaring that God and ‘divine will’, did not exist, Nietzsche reified the ‘existence’ of consciousness in the domain of subjectivity as the ground for individual ‘will’ and summarily dismissed all previous philosophical attempts to articulate the ‘will to truth’. The problem, claimed Nietzsche, is that linear versions of the ‘will to truth’ disguise the fact that all alleged truths were arbitrarily created in the subjective reality of the individual and are expressions or manifestations of individual ‘will’.
Nietzsche’s emotionally charged defence of intellectual freedom and his radical empowerment of mind as the maker and transformer of the collective fictions that shape human reality in a soulless mechanistic universe proved terribly influential on twentieth-century thought. Nietzsche sought to reinforce his view of the subjective character of scientific knowledge and arithmetic that arose during the last three decades of the nineteenth century. Though a curious course of events, attempts by Edmund Husserl, a philosopher trained in higher math and physics, to resolve this crisis results in a view of the character of human consciousness that closely resembled that of Nietzsche.
The best-known disciple of Husserl was Martin Heidegger, and the work of both figures greatly influenced that of the French atheistic existenualist Jean-Paul Sartre. The work of Husserl, Heidegger, and Sartre became foundational to that of the principal architects of philosophical postmodernism, the deconstructionalists Jacques Lacan, Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Derrida, this direct line found linkage between the nineteenth-century crisis about the epistemological foundations of mathematical physics and the origins of philosophical postmodernism served to perpetuate the Cartesian two world dilemma, in, an even, or oppressive form.
Philosophers like John Locke, Thomas Hobbes, and David Hume tried to articulate some basis for liking the mathematical describable motions of matter with linguistic representations of external reality in the subjective space of mind. Descartes’ compatriot Jean-Jacques Rousseau reified nature as the ground of human consciousness in a state of innocence and proclaimed that ‘Liberty, Equality, Fraternity’ is the guiding principles of this consciousness. Rousseau also made god-like the idea of the ‘general will’ of the people to achieve these goals and declared that those who do not conform to this will were social deviants.
The Enlightenment idea of deism, which imagined the universe as a clockwork and God as the clockmaker, provided grounds for believing in a divine agency lay the moment of creation. It also implied, however, that all the creative forces of the universe were exhausted at origins, that the physical substrates of mind were subject to the same natural laws as matter, and that the only means of mediating the gap between mind and matter was pure reason. Traditional Judeo-Christian theism, which had previously been based on both reason and revelation, responded to the challenge of deism by debasing rationality as a test of faith and embracing the idea that the truth of spiritual reality can be known only through divine revelation. This engendered a conflict between reason and revelation that persists to this day. And it also laid the fundamental for the fierce competition between the mega-narratives of science and religion as frame tale s for mediating the character of each should be ultimately defined.
The most fundamental aspect of intellectual tradition is the assumption that there is a fundamental division between the material and the immaterial world or between the realm of matter and the realm of pure mind and spirit. The metaphysical framework based on this assumption known as ontological dualism. As the word dual implies, the framework is predicated on an ontology, or a conception of the nature of God or Being, that assumes reality has two distinct and separable dimensions. The concept of Being as continuous, immutable, and having a prior or separate existence from the world of change dates from the ancient Greek philosopher Parmenides. The same qualities were associated with the God of the Judeo-Christian tradition, and they were considerably amplified by the role played in the theology by Platonic and Neoplatonic philosophy.
The role of seventeenth-century metaphysics is also apparent in metaphysical presuppositions about matter described by classical enumerations of motion. These presuppositions can be briefly defined as follows: (1) The physical world is made up of inert and changeless matter, and this matter changed only in terms of location in space, (2) the behaviour of matter mirrors physical theory and is inherently mathematical, (3) matter as the unchanging unit of physical reality can be exhaustively understood by mechanics, or by the applied mathematics of motion, and (4) the mind of the observer is separate from the observed system of matter, and the ontological bridge between the two physical law and theory.
Once, again, these presuppositions have a metaphysical basis because they are required to assume the following, - that the full and certain truths about the physical world are revealed in a mathematical structure governed by physical laws, which have a prior or separate existence from this world. While Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, Descartes, and Newton assumed that metaphysics or ontological foundation for these laws was the perfect mind of God, the idea was increasingly regarded, even in the eighteenth century, as somewhat unnecessary, what would endure in an increasingly disguised form was the assumption of ontological dualism. This assumption, which remains alive and well in the debates about scientific epistemology, allowed the truths of mathematical physics to be regarded as having a separate and immutable existence outside the world of change.
As this view of hypotheses and the truths of nature as qualities were extended in the nineteenth century to a mathematical description of phenomena like heat, light, electricity, an magnetism, LaPlaces’ assumptions about the actual character of scientific truths seemed quite correct, this progress suggested that if we could remove all thoughts about the ‘nature of’ or the ‘source of’ phenomena, the pursuit of strictly quantitative concepts would bring us to a complete description of all aspects of physical reality. Subsequently, figures like Combe, Kirchhoff. Hertz, and Poincaré developed a program for the study of nature that was quite different from that of the original creators of classical physics.
The seventeenth-century view of physics as a philosophy of nature or a natural philosophy was displaced by the view of physics as an autonomous science that was ‘the science of nature’. This view, which was premised on the doctrine of positivism, promised to subsume all of the nature with a mathematical analysis of entities in motion and claimed that the true understanding of nature was revealed only in the unmathematical descriptions. Since the doctrine of positivism, assumes that knowledge we call physics resides only in the mathematical formalism of physical theory, it disallows the prospect that the vision of physical reality reveals in physical theory can have any other meaning. In the history of science, the irony is that positivism, which was intended to banish metaphysical concerns from the domain of science, served to perpetuate a seventeenth-century metaphysical assumption about the relationship between physical reality and physical theory.
Kant was to argue that the earlier assumption that our knowledge has the world is a mathematical physics and is wholly determined by the behaviour of physical reality could well be false. Perhaps, he said that the reverse was true - that the objects of nature conform to our knowledge of nature. The relevance of the Kantian position was later affirmed by the leader of the Berlin school of mathematics, Karl Weierstrass, who came to a conclusion that would also be adopted by Einstein - that mathematics is a pure creation of the human mind.
A complete history of the debate over the epistemological foundation of mathematical physics should probably begin with the discovery of irrational numbers by the followers of Pythagoras, the paradoxes of Zeno and Gottfried Leibniz. But since we are more concerned with the epistemological crisis of the late nineteenth century, let us begin with the set theory developed by the German mathematician and logician Georg Cantor. From 1878 to 1897, Cantor created a theory of abstract sets of entities that eventually became a mathematical discipline. A set, as he defined it, is a collection of definite and a distinguishable object in thought or perception conceived as a whole.
Cantor attempted to prove that the proceeds of counting and the definition of integers could be placed on a solid mathematical foundation. His method was repeatedly to place the elements in one set into ‘one-to-one’ correspondence with those in another. In the case of integers, Cantor showed that each integer (1, 2, 3, . . . n) could be paired with an even integer
(2, 4, 6, . . . n), and, therefore, that the set of all integers was equal to the set of all even numbers.
Formidably, Cantor discovered that some infinite sets were larger than others and that infinite sets formed a hierarchy of ever greater infinities. After this failing attempt to save the classical view of logical foundations and internal consistency of mathematical systems, it soon became obvious that a major crack had appeared in the seemingly solid foundations of number and mathematics. Meanwhile, an impressive number of mathematicians began to see that everything from functional analysis to the theory of real numbers depended on the problematic character of number itself.
In 1886, Nietzsche was delighted to learn the classical view of mathematics as a logical consistent and self-contained system that could prove it might be undermined. And his immediate and unwarranted conclusion was that all of logic and the whole of mathematics were nothing more than fictions perpetuated by those who exercised their will to power. With his characteristic sense of certainty, Nietzsche does precisely proclaim. “Without accepting the fictions of logic, without measuring reality against the purely invented world of the unconditional and self-identical, without a constant falsification of the world by means of numbers, man could not live.”
Many writers, along with a few well-known new-age gurus, have played fast and loosely with firm interpretations of some new but informal understanding grounded within the mental in some vague sense of cosmic consciousness. However, these new age nuances are ever so erroneously placed in the new-age section of a commercial bookstore and purchased by those interested in new-age literature, and they will be quite disappointed.
Research in neuroscience has shown that language processing is a staggering complex phenomenon that places incredible demands on memory and learning. Language functions extend, for example, into all major lobes of the neocortex: Auditory opinion is associated with the temporal area; tactile information is associated with the parietal area, and attention, working memory, and planning are associated with the frontal cortex of the left or dominant hemisphere. The left prefrontal region is associated with verb and noun production tasks and in the retrieval of words representing action. Broca’s area, next to the mouth-tongue region of a motor cortex, is associated with vocalization in word formation, and Wernicke’s area, by the auditory cortex, is associated with sound analysis in the sequencing of words.
Lower brain regions, like the cerebellum, have also evolved in our species to help in language processing. Until recently, the cerebellum was thought to be exclusively involved with automatic or preprogrammed movements such as throwing a ball, jumping over a high hurdle or playing noted orchestrations as on a musical instrument. Imaging studies in neuroscience suggest, however, that the cerebellum awaken within the smoldering embers brought aflame by the sparks of awakening consciousness, to think communicatively during the spoken exchange. Mostly actuated when the psychological subject occurs in making difficult the word associations that the cerebellum plays a role in associations by providing access to automatic word sequences and by augmenting rapid shifts in attention.
Critically important to the evolution of enhanced language skills are that behavioural adaptive adjustments that serve to precede and situate biological changes. This represents a reversal of the usual course of evolution where biological change precedes behavioural adaption. When the first hominids began to use stone tools, they probably rendered of a very haphazard fashion, by drawing on their flexible ape-like learning abilities. Still, the use of this technology over time opened a new ecological niche where selective pressures occasioned new adaptions. A tool use became more indispensable for obtaining food and organized social behaviours, mutations that enhanced the use of tools probably functioned as a principal source of selection for both bodied and brains.
The fist stone choppers appear in their fossil executions seem as the remnant fragments remaining about 2.5 million years ago, and they appear to have been fabricated with a few sharp blows of stone on stone. If these primitive tools are reasonable, which were hand-held and probably used to cut flesh and to chip bone to expose the marrow, were created by Homo habilis - the first large-brained hominid. Stone making is obviously a skill passed on from one generation to the next by learning as opposed to a physical trait passed on genetically. After these tools became critical to survival, this introduced selection for learning abilities that did not exist for other species. Although the early tool makers may have had brains roughly comparable to those of modern apes, they were already confronting the processes for being adapted for symbol learning.
The first symbolic representations were probably associated with social adaptations that were quite fragile, and any support that could reinforce these adaptions in the interest of survival would have been favoured by evolution. The expansion of the forebrain in Homo habilis, particularly the prefrontal cortex, was on of the core adaptations. This adaption was enhanced over time by increased connectivity to brain regions involved in language processing.
Imagining why incremental improvements in symbolic representations provided a selective advantage is easy. Symbolic communication probably enhanced cooperation in the relationship of mothers to infants, allowed forgoing techniques to be more easily learned, served as the basis for better coordinating scavenging and hunting activities, and generally improved the prospect of attracting a mate. As the list of domains in which symbolic communication was introduced became longer over time, this probably resulted in new selective pressures that served to make this communication more elaborate. After more functions became dependent on this communication, those who failed in symbol learning or could only use symbols awkwardly were less likely to pass on their genes to subsequent generations.
The crude language of the earliest users of symbolics must have been considerably gestured and nonsymbiotic vocalizations. Their spoken language probably became reactively independent and a closed cooperative system.
The general idea is very powerful, however, the relevance of spatiality to self-consciousness comes about not merely because the world is spatial but also because the self-conscious subject is a spatial element of the world. One cannot be self-conscious without being aware that one is a spatial element of the world, and one cannot be ware that one is a spatial element of the world without a grasp of the spatial nature of the world. Face to face, the idea of a perceivable, objective spatial world that causes ideas too subjectively becoming to denote in the world. During which time, his perceptions as they have of changing position within the world and to the more or less stable way the world is. The idea that there is an objective world and the idea that the subject is somewhere, and where he is given by what he can perceive.
Research, however distant, are those that neuroscience reveals in that the human brain is a massive parallel system which language processing is widely distributed. Computers generated images of human brains engaged in language processing reveals a hierarchal organization consisting of complicated clusters of brain areas that process different component functions in controlled time sequences. And it is now clear that language processing is not accomplished by stand-alone or unitary modules that evolved with the addition of separate modules that were eventually wired together on some neutral circuit board.
While the brain that evolved this capacity was obviously a product of Darwinian evolution, the most critical precondition for the evolution of this brain cannot be simply explained in these terms. Darwinian evolution can explain why the creation of stone tools altered conditions for survival in a new ecological niche in which group living, pair bonding, and more complex social structures were critical to survival. And Darwinian evolution can also explain why selective pressures in this new ecological niche favoured preadaptive changes required for symbolic communication. All the same, this communication resulted directly through its passing an increasingly atypically structural complex and intensively condensed behaviour. Social evolution began to take precedence over physical evolution in the sense that mutations resulting in enhanced social behaviour became selectively advantageously within the context of the social behaviour of hominids.
Because this communication was based on symbolic vocalization that required the evolution of neural mechanisms and processes that did not evolve in any other species. As this marked the emergence of a mental realm that would increasingly appear as separate and distinct from the external material realm.
If the emergent reality in this mental realm cannot be reduced to, or entirely explained as for, the sum of its parts, it seems reasonable to conclude that this reality is greater than the sum of its parts. For example, a complete proceeding of the manner in which light in particular wave lengths has ben advancing by the human brain to generate a particular colour says nothing about the experience of colour. In other words, a complete scientific description of all the mechanisms involved in processing the colour blue does not correspond with the colour blue as perceived in human consciousness. And no scientific description of the physical substrate of a thought or feeling, no matter how accomplish it can but be accounted for in actualized experience, especially of a thought or feeling, as an emergent aspect of global brain function.
If we could, for example, define all of the neural mechanisms involved in generating a particular word symbol, this would reveal nothing about the experience of the word symbol as an idea in human consciousness. Conversely, the experience of the word symbol as an idea would reveal nothing about the neuronal processes involved. And while one mode of understanding the situation necessarily displaces the other, both are required to achieve a complete understanding of the situation.
Even if we are to include two aspects of biological reality, finding to a more complex order in biological reality is associated with the emergence of new wholes that are greater than the orbital parts. Yet, the entire biosphere is of a whole that displays self-regulating behaviour that is greater than the sum of its parts. The emergence of a symbolic universe based on a complex language system could be viewed as another stage in the evolution of more complicated and complex systems. As marked and noted by the appearance of a new profound complementarity in relationships between parts and wholes. This does not allow us to assume that human consciousness was in any sense preordained or predestined by natural process. But it does make it possible, in philosophical terms at least, to argue that this consciousness is an emergent aspect of the self-organizing properties of biological life.
The scientific implications to the relationship between parts (Qualia) and indivisible whole (the universe) are quite staggering. Our primary concern, however, is a new view of the relationship between mind and world that carries even larger implications in human terms. When factors into our understanding of the relationship between parts and wholes in physics and biology, then mind, or human consciousness, must be viewed as an emergent phenomenon in a seamlessly interconnected whole called the cosmos.
All that is required to embrace the alternative view of the relationship between mind and world that are consistent with our most advanced scientific knowledge is a commitment to metaphysical and epistemological realism and a willingness to follow arguments to their logical conclusions. Metaphysical realism assumes that physical reality or has an actual existence independent of a human observer or any act of observation, epistemological realism assumes that progress in science requires strict adherence to scientific mythology, or to the rules and procedures for doing science. If one can accept these assumptions, most of the conclusions drawn should appear fairly self-evident in logical and philosophical terms. And it is also not necessary to attribute any extra-scientific properties to the whole to understand and embrace the new relationship between part and whole and the alternative view of human consciousness that is consistent with this relationship. This is, in this that our distinguishing character between what can be “proven” in scientific terms and what can be reasonably “inferred” in philosophical terms based on the scientific evidence.
Moreover, advances in scientific knowledge rapidly became the basis for the creation of a host of new technologies. Yet, those of which are responsible for evaluating the benefits and risks associated with the use of these technologies, much less their potential impact on human needs and values, normally had expertise on only one side of a two-culture divide. Perhaps, more important, many of the potential threats to the human future - such as, to, environmental pollution, arms development, overpopulation, and spread of infectious diseases, poverty, and starvation - can be effectively solved only by integrating scientific knowledge with knowledge from the social sciences and humanities. We have not done so for a simple reason - the implications of the confusing new fact of nature called non-locality cannot be properly understood without some familiarity wit the actual history of scientific thought. The intent is to suggest that what be most important about this back-ground can be understood in its absence. Those who do not wish to struggle with the small and perhaps, less, then there were fewer in amounts of back-ground implications should feel free to ignore it. But this material will be no more challenging as such, that the hope is that from those of which will find a common ground for understanding and that will meet again on this commonly functions in an effort to close of its circle, resolve the equations of eternity and complete the universe made obtainable to gain into the profound mysteriousness through which its unification holds itself there-within.
Based on what we now know about the evolution of human language abilities, however, it seems clear that our real or actualized self is not imprisoned in our minds. It is implicitly a part of the larger whole of biological life, human observers its existence from embedded relations to this whole, and constructs its reality as based on evolved mechanisms that exist in all human brains. This suggests that any sense of the “otherness” of self and world be is an illusion, in that disguises of its own actualization are to find all its relations between the part that are of their own characterization. Its self as related to the temporality of being whole is that of a biological reality. It can be viewed, of course, that a proper definition of this whole must not include the evolution of the larger undissectible whole. Yet, the cosmos and unbroken evolution of all life, by that of the first self-replication molecule that was the ancestor of DNA. It should include the complex interactions that have proven that among all the parts in biological reality that any resultant of emerging is self-regulating. This, of course, is responsible to properties owing to the whole of what might be to sustain the existence of the parts.
Founded on complications and complex coordinate systems in ordinary language may be conditioned as to establish some developments have been descriptively made by its physical reality and metaphysical concerns. That is, that it is in the history of mathematics and that the exchanges between the mega-narratives and frame tales of religion and science were critical factors in the minds of those who contributed. The first scientific revolution of the seventeenth century, allowed scientists to better them in the understudy of how the classical paradigm in physical reality has marked results in the stark Cartesian division between mind and world that became one of the most characteristic features of Western thought. This is not, however, another strident and ill-mannered diatribe against our misunderstandings, but drawn upon equivalent self realization and undivided wholeness or predicted characterlogic principles of physical reality and the epistemological foundations of physical theory.
Scientific knowledge is an extension of ordinary language into greater levels of abstraction and precision through reliance upon geometry and numerical relationships. We imagine that the seeds of the scientific imagination were planted in ancient Greece. This, of course, opposes any other option but to speculate some displacement afar from the Chinese or Babylonian cultures. Partly because the social, political, and economic climates in Greece were more open in the pursuit of knowledge along with greater margins that reflect upon cultural accessibility. Another important factor was that the special character of Homeric religion allowed the Greeks to invent a conceptual framework that would prove useful in future scientific investigations. But it was only after this inheritance from Greek philosophy was wedded to some essential feature of Judeo-Christian beliefs about the origin of the cosmos that the paradigm for classical physics emerged.
The Greek philosophers we now recognized as the originator’s scientific thoughts were oraclically mystic who probably perceived their world as replete with spiritual agencies and forces. The Greek religious heritage made it possible for these thinkers to attempt to coordinate diverse physical events within a framework of immaterial and unifying ideas. The fundamental assumption that there is a pervasive, underlying substance out of which everything emerges and into which everything returns are attributed to Thales of Miletos. Thales had apparently transcended to this conclusion out of the belief that the world was full of gods, and his unifying substance, water, was similarly charged with spiritual presence. Religion in this instance served the interests of science because it allowed the Greek philosophers to view “essences” underlying and unifying physical reality as if they were “substances.”
The history of science grandly testifies to the manner in which scientific objectivity results in physical theories that must be assimilated into “customary points of view and forms of perception.” The framers of classical physics derived, like the rest of us there, “customary points of view and forms of perception” from macro-level visualized experience. Thus, the descriptive apparatus of visualizable experience became reflected in the classical descriptive categories.
A major discontinuity appears, however, as we moved from descriptive apparatus dominated by the character of our visualizable experience to a complete description of physical reality in relativistic and quantum physics. The actual character of physical reality in modern physics lies largely outside the range of visualizable experience. Einstein, was acutely aware of this discontinuity: “We have forgotten what features of the world of experience caused us to frame pre-scientific concepts, and we have great difficulty in representing the world of experience to ourselves without the spectacles of the old-established conceptual interpretation. There is the further difficulty that our language is compelled to work with words that are inseparably connected with those primitive concepts.”
It is time, for the religious imagination and the religious experience to engage the complementary truths of science in filling that which is silence with meaning. However, this does not mean that those who do not believe in the existence of God or Being should refrain in any sense for assessing the implications of the new truths of science. Understanding these implications does not require to some ontology, and is in no way diminished by the lack of ontology. And one is free to recognize a basis for an exchange between science and religion since one is free to deny that this basis exists - there is nothing in our current scientific world-view that can prove the existence of God or Being and nothing that legitimate any anthropomorphic conceptions of the nature of God or Being. The question of belief in ontology remains what it has always been - a question, and the physical universe on the most basic level remains what has always been - a riddle. And the elemental answer to the question and the ultimate meaning of the riddle is and probably will always be, a matter of personal choice and conviction, in that the finding by some conclusive evidences that openly evince its question, is, much less, that the riddle, is precisely and explicitly relationally found that of, least of mention, a requiring explication that evokes of an immediate introduction for which is the unanswerable representation thereof. In that of its finding as such, their assembling to gather by some inspiring of formidable combinations awaiting the presence to the future. Wherefore, in its secretly enigmatically hidden reservoir lay of the continuous phenomenons, in that, for we are to discover or rediscover upon which the riddle has to undertake by the evincing properties that bind all substantive quantifications raised of all phenomena that adhere to the out-of-the-ordinary endlessnes. That once found might that we realize that its answer belongs but to no man, because once its riddle is solved the owing results are once-more, the afforded efforts gainfully to employ in the obtainable acquirements for which categorize in all of what we seek. In that, the self-naming proclamation belongs only to an overflowing Nothingness, whereby its own bleeding is to call for that which speaks of Nothing. Subsequently, there remains are remnant infractions whose fragments also bleed from their pours as Nothing, for Nothingness means more than Nothingness. If, only to recover in the partialities that unify consciousness, but, once, again, the continuous flow of Nothing gives only to itself the vacuousness that Nothingness belongs of an unchanging endlessness.
Our frame reference point works mostly to incorporate in an abounding classical set affiliation between mind and world, by that lay to some defining features and fundamental preoccupations, for which there is certainly nothing new in the suggestion that contemporary scientific world-view legitimates an alternate conception of the relationship between mind and world. The essential point of attention is that one of “consciousness” and remains in a certain state of our study.
But at the end of this, sometimes labourious journey that precipitate to some conclusion that should make the trip very worthwhile. Initiatory comments offer resistance in contemporaneous physics or biology for believing of the “I” in the stark Cartesian division between mind and world that some have rather aptly described as “the disease of the Western mind.”
Following the fundamental explorations that include questions about knowledge and the intuitive certainty by which but even here the epistemic concepts involved, as this aim is to provide a unified framework for understanding the universe. That in giving the immaterial essences that gave form and structure to this universe were being coded in geometrical and mathematical ideas. And this insight led him to invented algebraic geometry.
A scientific understanding to these ideas could be derived, as did that Descartes declared, that with the aid of precise deduction, and he also claimed that the contours of physical reality could be laid out in three-dimensional coordinates. In classical physics, external reality consisted of inert and inanimate matter moving according to wholly deterministic natural laws, and collections of discrete atomized parts made up wholes. Classical physics was also premised, however, a dualistic conception of reality as consisting of abstract disembodied ideas existing in a domain separate form and superior to sensible objects and movements. The notion that the material world experienced by the senses was inferior to the immaterial world experienced by mind or spirit has been blamed for frustrating the progress of physics up too at least the time of Galileo. But in one very important respect, it also made the first scientific revolution possible. Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, and Newton firmly believed that the immaterial geometrical and mathematical ideas that inform physical reality had a prior existence in the mind of God and that doing physics was a form of communion with these ideas.
The tragedy of the Western mind is a direct consequence of the stark Cartesian division between mind and world. This is the tragedy of the modern mind which “solved the riddle of the universe,” but only to replace it by another riddle: The riddle of itself. Yet, we discover the “certain principles of physical reality,” said Descartes, “not by the prejudices of the senses, but by rational analysis, which thus possess so great evidence that we cannot doubt of their truth.” Since the real, or that which actually remains external to ourselves, was in his view only that which could be represented in the quantitative terms of mathematics, Descartes concluded that all qualitative aspects of reality could be traced to the deceitfulness of the senses.
Given that Descartes distrusted the information from the senses to the point of doubting the perceived results of repeatable scientific experiments, how did he conclude that our knowledge of the mathematical ideas residing only in mind or in human subjectivity was accurate, much less the absolute truth? He did so by making a leap of faith - God constructed the world, said Descartes, according to the mathematical ideas that our minds could uncover in their pristine essence. The truths of classical physics as Descartes viewed them were quite literally “revealed” truths, and it was this seventeenth-century metaphysical presupposition that became in the history of science what is termed the “hidden ontology of classical epistemology.” Descartes lingers in the widespread conviction that science does not provide a “place for man” or for all that we know as distinctly human in subjective reality.
The historical notion in the unity of consciousness has had an interesting history in philosophy and psychology. Taking Descartes to be the first major philosopher of the modern period, the unity of consciousness was central to the study of the mind for the whole of the modern period until the 20th century. The notion figured centrally in the work of Descartes, Leibniz, Hume, Reid, Kant, Brennan, James, and, in most of the major precursors of contemporary philosophy of mind and cognitive psychology. It played a particularly important role in Kant's work.
A couple of examples will illustrate the role that the notion of the unity of consciousness played in this long literature. Consider a classical argument for dualism (the view that the mind is not the body, indeed is not made out of matter at all). It starts like this: When I consider the mind, which is to say of myself, as far as I am only a thinking thing, I cannot distinguish in myself any parts, but apprehend myself to be clearly one and entire.
Here is another, more elaborate argument based on unified consciousness. The conclusion will be that any system of components could never achieve unified consciousness acting in concert. William James' well-known version of the argument starts as follows: Take a sentence of a dozen words, take twelve men, and to each word. Then stand the men in a row or jam them in a bunch, and let each think of his word as intently as he will; Nowhere will there be a consciousness of the whole sentence.
James generalizes this observation to all conscious states. To get dualism out of this, we need to add a premise: That if the mind were made out of matter, conscious states would have to be distributed over some group of components in some relevant way. Nevertheless, this thought experiment is meant to show that conscious states cannot be so distributed. Therefore, the conscious mind is not made out of matter. Calling the argument that James is using is the Unity Argument. Clearly, the idea that our consciousness of, here, the parts of a sentence are unified is at the centre of the Unity Argument. Like the first, this argument goes all the way back to Descartes. Versions of it can be found in thinkers otherwise as different from one another as Leibniz, Reid, and James. The Unity Argument continued to be influential into the 20th century. That the argument was considered a powerful reason for concluding that the mind is not the body is illustrated in a backhanded way by Kant's treatment of it (as he found it in Descartes and Leibniz, not James, of course).
Kant did not think that we could uncover anything about the nature of the mind, including whether nor is it made out of matter. To make the case for this view, he had to show that all existing arguments that the mind is not material do not work and he set out to do justly that in the Critique of Pure Reason on the Paralogisms of Pure Reason (1781) (paralogisms are faulty inferences about the nature of the mind). The Unity Argument is the target of a major part of that chapter; if one is going to show that we cannot know what the mind is like, we must dispose of the Unity Argument, which purports to show that the mind is not made out of matter. Kant's argument that the Unity Argument does not support dualism is simple. He urges that the idea of unified consciousness being achieved by something that has no parts or components are no less mysterious than its being achieved by a system of components acting together. Remarkably enough, though no philosopher has ever met this challenge of Kant's and no account exists of what an immaterial mind not made out of parts might be like, philosophers continued to rely on the Unity Argument until well into the 20th century. It may be a bit difficult for us to capture this now but the idea any system of components, and for an even stronger reason might not realize that merge with consciousness, that each system of material components, had a strong intuitive appeal for a long time.
The notion that consciousness agrees to unification and was in addition central to one of Kant's own famous arguments, his ‘transcendental deduction of the categories’. In this argument, boiled down to its essentials, Kant claims that to tie various objects of experience together into a single unified conscious representation of the world, something that he simply assumed that we could do, we could probably apply certain concepts to the items in question. In particular we have to apply concepts from each of four fundamental categories of concept: Quantitative, qualitative, relational, and what he called ‘modal’ concepts. Modal concept’s concern of whether an item might exist, does exist, or must exist. Thus, the four kinds of concept are concepts for how many units, what features, what relations to other objects, and what existence status is represented in an experience.
It was relational conceptual representation that most interested Kant and of relational concepts, he thought the concept of cause-and-effect to be by far the most important. Kant wanted to show that natural science (which for him meant primarily physics) was genuine knowledge (he thought that Hume's sceptical treatment of cause and effect relations challenged this status). He believed that if he could prove that we must tie items in our experience together causally if we are to have a unified awareness of them, he would have put physics back on "the secure path of a science.” The details of his argument have exercised philosophers for more than two hundred years. We will not go into them here, but the argument illustrates how central the notion of the unity of consciousness was in Kant's thinking about the mind and its relation to the world.
Although the unity of consciousness had been at the centre of pre-20th century research on the mind, early in the 20th century the notion almost disappeared. Logical atomism in philosophy and behaviourism in psychology were both unsympathetic to the notion. Logical atomism focussed on the atomic elements of cognition (sense data, simple propositional judgments, etc.), rather than on how these elements are tied together to form a mind. Behaviourism urged that we focus on behaviour, the mind being alternatively myth or something otherwise that we cannot and do not need of studying the mysteriousness of science, from which brings meaning and purpose to humanity. This attitude extended to consciousness, of course. The philosopher Daniel Dennett summarizes the attitude prevalent at the time this way: Consciousness may be the last bastion of occult properties, epiphenomena, immeasurable subjective states - in short, the one area of mind best left to the philosophers. Let them make fools of themselves trying to corral the quicksilver of ‘phenomenology’ into a respectable theory.
The unity of consciousness next became an object of serious attention in analytic philosophy only as late as the 1960s. In the years since, new work has appeared regularly. The accumulated literature is still not massive but the unity of consciousness has again become an object of serious study. Before we examine the more recent work, we need to explicate the notion in more detail than we have done so far and introduce some empirical findings. Both are required to understand recent work on the issue.
To expand on our earlier notion of the unity of consciousness, we need to introduce a pair of distinctions. Current works on consciousness labours under a huge, confusing terminology. Different theorists exchange dialogue over the excess consciousness, phenomenal consciousness, self-consciousness, simple consciousness, creature consciousness, states consciousness, monitoring consciousness, awareness as equated with consciousness, awareness distinguished from consciousness, higher orders thought, higher orders experience, Qualia, the felt qualities of representations, consciousness as displaced perception, . . . and on and on and on. We can ignore most of this profusion but we do need two distinctions: between consciousness of objects and consciousness of our representations of objects, and between consciousness of representations and consciousness of self.
It is very natural to think of self-consciousness or, cognitive state more accurately, as a set of cognitive states. Self-knowledge is an example of such a cognitive state. There are plenty of things that I know bout self. I know the sort of thing I am: a human being, a warm-blooded rational animal with two legs. I know of many properties and much of what is happening to me, at both physical and mental levels. I also know things about my past, things I have done and that of whom I have been with other people I have met. But I have many self-conscious cognitive states that are not instances of knowledge. For example, I have the capacity to plan for the future - to weigh up possible courses of action in the light of goals, desires, and ambitions. I am capable of ca certain type of moral reflection, tide to moral self-and understanding and moral self-evaluation. I can pursue questions like, what sort of person I am? Am I the sort of person I want to be? Am I the sort of individual that I ought to be? This is my ability to think about myself. Of course, much of what I think when I think about myself in these self-conscious ways is also available to me to employing in my thought about other people and other objects.
When I say that I am a self-conscious creature, I am saying that I can do all these things. But what do they have in common? Could I lack some and still be self-conscious? These are central questions that take us to the heart of many issues in metaphysics, the philosophy of mind, and the philosophy of psychology.
And, if, in at all, a straightforward explanation to what makes those of the “self contents” immune to error through misidentification concerning the semantics of self, then it seems fair to say that the problem of self-consciousness has been dissolved, at least as much as solved.
This proposed account would be on a par with other noted examples as such as the redundancy theory of truth. That is to say, the redundancy theory or the deflationary view of truth claims that the predicate ‘ . . . true’ does not have a sense, i.e., expresses no substantive or profound or explanatory concept that ought to be the topic of philosophic enquiry. The approach admits of different versions, but centres on the pints (1) that ‘it is true that p’ says no more nor less than ‘p’ (so, redundancy”) (2) that in less direct context, such as ‘everything he said was true’, or ‘all logical consequences of true propositions as true’, the predicated functions as a device enabling us to generalize rather than as an adjective or predicate describing the things he said, or the kinds of propositions that follow from true propositions. For example, its translation is to infer that: (œ p, Q)(P & p
q
q)’ where there is no use of a notion of truth.
