Editorial: Thinking Skills

The Government is, it seems, keen to introduce ‘thinking skills’ into the curriculum. Of course, no one could be against people, young or old, thinking. Nor would it be appropriate in a philosophical journal to cast doubt on an initiative that might expand the market for philosophers. Nevertheless, one may he forgiven for wondering just what is being envisaged by the notion of thinking skills.

Are these, in the modern jargon, ‘transferable’? Can someone who can think excellently about physics thereby think well about practical matters? Is there such a thing as musical thought, or painterly thinking? Are those who can compose or paint well necessarily any good at thinking when it comes to horse racing or tax returns?

Perhaps what is meant is something like the ability to do some formal and informal logic. No doubt it would be a good thing if people avoided the more glaring fallacies in their thinking, but that does not get us very far (two lessons, maybe). And there is no guarantee that those expert at logic, formal and informal, are going to be much good when it comes to thinking about other people, or even about politics. (All the usual suspects, starting with Frege and Russell.)

In any case, even in philosophy, the relationship between perennial fascination and thought in any straightforward, argumentative sense is by no means clear. Every first year undergraduate is given a quiver-full of arguments to show that Descartes and Plato can be punctured at crucial points, and, in Jonathan Bennett's words, every great philosopher is fought ‘tooth and nail’ at every step by those who follow. Mostly this has a disconcertingly small effect on the reputation of those who have a vision and a breadth to compel. If philosophy is a guide, what counts in the end are not thinking skills, but generosity of vision and human resonance: qualities which cannot be characterized as skills at all.

Notes on Contributors

Bernard Williams

Deutsch Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley, and a Fellow of All Souls' College, Oxford. He has held chairs in London, Cambridge, and Oxford, and from 1979 to 1987 he was Provost of King's College, Cambridge. His most recent publications are Making Sense of Humanity and Plato.

Michael Dummett

Emeritus Professor of Oxford University, Honorary Fellow of New College, Oxford and Emeritus Fellow of All Souls' College. He was Wykenham Professor of Logic from 1972 to 1992. Earlier he was for 13 years reader in Philosophy of Mathematics.

David S. Oderberg

Reader in Philosophy at the University of Reading. His most recent books are Moral Theory: A Non-consequentialist Approach and Applied Ethics: A Non-consequentialist Approach (Blackwell, 2000).

Andrea Christofidou

Lecturer in Philosophy, Worcester College, Oxford. She is currently working on a book called Descartes: God, Mind and the World.

E. J. Lowe

Professor of Philosophy, University of Durham. Author of Kinds of Being, Subjects of Experience, and The Possibility of Metaphysics.

Roger Fellows

Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Bradford. His publications include: What Philosophy Does, Open Books 1977; Philosophy and Technology, (ed.), Cambridge University Press, 1985.

Robert J. Deltete

Professor of Philosophy at Seattle University. He has published on the history and philosophy of science, especially 19th and 20th century physics and cosmology.

William F. Vallicella

After some years of teaching at University of Dayton and Case Western Reserve University, Dr Vallicella abandoned a tenured position, retiring to the Sonoran desert to live the life of the independent philosopher. He is the author of many published articles, mainly in metaphysics and philosophy of religion, in such journals as Analysis, Ratio, and Nous.

Philosophy should not try to assimilate itself to the aims of the sciences. Scientism stems from the false assumption that a representation of the world minimally based on local perspectives is what best serves self-understanding. Philosophy must concern itself with the history of our conceptions, and we must overcome the need to think that this history should ideally be vindicatory. There is no basic conflict between arguing within the framework of our ideas, reflectively making better sense of them, and understanding their highly contingent history. The third of these activities is an inescapable part of the second.

Our model of time is the classical continuum of real numbers, and our model of other measurable quantities that change over time is that of functions defined on real numbers with real numbers as values. This model is not derived from reality or from our experience of it, but imposed on reality; and the fit is very imperfect. In classical mathematics, the value of a function for any real number as argument is independent of its value for any other argument: the analogue is Hume's doctrine that events are loose and separate. This makes continuity in the change of any quantity a contingent law of physica, rather than a conceptual necessity. The article explores alternatives to this classical model.

Freedom of belief is one of the entrenched values in modern society. Interpreted as the right not to be coerced into believing something, it is surely correct. But most people take it to mean that there is a right to false belief, a right to be wrong. People think that freedom of thought is a good thing, and this must include the freedom to make mistakes. It is also often thought that making mistakes is a life-enhancing and essential part of personal development. I argue that these ideas are false. Beginning with an examination of the basic good of truth, and making comparisons with other goods like health and friendship, I argue that there is a duty to believe only the truth, which thus logically excludes the right also to believe falsehood. I distinguish between the strict wrongness of false belief and the fact that, because of our epistemic limitations, we are not always to be blamed for our false beliefs. Even in the case of those beliefs which are involuntary, there is no right to have them if they are false, even though we are not to be blamed for having them. The right to be wrong, I conclude, is a modern myth.

