GRE Plus Good Writing

Goliath Falls After One Hell Of A Battle

2005-10-17T21:49:00.000-07:00

It was the finest Ashes Test for 24 years, a contest so full of valour and exposed humanity, a contest so tight, so passionate, so important that concerned parties endured the sort of agonies otherwise reserved for Beelzebub and chums. Sport can be an emotional hellhole. Half of England was pacing around sitting rooms. Half of Australia was on tenterhooks. And all over this ridiculous game played with a lump of wood and a hunk of leather.
For three days and about 100 agonising minutes the game's most ancient rivals threw everything at each other, every ounce of strength, every drop of sweat. Batsmen took blows to the body. Heads were cracked. Catches were taken and inconsolably dropped. Umpteen mistakes were made, overthrows, byes, no-balls, bad shots, all of them a reminder that cricket is a game of the spirit.
There were also many glorious sights: Andrew Flintoff roaring into bowl like a Scottish lock forward charging towards the Sassenach line, Shane Warne wheeling away, one ball pushed through flatter, the next sent down a fraction slower. Warne's confrontations with Flintoff took on the epic proportions of George and the dragon.
There was more: Brett Lee's redemption, Kevin Pietersen's unexpected polish, Steve Harmison's flapping arms, Michael Kasprowicz's sturdiness and, most of all, Australia's last stand and England's relief.
Till that last morning the match had belonged to the hosts. Then came a magnificent Australian fightback that provoked alarm in English ranks. By the end the hosts were on the brink of despair.
Would these confounded antipodeans never go away? Oh, the sweetness of that brushed glove and the roar that erupted in the stands!
Among matches of the past decade, only India's incredible comeback in Kolkata and Brian Lara's inspired chase in Barbados compare. Australia lost those matches but no disgrace can be found in that. Much to their credit, the Australians seldom get beaten easily. Usually it takes a a rousing performance from imposing opponents and strong support from teammates to subdue them.
Pessimism was England's main weak point. Doubt lurked beneath the brave decision to attack. Throughout, players and spectators alike expected the Australians to rally.
At breakfast before that fourth morning numerous home supporters asked for a prediction. Australia needed more than 100 runs with a pair of dodgy customers in occupation and a bunny padded up to face a fresh attack supported by a fervent crowd. And they were seeking reassurance? England were almost undone by their own nervousness.
But England did win and the margin is irrelevant. Having brought down Goliath once they will believe they can repeat the feat, and belief is half the battle. Much will depend on the top order. If the opening partnerships are productive the middle order will feel free to continue its onslaught. Michael Vaughan must also contribute. Decisive foot work is the key to his game.
It is hard to win an Ashes series when both the captain and first-drop batsman are failing. Vaughan has much on his plate. It goes with the job.
Australia will hardly have time to draw breath before battle resumes in Manchester. The players must be kicking themselves for giving so many runs and wickets away in Birmingham. On the other hand they will realise they made 100 mistakes and still only lost by a whisker.
Successive Test matches make it hard even to consider changes. Consideration may be given to promoting Adam Gilchrist. Matthew Hayden has struggled since the retirement of Steve Waugh while the gloveman is happier starting against pace than spin. More likely Ponting and his fellow selectors will concentrate on correcting the looseness that crept into Australia's game in Birmingham.
Damien Martyn's lacklustre fielding on the first day predicted his subsequent run-out. Doubtless they will also review their tactics with the humility and determination shown by England after their defeat at Lord's.
Old Trafford will reveal the meaning of the events of the past few days. My view is that Australia still have the winning of it. Even without his best fast bowler, Ponting has the stronger side.
England played an inspired game and won by two runs. But the gap has closed. Moreover, winning becomes a habit. Vaughan's men did not just win a cricket match. They won a battle with themselves.
Credit: Roeb

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What to Do With Postings on This Blog

2005-10-16T00:10:00.000-07:00

Reading diverse kinds of stuff, written by different style authors on different themes as divergent as those covered here so far, with many having the so-called abstruse (difficult to understand) philosophical overtones teaches you a lot.

You learn to absorb heavy stuff and that gives you a good pace of reading.

You observe usage variations of vocabulary learnt words, thus relating more to these words.

You become perceptive as to what syntax (sentence and phrase structuring) is best applicable to various situations.

Just as disciples of Jesus and chelas of Hindu gurus learnt advanced level tenets of religion, same shall be your learning if you stay in company of well crafted pourings of the established authors.

Your mind thus assumes characters of flubber (a sci-fi movie had the concept of flubber, which was a very resilient rubber)

Scientific Realism

2005-10-15T23:51:00.000-07:00

It is easier to define scientific realism than it is to identify its role as a distinctly philosophical doctrine. Scientific realists hold that the characteristic product of successful scientific research is knowledge of largely theory-independent phenomena and that such knowledge is possible (indeed actual) even in those cases in which the relevant phenomena are not, in any non-question-begging sense, observable. According to scientific realists, for example, if you obtain a good contemporary chemistry textbook you will have good reason to believe (because the scientists whose work the book reports had good scientific evidence for) the (approximate) truth of the claims it contains about the existence and properties of atoms, molecules, sub-atomic particles, energy levels, reaction mechanisms, etc. Moreover, you have good reason to think that such phenomena have the properties attributed to them in the textbook independently of our theoretical conceptions in chemistry. Scientific realism is thus the common sense (or common science) conception that, subject to a recognition that scientific methods are fallible and that most scientific knowledge is approximate, we are justified in accepting the most secure findings of scientists "at face value."

1. Introduction
We defined scientific realism above as the common sense (or common science) conception that, subject to a recognition that scientific methods are fallible and that most scientific knowledge is approximate, we are justified in accepting the most secure findings of scientists "at face value." What requires explanation is why this is a philosophical position rather than just a common sense one. Consider, for example, tropical fish realism -- the doctrine that there really are tropical fish; that the little books you buy about them at pet stores tend to get it approximately right about their appearance, behavior, food and temperature requirements, etc.; and that the fish have these properties largely independently of our theories about them. That's a pretty clear doctrine, but it's so commonsensical that it doesn't seem to have any particular philosophical import. Why is the analogous doctrine about science a philosophical doctrine?
The answer is that -- setting aside skepticism about the external world -- there are no philosophical arguments against tropical fish realism, whereas important philosophical challenges have been raised against scientific realism. The dimensions of scientific realism, understood as a philosophical position, have been largely determined by the responses scientific realists have offered to these challenges. It will be conceptually useful (and approximately historically correct) to see the development of scientific realism as a response to four consecutive challenges, as follows.
The Empiricist Challenge: This is the challenge regarding knowledge of unobservable "theoretical" entities raised by logical empiricists and their allies and underwritten by arguments from the underdetermination of theory choice by observational data.
The Neo-Kantian Challenge, First Version: This is the challenge raised by Hanson (1958) and Kuhn (1970) who argue from the theory dependence of methods (and, especially, of observation) to the conclusion that a realist conception of the growth of approximate scientific knowledge cannot be sustained, given the semantic and methodological incommensurability (Kuhn's term) occasioned by revolutionary changes in science.
The Neo-Kantian Challenge, Second Version: This is the (somehow) related, but (somehow) less relativist conception represented by Putnam's ("internal realist") and Fine's ("natural ontological attitude") critiques of "metaphysical" versions of scientific realism.
The "Post-modern" Challenge: This is a challenge (to both realism and empiricism) arising from recent literary, sociological and historical studies in the emerging "science studies" tradition. It is grounded in the conception that such phenomena as science, knowledge, evidence and truth are social constructions, in some sense or other which implies that one should reject the idea that scientific practices achieve an approximate representational fit, of some sort or other, between the content of scientific theories and the world or reality.
We will discuss these challenges in the sections below.

2. The Empiricist Challenge: Knowledge Empiricism and the Underdetermination Argument
It is easy to characterize the basic empiricist underdetermination argument against scientific realism. Call two theories empirically equivalent just in case exactly the same conclusions about observable phenomena can be deduced from each. Let T be any theory which posits unobservable phenomena. There will always be infinitely many theories which are empirically equivalent to T but which are such that each differs from T, and from all the rest, in what it says about unobservable phenomena (for formalized theories, this is an elementary theorem of mathematical logic). Evidence in favor of T's conception of unobservable phenomena ("theoretical entities") would have to rule out the conceptions represented by each of those other theories. But, since T is empirically equivalent to each of them, they all make exactly the same predictions about the results of observations or experiments. So, no evidence could favor one of them over the others. Thus, at best, we could have evidence in favor of what all these theories have in common--their consequences about "observables"--we could confirm that they are all empirically adequate--but we could not have any evidence favoring T's conception of unobservable theoretical entities. Since T was any theory about unobservables, knowledge of unobservable phenomena is impossible; choice between competing but empirically equivalent conceptions of theoretical entities is underdetermined by all possible observational evidence. [For an important alternative formulation of the notions of empirical adequacy and empirical equivalence, see van Fraassen 1980; see also Demopoulos 1982.]

Several points about this simple and powerful argument are important.

1. It needs fixing up. As it stands, the basic underdetermination argument is fatally flawed. Suppose that T is some ordinary middle-sized scientific theory, like, e.g., the laws of Newtonian mechanics. According to the argument as it stands if T* is some other middle-sized theory empirically equivalent to T, then no evidence could favor T over T*, or vice versa. For ordinary scientific theories this is wrong. Scientists routinely supplement theories with well established auxiliary hypotheses in order to obtain observational predictions from them. [In fact, no observational predictions can be deduced from Newton's laws unless they have been so supplemented, and this is true for lots of fundamental scientific theories; see Kitcher 1982 for a nice discussion.] So, even if T and T* are empirically equivalent, it could still happen that they yield different observational predictions when supplemented by appropriate auxiliary hypotheses, in which case there could be observational evidence favoring one over the other.
So, it is probably best to think of the underdetermination argument as applying, not to "small" theories, but to "total sciences," large-scale conceptions of the world that might represent the total scientific conception of the world at a time. Such a conception would already contain all of the auxiliary hypotheses which were legitimate by its lights, so the problem just mentioned does not arise. In this revised form the underdetermination argument says that--whatever our best scientific conception of the world may be at any given time--we will ever have any evidence that it embodies knowledge of unobservables.

2. It rests on (a particular interpretation of) an extremely plausible doctrine about factual knowledge. Traditional empiricism attributed to experience or sensation two different roles: experience was the source of all of our ideas--of the raw material for thinking--and experience was the only basis we have for justifying beliefs abut matters of fact. The first of these doctrines of empiricism has fallen on hard times, but the second doctrine (called knowledge empiricism by Bennett 1964) enjoys widespread support. In particular, it is an epistemological doctrine to which almost all scientific realists subscribe. The logical empiricist challenge to scientific realism arises from a quite plausible interpretation of knowledge empiricism according to which what it says is that there can be no evidence which rationally distinguishes between two empirically equivalent total sciences (call this doctrine the evidential indistinguishability thesis, or the EIT).

3. It is part of a selectively skeptical program of anti-metaphysical "rational reconstruction." The basic aim of the logical empiricists' project was to solve the demarcation problem, the problem of distinguishing science (good) from "metaphysics" (bad), by appealing to arguments like the underdetermination argument. The result was supposed to be that scientific claims are meaningful and knowable (early on, logical empiricists identified these two properties) whereas "metaphysical" claims, because they are about unobservables, are (at least) unknowable and (according to early versions of logical empiricism) meaningless.
Now almost all actual science is conducted largely in a vocabulary consisting mainly of "theoretical terms": terms apparently referring to unobservables. It was definitely not the logical empiricists' project to reject such science. They intended to be selectively skeptical: to be skeptics about "metaphysics" but not about science. So, they embarked on a project of providing "rational reconstructions" of actual scientific theories and methods which were designed to eliminate any apparent commitments to knowledge of unobservables while still portraying actual scientific practices as sources of knowledge (see, e.g., Carnap 1932, 1959).
In the case of scientific theories, the basic logical empiricist approaches were variations on the idea of instrumentalism, the view that scientific theories were predictive instruments and that the knowledge they represent is limited to what they predict about the observable properties of observables. In the case of scientific methods, strategies for rational reconstruction have not been so easy to formulate. Here's the problem. Almost all of the methods scientists actually use in conducting experimental or observational studies are theory dependent: they depend for their justification on knowledge reflected in previously established theories. Kuhn's (1970) discussion of "normal science" makes this point especially clearly, but all of the logical empiricists were acutely aware of it. Moreover, in sciences like physics, chemistry, molecular biology and astronomy, almost all of those methods seem prima facie to rest on knowledge of unobservable phenomena (just think about the presuppositions of the design of any experiment in chemistry). What the project of rational reconstruction must show is that (almost) all of these methods can be reconstructed in such a way that their application, as guides to the identification of empirically adequate theories, does not require positing knowledge of unobservables.

4. The task of rationally reconstructing actual scientific methods has been the most significant challenge facing logical empiricism and related anti-realist approaches. Instrumentalism and its variants provide a simple reconstruction of the content of scientific theories that pretty exactly fits the requirements of the project of rational reconstruction. The depth of the theory dependence of scientific methods, and the extent to which they seem to depend on knowledge of unobservables, has posed a deeper challenge for logical empiricists and their allies. The fate of operationalism illustrates this challenge. Operationalism was a proposal for rationally reconstructing the use of "theoretical terms" (terms that apparently refer to unobservables) in science by treating those terms as being completely defined in terms of particular operational procedures, thereby eliminating the apparent references to unobservables.
Here's what operationalism says. For any theoretical term (say, for example, "electron density") we can "rationally reconstruct" the use of that term by treating it as having an analytic operational definition in terms of laboratory procedures and instrumentation. So, for example, the operational definition of "electron density" might be given by a sentence of the form
(*) The electron density in a region, R, is given by the value, x, if and only if E applied to R yields the value x,
where E is an instrument such that -- prior to rational reconstruction (but not after) -- scientists would have thought of it as a procedure for measuring electron density.
The analyticity of operational definitions like (*) is essential to the project of rational reconstruction. Operationalism is not, for example, the idea that electron density is defined as whatever magnitude instruments of sort E reliably measure. On that conception (*) would represent an empirical discovery about how to measure electron density, but -- since electrons are "unobservables" -- that's a realist conception not an empiricist one. What the project of rational reconstruction requires is that (*) be true purely as a matter of linguistic stipulation about how the term "electron density" is to be used.
Since (*) is supposed to be analytic, it's supposed to be unrevisable. There is supposed to be no such thing as discovering, about E,, that some other instrument provides a more accurate value for electron density, or provides values for electron density under conditions where E doesn't function. Here again, thinking that there could be an improvement on E with respect to electron density requires thinking of electron density as a real feature of the world which E (perhaps only approximately) measures. But, that's the realist conception which operationalism is designed to rationally reconstruct away.
In actual, and apparently reliable, scientific practice, changes in the instrumentation associated with theoretical terms is utterly routine, and apparently crucial to the progress of science. Scientists routinely replace one instrument with another in order to achieve (as they would say) more accurate measurements of some unobservable magnitude -- often in the light of new theoretical developments -- or to permit measurement of it under conditions for which previous instrumentation was inadequate. According to an operationalist conception, these sorts of modifications would not be methodologically acceptable. Most logical empiricists were not willing to accept this conclusion. After all, they intended to rationally reconstruct the best of actual scientific practice. So most logical empiricists felt compelled to reject operationalism.
Examples such as these made it clear that -- in apparently reliable scientific practice -- scientists behave as though (1) they obtain knowledge of unobservable (as well as observable) phenomena by deploying instruments which (perhaps indirectly) detect them, and (2) their theory dependent methodology in these and other matters is informed by knowledge of unobservables as well as of observables. In particular, they appear to improve, or extend the range of, procedures for measuring or detecting unobservable phenomena in the light of theoretical knowledge of those phenomena.
These features of scientific practice stimulated the articulation (largely by philosophers in the empiricist tradition) of two different but related arguments for scientific realism, to which we now turn our attention.

3. Realist Responses to the Empiricist Challenge: The Senses Extended and Explanations Rehabilitated

3.1 Extending the Senses
The fact that scientists, apparently justifiably, treat certain instruments and procedures as ways of detecting and measuring unobservable (as well as observable) phenomena led several philosophers (see especially Feigl 1956, Maxwell 1962) to adopt what amounts to a non-empiricist (or, perhaps, more flexibly empiricist) understanding of knowledge empiricism according to which (1) the special epistemic role of the senses derives from the fact that they are the only detectors we have built in to our bodies, but (2) the range of phenomena we can detect and measure can be broadened by extending the range of our senses through the use of instruments and procedures whose justification is theory dependent. Thus knowledge of phenomena "unobservable" by traditional empiricists standards is possible. This sort of focus on laboratory detection and manipulation in defense of realism finds perhaps its most energetic expression in the writings of Hacking (see, for example, Hacking 1982).

3.2 Explanation Rehabilitated
The conception that instruments, designed with the help of theoretical understanding, can extend the range of the senses so as to provide information about unobservable phenomena surely has to be a component of any even remotely plausible defense of scientific realism. Still, by itself the idea that instruments can extend the senses is inadequate as a rebuttal to the basic underdetermination argument. Here's why. The basic idea behind the extending-the-senses approach to defending scientific realism is that -- as scientists' knowledge of unobservable phenomena improves and as instrumental design becomes more sophisticated -- measurement and detection would become possible for phenomena hitherto beyond the reach of reliable detection and measurement; think of going from light microscopes, to electron microscopes, to x-ray crystallography devices (which can produce images of atomic structures within crystals).
That has to be the realist's conception, but consider the effect of underdetermination arguments. Suppose that, at some stage in the process of the improvement of theories and instruments, certain phenomena, D, posited by existing theories are detectable by the extended senses, but others are not. Let T be the total science of the time, and let T* be a theory empirically equivalent to T with respect, not to their observational consequences, but with respect to their consequence regarding the phenomena in D. The basic underdetermination argument can be repeated with respect to T and T*, leading to the conclusion that T does not reflect any knowledge of phenomena outside D. Thus there is no evidential basis for any extension of measurement and detection beyond D. Since this argument is applicable at any stage of any supposed extension of the senses, it challenges -- in the name of knowledge empiricism -- any extension of the senses.

3.3 Explanation as Evidential
Considerations such as these seem to have focused the attentions of realists on what we might call extra-experimental standards for theory assessment. To see what these are, let's examine the EIT mentioned earlier. Why would a knowledge empiricist defend the EIT? An obvious answer is that she might think that the only consideration which ever justifies accepting one theory, T, over a rival, T*, is that some prediction about observables obtained from T has proven to be true, whereas a prediction from T* about the same experiment or observation has proven to be false.
But is anything like this right? Pretty obviously -- and pretty obviously by empiricist standards -- no. Here's why. Consider any case in which observations in some set, O, provide us with good scientific evidence to accept some theory, T, such that T applies to an range of observable cases not represented in O (that is, consider any case of scientifically justified induction). In any such case there will always be infinitely many pair-wise empirically inequivalent theories such that (a) each of them is empirically inequivalent to T and (b) each of them is compatible with all the observational data ever collected. This is just the Humean point that induction is not deductively valid. If we have sufficient scientific evidence to justify our accepting T, that evidence must justify our rejection of each of these other theories. [Note that this conclusion must be accepted whether one is an empiricist or a scientific realist regarding the interpretation of T and its rivals, since the theories in question are pair-wise empirically inequivalent and are empirically inequivalent to T.]
Let T* be one of these rivals to T. T* is empirically inequivalent to T, so it would be possible in principle to run a crucial experiment to discriminate between T and T*. But, rational standards for the assessment of scientific evidence dictate that we are justified in rejecting T* even though no such experiment has been run! So, there must be rational standards for the assessment of scientific evidence in addition to the standards which say that evidence for or against a theory can be provided by the success or failure of observational predictions derived from the theory. Let's call these standards extra experimental. They solve the equation (!):
(!) T’s observational predictions have been thus far confirmed + Y = There is good scientific evidence favoring the empirical adequacy of T,
AND, both realists and empiricists agree, they are capable of adjudicating between competing substantive conceptions of the world (because they can adjudicate between empirically inequivalent theories).
So, realists and empiricists agree that it isn't true that rational standards for the assessment of scientific evidence dictate that choice between competing theories must always be based on the results of crucial experiments. Where does that leave the underdetermination argument against knowledge of unobservables?
Almost all scientific realist responses to empiricist anti-realism in the last three decades can be understood as variations on the idea that the solution to (!) -- which empiricists must agree exists on pain of abandoning selective skepticism for skepticism about induction -- also solves (!!):
(!!) T's observational predictions have been thus far confirmed + Y = There is good scientific evidence favoring the (approximate) truth of T, even of its claims about unobservables.
Defenses of realism along these lines (see, e.g, Boyd 1983; Byerly and Lazara 1973; Lipton 1993; Miller 1987; McMullin 1984; Psillos 1999; Putnam 1972, 1975a, 1975b) deploy somewhat different resources, but one thing they have in common is that they reflect, and participate in, what might be called the rehabilitation of explanation in recent philosophy of science. An obvious reply to the EIT is that it ignores the role of explanation as an evidential standard: perhaps one, among a family of empirically equivalent theories, is to be preferred because it explains observable phenomena better than the others, even though it makes the same observational predictions. The standard logical empiricist treatment of explanation, the deductive-nomological account (see Hempel 1942, 1965; Hempel and Oppenheim 1948), responds by identifying the explanatory power of a theory with its predictive power.
Over the last several decades a great many philosophers have been critical of some aspects or other of this reduction of explanation to prediction (see, e.g., Boyd 1985; Kitcher 1981; Lipton 1991; Kitcher and Salmon 1989; McMullin 1984, 1987; Miller 1987; Salmon 1984, 1989). In the context created by this critical work, the notion of explanation, as an independent component of rational scientific methodology, has been to some extent rehabilitated.
A closely related development is also important. Goodman 1954 drew the attention of philosophers of science to the important point that only some hypotheses, the projectible ones, are in the running for confirmation by observations, and that projectibility judgments are in some way or other a posteriori judgments informed by previously established theories and practices. What has become pretty clear is that, however they are to be philosophically analyzed, projectibility judgments are in fact judgments of plausibility in the light of previously established theories (Boyd 1999; Lipton 1991, 1993), and that plausibility of the relevant sort is a matter of the sort of unification with those theories which has explanatory import. So, explanation, in its own right, and as an aspect of projectibility judgments, appears to play a crucial role in the assessment of observational evidence for scientific theories.
To a good first approximation, the following characterize the conditions under which observations, O, substantially confirm a theory T:
T is projectible (that is, theoretically plausible in the light of the best established science).
The observations in O either confirm predictions obtained from T, or validate explanations based on T or both.
For each of the projectible alternatives, A, to T which address the same questions, the observations in O provide evidence against the predictions and/or explanations underwritten by A.
The observations in O were obtained under conditions which embody controls for each of the experimental artifacts or errors of sampling which are suggested by projectible conceptions of the relevant observational or experimental conditions.
The basic strategy of defenses of realism which argue that the solution to (!) -- which empiricists accept -- also solves (!!) involves arguing that the considerations of explanatory power of the sort indicated in characterizations like 1.-4. successfully adjudicate between empirically equivalent theories, so that knowledge of unobservables is sometimes obtained.

3.4 Two Explanationist Strategies for Defending Realism
There is a (very) rough division between two versions of the strategy in question. One strategy, let's call it local explanationism, (perhaps reflected in McMullin 1980, 1987; Miller 1987; and Lipton 1993) involves arguing that the relevant explanation-involving, extra-experimental criteria do, in some cases, successfully adjudicate between empirically equivalent theories, so that some scientific knowledge of unobservable phenomena is actual. An alternative approach, the abductive strategy, (see, e.g., Boyd 1983, Psillos 1999) treats scientific realism itself as a scientific hypothesis which is supported by the fact that it provides the only viable explanation for the such success as methodological principles like 1.-4., above, have as guides to the identification of empirically adequate theories. The justification of inductive methods in science is, therefore, provided by scientific realism, understood as itself an a posteriori scientific hypothesis.
There are interesting differences between these approaches, and between the various different versions of each, but certain empiricist challenges can be raised against all or most of them. Fine (1984, 1986a) has offered two very significant, and closely related, criticisms of the abductive strategy. First, Fine argues, the strategy begs the question against anti-realist positions by treating scientific explanatory power as carrying evidential weight in philosophy. After all, the dispute between empiricist anti-realists and realists is, in the first instance, a dispute about whether a theory's explanatory power can count in favor of the claims it makes about unobservables. [van Fraassen 1980 makes similar criticisms; he and Laudan 1981 each also challenges the claim that scientific realism provides the best explanation for the reliability of scientific methods in identifying empirically adequate theories.]
Fine's second criticisms is more abstractly epistemological. He points out that, according to the realist who adopts the abductive strategy, the methods of science are to be philosophically justified by appeal to a posteriori scientific findings, i.e., by appeal to the scientific realist's scientific explanation for their reliability. This approach, he argues, violates the philosophical requirement that the justification for the methods in a domain of inquiry should be grounded in methods more secure than the methods being justified.
Plainly these criticisms represent serious challenges to the abductive strategy. Importantly, they also challenge any version of the local explanationist strategy unless it incorporates an a priori (as opposed to an empirical scientific) defense of the evidential relevance of the explanatory power of theoretical claims about unobservables. There are two reasons to doubt that such an a priori defense is available.
In the first place, philosophical defenses of epistemological positions almost always rest, at least in part, on appeals to philosophical "intuitions" regarding particular cases. Although many philosophers regard the deliverances of philosophical intuitions as justified a priori, in fact epistemic intuitions about particular cases deliver to us the results of our trained (or, in some cases, untrained) judgments regarding the domain of inquiry in question. They are reliable guides to matters epistemological just in case -- and to the extent that -- the training in question has itself been relevantly reliable (Boyd 1999).
For philosophers of science, the relevant training centrally includes training in the methods and findings of the relevant sciences. Since, "pre-analytically" at least, those methods countenance inductive inferences to explanations involving unobservables, and since the most celebrated findings often incorporate the results of such inductions, a very significant burden of proof would rest on someone who maintained that her philosophical arguments in favor of accepting inductive inferences to explanatory theories about unobservables did not, at least tacitly, rest on intuitions which beg the question against empiricist anti-realism.
Moreover, there are independent reasons to doubt that there could be an a priori defense of accepting the results of inductive inferences to the best explanation, whether or not that explanation posits unobservables. To a good first approximation, typical scientific explanations offer accounts of the causal mechanisms or processes by which some phenomena are brought about, and scientists evaluate the explanatory power of a theory by trying to assess the likelihood that mechanisms or processes posited by the theory operate to produce the relevant effects. Their judgments in these matters are, almost always, informed by experiments and observations but they are nevertheless highly theory dependent, ordinarily relying heavily on previously established "background" theories concerning the relevant sorts of causal mechanisms and processes (for accounts with this flavor see, e.g., Lipton 1993, Psillos 1999, Boyd 1985). Such judgments are reliable only to the extent that those background theories are relevantly approximately accurate.
In consequence, any defense of the practice of counting the explanatory power of a particular theory as providing evidence in its favor would appear to require a defense of the proposition that the findings of the relevant background sciences are relevantly approximately accurate. While, in some cases, this may be a justified conclusion, its justification could hardly be a priori (for an account somewhat more sympathetic to a prioricity for certain cases, see Miller 1987). Exactly similar arguments regarding theory dependent judgments of projectibility provide additional prima facie support for the same anti-a prioristic conclusion (Boyd 1999).
In the light of these challenges, there is a strong case to be made that any defense of scientific realism must rest on a conception according to which both scientific methods and methods in the philosophy of science, must lack a priori justifications. Such a conception of science, and of the relevant parts of philosophy, would thus be non-foundational and, presumably, naturalistic (see Psillos 1999). [For a somewhat different naturalistic conception, see Kitcher 1993. For an excellent discussion of competing metaphilosophical conceptions in the philosophy of science and their relation to debates about realism see Wylie 1986.]

3.5 Realism and Approximate Truth
Whether or not the defense of scientific realism requires the adoption of a non-foundationalist conception of knowledge, it almost certainly requires the articulation of a conception of approximate truth. It is central to any plausible realist conception that, at least sometimes, the historical development of scientific theories reflect progress by successive approximation to the truth -- about unobservables as well as about observables, and it is central to arguments for realism that involve the rehabilitation of explanation as an epistemic notion that relevant improvements in approximate knowledge are typically reflected in improvements of method. So, realist philosophy of science relies heavily on the notion of approximate truth.
Laudan 1981 raises against scientific realism (and especially against abductive arguments for realism) the "pessimistic meta-induction." He points out that there are lots of real historical cases in which scientific theories which have been predictively successful and have contributed positively to scientific methodology have not been true, so that the truth of scientific theories need not be posited in order to explain the successes of scientific practice.
The obvious realist reply is that what must be posited is the approximate truth the relevant theories (see Hardin and Rosenberg 1982 and Laudan 1984). Articulation of this reply raises important issues, since any consistent theory can be represented as approximately true in certain respects, Moreover, as Laudan points out, many of the historically important and methodologically significant theories are, by our current lights, deeply false in some important respects. Efforts to develop an appropriate account of approximate truth in science include Niiniluoto 1987, Oldie 1986, Weston 1992, Boyd 1990.
One novel approach to the problem of approximation is provided by Worrall's structural realism (Worrall 1994; for a critique see Psillos 1995, 1999). The basic idea here is that the most serious departures from the truth in scientific theories tend to be errors about the natures of the basic phenomena rather than about their structural relations. In the light of this generalization, the structural realist proposes accepting the claims about causal structures (even unobservable ones) posited by well confirmed theories while withholding acceptance from what those theories say about the natures of the phenomena so related. To a good first approximation, one might think of structural realism as the view that, for any well established scientific theory, T, one should accept the Ramsey sentence obtained from T by replacing each theoretical term in T by a new variable, and then prefixing, to the resulting open sentence, existential quantifiers over those variables, where the quantification is understood to range over causal structures in nature.
Aside from its importance as a contribution to the literature on approximate truth, structural realism is significant in two other ways. In the first place, it reflects a general tendency in the literature on scientific realism to worry about the extent to which scientific realists must portray scientific knowledge as potentially resolving genuinely metaphysical questions. Putnam's internal realism and Fine's natural ontological attitude (discussed below) may be seen as important ontologically deflationary approaches to this question.
The other significance of structural realism lies in the fact that the distinction upon which it relies -- that between causal structures and natures -- may have been, in a certain sense, challenged by philosophers like Shoemaker (1980) who hold that properties, magnitudes, states and the like are defined by their contributions to the causal powers of things. It is an interesting question whether approaches to metaphysics like Shoemaker's are compatible with the approaches to approximation informed by structural realism.

4. The Neo-Kantian Challenge: First Version
Hanson (1958) and, especially, Kuhn (1970 -- first published 1962; see Scheffler 1967, Shapere 1964 for early discussions) raised significant challenges to scientific realism, arguing from the theory dependence of methods (and, especially, of observation) to the conclusion that a realist conception of the growth of approximate scientific knowledge cannot be sustained The intellectual impact of their work in the philosophy of science has been very different from the impact it has had in the rest of the humanities and in many of the social sciences. In the later disciplines the impact of Kuhn, especially, has been to underwrite the sort of anti-realist "postmodernism" discussed later in this essay. In the philosophy of science, by contrast, the impact of Hanson and Kuhn has been mainly to stimulate the articulation of naturalistic or causal conceptions of reference and essentialist conceptions of the definitions of scientific kinds and properties. [I am here presenting what might be thought of as the "standard" conception of Kuhn's position and of responses to it. There has been a recent revival of interest in Kuhn among analytic philosophers and others, and alternative readings of Kuhn are possible (see, e.g., Hoyningen-Huene 1993 and the papers collected in Hoyningen-Huene and Sankey 2001). Whatever the merits of less standard interpretations of Kuhn, it was the standard conception of his arguments that occasioned the realist responses discussed here.]
That arguments proceeding from the theory dependence of scientific methods and of measurement should have been deployed against realism is initially surprising. After all, most of the significant arguments for scientific realism emphasize theory dependence. Moreover, Kuhn's discussion of what he calls normal science seem to have exactly anticipated the abductive argument for realism discussed above. He insists that the success of research in normal science is explained, in significant part, because scientific practitioners have, as a result of their understanding of the paradigmatic theory, a quasi-metaphysical knowledge of the basic (and often unobservable) causal factors involved in the phenomena they study.
Where Kuhn's account departs from a realist conception of the growth of approximate knowledge is in his treatment of what he calls scientific revolutions. Although most empiricist philosophers of science had recognized the theory dependence of scientific methods even before the work of Hanson and Kuhn, it was Hanson's and Kuhn's work which made it clear that accepting the theory dependence of scientific methods raise the possibility of incommensurability between competing scientific theories (or paradigms): the possibility that in science there might be disagreements between theoretical perspectives such that there do not exist methods for their resolutions which are both rational and fair (to the competing positions).
What each author claimed was that this situation had actually obtained in important historical cases where, according to a realist perspective, one might think that the rational application of scientific methodology had resulted in the replacement of one theory by a more nearly accurate one. What was especially striking -- and challenging to a realist conception -- was Kuhn's claim that among the "scientific revolutions" where this had occurred was the transition from Newtonian mechanics to special relativity at the beginning of the 20th century.
What is important in understanding the realist response to Kuhn's claim about this particular historical case is that there are lots of experimental results (like, e.g., those which are ordinarily understood to reflect the increase of mass of particles in a cyclotron) such that they certainly look like cases in which a methodology -- including measurement procedures -- which is acceptable by both Newtonian and relativistic standards adjudicates in favor of the relativistic conception. Lots and lots of relativistic effects are such that they can be, apparently, detected and measured using instruments whose design begs no questions against either of the competing "paradigms." The transition from Newtonian mechanics to special relativity certainly looks like a textbook case of rational progression from, one theory to an even more accurate one.
Against this picture Kuhn argues that no such successive approximation occurred because Newtonian mechanics and relativity theory do not share a common subject matter regarding which the latter is a better approximation than the former. For example -- he argues -- the term "mass" as it occurs in Newtonian mechanics does not refer to the same magnitude as does the term "mass" in relativistic mechanics because "Newtonian mass is conserved; Einsteinian is convertible with energy. Only at low relative velocities may the two be measured in the same way, and even then they must not be conceived to be the same (102)."
In giving this remarkable argument Kuhn was tacitly relying on a conception of the referential semantics of scientific terms probably derived from the work of Carnap (see Carnap 1950; there are important controversies about the proper interpretation of Carnap -- see, e.g., Friedman 1987, 1991 -- but they are irrelevant to our story). The conception in question is a version of the standard empiricist "descriptivist" conception that the referent of a term is picked out by a description which constitutes the analytic definition of the term in question. According to the version Kuhn relies on, the analytic definition of a scientific term is provided by the most basic laws containing the term. Thus, as the example of "mass" illustrates, any change in the fundamental laws involving a scientific term must involve a change in referent (or reference failure, a possibility Kuhn 1970 does not discuss).

4.1 "Causal" and Naturalistic Theories of Reference
What was important for the development of realist philosophy of science was the fact that most philosophers of science were, at least tacitly, themselves inclined to some version of analytic descriptivism. The anti-realist consequences which Kuhn (and Hanson) derived from descriptivist conceptions let to the articulation by realists of alternative theories of reference. Characteristically, these theories followed the lead of Kripke (1971, 1972), whose work was mainly concerned with the semantics of modality, and Putnam (1972, 1975a, 1975b), whose work was mainly concerned with issues in the semantics of scientific terms. Each of them advocated a "causal" theory of reference according to which the reference relation between a term and its referent was a matter of there being the right sort of (chain of) causal relation(s) between uses of the term and (instances of) its referent. Numerous variations on this naturalistic theme -- some assigning importance to descriptive elements as well as causal relations in the establishment of reference -- have been proposed (see, e.g., Boyd 1999, Dretske 1981, Enç 1976, Field 1973, Kitcher 1992, Miller 1987, Papineau 1987, 1993, Psillos 1999). It is by now pretty well accepted that some departure from analytic descriptivism, involving some causal elements, is a crucial component of a realist approach to scientific knowledge.

4.2 Realism and the Revival of Essentialism
Kuhn's analytic descriptivism assigns to the analytic definition of a scientific term the role of fixing its referent. Once that role is assigned to other ("causal," "naturalistic") features of term use, it becomes possible to explore the issue of non-analytic a posteriori definitions of the kinds, magnitudes, etc. to which scientific terms refer. The work of Kripke and Putnam just cited gave rise to a class of theories according to which scientific kinds, etc. have real rather than nominal definitions ("real essences" rather than "nominal essences" in the sense of Locke 1689). The paradigm example is that the real definition, or essence, of water is described by the formula "H2O". It is by now a standard feature of realist conceptions of science that they incorporate some version or other of the idea that scientific kinds, categories, etc. (natural kinds) possess such real definitions (for interesting discussions of the development of this realist conception with special reference to biological kinds see Wilson 1999a, 1999b).
The idea that natural kinds possess such definitions has been consistently linked, in the realist literature, to discussions of the projectibility of predicates and hypotheses (Goodman 1954, Quine 1969). Only by reference to kinds (etc.) with real rather than nominal definitions -- only by, in some sense or other, "cutting the world at its (a posteriori defined) joints" -- are we able to fit our language use to the world in such a way as to make reliable induction and explanation possible (Boyd 1999; Psillos 1999; Putnam 1972, 1975a, 1975b; Sismondo 1996; Wilson 1999b).
One further point about real essences is important. The stock example of a real definition (H2O for water) might suggest that real definitions of scientific kinds (etc.) must, like logical empiricists' ideal nominal definitions, specify necessary and sufficient conditions for kind membership. In fact, examination of cases in those sciences which study complex phenomena indicate that some natural definitions may consist of families of imperfectly "clustered" properties, with the result that the kinds they define do not have precisely determinate boundaries (Boyd 1999, Wilson 1999b; but see also Hacking 1991a, 1991b). Realism may imply that there is, in that sense, vagueness in nature (contrast Putnam 1983).

4.3 The Metaphysics of Social Construction
Kuhn tacitly adopts a semantic conception according to which the most basic laws in a paradigm are exactly true by linguistic convention. He also claims that such laws provide quasi-metaphysical knowledge of basic causal factors. His claim that these laws are exactly true is what leads him to conclusions about the (semantic) history of recent physics which are prima facie implausible, and it is this feature of his semantic conception against which causal or naturalistic theories of reference are mainly directed.
The example of the semantics of the names of fictional characters indicates that the linguistic conventions operating in fiction make it possible to establish it by convention that certain claims about a character are approximately true without thereby establishing their exact truth. Versions of Kuhn's social constructivist position could, therefore, be formulated according to which the establishment of a paradigm imposes by convention, on the phenomena scientists study, a quasi-metaphysical structure which makes the central laws of the paradigm approximately (but not necessarily exactly) true.
Although Kuhn never considered this version of constructivism, it fits well with the tradition of anthropological relativism to which Kuhn's position is often assimilated. It is not refuted by arguments for causal or naturalistic theories of reference, nor does it entail wildly implausible claims about incommensurability in recent science. It is, however, pretty clearly an anti-realist position -- one which has resonances with the sorts of "postmodern" anti-realism discussed later in this essay. A realist rebuttal to it is available if one makes explicit, and defends, a piece of common, and philosophical, sense about the metaphysics of conventionality: the no non-causal contribution thesis (2N2C). According to 2N2C, human social practices make no non-causal contribution to the causal structure of the world, and are in that way metaphysically innocent (see Boyd 1999).

5. The Neo-Kantian Challenge: Second Version
Structural realism represents one attempt to defend scientific realism while being modest about its metaphysical implications. Putnam's "internal realism" and Fine's closely related "natural ontological attitude" (NOA) represent other attempts to follow scientific realists in taking the findings of science at "face value" while avoiding realism's excessively metaphysical understanding of those results (Putnam 1978, 1981, 1983a; Fine 1984, 1986a, 1986b, 1991; for a nice exposition see the Introduction to Papineau 1996; for critiques see Glymour 1982; Millikan 1986; Newton-Smith 1989a, 1989b; McMullin 1991; Papineau 1987).
"Internal realism" and NOA are not easy to explicate and are, almost certainly, not the same position. Nevertheless they share some important elements in common.
"Thin" Truth: Both Putnam and Fine assert that one can (and should) accept the well established theories of science (even about unobservable) as (probably) true, but that this should not be understood as accepting the "metaphysical realist" (Putnam's term) view that the statements which constitute those theories correspond to reality. They advocate a "thin" conception of truth rather than a correspondence conception. In Putnam's early papers defending internal realism he adopts a pragmatic conception of truth according to which truth of sentences is a matter of being epistemically acceptable in the limit of ideal inquiry. In the case of Fine, it's less clear exactly which thin conception of truth is at work.
De-Natured Naturalism: Naturalistic conceptions of reference have it that reference of scientific terms is a matter of certain causal patterns which relate the use of terms to instances of their referents. Relations of measurement and detection are supposed to be centrally involved in the establishment of reference, at least in paradigm cases. It is explicit in Putnam, and surely implied by Fine's position, that if the causal theory of reference, and related causal theories of detection and measurement, are understood as scientific theories (in linguistics, say, and -- for theories of measurement and detection -- theories in the relevant sciences) then they might, for all the internal realist or NOAer says, be well confirmed. What is to be denied is that such conceptions underwrite a correspondence conception of truth. They are bits of science, but not (also) bits of realist naturalist philosophy.

