Glenn Pearce, labels the identification of the firing of one's pain centres in the brain with feeling pain ‘a naive view,’ the refutation of which cannot much threaten any serious version of materialism. But in fact at least a dozen proponents of contemporary materialism have already hypothesized the identification of feeling pain with activation of a specific neural mechanism, although they picked the wrong mechanism, namely C-fibres. Just to take a recent example, James Cornman and Keith Lehrer, trying to get around the objection to the identity theory that the language of neural processes and the language of feeling pains belong to different linguistic categories, suggest that the materialist could devise a new term to refer to the same entity across categories: ‘fibain.’

They write,

Bolzano incorporated Kant's distinction between intuitions and concepts into the doctrine of propositions by distinguishing between conceptual (Begriffssätze an sich) and intuitive propositions (Anschauungssätze an sich). An intuitive proposition contains at least one objective intuition, that is, a simple idea that represents exactly one object; a conceptual proposition contains no objective intuition. After Bolzano, philosophers dispensed with the distinction between conceptual and intuitive propositions. So why did Bolzano attach philosophical importance to it? I will argue that, ultimately, the value of the distinction lies in the fact that conceptual and intuitive truths have different objective grounds: if a conceptual truth is grounded at all, its ground is a conceptual truth. The difference in grounds between conceptual and intuitive truths motivates Bolzano's criticism of Kant's view that intuition plays the fundamental role in mathematics, a conceptual science by Bolzano's lights.

Consider a language SL having as its primitive signs one or more atomic statements, the two connectives ‘∼’ and ‘&,’ and the two parentheses ‘(’ and ‘)’; and presume the extra connectives ‘V’ and ‘≡’ defined in the customary manner. With the statements of SL substituting for sets, and the three connectives ‘∼,’ ‘&,’and ‘V’ substituting for the complementation, intersection, and union signs, the constraints that Kolmogorov places in [1] on (unary) probability functions come to read:

K1. 0 ≤ P(A),

K2. P(∼(A & ∼A)) = 1,

K3. If ⊦ ∼(A & B), then P(A ∨ B) = P(A) + P(B),

K4. If ⊦ A ≡ B, then P(A) = P(B).2

It is Alistair Macleod's view that what he calls Justice Judgments are at root Judgments abput states of affair and only derivatively about actions. His interest in Fredrick Hayek's book, The Mirage of Social Justice, derives at least in part from the fact that assessing the Justice of actions is logically prior to assessing the Justice of situations or states of affairs. Thus evaluating Hayek's views offers a way in which Macleod can test his own position.

In responding to Professor Macleod's interesting and provocative paper, I shall begin by criticising his own position with respect to the relation of Judgments about situations to Judgments about actions. I shall argue that contrary to what Macleod asserts Judgments about the Justice of actions and Judgments about the Justice of situations are inextricably intertwined. Second, I shall argue that Macleod's criticism of the view that Judgments about the Justice of actions are more basic than Judgments about the Justice of situations is a sound one. However, Hayek's attack on social Justice is not rooted in this position.

This paper argues that Reid's first principle of design can be more widely accepted then one might suppose, due to the fact that it specifies no marks of design. Also it is explicated that the relation of the principle, on the one hand, and properly basic design beliefs on the other, is a relation of presupposition. It is furthermore suggested that Reid's discussion of what can be done in case of disagreement about first principles points to a position that is relevant to the current debates in the Epistemology of Disagreement literature and that merits further elaboration.

I am pleased to be able to respond to Al Mele’s reply to my paper on trying and desire (‘Desiring to Try: Reply to Adams’ and ‘Trying, Desire, and Desiring to Try,’ respectively, both this volume). My remarks will bebriet.

First, it is not thesis T (as stated in Mele’s reply) that I find objectionable. It may be possible for me to want TO TRY to quit smoking (prior to trying), while currently not wanting TO QUIT smoking (nor trying to quit). I may want to try because I want to ACQUIRE the desire to quit, since people persist in nagging me to quit. So I accept thesis T because it is not the issue. The issue is whether one can PERFORM THE ATTEMPT to quit smoking WHILE one lacks the desire to quit smoking. THAT is what I find objectionable and impossible. Mele accepts that it is possible. I believe such an attempt to be merely ‘going through the motions’ in bad faith and not a genuine attempt at all. I believe this for the controltheoretic reasons that I outlined in my original paper and elsewhere.

