Since the publication of Gilbert Ryle's book, The Concept of Mind, the distinction between dispositions and occurrences has loomed large in the philosophy of mind. In that enormously influential book Ryle set out to show that much of what passes as mental is best construed as dispositional in character rather than, as traditionally supposed, being made up of private “ghostly” occurrences, ‘happenings, or “episodes.” Many philosophers, including some of Ryle's ablest critics, have accepted the terms of Ryle's contentions. They have either agreed, with respect to certain kinds of mental states, that they are not occurrent because dispositional, or have undertaken to vindicate their occurrent status by showing Ryle's dispositional account to be inadequate. Thus U. T. Place in his essay, “The Concept of Heed,” while agreeing with Ryle's dispositional account of belief; memory, intention, and desire, rejects a similar account of heeding, attention, and consciousness, and defends the traditional account according to which they are construed as distinctive sorts of internal activity. And Terence Penelhum, in “The Logic of Pleasure,” defends an “episode-view” of pleasure as against Ryle's dispositional account.

Contemporary readers of Descartes can hardly fail to notice that the author uses the word pensée, or cogitatio, in a much broader sense than French speakers use pensée nowadays, or we use the closest English word, thought. He consistently maintains that feelings, sensations, as well as the products of one's fancy, are one and all modes of thought.

Yet, clearly, according to the normal use of the word, sensations of light, of sound, of hunger, and so forth, are not regarded as part of one's thinking, nor do we so regard the spontaneous flight of the imagination one might experience in daydreams or real dreams, or while thinking about unrelated matters. Some of these sensations, notably aches, pains, pangs of hunger, blinding light, and strong noise, are not only not counted among our thoughts, but they are apt to interfere with our thinking, and, in extreme cases, might stop it altogether. In a similar way, the lascivious play of St. Antony's imagination did not embellish his meditations on the holy mysteries; he had to overcome or ignore it to be able to pursue the train of his thought.

The central purpose of this paper is to examine the case for political authority, i.e., the argument for having political authority rather than for having none. Thus, the case for political authority is the case against anarchism. My construction of that case owes much, no doubt, to observations made long ago by Thomas Hobbes and john locke. Nevertheless, these observations have never been stated in a satisfactory and systematic fashion, not even by Hobbes and locke themselves. Hobbes’ observations have, more often than not, been misunderstood, and those of locke have generally been overlooked. However, this paper is not intended to be an exercise in the history of political philosophy. Rather, it is an assessment of a philosophical thesis, namely, that political authority is essential to man's survival and well-being. Although this thesis is rarely contested and, in fact, borders on the commonplace, it is contestable. Moreover, since disenchantment with authority and how it is exercised is growing, an examination of how men are likely to fare in its absence is appropriate. Such an examination is complex, but it is not impossible.

In this paper I shall give reasons for rejecting one type of analysis of the basic constituents of action, and reasons for preferring an alternative approach. I shall discuss the concept of basic action recently presented by Alvin Goldman, who gives an interesting version of the sort of analysis I wish to reject. Goldman agrees with Danto that bodily movements are basic actions, and his definition of ‘basic’ resembles Danto's fairly closely. What is new is a useful concept of level-generation between actions, which Goldman uses both in his recursive definition of action (45) and in his definition of a basic action (67, 72), as one whose performance does not depend on level-generational knowledge. In brief, an action is an event which is level-generated by or capable of level-generating another action, and a basic action is one which is not level-generated by any other action. I shall examine this concept of level-generation, and point out incoherences I think endemic to views of this sort. In the last part of the paper I shall indicate the direction in which a more satisfactory account of basic action is to be sought. The criterion of basicness I shall sketch will select as basic actions not bodily movements, but a more interesting class of actions, and one whose demarcation can help us see the relation between actions and intentions, and the differences between intentions and other states of mind.

It is important to try to understand Berkeley's exact position on what it is for someone to perceive an idea. He is frequently presented as holding that to perceive an idea is to be confronted by an object which is in some sense mind-dependent and private, and, if taken in a certain way, such a remark is not inaccurate. But the interpretation which renders it accurate needs to be specified and this is a task which awaits completion. Until it is completed, questions like ‘Can Berkeley account for everything we, as plain men, legitimately want to say?’, ‘Are his arguments against the possibility of mind-independent material substances sound?’, and ‘Is he right to hold that the ideas involved in different sense modalities are always different?’, cannot be finally resolved.

