Ontological Commitment Can there be a criterion of ontological commitment? Can there be a formal test of what a person is ontologically committed to? What a person is committed to is a matter of what he believes or assumes or presupposes or is prepared to act on—on his attitudes. So the […]
Observation and Scientific Realism Positivism, following empiricism, maintained that the real is coterminous with the observable. A scientific theory that posits unobservable entities cannot be taken at face value, but must be regarded as merely instrumentally useful or as plain false. The observable entities are real enough, but the unobservable […]
Noumenal Powers Suppose you hold that the world consists of powers all the way down: all properties consist of causal powers. [1]Now combine that with Hume’s position on our knowledge of powers: we have no impressions of powers, and hence no adequate conception of powers. Then you are committed to an extreme […]
Notes on the Concept of Law Consider the sentence forms “It is illegal to A” and “It is immoral to A” where A is a type of action (we could also consider “It is impolite to A” and “It is imprudent to A”). These are superficially similar, syntactically and semantically. […]
Multi-Dimensional (Inclusive) Semantics I address you today in a spirit of inclusiveness and diversity. For too long semantics (theory of meaning) has been the confine of a single type of entity held to constitute all that meaning encompasses (or a couple of entities, closely related). We must broaden our horizons […]
Muddy Waters Causation is one of those philosophical topics that drive you up the wall. As soon as you start to think about it you draw a complete blank. As Hume observes: “There are no ideas, which occur in metaphysics, more obscure or uncertain, than those of power, force, […]
Moral Subjectivism Defeated Moral subjectivism claims that what we think of as moral values reduce to moral beliefs: things are wrong because we believe they are wrong. It is not that we have moral beliefs because of moral facts, which may be cited to justify the belief; rather, the so-called moral […]
Moral Minimalism I shall explore the prospects for a minimalist theory of normative ethics. By “minimalist” I mean a theory (analogous to minimalism in linguistics) that seeks to base normative ethics on the most exiguous of foundations, viz. a single moral principle, with other aspects of the ethical life consigned […]
Moral Excess God is said to be morally perfect. According to one interpretation, this means that God seeks to maximize the good—he is committed to making this the best of all possible worlds. Of course, that does not appear to be the case (pace Leibniz), thus producing the problem of evil. […]
Moral Distance We tend to think that our moral obligations fall off with distance: the closer someone is to us the greater is his moral claim on us, and the further away the less. Morality operates like gravity—it weakens with distance. True, morality is an expanding circle, but […]