In attempting to establish a correspondence between the content of historical narrative and that of past facts, F. R. Ankersmit identifies a "mechanism" which enables one to arrive at a narrative representation of the past. He asserts that the mechanism cannot be called a "translation," since the correspondence is indirect. Narrative is, however, closer to the truth than he has stated. Historical narratives can be evaluated on their proximity to the truth by the degree of their coherence. Coherence can be (...) judged on two criteria: the kind of temporal content and the kind of conceptual organization of the worldview of the annalist. The chronicle emerged in the late Middle Ages. Temporally, the chronicler uses retrospection to introduce causal links in a chain of events. The worldview of the chronicler provides the conceptual organization. Strictly historical narratives took form in the nineteenth century and have a temporal organization which is both retrospective and prospective. The control of the theoretical organization of a narrative by an historian can be said to be one of the fundamental rules whereby historiography becomes a more and more coherent and integrated presentation of the past. (shrink)

What is structural rationality? Specifically, what is the distinctive feature of structural requirements of rationality? Some philosophers have argued, roughly, that the distinctive feature of structural requirements is coherence. But what does coherence mean, exactly? Or, at least, what do structuralists about rationality have in mind when they claim that structural rationality is coherence? This issue matters for making progress in various active debates concerning rationality. In this paper, I analyze three strategies for figuring out what coherence means in the (...) debates on structural rationality. I argue that these strategies face problems. (shrink)

Some combinations of attitudes--of beliefs, credences, intentions, preferences, hopes, fears, and so on--do not fit together right: they are incoherent. A natural idea is that there are requirements of "structural rationality" that forbid us from being in these incoherent states. Yet a number of surprisingly difficult challenges arise for this idea. These challenges have recently led many philosophers to attempt to minimize or eliminate structural rationality, arguing that it is just a "shadow" of "substantive rationality"--that is, correctly responding to one's (...) reasons. -/- In *Fitting Things Together*, Alex Worsnip pushes back against this trend--defending the view that structural rationality is a genuine kind of rationality, distinct from and irreducible to substantive rationality, and tackling the most important challenges for this view. In so doing, he gives an original positive theory of the nature of coherence and structural rationality that explains how the diverse range of instances of incoherence can be unified under a general account, and how facts about coherence are normatively significant. He also shows how a failure to focus on coherence requirements as a distinctive phenomenon and distinguish them adequately from requirements of substantive rationality has led to confusion and mistakes in several substantive debates in epistemology and ethics. -/- Taken as a whole, Fitting Things Together provides the first sustained defense of the view that structural rationality is a genuine, autonomous, unified, and normatively significant phenomenon. (shrink)

Structural and functional descriptions of technical artefacts play an important role in engineering practice. A complete description of a technical artefact involves a description of both functional and structural features. Engineers, moreover, assume that there is an intimate relationship between the function and structure of technical artefacts and they reason from functional properties to structural ones and vice versa. This raises the question of how structural and functional descriptions are related. The kind of inference patterns that establish coherence between structural (...) and functional descriptions are explored in this paper, using the analysis of coherence creating relations of Thagard et al. Explanatory, analogical and practical inference patterns are discussed and it is argued that of these three, practical inferences may be the most important. Practical inferences, however, cannot provide a full underpinning of the coherence of structural and functional descriptions of technical artefacts. The paper ends with the suggestion that any account of the coherence of the structural and functional descriptions of technical artefacts must involve reference to their intentional features.Keywords: Technical artefact; Structural description; Functional description; Coherence relation; Practical inference. (shrink)

A technical artefact is often described in two ways: by means of a physicalistic model of its structure and dynamics, and by a functional account of the contributions of the components of the artefact to its capacities. These models do not compete, as different models of the same phenomenon in physics usually do; they supplement each other and cohere. Coherence is shown to be the result of a mapping of role-contributions on physicalistic relations that is brought about by the concept (...) of function. It results a sandwich-like structure of the two models, which can be reconstructed as a two-sorted theory element. (shrink)

Structure and Qurʾanic Interpretation: A Study of Symmetry and Coherence in Islam’s Holy Text. By Raymond Farrin. Ashland, Ore.: White Cloud Press, 2014. Pp. xvii + 163. $17.95.