5.1 An Analogy with Phenomenalism
An analogy with issues regarding knowledge of the external world may be helpful here. One classical early logical empiricist response to questions about our knowledge of (observable) external objects was the phenomenalist strategy of representing external objects as "logical constructions" analytically defined in sense-datum terms (see, e.g., Carnap 1928). That certain experience patterns constituted experiences of, e.g., chairs was supposed to reflect, not a discovery about some epistemically important metaphysical relation between chairs and those patterns, but, instead, the implication of the analytic definition of "chair" in the sense-datum language.
Nevertheless, nothing in the phenomenalist project was supposed to preclude the possibility that psychologists studying perception might discover that those very experience patterns are caused by light reflected off chairs and stimulating the retina is particular ways. This would be unobjectionable as a bit of empirical science, but it was not to be understood as positing an epistemically relevant relation of detection and representation between the experiential pattern and chairs, understood as experience-independent features of the world. It could not be understood as a component in philosophical justification of the claim that we know about, and "chair" refers to, experience-independent chairs.
By contrast, non-foundationalist "causal" or "reliabilist" conceptions of perceptual knowledge in the tradition initiated by Goldman (1967, 1976) would treat the relevant discovery both as an empirical scientific discovery and as a component of a (naturalistic) philosophical (and epistemically relevant) explanation of why our chair beliefs sometimes represent knowledge about (experience independent) chairs. Similarly, if the psychological findings in question were incorporated into a suitable empirical theory of language use they could, on a causal or naturalistic conception of reference, underwrite the philosophical conception that "chair" refers to (experience independent) chairs.

5.2 Non-Foundationalist Epistemology Again
What this suggests is that a defense of realism against internal realism or NOA must follow the lead of non-foundational causal theories of knowledge, and of perception in particular, in insisting that scientific findings about, e.g., the measurement and detection of theoretical entities, and about the reference of scientific terms have philosophical as well as scientific relevance (see, e.g., Boyd 1999, Byerly and Lazara 1973,Hacking 1982, Psillos 1999).

5.3 Challenges Regarding the Epistemology and Metaphysics of Reference and Kinds
The arguments Putnam offers in defense of internal realism are complex, and (as the critiques cited indicate) both controversial and sometimes hard to explicate. Nevertheless, it seems pretty clear that Putnam attributes to "metaphysical realism" something like the following commitments:
Reference is a relation between linguistic entities and entirely extra-linguistic (and in that sense independently existing) natural kinds. Natural kinds (magnitudes, etc.) are, somehow or other, out in the world, and available for discovery and naming. There is a single set of such natural entities somehow given by the structure of the world itself, independently of human practice.
The reference relation between natural kind (magnitude, etc.) terms and their referents is a purely causal matter, where the purity in question is a matter of the reference relation's being definable without significantly acknowledging descriptive elements or human intentions.
If one accepts this picture of scientific realism, understood metaphysically, then it is natural to think that what makes the associated conception of truth a correspondence conception is that reference is seen as a relation between terms and such independently existing kinds. The realist correspondence conception, so conceived, is subject to two important challenges.
First, if we think of natural kinds as things somehow independent of linguistic and methodological practices, then there are lots of natural kinds out there, and it is difficult to see how the causal conception of reference fixing could explain how a natural kind term could ever have a unique referent. This problem is exacerbated if one thinks of reference as being purely causal in the way just indicated, since intentional and descriptive factors, which might otherwise be thought to reduce the ambiguity of the reference relation, are set aside. Such considerations seem to be the basis of the "model theoretic" arguments in Putnam 1978, 1980) against "metaphysical realism."
Secondly, reference to natural kinds is supposed to explain the inductive successes of scientific practice, so there must be some quite intimate connection between natural kinds and the conceptual machinery of the sciences. If one thinks of realist theories as entailing that natural kinds are independent of that machinery, it is hard to see how the explanation could work unless it rested on something like a objective idealist theory according to which natural kinds are somehow metaphysically "fitted" for explanation and induction independently of the relevant practices. Such an assumption is profoundly at odds with the philosophical naturalism and metaphysical materialism ordinarily associated with scientific realism. This sort of consideration appears to underwrite aspects of Putnam's criticism of materialist metaphysical realism in "Why There Isn't a Ready Made World" (Putnam 1983a).

5.4 Realist responses
Of these two challenges, the first has received much more attention from scientific realists. There has been widespread acceptance of the view that descriptive and/or intentional factors must figure in any scientific realist account of reference (e.g., Boyd 1999, Enç 1976, Kitcher 1992, Papineau 1979, Psillos 1999).
Much less has been said by realists about the sense, if any, in which scientific realism is committed to there being natural kinds (etc.) which are independent of us. Psillos (1999), for example, discusses problems with pure causal theories of reference extensively, but takes it to be a basic posit of scientific realism that "…the world has a definite and mind-independent natural-kind structure" (xix). Boyd (1999) offers an alternative approach according to which, like natural kind terms and classificatory practices, natural kinds themselves should be thought of as social artifacts deployed in achieving an appropriate fit or accommodation between inductive and explanatory practices and relevant causal structures.
Whether the intrusion of descriptive and intentional notions into realist accounts of reference, or the treatment of natural kinds as social artifacts, is compatible with the main spirit of scientific realism depends on the sense(s) in which scientific realism should be understood as entailing that the phenomena scientists study are "mind independent." A possible response to this question, compatible with the proposals just mentioned, is that the relevant sense of mind independence is fully captured by the no non-causal contribution doctrine discussed earlier.

6. The "Post-modern" Challenge
Most recent work in the relatively new discipline of science studies (see, e.g, Biagioli 1999; Galison 1987; Latour and Wolgar 1979; Latour 1987; Pickering 1984, 1995; Pinch 1985; Shapin 1982, 1994; Shapin and Schaffer 1985) and a significant body of work in feminist philosophy of science or feminist aproaches to particular science (see, e.g., Alcoff and Potter 1993; Antony 1993; Antony and Witt 1993; Conkey and Spector 1984; Fuss 1989; Gero and Conkey 1991; Harding 1986, 1987, 1991; Harding and Hintikka 1983; Harding and O'Barr 1987; Hartsock 1987; Haslanger 1993; Keller 1983: Longino 1989, 1990; Tuana 1989; Wright 1996; Wylie 1991, 1993, 2000; Wylie and Okruhlik 1987) has been to some extent influenced by, or has engaged with, anti-realist "postmodern" conceptions according to which such phenomena as science, knowledge, evidence and truth are social constructions, in some sense or other which implies that one should reject the idea that scientific practices achieve an approximate representational fit of some sort or other between the content of scientific theories and the world or reality.
Although serious interchanges between scientific realism and these approaches have not developed to the level of exchanges between, e.g., scientific realist approaches and logical empiricist or neo-Kantian ones, a number of philosophers of science have defended a realist approach against post modern relativism and skepticism (see, e.g., Boyd 1999; Kitcher 1993; Papineau 1998; Pettit 1998; Sismondo 1993a, 1993b, 1996). Several factors are probably important in determining the dimensions of the dispute between realists and postmodernists.

6.1 Boundary Work
Sociologists of science have identified a feature of scientific work which is especially important when new (sub)disciplines are being established. Practitioners of emerging disciplines devote considerable effort to distinguishing the approach of their new disciplines from the approaches of more fully established disciplines, often by adopting a substantially adversarial stance towards them. This phenomenon has been played out in the establishment of science studies and (to a somewhat lesser extent)feminist philosophy. In each of these cases, mainstream realist and empiricist approaches to epistemology have been special targets of such adversarial stance taking. In the case of science studies, to a very good first approximation, the "boundary work" foundations of the emerging discipline rest on a critique of epistemology and of the correspondence conception of truth. This perfectly ordinary, and non-culpable, boundary work resistance to traditional epistemology and the correspondence theory has proven to be a barrier to communication between mainstream philosophers of science and others in science studies.

6.2 Postmodern Responses to Naive Empiricist Conceptions of Objectivity
There is a prevalent conception of scientific objectivity which is historically associated with empiricist conceptions of science, even though it is sufficiently naive that probably no professional empiricist philosopher of science ever defended all of its components. According to it, the objects of scientific study are natural kinds (etc.) which are
independent of human practices,
defined by
eternal,
unchanging,
ahistorical, and
intrinsic
necessary and sufficient membership conditions;
referred to in
fundamental,
exceptionless,
eternal, and
ahistorical
laws; and
discovered by the deployment of
eternal,
ahistorical,
politically and culturally neutral, and
foundational
scientific methods.
To a significant extent, anti-realist postmodern conceptions of science take these components of naive empiricism to be definitive of the notion of scientific objectivity. Postmodern students of science hold -- correctly (Boyd 1999; Sismondo 1993a, 1993b, 1996; Knorr Cetina 1993) -- that nothing in actual scientific practice even remotely fits these criteria for objectivity. On this basis they often reach the anti-realist conclusion that scientific research never achieves objective knowledge. It is characteristic of defenses of realism against postmodern anti-realism that they deny, about one or more of the components mention, that they are necessary for objective knowledge.

6.3 "Quantum Superposition" of Conceptions of Social Construction
There are, in the literature and in intellectual discourse, roughly three versions of "social constructivism," the view that science is the "social construction of reality."
Neo-Kantian social constructivism. This is the view discussed earlier according to which the adoption of a scientific paradigm successfully imposes a quasi-metaphysical causal structure on the phenomena scientists study.
Science-as-social-process social constructivism. This is the view that the production of scientific findings is a social process subject to the same sorts of influences -- cultural, economic, political, sociological, etc. -- which affect any other social process.
Debunking social constructivism. This is the skeptical position according to which the findings of work in the sciences are determined exclusively, or in large measure, not by the "facts," but instead by relations of social power within the scientific community and the broader community within which research is conducted.
These are quite distinct positions. For example, 1. and 3. are mutually inconsistent, and 2. is compatible with either 1., or 3., or with standard logical empiricist and scientific realist conceptions. Nevertheless, in science studies and in other disciplines influenced by postmodernism they tend to become conflated.
In the first place, many practitioners in such disciples, for reasons rehearsed above, take 2. to imply that traditional realist and empiricist conceptions are mistaken. Moreover, having adopted 2., they tend to adopt a position which looks like a quantum superposition of 1. and 3., oscillating between thinking of scientific practice as (really) constructing the (quasi-metaphysical) truth and denying that it leads to truth in any metaphysically interesting sense.
The inconsistencies involved are made clearest in cases in which scientific theories of race and gender are said to be "social constructions." Often the intent here is to engage in scientific and political criticism but, in so far as the neo-Kantian, and the fully debunking conceptions of social construction are simultaneously operative, authors often have a difficult time finding the resources for saying that such theories are really (really!) false. [For discussions of these conflations and their impact on methodological and political criticism see Sismondo 1993a, 1993b, 1996; Knorr Cetina 1993; Boyd 1999.]

6.4 Naturalism and the symmetry thesis
In one of the founding documents of contemporary science studies, Barnes and Bloor (1982) criticize a tendency in the history, philosophy, and sociology of science to treat true and false scientific theories asymmetrically: explaining the acceptance of true theories as the ordinary and to-be-expected result of applying the scientific method, but explaining the acceptance of false theories by appealing instead to the operation of "social factors." They propose that explanations for the acceptance of scientific theories should be symmetrical, appealing to the same sorts of factors in explaining the acceptance of true and false theories.
In science studies, it has been nearly universal to accept the symmetry thesis and to interpret it as requiring that truth or the facts not be treated as among the factors involved in explaining the adoption of scientific theories. Almost certainly, a defense of scientific realism in the light of the symmetry thesis will require insisting that a naturalistic scientific realism does, by considering facts of all sorts potentially relevant to the explanation of the acceptance of scientific theories, satisfy the requirements of the symmetry thesis. The locus classicus for this approach is Antony 1993; it is developed in Sismondo 1999.

6.5 Essentialism
One of the most important sources of resistance to scientific realism among feminist philosophers has been the conception that realism underwrites essentialism and that essentialism is a central component of racist and sexist ideology (see Fuss 1989 for a discussion). A naturalistic version of scientific realism does entail a sort of essentialism about natural kinds (etc.) but that sort of essentialism need not have the form suggested by the stereotype of scientific objectivity discussed above, and need not be inimical to critiques of scientific racism or sexism (Boyd 1999, Sismondo 1996). In particular, it is compatible with the sort of realist naturalism discussed here that social categories like race and gender might have as their essences a certain role in the stabilization or justification of particular sorts of historically situated oppression and exploitation. Similarly, realist naturalism is compatible with the view that some social categories (like races and genders) or psychological categories (like mental illnesses) are real, but are in some respects artifacts of classificatory (and other) social practices (see, e.g., Hacking 1986a, 1986b). All that is required by naturalistic realism is that the contribution of social practices not violate 2N2C.

6.6 Concluding Remark
Scientific realism is, by the lights of most of its defenders, the sciences' own philosophy of science. Considerations of the significant philosophical challenges which it faces indicate that it can be effectively defended only by the adoption of a metaphilosophical approach which is also closely tied to the science, viz., some version or other of philosophical naturalism.

Credit: stan/pla

Religious Diversity (Pluralism)

2005-10-14T23:41:00.000-07:00

With respect to many, if not most issues, there exist significant differences of opinion among individuals who seem to be equally knowledgeable and sincere. Individuals who apparently have access to the same information and are equally interested in the truth affirm incompatible perspectives on, for instance, significant social, political, and economic issues. Such diversity of opinion, though, is nowhere more evident than in the area of religious thought. On almost every religious issue, honest, knowledgeable people hold significantly diverse, often incompatible beliefs.
Religious diversity of this sort can fruitfully be explored in many ways — for instance, from psychological, anthropological, or historical perspectives. The current discussion, however, will concern itself primarily with those key issues surrounding religious diversity with which philosophers, especially analytic philosophers of religion, are most concerned at present. Specifically, our discussion will focus primarily on the following questions: How pervasive is religious diversity? Does the reality of this diversity require a response? Can a person who acknowledges religious diversity remain justified in claiming just one perspective to be correct? If so, is it morally justifiable to attempt to convert others to a different perspective? Can it justifiably be claimed that only one religion offers a path into the eternal presence of God? The answers to such questions are not simply academic. They increasingly have great impact on how we treat others, both personally and corporately.
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1. The Pervasiveness of Religious Diversity
Religious diversity exists most noticeably at the level of basic theistic systems. For instance, while within Christianity, Judaism, and Islam it is believed that God is a personal deity, within Hinayana (Theravada) Buddhism God's existence is denied and within Hinduism the concept of a personal deity is, in an important sense, illusory. Within many forms of Christianity and Islam, the ultimate goal is subjective immortality in God's presence, while within Hinayana Buddhism the ultimate goal is the extinction of the self as a discrete, conscious entity. However, significant, widespread diversity also exists within basic theistic systems. For example, within Christianity, believers differ significantly on the nature of God. Some see God as all-controlling, others as self-limiting, and still others as incapable in principle of unilaterally controlling any aspect of reality. Some believe God to have infallible knowledge only of all that has occurred or is occurring, others claim God also has knowledge of all that will actually occur, while those who believe God possesses middle knowledge add that God knows all that would actually occur in any possible context. Some believe the moral principles stipulated by God for correct human behavior flow from God's nature and thus that such principles determine God's behavior, while others believe that God acts in accordance with a different set of moral rules, that for God what is right is simply whatever God does. Some believe that only those who have consciously "given their lives to Christ" will spend eternity in God's presence. Others believe that many who have never even heard the name of Jesus will enter God's presence, while others yet do not even believe subjective immortality (a conscious afterlife) to be a reality.
While it is still somewhat popular in philosophical circles today to focus on diversity among basic theistic systems, there is a growing awareness that the same basic questions (and responses) that apply to inter-system diversity (for example, to differing perspectives on the most accurate basic theistic conception of God) apply just as clearly, and in exactly the same sense, to intra-system diversity (for example, to differing perspectives within Christianity over the extent of God's knowledge). And there is increasing awareness that the practical import of intra-theistic diversity is just as significant as is that of inter-theistic diversity. For most Christians, for instance, the practical significance of retaining or modifying beliefs about God's power or knowledge is just as great as retaining or modifying the belief that Christianity is a better theistic explanatory hypothesis than is Islam (Basinger 2001, 2-3).

2. Possible Responses to Religious Diversity
One obvious response to religious diversity is to maintain that since there exists no divine reality — since the referent in all religious truth claims related to the divine is nonexistent — all such claims are false. Another possible response, put forth by religious relativists, is that there is no one truth when considering mutually incompatible religious claims about reality; more than one of the conflicting sets of specific truth-claims can be correct (Runzo 1988, 351-357). However, most current discussions of religious diversity presuppose a realist theory of truth — that there is a truth to the matter.
When the topic is approached in this way, philosophers normally center discussions of religious truth claims on three basic categories: religious exclusivism, religious nonexclusivism, and religious pluralism. For the purpose of our discussion, someone is a religious exclusivist with respect to a given issue when she believes the religious perspective of only one basic theistic system (for instance, only one of the major world religions) or only one of the variants within a basic theistic system (for instance, within Christianity) to be the truth or at least closer to the truth than any other religious perspective on this issue.[1] Someone is a religious non-exclusivist with respect to a given issue when she denies that the religious perspective of any basic theistic system or variant thereof is superior to all other religious perspectives on this issue. And someone is a religious pluralist with respect to a given issue when she claims not only (as a non-exclusivist) that no specific religious perspective is superior but also makes the positive claim that the religious perspectives of more than one basic theistic system or variant thereof are equally close to the truth.[2]

3. Religious Diversity and Epistemic Obligation
No philosopher denies that the awareness of (realization of) seeming religious diversity sometimes does in fact have an impact on an exclusivist — from causing minor uneasiness to significantly reducing her level of confidence in the truth of certain beliefs to precipitating belief abandonment. This is simply an empirical claim about psychological states and behaviors (Alston 1988, 442-446; Plantinga 2000, 189).
How should, though, an exclusivist coming to an awareness of religious diversity — the awareness that seemingly sincere, knowledgeable individuals differ with her on an issue of religious significance — respond to the reality of such diversity? How should, for instance, the devout Buddhist or Hindu or Christian who comes to realize that others who seem as knowledgeable and devout hold incompatible religious perspectives respond? Or how should the Christian who believes the Bible clearly portrays a God with total control over all aspects of reality respond to the realization that other seemingly sincere, devout, "Bible-believing" Christians see the Bible as clearly portraying a God who has chosen not to control what occurs in those contexts in which humans have been granted meaningful moral freedom? Can an exclusivist justifiably disregard such diversity? If not, is the exclusivist under some obligation to attempt to resolve such epistemic conflicts — engage in belief assessment? Or would it at least be a good idea for her to do so?
Philosophers continue to differ significantly on which response is correct. There are, of course, religious individuals (and groups) who believe it is inappropriate to subject religious beliefs to assessment of any sort. Certain individuals (sometimes called fideists) have argued, for instance, that religious beliefs are not of a type properly subject to rational assessment and/or that assessing such beliefs demonstrates a lack of faith (Peterson et al. 2003, 45-48). But few philosophers currently hold this position. Most maintain that the exclusivist has at least the right to assess her beliefs in the face of religious diversity.
There continues, however, to be significant debate on whether an exclusivist is under an obligation to engage in such belief assessment. Some philosophers agree with Robert McKim that "disagreement about an issue or area of inquiry provides reason to think that each side has an obligation to examine beliefs about the issue" (McKim 2001, 140). The underlying assumption here is that when an individual's perspective on any issue, be it personal, social, economic, political, or religious, has important consequences for that person or others, then that individual is under an obligation to find the truth of the matter — to maximize truth. And an individual, in this case a religious exclusivist, can only attempt to maximize truth or avoid error in the face of diverse claims, it is argued, if she attempts to resolve the conflict.
The contention here, it must be emphasized, is not that such resolution is always possible or that an exclusivist must necessarily give up her belief if no resolution is forthcoming. Discussion concerning those issues is yet to come. The claim, rather, is only that the exclusivist is obligated at the very least to assess the evidence for and against the beliefs in question and to try to "get a sense of the appeal and of the concern of those who advocate them" (McKim 2001, 146).
Others philosophers disagree. For example, Alvin Plantinga acknowledges that if a proponent of a specific religious perspective has no reason to doubt that those with whom he disagrees really are on equal epistemic footing, then he is under a prima facie obligation to attempt to resolve the conflict. However, Plantinga denies that the Christian exclusivist need ever acknowledge that he is facing true epistemic parity — need ever admit that he actually is differing with true epistemic peers. Although the Christian exclusivist, we are told, may grant that those with whom he is in disagreement have not violated any epistemic duty and may know of no arguments that would convince those with whom he is in disagreement that they are wrong and he is right, the exclusivist is likely to believe that he "has been epistemically favored in some way." He might believe, for instance, that he has been graced by "the Internal Witness of the Holy Spirit; or perhaps he thinks the Holy Spirit preserves the Christian church from serious error, at least with respect to the fundamentals of Christian belief; or perhaps he thinks that he has been converted by divine grace, so that he now sees what before was obscure to him — a blessing not so far bestowed upon the dissenters" (Plantinga 1997, 296).
Moreover, if any beliefs of this type are true, Plantinga contends, then the Christian exclusivist is quite probably "in a better position, epistemically speaking," than those who reject the exclusivistic belief in question. Therefore, since it cannot be demonstrated that Christian belief of this sort is very likely false, the Christian remains justified in maintaining that the proponents of other religious perspectives are not actually on equal epistemic footing. And the same, Plantinga acknowledges, might well be true for exclusivists in other religious belief systems (Plantinga 1997, 296).
The strength of this line of reasoning depends in part on the debatable issue of who shoulders the burden of proof on the question of equal epistemic footing. Those siding with Plantinga argue in essence that unless an exclusivist must acknowledge on epistemic grounds that are (or should be) accepted by all rational people that those holding incompatible beliefs are actually on equal footing, the exclusivist can justifiably deny that this is so and thus need not engage in belief assessment. Those supporting obligatory belief assessment argue that it is the exclusivist who shoulders the burden of proof. Unless it can be demonstrated on epistemic grounds that are (or should be) accepted by all rational people that proponents of the competing perspectives are not actually on equal epistemic footing, the exclusivist must consider his challenger on equal epistemic footing and is thus obligated to engage in belief assessment (Basinger 2001, 26-27).
Another influential type of challenge to obligatory belief assessment in the face of religious diversity has been raised by Jerome Gellman. The focus of his challenge centers on what he identifies as rock bottom beliefs. Such beliefs, as Gellman defines them, are the epistemic givens in a religious belief system — the assumed, foundational truths upon which all else is built. Gellman grants that if a religious belief affirmed by an exclusivist is not rock bottom (is not a foundational assumption), then it may well be subject to obligatory belief assessment in the face of religious diversity. However, he argues, since belief assessment only makes sense when one isn't certain that the belief in question is true, and since rock bottom religious beliefs are among the foundational truths — the basic, assumed truths — in an exclusivist's epistemic system, no assessment is necessary. Rather, when an exclusivist encounters a challenge to such a belief — for example, a challenge to her rock bottom belief in God's ultimate control over all earthly affairs — she can, utilizing the G. E. Moore switch, justifiably maintain that because her rock bottom belief is true, the competing belief can be rejected (Gellman 1993, 345-364; Gellman 1998, 229-235).
Furthermore, Gellman has added more recently, even if we grant that rock bottom beliefs are at times open to belief assessment, the exclusivist need not engage in such assessment in the face of religious diversity unless she finds the awareness of such diversity causes her to lose significant confidence in her own perspective. In the absence of this type of internal conflict, she "may rationally invoke her unreflective religious belief to defeat opposing religious claims, without having to consider the question any further" (Gellman 2000, 403).
Some, though, remain uneasy with Gellman's contention that we need only assess those basic, rock bottom beliefs in which we have lost confidence. It is clearly the case that exclusivists do sometimes lose confidence in beliefs in which they once had a great deal of confidence, and that this was frequently due to the fact that these beliefs were rationally assessed. Consequently, if we assume, as it seems Gellman does, that one of our epistemic goals should be to maximize truth, then it doesn't appear, some maintain, that the fact that a challenged basic belief isn't at present "squeaking" is a sufficient reason for the religious exclusivist faced with diversity of opinion not to engage in belief assessment (Basinger 2001, 42-43).[3]

4. Religious Diversity and Justified Belief
What if we assume, as do most philosophers today, that belief assessment in the face of religious diversity will not normally resolve debate over conflicting religious perspectives in an objective manner? That is, what if we assume that while the consideration of criteria such as self-consistency and comprehensiveness can rule out certain options, there exists no set of criteria that will allow us to resolve most religious epistemic disputes (either between or within religious perspectives) in a neutral, nonquestion-begging fashion (Peterson et al. 2003, 40-53)? In what epistemic position does this then place the exclusivist?
The answer, as some see it, is that the exclusivist can no longer justifiably maintain that her exclusivistic beliefs are true. J.C. Schellenberg, for example, argues that because no more than one among a set of incompatible truth claims can be true, a disputant in a debate over such claims is justified in continuing to maintain that her claim is true only if she possesses nonquestion-begging justification for believing the incompatible claim of any competitor to be false. However, since no disputant in religious conflicts possesses such justification, no disputant can be justified "in holding her own claim to be true." Or, as Schellenberg states this conclusion in another context, we must conclude that in the absence of objective, nonquestion-begging justification, none of the disputants in religious conflicts "has justification for supposing the others' claims false" (Schellenberg 2000, 213).
David Silver comes to a similar conclusion: "[Exclusivists] should provide independent evidence for the claim that they have a special source of religious knowledge … or they should relinquish their exclusivist religious beliefs" (Silver 2001, 11). Julian Willard goes even further. He argues that when exclusivists become aware of diversity and cannot demonstrate that their perspective is superior to that of their competitors, they not only lose the right to hold the exclusivistic belief in question justifiably, they have an epistemic obligation to "set about abandoning" the religious practices based on this exclusivistic belief (Willard 2001, 68).
Others have not gone this far, arguing rather that while the exclusivist need not abandon religious belief in the face of unresolved conflict, she should hold her exclusive religious beliefs tentatively. Such tentativeness, as McKim puts it, does not entail never-ending inquiry. What it means, rather, is that in the face of unresolved religious diversity, one should be open to the possibility “that one or more of the [alternatives] may be correct … that the position one had thought to be correct may be wrong [while] one of the other positions may be right" (McKim 2001, 154-55). Joseph Runzo and Gary Gutting agree. According to Runzo, "all faith commitments must be held with the humbling recognition that they can be misguided, for our knowledge is never sure" (Runzo 1993, 236). Gutting argues that only interim, not decisive assent is justified in the face of unresolved diversity and that "those who give merely interim assent must recognize the equal value, as an essential element in the continuing discussion, of beliefs contrary to theirs" (Gutting 1982, 108). Moreover, argues McKim, such tentativeness in the face of diversity has an important payoff. It can lead to deep tolerance: the allowance “that those with whom you disagree are people whom it is worthwhile to approach with rational arguments" (McKim 2001, 178) And personal tolerance of this sort, we are told, may well lead to a more tolerant and open society that will permit and even encourage a diversity of opinion on all issues, including opinions on religious matters.
William Alston represents an even more charitable response to exclusivism. His perspective is based on what he sees as a crucial distinction between two types of epistemic disputes: those in which "it is clear what would constitute non-circular grounds for supposing one of the contestants to be superior to the others” and those in which it is not. In the former case — in those cases in which there is a commonly accepted "procedure for settling disputes" — it isn't clear, he acknowledges, that it is rational for a person to continue to maintain that her position is superior (Alston 1988, 442-443).
However, as Alston sees it, there exists no such common ground for settling basic epitemic disputes over religious truth claims, and this, he contends, alters the situation drastically. It still remains true, he grants, that the reality of religious diversity diminishes justification. But the fact that "we are at a loss to specify [common ground]” means, he argues, that with respect to those religious perspectives that are self-consistent, it is not "irrational for one to remain an exclusivist" — not irrational for the proponent of any religious perspective to continue to hold that her perspective is true. That is, as Alston sees it, given the absence of common ground for resolving disputes, the proponent of any self-consistent religious perspective can justifiably continue to believe this perspective to be true "despite not being able to show that it is epistemically superior to the competition" (Alston 1988, 443-446).
In fact, at one point he goes even further. Because there exists at present no neutral ground for adjudicating religious epistemic conflicts, it is not only the case, Alston argues, that an exclusivist is justified (rational) in continuing to consider her own perspective superior. Since we do not even know in most cases what a non-circular reason for demonstrating superiority would look like, the "only rational course" for an exclusivist "is to sit tight" with the beliefs "which [have] served so well in guiding [her] activity in the world." Or, to generalize this point, Alston speaks for those who maintain that, given the absence of common ground for adjudicating disputes concerning self-consistent religious perspectives, it is not rational for an exclusivist to stop maintaining that her system is superior (Alston 1988, 444).[4]
Philip Quinn represents yet another, increasingly popular approach. While he agrees with Alston that in the face of diversity an exclusivist may well be justified in continuing to "sit tight" — in continuing to maintain that her religious perspective is true — he denies that this is the only rational course of action available (Quinn 2000, 235-246). The basis for this position is his distinction between a pre-Kantian and a Kantian understanding of religious belief. To have a pre-Kantian understanding of religious belief is to assume that we have (or at least can have) access to the truth as it really is. It is to believe, for instance, that we do (or at least can in principle) know what God is really like. To have a Kantian understanding of religious belief is to assume that although there is a literal noumenal reality, our understanding of this reality (and thus our truth claims about this reality) will of necessity be relative to the cultural/social/psychological grids through which our conceptualization of this noumenal reality is processed. It is to believe, for instance, that although there is a divine reality about which we can make truth claims, our understanding of (and thus our truth claims about) this divine reality will necessarily to some extent be conditioned by the ways in which our environment (our culture in the broadest sense) has shaped our categories of thought (Quinn 2000, 241-242).
Alston, Quinn contends, is essentially working off of a pre-Kantian model of religious belief when he encourages religious exclusivists to sit tight in the face of peer conflict since, in the absence of any objective basis for determining which perspective is right, the exclusivist has no sufficient reason not to do so. Quinn does not deny that this pre-Kantian approach is justifiable and thus does not deny that someone who follows Alston's advice to sit tight is rational in doing so. However, Quinn believes that "it should not be taken for granted that any of the [contending perspectives] in its present form is correct." Hence, he believes it is equally justifiable for an exclusivist to adopt a Kantian approach to religious belief. Specifically, he believes it is equally justifiable for an exclusivist to assume that whatever any of us can know about the truth of the matter will never be a description of religious reality that is free of significant "cultural" conditioning. Accordingly, it is also rational, he maintains, for exclusivists encountering diverse truth claims to "seek a more inclusivist or pluralistic understanding of their own faith" by modifying their beliefs to bring them "into line with such an understanding" (Quinn 2000, 242).
In short, as Quinn sees it, those who hold a position such as Alston's have left us, at least implicitly, with a false dilemma: either we find common ground on which we can objectively determine which religious perspective is the truth or we sit tight with what we have. However, Quinn holds that, once we realize it is perfectly reasonable for a person to assume that the proponent of no religious perspective has (or even could have) an accurate understanding of divine reality as it really is, another rational alternative appears. We then see that it is also perfectly rational for a person to begin to revise her own phenomenological perspective on the truth in a way that will allow for greater overlap with the phenomenological perspectives of others.
The approach to conflicting religious perspectives Quinn outlines has in fact become increasingly popular in exclusivistic circles. Consider, for example, the ongoing debate among Christians over how God brought the rest of reality into existence. Some still claim the Bible clearly teaches that God created the "heavens and the earth" in six twenty-four hour periods about ten thousand years ago. Others still maintain that the fact that "a day is to the Lord as a thousand years" means that while God is directly responsible for what the Bible says was created each "day," it is most reasonable to believe that the time frame for each instance of creative activity could well have been millions, or even billions, of years. And then there are those who still hold that God's direct creative activity consisted primarily of orchestrating the "Big Bang." However, more recently, many Christians have taken a more Kantian approach. Based on their assumption that we may well not have access, even through Scripture, to exactly how God was involved in the creative process, they have modified what is to be considered essential to Christianity on this issue. Rather than affirming any of the specific explanations of how God created all else, they affirm a more general contention compatible with each of these specific explanations: that God is in some manner directly responsible for the existence of all else. They have, in Quinn's terms, thinned their core theologies in a way that reconciles the divergent perspectives.
Everyone realizes, though, that moving toward a thinner theology and thicker phenomenology can resolve the epistemic tension produced by religious diversity only to a certain extent. Even if we assume that it is perfectly reasonable, and possibly even preferable, for exclusivists to thin their theologies (and thus thicken their phenomenologies) in an attempt to minimize that core of truths that must be accepted to remain proponents of the specific theological perspectives in question, to be an exclusivist — even a strongly Kantian exclusivist — is still to believe that one's religious perspective is superior in the sense that it is in some important way closer to the truth than are the competing perspectives of others. Accordingly, while thinning her theology may be a rational choice that can minimize conflict, no one is arguing that it can be the sole response for an exclusivist. At some point, a person must either cease to be the exclusivist she was or choose one of the other options: acknowledge that the belief in question isn't true, hold it more tentatively, or sit tight with what she has.

5. Religious Diversity and Apologetics
Let us assume that an exclusivist is justified in retaining her exclusivistic belief in the face of religious diversity. Specifically, let us assume that the exclusivist can justifiably defend the epistemic right to retain her exclusivity in the face of such diversity. Ought she stop there or can she justifiably go further? Can she justifiably try to convince others that she is right — can she justifiably try to convert others to her perspective? And if so, is she in any sense obligated to do so?
Most who believe that such proselytization is not justified challenge the moral character of an exclusivist who attempts to convince those with whom she differs to accept her perspective as the sole truth. For instance, Wilfred Cantwell Smith argues that "except at the cost of insensitivity or delinquency, it is morally not possible actually to go out into the world and say to devout, intelligent fellow human beings [that] we believe that we know God and we are right; you believe that you know God, and you are totally wrong" (Smith 1976, 14). And when Runzo claims that exclusivism can be "highly presumptive" and "morally repugnant" (Runzo 1988, 348) or John Hick maintains that exclusivists often manifest a sort of arbitrariness or arrogance (Hick, 1989, 235), they too appear to be challenging the moral character of those who attempt to convert others to their perspective.
Not surprisingly, most exclusivists deny that it is insensitive or arrogant or presumptive for an exclusivist to attempt to convince others that her perspective is the correct one — to tell others that she is right and they are wrong. Since we are justified in believing our position to be superior to others — closer to the truth — it is difficult to see, exclusivists argue, how our attempts to convince others that they should agree can be considered arrogant or presumptive or insensitive, especially if we believe that it is important for the welfare of those we are attempting to convert that they do so. Moreover, exclusivists continue, while it is surely true that some conversion is attempted for what we would all agree are morally inappropriate reasons — for instance, for financial gain or to gain power over others — there is little empirical evidence that exclusivists in general have these motives. It is probably true, rather, that many, if not most, exclusivists who proselytize do so primarily because they believe they have what others need and are willing (sometimes at great personal cost) to share it with them.
Are, though, exclusivists required to proselytize? Many exclusivistic religious systems do require proselytization, and most philosophers who believe that exclusivists are justified in retaining their exclusivistic beliefs in the face of religious diversity believe also that these exclusivists can justifiably feel obligated to attempt to "convert" their epistemic competitors. With very few exceptions, though, philosophers deny that exclusivists are under any general obligation to proselytize, regardless of whether the exclusivistic system in question demands or encourages such proselytization.[5]

6. Religious Diversity and the Eternal Destiny of Humankind
The discussion of religious diversity thus far has been framed in terms of truth claims (in terms of justified belief) because it is increasingly recognized by philosophers as the best way to access the most important questions that the reality of such diversity forces upon us. Historically, however, there has been one specific "diversity issue" with which philosophers have been most concerned: the question of the eternal destiny of humankind, that is, the question of who can spend eternity in God's presence — who can obtain salvation.
Those who are religious exclusivists on this question claim that those, and only those, who have met the criteria set forth by one religious perspective can spend eternity in God's presence.[6] Adherents of other religious perspectives, it is acknowledged, can affirm truth related to some or many issues. But with respect to the question of salvation (one's eternal destiny), a person must be told about, acknowledge, and follow the unique way. Or, to be more specific, as salvific exclusivists see it, the criteria for salvation specified by the one correct religious perspective are both epistemologically necessary in the sense that those seeking salvation must be aware of these conditions for salvation and ontologically necessary in the sense that these conditions must really be met (Peterson et al. 2003, 270).[7]
It is important to note, though, that not only Christians are salvific exclusivists. There are Muslims, for example, who hold that only those who commit themselves to Allah can spend eternity with the Divine. Also important to note is that differing, sometimes even conflicting, exclusivistic claims can exist within the same world religion. For instance, significant intra-Christian debate has centered historically on the eternal fate of young children who die. For some, the answer was (and still is) that all children who die are separated from God eternally. Others have believed that God "elects" some for heaven and allows the rest to spend eternity in hell, while still others have held that only the deceased children of believers are allowed to enter heaven or that salvation for children who die is tied to the sacrament of baptism. A more common belief today among Christians, though, is that all those who die in early childhood (or die having possessed only the mental capacities of young children) enter automatically into God's eternal presence (Basinger 1991, 4).
But what of those “adults” who die having never been aware of the salvific conditions of the one true religion? Is it not clearly unjust for exclusivists to claim that they cannot spend eternity with God because they have not met the criteria for salvation stipulated by this religion? For salvific inclusivists, the answer is yes. Like exclusivists, inclusivists believe that eternal existence in God's presence is only possible because of the salvific provisions noted in the one true religion. However, religious inclusivists allow that some adherents of other religions can be saved because of these provisions, even if the individuals in question haven't made the personal commitments normally stipulated as necessary to appropriate these salvific provisions. Put in philosophical language, as inclusivists see it, particular salvific events may be ontologically necessary for salvation in the sense that salvation cannot occur without them but not epistemically necessary in the sense that one need not know about them to be saved or liberated (Peterson et al. 2003, 280).
Probably the best known Christian proponent of this inclusivist perspective is Karl Rahner. Christianity, he argues, cannot recognize any other religion as providing the way to salvation. However, since God is love and desires everyone to be saved, God can apply the results of Jesus's atoning death and resurrection to everyone, even to those who have never heard of Jesus and his death or have never acknowledged his lordship. Just as adherents to pre-Christian Judaism were able, through the redemptive acts of Jesus of which they were not aware, to enter God's presence, so, too, is it possible for adherents of other religions to enter God's presence, even though they are not aware of the necessary redemptive acts of Jesus that makes this possible (Peterson et al. 2003, 280-281). Inclusivists, it should be noted, differ on the conditions such “anonymous Christians” must meet. Some stipulate, for instance, that those who have never heard "the gospel" still have both some innate knowledge of God and the freedom to establish a relationship with God and, therefore, that the eternal destiny of those in this category is dependent on the extent to which they commit as much as they knows of themselves to as much as they know of God through, or even apart from, a religion other than Christianity. Other inclusivists don't want to be as specific, maintaining only that, because God is just, there will surely be some adherents of other religions who will be in God's presence because they have met some set of divine conditions they have it within their power to meet (Paternoster 1967). But all agree these "anonymous Christians" are the recipients of supernatural grace.
Salvific pluralists, however, find such reasoning no more convincing than that offered by exclusivists. Inclusivists are right, pluralists grant, to say that individuals need not necessarily know of or fulfill certain requirements normally specificed in a given religion to attain salvation. But inclusivists, like exclusivists, are wrong to argue that this salvation is, itself, possible only because of certain conditions or events described in the one true religion. There is no one true religion and, therefore, no one, and only one, path to eternal existence with God.
Why, though, ought we consider this pluralistic salvific hypothesis more plausible than that offered by the exclusivist or inclusivist? According to Hick, the most influential proponent of pluralism, three factors make a pluralistic perspective the only plausible option. First, and foremost, he argues, is the reality of transformation parity. An efficacious salvific process is not just other-world centered — does not simply give individuals a "ticket" to eternal existence with God. It begins "the transformation from self-centeredness to Reality-centeredness" in this life (Hick 1984, 229). That is, an efficacious salvific process changes lives in the sense that it begins to turn people from thinking about, and acting only to enhance, their own personal well-being to viewing themselves as responsible participants in a much greater, more expansive reality. In short, an efficacious salvific process makes its participants better people. And all the evidence we have, Hick maintains, shows that many religions are equally transformational, given any general standard for positive transformation we might want to consider (Hick 1989, chapter 3).
There continues to be debate, however, over whether the same basic personal transformation actually does occur within various religions — over whether there is real transformational parity. Few claim that there is a strong experiential basis for denying such transformational parity or that it can be demonstrated on other objective, nonquestion-begging grounds that such parity does not exist. However, proponents of many basic theistic systems claim that while transformational parity may appear to be the case, this is actually not so — that is, claim that the transformation within their systems actually is qualitatively different than that produced by allegiance to other systems. It is sometimes argued, for instance, that the transformation within other systems will not last, or at least that this transformation, while possibly real and even lasting for a given individual, is not what it could have been for that individual within the one true theistic system. And some exclusivists have argued that unless it can be demonstrated in an objective, nonquestion-begging sense that they are not justified in affirming a religious perspective that makes such claims (which even Hick does not attempt to demonstrate), they are justified in denying that such parity actually exists (Clark 1997, 303-320).
Others have argued that focusing on transformational parity can also be used as an argument against salvific pluralism. The basis for this claim is the fact that people making a "secular" (non-religious) commitment to some goal, value, or metaphysical perspective — be it concern for the environment or world hunger or emotional health — often appear to have their lives transformed in ways quite similar to the ways in which the lives of religious believers are transformed. They, too, appear to have changed from self-centeredness to a focus on reality outside of self. If this is so, however, then might it not be that the religious transformational parity we observe is simply a sub-set of the general transformational parity we find among individuals who commit themselves to any perspective on life that centers reality outside of self, and thus that it is just as plausible to assume that all religious transformational parity is the result of some form of internal conceptual realignment than the result of some form of connection with an external divine reality? And if this is the case, it is argued, then transformational parity is at least weakened as support for any salvific perspective, whether pluralistic, inclusivistic, or exclusivistic (Basinger 2001, 64-69).
Seeming transformational parity is not, however, Hick's only reason for believing non-pluralistic salvific perspectives to be untenable. A credible perspective, he tells us, must account for the fact, "evident to ordinary people (even though not always taken into account by theologians) that in the great majority of cases — say 98 to 99 percent — the religion in which a person believes and to which he adheres depends upon where he was born" (Hick 1980, 44). And given this fact — given that "religious allegiance depends in the great majority of cases on the accident of birth" — it seems implausible to hold that "being born in our particular part of the world carries with it the privilege of knowing the full religious truth" (Hick 1997a, 287).
This contention, though, has also been challenged. No one denies that the admittedly high correlation between where and when a person is born and the religious perspective she affirms is relevant and might in fact negatively affect an exclusivist's confidence. But many exclusivists deny that a pluralistic explanation should be seen as the only plausible option. As they see it, exclusivists need not consider the high place-time/religious allegiance correlation in question in isolation from other relevant beliefs. For example, the Christian exclusivist need not consider this correlation in isolation from her basic belief that the Bible is an authoritative source of truth and that the Bible teaches that only the Christian perspective contains a totally accurate view of reality. And it is justifiable, some maintain, for exclusivists to consider the plausibility of such relevant background beliefs to outweigh the seeming counterevidence posed by the correlation in question (Plantinga 2000, 187; Plantinga 1997, 198).
Finally, Hick argues, a credible religious hypothesis must account for the fact, of which "we have become irreversibly aware in the present century, as the result of anthropological, sociological, and psychological studies and the work of philosophy of language,” that there is no one universal and invariable pattern for the interpretation of human experience, but rather a range of significantly different patterns or conceptual schemes "which have developed within the major cultural streams." And when considered in this light, a "pluralistic theory becomes inevitable" (Hick 1984, 232).
While no one denies that culture shapes reality to some extent, it has again been argued that when comparing the plausibility of specific beliefs, we must consider not only these specific beliefs themselves but also the basic background beliefs in which they are embedded. Thus, even if we grant that a pluralistic response to the obvious shaping power of culture is preferable to any exclusivistic response when such shaping power is considered in isolation, it isn't clear to all exclusivists that Hick's hypothesis is so strong that it renders implausible the whole set of basic background beliefs out of which the exclusivist's response to the profound shaping influence of culture on religious belief arises. Hence, it isn't clear to all exclusivists that they can't justifiably reject Hick's contention that a pluralisitic cultural/religious interpretation of reality must inevitably be considered superior (Basinger 2001, 74).
Hick argues for salvific pluralism on what might best be called metaphysical or epistemological grounds. Other philosophers, however, have attempted to make a moral case for salvific pluralism (or at least against salvific exclusivism.) For instance, Kenneth Himma has argued recently that moral considerations require Christian salvific exclusivism to be rejected (Himma 2002, 1-33). It follows both from God's perfection and conceptual truths about punishment, Himma maintains, that God would not punish individuals who are not morally culpable for their behavior. But those with non-Christian beliefs are generally not morally culpable for the fact that they hold these beliefs. Not only is it not the case that any objective line of reasoning demonstrates the Christian (or any other religious) path to salvation to be the correct one, religious traditions are, themselves, extremely elastic. That is, because of the shaping, foundational nature of basic religious belief, devout proponents of any given religion are capable of (in fact, usually simply find themselves) offering self-consistent responses to almost any challenge to their salvific perspective, no matter how strong or damaging this challenge might seem on the surface. Furthermore, recent sociological, psychological, and anthropological studies have confirmed that while one's basic religious beliefs are not inevitable, they are quite often to a significant extent "beyond the direct volitional control of the believer" (Himma 2002, 18). So we must conclude, argues Himma, that it would not be morally just for the Christian God to deny salvation to devout people of other faiths.
Not surprisingly, many nonexclusivists and pluralists will find this basic line of reasoning persuasive. However, some (although not all) exclusivists reject the basic moral assumption on which Himma's argument is based: that we are in a position to correctly identify some of the basic moral principles that guide God's interaction with us as humans. Specifically, while many Christian exclusivists do believe that God's behavior is guided by the same basic principles of justice and fairness that are so fundamental to our human moral thinking, this is not true for all. There is a strong Christian tradition that holds that God is under no obligation to treat any individual in what we would consider a just, fair fashion. God can do what God wants (including how God responds to those who haven't affirmed Christian beliefs) for whatever purposes God has, and it is right simply because God has done it.[8] And even among those Christian exclusivists who come to acknowledge Himma's basic point — that a just God cannot condemn those who aren't culpable for their non-Christian beliefs — the response has normally not been to reject their overall exclusivistic perspective. It is often simply assumed, rather, that “God's ways are above our ways” in some manner unfathomable to the human mind.
However, even if we were to agree with pluralists that both exclusivists and inclusivists are wrong to claim that the basis for true salvation can be found in only one religion, the question of what type of pluralistic hypothesis we ought to affirm remains. Hick, himself, favors what might be called a selective pluralism that centers on the world's great religions. Hick has never denied that the major world religions — Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam — make conflicting truth claims. In fact, he believes that "the differences of belief between (and within) the traditions are legion" and has often discussed these conflicts in great detail (Hick 1983, 487). His basic pluralistic claim, rather, is that such differences are best seen as differing ways in which differing cultures have conceived of and experienced the one ultimate divine Reality. Each major religious perspective "constitutes a valid context of salvation/liberation; but none constitutes the one and only such context" (Hick 1984, 229, 231).
Why, however, select only the paths offered by the world's great religions as ways to salvation? For Hick the answer lies in the fact that, unlike "Satanism, Nazism, the Order of the Solar Temple, etc.," the world's great religions offer paths that lead us away from "hatred, misery, aggression, unkindness, impatience, violence, and lack of self-control" to love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control (Hick 1997b, 164). Some, though, see this sort of ethical standard for acceptable salvific perspectives to be as arbitrary as the standard for acceptable paths to salvation set forth by exclusivists or inclusivists (Meeker 2003, 5). In fact, some have questioned whether, given this rather specific ethical criterion for assessing the salvific adequacy of religions, Hick's perspective should actually be considered pluralistic at all.
S. Mark Heim, for instance, argues that pluralists such as Hick are really inclusivists in disguise in that they advocate only one path to salvation — the transformation from self-centeredness to Reality-centeredness — and thus in essence deny that diverse religions have real, fundamental salvific differences. A better, more honest salvific pluralism, we are told, is to acknowledge that each religion has its own path to salvation that may be either similar to or different from that of other religions. That is, a more honest pluralistic perspective is to deny that the seemingly different salvific paths offered by various religious traditions are all just culturally distinct manifestations of the same fundamental path and maintain instead that salvific paths of various religions remain incompatible, but equally valid ways to achieve salvation. This is not to say, of course, it is acknowledged, that all the details of all the salvific paths are actually true since some of the relevant claims are inconsistent. But the appropriate response to this is not to claim there is one true path to salvation. It is rather to claim that many distinct paths, while remaining distinct, can lead to salvation (Heim 1995).
Critics, however, wonder whether part of this seeming disagreement is verbal in nature. Heim can appear to be bypassing the question of whether there is some sort of final, ultimate eschatological salvific state that the proponents of various religious perspectives will all experience, emphasizing rather that many distinct religious paths can liberate people (produce salvation) here and now (Peterson et al. 2003, 280). Hick, on the other hand, seems most concerned with the nature salvific reality — with what it means to experience salvation — while not denying that there exist in this world distinct ways that remain distinct to access this ultimate reality.

