The first two parts of Objectivity and Insight explore the prospects for objectivity on the standard ontological conception, and find that they are not good. In Part I, under the heading of subject-driven scepticism, Sacks addresses the problem of securing epistemic reach that extends beyond subjective content. In so doing, he considers models of mind proposed by Locke, Hume, Kant, James, and Bergson. Part II, under the heading of world-driven scepticism, discusses the scope for universality of normative structure-a problem (...) which survives even after the assumption of an epistemologically significant breach between subject and object has been rejected. In the third part of the book Sacks introduces an alternative conception of objectivity, and shows that there is good reason to accept it. This conception turns on an insight which is taken to be implicit in transcendental idealism, and responsible for its abiding appeal; but Sacks's articulation of that insight is neither idealist nor metaphysical. (shrink)

The paper aims to cast light on the kind of proof involved in central transcendental arguments. It is suggested that some of the difficulty associated with such arguments may result from the tendency to construe them simply as articulating relations between concepts or propositional contents. A different construal, connected with phenomenological description, is outlined, as a way of bringing out the force of these arguments. It is suggested that it can be fruitful to think in terms of this construal in (...) understanding some of Kant's transcendental proofs. The recommended construal also helps to understand the nature of the link between transcendental arguments and transcendental idealism. (shrink)

This paper compares the treatment of other minds in Strawson and Sartre. Both discussions are presented here as transcendental arguments, and some striking parallels between them are brought out. However the primary significance of the alignment lies in the difference that emerges between two forms of transcendental proof, with the phenomenological treatment in Sartre promising to yield a stronger conclusion than Strawson's argument. The paper goes some way towards bringing out this difference.

The paper begins by distinguishing between two ways of effecting the dissolution of a philosophical problem: reductive and philosophical. Of these, the former holds out deflationary prospects greater than those of the latter. Attention focuses specifically on McGinn's proposed dissolution of the mind‐body problem. Examination of his argument reveals that his naturalist dissolution involves traditional non‐naturalist constraints, in a way that counts against his deflationary conclusions. At best his treatment constitutes a philosophical, rather than a reductive dissolution. But there is (...) reason to think that it might in fact constitute a mere relocation of what is, essentially, the same problem that it set out to dissolve. (shrink)

Transcendental idealism has been conceived of in philosophy as a position that aims to secure objectivity without traditional metaphysical underpinnings. This article contrasts two forms of transcendental idealism that have been identified: one in the work of Kant, the other in the later Wittgenstein. The distinction between these two positions is clarified by means of a distinction between transcendental constraints and transcendental features. It is argued that these conceptions provide the - fundamentally different - bases of the two positions under (...) discussion. With the core of the positions identified, it is then suggested that neither form of transcendental idealism - the Kantian or the Wittgensteinian - manages to combine the twin aims of safeguarding objectivity and maintaining metaphysical parsimony. The Kantian form appears to succeed on the first score at the cost of failing on the second, while the Wittgensteinian form succeeds on the second and fails on the first. (shrink)

In what follows I will address Kant’s concerns in the First Analogy and in the Refutation of Idealism. Because the two discussions have a similar trajectory, it is of interest to identify some of the differences between them. As we will see, the manifest differences are indicative of more significant underlying differences, regarding two ways of construing transcendental proofs.

This paper is to a large extent an exercise in philosophical geography. It traces the way in which a resilient naturalist orientation has derived support, specifically in the analytic tradition, from a central structuring tenet of transcendental idealism. It attempts to bring out the philosophical reasons that drive this Kantian alliance. Attention then turns to the identification of two salient problems that confront this alliance in its most acceptable form. To the extent that a resilient naturalism is desirable, these problems (...) need to be addressed. (shrink)

Some critics have claimed that Spinoza's philosophy has nothing to offer aesthetics. I argue that within his conception of an ars vivendi one can discern a nascent theory of art. I bring the figure of the prophet in relation to that of the artist and, alongside a consideration of Spinoza's views on goodness and beauty, show that the special talent of the artist should be understood in terms of the entirely natural expression of the conatus.

This is a reply to Mark Sacks' essay on my book Points of View.

This is a review of Mark Sacks's book. It was published in _Canadian Philosophical Reviews_ 10 (1990), pp. 157-159.

