Once again great play is being made of the possibility that chimpanzees are capable of learning human language. Apparently, if supplied with a specially designed computer keyboard similar to that supplied to severely retarded human infants, Panbanisha and Kanzi, two bonobo pigmy chimpanzees are able to communicate with their trainers. According to Professor Sue Savage-Rumbaugh, the chief experimenter, the chimps are now beginning to produce real sentences. This is being taken to show that they have a sense of self and of tense.

I argue that the distinction between first-person present and other-directed contexts of justification throws new light on epistemology. In particular, it has implications for the relations between justification, knowledge and truth, the debate between externalism and internalism, and the prospects for reflective equilibrium. I suggest that to focus on the third-person questions about knowledge or justification is to risk missing the main point of epistemology, namely to help us make reflective judgments about what to believe.

Wittgenstein's Ph.D. viva, held in June 1929, was a charade, for the dissertation presented by Wittgenstein was his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus which had achieved the status of a classic in the seven years since its publication and was widely acclaimed as a masterpiece. The viva was treated by all participants as something of a joke, and the doctorate was duly awarded. But suppose that the viva had been properly conducted, and Wittgenstein had been subjected to searching criticism of the content of his dissertation, and the examiners had looked carefully at the question of how original were the ideas... ? I here present, in the form of a drama, that counterfactual viva.

This article is a sequel to ‘The Experience of Perceptual Familiarity’, published in Philosophy in January 1996. There it was argued that the experience of familiarity of appearance consists in awareness of ease of perception. A successful prediction of this hypothesis was that this experience will be absent if the familiar stimulus is perceptually simple. The new paper examines a series of experiments on recognition-memory for colours, often thought to confirm the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, that language influences fundamental cognitive and perceptual abilities. I argue that the hypothesis of Perceptual Familiarity provides a more plausible, non-Whorfian explanation of the results. Language is not influencing non-linguistic perception here, since, as the hypothesis is able to explain, recognition-memory for colours is itself invariably mediated by language.

The main claims are the following. (1) If we keep before us the distinction between the justification of punishment and its aims, we see that retribution is not an aim of punishment, and that there is a central place for retributivist considerations in the justification of punishment. (2) Justifications based upon aims or consequentialist considerations suffer from a serious epistemic vulnerability not shared by retributivism. (3) There are ethically sound sentiments that underwrite retributivist justification, and it would be a mistake to redeploy those sentiments. (4) The ethical authority of those sentiments justifies punitive sanction. (5) Retributivist justification is compatible with consequentialist aims.

From Colin Radford we have inherited the ‘fiction paradox’: How can we be moved by creatures of fiction? Answers recently offered by aestheticians presuppose a false theory of emotion and are inconsistent with emotional phenomenology as well as facts about human evolution, physiology, and anatomy. I argue that Kendall Walton's ‘Charles’ can genuinely fear the slime and yet avow that he does not consider it dangerous—all without being irrational. The solutions offered by Morreall, Moran, Hyslop, Boruah, Lamarque, and Neill are rejected as inadequate. Knowledge of how we can be moved probably lies outside philosophy altogether—in cognitive neuroscience.

Philosophers have traditionally responded to the question, ‘why does the universe exist?’, in one of two ways. One response is that ‘the universe exists because God created it’ and the other response is that ‘the universe exists for no reason—its existence is a brute fact’. Both these responses are inadequate, since a third response is possible, namely, that the reason the universe exists is that it caused itself to exist. There are at least three ways the universe can cause itself to exist, by (1) a closed, simultaneous causal loop at the first instant of time, (2) beginning with a continuum of instantaneous states in a first half-open second, with each state being caused by earlier states, and (3) being caused to exist by backward causation, where a later event causes the big bang to occur. This suggests that the principle, ‘if the universe begins to exist, it has a cause’ does not support theism (as traditionally has been thought) but instead supports atheism.

Anthony Quinton's ‘The Trouble with Kant’ (Philosophy, Vol. 72, no. 279, January, 1997, pp. 5–18) claims to expose radical faults in Kant's epistemology which are not pointed out ‘in the many commentators (he) has studied’ (p. 17). The faults are, initially, that Kant is a ‘wild and intellectually irresponsible arguer’ (p. 5), and finally that Kant's account of a priori intuitions and concepts is erroneous (p. 16). Quinton suggests that his objections are new, but the truth is that they, and the supposedly Kantian views against which they are directed, have formed a frequent response in commentators from Hegel to Strawson. The ‘wild and irresponsible arguer’ charge is, after all, a commonplace among the ‘fighting Kant tooth and nail’ commentators, though it remains to be shown that Kant is markedly worse than other philosophers of the same period. And the central claim against which Quinton directs his assault, that we impose a spatio-temporal-categorial framework on the manifold of sensation (pp. 5 and 7), has provoked fierce and extensive hostility. Throughout his article Quinton assumes an interpretation of Kant's claim in which his task is to show how our minds construct a common, objective, reality from a spatio-temporal-categorial synthesis ‘by applying a piece of mental apparatus ... to ... a manifold of sensation’ (p. 5). The familiar objections to a ‘coloured spectacles’ interpretation of Kant's account of space and time, and Strawson's initial rejection of the ‘imaginary subject of transcendental psychology’ (Bounds of Sense (London; Methuen, 1966) p. 32) belong to the same tradition.

Professor Cottingham's article ‘Varieties of Retribution’ in the Philosophical Quarterly, 1979, 29, 238ff. is discussed, and new varieties of retributivism are outlined and criticised, particularly those proposed by Richard Burgh, Michael Moore and Robert Nozick. The ‘Kantian gap’ between moral censure and the obligation to punish is emphasised. Distinctions are drawn between theories which make punishment a duty and those which make it a right, and also between those based on the notion of a rule and those based on the expression of blame.

Notebook

Apology

Unfortunately on page 290 of the New Books section of the April 1999 issue of Philosophy (Vol. 74, no. 288), the name of our reviewer, Raymond Geuss was spelt incorrectly. The editor and the Cambridge University Press would like to apologize unreservedly for this error.

Erratum

There are the following corrections to be made to Jonathan Harrison's article: ‘The Impossibility of Possible Worlds’, Philosophy74 1999, pp. 5–28.

p. 5. Line 6 (excluding quotation): delete ‘or is possible’.

p. 16. Line 19: for ‘more’ read ‘or more’.

p. 19. Line 5: for ‘to’ read ‘to them’.

p. 20. Line 7: omit ‘(d)’.

p. 20. Line 9: for ‘Fx’ read ‘x’.

p. 24. Line 3: for ‘omnipotent’ read ‘non-omnipotent’.