An acquaintance who works with street teens once said to me, “They live in a completely different world.” She did not mean only that they lived downtown and not in the suburbs, slept under bridges and not in beds, ate in soup kitchens instead of restaurants. She meant that street teens experienced a social reality radically different from the reality of those who have lived most of life in a relatively sheltered and stable middle-class environment. They have a different view of other people, of social authority, of human nature, of political and social institutions. As my acquaintance understood it, this difference resulted from experiences at home and school, experiences with adults who were at best negligent, at worst abusive and hostile. Children were not cared for at home, fared poorly at school, then ran from home to the street. The street teens she knew were hostile and despairing and expected others to be the same. A fundamental difference was in the area of trust: these teens lacked trust in family, teachers, peers, police, even those who sought to help them. And apparently for good reason, given the circumstances from which many of them emerged.

The Three Papers comprising this series, together with my earlier [34] also published in this journal, constitute an attempt to set out the major issues in the theoretical domain of reduction and to develop (tentatively) a general theory of theory reduction. The fourth paper, [34], though published separately from this trio, is integral to the presentation and should be read in conjunction with these papers. Even so, the presentation is limited in scope – roughly, to intertheoretic reduction among empirical theories – and informal in presentation – not least because a satisfying formal account of theories has yet to be offered. And despite the length, the treatment is still condensed; often corroborating and/or intuitively helpful detail has had to be consigned to footnotes or omitted. I approach the problem from within my own naturalistic realist philosophy of science and formal analysis of abstract hierarchy in theory. The sources for the former are [25], [29], [31], and [32] and those for the latter essentially [27] and [30]. Hierarchical notions played a significant role in the already published [34].

A Man whose height is four feet is short; adding one tenthof an inch to a short man's height leaves him short; therefore, a man whose height is four feet and one tenth of an inch is short. Now begin again and argue in the same pattern. A man whose height is four feet and one tenth of an inch is short; adding one tenth of an inch to a short man's height leaves him short; therefore, a man whose height is four feet and two tenths of an inch is short. In this way, it seems, we can reach the absurd result that a man whose height is four feet plus any number of tenths of an inch is short. For, if the first argument is sound, so is the second; and if the second, so is the third; and so on. There appears to be no good reason for stopping at any one point rather than at another; it is hard to see why the chain of arguments should ever be broken. But the conclusion is ridiculous; it is, for example, preposterous to say that a man whose height is seven feet is, nevertheless, short.

Today we tend to think that such diverse entities as facts of nature, mathematical propositions, and plans for action call for different kinds of accounts. Facts of nature require explanations, mathematical propositions demand proof, and plans for action call for justification. Though explaining, proving, and justifying all count as intellectual activities, it would be alien to most modern frameworks to envisage a general scheme within which these activities would be interrelated, and common denominators established. Still, such a program is hardly unreasonable since all three activities involve understanding. One wants to understand nature, one wants to understand mathematical propositions, and one wants to understand plans for action.

In the days when the Great Central and the Midland ran competitive services from Leicester to London, I agreed to meet your train when you came up from Leicester. “It arrives at 12.5”, you said in your letter. But you neglected to mention which station, and only on the morning of your journey did each of us realize that this matter had been left open. You intended to travel from Leicester Central, it being more convenient for you than London Road, and you supposed that I would be able to infer your intention by consulting Bradshaw, and noting a 12.5 arrival from Leicester at Marylebone.

One of the chief innovations in medieval adaptations of Aristotelian psychology was the expansion of Aristotle's notion of imagination or phantasia to include a variety of distinct perceptual powers known collectively as the internal senses (hawâss bâtinah). Amongst medieval philosophers in the Arabic world, Avicenna (Ibn Sînâ, 980–1037) offers one of the most complex and sophisticated accounts of the internal senses. Within his list of internal senses, Avicenna includes a faculty known as “estimation” (wahm), to which various functions are assigned in a wide variety of contexts. Although many philosophers in the Arabic world as well as in the Latin West accepted Avicenna's positing of an estimative faculty, Avicenna's best-known critics, al-Ghazâlî (1058–1111) and Averroes (Ibn Rushd, 1126–1198), found Avicenna's arguments in support of a distinct estimative faculty problematic. For different reasons, both Averroes and Ghazâlî raised the basic question of whether one needed to posit a distinct faculty of estimation to supplement the perceptual abilities of the other internal senses, and whether the notion of an estimative power as defined by Avicenna was internally coherent. Such criticisms suggest that the Avicennian conception of estimation is not entirely unambiguous, and that a correct understanding of Avicenna's motivations for delineating an estimative power requires a careful study of the diverse activities assigned to it throughout Avicenna's philosophical writings.