There are technical problems in interpreting all uses of the notion of truth in such ways, but they are not generally felt to be insurmountable. The approach needs to explain away apparently substantive uses of the notion, such as . . . ‘science aims at the truth’ or ‘truth is a norm governing discourse. Indeed, postmodernist writing frequently advocates that we must abandon such norms, along with a discredited ‘objective’ concept ion of truth. But perhaps, we can have the norms even when objectivity is problematic, since they can be framed within mention of truth: Science wants to be so that whenever science holds that ‘p’, when ‘p’‘. Discourse is to be regulated by the principle that it is wrong to assert ‘p’. When not-p.
Confronted with the range of putatively self-conscious cognitive states, one might assume that there is a single ability that is presupposed. This is my ability to think about myself, and I can only have knowledge about myself if I have beliefs about myself, and I can only have beliefs about myself if I can entertain thoughts about myself. The same can be said for auto-graphical memories and moral self-understanding. These are ways of thinking about myself.
Of course, much of what I think when I think about myself in these self-conscious ways is also available to me to employ in my thoughts about other people and other objects. My knowledge that I am a human being deploys certain conceptual abilities that I can also deploy in thinking that you are a human being. The same holds when I congratulate myself for satisfying the exacting moral standards of autonomous moral agencies. This involves concepts and descriptions that can apply equally to me and to others. On the other hand, when I think about myself, I am also putting to work an ability that I cannot put to work in thinking about other people and other objects. This is precisely the ability to apply those concepts and descriptions to myself. It has become common to refer to this ability as the ability to entertain “I’-thoughts.
What is an, “I”-thought?” Obviously, an “I”-thought is a thought that involves self-reference. I can think an “I”-thought only by thinking about myself. Equally obvious, though, this cannot be all that there is to say on the subject. I can think thoughts that involve a self-reference but am not “I”-thoughts. Suppose I think that the next person to set a parking ticket in the centre of Toronto deserves everything he gets. Unbeknown to be, the very next recipient of a parking ticket will be me. This makes my thought self-referencing, but it does not make it an “I”-thought. Why not? The answer is simply that I do not know that I will be the next person to get a parking ticket in the down-town area in Toronto. Is ‘A’, is that unfortunate person, then there is a true identity statement of the form I = A, but I do not know that this identity holds, I cannot be ascribed the thoughts that I will deserve everything I get? And say I am not thinking genuine “I”-thoughts, because one cannot think a genuine “I”-thought if one is ignorant that one is thinking about one’s self. So it is natural to conclude that “I”-thoughts involve a distinctive type of self-reference. This is the sort of self-reference whose natural linguistic expression is the first-person pronoun “I,” because one cannot be the first-person pronoun without knowing that one is thinking about oneself.
This is still not quite right, however, because thought contents can be specific, perhaps, they can be specified directly or indirectly. That is, all cognitive states to be considered, presuppose the ability to think about oneself. This is not only that they all have to some commonality, but it is also what underlies them all. We can see is more detail what this suggestion amounts to. This claim is that what makes all those cognitive states modes of self-consciousness is the fact that they all have content that can be specified directly by means of the first person pronoun “I” or, indirectly by means of the direct reflexive pronoun “he,” such they are first-person contents.
The class of first-person contents is not a homogenous class. There is an important distinction to be drawn between two different types of first-person contents, corresponding to two different modes in which the first person can be employed. The existence of this distinction was first noted by Wittgenstein in an important passage from The Blue Book: That there are two different cases in the use of the word “I” (or, “my”) which is called “the use as object” and “the use as subject.” Examples of the first kind of use are these” “My arm is broken,” “I have grown six inches,” “I have a bump on my forehead,” “The wind blows my hair about.” Examples of the second kind are: “I see so-and-so,” “I try to lift my arm,” “I think it will rain,” “I have a toothache.”
The explanations given are of the distinction that hinge on whether or not they are judgements that involve identification. However, one can point to the difference between these two categories by saying: The cases of the first category involve the recognition of a particular person, and there is in these cases the possibility of an error, or as: The possibility of can error has been provided for . . . It is possible that, say in an accident, I should feel a pain in my arm, see a broken arm at my side, and think it is mine when really it is my neighbour’s. And I could, looking into a mirror, mistake a bump on his forehead for one on mine. On the other hand, there is no question of recognizing a person when I say I have toothache. To ask “are you sure that its you who have pains?” Its one and only, would be nonsensical.
Wittgenstein is drawing a distinction between two types of first-person contents. The first type, which is describes as invoking the use of “I” as object, can be analysed in terms of more basic propositions. Such that the thought “I am B” involves such a use of “I.” Then we can understand it as a conjunction of the following two thoughts” “a is B” and “I am a.” We can term the former a predication component and the latter an identification component. The reason for braking the original thought down into these two components is precisely the possibility of error that Wittgenstein stresses in the second passages stated. One can be quite correct in predicating that someone is ‘B’, even though mistaken in identifying oneself as that person.
To say that a statement “a is B” is subject to error through misidentification relative to the term “a” means that the following is possible: The speaker knows some particular thing to be “B,” but makes the mistake of asserting “a is B” because, and only because, he mistakenly thinks that the thing he knows to be “B” is what “a” refers to.
The give direction to, then, is that one cannot be mistaken about who is being thought about. In one sense, Shoemaker’s criterion of immunity to error through misidentification relative to the first-person pronoun (simply “immunity to error through misidentification”) is too restrictive. Beliefs with first-person contents that are immune to error through identification tend to be acquired on grounds that usually do result in knowledge, but they do not have to be. The definition of immunity to error trough misidentification needs to be adjusted to accommodate them by formulating it in terms of justification rather than knowledge.
The connection to be captured is between the sources and grounds from which a belief is derived and the justification there is for that belief. Beliefs and judgements are immune to error through misidentification in virtue of the grounds on which they are based. The category of first-person contents being picked out is not defined by its subject matter or by any points of grammar. What demarcates the class of judgements and beliefs that are immune to error through misidentification is evidence base from which they are derived, or the information on which they are based. So, to take by example, my thought that I have a toothache is immune to error through misidentification because it is based on my feeling a pain in my teeth. Similarly, the fact that I am consciously perceiving you makes my belief that I am seeing you immune to error through misidentification.
To say that a statement “a is B” is subject to error through misidentification relative to the term “a” means that some particular thing is B, because his belief is based on an appropriate evidence base, but he makes the mistake of asserting “a is B” because, and only because, he mistakenly thinks that the thing he justified believes to be ‘B’ is what “a” refers to.
Beliefs with first-person contents that are immune to error through misidentification tend to be acquired on grounds that usually result in knowledge, but they do not have to be. The definition of immunity to error through misidentification needs to be adjusted to accommodate by formulating in terms of justification than knowledge. The connection to be captured is between the sources and grounds from which a belief is derived and the justification there is for that belief. Beliefs and judgements are immune to error through misidentification in virtue of the grounds on which they are based. The category of first-person contents picked out is not defined by its subject matter or by any points of grammar. What demarcates the class of judgements and beliefs that ae immune to error through misidentification is the evidence base from which they are derived, or the information on which they are based. For example, my thought that I have a toothache is immune to error through misidentification because it is based on my feeling a pain in my teeth. Similarly, the fact that I am consciously perceiving you makes my belief that I am seeing you immune to error through misidentification.
A suggestive definition is to enounce that a statement “a is b” is subject to error through misidentification relative to the term “a” means that the following is possible: The speaker is warranted in believing that some particular thing is “b,” because his belief is based on an appropriate evidence base, but he makes the mistake of asserting “a is b” because, and only because, he mistakenly thinks that the thing he justified believes to be “b” is what “a” refers to.
First-person contents that are immune to error through misidentification can be mistaken, but they do have a basic warrant in virtue of the evidence on which they are based, because the fact that they are derived from such an evidence base is closely linked to the fact that they are immune to error thought misidentification. Of course, there is room for considerable debate about what types of evidence base ae correlated with this class of first-person contents. Seemingly, then, that the distinction between different types of first-person content can be characterized in two different ways. We can distinguish between those first-person contents that are immune to error through misidentification and those that are subject to such error. Alternatively, we can discriminate between first-person contents with an identification component and those without such a component. For purposes rendered, in that these different formulations each pick out the same classes of first-person contents, although in interestingly different ways.
All first-person consent subject to error through misidentification contains an identification component of the form “I am a” and employ of the first-person-pronoun contents with an identification component and those without such a component. in that identification component, does it or does it not have an identification component? Acquitted by the pain of some infinite regress, at some stage we will have to arrive at an employment of the first-person pronoun that does not have to arrive at an employment of the first-person pronoun that does not presuppose an identification component, then, is that any first-person content subject to error through misidentification will ultimately be anchored in a first-person content that is immune to error through misidentification.
It is also important to stress how self-consciousness, and any theory of self-consciousness that accords a serious role in self-consciousness to mastery of the semantics of the first-person pronoun, are motivated by an important principle that has governed much if the development of analytical philosophy. This is the principle that the philosophical analysis of though can only proceed through the principle analysis of language. The principle has been defended most vigorously by Michael Dummett.
Even so, thoughts differ from that is said to be among the contents of the mind in being wholly communicable: It is of the essence of thought that I can convey to you the very thought that I have, as opposed to being able to tell you merely something about what my though is like. It is of the essence of thought not merely to be communicable, but to be communicable, without residue, by means of language. In order to understand thought, it is necessary, therefore, to understand the means by which thought is expressed. Dummett goes on to draw the clear methodological implications of this view of the nature of thought: We communicate thoughts by means of language because we have an implicit understanding of the workings of language, that is, of the principles governing the use of language, it is these principles, which relate to what is open to view in the mind other than via the medium of language that endow our sentences with the senses that they carry. In order to analyse thought, therefore, it is necessary to make explicit those principles, regulating our use of language, which we already implicitly grasp.
Many philosophers would want to dissent from the strong claim that the philosophical analysis of thought through the philosophical analysis of language is the fundamental task of philosophy. But there is a weaker principle that is very widely held as The Thought-Language Principle.
As it stands, the problem between to different roles that the pronoun “he” can play of such oracle clauses. On the one hand, “he” can be employed in a proposition that the antecedent of the pronoun (i.e., the person named just before the clause in question) would have expressed using the first-person pronoun. In such a situation that holds that “he,” is functioning as a quasi-indicator. Then when “he” is functioning as a quasi-indicator, it is written as “he.” Others have described this as the indirect reflexive pronoun. When “he” is functioning as an ordinary indicator, it picks out an individual in such a way that the person named just before the clause of opacity need not realize the identity of himself with that person. Clearly, the class of first-person contents is not homogenous class.
A subject has distinguished self-awareness to the extent that he is able to distinguish himself from the environment and its content. He has been distinguishing psychological self-awareness to the extent that he is able to distinguish himself as a psychological subject within a contract space of other psychological subjects. What does this require? The notion of a non-conceptual point of view brings together the capacity to register one’s distinctness from the physical environment and various navigational capacities that manifest a degree of understanding of the spatial nature of the physical environment. One very basic reason for thinking that these two elements must be considered together emerges from a point made in the richness of the self-awareness that accompanies the capacity to distinguish the self from the environment is directly proportion are to the richness of the awareness of the environment from which the self is being distinguished. So no creature can understand its own distinction from the physical enjoinment without having an independent understanding of the nature of the physical environment, and since the physical environment is essentially spatial, this requires an understanding of the spatial nature of the physical environment. but this cannot be the whole story. It leaves unexplained why an understanding should be required of this particular essential feature of the physical environment. After all, it is also an essential feature of the physical environment that it is composed of an object that has both primary and secondary qualities, but there is a reflection of this in the notion of a non-conceptual point of view. More is needed to understand the significance of spatiality.
The very idea of a perceived objective spatial world brings with it the ideas of the subject for being in the world, which there course of his perceptions due to his changing position in the world and to the more or less stable in the way of the world is. The idea that there is an objective world and the idea that the subject is somewhere cannot be separated, and where he is given by what he can perceive.
But the main criteria of his work is ver much that the dependence holds equally in the opposite direction.
It seems that this general idea can be extrapolated and brought to bar on the notion of a non-conceptual point of view. What binds together the two apparently discrete components of a non-conceptual point of view is precisely the fact that a creature’s self-awareness must be awareness of itself as a spatial bing that acts upon and is acted upon by the spatial world. Evans’s own gloss on how a subject’s self-awareness, is awareness of himself as a spatial being involves the subject’s mastery of a simple theory explaining how the world makes his perceptions as they are, with principles like “I perceive such and such, such and such holds at ‘P’; so (probably) am ‘P’ and “I’’: am ‘P?’, such does not hold at ‘P’, so I cannot really be perceiving such and such, even though it appears that I am” (Evans 1982). This is not very satisfactory, though. If the claim is that the subject must explicitly hold these principles, then it is clearly false. If, on the other hand, the claim is that these are the principles of a theory that a self-conscious subject must tacitly know, then the claim seems very uninformative in the absence of any specification of the precise forms of behaviour that can only be explained by there ascription to a body of tacit knowledge. We need an account of what it is for a subject to be correctly described as possessing such a simple theory of perception. The point however, is simply that the notion of as non-conceptual point of view as presented, can be viewed as capturing, at a more primitive level, precisely the same phenomenon that Evans is trying to capture with his notion of a simple theory of perception.
Moreover, stressing the importance of action and movement indicates how the notion of a non-conceptual point of view might be grounded in the self-specifying in for action to be found in visual perception. By that in thinking particularly of the concept of an affordance so central to Gibsonian theories of perception. One important type of self-specifying information in the visual field is information about the possibilities for action and reaction that the environment affords the perceiver, by which that affordancs are non-conceptual first-person contents. The development of a non-conceptual point of view clearly involves certain forms of reasoning, and clearly, we will not have a full understanding of he the notion of a non-conceptual point of view until we have an explanation of how this reasoning can take place. The spatial reasoning engaged over which this reasoning takes place. The spatial reasoning involved in developing a non-conceptual point of view upon the world is largely a matter of calibrating different affordances into an integrated representation of the world.
In short, any learned cognitive ability is contractible out of more primitive abilities already in existence. There are good reasons to think that the perception of affordance is innate. And so if, the perception of affordances is the key to the acquisition of an integrated spatial representation of the environment via the recognition of affordance symmetries, affordance transitivities, and affordance identities, then it is precisely conceivable that the capacities implicated in an integrated representation of the world could emerge non-mysteriously from innate abilities.
Nonetheless, there are many philosophers who would be prepared to countenance the possibility of non-conceptual content without accepting that to use the theory of non-conceptual content so solve the paradox of self-consciousness. This is ca more substantial task, as the methodology that is adapted rested on the first of the marks of content, namely that content-bearing states serve to explain behaviour in situations where the connections between sensory input and behaviour output cannot be plotted in a law-like manner (the functionalist theory of self-reference). As such, not of allowing that every instance of intentional behaviour where there are no such law-like connections between sensory input and behaviour output needs to be explained by attributing to the creature in question of representational states with first-person contents. Even so, many such instances of intentional behaviour do need to be explained in this way. This offers a way of establishing the legitimacy of non-conceptual first-person contents. What would satisfactorily demonstrate the legitimacy of non-conceptual first-person contents would be the existence of forms of behaviour in paralinguistic or nonlinguistic creatures for which inference to the best understanding or explanation (which in this context includes inference to the most parsimonious understanding, or explanation) demands the ascription of states with non-conceptual first-person contents.
The non-conceptual first-person contents and the pick-up of self-specifying information in the structure of exteroceptive perception provide very primitive forms of non-conceptual self-consciousness, even if forms that can plausibly be viewed as in place of one’s birth or shortly afterward. The dimension along which forms of self-consciousness must be compared is the richest of the conception of the self that they provide. All of which, a crucial element in any form of self-consciousness is how it enables the self-conscious subject to distinguish between self and environment - what many developmental psychologists term self-world dualism. In this sense, self-consciousness is essentially a contrastive notion. One implication of this is that a proper understanding of the richness of the conception that we take into account the richness of the conception of the environment with which it is associated. In the case of both somatic proprioception and the pick-up of self-specifying information in exteroceptive perception, there is a relatively impoverished conception of the environment. One prominent limitation is that both are synchronic than diachronic. The distinction between self and environment that they offer is a distinction that is effective at a time but not over time. The contrast between propriospecific and exterospecific invariant in visual perception, for example, provides a way for a creature to distinguish between itself and the world at any given moment, but this is not the same as a conception of oneself as an enduring thing distinguishable over time from an environment that also endures over time.
The notion of a non-conceptual point of view brings together the capacity to register one’s distinctness from the physical environment and various navigational capacities that manifest a degree of understanding of the spatial nature of the physical environment. One very basic reason for thinking that these elements must be considered together emerges from a point made from which the richness of the awareness of the environment from which the self is being distinguished. So no creature can understand its own distinctness from the physical environment without having an independent understanding of the nature of the physical environment, and since the physical environment is essentially spatial, this requires an understanding of the spatial nature of the physical environment. But this cannot be the whole story. It leaves unexplained why an understanding should be required of this particular essential feature of the physical environment. After all, it is also an essential feature of the physical environment that it is composed of objects that have both primary and secondary qualities, but there is no reflection of this in the notion of a non-conceptual point of view. More is needed to understand the significance of spatiality.
The general idea is very powerful, that the relevance of spatiality to self-consciousness comes about not merely because the world is spatial but also because the self-conscious subject is himself a spatial element of the world. One cannot be self-conscious without being aware that one is a spatial element of the world, and one cannot be aware that one is a spatial element of the world, and one cannot be aware that one is a spatial element of the world without a grasp of the spatial nature of the world.
The very idea of perceivable, objective spatial wold bings it the idea of the subject for being in the world, with the course of his perceptions due to his changing position in the world and to the more or less stable way the world is. The idea that there is an objective world and the idea that the subject is somewhere cannot be separated, and where he is given by what he can perceive.
One possible reaction to consciousness, is that it is erroneously only because unrealistic and ultimately unwarranted requirements are being placed on what is to count as genuinely self-referring first-person thoughts. Suppose for such an objection will be found in those theories that attempt to explain first-person thoughts in a way that does not presuppose any form of internal representation of the self or any form of self-knowledge. Consciousness arises because mastery of the semantics of the first-person pronoun is available only to creatures capable of thinking first-person thoughts whose contents involve reflexive self-reference and thus, seem to presuppose mastery of the first-person pronoun. If, thought, it can be established that the capacity to think genuinely first-person thoughts does not depend on any linguistic and conceptual abilities, then arguably the problem of circularity will no longer have purchase.
There is no account of self-reference and genuinely first-person thought that can be read in a way that poses just such a direct challenge to the account of self-reference underpinning the conscious. This is the functionalist account, although spoken before, the functionalist view, reflexive self-reference is a completely unmysterious phenomenon susceptible to a functional analysis. Reflexive self-reference is not dependent upon any antecedent conceptual or linguistic skills. Nonetheless, the functionalist account of a reflexive self-reference is deemed to be sufficiently rich to provide the foundation for an account of the semantics of the first-person pronoun. If this is right, then the circularity at which consciousness is at its heart, and can be avoided.
The circularity problems at the root of consciousness arise because mastery of the semantics of the first-person pronoun requires the capacity to think fist-person thoughts whose natural expression is by means of the first-person pronoun. It seems clear that the circle will be broken if there are forms of first-person thought that are more primitive than those that do not require linguistic mastery of the first-person pronoun. What creates the problem of capacity circularity is the thought that we need to appeal to first-person contents in explaining mastery of the first-person pronoun, whereby its containing association with the thought that any creature capable of entertaining first-person contents will have mastered the first-person pronoun. So if we want to retain the thought that mastery of the first-person pronoun can only be explained in terms of first-person contents, capacity circularity can only be avoided if there are first-person contents that do not presuppose mastery of the first-person pronoun.
On the other hand, however, it seems to follow from everything earlier mentioned about “I”-thoughts that conscious thought in the absence of linguistic mastery of the first-person pronoun is a contradiction in terms. First-person thoughts have first-person contents, where first-person contents can only be specified in terms of either the first-person pronoun or the indirect reflexive pronoun. So how could such thoughts be entertained by a thinker incapable of a reflexive self-reference? How can a thinker who is not capable of reflexively reference? How can a thinker who is not the first-person pronoun be plausibly ascribed thoughts with first-person contents? The thought that, despite all this, there are real first-person contents that do not presuppose mastery of the first-person pronoun is at the core of the functionalist theory of self-reference and first-person belief.
The best developed functionalist theory of self-reference has been provided by Hugh Mellor (1988-1089). The basic phenomenon he is interested in explaining is what it is for a creature to have what he terms a “subjective belief,” that is to say, a belief whose content is naturally expressed by a sentence in the first-person singular and the present tense. The explanation of subjective belief that he offers makes such beliefs independent of both linguistic abilities and conscious beliefs. From this basic account he constructs an account of conscious subjective beliefs and the of the reference of the first-person pronoun “I.” These putatively more sophisticated cognitive states are casually derivable from basic subjective beliefs.
Historically, Heidegger' theory of spatiality distinguishes three different types of space: (1) world-space, (2) regions (Gegend), and (3) Dasein's spatiality. What Heidegger calls "world-space" is space conceived as an “arena” or “container” for objects. It captures both our ordinary conception of space and theoretical space - in particular absolute space. Chairs, desks, and buildings exist “in” space, but world-space is independent of such objects, much like absolute space “in which” things exist. However, Heidegger thinks that such a conception of space is an abstraction from the spatial conduct of our everyday activities. The things that we deal with are near or far relative to us; according to Heidegger, this nearness or farness of things is how we first become familiar with that which we (later) represented to ourselves as "space." This familiarity with which are rendered the understanding of space (in a "container" metaphor or in any other way) possible. It is because we act spatially, going to places and reaching for things to use, that we can even develop a conception of abstract space at all. What we normally think of as space - world-space - turns out not to be what space fundamentally is; world-space is, in Heidegger's terminology, space conceived as vorhanden. It is an objectified space founded on a more basic space-of-action.
Since Heidegger thinks that space-of-action is the condition for world-space, he must explain the former without appealing to the latter. Heidegger's task then is to describe the space-of-action without presupposing such world-space and the derived concept of a system of spatial coordinates. However, this is difficult because all our usual linguistic expressions for describing spatial relations presuppose world-space. For example, how can one talk about the "distance between you and me" without presupposing some sort of metric, i.e., without presupposing an objective access to the relation? Our spatial notions such as "distance," "location," etc. must now be re-described from a standpoint within the spatial relation of self (Dasein) to the things dealt with. This problem is what motivates Heidegger to invent his own terminology and makes his discussion of space awkward. In what follows I will try to use ordinary language whenever possible to explain his principal ideas.
The space-of-action has two aspects: regions (space as Zuhandenheit) and Dasein's spatiality (space as Existentiale). The sort of space we deal within our daily activity is "functional" or zuhanden, and Heidegger's term for it is "region." The places we work and live-the office, the park, the kitchen, etc.-all having different regions that organizes our activities and conceptualized “equipment.” My desk area as my work region has a computer, printer, telephone, books, etc., in their appropriate “places,” according to the spatiality of the way in which I work. Regions differ from space viewed as a "container"; the latter notion lacks a "referential" organization with respect to our context of activities. Heidegger wants to claim that referential functionality is an inherent feature of space itself, and not just a "human" characteristic added to a container-like space.
In our activity, how do we specifically stand with respect to functional space? We are not "in" space as things are, but we do exist in some spatially salient manner. What Heidegger is trying to capture is the difference between the nominal expression "we exist in space" and the adverbial expression "we exist spatially." He wants to describe spatiality as a mode of our existence rather than conceiving space as an independent entity. Heidegger identifies two features of Dasein's spatiality - "de-severance" (Ent-fernung) and "directionality" (Ausrichtung).
De-severance describes the way we exist as a process of spatial self-determination by “making things available” to ourselves. In Heidegger's language, in making things available we "take in space" by "making the farness vanish" and by "bringing things close"
We are not simply contemplative beings, but we exist through concretely acting in the world - by reaching for things and going to places. When I walk from my desk area into the kitchen, I am not simply alternating locations from points ‘A’ to ‘B’ in an arena-like space, but I am “taking in space” as I move, continuously making the “farness” of the kitchen “vanish,” as the shifting spatial perspectives are opened as I go along.
This process is also inherently "directional." Every de-severing is aimed toward something or in a certain direction that is determined by our concern and by specific regions. I must always face and move in a certain direction that is dictated by a specific region. If I want to get a glass of ice tea, instead of going out into the yard, I face toward the kitchen and move in that direction, following the region of the hallway and the kitchen. Regions determine where things belong, and our actions are coordinated in directional ways accordingly.
De-severance, directionality, and regionality are three ways of describing the spatiality of a unified Being-in-the-world. As aspects of Being-in-the-world, these spatial modes of being are equiprimordial. Regions "refer" to our activities, since they are established by our ways of being and our activities. Our activities, in turn, are defined in terms of regions. Only through the region can our de-severance and directionality are established. Our object of concern always appears in a certain context and place, in a certain direction. It is because things appear in a certain direction and in their places “there” that we have our “here.” We orient ourselves and organize our activities, always within regions that must already be given to us.
Heidegger's analysis of space does not refer to temporal aspects of Being-in-the-world, even though they are presupposed. In the second half of Being and Time he explicitly turns to the analysis of time and temporality in a discussion that is significantly more complex than the earlier account of spatiality. Heidegger makes the following five distinctions between types of time and temporality: (1) The ordinary or "vulgar" conception of time; this is time conceived as Vorhandenheit. (2) World-time; this is time as Zuhandenheit. Dasein's temporality is divided into three types: (3) Dasein's inauthentic (uneigentlich) temporality, (4) Dasein's authentic (eigentlich) temporality, and (5) originary temporality or “temporality as such.” The analyses of the vorhanden and zuhanden modes of time are interesting, but it is Dasein's temporality that is relevant to our discussion, since it is this form of time that is said to be founding for space. Unfortunately, Heidegger is not clear about which temporality plays this founding role.
We can begin by excluding Dasein's inauthentic temporality. This mode of time refers to our unengaged, "average" way in which we regard time. It is the “past we forget” and the “future we expect,” all without decisiveness and resolute understanding. Heidegger seems to consider that this mode of a temporality is the temporal dimension of de-severance and directionality, since de-severance and directionality deal only with everyday actions. As such, is the inauthenticity founded within a temporality that must in themselves be set up in an authentic basis of some sort. The two remaining candidates for the foundation are Dasein's authentic temporality and originary temporality.
Dasein's authentic temporality is the "resolute" mode of temporal existence. An authentic temporality is realized when Dasein becomes aware of its own finite existence. This temporality has to do with one's grasp of his or her own life as a whole from one's own unique perspective. Life gains meaning as one's own life-project, bounded by the sense of one's realization that he or she is not immortal. This mode of time appears to have a normative function within Heidegger's theory. In the second half of BT he often refers to inauthentic or "everyday" mode of time as lacking some primordial quality which authentic temporality possesses.
In contrast, an originary temporality is the formal structure of Dasein's temporality itself. In addition to its spatial Being-in-the-world, Dasein also exists essentially as "projection." Projection is oriented toward the future, and this coming orientation regulates our concern by constantly realizing various possibilities. A temporality is characterized formally as this dynamic structure of "a future that makes present in the process of having been." Heidegger calls the three moments of temporality - the future, the present, and the past - the three ecstasies of the temporality. This mode of time is not normative but rather formal or neutral; as Blattner argues, the temporal features that constitute Dasein's temporality describe both inauthentic and authentic temporalities.
There are some passages that indicate that authentic temporality is the primary manifestation of the temporality, because of its essential orientation toward the future. For instance, Heidegger states that "temporality first showed itself in anticipatory resoluteness." Elsewhere, he argues that "the ‘time’ which is accessible to Dasein's common sense is not primordial, but arises rather from authentic temporality." In these formulations, authentic to the temporality is said to find of other inauthentic modes. According to Blattner, this is "by far the most common" interpretation of the status of authentic time.
However, to argue with Blattner and Haar, in that there are far more passages where Heidegger considers an originary temporality as distinct from authentic temporality, and founding for it and for Being-in-the-world as well. Here are some examples: The temporality has different possibilities and different ways of temporalizing itself. The basic possibilities of existence, the authenticity and inauthenticity of Dasein, are grounded ontologically on possible temporalizations of temporality. Time is primordial as the temporalizing of a temporality, and as such it makes possible the Constitution of the structure of care.
Heidegger's conception seems to be that it is because we are fundamentally temporal - having the formal structure of ecstatic-horizontals unity - that we can project, authentically or inauthentically, our concernful dealings in the world and exist as Being-in-the-world. It is on this account that temporality is said to found spatiality.
Since Heidegger uses the term "temporality" rather than "an authentic temporality" whenever the founding relation is discussed between space and time, I will begin the following analysis by assuming that it is originary temporality that founds Dasein's spatiality. On this assumption two interpretations of the argument are possible, but both are unsuccessful given his phenomenological framework.
The principal argument, entitled "The Temporality of the Spatiality that is Characteristic of Dasein." Heidegger begins the section with the following remark: Though the expression `temporality' does not signify what one understands by "time" when one talks about `space and time', nevertheless spatiality seems to make up another basic attribute of Dasein corresponding to temporality. Thus with Dasein's spatiality, existential-temporal analysis seems to come to a limit, so that this entity that we call "Dasein," must be considered as `temporal' `and' as spatial coordinately.
Accordingly, Heidegger asks, "Has our existential-temporal analysis of Dasein thus been brought to a halt . . . by the spatiality that is characteristic of Dasein . . . and Being-in-the-world?" His answer is no. He argues that since "Dasein's constitution and its ways to be are possible ontologically only on the basis of temporality," and since the "spatiality that is characteristic of Dasein . . . belongs to Being-in-the-world," it follows that "Dasein's specific spatiality must be grounded in temporality."
Heidegger's claim is that the totality of regions-de-severance-directionality can be organized and re-organized, "because Dasein as temporality is ecstatic-horizontals in its Being." Because Dasein exists futurely as "for-the-sake-of-which," it can discover regions. Thus, Heidegger remarks: "Only on the basis of its ecstatic-horizontals temporality is it possible for Dasein to break into space."
However, in order to establish that temporality founds spatiality, Heidegger would have to show that spatiality and temporality must be distinguished in such a way that temporality not only shares a content with spatiality but also has additional content as well. In other words, they must be truly distinct and not just analytically distinguishable. But what is the content of "the ecstatic-horizontals constitution of temporality?" Does it have a content above and beyond Being-in-the-world? Nicholson poses the same question as follows: Is it human care that accounts for the characteristic features of a humanistic temporality? Or is it, as Heidegger says, human temporality that accounts for the characteristic features of human care, serves as their foundation? The first alternative, according to Nicholson, is to reduce temporality to care: "the specific attributes of the temporality of Dasein . . . would be in their roots not aspects of temporality but reflections of Dasein's care." The second alternative is to treat temporality as having some content above and beyond care: "the three-fold constitution of care stems from the three-fold constitution of temporality."
Nicholson argues that the second alternative is the correct reading.18 Dasein lives in the world by making choices, but "the ecstasies of temporality lies well prior to any choice . . . so our study of care introduces us to a matter whose scope outreaches care: the ecstasies of temporality itself." Accordingly, "What was able to make clear is that the reign of temporal ecstasies over the choices we make accords with the place we occupy as finite beings in the world."
But if Nicholson's interpretation is right, what would be the content of "the ecstasies of the temporality itself," if not some sort of purely formal entity or condition such as Kant's "pure intuition?" But this would imply that Heidegger has left phenomenology behind and is now engaging in establishing a transcendental framework outside the analysis of Being-in-the-world, such that this formal structure founds Being-in-the-world. This is inconsistent with his initial claim that Being-in-the-world is itself foundational.
Nicholson's first alternative offers a more consistent reading. The structure of temporality should be treated as an abstraction from Dasein's Being-in-the-world, specifically from care. In this case, the content of temporality is just the past and the present and the future ways of Being-in-the-world. Heidegger's own words support this reading: "as Dasein temporalizes itself, a world is too," and "the world is neither present-at-hand nor ready-to-hand, but temporalizes itself in temporality." He also states that the zuhanden "world-time, in the rigorous sense of the existential-temporal conception of the world, belongs as itself." In this reading, "temporality temporalizing itself," "Dasein's projection," and "the temporal projections of the world" are three different ways of describing the same "happening" of Being-in-the-world, which Heidegger calls "self-directive."
However, if this is the case, then temporality does not found spatiality, except perhaps in the trivial sense that spatiality is built into the notion of care that is identified with temporality. The fulfilling contents of “temporality temporalizing itself” simply is the various openings of regions, i.e., Dasein's "breaking into space." Certainly, as Stroeker points out, it is true that "nearness and remoteness are spatially-transient phenomena and cannot be conceived without a temporal moment." But this necessity does not constitute a foundation. Rather, they are equiprimordial. The addition of temporal dimensions does indeed complete the discussion of spatiality, which abstracted from time. But this completion, while it better articulates the whole of Being-in-the-world, does not show that temporality is more fundamental.