7. Conclusion
As we have seen, discussions of religious diversity lend themselves to no easy answers. The issues are many, the arguments complex, and the responses varied. It would be hard, though, to overstate the practical significance of this topic. While some (many) issues that philosophers discuss have practical implications for how we view ourselves and treat others, none is more relevant today than the question of religious diversity. Exclusivistic religious convictions have not only motivated impassioned behavior in the past — behavior that has affected significantly the lives of many — such convictions clearly continue to do so today. So to the extent that such exclusivistic behavior is based on inadequate conceptual tools and/or fallacious reasoning, the continuing philosophical discussions of religious diversity that clarify issues and assess arguments may well be of great practical value.

Credit: stan/pla

Ralph Waldo Emerson...An Insight Into a Literateur's Mind

2005-10-13T15:43:00.000-07:00

An American essayist, poet, and popular philosopher, Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-82) began his career as a Unitarian minister in Boston, but achieved worldwide fame as a lecturer and the author of such essays as “Self-Reliance,” “History,” “The Over-Soul,” and “Fate.” Drawing on English and German Romanticism, Neoplatonism, Kantianism, and Hinduism, Emerson developed a metaphysics of process, an epistemology of moods, and an “existentialist” ethics of self-improvement. He influenced generations of Americans, from his friend Henry David Thoreau to John Dewey, and in Europe, Friedrich Nietzsche, who takes up such Emersonian themes as power, fate, the uses of poetry and history, and the critique of Christianity.
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1. Chronology of Emerson's Life
1803, Born in Boston to William and Ruth Haskins Emerson. 1811, Father dies, probably of tuberculosis. 1812, Enters Boston Public Latin School 1817, Begins study at Harvard College: Greek, Latin, History, Rhetoric. 1820, Starts first journal, entitled “The Wide World.” 1821, Graduates from Harvard and begins teaching at his brother William's school for young ladies in Boston. 1825, Enters Harvard Divinity School. 1829, Marries Ellen Tucker and is ordained minister at Boston's Second Church. 1831, Ellen Tucker Emerson dies, at age 19. 1832, Resigns position as minister and sails for Europe. 1833, Meets Wordsworth, Coleridge, J. S. Mill, and Thomas Carlyle. Returns to Boston in November, where he begins a career as a lecturer. 1834, Receives first half of a substantial inheritance from Ellen's estate (second half comes in 1837). 1835, Marries Lidian Jackson. 1836, Publishes first book, Nature. 1838, Delivers the “Divinity School Address.” Protests relocation of the Cherokees in letter to President Van Buren. 1841, Essays published (contains “Self-Reliance,” “The Over-Soul,” “Circles,” “History"). 1842, Son Waldo dies of scarlet fever at the age of 5. 1844, Essays, Second Series published (contains “The Poet,” “Experience,” “Nominalist and Realist”). 1847-8, Lectures in England. 1850, Publishes Representative Men (essays on Plato, Swedenborg, Montaigne, Goethe, Napoleon). 1851-60, Speaks against Fugitive Slave Law and in support of anti-slavery candidates in Concord, Boston, New York, Philadelphia. 1856, Publishes English Traits. 1860, Publishes The Conduct of Life (contains “Culture” and “Fate”). 1867, Lectures in nine western states. 1870, Publishes Society and Solitude. Presents sixteen lectures in Harvard's Philosophy Department. 1872-3, After a period of failing health, travels to Europe, Egypt. 1875, Journal entries cease. 1882, Dies in Concord.

2. Major Themes in Emerson's Philosophy

2.1 Education
In “The American Scholar,” delivered as the Phi Beta Kappa Address in 1837, Emerson maintains that the scholar is educated by nature, books, and action. Nature is the first in time (since it is always there) and the first in importance of the three. Nature's variety conceals underlying laws that are at the same time laws of the human mind: “the ancient precept, ‘Know thyself,’ and the modern precept, ‘Study nature,’ become at last one maxim” (87). Books, the second component of the scholar's education, offer us the influence of the past. Yet much of what passes for education is mere idolization of books — transferring the “sacredness which applies to the act of creation…to the record.” The proper relation to books is not that of the “bookworm” or “bibliomaniac,” but that of the “creative” reader who uses books as a stimulus to attain “his own sight of principles.” Used well, books “inspire…the active soul” (88). Great books are mere records of such inspiration, and their value derives only, Emerson holds, from their role in inspiring or recording such states of the soul. The “end” Emerson finds in nature is not a vast collection of books, but, as he puts it in “The Poet,” “the production of new individuals,…or the passage of the soul into higher forms” (CW3:14)
The third component of the scholar's education is action. Without it, thought never “ripens into truth.” Action is the process whereby what is not fully formed passes into expressive consciousness (91-2). Action is also the scholar's “dictionary,” the source for what she has to say. The true scholar speaks from experience, not in imitation of others; her words, as Emerson puts it, are “are loaded with life…” (Z: 92). The scholar's education in original experience and self-expression is appropriate, according to Emerson, not only for a small class of people, but for everyone. Its goal is the creation of a democratic nation. Only when we learn to “walk on our own feet” and to “speak our own minds,” he holds, will a nation “for the first time exist” (Z: 104-5).
Emerson returned to the topic of education late in his career in “Education,” an address he gave in various versions at graduation exercises in the 1860's. Self-reliance appears in the essay in his discussion of respect. The “secret of Education,” he states, “lies in respecting the pupil.” It is not for the teacher to choose what the pupil will know and do, but for the pupil to discover “his own secret.” The teacher must therefore “wait and see the new product of Nature” (L: 143), guiding and disciplining when appropriate-not with the aim of encouraging repetition or imitation, but with that of finding the new power that is each child's gift to the world. The aim of education is to “keep” the child's “nature and arm it with knowledge in the very direction in which it points” (L: 144). This aim is sacrificed in mass education, Emerson warns. Instead of educating “masses,” we must educate “reverently, one by one,” with the attitude that “the whole world is needed for the tuition of each pupil” (L: 154).

2.2 Process
Emerson is in many ways a process philosopher, for whom the universe is fundamentally in flux and “permanence is but a word of degrees” (CW 2: 179). Even as he talks of “Being,” Emerson represents it not as a stable “wall” but as a series of “interminable oceans” (CW3: 42). This metaphysical position has epistemological correlates: that there is no final explanation of any fact, and that each law will be incorporated in “some more general law presently to disclose itself” (CW2: 181). Process is the basis for the succession of moods Emerson describes in “Experience,” (CW3: 30), and for the emphasis on the present throughout his philosophy.
Some of Emerson's most striking ideas about morality and truth follow from his process metaphysics: that no virtues are final or eternal, all being “initial,” (CW2: 187); that truth is a matter of glimpses, not steady views. We have a choice, Emerson writes in “Intellect,” “between truth and repose,” but we cannot have both (CW2: 202). Fresh truth, like the thoughts of genius, comes always as a surprise, as what Emerson calls “the newness” (CW3: 40). He therefore looks for a “certain brief experience, which surprise[s] me in the highway or in the market, in some place, at some time…” (Z: 253). This is an experience that cannot be repeated by simply returning to a place or to an object such as a painting. A great disappointment of life, Emerson finds, is that one can only “see” certain pictures once, and that the stories and people who fill a day or an hour with pleasure and insight are not able to repeat the performance.
Emerson's basic view of religion also coheres with his emphasis on process, for he holds that one finds God only in the present: “God is, not was” (Z: 123). In contrast, what Emerson calls “historical Christianity” (114) proceeds “as if God were dead” (Z: 116). Even history, which seems obviously about the past, has its true use, Emerson holds, as the servant of the present: “The student is to read history actively and not passively; to esteem his own life the text, and books the commentary” (CW2:5).

2.3 Morality
Emerson's views about morality are intertwined with his metaphysics of process, and with his perfectionism, his idea that life has the goal of passing into “higher forms” (CW3:14). The goal remains, but the forms of human life, including the virtues, are all “initial” (CW2: 187). The word “initial” suggests the verb “initiate,” and one interpretation of Emerson's claim that “all virtues are initial” is that virtues initiate historically developing forms of life, such as those of the Roman nobility or the Confucian junxi. Emerson does have a sense of morality as developing historically, but in the context in “Circles” where his statement appears he presses a more radical and skeptical position: that our virtues often must be abandoned rather than developed. “The terror of reform,” he writes, “is the discovery that we must cast away our virtues, or what we have always esteemed such, into the same pit that has consumed our grosser vices” (CW2: 187). The qualifying phrase “or what we have always esteemed such” means that Emerson does not embrace an easy relativism, according to which what is taken to be a virtue at any time must actually be a virtue. Yet he does cast a pall of suspicion over all established modes of thinking and acting. The proper standpoint from which to survey the virtues is the ‘new moment‘ “the moment of truth rather than repose” (CW2:202), in which what once seemed important may appear “trivial” or “vain.” From this perspective (or more properly the developing set of such perspectives) the virtues do not disappear, but they may be fundamentally altered and rearranged.
Although Emerson is thus in no position to set forth a system of morality, he nevertheless delineates throughout his work a set of virtues and heroes, and a corresponding set of vices and villains. In “Circles” the vices are “forms of old age,” and the hero the “receptive, aspiring” youth (CW2:189). In the “Divinity School Address,” the villain is the “spectral” preacher whose sermons offer no hint that he has ever lived. “Self Reliance” condemns virtues that are really “penances” (CW2: 31), and the philanthropy of abolitionists who display an idealized “love” for those far away, but are full of hatred for those close by (CW2: 30).
Conformity is the chief Emersonian vice, the opposite or “aversion” of the virtue of “self-reliance.” We conform when we pay unearned respect to clothing and other symbols of status, when we show “the foolish face of praise” or the “forced smile which we put on in company where we do not feel at ease in answer to conversation which does not interest us” (CW2: 32). Emerson criticizes our conformity even to our own past actions-when they no longer fit the needs or aspirations of the present. This is the context in which he states that “a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen, philosophers and divines” (CW2: 33). There is wise and there is foolish consistency, and it is foolish to be consistent if that interferes with the “main enterprise of the world for splendor, for extent, …the upbuilding of a man” (99).
If Emerson criticizes much of human life, he nevertheless devotes most of his attention to the virtues. Chief among these is what he calls “self-reliance.” The phrase connotes originality and spontaneity, and is memorably represented in the image of a group of nonchalant boys, “sure of a dinner…who would disdain as much as a lord to do or say aught to conciliate one…” The boys sit in judgment on the world and the people in it, offering a free, “irresponsible” condemnation of those they see as “silly” or “troublesome,” and praise for those they find “interesting” or “eloquent.” (CW2: 29). The figure of the boys illustrates Emerson's characteristic combination of the romantic (in the glorification of children) and the classical (in the idea of a hierarchy in which the boys occupy the place of lords or nobles).
Speaking of “self-reliance,” Emerson nevertheless warns-undermining his own previous statements-can be a “poor external way of speaking” (CW 2:40). For it can be taken to mean that there is a self already formed on which we may rely. The “self” on which we are to “rely” is, in contrast, the original self that we are in the process of creating. Such a self, to use a phrase from Nietzsche's Ecce Homo, “becomes what it is.”
For Emerson, the best human relationships require the confident and independent nature of the self-reliant. Emerson's ideal society is a confrontation of powerful, independent “gods, talking from peak to peak all round Olympus.” There will be a proper distance between these gods, who, Emerson advises, “should meet each morning, as from foreign countries, and spending the day together should depart, as into foreign countries” (CW 3:81). Even “lovers,” he advises, “should guard their strangeness” (CW3: 82). Emerson portrays himself as preserving such distance in the cool confession with which he closes “Nominalist and Realist,” the last of the Essays, Second Series:
I talked yesterday with a pair of philosophers: I endeavored to show my good men that I liked everything by turns and nothing long…. Could they but once understand, that I loved to know that they existed, and heartily wished them Godspeed, yet, out of my poverty of life and thought, had no word or welcome for them when they came to see me, and could well consent to their living in Oregon, for any claim I felt on them, it would be a great satisfaction (CW 3:145). The self-reliant person will “publish” her results, but she must first learn to detect that spark of originality or genius that is her particular gift to the world. It is not a gift that is available on demand, however, and a major task of life is to meld genius with its expression. “The man,” Emerson states “is only half himself, the other half is his expression” (CW 3:4). There are young people of genius, Emerson laments in “Experience,” who promise “a new world” but never deliver: they fail to find the focus for their genius “within the actual horizon of human life” (CW 3:31). Although Emerson emphasizes our independence and even distance from one another, then, the payoff for self-reliance is public and social. The scholar finds that the most private and secret of his thoughts turn out to be “the most acceptable, most public, and universally true” (Z: 97). And the great “representative men” Emerson identifies are marked by their influence on the world. Their names-Plato, Moses, Jesus, Luther, Copernicus, even Napoleon-are “ploughed into the history of the world” (Z: 112). Although self-reliance is central, it is not the only Emersonian virtue. Emerson also praises a kind of trust, and the practice of a “wise skepticism.” There are times, he holds, when we must let go and trust to the nature of the universe: “As the traveler who has lost his way, throws his reins on his horse's neck, and trusts to the instinct of the animal to find his road, so must we do with the divine animal who carries us through this world” (3:15). But the world of flux and conflicting evidence also requires a kind of epistemological and practical flexibility that Emerson calls “wise skepticism” (318). His representative skeptic of this sort is Michel de Montaigne, who as portrayed in Representative Men is no unbeliever, but a man with a strong sense of self, rooted in the earth and common life, whose quest is for knowledge. He wants “a near view of the best game and the chief players; what is best in the planet; art and nature, places and events; but mainly men” (CW4: 91). Yet he knows that life is perilous and uncertain, “a storm of many elements,” the navigation through which requires a flexible ship, “fit to the form of man.” (CW4: 91).

2.4 Christianity
The son of a Unitarian minister, Emerson attended Harvard Divinity School and was employed as a minister for almost three years. Yet he offers a deeply felt and deeply reaching critique of Christianity in the “Divinity School Address,” flowing from a line of argument he establishes in “The American Scholar.” If the one thing in the world of value is the active soul, then religious institutions, no less than educational institutions, must be judged by that standard. Emerson finds that contemporary Christianity deadens rather than activates the spirit. It is an “Eastern monarchy of a Christianity” in which Jesus, originally the “friend of man,” is made the enemy and oppressor of man. A Christianity true to the life and teachings of Jesus should inspire “the religious sentiment” — a joyous seeing that is more likely to be found in “the pastures,” or “a boat in the pond” than in a church. Although Emerson thinks it is a calamity for a nation to lose the capacity to worship (Z: 122) he finds it strange that, given the “famine of our churches” (Z: 117) anyone should attend them. He therefore calls on the Divinity School graduates to breathe new life into the old forms of their religion, to be friends and exemplars to their parishioners, and to remember “that all men have sublime thoughts; that all men value the few real hours of life; they love to be heard; they love to be caught up into the vision of principles” (Z: 124).

2.5 Power
Power is a theme in Emerson's early writing, but it becomes especially prominent in such middle- and late-career essays as “Experience,” “Montaigne; or the Skeptic” “Napoleon,” and “Power.” Power is related to action in “The American Scholar,” where Emerson holds that a “true scholar grudges every opportunity of action passed by, as a loss of power” (Z: 92). It is also a subject of “Self-Reliance,” where Emerson writes of each person that “the power which resides in him is new in nature” (CW2:28). In “Experience” Emerson speaks of a life which “is not intellectual or critical, but sturdy” (CW3:294); and in “Power” he celebrates the “bruisers” (P: 372) of the world who express themselves rudely and get their way. The power in which Emerson is interested, however, is more artistic and intellectual than political or military. In a characteristic passage from “Power,” he states:
In history the great moment is, when the savage is just ceasing to be a savage, with all his hairy Pelasgic strength directed on his opening sense of beauty:-and you have Pericles and Phidias,-not yet passed over into the Corinthian civility. Everything good in nature and the world is in that moment of transition, when the swarthy juices still flow plentifully from nature, but their astringency or acridity is got out by ethics and humanity” (P: 375). Power is all around us, but it cannot always be controlled. It is like “a bird which alights nowhere,” hopping “perpetually from bough to bough” (CW3:34). Moreover, we often cannot tell at the time when we exercise our power that we are doing so: happily we sometimes find that much is accomplished in “times when we thought ourselves indolent” (CW3:28). 2.6 Unity and MoodsAt some point in many of his essays and addresses, Emerson enunciates, or at least refers to, a great vision of unity. He speaks in “The American Scholar” of an “original unit” or “fountain of power” (Z: 84), of which each of us is a part. He writes in “The Divinity School Address” that each of us is “an inlet into the deeps of Reason.” And in “Self-Reliance,” the essay that more than any other celebrates individuality, he writes of “the resolution of all into the ever-blessed ONE” (CW 2:40). “The Oversoul” is Emerson's most sustained discussion of “the ONE,” but he does not, even there, shy away from the seeming conflict between the reality of process and the reality of an ultimate metaphysical unity. How can the vision of succession and the vision of unity be reconciled?
Emerson never comes to a clear or final answer. One solution he both suggests and rejects is an unambiguous idealism, according to which a nontemporal “One” or “Oversoul” is the only reality, and all else is illusion. He suggests this, for example, in the many places where he speaks of waking up out of our dreams or nightmares. But he then portrays that to which we awake not simply as an unchanging “ONE,” but as a process or succession: a “growth” or “movement of the soul” (CW2: 189); or a “new yet unapproachable America” (CW3: 259).
Emerson undercuts his visions of unity (as of everything else) through what Stanley Cavell calls his “epistemology of moods.” According to this epistemology, most fully developed in “Experience” but present in all of Emerson's writing, we never apprehend anything “straight” or in-itself, but only under an aspect or mood. Emerson writes that life is “a train of moods like a string of beads,” through which we see only what lies in each bead's focus (CW3: 30). The beads include our temperaments, our changing moods, and the “Lords of Life” which govern all human experience. The Lords include “Succession,” “Surface,” “Dream,” “Reality,” and “Surprise.” Are the great visions of unity, then, simply aspects under which we view the world?
Emerson's most direct attempt to reconcile succession and unity, or the one and the many, occurs in the last essay in the Essays, Second Series, entitled “Nominalist and Realist.” There he speaks of the universe as an “old Two-face…of which any proposition may be affirmed or denied” (CW3: 144). As in “Experience,” Emerson leaves us with the whirling succession of moods. “I am always insincere,” he skeptically concludes, “as always knowing there are other moods” (CW3: 145). But Emerson enacts as well as describes the succession of moods, and he ends “Nominalist and Realist” with the “feeling that all is yet unsaid,” and with at least the idea of some universal truth (CW3: 363).

3. Some Questions about Emerson

3.1 Consistency
Emerson routinely invites charges of inconsistency. He says the world is fundamentally a process and fundamentally a unity; that it resists the imposition of our will and that it flows with the power of our imagination; that travel is good for us, since it adds to our experience, and that it does us no good, since we wake up in the new place only to find the same “ sad self” we thought we had left behind (CW2: 46).
Emerson's “epistemology of moods” is an attempt to construct a framework for encompassing what might otherwise seem contradictory outlooks, viewpoints, or doctrines. Emerson really means to “accept,” as he puts it, “the clangor and jangle of contrary tendencies” (CW3: 36). He means to be irresponsible to all that holds him back from his self-development. That is why, at the end of “Circles,” he writes that he is “only an experimenter…with no Past at my back” (CW2: 188). In the world of flux that he depicts in that essay, there is nothing stable to be responsible to: “every moment is new; the past is always swallowed and forgotten, the coming only is sacred” (CW2: 189).
Despite this claim, there is considerable consistency in Emerson's essays and among his ideas. To take just one example, the idea of the “active soul” — mentioned as the “one thing in the world, of value” in “The American Scholar-is a presupposition of Emerson's attack on “the famine of the churches” (for not feeding or activating the souls of those who attend them); it is an element in his understanding of a poem as “a thought so passionate and alive, that, like the spirit of a plant or an animal, it has an architecture of its own …” (CW3: 6); and, of course, it is at the center of Emerson's idea of self-reliance. There are in fact multiple paths of coherence through Emerson's philosophy, guided by ideas discussed previously: process, education, self-reliance, and the present.

3.2 Early and Late Emerson
It is hard for an attentive reader not to feel that there are important differences between early and late Emerson: for example, between the buoyant Nature (1836) and the weary ending of “Experience” (1844); between the expansive author of “Self-Reliance” (1841) and the burdened writer of “Fate” (1860). Emerson himself seems to advert to such differences when he writes in “Fate”: “Once we thought positive power was all. Now we learn that negative power, or circumstance, is half” (Z: 369). Is “Fate” the record of a lesson Emerson had not absorbed in his early writing, concerning the multiple ways in which circumstances over which we have no control — plagues, hurricanes, temperament, sexuality, old age-constrain self-reliance or self-development?
“Experience” is a key transitional essay. “Where do we find ourselves?” is the question with which it begins. The answer is not a happy one, for Emerson finds that we occupy a place of dislocation and obscurity, where “sleep lingers all our lifetime about our eyes, as night hovers all day in the boughs of the fir-tree” (CW3: 27). An event hovering over the essay, but not disclosed until its third paragraph, is the death of his five-year old son Waldo. Emerson finds in this episode and his reaction to it an example of an “unhandsome” general character of existence-it is forever slipping away from us, like his little boy.
“Experience” presents many moods. It has its moments of illumination, and its considered judgment that there is an “Ideal journeying always with us, the heaven without rent or seam” (CW3: 41). It offers wise counsel about “skating over the surfaces of life” and confining our existence to the “mid-world.” But even its upbeat ending takes place in a setting of substantial “defeat.” “Up again, old heart!” a somewhat battered voice states in the last sentence of the essay. Yet the essay ends with an assertion that in its great hope and underlying confidence chimes with some of the more expansive passages in Emerson's writing. The “true romance which the world exists to realize,” he states, “will be the transformation of genius into practical power” (CW3: 49).
Despite important differences in tone and emphasis, Emerson's assessment of our condition remains much the same throughout his writing. There are no more dire indictments of ordinary human life than in the early work, “The American Scholar,” where Emerson states that “Men in history, men in the world of today, are bugs, are spawn, and are called ‘the mass’ and ‘the herd.’ In a century, in a millennium, one or two men; that is to say, one or two approximations to the right state of every man” (99). Conversely, there is no more idealistic statement in his early work than the statement in “Fate” that “[t]hought dissolves the material universe by carrying the mind up into a sphere where all is plastic” (377). All in all, the earlier work expresses a sunnier hope for human possibilities, the sense that Emerson and his contemporaries were poised for a great step forward and upward; and the later work, still hopeful and assured, operates under a weight or burden, a stronger sense of the dumb resistance of the world.

3.3 Sources and Influence
Emerson read widely, and gave credit in his essays to the scores of writers from whom he learned. He kept lists of literary, philosophical, and religious thinkers in his journals and worked at categorizing them.
Among the most important writers for the shape of Emerson's philosophy are Plato and the Neoplatonist line extending through Plotinus, Proclus, Iamblichus, and the Cambridge Platonists. Equally important are writers in the Kantian and Romantic traditions (which Emerson probably learned most about from Coleridge's Biographia Literaria). Emerson read avidly in Indian, especially Hindu, philosophy, and in Confucianism. There are also multiple empiricist, or experience-based influences, flowing from Berkeley, Wordsworth and other English Romantics, Newton's physics, and the new sciences of geology and comparative anatomy. Other writers whom Emerson often mentions are Anaxagoras, St. Augustine, Francis Bacon, Jacob Behmen, Cicero, Goethe, Heraclitus, Lucretius, Mencius, Pythagoras, Schiller, Thoreau, August and Friedrich Schlegel, Shakespeare, Socrates, Madame de Staël and Emanuel Swedenborg.
Emerson's works were well known throughout the United States and Europe in his day. Nietzsche read German translations of Emerson's essays, copied passages from “History” and “Self-Reliance” in his journals, and wrote of the Essays: that he had never “felt so much at home in a book.” Emerson's ideas about “strong, overflowing” heroes, friendship as a battle, education, and relinquishing control in order to gain it, can be traced in Nietzsche's writings. Other Emersonian ideas-about transition, the ideal in the commonplace, and the power of human will permeate the writings of such classical American pragmatists as William James and John Dewey; and his philosophy is a primary source for Stanley Cavell's contemporary writing on “moral perfectionism.”

Philosophy of Economics

2005-10-12T15:21:00.000-07:00

“Philosophy of Economics” consists of inquiries concerning (a) rational choice, (b) the appraisal of economic outcomes, institutions and processes, and (c) the ontology of economic phenomena and the possibilities of acquiring knowledge of them. Although these inquiries overlap in many ways, it is useful to divide philosophy of economics in this way into three subject matters which can be regarded respectively as branches of action theory, ethics (or normative social and political philosophy), and philosophy of science. Economic theories of rationality, welfare, and social choice defend substantive philosophical theses often informed by relevant philosophical literature and of evident interest to those interested in action theory, philosophical psychology, and social and political philosophy. Economics is of particular interest to those interested in epistemology and philosophy of science both because of its detailed peculiarities and because it possesses many of the overt features of the natural sciences, while its object consists of social phenomena.
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1. Introduction: What is Economics?
Both the definition and the precise domain of economics are subjects of controversy within philosophy of economics. At first glance, the difficulties in defining economics may not appear serious. Economics is, after all, obviously concerned with aspects of the production, exchange, distribution, and consumption of commodities. But this claim and the terms it contains are vague; and it is arguable that economics is relevant to a great deal more. It helps to approach the question, "What is economics?” historically, before turning to comments on contemporary features of the discipline.

1.1 The emergence of economics and of economies
Philosophical reflection on economics is ancient, but the conception of the economy as a distinct object of study dates back only to the 18th century. Aristotle addresses some problems that most would recognize as pertaining to economics mainly as problems concerning how to manage a household. Scholastic philosophers addressed ethical questions concerning economic behavior, and they condemned usury — that is, the taking of interest on money. With the increasing importance of trade and of nation-states in the early modern period, ‘mercantilist’ philosophers and pamphleteers addressed questions concerning the balance of trade and the regulation of the currency. There was an increasing recognition of the complexities of the financial management of the state and of the possibility that the way that the state taxed and acted influenced the production of wealth.
In the early modern period, those who reflected on the sources of a country's wealth recognized that the annual harvest, the quantities of goods manufactured, and the products of mines and fisheries depend on facts about nature, individual labor and enterprise, and state and social regulations. Trade also seemed advantageous, at least if the terms were good enough. It took no conceptual leap to recognize that manufacturing and farming could be improved and that some taxes and tariffs might be less harmful to productive activities than others. But to formulate the idea that there is such a thing as “the economy” with regularities that can be investigated requires a bold further step. In order for there to be an object of inquiry, there must be regularities in production and exchange; and for the inquiry to be non-trivial, these regularities must go beyond what is obvious to the producers, consumers, and exchangers themselves. Only in the eighteenth century, most clearly illustrated by the work of Cantillon (1755), the physiocrats, David Hume, and especially Adam Smith, does one find the idea that there are laws to be discovered that govern the complex set of interactions that produce and distribute consumption goods and the resources and tools that produce them (Backhouse 2002).
Crucial to the possibility of a social object of scientific inquiry is the idea of tracing out the unintended consequences of the actions of individuals. Thus, for example, Hume traces the rise in prices and the temporary increase in economic activity that follow an increase in currency to the perceptions and actions of individuals who first spend the additional currency (1752). In spending their additional gold imported from abroad, traders do not intend to increase the price level. But that is what they do nevertheless. Adam Smith expands and perfects this insight and offers a systematic Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. From his account of the demise of feudalism (1776, Book II, Ch. 4) to his famous discussion of the invisible hand, Smith emphasizes unintended consequences. “[H]e intends only his own gain; and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention. Nor is it always the worse for the society that it was no part of it. By pursuing his own interest, he frequently promotes that of the society more effectually than when he really intends to promote it” (1776, Book IV, Ch. 2). The existence of unobvious regularities, which are the unintended consequences of individual choices gives rise to an object of scientific investigation.
One can distinguish the domain of economics from the domain of other social scientific inquiries either by specifying some set of causal factors or by specifying some range of phenomena. But since so many different causal factors are relevant to the study of production or consumption, from the laws of thermodynamics and metallurgy to the laws governing digestion, economics cannot be distinguished from other inquiries only by the phenomena it studies. Some reference to a set of central causal factors is needed. Thus, for example, John Stuart Mill maintained that, “Political economy…[is concerned with] such of the phenomena of the social state as take place in consequence of the pursuit of wealth. It makes entire abstraction of every other human passion or motive, except those which may be regarded as perpetually antagonising principles to the desire of wealth, namely aversion to labour, and desire of the present enjoyment of costly indulgences.” (1843, Book VI, Chapter 9, Section 3) Economics is mainly concerned with the consequences of individual pursuit of wealth, though it takes some account of less significant motives such as aversion to labor.
Mill takes it for granted that individuals act rationally in their pursuit of wealth and luxury and avoidance of labor, rather than in a disjointed or erratic way, but since he does not have a theory of consumption, he develops no explicit theory of rational economic choice. Such theories were developed only in the wake of the so-called neoclassical revolution, which linked choice (and price) of some object of consumption not to its total utility but to its marginal utility. For example, nothing could be more useful than water. But in much of the world water is plentiful enough that another glass more or less matters little to an agent. So water is cheap. Early “neoclassical" economists such as Jevons held that agents make consumption choices so as to maximize their own happiness (1871). This implies that they distribute their expenditures so that a dollar's worth of water or porridge or upholstery makes the same contribution to their happiness. The “marginal utility” of a dollar's worth of each good is the same.
In the Twentieth Century, economists stripped this general theory of rationality of its hedonistic clothing (Pareto 1909, Hicks and Allen 1934). Rather than supposing that all consumption choices can be ranked in terms of the extent to which they promote an agent's happiness, economists focused on the ranking itself. All that they suppose concerning evaluations is that agents are able consistently to rank the alternatives they face. This is equivalent to supposing first that rankings are complete — that is, for any two alternatives x and y, either the agent ranks x above y (prefers x to y), or the agent prefers y to x, or the agent is indifferent. Second, economists suppose that agent's rankings of alternatives (preferences) are transitive. Though there are further technical conditions to extend the theory to infinite sets of alternatives and to capture further plausible rationality conditions concerning gambles, economists generally subscribe to a view of a rational agent as possessing complete and transitive preferences and as choosing among the feasible alternatives whatever he or she most prefers. Attempts have also been made in the theory of revealed preference to eliminate all reference to subjective preference or to define preference in terms of choices (Samuelson 1947, Houtthaker 1950, Little 1957, Sen 1971, 1973).
In clarifying the view of rationality that characterizes economic agents, economists have for the most part continued to distinguish economics from other social inquiries by the content of the motives or preferences with which it is concerned. So even though an agent may for example seek happiness through asceticism or may rationally prefer to sacrifice all his or her worldly goods to a political cause, economists have supposed that such preferences are rare and unimportant to economics. What economists are concerned with are the phenomena deriving not just from rationality, but from rationality coupled with a desire for wealth and larger consumption bundles.
Economists have flirted with a less substantive characterization of individual motivation and with a more expansive view of the domain of economics. In his influential monograph, An Essay on the Nature and Significance of Economic Science, Lionel Robbins defined economics as “the science which studies human behavior as a relationship between ends and scarce means which have alternative uses" (1932, p. 15). According to Robbins, economics is not concerned with production, exchange, distribution, or consumption as such. It is instead concerned with an aspect of all human action. Although Robbins' definition helps one to understand efforts to apply economic concepts, models, and techniques to other subject matters such as the analysis of voting behavior and legislation, it seems evident that economics maintains its connection to a traditional domain.

1.2 Contemporary economics and its several schools
Contemporary economics is extremely diverse. There are many schools and many branches. Even so-called “orthodox” or “mainstream” economics has many variants. Some mainstream economics is highly theoretical, though most of it is applied and relies on only rather rudimentary theory. Both theoretical and applied work can be distinguished as microeconomics or macroeconomics. Microeconomics focuses on relations among individuals (though firms and households often count as honorary individuals and consumer demand is in practice often treated as an aggregate). Individuals have complete and transitive preferences that govern their choices. Consumers prefer more commodities to fewer and have “diminishing marginal rates of substitution” — i. e. they will pay less for units of a commodity when they already have lots of it than when they have little of it. Firms attempt to maximize profits in the face of diminishing returns: holding fixed other inputs, with more units of one input output increases, but at a diminishing rate. Economists idealize and suppose that in competitive markets, firms and individuals cannot influence prices, but economists are also interested in strategic interactions, in which the rational choices of separate individuals are interdependent. Game theory, which is devoted to the study of strategic interactions, is of growing importance both in theoretical and applied microeconomics. Economists model the outcome of the profit-maximizing activities of firms and the attempts of consumers to best satisfy their preferences as an equilibrium in which there is no excess demand on any market. What this means is that anyone who wants to buy anything at the going market price is able to do so. There is no excess demand, and unless a good is free, there is no excess supply.
Macroeconomics grapples with the relations among economic aggregates, focusing especially on problems concerning the business cycle and the influence of monetary and fiscal policy on economic outcomes. Many mainstream economists would like to unify macroeconomics and microeconomics, but few economists are satisfied with the attempts that have been made to do so. Econometrics is a third main branch of economics, devoted to the empirical estimation, elaboration, and to some extent testing of specific microeconomic and macroeconomic models. Among macroeconomists, disagreement is much sharper than among microeconomists or econometricians. In addition to Keynesians and monetarists, “new classical economics” (rational expectations theory) has spawned several approaches such as so-called “real business cycle” theories (Begg 1982, Carter and Maddock 1984, Hoover 1988, Minford and Peel 1983, Sent 1998). Branches of mainstream economics are also devoted to specific questions concerning growth, finance, employment, agriculture, natural resources, international trade, and so forth. Within orthodox economics, there are also many different approaches, such as agency theory (Jensen and Meckling 1976, Fama 1980), the Chicago school (Becker 1976), or public choice theory (Brennan and Buchanan 1985, Buchanan 1975).
Although mainstream economics is dominant and demands the most attention, there are many other schools. Austrian economists accept orthodox views of choices and constraints, but they emphasize uncertainty and question whether one should regard outcomes as equilibria, and they are skeptical about the value of mathematical modeling (Buchanan and Vanberg 1989, Dolan 1976, Kirzner 1976, Mises 1949, 1978, 1981, Rothbard 1957, Wiseman 1983). Traditional institutionalist economists question the value of abstract general theorizing (Dugger 1979, Wilber and Harrison 1978, Wisman and Rozansky 1991). They emphasize the importance of generalizations concerning norms and behavior within particular institutions. Applied work in institutional economics is sometimes very similar to applied orthodox economics. More recent work in economics, which is also called institutionalist, attempts to explain features of institutions by emphasizing the costs of transactions, the inevitable incompleteness of contracts, and the problems “principals" face in monitoring and directing their agents (Williamson 1985; Mäki et al. 1993). Marxian economists traditionally articulated and developed Karl Marx's economic theories, but recently many Marxian economists have revised traditional Marxian concepts and themes with tools borrowed from orthodox economic theory (Morishima 1973, Roemer 1981, 1982). There are also socio-economists (Etzioni 1988), behavioral economists (Ben Ner and Putterman 1998, Winter 1962), post-Keynesians (Dow 1985, Kregel 1976), and neo-Ricardians (Sraffa 1960, Pasinetti 1981, Roncaglia 1978). Economics is not one homogeneous enterprise.