Yes, Aristotle was named ‘Aristotle’. I want to show that since ‘Aristotle’ is a proper name, this is true by definition. My theory of proper names is a version of Russell's, a theory that a name is equivalent in meaning to definite description(s) which single out the individual, if there is one, to which the name refers. (“When I say,e.g. ‘Homer existed’, I am meaning by ‘Homer’ some description, say ‘the author of the Homeric poems’ .”) Braithwaite at one time said that the proper name ‘Aristotle’ meant the description ‘the individual named “Aristotle” ’. This theory, which makes it contradictory to suppose that Aristotle was not (the individual) named ‘Aristotle’ I will argue is the correct one. This will involve some explanation of what naming is, which I will carry out in the first two sections. My contention is that naming is an activity that can be done either explicitly or non-explicitly. And names can be conferred either (a) on the basis of acquaintance or (b) by associating the name with descriptions.

Suppose we are able to transplant Jones's pain centres into Smith's brain. Half way through the operation we test the pain centres by stimulating them electrically in vitro. Would there be pain? Roland Puccetti argues that there would not be. Because (a) pains must have owners and (b) the only available candidate for that role — the excised tissue — is logically unfit to play it. He concludes that the firing of such centres in a normally functioning brain cannot be pain either and that, therefore, materialism is false.

So far as I can see, Puccetti's “refutation” is a series of nonsequiturs from start to finish, and that is what I mainly want to show. It will not follow, of course, that materialism is true. Indeed, I think the view which Puccetti attacks under that name is too naive to be taken seriously by anyone.

Heterosexuality, which I define as a romantic and sexual orientation toward persons not of one's own sex, is apparently a very general, though not entirely universal, characteristic of the human condition. In fact, it is so ubiquitous a part of human interactions and relations as to be almost invisible, and so natural-seeming as to appear unquestionable. Indeed, the 1970 edition of The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary defines ‘heterosexual’ as ‘pertaining to or characterized by the normal relation of the sexes.’

Reid had a theory of the human mind containing a theory of truth, both of our evidence of truth and the conditions of truth, fully consistent with empiricism. The justification and evidence of first principles is something felt in consciousness rather than some external relation. This is the result of our faculties, original and natural powers of our constitution. Original convictions and conceptions arise from our faculties in response to experience as a result of our natural development. Reid combines elements of foundationalism, coherentism, falliblism and nominalism. I distinguish and compare Reid to Hume, Moore, Quine, James and Wittgenstein.

Terence Penelhum has written extensively about the role of the idea of the self in Hume's account of the emotional and moral life of persons. Penelhum fails to notice, however, a change that takes place in the way that the idea of the self functions in Hume's account of the passions as that account evolved after the Treatise. This paper charts part of that evolution, and reflects on its significance for Hume's moral psychology.

The most embarrassing thing about ‘facts’ is the etymology of the word. The Latin facere means to make or construct. Bruno Latour, like so many other anti-realists who revel in the word’s history, thinks facts are made by us: they are a social construction. The view acquires some plausibility in Laboratory Life: The Social Construction of Scientific Facts (hereafter LL) which Latour co-authored with Steve Woolgar.1 This work, first published a decade ago, has become a classic in the sociology of science literature. It is in the form of field notes by an ‘anthropologist in the lab.’ This may seem an odd place for an anthropologist, but Latour finds his presence easy to justify. ‘Whereas we have a fairly detailed knowledge of the myths and circumcision rituals of exotic tribes, we remain relatively ignorant of the details of equivalent activity among tribes of scientists … ’ (LL, 17).

Austin's lecture on this topic contributes little to the problem of freedom of the will, and so in my discussion of his ideas I shall stop short of the difficult part of that problem. His most important positive suggestion is that hypotheticals should be divided into two classes, conditionals and pseudo-conditionals. He claims that neglect of this distinction has been the cause of mistakes in certain forms of the dispositional analysis of the statement that an agent could have acted otherwise, and he then goes on to criticise all forms of that analysis using arguments which do not depend on the difference between the two kinds of hypothetical.

This discussion will be in two parts. In the first I shall take up Austin's distinction between conditionals and pseudos and criticise it and develop it at length, because it seems to me to be the most important thing in his lecture. Since I shall not have space for comment on fortuitous errors made by defenders of the dispositional analysis of the claim that an agent could have acted otherwise, I shall concentrate on the essential features of that analysis.

We can find in the passages that set out the Master Argument a precursor to the paradox of knowability. That paradox shows that if all truths are knowable, all truths are known. Similarly, Berkeley might be read as proposing that if all sensible objects are (distinctly) conceivable, then all sensible objects are conceived.

In his Generalization in Ethics, Marcus Singer distinguishes between individual and collective consequences. According to Singer, the collective consequences of everyone's acting in a certain way is for certain kinds of acts not the sum of—or, more exactly, is greater than the sum of—the individual consequences of each individual act. The point is put more straightforwardly by Sir Roy Harrod: