Realism

"Realism has two parts. The first is the thesis that reality is independent of the way it is represented in human judgment: it is always possible that thought gets the world wrong. But the realist needs a second epistemological part to meet the implicit sceptical challenge: it needs to show how the danger of divergence between thought and reality can be averted."
David Papineau, Reality and representation (1988)

It could be argued that realism and anti-realism, or better still realism and some form of idealism, are as applicable to mind as to the external world.

A. C. Grayling on M. A. E. Dummett, The Logical Basis Of Metaphysics (Duckworth), in The Higher 9 August 1991

"Realism is a thesis about the knowledge-independent existence of certain sorts of entities. As regards the physical world it is the common-sense view that physical objects exist independently of thought or experience of them. In ethics it is the view that the value of (say) an action is not the product of our subjective preferences, but is in some sense an intrinsic property of the action itself. And in mathematics it is the view that mathematical statements are true or false independently of whether we know or can find out which...The connection between bivalence and realism is that, for realists, the determinate truth or falsehood of a given statement is not a function of our investigations, but is conferred by a reality which exists independently of our knowledge. So to be committed to the principle of bivalence and therefore to the classical logic which a bivalent semantics generates, is to be a realist."

Reality

If reality were to be defined in terms of awareness, we would be leaving out a great many propositions which we have unconsciously. Some unconscious propositions affect the way we think and feel. To be safe, and accurate as well, from the definition of all thought as propositional, we must define reality in terms of propositions, not of awareness. But should we leave awareness entirely out of our definition of reality? Most of reality is awareness, and the sum of awareness can do duty as the sum of propositions. Awareness does not encompass reality. But strictly speaking, and from the premise that all thought is propositional, reality is the sum of propositions.

Reason

Is there such a beastie as applied logic? If there is it must be the use of intuitive logic. Since the use of intuitive logic is tantamount to reason, then this is as likely as we shall get to a definition of the phrase.

Recall

Recall is a step in the process of recognition.

Reciprocal entailment

See   Codependence

Reciprocal implication

There is no codependence in reciprocal implication, which is a logical but not an apodictic or even a necessary relation.

Recursion

See   Definition

Reductionism

Reductionism is ultimately the belief in one law for everything. In practice, reductionism consists in the tendency to seek the most basic explanation possible for phenomena.

Reference

In a very general sense reference refers to the action of indicating. It is not used in the same strict sense as an ostensive definition, which implies gesture rather than verbal expression. Often it is a synonym for truth-value.

References of words

The meaning of words has various references: (1) simple reference (objects); (2) "complex" reference (events, actions, concepts, etc., that words refer to); (3) self-reference.

There are various forms of self-reference
--synonymy (on which see Quine)
--definition of terms
--illocutionary meaning (see Austin)
--circularity.

The words in a public language have their corresponding mental squiggles. The squiggles too must then include simple reference, complex reference, and self-reference. We can do all these operations in the system of squiggles.

Regret

Guilt involves regret. Regret is the feeling of propositional pain involving the desire that something that actually happened had not happened. Normally, guilty regret is explicable in reference to moral norms. Moral norms are valid as expressions of collective belief.

Relations

Certain relations are purely mental entities or things. We cannot perceive relations of comparison such as quantitative relations. But there are physical relations such as those expressed in verbs like "to eat" or "to paint". The use of verbs involves the grasp of relations. This means that children are perfectly capable of abstract, logical thought. In fact, it is only necessary for children to be able to grasp relations to learn the use of verbs. Since intuitive logic involves relations, it seems superfluous to posit a module to account for language-learning since for this it suffices with the mental language and its rules and its representation of intuitive logic.

Relativity

In reference to the physical world, the qualifier "intuitive" means, in general terms, according to Eucledian algebra and Newtonian physics. This implies that (a) there is matter and non-matter; and (b) that time and space are the same all over the universe as they are around me. "Counter-intuitive" would be that water ran up rather than down a bedstream and that a straight line was bent. This is at least partly to say that modern physics is counter-intuitive, which surely entails that intuitive is a prejudicial and a parochial idea.

According to the specific theory of relativity (in analogical terms), the shape of a car when it is approaching me is the shape it has in my sight, but it is possible mathematically to determine its shape as it passes in front of me. The car has no unmodifiable shape. It can be said that its shapes varies as it moves. Seeing planes approaching or climbing to and from airports, smaller planes appear to be flying faster than bigger planes even though their velocities are the same. That time depends on the relative position of the observer is easy to illustrate from the fact that the time in my wristwatch--which translates into "body-time" or Circadian rhythms--is different from the real time each instant as the plane heads either east or west and that the time travelled by me is different relative to each person in the line of the trajectory I am travelling.

The force of gravity and the force of inertia are indistinguishable in that they produce the same specifiable motion. Alternatively, the motion produced by gravity is indistinguishable from the motion produced by inertia. Since the motion produced by the force of gravity is dependent on mass and the motion produced by inertia is dependent on energy, then mass and energy, having the same effects, can be said to be equivalent. Unless it is assumed that the Universe is like a piece of paper lying flat on a table, then a straight line does not exist. If a straight line is always bent, then Eucledian geometry is false, because it is impossible to say that two straight lines are of the same length unless one is on top of the other. An equilateral triangle is composed of three sides of unequal lengths.

To be able to specify time, it is necessary to have some concrete reference. Time and space are inextricable. Since space is specifiable, the way to specify time is to define it in some way related to space. The most concrete time-space relation is simultaneity. Its concrete definition is the time it takes light to travel the distance from point a to point b, because no known phenomenon is faster than light. Alternatively, assuming light to have the highest possible velocity, simultaneity is the time it takes light to go from a to b. Since simultaneity and the speed of light are the same, then the velocity of light is independent of the velocity of its source. Since mass is energy and energy is motion, then, even if we can give a theoretical definition of simultaneity, it is not possible to have actual simultaneity and time is always relative to the motion of the observer. If time is relative, then time intervals are also relative to the velocity of the observer.

