¹ Incidentally I would not accept, as I think Ruben does, that a law, properly so-called, must specify sufficient conditions for the event-type described in its consequent exhaustively or absolutely. This is unduly restrictive. Many causal generalizations qualify as laws even though they remain explicitly or implicitly relativized to an unspecified causal field, or to an assumption that unspecified exogeneous factors do not interfere. To refuse them the title of laws is too quick a way of concluding that only fundamental and fully universal principles of physics are laws, and only fundamental physical explanations are explanations. On the less restrictive conception of law, there can be social scientific laws. However the proper use of ‘law’ is not the main point at issue here.

² It would be an illuminating study of the complexities of interpretation to examine whether the aesthetic appeal primitive art has for us is in any way part of what it meant to its producers, the connection of that question, in turn, with the question whether it is straightforwardly ‘art’, or whether its aestheticization is an artefact of modernist sensibility, and the further question whether this itself imposes on the data a misleadingly modern-European distinction between art and non-art.

³ I consider the issue in ‘Objectivity and convergence’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 84 (1986), 235–50.Google Scholar

⁴ Evans-Pritchard, E. E.Theories of Primitive Religion (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), e.g. pp. 24, 43.Google Scholar

⁵ I have discussed the problems of interpreting primitive religion and magic in Symbol and Theory. A Philosophical Study of Theories of Religion in Social Anthropology (Cambridge University Press, 1976).Google Scholar

⁶ The expected utility of an action is calculated by discounting the utility of each of its possible outcomes by the probability of that outcome's occurring if the action is done, and summing the results.

⁷ Originally in Allais, Maurice, ‘Le comportement de l'homme rationnel devant le risque: critique des postulats et axiomes de l'ecole americaine’, Econometrica 21 (1953), 503–46CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Allais, , ‘The so-called Allais Paradox and Rational Decision under Uncertainty’ in Allais, M. and Hagen, O. (eds), Expected Utility Hypotheses and the Allais Paradox (Dordrect: Reidel, 1979)CrossRefGoogle Scholar (the collection in which this appears also contains an English translation of the full-length memoir which Allais 1953 presents in summary). There is a useful collection of papers, together with a survey of the issues, in Gardenfors, Peter and Sahlin, Nils-Eric (eds.) Decision, Probability and Utility (Cambridge University Press, 1988.)CrossRefGoogle Scholar

⁸ Savage, L. J., The Foundations of Statistics (New York: John Wiley & Sons 1954), 101–3.Google Scholar

⁹ I discuss this in a more general context in ‘Value and Distribution’ in Hollis, M. and Vossenkiihl, W. (eds.), Moralische Entscheidung und rationale Wahl (forthcoming).Google Scholar

¹⁰ In the context of decision-making under risk, ‘leximin’ will hold that one should choose the action whose worst possible outcome is better than the worst possible outcomes of other actions; where there is more than one such action, one prefers that action within the set whose second worst outcome is better than the second worst outcome of the other actions in the set … and so on.

¹¹ Causal but not nomothetic: I am not envisaging a form of mental causation which breaks the link between causality and nomic uniformity. The point is simply that it remains unobvious that, if one accepts that the explaining relation between beliefs/purposes and actions is causal, one must also accept that there are uniformities—stateable at that, interpretative, level—which are substantive and sharp enough to warrant the name of laws.

¹² Davidson, Donald, ‘Freedom to Act’, in Honderich, Ted (ed.), Essays on Freedom of Action (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul 1978)Google Scholar. The mention of Achilles and the tortoise in the next paragraph refers to Carroll, Lewis, ‘What the Tortoise Said to Achilles’, Mind 4 (1985), 278–80.Google Scholar