If temporality and spatiality are equiprimordial, then all of the supposedly founding relations between temporality and spatiality could just as well be reversed and still hold true. Heidegger's view is that "because Dasein as temporality is ecstatic-horizontals in its Being, it can take along with it a space for which it has made room, and it can do so farcically and constantly." But if Dasein is essentially a factical projection, then the reverse should also be true. Heidegger appears to have assumed the priority of temporality over spatiality perhaps under the influence of Kant, Husserl, or Dilthey, and then based his analyses on that assumption.
However, there may still be a way to save Heidegger's foundational project in terms of authentic temporality. Heidegger never specifically mentions the authenticity of temporalities, since he suggests earlier that the primary manifestation of temporality is authentic temporality, such a reading may perhaps be justified. This reading would treat the whole spatio-temporal structure of Being-in-the-world. The resoluteness of authentic temporality, arising out of Dasein's own "Being-towards-death," would supply a content to temporality above and beyond everyday involvements.
Heidegger is said to have its foundations in resoluteness, Dasein determines its own Situation through anticipatory resoluteness, which includes particular locations and involvements, i.e., the spatiality of Being-in-the-world. The same set of circumstances could be transformed into a new situation with different significance, if Dasein chooses resolutely to bring that about. Authentic temporality in this case can be said to found spatiality, since Dasein's spatiality is determined by resoluteness. This reading moreover enables Heidegger to construct a hierarchical relation between temporality and spatiality within Being-in-the-world than going outside of it to a formal transcendental principle, since the choice of spatiality is grasped phenomenological ly in terms of the concrete experience of decision.
Moreover, one might argue that according to Heidegger one's own grasp of "death" is uniquely a temporal mode of existence, whereas there is no such weighty conception involving spatiality. Death is what makes Dasein "stands before itself in its own most potentiality-for-Being." Authentic Being-towards-death is a "Being towards a possibility - indeed, towards a distinctive possibility of Dasein itself." One could argue that notions such as "potentiality" and "possibility" are distinctively temporal, nonspatial notions. So "Being-towards-death," as temporal, appears to be much more ontologically "fundamental" than spatiality.
However, Heidegger is not yet out of the woods. I believe that labelling the notions of anticipatory resoluteness, Being-towards-death, potentiality, and possibility specifically as temporal modes of being (to the exclusion of spatiality) begs the question. Given Heidegger's phenomenological framework, why assume that these notions are only temporal (without spatial dimensions)? If Being-towards-death, potentiality-for-Being, and possibilities were "purely" temporal notions, what phenomenological sense can we make of such abstract conceptions, given that these are manifestly our modes of existence as bodily beings? Heidegger cannot have in mind such an abstract notion of time, if he wants to treat of the proposed authenticity that corragulates of temporality is the meaning of care. It would seem more consistent with his theoretical framework to say that Being-towards-death is a rich spatio-temporal mode of being, given that Dasein is Being-in-the-world.
Furthermore, the interpretation that defines resoluteness as uniquely temporal suggests too much of a voluntaristic or subjectivistic notion of the self that controls its own Being-in-the-world from the standpoint of its future. This would drive a wedge between the self and its Being-in-the-world, thereby creating a temporal "inner self" which can decide its own spatiality. However, if Dasein is Being-in-the-world as Heidegger claims, then all of Dasein's decisions should be viewed as concretely grounded in Being-in-the-world. If so, spatiality must be an essential constitutive element.
Hence, authentic temporality, if construed narrowly as the mode of temporality, at first appears to be able to found spatiality, but it also commits Heidegger either to an account of time that is too abstract, or to the notion of the self far more like Sartre's than his own. What is lacking in Heidegger's theory that generates this sort of difficulty is a developed conception of Dasein as a lived body - a notion more fully developed by Merleau-Ponty.
The elements of a more consistent interpretation of authentic temporality are present in Being and Time. This interpretation incorporates a view of "authentic spatiality" in the notion of authentic temporality. This would be Dasein's resolutely grasping its own spatio-temporal finitude with respect to its place and its world. Dasein is born at a particular place, lives in a particular place, dies in a particular place, all of which it can relate to in an authentic way. The place Dasein lives are not a place of anonymous involvements. The place of Dasein must be there where its own potentiality-for-Being is realized. Dasein's place is thus a determination of its existence. Had Heidegger developed such a conception more fully, he would have seen that temporality is equiprimordial with thoroughly spatial and contextual Being-in-the-world. They are distinguishable but equally fundamental ways of emphasizing our finitude.
The internalized tensions within his theory eventually led Heidegger to reconsider his own positions. In his later period, he explicitly develops what may be viewed as a conception of authentic spatiality. For instance, in "Building Dwelling Thinking," Heidegger states that Dasein's relations to locations and to spaces inheres in dwelling, and dwelling is the basic character of our Being. The notion of dwelling expresses an affirmation of spatial finitude. Through this affirmation one acquires a proper relation to one's environment.
But the idea of dwelling must accede to the fact that has already been discussed in Being and Time, regarding the term "Being-in-the-world," Heidegger explains that the word "in" is derived from "in-an" - to "reside," "habits are," "to dwell." The emphasis on "dwelling" highlights the essentially "worldly" character of the self.
Thus from the beginning Heidegger had a conception of spatial finitude, but this fundamental insight was undeveloped because of his ambition to carry out the foundational project that favoured time. From the 1930's on, as Heidegger abandons the foundational project focussing on temporality, the conception of authentic spatiality comes to the fore. For example, in Discourse on Thinking Heidegger considers the spatial character of Being as "that-which-regions (die Gegnet)." The peculiar expression is a re-conceptualization of the notion of "region" as it appeared in Being and Time. Region is given an active character and defined as the "openness that surrounds us" which "comes to meet us." By giving it an active character, Heidegger wants to emphasize that region is not brought into being by us, but rather exists in its own right, as that which expresses our spatial existence. Heidegger states that "one needs to understand ‘resolve’ (Entschlossenheit) as it is understood in Being and Time: as the opening of man [Dasein] particularly undertaken by him for openness, . . . which we think of as that-which-regions." Here Heidegger is asserting an authentic conception of spatiality. The finitude expressed in the notion of Being-in-the-world is thus transformed into an authentic recognition of our finite worldly existence in later writings.
Meanwhile, it seems that it is nonetheless, natural to combine this close connection with conclusions by proposing an account of self-consciousness, as to the capacity to think “I”-thoughts that are immune to error through misidentification, though misidentification varies with the semantics of the “self” - this would be a redundant account of self-consciousness. Once we have an account of what it is to be capable of thinking “I”-thoughts, we will have explained everything distinctive about self-consciousness. It stems from the thought that what is distinctive about “I”-thoughts are that they are either themselves immune to error or they rest on further “I” - Thoughts that are immune in that way.
Once we have an account of what it is to be capable of thinking thoughts that are immune to error through misidentification, we will have explained everything about the capacity to think “I”-thoughts. As it would to claim of deriving from the thought that immunity to error through misidentification depends on the semantics of the “self.”
Once, again, that when we have an account of the semantics in that we will have explained everything distinctive about the capacity to think thoughts that are immune to error through misidentification.
The suggestion is that the semantics of “self-ness” will explain what is distinctive about the capacity to think thoughts immune to error through misidentification. Semantics alone cannot be expected to explain the capacity for thinking thoughts. The point in fact, that all that there is to the capacity of think thoughts that are immune tp error is the capacity to think the sort of thought whose natural linguistic expression involves the “self,” where this capacity is given by mastery of the semantics of “self-ness.” Yielding, to explain what it is to master the semantics of “self-ness,” especially to think thoughts immune to error through misidentification.
On this view, the mastery of the semantics of “self-ness” may be construed as for the single most important explanation in a theory of “self-consciousness.”
Its quickened reformulation might be put to a defender of “redundancy” or the deflationary theory is how mastery of the semantics of “self-ness” can make sense of the distinction between “self-ness contents” that are immune to error through misidentification and the “self contents” that lack such immunity. However, this is only an apparent difficulty when one remembers that those of the “selves” content is immune to error through misidentification, because, those employing ‘”I” as object, were able in having to break down their component elements. The identification component and the predication components that for which if the composite identification components of each are of such judgements that mastery of the semantics of “self-regulatory” content must be called upon to explain. Identification component are, of course, immune to error through misidentification.
It is also important to stress how the redundancy and the deflationary theory of self-consciousness, and any theory of self-consciousness that accords a serious role in self-consciousness to mastery of the semantics of the “self-ness,” are motivated by an important principle that has governed much of the development of analytical philosophy. The principle is the principle that the analysis of thought can only continue thought, the philosophical analysis of language such that we communicate thoughts by means of language because we have an implicit understanding of the workings of language, that is, of the principle governing the use of language: It is these principles, which relate to what is open to view and mind other that via the medium of language, which endow our sentences with the senses that they carry. In order to analyse thought, therefore, it is necessary to make explicitly those principles, regulating our use of language, which we already implicitly grasp.
Still, at the core of the notion of broad self-consciousness is the recognition of what consciousness is the recognition of what developmental psychologist’s call “self-world dualism.” Any subject properly described as self-conscious must be able to register the distinction between himself and the world, of course, this is a distinction that can be registered in a variety of way. The capacity for self-ascription of thoughts and experiences, in combination with the capacity to understand the world as a spatial and causally structured system of mind-independent objects, is a high-level way of registering of this distinction.
Consciousness of objects is closely related to sentience and to being awake. It is (at least) being in somewhat of a distinct informational and behavioural intention where its responsive state is for one's condition as played within the immediateness of environmental surroundings. It is the ability, for example, to process and act responsively to information about food, friends, foes, and other items of relevance. One finds consciousness of objects in creatures much less complex than human beings. It is what we (at any rate first and primarily) have in mind when we say of some person or animal as it is coming out of general anaesthesia, ‘It is regaining consciousness’ as consciousness of objects is not just any form of informational access to the world, but the knowing about and being conscious of, things in the world.
We are conscious of our representations when we are conscious, not (just) of some object, but of our representations: ‘I am seeing [as opposed to touching, smelling, tasting] and seeing clearly [as opposed too dimly].’ Consciousness of our own representations it is the ability to process and act responsively to information about oneself, but it is not just any form of such informational access. It is knowing about, being conscious of, one's own psychological states. In Nagel's famous phrase (1974), when we are conscious of our representations, it is ‘like something’ to have them. If, that which seems likely, there are forms of consciousness that do not involve consciousness of objects, they might consist in consciousness of representations, though some theorists would insist that this kind of consciousness be not of representations either (via representations, perhaps, but not of them).
The distinction just drawn between consciousness of objects and consciousness of our representations of objects may seem similar to Form's (1995) contributes of a well-known distinction between P- [phenomenal] and A- [access] consciousness. Here is his definition of ‘A-consciousness’: "A state is A-conscious if it is poised for direct control of thought and action." He tells us that he cannot define ‘P-consciousness’ in any "remotely non-circular way" but will use it to refer to what he calls "experiential properties,” what it is like to have certain states. Our consciousness of objects may appear to be like A-consciousness. It is not, however, it is a form of P-consciousness. Consciousness of an object is - how else can we put it? - consciousness of the object. Even if consciousness is just informational excess of a certain kind (something that Form would deny), it is not all form of informational access and we are talking about conscious access here. Recall the idea that it is like something to have a conscious state. Other closely related ideas are that in a conscious state, something appears to one, that conscious states have a ‘felt quality’. A term for all this is phenomenology: Conscious states have a phenomenology. (Thus some philosophers speak of phenomenal consciousness here.) We could now state the point we are trying to make this way. If I am conscious of an object, then it is like something to have that object as the content of a representation.
Historically, Heidegger' theory of spatiality distinguishes three different types of space: (1) world-space, (2) regions (Gegend), and (3) Dasein's spatiality. What Heidegger calls "world-space" is space conceived as an “arena” or “container” for objects. It captures both our ordinary conception of space and theoretical space - in particular absolute space. Chairs, desks, and buildings exist “in” space, but world-space is independent of such objects, much like absolute space “in which” things exist. However, Heidegger thinks that such a conception of space is an abstraction from the spatializing conduct of our everyday activities. The things that we deal with are near or far relative to us; according to Heidegger, this nearness or farness of things is how we first become familiar with that which we (later) represent to ourselves as "space." This familiarity is what renders the understanding of space (in a "container" metaphor or in any other way) possible. It is because we act spatially, going to places and reaching for things to use, that we can even develop a conception of abstract space at all. What we normally think of as space - world-space - turns out not to be what space fundamentally is; world-space is, in Heidegger's terminology, space conceived as vorhanden. It is an objectified space founded on a more basic space-of-action.
Since Heidegger thinks that space-of-action is the condition for world-space, he must explain the former without appealing to the latter. Heidegger's task then is to describe the space-of-action without presupposing such world-space and the derived concept of a system of spatial coordinates. However, this is difficult because all our usual linguistic expressions for describing spatial relations presuppose world-space. For example, how can one talk about the "distance between you and me" without presupposing some sort of metric, i.e., without presupposing an objective access to the relation? Our spatial notions such as "distance," "location," etc. must now be re-described from a standpoint within the spatial relation of self (Dasein) to the things dealt with. This problem is what motivates Heidegger to invent his own terminology and makes his discussion of space awkward. In what follows I will try to use ordinary language whenever possible to explain his principal ideas.
The space-of-action has two aspects: regions (space as Zuhandenheit) and Dasein's spatiality (space as Existentiale). The sort of space we deal with in our daily activity is "functional" or zuhanden, and Heidegger's term for it is "region." The places we work and live-the office, the park, the kitchen, etc.-all have different regions that organize our activities and contexualize “equipment.” My desk area as my work region has a computer, printer, telephone, books, etc., in their appropriate “places,” according to the spatiality of the way in which I work. Regions differ from space viewed as a "container"; the latter notion lacks a "referential" organization with respect to our context of activities. Heidegger wants to claim that referential functionality is an inherent feature of space itself, and not just a "human" characteristic added to a container-like space.
In our activity, how do we specifically stand with respect to functional space? We are not "in" space as things are, but we do exist in some spatially salient manner. What Heidegger is trying to capture is the difference between the nominal expression "we exist in space" and the adverbial expression "we exist spatially." He wants to describe spatiality as a mode of our existence rather than conceiving space as an independent entity. Heidegger identifies two features of Dasein's spatiality - "de-severance" (Ent-fernung) and "directionality" (Ausrichtung).
De-severance describes the way we exist as a process of spatial self-determination by “making things available” to ourselves. In Heidegger's language, in making things available we "take in space" by "making the farness vanish" and by "bringing things close"
We are not simply contemplative beings, but we exist through concretely acting in the world - by reaching for things and going to places. When I walk from my desk area into the kitchen, I am not simply changing locations from point A to B in an arena-like space, but I am “taking in space” as I move, continuously making the “farness” of the kitchen “vanish,” as the shifting spatial perspectives are opened as I go along.
This process is also inherently "directional." Every de-severing is aimed toward something or in a certain direction that is determined by our concern and by specific regions. I must always face and move in a certain direction that is dictated by a specific region. If I want to get a glass of ice tea, instead of going out into the yard, I face toward the kitchen and move in that direction, following the region of the hallway and the kitchen. Regions determine where things belong, and our actions are coordinated in directional ways accordingly.
De-severance, directionality, and regionality are three ways of describing the spatiality of a unified Being-in-the-world. As aspects of Being-in-the-world, these spatial modes of being are equiprimordial.9 10 Regions "refer" to our activities, since they are established by our ways of being and our activities. Our activities, in turn, are defined in terms of regions. Only through the region can our de-severance and directionality be established. Our object of concern always appears in a certain context and place, in a certain direction. It is because things appear in a certain direction and in their places “there” that we have our “here.” We orient ourselves and organize our activities, always within regions that must already be given to us.
Heidegger's analysis of space does not refer to temporal aspects of Being-in-the-world, even though they are presupposed. In the second half of Being and Time he explicitly turns to the analysis of time and temporality in a discussion that is significantly more complex than the earlier account of spatiality. Heidegger makes the following five distinctions between types of time and temporality: (1) the ordinary or "vulgar" conception of time; this is time conceived as Vorhandenheit. (2) world-time; this is time as Zuhandenheit. Dasein's temporality is divided into three types: (3) Dasein's inauthentic (uneigentlich) temporality, (4) Dasein's authentic (eigentlich) temporality, and (5) originary temporality or “temporality as such.” The analyses of the vorhanden and zuhanden modes of time are interesting, but it is Dasein's temporality that is relevant to our discussion, since it is this form of time that is said to be founding for space. Unfortunately, Heidegger is not clear about which temporality plays this founding role.
We can begin by excluding Dasein's inauthentic temporality. This mode of time refers to our unengaged, "average" way in which we regard time. It is the “past we forget” and the “future we expect,” all without decisiveness and resolute understanding. Heidegger seems to consider that this mode of temporality is the temporal dimension of de-severance and directionality, since de-severance and directionality deal only with everyday actions. As such, inauthentic temporality must itself be founded in an authentic basis of some sort. The two remaining candidates for the foundation are Dasein's authentic temporality and originary temporality.
Dasein's authentic temporality is the "resolute" mode of temporal existence. An authentic temporality is realized when Dasein becomes aware of its own finite existence. This temporality has to do with one's grasp of his or her own life as a whole from one's own unique perspective. Life gains meaning as one's own life-project, bounded by the sense of one's realization that he or she is not immortal. This mode of time appears to have a normative function within Heidegger's theory. In the second half of BT he often refers to inauthentic or "everyday" mode of time as lacking some primordial quality which authentic temporality possesses.
In contrast, to the originary temporality, for which the formal structure of Dasein's temporality itself is grounded to its spatial Being-in-the-world, Dasein also exists essentially as "projection." Projection is oriented toward the future, and this outcome orientation regulates our concern by constantly realizing various possibilities. Temporality is characterized formally as this dynamic structure of "a future that makes present in the process of having been." Heidegger calls the three moments of temporality - the future, the present, and the past - the three ecstasies of temporality. This mode of time is not normative but rather formal or neutral; as Blattner argues, the temporal features that constitute Dasein's temporality describe both inauthentic and authentic temporality.
There are some passages that indicate that authentic temporality is the primary manifestation of the temporality, because of its essential orientation toward the future. For instance, Heidegger states that "temporality first showed itself in anticipatory resoluteness." Elsewhere, he argues that "the ‘time’ which is accessible to Dasein's common sense is not primordial, but arises rather from authentic temporality." In these formulations, the authentic temporality is said to found other inauthentic modes. According to Blattner, this is "by far the most common" interpretation of the status of authentic time.
However, to ague with Blattner and Haar, in that there are far more passages where Heidegger considers an originary temporality as distinct from authentic temporality, and founding for it and for Being-in-the-world as well. Here are some examples: A temporality has different possibilities and different ways of temporalizing itself. The basic possibilities of existence, the authenticity and inauthenticity of Dasein, are grounded ontologically on possible temporalizations of the temporality. Time is primordial as the temporalizing of temporality, and as such it makes possible the Constitution of the structure of care.
Heidegger's conception seems to be that it is because we are fundamentally temporal - having the formal structure of ecstatic-horizontal unity - that we can project, authentically or in authentically, our concernful dealings in the world and exist as Being-in-the-world. It is on this account that temporality is said to found spatiality. Nicholson's first alternative offers a more consistent reading. The structure of temporality should be treated as an abstraction from Dasein's Being-in-the-world, specifically from care. In this case, the content of temporality is just the past and the present and the future ways of Being-in-the-world. Heidegger's own words support this reading: "as Dasein temporalizes itself, a world is too," and "the world is neither present-at-hand nor ready-to-hand, but temporalizes itself in temporality." He also states that the zuhanden "world-time, in the rigorous sense of the existential-temporal conception of the world, belongs to temporality itself." In this reading, "temporality temporalizing itself," "Dasein's projection," and "the temporal projection of the world" are three different ways of describing the same "happening" of Being-in-the-world, which Heidegger calls "self-directive."
However, if this is the case, then the temporality does not found spatiality, except perhaps in the trivial sense that spatiality is built into the notion of care that is identified with a temporality. The sustaining of "temporality temporalizing itself" simply is the various openings of regions, i.e., Dasein's "breaking into space." Certainly, as Stroeker points out, it is true that "nearness and remoteness are spatio-temporal phenomena and cannot be conceived without a temporal moment." But this necessity does not constitute a foundation. Rather, they are equiprimordial. The addition of temporal dimensions does indeed complete the discussion of spatiality, which abstracted from time. But this completion, while it better articulates the whole of Being-in-the-world, does not show that temporality is more fundamental.
If temporality and spatiality are equiprimordial, then all of the supposedly founding relations between temporality and spatiality could just as well be reversed and still hold true. Heidegger's view is that "because Dasein as temporality is ecstatic-horizontals in its Being, it can take along with it a space for which it has made room, and it can do so farcically and constantly." But if Dasein is essentially a factical projection, then the reverse should also be true. Heidegger appears to have assumed the priority of temporality over spatiality perhaps under the influence of Kant, Husserl, or Dilthey, and then based his analyses on that assumption.
However, there may still be a way to save Heidegger's foundational project in terms of authentic temporality. Heidegger never specifically mentions authentic temporality, since he suggests earlier that the primary manifestation of temporality is authentic temporality, such a reading may perhaps be justified. This reading would treat the whole spatio-temporal structure of Being-in-the-world. The resoluteness of authenticated temporality, arising out of Dasein's own "Being-towards-death," would supply a content to temporality above and beyond everyday involvements.
Heidegger is said to have its foundations in resoluteness, Dasein determines its own Situation through anticipatory resoluteness, which includes particular locations and involvements, i.e., the spatiality of Being-in-the-world. The same set of circumstances could be transformed into a new situation with different significance, if Dasein chooses resolutely to bring that about. An authentic temporality in this case can be said to found spatiality, since Dasein's spatiality is determined by resoluteness. This reading moreover enables Heidegger to construct a hierarchical relation between temporality and spatiality within Being-in-the-world rather than going outside of it to a formal transcendental principle, since the choice of spatiality is grasped phenomenologically in terms of the concrete experience of decision.
Moreover, one might argue that according to Heidegger one's own grasp of "death" is uniquely a temporal mode of existence, whereas there is no such weighty conception involving spatiality. Death is what compels Dasein to "stand before itself in its own most potentiality-for-Being." Authentic Being-towards-death is a "Being towards a possibility - indeed, towards a distinctive possibility of Dasein itself." One could argue that notions such as "potentiality" and "possibility" are distinctively temporal, nonspatial notions. So "Being-towards-death," as temporal, appears to be much more ontologically "fundamental" than spatiality.
However, Heidegger is not yet out of the woods. I believe that labelling the notions of anticipatory resoluteness, Being-towards-death, potentiality, and possibility specifically as temporal modes of being (to the exclusion of spatiality) begs the question. Given Heidegger's phenomenological framework, why assume that these notions are only temporal (without spatial dimensions)? If Being-towards-death, potentiality-for-Being, and possibility were "purely" temporal notions, what phenomenological sense can we make of such abstract conceptions, given that these are manifestly our modes of existence as bodily beings? Heidegger cannot have in mind such an abstract notion of time, if he wants to treat authentic temporality as the meaning of care. It would seem more consistent with his theoretical framework to say that Being-towards-death is a rich spatio-temporal mode of being, given that Dasein is Being-in-the-world.
Furthermore, the interpretation that defines resoluteness as uniquely temporal suggests too much of a voluntaristic or subjectivistic notion of the self that controls its own Being-in-the-world from the standpoint of its future. This would drive a wedge between the self and its Being-in-the-world, thereby creating a temporal "inner self" which can decide its own spatiality. However, if Dasein is Being-in-the-world as Heidegger claims, then all of Dasein's decisions should be viewed as concretely grounded in Being-in-the-world. If so, spatiality must be an essential constitutive element.
Hence, authentic temporality, if construed narrowly as the mode of temporality, at first appears to be able to found spatiality, but it also commits Heidegger either to an account of time that is too abstract, or to the notion of the self far more like Sartre's than his own. What is lacking in Heidegger's theory that generates this sort of difficulty is a developed conception of Dasein as a lived body - a notion more fully developed by Merleau-Ponty.
The elements of a more consistent interpretation of an authentic temporality are present in Being and Time. This interpretation incorporates a view of "authentic spatiality" in the notion of its authenticated temporality. This would be Dasein's resolutely grasping its own spatio-temporal finitude with respect to its place and its world. Dasein is born at a particular place, lives in a particular place, dies in a particular place, all of which it can by its relation to in an authenticated process. The place Dasein lives is not a place of anonymous involvements. The place of Dasein must be there where its own potentiality-for-Being is realized. Dasein's place is thus a determination of its existence. Had Heidegger developed such a conception more fully, he would have seen that temporality is equiprimordial with thoroughly spatial and contextual Being-in-the-world. They are distinguishable but equally fundamental ways of emphasizing our finitude.
The internalized tensions within his theory leads Heidegger to reconsider his own positions. In his later period, he explicitly develops what may be viewed as a conception of authentic spatiality. For instance, in "Building Dwelling Thinking," Heidegger states that Dasein's relations to locations and to spaces inheres in dwelling, and dwelling is the basic character of our Being. The notion of dwelling expresses an affirmation of spatial finitude. Through this affirmation one acquires a proper relation to one's environment.
But the idea of dwelling is in fact already discussed in Being and Time, regarding the term "Being-in-the-world," Heidegger explains that the word "in" is derived from "in-an" - to "reside," "habit are," "to dwell." The emphasis on "dwelling" highlights the essentially "worldly" character of the self.
Thus from the beginning Heidegger had a conception of spatial finitude, but this fundamental insight was undeveloped because of his ambition to carry out the foundational project that favoured time. From the 1930's on, as Heidegger abandons the foundational project focussing on temporality, the conception of authentic spatiality comes to the fore. For example, in Discourse on Thinking Heidegger considers the spatial character of Being as "that-which-regions (die Gegnet)." The peculiar expression is a re-conceptualization of the notion of "region" as it appeared in Being and Time. Region is given an active character and defined as the "openness that surrounds us" which "comes to meet us." By giving it an active character, Heidegger wants to emphasize that region is not brought into being by us, but rather exists in its own right, as that which expresses our spatial existence. Heidegger states that "one needs to understand ‘resolve’ (Entschlossenheit) as it is understood in Being and Time: as the opening of man [Dasein] particularly undertaken by him for openness, . . . which we think of as that-which-regions." Here Heidegger is asserting an authentic conception of spatiality. The finitude expressed in the notion of Being-in-the-world is thus transformed into an authentic recognition of our finite worldly existence in later writings.
The return to the conception of spatial finitude in the later period shows that Heidegger never abandoned the original insight behind his conception of Being-in-the-world. But once committed to this idea, it is hard to justify singling out an aspect of the self - temporality - as the foundation for the rest of the structure. All of the Existentiale and zuhanden modes, which constitute the whole of Being-in-the-world, are equiprimordial, each mode articulating different aspects of a unified whole. The preference for temporality as the privileged meaning of existence reflects the Kantian residue in Heidegger's early doctrine that he later rejected as still excessively subjectivistic.
Meanwhile, it seems that it is nonetheless, natural to combine this close connection with conclusions by proposing an account of self-consciousness, as to the capacity to think “I”-thoughts that are immune to error through misidentification, though misidentification varies with the semantics of the “self” - this would be a redundant account of self-consciousness. Once we have an account of what it is to be capable of thinking “I”-thoughts, we will have explained everything distinctive about self-consciousness. It stems from the thought that what is distinctive about “I”-thoughts are that they are either themselves immune to error or they rest on further “I” - Thoughts that are immune in that way.
Once we have an account of what it is to be capable of thinking thoughts that are immune to error through misidentification, we will have explained everything about the capacity to think “I”-thoughts. As it would to claim of deriving from the thought that immunity to error through misidentification depends on the semantics of the “self.”
Once, again, that when we have an account of the semantics in that we will have explained everything distinctive about the capacity to think thoughts that are immune to error through misidentification.
The suggestion is that the semantics of “self-ness” will explain what is distinctive about the capacity to think thoughts immune to error through misidentification. Semantics alone cannot be expected to explain the capacity for thinking thoughts. The point in fact, that all that there is to the capacity of think thoughts that are immune tp error is the capacity to think the sort of thought whose natural linguistic expression involves the “self,” where this capacity is given by mastery of the semantics of “self-ness.” Yielding, to explain what it is to master the semantics of “self-ness,” especially to think thoughts immune to error through misidentification.
On this view, the mastery of the semantics of “self-ness” may be construed as for the single most important explanation in a theory of “self-consciousness.”
Its quickened reformulation might be put to a defender of “redundancy” or the deflationary theory is how mastery of the semantics of “self-ness” can make sense of the distinction between “self-ness contents” that are immune to error through misidentification and the “self contents” that lack such immunity. However, this is only an apparent difficulty when one remembers that those of the “selves” content is immune to error through misidentification, because, those employing ‘”I” as object, were able in having to break down their component elements. The identification component and the predication components that for which if the composite identification components of each are of such judgements that mastery of the semantics of “self-regulatory” content must be called upon to explain. Identification component are, of course, immune to error through misidentification.
It is also important to stress how the redundancy and the deflationary theory of self-consciousness, and any theory of self-consciousness that accords a serious role in self-consciousness to mastery of the semantics of the “self-ness,” are motivated by an important principle that has governed much of the development of analytical philosophy. The principle is the principle that the analysis of thought can only continue thought, the philosophical analysis of language such that we communicate thoughts by means of language because we have an implicit understanding of the workings of language, that is, of the principle governing the use of language: It is these principles, which relate to what is open to view and mind other that via the medium of language, which endow our sentences with the senses that they carry. In order to analyse thought, therefore, it is necessary to make explicitly those principles, regulating our use of language, which we already implicitly grasp.
Still, at the core of the notion of broad self-consciousness is the recognition of what consciousness is the recognition of what developmental psychologist’s call “self-world dualism.” Any subject properly described as self-conscious must be able to register the distinction between himself and the world, of course, this is a distinction that can be registered in a variety of way. The capacity for self-ascription of thoughts and experiences, in combination with the capacity to understand the world as a spatial and causally structured system of mind-independent objects, is a high-level way of registering of this distinction.
Consciousness of objects is closely related to sentience and to being awake. It is (at least) being in somewhat of a distinct informational and behavioural intention where its responsive state is for one's condition as played within the immediateness of environmental surroundings. It is the ability, for example, to process and act responsively to information about food, friends, foes, and other items of relevance. One finds consciousness of objects in creatures much less complex than human beings. It is what we (at any rate first and primarily) have in mind when we say of some person or animal as it is coming out of general anaesthesia, ‘It is regaining consciousness’ as consciousness of objects is not just any form of informational access to the world, but the knowing about and being conscious of, things in the world.
We are conscious of our representations when we are conscious, not (just) of some object, but of our representations: ‘I am seeing [as opposed to touching, smelling, tasting] and seeing clearly [as opposed too dimly].’ Consciousness of our own representations it is the ability to process and act responsively to information about oneself, but it is not just any form of such informational access. It is knowing about, being conscious of, one's own psychological states. In Nagel's famous phrase (1974), when we are conscious of our representations, it is ‘like something’ to have them. If, that which seems likely, there are forms of consciousness that do not involve consciousness of objects, they might consist in consciousness of representations, though some theorists would insist that this kind of consciousness be not of representations either (via representations, perhaps, but not of them).
The distinction just drawn between consciousness of objects and consciousness of our representations of objects may seem similar to Form's (1995) contributes of a well-known distinction between P- [phenomenal] and A- [access] consciousness. Here is his definition of ‘A-consciousness’: "A state is A-conscious if it is poised for direct control of thought and action." He tells us that he cannot define ‘P-consciousness’ in any "remotely non-circular way" but will use it to refer to what he calls "experiential properties,” what it is like to have certain states. Our consciousness of objects may appear to be like A-consciousness. It is not, however, it is a form of P-consciousness. Consciousness of an object is - how else can we put it? - consciousness of the object. Even if consciousness is just informational excess of a certain kind (something that Form would deny), it is not all form of informational access and we are talking about conscious access here. Recall the idea that it is like something to have a conscious state. Other closely related ideas are that in a conscious state, something appears to one, that conscious states have a ‘felt quality’. A term for all this is phenomenology: Conscious states have a phenomenology. (Thus some philosophers speak of phenomenal consciousness here.) We could now state the point we are trying to make this way. If I am conscious of an object, then it is like something to have that object as the content of a representation.
Some theorists would insist that this last statement be qualified. While such a representation of an object may provide everything that a representation has to have for its contents to be like something to me, they would urge, something more is needed. Different theorists would add different elements. For some, I would have to be aware, not just of the object, but of my representation of it. For others, I would have directorial implications that infer of the certain attentive considerations to its way or something other than is elsewhere. We cannot go into this controversy here. As, we are merely making the point that consciousness of objects is more than Form's A-consciousness.
Consciousness self involves, not just consciousness of states that it is like something to have, but consciousness of the thing that has them, i.e., of ones-self. It is the ability to process and act responsively to information about oneself, but again it is more than that. It is knowing about, being conscious of, oneself, indeed of itself as itself. And consciousness of oneself in this way it is often called consciousness of self as the subject of experience. Consciousness of oneself as oneself seems to require indexical adeptness and by preference to a special indexical ability at that, not just an ability to pick out something out but to pick something out as oneself. Human beings have such self-referential indexical ability. Whether any other creatures have, it is controversial. The leading nonhuman candidate would be chimpanzees and other primates whom they have taught enough language to use first-person pronouns.