We investigate the effect after forcing with a coherent Souslin tree on the gap structure of the class of coherent Aronszajn trees ordered by embeddability. We shall show, assuming the relativized version PFA(S) of the proper forcing axiom, that the Souslin tree S forces that the class of Aronszajn trees ordered by the embeddability relation is universal for linear orders of cardinality at most ${\aleph_1}$.

Systematic philosophy has for a long time now been disavowed as an objective or even as an interest by many professional philosophers whose view of their subject regards it as an activity of analysis rather than of construction. That this disclaimer should have become so common at a time when, in other disciplines, the idea of system was coming more and more into prominence suggests that philosophers and other scholars may somehow have been talking at cross-purposes. The opposition of analytic (...) and constructive modes comes out clearly in the pejorative use of expressions like “system-builders,” and a glance at the history of the analytic movement makes it clear that the kind of system it sets itself against is typified by the Hegelian system, the System before which Kierkegaard was on the point of kneeling down, flourishing his handkerchief so as not to get his trousers dirty, only to discover that its completion had been put off until the next Sunday. (shrink)

There are at least two different aspects of our rational evaluation of agents’ doxastic attitudes. First, we evaluate these attitudes according to whether they are supported by one’s evidence (substantive rationality). Second, we evaluate these attitudes according to how well they cohere with one another (structural rationality). In previous work, I’ve argued that substantive and structural rationality really are distinct, sui generis, kinds of rationality – call this view ‘dualism’, as opposed to ‘monism’, about rationality – by arguing that the (...) requirements of substantive and structural rationality can come into conflict. In this paper, I push the dialectic on this issue forward in two main ways. First, I argue that the most promising ways of resisting the diagnosis of my cases as conflicts still end up undermining monism in different ways. Second, supposing for the sake of argument that we should understand the cases as conflicts, I address the question of what we should do when such conflicts arise. I argue that, at least in a prominent kind of conflict case, the coherence requirements take precedence over the evidential requirements. (shrink)

What is the place of coherence, or structural rationality, in good first-personal deliberation? According to Kolodny (2005), considerations of coherence are irrelevant to good first-personal deliberation. When we deliberate, we should merely care about the reasons or evidence we have for our attitudes. So, considerations of coherence should not show up in deliberation. In response to this argument, Worsnip (2021) argues that considerations of coherence matter for how we structure deliberation. For him, we should treat incoherent combinations of attitudes as (...) off-limits in deliberation. Some important questions are left unanswered by both camps. What do we mean by considerations of coherence “showing up” in first-personal deliberation? How do we interpret the divide between reasons-responsiveness and coherence? How should we interpret cases in which considerations of coherence interact with other norms or requirements? In this paper, I show how Haack’s (1993) crossword puzzle analogy sheds light on these questions. Also, the crossword puzzle analogy allows us to evaluate Kolodny’s objection and identify promising avenues for future research. (shrink)

During the latter part of the nineteenth century our description of nerve cell structure underwent a relatively unrecognized, though fundamental, transformation-a quiet revolution of sorts. The central problem facing scientists in neurology (the study of the nervous system) was a related pair: are nerve cells continuous with each other or not, and how is information conducted? Microscope resolution and staining techniques were inadequate at the time to yield definitive proof either way. I contend that explanatory coherence provides a means to (...) elucidate this instance of theory change in the history of science. The means of elucidation will be Thagard's computational model of explanatory coherence, ECHO (). (shrink)

Classical models of decision making deal fairly well with uncertainty, where settings are well-structured in terms of goals, alternatives, and consequences. Conversely, the typical ill-structured nature of strategy choices remains a challenge for extant models. Such cases can hardly build on the past, and their novelty makes the prediction of consequences a very difficult and poorly robust task. The weakness of the classical expected utility model in representing such problems has not been adequately solved by recent extensions. In this paper (...) we offer an explanatory coherence model for decision making in ill-structured problems. We model alternatives as sets of concurrent causal explanations of reality that act as justifications for action. According to these premises, choice is based on an evaluation of the internal coherence and the consistency of competing explanations of the available evidence. This model is psychologically grounded on causal inference and builds on the connectionist tradition of explanatory coherence. To illustrate the model, we consider the decision of investing in a new technology and we discuss how changes in the structure of alternatives may impact on the solution. We show how the final choice depends on collecting the relevant evidence, making the suitable hypotheses, and drawing the consistent causal explanations linking the two. (shrink)

This a review of Alex Worsnip's book 'Fitting Things Together: Coherence and the Demands of Structural Rationality'.