In this essay, I discuss the relationship between Garfinkel’s Studies in Ethnomethodology and subsequent developments in ethnomethodology and conversation analysis. I argue that a point of continuity in ethnomethodology and CA, which marks both as radically different from long-standing traditions in Western philosophy and social science, is the claim that social order is evidently produced in ongoing activities, and that no specialized theory or methodology is necessary for making such order observable and accountable. In the half-century following the publication of (...) Studies, Garfinkel explicitly aimed to radicalize ethnomethodology’s stance toward what he called “formal” or “classical” treatments of social order, while much of CA pursued the path of an empirical social science that became increasingly integrated with other branches of social science. Nevertheless, I argue, Garfinkel’s radical initiatives are not completely out of play in ethnomethodological conversational analysis, and the potential remains for further elucidating, exemplifying, and developing them. (shrink)

Behind all of Sheldon Sacks' writing and teaching lay an intense belief in the objectivity of literary experience and our capacity to achieve a shared conceptual understanding of the forms which underlie it. Literary criticism for him was not the critic's unique and unrepeatable performance but a serious inquiry—a critical inquiry—seeking explicit and precise explanatory concepts which others could grasp, test, and build upon. His effort was to show that we could in significant measure understand and explain literature and (...) its value as standing independent of our understanding and explanation, and it was this double emphasis on the real being of literature and the possibility of valid conceptualization of it which gave his thought its appeal for those whom it influences. His creative constitution—and the length and circumstances of his life—were such as to allow only the one sustained effort of Fiction and the Shape of Belief and a series of articles in which he modified and expanded the application of the ideas developed therein. Yet in this relatively small body of work he revised and extended the ideas of the Chicago School within which he worked so as to achieve what seem to me genuine advances in the explicit conception of novelistic forms—what might be called portable ideas, sharp and definite enough to be adopted and used and in their turn revised and redefined by others; this sets them apart from much critical work and marks their value and his intention. Ralph W. Rader, chairman of the department of English at the University of California at Berkeley, is the author of Tennyson's "Maud": The Biographical Genesis. His previous contributions to Critical Inquiry are "Fact, Theory, and Literary Explanation" , "Explaining Our Literary Understanding: A Response to Jay Schleusener and Stanley Fish" , and "The Dramatic Monologue and Related Lyric Forms". (shrink)

This almost self-contained introduction to higher recursion theory is essential reading for all researchers in the field.

Why was Abraham ordered to sacrifice his son? Was Jacob right in stealing the blessings? Why were we commanded to destroy Amalek? What was Moses' sin in hitting the rock? And how did the Ten Commandments change the Jewish people, and humankind, for good? Essays on Ethics is the second companion volume to Rabbi Jonathan Sacks's celebrated series Covenant & Conversation. Believing the Hebrew Bible to be the ultimate blueprint for Western morality, Rabbi Sacks embarks upon an ethical (...) exploration of the weekly Torah portion, uncovering its message of truth and justice, dignity and compassion, forgiveness and love. (shrink)

In Morality, the distinguished religious leader and philosopher Rabbi Jonathan Sacks diagnoses our troubled times as a period of "cultural climate change." Delivering an insightful critique of our modern condition, and assessing its roots and causes from the ancient Greeks through the Reformation and Enlightenment to the present day, Sacks argues that there is no liberty without morality, and no freedom without responsibility.

In this book the chief rabbi addresses some of the major themes of our time: the fragmentation of our common culture, the breakdown of family and community life ...

Congo Style presents a postcolonial approach to discussing the visual culture of two now-notorious regimes: King Leopold II's Congo Colony and the state sites of Mobutu Sese Seko's totalitarian Zaïre. Readers are brought into the living remains of sites once made up of ambitious modernist architecture and art in Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of the Congo. From the total artworks of Art Nouveau to the aggrandizing sites of post-independence Kinshasa, Congo Style investigates the experiential qualities of man-made environments intended to entertain, (...) delight, seduce and impress. In her study of visual culture, Ruth Sacks sets out to reinstate the compelling wonder of nationalist architecture from Kinshasa's post-independence era, such as the Tower of the Exchange (1974), Gécamines Tower (1977), and the artworks and exhibitions that accompanied them. While exploring post-independence nation-building, this book examines how the underlying ideology of Belgian Art Nouveau, a celebrated movement in Belgium, led to the dominating early colonial settler buildings of the ABC Hotels (circa 1908-13). Congo Style combines Sacks's practice as a visual artist and her academic scholarship to provide an original study of early colonial and independence-era modernist sites in their African context. (shrink)