2. Six central methodological problems
Although the different branches and schools of economics raise a wide variety of methodological issues, six problems have been central to methodological reflection concerning economics:

2.1 Positive versus normative economics
Policy makers look to economics to guide policy, and it seems inevitable that even the most esoteric issues in theoretical economics may bear on some people's material interests. The extent to which economics bears on and may be influenced by normative concerns raises methodological questions about the relationships between a positive science concerning “facts” and a normative inquiry into what ought to be. Most economists and methodologists believe that there is a reasonably clear distinction between facts and values, between what is and what ought to be, and they believe that most of economics should be regarded as a positive science that helps policy makers choose means to accomplish their ends, though it does not bear on the choice of ends itself.
This view is questionable for several reasons. First economists have to interpret and articulate the incomplete specifications of goals and constraints provided by policy makers (Machlup 1969b). Second, economic “science” is a human activity, and like all human activities it is governed by values. Those values need not be the same as the values that influence economic policy, but it is questionable whether the values that govern the activity of economists can be sharply distinguished from the values that govern policy makers. Third, much of economics is built around a normative theory of rationality. One can question whether the values implicit in such theories are sharply distinguishable from the values that govern policies. For example, it may be difficult to hold a maximizing view of individual rationality, while at the same time insisting that social policy should resist maximizing growth, wealth, or welfare in the name of freedom, rights, or equality. Fourth, people's views of what is right and wrong are, as a matter of fact, influenced by their beliefs about how people in fact behave. There is evidence that studying theories that depict individuals as self-interested leads people to regard self-interested behavior more favorably and to become more self-interested (Marwell and Ames 1981, Frank et al. 1993). Finally, people's judgments are clouded by their interests. Since economic theories bear so centrally on people's interests, there are bound to be ideological biases at work in the discipline (Marx 1867, Preface).

2.2 Reasons versus causes
Orthodox theoretical microeconomics is as much a theory of rational choices as it a theory that explains and predicts economic outcomes. Since virtually all economic theories that discuss individual choices take individuals as acting for reasons, and thus in some way rational, questions about the role that views of rationality and reasons should play in economics are of general importance. Economists are typically concerned with the aggregate results of individual choices rather than with particular individuals, but their theories in fact offer both causal explanations for why individuals choose as they do and accounts of the reasons for their choices.
Explanations in terms of reasons have several features that distinguish them from explanations in terms of causes. Reasons justify the actions they explain. Reasons can be evaluated, and they are responsive to criticism. Reasons, unlike causes, must be intelligible to those for whom they are reasons. On grounds such as these, many philosophers have questioned whether explanations of human action can be causal explanations (von Wright 1971, Winch 1958). Yet merely giving a reason — even an extremely good reason — fails to explain an agent's action, if the reason was not in fact “effective.” Someone might, for example, start attending church regularly and give as his reason a concern with salvation. But others might suspect that this agent is deceiving himself and that the minister's attractive daughter is in fact responsible for his renewed interest in religion. Donald Davidson (1963) argued that what distinguishes the reasons that explain an action from the reasons that fail to explain it are that the former are also causes of the action. Although the account of rationality within economics differs in some ways from the “folk psychology" people tacitly invoke in everyday explanations of actions, many of the same questions carry over (Rosenberg 1976, ch. 5; 1980).
An additional difference between explanations in terms of reasons and explanations in terms of causes, which some economists have emphasized, is that the beliefs and preferences that explain actions may depend on mistakes and ignorance (Knight 1935). As a first approximation, economists can abstract from such difficulties. They thus often assume that people have perfect information about all the relevant facts. In that way theorists need not worry about what people's beliefs are. By assumption people believe and expect whatever the facts are. But once one goes beyond this first approximation, difficulties arise which have no parallel in the natural sciences. Choice depends on how things look “from the inside", which may be very different from the actual state of affairs. Consider for example the stock market. The “true” value of a stock depends on the future profits of the company, which are of course uncertain. In 1999 and 2000 stock prices were far above any plausible estimate of their true value. But what matters, at least in the short run, is what people believe. No matter how overpriced shares might be, they were excellent investments if tomorrow or next month somebody would be willing to pay even more for them. Economists disagree about how significant this subjectivity is. Members of the Austrian school argue that these differences are of great importance and sharply distinguish theorizing about economics from theorizing about any of the natural sciences (Buchanan and Vanberg 1989, von Mises 1981).

2.3 Social scientific naturalism
Of all the social sciences, economics most closely resembles the natural sciences. Economic theories have been axiomatized, and articles and books of economics are full of theorems. Of all the social sciences, only economics boasts a Nobel Prize. Economics is thus a test case for those concerned with the extent of the similarities between the natural and social sciences. Those who have wondered whether social sciences must differ fundamentally from the natural sciences seem to have been concerned mainly with three questions:
(i) Are there fundamental differences between the structure or concepts of theories and explanations in the natural and social sciences? Some of these issues were already mentioned in the discussion above of reasons versus causes.
(ii) Are there fundamental differences in goals? Philosophers and economists have argued that in addition to or instead of the predictive and explanatory goals of the natural sciences, the social sciences should aim at providing us with understanding. Weber and others have argued that the social sciences should provide us with an understanding “from the inside", that we should be able to empathize with the reactions of the agents and to find what happens “understandable” (Weber 1904, Knight 1935, Machlup 1969a). This (and the closely related recognition that explanations cite reasons rather than just causes) seems to introduce an element of subjectivity into the social sciences that is not found in the natural sciences.
(iii) Owing to the importance of human choices (or perhaps free will), are social phenomena too “irregular” to be captured within a framework of laws and theories? Given human free will, perhaps human behavior is intrinsically unpredictable and not subject to any laws. But there are, in fact, many regularities in human action, and given the enormous causal complexity characterizing some natural systems, the natural sciences must cope with many irregularities, too.

2.4 Abstraction, idealization, and ceteris paribus clauses in economics
Economics raises questions concerning the legitimacy of severe abstraction and idealization. For example, mainstream economic models often stipulate that everyone is perfectly rational and has perfect information or that commodities are infinitely divisible. Such claims are exaggerations, and they are clearly false. Other schools of economics may not employ idealizations that are this extreme, but there is no way to do economics if one is not willing to simplify drastically and abstract from many complications. How much simplification, idealization, and abstraction is legitimate?
In addition, because economists attempt to study economic phenomena as constituting a separate domain, influenced only by a small number of causal factors, the claims of economics are true only ceteris paribus — that is, they are true only if there are no interferences or disturbing causes. What are ceteris paribus clauses, and when if ever are they legitimate in science? Questions concerning ceteris paribus clauses are closely related to questions concerning simplifications and idealizations, since one way to simplify is to suppose that the various disturbing causes or interferences are inactive and to explore the consequences of some small number of causal factors. These issues and the related question of how well supported economics is by the evidence have been the central questions in economic methodology. They will be discussed further below in Section 3 and elsewhere.

2.5 Causation in economics and econometrics
Many important generalizations in economics are causal claims. For example, the law of demand asserts that a price increase will (ceteris paribus) diminish the quantity demanded. Econometricians have also been deeply concerned with the possibilities of determining causal relations from statistical evidence and with the relevance of causal relations to the possibility of consistent estimation of parameter values. Since concerns about the consequences of alternative policies are so central to economics, causal inquiry is unavoidable.
Before the 1930s, economists were generally willing to use causal language explicitly and literally, despite some concerns that there might be a conflict between causal analysis of economic changes and “comparative statics” treatments of equilibrium states. Some economists were also worried that thinking in terms of causes was not compatible with recognizing the multiplicity and mutuality of determination in economic equilibrium. In the anti-metaphysical intellectual environment of the 1930s and 1940s (of which logical positivism was at least symptomatic), any mention of causation became highly suspicious, and economists commonly pretended to avoid causal concepts. The consequence was that they ceased to reflect carefully on the causal concepts that they continued implicitly to invoke (Hausman 1983, 1990, Helm 1984, Runde 1998). For example, rather than formulating the law of demand in terms of the causal consequences of price changes for quantity demanded, economists tried to confine themselves to discussing the mathematical function relating price and quantity demanded. There were important exceptions (Haavelmo 1944, Simon 1953, Wold 1954), and during the past generation, this state of affairs has changed dramatically.
For example, in his Causality in Macroeconomics (2001) Kevin Hoover develops feasible methods for investigating large scale causal questions, such as whether changes in the money supply (M) cause changes in the relate of inflation P or accommodate changes in P that are otherwise caused. If changes in M cause changes in P, then the conditional distribution of P on M should remain stable with exogenous changes in M, but should change with exogenous changes in P. Hoover argues that historical investigation, backed by statistical inquiry, can justify the conclusion that some particular changes in M or P have been exogenous. One can then determine the causal direction by examining the stability of the conditional distributions. Econometricians have made vital contributions to the contemporary revival of philosophical interest in the notion of causation. In addition to Hoover's work, see for example Geweke (1982), Granger (1969, 1980), Cartwright (1989), Sims (1977), Zellner and Aigner (1988).

2.6 Structure and strategy of economics
In the wake of the work of Kuhn (1970) and Lakatos (1970), philosophers are much more aware of and interested in the larger theoretical structures that unify and guide research within particular research traditions. Since many theoretical projects or approaches in economics are systematically unified, they pose questions about what guides research, and many economists have applied the work of Kuhn or Lakatos to shed light on the overall structure of economics (Baumberg 1977, Blaug 1976, Blaug and de Marchi 1991, Bronfenbrenner 1971, Coats 1969, Dillard 1978, Hands 1985b, Hausman 1992, ch. 6, Hutchison 1978, Latis 1976, Jalladeau 1978, Kunin and Weaver 1971, Stanfield 1974, Weintraub 1985, Worland 1972). Whether these applications have been successful is controversial, but the comparison of the structure of economics to Kuhn's and Lakatos' schema has at least served to highlight distinctive features of economics. For example, asking what the “positive heuristic” of mainstream economics consists in permits one to see that mainstream models typically attempt to demonstrate that an economic equilibrium will obtain, and thus that mainstream models are unified in more than just their common assumptions. Since the success of research projects in economics is controversial, understanding their global structure and strategy may clarify their drawbacks as well as their advantages.

3. Inexactness, ceteris paribus clauses, and “unrealistic assumptions"
As mentioned in the previous section, the most important methodological issue concerning economics involves the very considerable simplification, idealization, and abstraction that characterizes economic theory and the consequent doubts these features of economics raise concerning whether economics is well supported. Claims such as, “Agents prefer larger commodity bundles to smaller commodity bundles,” raise serious questions, because if they are interpreted as universal generalizations, they are false. Can a science rest on false generalizations? If these claims are not universal generalizations, then what is their logical form? And how can claims that appear in this way to be false or approximate be tested and confirmed or disconfirmed? These problems have bedeviled economists and economic methodologists from the first methodological reflections to the present day.

3.1 Classical economics and the method a priori
The first extended reflections on economic methodology appear in the work of Nassau Senior (1836) and John Stuart Mill (1836). Their essays must be understood against the background of the prevailing economic theory. Like Smith's economics (to which it owed a great deal) and modern economics, the “classical” economics of the middle decades of the 19th century traced economic regularities to the choices of individuals facing social and natural constraints. But, as compared to Smith, more reliance was placed on severely simplified models. In David Ricardo's Principles of Political Economy (1817), a portrait is drawn in which wages above the subsistence level lead to increases in the population, which in turn require more intensive agriculture or cultivation of inferior land. The extension of cultivation leads to lower profits and higher rents; and the whole tale of economic development leads to a gloomy stationary state in which profits are too low to command any net investment, wages return to subsistence levels, and only the landlords are affluent.
Fortunately for the world, but unfortunately for economic theorists at the time, the data consistently contradicted the trends the theory predicted (de Marchi 1970). Yet the theory continued to hold sway for more than half a century, and the consistently unfavorable data were explained away as due to various “disturbing causes.” It is consequently not surprising then that Senior's and Mill's accounts of the method of economics emphasize the relative autonomy of theory.
Mill distinguishes between two main kinds of inductive methods. The method a posteriori is a method of direct experience. In his view, it is only suitable for phenomena in which few causal factors are operating or in which experimental controls are possible. Mill's famous methods of induction provide an articulation of the method a posteriori. In his method of difference, for example, one holds fixed every causal factor except one and checks to see whether the effect ceases to obtain when that one factor is removed.
Mill maintains that direct inductive methods cannot be used to study phenomena in which many causal factors are in play. If, for example, one attempts to investigate whether tariffs enhance or impede prosperity by comparing the prosperity of nations with high tariffs and nations without high tariffs, the results will be worthless because the prosperity of the countries studied depend on so many other causal factors. So, Mill argues, one needs instead to employ the method a priori. Despite its name, Mill emphasizes that this too is an inductive method. The difference between the method a priori and the method a posteriori is that the method a priori is an indirect inductive method. One first determines the laws governing individual causal factors in domains in which Mill's methods of induction are applicable. Having then determined the laws of the individual causes, one investigates their combined consequences deductively. Finally, there is a role for "verification” of the combined consequences, but owing to the causal complications, this testing has comparatively little weight. The testing of the conclusions serves only as a check on one's deductions and as an indicator of whether there are significant disturbing causes that one has not yet accounted for.
Mill gives the example of the science of the tides. One determines the law of gravitation by studying planetary motion, in which gravity is the only significant causal factor. Then one develops the theory of tides deductively from that law and information concerning the positions and motions of the moon and sun. The implications of the theory will be inexact and sometimes badly mistaken, because many subsidiary causal factors influence tides. By testing the theory one can uncover mistakes in one's deductions and evidence concerning the role of the subsidiary factors. But because of the causal complexity, such testing does little to confirm or disconfirm the law of gravitation, which has already been established. Although Mill does not often use the language of “ceteris paribus”, his view that the principles or “laws” of economics hold in the absence of “interferences” or “disturbing causes” provides an account of how the principles of economics can be true ceteris paribus (Hausman 1992, ch. 8, 12).
Because economic theory includes only the most important causes and necessarily ignores minor causes, its claims, like claims concerning tides, are inexact. Its predictions will be imprecise, and sometimes far off. Mill maintains that it is nevertheless possible to develop and confirm economic theory by studying in simpler domains the laws governing the major causal factors and then deducing their consequences in more complicated circumstances. For example, the statistical data are ambiguous concerning the relationship between minimum wages and unemployment of unskilled workers; and since the minimum wage has never been extremely high, there are no data about what unemployment would be in those circumstances. On the other hand, everyday experience teaches one that firms can choose among more or less labor-intensive processes and that a high minimum wage will make more labor-intensive processes more expensive. On the assumption that firms try to keep their costs down, one has good though not conclusive reason to believe that a high minimum wage will increase unemployment.
In defending a view of economics as in this way inexact and employing the method a priori, Mill was able to reconcile his empiricism and his commitment to Ricardo's economics. Although Mill's views on economic methodology were challenged later in the nineteenth century by economists who believed that the theory was too remote from the contingencies of policy and history (Roscher 1874, Schmoller 1888, 1898), Mill's methodological views dominated the mainstream of economic theory for well over a century (for example, Cairnes 1875). Mill's vision survived the so-called neoclassical revolution in economics beginning in the 1870s and is clearly discernable in the most important methodological treatises concerning neoclassical economics, such as John Neville Keynes' The Scope and Method of Political Economy (1891) or Lionel Robbins' An Essay on the Nature and Significance of Economic Science (1932). Hausman (1992) argues that current methodological practice closely resembles Mill's methodology, despite the fact that few economists would explicitly defend it.

3.2 Milton Friedman and the defense of “unrealistic assumptions"
Although some contemporary philosophers have argued that Mill's method a priori is largely defensible (Bhaskar 1978, Cartwright 1989, and Hausman 1992), by the middle of the Twentieth Century Mill's views appeared to many economists out of step with contemporary philosophy of science. Without studying Mill's text carefully, it was easy for economists to misunderstand his terminology and to regard his method a priori as opposed to empiricism. Others took seriously Mill's view that the basic principles of economics should be empirically established and found evidence to cast doubt on some of the basic principles, particularly the view that firms attempt to maximize profits (Hall and Hitch 1938, Lester 1946, 1947). Methodologists who were well-informed about contemporary developments in philosophy of science, such as Terence Hutchison (1938), denounced “pure theory” in economics as unscientific.
Philosophically reflective economists proposed several ways to replace the old-fashioned Millian view with a more up-to-date methodology that would continue to justify much of current practice (see particularly Machlup 1955, 1960 and Koopmans 1957). By far the most influential of these was Milton Friedman's contribution in his 1953 essay, “The Methodology of Positive Economics.” This essay has had an enormous influence, far more than any other work on methodology.
Friedman begins his essay by distinguishing between positive and normative economics and conjecturing that policy disputes are typically really disputes about the consequences of alternatives and thus are capable of being resolved by progress in positive economics. Turning to positive economics, Friedman asserts (without argument) that the ultimate goal of all positive sciences is correct prediction concerning phenomena not yet observed. He holds a practical view of science and looks to science for predictions that will guide policy.
Since it is difficult or impossible to carry out experiments and since the uncontrolled phenomena economists observe are difficult to interpret (owing to the same causal complexity that bothered Mill), it is hard to judge whether a particular theory is a good basis for predictions or not. Consequently, Friedman argues, economists have supposed that they could test theories by the realism of their “assumptions” rather than by the accuracy of their predictions. Friedman argues at length that this is a grave mistake. Theories may be of great predictive value even though their assumptions are extremely “unrealistic.” The realism of a theory's assumptions is, he maintains, irrelevant to its predictive value. It does not matter whether the assumption that firms maximize profits is realistic. Theories should be appraised exclusively in terms of the accuracy of their predictions. What matters is whether the theory of the firm makes correct and significant predictions.
As critics have pointed out (and almost all commentators have been critical), Friedman refers to several different things as “assumptions” of a theory and means several different things by speaking of assumptions as “unrealistic” (Brunner 1969). Since Friedman aims his criticism to those who investigate empirically whether firms in fact attempt to maximize profits, he must take “assumptions” to include central explanatory generalizations, such as “Firms attempt to maximize profits,” and by “unrealistic,” he must mean, among other things, “false.” In arguing that it is a mistake to appraise theories in terms of the realism of assumptions, Friedman is arguing at least that it is a mistake to appraise theories by investigating whether their central explanatory generalizations are true or false.
It would seem that this interpretation would render Friedman's views inconsistent, because in testing whether firms attempt to maximize profits, one is checking whether predictions of theory concerning the behavior of firms are true or false. An “assumption” such as “firms maximize profits” is itself a prediction. But there is a further wrinkle. Friedman is not concerned with every prediction of economic theories. In Friedman's view, “theory is to be judged by its predictive power for the class of phenomena which it is intended to “explain” (1953, p. 8 [italics added]). Economists are interested in only some of the implications of economic theories. Other predictions, such as those concerning the results of Lester's surveys, are irrelevant to policy. What matters is whether economic theories are successful at predicting the phenomena that economists are interested in. In other words, Friedman believes that economic theories should be appraised in terms of their predictions concerning prices and quantities exchanged on markets. In his view, what matters is “narrow predictive success” (Hausman 1994b), not overall predictive adequacy.
So economists can simply ignore the disquieting findings of surveys. They can ignore the fact that people do not always prefer larger bundles of commodities to smaller bundles of commodities. They need not be troubled that some of their models suppose that all agents know the prices of all present and future commodities in all markets. All that matters is whether the predictions concerning market phenomena turn out to be correct or not. And since anomalous market outcomes could be due to any number of uncontrolled causal factors, while experiments are difficult or impossible to carry out, it turns out that economists need not worry about ever encountering evidence that would disconfirm fundamental theory. Detailed models may be confirmed or disconfirmed, but fundamental theory is safe. In this way one can understand how Friedman's methodology, which appears to justify the eclectic and pragmatic view that economists should use any model that appears to "work” regardless of how absurd or unreasonable its assumptions might appear, has been put in service of a rigid theoretical orthodoxy. For other discussions of Friedman's essay, see Bear and Orr 1969, Boland 1979, Hammond 1992, Hirsch and de Marchi 1990, Mäki 1990a, Melitz 1963, Rotwein 1959, and Samuelson 1963.
Over the last two decades there has been a surge of experimentation in economics, and Friedman's methodological views probably do not command the same near unanimity that they used to. But they are still enormously influential, and they still serve as a way of avoiding awkward questions concerning simplifications, idealizations, and abstraction in economics rather than providing a response to them.

4. Contemporary directions in economic methodology
The past half century has witnessed the emergence of a large literature devoted to economic methodology. That literature explores many methodological approaches and applies its conclusions to many schools and branches of economics. Much of the literature focuses on the fundamental theory of mainstream economics — the theory of the equilibria resulting from constrained rational individual choice. Since 1985, there has been a journal Economic and Philosophy devoted specifically to philosophy of economics, and since 1994 there has also been a Journal of Economic Methodology. This section will sample some of the methodological work that has been done during the past two decades.

4.1 Popperian approaches
Karl Popper's philosophy of science has been influential among economists, as among other scientists. Popper defends what he calls a falsificationist methodology (1968, 1969). Scientists should formulate theories that are “logically falsifiable” — that is, inconsistent with some possible observation reports. “All crows are black” is logically falsifiable, since it is inconsistent with (and would be falsified by) an observation report of a red crow. Second, Popper maintains that scientists should subject theories to harsh test and should be willing to reject them when they fail the tests. Third, scientists should regard theories as at best interesting conjectures. Passing a test does not confirm a theory or provide one with reason to believe it. It only justifies continuing to employ it (since it has not yet been falsified) and devoting increased efforts to attempting to falsify it (since it has thus far survived testing). Popper has also written in defense of what he calls “situational logic” (which is basically rational choice theory) as the correct method for the social sciences (1967, 1976). There appear to be serious tensions between Popper's falsificationism and his defense of situational logic, and his discussion of situational logic has not been as influential as his falsificationism. For discussion of how situational logic applies to economics, see Hands (1985a).
Given Popper's falsificationism, there seems little hope of understanding how extreme simplifications can be legitimate or how current economic practice could be scientifically reputable. Specific economic theories are rarely logically falsifiable. When they are, the widespread acceptance of Friedman's methodological views insures that they are not subjected to serious test. When they apparently fail tests, they are rarely repudiated. Economic theories, which have not been well tested, are taken to be well-established guides to policy, rather than merely conjectures. Some critics of neoclassical economics have made these criticisms (Eichner 1983). But most of those who have espoused Popper's philosophy of science have not repudiated mainstream economics and have not been so harshly critical of its practitioners.
Mark Blaug (1992) and Terence Hutchison (1938, 1977, 1978, 2000), who are the most prominent Popperian methodologists, criticize particular features of economics, and they both call for more testing and a more critical attitude. For example, Blaug praises Gary Becker (1976) for his refusal to explain differences in choices by differences in preferences, but criticizes him for failing to go on and test his theories severely (1980a, chapter 14). However, both Blaug and Hutchison understate the radicalism of Popper's views and take his message to be merely that scientists should be critical and concerned to test their theories.
Blaug's and Hutchison's criticisms have sometimes been challenged on the grounds that economic theories cannot be tested, because of their ceteris paribus clauses and the many subsidiary assumptions required to derive testable implications (Caldwell 1984). But this response ignores Popper's insistence that testing requires methodological decisions not to attribute failures of predictions to mistakes in subsidiary assumptions or to “interferences.” For views of Popper's philosophy and its applicability to economics, see de Marchi (1988), Caldwell (1991), and Boland (1982, 1989, 1992).
Applying Popper's views on falsification literally would be destructive. Not only neoclassical economics, but all known economic theories would be condemned as unscientific, and there would be no way to discriminate among economic theories. One major problem is that one cannot derive testable implications from theories by themselves. To derive testable implications, one also needs subsidiary assumptions or hypotheses concerning distributions, measurement devices, proxies for unmeasured variables, the absence of various interferences, and so forth. This is the so-called “Duhem-Quine problem” (Duhem 1906, Quine 1953, Cross 1982). These problems arise generally, and Popper proposes that they be solved by a methodological decision to regard a failure of the deduced testable implication to be a failure of the theory. But in economics the subsidiary assumptions are dubious and in many cases known to be false. Making the methodological decision that Popper requires is unreasonable and would lead one to reject all economic theories.
Imre Lakatos (1970), who was for most of his philosophical career a follower of Popper, offers a broadly Popperian solution to this problem. Lakatos insists that testing is always comparative. When theories face empirical difficulties, as they always do, one attempts to modify them. Scientifically acceptable (in Lakatos' terminology “theoretically progressive”) modifications must always have some additional testable implications and are thus not purely ad hoc. If some of the new predictions are confirmed, then the modification is “empirically progressive,” and one has reason to reject the unmodified theory and to employ the new theory, regardless of how unsuccessful in general either theory may be. Though progress may be hard to come by, Lakatos' views do not have the same destructive implications as Popper's. Lakatos appears to solve the problem of how to appraise mainstream economic theory by arguing that what matters is empirical progress or retrogression rather than empirical success or failure. Lakatos' views have thus been more attractive to economic methodologists than Popper's.
Developing Thomas Kuhn's notion of a “paradigm” (1970) and some hints from Popper, Lakatos also developed a view of the global theory structure of whole theoretical enterprises, which he called “scientific research programmes.” Lakatos emphasized that there is a “hard core” of basic theoretical propositions that define a research programme and are not to be questioned within the research programme. In addition members of a research programme accept a common body of heuristics that guide them in the articulation and modification of specific theories. These views were also attractive to economic methodologists, since theory development in economics is so sharply constrained and since economics appears at first glance to have a “hard core.” The fact that economists do not give up basic theoretical postulates that appear to be false might be explained and justified by regarding them as part of the “hard core” of the neoclassical research programme.
Yet Lakatos' views do not provide a satisfactory account of how economics can be a reputable science despite its reliance on extreme simplifications. For it is questionable whether the development of neoclassical economic theory has demonstrated empirical progress. For example, the replacement of “cardinal” utility theory by “ordinal” utility theory (see below Section 5.1) in the 1930's, which is generally regarded as a major step forward, involved the replacement of one theory by another that was strictly weaker and which had no additional empirical content. Furthermore, despite his emphasis on heuristics as guiding theory modification, Lakatos still emphasizes testing. Science is for Lakatos more empirically driven than is contemporary economics (Hands 1992). It is also doubtful whether research enterprises in economics have “hard cores” (Hoover 1991, Hausman 1992, ch. 6). For attempts to apply Lakatos' views to economics see Latsis (1976), and Weintraub (1985). As is apparent in de Marchi and Blaug (1991), writers on economic methodology have in recent years become increasingly disenchanted with Lakatos' philosophy.
There is a second major problem with Popper's philosophy of science, which plagues Lakatos' views as well. Both maintain that there is no such thing as empirical confirmation (for some late qualms of Lakatos see Lakatos 1974). Popper and Lakatos maintain that evidence never provides reason to believe that scientific claims are true, and both also deny that results of tests can justify relying on statements in practical endeavours or in theoretical inquiry. There is no better evidence for one unfalsified proposition than for another. Someone who questions whether there is enough evidence for some proposition to justify relying on it in theoretical studies or for policy purposes would be making the methodological “error” of supposing that there can be evidence in support of hypotheses. With the notable exception of Watkins (1984), few philosophers within the Popperian tradition have faced up to this radical consequence.

4.2 The rhetoric of economics
One radical reaction to the difficulties of justifying the reliance on severe simplifications is to deny that economics passes methodological muster. Alexander Rosenberg (1992) maintains that economics can only make imprecise generic predictions, and it cannot make progress, because it is built around folk psychology, which is a mediocre theory of human behavior and which (owing to the irreducibility of intentional notions) cannot be improved. Complex economic theories are valuable only as applied mathematics, not as empirical theory. Since economics does not show the same consistent progress as the natural sciences, one cannot dismiss Rosenberg's suggestion that economics is an empirical dead end. But his view that it has made no progress and that it does not permit quantitative predictions is hard to accept. For example, contemporary economists are much better at pricing stock options than economists were even a generation ago.
An equally radical but opposite reaction is Deirdre McCloskey's, who denies that there are any non-trivial methodological standards that economics must meet (1985, 1994). In her view, the only relevant and significant criteria for assessing the practices and products of a discipline are those accepted by the practitioners. Apart from a few general standards such as honesty and a willingness to listen to criticisms, the only justifiable criteria for any conversation are those of the participants. Economists can thus dismiss the arrogant pretensions of philosophers to judge economic discourse. Whatever a group of economists takes to be good economics is good economics. Philosophical standards of empirical success are just so much hot air. Those who are interested in understanding the character of economics and in contributing to its improvement should eschew methodology and study instead the “rhetoric” of economics — that is, the means of argument and persuasion that succeed among economists.
McCloskey's studies of the rhetoric of economics have been valuable and influential (1985, esp. ch. 5-7), but much of her work consists not of such studies but of philosophical critiques of economic methodology. These are more problematic, because the position sketched in the previous paragraph is hard to defend and potentially self-defeating. It is hard to defend, because epistemological standards for good science have already infected the conversation of economists. The standards of predictive success which lead one to have qualms about economics are already standards that many economists accept. The only way to escape these doubts is to surrender the standards that gave rise to them. But McCloskey's position undermines any principled argument for a change in standards. Furthermore, as Alexander Rosenberg has argued (1988), it seems that economists would doom themselves to irrelevance if they were to surrender standards of predictive success, for it is upon such standards that policy decisions are made.
McCloskey does not, in fact, want to preclude all criticisms that economists are sometimes persuaded when they should not be or are not persuaded when they should be. For she herself criticizes the bad habit many economists have of conflating statistical significance with economic importance (1985, ch. 9). Sometimes McCloskey characterizes rhetoric descriptively as the study of what in fact persuades, but sometimes she characterizes it normatively as the study of what ought to persuade (1985, ch. 2). And if rhetoric is the study of what ought to persuade, then it is methodology, not an alternative to methodology. Questions about whether economics is a successful empirical science cannot be conjured away.

4.3 “Realism” in economic methodology
Economic methodologist have paid little attention to debates within philosophy of science between realists and anti-realists (van Fraassen 1980, Boyd 1984), because economic theories rarely postulate the existence of unobservable entities or properties, apart from variants of “everyday unobservables,” such as beliefs and desires. Methodologists have, on the other hand, vigorously debated the goals of economics, but those who argue that the ultimate goals are predictive (such as Milton Friedman) do so because of their interest in policy, not because they seek to avoid or resolve epistemological and semantic puzzles concerning references to unobservables.
Nevertheless there are two important recent realist programs in economic methodology. The first, developed mainly by Uskali Mäki, is devoted to exploring the varieties of realism implicit in the methodological statements and theoretical enterprises of economists (see Mäki 1990a, b, c). The second, which is espoused by Tony Lawson and his co-workers, mainly at Cambridge University, derives from the work of Roy Bhaskar (1978) (see Lawson 1997 and Fleetwood 1999). In Lawson's view, one can trace many of the inadequacies of mainstream economics (of which he is a critic) to an insufficient concern with ontology. In attempting to identify regularities on the surface of the phenomena, mainstream economists are doomed to failure. Economic phenomena are in fact influenced by a large number of different causal factors, and one can achieve scientific knowledge only of the underlying mechanisms and tendencies, whose operation can be glimpsed intermittently and obscurely in observable relations. Mäki's and Lawson's programs obviously have little to do with one another, though Mäki (like Mill, Cartwright, and Hausman) shares Lawson's and Bhaskar's concern with underlying causal mechanisms.

4.4 Economic methodology and social studies of science
Throughout its history, economics has been the subject of sociological as well as methodological scrutiny. Many sociological discussions of economics, like Marx's critique of classical political economy, have been concerned to identify ideological distortions and thereby to criticize particular aspects of economic theory and economic policy. Since every political program finds economists who testify to its economic virtues, there is a never-ending source of material for such critiques.
The influence of contemporary sociology of science and social studies of science, coupled with the difficulties methodologists have had making sense of and rationalizing the conduct of economics, have led to a sociological turn within methodological reflection itself. Rather than showing that there is good evidence supporting developments in economic theory or that those developments have other broadly epistemic virtues, methodologists and historians such as D. Wade Hands (2001; Hands and Mirowski 1998), Philip Mirowski (2002), and E. Roy Weintraub (1991) have argued that these changes reflect a wide variety of non-rational factors, from changes in funding for theoretical economics, political commitments, personal rivalries, attachments to metaphors, or mathematical interests.
Furthermore, many of the same methodologists and historians have argued that economics is not only an object of social inquiry, but also as a tool of social inquiry. By studying the incentive structure of scientific disciplines and the implicit or explicit market forces impinging on research (including of course research in economics), it should be possible to write the economics of science and the economics of economics itself (Hands 1995, Hull 1988, and Leonard 2002).
Exactly how, if at all, this work is supposed to bear on questions concerning how well supported are the claims economists make is not clear. Though eschewing traditional methodology, Mirowski's monograph on the role of physical analogy in economics (1990) is often very critical of mainstream economics. In his recent Reflection without Rules (2001) D. W. Hands maintains that general methodological rules are of little use. He defends a naturalistic view of methodology and is skeptical of prescriptions that are not based on detailed knowledge. But he does not argue that no rules apply.

4.5 Detailed contemporary studies
The above survey of approaches to the fundamental problems of appraising economic theory is far from complete. For example, there have been substantial efforts to apply structuralist views of scientific theories (Sneed 1971, Stegmueller 1976, 1979) to economics (Stegmüller et al. 1981, Hamminga 1983, Hands 1985c, Balzer and Hamminga 1989). The above discussion does at least document the diversity and disagreements concerning how to interpret and appraise economic theories. It is not surprising that there is no consensus among those writing on economic methodology concerning the overall empirical appraisal of specific approaches in economics, including mainstream microeconomics, macroeconomics, and econometrics. When practitioners cannot agree, it is questionable whether those who know more philosophy but less economics will be able to settle the matter. Since the debates continue, those who reflect on economic methodology should have a continuing part to play.
Meanwhile, there are many other more specific methodological questions to address, and it is a sign of the maturity of the subdiscipline that a large and increasing percentage of work on economic methodology addresses more specific questions. There is plethora of work, as a perusal of any recent issue of the Journal of Economic Methodology or Economics and Philosophy will confirm. Some of the range of issues currently under discussion were mentioned above in Section 2. Here is a list of three of the many areas of current interest:

1. Although more concerned with the content of economics than with its methodology, the recent explosion of work on feminist economics is shot through with methodological (and sociological) self-reflection. The fact that a larger percentage of economists are men than is true of any of the other social sciences and indeed than several of the natural sciences raises methodological questions about whether there is something particularly masculine about the discipline. Important texts are Ferber and Nelson (1993) and Nelson (1996). Since 1995, there has been a journal, Feminist Economics, which pulls together much of this work.

2. A century ago economists talked of their work in terms of “principles,” “laws,” and “theories.” Nowadays the standard intellectual tool or form is a “model.” Is this just a change in terminological fashion, or does the concern with models signal a methodological shift? What are models? These questions have been discussed by Cartwright 1989, 1999, Hausman 1992, Mäki, ed. 1991, Morgan 2001, Morgan and Morrison 1999, Rappaport 1998, and Sugden 2000.

3. During the past generation, experimental work in economics has expanded rapidly. This work has many different objectives (see Roth 1988) and apparently holds out the prospect of bridging the gulf between economic theory and empirical evidence. Some of it casts light on the way in which methodological commitments influence the extent to which economists heed empirical evidence. For example, in the case of preference reversals, discussed briefly below in Section 5.1, economists devoted considerable attention to the experimental findings and conceded that they disconfirmed central principles of economics. But economists were generally unwilling to pay serious attention to the theories proposed by psychologists that predicted the phenomena before they were observed. The reason seems to be that these psychological theories do not have the same wide scope as the basic principles of mainstream economics (Hausman 1992, chapter 13). The methodological commitments governing theoretical economics are much more complex and much more specific to economics than the general rules proposed by philosophers such as Popper and Lakatos.
The relevance of experimentation remains however controversial. There are many questions about whether experimental findings can be generalized to non-experimental contexts and, more generally, concerning the possibilities of learning from experiments. See Guala (2000a, b, 2003), Hey (1991), Kagel and Roth (1995), Plott (1991), Smith (1991), Starmer (1999).

5. Rational choice theory
Insofar as economics explains and predicts phenomena as consequences of individual choices, which are themselves explained in terms of reasons, it must depict agents as to some extent rational. Rationality, like reasons, involves evaluation, and just as one can assess the rationality of individual choices, so one can assess the rationality of social choices and examine how they are and ought to be related to the preferences and judgments of individuals. In addition, there are intricate questions concerning rationality in strategic situations in which outcomes depend on the choices of multiple individuals. Since rationality is a central concept in branches of philosophy such as action theory, epistemology, ethics, and philosophy of mind, studies of rationality frequently cross the boundaries between economics and philosophy and thus constitute one of the domains of philosophy of economics.

5.1 Individual rationality
The barebones theory of rationality discussed above in Section 1.1 takes an agent's preferences (rankings of objects of choice) to be rational if they are complete and transitive, and it takes the agent's choice to be rational if the agent does not prefer any feasible alternative to what he or she chooses. Such a theory of rationality is clearly too weak, because it says nothing about belief or what rationality implies when agents do not know (with certainty) everything relevant to their choices. But it may also be too strong, since, as Isaac Levi in particular has argued (1986), there is nothing irrational about having incomplete preferences in situations involving uncertainty. Sometimes it is rational to suspend judgment and to defer ranking alternatives that are not well understood. On the other hand, transitivity is a plausible condition, and the so-called "money pump” argument demonstrates that if one's preferences are intransitive, then one can be exploited. (Suppose an agent A prefers X to Y, Y to Z and Z to X, and that A will pay some small amount of money $P to exchange Y for X, Z for Y, and X for Z. That means that, starting with Z, A will pay $P for Y, then $P again for X, then $P again for Z and so on. Agents are not this stupid. They will instead adjust their preferences to eliminate the intransitivity (but see Schick 1986).
On the other hand, there is considerable experimental evidence that people's preferences are not in fact transitive. Such evidence does not establish that transitivity is not a requirement of rationality. It may show instead that people are sometimes irrational. In the case of so-called “preference reversals,” for example, it seems plausible that people in fact make irrational choices (Lichtenstein and Slovic 1971, Tversky and Thaler 1990). Evidence of persistent violations of transitivity is disquieting, since standards of rationality should not be impossibly high.
A further difficulty with the barebones theory of rationality concerns the individuation of the objects of preference or choice. Consider, for example, data from multistage ultimatum games. Suppose A can propose any division of $10 between A and B. B can accept or reject A's proposal. If B rejects the proposal, then the amount of money drops to $5, and B gets to offer a division of the $5 which A can accept or reject. If A rejects B's offer, then both players get nothing. Suppose that A proposes to divide the money with $7 for A and $3 for B. B declines and offers to split the $5 evenly, with $2.50 for each. Behavior such as this is, in fact, common (Ochs and Roth 1989, p. 362). Assuming that B prefers more money to less, these choices appear to be a violation of transitivity. B prefers $3 to $2.50, yet declines $3 for certain for $2.50 (with some slight chance of A declining and B getting nothing). But the objects of choice are not just quantities of money. B is turning down $3 as part of “a raw deal” in favor of $2.50 as part of a fair arrangement. If the objects of choice are defined in this way, there is no failure of transitivity.
This plausible observation gives rise to a serious problem. Unless there are constraints on how the objects of choice are individuated, conditions of rationality such as transitivity are empty. A's choice of X over Y, Y over Z and Z over X does not violate transitivity if “X when the alternative is Y” is not the same object of choice as “X when the alternative is Z". John Broome (1991) argues that further substantive principles of rationality are required to limit how alternatives are individuated or to require that agents be indifferent between alternatives such as “X when the alternative is Y” and “X when the alternative is Z."
To extend the theory of rationality to circumstances involving risk (where the objects of choice are lotteries with known probabilities) and uncertainty (where agents do not know the probabilities or even the payoffs in the lotteries among which they are choosing) requires further principles of rationality, as well as controversial technical simplifications. Subjective Bayesians suppose that individuals in circumstances of uncertainty have well-defined subjective probabilities over all the payoffs and thus that the objects of choice can be modeled as lotteries, just as in circumstances involving risk, though with subjective probabilities in place of objective probabilities. See the entries on Bayes' theorem and Bayesian epistemology. The central additional principle of rationality decision theorists invoke is the independence condition. Suppose an agent is offered a choice between two bets involving flipping a fair coin. In both cases the agent loses $1 if the coin lands tails, but the prizes the agent wins if the coin lands heads differ. The independence condition says that rational agents should prefer the first bet to the second bet if and only if the agent prefers the prize in the first bet when the coin lands heads to the prize in the second bet when the coin lands heads. An agent A is irrational if A prefers X to Y, but A does not prefer the lottery [(X, 0.5), ($-1, 0.5)] to [(Y, 0.5), ($-1, 0.5)]. Although initially plausible, the independence condition is very controversial. See (Allais and Hagen 1979) and McClennen 1983, 1990.
A considerable part of rational choice theory is concerned with formalizations of conditions of rationality and investigation of their implications. When an agent's preferences are complete and transitive and satisfy a further continuity condition, then they can be represented by a so-called ordinal utility function. What this means is that it is possible to define a function that represents an agent's preferences so that U(X) > U(Y) if and only if the agent prefers X to Y, and U(X) = U(Y) if and only if the agent is indifferent between X and Y. This function merely represents the preference ranking. It contains no information beyond the ranking. Any order-preserving transformation of “U” would represent the agent's preferences just as well.
When an agent's preferences in addition satisfy the independence condition and some other technical conditions, then they can be represented by an expected utility function (Harsanyi 1977b, ch. 4, Hernstein and Milnor 1953, Ramsey 1926, and Savage 1972). Such a function has two important properties. First, the expected utility of a lottery is equal to the expectation of the expected utilities of its prizes. Suppose, for example, that a lottery L has two prizes W and Z and the probability of winning W is p (and hence the probability of winning Z is 1 - p). Then if U is an expected utility function representing the agent's preferences, U(L) = pU(W) + (1 - p)U(Z). Second, expected utility functions are unique up to a positive affine transformation. What this means is that if U and V are both expected utility functions representing the preferences of an agent, then for all objects of preference, X, V(X) must be equal to aU(X) + b, where a and b are real numbers and a is positive. In addition, the axioms of rationality imply that the agent's degrees of belief will satisfy the axioms of the probability calculus.
A great deal of controversy surrounds the theory of rationality, and there have been many formal investigations into weakened or amended theories of rationality. For further discussion, see Allais and Hagen 1979, Barberà, Hammond and Seidl 1999, Kahneman and Tversky 1979, Loomes and Sugden 1982, Luce and Raiffa 1957 and Machina 1987.