Before Einstein, physicists had worked out the mathematics of the theory that mass is transformed by gravitation. "I [Einstein] came to realize that all the natural laws except the law of gravity could be discussed within the framework of the special theory of relativity." It was the generalization of the special theory of relativity which led to the calculation that gravity applies to an electromagnetic phenomenon such as light. Any "observable" phenomenon has energy and if it has energy it has mass. Since it has mass, it is subject to the law of gravity, hence light can be bent by matter. Einstein also predicted that gravity or mass could slow time down.

If time and space are not absolutes--if perspective can modify the real shape of objects and time is relative to the observer--then time and space cannot be separated and space can affect time and time can affect space. Since the shortest distance between a and b is not a straight line, then the time it takes to travel from a to b will depend on the curvature of space and conversely duration will determine the shape of space. Space is not an emptiness but the reach of forces which can be measured in terms of duration. The time it takes to cross the universe will depend on the shape of space. If forces determine space, then the universe should be contracting. In order to avoid having to reach this conclusion, Einstein postulated a force he called the "cosmological term" whose calculation he termed the "cosmological constant". This, however, was just a factor he introduced into his calculations about the universe.

"In the Newtonian approximation, the attractive force between two particles becomes four times as weak whenever the distance between them doubles, while the cosmological force becomes twice as strong...Einstein's theory of a static universe was an important start for cosmology based on general relativity, although it is no longer accepted...Since small fluctuations are viewed as inevitable, the universe could not conceivably remain approximately static, as Einstein had proposed." (Guth)

Einstein's cosmological constant is solely mathematical. The origins of his theory of relativity was perhaps more "conceptual" than mathematical but the general theory of relativity was derived mathematically. The development on the inflationary version of Big Bang theory was at various crucial junctures exclusively mathematical, that is, a question of "making" the numbers "work".

Modern physics presupposes that numbers and their relations are of the essence in reality. But what exactly does this mean, because surely the Earth is not made of numbers nor is the sun nor are the galaxies? Mathematics which is not the same as logic has the answers to all valid explanations of the universe. The entire universe could theoretically be expressed in coherent and consistent mathematical equations. However, logic is ultimately what rules the universe and logic in some way as yet undiscovered and possibly undiscoverable is the font of mathematics.

Reliability

Necessary inferences are reliable. Factual propositions are reliable. Reliable means that we can act on it. Reliability is then the philosophical belief that validity is behavioristic.

Religion

All religions, not excluding animism, have three things in common: the existence of gods and intercessors, the efficacy of prayer and rites, and a soteriology in a wide sense.

In a strictly sequential sense religion has gone through three phases: in the first phase it is animistic (it places greater emphasis on divine intercession than on divinity itself); in the second phase it is a collective endeavour primarily (it has no sense outside of rite); in the third phase it is principally about personal salvation; in the final phase it de-personalizes God. Each phase has anteceded the following phase. This is not to say that all religions develop in this sense or that any of these phases is necessarily and inevitably superior to the previous phases. Except for the times when these phases first arose, all these phases have co-existed in time.

In the second phase religion tends to split into fertilicism and bellicism. Rites are to bend the gods' will in favour of the community's survival or they are designed to obtain the gods' help in warfare. Historians of religion propend to classify religions as either earth- or sun-oriented. Some interpreters of religious beliefs attribute the worship of the sun to the Aryans (Dumézil). The poet and imagist Graves argued at length but with great imagination that the religious substratum of mankind is the worship of a fundamental female goddess. Somehow, rationalistic, male-oriented beliefs got the upper hand in some societies and eventually suppressed or transformed the primary female, earth worship,

Representation

Words "refer" to a "representation" (squiggle). This representation in turn can be of the world (things), of abstract "existents" (justice, society, etc.), of actions (walking, etc.), or of relations (equal, unequal, etc.). Representations are the same as concepts. The representation "society exists" is a proposition. All representations are propositional. Squiggles represent concepts as propositions.

Representation in Quine is called reification, as in "Reification of bodies by small children and dumb animals is rudimentary; full reification of them comes only when we have our full framework of space and time and can presume to identify or distinguish recurrent bodies that look alike" ( TLS , July 3 1992). More precisely, reification is verbal representation.

Robert Cummins, in Meaning and mental representation (1989), on the problem of representation: "To a large extent, empirical theories of cognition can and do take the notion of mental content as an explanatory primitive. But this is a kind of explanatory loan (Dennett 1978): If it turns out that the notion of mental representation cannot be given a satisfactory explanation--if, in particular, no account of the nature of the (mental) representation relation can be given that is consistent with the empirical theory that assumes it--then, at least in this respect, that empirical theory must be regarded as ill-founded, and hence as a less than adequate response to the drive for the kind of thorough intellectual understanding that motivates scientific theory in the first place."

The following are deductions for this circular text:
(1) that philosophy is science;
(2) that representation is mental content, yet the word representation itself is qualified as mental even in this context;
(3) that a theory built on an assumption can turn out or be inconsistent with that assumption
But if a theory is built on an assumption, how can it not be consistent with that assumption?

Theories of representation in Cummins' book

(1) "When mental stuff is informed by redness and sphericity, the result is an idea of a red ball--or, perhaps better, the result is a red ball as mental object (i.e., as idea) rather than a red ball as material object...The basic idea behind this theory is that to know something is, in a pretty straightforward sense, to be it." This is of course the Aristotelian essence of realism. (Notice the use of "idea" in two senses: as mental content, or concept, and as argument.)

(2) "The favorite theory of Berkeley and Hume was that mental representations are images...Images represent things in virtue of resembling them--i.e., in virtue of sharing properties with them (though, of course, a sphere in the mind--i.e., as it exists as an image--takes up no physical space, only mental space; it occupies a portion of the visual field, for example)." There is little difference, from a cognitive perspective, between (1) and (2). Yet (1), as said, as realism and (2) is idealism. This implies that idealists' image introduces dualism into Aristotelian realist monism.

(3) "Haugeland (1985) credits Hobbes with being the first to have an inkling that mental representations might be language-like symbols. This is now the orthodox position, insofar as there is such a thing. The main thing to realize at this stage is just that if mental representations are symbols, then mental representation cannot be founded on similarity; symbols don't resemble the things they represent." Oh, but they do! Let us assume that similarity and covariance are codependent: similar things vary in similar ways and this is one way, perhaps the most important way, that we know they are similar. When I look at a bookcase there are many predicates implicit in my looking which are not part of the act of recognition per se. There is logic, there are token bookcases, there are associations, and so on. Recognition always involves all or some of these implications. This is the bookcase, yet this bookcase with all its adherences can only really be represented in symbols: an image leaves all the adherences out. Therefore, if anything it is the symbolic representation rather than the image that resembles the bookcase that I recognize.

