In a recent article (1972) I gave reasons for attributing to Mill a restricted view of the demands of morality, according to which no conduct would be prima facie wrong unless it was harmful to others. This interpretation of Mill raises the problem of reconciling such a view of morality with the principle which Mill calls the Principle of Utility. I tried to show that a reconciliation was possible by invoking the reminder, for which we are indebted to Alan Ryan (1965, 1970) and D. P. Dryer (1969), that Mill conceived of the Principle of Utility as a very abstract principle, and said that it governed not just morality but the whole of the Art of Life. I concluded that, whatever the subject matter of Mill's Principle of Utility might be, it was not the rightness and wrongness of actions.

This is yet another study of Mill's ‘proof’ of utilitarianism, and since the topic is by now rather shop-worn I should state right off what new form I hope to give to it. Mill argues from the premise that each person desires his own happiness to the conclusion that the general happiness is desirable. To be more precise, he argues that one's own happiness is the only thing that any person desires as an end, and from this he moves to the conclusion that the general happiness is that state of things which should be promoted. It is not necessary at the outset to accept this as the correct rendering of Mill's argument; it is part of my object to show that it is.

So many times have we heard it told and even recounted it ourselves, that the tale of Descartes’ metaphysical adventure is something we can slip our philosophical feet into without feeling the slightest pinch. The story, or perhaps, only its plot, is this: Descartes, in order to discover whether anything is certain, attempted to doubt everything; though he succeeded in casting at least a shadow of doubt on vast areas of belief, happily one item, though only one, emerged from the inquiry in a respectable condition, indubitable. The remainder of the tale relates how he proceeded to deduce truth after truth from that single original certainty.

There is still considerable debate among commentators about the extent to which Descartes intended to, or actually did, exercise the principle of methodic doubt. Basically, the debate is about the import of the word “all” in the opening sentence of the synopsis of the Meditations: “In the first Meditation I set forth the reasons for which we may, generally speaking, doubt about all things … ” (HR 1, 140; AT 7, 12). A. K. Stout and Willis Doney have argued that the thing to be doubted is all knowledge to the extent in which memory plays a role in it. They attempt to show that Descartes is looking for a guarantee for the reliability of memory rather than for, say, a guarantee for the reliability of all clear and distinct ideas. Most commentators do not restrict methodic doubt in this way. For example, Alan Gewirth has recently suggested that sometimes Descartes even doubts the cogito.

In recent times it has become fashionable to emphasize the role of conceptual change in the (philosopher's) history of science. To judge from recent writers (Feyerabend 5-9, Kuhn 18), every significant theoretical change in science is first and foremost a revolution in scientific concepts—a conceptual revolution. According to this view, every level of experience is affected by each fundamental theoretical change: physical theory, experimental practice and even perceptual experience. The Aristotelian patrician who watched the sun sink beneath the horizon not only had different beliefs (theory) about the phenomenon but actually saw something different from the Newtonian gentleman who saw the horizon rise above his eye-sun line, and the Einsteinian professional who saw the sun's varying geometrical relations to the world light-geodesics on which successive temporal stages of his eye world-line lay. Moreover, such is the completeness of the conceptual-experiential shifts undergone in a fundamental scientific change that it is impossible to meaningfully discuss the one theory within the confines of the other or, indeed, to provide any systematic, cumulative comparison of successive theories.

Crucial to Peter Achinstein's philosophy of science, as presented in Concepts of Science, is the concept of semantic relevance. First, the concept of semantic relevance is central to his analysis of definition and it is presupposed both in his analysis of the concepts of theory and model and in his critique of alternative analyses. Secondly, Achinstein's way of doing philosophy of science rests heavily on his analysis of semantic relevance. Philosophical analysis for Achinstein seems primarily to consist in specifying the use of certain terms. As we shall see, use and semantic relevance are, according to Achinstein, closely connected.

Yet, despite the centrality of this concept in Achinstein's philosophy, I will argue that the concept has serious philosophical problems and that the use Achinstein makes of the concept is dubious. First, I will argue that the notion of semantic relevance inherits some of the traditional problems of analyticity as well as having problems of its own. In particular, I will show that given Achinstein's construal of semantic relevance it is extremely difficult if not impossible to determine the semantic relevance of a term. Secondly, I will maintain that given these problems, Achinstein is not in any way justified in using the notion of semantic relevance in his criticism of other philosophers' views and in the construction of his own.

‘Mental processes are brain processes’ is not a logically necessary truth, but nevertheless certain logical conditions must be fulfilled if it is to be a candidate for the role of contingent truth. Not just anything can, conceivably, be contingently identical with anything else: a play cannot be identical with its copies, nor beauty with a beautiful object. The propagation of light may be electromagnetic radiation, but it cannot conceivably be the tri-section of a right-angle. In this paper I shall be concerned with the general question of whether there are any logical barriers to mind-body identification, and I shall approach this via the more particular question of whether the mental processes of persons can conceivably be identical with the physiological processes of brains. It is my contention that identity theorists, by concentrating their attentions upon what were once called the “lower” parts of the soul rather than upon “higher” parts which are more typical of human persons, have paved a logical way for themselves which is artificially straight.

In Mental Acts Professor Peter Geach asserts that “‘The same’ is a fragmentary expression, and has no significance unless we say or mean ‘the same X’, where ‘X’ represents a general term … ” In Reference and Generality Geach interjects the following note: “I maintain that it makes no sense to judge whether x and y are ‘the same’, or whether x remains ‘the same’, unless we add or understand some general term ‘the same F’.” Here, as in Mental Acts, he goes on to say that not any general term will serve to complete ‘the same’ constructions; only substantival terms will suffice for this purpose. Finally, in his article, “ldentity,” Geach asserts that “When one says ‘x is identical with y’, this … is an incomplete expression; it is short for ‘x is the same A as y’, where ‘A’ represents some count noun understood from the context of utterance—or else, it is just a vague expression of a half-formed thought.” (We should not, incidently, conclude from this last remark that Geach thinks all and only count nouns are substantival terms.

This note is prompted by a re-reading of the late Professor J. L. Austin's British Academy Lecture of 1956 “Ifs and Cans” and Professor P. H. Nowell-Smith's rejoinder to it. Austin states his topic at the beginning, and though he re-formulates it more precisely later on, it will suffice for my purposes to quote the opening short paragraph. He asks: “Are cans constitutionally iffy? Whenever, that is, we say that we can do something, or could do something, or could have done something, is there an if in the offing—suppressed, it may be, but due nevertheless to appear when we set out our sentence in full or when we give an explanation of its meaning?” (p. 295). Towards the end of his lecture he states his conclusion concerning the issue, viz. determinism, which is usually prominent at least implicitly in our discussion of such questions, in the following terms: “Determinism, whatever it may be, may yet be the case, but at least it appears not consistent with what we ordinarily say and presumably think.” (p. 321, italics mine).

A main thrust of much of Quine's work is that meaning, belief, desire, motive and other so-called “intentional phenomena” are under-determined by all possible evidence: the totality of possible evidence could not determine whether two persons meant, believed, desired, or had as motives the same thing. One way to identify a person's beliefs, desires and motives is to frame a theory of his meanings, for then we could ask him what he believed and desired; this will be a theory of translation for his language. But such a theory of meaning, according to Quine, is also not uniquely determined by all the evidence. Thus