5.2 Collective rationality and social choice
Although societies are very different from individuals, they make choices, which may be rational or irrational. It is not, however, obvious, what principles of rationality should govern the choices and evaluations of society. Transitivity is one plausible condition. It seems that a society which chooses X when faced with the alternatives X or Y, Y when faced with the alternatives Y or Z and Z when faced with the alternatives X or Z either has had a change of heart or is choosing irrationally. Yet, purported irrationalities such as these can easily arise from standard mechanisms that aim to link social choices and individual preferences. Suppose there are three individuals in the society. One ranks the alternatives X, Y, Z. Two ranks them Y, Z, X. Three ranks them Z, X, Y. If decisions are made by pairwise majority voting, X will be chosen from the pair (X, Y), Y will be chosen from (Y, Z), and Z will be chosen from (X, Z). Clearly this is unsettling, but are possible cycles in social choices irrational?
Similar problems affect what one might call the logical coherence of social judgments (List and Pettit 2002). Suppose society consists of three individuals who make the following judgments concerning the truth or falsity of the propositions P and Q and that social judgment follows the majority.
P if P then Q Q Individual 1 true true true Individual 2 false true false Individual 3 true false false Society true true false
The judgments of each of the individuals are consistent with the principles of logic, while social judgments violate them. How important is it that social judgments be consistent with the principles of logic?
Although social choice theory in this way bears on questions of social rationality, most work in social choice theory explores the consequences of principles of rationality coupled with explicitly ethical constraints. The seminal contribution was Kenneth Arrow's impossibility theorem (1963, 1967). Arrow assumed that both individual preferences and social choices are complete and transitive and (as completeness implies) that the method of making social choices issues in some choice for any possible profile of individual preferences. In addition, he imposed a weak unanimity condition: if everybody prefers X to Y, then Y must not be chosen. Third, he required that there be no dictator whose preferences determine social choices irrespective of the preferences of anybody else. Lastly, he imposed the condition that the social choice between X and Y should depend on how individuals rank X and Y and on nothing else. He proved the surprising result that no method of relating social choices and individual preferences can satisfy all these conditions!
In the half-century since Arrow wrote, there has been a plethora of work in social choice theory, a good deal of which is arguably of great importance to ethics. For example, John Harsanyi proved that if individual preferences and social evaluations both satisfy the axioms of expected utility theory (with shared or objective probabilities) and a stronger unanimity condition is imposed, then social evaluations are determined by a weighted sum of individual utilities (1955, 1977a). When there are instead disagreements in probability assignments, there is an impossibility result: the unanimity condition implies that social evaluations will not satisfy the axioms of expected utility theory (Hammond 1983, Seidenfeld, et al. 1989, Mongin 1995). For further discussion of social choice theory and the relevance of utility theory to social evaluation, see Sen (1970).

5.3 Game theory
When outcomes depend on what several agents do, one agent's best choice may depend on what other agents choose. Although the principles of rationality governing individual choice still apply, arguably there are further principles of rationality governing expectations of the actions of others (and of their expectations concerning your actions and expectations, and so forth). Game theory occupies an increasingly important role within economics itself, and it is also relevant both to inquiries concerning rationality and inquiries concerning ethics. For further discussion see the entries on game theory and Game Theory and Ethics.

6. Economics and ethics
As discussed above in Section 2.1 most economists would insist that one distinguish between positive and normative economics, and most would argue that economics is mainly relevant to policy because of the information it provides concerning the consequences of policy. Yet the same economists who so sharply distinguish positive and normative economics will often turn around and offer their advice concerning how to fix the economy. In addition, there is a whole field of normative economics.
Economic outcomes, institutions, and processes may be better or worse in several different ways. Some outcomes may make people better off. Other outcomes may be less unequal. Others may restrict individual freedom more severely. Economists typically evaluate outcomes exclusively in terms of welfare. This does not imply that they believe that only welfare is of moral importance. They focus on welfare, because they believe that economics provides a particularly apt set of tools to address questions of welfare and because they believe or hope that questions about welfare can be separated from questions about equality, freedom, or justice. As sketched below, economists have had some things to say about other dimensions of moral appraisal, but welfare takes center stage. Indeed normative economics is called “welfare economics.”

6.1 Welfare
One central question of moral philosophy has been to determine what things are
intrinsically good for human beings. This is a central question, because all plausible moral views assign an important place to individual welfare or well-being. This is obviously true of utilitarianism (which hold that what is right maximizes total or average welfare), but even non-utilitarian views must be concerned with welfare, if they recognize the virtue of benevolence, or if they are concerned with the interests of individuals or with avoiding harm to individuals.
There are many theories of well-being, and the prevailing view among economists themselves has shifted from hedonism (which takes the good to be a mental state such as pleasure or happiness) to the view that welfare is the satisfaction of preferences. Unlike hedonism, taking welfare to be the satisfaction of preference specifies how to find out what is good for a person rather than committing itself to any substantive view of a person's good. Note that equating welfare with the satisfaction of preferences is not equating welfare with satisfaction. If welfare is the satisfaction of preferences, then a person is better off if what he or she prefers comes to pass, regardless of whether that occurrence makes the agent feel satisfied.
Since mainstream economics attributes a consistent preference ordering to all agents, and since more specific models typically take agents to be well-informed and self-interested, it is easy for economists to accept the view that an individual agent A will prefer X to Y if and only if X is in fact better for A than Y is. This is one place where positive theory bleeds into normative theory. In addition the identification of welfare with the satisfaction of preferences is attractive to economists, because it prevents questions about the justification of paternalism (to which most economists are strongly opposed) from even arising.
There are however many obvious objections to the view that well-being is the satisfaction of preferences. Preferences may be based on mistaken beliefs. People may prefer to sacrifice their own well-being for some purpose they value more highly. Preferences may reflect past manipulation or distorting psychological influences (Elster 1983). Taking well-being to be the satisfaction of preferences makes it very difficult to make interpersonal comparisons of well-being. (Although mental states are hard to measure, it is easier to make sense of a comparison of A's happiness to B's happiness than it is to make sense of a comparison of the extent to which A's and B's preferences are satisfied.) In addition there are objections to basing policy on identifying welfare with the satisfaction of preferences. Doing so implies that one can make people better off by molding their wants rather than by providing them with goods and services. Furthermore, it seems unreasonable that social policy should attend to extravagant preferences. Rather than responding to these objections and defending this theory of welfare, most economists would argue that the satisfaction of preference is instead a good empirical proxy for whatever it is that welfare “really" is. There are some exceptions, most notable Amartya Sen (1987a,b,c, 1992), but most economists take welfare to be the satisfaction of preference.

6.2 Efficiency
Because the preference satisfaction view of welfare makes it questionable whether one can make interpersonal welfare comparisons, few economists defend a utilitarian view of policy as maximizing total or average welfare. (Harsanyi is one exception, for another see Ng 1983). Economists have instead explored the possibility of making welfare evaluations of economic processes, institutions, outcomes, and policies without making interpersonal comparisons. Consider two economic outcomes S and R, and suppose that some people prefer S to R and that nobody prefers R to S. In that case S is “Pareto superior” to R or S is a “Pareto improvement” over R. Without making any interpersonal comparisons, one can conclude that people's preferences are better satisfied in S than in R. If there is no state of affairs that is Pareto superior to S, then economists say that S is “Pareto optimal” or “Pareto efficient.” Efficiency here is efficiency with respect to satisfying preferences rather than minimizing the number of inputs needed to produce a unit of output or some other technical notion (Legrand 1991). If a state of affairs is not Pareto efficient, then society is missing an opportunity costlessly to satisfy some people's preferences better. A Pareto efficient state of affairs avoids this failure, but it has no other virtues. For example, suppose nobody is satiated and people care only about how much food they get. Consider two distributions of food. In the first, millions are starving but no food is wasted. In the second, nobody is starving, but some food is wasted. The first is Pareto efficient, while the second is not.
The notions of Pareto improvements and Pareto efficiency might seem useless, because economic policies almost always have both winners and losers. Mainstream economists have nevertheless found these concepts useful in two ways. First, they have succeeded in proving two theorems concerning properties of perfectly competitive equilibria (Arrow 1968). The first theorem says that perfectly competitive equilibria are Pareto optimal, while the second says that any Pareto optimal allocation, with whatever distribution of income one might prefer, can be achieved as a perfectly competitive equilibrium, provided that one begins with just the right distribution of endowments among economic agents. The first theorem has been regarded as underwriting Adam Smith's view of the invisible hand (Arrow and Hahn 1971, preface; Hahn 1973). This interpretation is problematic, because no economy has ever been or will ever be in perfectly competitive equilibrium. The second theorem provides some justification for the normative division of labor economists prefer, with economists concerned about efficiency and others concerned about justice. The thought is that theories of just distribution are compatible with reliance on competitive markets. These theorems go some way toward explaining why mainstream economists, whether they support laissez-faire policies or government intervention to remedy market imperfections, think of perfectly competitive equilibria as ideals. But the significance of the theorems is debatable, since actual markets differ significantly from perfectly competitive markets and, when there are multiple market imperfections, the “theory of the second best” shows that fixing any may lead one away from a perfectly competitive equilibrium rather than toward one (Lipsey and Lancaster 1956-7).
The other way that economists have found to extend the Pareto efficiency notions leads to cost-benefit analysis, which is a practical tool for policy analysis (Mishan 1971, Sugden and Williams 1978). Suppose that S is not a Pareto improvement over R. Some members of the society would be losers in a shift from R to S. They prefer R to S, but there are enough winners — enough people who prefer S to R — that the winners could compensate the losers and make the preference for S' (S with compensation paid) over R unanimous. S is a “potential Pareto improvement” over R. In other terms, the amount of money the winners would be willing to pay to bring about the change is larger than the amount of money the losers would have to be compensated so as not to object to the change. (Economists are skeptical about what one learns from asking people how much they would be willing to pay and attempt to infer this information indirectly from market phenomena, but what matters in principle is willingness to pay.) When S is a potential Pareto improvement over R, there is said to be a “net benefit” to the policy of bringing about S. According to cost-benefit analysis, among eligible policies (which satisfy legal and moral constraints), one should, other things being equal, employ the one with the largest net benefit. Note that the compensation is not paid. It is entirely hypothetical. There are losers. Justice or beneficence may require that the society do something to mitigate their losses. But since there is a larger “pie” of goods and services to satisfy preferences (since compensation could be paid and everybody's preferences better satisfied), selecting policies with the greatest net benefit serves economic efficiency (Hicks 1939, Kaldor 1939).
Despite the practical importance of cost-benefit analysis, the technique and the justification for it sketched in the previous paragraph are controversial. One technical difficulty is that it is possible for S to be a potential Pareto improvement over R and for R to be a potential Pareto improvement over S (Scitovsky 1941, Samuelson 1950). That means that the fact that S is a potential Pareto improvement over R does not imply that there is a larger economic “pie” in S than in R, because there cannot, of course, be a larger economic pie in S than in R and a larger economic pie in R than in S. A second problem is that willingness to pay for some policy and the amount one would require in compensation if one opposes the policy depend as much on how much wealth one has as on one's attitude to the policy. Cost-benefit analysis weights the preferences of the rich much more than the preferences of the poor (Baker 1975). It is possible to compensate roughly for the effects of income and wealth (Harburger 1978), but it is bothersome to do so and cost-benefit analysis is commonly employed without any adjustment for wealth or income.

6.3 Other directions in normative economics
Although welfare economics and concerns about efficiency dominate normative economics, they do not exhaust the subject, and in collaboration with philosophers, economists have made a wide variety of important contributions to contemporary work in ethics and normative social and political philosophy. Section 5.2 and Section 5.3 gave some hint of the contributions of social choice theory and game theory. In addition economists and philosophers have been working on the problem of providing a formal characterization of freedom so as to bring tools of economic analysis to bear (Pattanaik and Xu 1990, Sen 1988, 1990, 1991, Carter 1999). Others have developed formal characterizations of equality of resources, opportunity, and outcomes and have analyzed the conditions under which it is possible to separate individual and social responsibility for inequalities (Pazner and Schmeidler 1974, Varian 1974, 1975, Roemer 1986b, 1987, Fleurbaey 1995). John Roemer has put contemporary economic modeling to work to offer precise characterizations of exploitation (1982). Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum have not only developed novel interpretations of well-being in terms of capabilities (Sen 1992, Nussbaum and Sen 1993, Nussbaum 2000), but Sen has linked them to characterizations of egalitarianism and to operational measures of deprivation (1999). There are many lively interactions between normative economics and moral philosophy.

7. Conclusions
There is an enormous amount of activity at the frontiers between economics and philosophy concerned with methodology, rationality, ethics and normative social and political philosophy. This work is diverse and addresses very different questions. Although many of these are related, philosophy of economics is not a single unified enterprise. It is a collection of separate inquiries linked to one another by connections among the questions and by the dominating influence of mainstream economic models and techniques.

Credit: Stan/pla

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel's Contributions

2005-10-11T08:51:00.000-07:00

Along with J. G. Fichte and F. W. J. von Schelling, Hegel (1770-1831) belongs to the period of “German idealism” in the decades following Kant. The most systematic of the post-Kantian idealists, Hegel attempted, throughout his published writings as well as in his lectures, to elaborate a comprehensive and systematic ontology from a “logical” starting point. He is perhaps most well-known for his teleological account of history, an account which was later taken over by Marx and “inverted” into a materialist theory of an historical development culminating in communism. For most of the twentieth century, the “logical” side of Hegel's thought had been largely forgotten, but his political and social philosophy continued to find interest and support. However, since the 1970s, a degree of more general philosophical interest in Hegel's systematic thought has also been revived.
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1. Life, Work, and Influence
Born in 1770 in Stuttgart, Hegel spent the years 1788-1793 as a theology student in nearby Tübingen, forming friendships there with fellow students, the future great romantic poet Friedrich Hölderlin (1770-1843) and Friedrich W. J. von Schelling (1775-1854), who, like Hegel, would become one of the major figures of the German philosophical scene in the first half of the nineteenth century. These friendships clearly had a major influence on Hegel's philosophical development, and for a while the intellectual lives of the three were closely intertwined.
After graduation Hegel worked as a tutor for families in Bern and then Frankfurt, where he was reunited with Hölderlin. Until around 1800, Hegel devoted himself to developing his ideas on religious and social themes, and seemed to have envisaged a future for himself as a type of modernising and reforming educator, in the image of figures of the German Enlightenment such as Lessing and Schiller. Around the turn of the century, however, possibly under the influence of Hölderlin, his interests turned more to the issues in the “critical” philosophy of Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) that had enthused Hölderlin, Schelling, and many others, and in 1801 he moved to the University of Jena to join Schelling. In the 1790s Jena had become a centre of both “Kantian” philosophy and the early romantic movement and by the time of Hegel's arrival Schelling had already become an established figure, taking the approach of J. G. Fichte (1762-1814), the most important of the new Kantian-styled philosophers, in novel directions. In late 1801, Hegel published his first philosophical work, The Difference between Fichte's and Schelling's System of Philosophy, and up until 1803 worked closely with Schelling, with whom he edited the Critical Journal of Philosophy. In his “Difference” essay Hegel had argued that Schelling's approach succeeded where Fichte's failed in the project of systematising and thereby completing Kant's transcendental idealism, and on the basis of this type of advocacy was dogged for many years by the reputation of being a “mere” follower of Schelling (who was five years his junior).
By late 1806 Hegel had completed his first major work, the Phenomenology of Spirit (published 1807), which showed a divergence from his earlier, seemingly more Schellingian, approach. Schelling, who had left Jena in 1803, interpreted a barbed criticism in the Phenomenology's preface as aimed at him, and their friendship abruptly ended. The occupation of Jena by Napoleon's troops as Hegel was completing the manuscript closed the university and Hegel left the town. Now without a university appointment he worked for a short time, apparently very successfully, as an editor of a newspaper in Bamberg, and then from 1808-1815 as the headmaster and philosophy teacher at a “gymnasium” in Nuremberg. During his time at Nuremberg he married and started a family, and wrote and published his Science of Logic. In 1816 he managed to return to his university career by being appointed to a chair in philosophy at the University of Heidelberg. Then in 1818, he was offered and took up the chair of philosophy at the University of Berlin, the most prestigious position in the German philosophical world. While in Heidelberg he published the Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences, a systematic work in which an abbreviated version of the earlier Science of Logic (the “Encyclopaedia Logic” or “Lesser Logic”) was followed by the application of its principles to the Philosophy of Nature and the Philosophy of Spirit. In 1821 in Berlin Hegel published his major work in political philosophy, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, based on lectures given at Heidelberg but ultimately grounded in the section of the Encyclopaedia Philosophy of Spirit dealing with “objective spirit.” During the following ten years up to his death in 1831 Hegel enjoyed celebrity at Berlin, and published subsequent versions of the Encyclopaedia. After his death versions of his lectures on philosophy of history, philosophy of religion, aesthetics, and the history of philosophy were published.
After Hegel's death, Schelling, whose reputation had long since been eclipsed by that of Hegel, was invited to take up the chair at Berlin, reputedly because the government of the day had wanted to counter the influence that Hegelian philosophy had developed among a generation of students. Since the early period of his collaboration with Hegel, Schelling had become more religious in his philosophising and criticised the “rationalism” of Hegel's philosophy. During this time of Schelling's tenure at Berlin, important forms of later critical reaction to Hegelian philosophy developed. Hegel himself had been a supporter of progressive but non-revolutionary politics, but his followers divided into “left-” and “right-wing” factions; from out of the former circle, Karl Marx was to develop his own “scientific” approach to society and history which appropriated many Hegelian ideas into Marx's materialistic outlook. (Later, especially in reaction to orthodox Soviet versions of Marxism, many “Western Marxists” re-incorporated further Hegelian elements back into their forms of Marxist philosophy.) Many of Schelling's own criticisms of Hegel's rationalism found their way into subsequent “existentialist” thought, especially via the writings of Kierkegaard, who had attended Schelling's lectures. Furthermore, the interpretation Schelling offered of Hegel during these years itself helped to shape subsequent generations' understanding of Hegel, contributing to the orthodox or traditional understanding of Hegel as a “metaphysical” thinker in the pre-Kantian “dogmatic” sense.
In academic philosophy, Hegelian idealism underwent a revival in both Great Britain and the United States in the last decades of the nineteenth century. In Britain, where philosophers such as T. H Green and F. H. Bradley had developed metaphysical ideas which they related back to Hegel's thought, Hegel came to be one of the main targets of attack by the founders of the emerging “analytic” movement, Bertrand Russell and G. E. Moore. For most of the twentieth century, interest in Hegel became limited to the context of his relation to other more popular philosophical movements like existentialism or Marxism, or to his social and political thought. In France, a version of Hegelianism came to influence a generation of thinkers, including Jean-Paul Sartre and the psychoanalyst, Jacques Lacan, largely through the lectures of Alexandre Kojève, an important precursor to the later “post-modern” movement. A later generation of French philosophers coming to prominence in the late 1960s and after, however, tended to react against Hegel in ways analogous to those in which early analytic philosophers had reacted against the Hegel who had influenced their predecessors. In Germany, interest in Hegel was revived early in the century with the historical work of Wilhelm Dilthey, and important Hegelian elements were incorporated into the approach of thinkers of the Frankfurt School, such as Theodor Adorno, and later, Jürgen Habermas, as well as the “hermeneutic” approach of H.-G. Gadamer. In Hungary, similar Hegelian themes were developed by Georg Lukács and later thinkers of the “Budapest School.” In the 1960s the German philosopher Klaus Hartmann developed what was termed a “non-metaphysical” interpretation of Hegel which, together with the work of Dieter Henrich and others, played an important role in the revival of interest in Hegel in academic philosophy in the second half of the century. Within English-speaking philosophy, the final quarter of the twentieth century saw something of a revival of serious interest in Hegel's philosophy, especially in North America, with important works appearing such as those by H. S. Harris, Charles Taylor, Robert Pippin and Terry Pinkard.

2. Hegel's Philosophy
Hegel's own pithy account of the nature of philosophy given in the “Preface” to his Elements of the Philosophy of Right captures a characteristic tension in his philosophical approach and, in particular, in his approach to the nature and limits of human cognition. “Philosophy,” he says there, “is its own time raised to the level of thought.”
On the one hand we can clearly see in the phrase “its own time” the suggestion of an historical or cultural conditionedness and variability which applies even to the highest form of human cognition, philosophy itself -- the contents of philosophical knowledge, we might suspect, will come from the historically changing contents of contemporary culture. On the other, there is the hint of such contents being “raised” to some higher level, presumably higher than other levels of cognitive functioning -- those based in everyday perceptual experience, for example, or those characteristic of other areas of culture such as art and religion. This higher level takes the form of “thought” -- a type of cognition commonly taken as capable of having “eternal” contents (think of Plato and Frege, for example).
This antithetical combination within human cognition of the temporally-conditioned and the eternal, a combination which reflects a broader conception of the human being as what Hegel describes elsewhere as a “finite-infinite,” has led to Hegel being regarded in different ways by different types of philosophical readers. For example, an historically-minded pragmatist like Richard Rorty, distrustful of all claims or aspirations to the “God's-eye view,” could praise Hegel as a philosopher who had introduced this historically reflective dimension into philosophy (and setting it on the characteristically “hermeneutic” path which has predominated in modern continental philosophy) but who had unfortunately still remained bogged down in the remnants of the Platonistic idea of the search for ahistorical truths. Those adopting such an approach to Hegel tend to have in mind the (relatively) young author of the Phenomenology of Spirit and have tended to dismiss as “metaphysical” later and more systematic works like the Science of Logic. In contrast, the British Hegelian movement at the end of the nineteenth century, for example, tended to ignore the Phenomenology and the more historicist dimensions of his thought, and found in Hegel a systematic metaphysician whose Logic provided a systematic and definitive philosophical ontology of an idealist type. This latter traditional, “metaphysical” view of Hegel dominated Hegel reception for most of the twentieth century, but has over the last few decades been contested by many Hegel scholars who have offered an alternative, “post-Kantian” view of Hegel.

2.1 The traditional “metaphysical” view of Hegel's philosophy
Given the understanding of Hegel that predominated at the time of the birth of analytic philosophy together with the fact that early analytic philosophers were rebelling precisely against “Hegelianism” so understood, the “Hegel” encountered in discussions within analytic philosophy is often that of the late nineteenth-century interpretation. In this picture, Hegel is seen as offering a metaphysico-religious view of “Absolute Spirit” which draws on pantheistic ideas of the identity of the universe and God, together with theistic ideas concerning the necessary “self-consciousness” of God. The peculiarity of Hegel's view, on this account, lies in his idea that the mind of God becomes actual only via the minds of his creatures, who serve as its vehicle. It is as distributed bearers of this developing self-consciousness of God that those finitely-embodied inhabitants of the universe -- we humans -- can be such “finite-infinites.”
An important consequence of Hegel's metaphysics, so understood, concerns history and the idea of historical development or progress, and it is as an advocate of an idea concerning the logically-necessitated teleological course of history that Hegel is most often decried. To many critics Hegel not only was an advocate of a disastrous political conception of the state and the relation of its citizens to it, a conception prefiguring twentieth-century totalitarianism, but had tried to underpin such advocacy with dubious logico-metaphysical speculations. With his idea of the development of “spirit” in history, Hegel is seen as literalising a way of talking about different cultures in terms of their “spirits,” of constructing a developmental sequence of epochs typical of nineteenth-century ideas of linear historical progress, and then enveloping this story of human progress in terms of one about the developing self-conscious of the cosmos-God itself.
As the bottom line of such an account concerned the evolution of states of a mind (God's), such an account is clearly an idealist one, but not in the sense, say, of Berkeley. The pantheistic legacy inherited by Hegel meant that he had no problem in considering an objective outer world beyond any particular subjective mind. But this objective world itself had to be understood as conceptually informed, as it were -- it was objectified spirit. Thus in contrast to Berkeleian “subjective idealism” it became common to talk of Hegel as incorporating the “objective idealism” of views, especially common among German historians, in which social life and thought were understood in terms of the conceptual or “spiritual” structures that informed them. But in contrast to both forms of idealism, Hegel, according to this reading, postulated a form of absolute idealism by including both subjective life and the objective cultural practices on which subjective life depended within the dynamics of the development of the self-consciousness and self-actualisation of God, the “Absolute Spirit.”
It is hardly surprising, given the more secular character of much twentieth-century philosophy, that Hegel, so understood, would be generally regarded as of merely historical interest. Nevertheless, Hegel was still seen by many as an important precursor of other more characteristically modern strands of thought such as existentialism and Marxist materialism. Existentialists were thought of as taking the idea of the finitude and historical and cultural dependence of individual subjects from Hegel and leaving out all pretensions to the “absolute,” while Marxists were thought of as taking the historical dynamics of the Hegelian picture but understanding this in materialist rather than idealist categories. But while the traditional view of Hegel remained a commonplace throughout the twentieth century it has come to be increasingly questioned as an accurate account of Hegel's philosophy within Hegel scholarship itself. In the last quarter of the century, an increasing number of Hegel interpreters argued that such an understanding was seriously flawed, and while various quite different philosophical interpretations of Hegel have emerged which attempt to acquit him of implausible metaphysico-theological views, one common tendency has been to stress the continuity of his ideas with the “critical philosophy” of Immanuel Kant.

2.2 The non-traditional or “post-Kantian” view of Hegel
Least controversially, it has been claimed that either particular works such as the Phenomenology of Spirit, or particular areas of Hegel's philosophy, especially his ethical and political philosophy, can be understood as standing independently of the type of unacceptable metaphysical system sketched above. Somewhat more controversially, it has also been argued that the traditional picture is simply wrong at a more general “metaphysical” level and that Hegel is in no way committed to the bizarre “spirit monism” that has been traditionally attributed to him. While these latter views often differ among themselves and continue to take exception to various aspects of Hegel's actual work, they commonly agree in regarding Hegel as being a “post-Kantian” philosopher who had accepted that aspect of Kant's critical philosophy which has been the most influential, his critique of traditional “dogmatic” metaphysics. Thus while the traditional view sees Hegel as exemplifying the very type of metaphysical speculation that Kant successfully criticised, the post-Kantian view of Hegel sees him as both accepting and extending Kant's critique, even of turning it against the residual “dogmatically metaphysical” aspects of Kant's own philosophy.
To see Hegel as a post-Kantian is to regard him as extending that “critical” turn that Kant saw as setting his philosophy on a scientific footing in a way analogous to the work of Copernicus in cosmology. With his Copernican analogy Kant had compared the way that the positions of the sun and earth were reversed in Copernicus' transformation of cosmology to the way that the positions of knowing subject and known object were reversed in his own transcendental idealism. Objectivity could no longer be thought as a matter of mental representations “corresponding” to an object “in itself” . Having posed the question of the ground of the relation of a representation to an object, Kant had answered that where a representation was not made possible by the process of sensory affection, it could be justified as objective only if through it it became possible to cognise something as an object.
No sooner had Kant's philosophy appeared then many objections were raised, among which were complaints about the apparently irreducible gap between the mind qua universal discursive intelligence and the mind as individual psychological reality. Kantian ideas were quickly integrated by Schelling with extant Spinozist ideas concerning mind and body as different aspects of an underlying substance to yield a type of philosophical biology. Others, such as Wilhelm von Humboldt and Friedrich D. E. Schleiermacher joined Kantian ideas about the mind with philological ideas linking thought to the structures of historically variable languages. Other critics pointed to internal inconsistencies in Kant's picture in which the world in itself seemed to be thought of on the one hand as the cause of its appearance, and on the other, as beyond knowledge and its constituent categories such as “cause.” Among the ambitions of many of Kant's successors, including Hegel, was that of somehow “completing” Kant. In Hegel especially, many argue, one can see the ambition to bring together the universalist dimensions of Kant's transcendental program with the culturally particularist conceptions of his more historically and relativistically-minded contemporaries. This resulted in his controversial conception of “spirit,” as developed in his Phenomenology of Spirit. With this notion, it has been argued, Hegel was pursing the Kantian question of the conditions of rational human “mindedness” rather than being concerned with giving an account of the developing self-consciousness of God. But while Kant had limited such conditions to “formal” structures of the mind, Hegel extended them to include aspects of historically and socially determined forms of embodied existence.

3. Hegel's Works
3.1 Phenomenology of Spirit
The term “phenomenology” had been coined by the German scientist and mathematician (and Kant correspondent) J. H. Lambert (1728 -- 1777), and in a letter to Lambert, sent to accompany a copy of his “Inaugural Dissertation” (1770), Kant had proposed a “general phenomenology” as a necessary “propaedeutic” presupposed by the science of metaphysics. Such a phenomenology was meant to determine the “validity and limitations” of what he called the “principles of sensibility,” principles he had (he thought) shown in the accompanying work to be importantly different to those of conceptual thought. The term clearly suited Kant as he had distinguished the “phenomena” known through the faculty of sensibility from the “noumena” known conceptually. This envisioned “phenomenology” seems to coincide roughly with what he was to eventually entitle a “critique of pure reason,” although Kant's thought had gone through important changes by the time that he came to publish the work of that name (1781, second edition 1787). Perhaps because of this he never again used the term “phenomenology” for quite this purpose.
There is clearly some continuity between this Kantian notion and Hegel's project. In a sense Hegel's phenomenology is a study of “phenomena” (although this is not a realm he would contrast with that of “noumena” ) and Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit is likewise to be regarded as a type of “propaedeutic” to philosophy rather than an exercise in it -- a type of induction or education of the reader to the “standpoint” of purely conceptual thought of philosophy itself. As such, its structure has been compared to that of an “educational novel,” having an abstractly conceived protagonist -- the bearer of an evolving series of “shapes of consciousness” or the inhabitant of a series of successive phenomenal worlds -- whose progress and set-backs the reader follows and learns from. Or at least this is how the work sets out: in the later sections the earlier series of “shapes of consciousness” becomes replaced with what seem more like configurations of human social existence, and the work comes to look more like an account of interlinked forms of social existence and thought, the series of which maps onto the history of western European civilization from the Greeks to Hegel's own time. The fact that it ends in the attainment of “Absolute Knowing,” the standpoint from which real philosophy gets done, seems to support the traditionalist reading in which a “triumphalist” narrative of the growth of western civilization is combined with the theological interpretation of God's self-manifestation and self-comprehension. When Kant had broached the idea of a phenomenological propaedeutic to Lambert, he himself had still believed in the project of a purely conceptual metaphysics, but this was a project that in his later critical philosophy he came to disavow. Traditional readers of Hegel thus see the Phenomenology's telos as attesting to Hegel's “pre-Kantian” (that is, “pre-critical”) outlook and his embrace of the metaphysical project that Kant famously came to dismiss as illusory. Supporters of the non-metaphysical Hegel obviously interpret this work and its telos differently. For example, some have argued that what this history tracks is the development of a type of social existence which enables a unique form of rationality, in that in such a society all dogmatic bases of thought have been gradually replaced by a system in which all claims become open to rational self-correction, by becoming exposed to demands for conceptually-articulated justifications.
Something of Hegel's phenomenological method may be conveyed by the first few chapters, which are perhaps among the more conventionally philosophical parts. Chapters 1 to 3 effectively follow a developmental series of “shapes of consciousness” or conscious attitudes which seem to be based upon distinct criteria for epistemic certainty. Chapter 1, “Sense-certainty” considers an epistemological attitude involving an appeal to some immediately given perceptual contents -- the sort of role played by “sense data” in some early twentieth-century approaches to epistemology, for example. By following the protagonist's attempts to make these implicit criteria explicit we are meant to appreciate that any such contents, even the apparently most “immediate,” in fact contain implicit conceptually articulated presuppositions, and so, in Hegel's terminology, are “mediated.” One might compare Hegel's point here to that expressed by Kant in his well known claim that without concepts, those singular and immediate mental representations he calls “intuitions” are “blind.” In more recent terminology one might talk of the “concept-” or “theory-ladenness” of all experience, and the lessons of this chapter have been likened to that of Wilfrid Sellars's famous criticism of the “myth of the given.”
By the end of this chapter our protagonist consciousness (and by implication, we the audience to this drama) has learnt that the nature of consciousness cannot be as originally thought, rather its contents must have some implicit universal (conceptual) aspect to them. Consciousness thus now commences anew with its new implicit epistemic criterion -- the assumption that since the contents of consciousness are “universal” they must be publicly graspable by others as well. Hegel's name for this type of perceptual realism in which any individual's idiosyncratic private apprehension will always be in principle correctable by the experience of others is “perception” (Wahrnehmung -- in German this term having the connotations of taking (nehmen) to be true (wahr)). As with the case for “sense-certainty,” here again, by following the protagonist consciousness's efforts to make this implicit criterion explicit, we see how the criterion generates contradictions which eventually undermine it as a criterion for certainty. In fact, such collapse into a type of self-generated scepticism is typical of all the “shapes” we follow in the work, and there seems something inherently skeptical about such reflexive cognitive processes. But Hegel's point is equally that there has always been something positive that has been learned in such processes, and this learning is more than that which consists in the mere elimination of epistemological dead-ends. Rather, as in the way that the internal contradictions that emerged from sense-certainty had generated a new shape, perception, the collapse of any given attitude always involves the emergence of some new implicit criterion which will be the basis of a new emergent attitude. In the case of “perception,” the emergent new shape of consciousness Hegel calls “understanding” -- a shape which he identifies with scientific cognition rather than that of everyday “perception.”
The transition from Chapter 3 to 4, “The Truth of Self-Certainty,” also marks a more general transition from “consciousness” to “self-consciousness.” It is in the course of chapter 4 that we find what is perhaps the most well-known part of the Phenomenology, the account of the “struggle of recognition” in which Hegel examines the intersubjective conditions which he sees as necessary for any form of “consciousness“.
Like Kant, Hegel thinks that one's capacity to be “conscious” of some external object as something distinct from oneself requires the reflexivity of “self-consciousness,” that is, it requires one's awareness of oneself as a subject for whom something distinct, the object, is presented as known. Hegel goes beyond Kant, however, in making this requirement dependent on one's recognition (or acknowledgment -- Anerkennung) as a subject by other self-consciousnesses whom one recognises in turn. In short, one's self-consciousness is in no sense direct, as it was for Descartes, for example. It comes about only indirectly via one's recognising other conscious subjects' recognition of oneself! It is in this way that the Phenomenology can change course, the earlier tracking of “shapes of consciousness” being effectively replaced by the tracking of distinct patterns of “mutual recognition” between subjects.
It is thus that Hegel has effected the transition from a phenomenology of “subjective mind,” as it were, to one of “objective spirit,” thought of as culturally distinct patterns of social interaction analysed in terms of the patterns of reciprocal recognition they embody. (“Geist” can be translated as either “mind” or “spirit,” but the latter, allowing a more cultural sense, as in the phrase “spirit of the age” (“Zeitgeist” ), seems a more suitable rendering for the title.) But this is only worked out in the text gradually. We -- the reading, “phenomenological” we -- can see how particular shapes of self-consciousness, such as that of the other-worldly religious self-consciousness (“unhappy consciousness” ) with which chapter 4 ends, depend on certain institutionalised forms of mutual recognition. But we are seeing this from the “outside” as it were, we still have to learn how real in situ self-consciousnesses could learn this of themselves. So we have to see how the protagonist self-consciousness could achieve this insight. It is to this end that we further trace the learning path of self-consciousness through the processes of “reason” (in chapter 5) before “objective spirit” can become the explicit subject matter of chapter 6, (Spirit).
Hegel's discussion of spirit starts from what he calls “Sittlichkeit” (translated as “ethical order” or “ethical substance”), “Sittlichkeit” being a nominalisation from the adjectival (or adverbial) form “sittlich,” “customary,” from the stem “Sitte” -- “custom” or “convention.” Thus Hegel might be seen as adopting the viewpoint that since social life is ordered by customs we can approach the lives of those living in it in terms of the patterns of those customs or conventions themselves -- the conventional practices, as it were, constituting specific forms of life. It is not surprising then that his account of spirit here starts with a discussion of religious and civic law. Undoubtedly it is Hegel's tendency to nominalise such abstract concepts as “customary” in his attempt to capture the concrete nature of such as patterns of conventional life, together with the tendency to then personify them (as in talking about “spirit” becoming “self-conscious”) that lends plausibility to the traditionalist understanding of Hegel. But for non-traditionalists it is not obvious that Hegel is in any way committed to any metaphysical supra-individual conscious beings with such usages. To take an example, in the second section of the chapter “Spirit” Hegel discusses “culture” as the “world of self-alienated spirit.” The idea seems to be that humans in society not only interact, but that they collectively create relatively enduring cultural products (stories, dramas, and so forth) within which they can recognise their own patterns of life reflected. We might find intelligible the idea that such products “hold up a mirror to society” within which “the society can regard itself,” without thinking we are thereby committed to some supra-individual social “mind” achieving self-consciousness. Furthermore, such cultural products themselves provide conditions allowing individuals to adopt particular cognitive attitudes. Thus, for example, the capacity to adopt the type of objective viewpoint demanded by Kantian morality (discussed in the final section of Spirit) -- the capacity to see things, as it were, from a “universal” point of view -- is bound up with the attitude implicitly adopted in engaging with spirit's “alienations.”
We might think that if Kant had written the Phenomenology, he would have ended it at chapter 6 with the modern moral subject as the telos of the story. For Kant, the practical knowledge of morality, orienting one within the noumenal world, exceeds the scope of theoretical knowledge which had been limited to phenomena. Hegel, however, thought that philosophy had to unify theoretical and practical knowledge, and so the Phenomenology has further to go. Again, this is seen differently by traditionalists and revisionists. For traditionalists, Chapters 7, “Religion” and 8, “Absolute Knowing,” testify to Hegel's disregard for Kant's critical limitation of theoretical knowledge to empirical experience. Revisionists, on the other hand, tend to see Hegel as furthering the Kantian critique into the very coherence of a conception of an “in-itself” reality which is beyond the limits of our theoretical (but not practical) cognition. Rather than understand “absolute knowing” as the achievement of some ultimate “God's-eye view” of everything, the philosophical analogue to the connection with God sought in religion, revisionists see it as the accession to a mode of self-critical thought that has finally abandoned all non-questionable mythical “givens,” and which will only countenance reason-giving argument as justification. However we understand this, absolute knowing is the standpoint to which Hegel has hoped to bring the reader in this complex work. This is the “standpoint of science,” the standpoint from which philosophy proper commences, and it commences in Hegel's next book, the Science of Logic.