(4) "(Actual) neuro-physiological states: The crucial claim here is that mental representation cannot be identified at any level more abstract than actual neurophysiology...Mental representation cannot be realized in, say, a digital computer, no matter how `brain-like' its architecture happens to be at some non-biological level of description."

If this were the case, then mental representation would be ineffable. But in fact how can any description of the nervous system be comprehensible at all if it isn't related in some way to representation? This is where analogous monism comes in. Digital computers represent the contents of files as "squiggles" on monitor screens. Assuming these squiggles compose a kind of language--which in fact they are for the initiates--then by assuming that they are analogues of neurons, we get that it is indeed possible to relate representation and neurophysiology. From this we can say that the propositions that describe representation or cognition or whatever have correspondents in neurophysiology and that propositions about squiggles have to be consistent with propositions about neurons.

"Like symbols, neuro-physiological states cannot represent things in virtue of resembling them. Advocates of symbols or neuro-physiological states must ground representation in something other than similarity." This is not accurate. The symbolic representation of a bookcase is different from every other symbolic representation. With its adherences, the symbolic representation of a specific bookcase is also different from all other representations even of other bookcases. Vary the symbols, vary the representation. Since covariance is the essence of similarity, then a symbolic representation is similar to the thing it represents.

(E) Pascal Engel on J. Christopher Maloney, The Mundane Matter of Mental Language (Cambridge University Press), TLS, August 17-23 1990, p. 880

"Mental representations occur when sensation induces intentional states. Such states are assumed to be foundational in a theory of mental content."

Representationalism

The commonsensical belief that something goes on in mind between the impingement of external stimuli and the production of either thought or behaviour. Representationalism adverts to what certain philosophies of mind disdainfully term folk psychology. Representationalism consequently involves the awareness of mental events and the reliability of their verbal report. This used to be called introspection, a much maligned word. Representationalism, which merely means that something goes on in mind between input and outut, is too close to functionalism.

Simon Blackburn on Crispin Wright, Realism, meaning, and truth (1987)

"One of the most central, beautiful and difficult disputes in analytical philosophy for (at least) the past twenty-five years has concerned the role of truth and `truth conditions' in the theory of language. An extreme position holds that a proper view of the way sentences of a language have their `truth condition' is the first thing that we need to know if we are to understand language. The focus in this view is upon the connection of language with the world: the connection effected because names refer to things, predicates delimit sets of things, and sentences are true or false in determinate circumstances. Compared to the technical problem of properly charting the structures whereby sentences obtain their meaning, other issues are secondary...To most philosophers this view would seem at best complacent. It is a way of entering during Act Two of the drama, of failing to engage with the problems of how reference, predication, assertion and truth are even possible. It neglects the connection of the meaning of language with its use--with experience, activity, and with the responses and purposes of human beings in their societies."

Jeffrey Poland, Physicalism: the philosophical foundation (1994)

Physicalism is compatible with representationalism. Some philosophers, among whom Quine, deny this "My goal was to clarify and defend physicalism in a way that would prepare the ground for a thorough defence of mental representation and representational theory."

According to Fodor, a representational theory of mind states that a relation to a proposition entails a relation to a mental representation with the result that the proposition and the mental representation are equivalent. This is in contrast to standard realism, which makes no claims about the means of thought. In Fodor, the mental representation is the so-called language of thought. As between RTM and SR, Fodor claims that productivity and constituency are arguments for RTM. Constituency refers to logic and implies productivity. Fodor's claim seems to be that RTM comprises an intentional system in which the equivalence of propositions and their mental representation yields or makes possible a functional-roles semantics. It is not entirely clear why SR is not as logical as representationalism. The argument seems to be that logic must be propositional and the mental states posited in SR are not. The entire argument hinges on explanatory efficacy.

British empiricism proposed a theory of thought based on association. RTM is based on mental representation and logic. "What associationism missed", according to Fodor, "...was the similarity between trains of thought and arguments", and this is something that RTM takes in with its specification of propositional mental representation. In Fodor's retrospective summary, the failure of associationism led to behaviorism until cognitivism insisted on the rationality of thought based on the computer metaphor. Instead of being constituted by images, as in British empiricism, thought is assumed to be constituted by something resembling computer symbols. "Computers show us how to connect semantical with causal properties for symbols...So if the tokening of an attitude involves the tokening of a symbol, then we can get some leverage on connecting semantical with causal properties for thoughts...You connect the causal properties of a symbol with its semantical properties via its syntax...because, to all intents and purposes, syntax reduces to shape...Computers are a solution to the problem of mediating between the causal properties of symbols and their semantic properties." Basically what we have here is that the physicality of the syntax of symbols is the key to the physical causal function of semantico-logical symbols.

"What exactly is RTM minimally committed to by way of explicit mental representation?...According to RTM, mental processes are transformations of mental representations. The rules which determine the course of such transformations may, but needn't, be themselves explicitly represented. But the mental contents (the `thoughts', as it were) that get transformed must be explicitly represented or the theory is simply false."

Most of the above quotes and arguments are taken from Fodor, "Fodor's guide to mental representation" (1985), in A. Goldman's Readings in Philosophy and Cognitive Science (1993)

K Sterelny on J A Fodor, A Theory of Content and Other Essays and on Barry Loewer and Georges Rey, editors, Meaning in Mind: Fodor and his critics , in the TLS, May 1 1992

"He insists that intentional explanation [folk psychology] is a species of causal explanation: a doctrine now known as Intentional Realism."

This is--approximately, but not distortively--Fodor's argument. Thoughts have structure. Computers have structure. Therefore, intentionality is reconciled with the physical.

"...[O]ur thoughts have a syntactic structure, being constructed according to definite rules...This fact gives us the critical linkage between the conception of the mind as a representational system, and the conception of it as a physical system. For structure-dependent rules can be followed by purely mechanical systems...So the representational theory of mind is linked to physicalism via a computational theory of mental process."

