Knowing what one wants. Is there any truth to the story that if you don't know what it is, then you can't want it? Well, I see, off to the right, in half-light, something that may or may not be an F: I can't really tell, and I don't much care. Perhaps my appetite for the unknown is not entirely normal, but I find that, whatever it is, I want it. Even if it turns out to be a particularly nasty or revolting or un-recherché thing, a G say, it will still be true that I wanted it, though it is neither something that I now want nor what I would have wanted it to be; and though I won't want it any longer and regret it's turning out to be a G, it is still, even to my discomfort, something that I once wanted.

The philosophy of primary and secondary qualities is in a state of some confusion. There is no agreement as to the basis upon which the two classes of quality may be distinguished—a host of features, as diverse as perceptible by more than one sense and belonging to the definition of matter, are offered as the mark of the primary. There is not even agreement on which qualities belong to which group. Shape, size and solidity are generally held to be primary, while colours, smells, and the like (I) are favoured secondary candidates. But for large numbers of qualities, for example being acidic, malleable, rust-proof—or, among perceptible qualities, glistening and vibrating—we are offered no effective guidance.

Inevitably, in such a situation, we are without clear answers to the questions; Why should any distinction be made between primaries and secondaries? Must all qualities be the one or the other? To the solution of which problems does the distinction serve as a preliminary step? What special relationship is there between primary qualities and scientific theory, or between secondary qualities and peculiarities in perception?

The title of this paper is misleading. I do not intend to defend pacifism against those who would contend that it is false. In point of fact, I agree that pacifism is false, and profoundly so, if any moral belief is. Yet pacifism’s critics sometimes believe it is false for inadequate reasons, and it is important to make the inadequacy of these reasons apparent whenever possible. Otherwise pacifism’s apologists are apt to suppose that they have overcome their critic’s strongest objections, when, in fact, in exposing the inadequacy of the grounds of certain objections, they have succeeded only in meeting the weaker ones. What I intend to defend, then, is not the truth of pacifism, but the very different claim that pacifism is not necessarily false. This objection to pacifism, which, if sound, would silence the debate over its possible merits, and which, therefore, if sound, would be a strong objection indeed, is set forth by Jan Narveson in his paper on pacifism. I hope to show that this objection is unfounded, and I shall, accordingly, direct my argument principally against Narveson’s. And yet it is with a certain degree of reluctance that I do so, since Narveson, himself, suggests that “most people” whose opinion he has solicited would agree with me that pacifism, although false, is not necessarily so. One runs a risk, in such a situation, of pouring old wine into new bottles.

In 385B-C of the Cratylus, Plato appears to be formulating a version of the correspondence theory of truth, in such a way that it applies not only to discourse, but to individual names as well. However commentators who have remarked on this passage, either take exception to the reasoning, or find it necessary to interpret the conclusion with qualifications that Plato never could have intended. Richard Robinson, for example, on p.328 of “A Criticism of Plato’s Cratylus”, sums up the argument thus:

and criticises it for involving a fallacy of division. Lorenz and Mittelstrasse, by contrast, construe the argument as validly proceeding from the true-false distinction of sentences to a corresponding true-false distinction of their parts.