Mark Jago presents an original philosophical account of meaningful thought: in particular, how it is meaningful to think about things that are impossible. We think about impossible things all the time. We can think about alchemists trying to turn base metal to gold, and about unfortunate mathematicians trying to square the circle. We may ponder whether God exists; and philosophers frequently debate whether properties, numbers, sets, moral and aesthetic qualities, and qualia exist. In many philosophical or mathematical debates, when (...) one side of the argument gets things wrong, it necessarily gets them wrong. As we consider both sides of one of these philosophical arguments, we will at some point think about something that’s impossible. Yet most philosophical accounts of meaning and content hold that we can’t meaningfully think or reason about the impossible. -/- In The Impossible, Jago argues that we often gain new information, new beliefs, and, sometimes, fresh knowledge through logic, mathematics, and philosophy. That is why logic, mathematics, and philosophy are useful. We therefore require accounts of knowledge and belief, of information and content, and of meaning which allow space for the impossible. Jago’s aim in this book is to provide such accounts. He gives a detailed analysis of the concept of hyperintensionality, whereby logically equivalent contents may be distinct, and develops a theory in terms of possible and impossible worlds. Along the way, he provides a theory of what those worlds are and how they feature in our analysis of normative epistemic concepts: knowledge, belief, information, and content. (shrink)

The notion of a weakly scattered theory T is defined. T need not be scattered. For each a model of T, let sr() be the Scott rank of . Assume sr() ≤ ω\sp A \sb 1 for all a model of T. Let σ\sp T \sb 2 be the least Σ₂ admissible ordinal relative to T. If T admits effective k-splitting as defined in this paper, then θσ\cal Aθ\cal A$ a model of T.

Nondescriptivist views in many areas of philosophy have long been associated with the commitment that in contrast to other domains of discourse, there are no propositions in their particular domain. For example, the ‘no truth conditions’ theory of conditionals1 is understood as the view that conditionals don’t express propositions, noncognitivist expressivism in metaethics is understood as advocating the view that there are not really moral propositions,2 and expressivism about epistemic modals is thought of as the view that there is no (...) such thing as the proposition that Jack might be at home, over and above the proposition that Jack is at home.3 Of course, it is nearly always acknowledged that advocates of a nondescriptivist theory need not deny that there are conditional, moral, or modal propositions ‘at the end of the day’ – for if they also endorse a deflationary reading of talk about propositions, as famously advocated by Simon Blackburn, then they can employ such deflationary talk just as much as the rest of us. They just don’t appeal to propositions to do any of the work in their theories. Rather, they ‘earn the right’ to talk about propositions.4 It is the aim of this paper to upset this way of thinking about the proper attitude of nondescriptivists toward propositions, and to advocate a more constructive and in some ways more radical alternative on behalf of the nondescriptivist. I will begin by introducing and developing a set of problems that are faced by any nondescriptivist theory which tries to do without propositions. All of these problems are easily solved by any view which postulates propositions across the board, but none of them are solved by merely deflationary talk about propositions – their most promising solutions require propositions to do real theoretical work, and therefore the problems themselves remind us of and illustrate some of the important reasons why it is worth positing propositions in the first place.. (shrink)

Gaining information can be modelled as a narrowing of epistemic space . Intuitively, becoming informed that such-and-such is the case rules out certain scenarios or would-be possibilities. Chalmers’s account of epistemic space treats it as a space of a priori possibility and so has trouble in dealing with the information which we intuitively feel can be gained from logical inference. I propose a more inclusive notion of epistemic space, based on Priest’s notion of open worlds yet which contains only those (...) epistemic scenarios which are not obviously impossible. Whether something is obvious is not always a determinate matter and so the resulting picture is of an epistemic space with fuzzy boundaries. (shrink)

I discuss three ways of responding to the logical omniscience problems faced by traditional ‘possible worlds’ epistemic logics. Two of these responses were put forward by Hintikka and the third by Cresswell; all three have been influential in the literature on epistemic logic. I show that both of Hintikka's responses fail and present some problems for Cresswell’s. Although Cresswell's approach can be amended to avoid certain unpalatable consequences, the resulting formal framework collapses to a sentential model of knowledge, which defenders (...) of the ‘possible worlds’ approach are frequently critical of. (shrink)