This chapter discusses one of the main subjects: the structure of good. It aims to establish one point about all of the general relation and the individual relations: they all conform to the axioms of expected utility theory. The theory proves that, if a relation satisfies the axioms, it can be represented by an expectational utility function. The details of the representation and its significance are spelt out. The chapter also aims to show that individual and general betterness relations satisfy (...) the axioms of expected utility theory: they are coherent. It extends the defence to betterness relations. The most straightforward way of showing the coherence of betterness would be to show first the coherence of rational preference relations, and then identify each betterness relation with some rational preference relation. The chapter explores that route, and explains that it cannot be completely successful. (shrink)

David Hume’s historical thought was shaped before he even began writing the History of Great Britain in 1752. This article shows how Hume developed his historical thought in an attempt to combine two historical structures: the natural-jurisprudential conjectural history of the Treatise of Human Nature and the early eighteenth-century historical narratives of modern Europe that featured in his Essays. The Treatise’s conjectural history used the developmental categories “rude” and “civilised” to explain the origins of justice, government and the moral (...) sentiment. The narratives of modern Europe, in contrast, revolved around the historical categories “ancient” and “modern.” Hume’s historical thought was shaped by the attempt to merge those two structures into a single, coherent structure. The critical question concerned the relation between the ancient and the modern: was modern Europe merely a “revival” of classical antiquity? Or did it have new, “post-ancient” dimensions? The article shows how Hume gradually distanced classical antiquity from modern Europe, thereby creating space for exclusively modern concepts such as “civilised monarchies” and the narrative of modern civilisation that structured his History of England (1754–1762). The paper concludes by suggesting that this structure defined Enlightenment philosophical history, not just Hume’s version of it. (shrink)

Being incoherent is often viewed as a paradigm kind of irrationality. Numerous authors attempt to explain the distinct-seeming failure of incoherence by positing a set of requirements of structural rationality. I argue that the notion of coherence that structural requirements are meant to capture is very slippery, and that intuitive judgments – in particular, a charge of a distinct, blatant kind of irrationality – are very imperfectly correlated with respecting the canon of structural requirements. I outline an alternative strategy for (...) explaining our patterns of normative disapproval, one appealing to feasible dispositions to conform to substantive, non-structural norms. A wide range of paradigmatic cases of incoherence, I will argue, involve manifesting problematic dispositions, dispositions that manifest across a range of cases as blatant-seeming normative failures. (shrink)

This article aims to contribute to the literature on conceptual change by engaging in direct theoretical and empirical comparison of contrasting views. We take up the question of whether naïve physical ideas are coherent or fragmented, building specifically on recent work supporting claims of coherence with respect to the concept of force by Ioannides and Vosniadou [Ioannides, C., & Vosniadou, C. (2002). The changing meanings of force. Cognitive Science Quarterly 2, 5–61]. We first engage in a theoretical inquiry on (...) the nature of coherence and fragmentation, concluding that these terms are not well‐defined, and proposing a set of issues that may be better specified. The issues have to do with contextuality, which concerns the range of contexts in which a concept (meaning, model, theory) applies, and relational structure, which is how elements of a concept (meaning, model, or theory) relate to one another. We further propose an enhanced theoretical and empirical accountability for what and how much one needs to say in order to have specified a concept. Vague specification of the meaning of a concept can lead to many kinds of difficulties.Empirically, we conducted two studies. A study patterned closely on Ioannides and Vosniadou's work (which we call a quasi‐replication) failed to confirm their operationalizations of “coherent.” An extension study, based on a more encompassing specification of the concept of force, showed three kinds of results: (1) Subjects attend to more features than mentioned by Ioannides and Vosniadou, and they changed answers systematically based on these features; (2)We found substantial differences in the way subjects thought about the new contexts we asked about, which undermined claims for homogeneity within even the category of subjects (having one particular meaning associated with “force”) that best survived our quasi‐replication; (3) We found much reasoning of subjects about forces that cannot be accounted for by the meanings specified by Ioannides and Vosniadou. All in all, we argue that, with a greater attention to contextuality and with an appropriately broad specification of the meaning of a concept like force, Ioannides and Vosniadou's claims to have demonstrated coherence seem strongly undermined. Students' ideas are not random and chaotic; but neither are they simply described and strongly systematic. (shrink)