The literature on consciousness sometimes fails to distinguish consciousness of objects, consciousness of one's own representations, and consciousness of self, or treat one three, usually consciousness of one's own representations, as actualized of its owing totality in consciousness. (Conscious states do not have objects, yet is not consciousness of a representation either. We cannot pursue that complication here.) The term ‘conscious’ and cognates are ambiguous in everyday English. We speak of someone regaining consciousness - where we mean simple consciousness of the world. Yet we also say things like, She was haphazardly conscious of what motivated her to say that - where we do not mean that she lacked either consciousness of the world or consciousness of self but rather than she was not conscious of certain things about herself, specifically, certain of her own representational states. To understand the unity of consciousness, making these distinctions is important. The reason is this: the unity of consciousness takes a different form in consciousness of self than it takes in either consciousness of one's own representations or consciousness of objects.
So what is unified consciousness? As we said, the predominant form of the unity of consciousness is being aware of several things at the same time. Intuitively, this is the notion of several representations being aspects of a single encompassing conscious state. A more informative idea can be gleaned from the way philosophers have written about unified consciousness. As emerging from what they have said, the central feature of unified consciousness is taken to be something like this unity of consciousness: A group of representational relations related to each other that to be conscious of any of them is to be conscious of others of them and of the group of them as a single group.
In order for science to be rigorous, Husserl claimed that mind must ‘intend’ itself as subject and also all its ‘means’. The task of philosophy, also, is so, that in to substantiate that science is, in fact, rigorous by clearly distinguishing, naming, and taxonomizing phenomena. What William James termed the stream of consciousness was dubbed by Husserl the system of experience. Recognizing, as James did, that consciousness is contiguous, Husserl eventually concluded that any single mental phenomenon is a moving horizon receding in all directions at once toward all other phenomena.
Interesting enough, this created an epistemological dilemma that became pervasive in the history of postmodern philosophy. the dilemma is such that if mind ‘intends’ itself as subject and objects within this mind are moving in all directions toward all other objects, how can any two minds objectively agree that they are referring to the same object? The followers of Husserl concluded that this was not possible, therefore, the prospect that two minds can objectively or inter-subjectively know the same truth is annihilated.
Ever so, that it is ironic, least of mention, that Husserl’s attempt to establish a rigorous basis for science in human consciousness served to reinforce Nietzsche’s claim that truths are evolving fictions that exist only in the subjective reality of single individuals. And it also massively reinforced the stark Cartesian division between mind and world by seeming to legitimate the view that logic and mathematical systems reside only in human subjectivity and, therefore, that there is no real or necessary correspondence of physical theories with physical reality. These views would later be embarked by Ludwig Wittgenstein and Jean-Paul Sartre.
One of Nietzsche’s fundamental contentions was that traditional value (represented primarily by Christianity) had lost their power in the lives of individuals. He expressed this in his proclamation “God is dead.” He was convinced that traditional values represented “slave morality,” such that it was the characterological underpinning with which succeed too weakly and resentful individually created morality. Who encouraged such behaviour as gentleness and kindness because the behaviour served their interests?
By way of introducing some of Nietzsche’s written literature, which it may as such, by inclination alone be attributively contributive that all aspiration’s are in fact the presentation of their gestural point reference. A few salient points that empower Nietzsche as the “great critic” of that tradition, in so that by some meaningfully implication, is to why this critique is potentially so powerful and yet as provocative by statements concerting the immediacy of its topic.
Although enwrapped in shrouds his guising shadow that which we can identify Nietzsche in a decisive challenge to the past, from one point of view there should be nothing too remarkably new about what Nietzsche is doing, least of mention, his style of doing so is very intriguing yet distinctive. For him, undertaking to characterized methods of analysis and criticism, under which we should feel quite familiar with, just as the extracted forms of familiarity are basic throughout which contextual matters of representation have previously been faced. He is encouraging as a new possibility for our lives of a program that has strong and obvious roots in certain forms of Romanticism. Thus, is to illustrate how the greater burden of tradition, as he is deeply connected to categorical priorities as in the finding that considerations for which create tradition.
Irish philosopher and clergyman George Berkeley set out to challenge what he saw as the atheism and skepticism inherent in the prevailing philosophy of the early 18th century. His initial publications, which asserted that no objects or matter existed outside the human mind, were met with disdain by the London intelligentsia of the day. Berkeley aimed to explain his “Immaterialist” theory, part of the school of thought known as idealism.
The German philosopher Immanuel Kant tried to solve the crisis generated by Locke and brought to a climax by Hume; his proposed solution combined elements of rationalism with elements of empiricism. He agreed with the rationalists that one can have an exact and certain opening for knowledge, but he followed the empiricists in holding that such knowledge is more informative about the structure of thought than about the worlds’ outside thought. He distinguished three kinds of knowledge, analytical deductions, for which is exact and certain but uninformative, because it makes clear only what is contained in definitions; Synthetic empirically, which conveys information about the world learned from experience, but is subject to the errors of the senses. Theoretical synthetics, which are discovered by pure intuitive certainty, are both exact and understanding. Its expressions are the necessary conditions that the mind imposes on all objects of experience. Mathematics and philosophy, according to Kant, provide this last. Since the time of Kant, one of the most frequently argued questions in philosophy has been whether or not such a thing as theoretic synthetical knowledge really exists.
Because of the diversity of positions associated with existentialism, the term is impossible to define precisely. Certain themes common to nearly all existentialist writers can, however, be identified. The term itself suggests one major theme: the stress on concrete individual existence and, consequently, on subjectivity, individual freedom, and choice.
Most philosophers since Plato have held that the highest ethical good are the same for everyone; as far as one is to approach moral perfection, one resembles other morally perfect individuals. The 19th-century Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard, who was the first writer to call himself existential, reacted against this tradition by insisting that the highest good for the individual are to find his or her own unique vocation. As he wrote in his journal, “I must find a truth that is true for me . . . the idea for which I can live or die.” Other existentialist writers have echoed Kierkegaard's belief that one must choose one's own way without the aid of universal, objective standards. Against the traditional view that moral choice involves an objective judgment of right and wrong, existentialists have argued that no objective, rational basis can be found for moral decisions. The 19th-century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche additionally contended with an individuality that must define for which situations are to count as moral situations.
All existentialists have followed Kierkegaard in stressing the importance of passionate individual action in deciding questions of both morality and truth. They have insisted, accordingly, that personal experience and acting on one's own convictions are essential in arriving at the truth. Thus, the understanding of a situation by someone involved in that situation is superior to that of a detached, objective observer. This emphasis on the perspective of the individual agent has also made existentialists suspicious of systematic reasoning. Kierkegaard, and other existentialist writers have been deliberately unsystematic in the exposition of their philosophies, preferring to express themselves in aphorisms, dialogues, parables, and other literary forms. Despite their antirationalist position, however, most existentialists cannot be said to be irrationalists in the sense of denying all validity to rational thought. They have held that rational clarity is desirable wherever possible, but that the most important questions in life are not accessible for reason and the accessible knowledge as cohered by supporting structures of scientific understanding, in that they have argued that even science is not as rational as is commonly supposed. For instance, asserted that the scientific assumption of an orderly universe is for the most part a worthwhile rationalization.
Perhaps the most prominent theme in existentialist writing is that of choice. Humanity's primary distinction, in the view of most existentialists, is the freedom to choose. Existentialists have held that human beings do not have a fixed nature, or essence, as other animals and plants do: Yet, to every human that make choices that create his or her own natures embark upon the dogma that which, in its gross effect, formulates his or hers existential decision of choice. That if, one might unduly sway to consider in having to embody the influences that persuade one’s own self to frowardly acknowledge the fact of an existence that precedes the idealization pertaining to its essences. Choice is therefore central to human existence, and it is inescapable; even the refusal to choose is a choice. Freedom of choice entails commitment and responsibility. Because individuals are free to choose their own path, existentialists have argued, they must accept the risk and responsibility of following their commitment wherever it leads.
Kierkegaard held that recognizing that one experience is spiritually crucial not only a fear of specific objects but also a feeling of general apprehension, which he called dread. He interpreted it as God's way of calling each individual to agree to a personally valid way of life. The word anxiety (German Angst) has a similarly crucial role in the work of the 20th-century German philosopher Martin Heidegger - anxiety leads to the individual's confrontation with nothingness and with the impossibility of finding ultimate justification for the choices he or she must make. In the philosophy of Sartre, the word nausea is used for the individual's recognition of the pure contingency of the universe, and the word anguish is used for the recognition of the total freedom of choice that confronts the individual at every moment.
Existentialism as a distinct philosophical and literary movement belongs to the 19th and 20th centuries. However, elements of existentialism can be found in the thought (and life) of Socrates, in the Bible, and in the work of many pre-modern philosophers and writers.
The first to anticipate the major concerns of modern existentialism was the 17th-century French philosopher Blaise Pascal. Pascal rejected the rigorous rationalism of his contemporary René Descartes, asserting, in his Pensées (1670), that a systematic philosophy that presumes to explain God and humanity is a form of pride. Like later existentialist writers, he saw human life as for paradoxes: The human self, which combines mind and body, is itself a paradox and contradiction.
Nineteenth-century Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard played a major role in the development of existentialist thought. Kierkegaard criticized the popular systematic method of rational philosophy advocated by German Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. He emphasized the absurdity inherent in human life and questioned how any systematic philosophy could apply to the ambiguous human condition. In Kierkegaard’s deliberately unsystematic works, he explained that each individual should attempt an intense examination of his or her own existence.
Kierkegaard, generally regarded as the founder of modern existentialism, reacted against the systematic absolute idealism of the 19th-century German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, who claimed to have worked out a total rational understanding of humanity and history. Kierkegaard, on the contrary, stressed the ambiguity and absurdity of the human situation. The individual's response to this situation must be to live a totally committed life, and this commitment can only be understood by the individual who has made it. The individual, therefore, must always be prepared to defy the norms, least of mention, for which any if not all sociological associations that bring of some orientation, that for the sake of the higher persuasion brings the possible that implicate of a personally respective way of life. Kierkegaard ultimately advocated a “leap of faith” into a Christian way of life, which, although hard to grasp and fully in the risk of which was the only commitment he believed could save the individual from despair.
Danish religious philosopher Søren Kierkegaard rejected the all-encompassing, analytical philosophical systems of such 19th-century thinkers as German philosopher G.W.F. Hegel. Instead, Kierkegaard focussed on the choices the individual must make in all aspects of his or her life, especially the choice to maintain religious faith. The literaturized work of Fear and Trembling, 1846 and translated, 1941, Kierkegaard explored the conceptual representations of faith through which an examination of the biblical story of Abraham and Isaac, under which God demanded that Abraham show by his proving of faith by sacrificing his son.
One of the most controversial works of 19th-century philosophy, Thus Spake Zarathustra (1883-1885) articulated through Friedrich Nietzsche’s theory of the Übermensch, a term translated as “Superman” or “Overman.” The Superman was an individual who overcame what termed the “slave morality” of traditional values, and lived according to his own morality. Who also advanced his idea that “God is dead,” or that traditional morality was no longer relevant in people’s lives. In the sage Zarathustra came down from the mountain where he had spent the last ten years alone to preach to the people.
Nietzsche, who was not conversant with the functional dynamics that were the contributive peculiarities for which their premise is attributable to Kierkegaard. The influence of the subsequential existentialist thought, only through his criticism of traditional metaphysical and moral assumptions and through his espousal of tragic pessimism and the life-affirming individual will that opposes itself to the moral conformity of the majority. In contrast to Kierkegaard, whose attack on conventional morality led him to advocate a radically individualistic Christianity, proclaimed the “death of God” and went on to reject the entire Judeo-Christian moral tradition in favour of a heroic pagan ideal.
The “will” (philosophy and psychology), is the capacity to choose among alternative courses of action and to act on the choice made, particularly when the action is directed toward a specific goal or is governed by definite ideals and principles of conduct? Bestowing the consignment of willed behaviour contrasts with behaviour stemming from instinct, impulse, reflex, or habit, none, of which involves conscious choice among alternatives. Again, a consigning of willed behaviour contrasts with the vacillations manifested by alternating choices among conflicting alternatives.
Until the 20th century most philosophers conceived the will as a separate faculty with which every person is born. They differed, however, about the role of this faculty in the personality makeup. For one school of philosophers, most notably represented by the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, universal will-power is the primary reality, and the individual's will forms part of it. In his view, the will dominates every other aspect of an individual's personality, knowledge, feelings, and direction in life. A contemporary form of Schopenhauer's theory is implicit in some forms of existentialism, such as the existentialist view expressed by the French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, which regards personality as the desire to action, and actions as they are the manifestations of the will for which gives meaning to the universe.
Most other philosophers have regarded the will as coequal or secondary to other aspects of personality. Plato believed that the psyche is divided into three parts: Reason, will, and desire, for rationalist philosophers, such as Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, and René Descartes. The will is the agent of the rational soul in governing purely animal appetites and passions. Some empirical philosophers, such as David Hume, discount the importance of rational influences upon the will; They think of the will as ruled mainly by emotion. Evolutionary philosophers, such as Herbert Spencer, and pragmatist philosophers, such as John Dewey, conceive the will not as an innate faculty but as a product of experience evolving gradually as the mind and personality of the individual development in social interaction.
Modern psychologists tend to accept the pragmatic theory of the will. They regard the will as an aspect or quality of behaviour, than as a separate faculty. It is the whole person who wills. This act of willing is manifested by (1) the fixing of attention on distant goals and abstract standards and principles of conduct; (2) the weighing of alternative courses of action and the taking of deliberate action that seems best calculated serving specific goals and principles; (3) the inhibition of impulses and habits that might distract attention from, or otherwise conflict with, a goal or principle; and (4) perseverance against deterrents and the obstruction, that within one’s pursuit of goals or adherence is given into the characteristic principles.
The modern philosophy movements of phenomenology and existentialism have been greatly influenced by the thought of German philosopher Martin Heidegger. According to Heidegger, humankind has fallen into a crisis by taking a narrow, technological approach to the world and by ignoring the larger question of existence. People, if they wish to live authentically, must broaden their perspectives. Instead of taking their existence for granted, people should view themselves as part of Being (Heidegger's term for that which underlies all existence).
Heidegger, like Pascal and Kierkegaard, reacted against an attempt to put philosophy on a conclusive rationalistic basis - as Max Scheler (1874-1928), the German social and religious philosopher, whose work reflected the influence of the phenomenology of his countryman Edmund Husserl. Born in Munich, Scheler taught at the universities of Jena, Munich, and Cologne. In The Nature of Sympathy, 1913 translated 1970, he applied Husserl's method of detailed phenomenological description to the social emotions that relate human beings to one another - especially love and hate. This book was followed by his most famous work, Formalism in Ethics and Non-Formal Ethics of Values, 1913, and translated 1973, a two-volume study of ethics in which he criticized the formal ethical approach of the German philosopher Immanuel Kant and substituted for it a study of specific values as they directly present themselves to consciousness. Scheler converted to Roman Catholicism in 1920 and wrote On the Eternal in Man, 1921 and translated 1960, to justify his conversion, followed by an important study of the sociology of knowledge, Die Wissensformen und die Gesellschaft (Forms of Knowledge and Society, 1926). Later he rejected Roman Catholicism and developed a philosophy, based on science, in which all abstract knowledge and religious values are considered sublimations of basic human drives. This is presented in his last book, The Place of Man in the Universe, 1928 translated 1961.
Phenomenology of the 20th-century German philosopher Edmund Husserl. Heidegger argued that humanity finds itself in an incomprehensible and indifferent world. Human beings can never hope to understand why they are here; Instead, each individual must choose a goal and follow it with passionate conviction, aware of the certainty of death and the ultimate meaninglessness of one's life. Heidegger contributed to existentialist thought an original emphasis on Being and ontology and on language.
The subjects treated in Aristotle's Metaphysics (substance, causality, the nature of being, and the existence of God) fixed the content of metaphysical speculation for centuries. Among the medieval Scholastic philosophers, metaphysics were known as the “transphysical science” on the assumption that, by means of it, the scholar philosophically could make the transition from the physical world to a world beyond sense perception. The 13th-century Scholastic philosopher and theologian St. Thomas Aquinas declared that the cognition of God, through a causal study of finite sensible beings, was the aim of metaphysics. With the rise of scientific study in the 16th century the reconciliation of science and faith in God became an increasingly important problem.
The Irish-born philosopher and clergyman George Berkeley (1685-1753) argued that everything, that human beings were to conceive of exists as an idea in a mind, a philosophical focus that is idealism. Berkeley reasoned that because one cannot control one’s thoughts, they must come directly from a larger mind: That of God. In his treatise, Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge, written in 1710, Berkeley explained why he believed that it is “impossible . . . that there should be any such thing as an outward object.”
Before the time of the German philosopher Immanuel Kant’s metaphysics was characterized by a tendency to construct theories based on deductive knowledge, that is, knowledge derived from reason alone, in the contradistinction to empirical knowledge, which is gained by reference to the facts of experience. From theoretical knowledge were deduced general propositions held to be true of all things. The method of inquiry based on deductive principles is known as rationalistic. This method may be subdivided into monism, which holds that the universe is made up of a single fundamental substance: Dualism, is nonetheless, the belief in two such substances, and pluralism, which proposes the existence of many fundamental substances.
In the 5th and 4th centuries Bc, Plato postulated the existence of a realm of Ideas that the varied objects of common experience imperfectly reflect. He maintained that these ideal Forms are not only more clearly intelligible but also more real than the transient and essentially illusory objects themselves.
George Berkeley is considered the founder of idealism, the philosophical view that all physical objects are dependent on the mind for their existence. According to Berkeley's early 18th-century writing, an object such as a table exists only if a mind is perceiving it. Therefore, objects are ideas.
Berkeley speculated that all aspects of everything of which one is conscious are reducible to the ideas present in the mind. The observer does not conjure external objects into existence, however, the true ideas of them are caused in the human mind directly by God. Eighteenth-century German philosopher Immanuel Kant greatly refined idealism through his critical inquiry into what he believed to be the limit of possible knowledge. Kant held that all that can be known of things is the way in which they appear in experience, there is no way of knowing what they are substantially in themselves. He also held, however, that the fundamental principles of all science are essentially grounded in the constitution of the mind than being derived from the external world.
George Berkeley, argued, that all naturalized associations brought upon the human being to conceive of existent and earthly ideas within the mind, a philosophical focus that is known as idealism.
Trying to develop an all-encompassing philosophical system, German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel wrote on topics ranging from logic and history to art and literature. He considered art to be one of the supreme developments of spiritual and absolute knowledge, surpassed only by religion and philosophy. In his excerpt from Introductory Lectures on Aesthetics, which were based on lectures that Hegel delivered between 1820 and 1829, Hegel discussed the relationship of poetry to other arts, particularly music, and explained that poetry was one mode of expressing the “Idea of beauty” that Hegel believed resided in all art forms. For Hegel, poetry was “the universal realization of the art of the mind.”
Nineteenth-century German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel disagreed with Kant's theory concerning the inescapable human ignorance of what things are in themselves, instead arguing for the ultimate intelligibility of all existence. Hegel also maintained that the highest achievements of the human spirit (culture, science, religion, and the state) are not the result of naturally determined processes in the mind, but are conceived and sustained by the dialectical activity.
Hegel applied the term dialectic to his philosophic system. Hegel believed that the evolution of ideas occurs through a dialectical process - that is, a conceptual lead to its opposite, and because of this conflict, a third view, the synthesis, arises. The synthesis is at a higher level of truth than the first two views. Hegel's work is based on the idealistic conceptualized representation of a universal mind that, through evolution, seeks to arrive at the highest level of self-awareness and freedom.
German political philosopher Karl Marx applied the conceptualize representation of dialectic social and economic processes. Marx's so-called dialectical materialism, frequently considered a revision of the Hegelian, dialectic of free, reflective intellect. Additional strains of idealistic thought can be found in the works of 19th-century Germans Johann Gottlieb Fichte and F.W.J. Schelling, 19th-century Englishman F.H. Bradley, 19th-century Americans Charles Sanders Peirce and Josiah Royce, and 20th-century Italian Benedetto Croce.
The monists, agreeing that only one basic substance exists, differ in their descriptions of its principal characteristic. Thus, in idealistic monism the substance is believed to be purely mental; in materialistic monism it is held to be purely physical, and in neutral monism it is considered neither exclusively mental nor solely physical. The idealistic position was held by the Irish philosopher George Berkeley, the materialistic by the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes, and the neutral by the Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza. The latter expounded a pantheistic view of reality in which the universe is identical with God and everything contains God's substance.
George Berkeley set out to challenge what he saw as the atheism and skepticism inherent in the prevailing philosophy of the early 18th century. His initial publications, which asserted that no objects or matter existed outside the human mind, were met with disdain by the London intelligentsia of the day. Berkeley aimed to explain his “Immaterialist theory, is part of the school of thought known as idealism, to a more general audience in Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous (1713).
The most famous exponent of dualism was the French philosopher René Descartes, who maintained that body and mind are radically different entities and that they are the only fundamental substances in the universe. Dualism, however, does not show how these basic entities are connected.
In the work of the German philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, the universe is held to consist of many distinct substances, or monads. This view is pluralistic in the sense that it proposes the existence of many separate entities, and it is monistic in its assertion that each monad reflects within itself the entire universe.
Other philosophers have held that knowledge of reality is not derived from some deductive principles, but is obtained only from experience. This type of metaphysic is called empiricism. Still another school of philosophy has maintained that, although an ultimate reality does exist, it is altogether inaccessible to human knowledge, which is necessarily subjective because it is confined to states of mind. Knowledge is therefore not a representation of external reality, but merely a reflection of human perceptions. This, nonetheless, is basically known as skepticism or agnosticism, in that their appreciation of the soul and the reality of God.
Immanuel Kant had circulated his thesis on, The Critique of Pure Reason in 1781. Three years later he expanded on his study of the modes of thinking with an essay entitled “What is Enlightenment?” In this 1784 essay, Kant challenged readers to “dare to know,” arguing that it was not only a civic but also a moral duty to exercise the fundamental freedoms of thought and expression.
Several major viewpoints were combined in the work of Kant, who developed a distinctive critical philosophy called Transcendentalism. His philosophy is agnostic in that it denies the possibility of a strict knowledge of ultimate reality; it is empirical in that it affirms that all knowledge arises from experience and is true of objects of actual and possible experience and it is rationalistic in that it maintains the deductive character of the structural principles of this empirical knowledge.
These principles are held to be necessary and universal in their application to experience, for in Kant's view the mind furnishes the archetypal forms and categories (space, time, causality, substance, and relation) to its sensations, and these categories are logically anterior to experience, although manifested only in experience. Their logical anteriority to comprehend an experience only makes these categories or structural principle’s transcendental. They transcend all experience, both actual and possible. Although these principles determine all experience, they do not in any way affect the nature of things in themselves. The knowledge of which these principles are the necessary conditions must not be considered, therefore, as constituting a revelation of things as they are in themselves. This knowledge concerns things only as far as they appear to human perception or as they can be apprehended by the senses. The argument by which Kant sought to fix the limits of human knowledge within the framework of experience and to demonstrate the inability of the human mind to penetrate beyond experience strictly by knowledge to the realm of ultimate reality makes up the critical feature of his philosophy, giving the key word to the titles of his three leading treatises, Critique of Pure Reason, Critique of Practical Reason, and Critique of Judgment. In the system propounded in these works, Kant sought also to reconcile science and religion in a world of two levels, comprising noumena, objects conceived by reason although not perceived by the senses, and phenomena, things as they appear to the senses and are accessible to material study. He maintained that, because God, freedom, and human immortality are noumenal realities, these conceptualized understandings were brought through the moral faith than through scientific knowledge. With the continuous development of science, the expansion of metaphysics to include scientific knowledge and methods became one of the major objectives of metaphysicians.
Some of Kant's most distinguished followers, notably Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Friedrich Schelling, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, and Friedrich Schleiermacher, negated Kant's criticism in their elaborations of his transcendental metaphysics by denying the Kantian conception of the thing-in-itself. They thus developed an absolute idealism opposing Kant's critical transcendentalism.
Since the formation of the hypothesis of absolute idealism, the development of metaphysics has resulted in as many types of metaphysical theory as existed in pre-Kantian philosophy, despite Kant's contention that he had fixed definitely the limits of philosophical speculation. Notable among these later metaphysical theories is radical empiricism, or pragmatism, a native American form of metaphysics expounded by Charles Sanders Peirce, developed by William James, and adapted as instrumentalism by John Dewey; voluntarism, the foremost exponents of which are the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer and the American philosopher Josiah Royce; phenomenalism, as it is exemplified in the writings of the French philosopher Auguste Comte and the British philosopher Herbert Spencer, emergent evolution, or creative evolution, originated by the French philosopher Henri Bergson; and the philosophy of the organism, elaborated by the British mathematician and philosopher Alfred North Whitehead. The salient doctrines of pragmatism are that the chief function of thought is to guide action, that the meaning of concepts is to be sought in their practical applications, and that truth should be tested by the practical effects of belief; According to instrumentalism, ideas are instruments of action, and their truth is determined by their role in human experience. In the theory of voluntarism suspects that Will is postulated as the supreme manifestation of reality. The exponents of phenomenalism, who are sometimes called positivists, contend that everything can be analysed in actual or possible occurrences, or phenomena, and that anything that cannot be analysed in this manner cannot be understood. In emergent or creative evolution, the evolutionary process is characterized as spontaneous and unpredictable than mechanistically determined. The philosophy of the organism combines an evolutionary stress on constant process with a metaphysical theory of God, the eternal objects, and creativity.
In the 20th century the validity of metaphysical thinking has been disputed by the logical positivists and by the so-called dialectical materialism of the Marxists. The basic principle maintained by the logical positivists is the verifiability theory of meaning. According to this theory, a sentence has factual meaning only if it meets the test of observation. Logical positivists argue that metaphysical expressions such as “Nothing exists except material particles” and “Everything is part of one all-encompassing spirit” cannot be tested empirically. Therefore, according to the verifiability theory of meaning, these expressions have no factual cognitive meaning, although they can have an emotive meaning about human hopes and feelings.
The dialectical materialists assert that the mind is conditioned by and reflects material reality. Therefore, speculations that conceive of constructs of the mind as having any other than material reality are themselves strangling unreal and can result only in delusion. To these assertions metaphysicians reply by denying the adequacy of the verifiability theory of meaning and of material perception as the standard of reality. Both logical positivism and dialectical materialism, they argue, conceal metaphysical assumptions, for example, that everything is observable or at least connected with something observable and that the mind has no distinctive life of its own. In the philosophical movement known as existentialism, thinkers have contended that the questions of the nature of being and of the individual's relationship to it are extremely important and meaningful concerning human life. The investigation of these questions is therefore considered valid of whether or not its results can be verified objectively.
Since the 1950s the problems of systematic analytical metaphysics have been studied in Britain by Stuart Newton Hampshire and Peter Frederick Strawson, the former concerned, in the manner of Spinoza, with the relationship between thought and action, and the latter, in the manner of Kant, with describing the major categories of experience as they are embedded in language. In the United States, metaphysics have been pursued much in the spirit of positivism by Wilfred Stalker Sellars and Willard Van Orman Quine, wherefore Sellars has aspired to express metaphysical questions in linguistic terms, and Quine has attempted to decide whether the structure of language commits the philosopher to asserting the existence of any entities whatever and, if so, what kind. In these new formulations the issues of metaphysics and ontology remain vital.
Twentieth-century French intellectual Jean-Paul Sartre helped to develop existential philosophy through his writings, novels, and plays. Considerable amounts of Sartre’s workings focuses on the dilemma of choice faced by free individuals and on the challenge of creating meaning by acting responsibly in an indifferent world. In stating that “man is condemned to be free,” Sartre reminds us of the responsibility that accompanies human decisions.
Sartre first gave the term existentialism general currency by using it for his own philosophy and by becoming the leading figure of a distinct movement in France that became internationally influential after World War II. Sartre's philosophy is explicitly atheistic and pessimistic; He declared that human beings require a rational basis for their lives but are unable to achieve one, and thus human life is a “futile passion.” Sartre nevertheless, insisted that his existentialism be a form of humanism, and he strongly emphasized human freedom, choice, and responsibility. He eventually tried to reconcile these existentialist concepts with a Marxist analysis of society and history. Because, for Heidegger, one is what one does in the world, a phenomenological reduction to one's own private experience is impossible; and because human action consists of a direct grasp of objects, it is not necessary to posit a special mental entity called a meaning to account for intentionality. For Heidegger, being thrown into the world among things in the act of realizing projects is a more fundamental kind of intentionality than that revealed in merely staring at or thinking about objects, and it is this more fundamental intentionality that makes possible the directedness analysed by Husserl.
In the mid-1900s, French existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre attempted to adapt Heidegger's phenomenology to the philosophy of consciousness, in effect returning to the approach of Husserl. Sartre agreed with Husserl that consciousness is always directed at objects but criticized his claim that such directedness is possible only by means of special mental entities called meanings. The French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty rejected Sartre's view that phenomenological description reveals human beings to be pure, isolated, and free consciousnesses. He stressed the role of the active, involved body in all human knowledge, thus generalizing Heidegger's insights to include the analysis of perception. Like Heidegger and Sartre, Merleau-Ponty is an existential phenomenologist, in that he denies the possibility of bracketing existence.
In the treatise Being and Nothingness, French writer Jean-Paul Sartre presents his existential philosophical framework. He reasons that the essential nothingness of human existence leaves individuals to take sole responsibility for their own actions. Shunning the morality and constraints of society, individuals must embrace personal responsibility to craft a world for themselves. Along with focussing on the importance of exercising individual responsibility, Sartre stresses that the understanding of freedom of choice is the only means of authenticating human existence. A novelist and playwright as well as a philosopher, Sartre will become a leader of the modern existentialist movement.
Although existentialist thought encompassing the uncompromising atheism of Nietzsche and Sartre and the agnosticism of Heidegger, its origin in the intensely religious philosophies of Pascal and Kierkegaard, foreshadowed its profound influence on 20th-century theologies. The 20th-century German philosopher Karl Jaspers, although he rejected explicit religious doctrines, influenced a contemporary theology through his preoccupation with transcendence and the limits of human experience. The German Protestant theologian’s Paul Tillich and Rudolf Bultmann, the French Roman Catholic theologian Gabriel Marcel, the Russian Orthodox philosopher Nikolay Berdyayev, and the German Jewish philosopher Martin Buber inherited many of Kierkegaard's concerns, especially that a personal sense of authenticity and commitment is essential to religious faith.
Renowned as one of the most important writers in world history, 19th-century Russian author Fyodor Dostoyevsky wrote psychologically intense novels that probed the motivations and moral justifications for his characters’ actions. Dostoyevsky commonly addressed themes such as the struggle between good and evil within the human soul and the idea of salvation through suffering. The Brothers Karamazov (1879-1880), generally considered Dostoyevsky’s best work, interlaces religious exploration with the story of a family’s violent quarrels over a woman and a disputed inheritance.
Twentieth-century writer and philosopher Albert Camus examined what he considered the tragic inability of human beings to understand and transcend their intolerable conditions. In his work Camus presented an absurd and seemingly unreasonable world in which some people futilely struggle to find meaning and rationality while others simply refuse to care. For example, the main character of The Stranger (1942) kills a man on a beach for no reason and accepts his arrest and punishment with a dispassion. In contrast, in The Plague (1947), Camus introduces characters who act with courage in the face of absurdity.
Several existentialist philosophers used literary forms to convey their thought, and existentialism has been as vital and as extensive a movement in literature as in philosophy. The 19th-century Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoyevsky is probably the greatest existentialist literary figure. In Notes from the Underground (1864), the alienated antihero rages against the optimistic assumptions of rationalist humanism. The view of human nature that emerges in this and other novels of Dostoyevsky is that it is unpredictable and perversely self-destructive; Only Christian love can save humanity from itself, but such love cannot be understood philosophically. As the character Alyosha says in The Brothers Karamazov (1879-80), “We must love life more than the meaning of it.”
The unfolding narrations that launch the chronological lines are attributed to the Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Notes from Underground (1864) - “I am a sick man . . . I am a spiteful man”- are among the most famous in 19th-century literature. Published five years after his release from prison and involuntary, military service in Siberia, Notes from Underground is a sign of Dostoyevsky’s rejection of the radical social thinking he had embraced in his youth. The unnamed narrator is antagonistic in tone, questioning the reader’s sense of morality plus the foundations of rational thinking.
In the 20th century, the novels of the Austrian Jewish writer Franz Kafka, such as The Trial 1925, translated, 1937, and The Castle (1926, translated, 1930), present isolated men confronting vast, elusive, menacing bureaucracies; Kafka's themes of anxiety, guilt, and solitude reflect the influence of Kierkegaard, Dostoyevsky, and, the influence of Nietzsche is also discernible in the novels of the French writer’s André Malraux and in the plays of Sartre. The work of the French writer Albert Camus is usually associated with existentialism because of the prominence of such themes as the apparent absurdity and futility of life, the indifference of the universe, and the necessity of engagement in a just cause. Existentialist themes are also reflected in the theatre of the absurd, notably in the plays of Samuel Beckett and Eugène Ionesco. In the United States, the influence of existentialism on literature has been more indirect and diffused, traces of Kierkegaard's thought can be found in the novels of Walker Percy and John Updike, and various existentialist themes are apparent in the work of such diverse writers as Norman Mailer, John Barth, and Arthur Miller.