George Pitcher, in “Minds and Ideas in Berkeley”, makes a good start on the problem, but he does not consider a sufficient number of alternative analyses of ‘So and so perceives such and such an idea’. As a result he fails to pinpoint the exact analysis which Berkeley himself would favour.

In answering the question, “How is the concept of a person possible?”, Strawson (Individuals. London: Methuen, 1959) lays great stress upon a particular class of predicate.

He says, “They are predicates, roughly, which involve doing something, which clearly imply intention or a state of mind or at least consciousness in general, and which indicate a characteristic pattern, or range of patterns, of bodily movement, while not indicating at all precisely any very definite sensation or experience … . Such predicates have the interesting characteristic of many P-predicates, that one does not, in general, ascribe them to oneself on the strength of observation, whereas one does ascribe them to others on the strength of observations. But, in the case of these predicates, one feels minimal reluctance to concede that what is ascribed in these two different ways is the same. This is because of the marked dominance of a fairly definite pattern of bodily movement in what they describe, and the marked absence of any distinctive experience.

In the last thirty-five years philosophers have often referred to corrigible and incorrigible statements or judgements. This usage probably began with the Inaugural lecture of the Wykeham Professor of logic at Oxford University on 5 March, 1936, which was called ‘Truth and Corrigibility’ and discussed the theory that ‘all judgements are corrigible'. Price did not say there that he himself invented this usage. On the contrary, he said that “it is maintained by many philosophers that all judgements are corrigible”. But he gave no reference to support this statement; and it seems that in fact only Bradley preceded him in writing of a ‘corrigible statement', and Bradley did so only in a single (though thrice repeated) paragraph, once taken up by Russell. The effective disseminator of the notion was probably Price himself.

The Oxford English Dictionary in 1893, when its C volume appeared, knew of no such thing as a corrigible judgement or statement. The possible owners of corrigibility then were things, men, disorders, votes, faults, weaknesses, passions, abuses, dispositions, inclinations, offenders, sinners, and necks. (“Bending down his corrigible neck”, Antony and Cleopatra, 4, 14, 74).

John said, “Sam went to the bank”. He meant it as a literal statement to be assessed as true or false. He meant by “bank” ‘financial institution', referring by it to the First National Bank of Muncie. By “Sam” he referred to Sam Jorgensen. Do we need to know any other sorts of facts about John's utterance to know how it is to be understood?

It might be argued that we do need to know something else, for suppose john produced an utterance fitting the above description before Sam went to the bank. Then what he said was false. If John produced an utterance fitting the same description after Sam went to the bank, then what he said was true. Whatever John says on any occasion, it surely can't be both true and false. But if what John said before Sam went to the bank equals what john said after Sam went to the bank, equals what john said, then what john said appears to be both true and false. The moral drawn by this argument is that on the two different occasions john said two different things. So full specifications of what John would have said on the two different occasions must be different. These specifications must, then, differ by features not yet mentioned.

We can often explain a person's action by citing some fact which prompted him to do what he did. For example:

In each case there are four elements which fit together in a characteristic pattern. (1) The first is the fact that Tom has been offered more money, that Dick's daughter has a toothache, or that the theater in which Harry is sitting is on fire. If the theater were not on fire, for example, then we would have to give a different sort of explanation of why Harry rushed out: we would have to say that he left because he thought it was on fire, not because it was on fire. I shall have more to say about this point later. (2) The second is their knowledge of these facts. If Dick is unaware of the girl's toothache, he can hardly do anything on account of it; and of course the same goes for the other cases. (3) The third element is the attitude which each agent has toward the existing state-of-affairs. Tom wants to earn more money; Dick loves his daughter and doesn't want her to suffer; and Harry, like the rest of us, doesn't want to be burned. (4) Finally, there is the action which is being explained: Tom quits his job, Dick takes the girl to the dentist, and Harry rushes from the theater.

