EVEN IF ’MIRACLE’ MEANS A VIOLATION OF A LAW OF NATURE, A CASE CAN BE MADE FOR THINKING THAT MIRACLES ARE POSSIBLE, DETECTABLE, AND COMPATIBLE WITH SCIENCE. THE CASE WORKS BY DEFINING A LAW-VIOLATION AS AN EVENT OF A KIND THAT IS EPISTEMICALLY IMPOSSIBLE UNLESS THERE IS GOOD EVIDENCE OF A GOD’S PRODUCING AN INSTANCE. HUMAN AND NON-HUMAN OBJECTIONS ARE CONSIDERED AND ANSWERED.
The principle that epistemic justification is necessarily transmitted to all the known logical consequences of a justified belief continues to attract critical attention. That attention is not misplaced. If the Transmission Principle is valid, anyone who thinks that a given belief is justified must defend the view that every known consequence of the belief is also justification of the conclusion in an obviously valid argument. Once created, the gap is hard to fill, whatever the circumstances. Reflection principle is modified, the (...) possibility of deductive justification is threatened. If some known consequence fails to be justified, the failure may extend to every known consequence. To reject Transmission is to insert a logical gap between the justification of a premise and the justification of the conclusion in an obviously valid argument. Once created, the gap is hard to fill, whatever the circumstances. Reflection on the Transmission Principle therefore usefully brings us face to face with the following dilemma: accept the principle and hand Cartesian scepticism a powerful weapon, or modify the principle and risk undermining deductive justification. (shrink)
Like his earlier Language and Philosophy. and Problems of Analysis, Models and Metaphors is a collection of Black's papers unified by the belief that linguistic considerations can play an important part in framing and solving philosophical problems. Broadly speaking, the linguistic approach takes two forms: examining the uses of a word, or of a set of related words, frequently occurring in philosophical inquiries, either for the general purposes of clarification or as a useful aid to the solution, or dissolution, of (...) a specific philosophical problem ; considering questions about language, meaning, and related subjects. Obviously, given that the concepts involved are of language or meaning, the former approach can be readily incorporated in the latter. (shrink)
The question ‘For Spinoza, what body is identical with the human mind?’ deserves more attention than it has received. On first view it looks plausible enough simply to answer ‘the human body’, using the latter expression in its ordinary sense. Yet a second look, prompted by the question What then are we to make of the human brain?’, can easily create dissatisfaction and send us searching for firmer guidelines in Spinoza’s philosophy. I want to unearth such guidelines here. My investigation (...) will be undertaken mainly from the viewpoint of someone familiar with issues of current interest in philosophy of mind. It will therefore be helpful to begin the discussion with a brief attempt to classify his general position on mind and body from a contemporary point of view. (shrink)
The word ‘dualism’ can be used to pick out at least four different theories concerning the relationship between mind and body. A mind and a body are two different entities and each is “had” by a man. A man is thus a composite being with two components, one “inner”, the other “outer”. You, for example, are a man and your mind is “inner” in the sense that you alone can reflectively experience yourself thinking, or feeling pain, or seeing colours . (...) I can in a sense observe you thinking, but only by observing you use your body in certain ways—e.g. to make certain sounds, write certain things, look at the pages of an open book and frown. My “experience” of you thinking is thus not a reflective experience. Your body is “outer”, on the other hand, in the sense that you cannot experience it or its properties in any exclusive way. That is, in whatever sense you can be said to experience your body, someone else can equally be said to experience it. (shrink)
Let us use ‘sensation’ such that we can talk about ‘visual sensation’ and ‘auditory sensation’, and such that ‘sensation’ cannot readily be pluralized. It then makes sense to talk about the “objects” involved in sensation. For example, if someone sees red, where his seeing red is a case of sensation, then there is an “object” involved in the situation in the sense that we can talk about “what” he sees. One of the enduring problems in philosophy is to try to (...) determine the status of such objects. (shrink)