Revolution

The revolutionary projects is contradictory in various ways. It attacks the hypocrisy of the ruling class but assumes an arrogant, unbending moral stance, which, because all moral arrogance is hypocritical, puts it on a par with what it is condemning. The historically-savvy, well-meaning revolutionary intellectual says that he knows the revolution will crush him, which is a sacrifice he is willing to make. Yet it is not himself that shehe is sacrificing: it is every fellow human being, for if for this cause you are willing to give up your most precious possession, which is your own life, then you are telling your executioners that they are authorized to kill as they please. Marxists who decry alienation, exploitation, and so on, don't really give a fig for the lives of others. So what good is a classless society in which life is worthless?

Ricoeur

Paul Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation, (New Haven, 1970)

There are two movements in Ricoeur's text. In one movement, he explains how Freud interprets all higher elaborations of mind, especially religion, as the work of instincts. In the second movement he concentrates on religion itself. In Freud the basis of religion is explained through the coincidence or conformance of ancient myths and neurotic feelings. But Ricoeur finds a totally different explanation. The ancient symbols and myths can be interpreted as involving an epigenesis of religious belief and as such they are what he terms a kerygma or calling. The interpretation of those symbols and myths is achieved through a reflective philosophy that discovers their religious meaning. The reflective philosophy works on the "hyletic of this mytho-poetic imagination" and finds the "signs of the sacred", i.e the kerygma or calling to faith. Since it is in language and through language that humanity discovers this call to faith, speech or language is the ultimate source of religious belief. Ricoeur states that awareness is possible only through language. It is implied in this that language has an epigenesis, i.e. that it has a divine source. In other words, the symbols and myths are there, in speech, and through speech, man becomes conscious of the meaning of those symbols. For instance: guilt "can only be deciphered by the indirect means of a textual exegesis of the penitential literature." (p.546)

"The symbolic is the universal mediation of the mind between ourselves and the real; the symbolic, above all, indicates the nonimmediacy of our apprehension of reality." (p.10)

"Symbols occur when the language produces signs of composite degree in which the meaning, not satisfied with designating some one thing, designates another meaning attainable only in and through the first intentionality." (p.16)

"For [Freud], interpretation is concerned not only with scripture or writing but with any set of signs that may be taken as a text to decipher, hence a dream or neurotic symptom, as well as a ritual, myth, work of art, or a belief." (p.26)

 "Thus, the distinguishing characteristic of Marx, Freud, and Nietzsche is the general hypothesis concerning both the process of false consciousness and the method of deciphering...Freud entered the problem of false consciousness via the double road of dreams and neurotic symptons; his working hypothesis has the same limits as his angle of attack, which was...an economics of instincts. Marx attacks the problem of ideologies from within the limits of economic alienation...Nietzsche, focusing on the problem of `value'...looks for the key to lying and masks on the side of the `force' and `weakness' of the will to power." (p.34)

"What Freud desires is that the one who is analyzed, by making his own the meaning that was foreign to him, enlarge his field of consciousness, live better, and finally be a little freer, if possible, a little happier." (p.35)

"...[P]hilosophy does not begin anything, since the fullness of language precedes it...it begins from itself, since it is philosophy which inaugurates the question of meaning and of the foundation of meaning." (p.38)

"...[T]he substitution of the economic notion of cathexis--i.e. placement and displacement of energy--for the notions of intentional consciousness and intended object apparently calls for a naturalistic explanation and excludes an understanding of meaning through meaning. In short, it would seem that the topographic-economic point of view can uphold an energetics but not a hermeneutics." (p.65-6)

 "As I see it, the whole problem of the Freudian epistemology may be centralized in a single question: How can the economic explanation be involved in an interpretation dealing with meanings; and conversely, how can an interpretation be an aspect of the economic explanation?" (p.66)

 "Indeed, the notion of the `psychical apparatus' that dominates this essay [The Project for a Scientific Psychology (1895)]...is based on a principle borrowed from physics--the constancy principle--and tends to be a quantitative treatment of energy." (p.69)

 "Herbart, who, beginning in 1824, had protested against free will, linked determinism with unconscious motivation, and applied the terminology of physics to a dynamic of ideas." (p.72)

 "...[T]he work of mourning is undertaken in order to survive the loss of the object; detachment from the object is dictated by self-attachment. (p.132)

 "One might say that the topography is the nonanatomical, psychical locality introduced into psychoanalytic theory as the condition of the possibility of all the vicissitudes of instincts; it is the marketplace of cathexes where ego-instincts and object-instincts are exchanged for one another." (p.133)

 "Psychoanalysis never confronts one with bare forces, but always with forces in search of meaning; this link between force and meaning makes instinct a psychical reality, or more exactly, the limit concept at the frontier between the organic and the psychical." (p.151)

"It is to be understood that ideals and illusions will be regarded only as the vicissitudes of instincts, as derivatives more or less `distant', more or less `deformed', of the psychical expressions of instinct. Esthetic creativity and pleasure, ideals of moral life, illusions in the religious sphere, will figure simply as elements on the economic balance sheet of instincts, as expenditures in pleasure-unpleasure; one will speak of them and can only speak of them in terms of cathexis, withdrawal of cathexis, hypercatexis, and anticathexis, according to the economic combination system...In this sense the analytic theory of culture is an applied psychoanalysis." (p.154)

"The crucial point is the transition to the second topography of ego, id, and superego." (p.155)

 "...Freud was also the one who discovered that neuroses have meaning and that the ceremonials of obsessed persons have meaning." (p.232)

"An obsessional neurosis presents a travesty, half comic, half tragic, of a private religion." (Freud) (p.232)

 "Freud was bothered by only one thing: the gap between the private character of the `religion of the neurotic' and the universal character of the `neurosis of the religious man.'" (p.233)

"The relation of religion to desire and fear is, of course, an old theme: the peculiar role of psychoanalysis is to decipher that relation qua hidden relation and to relate the deciphering process to an economics of desire." (p.235)