In Knowledge and Belief Jaakko Hintikka presents a fairly detailed system of epistemic logic and tries to show its philosophical importance by bringing it to bear upon such problems as what goes wrong in saying “It’s raining, but I don’t believe it.” In setting up the system, Hintikka presents a way of symbolizing certain locutions containing expressions like ‘knows that’, ‘know who’, and ‘believes that’; he introduces certain notions which are analogous to the standard logical concepts consistency, validity, entailment (or logical implication), and logical equivalence; and he sets up (in effect) certain criteria which determine when these analogues of consistency, validity, etc. apply to epistemic and doxastic sentences and schemata-i.e., to sentences and schemata which contain, in their symbolic renditions, one or more of the so-called epistemic operators: ‘K’, ‘B’, ‘P’, and ‘C’. (⌈Ka⌉ is “the formal counterpart” of the words ⌈a knows that⌉; ⌈Ba⌉ is the counterpart of ⌈a believes that⌉; ⌈Pa⌉ is the counterpart of ⌈it is possible, for all that a knows, that⌉; and ⌈Ca⌉ is the counterpart of ⌈it is compatible with everything a believes that⌉ [p. 10].) The analogue of logical consistency which Hintikka introduces is called “defensibility.” Intuitively, a sentence is defensible provided that it is true in at least one of the “most knowledgeable of possible worlds” (p. 36)-i.e., provided it is true in at least one of the possible worlds which have the feature that each inhabitant which is capable of knowing and/or believing things (a) knows all the logical consequences of every proposition it knows and (b) believes all the logical consequences of every proposition it believes. The remaining notions are defined by reference to defensibility in just the way validity, entailment, and logical equivalence are often defined by reference to consistency. Thus self-sustenance, the epistemic analogue of validity, is defined thus:

Sometimes in THE CONCEPT OF MIND Gilbert Ryle describes what he is up to in a way which is quite unhelpful. The following passage will serve as an example of what I mean:

I call this passage unhelpful because it commits the fallacy of false alternatives. It would have us think that talk of a person's mind is either (1) talk of a special non-physical repository or else (2) talk of a person's abilities, liabilities, inclinations, etc.—but not both. Yet surely talk of the mind as a non-physical repository might be one way of talking about a person's abilities, liabilities, inclinations, etc.

Perhaps what Ryle should have said is that to speak of the mind as a non-physical repository that houses special, mental objects is a figurative way of putting what could be reported literally in talk of a person’s abilities, liabilities, inclinations, etc. Certainly that is a point Ryle tries to make in his book. Indeed it is a major burden of THE CONCEPT OF MIND to identify and analyze those figures of speech, or tropes, in which mental activities and capacities are commonly reported and described. The idea seems to be that we are misled philosophically by our failure to recognize the tropological character of what we commonly say about the mind and by our naivete as to how the tropes work.

Carl Hempel has proposed the following model for explanations by reasons.

• (R) (i) A was in a situation of type C.

• (ii) A was a rational agent at the time.

• (iii) In a situation of type C, any rational agent will do X.

• (iv) Therefore, A did X.

According to Hempel (R) overcomes the shortcomings of alternative accounts of explaining by reasons such as William Dray's model, in that the so-called evaluative principle is replaced by an empirical law. It is William Dray's contention that to understand the action of a rational agent is to see that his action was appropriate in his situation. Following Dray this then means that in explaining such an action one makes use of a normative ‘principle of action', not an empirical law, which has the form ‘when in a situation of type C1… Cn the thing to do is X'.

The theory I want to refute is sometime called Impersonal Ethical Egoism (IEE): the view that everyone ought (morally) to do what will benefit him the most in any given situation. It might be thought that this view can be distinguished from Personal Ethical Egoism (PEE): the view that I ought (morally) to do what will benefit me the most in any given situation. But to whom does “I” refer in PEE? To any person who states the view? And is the view supposed to be true no matter who states it? If the answers to the last two questions are Yes, then PEE and IEE come to the same thing. To distinguish the views, we might take “I” to refer to a specific person, say, the person who just stated the view. Put unambiguously, without the personal pronoun, PEE then becomes: RC ought (morally) to do what will benefit RC the most in any given situation. IEE would then logically imply PEE, but not conversely. But the reason why PEE would not imply IEE is not that it would be a conflicting, or even an alternative and competing, form of ethical egoism; it is simply that PEE would be formulated much less generally than IEE. In fact, since PEE would concern only what one particular person ought to do, it would not be obvious that the view itself should be called a form of egoism. For if anyone else subscribed to the view, that would hardly make him an egoist; so there would seem to be nothing inherently egoistic about the view. But, in any case, what I aim to refute is a general theory about what anyone ought to do in a given situation, not a theory limited in scope to the actions of only one individual.