Nietzsche’s concept has often been interpreted as one that postulates a master-slave society and has been identified with totalitarian philosophies. Many scholars deny the connection and attribute it to misinterpretation of Nietzsche 's work.
For him, an undertaking to characterize its method of analysis and criticism, under which we should feel quite familiar with, just as the extracted forms of familiarity are basic throughout which contextual matters of representation have previously been faced. He is encouraging as a new possibility for our lives a program that has strong and obvious roots in certain forms of Romanticism. Thus, is to illustrate how Nietzsche, the greater burden of tradition, as he is deeply connected to categorical priorities as to finding the considerations of which make of tradition.
Yet, Kant tried to solve the crisis generated by Locke and brought to a climax by Hume; his proposed solution combined elements of rationalism with elements of empiricism. He agreed with the rationalists that one can have an exact and certain opening for knowledge, but he followed the empiricists in holding that such knowledge is more informative about the structure of thought than about the world outside thought.
During the 19th century, the German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel revived the rationalist claim that absolutely certain knowledge of reality can be obtained by equating the processes of thought, of nature, and of history. Hegel inspired an interest in history and a historical approach to knowledge by Herbert Spencer in Britain and by the German school of historicisms. Spencer and the French philosopher Auguste Comte brought attention to the importance of sociology as a branch of knowledge, and both extended the principles of empiricism to the study of society.
The American school of pragmatism, founded by the philosophers Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, and John Dewey at the turn of this century, carried empiricism by maintaining that knowledge is an instrument of action and that all beliefs should be judged by their usefulness as rules for predicting experiences.
In the early 20th century, epistemological problems were discussed thoroughly, and subtle shades of difference grew into rival schools of thought. Special attention was given to the relation between the act of perceiving something, the object directly perceived, and the thing that can be said to be known because of the perception. The phenomenalists contended that the objects of knowledge are the same as the objects perceived. The neorealist argued that one has direct perceptions of physical objects or parts of physical objects, than of one's own mental states. The critical realists took a middle position, holding that although one perceives only sensory data such as colours and sounds, these stand for physical objects and provide knowledge of it.
A method for dealing with the problem of clarifying the relation between the act of knowing and the object known was developed by the German philosopher Edmund Husserl. He outlined an elaborate procedure that he called phenomenology, by which one is said to be able to distinguish the way things are from the way one thinks they really are, thus gaining a more precise understanding of the conceptual foundations of knowledge.
During the second quarter of the 20th century, two schools of thought emerged, each indebted to the Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. The first of these schools, logical empiricism, or logical positivism, had its origins in Vienna, Austria, but it soon spread to England and the United States. The logical empiricists insisted that there be only one kind of knowledge: Scientific knowledge; In that, any legitimate claim that is reinforced through the knowledge claim must be verifiable in experience. So that, much that had passed for philosophy was neither true nor false but literally meaningless. Finally, following Hume and Kant, a clear distinction must be maintained between analytic and synthetic statements. The so-called verifiability criterion of meaning has undergone changes because of discussions among the logical empiricists themselves, and their critics, but has not been discarded. More recently, the sharp distinction between the analytic and the synthetic has been attacked by many of philosophers, chiefly by American philosopher W.V.O. Quine, whose overall approach is in the pragmatic tradition.
The latter of these recent schools of thought, generally called linguistic analysis, or ordinary language philosophy, seem to break with traditional epistemology. The linguistic analysts undertake to examine the actualized directive in key epistemological terms are used-terms such as knowledge, perception, and probability - and to formulate definitive rules for their use to avoid verbal confusion.
John Austin (1911-1960), a British philosopher, a prominent figure in 20th-century analytic and linguistic philosophy, was born in Lancaster, England, he was educated at the University of Oxford. After serving in British intelligence during World War II (1939-1945), he returned to Oxford and taught philosophy until his death.
Austin viewed the fundamental philosophical task to be that of annualizing and clarifying ordinary language. He considered attention to distinctions drawn in ordinary language as the most fruitful starting point for philosophical inquiry. Austin's linguistic work led to many influential concepts, such as the speech-act theory. This arose from his observation that many utterances do not merely describe reality but also affect reality; They are the performance of some act than a report of its performance. Austin came to believe that all languages are performatives and is made up of speech acts. Seven of his essays were published during his lifetime. Posthumously published works include Philosophical Papers (1961), Sense and Sensibilia (1962), and How to Do Things with Words (1962).
Thomas Hill Green (1836-1882), British philosopher and educator, who led the revolt against empiricism, the dominant philosophy in Britain during the latter part of the 19th century. He was born in Birkin, Yorkshire, England, and educated at Rugby and the University of Oxford. He taught at Oxford from 1860 until his death, initially as a fellow and after 1878 as Whyte Professor of Moral Philosophy.
A disciple of the German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Green insisted that consciousness provide the necessary basis for both knowledge and morality. He argued that a person's highest good is realization and that the individual can obtainably achieve realization, only in society. Society has an obligation, in turn, to provide for the good of all its members. The political implications of his philosophy laid the basis for sweeping social-reform legislation in Britain. Besides being the most influential British philosopher of his time, Green was a vigorous champion of popular education, temperance, and political liberalism. His writings include Prolegomena to Ethics (1883) and Lectures on the Principles of Political Obligation (1895), as both liberalized materials were posthumously published.
The outcome of this crisis in economic and social thinking was the development of positive liberalism. As noted, certain modern liberals, like the Austrian-born economist Friedrich August von Hayek, consider the positive attitude an essential betrayal of liberal ideals. Others, such as the British philosophers Thomas Hill Green and Bernard Bosanquet, known as the “Oxford Idealists,” ‘devised a so-called organic liberalism designed to hinder hindrances to the good life’. Green and Bosanquet advocated positive state action to promote - fulfilment, that is, to prevent economic monopoly, abolish poverty, and secure people against the disabilities of sickness, unemployment, and old age. The identified liberalism came alongside with the extension of democracy.
Most of the philosophical discussions of consciousness arose from the mind-body issues posed by René Descartes in the 17th century. Descartes asked: Is the mind, or consciousness, independent of matter? Is consciousness extended (physical) or unexceeded (nonphysical)? Is consciousness determinative, or is it determined? English philosophers such as John Locke equated consciousness with physical sensations and the information they provide, whereas European philosophers such as Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and Immanuel Kant gave a more central and active role to the awakening of consciousness.
The philosopher who most directly influenced subsequent exploration of the subject of consciousness was the 19th-century German educator Johann Friedrich Herbart, who wrote that ideas had quality and intensity and that they may inhibit or simplify every other. Thus, ideas may pass from “states of reality” (consciousness) to “states of tendency” (unconsciousness), with the dividing line between the two states being described as the threshold of consciousness. This formulation of Herbart clearly presages the development, by the German psychologist and physiologist Gustav Theodor Fechner, of the psycho-physical measurement of sensation thresholds, and the later development by Sigmund Freud of the concept of the unconscious.
No simple, agreed-upon definition of consciousness exists. Attempted definitions tend to be tautological (for example, consciousness defined as awareness) or merely descriptive (for example, consciousness described as sensations, thoughts, or feelings). Despite this problem of definition, the subject of consciousness has had a remarkable history. There had occasioned that the primary subject matter of psychology, consciousness as an area of study has suffered almost a total dissolution, later reemerging to become a topic of current interest.
The experimental analysis of consciousness dates from 1879, when the German psychologist Wilhelm Max Wundt started his research laboratory. For Wundt, the task of psychology was the study of the structure of consciousness, which extended well beyond sensations and included feelings, images, memory, attention, duration, and movement. Because early interest focussed on the content and dynamics of consciousness, it is not surprising that the central methodology of such studies was introspection; That is, subjects reported on the mental contents of their own consciousness. This introspective approach was developed most fully by the American psychologist Edward Bradford Titchener at Cornell University. Setting his task as that of describing the structure of the mind, Titchener attempted to detail, from introspective-reports, the dimensions of the elements of consciousness. For example, taste was “dimensionalized” into four basic categories, sweet, sour, salt, and bitter. This approach was known as structuralism.
By the 1920s, however, a remarkable revolution had occurred in psychology that was essentially to remove considerations of consciousness from psychological research for some fifty years: Behaviourism captured the field of psychology. The main initiator of this movement was the American psychologist John Broadus Watson. When in a 1913 article, Watson stated, ‘I believe that we can write on the preliminaries of psychology and never use the term’s consciousness, mental states, mind . . . imagery and the like.’ Psychologists then turned almost exclusively to behaviours, as described as to stimulus and response, and consciousness was totally bypassed as a subject. A survey of eight leading introductory psychology texts published between 1930 and the 1950s found no mention of the topic of consciousness in five texts, and in two it was treated as a historical curiosity.
Impelled of the 1950s, were, however, an interest in the subject of consciousness returned, specifically in those subjects and techniques relating to altered states of consciousness, such in sleep and dreams, meditation, biofeedback, hypnosis, and drug-induced states. An increase in sleep and dream research was directly fuelled by a discovery used for the nature of consciousness. A physiological indicator of the dream state was found: At roughly 90-minute intervals, the eyes of sleepers were observed to move rapidly, and while the sleepers' brain waves would show a pattern resembling the waking state. When people were awakened during these periods of rapid eye movement, they usually reported dreams, whereas if awakened at other times they did not. This and other research clearly suggested that sleep, once considered a passive state, were instead an active state of consciousness.
During the 1960s, an increased search for “higher levels” of consciousness through meditation resulted in a growing interest in the practices of Zen Buddhism and Yoga from Eastern cultures. A full flowering of this movement in the United States was seen in the development of training programs, such as Transcendental Meditation, that was, - directed procedures of physical relaxation and focussed attention. Biofeedback techniques also were developed to bring body systems involving factors such as blood pressure or temperature under voluntary control by providing response from the body, so that subjects could learn to control their responses. For example, researchers found that persons could control their brain-wave patterns to some extent, particularly the so-called alpha rhythms generally associated with a relaxed, meditative state. This finding was especially used for those interested in consciousness and meditation, and several ‘alpha training’ programs emerged.
Another subject that led to increased interest in altered states of consciousness was hypnosis, which involves a transfer of conscious control from the one person to another person. Hypnotism has had a long and intricate history in medicine and folklore and has been intensively studied by psychologists. Much has become known about the hypnotic state, compared with individual suggestibility and personality traits; The subject has now been largely demythologized, and the limitations of the hypnotic state are well known. Despite the increasing use of hypnosis, however, much remains to be learned about this unusual state of focussed attention.
Many people in the 1960s experimented with the psychoactive drugs known as hallucinogens, which produce mental or mind distortions of conscious dialectic awareness. The most prominent of these drugs is lysergic acid diethylamide, or LSD; Mescaline and psilocybin, the latter two have long been associated with religious ceremonies in various cultures. LSD, because of its radical thought-modifying properties, was initially explored for its so-called mind-expanding potential and for its psychotomimetic effects (imitating psychoses). Little positive use, however, has been found for these. As the metaphysic of an orderly but simple linkage between environment and behaviour became unsatisfactory in recent decades. Interest in altered states of consciousness may be taken as a visible sign of renewed interest in the topic of consciousness. That persons are active and intervening participants in their behaviour has become increasingly clear. Environments, rewards, and punishments are not simply defined by their physical character. Memories are organized, not simply stored in the composites of memory. An entirely new area called cognitive psychology has emerged that centre on these concerns. In the study of children, increased attention is being paid to how they understand, or perceive, the world at different ages. In the field of animal behaviour, researchers increasingly emphasize the inherent characteristics resulting from the way a species has been shaped to respond adaptively to the environment. Humanistic psychologists, with a concern for-actualization and growth, have emerged after a long period of silence. Throughout the development of clinical and industrial psychology, the conscious states of persons as to their current feelings and thoughts were important. The role of consciousness, however, was often de-emphasised in favour of unconscious needs and motivations. Trends can be seen, however, toward a new emphasis on the nature of states of consciousness.
When the German psychologist Wilhelm Max Wundt started his research laboratory. For Wundt, the task of psychology was the study of the structure of consciousness, which extended well beyond sensations and included feelings, images, memory, attention, duration, and movement. Because early interest focussed on the content and dynamics of consciousness, it is not surprising that the central methodology of such studies was introspection; that is, subjects reported on the mental contents of their own consciousness. This introspective approach was developed most fully by the American psychologist Edward Bradford Titchener at Cornell University. Setting his task as that of describing the structure of the mind, Titchener attempted to detail, from introspective self-reports, the dimensions of the elements of consciousness.
Scientists have long since considered the nature of consciousness without producing a fully satisfactory definition. In the early 20th century American philosopher and psychologist William James suggested that consciousness is a mental process involving both attention to external stimuli and short-term memory. Later scientific explorations of consciousness mostly expanded upon James’s work. In this, a 1997 special issue of Scientific American, Nobel laureate Francis Crick, who helped determine the structure of DNA, and fellow biophysicists Christof Koch explain how experiments on vision might deepen our understanding of consciousness.
Thirteenth-century Italian philosopher and theologian Saint Thomas Aquinas attempted to synthesize Christian belief with a broad range of human knowledge, embracing diverse sources such as Greek philosopher Aristotle and Islamic and Jewish scholars. His thought exerted lasting influence on the development of Christian theology and Western philosophy. Author Anthony Kenny examines the complexities of Aquinas’s concepts of substance and accident.
In the 5th century Bc, the Greek Sophists questioned the possibility of reliable and objective knowledge. Thus, a leading Sophist, Gorgias, argued that nothing really exists, that if anything did exist it could not be known, and that if knowledge were possible, it could not be communicated. Another prominent Sophist, Protagoras, maintained that no person's opinions can be said to be correct than another's, because each is the sole judge of his or her own experience. Plato, following his illustrious teacher Socrates, tried to answer the Sophists by postulating the existence of a world of unchanging and invisible forms, or ideas, about having exact and accurate knowledge is possible. The thing’s one sees and touches, they maintained, are imperfect copies of the pure forms studied in mathematics and philosophy. Accordingly, only the abstract reasoning of these disciplines yields genuine knowledge, whereas reliance on sense perception produces vague and inconsistent opinions. They concluded that philosophical contemplation of the unseen world of forms is the highest goal of human life.
Aristotle followed Plato in regarding abstract knowledge as superior to any other, but disagreed with him as to the proper method of achieving it. Aristotle maintained that most knowledge is derived from experience. Knowledge is gained either directly, by abstracting the defining traits of a species, or indirectly, by deducing new facts from those already known, according to the rules of logic. Careful observation and strict adherence to the rules of logic, which were first set down in systematic form by Aristotle, would help guard against the pitfalls the Sophists had exposed. The Stoic and Epicurean schools agreed with Aristotle that knowledge originates in sense perception, but against both Aristotle and Plato they maintained that philosophy is to be valued as a practical guide to life, than as an end in it.
After many centuries of declining interest in rational and scientific knowledge, the Scholastic philosopher Saint Thomas Aquinas and other philosophers of the Middle Ages helped to restore confidence in reason and experience, blending rational methods with faith into a unified system of beliefs. Aquinas followed Aristotle in regarding perception as the starting point and logic as the intellectual procedure for arriving at reliable knowledge of nature, but he considered faith in scriptural authority as the main source of religious belief.
From the 17th to the late 19th century, the main issue in epistemology was reasoning versus sense perception in acquiring knowledge. For the rationalists, of whom the French philosopher René Descartes, the Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza, and the German philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz were the leaders, the main source and final test of knowledge was deductive reasoning based on evident principles, or axioms. For the empiricists, beginning with the English philosophers Francis Bacon and John Locke, the main source and final test of knowledge was sense perception.
French thinker René Descartes applied rigorous scientific methods of deduction to his exploration of philosophical questions. Descartes is probably best known for his pioneering work in philosophical skepticism. Author Tom Sorell examines the concepts behind Descartes’s work Meditationes de Prima Philosophia (1641, Meditations on First Philosophy), focussing on its distinctive use of logic and the reactions it aroused.
Bacon inaugurated the new era of modern science by criticizing the medieval reliance on tradition and authority and by setting down new rules of scientific method, including the first set of rules of inductive logic ever formulated. Locke attacked the rationalist belief that the principles of knowledge are intuitively evident, arguing that all knowledge is derived from experience, either from experience of the external world, which stamps sensations on the mind, or from internal experience, in which the mind reflects on its own activities. Human knowledge of external physical objects, he claimed, is always subject to the errors of the senses, and he concluded that one cannot have absolutely certain knowledge of the physical world.
George Berkeley conceded with Locke who retained in the possibility of knowing that some of our ideas (those of primary qualities) give us an adequate representation of the world around us, and that the various sources of knowledge, and above all the limits and doubtful capacities of our minds. It is through this that Locke connected his epistemology with the defence of religious toleration. Nevertheless, Berkeley denied Locke's belief that a distinction can be made between ideas and objects. The British philosopher David Hume continued the empiricist tradition, but he did not accept Berkeley's conclusion that knowledge was of ideas only. He divided all knowledge into two kinds: Knowledge of relations of ideas - that is, the knowledge found in mathematics and logic, which is exact and certain but provide no information about the world; and knowledge of matters of fact - that is, the knowledge derived from sense perception. Hume argued that most knowledge of matters of fact depends upon cause and effect, and since no logical connection exists between any given cause and its effect, one cannot hope to know any future matter of fact with certainty. Thus, the most reliable laws of science might not remain true, that of a conclusion that had a revolutionary impact on philosophy.
During the 19th century, the German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel revived the rationalist claim that absolutely certain knowledge of reality can be obtained by equating the processes of thought, of nature, and of history. Hegel inspired an interest in history and a historical approach to knowledge emphasized by Herbert Spencer in Britain and by the German school of historicisms. Spencer and the French philosopher Auguste Comte brought attention to the importance of sociology as a branch of knowledge, and both extended the principles of empiricism to the study of society.
In the early 20th century, epistemological problems were discussed thoroughly, and subtle shades of difference grew into rival schools of thought. Special attention was given to the relation between the act of perceiving something, the object directly perceived, and the thing that can be said to be known because of the perception. The phenomenalists contended that the objects of knowledge are the same as the objects perceived. The neorealist argued that one has direct perceptions of physical objects or parts of physical objects, than of one's own mental states. The critical realists took a middle position, holding that although one perceives only sensory data such as colours and sounds, these stand for physical objects and provide knowledge of it.
During the second quarter of the 20th century, two schools of thought emerged, each indebted to the Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. The first of these schools, logical empiricism, or logical positivism, had its origins in Vienna, Austria, but it soon spread to England and the United States. The logical empiricists insisted that there be only one kind of knowledge - scientific knowledge, that any valid knowledge claim must be verifiable in experience: Consequently, that much that had passed for philosophy was neither true nor false but literally meaningless. Finally, following Hume and Kant, a clear distinction must be maintained between analytic and synthetic statements.
Of these recent schools of thought, generally called linguistic analysis, or ordinary language philosophy, seems to break with traditional epistemology. The linguistic analysts undertake to examine the actualization laced upon the way major epistemological terms are used-terms such as knowledge, perception, and probability - and to formulate definitive rules for their use to avoid verbal confusion. British philosopher John Langshaw Austin argued, for example, that to say a statement was truly added but nothing to the statement except a promise by the speaker or writer. Austin does not consider truth a quality or property attaching to statements or utterances.
Positivism, is a contained system of philosophy based on experience and empirical knowledge of natural phenomena, in which metaphysics and theology are regarded as inadequate and imperfect systems of knowledge.
The doctrine was first called positivism by the 19th-century French mathematician and philosopher Auguste Comte, but some positivist concepts may be traced to the British philosopher David Hume, the French philosopher Duc de Saint-Simon, and Immanuel Kant.
The keystone of Kant's philosophy, sometimes called critical philosophy, is contained in his Critique of Pure Reason (1781), in which he examined the bases of human knowledge and created an individual epistemology. Like earlier philosophers, Kant differentiated modes of thinking into analytic and synthetic propositions. An analytic proposition is one in which the predicate is contained in the subject, as in the statement “Black houses are houses.” The truth of this type of proposition is evident, because to state the reverse would be to make the proposition self-contradictory. Such propositions are called analytic because truth is discovered by the analysis of the concept itself. Synthetic propositions, on the other hand, are those that cannot be arrived at by pure analysis, as in the statement “The house is black.” All the common propositions that result from experience of the world are synthetic.
Propositions, according to Kant, can also be divided into two other types, empirical and deductive. Empirical propositions depend entirely on sense perception, but a deductive proposition has for itself - , a fundamental validity and is not based on such perception. The difference between these two types of propositions may be illustrated by the empirical “The house is black” and the deductivity “Two plus two makes four.” Kant's thesis in the Critique is that making synthetic speculative judgment is possible. This philosophical position is usually known as transcendentalism. In describing how this type of judgment is possible Kant regarded the objects of the material world as fundamentally unknowable, from the point of view of reason, they serve merely as the raw material from which sensations are formed. Objects of themselves have no existence, and space and time exists only as part of the mind, as “intuitions” by which perceptions are measured and judged.
Besides these intuitions, Kant stated that several deductive concepts, which he called categories, also exists. He divided the categories into four groups concerning quantity, which are unity, plurality, and totality. Those concerning quality values, for which reality, negation, and limitation, are the concerning relations under which are substance-and-accident, cause-and-effect, and reciprocity, all of these under consideration contend with the concerns of modality, in that they are possibly to explicate upon existence, and necessity. The intuitions and the categories can be applied to make judgments about experiences and perceptions, but cannot, according to Kant, be applied to abstract ideas such as freedom and existence without leading to inconsistencies in the form of coupling incomparable propositions, or “antinomies,” in which both members of each pair can be proven true.
In the Metaphysics of Ethics (1797) Kant described his ethical system, which is based on a belief that the reason is the final authority for morality. Actions of any sort, he believed, must be undertaken from a sense of duty dictated by reason, and no action had rendered for expediency or solely in obedience to law or custom can be regarded as moral. Kant described two types of commands given by reason, the hypothetical imperative, which dictates a given course of action to reach a specific end, and the categorical imperative, which dictates a course of action that must be followed because of its rightness and necessity. The categorical imperative is the basis of morality and was stated by Kant in these words: “Act as if the maxim of your action were to become a vessel through which means were a way of your will and general common law.”
Kant's ethical ideas are a logical outcome of his belief in the fundamental freedom of the individual as stated in his Critique of Practical Reason (1788). This freedom he did not regard as the lawless freedom of anarchy, but as the freedom of a self-government, the freedom to obey consciously the laws of the universe as revealed by reason. He believed that the welfare of each individual should properly be regarded as an end, that the world was progressing toward an ideal society in which reason would “bind every law giver to make his laws so that they could have sprung from the united will of an entire people, and to regard every subject, in as far as he wishes to be a citizen, based on whether he has conformed to that will.” In his treatise Perpetual Peace (1795) Kant advocated the establishment of a world federation of republican states.
Kant had a greater influence than any other philosopher of modern times. Kantian philosophy, particularly as developed by the German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, was the basis on which the structure of Marxism was built; Hegel's dialectical method, which was used by Karl Marx, was an outgrowth of the method of reasoning by “antinomies” that Kant used. The German philosopher Johann Fichte, Kant's pupil, rejected his teacher's division of the world into objective and subjective parts and developed an idealistic philosophy that also had great influence on 19th-century socialists. One of Kant's successors at the University of Königsberg, J.F. Herbart, incorporated some of Kant's ideas in his system of pedagogy.
Besides works on philosophy, Kant wrote many treatises on various scientific subjects, many in the field of physical geography. His most important scientific work was General Natural History and Theory of the Heavens (1755), in which he advanced the hypothesis of the formation of the universe from a spinning nebula hypothesis that later was developed independently by Pierre de LaPlace.
Among Kant's other writings are Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics (1783), Metaphysical Rudiments of Natural Philosophy (1786), Critique of Judgment (1790), and Religion Within the Boundaries of Pure Reason (1793).
Metaphysics, is the branch of philosophy that is concerned with the nature of ultimate reality. Metaphysic is customarily divided into ontology, which deals with the question of how many fundamentally distinct sorts of entities compose the universe, and metaphysics proper, which is concerned with describing the most general traits of reality. These general traits together define reality and would presumably characterize any universe whatever. Because these traits are not peculiar to this universe, but are common to all possible universes, metaphysics may be conducted at the highest level of abstraction. Ontology, by contrast, because it investigates the ultimate divisions within this universe, is more closely related to the physical world of human experience.
The term metaphysic is believed to have been derived in Rome about 70Bc, with the Greek Peripatetic philosopher Andronicus of Rhodes (flourished 1st century Bc) in his edition of the works of Aristotle. In the arrangement of Aristotle's works by Andronicus, the treatise originally called First Philosophy, or Theology, followed the treatise Physics. Hence, the First Philosophy became known as meta (ta) physica, or “following (the) Physics,” later shortened to Metaphysics. The word took on the connotation, in popular usage, of matters transcending material reality. In the philosophic sense, however, particularly as opposed to the use of the word by occultists, metaphysic apply to all reality and is distinguished from other forms of inquiry by its generality.
The subjects treated in Aristotle's Metaphysics (substance, causality, the nature of being, and the existence of God) fixed the content of metaphysical speculation for centuries. Among the medieval Scholastic philosophers, metaphysics were known as the “transphysical science” on the assumption that, by means of it, the scholar philosophically could make the transition from the physical world to a world beyond sense perception. The 13th-century Scholastic philosopher and theologian St. Thomas Aquinas declared that the cognition of God, through a causal study of finite sensible beings, was the aim of metaphysics. With the rise of scientific study in the 16th century the reconciliation of science and faith in God became an increasingly important problem.
Before the time of Kantian metaphysics that was characterized by a tendency to construct theories based on deductive knowledge, that is, knowledge derived from reason alone, in contradistinctions to empirical knowledge, which is gained by reference to the facts of experience. From deductive knowledge were to signify a deduced general proposition held to be true of all things. The method of inquiry based on deductive principles is known as rationalistic. This method may be subdivided into monism, which holds that the universe is made up of a single fundamental substance; Dualism, may be viewed as the belief in two such substances, as the pluralism for which proposes the existence of several fundamental properties.
The monists, agreeing that only one basic substance exists, differ in their descriptions of its principal characteristics. Thus, in idealistic monism the substance is believed to be purely mental; in materialistic monism it is held to be purely physical, and in neutral monism it is considered neither exclusively mental nor solely physical. The idealistic position was held by the Irish philosopher George Berkeley, the materialistic by the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes, and the neutral by the Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza. The latter expounded a pantheistic view of reality in which the universe is identical with God and everything contains God's contention.
George Berkeley set out to challenge what he saw as the atheism and skepticism inherent in the prevailing philosophy of the early 18th century. His initial publications, which asserted that no objects or matter existed outside the human mind, were met with disdain by the London intelligentsia of the day. Berkeley aimed to explain his “Immaterialist” theory, part of the school of thought known as idealism, to a more general audience in Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous (1713).
The most famous exponent of dualism was the French philosopher René Descartes, who maintained that body and mind are radically different entities and that they are the only fundamental substances in the universe. Dualism, however, does not show how these basic entities are connected.
In the work of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, the universe is held to consist of many distinct substances, or monads. This view is pluralistic in the sense that it proposes the existence of many separate entities, and it is monistic in its assertion that each monad reflects within itself the entire universe.
Other philosophers have held that knowledge of reality is not derived from theoretical principles, but is obtained only from experience. This type of metaphysic is called empiricism. Still another school of philosophy has maintained that, although an ultimate reality does exist, it is altogether inaccessible to human knowledge, which is necessarily subjective because it is confined to states of mind. Knowledge is therefore not a representation of external reality, but merely a reflection of human perceptions. This view is known as skepticism or agnosticism in respect to the soul and the reality of God.
It is empirical in that it affirms that all knowledge arises from experience and is true of objects of actual and possible experience; and it is rationalistic in that it maintains the speculative character of the structural principles of this empirical knowledge.
These principles are held to be necessary and universal in their application to experience, for in Kant's view the mind furnishes the archetypal forms and categories such that experience, is manifested only in experience. Their logic precedes the experience from which of these categories or structural principle’s are made transcendental. They transcend all experience, both actual and possible. Although these principles determine all experience, they do not in any way affect the nature of things in themselves. The knowledge of which these principles are the necessary conditions must not be considered, therefore, as constituting a revelation of things as they are in themselves. This knowledge concerns things only insofar as they appear to human perception or as they can be apprehended by the senses. The argument by which Kant sought to fix the limits of human knowledge within the framework of experience and to demonstrate the inability of the human mind to penetrate beyond experience strictly by knowledge to the realm of ultimate reality constitutes the critical feature of his philosophy, given the key word to the titles of his three leading treatises, Critique of Pure Reason, Critique of Practical Reason, and Critique of Judgment. He maintained that, because God, freedom, and human immortality are noumenal realities, these concepts are understood through moral faith rather than through scientific knowledge. With the continuous development of science, the expansion of metaphysics to include scientific knowledge and methods became one of the major objectives of metaphysicians.
Since the formation of the hypothesis of absolute idealism, the development of metaphysics has resulted in as many types of metaphysical theory as existed in pre-Kantian philosophy, despite Kant's contention that he had fixed definitely the limits of philosophical speculation. Notable among these later metaphysical theories is radical empiricism, or pragmatism, a native American form of metaphysics expounded by Charles Sanders Peirce, developed by William James, and adapted as instrumentalism by John Dewey; Voluntarism, is the foremost exponents of which are the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer and the American philosopher Josiah Royce, for phenomenalism is exemplified in the writings of the French philosopher Auguste Comte and the British philosopher Herbert Spencer, emergent evolution, or creative evolution, originated by the French philosopher Henri Bergson, and the philosophy of the organism, which is elaborated by the British mathematician and philosopher Alfred North Whitehead. The salient doctrines of pragmatism are that the chief function of thought is to guide action, that the meaning of concepts is to be sought in their practical applications, and that truth should be tested by the practical effects of belief: According to instrumentalism, ideas are instruments of action, and their truth is determined by their role in human experience. In the theory of voluntarism ‘the Determination of Will’ is postulated as the supreme manifestation of reality. The exponents of phenomenalism, who are sometimes called positivists, contend that everything can be analysed as to actual or possible occurrences, or phenomena, and that anything that cannot be analysed in this manner cannot be understood. In emergent or creative evolution, the evolutionary process is characterized as spontaneous and unpredictable rather than mechanistically determined. The philosophy of the organism combines an evolutionary stress on constant process with a metaphysical theory of God, the eternal objects, and creativity what is Mysticism but an immediate, direct, intuitive knowledge of God or of ultimate reality attained through personal religious experience? Wide variations are found in both the form and the intensity of mystical experience. The authenticity of any such experience, however, is not dependent on the form, but solely on the quality of life that follows the experience. The mystical life is characterized by enhanced vitality, productivity, serenity, and joy as the inner and outward aspects harmonize in union with God.
Daoism (Taoism) emphasizes the importance of unity with nature and of yielding to the natural flow of the universe. This contrasts greatly with Confucianism, another Chinese philosophy, which focuses on society and ethics. The fundamental text of Daoism is traditionally attributed to Laozi, a legendary Chinese philosopher who supposedly lived in the 500s Bc.
Elaborate philosophical theories have been developed in an attempt to explain the phenomena of mysticism. Thus, in Hindu philosophy, and particularly in the metaphysical system known as the Vedanta, the self or atman in man is identified with the supreme self, or Brahman, of the universe. The apparency of separateness and individuality of beings and events are held to be an illusion (Sanskrit maya), or convention of thought and feeling. This illusion can be dispelled through the realization of the essential oneness of atman and Brahman. When the religious initiate has overcome the beginningless, ignorance (Sanskrit avidya) upon which, depends on the apparent separability of subject and objects, of self and no self, a mystical state of liberation, or moksha, is attained. The Hindu philosophy of Yoga incorporates perhaps the most comprehensive and rigorous discipline ever designed to transcend the sense of personal identity and to clear the way for an experience of union with the divine self. In China, Confucianism is formalistic and antimystical, but Daoism, as expounded by its traditional founder, the Chinese philosopher Laozi (Lao-tzu), has a strong mystical emphasis.
The philosophical ideas of the ancient Greeks were predominantly naturalistic and rationalistic, but an element of mysticism found expression in the Orphic and other sacred mysteries. A late Greek movement, Neoplatonism, was based on the philosophy of Plato and shows the influence of the mystery religions. The Muslim Sufi sect embraces a form of theistic mysticism closely resembling that of the Vedanta. The doctrines of Sufism found their most memorable expression in the symbolic works of the Persian poets Mohammed Shams od-Din, better known as Hafiz, and Jalal al-Din Rumi, and in the writings of the Persian al-Ghazali. Mysticism of the pre-Christian period is evidenced in the writings of the Jewish-Hellenistic philosopher Philo Judaeus.
The Imitation of Christ, the major devotional works of medieval German monk Thomas à Kempis, was written more than 500 years ago to aid fellow members of religious orders. The book, simple in language and style, has become one of the most influential works in Christian literature. It is a thoughtful yet practical treatise that guides the reader toward a spiritual union with God through the teachings of Jesus Christ and the monastic qualities of poverty, chastity, and obedience. In this, Kempis urges Christians to live each day as if it might be their last.