We argue that the interaction of biased media coverage and widespread employment of the recognition heuristic can produce epistemic injustices. First, we explain the recognition heuristic as studied by Gerd Gigerenzer and colleagues, highlighting how some of its components are largely external to, and outside the control of, the cognitive agent. We then connect the recognition heuristic with recent work on the hypotheses of embedded, extended, and scaffolded cognition, arguing that the recognition heuristic is best understood as an instance of (...) scaffolded cognition. In section three, we consider the double-edged sword of cognitive scaffolding. On the one hand, scaffolds can reduce the internal processing demands on cognitive agents while increasing their access to information. On the other hand, the use of scaffolding leaves cognitive agents increasingly vulnerable to forming false beliefs or failing to form beliefs at all about particular topics. With respect to the recognition heuristic, agents rely on third parties (such as the media) to report not just what’s true but also what’s important or valuable. This makes cognitive agents relying on these third parties vulnerable to two erroneous influences: 1) because they don’t recognize something, it isn’t important or valuable, and 2) because they do recognize something, it is important or valuable. Call the latter the Kardashian Inference and the former the Darfur Inference. In section four, we use Fricker’s (2007) concept of epistemic injustice to characterize the nature and harm of these false inferences, with special emphasis on the Darfur Inference. In section five, we use data-mining and an empirical study to show how Gigerenzer’s population estimation task is liable to produce Darfur Inferences. We conclude with some speculative remarks on more important Darfur Inferences, and how to avoid them by scaffolding better. One primary way to accomplish this it to shift the burden of embodying the virtue of epistemic justice from the hearer or consumer of media to the media themselves. (shrink)

This book offers a systematic framework for thinking about the relationship between language and technology and an argument for interweaving thinking about technology with thinking about language. The main claim of philosophy of technology—that technologies are not mere tools and artefacts not mere things, but crucially and significantly shape what we perceive, do, and are—is re-thought in a way that accounts for the role of language in human technological experiences and practices. Engaging with work by Wittgenstein, Heidegger, McLuhan, Searle, Ihde, (...) Latour, Ricoeur, and many others, the author critically responds to, and constructs a synthesis of, three "extreme", idealtype, untenable positions: only humans speak and neither language nor technologies speak, only language speaks and neither humans nor technologies speak, and only technology speaks and neither humans nor language speak. The construction of this synthesis goes hand in hand with a narrative about subjects and objects that become entangled and constitute one another. Using Words and Things thus draws in central discussions from other subdisciplines in philosophy, such as philosophy of language, epistemology, and metaphysics, to offer an original theory of the relationship between language and technology centered on use, performance, and narrative, and taking a transcendental turn. (shrink)

Being excerpts from pages 187, 203, 204, 207, 208, 209, 210 and 211 of Uncle Tungsten , extracted by Michael Laing with the consent of the author, Professor Oliver Sacks, and Picador Publishers.

In this paper, I describe some of what I take to be the more interesting features of friendship, then explore the extent to which other virtues can be reconstructed as sharing those features. I use trustworthiness as my example throughout, but I think that other virtues such as generosity & gratitude, pride & respect, and the producer’s & consumer’s sense of humor can also be analyzed with this model. The aim of the paper is not to demonstrate that all moral (...) virtues are exactly like friendship in all important respects, but rather to articulate a fruitful model in which to explore the virtues. Section 2 explores the relational nature of friendship, drawing on Aristotle’s discussion of friendship in the Nicomachean Ethics. Section 3 catalogues four motivations for taking seriously the friendship model of virtue. Section 4 applies the friendship model in depth to the virtue of trustworthiness. (shrink)

During multiple testing, researchers often adjust their alpha level to control the familywise error rate for a statistical inference about a joint union alternative hypothesis (e.g., “H1,1 or H1,2”). However, in some cases, they do not make this inference. Instead, they make separate inferences about each of the individual hypotheses that comprise the joint hypothesis (e.g., H1,1 and H1,2). For example, a researcher might use a Bonferroni correction to adjust their alpha level from the conventional level of 0.050 to 0.025 (...) when testing H1,1 and H1,2, find a significant result for H1,1 (p < 0.025) and not for H1,2 (p > .0.025), and so claim support for H1,1 and not for H1,2. However, these separate individual inferences do not require an alpha adjustment. Only a statistical inference about the union alternative hypothesis “H1,1 or H1,2” requires an alpha adjustment because it is based on “at least one” significant result among the two tests, and so it refers to the familywise error rate. Hence, an inconsistent correction occurs when a researcher corrects their alpha level during multiple testing but does not make an inference about a union alternative hypothesis. In the present article, I discuss this inconsistent correction problem, including its reduction in statistical power for tests of individual hypotheses and its potential causes vis-à-vis error rate confusions and the alpha adjustment ritual. I also provide three illustrations of inconsistent corrections from recent psychology studies. I conclude that inconsistent corrections represent a symptom of statisticism, and I call for a more nuanced inference-based approach to multiple testing corrections. (shrink)

Book reviewed in this article: The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales. By Oliver Sacks.