In the present paper I wish to argue that psychological egoism may well have a basis in the empirical facts of human psychology. Certain contemporary learning theorists, e.g., Hull and Skinner, have put forward behavioristic theories of the origin and functioning of human motives which posit a certain number of basically "selfish, " unlearned primary drives or motives (like hunger, thirst, sleep, elimination, and sex), explain all other, higher-order, drives or motives as derived genetically from the primary ones via certain (...) "laws of reinforcement," and, further, deny the "functional autonomy" of those higher-order drives or motive. Now it is a hotly debated issue in contemporary Learning Theory whether any theory such as we have described briefly above could adequately explain adult human behavior. I shall, however, argue only that a theory of the above kind may well be true, and that from such a theory, fortified only by one additional psychological premise, the truth of egoism (non-altruism) logically follows. I hope to show, thereby, that the question of psychological egoism is still an open empirical issue, however fallacious be the philosophical arguments for it. (shrink)

Philosophers frequently treat certainty as some sort of absolute, while ordinary men typically do not. According to the Theory of Important Criteria, on which the present paper is based, this difference is not to be explained in terms of ambiguity or vagueness in the word?certain?, but rather in terms of disagreement between ordinary men and philosophers as to the importance of one of the criteria of the ordinary sense of?certain?. I argue that there is reason to think that certainty is (...) some sort of absolute, and thus that no empirical statement is certain. And in any case, the problem of empirical certainty is not a pseudo?problem, as metaphilosophers like Wittgenstein and Wisdom have thought. (shrink)

In "Induction and Other Minds," Plantinga casts the Argument from Analogy in the form of an inductive argument in the following way.