Saint Paul was the first great Christian mystic. The New Testament writings’ best known for their deeply mystical emphasis are Paul’s letters and the Gospel of John. Christian mysticism as a system, however, had arisen from Neoplatonism through the writings of Dionysius the Areopagite, or Pseudo-Dionysius. The 9th-century Scholastic philosopher John Scotus Erigena translated the works of Pseudo-Dionysius from Greek into Latin and thus introduced the mystical theology of Eastern Christianity into Western Europe, where it was combined with the mysticism of the early Christian prelate and theologian Saint Augustine.
In the Middle Ages mysticism was often associated with monasticism. Many celebrated mystics are found among the monks of both the Eastern church and the Western church, particularly the 14th-century Hesychasts of Mount Athos in the former, and Saints Bernard of Clairvaux, Francis of Assisi, and John of the Cross in the latter. The French monastery of Saint Victor, near Paris, was an important centre of mystical thought in the 12th century. The renowned mystic and Scholastic philosopher Saint Bonaventure was a disciple of the monks of St. Victor and St. Francis, who derived mysticism directly from the New Testament, without reference to Neoplatonism, remains a dominantly deliberated figure in modern mysticism. Among the mystics of Holland were Jan van Ruysbroeck and Gerhard Groote, the latter a religious reformer and founder of the monastic order known as the Brothers of the Common Life. Johannes Eckhart, called Meister Eckhart, was the foremost mystic of Germany.
Written by an anonymous English monk in the late 14th century, ‘The Cloud of Unknowing’ has been deeply influential in Christian mysticism. The author stressed the need for contemplation to understand and know God, with the goal of experiencing the spiritual touch of God, and perhaps even achieving a type of spiritual union with God here on earth. Encouraging the faithful to meditate as a way of prayer, putting everything but God out of their minds, even if, at first, all they are aware of is a cloud of unknowing.
Other important German mystics are Johannes Tauler and Heinrich Suso, and followers of Eckhart and members of a group called the Friends of God. One of this group wrote the German Theology that influenced Martin Luther. Prominent later figures are to include, Thomas à Kempis, generally regarded as the author of The Imitation of Christ. English mystics of the 14th and 15th centuries include Margery Kempe and Richard Rolle, Walter Hilton, Julian of Norwich, and the anonymous author of The Cloud of Unknowing, an influential treatise on mystic prayer.
Several distinguished Christian mystics have been women, notably Hildegard of Bingen, Saint Catherine of Siena, and Saint Teresa of Ávila. The 17th-century French mystic Jeanne Marie Bouvier de la Motte Guyon delivered a naturalized mystical doctrine of quietism to France.
Sixteenth-century Spanish mystic and religious reformer Saint Teresa of Ávila’s books on prayer and contemplation frequently dealt with her intense visions of God. Her autobiography, The Life of Saint Teresa of Ávila, written in the 1560s, is frank and unsophisticated in style, and its vocabulary and theology is accessible to the everyday reader. Through this, Teresa described the physical and spiritual sensations that accompanied her religious raptures.
By its pursuit of spiritual freedom, sometimes at the expense of theological formulas and ecclesiastical discipline, mysticism may have contributed to the origin of the Reformation, although it inevitably disagreed with Protestant, as it had with Roman Catholic, religious authorities. The Counter Reformation inspired the Spiritual Exercises of Saint Ignatius of Loyola. The Practice of the Presence of God by Brother Lawrence was a classic French work of a later date. The most notable German Protestant mystics were Jakob Boehme, author of Mysterium Magnum (The Great Mystery), and Kaspar Schwenkfeld. Mysticism finds expression in the theology of many Protestant denominations and is a salient characteristic of such sects as the Anabaptists and the Quakers.
New England, Congregational divine, Jonathan Edwards, exhibited a strong mystical tendency, and the religious revivals that began in his time, and spread throughout the United States during the 19th century derived much of their peculiar power from the assumption of mystical principles, great emphasis being placed on heightened feeling as a direct intuition of the will of God. Mysticism manifested itself in England in the works of the 17th-century Cambridge Platonists: In those of devotional writer William Law, author of the Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life, and in the Art and Poetry of William Blake.
Religious Revivals, by its term is widely used among Protestants since the early 18th century to denote periods of marked religious interest. Evangelistic preaching and prayer meetings, frequently accompanied by intense emotionalism, are characteristic of such periods, which are intended to renew the faith of church members and to bring others to profess their faith openly for the first time. By an extension of its meaning, the term is sometimes applied to various important religious movements of the past. Instances are recorded in the Scriptures as occurring both in the history of the Jews and in the early history of the Christian church. In the Middle Ages revivals took place concerning the Crusades and under the charge of the monastic orders, sometimes with strange adjuncts, as often happens with the Flagellants and the dancing mania. The Reformation of the 16th century was also accompanied by revivals of religion.
It is more accurate, however, to limit the application of the term revival to the history of modern Protestantism, especially in Britain and the United States where such movements have flourished with unusual vigour. The Methodist churches originated from a widespread evangelical movement in the first half of the 18th century. This was later called the Wesleyan movement or Wesleyan revival. The Great Awakening was the common designation for the revival of 1740-42 that took place in New England and other parts of North America under the Congregational clergyman Joseph Bellamy, and three Presbyterian clergymen, Gilbert Tennent, William Tennent, and their father, the educator William Tennent. Both Princeton University and Dartmouth College had their origin in this movement. Toward the end of the 18th century a fresh series of revivals began in America, lasting intermittently from 1797 to 1859. In New England the beginning of this long period was called the evangelical reawakening.
Churches soon came to depend upon revivals for their growth and even for their existence, and, as time went on, the work was also taken up by itinerant preachers also called circuit riders. The early years of the 19th century were marked by great missionary zeal, extending even to foreign lands. In Tennessee and Kentucky, encampment conventions, great open-air assemblies, began about 1800AD to play an important part in the evangelical work of the Methodist Church, now the United Methodist Church. One of the most notable products of the camp meeting idea was the late 19th-century Chautauqua Assembly, a highly successful educational endeavour. An outstanding religious revival of the 19th century was the Oxford movement (1833-45) in the Church of England, which resulted in the modern English High Church movement. Distinctly a revival, it was of a type different from those of the two preceding centuries. The great American revival of 1859-61 began in New England, particularly in Connecticut and Massachusetts, and extended to New York and other states. It is believed that in a single year half a million converts were received into the churches. Another remarkable revival, in 1874-75, originated in the labours of the American evangelists Dwight L. Moody and Ira D. Sankey. Organized evangelistic campaigns have sometimes had great success under the leadership of professional evangelists, among them Billy Sunday, Aimee Semple McPherson, and Billy Graham. The Salvation Army carries on its work largely by revivalistic methods.
American religious writer and poet Thomas Merton joined a monastery in 1941 and was later ordained as a Roman Catholic priest. He is known for his autobiography, The Seven Storey Mountains, which was published in 1948.
The 20th century has experienced a revival of interest in both Christian and non-Christian mysticism. Early commentators of note were Austrian Roman Catholic Baron Friedrich von Hügel, British poet and writer Evelyn Underhill, American Quaker Rufus Jones, the Anglican prelate William Inge, and German theologian Rudolf Otto. A prominent nonclerical commentator was American psychologist and philosopher William James in The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902).
At the turn of the century, American psychologist and philosopher William James gave a series of lectures on religion at Scotland’s University of Edinburgh. In the twenty lectures he delivered between 1901 and 1902, published together as The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), James discussed such topics as the existence of God, religious conversions, and immortality. In his lectures on mysticism. James defined the characteristics of a mystical experience - a state of consciousness in which God is directly experienced. He also quoted accounts of mystical experiences as given by important religious figures from many different religious traditions.
In non-Christian traditions, the leading commentator on Zen Buddhism was Japanese scholar Daisetz Suzuki; on Hinduism, Indian philosopher Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan; and on Islam, British scholar R. A. Nicholson. The last half of the 20th century saw increased interest in Eastern mysticism. The mystical strain in Judaism, which received particular emphasis in the writings of the Kabbalists of the Middle Ages and in the Hasidism movement of the 18th century, was again pointed up by the modern Austrian philosopher and scholar Martin Buber. Mid-20th-century mystics of note included French social philosopher Simone Weil, French philosopher Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, and American Trappist monk Thomas Merton.
Comte chose the word positivism on the ground that it showed the “reality” and “constructive tendency” that he claimed for the theoretical aspect of the doctrine. He was, in the main, interested in a reorganization of social life for the good of humanity through scientific knowledge, and thus controls of natural forces. The two primary components of positivism, the philosophy and the polity (or a program of individual and social conduct), were later welded by Comte into a whole under the conception of a religion, in which humanity was the object of worship. Many of Comte's disciples refused, however, to accept this religious development of his philosophy, because it seemed to contradict the original positivist philosophy. Many of Comte's doctrines were later adapted and developed by the British social philosophers John Stuart Mill and Herbert Spencer and by the Austrian philosopher and physicist Ernst Mach.
In the early 20th century British mathematician and philosopher Bertrand Russell, along with British mathematician and philosopher Alfred North Whitehead, attempted to prove that mathematics and numbers can be understood as groups of concepts, or set classifications. Russell and Whitehead tried to show that mathematics is closely related to logic and, in turn, that ordinary sentences can be logically analysed using mathematical symbols for words and phrases. This idea resulted in a new symbolic language, used by Russell in a field he termed philosophical logic, in which philosophical propositions were reformulated and examined according to his symbolic logic.
During the early 20th century a group of philosophers who were concerned with developments in modern science rejected the traditional positivist ideas that held personal experience to be the basis of true knowledge and emphasized the importance of scientific verification. This group became known as logical positivists, and it included the Austrian Ludwig Wittgenstein and Bertrand Russell and G.E. Moore. It was Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-philosophicus (1921, German-English parallels texts, 1922) that proved to be of a decisive influence in the rejection of metaphysical doctrines for their meaninglessness and the acceptance of empiricism as a matter of logical necessity.
Philosophy, for Moore, was basically a two-fold activity. The first part involves analysis, that is, the attempt to clarify puzzling propositions or concepts by indicating fewer puzzling propositions or concepts to which the originals are held to be logically equivalent. Moore was perplexed, for example, by the claim of some philosophers that time is unreal. In analysing this assertion, he maintained that the proposition “time is unreal” was logically equivalent, as, “there are no temporal facts.” (“I read the article yesterday” is an example of a temporal fact.) Once the meaning of an assertion containing the problematic concept is clarified, the second task is to determine whether justifying reasons exist for believing the assertion. Moore's diligent attention to conceptual analysis for achieving clarity established him as one of the founders of the contemporary analytic and linguistic emphasis in philosophy.
Moore's most famous work, Principia Ethica (1903), contains his claim that the concept of good refers to a simple, unanalyzable, indefinable quality of things and situations. It is a nonnatural quality, for it is apprehended not by sense experience but by a kind of moral intuition. The quality goodness is evident, argued Moore, in such experiences as friendship and aesthetic enjoyment. The moral concepts of right and duty are then analysed as to producing whatever possesses goodness.
Several of Moore's essays, including “The Refutation of Idealism” (1903), contributed to developments in modern philosophical realism. An empiricist in his approach to knowledge, he did not identify experience with sense experience, and he avoided the skepticism that often accompanies empiricism. He came to the defence of the common-sense point of view that suggests that an experience result in knowledge of an external world independent of the mind.
Moore also wrote Ethics (1912), Philosophical Studies (1922), and Philosophical Papers (1959) and edited (1921-47) Mind, a leading British philosophical journal.
Nonetheless, language, Wittgenstein argued in the Tractatus, is composed of complex propositions that can be analysed into fewer complex propositions until one arrives at simple or elementary propositions. Correspondingly, the world is composed of complex facts that can be analysed into fewer complex facts until one arrives at simple, or atomic, facts. The world is the totality of these facts. According to Wittgenstein’s picture theory of meaning, it is the nature of elementary propositions logically to picture atomic facts, or ‘states of affairs’. He claimed that the nature of language required elementary propositions, and his theory of meaning required that there be atomic facts pictured by the elementary propositions. On this analysis, only propositions that picture facts - the propositions of science are considered cognitively meaningful. Metaphysical and ethical statements are not meaningful assertions. The logical positivists associated with the Vienna Circle were greatly influenced by this conclusion.
Wittgenstein came to believe, however, that the narrow view of language reflected in the Tractatus was mistaken. In the Philosophical Investigations he argued that if one looks to see how language is used, the variety of linguistic usage becomes clear. Words are like tools, and just as tools serve different dynamic functions, so linguistic expressions serve many foundational functional structures as bound akin the stability of fundamental linguistics. Although some propositions are used to picture facts, others are used to command, question, pray, thank, curse, and so on. This recognition of linguistic flexibility and variety led to Wittgenstein’s concept of a language game and to the conclusion that people play different language games. The scientist, for example, is involved in a different language game than the theologian. Moreover, the meaning of a proposition must be understood concerning its context, that is, for the rules of the game of which that proposition is a part. The key to the resolution of philosophical puzzles is the therapeutic process of examining and describing language in use.
The positivists today, who have rejected this so-called Vienna school of philosophy, prefer to call themselves logical empiricists to dissociate themselves from the emphasis of the earlier thinkers on scientific verification. They maintain that the verification principle it is philosophically unverifiable positivism, is a contained system of philosophy based on experience and empirical knowledge of natural phenomena, in which metaphysics and theology are regarded as inadequate and imperfect systems of knowledge.
Positivism is the system of philosophy based on experience and empirical knowledge of natural phenomena, in which metaphysics and theology are regarded as inadequate and imperfect systems of knowledge.
The doctrine was first called positivism by the 19th-century French mathematician and philosopher Auguste Comte, but some positivist ideas may be traced to the British philosopher David Hume, the French philosopher Duc de Saint-Simon, and the German philosopher Immanuel Kant.
Several major viewpoints were combined in the work of Kant, who developed a distinctive critical philosophy called transcendentalism. His philosophy is agnostic in that it denies the possibility of a strict knowledge of ultimate reality; it is empirical in that it affirms that all knowledge arises from experience and is true of objects of actual and possible experience; and it is rationalistic in that it maintains the theoretical character of the structural principles of this empirical knowledge.
Although, principles determine all experience, they do not in any way affect the nature of things in themselves. The knowledge of which these principles are the necessary conditions must not be considered, therefore, as constituting a revelation of things as they are in themselves. This knowledge concerns things only insofar as they appear to human perception or as they can be apprehended by the senses. The argument by which Kant sought to fix the limits of human knowledge within the framework of experience and to demonstrate the inability of the human mind to penetrate beyond experience strictly by knowledge to the realm of ultimate reality constitutes the critical feature of his philosophy. Kant sought also to reconcile science and religion in a world of two levels, comprising noumena, objects conceived by reason although not perceived by the senses, and phenomena, things as they appear to the senses and are accessible to material study. He maintained that, because God, freedom, and human immortality are noumenal realities, these concepts are understood through moral faith than through scientific knowledge. With the continuous development of science, the expansion of metaphysics to include scientific knowledge and methods became one of the major objectives of metaphysicians.
All the same, in that, these theoretical principles as were structurally given are those contained or restricted by their measure through which we discover that the philosopher John Locke (1632-1704), was that he founded the school of empiricism. Under which of his understanding, Locke explained his theory of empiricism, a philosophical doctrine holding that all knowledge is based on experience, in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690). Locke believed the human mind to be a blank slate at birth that gathered all its information from its surroundings - starting with simple ideas and combining these simple ideas into more complex ones. His theory greatly influenced education in Great Britain and the United States. Locke believed that education should begin in early childhood and should proceed gradually as the child learns increasingly complex ideas.
Locke was born in the village of Wrington, Somerset, on August 29, 1632. He was educated at the University of Oxford and lectured on Greek, rhetoric, and moral philosophy at Oxford from 1661 to 1664. In 1667 Locke began his association with the English statesman Anthony Ashley Cooper, 1st earl of Shaftesbury, to whom Locke was friend, adviser, and physician. Shaftesbury secured for Locke a series of minor government appointments. In 1669, in one of his official capacities, Locke wrote a constitution for the proprietors of the Carolina Colony in North America, but it was never put into effect. In 1675, after the liberal Shaftesbury had fallen from favour, Locke went to France. In 1679 he returned to England, but in view of his opposition to the Roman Catholicism favoured by the English monarchy at that time, he soon found it expedient to return to the Continent. From 1683 to 1688 he lived in Holland, and following the so-called Glorious Revolution of 1688 and the restoration of Protestantism to favour, Locke returned once more to England. The new king, William III, appointed Locke to the Board of Trade in 1696, a position from which he resigned because of ill health in 1700. He died in Oates on October 28, 1704.
The ideas of 17th-century English philosopher and political theorists John Locke greatly influenced modern philosophy and political thought. Locke, who is best known for establishing the philosophical doctrine of empiricism, was criticized for his “atheistic” proposition that morality is not innate within human beings. However, Locke was a religious man, and the influence of his faith was overlooked by his contemporaries and subsequent readers. Author John Dunn explores the influence of Locke’s Anglican beliefs on works such as An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690).
Locke's empiricism emphasizes the importance of the experience of the senses in pursuit of knowledge than intuitive speculation or deduction. The empiricist doctrine was first expounded by the English philosopher and statesman Francis Bacon early in the 17th century, but Locke gave it systematic expression in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690). He regarded the mind of a person at birth as a tabula rasa, a blank slate upon which experience imprinted knowledge, and did not believe in intuition or theories of innate conceptions. Locke also held that all persons are born good, independent, and equal.
English philosopher John Locke anonymously published his Treatises on Government (1690) the same year as his famous Essay Concerning Human Understanding. In the Second Treatise, Locke described his concept of a ‘civil government’. Locke excluded absolute monarchy from his definition of civil society, because he believed that the people must consent to be ruled. This argument later influenced the authors of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States.
Locke's views, in his Two Treatises of Government (1690), attacked the theory of divine right of kings and the nature of the state as conceived by the English philosopher and political theorist Thomas Hobbes. In brief, Locke argued that sovereignty did not reside in the state but with the people, and that the state is supreme, but only if it is bound by civil and what he called ‘natural’ law. Many of Locke's political ideas, such as that relating to natural rights, property rights, the duty of the government to protect these rights, and the rule of the majority, were later embodied in the U.S. Constitution.
Locke further held that revolution was not only a right but often an obligation, and he advocated a system of checks and balances in government. He also believed in religious freedom and in the separation of church and state.
Locke's influence in modern philosophy has been profound and, with his application of empirical analysis to ethics, politics, and religion, he remains one of the most important and controversial philosophers of all time. Among his other works are Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693) and The Reasonableness of Christianity (1695).
In accord with empirical knowledge it is found that pragmatism, is an aligned to a philosophical movement that has had a major impact on American culture from the late 19th century to the present. Pragmatism calls for ideas and theories to be tested in practice, by assessing whether acting upon the idea or theory produces desirable or undesirable results. According to pragmatists, all claims about truth, knowledge, morality, and politics must be tested in this way. Pragmatism has been critical of traditional Western philosophy, especially the notion that there is absolute truths and absolute values. Although pragmatism was popular for a time in France, England, and Italy, most observers believe that it encapsulates an American faith in understanding and practicality and an equally American distrust of abstract theories and ideologies.
American psychologist and philosopher William James helped to popularize the philosophy of pragmatism with his book Pragmatism: A New Name for Old Ways of Thinking (1907). Influenced by a theory of meaning and verification developed for scientific hypotheses by American philosopher C.S. Peirce, James held that truth is what work, or has good experimental results. In a related theory, James argued the existence of God is partly verifiable because many people derive benefits from believing.
The Association for International Conciliation first published William James’s pacifist statement, “The Moral Equivalent of War,” in 1910. James, a highly respected philosopher and psychologist, was one of the founders of pragmatism of which was a philosophical movement holding that ideas and theories must be tested in practice to assess their worth. James hoped to find a way to convince men with a long-standing history of pride and glory in war to evolve beyond the need for bloodshed and to develop other avenues for conflict resolution. Spelling and grammar represents standards of the time.
Pragmatists regarded all theories and institutions as tentative hypotheses and solutions, and for this reason they believed that efforts to improve society, through such means as education or politics, must be geared toward problem solving and must be ongoing. Through their emphasis on connecting theory to practice, pragmatist thinkers attempted to transform all areas of philosophy, from metaphysics to ethics and political philosophy.
Pragmatism sought a middle ground between traditional ideas about the nature of reality and radical theories of nihilism and irrationalisms, which had become popular in Europe in the late 19th century. Traditional metaphysics assumed that the world has a fixed, intelligible structure and that human beings can know absolute or objective truths about the world and about what constitutes moral behaviour. Nihilism and irrationalism, on the other hand, denied those very assumptions and their certitude. Pragmatists today still try to steer a middle course between contemporary offshoots of these two extremes.
The ideas of the pragmatists, moreover, were considered revolutionary when they first appeared. To some critics, pragmatism’s refusal to affirm any absolutes carried negative implications for society. For example, pragmatists do not believe that a single absolute idea of goodness or justice exists, but rather than these concepts are changeable and depend on the context in which they are being discussed. The absence of these absolutes, critics feared, could result in a decline in moral standards. The pragmatists’ denial of absolutes, moreover, challenged the foundations of religion, government, and schools of thought. As a result, pragmatism influenced developments in psychology, sociology, education, semiotics (the study of signs and symbols), and scientific method, as well as philosophy, cultural criticism, and social reform movements. Various political groups have also drawn on the assumptions of pragmatism, from the progressive movements of the early 20th century to later experiments in social reform.
Pragmatism is best understood in its historical and cultural context. It arose during the late 19th century, a period of rapid scientific advancement typified by the theories of British biologist Charles Darwin, whose theories suggested to many thinkers that humanity and society are in a perpetual state of progress. During this same period a decline in traditional religious beliefs and values accompanied the industrialization and material progress of the time. In consequence it became necessary to rethink fundamental ideas about values, religion, science, community, and individuality.
The three most important pragmatists are American philosopher’s Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, and John Dewey. Peirce was primarily interested in scientific method and mathematics; His objective was to infuse scientific thinking into philosophy and society, and he believed that human comprehension of reality was becoming ever greater and that human communities were becoming increasingly progressive. Peirce developed pragmatism as a theory of meaning - in particular, the meaning of concepts used in science. The meaning of the concept ‘brittle’, for example, is given by the observed consequences or properties that objects called ‘brittle’ exhibit. For Peirce, the only rational way to increase knowledge was to form mental habits that would test ideas through observation, experimentation, or what he called inquiry. Many philosophers known as logical positivists, a group of philosophers who have been influenced by Peirce, believed that our evolving species was fated to get ever closer to Truth. Logical positivists emphasize the importance of scientific verification, rejecting the assertion of positivism that personal experience is the basis of true knowledge.
James moved pragmatism in directions that Peirce strongly disliked. He generalized Peirce’s doctrines to encompass all concepts, beliefs, and actions; he also applied pragmatist ideas to truth as well as to meaning. James was primarily interested in showing how systems of morality, religion, and faith could be defended in a scientific civilization. He argued that sentiment, as well as logic, is crucial to rationality and that the great issues of life-morality and religious belief, for example, - are leaps of faith. As such, they depend upon what he called ‘the will to believe’ and not merely on scientific evidence, which can never tell us what to do or what is worthwhile. Critics charged James with relativism (the belief that values depend on specific situations) and with crass expediency for proposing that if an idea or action works the way one intends, it must be right. But James can more accurately be described as a pluralist - someone who believes the world to be far too complex for anyone philosophy to explain everything.
Dewey’s philosophy can be described as a foundational version of philosophical naturalism, which regards human experience, intelligence, and communities as ever-evolving mechanisms. Using their experience and intelligence, Dewey believed, human beings can solve problems, including social problems, through inquiry. For Dewey, naturalism led to the idea of a democratic society that allows all members to acquire social intelligence and progress both as individuals and as communities. Dewey held that traditional ideas about knowledge, truth, and values, in which absolutes are assumed, are incompatible with a broadly Darwinian world-view in which individuals and societies are progressing. In consequence, he felt that these traditional ideas must be discarded or revised. For pragmatists, everything people know and do depend on a historical context and are thus tentative rather than absolute.
Many followers and critics of Dewey believe he advocated elitism and social engineering in his philosophical stance. Others think of him as a kind of romantic humanist. Both tendencies are evident in Dewey’s writings, although he aspired to synthesize the two realms.
The pragmatists’ tradition was revitalized in the 1980s by American philosopher Richard Rorty, who has faced similar charges of elitism for his belief in the relativism of values and his emphasis on the role of the individual in attaining knowledge. Interest has renewed in the classic pragmatists - Pierce, James, and Dewey - as an alternative to Rorty’s interpretation of the tradition.
In an ever-changing world, pragmatism has many benefits. It defends social experimentation as a means of improving society, accepts pluralism, and reject’s dead dogmas. But a philosophy that offers no final answers or absolutes and that appears vague as a result of trying to harmonize opposites may also be unsatisfactory to some.
It may prove fitting to turn tables of a direction that inclines by inclination some understanding of Kant's most distinguished followers, notably Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Friedrich Schelling, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, and Friedrich Schleiermacher, who negated Kant's criticism in their elaborations of his transcendental metaphysics by denying the Kantian conception of the thing-in-itself. They thus developed an absolute idealism opposing Kant's critical transcendentalism.
Since the formation of the hypothesis of absolute idealism, the development of metaphysics has resulted in as many types of metaphysical theory as existed in pre-Kantian philosophy, despite Kant's contention that he had fixed definitely the limits of philosophical speculation. Phenomenalism, as it is exemplified in the writings of the French philosopher Auguste Comte and the British philosopher Herbert Spencer; Emergent evolution, or creative evolution, originated by the French philosopher Henri Bergson. The philosophy of the organism, elaborated by Alfred North Whitehead. The salient doctrines of pragmatism are that the chief function of thought is to guide action, that the meaning of concepts is to be sought in their practical applications, and that truth should be tested by the practical effects of belief; According to instrumentalism, ideas are instruments of action, and their truth is determined by their role in human experience. In the teachings of voluntarism may obtainably presuppose that Will is theoretically equal to postulates as they are the supreme manifestation of reality. The exponents of phenomenalism, who are sometimes called positivists, contend that everything can be analysed as to actual or possible occurrences, or phenomena, and that anything that cannot be analysed in this manner cannot be understood. In emergent or creative evolution, the evolutionary process is characterized as spontaneous and unpredictable than mechanistically determined. The philosophy of the organism combines an evolutionary stress on constant process with a metaphysical theory of God, the eternal objects, and intuitive creativity.
Comte chose the word positivism on the ground that it suggested the ‘reality’ and ‘constructive tendency’ that he claimed for the theoretical aspect of the doctrine. He was, in the main, interested in a reorganization of social life for the good of humanity through scientific knowledge, and thus controls of natural forces. The two primary components of positivism, the philosophy and the polity (or a program of individual and social conduct), were later welded by Comte into a whole under the conception of a religion, in which humanity was the object of worship.
In response to the scientific, political, and industrial revolution of his day, Comte was fundamentally concerned with an intellectual, moral, and political reorganization of the social order. Adoption of the scientific attitude was the key, he thought, to such a reconstruction.
Comte, also, argued that an empirical study of historical processes, particularly of the progress of the various interrelated sciences, reveals a law of three stages that govern human development. He analysed these stages in his major work, the six-volume Course of Positive Philosophy (1830-42, which was translated by 1853). Because of the nature of the human mind, each science or branch of knowledge passes through “three different theoretical states: the theological or fictitious state; The metaphysical or abstract state; and, lastly, the scientific or positive state.” At the theological stage, events are immaturely explained by appealing to the will of the gods or of God. At the metaphysical stage phenomena are explained by appealing to abstract philosophical categories. The final evolutionary stage, the scientific, involves relinquishing any quest for absolute explanations of causes. Attention is focussed altogether on how phenomena are related, with the aim of arriving at generalizations subject to observational verification. Comte's work is considered as the classical expression of the positivist attitude - namely, that the empirical sciences are the only adequate source of knowledge.
Although Kant rejected belief in a transcendent being, Comte recognized the value of religion in contributing to social stability. In his four-volume System of Positive Polity, 1851-54 and translated, 1875-77, he proposed his religion of humanity, aimed as the presentation to socially beneficial behaviour. Comte's chief significance, however, derives from his role in the historical development of positivism.
Wittgenstein’s philosophical life may be divided into two distinct phases: an early period, represented by the Tractatus, and a later period, represented by the Philosophical Investigations. Throughout most of his life, however, Wittgenstein consistently viewed philosophy as linguistic or a conceptual analysis. In the Tractatus he argued that “philosophy aims at the logical clarification of thoughts.” In the Philosophical Investigations, however, he maintained that “philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language.”
This recognition of linguistic flexibility and variety led to Wittgenstein’s concept of a language game and to the conclusion that people play different language games. The scientist, for example, is involved in a different language game than the theologian. Moreover, the meaning of a proposition must be understood in terms of its context, that is, about the rules of the game of which that proposition is a part. The key to the resolution of philosophical puzzles is the therapeutic process of examining and describing language in use.
During the early 20th century a group of philosophers who were concerned with developments in modern science rejected the traditional positivist ideas that held personal experience to be the basis of true knowledge and emphasized the importance of scientific verification. This group became known as logical positivists, and it included the Austrian Ludwig Wittgenstein and the British Bertrand Russell and G.E. Moore. It was Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-philosophicus, 1921; German-English parallels text, 1922, that proved to be of decisive influence in the rejection of metaphysical doctrines for their meaninglessness and the acceptance of empiricism as a matter
The positivists today, who have rejected this so-called Vienna school of philosophy, prefer to call themselves logical empiricists to dissociate themselves from the emphasis of the earlier thinkers on scientific verification. They maintain that the verification principle itself is philosophically unverifiable.
Edmund Husserl inherited his view from Brentano, that the central problem in understanding thought is that of explaining the way in which an intentional direction, or content, can belong to the mental phenomenon that exhibits it. What Husserl discovered when he contemplated the content of his mind were such acts as remembering, desiring, and perceiving, besides the abstract content of these acts, which Husserl called meanings. These meanings, he claimed, enabled an act to be directed toward an object under a certain aspect. Such directedness, called intentionality, he held to be the essence of consciousness. Transcendental phenomenology, according to Husserl, was the study of the basic components of the meanings that make intentionality possible. After, the Méditations Cartésiennes (1931, Cartesian Meditations, 1960), he introduced genetic phenomenology, which he defined as the study of how these meanings are built up in the course of experience.
Edmund Husserl is considered the founder of phenomenology. This 20th-century philosophical movement is dedicated to the description of phenomena as they present themselves through perception to the conscious mind.
Edmund Husserl, introduced the term in his book Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenolgie und phänomenologischen Philosophie, 1913 Ideas: A General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology, 1931. Early followers of Husserl such as German philosopher Max Scheler, was influenced by his previous book, Logische Untersuchungen, two volumes, 1900 and 1901, Logical Investigations, 1970, claimed that the task of phenomenology is to study essences, such as the essence of emotions. Although Husserl himself never gave up his early interest in essences, he later held that only the essences of certain special conscious structural foundations are the proper Objectifies of phenomenology. As formulated by Husserl after 1910, phenomenology is the study of the structures of consciousness that enable consciousness to refer to objects outside itself. This study requires reflection on the content of the mind to the exclusion of everything else. Husserl called this type of reflection the phenomenological reduction. Because the mind can be directed toward nonexistent with real objects, Husserl recognized that phenomenological reflection does not really presuppose that of anything that exists, but amounts to a ‘bracketing of existence’- that is, setting aside the question of the real existence of the meditated objective.
Husserl argued against his early position, which he called psychologies, in Logical Investigations, 1900-1901 and translated, 1970. In this book, regarded as a radical departure in philosophy, he contended that the philosopher's task is to contemplate the essences of things, and that the essence of an object can be arrived at by systematically varying that object in the imagination. Husserl noted that consciousness is always directed toward something. He called this directedness intentionality and argued that consciousness contains ideal, unchanging structures called meanings, which determine what object the mind is directed toward at any given time.
During his tenure (1901-1916) at the University of Göttingen, Husserl attracted many students, who began to form a distinct phenomenological school, and he wrote his most influential work, Ideas: A General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology, 1913; and translated 1931. In this book Husserl introduced the term phenomenological reduction for his method of reflection on the meanings the mind employs when it contemplates an object. Because this method concentrates on meanings that are in the mind, whether or not the object present to consciousness actually exists, he proceeded to give detailed analyses of the mental structures involved in perceiving particular types of objects, describing in detail, for instance, his perception of the apple tree in his garden. Thus, although phenomenology does not assume the existence of anything, it is nonetheless a descriptive discipline; according to Husserl, phenomenology is devoted, not to inventing theories, but rather to describing the “things themselves.”
After 1916 Husserl taught at the University of Freiburg. Phenomenology had been criticized as an essentially solipistic method, confining the philosopher to the contemplation of private meanings, so in Cartesian Meditations, 1931 and translated, 1960, Husserl attempted to show how the individual consciousness can be directed toward other minds, society, and history. Husserl died in Freiburg on April 26, 1938.
Husserl's phenomenology had a great influence on a younger colleague at Freiburg, Martin Heidegger, who developed existential phenomenology, and Jean-Paul Sartre and French existentialism. Phenomenology remains one of the most vigorous tendencies in contemporary philosophy, and its impact has also been felt in theology, linguistics, psychology, and the social sciences.