"...[A] clear instance of what The Interpretation of Dreams and the theory of obsessional neurosis called the `omnipotence of thoughts' or `overvaluation of mental processes': `By way of summary, then, it may be said that the principle governing magic, the technique of the animistic mode of thinking, is the principle of the `omnipotence of thoughts'." (Freud) (p.237)

 "Omnipotence of thoughts, paranoiac projection, displacement of the father onto an animal, ritual repetition of the killing of the father and of the filial revolt constitute the `indestructible' basis of religion...rational and dogmatic theology, far from bringing religion into closer contact with reason and reality, can only be rationalizations adding to the distortion."--p.245

 "For Freud, `the universality of symbolism in language' is far more a proof of the memory traces of the great traumas of mankind than an incentive to explore other dimensions of language, the imaginary, and myth."--p.247

 "...[T]he function of a dialectic between regression and progression, between archeology and teleology, is to lead from a reflection that understands its archeology to a symbolic understanding that would grasp the indivisible unity of its archeology and its teleology in the very origin of speech."--p.343

"...[T]he problem that lies at the origin of this book, namely, the conflict--within myself and within contemporary culture between a hermeneutics that demystifies religion and a hermeneutics that tries to grasp, in the symbols of faith, a possible call or kerygma."--p.343

"The origin of faith lies in the solicitation of man by the object of faith. Hence I will not employ the ruse of extrapolating the question of the radical origin from an archeology of the Cogito, or the question of the final end from a teleology. The archeology only points to what is already there, already posited in the Cogito that posits itself; the teleology only points to an ulterior meaning that holds the earlier meaning of the figures of spirit in suspense; but this ulterior meaning can always be understood as spirit's advance upon itself, as a self-projection into a telos. Compared to this archeology of myself and this teleology of myself, genesis and eschatology are Wholly Other. To be sure, I speak of the Wholly Other only insofar as it addresses itself to me; and the kerygma, the glad tidings, is precisely that it addresses itself to me and ceases to be the Wholly Other. Of an absolute Wholly Other I know nothing at all. But by its very manner of approaching, of coming, it shows itself to be Wholly Other than the archê and the telos which I can conceptualize in reflective thought. It shows itself as Wholly Other by annihilating its radical otherness.

   "But if a problematic of faith has a different origin, the field of its manifestation is the very one we have been exploring. An Anselmian type of procedure, i.e. the movement from faith to understanding, necessarily encounters a dialectic of reflection, which it attempts to use as the instrument of its expression. This is where the question of faith becomes a hermeneutic question, for what annihilates itself in our flesh is the Wholly Other as logos. Thereby it becomes an event of human speech and can be recognized only in the movement of interpretation of this human speech. The `hermeneutic circle' is born: to believe is to listen to the call, but to hear the call we must interpret the message. Thus we must believe in order to understand and understand in order to believe."--p.525

"...[A] teleology along Hegelian lines does not have as its eschaton, or final term, the sacred as carried by myth, ritual, and belief. Of itself, this teleology aims not at faith but at absolute knowledge; and absolute knowledge presents no transcendence, but the reabsorption within a completely mediated self-knowledge."--p.526

"The symbols of evil teach us something decisive about the passage from a phenomenology of spirit to a phenomenology of the sacred. These symbols resist any reduction to a rational knowledge; the failure of all theodicies, of all systems concerning evil, witnesses to the failure of absolute knowledge in the Hegelian sense. All symbols give rise to thought, but the symbols of evil show in an exemplary way that there is always more in myths and symbols than in all of our philosophy, and that a philosophical interpretation of symbols will never become absolute knowledge...Thus the symbols of evil attest to the unsurpassable character of all symbolism; while telling us of the failure of our existence and of our power of existing, they also declare the failure of systems of thought that would swallow up symbols in absolute knowledge."--p.527

"First of all, every reconciliation is looked for `in spite of'--in spite of evil. This `in spite of', this `nevertheless', this `even so', constitutes the first category of hope, the category of confidence. But there is no proof of this `in spite of', but only signs; the area in which this category operates is not a logic but a history, and one that must constantly be deciphered in the sign of promise, a glad tidings, a kerygma."--p.528

"I am not unaware of the fragility of this relationship, in a philosophy of reflection, between the figures of spirit and the symbols of the sacred. From the viewpoint of the philosophy of reflection, which is a philosophy of immanence, the symbols of the sacred appear only as cultural factors mixed in with the figures of spirit. But at the same time these symbols designate the impact on culture of a reality that the movement of culture does not contain; they speak of the Wholly Other, of the Wholly Other than all of history; in this way they exercise an attraction and a call upon the entire series of the figures of culture. This is the sense in which I spoke of a prophecy or an eschatology. It is solely through its relation to the immanent teleology of the figures of culture that the sacred concerns this philosophy; the sacred is its eschatology; it is the horizon that reflection does not comprehend, does not encompass, but can only salute as that which quietly presents itself from afar. Thus another dependence of the Cogito or self is revealed, a dependence that is first seen not in the symbol of its birth but in the symbol of an eschaton, an ultimate, toward which the figures of spirit point. The Cogito's dependence on the ultimate, just as its dependence on its birth, its nature, its desire, is revealed only through symbols."--p.529

"...[T]he reason man projects himself into the Wholly Other is to grasp hold of it and thus fill the emptiness of his unawareness.

   "This objectifying process is the origin both of metaphysics and of religion: metaphysics makes God into a supreme being; and religion treats the sacred as a new sphere of objects, institutions, and powers within the world of immanence--of objective spirit--and alongside the objects, institutions, and powers of the economic, political, and cultural spheres. We may say that a fourth sphere of objects has arisen within the human sphere of spirit. Henceforward there are sacred objects and not merely signs of the sacred; sacred objects in addition to the world of culture.

   "This diabolic transformation makes religion the reification and alienation of faith; by thus entering the sphere of illusion, religion becomes vulnerable to the blows of a reductive hermeneutics."--p.530

 "It seems to me, however, that this cultural movement cannot and must not remain external to the restoration of the signs of the Wholly Other in their authentic function as sentinels of the horizon...Faith is that region of the symbolic where the horizon-function is constantly being reduced to the object-function; thus arise idols, the religious figures of the same illusion which in metaphysics engenders the concepts of supreme being, first substance, absolute thought. An idol is the reification of the horizon into a thing, the fall of the sign into a thing, the fall of the sign into a supernatural and supracultural object.