It is accepted that first-person thoughts are immune to error through misidentification. I argue that there is also immunity to error through misascription, failure to recognise which has resulted in mistaken claims that first-person thoughts involving the self-ascription of bodily states are, at best, circumstantially immune to error through misidentification relative to ‘I’ and, at worst, subject to error. Central to my thesis is that, first, ‘I’ is immune to error through misidentification absolutely, and that if there is any problem with first-person thoughts this cannot be with the self-identification component, but only with the self-ascriptive component. Secondly, the ‘know who’, or ‘know what’, or ‘know which’ requirement is appropriately relevant to considerations of different self-ascriptive properties, and thus its inapproriateness in self-identification does not entail that ‘I’ may fail to refer and identify.

Causal closure arguments against interactionist dualism are currently popular amongst physicalists. Such an argument appeals to some principles of the causal closure of the physical, together with certain other premises, to conclude that at least some mental events are identical with physical events. However, it is crucial to the success of any such argument that the physical causal closure principle to which it appeals is neither too strong nor too weak by certain standards. In this paper, it is argued that various forms of naturalistic dualism, of an emergentist character, are consistent with the strongest physical causal closure principles that can plausibly be advocated.

Non language-using animals cannot have beliefs, because believing entails the ability to distinguish true from false beliefs and also the ability to distinguish changes in belief from changes in the world. For these abilities we need both the fixation of belief and counter-factual thought, for both of which language is necessary. The argument of the paper extends Davidson's argument to the same conclusion (which is found wanting). But denying beliefs to animals has no moral implications.

Quentin Smith has been arguing for more than a decade that the universe is uncaused. For nearly as long he has also argued that it appeared spontaneously from literally nothing. I have replied to these arguments in many places, including a recent essay in Philosophy. Now, apparently, Smith has changed his mind: in his most recent contribution to Philosophy, he argues not that the universe is uncaused, but that it is self-caused. His motives for so doing remain much the same, however: he would like to undermine the efforts of theists to show that the universe requires an external cause, by arguing that the universe can cause itself (580). I do not think that the arguments he gives for this new position are any more plausible than his older ones for an uncaused universe, so I don't think that he has advanced the cause of atheism. This essay defends that evaluation.

This article responds to Quentin Smith's, ‘The Reason the Universe Exists is that it Caused Itself to Exist’, Philosophy74 (1999), 579–586. My rejoinder makes three main points. The first is that Smith's argument for a finitely old, but causally self-explanatory, universe fails from probative overkill: if sound, it also shows that all manner of paltry event-sequences are causally self-explanatory.The second point is that the refutation of Smith's argument extends to Hume's argument for an infinitely old causally self-explanatory universe, as well as to Smith's two ‘causal loop’ arguments. The problem with all four arguments is their reliance on Hume's principle that to explain the members of a collection is ipso facto to explain the collection. This principle succumbs to counterexamples. The third point is that, even if Hume's principle were true, Smith's argument could not succeed without the aid of a theory of causation according to which causation is production (causation of existence).

Notebook

Royal Institute of Philosophy Annual Lecture Series, 2000–2001

Logic, Thought and Language

2000

13 October Mark Sainsbury What Logic Should We Think With?

20 October Gregory McCulloch Mental Representation

27 October Julia Tanney Self-Knowledge, Normativity, and Construction

3 November Barry Smith Thought and Language

10 November Alan Millar The Normativity of Intention and Meaning

17 November Gabriel Segal On the Semantics of Proper Names

24 November David Wiggins Indefinables

1 December Jennifer Hornsby Linguistic Knowhow

8 December Crispin Wright Relativism and Classical Knowledge

15 December Paul Boghossian Rational Belief

2001

5 January Christopher Peacocke Principles for Possibilia

12 January A. W. Moore What Are These familiar Words Doing Here?

26 January M. G. F. Martin Particular Thoughts and Singular Thought

9 February Scott Surgeon The Conditionality of Thought

16 February Timothy Williamson Possible Beings

23 February S. G. Williams Ambiguity

2 March Bob Hale Logical Knowledge

9 March Charles Travis Rethinking Psychologism

All Lectures to be given at 14 Gordon Square, London WC1 on Fridays at 5.45 pm. Admission is free.

The Fourth Royal Institute of Philosophy Annual Lecture will be given by Professor John Searle

‘Freedom of the Will As a Problem in Neurobiology’

Beveridge Hall, Senate House, University of London, Malet Street, London WC1, on Friday 2 February at 5.30. Admission is free.