3.2 Science of Logic
Hegel's Science of Logic, the three constituent “books” of which appeared in 1812, 1813, and 1816 respectively, is a work that few contemporary logicians would recognise as a work of logic, but it is not meant as a treatise in formal (or “general” ) logic. Rather, its provenance is to be found in what Kant had called “transcendental logic,” and which is more akin to what now is termed “epistemic” logic. In this sense it stands as a successor to Kant's “transcendental deduction of the categories” in the Critique of Pure Reason in which Kant attempted to “deduce” a list of those non-empirical concepts, the “categories,” which he believed to be presupposed by the empirical judgments of finite, discursive knowers like ourselves.
A glance at the table of contents of Science of Logic reveals the same triadic structuring noted in the Phenomenology. At the highest level of its branching structure there are three “books,” devoted to the doctrines of “being,” “essence,” and “concept” respectively. In turn, each book has three sections, each section containing three chapters, and so on. In general each of these nodes deals with some particular category or “thought determination,” sometimes the first subheading under a node having the same name as the node itself. To some extent, the treatment of the syllogism found in Book 3 (and following Aristotle's three-termed schematism of the syllogistic structure) might be seen as providing a retrospective justification for this structuring, Hegel's idea being that all rigorous thought about anything must grasp it in terms of the fundamental thought determinations of “singularity,” “particularity,” and “universality.” (This combination may, in fact, reflect the post-Kantians' re-interpretation of Kant's taxonomy of the basic components of cognition -- the division of mental representation into “singular” intuitions and “general” concepts. Fichte had understood that Kant equivocates over the relation of “sensation” to “intuition” : sometimes Kant treats sensations as parts of intuitive representations (their “matter” ) and sometimes as non-representational states of the subject somehow “corresponding to” such matter. Kant's two-termed account therefore gets rearticulated as a three-termed account. In the later nineteenth century, no less a logician than Charles Sanders Peirce came to a similar idea about the fundamentally trinary structure of the categories of thought.)
Reading into the first chapter of Book 1, “Being,” it is quickly seen that the Logic repeats the movements of the first chapters of the Phenomenology, now, however, at the level of “thought” rather than conscious experience. Thus “being” is the thought determination with which the work commences because it at first seems to be the most “immediate,” fundamental determination characterising any possible thought content at all. It apparently has no internal structure (in the way that “bachelor,” say, has a structure containing further concepts “male” and “unmarried"). Again parallel to the Phenomenology, it is the effort of thought to make such contents explicit that both undermines them and brings about a new contents. “Being” seems “immediate” but reflection reveals that it itself is, in fact, only meaningful in opposition to another concept, “nothing.” In fact, the attempt to think “being” as immediate, and so as not mediated by its opposing concept “nothing,” has so deprived it of any determinacy or meaning at all that it effectively becomes nothing. That is, on reflection it is grasped as having passed over into its “negation” . Thus, while “being” and “nothing” seem both absolutely distinct and opposed, from another point of view they appear the same as no criterion can be invoked which differentiates them. The only way out of this paradox is to posit a third category, “becoming,” which seems to save thinking from paralysis because it accommodates both concepts: “becoming” contains “being” and “nothing” since when something “becomes” it passes, as it were, between nothingness and being. That is, when something becomes it seems to posses aspects of both being and nothingness.
In general this is how the Logic proceeds: seeking its most basic and universal determination, thought posits a category to be reflected upon, finds then that this collapses due to a contradiction generated, but then seeks a further category with which to make retrospective sense of that contradiction. This new category is more complex as it has internal structure in the way that “becoming” contains “being” and “nothing” as moments. But in turn the new category will generate some further contradictory negation and again the demand will arise for a further concept which will reconcile these opposed concepts by incorporating them as moments.
In this way the categorical infrastructure to thought becomes unpacked with only the use of those resources available to thought itself, its capacity to make its contents determinate (i.e., clear and distinct) and its refusal to tolerate contradiction. As has been mentioned, Hegel's logic might best be considered as a “transcendental” not a “formal” logic. Rather than treating the pure “form” of thought that has been abstracted from any possible content, transcendental logic treats thought that already possesses a certain type of content that Kant had called (predictably) “transcendental content.” This was that non-empirical but nevertheless intuitive element of “content” that was implicit in our thought, given that it was the thought of a particular kind of thinker, whose cognition about the world was restricted to the capacity to apply general concepts to singular and immediate empirical “intuitions.” It would seem to be this difference to traditional formal logic that underlies the contrast between the conceptual structure generated here, and that of the traditional “Tree of Porphyry” that results from the Platonic “method of division.” In the traditional structure, a more general concept is divided into more specific ones by means of some differentiating characteristic, in the way, for example, that the more general concept “animal” can be differentiated into “vertebrates” and “invertebrates.” In such a structure, the direction of conceptual specificity, and conceptual containment are reversed: a concept at any level will “contain,” as sub-concepts, all members of the chain of more abstract concepts standing “above” it. Thus if the concept “animal” is divided into the contraries “vertebrate” and “invertebrate,” each will in turn “contain” the superordinating concept “animal” and thereby in turn contain every concept that is contained within (and stands above) “animal.” In contrast, in Hegel's conceptual structure, reflection on a concept produces its negation in a type of internal division, and then both concept and negation become contained as “moments” in the more specific concept that is posited to resolve the paradox of that internal negation.
If Hegel's is a transcendental logic, however, it is clearly different from that of Kant's. For Kant, transcendental logic was the logic governing the thought of finite thinkers like ourselves, whose cognition was constrained by the necessity of applying general discursive concepts to the singular contents given in sensory intuitions, and he kept open the possibility that there could be a kind of thinker not so constrained -- God, for example, whose thought could apply directly to the world in a type of “intellectual” intuition. Again, opinions divide as to how Hegel's approach to logic relates to that of Kant. Traditionalists see Hegel as treating the finite thought of individual human discursive intellects as a type of “distributed” vehicle for the classically conceived infinite and intuitive thought of God. Non-traditionalists, in contrast, see the post-Kantians as removing the last residual remnant of the mythical idea of transcendent godly thought from Kant's approach. On their account, the very opposition that Kant has between finite human thought and infinite godly thought is suspect, and the removal of this mythical obstacle allows an expanded role for “transcendental content.” Regardless of how we interpret this however, it is important to grasp that for Hegel logic is not simply a science of the form of our thoughts but is also a science of actual “content” as well, and as such is a type of ontology. Thus it is not just about the concepts “being,” “nothing,” “becoming” and so on, but about being, nothing, becoming and so on, themselves. This in turn is linked to Hegel's radically non-representationalist (and in some sense “direct realist” ) understanding of thought. The world is not “represented” in thought by a type of “proxy” standing for it, but rather is presented, exhibited, or made manifest in it. (In recent analytic philosophy, John McDowell has presented an account of thought with this type of character, and has explicitly drawn a parallel to the approach of Hegel.)
The thought determinations of Book 1 lead eventually into those of Book 2, “The Doctrine of Essence.” Naturally the structures implicit in “essence” thinking are more developed than those of “being” thinking. Crucially, the contrasting pair “essence” and “appearance” allow the thought of some underlying reality which manifests itself through a different overlying appearance, a relation not able to be captured in the simpler “being” structures. Given the ontological dimension of Hegel's logic, its various stages are meant to coincide roughly with actual ontologies encountered in a history of metaphysics. Thus the metaphysics of Parmenides and Heraclitus, for example, line up with the thought determinations “being” and “becoming” at the beginning of Being-logic while Essence-logic culminates in concepts bound up with modern forms of substance metaphysics as found in Spinoza and Leibniz.
Book 3, “The Doctrine of Concept” effects a shift from the “Objective Logic” of Books 1 and 2, to “Subjective Logic,” and metaphysically coincides with a shift to the modern subject-based ontology of Kant. Just as Kantian philosophy is founded on a conception of objectivity secured by conceptual coherence, Concept-logic commences with the concept of “concept” itself! While in the two books of objective logic, the movement had been between particular concepts, “being,” “nothing,” “becoming” etc., in the subjective logic, the conceptual relations are grasped at a meta-level, such that the concept “concept” treated in Chapter 1 of section 1 (“Subjectivity” ) passes over into that of “judgment” in Chapter 2, as judgments are the larger wholes within which concepts themselves get related to each other. When the anti-foundationalism and holism of the Phenomenology is recalled, it will come as no surprise that the concept of judgment passes over into that of “syllogism”: for Hegel just as a concept gains its determinacy in the context of the judgments within which it is applied, so too do judgements gain their determinacy within larger patterns of inference. When Hegel declares the syllogism to be “the truth” of the judgment, he might be thought, as has been suggested by Robert Brandom, to be advocating a view somewhat akin to contemporary “inferentialist” approaches to semantics. On these approaches, an utterance gains its semantic content not from any combination of its already meaningful sub-sentential components, but from the particular inferential “commitments and entitlements” acquired when it is offered to others in practices presupposing the asking for and giving of reasons. Thought of in terms of the framework of Kant's “transcendental logic,” Hegel's position would be akin to allowing inferences -- “syllogisms” -- a role in the determination of “transcendental content,” a role which inference definitely does not have in Kant.
We might see then how the different ways of approaching Hegel's logic will be reflected in the interpretation given to the puzzling claim in Book 3 concerning the syllogism becoming “concrete” and “pregnant with” a content that has necessary existence. In contrast with Kant, Hegel seems to go beyond a “transcendental deduction” of the formal conditions of experience and thought and to a deduction of their material conditions. Traditionalists will see here something akin to the “ontological argument” of medieval theology in which the existence of something seems to have been necessitated by its concept -- an argument undermined by Kant's criticism of the treatment of existence as a predicate. In Hegel's version, it would be said, the objective existence that God achieves in the world has been necessitated by his essential self-consciousness. The revisionist reading, in contrast, would have to interpret this aspect of Hegel's logic differently.
As already noted, for Hegel, the logic of inference has a “transcendental content” in a way analogous to that possessed by the logic of judgment in Kant's transcendental logic. It is this which is behind the idea that the treatment of the formal syllogisms of inference will lead to a consideration of those syllogisms as “pregnant with content.” But for logic to be truly ontological a further step “beyond” Kant is necessary. For the post-Kantians, Kant had been mistaken in restricting the conditions of experience and thought to a “subjective” status. Kant's idea of our knowledge as restricted to the world as it is for us requires us to have a concept of the noumenal as that which cannot be known, the concept “noumenon” playing the purely negative role of giving a determinate sense to “phenomenon” by specifying its limits. That is, for Kant we need to be able to think of our experience and knowledge as finite and conditioned, and this is achieved in terms of a concept of a realm we cannot know. But, the post-Kantian objection goes, if the concept “noumenon” is to provide some sort of boundary to that of “phenomenon,” then it cannot be the empty concept that Kant supposed. Only a concept with a content can determine the limits of the content of some another concept (as when our empirical concept of “river,” for example, is made determinate by opposing empirical concepts like “stream” or “creek”). The positing of a noumenal realm must be the positing of a realm about which we can have some understanding.
This need felt by the post-Kantians for having a contentful concept of the “noumenal” or the “in itself” can also be seen from the inverse perspective. For Kant, sensation testifies to the existence of an objective noumenal world beyond us, but this world cannot be known as such; we can only know that world as it appears to us from within the constraints of the subjective conditions of our experience and thought. But for Hegel this is to attribute to a wholly inadequate form of knowledge -- sensation or feeling -- a power that is being denied to a much better form of knowledge -- that articulated by concepts. To think that our inarticulate sensations or feelings give us a truer account of reality than that of which we are capable via the scientific exercise of conceptualised thought indicates a type of irrationalist potential within Kantian thought, a potential that Hegel thought was being realised by the approach of his romantic contemporaries. The rational kernel of Kant's approach, then, had to be carried beyond the limits of a method in which the conditions of thought and experience were regarded as merely subjective. Rather than restrict its scope to “formal” conditions of experience and thought, it had to be understood as capable of revealing the objective or material conditions. Transcendental logic must thereby become ontological. It may be significant here that, as some recent studies of Kant's own later work (the Opus Postumum) suggest, Kant himself seems to have revised his own approach such that something like a deduction of the material conditions of thought was now considered as the proper province of transcendental philosophy.

3.3 Philosophy of Right
Like the Science of Logic, the Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences is itself divided into three parts: a Logic; a Philosophy of Nature; and a Philosophy of Spirit. The same triadic pattern in the Philosophy of Spirit results in the philosophies of subjective spirit, objective spirit, and absolute spirit. The first of these constitutes Hegel's philosophy of mind, the last, his philosophy of art, religion, and philosophy itself. The philosophy of objective spirit concerns the objective patterns of social interaction and the cultural institutions within which “spirit” is objectified. The book entitled Elements of the Philosophy of Right which Hegel published as a textbook for his lectures at Berlin essentially corresponds to a more developed version of the section on “Objective Spirit” in the Philosophy of Spirit.
The Philosophy of Right (as it is more commonly called) can, and has been, read as a political philosophy which stands independently of the system, but it is clear that Hegel intended it to be read against the background of the developing conceptual determinations of the Logic. The text proper starts from the conception of a singular willing subject (grasped from its own first-person point of view) as the bearer of “abstract right.” While this conception of the individual willing subject with some kind of fundamental right is in fact the starting point of many modern political philosophies (such as that of Locke, for example) the fact that Hegel commences here does not testify to any ontological assumption that the consciously willing and right-bearing individual is the basic atom from which all society can be understood as constructed -- an idea at the heart of standard “social contract” theories. Rather, this is merely the most “immediate” starting point of Hegel's presentation and corresponds to analogous starting places of the Logic. Just as the categories of the Logic develop in a way meant to demonstrate that what had at the start been conceived as simple is in fact only made determinate in virtue of its being part of some larger structure or process, here too it is meant to be shown that any simple willing and right-bearing subject only gains its determinacy in virtue of a place it finds for itself in a larger social, and ultimately historical, structure or process. Thus even a contractual exchange (the minimal social interaction for contract theorists) is not to be thought simply as an occurrence consequent upon the existence of two beings with natural wants and some natural calculative rationality; rather, the system of interaction within which individual exchanges take place (the economy) will be treated holistically as a culturally-shaped form of social life within which the actual wants of individuals as well as their reasoning powers are given determinate forms.
Here too it becomes apparent in Hegel's treatment of property and the exchange contract that the notion of recognition plays a crucial role in his general conception of the relation of individuals to each other and to society as a whole. A contractual exchange of commodities between two individuals itself involves an implicit act of recognition in as much as each, in giving something to the other in exchange for what they want, are thereby recognizing them as a proprietor of that thing, or, more properly, of the inalienable value attaching to it. By contrast, such proprietorship would be denied rather than recognised in fraud or theft -- forms of “wrong” (Unrecht) in which right is negated rather than acknowledged or posited. Thus what differentiates property from mere possession is that it is grounded in a relation of reciprocal recognition between two willing subjects. Moreover, it is in the exchange relation that we can see what it means for Hegel for individual subjects to share a “common will” -- an idea which will have important implications with respect to the difference of Hegel's conception of the state from that of Rousseau. Such an interactive constitution of the common will means that for Hegel such an identity of will is achieved because of not in spite of a co-existing difference between the particular wills of the subjects involved: while contracting individuals both “will” the same exchange, at a more concrete level, they do with different ends in mind. Each wants something different from the exchange.
Hegel passes from the abstract individualism of “Abstract Right” to the social determinacies of “Sittlichkeit” or “Ethical Life” via considerations first of “wrong” (the negation of right) and its punishment (the negation of wrong, and hence the “negation of the negation” of the original right), and then of “morality,” conceived more or less as an internalisation of the external legal relations. Consideration of Hegel's version of the retributivist approach to punishment affords a good example of his use of the logic of “negation.” In punishing the criminal the state makes it clear to its members that it is the acknowledgment of right per se that is essential to developed social life: the significance of “acknowledging another's right” in the contractual exchange cannot be, as it at first might have appeared to the participants, simply that of being a way of each getting what he or she wants from the other. Hegel's treatment of punishment also brings out the continuity of his way of conceiving of the structure and dynamics of the social world with that of Kant, as Kant too, in his Metaphysics of Morals had employed the idea of the state's punitive action as a negating of the original criminal act. Kant's idea, conceived on the model of the physical principle of action and reaction, was structured by the category of “community” or reciprocal interaction, and was conceived as involving what he called “real opposition.” Such an idea of opposed dynamic forces seems to form something of a model for Hegel's idea of contradiction and the starting point for his conception of reciprocal recognition. Nevertheless, clearly Hegel articulates the structures of recognition in more complex ways than those derivable from Kant's category of community.
First of all, in Hegel's analysis of Sittlichkeit the type of sociality found in the market-based “civil society” is to be understood as dependent upon and in contrastive opposition with the more immediate form found in the institution of the family -- a form of sociality mediated by a quasi-natural inter-subjective recognition rooted in sentiment and feeling: love. In the family the particularity of each individual tends to be absorbed into the social unit, giving this manifestation of Sittlichkeit a one-sidedness that is the inverse of that found in market relations in which participants grasp themselves in the first instance as separate individuals who then enter into relationships that are external to them.
These two opposite but interlocking principles of social existence provide the basic structures in terms of which the component parts of the modern state are articulated and understood. As both contribute particular characteristics to the subjects involved in them, part of the problem for the rational state will be to ensure that each of these two principles mediate the other, each thereby mitigating the one-sidedness of the other. Thus, individuals who encounter each other in the “external” relations of the market place and who have their subjectivity shaped by such relations also belong to families where they are subject to opposed influences. Moreover, even within the ensemble of production and exchange mechanisms of civil society individuals will belong to particular “estates” (the agricultural estate, that of trade and industry, and the “universal estate” of civil servants), whose internal forms of sociality will show family-like features.
Although the actual details of Hegel's “mapping” of the categorical structures of the Logic onto the Philosophy of Right are far from clear, the general motivation is apparent. As has been mentioned above, Hegel's logical categories can be read as an attempt to provide a schematic account of the material (rather than formal) conditions required for developed self-consciousness. Thus we might regard the various “syllogisms” of Hegel's Subjective Logic as attempts to chart the skeletal structures of those different types of recognitive inter-subjectivity necessary to sustain various aspects of rational cognitive and conative functioning (“self-consciousness”). From this perspective, we might see his “logical” schematisation of the modern “rational” state as a way of displaying just those sorts of institutions that a state must provide if it is to answer Rousseau's question of the form of association needed for the formation and expression of the “general will.”
Concretely, for Hegel it is representation of the estates within the legislative bodies that is to achieve this. As the estates of civil society group their members according to their common interests, and as the deputies elected from the estates to the legislative bodies give voice to those interests within the deliberative processes of legislation, we might see how the outcome of this process might be considered to give expression to the general interest. But Hegel's “republicanism” is here cut short by his invocation of the familial principle: such representative bodies can only provide the content of the legislation to a constitutional monarch who must add to it the form of the royal decree -- an individual “I will ….” To declare that for Hegel the monarch plays only a “symbolic” role here is to miss the fundamentally idealist complexion of his political philosophy. The expression of the general will in legislation cannot be thought of as an outcome of some quasi-mechanical process: it must be “willed.” If legislation is to express the general will, citizens must recognize it as expressing their wills; and this means, recognising it as willed. The monarch's explicit “I will” is thus needed to close this recognitive circle, lest legislation look like a mechanical compromise resulting from a clash of interests, and so as actively willed by nobody. Thus while Hegel is critical of standard “social contract” theories, his own conception of the state is still clearly a complicated transformation of those of Rousseau and Kant.
Perhaps one of the most influential parts of Hegel's Philosophy of Right concerns his analysis of the contradictions of the unfettered capitalist economy. On the one hand, Hegel agreed with Adam Smith that the interlinking of productive activities allowed by the modern market meant that “subjective selfishness” turned into a ”contribution towards the satisfaction of the needs of everyone else.” But this did not mean that he accepted Smith's idea that this “general plenty” produced thereby diffused (or “trickled down” ) though the rest of society. From within the type of consciousness generated within civil society, in which individuals are grasped as “bearers of rights” abstracted from the particular concrete relationships to which they belong, Smithean optimism may seem justified. But this simply attests to the one-sidedness of this type of abstract thought, and the need for it to be mediated by the type of consciousness based in the family in which individuals are grasped in terms of the way they belong to the social body. In fact, the unfettered operations of the market produces a class caught in a spiral of poverty. Starting from this analysis, Marx later used it as evidence of the need to abolish the individual proprietorial rights at the heart of Hegel's “civil society” and socialise the means of production. Hegel, however, did not draw this conclusion. His conception of the exchange contract as a form of recognition that played an essential role within the state's capacity to provide the conditions for the existence of rational and free-willing subjects would certainly prevent such a move. Rather, the economy was to be contained within an over-arching institutional framework of the state, and its social effects offset by welfarist state intervention.

Credit: Stan/pla

Fathoming Self-Knowledge

2005-10-10T09:00:00.000-07:00

‘Self-knowledge’ is commonly used in philosophy to refer to knowledge of one's particular mental states, including one's beliefs, desires, and sensations. It is also sometimes used to refer to knowledge about a persisting self -- its ontological nature, identity conditions, or character traits. At least since Descartes, most philosophers have believed that self-knowledge is importantly different from knowledge of the world external to oneself, including others' thoughts. But there is little agreement about what precisely distinguishes self-knowledge from knowledge in other realms. Partially because of this disagreement, philosophers have endorsed competing accounts of how we acquire self-knowledge. These accounts have important consequences for the scope of mental content, for mental ontology, and for personal identity. This entry will focus on the first sort of self-knowledge, knowledge of one's own particular mental states; but I will also touch on some central debates about knowledge of a persisting self. I begin by surveying the leading candidates for the distinctive feature of self-knowledge (Section 1); I then outline the most influential accounts of self-knowledge (Section 2). Section 3 takes up knowledge of the self. Sections 4 and 5 briefly describe two special topics in the philosophy of self-knowledge, respectively: the problem of self-deception, and the consequences of epistemically distinctive self-knowledge for the doctrine of content externalism.
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1. The Distinctiveness of Self-Knowledge
What is special about self-knowledge, compared to knowledge in other domains? There are three leading views: Knowledge of one's own mental states is especially secure, epistemically. One uses a unique method to determine one's own mental states. One's pronouncements about one's own states bear a special authority or presumption of truth. The differences between these are subtle. Position (1) identifies the distinctive feature of self-knowledge as the epistemic status of a certain class of beliefs, whereas position (2) identifies it by the method one uses in forming these beliefs. Position (3) rejects these first-person characterizations, focusing instead on the way self-attributions are treated by others. Views which maintain that ‘privileged access’ captures what is special about self-knowledge fall within (1) and (2). The looseness with which this term is employed, and the ensuing possibilities for ambiguity, are illustrated by Alston (1971), who lists well over a dozen senses of ‘privileged access’. Those who take the subjects' special authority to be the distinctive feature of self-attributions deny that ‘privileged access’ captures what is special about self-attributions. I will summarize the major positions in each of these three categories (subsections 1.1-1.3), and I will explain why some have denied that self-knowledge is special in any of these ways (subsection 1.4).

1.1 Epistemic Security
The strongest epistemic claims on behalf of self-knowledge are infallibility and omniscience. If self-knowledge is infallible, one cannot have a false belief to the effect that one is in a certain mental state. One is omniscient about one's own states only if being in a mental state suffices for knowing that one is in that state. Few if any contemporary philosophers accept infallibility or omniscience in their unqualified forms. Here is a simple counter-example to the claim of infallibility. Kate trusts a friend's insights into her own psychology, and so she believes the friend when he tells her that she wants to live in the country. But the friend is mistaken -- Kate really wants an urban life, though she hasn't reflected on her desires enough to realize this. Hence, Kate has a false belief about her own desires. This case also undercuts the claim of omniscience: in the case described, Kate is unaware of her real desire, which is to live in the city.
Even if we are not strictly infallible about our states, there is a more plausible, qualified version of the infallibility claim. In the case described, Kate's belief about her desires is based on the testimony of another person. Relying on testimony is, of course, a way of gaining knowledge about all sorts of things, not only one's own mental states. As mentioned above, some philosophers believe that one has a special way of knowing about one's own states. (This is the second candidate for what is special about self-knowledge; particular accounts of this special access will be discussed in the following subsection.) If we limit the domain of beliefs to those which are formed by use of a method unique to self-knowledge, we can formulate a more plausible infallibility thesis, as follows. When one carefully, attentively employs the mode of knowing which is unique to self-knowledge, one will not form a false belief about one's own states. (Jackson 1973 defends a limited infallibility claim, regarding one's current phenomenal states. Descartes may have advocated a limited infallibility thesis as well.)
While this infallibility thesis seems preferable to the unrestricted version, it is still quite controversial. A common objection to a thesis of this sort is the claim, often attributed to Wittgenstein, that where one cannot be wrong, one cannot be right either. For instance, Wright claims that the possibility of error is required for concept application, which is in turn required for substantial self-knowledge.“[E]rror -- if only second-order error -- has to be possible, if a genuine exercise of concepts is involved” (Wright 1989, 634). Even if we reject this claim, it will be very difficult to explain how a method which is guaranteed to yield true beliefs is epistemically substantial enough to provide genuine knowledge, short of trivially specifying the method as that which is used when and only when self-knowledge occurs. Another objection to the infallibility thesis stems from Armstrong's (1963) claim that self-attributions are generally subject to correction by others.
The omniscience thesis may be qualified as well. For instance, one may claim (with Chisholm 1981) that a restricted class of states is such that anyone who is in a state in that class knows that she is. Alternatively, one may limit the omniscience thesis by claiming (with Peacocke 1992 and Siewert 1998) that some states automatically justify self-attributing beliefs about them, even if they don't automatically issue in self-attributions.
The infallibility and omniscience theses may be weakened further. It may be argued that, in certain normal circumstances, one will generally avoid false self-attributing beliefs, and will generally be aware of one's own mental states. These claims are obviously more modest, as regards the accuracy of self-attributing beliefs. Moreover, some deny that the source of one's general accuracy about one's own states is a conceptual or logical truth. E.g., Hill (1993) maintains that we are generally accurate about and aware of our own sensations, but only contingently so, because this accuracy derives from “certain facts about the relationships between human cognitive mechanisms” (130). Such claims are probably too weak to deserve the label ‘infallibility’ or ‘omniscience’. What they share with the original infallibility and omniscience theses is the notion that we are especially reliable detectors of our own states.
An alternative notion of epistemic security, one which is not directly linked with reliability, stems from an internalist construal of justification. Whereas the highest degree of epistemic security on the former model is perfect reliability, the highest degree of epistemic security on the internalist model is certainty. Corresponding to this alternative notion is the claim that the specialness of self-knowledge lies in this: one can, at times, be certain that one is in a particular mental state. The certainty may be absolute (Lewis 1946) or relative (Chisholm 1977). The difference between the reliability-based theses (infallibility and omniscience) and this justification-based thesis is that the former concern a person's general accuracy, whereas the latter applies to a single self-attributing belief. Claiming that self-attributing beliefs can achieve certainty is compatible with accepting that many or even most of our actual self-attributing beliefs are false, and that we are aware of few of our mental states.
It is certainty, rather than a general reliability, which is most salient in Descartes' famous use of introspection in the cogito argument. For Descartes' meditator, nothing -- not even an evil genius -- could undermine his evidence that he was thinking. (Of course, the capacity to be certain that one is thinking may imply a limited infallibility.) Some philosophers deny that absolute certainty is possible in any realm (Unger 1975); this denial is one source of objections to certainty-based views. Doubts about the existence of a special method for determining one's own states (Ryle 1949) constitute another source of objections to the certainty claim. For it is hard to see how to explain the purportedly unequalled certainty of some self-attributing beliefs without invoking a special epistemic method. Finally, as we will see in 1.4 below, some philosophers deny that self-attributions enjoy a special epistemic security.

1.2 Special Method
This brings us to the second candidate for what is special about self-knowledge, that it involves a special method of knowing. The term ‘introspection’ -- literally, ‘looking within’ -- captures a traditional way of conceiving how we grasp our own mental states. This term expresses, in spatial language, a divide between an ‘inner’ world and an ‘outer’ or ‘external’ world. For most philosophers, the spatial connotations of this language are purely metaphorical: to say that a state or entity is internal to the mind is not to say that it falls within a given spatial boundary. If the distinction between what is within the mind and what lies outside of it were purely spatial, the difference between introspection and normal visual perception (‘extrospection’) would be trivial, simply a matter of looking in different directions. The term ‘introspection’ is standardly used to denote a method of knowing which is unique to self-knowledge and which differs from perception in important ways. (As we will see in Section 2, however, some philosophers maintain that there are also important features which introspection and perception share.)
How, then, does introspection differ from other methods of knowledge? One standard answer to this question is that introspection, unlike most or all other methods of knowledge, gives one direct access to its objects, one's own mental states. There are two senses of directness that are relevant here. In the first, epistemic sense, the claim is that we can grasp our own mental states without inference; we need not rely on reasoning from observation. The second sense of directness is metaphysical: there is no state or object which mediates between my self-attributing belief (e.g., that I am now thinking that it will rain) and its object (my thought that it will rain). On most views, these senses of directness require that the self-attribution is contemporaneous with the state attributed; reliance on memory would constitute a failure of directness. (But see Burge 1993 for an argument to show that memory needn't always add an inferential step.)
These two senses of directness are closely related. It may be argued that if my access to my own mental states is epistemically direct, it must be metaphysically immediate as well. For anything which stood between my self-attributing belief and its object would, arguably, also constitute an epistemically mediating factor. For instance, Russell (1917) held that introspection is unique among epistemic methods in that it is the only process which yields non-inferential knowledge of contingent truths. He used the epistemic directness of introspective self-knowledge to argue that nothing metaphysical mediates between a subject and a mental state of which she is aware; in his terms, we stand in a relation of “acquaintance” to our own mental states.
The claim that introspective access is both epistemically and metaphysically direct is captured in the familiar view that, for mental states, an appearance and the reality which appears are numerically identical. This claim seems most plausible for the case of sensations. Here are a few representative statements of it.
Pain … is not picked out by one of its accidental properties; rather it is picked out by the property of being pain itself, by its immediate phenomenological quality. (Kripke 1980, 152-3) [T]here is no appearance/reality distinction in the case of sensations. (Hill 1991, 127)
When introspecting our mental states, we do not take canonical evidence to be an intermediary between properties introspected and our own conception of them. We take evidence to be properties introspected. (Sturgeon 2000, 48)
What does epistemic directness imply about the epistemic status of self-knowledge? Clearly, it does not imply that we are either infallible or omniscient about our own states. Consistent with the epistemic directness claim, we may be fallible in that we may use methods other than introspection, as in the case of Kate; and we may simply fail to reflect on our current mental states, in which case we are not omniscient. But if introspection affords epistemically direct access to our own thoughts, then there appears to be no room for error, for there is no process of inference, etc., that could go wrong. One could argue, on this basis, that epistemic directness can provide for certainty.
While the term ‘introspection’ connotes a looking within, some philosophers have claimed that the method unique to self-knowledge requires precisely the opposite. On this view, we ascertain our own thoughts by looking without, to the states of the world they represent. For instance, in determining whether one believes it will rain this afternoon, one may look to the sky, to see whether dark clouds are gathering. This position was advanced by Wittgenstein (1953), and defended by Evans (1982). It is discussed in 2.3 below.
The “looking outward” claim has been criticized on the grounds that these cases are not ordinary instances of self-knowledge, for the thought that is self-attributed was not present prior to the question. Perhaps you hadn't formed a belief about the likelihood of rain until you were asked; the question is less a question about what one does believe than an invitation to form a belief. It is unsurprising that forming such a belief will involve considering evidence regarding the likelihood of rain.
In response, proponents of the “looking outward” view claim that this objection depends on a naïve picture of self-reflection. According to the naïve picture, mental states are stable particulars, awaiting discovery through introspection. (This is sometimes called the “act-object” conception of self-knowledge: introspection is a quasi-perceptual act of recognizing an independent object.) However, the response continues, mental states are in fact dynamically related to first-person reflection. One's own mental states are not static entities merely to be observed. Rather, insofar as one considers a mental state as one's own, in becoming aware of the state one subjects it to rational scrutiny. This line alleges that models of self-knowledge which treats what is special about self-knowledge as a purely epistemic matter are inadequate; for, as Moran (2001) puts it, these models overlook the fact that “self-consciousness has specific consequences for the object of consciousness” (28). For instance, awareness that one believes that p will, in a rational person, prompt the question whether p, and one's “p” belief will be influenced by one's evidence regarding p.
According to this rejection of the naïve picture, self-knowledge does not consist in simple observation of one's thoughts. If one simply reflects on the evidence regarding the state and does not evaluate its object (by considering the likelihood that it will rain, say), one may gain knowledge about states which are in fact one's own, but not knowledge about states conceived reflexively as one's own -- about states conceived as mine. What is special about the method of knowing one's own states, on this view, is its dynamic quality: specifically, self-attributed states are open to evaluation. (This view is examined in 2.5.)

1.3 First-Person Authority
The agency of the self-ascriber also plays an important role in the third construal of what is special about self-knowledge, that what is special about self-knowledge is that each of us is authoritative as to her own mental states. This means that, in ordinary conversational contexts, self-attributions enjoy a presumption of truth, and it is unreasonable or improper for others to gainsay them. First-person authority is built into our use of self-attributing statements like “I believe that it is raining”, so that one who responds, “no you don't”, under normal circumstances (where there is no obvious reason to think that the self-attributing person is insincere or insane), simply fails to understand how such statements operate. The point is not that each of us is in a privileged position to ascertain her own states; it is, rather, that an understanding of self-attributions is partially constituted by being disposed to defer to self-attributors.
Wright describes this view, which he attributes to Wittgenstein, as follows.
[T]he authority standardly granted to a subject's own beliefs, or expressed avowals, about his intentional states is a constitutive principle. (Wright 1989, 632)In other words, what is special about self-attributions is that each of us is the default authority about her own mental states, in the sense that self-attributions are not -- except in extraordinary circumstances -- open to challenge by others. Default first-person authority is, on this view, not optional, since self-attributions' immunity to challenge partially constitutes the psychological concepts these attributions employ.
The default authority view does not require that self-attributions be epistemically grounded, for the fact that one is treated as an authority about one's own states does not show that one knows those states at all, let alone in any privileged way. But it does see self-attributions as statements which are exceptionally likely to be true. The fact that we defer to others regarding their own states thus cries out for explanation: what justifies the practice of treating others as default authorities on their own states, given that they are not in an epistemically privileged position to determine those states? Critics of this view, including Wright (1998), say that it fails to justify or even explain the practice of treating persons as default authorities, but is “a mere invitation to choose to treat as primitive something which we have run into trouble trying to explain” (45). In a similar vein, Moran (1997) charges that the default authority view can't capture the fact that self-knowledge is a “cognitive achievement”. Of course, if we find that no more substantive explanation will work, the strategy of treating our deferential practices as primitive may become more appealing.
The idea that each of us is ordinarily the authority on her own states appears compatible with the previous positions regarding self-knowledge's distinctive feature. For we may be the authority on our own states precisely because our beliefs about them are especially secure, epistemically, or because we enjoy a special, privileged mode of access to them. The current view makes a radical departure from these, by claiming that the specialness of self-attributions is not an epistemic factor at all, but a conceptual or pragmatic one. Strictly speaking, then, this third sort of position is not primarily concerned with what is special about self-knowledge, but is instead concerned with the distinctive feature of self-attributions.
There is another, more extreme view which also denies that utterances like “I am in pain” are epistemically special. On this expressivist view, which is sometimes attributed to Wittgenstein as well, such utterances are not genuine self-attributions at all. Rather, they are non-propositional expressions of mental states, on a par with winces and laughter. (Expressivism is discussed in 2.6 below.) Both of these views provide alternative, non-epistemic diagnoses of the apparent epistemic specialness of self-attributions.

1.4 No Specialness
Those discussed in the previous subsection reject the claim of epistemic privilege (described in 1.1 and 1.2), on the grounds that what is special about self-attributions is a non-epistemic factor. Others reject the claim of epistemic privilege on its own, without proposing an alternative diagnosis of the distinctiveness of self-knowledge. For these philosophers simply deny that self-knowledge is truly special. This subsection outlines the grounds for these denials.
The denial that self-knowledge is truly special was especially prevalent during the heyday of behaviorism. For instance, Ryle (1949) claims that the difference between self-knowledge and other-knowledge is at most a matter of degree, and stems from the mundane fact that each of us is always present to observe her own behavior. His chief criticism of traditional claims about self-knowledge targets the idea that self-knowledge involves a uniquely direct epistemic process. If self-knowledge were direct, he argues, then the higher-order mental state which constitutes immediate grasp of one's own mental state would have to be grasped as well. This would quickly lead to a regress, which could be blocked only by positing a state that somehow comprehends itself. But Ryle believes that this sort of reflexivity is impossible; and interestingly, skepticism about reflexive self-awareness was already present in James (1884).
Self-consciousness, if the word is to be used at all, must not be described on the hallowed paraoptical model, as a torch that illuminates itself by beams of its own light reflected from a mirror in its own insides. (Ryle 1949, 39) No subjective state, whilst present, is its own object; its object is always something else. (James 1884, 2)
Ryle suggests an alternative, which does not involve any sort of second-order grasp of a first-order state: self-knowledge is simply a “standing condition or frame of mind”, in which one is “ready to perform” certain tasks, and thereby “alive to” what one is doing or thinking (Ryle 1949). This does not differentiate self-knowledge from other-knowledge, for one can be similarly “alive to” another's activities and thoughts.
Doubts about self-knowledge are also fueled by more general epistemological views, such as doubts about the possibility of theory-free observations. Dennett (1991) questions whether our self-attributions are due to anything like a direct grasp of our mental states, unsullied by independent theories about the mental. On Dennett's view, the assumption that mental states are inaccessible from the third-person perspective encourages ungrounded speculation about one's own states, for it means that self-attributions go unchecked.
I suspect that when we claim to be just using our powers of inner observation, we are always actually engaging in a sort of impromptu theorizing -- and we are remarkably gullible theorizers, precisely because there is so little to observe and so much to pontificate about without fear of contradiction.” (Dennett 1991, 55-6)Relatedly, some (including Stich 1983) deny that self-knowledge is special, relative to knowledge of others' states, by claiming that ordinary (“folk”) concepts of psychological states are theoretical concepts. If psychological states are theoretical entities, both self-attributions and other-attributions will proceed by inference from observed data -- presumably, behavior. This understanding of folk psychology is known as “theory theory”; it stands in opposition to “simulation theory” (Gordon 1986), which is usually thought more conducive to the claim that self-knowledge is special. According to simulation theory, one learns of others' states by imaginatively projecting oneself into the other's situation and thereby determining, perhaps through a special mode of self-reflection, what one would believe or desire (etc.) if one were in that situation oneself.
Another general epistemological contention which generates doubt about self-knowledge is the familiar worry that the observational process unavoidably alters the target of observation. The introspective process may be especially vulnerable to this worry, since the observer has some direct control over that which she observes. One reaction to this worry is to adopt the position, mentioned above, which denies that thoughts are stable entities. (See also 2.5.) A more sweeping reaction is to claim that thoughts are never fully grasped: the attempt to grasp a thought inevitably changes the thought, so unobserved thoughts have a nature which is distinct from that which we grasp in introspection, and forever inaccessible. This global skepticism about self-knowledge is rejected by nearly all current philosophers.
Empirical work in psychology constitutes a final source of doubt about the epistemic status of self-attributions. In a much-cited paper, Nisbett and Wilson (1977) present studies which show that subjects routinely misidentify the factors which influenced their reasoning processes. For instance, subjects in one study explained their preference for a product by its apparent quality, while in fact it was the product's spatial position relative to its competitors that led to the preference.
The accuracy of subject reports is so poor as to suggest that any introspective access that may exist is not sufficient to produce generally correct or reliable reports. (Nisbett and Wilson, 1977, 33)While these studies are instructive, their results are limited in that they apply only to the causal sources of one's decisions. Nisbett and Wilson are silent as to the epistemic status of self-attributions of one's current states, and it is current states to which the claim of specialness least controversially applies. Still, some philosophers have used such studies to argue that presuppositions have a distorting influence on putatively direct self-attributions.

2. Accounts of Self-Knowledge
We have seen that some characterizations of what is distinctive about self-knowledge construe the special feature as an epistemic one, while others construe it as non-epistemic. Corresponding to this difference, accounts of how self-knowledge proceeds are of two sorts, epistemic and non-epistemic. The current section surveys accounts within each of these categories. Subsections 2.1-2.4 describe epistemic accounts, and subsections 2.5 and 2.6 describe non-epistemic accounts. (Those who claim that there is nothing special about self-knowledge need not provide an account of self-knowledge specifically, for they assimilate self-knowledge to other sorts of knowledge.)

2.1 The Unmediated Observation Model
As is the case with many other issues in the philosophy of mind, the model of self-knowledge that most current views define themselves against is associated with Descartes. The Unmediated Observation model of self-knowledge attributed to him holds that we observe our own thoughts, but that these “inner” observations differ from ordinary perceptual observations in that nothing mediates, epistemically or metaphysically, between the observational state and the state observed. Inner observations are thus non-inferential and metaphysically direct. Those who endorse the Unmediated Observation model generally limit its application to a subject's current states, as they claim that the use of memory would involve inference. As explained above, the epistemic and metaphysical directness is thought to provide for infallibility and/or certainty by closing off all sources of introspective error, including faulty inferences and appearance -- reality gaps. For this reason, the Unmediated Observation model has special appeal for epistemic foundationalists, who require a set of self-justifying beliefs to serve as the foundation for other beliefs. (Chisholm (1977) argues that knowledge of our phenomenal states can serve as epistemic foundations, but denies that this is the only sort of foundational knowledge. See also Lewis 1946.)
One contemporary version of the Unmediated Observation model (Chisholm 1981) which focuses on the epistemic features of self-knowledge claims that some psychological properties are “self-presenting”, where self-presenting properties are those with particular psychological and epistemic characteristics. Specifically, (i) no one who has a self-presenting property directly self-attributes its negation (though of course one may indirectly self-attribute its negation, e.g., by attributing it to “the person in the mirror”, when one fails to recognize that it is she herself who is reflected in the mirror); (ii) anyone who has a self-presenting property and considers whether she does, will self-attribute that property; and (iii) a direct attribution of a self-presenting property is certain, in a relative sense.
An alternative modern version (Chalmers 2002) also exploits the notion of directness, but applies only to knowledge of one's own phenomenal states. On this account, the phenomenal quality which one attends to partially constitutes the phenomenal belief. In other words, the phenomenal state which is known just is part of the state which constitutes knowledge of it. This partial constitution secures the metaphysical directness described above, as nothing mediates between the known state and the knowing state. And this sort of account is also meant to secure epistemic directness, by drawing on the relation between a phenomenal quality's appearance and its reality emphasized in the passages from Kripke, Hill and Sturgeon above. Since an appearance of a phenomenal quality and the reality which appears (the phenomenal quality itself) are one and the same, on this account, one can enjoy epistemically direct access to the phenomenal quality by attending to it. (See also Gertler 2001.)
The Unmediated Observation model has been criticized on various grounds. First, as stated above, some deny that any method will yield the strong epistemic results -- most notably, infallibility or certainty -- it claims. In response, proponents of the Unmediated Observation model may narrowly define the observational method, so that self-attributions will be said to be infallible or certain only under sharply limited conditions. Or they may simply forego the more extreme epistemic claims on behalf of self-attributions, maintaining that we directly observe our own states but denying that this directness produces such strongly justified beliefs.
A second objection charges that this model pays an excessively high price for securing metaphysical directness: viz., that it construes introspective belief as too close to its object to qualify as genuine, substantial knowledge of that object. For instance, Wright argues that the Unmediated Observation model will not allow for truly epistemic access to one's own states, since genuine knowledge that one is having a seeing-red experience, say, requires that one correctly apply the concept ‘red’. This in turn requires the possibility of error, for a judgment which is guaranteed to be correct will not qualify as a “substantial cognitive accomplishment”; but the directness posited by the Unmediated Observation model seems to foreclose the possibility of error, and thus to render the resulting judgment cognitively insubstantial (Wright 1989). James beat contemporary philosophers to the punch here as well, by denying that the mere lack of an appearance-reality gap ensures self-knowledge.
[Even if] the esse of a mental state is its sentiri, [in self-knowledge the mental state] must be more than experienced; it must be remembered, reflected on, named, classed, known, related to other facts of the same order. (James 1884, 1)Another way of putting this second objection is to say that the Unmediated Observation model threatens to reduce one's understanding of the self-attributed quality to an event, viz., one's attending to an instance of that quality. The model thus faces Wittgensteinian concerns about the legitimacy of private language. Sellars (1963) expresses related worries when he claims that the concepts used in understanding putatively “private” episodes cannot themselves be wholly private:
[T]he reporting role of these concepts, their role in introspection, the fact that each of us has a privileged access to his impressions, constitutes a dimension of these concepts which is built on and presupposes their role in intersubjective discourse. (Sellars ibid., sec. 62)A final worry about the Unmediated Observation model, articulated by Boghossian (1989), questions whether this model can capture the relational features which, on most views, define propositional attitude contents. Such contents are construed relationally not only by externalist theories of content, but also by non-externalist versions of functionalism and conceptual role semantics. Presumably, it is only intrinsic features of states that can be directly observed. If propositional attitude contents cannot be directly observed, then observations can at most provide an inferential ground for knowledge of such contents. And the need for inference is at odds with the immediacy which the Unmediated Observation model requires.

2.2 The Inner Sense Model
Many philosophers deny that self-knowledge is as exceptional as the Unmediated Observation model implies. The Inner Sense model of introspection seeks to minimize the anomalousness and associated mystery of self-knowledge by construing introspection as fundamentally similar to perception. Locke, perhaps the first champion of the Inner Sense model, described the introspective faculty as follows.
This Source of Ideas, every Man has wholly in himself … And though it be not Sense, as having nothing to do with external Objects; yet it is very like it, and might properly enough be call'd internal Sense. (Locke 1975, II.1.iv.)There is variation among contemporary versions of the Inner Sense model as to the extent of the analogy with perception. Armstrong's (1981) view lies at one extreme. He describes introspection as the brain's “self-scanning process”: the introspective process is “a mere flow of information or beliefs”, resulting in a higher-order awareness of a lower-order state of the brain (Armstrong 1981, 112). In contrast to the Unmediated Observation model, the connection between the introspective (scanning) state, and the introspected (scanned) state, is causal and contingent. In fact, on this view there is no bar, in principle, to scanning others' states. Armstrong (ibid.) argues, against the Unmediated Observation model, that the relation between the introspected state and the introspective state must be causal; and hence, these states must be “distinct existences”. But Armstrong's view shares with the Unmediated Observation model the claim that introspection is non-inferential, because the causal connections between the scanner and the states scanned need not be known by the subject in order to deliver self-knowledge.
Other versions of the Inner Sense model construe the analogy with perception as less comprehensive. Lycan (1996) claims that, unlike perception, introspection need not involve any sensory quality. More importantly, he argues that introspection is limited in principle to one's own states, for in introspective self-attribution one refers to oneself with “semantically primitive lexemes” (of a language of thought) which are applicable only to oneself (Lycan 1996, 61). Still, Lycan's version of the Inner Sense model sees introspection as deeply akin to perception in that it involves a monitoring mechanism, causally sensitive to its objects, that yields representations of its objects through attention. Proponents of the Inner Sense model often hold that conscious states are just those mental states of which the subject has higher-order awareness. (This is known as the Higher-Order Perception, or HOP, theory of consciousness.) Assimilating introspection to perception may thus potentially resolve another puzzle about the mind.
The Inner Sense model has faced three main criticisms. The first is that, by construing the relation between the scanner and the state scanned as causal, the model fails to do justice to the deep epistemic disparity between self-knowledge and other-knowledge. Gertler (2000a) argues on these grounds that no perceptual model can accommodate a noncontingent epistemic disparity between self-knowledge and other-knowledge. In response, the Inner Sense theorist can allow that this epistemic disparity is less significant than some other models, including the Unmediated Observation model, maintain.
A related objection challenges the Inner Sense model's depiction of the capacity for self-awareness as a merely contingent -- albeit evolutionarily important -- feature of persons. Some of the competing models discussed below are predicated on the claim that this capacity is essential to rational agency. For instance, Shoemaker (1994) argues that no rational agent with the relevant concepts could be incapable of self-knowledge. (See 2.4 below.)
The third main criticism (Evans 1982, Dretske 1999) claims that, in construing self-knowledge as looking within oneself, the Inner Sense model neglects the transparency of mental content. This criticism is based on the view (discussed in 1.2 above) that self-awareness does not involve directing one's attention inward, as the Inner Sense model requires. Instead, one becomes aware of one's own mental states by attending to features of the world external to oneself. This objection is the impetus for a different perceptual model of self-knowledge, the Displaced Perception model.

2.3 The Displaced Perception Model
In contrast to the Inner Sense view, the Displaced Perception model denies that there is a perception-like mechanism which is directed inward. On the Displaced Perception model, self-knowledge is “a form of perceptual knowledge that is obtained -- indeed, can only be obtained -- by awareness of non-mental objects” (Dretske 1994, 264). Dretske claims that when one is aware of a non-mental object -- a car parked in the driveway, for instance -- one can infer that one is in a mental state, viz., one which represents ‘car in the driveway’. Hence, Dretske's version of this model differs from the Inner Sense model in taking introspective knowledge to be inferential.
Another version of the Displaced Perception model, one that was mentioned earlier as the ‘looking outward’ claim, is found in Evans (1982).
[I]n making a self-ascription of belief, one's eyes are, so to speak, or occasionally literally, directed outward -- upon the world. If someone asks me “Do you think there is going to be a third world war?,” I must attend, in answering him, to precisely the same outward phenomena as I would attend to if I were answering the question “Will there be a third world war?” (Evans 1982, 225)In order to determine whether one believes that p, on Evans' view, one must try to determine whether p is true, and one does this by examining the relevant evidence regarding p. This method is distinct from ordinary perception. Ordinary perception requires directing one's attention towards the object of knowledge, whereas on Evans' view, we direct our attention away from the belief, the “inner” object of knowledge. Our ability to ascertain our beliefs by looking at the beliefs' objects is attributed to the “transparency” of belief. One's own beliefs are transparent to one in that one does not notice them as beliefs, but instead looks “through” them directly to their objects.
The idea that one looks outward to determine one's own states need not be restricted to the case of beliefs. A parallel case can be made for desires: when asked, “do you want some ice cream?”, I do not look inward to consult my desires, but instead I think about ice cream, to determine its desirability. A somewhat different case can be made for sensations: when asked “are you experiencing pain in your ankle?”, I consider whether the ankle (a non-mental object) has the quality of hurting, rather than thinking about my pain as such. We have already seen an objection to Evans' version of the Displaced Perception model: that the method described doesn't allow us to determine pre-existing mental states, but rather serves as an invitation to form new mental states. (Martin (1998) discusses limitations of Evans' model.)
It is noteworthy that both the Inner Sense model and the Displaced Perception model locate the asymmetry between self-knowledge and other-knowledge as a difference in the direction of attention. For the Inner Sense view, what is special about self-knowledge is that it proceeds via a special perception-like mechanism, one which is unique in being directed inward. For the Displaced Perception model, what is special about self-knowledge, relative to knowledge of others' mental states, is that it proceeds from directing one's attention outward, towards the features of the world which the mental state represents. Knowledge of others' mental states may incorporate knowledge of their environment, but even on the Displaced Perception model, it will involve attending to the other person and not just to the features of the world her mental state represents.
[W]hile to know what another representational system represents requires examining both the system (to see that it's functioning properly) and the world, to know what oneself (as a representational system) represents requires examining only the world. (Dretske 1994)In using beliefs about the external world as the basis for this inference, the Displaced Perception model avoids one problem which threatens most inferential models: that they lead to a regress, by grounding inferential knowledge of a mental state on knowledge of other mental states, which is itself presumably inferential (Boghossian 1989). But the use of external objects invites other worries, given the large inferential gap between non-mental and mental states. An objection to Dretske's version of the Displaced Perception model questions whether any belief powerful enough to justify the required inference from external-world facts to mental states could itself be justified (Aydede forthcoming). Even supposing that there were such a powerful, complex belief, it seems unlikely that everyone capable of self-knowledge has such complex beliefs. Proponents of the Displaced Perception model might respond by claiming that awareness of external objects is all that could ground self-awareness, and so it must somehow perform this task, in a way yet to be determined.
The accounts of self-knowledge canvassed thus far share a common feature: they interpret what is special about self-attributions in terms which are not only epistemic but empirical. That self-knowledge is an empirical matter is clearest in the Inner Sense and Displaced Perception models, which emphasize similarities between introspection and ordinary perception. But the Unmediated Observation model is empirical as well. For it portrays introspection as a process of inner examination, albeit one whose objects are directly available to the introspective faculty. By contrast, the next set of views (subsections 2.4-2.6) highlight the importance of a priori connections between mental states and self-attributions.

2.4 The Rationality Model
Proponents of the Rationality model reject the notion that self-knowledge consists in introspective access to evidence, or perception-like reliability. But this rejection leaves room for an alternative epistemic analysis of self-knowledge. I describe two versions of the Rationality model, one which is purely epistemic and one which is partially non-epistemic.
Purely epistemic versions of the Rationality model claim that rationality can justify self-attributions. On one such model (Gallois 1996), anyone who fails to self-attribute beliefs will be faced with “a bizarre picture of the world”, because a change in beliefs will appear, to the subject, as an inexplicable change in the world itself. Because a rational person can know a priori that the world is not bizarre, the ability to self-attribute beliefs is a requirement on rationality. These self-attributions are epistemically underwritten: for conscious beliefs are at least subjectively justified, and one is rationally justified in taking herself to believe everything for which she has subjective justification. That is, your evidence that it is raining suffices to justify your belief that you believe that it is raining. This account covers knowledge of other propositional attitude states as well: for instance, one's reasons for desiring something can suffice to justify her belief that she desires that thing.
Shoemaker (1994) offers a version of the Rationality model which is only partially epistemic. On his view, no rational person who had the concepts ‘belief’, ‘desire’, ‘pain’, etc., could be incapable of self-knowledge -- in his terms, “self-blind”. For a self-blind person would not function as a normal, rational person. He would (i) fall into certain conceptual errors, such as asserting transparency-violating sentences (“It's raining but I believe that it isn't raining”); (ii) lack the ability to share his beliefs with others, and hence to engage in cooperative endeavors; (iii) be devoid of true agency, as agency involves higher-order deliberation regarding lower-order states; and (iv) regard himself “as a stranger”, e.g., in observing his own pain-avoidance behavior without grasping his own pain.
Importantly, Shoemaker sees the capacity for self-knowledge as an essential part of our rational nature. He rejects the notion that self-knowledge is a matter of access to logically independent evidence, on the grounds that this notion treats our capacity for self-knowledge as contingent. He therefore rejects perceptual models of self-knowledge in favor of an account which is, as he recognizes, somewhat Cartesian. This account denies that higher-order states of self-awareness, and the lower-order states they concern, are “distinct existences”. If the relation between lower-order states and higher-order self-attributions is causal -- Shoemaker (1994) is undecided about this -- the causal relation here is importantly different from the relation posited by the Inner Sense model. For it is essential to lower-order states that, under certain conditions, they give rise to awareness of them.
A final difference between self-knowledge and perceptual knowledge, on Shoemaker's account, is that the former is “immune to error through misidentification relative to the first-person pronoun” (Shoemaker 1968). This means that when we introspectively grasp that there is pain, for instance, we cannot be mistaken about whose pain it is. By contrast, it is clearly possible to perceptually recognize that a property is instantiated, yet misidentify the object which instantiates it: perhaps I think that the brick building in the distance is my house, when in fact it is my neighbor's barn.
While it limits the sorts of error that are possible, this second version of the Rationality model is not fully Cartesian. For the Cartesian Unmediated Observation model sees self-awareness as something which occurs within the subject, by a process which may be unknown to third-person observers. Shoemaker instead claims that anyone who appears to be self-aware is, in fact, self-aware; there is no inner process, hidden from others, which could allow one's epistemic state to deviate from apparent behavioral manifestations of it. (Compare Ryle 1949, Sellars 1963.) For instance, he thinks that appearing rational -- avoiding (i)-(iv) above -- is conclusive evidence that one knows one's own states in a distinctively first-person way. This differs from the first Rationality model, which treats the capacity for self-awareness as, most basically, a fact about the subject's inner life.
In its insistence that the possession of certain mental concepts entails a capacity for self-knowledge, and its rejection of hidden “inner” processes, this second version of the Rationality model resonates with non-epistemic accounts (discussed in 2.5 and 2.6). Still, the view qualifies as epistemic because the rationally necessitated link between mental states and self-attributions is an epistemic one.
Siewert (forthcoming) has argued that Shoemaker's account faces a circularity worry. In order for me to accept, on the basis of Shoemaker's argument, that I am an accurate introspector, it seems I must have reasons to believe that I am rational. After all, Shoemaker claims that my general accuracy is ensured by my rationality. And it is unclear how to establish that I'm rational without using the accuracy of my self-attributions, or how to establish that I'm an accurate self-attributor without using the fact of my rationality. (For a related criticism, which challenges whether the absence of self-blindness suffices for self-knowledge, see Kind (forthcoming). For a slightly different worry about Gallois' version of the Rationality model, see Gertler (2000b).)
More generally, the chief problem for the Rationality model is to defend the picture of rationality on which it depends. It may be objected that this picture is overly demanding, in that the results of failing to self-attribute beliefs -- e.g., having “a bizarre picture of the world”, or satisfying one or more of Shoemaker's (i)-(iv) -- is compatible with a modest degree of rationality. For instance, the phenomenon of self-deception (discussed in Section 4 below) poses a prima facie difficulty for the claim that rational agents cannot be self-blind. Of course, proponents of the Rationality model are free to use a robust notion of rationality; after all, they do not claim that all subjects meet the requirements for rationality. But requiring an excessively high degree of rationality threatens to trivialize the model. For the more rational subjects are, the less surprising it is that they are self-aware.

2.5 The Commitment Model
Epistemic accounts seek to provide an epistemological picture which meshes with the special -- in some cases, only slightly special -- epistemic character of self-knowledge. But as I noted above (1.3), some philosophers deny that the special character of self-attributions consists in an epistemic feature. Doubts about epistemic accounts of self-knowledge have two main sources: (i) broadly Wittgensteinian worries about inner operations conducted in private language, unknowable by others; and (ii) the belief that, by its exclusive focus on the epistemic, these accounts ignore the self-evaluation inherent in recognizing one's own states, and thus overlooks the fact that we are responsible for our attitudes (Sartre 1956).
The first non-epistemic account of introspection I will discuss is the Commitment Model. Proponents of this model argue that purely epistemic models don't do justice to what is special about self-knowledge: that in recognizing an attitude, one also implicitly endorses -- avows -- it.
But, as I conceive of myself as a rational agent, my awareness of my belief is awareness of my commitment to its truth, a commitment to something that transcends any description of my psychological state. (Moran 1997, 151) We may allow any manner of inner events of consciousness, any exclusivity and privacy, any degree of privilege and special reliability, and their combination would not add up to the ordinary capacity for self-knowledge. For the connection with the avowal of one's attitudes would not be established by the addition of any degree of such epistemic ingredients. (Moran 2001, 93)
One who treats her own thoughts as simple objects of knowledge, without taking any responsibility for them, is “self-alienated”. (This complements Shoemaker's contention that failure to self-attribute thoughts may lead to treating oneself “as a stranger”.) While we may have epistemic access to our own states which others lack, proponents of the Commitment model hold that what is most distinctive about self-awareness is this: so long as a rational person attributes attitudes to herself as such (i.e., as “mine”), she must be committed to those attitudes. The requirement that one be committed to one's self-attributed attitudes ties in with the transparency of mental states. We reflect on our attitudes by directly considering their contents; it is because we consider our attitudes and their contents inseparably that we avoid pragmatic paradoxes such as “It is raining but I believe that it isn't” and “Ice cream is wholly undesirable, but I want some”. (These are known as “Moore Paradoxes”, after G.E. Moore (1942).) Despite the fact that such statements may be true, one who utters them apparently fails to grasp that the subject whose attitudes are specified is identical to the person making the utterance. Grasping this identity will lead any rational person to self-attribute only those attitudes she endorses. But whereas epistemic accounts explain this result by claiming that awareness of the lower-order state justifies (and causes) the self-attribution, the Commitment model explains it by reference to the fact that avowing the state commits one to endorsing it. Because of its focus on non-epistemic responsibility and commitment, this model is especially relevant to debates in moral psychology. (See 3.4 below.)
There is a noteworthy hybrid account, advanced by Peacocke (1998), which combines elements of the Commitment model with elements of the Rationality model. Like the Rationality model, it claims that rational subjects who possess the concepts ‘belief’, ‘desire’, etc., are necessarily self-aware. But it also sees commitment to the attitude as a requirement on self-knowledge. A direct grasp of a conscious, occurrent attitude constitutes knowledge if it simultaneously causes and rationalizes a self-attributing belief. And the conscious attitude will simultaneously cause and rationalize the belief if and only if it is one which the subject would endorse. By making the belief rational, in these conditions, the presence of the conscious attitude justifies the belief; the account is thus at least partially epistemic, and closely related to the Rationality model. Yet in requiring that a subject be disposed to endorse a self-attributed attitude, it is also similar to the Commitment model. Martin (1998) questions whether Peacocke's account is ultimately substantial enough to explain first-person access.
The Commitment model shares with other non-epistemic models the challenge of accommodating the strong intuition that what differentiates self-knowledge from knowledge in other realms is, first and foremost, an epistemic feature. For instance, it might be argued that an epistemic model will best explain what is special about self-knowledge, while the Commitment model pertains to a slightly different issue, namely, what is involved, conceptually and psychologically, in reflecting on one's attitudes considered as one's own. A second objection claims that the Commitment model has only limited application. It is unclear how one can be “committed to” a sensation in the same way that one is committed to beliefs, desires, and intentions. Finally, in its dependence on rationality, the Commitment model confronts the difficulties which faced the Rationality model: it must accommodate cases of (apparent) self-deception, and provide a notion of rationality that is robust enough to bear the substantial implications which the model requires, but not so robust that it trivializes the account.

2.6 The Expressivist Model
The second non-epistemic model construes self-attributions as performances which express one's mental states. It highlights the similarity between self-attributions and other modes of self-expression, such as shouting “yay!” or “ouch!” or “give me that!” These expressions or performances have no propositional content; they cannot be true or false. The most extreme version of this model, Pure Expressivism, holds that self-attributions that appear to be propositional, such as “I am happy”, “I am in pain”, and “I want that”, are also devoid of propositional content, but express one's mental states in much the same way that shouting “yay!” expresses joy, and blushing expresses embarrassment. It's not clear whether anyone has seriously defended Pure Expressivism, but some have interpreted Wittgenstein as holding this sort of view. In diagnosing the apparent propositional structure of self-attributions as merely apparent, Pure Expressivism parallels Expressivism in ethics.
The deepest objections to Pure Expressivism target its implication that self-attributions are non-propositional. For instance, if self-attributions are non-propositional, then subjects seem unable to give a true (or false) description of their own states. But Pure Expressivism allows that others can describe one's state, correctly or incorrectly. The idea that subjects are thus restricted is unpalatable on its own; and it blocks this view from accommodating substantial first-person authority, since the subject cannot so much as articulate her own condition.
The appeal of Pure Expressivism lies in its recognition that the subject is uniquely situated to express her own states. In a series of recent papers (Bar-On 2000, Bar-On and Long 2001), Bar-On and Long have formulated a view which is also based in this recognition, which they label “Neo-Expressivism”. Neo-Expressivism avoids the strongest objections to Pure Expressivism by allowing that self-attributions are propositional. What is special about some self-attributions -- attributions they call “avowals” -- is that they are not the product of observation or reflection, and are not based on reasons. Instead, avowals serve to express or “give voice to” one's mental states, by issuing directly from those states. This process is not an epistemically special method for determining one's own states; Bar-On and Long deny that there is any such special method. But avowals are nonetheless special, on their view, for it is only through an avowal that one can express a condition in a way which is both direct and possesses propositional content. A blush directly expresses one's embarrassment, but is not propositional; a verbal report that “my toenails are painted red” is propositional, but only indirectly expresses one's condition. Exclaiming “I want the teddy!” is both propositional and directly expresses one's desire for the teddy.
Neo-Expressivism thus identifies the distinctive element of self-attributions as non-epistemic. Still, the account sees first-person authority as justified by the subject's unique ability to express her states, and hence rejects outright epistemic deflationism. The greatest challenge to Neo-Expressivism is to explain how first-person authority may be justified by the subject's unique situation, without invoking an epistemic model of self-knowledge.

3. Knowledge of the Self
This entry has thus far focused on knowledge of one's own mental states. Yet as I mentioned at the outset, “self-knowledge” can also be used to refer to knowledge of the self and its nature. Issues about knowledge of the self include: (1) how it is that one distinguishes oneself from others, as the object of a self-attribution; (2) whether self-awareness yields a grasp of the material or non-material nature of the self; (3) whether self-awareness yields a grasp of one's personal identity over time; and (4) what sort of self-understanding is required for rational or free agency. These issues are closely connected with referential semantics, the mind-body problem, the metaphysics of personal identity, and moral psychology, respectively. I will only briefly sketch some prominent views about knowledge of the self arising from debates in these areas.

3.1 Self-Identification
In self-attributing a mental state, I recognize the state as mine in some sense, and my self-attribution partially consists in a reference to myself. This reference is reflexive, in that I think of myself as myself and not, e.g., as BG, or as the shortest person in the room. Nozick (1981) underscores the significance of being able to thus refer to oneself: “To be an I, a self, is to have the capacity for reflexive self-reference.” This raises the question: how is it that I identify myself, and distinguish myself from others? Consider: seeing a flushed red face on film, I might wonder whether the face I see is mine or my identical twin's, and therefore I may say, “someone is embarrassed, but is it me?” Evans (1982) argues that for some kinds of self-attributions, such a question will not arise. Adopting the term from Shoemaker (1968) mentioned above (2.4), he describes self-attributions of the relevant type as “immune to error through misidentification.”
None of the following utterances appears to make sense when the first component expresses knowledge gained in the appropriate way: “Someone's legs are crossed, but is it my legs that are crossed?”; “Someone is hot and sticky, but is it I who am hot and sticky?”; “Someone is being pushed, but is it I who am being pushed?” (Evans 1982, 220-1)Evans believes that my immunity to error through misidentification, in such cases, shows that I identify myself directly in these cases. If in identifying myself as the one who is hot and sticky, I used some information beyond the information involved in determining that someone is hot and sticky, then I could possibly be justified in believing that someone was hot and sticky but mistaken in thinking that it was me. Because that scenario doesn't “make sense”, he thinks, I must recognize myself directly, without any identifying information.
Others deny that self-identification is direct, claiming instead that it occurs by way of some sort of description. For instance, Rovane (1993) argues that, in self-reference, the way one thinks of oneself can be analyzed as “the series of psychologically related intentional episodes to which this one [the current intentional episode] belongs” (86). Proponents of descriptive accounts claim that such accounts can accommodate the fact that we don't actually err about who it is that is hot and sticky. On Rovane's view, our reliability in self-identification is to be expected, given that understanding ourselves and our place in the world is required for genuine agency. (I return to the issue of agency in 3.4 below.) Still, there is an important epistemic disagreement between those, like Evans, who claim that self-reference is “identification-free”, and those who claim that we refer to ourselves via a description. The former maintain that there is, in a real sense, no room for error about who is hot and sticky, whereas the latter will say that while such errors are possible, we simply avoid them.
Notably, both “direct reference” and descriptive accounts capture the reflexivity of first-person reference. (For descriptive accounts, this reflexivity lies in the fact that “this one” refers to the very thought of which it is a part.) They thereby fit with the widely accepted belief that self-reference in the distinctively first-person mode is essentially indexical. (See Castañeda 1966, Perry 1979, Lewis 1979.) The dispute between Evans and Rovane is then, in part, a disagreement as to whether the indexical term “I” refers to the self directly, as Evans believes, or instead refers via an implicit indexical of another sort, e.g. “this” or “here”. In general, one's epistemology of self-identification will depend on what sort of indexical one considers most fundamental, in self-reference.
A final issue concerns the relation between self-awareness and awareness of other persons. On the leading traditional view of this relation, one first grasps that one bears psychological properties, and reasons by analogy to the conclusion that other creatures do as well. (This is the “argument from analogy” to the existence of other minds, articulated by J.S. Mill (1867).) Some recent philosophers have challenged this traditional view, contending that self-awareness is logically dependent on at least a conceptual grasp of other persons. For instance, here is Bermúdez:
[A] subject's recognition that he is distinct from the environment in virtue of being a psychological subject depends on his ability to identify himself as a psychological subject within a contrast space of other psychological subjects. (Bermúdez 1998, 274)

3.2 Materialism and Dualism
In a much-criticized piece of reasoning, Descartes (1641/1984) contrasts the certainty afforded by introspection with the dubitability of knowledge of the physical, to show that introspective objects (thoughts) are ontologically distinct from physical things. This strategy for supporting dualism has few current proponents. Commentators still adhere to the basic criticism lodged by Arnauld (1641/1984): that a purely epistemic premise cannot support an ontological one. It is clearly possible to be (relatively) certain that there is water in the tub, while doubting that there is H2O in the tub; yet water is identical to H2O. Many contemporary materialists are similarly concerned to restrict the deliverances of introspection, arguing that while mental states appear, to introspection, to be non-physical, the grasp which introspection affords is partial at best, and systematically misleading at worst.
However, there are materialists who take the opposite tack: rather than rejecting self-reflection as a guide to ontology, they claim that some mental states appear physical. These arguments employ three types of self-reflection: introspective awareness of sensations, introspective awareness of perceptual states, and proprioceptive awareness of bodily states. Proprioception is the putatively direct, non-perceptual awareness of one's bodily state; it is what allows you to know that your arm is raised “from the inside”, that is, without looking at your arm.
The argument for materialism from proprioceptive awareness, due to Brewer (1995), is as follows. Proprioception is epistemically on a par with introspective knowledge, in that (i) it is a species of direct, non-inferential awareness, and (ii) it is “immune to error through misidentification of the first-person pronoun” in Shoemaker's sense (see 2.4 above).
Presumably, introspective awareness of mental states justifies the claim that we are mental beings, by virtue of its epistemic character. But proprioceptive awareness of physical states shares this epistemic character; so we are equally justified in the claim that we are physical beings. This argument falls short of disproving dualism, for it leaves open the question how our mental nature is related to our physical nature.
Brewer (1995) also builds an alternative argument along these lines, which seeks to rule out dualism by focusing on introspective awareness of sensations. This argument takes introspective awareness of sensations as intrinsically mental and, at the same time, intrinsically physical. Like the previous argument, it claims that awareness of physical properties is epistemologically equivalent to awareness of mental properties. But it goes further, contending that introspection provides an awareness of physical and mental properties, in sensations, as inextricable. It thus tries to block the possibility of distinctness between the mental subject and the physical subject.
A final argument to show that self-knowledge supports materialism, advanced by Cassam (1997), uses a somewhat different approach. Rather than relying on the spatial quality of bodily sensations or proprioception, this argument exploits one's awareness of one's own perceptual states. It says that in becoming aware of our own perceptual states and taking these states to represent a physical world, we are driven to conceive of ourselves as physical objects.
Broadly Cartesian objections to introspection-based arguments for materialism illuminate possible ways that the ontological conclusion can be flawed, consistent with the introspective evidence. For instance, the apparent proprioceptive awareness of the position of one's limbs could be nonveridical: an amputee might have a similar sense that her legs are crossed, even if she doesn't, in fact, have any legs. (This does not violate Evans' claim that such judgments are immune to error through misidentification: the error here is not one of misidentifying the subject, but instead of falsely ascribing a property to the self.) A similar argument could be made against the claim that sensations are intrinsically spatial, and that perceptual states represent a physical world. Even if one's sensations portray oneself as spatially extended, the idea that one is non-extended (immaterial) is logically consistent with the presence of those sensations or (apparent) perceptual states. Proponents of these arguments for materialism could respond by claiming either that knowledge of oneself as a mental thing is less certain than this alleged contrast implies, or that knowledge of oneself as a physical thing is more certain than it implies.

3.3 Personal Identity
The ontological views described in the previous subsection have no immediate consequences for personal identity. For it may be that the criteria of persistence through time, for persons, differ from the criteria of persistence for (other) material objects even if, as materialists contend, a person at a time is necessarily constituted by some matter or other. Knowledge of mental states is not usually thought to provide any special insight into one's persistence through time, since it is typically assumed that one enjoys privileged access only to one's current states. In particular, the individual has no special insight into whether her current apparent memories are veridical, and so has no special way to determine whether a particular prior experience was hers. Since views about first-person access played a greater part in shaping theories of personal identity during the modern period than they do today, my brief remarks here will focus on that period.
As mentioned above, Descartes' meditator uses the proposition that there is thinking occurring, to which she purportedly has immediate (indubitable) introspective access, to establish her own existence with certainty. But this does not allow the meditator to grasp a persisting self. For Descartes, the self, like every other substance, is not directly apprehended; it is understood only through its properties.
Hume also claims that we never directly apprehend the self. Unlike Descartes, he concludes from this that there is no substantial self. In a famous passage, Hume uses introspective awareness to show that the self is a non-substantial “bundle” of perceptions.
For my part, when I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some particular perception or other, of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I can never catch myself at any time without a perception, and can never observe anything but the perception. When my perceptions are remov'd for any time, as by sound sleep; so long am I insensible of myself , and may truly be said not to exist. (Hume 1739-40/1978, 252)Locke agrees that self-reflection can help to reveal the nature of the self, but for him the self is a substantial entity which persists through time. Most important for our purposes is that Locke's criterion for a successful account of personal identity is based on self-awareness.
[A person is] a thinking intelligent Being, that has reason and reflection, and considers itself as itself, the same thinking thing in different times and places. (Locke 1975, II.27.ix, my emphasis).Locke takes introspectible states as only partial determinants of one's persistence through time; still, he shares Hume's basic strategy of using introspective data to understand personal identity.
Kant repudiates the basic strategy shared by Locke and Hume, for he denies that self-awareness reveals objective facts about personal identity. He concurs with Descartes and Hume that we never directly apprehend the self (this fact is what he calls the “systematic elusiveness of the ‘I’”). And while he holds that we cannot avoid thinking of ourselves as persisting, unitary beings, he attributes this self-conception to necessary requirements for thought which do not directly support substantive ontological conclusions about the nature of the self.
One contemporary view about personal identity is noteworthy in this context. This view, defended by Galen Strawson (1997), does not explicitly draw on introspective reflection, but it implies that the limits of a subject correspond to the limits of what could be introspectively grasped, at a moment. A subject is defined by (indeed, identified with) a period of experience which is “experientially unitary”. Since in humans an appropriately unified experience lasts no more than about three seconds, subjects are in fact very short-lived.

3.4 Agency
The role of self-understanding in agency is a complex topic, and I can only briefly address some leading positions on the issue here. Knowledge of one's relatively stable traits and dispositions -- one's character -- is believed, by some, to be crucial for the exercise of free agency. For instance, Taylor claims that self-reflection is imperative for being human (where this means, in part, being capable of agency),
[T]he human animal not only finds himself impelled from time to time to interpret himself and his goals, but … he is always already in some interpretation, constituted as human by this fact. (Taylor 1985, 75)In a somewhat different vein, Frankfurt maintains that the capacity to rationally evaluate one's desires is required for freedom of the will. This rational evaluation issues in second-order desires, that is, desires concerning which desires to have or to act upon.
[N]o animal other than man … appears to have the capacity for reflective self-evaluation that is manifested in the formation of second-order desires. (Frankfurt 1971, 7) It is only because a person has volitions of the second order that he is capable both of enjoying and of lacking freedom of the will. (ibid.,14)
These claims by Taylor and Frankfurt go beyond the merely pragmatic observation that a reasonable degree of self-understanding is required for effective action. Instead, they assert that what is distinctive about the exercise of a free will, in determining one's course of action, is that this exercise involves the capacity to critically reflect on one's basic goals and desires. (For a related view, see Bilgrami 1998.)
While Taylor, Frankfurt, and Bilgrami stress that a broad self-understanding is crucial for responsible agency, other views claim that particular actions require some awareness of one's intentions in performing that action. For instance, Searle (1983) argues that intentions are always self-referential, in that when one performs an action X intentionally, the relevant intention to act includes an intention to X so as to fulfill that intention itself. Anscombe (1981) similarly emphasizes the significance of one's awareness of intentions in acting. In fact, on her view thoughts about actions, intentions, postures, etc. have a special status: it is only thoughts about such aspects of the self that are “unmediated, non-observational, and also are descriptions (e.g., ‘standing’) which are directly verifiable or falsifiable about the person” (Anscombe 1981, 35). And she also believes that action requires some awareness of these features of oneself. For criticism of the idea that action requires awareness of intention, see Cunning (1999).
One contemporary theory of practical reasoning, offered by Velleman (1989), casts knowledge of the self in a particularly important role. Velleman notes that we strongly desire to understand ourselves and, in particular, to understand our reasons for acting. On his view, this desire leads us to try to discern our action-motivating desires and beliefs. (He calls this attempt to gain self-awareness “reflective theoretical reasoning”.) But strikingly, Velleman thinks that the desire for self-understanding also leads us to model our actions on our predictions about how we will act. In this way, our expectations as to how we will act are themselves intentions to act. “Intentions to act … are the expectations of acting that issue from reflective theoretical reasoning” (Velleman 1989, 98). Thus, Velleman can say that our desire to understand what we are doing, at the moment we are doing it, is usually satisfied, since our predictions about how we will act are themselves intentions to act, and hence our beliefs about what we will do are “self-fulfilling expectations”.
Finally, there is an emerging literature which examine the effect of societal influences on subjects' self-understanding and, thereby, on agency. See, e.g., Neisser and Jopling 1997 and Meyers 2002.

4. Self-Deception
One who lacks self-knowledge may simply be ignorant about some aspect or state of the self, perhaps because he or she has not formed any relevant belief. But in extreme cases, an absence of accurate self- reflection, or ignorance about what is guiding one's reasoning, may allow one's interests to shape one's beliefs. When false beliefs are formed due to such motivations, the subject is self-deceived. The phenomenon of self-deception has received a great deal of attention; I can only briefly discuss some of the main issues involving self-deception here.
It seems clear that rational persons may sometimes engage in self-deception: in the face of clear evidence to the contrary, hopes and fears may lead one to believe that her spouse is faithful, or that she is popular, or (even) that she has a fatal disease. However, the idea of self-deception poses conceptual difficulties. The basic problem is that self-deception appears to involve a paradox (Davidson 1985): given that “deception” refers to a deliberate attempt to make someone believe a proposition one believes to be false, self-deception seems to require that one believes the proposition in question to be false. Yet when self-deception succeeds, one (also) believes the proposition in question to be true. And it is doubtful that a rational person can have two explicitly contradictory beliefs.
One way of resolving this difficulty is to see the self as partitioned, and to claim that rationality requires only that each “part” of the self is internally consistent. Self-deceived rational persons can be accommodated so long as the deceiving part of the self is distinct from the deceived part. This approach is exemplified by the claim (Freud 1923) that the unconscious may mislead the conscious self in an effort to shield it from awareness of painful facts.
An alternative approach to this paradox is to deny that self-deceived persons ordinarily have two contradictory beliefs. For instance, Mele (1997) provides an alternative analysis of the case of the husband who believes that his wife is faithful, despite strong evidence that she is having an affair. According to Mele, the husband's desire that his wife be faithful may lead him to fail to attend to the ample evidence that she is deceiving him, or to give too much weight to her declarations of love for him. In this way, Mele claims, the husband simply avoids the obvious conclusion that she is having an affair. Mele terms his view of self-deception “deflationist”, in that it denies that standard cases of self-deception are especially mysterious or pose special explanatory problems. (Compare Barnes 1997.)
Another key dispute about self-deception concerns whether persons deliberately engage in self-deception. Predictably, deflationists deny that self-deception must be intentional, while non-deflationists (I'll call these “traditionalists”, following Scott-Kakures 2002) maintain that deliberateness is central to self-deception. For instance, Bach (1997, 105) claims that self-deception requires an “active effort” on the part of the subject. Scott-Kakures (ibid.) defends a hybrid of deflationism and traditionalism.
Holton (2001) has offered a very different way of understanding self-deception. Holton argues that cases which are ordinarily glossed as cases of deceiving oneself are, in fact, simply cases in which one is deceived about the self. If the self is not the deceiver in these cases, but is simply that about which one is deceived, then no paradox arises.

5. Self-Knowledge and Content Externalism
In recent years, much of the literature which addresses self-knowledge has focused on the question whether content externalism (Burge 1979, Putnam 1975) is compatible with the sort of privileged access we take ourselves to enjoy. Content externalism is the view that mental content is partially determined by factors external to the subject, such as her physical environment, the practices of her language community, or her historical context. There is a natural tension between this view and the claim that we enjoy privileged self-knowledge, especially when first-person privilege is explained by a special access to “inner” facts. For we are not privileged, relative to others, as to the presence of external factors in our own environment. Nearly all who accept content externalism claim that this tension is merely apparent; few are willing to completely abandon first-person privilege. Because of the popularity of content externalism, the need to resolve this tension is pressing.
Arguments to show that content externalism is incompatible with first-person privilege are principally of two types. The first (Boghossian 1989) charges that, if content is determined by environmental factors, then a subject cannot know her own mental contents without examining her environment. In response to this charge, externalists (Burge 1988, Heil 1988) have tried to show that the contents of self-attributions will appropriately track the contents of the lower-order states they concern, even if the subject remains ignorant of the salient environmental factors. Some externalists (Gibbons 1996) argue that the environmental factors which shape lower-order mental contents will also shape the contents of self-attributions. Others deny that the environment directly affects the content of self-attributions, claiming instead that self-attributions inherit their contents from the lower-order, self-attributed states. For their part, externalism's opponents have claimed that these tracking relationships are insufficiently reliable, or not of the right sort to underwrite substantive knowledge.
The second type of argument (McKinsey 1991, Brown 1995) claims that if we can know our own mental contents through introspection, and those contents are determined in part by environmental factors, then contingent facts about the environment can be deductively inferred from introspective self-knowledge. But it is highly implausible that we enjoy “privileged access to the world”. Externalists (Tye and McLaughlin 1998) have tried to block this challenge by saying that an introspective subject must have empirical information about the concepts which her mental states employ, and/or empirical information about the environment, in order to determine how the environment contributes to her mental contents. If this response succeeds, it shows that knowledge of the environment is empirical after all. Critics of this argument (Boghossian 1997) have claimed that the relevant information can be known non-empirically, and hence externalism implies that privileged self-knowledge does yield “privileged access to the world” after all. Finally, some externalists (Sawyer 1998) defend the idea that introspective self-knowledge can yield limited information about the environment.

Credit: Stan/pla

Zeno's Paradoxes

2005-10-09T09:26:00.000-07:00

Almost everything that we know about Zeno of Elea is to be found in the opening pages of Plato's Parmenides. There we learn that Zeno was nearly 40 years old when Socrates was a young man, say 20. Since Socrates was born in 469 BC we can estimate a birth date for Zeno around 490 BC. Beyond this, really all we know is that he was close to Parmenides (Plato reports the gossip that they were lovers when Zeno was young), and that he wrote a book of paradoxes defending Parmenides' philosophy. Sadly this book has not survived, and what we know of his arguments is second-hand, principally through Aristotle and his commentators (here I have drawn particularly on Simplicius, who, though writing a thousand years after Zeno, apparently possessed at least some of his book). There were apparently 40 ‘paradoxes of plurality’, attempting to show that ontological pluralism -- a belief in the existence of many things rather than only one -- leads to absurd conclusions; of these paradoxes only two definitely survive, though a third argument can probably be attributed to Zeno. Aristotle speaks of a further four arguments against motion (and by extension change generally), all of which he gives and attempts to refute. In addition Aristotle attributes two other paradoxes to Zeno. Sadly again, almost none of these paradoxes are quoted in Zeno's original words by their various commentators, but in paraphrase.
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1. Background
Before we look at the paradoxes themselves it will be useful to sketch some of their historical and logical significance. First, Zeno sought to defend Parmenides by attacking his critics. Parmenides rejected pluralism and the reality of any kind of change: for him all was one indivisible, unchanging reality, and any appearances to the contrary were illusions, to be dispelled by reason and revelation. Not surprisingly, this philosophy found many critics, who ridiculed the suggestion; after all it flies in the face of some of our most basic beliefs about the world. (Interestingly, general relativity -- particularly quantum general relativity -- arguably provides a novel -- if novelty is possible -- argument for the Parmenidean denial of change: Belot and Earman, 2001.) In response to this criticism Zeno did something that may sound obvious, but which had a profound impact on Greek philosophy that is felt to this day: he attempted to show that equal absurdities followed logically from the denial of Parmenides' views. You think that there are many things? Then you must conclude that everything is both infinitely small and infinitely big! You think that motion is infinitely divisible? Then it follows that nothing moves! (This is what a ‘paradox’ is: a demonstration that a contradiction or absurd consequence follows from apparently reasonable assumptions.) ‘Dialectic’, the technique of arguing for or against a position by careful logical reasoning -- and in particular the technique of arguing against a view by showing that it entails unacceptable consequences -- was a crucial innovation, which has governed philosophical method ever since. In the absence of such a method one can only defend a position by mystical revelation say, or by rhetorical rather than rational appeal, or by force perhaps. And according to Aristotle, Zeno was the inventor of the method (in philosophy of least, for such an approach has been a part of mathematics for even longer). Later philosophers however -- especially Plato and Aristotle -- were far finer exponents of the approach.
As we read the arguments it is crucial to keep this method in mind. They are always directed towards a more-or-less specific target: the views of some person or school. We must bear in mind that the arguments are ad hominem, not in the ‘bad sense’ that they attack a person rather than his views but in the ‘good sense’ that they are formulated against a particular philosopher's assertions. They work by temporarily supposing ‘for argument's sake’ that those assertions are true, and then arguing that if they are then absurd consequences follow -- that nothing moves for example: they are ‘reductio ad absurdum’ arguments. Then, if the argument is logically valid, and the conclusion genuinely unacceptable, the assertions must be false after all. Thus when we look at Zeno's arguments we must ask two related questions: whom or what position is Zeno attacking, and what exactly is assumed for argument's sake? If we find that Zeno makes hidden assumptions beyond what the position under attack commits one to, then the absurd conclusion can be avoided by denying one of the hidden assumptions, while maintaining the position. Indeed commentators at least since Aristotle have responded to Zeno in this way.
So whom do Zeno's arguments attack? There is a huge literature debating Zeno's exact historical target. As we shall discuss briefly below, some say that the target was a technical doctrine of the Pythagoreans, but most today see Zeno as opposing common-sense notions of plurality and motion. I will approach the paradoxes in this spirit, and refer the reader to the literature concerning the interpretive debate.
That said, it is also the majority opinion that -- with certain qualifications -- Zeno's paradoxes reveal some problems that cannot be resolved without the full resources of mathematics as worked out in the Nineteenth century (and perhaps beyond). This is not (necessarily) to say that modern mathematics is required to answer any of the problems that Zeno explicitly wanted to raise; arguably Aristotle and other ancients had replies that would -- or should -- have satisfied Zeno. (Nor yet should we conclude that Zeno's work had any direct influence on the history of mathematics, though surely the kind of worries that he raised did.) However, as mathematics developed, and more thought was given to the paradoxes, new difficulties arose from them; these difficulties require modern mathematics for their resolution. These new difficulties arise partly in response to the evolution in our understanding of what mathematical rigor demands: solutions that would satisfy Aristotle's standards of rigor would not satisfy ours. Thus we shall push several of the paradoxes from their common sense formulations to their resolution in modern mathematics. (Another qualification: I will offer resolutions in terms of ‘standard’ mathematics, but other modern formulations are also capable of dealing with Zeno.)