   "Thus there is a never-ending task of distinguishing between the faith of religion--faith in the Wholly Other which draws near--and belief in the religious object, which becomes another object of our culture and thus part of our own sphere. The sacred, as signifying separation or otherness, is the area of this combat. The sacred can be the sign of that which does not belong to us, the sign of the Wholly Other; it can also be a sphere of separate objects within our human world of culture and alongside the sphere of the profane. The sacred can be the meaningful bearer of what we described as the structure of horizon peculiar to the Wholly Other which draws near, or it can be the idolatrous reality to which we assign a separate place in our culture, thus giving rise to religious alienation. The ambiguity is inevitable: for if the Wholly Other draws near, it does so in the signs of the sacred; but symbols soon turn into idols...Thus the idols must die--so that symbols may live."--pp.530-1

"...[W]e must confront [Freud's] hermeneutics, with the hermeneutics of Eliade, Van der Leuuw, Barth, and Bultmann, in order to construct what we can say positively and negatively about the psychoanalysis of religion."--p.531

 "All that can be said is that man is capable of neurosis as he is capable of religion, and vice versa. The same causes--life's hardship, the triple suffering dealt the individual by nature, his body, and other men--give rise to similar responses--neurotic ceremonials and religious ceremonials, demand for consolation and appeal to Providence--and obtain comparable effects--compromise formations, secondary gain of illness and discharge of guilt, substitute satisfaction."--p.533

"Freud's exclusive attention to repetition becomes a refusal to consider a possible epigenesis of religious feeling, that is to say, a transformation or conversion of desire and fear."--p.534

"In the famous myth of the primal murder, Freud encounters an episode that remains unexplained, although it is ultimately the pivot of the drama: this episode is the forming of the covenant among the brothers whereby they agreed not to repeat among themselves the murder of the father...Why not link the destiny of faith with this fraternal conciliation, rather than with the perpetual repetition of the parricide?"--p.535

"Nevertheless, by contrasting Eros with death, Freud recaptured a certain mythical basis preserved by the German romantic tradition; through the latter he was able to go back to Plato and Empedocles and describe Eros as `the power which holds everything together'. But he never suspected that this mythology of Eros might concern an epigenesis of religious feeling..."--p.536

"This `history of a nation's earliest days, which was compiled later and for tendentious reasons' [discerned by Freud in his Leonardo]--does it not imply a creation of meaning, capable of marking off and carrying what we have called an epigenesis of religious feeling?"--p.538

 "To use Husserlian terminology, I will say that the fantasies explored by Freud make up the hyletic of this mytho-poetic imagination. It is in and through certain primal scene fantasies that man `forms', `interprets', `intends' meanings of another order, meanings capable of becoming the signs of the sacred which the philosophy of reflection can only acknowledge and salute at the horizon of its archeology and its teleology."--p.540

"What constitutes the father as an origin myth is the interpretation through which the primal scene fantasy receives a new intention--to the point where I can invoke "our Father, who art in heaven..." Stated in the prephilosophical language of myth, the symbolism of the heavens and the symbolism of the father make explicit the origin symbolism that the archaic fantasy virtually contained by reason of the absence, lack, loss, and emptiness of its proper `object'.

   "Why does the father figure have a privilege that the mother figure does not have? Its privileged status is no doubt due to its extremely rich symbolic power, in particular its potential for `transcendence'. In symbolism, the father figures less as a begetter equal to the mother than as the name-giver and the lawgiver."--p.542

 "But then the father figure is not simply a return of the repressed; it is rather the result of a true process of creation. This creation of meaning constitutes the true overdetermination of authentic symbols, and this overdetermination in turn grounds the possibility of two hermeneutics, one of which unmasks the archaism of its fantasy content, while the other discovers the new intention that animates the material content. The reconciliation of the two hermeneutics lies in symbols themselves. Thus one cannot stop with an antithetic that would distinguish between `two sources of morality and religion' for the prophecy of consciousness is not external to its archeology."--p.542-3

"The two functions of symbol remain inseparable. The symbolic meanings closest to theological and philosophical speculation are always involved with some trace of an archaic myth. This close alliance of archaism and prophecy constitute the richness of religious symbolism; it also constitutes its ambiguity. `Symbols give rise to thought', but they are also the birth of idols. That is why the critique of idols remains the condition of the conquest of symbols."--p.543

"What we have said in general about the process of man's `becoming conscious' should be said more specifically about his `becoming religious'. For man, to become conscious is to be drawn away from his archaism by a series of figures that institute and constitute him as a man. Hence there can be no question of grasping the meaning of the religious man apart from the meaning of the texts that are the documents of his belief...If literature is the privileged area of this process of interpretation--though one may also legitimately speak of a hermeneutics of sculpture and of painting--it is because language is the only complete, exhaustive, and objectively intelligible expression of human interiority: `That is why', Dilthey continues, `the art of understanding centers around the exegesis or interpretation of the written testimony of human existence'."--p.544-5

"Now, Freud has no interest whatsoever in what might be called an epigenesis of the sense of guilt, an epigenesis that would be guided by an increasingly refined symbolism. The sense of guilt seems to have no history beyond the Oedipus complex and its dissolution. It remains a preventive procedure with respect to anticip[ated punishment. In the Freudian literature, the sense of guilt is consistently understood in this archaic sense. But an epigenesis of guilt cannot be directly established by a psychology of the superego; [guilt] can only be deciphered by the indirect means of a textual exegesis of the penitential literature. In this literature there is constituted an exemplary history of conscience (Gewissen). Man arrives at adult, normal, ethical guilt when he understands himself according to the figures of this exemplary history."--p.546

 "The question is whether the function of consolation is merely infantile, or whether there is not also what I should now call an epigenesis or ascending dialectic of consolation."--p.548

 "Job receives no explanation of his suffering; he is merely shown something of the grandeur and order of the whole, without any meaning being directly given to the finite point of view of his desire. His faith is closer to the `third kind' of knowledge in Spinoza's sense than to any religion of Providence. A path is thus opened, a path of non-narcissistic reconciliation: I give up my point of view; I love the whole; I make ready to say: `The intellectual love of the mind toward God is a part of that very love of God whereby God loves himself' (quo Deus seipsum amat)."--p.549