An analysis of necessary condition and presupposition reveals that, as logical relations, these notions are basically similar to each other and different from the notion of entailment or other ‘if-then’ relations of logical consequence. Both necessary condition and presupposition seem to be two-directional in a rather peculiar way. Appreciating this is helpful in interpreting philosophers such as Kant and Strawson who have relied extensively on these relations in constructing the philosophical arguments often referred to as transcendental arguments. It also suggests some fundamental shortcomings in Strawson's account of presupposition and in the logician's way of presenting necessary condition using ‘⊂'.

In the discussion which follows I shall exhibit some of the differences between necessary condition and presupposition on the one hand and entailment on the other. I shall then go on to offer an explanation of these differences in conjunction with an analysis of necessary condition and presupposition which diverges from other contemporaty accounts. Once these distinctions and explanations have been stated, I shall make some suggestions about their relevance to the interpretation and assessment of philosophical texts and arguments.

In many of his writings, Quine has argued that language is indeterminate in various ways. He has pursued, at length and often, an ingenious conclusion about one such way, which he sometimes calls the inscrutability of reference and, sometimes, the inscrutability of terms. It is the conclusion that one dimension of indeterminacy leaves the references of general terms unfixed among a number of alternatives; further, that no sort of scrutiny of the terms or of the occasions of their utterance could, in principle, provide a means for settling objectively which referent to assign to a term. This single doctrine assumes various guises: there is a firm claim about incompatible but equally acceptable translations of certain Japanese classifiers; there is a somewhat less clear commitment to the inscrutability of a choice between expressions and their Godel numbers as referents for quoted expressions; further, there is a yet more tentative endorsement of Harman's example of the various referents of numerical expressions given by competing set theoretic reductions of number.

In the early chapters of Mind and the World Order, Lewis develops a theory of meaning which has interesting points of similarity with that mentalistic or propositional theory of meaning which has been rejected by Quine, in Word and Object and elsewhere. There are also interesting similarities, however, between Lewis’ theory and Quine's own naturalistic theory. In this paper, I shall concentrate on one such similarity: namely, the analogy, noticed by Quine, between the predicament formulated in his own thesis of the indeterminacy of translation, and the “predicament of private worlds” in which Lewis’ theory of meaning is involved.

These analogous predicaments have a bearing on the problems of the commensurability of scientific theories and of objectivity in science in general; in fact, my primary motivation in attempting to explicate the analogy between Quine's theory of meaning and Lewis’ theory is to clear the way for an assessment of Quine's position on the problem of the objectivity of theories in science.

Nelson Goodman's new riddle of induction wears many faces. In one of its guises the new riddle of induction appears as the problem of providing a general account of the distinction between projectible and non-projectible predicates. This is the form of the riddle which is supposed to point up a lacuna in the foundations of confirmation theories such as Carnap's which, Goodman charges, work only to the extent that one builds into them just the right (projectible) predicates. As a new riddle of induction, the problem of distinguishing projectible from non-projectible predicates has the virtue that it is in fact new—a virtue not shared by some other forms of the riddle.

Philosophers had recognized previously that some predicates are more projectible than others in the sense that, for instance, the prediction that a certain toss of a die will turn up an even face is safer and more likely to be true than the prediction that the same toss will turn up six.

That utility is not a sufficient test for a set of social rules to be morally binding upon a group of persons has been argued in a number of recent books and articles. Yet it is generally conceded in these arguments that a group's observance of rules makes possible greater benefits than would accrue if each did not associate himself with others under the rules. It is not denied that the practice of morality is socially advantageous. What is denied is that social advantage is either the sole criterion or a sufficient criterion for the justifiability of any set of rules that could constitute the de facto system of moral requirements in a given society.

What, then, is sufficient? The answer I am interested in defending in this paper is that both utility as an aggregative principle and justice as a distributive principle are each a necessary condition and together provide a sufficient condition for the justification of a moral code. In the first two parts of this paper, I shall explain how the concepts of justice and utility, respectively, are to be construed in the argument of the third part.

Recent metaphysical theories, which stress the importance of an agent as a sort of cause, raise again the question of where and how in the chain of events involved in voluntary motion the human agent “immediately” exerts his influence. The matter is still every bit as mystifying as Hume suggests. We know that when a human being moves voluntarily, there are events in his central nervous system which are causes of the motion. Of course, nothing whatever need be known about these events in order to move voluntarily. Either human agents produce these events or they do not.