There has been a tendency in recent literature on personal identity to treat puzzle cases as unfair intrusions upon the discussion, like proposing to play chess without the Queen. Thus Terence Penelhum speaks of ‘imaginary worlds’ where our normal criteria do not hold and Sydney Shoemaker refers approvingly to G. C. Nerlich's dictum that it is a universal truth of our world, and not of ‘all possible worlds', that only by being identical with a witness to past events can one have the knowledge of them we have in memory.

I would agree that where puzzle cases involve changing basic features of our physical universe, e.g. in having people's bodies go out of existence in one place and reappear in another, as recently envisaged by J. M. Shorter, there is some point in talking of ‘imaginary’ or ‘possible’ worlds. But where puzzle cases propose no such basic changes but ground the discussion in physiological possibilities, however unfeasible technologically, this seems an arbitrarily harsh description. It would be like Nineteenth Century philosophers saying talk of flying machines and heart transplants belongs, not to another age merely, but to other worlds.

The main aim of this paper is to revive interest among philosophers, and particularly philosophers of religion, in Descartes’ Fourth Meditation. Two recent works on Descartes1 make virtually no mention of it, and this omission seems to reflect a fairly general feeling that it is of relatively little philosophical significance. In philosophy of religion textbooks, the Fifth Meditation is often discussed in connection with the ontological proof, but in sections devoted to the problem of evil, no reference is made to the Fourth. Even in John Hick’s admirable study of the problem,2 Descartes’ contribution is relegated to a single sentence in a single footnote.

There is a certain view of religion, deriving from Wittgenstein’s thought, that might be called the language-game view of religion. It has many parts, but in essence it holds–in its own terms–that religion is a language-game (or cluster of languagegames) in fact engaged in by men; or, what seems to be an alternative way of saying the same thing, or very nearly the same. thing, religion is a form of life participated in by men. As such it is in order. Although one needs to enter into the torm ot lite and engage in the language-game to learn its grammar or logic and to see the order that it has. For its order has internal criteria: what count as, e.g., rational and meaningful within religion are determined not by criteria appropriate to physics or chess playing but by criteria appropriate to religion as it is lived by the religious.

In the last two decades, there has been a great deal of interest in providing an intentional criterion of the psychological. Of the various ones proferred, it seems to me that the best was the earliest, which was Chisholm’s initial criterion in his 1955 essay “Sentences about Believing.” In this present paper I first single out a basic misconception pervading the recent literature on intentionality and suggest that a consequence of this misconception has been the futile attempt to use the notion of intentionality to provide a kind of definition of “mind”; that is, to use intentionality to provide a necessary and sufficient condition for the psychological. Secondly, I point out how intentionality as captured by my own criterion is indispensable in that it is an essential property of certain particulars (persons) which are basic to our conceptual scheme and apparently basic to any conceptual scheme whatsoever.

In defense of anarchism Robert Paul Wolff contends that the moral autonomy of individuals cannot be made compatible with legitimate political authority. A state is legitimate, he maintains, if (and perhaps only if) authorities in the state have a right to command where subjects correlatively have an obligation to obey. However, he also holds both that all autonomous individuals have a primary obligation to refuse to be ruled by all authorities and that all men are normally obliged to remain autonomous. It allegedly follows that anarchism is the only political theory consistent with autonomy (9, 18f). We propose to show that his arguments concerning legitimacy contain a crucial inconsistency and that his conclusions concerning the incompatibility of authority and autonomy fail.

In his Arthur Holly Compton Memorial Lecture Sir Karl Popper tackles a problem raised by Compton himself in an earlier lecture. The problem is to understand how such abstract things as aims, purposes, rules, or agreements can influence or control the movements of men, and perhaps also of animals (p. 15). To illustrate the problem Compton had remarked on the amazing faith and confidence shown by his audience and the lecture's organizer that he should arrive on the agreed date to give the lecture, considering ‘the great physical improbability that their confidence was justified’. For