Probabilistic coherence is not an absolute requirement of rationality; nevertheless, it is an ideal of rationality with substantive normative import. An idealized rational agent who avoided making implicit logical errors in forming his preferences would be coherent. In response to the challenge, recently made by epistemologists such as Foley and Plantinga, that appeals to ideal rationality render probabilism either irrelevant or implausible, I argue that idealized requirements can be normatively relevant even when the ideals are unattainable, so long as (...) they define a structure that links imperfect and perfect rationality in a way that enables us to make sense of the notion of better approximations to the ideal. I then analyze the notion of approximation to the ideal of coherence by developing a generalized theory of belief functions that allows for incoherence, and showing how such belief functions can be ordered with regard to greater or lesser coherence. (shrink)

This paper proposes a reading of Galileo’s Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina as analogous to a legal brief submitted to a court en banc. The Letter develops a theory of the general issues underlying the case at hand, but it is organized around advocacy for a particular judgment. I have drawn two architectonic implications from this framework, each of which helps to resolve an issue still standing in the literature. First, the Letter anticipates varying degrees of acquiescence to its (...) general account, and provides ‘hooks’ for different readers to interpret variously while still converging on the particular judgment. This reading allows for a coherent Galilean interpretation of passages that notoriously concede priority to Scripture, while also explaining their dialectical function. Galileo is neither self-contradictory nor dissimulating here, but strategically leaves the specification of key distinctions for the reader. Second, the Letter, and particularly its apparent shifting of the burden of proof, must be understood in light of the tripartite ‘adversarial-judicial’ framework that Galileo sets up. The burden of proof is shifted to anti-Copernicans within the Church, not as a rhetorical trick, but because of the benefits of adversarial procedure that will accrue to the Church as the responsible judge. (shrink)

Coherence is a key concept in many accounts of epistemic justification within ‘traditional’ analytic epistemology. Within formal epistemology, too, there is a substantial body of research on coherence measures. However, there has been surprisingly little interaction between the two bodies of literature. The reason is that the existing formal literature on coherence measure operates with a notion of belief system that is very different from—what we argue is—a natural Bayesian formalisation of the concept of belief system from traditional epistemology. Therefore, (...) formal epistemology has so far only been concerned with one particular—arguably not even very natural—way of formalising coherence of belief systems; it has by no means refuted the viability of coherentism. In contrast to the existing literature, we formalise belief systems as families of assignments of (conditional) degrees of belief (which may be compatible with several subjective probability measures). Within this framework, we propose a Bayesian formalisation of the thrust of BonJour’s coherence concept in The structure of empirical knowledge (Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1985), using a combination of Bayesian confirmation theory and basic graph theory. In excursions, we introduce graded notions for both logical and probabilistic consistency of belief systems—the latter being based on certain geometrical structures induced by probabilistic belief systems. For illustration, we reconsider BonJour’s “ravens” challenge (op. cit., p. 95f.). Finally, potential objections to our proposed formal coherence notion are explored. (shrink)

Coherentism maintains that coherent beliefs are more likely to be true than incoherent beliefs, and that coherent evidence provides more confirmation of a hypothesis when the evidence is made coherent by the explanation provided by that hypothesis. Although probabilistic models of credence ought to be well-suited to justifying such claims, negative results from Bayesian epistemology have suggested otherwise. In this essay we argue that the connection between coherence and confirmation should be understood as a relation mediated by (...) the causal relationships among the evidence and a hypothesis, and we offer a framework for doing so by fitting together probabilistic models of coherence, confirmation, and causation. We show that the causal structure among the evidence and hypothesis is sometimes enough to determine whether the coherence of the evidence boosts confirmation of the hypothesis, makes no difference to it, or even reduces it. We also show that, ceteris paribus, it is not the coherence of the evidence that boosts confirmation, but rather the ratio of the coherence of the evidence to the coherence of the evidence conditional on a hypothesis. (shrink)

This paper presents a framework for the generation of coherent elementary conversational sequences at the speech act level. We will embrace the notion of a cooperative dialogue game in which two players produce speech acts to transfer relevant information with respect to their commitments. Central to the approach is that participants try to achieve some sort of balanced cognitive state as a result of speech act generation and interpretation. Cognitive states of the participants change as a result of the (...) interpretation of speech acts and these changes provoke the production of a subsequent speech act. Describing the properties and the dynamics of the mental constructs that constitute the participants’ cognitive states, such as beliefs and commitments, in relation to the various dialogue contributions is an essential aspect of the game. Although simple in its basic form, the framework enables us to produce abstract conversations with some properties that agree strikingly with coherence structures found in, for instance, Conversation Analysis. (shrink)

Alex Worsnip's recent book, Fitting Things Together: Coherence and the Demands of Structural Rationality, provides a sustained, wide-ranging defence of dualism.