What is more, Husserl discovered when he contemplated the content of his mind were such acts as remembering, desiring, and perceiving, beyond the abstract content of these acts, which Husserl called meanings. These meanings, he claimed, enabled an act to be directed toward an object under a certain aspect. Such directedness, called intentionality, he held to be the essence of consciousness. Transcendental phenomenology, according to Husserl, was the study of the basic components of the meanings that make intentionality possible. Successively, in Méditations Cartésiennes (1931, Cartesian Meditations, 1960), he introduced genetic phenomenology, which he defined as the study of how these meanings are built up in the course of experience.
Phenomenology attempts to describe reality as for pure experience by suspending all beliefs and assumptions about the world. Though first defined as descriptive psychology, phenomenological attempts in philosophical than psychological investigations into the nature of human beings. Influenced by his colleague Edmund Husserl, and German philosopher Martin Heidegger published Sein und Zeit (Being and Time) in 1927, an effort to describe the phenomenon of being by considering the full scope of existence.
All phenomenologists follow Husserl in attempting to use pure description. Thus, they all subscribe to Husserl's slogan ‘To the things themselves’. They differ among themselves, however, whether the phenomenological reduction can be realized, and what is manifest to the philosopher as giving a pure description of experience. Martin Heidegger, Husserl's colleague and most brilliant of critics, claimed that phenomenology must necessitate the essential manifestations what is hidden or perhaps underlying to cause among the
ordinary, everyday experience. He therefore, endeavoured within Being and Time, to describe what he called the structure of everydayness, or being-in-the-world, which he found an interconnected system of equipment, social roles, and purposes.
Martin Heidegger strongly influenced the development of the 20th-century philosophical school of existential phenomenology, which examines the relationship between phenomena and individual consciousness. His inquiries into the meaning of ‘authentic’ or ‘inauthentic’ existence greatly influenced a broad range of thinkers, including French existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre. Author Michael Inwood explores Heidegger’s key concept of Dasein, or “Being,” which was first expounded in his major work Being and Time.
Accountably of Heidegger, one is what one does in the world, a phenomenological reduction to one's own private experience is impossible. Because human action consists of a direct grasp of objects, positing a special mental entity called a meaning to account for intentionality is not necessary. For Heidegger, being thrown into the world among things in the act of realizing projects is a more fundamental kind of intentionality than that revealed in merely staring at or thinking about objects, and it is this more fundamental intentionality that makes possible the directedness analysed by Husserl.
In the mid-1900s, French existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre attempted to adapt Heidegger's phenomenology to the philosophy of consciousness, in effect returning to the approach of Husserl. Sartre agreed with Husserl that consciousness is always directed at objects but criticized his claim that such directedness is possible only by means of special mental entities called meanings. The French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty rejected Sartre's view that phenomenological description reveals human beings to be pure, isolated, and free consciousness. He stressed the role of the active, involved body in all human knowledge, thus generalizing Heidegger's insights to include the analysis of perception. Like Heidegger and Sartre, Merleau-Ponty is an existential phenomenologists, in that he denies the possibility of bracketing existence.
Phenomenology has had a pervasive influence on 20th-century thought. Phenomenological versions of theology, sociology, psychology, psychiatry, and literary criticism have been developed, and phenomenology remains one of the most important schools of contemporary philosophy.
Phenomenology attempts to describe reality as for pure experience by suspending all beliefs and assumptions about the world. Though first defined as descriptive psychology, phenomenology attemptively afforded through the efforts established in philosophical than psychological investigations into the nature of human beings. Influenced by his colleague Edmund Husserl (known as the founder of phenomenology),
Husserl's colleague and most brilliant of critics, claimed that phenomenology ought be effectually manifested in what is hidden in ordinary, everyday experience. He thus attempted in Being and Time, to describe what he called the structure of everydayness, or being-in-the-world, which he found an interconnected system of equipment, social roles, and purposes.
German philosopher Martin Heidegger strongly influenced the development of the 20th-century philosophical school of existential phenomenology, which examines the relationship between phenomena and individual consciousness. His inquiries into the meaning of ‘authentic’ or ‘inauthentic’ existence greatly influenced a broad range of thinkers, including French existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre. Author Michael Inwood explores Heidegger’s key concept of Dasein, or ‘Being’, which was first expounded in his major work Being and Time.
Besides Husserl, Heidegger was especially influenced by the pre-Socratics, by Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard, and by German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. In developing his theories, Heidegger rejected traditional philosophic terminology in favour of an individual interpretation of the works of past thinkers. He applied original meanings and etymologies to individual words and expressions, and coined hundreds of new, complex words. Heidegger was concerned with what he considered the essential philosophical question: What is it, to be? This led to the question of what kind of ‘Being’ human beings have. They are, he said, thrown into a world that they have not made but that consists of potentially useful things, including cultural and natural objects. Because these objects come to humanity from the past and are used in the present for the sake of future goals, Heidegger posited a fundamental relation between the mode of being of objects, of humanity, and of the structure of time.
The individual is, however, always in danger of being submerged in the world of objects, everyday routine, and the conventional, shallow behaviour of the crowd. The feeling of dread (Angst) brings the individual to a confrontation with death and the ultimate meaninglessness of life, but only in this confrontation can an authentic sense of Being and of freedom be attained.
After 1930, Heidegger turned, in such works as Einführung in die Metaphysik (An Introduction to Metaphysics, 1953), to the interpretation of particular Western conceptions of Being. He felt that, in contrast to the reverent ancient Greek conception of being, modern technological society has fostered a purely manipulative attitude that has deprived Being and human life of meaning - a condition he called nihilism. Humanity has forgotten its true vocation and must recover the deeper understanding of Being (achieved by the early Greeks and lost by subsequent philosophers) to be receptive to new understandings of Being.
Heidegger's original treatment of such themes as human finitude, death, nothingness, and authenticity led many observers to associate him with existentialism, and his work had a crucial influence on French existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre. Heidegger, however, eventually repudiated existentialist interpretations of his work. His thought directly influenced the work of French philosophers’ Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida and of German sociologist Jurgen Habermas. Since the 1960s his influence has spread beyond continental Europe and has had an increasing impact on philosophy in English-speaking countries worldwide.
Because, for Heidegger, one is what one does in the world, a phenomenological reduction to one's own private experience is impossible. Because human action consists of a direct grasp of objects, positing a special mental entity called a meaning to account for intentionality is not necessary. For Heidegger, being given off into the world among things in the act of realizing projects is a more fundamental kind of intentionality than that revealed in merely staring at or thinking about objects, and it is this more fundamental intentionality that makes possible the directedness analysed by Husserl.
Like Heidegger and Sartre, Merleau-Ponty Maurice (1908-1961), A French existentialist philosopher, whose phenomenological studies of the role of the body in perception and society opened a new field of philosophical investigation. He taught at the University of Lyon, at Sorbonne, and, after 1952, at the Collège de France. His first important work was The Structure of Comportment, 1942 translated, 1963, an interpretative analysis of behaviourism. His major work, Phenomenology of Perception, 1945 and translated 1962, is a detailed study of perception, influenced by the German philosopher Edmund Husserl's phenomenology and by Gestalt psychology. In it, he argues that science presupposes an original and unique perceptual relation to the world that cannot be explained or even described in scientific terms. This book can be viewed as a critique of cognitivism - the view that the working of the human mind can be understood under rules or programs. It is also a telling on the critique of the existentialism of his contemporary, Jean-Paul Sartre, showing how human freedom is never total, as Sartre claimed, but is limited by our characterization.
Born in Vienna on April 26, 1889, Wittgenstein was raised in a wealthy and cultured family. After attending schools in Linz and Berlin, he went to England to study engineering at the University of Manchester. His interest in pure mathematics led him to Trinity College, University of Cambridge, to study with Bertrand Russell. There he turned his attention to philosophy. By 1918 Wittgenstein had completed his Tractatus Logico-philosophicus, 1921 translated, 1922, a work he then believed provided the “solution” to philosophical problems. Subsequently, he turned from philosophy and for several years taught elementary school in an Austrian village. In 1929 he returned to Cambridge to resume his work in philosophy and was appointed to the faculty of Trinity College. Soon he began to reject certain conclusions of the Tractatus and to develop the position reflected in his Philosophical Investigations, published, Posthumously 1953, and translated 1953. Wittgenstein retired in 1947, he died in Cambridge on April 29, 1951. A sensitive, intense man who often sought solitude and was frequently depressed, Wittgenstein abhorred pretense and was noted for his simple style of life and dress. The philosopher was forceful and confident in personality, however, and he exerted considerable influence on those with whom he came in contact.
Wittgenstein’s philosophical life may be divided into two distinct phases: an early period, represented by the Tractatus, and a later period, represented by the Philosophical Investigations. Throughout most of his life, however, Wittgenstein consistently viewed philosophy as linguistic or conceptual analysis. In the Tractatus he argued that “philosophy aims at the logical clarification of thoughts.” In the Philosophical Investigations, however, he maintained that “philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language.”
Language, Wittgenstein argued in the Tractatus, is composed of complex propositions that can be analysed into fewer complex propositions until one arrives at simple or elementary propositions. Correspondingly, the world is composed of complex facts that can be analysed into fewer complex facts until one arrives at simple. The world is the totality of these facts. According to Wittgenstein’s picture theory of meaning, it is the nature of elementary propositions logically to picture atomic facts, or “states of affairs.” He claimed that the nature of language required elementary propositions, and his theory of meaning required that there be atomic facts pictured by the elementary propositions. On this analysis, only propositions that picture facts - the propositions of science - are considered cognitively meaningful. Metaphysical and ethical statements are not meaningful assertions. The logical positivists associated with the Vienna Circle were greatly influenced by this conclusion.
Wittgenstein came to believe, nonetheless, that the narrow view of language reflected in the Tractatus was mistaken. In the Philosophical Investigations he argued that if one looks to see how language is used, the variety of linguistic usage becomes clear. Although some propositions are used to picture facts, others are used to command, question, pray, thank, curse, and so on. This recognition of linguistic flexibility and variety led to Wittgenstein’s concept of a language game and to the conclusion that people play different language games. The scientist, for example, is involved in a different language game than the theologian. Moreover, the meaning of a proposition must be understood as to its context, that is, for the rules of the game of which that proposition is a part. The key to the resolution of philosophical puzzles is the therapeutic process of examining and describing language in use.
Phenomenology attempts to describe reality as pure experience by suspending all beliefs and assumptions about the world. Though first defined as descriptive psychology, phenomenology attempts of philosophical than psychological investigations into the nature of human beings. Influenced by his colleague Edmund Husserl and the German philosopher Martin Heidegger published Being and Time, in 1927, an effort to describe the phenomenon of being by considering the full scope of existence.
German philosopher Martin Heidegger strongly influenced the development of the 20th-century philosophical school of existential phenomenology, which examines the relationship between phenomena and individual consciousness. His inquiries into the meaning of ‘authentic’ or ‘inauthentic’ existence greatly influenced a broad range of thinkers.
Because, for Heidegger, one is what one does in the world, a phenomenological reduction to one's own private experience is impossible. Because human action consists of a direct grasp of objects, positing a special mental entity called a meaning to account for intentionality is not necessary. For Heidegger, being thrown into the world among things in the act of realizing projects is a more fundamental kind of intentionality than that revealed in merely staring at or thinking about objects, and it is this more fundamental intentionality that makes possible the directedness analysed by Husserl.
Consciousness, is the latest development of the organic and so what is most unfinished and unstrong. It was in 1882, the year and publication of The Gay Science. Yet, the domination with which several times he spoke against antisemitism. Although overlooking Wagner’s antisemitism during the period in which he idealized him was easy for him, when Wagner gained wider public and his antisemitism became more intense did forcefully condemn him for it. In the Gay Science Nietzsche wrote that ‘Wagner is Schopenhauerian in his hatred of the Jews to whom he is not able to do justice even when it comes to their greatest deed, after all, the Jews are the inventors of Christianity; (Recognizing that is important while Nietzsche frequently attacked those forces that led the developments of Christianity and its destructive impact there is no simple condemning. Here Nietzsche is genuinely castigating Wagner, [and Schopenhauer] and recognizing this greatest deed of the Jews, the consequences may have been as deeply as the neurotic creature. Nevertheless, a creature who brought into the world something new and full of promise. In addition, as we can take to consider, in the words of Bernard Williams, ‘Nietzsche’s ever-present sense that his own consciousness would not be possible without the developments that he disliked’.
The problem with consciousness lies at work who of the scientists has long considered the nature of consciousness without producing a fully satisfactory definition. In the early 20th century American philosopher and psychologist William James suggested that consciousness be a mental process involving both attention to external stimuli and short-term memory. Later scientific explorations of consciousness mostly expanded upon Jame’s work. In an article dated from a 1997 special issue of Scientific American, Nobel laureate Francis Crick, who helped determine the structure of a DNA, and fellow biophysicist Christof Koch explains how experiments on vision might deepen our understanding of a sensible characterization of consciousness.
States of Consciousness., are no simple, agreed-upon definition of consciousness exists? Attempted definitions tend to be tautological (for example, consciousness defined as awareness) or merely descriptive (for example, consciousness described as sensations, thoughts, or feelings). Despite this problem of definition, the subject of consciousness has had a remarkable history. At one time the primary subject matter of psychology, consciousness as an area of study suffered an almost total demise, later reemerging to become a topic of current interest.
French thinker René Descartes applied rigorous scientific methods of deduction to his exploration of philosophical questions. Descartes is probably best known for his pioneering work in philosophical skepticism. Author Tom Sorell examines the concepts behind Descartes’s work Meditationes de Prima Philosophia (1641; Meditations on First Philosophy), focussing on its unconventional use of logic and the reactions it aroused.
Most of the philosophical discussions of consciousness arose from the mind-body issues posed by the French philosopher and mathematician René Descartes in the 17th century. Descartes asked: Is the mind, or consciousness, independent of matter? Is consciousness extended (physical) or unextended (nonphysical)? Is consciousness determinative, or is it determined? English philosophers such as John Locke equated consciousness with physical sensations and the information they provide, whereas European philosophers such as Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and Immanuel Kant gave a more central and active role to consciousness.
The philosopher who most directly influenced subsequent exploration of the subject of consciousness was the 19th-century German educator Johann Friedrich Herbart, who wrote that ideas had quality and intensity and that they may inhibit or facilitate one another. Thus, ideas may pass from “states of reality” (consciousness) to “states of tendency” (unconsciousness), with the dividing line between the two states being described as the threshold of consciousness. This formulation of Herbart clearly presages the development, by the German psychologist and physiologist Gustav Theodor Fechner, of the Psycho-physical measurement of sensation thresholds, and the later development by Sigmund Freud of the concept of the unconscious.
The experimental analysis of consciousness dates from 1879, when the German psychologist Wilhelm Max Wundt started his research laboratory. For Wundt, the task of psychology was the study of the structure of consciousness, which extended well beyond sensations and included feelings, images, memory, attention, duration, and movement. Because early interest focussed on the content and dynamics of consciousness, it is not surprising that the central methodology of such studies was introspection; that is, subjects reported on the mental contents of their own consciousness. This introspective approach was developed most fully by the American psychologist Edward Bradford Titchener at Cornell University. Setting his task as that of describing the structure of the mind, Titchener attempted to detail, from introspective self-reports, the dimensions of the elements of consciousness. For example, taste was “dimensionalized” into four basic categories: sweet, sour, salt, and bitter. This approach was known as structuralism.
By the 1920s, however, a remarkable revolution had occurred in psychology that was essentially to remove considerations of consciousness from psychological research for some 50 years: Behaviourism captured the field of psychology. The main initiator of this movement was the American psychologist John Broadus Watson. In a 1913 article, Watson stated, “I believe that we can write a psychology and never use the terms consciousness, mental states, mind . . . imagery and the like.” Psychologists then turned almost exclusively to behaviour, as described in terms of stimulus and response, and consciousness was totally bypassed as a subject. A survey of eight leading introductory psychology texts published between 1930 and the 1950s found no mention of the topic of consciousness in five texts, and in two it was treated as a historical curiosity.
Beginning in the late 1950s, however, interest in the subject of consciousness returned, specifically in those subjects and techniques relating to altered states of consciousness: sleep and dreams, meditation, biofeedback, hypnosis, and drug-induced states. Much of the surge in sleep and dream research was directly fuelled by a discovery relevant to the nature of consciousness. A physiological indicator of the dream state was found: At roughly 90-minute intervals, the eyes of sleepers were observed to move rapidly, and at the same time the sleepers' brain waves would show a pattern resembling the waking state. When people were awakened during these periods of rapid eye movement, they almost always reported dreams, whereas if awakened at other times they did not. This and other research clearly indicated that sleep, once considered a passive state, was instead an active state of consciousness (see Dreaming; Sleep).
During the 1960s, an increased search for “higher levels” of consciousness through meditation resulted in a growing interest in the practices of Zen Buddhism and Yoga from Eastern cultures. A full flowering of this movement in the United States was seen in the development of training programs, such as Transcendental Meditation, that were self-directed procedures of physical relaxation and focussed attention. Biofeedback techniques also were developed to bring body systems involving factors such as blood pressure or temperature under voluntary control by providing feedback from the body, so that subjects could learn to control their responses. For example, researchers found that persons could control their brain-wave patterns to some extent, particularly the so-called alpha rhythms generally associated with a relaxed, meditative state. This finding was especially relevant to those interested in consciousness and meditation, and a number of “alpha training” programs emerged.
Another subject that led to increased interest in altered states of consciousness was hypnosis, which involves a transfer of conscious control from the subject to another person. Hypnotism has had a long and intricate history in medicine and folklore and has been intensively studied by psychologists. Much has become known about the hypnotic state, relative to individual suggestibility and personality traits; the subject has now been largely demythologized, and the limitations of the hypnotic state are fairly well known. Despite the increasing use of hypnosis, however, much remains to be learned about this unusual state of focussed attention.
Finally, many people in the 1960s experimented with the psychoactive drugs known as hallucinogens, which produce disorders of consciousness. The most prominent of these drugs are lysergic acid diethylamide, or LSD; mescaline (see Peyote); and psilocybin; the latter two have long been associated with religious ceremonies in various cultures. LSD, because of its radical thought-modifying properties, was initially explored for its so-called mind-expanding potential and for its psychotomimetic effects (imitating psychoses). Little positive use, however, has been found for these drugs, and their use is highly restricted.
Scientists have long considered the nature of consciousness without producing a fully satisfactory definition. In the early 20th century American philosopher and psychologist William James suggested that consciousness is a mental process involving both attention to external stimuli and short-term memory. Later scientific explorations of consciousness mostly expanded upon James’s work. In this article from a 1997 special issue of Scientific American, Nobel laureate Francis Crick, who helped determine the structure of DNA, and fellow biophysicist Christof Koch explain how experiments on vision might deepen our understanding of consciousness.
The concept of a direct, simple linkage between environment and behaviour became unsatisfactory in recent decades, the interest in altered states of consciousness may be taken as a visible sign of renewed interest in the topic of consciousness. That persons are active and intervening participants in their behaviour has become increasingly clear. Environments, rewards, and punishments are not simply defined by their physical character. Memories are organized, not simply stored (see Memory). An entirely new area called cognitive psychology has emerged that centres on these concerns. In the study of children, increased attention is being paid to how they understand, or perceive, the world at different ages. In the field of animal behaviour, researchers increasingly emphasize the inherent characteristics resulting from the way a species has been shaped to respond adaptively to the environment. Humanistic psychologists, with a concern for self-actualization and growth, have emerged after a long period of silence. Throughout the development of clinical and industrial psychology, the conscious states of persons in terms of their current feelings and thoughts were of obvious importance. The role of consciousness, however, was often de-emphasised in favour of unconscious needs and motivations. Trends can be seen, however, toward a new emphasis on the nature of states of consciousness.
The overwhelming question in neurobiology today is the relation between the mind and the brain. Everyone agrees that what we know as mind is closely related to certain aspects of the behaviour of the brain, not to the heart, as Aristotle thought. Its most mysterious aspect is consciousness or awareness, which can take many forms, from the experience of pain to self-consciousness. In the past the mind (or soul) was often regarded, as it was by Descartes, as something immaterial, separate from the brain but interacting with it in some way. A few neuroscientists, such as Sir John Eccles, still assert that the soul is distinct from the body. Nonetheless, most neuroscientists now believe that all aspects of mind, including its most puzzling attribute. Consciousness or awareness is likely to be explainable in a more materialistic way as the behaviour of large sets of interacting neurons. As William James, the father of American psychology, said a century ago, consciousness is not a thing but a process.
Exactly what the process is, as, yet, to be discovered. For many years after James penned The Principles of Psychology, consciousness was a taboo concept in American psychology because of the dominance of the behaviorist movement. With the advent of cognitive science in the mid-1950s, it became possible again for psychologists to consider mental processes as opposed to merely observing behaviour. In spite of these changes, until recently most cognitive scientists ignored consciousness, as did most neuroscientists. The problem was felt to be either purely ‘philosophical’ or too elusive to study experimentally. Getting a grant just to study consciousness would not have been easy for a neuroscientist.
Such timidity is ridiculous, so to think about how best to attack the problem scientifically, may be in how to explain mental events as caused by the firing of large sets of neurons? Although there are those who believe such an approach is hopeless, however, worrying too much over aspects of the problem that cannot be solved scientifically is not productive or, more precisely, that it cannot be solved solely by using existing scientific ideas. Radically new concepts may be needed to recall, and the modifications of scientific thinking may be forced upon us by quantum mechanics. Seemingly, the only sensible approach is to press the experimental attack until we are confronted with dilemmas that call for new ways of thinking.
There are many possible approaches to the problem of consciousness. Some psychologists feel that any satisfactory theory should try to explain as many aspects of consciousness as possible, including emotion, imagination, dreams, mystical experiences and so on. Although such an all-embracing theory will be necessary over time, it is wiser to begin with the particular aspect of consciousness that is likely to yield most easily. What this aspect may be a matter of personal judgment. Selecting the mammalian visual system because humans are very visual animals and because so much experimental and theoretical work has already been done on it.
Grasping exactly what we need to explain is not easy, and it will take many careful experiments before visual consciousness can be described scientifically. In that, no attempt to define consciousness is of itself the dangers of premature definitions. (If this seems like a copout, try defining the word ‘gene’- you will not find it easy.) Yet the experimental evidence that already exists provides enough of a glimpse of the nature of visual consciousness to guide research.
Visual theorists agree that the problem of visual consciousness is ill-posed. The mathematical term ‘ill posed’ means that additional constraints are needed to solve the problem. Although the main function of the visual system is to perceive objects and events in the world around us, the information available to our naked eyes is not sufficient by itself to provide the brain with its unique interpretation of the visual world. The understanding held within the brain must essential use experience (either its own or that of our distant descendabilities, which is embedded in our genes) to help interpret the information coming into our eyes. An example would be the derivation of the three-dimensional representation of the world from the two-dimensional signals falling onto the retinas of our two eyes or even onto one of them.
Visual theorists also would agree that seeing is a constructive process, one in which the brain has to carry out complex activities (sometimes called computations) to decide which interpretation to adopt of the ambiguous visual input. ‘Computation’ implies that the brain acts to form a symbolic representation of the visual world, with a mapping (in the mathematical sense) of certain aspects of that world onto elements in the brain.
Ray Jackendoff of Brandeis University postulates, as do most cognitive scientists, that the computations carried out by the brain are largely unconscious and that what we become aware of is the result of these computations. However, while the customary view is that this awareness occurs at the highest levels of the computational system, Jackendoff has proposed an intermediate-level theory of consciousness.
What we see, Jackendoff suggests, relates to a representation of surfaces that are directly visible to us, with their outline, orientation, colour, texture and movement. (This idea has similarities to what the late David C. Marr of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology called a 2 ½ dimensional sketch. It is more than a two-dimensional sketch because it conveys the orientation of the visible surfaces. It is less than three-dimensional because depth information is not explicitly represented.) In the next stage this sketch is processed by the brain to produce a three-dimensional representation. Jackendoff argues that we are not usually aware of this three-dimensional representation.
An example may make this process clearer. If you look at a person whose back is turned to you, you can see the back of the head but not the face. Nevertheless, your brain infers that the person has a face. We can deduce as much because if that person turned around and had no face, you would be very surprised.
The viewer - entering representation is that he might correspond to the visible support of the head from which its back-end is usually proven as the observable aid under which that you are vividly aware. What your brain infers about the front would come from some kind of three-dimensional representation. This does not mean that information flows only from the surface representation to the three-dimensional one; It almost flows in both directions. When you imagine the front of the face, what you are aware of is a surface representation generated by information from the three-dimensional model.
Distinguishing it between an explicit and an implicit representation is important. An explicit representation is something symbolized without further processing. An implicit representation contains the same information but requires further processing to make it explicit. The pattern of coloured pixels on a television screen, for example, contains an implicit representation of objects (say, a person's face), but only the dots and their locations are explicit. When you see a face on the screen, there must be neurons in your brain whose firing, in some sense, symbolizes that face.
We call this pattern of firing neurons an active representation. A latent representation of a face must also be stored in the brain, probably as a special pattern of synaptic connections between neurons. For example, you probably have a representation of The Sky Dome in your brain, a representation that is usually inactive. If you do think about the Dome, the representation becomes active, with the relevant neurons firing away.
An object, incidentally, may be represented in more than one way - as a visual image, as a set of words and their related sounds, or even as a touch or a smell. These different representations are likely to interact with one another. The representation is likely to be distributed over many neurons, both locally and more globally. Such a representation may not be as simple and straightforward as uncritical introspection might indicate. There is suggestive evidence, in that it is partly from studying how neurons fire in various parts of a monkey's brain and partly from examining the effects of certain types of brain damage in humans. That these different aspects of a face and of the implications of a face - may be represented in different parts of the brain.
First, there is the representation of a face as a face, two eyes, a nose, a mouth and so on. The neurons involved are usually not too fussy about the exact size or position of this face in the visual field, nor are they very sensitive to small changes in their orientation. In monkeys, there are neurons that respond best when the face is turning in a particular direction, while others are more concerned with the direction in which the eyes are gazing.
Then there are representations of the parts of a face, as separate from those for the face as a whole. What is more, that the implications of seeing a face, such as that person's sex, the facial expression, the familiarity or unfamiliarity of the face, and in particular whose face it is, may each be correlated with neurons firing in other places.
What we are aware of at any moment, in one sense or another, is not a simple matter. It is to suggest, that there may be a very transient form of fleeting awareness that represents only simple features and does not require an attentional mechanism. From this brief awareness the brain constructs a viewer - cantered representation - what we see vividly and clearly - that does require attention. This in turn probably leads to three-dimensional object representations and thence to more cognitive ones.
Representations corresponding to vivid consciousness are likely to have special properties. William James thought that consciousness to involve both attention and short-term memory. Most psychologists today would agree with this view. Jackendoff writes that consciousness is ‘enriched’ by attention, implying that whereas attention may not be essential for certain limited types of consciousness, it is necessary for full consciousness. Yet it is not clear exactly which forms of memory are involved. Is long-term memory needed? Some forms of acquired knowledge are so embedded in the machinery of neural processing that they are almost used in becoming aware of something. On the other hand, there is evidence from studies of brain-damaged patients that the ability to lay down new long-term episodic memories is not essential for consciousness to be experienced.
Imagining that anyone could be conscious is difficult if he or she had no memory whatsoever of what had just happened, even an extremely short one. Visual psychologists talk of iconic memory, which lasts for a fraction of a second, and working memory (such as that used to remember a new telephone number) that lasts for only a few seconds unless it is rehearsed. It is not clear whether both are essential for consciousness. In any case, the division of short-term memory into these two categories may be too crude.
If these complex processes of visual awareness are localized in parts of the brain, which processes are likely to be where? Many regions of the brain may be involved, but it is almost certain that the cerebral neocortex plays a dominant role. Visual information from the retina reaches the neocortex mainly by way of a part of the thalamus (the lateral geniculate nucleus), being of another significant visual pathway, of which the retina is to the superior colliculus, at the top of the brain stem.
The cortex in humans consists of two intricately folded sheets of nerve tissue, one on each side of the head. These sheets are connected by a large tract of about half a billion axons called the corpus callosum. It is well known that if the corpus callosum is cut, as is done for certain cases of intractable epilepsy, one side of the brain is not aware of what the other side is seeing. In particular, the left side of the brain (in a right-handed person) appears not to be aware of visual information received exclusively by the right side. This shows that none of the information required for visual awareness can reach the other side of the brain by travelling down to the brain stem and, from there, back up. In a normal person, such information can get to the other side only by using the axons in the corpus callosum.
A different part of the brain - the hippocampal system - is involved in one-shot, or episodic, memories that, over weeks and months, it passes on to the neocortex. This system is so placed that it receives inputs from, and projects to, many parts of the brain. Thus, one might suspect that the hippocampal system is the essential seat of consciousness. This is not true: Evidence from studies of patients with damaged brains shows that this system is not essential for visual awareness, although naturally a patient lacking one is severely disabled in everyday life because he cannot remember anything that took place more than a minute or so in the past.
In broad terms, the neocortex of alert animals probably acts in two ways. By building on crude and redundant wiring, for which is produced by our genes and by embryonic processes. The neocortex draws on visual and other experience to prolong the ‘filament’ to assimilate itself and create sectional categories (or "features") it can respond to. A new category is not fully created in the neocortex after exposure to only one example of it, although some small modifications of the neural connections may be made.
The second function of the neocortex (at least of the visual part of it) is to respond extremely rapidly to incoming signals. To do so, it uses the categories it has learned and tries to find the combinations of active neurons that, because of its experience, are most likely to represent the relevant objects and events in the visual world at that moment. The formation of such coalitions of active neurons may also be influenced by biases coming from other parts of the brain: For example, signals telling it what best to attend to or high-level expectations about the nature of the stimulus.
Consciousness, as James noted, is always changing. These rapidly formed coalitions occur at different levels and interact to form even broader coalitions. They are transient, lasting usually for only a fraction of a second. Because coalitions in the visual system are the basis of what we see, evolution has seen to it that they form as fast as possible, otherwise, no animal could survive. The brain is impeded in forming neuronal coalitions rapidly because, by computer standards, neurons act very slowly. The brain formally compensates of stabilizing the account for which this relative slowness is partially used through a number of neurons, simultaneously and in parallel, and partly by arranging the system in a roughly hierarchical manner.
If visual awareness at any moment corresponds to sets of neurons firing, then the obvious question is: Where are these neurons located in the brain, and in what way are they firing? Visual awareness is highly unlikely to occupy all the neurons in the neocortex that are firing above their background rate at a particular moment. It would be to expect that, theoretically, at least some of these neurons would be involved in doing computations - trying to arrive at the best coalitions - whereas others would express the results of these computations, in other words, what we see.
Fortunately, some experimental evidence can be found to back up this theoretical conclusion. A phenomenon called binocular rivalry may help identify the neurons whose firing symbolizes awareness. This phenomenon can be seen in dramatic form in an exhibit prepared by Sally Duensing and Bob Miller at the Exploratorium in San Francisco.
Binocular rivalry occurs when each eye has a different visual input relating to the same part of the visual field. The early visual system on the left side of the brain receives an input from both eyes but sees only the part of the visual field to the right of the fixation point. The converse is true for the right side. If these two conflicting inputs are rivalrous, one sees not the two inputs superimposed but first one and then the other, and so given alternatively.
In the exhibit, called "The Cheshire Cat," viewers put their heads in a fixed place and are told to keep the gaze fixed. By means of a suitably a placed mirror, one of the eyes can look at another person's face, directly in front, while the other eye sees a blank white screen to the side. If the viewer waves a hand in front of this plain screen at the same location in his or her visual field occupied by the face, the face is wiped out. The movement of the hand, being visually very salient, has captured the brain's attention. Without attention the face cannot be seen. If the viewer moves the eyes, the face reappears.
In some cases, only part of the face disappears. Sometimes, for example, one eye, or both eyes, will remain. If the viewer looks at the smile on the person's face, the face may disappear, leaving only the smile. For this reason, the effect has been called the Cheshire Cat effect, after the cat in Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.
Although recording activity in individual neurons in a human brain is very difficult, such studies can be done in monkeys. A simple example of binocular rivalry has been studied in a monkey by Nikos K. Logothetis and Jeffrey D. Schall, both then at M.I.T. They trained a macaque to keep its eye’s still and to signal whether it is seeing upward or downward movement of a horizontal grating. To produce rivalry, upward movement is projected into one of the monkey's eyes and downward movement into the other, so that the two images overlap in the visual field. The monkey signals that it sees up and down movements alternatively, just as humans would. Even though the motion stimulus coming into the monkey's eyes is always the same, the monkey's percept changes every second or so.
Cortical area MT (which some researchers prefer to label V5) is an area mainly concerned with movement. What do the neurons in MT do when the monkey's percept is sometimes up and sometimes down? (The researchers studied only the monkey's first response.) The simplified answer - the actual data are more disorganized - is that whereas the firing of some of the neurons correlates with the changes in the percept, for others the average firing rate is unchanged and independent of which direction of movement the monkey is seeing at that moment. Thus, it is unlikely that the firing of all the neurons in the visual neocortex at one particular moment corresponds to the monkey's visual awareness. Exactly which neurons do correspond to awareness remains to be discovered.