2. The Paradoxes of Plurality

2.1 The Argument from Denseness
If there are many, they must be as many as they are and neither more nor less than that. But if they are as many as they are, they would be limited. If there are many, things that are are unlimited. For there are always others between the things that are, and again others between those, and so the things that are are unlimited. (Simplicius(a) On Aristotle's Physics, 140.29)This first argument, given in Zeno's words according to Simplicius, attempts to show that there could not be many things, on pain of contradiction. Assume then that there are many things. First, he says that any collection must contain some definite number of things, neither more nor fewer. But if you have a definite number of things, he further concludes, you must have a finite -- ‘limited’ -- number of them; he implicitly assumes that to have infinitely many things is not to have any particular number of them. Second, imagine any collection of things arranged in space -- imagine them lined up in one dimension for definiteness. Between and two of them, he claims, is a third; and in between these three elements another two; and another four between these five; and so on without end. Therefore the limited collection is also ‘unlimited’, which is a contradiction, and hence our original assumption must be false: there are not many things after all. At least, so Zeno's reasoning runs.
But why are there ‘always others between the things that are’? (In modern terminology, why must objects always be ‘densely’ ordered?) Suppose that I had imagined a collection of ten apples lined up; then there is indeed another apple between the sixth and eighth, but there is none between the seventh and eighth! On the assumption that Zeno is not simply confused, what does he have in mind? There are two possibilities: first, one might hold that for any pair of physical objects (two apples say) to actually be two distinct objects and not just one (a ‘double-apple’) there must be a third between them, physically separating them, even if it is just air. And one might think that for these three to be distinct, there must be two more objects separating them, and so on (this view presupposes that their being made of different substances is not sufficient to render them distinct). Second, one might hold that any body has parts that can be densely ordered. Of course 1/2s, 1/4s, 1/8s and so on of apples are not dense -- some such parts are adjacent -- but there may be sufficiently small parts -- call them ‘point-parts’ -- that are. Indeed, if between any two point-parts there lies a finite distance, and if point-parts can be arbitrarily close, then they are dense; a third lies at the half-way point of any two. In particular, familiar geometric points are like this, and hence are dense.
And thus we should read the argument as follows: if you suppose that the world contains many things, then you are faced with a contradiction, for the collection must be both finite and infinite -- finite because it contains a definite number of things, and infinite because they are dense. The assumption that any definite number is finite seems intuitive, but we now know, thanks to the work of Cantor in the Nineteenth century, how to understand infinite numbers in a way that makes them just as definite as finite numbers. One central element of the this theory of the ‘transfinite numbers’ is a precise definition of when two infinite collections are the same size, and when one is bigger than the other -- with such a definition in hand it is then possible to order the infinite numbers just as the finite numbers are ordered. For example, both the fractions and geometric points in a line are dense, but there are different, definite infinite numbers of them. (See Further Reading below for references to introductions to these mathematical ideas.) Of course, settling the mathematical question of whether infinite numbers can be definite doesn't show that real physical objects actually have geometric point parts, all it shows is that it is a logical possibility.

2.2 The Argument from Finite Size
… if it should be added to something else that exists, it would not make it any bigger. For if it were of no size and was added, it cannot increase in size. And so it follows immediately that what is added is nothing. But if when it is subtracted, the other thing is no smaller, nor is it increased when it is added, clearly the thing being added or subtracted is nothing. (Simplicius(a) On Aristotle's Physics,139.9) But if it exists, each thing must have some size and thickness, and part of it must be apart from the rest. And the same reasoning holds concerning the part that is in front. For that too will have size and part of it will be in front. Now it is the same thing to say this once and to keep saying it forever. For no such part of it will be last, nor will there be one part not related to another. Therefore, if there are many things, they must be both small and large; so small as not to have size, but so large as to be unlimited. (Simplicius(a) On Aristotle's Physics, 141.2)
Once again we have Zeno's own words. According to his conclusion, there are three parts to this argument, but only two survive. The first -- missing -- argument purports to show that if many things exist then they must have no size at all. Second, from this Zeno argues that it follows that they do not exist at all; since the result of joining (or removing) a sizeless object to anything is no change at all, he concludes that the thing added (or removed) is literally nothing. The argument to this point is a self-contained refutation of pluralism, but Zeno goes on to generate a further problem for someone who continues to urge the existence of a plurality. This third part of the argument is rather badly put but it seems to run something like this: suppose there is a plurality, so some spatially extended object exists (after all, he's just argued that inextended things do not exist). Since it is extended, it has two spatially distinct parts (one ‘in front’ of the other). And the parts exist, so they have extension, and so they also each have two spatially distinct parts; and so on without end. And hence, the final line of argument seems to conclude, the object, if it is extended at all, is infinite in extent.
But what could justify this final step? It doesn't seem that because an object has two parts it must be infinitely big! And neither does it follow from any other of the divisions that Zeno describes here; four, eight, sixteen, or whatever finite parts make a finite whole. Again, surely Zeno is aware of these facts, and so must have something else in mind, presumably the following: he assumes that if the infinite series of divisions he describes were repeated infinitely many times then a definite collection of parts would result. And notice that he doesn't have to assume that anyone could actually carry out the divisions -- there's not enough time and knives aren't sharp enough -- just that an object can be geometrically decomposed into such parts (neither does he assume that these parts are what we would naturally categorize as distinct physical objects like apples, cells, molecules, electrons or so on, but only that they are geometric parts of these objects). Now, if -- as a pluralist might well accept -- such parts exist, it follows from the second part of his argument that they are extended, and, he apparently assumes, an infinite sum of finite parts is infinite.
Here we should note that there are two ways he may be envisioning the result of the infinite division.
First, one could read him as first dividing the object into 1/2s, then one of the 1/2s -- say the second -- into two 1/4s, then one of the 1/4s -- say the second again -- into two 1/8s and so on. In this case the result of the infinite division results in an endless sequence of pieces of size 1/2 the total length, 1/4 the length, 1/8 the length … . And then so the total length is (1/2 + 1/4 + 1/8 + …) of the length, which Zeno concludes is an infinite distance, so that the pluralist is committed to the absurdity that finite bodies are ‘so large as to be unlimited’.
What is often pointed out in response is that Zeno gives us no reason to think that the sum is infinite rather than finite. He might have had the intuition that any infinite sum of finite quantities, since it grows endlessly with each new term must be finite, but one might also take this kind of example as showing that some infinite sums are after all finite. Thus, contrary to what he thought, Zeno has not proven that the absurd conclusion follows. However, what is not always appreciated is that the pluralist is not off the hook so easily, for it is not enough just to say that the sum might be finite, she must also show that it is finite -- otherwise we remain uncertain about the tenability of her position. As an illustration of the difficulty faced here consider the following: many commentators speak as if it is simply obvious that the infinite sum of the fractions is 1, that there is nothing to infinite summation. But what about the following sum: 1 - 1 + 1 - 1 + 1 - … . Obviously, it seems, the sum can be rewritten (1 -1) + (1 - 1) + … = 0 + 0 + … = 0. Surely this answer seems as intuitive as the sum of fractions. But this sum can also be rewritten 1 - (1 - 1 + 1 - 1 + …) = 1 - 0 -- since we've just shown that the term in parentheses vanishes -- = 1. Relying on intuitions about how to perform infinite sums leads to the conclusion that 1 = 0. Until one can give a theory of infinite sums that can give a satisfactory answer to any problem, one cannot say that Zeno's infinite sum is obviously finite. Such a theory was not fully worked out until the Nineteenth century by Cauchy. (In Cauchy's system 1/2 + 1/4 + … = 1 but 1 - 1 + 1 - … is undefined.)
Second, it could be that Zeno means that the object is divided in half, then both the 1/2s are both divided in half, then the 1/4s are all divided in half and so on. In this case the pieces at any particular stage are all the same finite size, and so one could conclude that the result of carrying on the procedure infinitely would be pieces the same size, which if they exist -- according to Zeno -- is greater than zero; but an infinity of equal extended parts is indeed infinitely big.
But this line of thought can be resisted. First, suppose that the procedure just described completely divides the object into non-overlapping parts. (There is a problem with this supposition that we will see just below.) It involves doubling the number of pieces after every division and so after N divisions there are 2N pieces. But it turns out that for any natural or infinite number, N, 2N > N, and so the number of (supposed) parts obtained by the infinity of divisions described is an even larger infinity. This is no immediate difficulty since, as we mentioned above, infinities come in different sizes. The number of times everything is divided in two is said to be ‘countably infinite’: there is a countable infinity of things in a collection if they can be labeled by the numbers 1, 2, 3, … without remainder on either side. But the number of pieces the infinite division produces is ‘uncountably infinite’, which means that there is no way to label them 1, 2, 3, … without missing some of them -- in fact infinitely many of them. However, Cauchy's definition of an infinite sum only applies to countably infinite series of numbers, and so does not apply to the pieces we are considering. However, we could consider just countably many of them, whose lengths according to Zeno -- since he claims they are all equal and non-zero -- will sum to an infinite length; clearly the length of all of the pieces could not be less than this.
At this point the pluralist who believes that Zeno's division completely divides objects into non-overlapping parts (see the next paragraph) could respond that the parts in fact have no extension, even though they exist. That would block the conclusion that finite objects are infinite, but it seems to push her back to the other horn of Zeno's argument, for how can all these zero length pieces make up a non-zero sized whole? (Note that according to Cauchy 0 + 0 + 0 + … = 0 but this result shows nothing here, for as we saw there are uncountably many pieces to add up -- more than are added in this sum.) We shall postpone this question for the discussion of the next paradox, where it comes up explicitly.
The second problem with interpreting the infinite division as a repeated division of all parts is that it does not divide an object into distinct parts, if objects are composed in the natural way. To see this, let's ask the question of what parts are obtained by this division into 1/2s, 1/4s, 1/8s, .... Since the division is repeated without end there is no last piece we can give as an answer, and so we need to think about the question in a different way. If we suppose that an object can be represented by a line segment of unit length, then the division produces collections of segments, where the first is either the first or second half of the whole segment, the second is the first or second quarter, or third or fourth quarter, and in general the segment produced by N divisions is either the first or second half of the previous segment. For instance, writing the segment with endpoints a and b as [a,b], some of these collections (technically known as 'chains' since the elements of the collection are ordered by size) would start {[0,1], [0,1/2], [1/4,1/2], [1/4,3/8], ...}. (When I argued before that Zeno's division produced uncountably many pieces of the object, what I should have said more carefully is that it produces uncountably many chains like this.)
The question of which parts the division picks out is then the question of which part any given chain picks out; it's natural to say that a chain picks out the part of the line which is contained in every one of its elements. Consider for instance the chain {[0,1/2], [1/4,1/2], [3/8,1/2], ...}, in other words the chain that starts with the left half of the line and for which every other element is the right half of the previous one. The half-way point is in every one of the segments in this chain; it's the right-hand endpoint of each one. But no other point is in all its elements: clearly no point beyond half-way is; and pick any point p before half-way, if you take right halves of [0,1/2] enough times, the left-hand end of the segment will be to the right of p. Thus the only part of the line that is in all the elements of this chain is the half-way point, and so that is the part of the line picked out by the chain. The problem is that by parallel reasoning, the half-way point is also picked out by the distinct chain {[1/2,1], [1/2,3/4], [1/2,5/8], ...}, where each segment after the first is the left half of the preceding one. And so both chains pick out the same piece of the line: the half-way point. (And many other pairs of chains have the same problem.) Thus Zeno's Dichotomy, interpreted as a repeated division of all parts into half, doesn't divide the line into distinct parts. Hence, if we think that objects are composed in the same way as the line, it follows that despite appearances, this version of the Dichotomy does not cut objects into parts whose total size we can properly discuss.
(You might think that this problem could be fixed by taking the elements of the chains to be segments with no endpoint to the right. Then the first of the two chains we considered no longer has the half-way point in any of its segments, and so does not pick out that point. The problem now is that it fails to pick out any part of the line: the previous reasoning showed that it doesn't pick out any point greater than or less than the half-way point, and now it doesn't pick out that point either!)

2.3 The Argument from Complete Divisibility
… whenever a body is by nature divisible through and through, whether by bisection, or generally by any method whatever, nothing impossible will have resulted if it has actually been divided … though perhaps nobody in fact could so divide it. What then will remain? A magnitude? No: that is impossible, since then there will be something not divided, whereas ex hypothesi the body was divisible through and through. But if it be admitted that neither a body nor a magnitude will remain … the body will either consist of points (and its constituents will be without magnitude) or it will be absolutely nothing. If the latter, then it might both come-to-be out of nothing and exist as a composite of nothing; and thus presumably the whole body will be nothing but an appearance. But if it consists of points, it will not possess any magnitude. (Aristotle On Generation and Corruption, 316a19)
These words are Aristotle's not Zeno's, and indeed the argument is not even attributed to Zeno by Aristotle. However we have Simplicius' opinion ((a) On Aristotle's Physics, 139.24) that it originates with Zeno, which is why it is included here. Aristotle begins by hypothesizing that some body is completely divisible, ‘through and through’; the second step of the argument makes clear that he means by this that it is divisible into parts that themselves have no size -- parts with any magnitude remain incompletely divided. (Once again what matters is that the body is genuinely composed of such parts, not that anyone has the time and tools to make the division; and remembering from the previous section that one does not obtain such parts by repeatedly dividing all parts in half.) So suppose the body is divided into its dimensionless parts. These parts could either be nothing at all -- as Zeno argued above -- or ‘point-parts’. If the parts are nothing then so is the body: it's just an illusion. And, the argument concludes, even if they are points, since these are unextended the body itself will be unextended: surely any sum -- even an infinite one -- of zeroes is zero.
One could of course point out that it is only assumed that an infinity of zeroes is itself zero, and deny that assumption. However it has a strong intuitive pull, and once again one should show how any dimensionless points actually do make an extended whole. Fortunately Grünbaum (1967) showed how this is possible according to the modern mathematical treatment of a line. Consider a line segment of unit length. At its most basic level the segment is just a set of points -- if you take any spatial part of it, all you have is a point or set of points. Now Cantor gave a beautiful, astounding and extremely influential ‘diagonal’ proof that the number of points in the segment is uncountably infinite: there is no way to label all the points in the line with the infinity of numbers 1, 2, 3, … . As we noted above, it follows that we cannot apply the Cauchy definition of infinite sums to the points of the line, and so happily we cannot immediately conclude that because they all have zero length so does the whole line. But that still leaves open the question of how the line gets extension from its inextended points.
So suppose that you are just given the number of points in a line and that their lengths are all zero; how would you determine the length? Do we need a new definition, one that extends Cauchy's to uncountably infinite sums? It turns out that that would not help, because Cauchy further showed that any segment, of any length whatsoever (and indeed an entire infinite line) have exactly the same number of points as our unit segment. So knowing the number of points won't determine the length of the line, and so nothing like familiar addition -- in which the whole is determined by the parts -- is possible. Instead we must think of the distance properties of a line as logically posterior to its point composition: first we have a set of points (ordered in a certain way, so that there is some fact, for example, about which of any two is before the other) then we define a function of two points which specifies how far apart they are (and which satisfies such conditions as that the distance between A and B plus the distance between B and C equals the distance between A and C -- assuming that C is not between A and B). By analogy, the maiden names of a married couple do not determine their surname: they could take either maiden name or hyphenate, or take a wholly new name if they choose. Thus we answer Zeno as follows: the argument assumed that the size of the body was a sum of the sizes of the point parts, but that is not the case; according to modern mathematics, a line is an uncountable infinity of points plus a distance function. (Note that Grünbaum used the fact that the point composition fails to determine a length to support his ‘conventionalist’ view that a line has no determinate length at all, independent of a standard of measurement.)

3. The Paradoxes of Motion

3.1 The Dichotomy
The first asserts the non-existence of motion on the ground that that which is in locomotion must arrive at the half-way stage before it arrives at the goal. (Aristotle Physics, 239b11)This paradox is known as the ‘dichotomy’ because it involves repeated division into two (like the second paradox of plurality). Like the other paradoxes of motion we have it from Aristotle, who sought to refute it.
Suppose a very fast runner -- such as mythical Atalanta -- needs to run for the bus. Clearly before she reaches the bus stop she must run half-way, as Aristotle says. There's no problem there; supposing a constant motion it will take her 1/2 the time to run half-way there and 1/2 the time to run the rest of the way. Now she must also run half-way to the half-way point -- i.e., a 1/4 of the total distance -- before she reaches the half-way point, but again she is left with a finite number of finite lengths to run, and plenty of time to do it. And before she reaches 1/4 of the way she must reach 1/2 of 1/4 = 1/8 of the way; and before that a 1/16; and so on. There is no problem at any finite point in this series, but what if the halving is carried out infinitely many times? The resulting series contains no first distance to run, for any possible first distance could be divided in half, and hence would not be first after all. However it does contain a final distance, namely 1/2 of the way; and a penultimate distance, 1/4 of the way; and a third to last distance, 1/8 of the way; and so on. Thus the series of distances that Atalanta is required to run is: …, then 1/16 of the way, then 1/8 of the way, then 1/4 of the way, and finally 1/2 of the way (of course we are not suggesting that she stops at the end of each segment and then starts running at the beginning of the next -- we are thinking of her continuous run being composed of such parts). And now there is a problem, for this description of her run has her travelling an infinite number of finite distances, which, Zeno would have us conclude, must take an infinite time, which is to say it is never completed. And since the argument does not depend on the distance or who or what the mover is, it follows that no finite distance can ever be traveled, which is to say that all motion is impossible. (Note that the paradox could easily be generated in the other direction so that Atalanta must first run half way, then half the remaining way, then half of that and so on, so that she must run the following endless sequence of fractions of the total distance: 1/2, 1/4, 1/8 ….)
A couple of common responses are not adequate. One might -- as Simplicius ((a) On Aristotle's Physics, 1012.22) tells us Diogenes the Cynic did by silently standing and walking -- point out that it is a matter of the most common experience that things in fact do move, and that we know very well that Atalanta would have no trouble reaching her bus stop. But this would not impress Zeno, who as a paid up Parmenidean held that many things are not as they appear: it may appear that Diogenes is walking or that Atalanta is running, but appearances can be deceptive and surely we have a logical proof that they are in fact not moving at all. And if one doesn't accept that Zeno has given a proof that motion is illusory -- as we hopefully do not -- one then owes an account of what is wrong with his argument: he has given reasons why motion is impossible, and so an adequate response must show why those reasons are not sufficient. And it won't do simply to point out that there are some ways of cutting up Atalanta's run -- into just two halves, say -- in which there is no problem. For if you accept all of the steps in Zeno's argument then you must accept his conclusion (assuming that he has reasoned in a logically deductive way): it's not enough to show an unproblematic division, you must also show why the given division is unproblematic.
Another response -- given by Aristotle himself -- is to point out that as we divide the distances run we should also divide the total time taken: there is 1/2 the time for the final 1/2, a 1/4 of the time for the previous 1/4, an 1/8 of the time for the 1/8 of the run and so on. Thus each fractional distance has just the right fraction of the finite total time for Atalanta to complete it, and thus the distance can be completed in a finite time. Aristotle felt that this reply should satisfy Zeno, however he also realized (Physics, 263a15) that this could not be the end of the matter (and surely Zeno would have made the same point if presented with Aristotle's response). For now we are saying that the time Atalanta takes to reach the bus stop is composed of an infinite number of finite pieces -- …, 1/8, 1/4, and 1/2 (of the total time) -- and isn't that an infinite time?
Of course, one could again claim that some infinite sums in fact have finite totals, and in particular that the sum of these pieces is 1 × the total time, which is of course finite (and again a complete solution would demand a rigorous account of infinite summation, like Cauchy's). However, Aristotle did not make such a move. What he said is worth noting because it had a considerable influence on later thinking about Zeno. In his response Aristotle drew a sharp distinction between what he termed a ‘continuous’ line and a line divided into parts. Consider a simple division of a line into two: on the one hand there is the undivided line, and on the other the line with a mid-point selected as the boundary of the two halves. Aristotle claims that these are two distinct things: and that the later is only ‘potentially’ derivable from the former. Next, Aristotle takes the common-sense view that time is like a geometric line, and considers the time it takes to complete the run. We can again distinguish the two cases: on the one hand there is the continuous run from start to finish, and on the other there is the run divided into Zeno's infinity of half-runs. The former is ‘potentially infinite’ in the sense that it could be divided into latter ‘actual infinity’. Here's the crucial step: Aristotle thinks that since these times are geometrically distinct they must be physically distinct. But how could that be? He claims that the runner must do something at the end of each half-run to make it distinct from the next: she must stop. (Why stop rather than cough or something? Because if the time is discontinuous then so is the motion.) And so Aristotle's full answer to the paradox is that Zeno's question -- whether the infinite series of runs is possible or not -- is ambiguous. One the one hand, the answer is ‘yes’ if one means the potentially infinite series that form the continuous run. On the other the answer is ‘no’ if one means the actual infinity of pieces that form the discontinuous run.
It is hard -- from our modern perspective perhaps -- to see how this answer could be completely satisfactory. In the first place it assumes that a clear distinction can be drawn between potential and actual infinities, something that was never fully achieved. Second, suppose that Zeno's problem turns on the claim that infinite sums of finite quantities are invariably infinite. Then Aristotle's distinction will only help if he can explain why potentially infinite sums are in fact finite (and couldn't I potentially add 1 + 1 + 1 + …, which does not have a finite total); or if he can give a reason why potentially infinite sums just don't exist. Or perhaps Aristotle did not see infinite sums as the problem, but rather whether completing an infinity of finite actions is metaphysically and conceptually and physically possible, an idea discussed at length in recent years: see ‘Supertasks’ below. In this case we need an account of actions that makes precise the sense in which the continuous run is indeed a single action (using rest to individuate motions seems problematic, for humans are probably never completely still, and yet we perform distinct motions -- breathing, eating, skipping and so on). Finally, the distinction between potential and actual infinities has played no role in mathematics since Cantor tamed the transfinite numbers -- certainly the potential infinite has played no role in the modern mathematical solutions discussed here.
One last point: Zeno's argument seeks most obviously to establish the impossibility of motion, but he also intended it (and the following arguments) as further refutations of plurality -- certainly, Plato interprets Zeno's intentions in this way. How might the argument seek to establish this conclusion? Presumably Zeno has in mind the view that spatial (and perhaps temporal) distances have a plurality of parts; parts which are infinitely divisible into two. Given that assumption, supposedly finite distances (or times) can be decomposed into an infinity of finite parts with no first (or alternatively, last) one. And how can such distances be finite after all? And if the pluralist also believes in motion, how can such a distance be traversed? It seems it cannot be.

3.2 Achilles and the Tortoise
The [second] argument was called "Achilles," accordingly, from the fact that Achilles was taken [as a character] in it, and the argument says that it is impossible for him to overtake the tortoise when pursuing it. For in fact it is necessary that what is to overtake [something], before overtaking [it], first reach the limit from which what is fleeing set forth. In [the time in] which what is pursuing arrives at this, what is fleeing will advance a certain interval, even if it is less than that which what is pursuing advanced … . And in the time again in which what is pursuing will traverse this [interval] which what is fleeing advanced, in this time again what is fleeing will traverse some amount … . And thus in every time in which what is pursuing will traverse the [interval] which what is fleeing, being slower, has already advanced, what is fleeing will also advance some amount. (Simplicius(b) On Aristotle's Physics, 1014.10)This paradox turns on much the same considerations as the last. Imagine Achilles chasing a tortoise, and suppose that Achilles is running at 1 m/s, that the tortoise is crawling at 0.1 m/s and that the tortoise starts out 0.9 m ahead of Achilles. On the face of it Achilles should catch the tortoise after 1s, at a distance of 1m from where he starts (and so 0.1m from where the Tortoise starts). We could break Achilles' motion up as we did Atalanta's, into halves, or we could do it as follows: before Achilles can catch the tortoise he must reach the point where the tortoise started. But in the time he takes to do this the tortoise crawls a little further forward. So next Achilles must reach this new point. But in the time it takes Achilles to achieve this the tortoise crawls forward a tiny bit further. And so on to infinity: every time that Achilles reaches the place where the tortoise was the tortoise has had enough time to get a little bit further, and so Achilles has another run to make, and so Achilles has in infinite number of finite catch-ups to do before he can catch the tortoise, and so, Zeno concludes, he never catches the tortoise.
One aspect of the paradox is thus that Achilles must traverse the following infinite series of distances before he catches the tortoise: first 0.9m, then an additional 0.09m, then 0.009m, … . These are the series of distances ahead that the tortoise reaches at the start of each of Achilles' catch-ups. Looked at this way the puzzle is identical to the Dichotomy, for it is just to say that ‘that which is in locomotion must arrive [nine tenths of the way] before it arrives at the goal’. And so everything we said above applies here too.
But what the paradox in this form brings out most vividly is the problem of completing a series of actions that has no final member -- in this case the infinite series of catch-ups before Achilles reaches the tortoise. But just what is the problem? Perhaps the following: Achilles' run to the point at which he should reach the tortoise can, it seems, be completely decomposed into the series of catch-ups, none of which take him to the tortoise. Therefore, nowhere in his run does he reach the tortoise after all. But if this is what Zeno had in mind it won't do. Of course Achilles doesn't reach the tortoise at any point of the sequence, for every run in the sequence occurs before we expect Achilles to reach it! Thinking in terms of the points that Achilles must reach in his run, 1m does not occur in the sequence 0.9m, 0.99m, 0.999m, … , so of course he never catches the tortoise during that sequence of runs! The series of catch-ups does not after all completely decompose the run: the final point -- at which Achilles does catch the tortoise -- must be added to it. So is there any puzzle? Arguably yes.
Achilles run passes through the sequence of points 0.9m, 0.99m, 0.999m, … , 1m. But does such a strange sequence -- comprised of an infinity of members followed by one more -- make sense mathematically? If not then our mathematical description of the run cannot be correct, but then what is? Fortunately the theory of transfinites pioneered by Cantor assures us that such a series is perfectly respectable. It was realized that the order properties of infinite series are much more elaborate than those of finite series. Any way of arranging the numbers 1, 2 and 3 gives a series in the same pattern, for instance, but there are many distinct ways to order the natural numbers: 1, 2, 3, … for instance. Or … , 3, 2, 1. Or … , 4, 2, 1, 3, 5, … . Or 2, 3, 4, … , 1, which is just the same kind of series as the positions Achilles must run through. Thus the theory of the transfinites treats not just ‘cardinal’ numbers -- which depend only on how many things there are -- but also ‘ordinal’ numbers which depend further on how the things are arranged. Since the ordinals are standardly taken to be mathematically legitimate numbers, and since the series of points Achilles must pass has an ordinal number, we shall take it that the series is mathematically legitimate. (Again, see ‘Supertasks’ below for another kind of problem that might arise for Achilles’.)

3.3 The Arrow
The third is … that the flying arrow is at rest, which result follows from the assumption that time is composed of moments … . he says that if everything when it occupies an equal space is at rest, and if that which is in locomotion is always in a now, the flying arrow is therefore motionless. (Aristotle Physics, 239b.30) Zeno abolishes motion, saying "What is in motion moves neither in the place it is nor in one in which it is not". (Diogenes Laertius Lives of Famous Philosophers, ix.72)
This argument against motion explicitly turns on a particular kind of assumption of plurality: that time is composed of moments (or ‘nows’) and nothing else. Consider an arrow, apparently in motion, at any instant. First, Zeno assumes that it travels no distance during that moment -- ‘it occupies an equal space’ for the whole instant. But the entire period of its motion contains only instants, all of which contain an arrow at rest, and so, Zeno concludes, the arrow cannot be moving.
An immediate concern is why Zeno is justified in assuming that the arrow is at rest during any instant. It follows immediately if one assumes that an instant lasts 0s: whatever speed the arrow has, it will get nowhere if it has no time at all. But what if one held that the smallest parts of time are finite -- if tiny -- so that a moving arrow might actually move some distance during an instant? One way of supporting the assumption -- which requires reading quite a lot into the text we have -- is to assume that instants are indivisible. Then suppose that an arrow actually moved during an instant. It would be at different locations at the start and end of the instant, which implies that the instant has a ‘start’ and an ‘end’, which in turn implies that it has at least two parts, and so is divisible, and so is not an indivisible moment at all. (Note that this argument only establishes that nothing can move during an instant, not that instants cannot be finite.)
So then, nothing moves during any instant, but time is entirely composed of instants, so nothing ever moves. A first response is to point out that determining the velocity of the arrow means dividing the distance traveled in some time by the length of that time. But -- assuming from now on that instants have zero duration -- this formula makes no sense in the case of an instant: the arrow travels 0m in the 0s the instant lasts, but 0/0 m/s is not any number at all. Thus it is fallacious to conclude from the fact that the arrow doesn't travel any distance in an instant that it is at rest; whether it is in motion at an instant or not depends on whether it travels any distance in a finite interval that includes the instant in question.
The answer is correct, but it carries the counter-intuitive implication that motion is not something that happens at any instant, but rather only over finite periods of time. Think about it this way: time, as we said, is composed only of instants. No distance is traveled during any instant. So when does the arrow actually move? How does it get from one place to another at a later moment? There's only one answer: the arrow gets from point X at time 1 to point Y at time 2 simply in virtue of being at successive intermediate points at successive intermediate times -- the arrow never changes its position during an instant but only over intervals composed of instants, by the occupation of different positions at different times. In Bergson's memorable words -- which he thought expressed an absurdity -- ‘movement is composed of immobilities’ (1911, 308): getting from X to Y is a matter of occupying exactly one place in between at each instant (in the right order of course). For a recent discussion of this issue see Arntzenius (2000).

3.4 The Stadium
The fourth argument is that concerning equal bodies [AA] which move alongside equal bodies in the stadium from opposite directions -- the ones from the end of the stadium [CC], the others from the middle [BB] -- at equal speeds, in which he thinks it follows that half the time is equal to its double…. And it follows that the C has passed all the As and the B half; so that the time is half … . And at the same time it follows that the first B has passed all the Cs. (Aristotle Physics, 239b33)The final paradox of motion runs as follows: picture three sets of three touching cubes -- all nine exactly the same, with side L m -- in relative motion. One set -- the As --are at rest, and the others -- the Bs and Cs -- move from the left and right respectively, at a constant equal speed, S m/s. And suppose that at some moment the rightmost B is perfectly aligned with the middle A, and the leftmost C with the rightmost A: thus the edges of the rightmost B and leftmost C are exactly lined up. That is they are arranged as shown.
A A A B B B C C C
Now consider the later time at which the rightmost A and B are aligned; since the speeds of the Bs and Cs are equal, at this moment the middle A will be aligned with the leftmost C. That is consider the moment when the blocks are configured thus.
A A A B B B C C C
This motion requires the rightmost B to move one block -- a distance L m -- to the right, at a speed of S m/s, so it takes L/S s. And the same motion also requires the leftmost C to move from just to the right of the rightmost B into alignment with the middle B, a distance a distance of 2L m. So far so good, but now Zeno concludes that since the Cs are moving at S m/s, the motion must also take 2L/S s. And hence ‘half the time [L/S] is equal to its double [2L/S]’, since one and the same motion seems to take both times.
The unanimous verdict on Zeno is that he was hopelessly confused about relative velocity in this paradox. If the Bs are moving with speed S m/s to the right with respect to the As and if the Cs are moving with speed S m/s to the left with respect to the As then the Cs are moving with speed S+S = 2S m/s to the left with respect to the Bs. And so, as expected it takes the Cs 2L/2S = L/S s to complete the motion after all.
This resolution notwithstanding, recent philosophers have attempted to put a new spin on Zeno's argument (it's arguable whether Zeno himself had anything like what follows in mind). This argument opposed the view that space and time are ‘quantized’, composed of smallest finite parts. Suppose they are and that L m is the ‘quantum’ of length and that the two moments considered are separated by a single quantum of time. Now something strange has happened, for the rightmost B and the leftmost C have clearly passed each other during the motion, and yet there is no moment at which they are level: since the two moments are separated by the smallest possible time, there can be no moment between them -- it would be a time smaller than the smallest time from the two moments we considered. Conversely, if one insisted that if they pass then there must be a moment when they are level, then it shows that cannot be a shortest finite interval -- whatever it is, just run this argument against it. However, why should one insist on this assumption? The problem is that one naturally imagines quantized space as being like a chess board, on which the chess pieces are frozen during each quantum of time. Then one wonders when the red queen, say, gets from one square to the next, or how she gets past the white queen without being level with her. But the analogy is misleading. It is better to think of quantized space as a giant matrix of lights that holds some pattern of illuminated lights for each quantum of time. In this analogy a lit bulb represents the presence of an object: for instance a series of bulbs in a line lighting up in sequence represent a body moving in a straight line. In this case there is no temptation to ask when the light ‘gets’ from one bulb to the next -- or in analogy how the body moves from one location to the next.

4. Two More Paradoxes

4.1 The Paradox of Place
Zeno's difficulty demands an explanation; for if everything that exists has a place, place too will have a place, and so on ad infinitum. (Aristotle Physics, 209a23)When he sets up his theory of place -- the crucial spatial notion in his theory of motion -- Aristotle lists various theories and problems that his predecessors, including Zeno, have formulated on the subject. One can again see here a problem for pluralism, for the second step of the argument concludes that there are many places. It is perhaps a little hard to feel the full force of the conclusion, for why should there not be an infinite series of places of places of places of …? Presumably the worry would be greater for someone who (like Aristotle) believed that there could not be an actual infinity of things, for the argument seems to show that there are. But certainly today we need have no such qualms; there seems nothing problematic with an actual infinity of places; indeed, it seems very natural to think that every point of space is a distinct place, even if there are an infinity of points.
The only other way one might find the regress troubling is if one had reason to suppose that objects must have ‘absolute’ places, in the sense that there is always a unique answer to the question ‘where is it’? For example, where am I as I write? If the paradox is right then I'm in my place, and I'm also in my place's place, and my place's place's place, and my … . Since I'm in all these places any might seem an appropriate answer to the question. But why think that there must be a unique answer to the question? Why shouldn't I have many locations? At my desk, in my apartment, in Chicago, Illinois, USA, North America, the Earth, Solar System … . (In fact there is a reason that Aristotle might have had this concern about Zeno's argument, for in his theory of motion, the natural motion of a body is determined by the relation of its place to the center of the universe: an account that only makes sense if bodies can be attributed a unique place. Interestingly, Newton, in the Scholium to the principal Definitions in Book I of his Principia, gives an argument along similar lines: he assumes that every body has a unique, absolute velocity, and argues that only a fixed matter-independent, ‘absolute’ space will provide such uniqueness. That said, there is no evidence either that Zeno had this kind of argument in mind, or that Newton was influenced by Aristotle in this regard.)

4.2 The Grain of Millet
… Zeno's reasoning is false when he argues that there is no part of the millet that does not make a sound; for there is no reason why any part should not in any length of time fail to move the air that the whole bushel moves in falling. (Aristotle Physics, 250a19)This argument is a Parmenidean argument against the reliability of the senses. It goes like this: if you drop a sack of millet on the floor then you hear a loud thud; but this noise is the result of the noise made by every grain of millet in the sack; and the result of the noise made by every part of every grain; therefore every part of every grain makes a noise as it hits the ground. But now consider dropping a tiny part of a grain; we know that we won't hear it. Therefore our sense of hearing is deceptive -- there are noises it cannot hear -- and so we should not trust it. Aristotle's response seems to be that the part would not move as much air as the sack, but the paradox is not that the part should make as much noise as the sack, but that it should make some noise. A better reply is surely that not every disturbance in the air is audible by us: that a measuring instrument is unreliable over some range is no argument that it is unreliable over every range.

5. Zeno's Influence on Philosophy
In this final section we should consider briefly the impact that Zeno has had on various philosophers; a search of the literature will reveal that these debates continue.

The Pythagoreans: For the first half of the Twentieth century the majority reading -- following Tannery (1885) -- of Zeno held that his arguments were directed against a technical doctrine of the Pythagoreans. According to this reading they held that all things were composed of elements that had the properties of a unit number, a geometric point and a physical atom: this kind of position would fit with their doctrine that reality is fundamentally mathematical. However, in the middle of the century a series of commentators (Vlastos, 1967, summarizes the argument and contains references) forcefully argued that Zeno's target was instead a common sense understanding of plurality and motion -- one grounded in familiar geometrical notions -- and indeed that the doctrine was not a major part of Pythagorean thought. We have implicitly assumed that these arguments are correct in our readings of the paradoxes. That said, Tannery's interpretation still has its defenders (see e.g., Matson 2001).

The Atomists: Aristotle (On Generation and Corruption 316b34) claims that our third argument -- the one concerning complete divisibility -- was what convinced the atomists that there must be smallest, indivisible parts of matter. See Abraham (1972) for a further discussion of Zeno's connection to the atomists.

Temporal Becoming: In the early part of the Twentieth century several influential philosophers attempted to put Zeno's arguments to work in the service of a metaphysics of ‘temporal becoming’, the (supposed) process by which the present comes into being. Such thinkers as Bergson (1911), James (1911, Ch 10 -11) and Whitehead (1929) argued that Zeno's paradoxes show that space and time are not structured as a mathematical continuum: they argued that the way to preserve the reality of motion was to deny that space and time are composed of points and instants. However, we have clearly seen that the tools of standard modern mathematics are up to the job of resolving the paradoxes, so no such conclusion seems warranted: if the present indeed ‘becomes’, there is no reason to think that the process is not captured by the continuum.

Applying the Mathematical Continuum to Physical Space and Time: Following a lead given by Russell (1929, 182-198), a number of philosophers -- most notably Grünbaum (1967) -- took up the task of showing how modern mathematics could solve all of Zeno's paradoxes; their work has thoroughly influenced our discussion of the arguments. What they realized was that a purely mathematical solution was not sufficient: the paradoxes not only question abstract mathematics, but also the nature of physical reality. So what they sought was an argument not only that Zeno posed no threat to the mathematics of infinity but also that that mathematics correctly describes objects, time and space. The idea that a mathematical law -- say Newton's law of universal gravity -- may or may not correctly describe things is familiar, but some aspects of the mathematics of infinity -- the nature of the continuum, definition of infinite sums and so on -- seem so basic that it may be hard to see at first that they too apply contingently. But surely they do: nothing guarantees a priori that space has the structure of the continuum, or even that parts of space add up according to Cauchy's definition. (Salmon offers a nice example to help make the point: since alcohol dissolves in water, if you mix the two you end up with less than the sum of their volumes, showing that even ordinary addition is not applicable to every kind of system.) Our belief that the mathematical theory of infinity describes space and time is justified to the extent that the laws of physics assume that it does, and to the extent that those laws are themselves confirmed by experience. While it is true that almost all physical theories assume that space and time do indeed have the structure of the continuum, it is also the case that quantum theories of gravity likely imply that they do not. While no one really knows where this research will ultimately lead, it is quite possible that space and time will turn out, at the most fundamental level, to be quite unlike the mathematical continuum that we have assumed here. One should also note that Grünbaum took the job of showing that modern mathematics describes space and time to involve something rather different from arguing that it is confirmed by experience. The dominant view at the time (though not at present) was that scientific terms had meaning insofar as they referred directly to objects of experience -- such as ‘1 m ruler’ -- or, if they referred to ‘theoretical’ rather than ‘observable’ entities -- such as ‘a point of space’ or ‘1/2 of 1/2 of … 1/2 a racetrack’ -- then they obtained meaning by their logical relations -- via definitions and theoretical laws -- to such observation terms. Thus Grünbaum undertook an impressive program to give meaning to all terms involved in the modern theory of infinity, interpreted as an account of space and time.

Supertasks: A further strand of thought concerns what Black (1950-51) dubbed ‘infinity machines’. Black and his followers wished to show that although Zeno's paradoxes offered no problem to mathematics, they showed that after all mathematics was not applicable to space, time and motion. Most starkly, our resolution to the Dichotomy and Achilles assumed that the complete run could be broken down into an infinite series of half runs, which could be summed. But is it really possible to complete any infinite series of actions: to complete was is known as a ‘supertask’? If not, and assuming that Atalanta and Achilles can complete their tasks, their complete runs cannot be correctly described as an infinite series of half-runs, although modern mathematics would so describe them. What infinity machines are supposed to establish is that an infinite series of tasks cannot be completed -- so any completable task cannot be broken down into an infinity of smaller tasks, whatever mathematics suggests.

Non-standard analysis: Finally, we have seen how to tackle the paradoxes using the resources of mathematics as developed in the Nineteenth century. For a long time it was considered one the great virtues of this system that it finally showed how to do without infinitesimal quantities, smaller than any finite number but larger than zero. (Newton's calculus for instance effectively made use of such numbers, treating them sometimes as zero and sometimes as finite; the problem with such an approach is that how to treat the numbers is a matter of intuition not rigor.) However, in the Twentieth century Robinson showed how to introduce infinitesimal numbers into mathematics: this is the system of ‘non-standard analysis’ (the familiar system of real numbers, given a rigorous foundation by Dedekind, is by contrast just ‘analysis’). And it has been shown by McLaughlin (1992, 1994) that Zeno's paradoxes can also be resolved in non-standard analysis; they are no more argument against non-standard analysis than the standard mathematics we have assumed here. It should be emphasized however that -- contrary to McLaughlin's suggestions -- there is no need for non-standard analysis to solve the paradoxes: either system is equally successful. (The construction of non-standard analysis does however raise a further question about the applicability of analysis to physical space and time: it seems plausible that all physical theories can be formulated in either terms, and so as far as our experience extends both seem equally confirmed. But they cannot both be true of space and time: either space has infinitesimal parts or it doesn't.)

Credit: Stan/pla