In the history of thought the relation between the mind and the body has been discussed in terms of various analogies. Plato, for example, examined the analogy of a man and his clothes and of the music of an instrument and the instrument itself; Aristotle advocated the analogy of an instrument's capacity and the instrument itself; Descartes alluded to that of a pilot and his ship; and Ryle derided that of a ghost and a machine.

What I wish to discuss, however, are the analogies used by contemporary philosophers to explain their theory that the mind is the brain, that the mind's states, capacities and qualities are the brain's states, capacities and qualities, that our thoughts and our thinking are brain elements and brain movements and that our mental experiences, such as having images or sensations, are brain processes. Various analogies have been advanced to explain the sense in which one of the former is one of the latter.

In this paper, I shall be concerned to explore the utilitarian account of promising, which for some time has had, in many circles, the status of a dead horse. My aim is not to flog it, however, but to show that perhaps it yet lives. At least, I hope to show that some prominent and apparently powerful objections to this account do not find their mark. In the course of this, several subjects of wider interest will come in for review as well, and it is hoped that some further light on the utilitarian position in general, as well as the concepts of expectation and obligation, may glimmer forth.

At the outset, some clarification of the question at issue about promising is essential. Briefly, the question is: why ought we to keep our promises? Less question-beggingly put: why, if at all, should we keep promises, and to what extent?; where by talk of ‘extent’ it is meant that the question of whether we sometimes should not keep them, of its being a matter of attaching a “degree of stringency” to the obligation, is to be kept open.

A common complaint of biologists is that their subject receives poor treatment from philosophers—it gets but a fraction of the attention accorded to physics and chemistry, and what little it does receive, is usually of the type where ‘All swans are white’ is taken to be a paradigmatic example of the state of biological thinking. It cannot be denied that this complaint is, to a great extent, justified; however, there are some notable breaches in the wall of ignorance and silence, amongst which must be numbered The Ascent of Life by T.A. Goudge. In this book, starting from what is obviously a very wide knowledge of biology, Goudge attempts a careful and thorough analysis of one of the major achievements of biological thought, evolutionary theory. The conclusions that Goudge draws are many; nevertheless, one can discern running through them a common theme, namely that whilst evolutionary theory is indeed a legitimate branch of science, to assume that it is a science of the same nature as physics and chemistry would be a grave error. Goudge argues that, despite certain similarities to other branches of science, the essential aims, methods and results of evolutionary theory are peculiar unto itself.

The correlativity of rights and obligations is one of the few stock topics in the basic repertory of English-speaking philosophy th-t is considered suitable for assignment to philosophers specializing in political philosophy (even so it is a topic that must be shared with ethics). It is a topic perennially discussed, chiefly (I think) for reasons that have little to do with its importance: namely, just because it is a recognized topic and because it appears to be a safely tidy one that lends itself readily to being tidied up further by formal or quasi-formal considerations. For my part, I wish more effort went into discussing less tractable subjects like the individuation of rights and their delimitation vis-à-vis one another.

What I have to contribute to the subject of correlativity, returning to the scene of my comments on David Lyons’ paper, “The Correlativity of Rights and Duties,” is mainly a stint of annual or biennial repair-work, designed to restore the obvious — the truth that rights do imply obligations and cannot be understood without accepting this implication.

The concepts of necessary being, or necessary existence, and contingent being, or contingent existence, continue to occupy a central position in philosophical appraisals of Christian theism. Some philosophers have been concerned of late to emphasize a crucial ambiguity in the terms ‘necessary’ and ‘contingent', an ambiguity which threatens seriously to bedevil assessment of the claim that God's existence is necessary and not contingent. An important consequence of getting clear on this point, it is suggested, is that certain brisk attempts to demolish the concept of a necessary being may be seen at least to be premature, leaving untouched,, as they do, an apparently viable sense in which God can be said to be a, indeed the, necessary being.

This, substantially, is the position advocated by Professor J.H. Hick in recent discussions of this point. Hick maintains that it is of the greatest importance to distinguish two fundamentally different and contrasting notions of necessary being or necessary existence.