Having postulated that when we clearly see something, there must be neurons actively firing that stand for what, we see. This might be called the activity principle. Here, too, there is some experimental evidence. One example is the firing of neurons in a specific cortical visual area in response to illusory contours. Another and perhaps more striking case are the filling in of the blind spot. The blind spot in each eye is caused by the lack of photoreceptors in the area of the retina where the optic nerve leaves the retina and projects to the brain. Its location is about 15 degrees from the fovea (the visual centre of the eye). Yet if you close one eye, you do not see a hole in your visual field.
Philosopher Daniel C. Dennett of Tufts University is unusual among philosophers in that he is interested both in psychology and in the brain. This interest is much to be welcomed. In a recent book, Consciousness Explained, he has argued that talking about filling in is wrong. He concludes, correctly, that "an absence of information is not the same as information about an absence." From this general principle he argues that the brain does not fill in the blind spot but ignores it.
Dennett's argument by itself, however, does not establish that filling in does not occur; it only suggests that it might not. Dennett also states that "your brain has no machinery for [filling in] at this location." This statement is incorrect. The primary visual cortex lacks a direct input from one eye, but normal "machinery" is there to deal with the input from the other eye. Ricardo Gattass and his colleagues at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro have shown that in the macaque some of the neurons in the blind-spot area of the primary visual cortex do respond to input from both eyes, probably assisted by inputs from other parts of the cortex. Moreover, in the case of simple filling in, some of the neurons in that region respond as if they were actively filling in.
Thus, Dennett's claim about blind spots is incorrect. In addition, psychological experiments by Vilayanur S. Ramachandran have shown that what is filled of a volume in a can be quite complex depending on the overall context of the visual scene. How, he argues, can your brain be ignoring something that is in fact commanding attention?
Filling in, therefore, is not to be dismissed as nonexistent or unusual. It probably represents a basic interpolation process that can occur at many levels in the neocortex. It is, incidentally, a good example of what is meant by a constructive process.
How can we discover the neurons whose firing symbolizes a particular percept? William T. Newsome and his colleagues at Stanford University have done a series of brilliant experiments on neurons in cortical area MT of the macaque's brain. By studying a neuron in area MT, we may discover that it responds best to very specific visual features having to do with motion. A neuron, for instance, might fire strongly in response to the movement of a bar in a particular place in the visual field, but only when the bar is oriented at a certain angle, moving in one of the two directions perpendicular to its length within a certain range of speed.
Exciting just a single neuron is technically difficult, but it is known that neurons that respond to roughly the same position, orientation and direction of movement of a bar tend to be located near one another in the cortical sheet. The experimenters taught the monkey a simple task in movement discrimination using a mixture of dots, some moving randomly, the rest all in one direction. They showed that electrical stimulation of a small region in the right place in cortical area MT would bias the monkey's motion discrimination, almost always in the expected direction.
Thus, the stimulation of these neurons can influence the monkey's behaviour and probably its visual percept. Such exploring experiments do not, only show decisively that the firing of such neurons is the exact neural correlate of the percept. The correlate could be only a subset of the neurons being activated. Or perhaps the real correlate is the firing of neurons in another part of the visual hierarchy that is strongly influenced by the neurons activated in area MT.
These same reservations apply also to cases of binocular rivalry. Clearly, the problem of finding the neurons whose firing symbolizes a particular percept is not going to be easy. It will take many careful experiments to track them down even for one kind of percept.
The purpose of vivid visual awareness is obviously to feed into the cortical areas concerned with the implications of what we see, as from its position, the information shuttles on the one hand to the hippocampal system, to be encoded (temporarily) into long-term episodic memory, and on the other to the planning levels of the motor system. Nevertheless, is it possible to go from a visual input to a behavioural output without any relevant visual awareness?
That such a process can happen is demonstrated by the remarkable class of patients with ‘blind-sight’. These patients, all of whom have suffered damage to their visual cortex, can point with fair accuracy at visual targets or track them with their eyes while vigorously denying seeing anything. In fact, these patients are as surprised as their doctors by their abilities. The amount of information that ‘gets through’, however, is limited: Blind-sight patients have some ability to respond to wavelength, orientation and motion, yet they cannot distinguish a triangle from a square.
It is naturally of great interest to know which neural pathways are being used in these patients. Investigators originally suspected that the pathway ran through the superior colliculus. Recent experiments suggest that a direct but weak connection may be involved between the lateral geniculate nucleus and other visual areas in the cortex. It is unclear whether an intact primary visual cortex region is essential for immediate visual awareness. Conceivably the visual signal in blind-sight is so weak that the neural activity cannot produce awareness, although getting through to the motor system remains strong enough.
Normal-seeing people regularly respond to visual signals without being fully aware of them. In automatic actions, such as swimming or driving a car, complex but stereotypical actions occurred with little, if any, associated visual awareness. In other cases, the information conveyed is either very limited or very attenuated. Thus, while we can function without visual awareness, our behaviour without it is restricted.
Clearly, it takes a certain amount of time to experience a conscious percept. It is tediously difficult to determine just how much time is needed for an episode of visual awareness, but one aspect of the problem that can be demonstrated experimentally is that signals received close together in time are treated by the brain as simultaneous.
A disk of red light is flashed for, say, 20 milliseconds, followed immediately by a 20-millisecond flash of green light in the same place. The subject reports that he did not see a red light followed by a green light. Instead he saw a yellow light, just as he would have if the red and the green light had been flashed simultaneously. Yet the subject could not have experienced yellow until after the information from the green flash had been processed and integrated with the preceding red one.
Experiments of this type led psychologist Robert Efron, now at the University of California at Davis, to conclude that the processing period for perception is about 60 to 70 milliseconds. Similar periods are found in experiments with tones in the auditory system. It is always possible, however, that the processing times may be different in higher parts of the visual hierarchy and in other parts of the brain. Processing is also more rapid in trained, compared with naive, observers.
Because it appears to be involved in some forms of visual awareness, it would help if we could discover the neural basis of attention. Eye movement is a form of attention, since the area of the visual field in which we see with high resolution is remarkably small, roughly the area of the thumbnail at arms’ length. Thus, we move our eyes to gaze directly at an object in order to see it more clearly. Our eyes usually move three or four times a second. Psychologists have shown, however, that there appears to be a faster form of attention that moves around, in some sense, when our eyes are stationary.
The exact psychological nature of this faster attentional mechanism is currently questionable. Several neuroscientists, however, including Robert Desimone and his colleagues at the National Institute of Mental Health, have shown that the rate of firing of certain neurons in the macaque's visual system depends on what the monkey is attending too in the visual field. Thus, attention is not solely a psychological concept; it also has neural correlates that can be observed. A number of researchers have found that the pulvinars, a region of the thalamus, appears to be involved in visual attention. We would like to believe that the thalamus deserve to be called ‘the organ of attention’, but this status has yet to be established.
The major problem is to find what activity in the brain corresponds directly to visual awareness. It has been speculated that each cortical area produces awareness of only those visual features that are ‘columnar’, or arranged in the stack or column of neurons perpendicular to the cortical surface. Thus, the primary visual cortex could code for orientation and area MT for motion. So far experientialists have not found one particular region in the brain where all the information needed for visual awareness appears to come together. Dennett has dubbed such a hypothetical place ‘The Cartesian Theatre’. He argues on theoretical grounds that it does not exist.
Awareness seems to be distributed not just on a local scale, but more widely over the neocortex. Vivid visual awareness is unlikely to be distributed over every cortical area because some areas show no response to visual signals. Awareness might, for example, be associated with only those areas that connect back directly to the primary visual cortex or alternatively with those areas that project into one another's layer four (The latter areas are always at the same level in the visual hierarchy.)
The key issue, then, is how the brain forms its global representations from visual signals. If attention is crucial for visual awareness, the brain could form representations by attending to just one object at a time, rapidly moving from one object to the next. For example, the neurons representing all the different aspects of the attended object could all fire together very rapidly for a short period, possibly in rapid bursts.
This fast, simultaneous firing might not only excite those neurons that symbolized the implications of that object but also temporarily strengthen the relevant synapses so that this particular pattern of firing could be quickly recalled in the form of short-term memory. If only one representation needs to be held in short-term memory, as in remembering a single task, the neurons involved may continue to fire for a period.
A problem arises if being aware of more than one object at absolute measure from the corresponding outlet in time is imperative. If all the attributes of two or more objects were represented by neurons firing rapidly, their attributes might be confused. The colour of one might become attached to the shape of another. This happens sometimes in very brief presentations.
Some time ago Christoph von der Malsburg, now at the Ruhr-Universität Bochum, suggested that this difficulty would be circumvented if the neurons associated with anyone objects all fired in synchrony (that is, if their times of firing were correlated) but out of synchrony with those representing other objects. Recently two groups in Germany reported that there does appear to be correlated firing between neurons in the visual cortex of the cat, often in a rhythmic manner, with a frequency in the 35- to 75-hertz range, sometimes called 40-hertz, or g, oscillation.
Von der Malsburg's proposal prompted to suggest that this rhythmic and synchronized firing might be the neural correlate of awareness and that it might serve to bind together activity concerning the same object in different cortical areas. The matter is still undecided, but at present the fragmentary experimental evidence does little to support such an idea. Another possibility is that the 40-hertz oscillations may help distinguish figures from ground or assist the mechanism of attention.
Are there some particular types of neurons, distributed over the visual neocortex, whose firing directly symbolizes the content of visual awareness? One very simplistic hypothesis is that the activities in the upper layers of the cortex are largely unconscious ones, whereas the activities in the lower layers (layers five and six) mostly correlate with consciousness. We have wondered whether the pyramidal neurons in layer five of the neocortex, especially the larger ones, might play this latter role.
These are the only cortical neurons that project right out of the cortical system (that is, not to the neocortex, the thalamus or the claustrum). If visual awareness represents the results of neural computations in the cortex, one might expect that what the cortex sends elsewhere would symbolize those results. What is more, the neurons in layer five show an unusual propensity to fire in bursts. The idea that layer five neurons may directly symbolize visual awareness is attractive, but it still is too early to tell whether there is anything in it.
Visual awareness is clearly a difficult problem. More work is needed on the psychological and neural basis of both attention and very short-term memory. Studying the neurons when a percept changes, even though the visual input is constant, should be a powerful experimental paradigm. We need to construct neurobiological theories of visual awareness and test their using a combination of molecular, neurobiological and clinical imaging studies.
It is strongly believed that once we have mastered the secret of this simple form of awareness, we may be close to understanding a central mystery of human life: How the physical events occurring in our brains while we think and act in the world relate to our subjective sensations - that is, how the brain relates to the mind.
Afterthought or precept, may that it is that it now seems likely that there are rapid ‘on-line’ systems for stereotyped motor responses such as hand or eye movement. These systems are unconscious and lack memory. Conscious seeing, on the other hand, seems to be slower and more subject to visual illusions. The brain needs to form a conscious representation of the visual scene that it then can use for many different actions or thoughts. Precisely, how all these pathways’ work may by some enacting deliverance as to how they interact is far from clear.
Still, it is probably too early to draw firm conclusions from them about the exact neural correlates of visual consciousness. We have suggested that on theoretical grounds are based the neuroanatomy of the macaque monkey that primates are not directly aware of what is happening in the primary visual cortex, even though most of the visual information flows through it. Although on hypothetical grounds that are supported by some experimental evidence, with the exception, that, it is still controversial.
Let us consider once again, if for example, mindfully you rotate the letter”N” 90 degrees to the right, is a new letter formed? In seeking answers such that to are fractionally vulnerable to the plexuities of the mind’s eye, scientists say, most people conjure up an image in their mind’s eye, mentally ‘look’ at it, add details one a time and describe what they see. They seem to have a definite picture in their heads, but where in the brain are these images formed? How are they generated? How do people ’move things around’ in their imaginations?
Using clues from brain-damaged patients and advanced brain imaging techniques, neuroscientists have now found that the brain uses virtually identical pathways for seeing objects and for imagining them, only it uses these pathways in reverse.
In the process of human vision, a stimulus in the outside world is passed from the retina to the primary visual cortex and then to higher centres until an object or event is recognized. In mental imaging, a stimulus originates in higher centres and is passed down to the primary visual cortex. Where it is recognized.
The implications are beguiling. Scientists say that for the first time they are glimpsing the biological basis for abilities that make some people better at math or art or flying fighter aircraft. They can now explain why imagining oneself shooting baskets like Michael Jordan can improve one’s athletic performance. In a finding that raises troubling questions about the validity of eyewitness testimony, they can show that an imagined object is, to the observer’s brain at least, every bit as real as one that is seen.
“People have always wondered if there are pictures in the brain.” More recently, the debate centred on a specific query: As a form of thought, is mental imagery rooted in the abstract symbols of language or in the biology of the visual system?
The biology arguments are winning converts every day. The new findings are based on the notion that mental capacities like memory, perception, mental imagery, language and thought are rooted in complex underlying structures in the brain. Thus an image held in the mind’s eye has physically than ethereal properties. Mental imagery research has developed apart with research on the human visual system. Each provides clues to the other helping along the forcing out the details of a highly complex system.
Vision is not a single process but the linking of subsystems that process specific aspects of vision. To understand how this works, we are to consider looking at an apple on a picnic table ten feet away. Light reflects off the apple, hits the retina and is sent through nerve fibres to an early visual way station might that we call the visual buffer, here the apple image is literally mapped onto the surface of brain tissue as it appears in space, with high resolution. “You can think of the visual buffer is a screen,” as if it were “A picture can be displayed on the screen from the camera, which are your eyes, or from a videotape recorder, which is your memory.”
In this case, the image of the apple is held on the screen as the visual buffer carries out a variety of other features are examined separately. Still, the brain does not as yet know is seeing an apple. Next, distinct features of the apple are sent to two higher subsystems for further analysis, as they are often referred to as the ‘what’ system and the ‘where’ system. The brain needs to match the primitive apple pattern with memories and knowledge about apples, in that it seeks knowledge from visual memories that are held like videotapes in the brain.
The ‘what’ system, in the temporal lobe, contains cells that are tuned for specific shapes and colours of objects, some respond to red, round objects in an infinite variety of positions, ignoring local space. Thus, the apple could be on a distant tree, on the picnic table or in front of your nose, thereby, it would still stimulate cells tuned for red round objects, which might be apples, beach balls or tomatoes.
The ‘where’ system, in the parietal lobe, contains cells that are tuned to fire when objects are in different locations. If the apple is far away, one set of cells is activated, while another set fires if the apple is close up. Thus the brain has a way of knowing where objects are in space so the body can navigate accordingly.
When cells in the ‘what’ and ‘where’ systems are stimulated, they may combine their signals in yet a higher subsystem where associative memories are stored, such as this systems are like a card file where visual memories, as if held on videotapes, can be looked up and activated. If the signals from the ‘what’ and ‘where’ system finds a good match in associative memory, one is to find the knowable object as an apple. You, however, also know what it tastes and smells like, that it has seeds, that it can be made into our favourite pie and everything else stored in your brain about apples.
However, sometimes, recognition does not occur at the level of associative memory. Because it is far away, the red object on the picnic table could be a tomato or an apple. You are not sure of its identity, and so, another level of analysis kicks in.
This highest level, in the frontal lobe, is where decisions are made, and to use the same analogy, it is like a catalogue for the videotape is in the brain. You look up features about the image to help you identify it. A tomato has a pointed leaf, while an apple has a slender stem. When the apple stem is found at this higher level, the brain decides that it has an apple in its visual field.
Signals are then fired back down through the system to the visual buffer and the apple is recognized. Significantly, every visual information that sends information upstream through nerve fibres also receives information back from that area. Information flows richly in both directions at all times.
Mental imagery is the result of this duality. Instead of a visual stimulus, a mental stimulus activates the system. The stimulus can be anything, including a memory, odour, face, reverie, song or question, for example, you look up the videotape in associative memory for cat, images are based on previously encoded representations of shape, whereby you look up the videotape in associative memory for cat.
When that subsystem initiated, a general image of a cat was mapped out on the screen, or the visual buffer, in the primary visual cortex. It is a tripped-down version of a cat and everyone’s version is different. Its preliminary mapping calls in detail of whether the cat has curved claws? To find out, the mind’s eye shifts attention and goes back to higher subsystems where detailed features are stored. Activating the curved claws tape, then zoom back down to the front paws of the cat and you add them to the cat. Thus each image is built up, a part at a time.
The more complex the image, the more time it takes to conjure it in the visual buffer. On the basis of brain scans with the technique known as positron emission tomography, its estimates that are required range from 75 to 100 thousandths of a second that to add each new part.
The visual system maps imagined objects and scenes precisely, mimicking the real world, in that, you scan it and study it as it was there.
How is this to be? This can be demonstrated when people are asked to imagine objects at different sizes: “Imagine a tiny honeybee.” “What colour is its head?” To do this, people have to take time to zoom in on the bee’s head before they can answer. Conversely, objects can be imagined so that they overflow the visual field. “Imagine walking toward a car,” “It looms larger as you get closer to it. There comes a point where you cannot see the car at once, in that it seems to overflow the screen in your mind’s eye.”
People with brain damage often demonstrate that the visual systems are doing double duty. For example, stroke patients who lose the ability to see colours also cannot imagine colours.
An epilepsy patient experienced a striking change in her ability to imagine objects after her right occipital lobe was removed to reduce seizures. On the same line, before surgery, the woman estimated she would stand, in her mind’s eye, about 14 feet from a horse before it overflowed her visual field. After surgery, she estimated the overflow at 34 feet. Her field of mental imagery was reduced by half.
Another patient underwent to endure the disability affecting his ‘what’ system while his ‘where’ system was intact. If you were to ask him to imagine what colour is the inside of a watermelon, he does not know, and if you press him, he might guess blue. However, if you ask him, is Toronto closer to London than Winnipeg, he answers correctly instantly.
Imaging studies of healthy brains produce similar findings, As when a person is asked to look at and then to imagine an object, the same brain areas are activated. When people add detail to images, they use the same circuits used in vision. Interestingly, people who say they are vivid, as imaginers can show stronger activation of the relevant areas in the brain.
People use imagery in their everyday lives to call up information in memory, at which time, to initiate reason and to learn new skills, the scientists say. It can lead to creativity. Albert Einstein apparently got his first insight into relativity when he imagined chasing after and matching the speed of a beam of light.
It can improve athletic skills. When you see a gifted athlete, move in a particular way, you not how he or she moves, and you can use that information to program your own physiological techniques as to improve everyone. Basically, his brain uses the same representations in the ‘where’ system to help direct actual movements and imagined movements. Thus, refining these representations in imagery will transfer frowardly into the actualized momentum, provided the motions are physically practised.
Humans exhibit vast individual differences in various component’s of mental imaging, which may help explain certain talents and predilection. Fighter pilots, for example, can imagine the rotation of complex objects in a flash, but most people need time to imagine such tasks.
Currently in progress, are studies in the examination of the brains of mathematicians and artists with a new imaging machine that reveals individual difference in the way brains are biologically wired up, still, they are looking to see if people who are good at geometry have different circuitry from those people who are good at algebra.
In a philosophical conundrum arising from the new research, it seems that people can confuse what is real and what is imagined, raising questions about witnesses’ testimony and memory itself.
Meanwhile, in visual perception, must have some really superb mechanistic actions in our favour, yet to be considered is the expectation to expect, if not only for yourself, however, in order to see an object when you have a part of the picture. As these expectations allow you to see an apple, its various fragments can drive the system into producing the image of an apple in your visual buffer. In other words, you prime yourself so much that you particularly can play the apple tape from your memory banks. Thus, people can be fooled by their mind’s eye, justly of imaging a man standing before a frightened store clerk and you quicken to assume a robbery is under way. It is dark and he is in the shadow. Because you expect to see a gun, your thresholds are lowered and you may occasion to run the tape for a gun, even though it is not there. As far as your brain is concerned, it saw a gun, yet it may not have been real.
Luckily, inputs from the eye tend to be much stronger than inputs from imagination, but on a dark night, under certain circumstances, it is easy to be fooled by one’s own brain.
It is amazing that imagination and reality are not confused more often, least of mention, images are fuzzier and less coherent than real memories, and humans are able to differentiate them by how plausible they seem.
Although our new epistemological situation suggests that questions regarding the character of the whole no longer lies within the domain of science, derived from the classical assumption that knowledge of all the constituent parts of a mechanistic universe is equal to knowledge of the whole. This paradigm sanctioned the Cartesian division between mind and world that became a pervasive preoccupation in western philosophy, art, and literature beginning in the seventeenth century. This explains in no small part why many humanists-social scientists feel that science concerns itself only with the mechanisms of physical reality and it, therefore, indifference or hostile to the experience of human subjectivity - the world where a human being with all his or her myriad sensations, feelings, thoughts, values and beliefs and yet, have a life and subside into an ending.
Nevertheless, man has come to the threshold of a state of consciousness, regarding his nature and his relationship to the cosmos, in terms that reflect ‘reality’. By using the processes of nature as metaphor, to describe the forces by which it operates upon and within man, we come as close to describing ‘reality’ as we can within the limits of our comprehension. Men will be very uneven in their capacity for such understanding, which, naturally, differs for different ages and cultures, and develops and changes over the course of time. For the reasons that using metaphors and myth to provide will always be necessary ‘comprehensible’ guides to living. In this way, man’s imagination and intellect play vital roles on his survival and evolution.
Notwithstanding, of ethics, differing in transliterations to which underlie such different conceptions of human life as that of the classical Greeks, Christianity and an adherent of Judaism as a religion or the Hebrew’s or the Jewish culture - the Hebrews are a native inhabitants of the ancient kingdom of Judah, least of mention, the lunisolar calendar used by the Jew’s or their culture or their religious mark in the events of the Jewish year, dating the creation of the world at 3761Bc.
Europe owes the Jew no small thanks for making people think more logically and for establishing cleaner intellectual habits - nobody more so than the Germans who are a lamentable déraisonnable [unreasonable] race . . . Wherever Jews have won influence they have taught men to make finer distinctions, more rigorous inferences, and to write in a more luminous and cleanly fashion, their task as ever to bring the people ‘to listen to raison’.
His position is very radical. Nietzsche does not simply deny that knowledge, construed as the adequate representation he the world by the intellect, exists. He also refuses the pragmatist identification of knowledge and truth with usefulness: He writes that we think we know what we think is useful, and that we can be quite wrong about the latter.
Nietzsche’s view, his ‘perspectivism’, depends on his claim that the being not sensible conception of a world independent of human interpretation and of which interpretation would correspond if that were to unite knowledge. He sums up this highly controversial interpretation in The Will to Power: Fact and precisely what there is not, only interpretations.
Perspectivism does not deny that particular views can be like some versions of contemporary anti-realism, and it attributes of a specific approach in truth as fact relationally determines it and justly untenable by those approaches in themselves. Still, it refuses to envisage a single independent set of facts, to be accounted for all theories, thus Nietzsche grants the truth of specific scientific theories, it does, however, deny that a scientific interpretation can possibly be ‘the only justifiable interpretation of the world’, neither the fact’s science addresses nor methods it employs are privileged. Scientific theories serve the purpose for which they have been devised, but they have no priority over the many other purposes of human life.
For those curiously consigned by the uncanny representations brought-about to the affectual nature between mind and mental as drive of both Freud and Nietzsche will soon attest to some uncanny theories.
In the late 19th century Viennese neurologist Sigmund Freud developed a theory of personality and a system of psychotherapy known as psychoanalysis. According to this theory, people are strongly influenced by unconscious forces, including innate sexual and aggressive drives. Freud, recounts the early resistance to his ideas and later acceptance of his work. From the outset of a psychoanalysis, Freud attracted followers, many of whom later proposed competing theories. As a group, these neo-Freudians shared the assumption that the unconscious plays and important role in a person’s thoughts and behaviours. Most parted company with Freud, however, over his emphasis on sex as a driving force. For example, Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung theorized that all humans inherit a collective unconscious that contains universal symbols and memories from their ancestral past. Austrian physician Alfred Adler theorized that people are primarily motivated to overcome inherent feelings of inferiority. He wrote about the effects of birth order in the family and coined the term sibling rivalry. Karen Horney, a German-born American psychiatrist, argued that humans have a basic need for love and security, and become anxious when they feel isolated and alone.
Motivated by a desire to uncover unconscious aspects of the psyche, psychoanalytic researchers devised what is known as projective tests. A projective test asks people to respond to an ambiguous stimulus such as a word, an incomplete sentence, an inkblot, or an ambiguous picture. These tests are based on the assumption that if a stimulus is vague enough to accommodate different interpretations, then people will use it to project their unconscious needs, wishes, fears, and conflicts. The most popular of these tests are the Rorschach Inkblot Test, which consists of ten inkblots, and the Thematic Apperception Test, which consists of drawings of people in ambiguous situations.
Psychoanalysis has been criticized on various grounds and is not as popular as in the past. However, Freud’s overall influence on the field has been deep and lasting, particularly his ideas about the unconscious. Today, most psychologists agree that people can be profoundly influenced by unconscious forces, and that people often have a limited awareness of why they think, feel, and behave as they do.
The techniques of psychoanalysis and much of the psychoanalytic theory based on its application were developed by Sigmund Freud. Squarely, his work concerning the structure and the functioning of the human mind had far-reaching significance, both practically and scientifically, and it continues to influence contemporary thought.
The first of Freud's innovations was his recognition of unconscious psychiatric processes that follow laws differently from those that govern conscious experience. Under the influence of the unconscious, thoughts and feelings that belong together may be shifted or displaced out of context; two disparate ideas or images may be condensed into one; thoughts may be dramatized in images rather than expressed as abstract concepts; and certain objects may be represented symbolically by images of other objects, although the resemblance between the symbol and the original object may be vague or farfetched. The laws of logic, indispensable for conscious thinking, do not apply to these unconscious mental productions.
Recognition of these modes of operation in unconscious mental processes made possibly the understanding of such previously hard to grasp psychological phenomena as dreaming. Through analysis of unconscious processes, Freud saw dreams as serving to protect sleep against disturbing impulses arising from within and related to early life experiences. Thus, unacceptable impulses and thoughts, called the latent dream content, are transformed into a conscious, although no longer immediately comprehensible, experience called the manifest dream. Knowledge of these unconscious mechanisms permits the analyst to reverse the so-called dream work, that is, the process by which the latent dream is transformed into the manifest dream, and through dream interpretation, to recognize its underlying meaning.
A basic assumption of Freudian theory is that the unconscious conflicts involve instinctual impulses, or drives, that originate in childhood. As these unconscious conflicts are recognized by the patient through analysis, his or her adult mind can find solutions that were unattainable to the immature mind of the child. This depiction of the role of instinctual drives in human life is a unique feature of Freudian theory.
According to Freud's doctrine of infantile sexuality, adult sexuality is a product of a complex process of development, beginning in childhood, involving a variety of body functions or areas (oral, anal, and genital zones), and corresponding to various stages in the relation of the child to adults, especially to parents. Of crucial importance is the so-called Oedipal period, occurring at four to six years of age, because at this stage of development the child for the first time becomes capable of an emotional attachment to the parent of the opposite sex that is similar to the adult's relationship to a mate; the child simultaneously reacts as a rival to the parent of the same sex. Physical immaturity dooms the child's desires to frustration and his or her first step toward adulthood to failure. Intellectual immaturity further complicates the situation because it makes children afraid of their own fantasies. The extent to which the child overcomes these emotional upheavals and to which these attachments, fears, and fantasies continue to live on in the unconscious greatly influences later life, especially loves relationships.
The conflicts occurring in the earlier developmental stages are no less significant as a formative influence, because these problems represent the earliest prototypes of such basic human situations as dependency on others and relationship to authority. Also, basic in moulding the personality of the individual is the behaviour of the parents toward the child during these stages of development. The fact that the child reacts, not only to objective reality, but also to fantasy distortions of reality, and, however, greatly complicates even the best-intentioned educational efforts.
The effort to clarify the bewildering number of interrelated observations uncovered by psychoanalytic exploration led to the development of a model of the structure of the psychic system. Three functional systems are distinguished that are conveniently designated as the id, ego, and superego.
The first system refers to the sexual and aggressive tendencies that arise from the body, as distinguished from the mind. Freud called these tendencies ‘Triebe’, which literally means “drives,” but is often inaccurately translated as “instincts” to show their innate character. These inherent drives claim immediate satisfaction, which is experienced as pleasurable; the id thus is dominated by the pleasure principle. In his later writings, Freud tended more toward psychological rather than biological conceptualization of the drives.
How the conditions for satisfaction are to be caused is the task of the second system, the ego, which is the domain of such functions as perception, thinking, and motor control that can accurately assess environmental conditions. To fulfill its function of adaptation, or reality testing, the ego can enforce the postponement of satisfaction of the instinctual impulses originating in the id. To defend it against unacceptable impulses, the ego develops specific psychic means, known as defence mechanisms. These include repression, the exclusion of impulses from conscious awareness; projection, the process of ascribing to others one's own unacknowledged desires; and reaction formation, the establishments of a pattern of behaviour directly opposed to a strong unconscious need. Such defence mechanisms are put into operation whenever anxiety signals a danger that the original unacceptable impulses may reemerge.
An id impulse becomes unacceptable, not only from a temporary need for postponing its satisfaction until suitable reality conditions can be found, but more often because of a prohibition imposed on the individual by others, originally the parents. All these demands and prohibitions are the major content of the third system, the superego, the function of which is to control the ego according to the internalized standards of parental figures. If the demands of the superego are not fulfilled, the person may feel shame or guilt. Because the superego, in Freudian theory, originates in the struggle to overcome the Oedipal conflict, it has a power akin to an instinctual drive, is in part unconscious, and can cause feelings of guilt not justified by any conscious transgression. The ego, having to mediate among the demands of the id, the superego, and the outside world, may not be strong enough to reconcile these conflicting forces. The more the ego is impeded in its development because of being enmeshed in its earlier conflicts, called fixations or complexes, or the more it reverts to earlier satisfactions and archaic modes of functioning, known as regression, the greater is the likelihood of succumbing to these pressures. Unable to function normally, it can maintain its limited control and integrity only at the price of symptom formation, in which the tensions are expressed in neurotic symptoms.
A cornerstone of modern psychoanalytic theory and practice is the concept of anxiety, which makes appropriate mechanisms of defence against certain danger situations. These danger situations, as described by Freud, are the fear of abandonment by or the loss of the loved one (the object), the risk of losing the object's love, the danger of retaliation and punishment, and, finally, the hazard of reproach by the superego. Thus, symptom formation, character and impulse disorders, and perversions, and sublimations, represent compromise formations - different forms of an adaptive integration that the ego tries to achieve through essentially successfully reconciling the different conflicting forces in the mind.
Various psychoanalytic schools have adopted other names for their doctrines to show deviations from Freudian theory.
Carl Gustav Jung, one of the earliest pupils of Freud, eventually created a school that he preferred to call analytical psychology. Like Freud, Jung used the concept of the libido; However, to him it meant not only sexual drives, but a composite of all creative instincts and impulses and the entire motivating force of human conduct. According to his theories, the unconscious is composed of two parts, the personal unconscious, which contains the results of the completion by the individualities as characterologically is the entity of the experience, and the collective unconscious, the reservoir of the experience of the human race. In the collective unconscious exist many primordial images, or archetypes, common to all individuals of a given country or historical era. Archetypes take the form of bits of intuitive knowledge or apprehension and normally exist only in the collective unconscious of the individual. When the conscious mind contains no images, however, as in sleep, or when the consciousness is caught off guard, the archetypes commence to function. Archetypes are primitive modes of thought and tend to personify natural processes as to such mythological concepts as good and evil spirits, fairies, and dragons. The mother and the father also serve as prominent archetypes.
An important concept in Jung's theory is the existence of two basically different types of personality, mental attitude, and function. When the libido and the individual's general interest are turned outward toward people and objects of the external world, he or she is said to be extroverted. When the reverse is true, and libido and interest are entered on the individual, he or she is said to be introverted. In a completely normal individual these two tendencies alternate, neither dominating, but usually the libido is directed mainly in one direction nor the other; as a result, two personality types are recognizable.
Jung rejected Freud's distinction between the ego and superego and recognized part of the personality, similar to the superego, that he called the persona. The persona consists of what a person may be to others, in contrast to what he or she is. The persona is the role the individual chooses to play in life, the total impression he or she wishes to make on the outside world.
Alfred Adler, another of Freud's pupils, differed from both Freud and Jung in stressing that the motivating force in human life is the sense of inferiority, which begins when an infant can comprehend the existence of other people who are better able to care for themselves and cope with their environment. From the moment the feeling of inferiority is established, the child strives to overcome it. Because inferiority is intolerable, the compensatory mechanisms set up by the mind may get out of hand, resulting in - centred neurotic attitudes, overcompensations, and a retreat from the real world and its problems.
Adler laid particular stress on inferiority feelings arising from what he regarded as the three most important relationships: those between the individual and work, friends, and loved ones. The avoidance of inferiority feelings in these relationships leads the individual to adopt a life goal that is often not realistic and is frequently expressed as an unreasoning will to power and dominance, leading to every type of antisocial behaviour from bullying and boasting to political tyranny. Adler believed that analysis can foster a sane and rational “community feeling” that is constructive rather than destructive.
Another student of Freud, Otto Rank, introduced a new theory of neurosis, attributing all neurotic disturbances to the primary trauma of birth. In his later writings he described individual development as a progression from complete dependence on the mother and family, to a physical independence coupled with intellectual dependence on society, and finally to complete intellectual and psychological emancipation. Rank also laid great importance on the will, defined as “a positive guiding organization and integration of, which uses creatively and inhibits and controls the instinctual drives.”
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