"We have reached a point here which seems unsurpassable. It is not a point of repose but of tension, for it is not yet apparent how the `personality' of God who pardons and the `impersonality' of Deus sive nature could coincide."--p.549

 "...[T]he reading of Freud is what helped me place the `giving up of the father' at the heart of the problematic of faith..."--p.550

 "But then, I asked, is reality merely Ananke? Is reality simply necessity offered to my resignation? Is it not also possibility opened to the power of loving?"--p.550

 "...[T]he Freudian hermeneutics can be related to another hermeneutics, a hermeneutics that deals with the mytho-poetic function and regards myths not as fables, i.e. stories that are false, unreal, illusory, but rather as the symbolic exploration of our relationship to beings and to Being. What carries this mytho-poetic function is another power of language, a power that is no longer the demand of desire, demand for protection, demand for providence, but a call in which I leave off all demands and listen...To the cleavage the yes to Freud introduces into the heart of the faith of believers, separating idols from symbols, there corresponds the cleavage the no to Freud introduces into the heart of the Freudian reality principle, separating mere resignation to Anake from the love of Creation."--p.551

In Ricoeur there is a meshing of life and God constituting reality such that atheism becomes the ultimate, irredeemable illusion. The fundamental concepts in Ricoeur are: kerygma, epigenesis, and symbol .

 "What Freud desires is that the one who is analyzed, by making his own the meaning that was foreign to him, enlarge his field of consciousness, live better, and finally be a little freer, if possible, a little happier."--p.35

Robust

Usually robust means realistic, feet-on-the-ground. Sometimes it has the connotation of strong conviction.

Rorty

In Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (1989), Rorty talks about the stories we tell ourselves about our lives. The implication here is the "pragmatic" value of private philosophies.

Julian Bell has these commentaries on Rorty's book.

"Everyone tries to weave a coherent story about what he is out of the materials that chance has given him...What is good in private--what gives worth to our lives--may be no good at all in public. A philosopher who believed that each item in that list of terms possessed an intrinsic matter might look for a way of reconciling and unifying the public and the private. Rorty spurns such `metaphysics'. `We should stop trying to combine self-creation and politics.' The ethos of self-creation should be decisively privatized..."Against metaphysics Rorty sets irony. An ironist `thinks that that nothing has an intrinsic nature', and therefore `does not think that her vocabulary'--the story that she makes of her life, her beliefs--`is closer to reality than others'; and so has doubts about that vocabulary, but does not suppose that any argument can settle them...Great scientists, poets, and political thinkers all invent descriptions of the world, he tells us, `but there is no sense in which any of these descriptions is an accurate representation of the way the world is in itself...History is a jumble of `random factors', out of which geniuses spasmodically and mysteriously emerge...When our contingency to the world presents itself in the form of suffering, he says, we can no longer re-describe: `we can only recognize contingency and pain'."

Rules, laws, and inferences

Rules are propositions which define the way things either: should be done, e.g., rules of a game; or are done, e.g., rules of perception. The propositions of logic are rules in both senses. The rules of logic can mean: (a) the way we should think and argue; (b) the way reality is organized and the way we think about reality. But if (b) then (a) and the only difference is the specificity of cognition.

When rules mostly reflect the way things actually are or the way they actually function, they are sometimes called "laws". The rules of logic that pervade reality are not called laws. This may be because reality is logical only in the sense of not being non-logical. Laws is a social, normative concept. But it is also applied to:
   --nature
   --psychology
   --society and history.
Laws as norms define the things we should and should not do in society, in which they are the same thing as rules. In effect, they can become indirect explanations of behaviour and ethics.

The laws of nature state that given such and such circumstances, such and such event or events will ensue. They offer no explanations other than this. And they are, like perception, factual propositions involving prediction. However , there are natural events, e.g., meteorology, about which even though natural laws would seem to apply, it is exceedingly difficult to make precise, infallible predictions. The problem is the type of complex and changeable anteceding circumstances involved.

The laws of psychology theoretically should have the same sort of epistemic value as the laws of nature. And indeed if such laws were ever to be formulated, they would have to be validated from prediction. But in reality it is virtually impossible to gather, first, sufficient information about what causes behaviour--both thought and action--to elaborate such laws; second, even if there were hypotheses for such laws, there would never be sufficient information on anteceding circumstances to validate such laws by saying: given such and such circumstances, such and such event or events will ensue; and third, even if there were sufficient information of the sort we need, it would be about the specificities of mind, which are not subject to generalizations, i.e., what moves me to act in a certain way, even though it is in the same pattern as what moves every other individual to act, cannot be predicated of any other individual.

Finally, social and historical laws are perhaps closer to the sense of psychological laws than to natural laws. However, for some reason, even though the study of society and history is about human beings, there seems to be more scope for prediction in these areas than in psychology. But no matter how relatively wider the predictive scope, it doesn't remotely approach even the chanceful predictability involved in meteorological and similar laws.

Rule-following

Stephen Nulhall on Peter Carruthers, Tractarian Semantics: Finding sense in Wittgenstein's "Tractatus" (Blackwell) and The Metaphysics of the "Tractatus" (Cambridge), in TLS, January 18 1991, p. 20

"Peter Carruthers's two-volume study of the Tractatus ...[offers] an interpretation of Tractarian semantic doctrines designed to reveal that they are not only separable from Tractarian metaphysics but true; and although this interpretation of those metaphysical doctrines entails their falsehood, it implies that they are none the less defensible. Indeed, Carruthers regards them as hard to avoid if we retain a belief in `logical objectivism'--the doctrine that all relations between symbols, and between symbols and reality, are rendered wholly determinate in a mind-independent way as soon as the sense of the signs in question is fixed. It is this belief which underpins the Tractatus as a whole, and it is the later rejection of it, as a result of the now famous rule-following considerations, which allegedly constitutes the key contrast between Wittgenstein's early and later philosophies."