Any theory of reduction that goes only so far as carried in Parts I and II ([165], [166]) does only half the job. Prima facie at least, there are cases of would-be reduction which seem torn between two conflicting intuitions. On the one side there is a strong intuition that reduction is involved, and a strongly retentive reduction at that. On the other side it seems that the concepts at one level cross-classify those at the other level, so that there is no way to identify properties at one level with those at the other. There is evidence to suggest that there will be no unique mental state/neural state association that can be set up, because, e.g., many different parts of the nervous system are all capable of taking over ‘control’ of the one mental function. And it is alleged that infinitely many, worse: indefinitely many, different bio-chemo-physical states could correspond to the economic property ‘has a monetary system of economic exchange’; and similarly for the property ‘has just won a game of tennis’. Yet one doesn't want an economic system or a game of tennis to be some ghostly addition to the actual bio-chemo-physical processes and events involved (cf. Rudner [188]). Similarly one hopes that neurophysiology allied with the rest of natural science will render human experience and behaviour explicable.

An account of the ontological nature of collectives would be useful for several reasons. A successful theory would help to show us a route through the thicket of views known as “methodological individualism”. It would have a bearing on the plausibility of legal positivism. It would be relevant to the question whether collectives are capable of acting. The debate about the ontology of collectives is therefore important for such fields as the theory of action, social and political philosophy, the philosophy of law and the philosophy of social science. I hope to contribute to the debate by proposing an account of collectives, and by showing its theoretical soundness and utility. In its essentials, my proposal is that collectives are “mereological sums” of “stages” of persons linked by a “unity relation”. The influence on this account of some theories of personal identity will perhaps be obvious. But the motivation is different, for it lies at least as much in the ability of the theory to help us deal with the issues already mentioned as in problems concerning the identity of collectives over time. I acknowledge that my proposal is not commonsensical; however, I believe that no account could be both commonsensical and adequate. I will begin by introducing some constraints on a theory of collectives.

The traditional problem of the social contract defies solution. Agents with the motivations traditionally assumed would not in the circumstances traditionally assumed voluntarily arrive at a contract or voluntarily keep it up, as we can now understand, more clearly than our illustrious predecessors, by treating the problem in terms not available to them: the terms of Prisoner's Dilemma and of the theory of public goods.

Ira Brevis furor, said the Latins: anger is a brief bout of madness. There is a long tradition that views all emotions as threats to rationality. The crime passionnel belongs to that tradition: in law it is a kind of “brief-insanity defence.” We still say that “passion blinds us;” and in common parlance to be philosophical about life's trials is to be decently unemotional about them. Indeed many philosophers have espoused this view, demanding that Reason conquer Passion. Others — from Hume to the Emotivists — have appeared to reverse this hierarchy (“reason is and ought to be nothing but the slave of the passions).” But those philosophers who refuse to join in the general denigration of emotion as irrational usually share the presupposition that the role of rationality is limited to the calculation of means. In so far as emotions (often confused with desires) are concerned with the determination of ends, they remain, on this view, beyond the pale of rationality. Modern decision theorists have worked out schemes to assess the rationality of desires, as well as actions, against the background of beliefs and other desires.1 But these schemes leave no room at all for emotions, except, by implication, as disrupters of the rational process.

Contrary to much Kant interpretation, this article argues that Kant's moral philosophy, including his account of charity, is irrelevant to justifying the state's right to redistribute material resources to secure the rights of dependents (the poor, children, and the impaired). The article also rejects the popular view that Kant either does not or cannot justify anything remotely similar to the liberal welfare state. A closer look at Kant's account of dependency relations in “The Doctrine of Right” reveals an argumentative structure sufficient for a public institutional protection of dependents and evidence that Kant identifies concerns of economic justice as lying at the heart of the state's legitimacy.