I investigate the structure of an argument that culture cannot be maintained in a population if each individual learns only from a single person. This appears to conflict with many models of cultural transmission and real-world cases. I resolve the first problem by showing that one of the models central to the argument is conceptually analogous and mathematically equivalent to one used to investigate the evolution of sexual reproduction. I resolve the second by arguing that probabilistic models of epistemological coherence (...) can be reinterpreted as models of support between cultural variants—illustrating the idea with a new model. (shrink)

Stojnić (2021) argues that the content of linguistic utterances is determined by the rules of natural language grammar more stringently than what is generally assumed. She proposes specifically that coherence relations are encoded by the linguistic structures and determine what individuals count as most prominent, thereby serving as the referents of free (“demonstrative”) pronouns. In this paper, I take a close look at the empirical evidence from English and Serbian that she offers in support of this position. Considering these (...) data points in connection with additional linguistic data (also from German and Japanese), I argue that there is no compelling evidence for the assumption that coherence relations directly determine the resolution of pronouns. Instead, grammatical restrictions imposed by different types of pronouns and tenses have a larger impact on the meaning conventionally expressed by complex utterances than what is generally assumed in the literature on coherence relations. (shrink)

In this paper, we provide a new formulation of a coherence theory of truth using the resources of the partial structures approach − in particular the notions of partial structure and quasi-truth. After developing this new formulation, we apply the resulting theory to the philosophy of mathematics, and argue that it can be used to develop a new account of nominalism in mathematics. This application illustrates the strength and usefulness of the proposed formulation of a coherence theory of truth.

A major goal of this work is to specify some steps of the process by which participants maintain coherency in their conversations.The underlying element of the analysis is a construct called a “context space.” Roughly, a group of utterances that refers to a single issue or episode forms the basis for a context space. Superficially, a conversation is a sequence of utterances; at a deeper level it is a structured entity whose utterances can be parsed into hierarchically related context spaces.As (...) a conversation proceeds, each conversant builds a discourse model that includes the conversation's context space structure, a notion of the present discourse topic, and a list of items being focused upon. Conversational coherency depends upon a lack of conflict between the respective models of the participants. Conflicts are prevented by speakers following high level syntactic and semantic relational rules that enable listeners to identify their discourse models. These rules, given in the study, are highly integrated with the view of conversation presented here—a hierarchy of related context spaces. (shrink)

In this paper, we provide a new formulation of a coherence theory of truth using the resources of the partial structures approach − in particular the notions of partial structure and quasi-truth. After developing this new formulation, we apply the resulting theory to the philosophy of mathematics, and argue that it can be used to develop a new account of nominalism in mathematics. This application illustrates the strength and usefulness of the proposed formulation of a coherence theory of truth.Neste (...) artigo, propomos uma nova formulação de uma teoria coerentista da verdade utilizando os recursos da abordagem de estruturas parciais - em particular as noções de estrutura parcial e quase-verdade. Após desenvolver esta formulação, aplicamos a teoria resultante à filosofia da matemática, e argumentamos que aquela pode ser usada para desenvolver um novo tratamento do nominalismo na matemática. Esta aplicação ilustra a força e utilidade da formulação proposta de uma teoria coerentista da verdade. (shrink)