Malcolm Budd on Norman Malcolm, Nothing is Hidden: Wittgentein's criticism of his early thought (Oxford: Blackwell), in TLS, March 13 1987, p. 277

"[Malcolm] ascribes to Wittgenstein the view that the concept of following a rule implies the concept of a community of rule-followers in which there is agreement about which actions conform with the rule: someone can truly be said to follow a rule only if he is a member of such a community...he miscontrues Wittgenstein's rejection of the idea of a rule that is essentially unshareable as the assertion that it is impossible for a socially isolated individual to follow a rule."

Malcolm Budd on P. M. S. Hacker, Insight and Illusion: Themes in the philosophy of Wittgenstein (Oxford: Clarendon Press), in TLS, March 13 1987, p. 277

"Hacker's treatment of the topics of rule-following and sensations is greatly superior to anything on these matters in Malcolm's or the Hintikkas's book. He fully exposes the error of the community-interpretation and he has too firm a grasp of Wittgenstein's reflections on privacy and the self-ascription of present sensations to fall for the absurd idea that Wittgenstein conceived of sensations as Cartesian immaterial events about which nothing can be said except by means of a public correlate."

Russell

Bertrand Russell (1872-1970)

Russell created further language paradoxes based on the assumption that, even though thought gives words their meaning, words are the only means that we have to know thought, i.e., we cannot know thought directly through introspection. The source of the paradoxes in Russell were propositional attitudes. King George knows Walter Scott. King George does not know the author of Waverly. King George both knows and does not know Walter Scott. The apparent contradiction stemmed from King George's mistaken belief that he did not know the author of Waverly. But whether from the sense of words and propositions or from propositional attitudes, both Frege and Russell concluded that mind is intensional. Intensionality implies ambiguity. Extensionality permits either true or false propositions. The ambiguity of mind prevented the making of certain logical deductions. In addition, in both philosophers mental events were relational. In the case of Frege, between the sense of a proposition and its reference. In the case of Russell, between the propositional attitude and the proposition itself. Implicit in sense and in propositional attitudes was the self

D. W. Hamlyn, The Penguin History of Western Philosophy, Harmondsworth, Middlesex, 1987

Russell felt obliged to analyze the proposition `The present King of France is bald' in order to demonstrate its falseness, and all because if you said it was false as it stood, it could be understood to mean that `The present the King of France is not bald'. He was certainly one confused philosopher! No amount of analysis will demonstrate the falseness of the proposition per se. Hamlyn's may be a caricature: he does not like Russell.

 Mutual influence between Russell and Wittgenstein, as revealed in Russell's 1918 articles on  "The Philosophy of Logical Atomism" in The Monist

"In these articles, which were based on lectures, he presented an ontology consisting of particulars, to be identified with sense data, standing in relations of varying orders of complexity." (p.296)

"Despite what is said about neutral monism in its last section, sense-data are said in the second section to be such that they constitute different objects of acquaintance for different people. They are in that sense private, and Russell draws the consequence that people must mean different things by what they say, since the meaning of their words, what they refer to, is ultimately these private sense-data. It is, he says, the ambiguity of language (although it is of course no ordinary ambiguity) which makes intercourse by language possible. Wittgenstein was to take this, quite rightly, as a reductio ad absurdum of the thesis that a language could get its meaning that way." (p.297)

Richard Jeffrey on Frank Plimpton Ramsay, Philosophical Papers and On Truth: Original manuscript materials (1927-1929) from the Ramsey Collection at the University of Pittsburgh, edited by Nicholas Rescher and Ulrich Majer, TLS, May 17 1991, pp.5-6

"...Russell's paradox concerning the property of non-self-applicability, which is non-self-applicable iff it isn't, and Grelling's paradox, concerning the sentence `"Non-self-applicable" is non-self-applicable', which is true iff false. Russell's was the paradox seen in 1902 to vitiate Frege's Foundations of Arithmetic, revealing it to be self-contradictory. Russell protected Principia against paradoxes by an intricate set of restrictions (the ramified theory of types) ruling out terms like `non-self-applicable' as meaningless, so that the question of its self-applicability does not arise. But these restrictions also ruled out principles like mathematical induction, in whose absence important mathematical truths become unprovable. To cure that, Russell adopted an ad hoc axiom (of reducibility) that had nothing to recommend it except that it eased his type restrictions enough to make the required proofs possible without reintroducing paradoxes."

L. Jonathan Cohen on Lewis Edwin Hahn and Paul Arthur Schilpp (editors), The Philosophy of W. V. Quine (La Salle, IL: Open Court), in TLS, November 13-19 1987, p. 1259

"Russell had claimed that, in the end, all mathematical concepts were definable in terms of logical ones."

Russell equated philosophy and science. He believed that this proposition had its justification in logical atomism. For Russell logical atomism was expressed in logical forms. For Wittgenstein logical atomism was linguistic. Logical forms were tautologies.

"When Russell began to invoke the notion of facts, rather than propositions, as composing the world, he expressed this by distinguishing the grammatical form of a sentence from the logical form of the corresponding fact." (Hacker, p. 11)

"In 1910 a deep change occurred in Russell's ontology and metaphysics. In the early years of the century, he had followed Moore in propounding an extreme form of Platonist realism. He had argued that the world is composed of `terms'--things and `concepts' (or attributes)--which are constituents of propositions. Propositions were conceived of as objective entities, neither mental nor linguistic, which had the unanalysable properties of truth or falsehood. Terms were `contained' in, or `constituents' of, propositions. Judgement was thought to involve a direct relation between a person and a proposition, conceived as existing independently of judgement. True propositions were facts obtaining in the world." (Hacker, p.13)

Knowledge by acquaintance is a Russell concept that refers to "a sort of non-propositional knowledge."

If language derives from ambiguity, as Russell claims, and ambiguity is the denial of meaning, how can language, which is the vehicle of meaning, be impugned from its own denial as meaning?

Quinian holism is the doctrine, to which we have already alluded above, that all cognition is tainted by theory and that meaning is not a function of the proposition but of individual systems of belief. This version has all sort of sceptical implications about knowing including the famous theory of the underdetermination of belief expressed in the formula of a paucity of input and a torrent of output. In fact, however, the richness of the objects of perception and the relative poverty of individual acts of perceiving is proof of precisely the contrary.