Abortion has long been a central issue in the arena of applied ethics, but, the distinctive analysis of feminist ethics is generally overlooked in most philosophic discussions. Authors and readers commonly presume a familiarity with the feminist position and equate it with liberal defences of women's right to choose abortion, but, in fact, feminist ethics yields a different analysis of the moral questions surrounding abortion than that usually offered by the more familiar liberal defenders of abortion rights. Most feminists can agree with some of the conclusions that arise from certain non-feminist arguments on abortion, but they often disagree about the way the issues are formulated and the sorts of reasons that are invoked in the mainstream literature.

Part I of this trilogy, Historical and Scientific Setting, set out a general context for selecting a certain subclass of inter-theoretic relations as achieving appropriate explanatory and ontological unification – hence for properly being labelled reductive. Something of the complexity of these relations in real science was explored. The present article concentrates on the role which identity plays in structuring the reduction relation and so in achieving ontological and explanatory unification.

ABSTRACT: Are there justified emotions? Can they justify evaluative judgements? We first explain the need for an account of justified emotions by emphasizing that emotions are states for which we have or lack reasons. We then observe that emotions are explained by their cognitive and motivational bases. Considering cognitive bases first, we argue that an emotion is justified if and only if the properties the subject is aware of constitute an instance of the relevant evaluative property. We then investigate the roles of motivational bases. Finally, we argue that justified emotions are sufficient for justified evaluative judgements.

Functionalism in the philosophy of mind is here criticized from the perspective of a more naturalistic and less compromising form of materialism. Parallels are explored between the problem of cognitive activity and the somewhat more settled problem of vital activity. The lessons drawn suggest that functionalism in the philosophy of mind may be both counterproductive as a research strategy, and false as a substantive position.

No one denies that scientists frequently use bodies of knowledge from already-explored fields of inquiry as models as they argue analogically in the attempt to build new theories in other fields; however, there appears to be considerable controversy about the values of the analogical models when once the new theories are complete. One school of thought has it that although acquaintance with a theory's analogical models might serve a useful pedagogical value—helping to introduce the novice to complex ideas—essentially such acquaintance is theoretically superfluous, and is indeed often dangerously misleading. Thus, R.B. Braithwaite cautions us that “The price of the employment of models is eternal vigilance,” and Mario Bunge states flatly that:

In factual science analogy and analogical inference are welcome as theory construction tools. By the same token they are signs of growth, symptoms that the theory is still in the making rather than mature. A mature classical electrodynamics has no need for elastic tubes of force: the field—a non-mechanical substance—suffices for all purposes, the mechanical analogies being regarded as removable appendages.

Epistemic duties would be duties to believe, disbelieve, or withhold judgement from propositions, and they would be grounded in purely evidential considerations. I offer a new argument for the claim that there are no epistemic duties. Though people may have duties to believe, disbelieve, or withhold judgement from propositions, those duties are never grounded in purely epistemic considerations. Rather, allegedly epistemic duties are a species of moral duty.

En cet article nous montrons en premier lieu que la théorie de l'hexagone logique de Blanché n'est pas, comme il le pense, le résultat d'une réflexion philosophique, mais qu'elle relève véritablement de la logique scientifique, puisqu'elle s'insère tout naturellement dans la structure d'ensemble des liaisons uninaires (ou monaires) de la logique trivalente des propositions. Cette démonstration nous conduit, en second lieu, à renverser le jugement défavorable que E. J. Lemmon avait porté sur la toute première ébauche de cette théorie, et ainsi à déVelopper la logique modale dans le sens de Blanché plutôt que dans celui de von Wright. En troisième lieu, nous complétons l'application que fait Blanché de cette théorie de l'hexagone aux liaisons binaires de la logique bivalente des propositions, en intégrant en une seule structure tétrahexaédrique l'ensemble des seize liaisons binaires, lui-même s'étant contenté d'en grouper seulement dix en une espèce d'anneau bihexagonal.