Werkmeister's new book, The Basis and Structure of Knowledge is the second major attempt in recent years to defend the idealistic theory of knowledge. The first was Blanshard's Nature of Thought; and it is worth noticing that both authors, in undertaking the defense of a position long in the shadows, are well aware of contemporary developments in logic and technical philosophy. Werkmeister freely acknowledges his debt to Blanshard; yet his work differs in scope from the latter's in at least two (...) ways. Firstly, the more recent book is concerned largely with the epistemological analysis of meaning and truth and hardly at all with what an older generation called "philosophical psychology," while philosophical psychology fills all of the first and part of the second volume of Blanshard's work. In my opinion, this is all to the good. (That our generation inverts the error and too often indulges in psychological philosophy is another story!) Secondly, Werkmeister presents us with detailed analyses of scientific method, of the structure of scientific theories, and of mathematics, all three areas to which Blanshard pays virtually no attention. The First Part of Werkmeister's book treats of Language and Meaning; the Second of Truth and the World About Us, the Third of Formal Knowledge, and the Fourth Part deals with Empirical Knowledge. But there is a fundamental thesis that runs through all of this. The analysis of each of these four domains reveals, according to Werkmeister, that only a coherence theory of meaning and truth can adequately reflect the criteria actually used by science and commonsense. It is not my intention to rehearse here the familiar dialectic of the arguments for and against this doctrine; the less so, since Werkmeister himself gives a useful review of both sides of the controversy. Rather, I want to try to fix as precisely as possible, within the context of Werkmeister's discussion, the nature of the difference between coherence theories on the one hand and correspondence theories on the other. This difference has not always been too clearly stated; it even seems that recent developments in linguistic analysis have been the occasion for some new confusions on this very point. For coherence theorists who have recognized that philosophical semantics is a "formal" discipline now insist that "to say what a symbol means is not to relate it to an object, but to give it an interpretation in terms of other symbols," as Ayer2 has recently put it. This seems to contradict the "comparison with fact" feature of the traditional realistic formulations of the correspondence view. A superficial bystander could even believe that the correspondence theorists have given up their original position, since both sides now agree that truth is a matter of a relation between symbols. Such agreement, as I hope to show, is more apparent than real, for what is now at stake is the nature of that "intrasymbolic relation." And on this nature the two parties disagree. There is little doubt that Werkmeister's book appears at a moment more propitious for the advocacy of the coherence theory of truth than did Blanshard's. In the near decade that separates the two works the intellectual climate has become, for better or for worse, considerably more favorable to a reconsideration of, and possibly even a reconciliation with, some of the major tenets of rationalism. This is reflected in the current discussion regarding the contrary-to-fact conditional, the dissatisfaction with material implication, and the correlative concern for a more adequate analysis of the concept of a natural law. It is evident too in the revived enthusiasm for intensional logic and in the related interest in the modalities. As uncompromising an empiricist as C. L. Lewis, with whom, by the way, Werkmeister shares a common Kantian background, has introduced into his latest work a "congruence" theory of truth which, despite the substitution of a so-called "probability" inference for necessary inference, looks very much like the coherance criterion all over again. So Werkmeister's book should be welcome for its clear presentation of the relevant issues; and even those who disagree with him can admire the candor and forthrightness with which he champions what remains, despite vacillations, an essentially unpopular position. (shrink)

In this paper, I offer a novel view of the coherence (or structural) requirements on belief and intention, according to which they are not norms, but rather principles describing how your belief and intention operate. I first argue, on the basis of the unintelligibility of some relevant attitudes-reports, that there are conditions under which you simply do not count as believing or intending unless your beliefs and intentions satisfy the requirements: the conditions under which all of your relevant attitudes are (...) occurrent or activated. I then argue that you are subject to a coherence requirement only if your relevant attitudes are all activated, for you are not necessarily subject to the charge of irrationality in violating a coherence requirement when your attitudes are not all activated. If so, however, you satisfy the coherence requirements whenever you are subject to them, which makes it plausible that the “requirements” should be seen as descriptive principles about belief and intention. [*published with open access]. (shrink)

The debate over Socrates’s claim in the Apology to have practiced philosophy as a divinely ordained mission is almost as old as this claim itself. Yet scholars remain divided over the issue because of the extraordinary difficulty of understanding how Socrates interpreted the negative proclamation of the oracle as providing a positive prescription for a way of life. Finding this difficultly insurmountable, many authors have denied the coherence of Socrates’s account. In this essay, I argue that the debate can be (...) resolved by revisiting the interpretation of human wisdom offered in the Apology. Demonstrating that Socrates understands human wisdom to be structurally incompatible with the claim to possess it, I show that he is thereby prevented from ever simply affirming the truth of the oracle and that this, in turn, establishes his philosophical practice as a lifelong mission. (shrink)