Cognitivism (ethics)

In ethics, cognitivism is the view that ethical sentences express propositions.

Propositions are, roughly, what meaningful sentences are supposed to express. Different sentences, in different languages, can (it is often thought) express the same proposition: 'snow is white' and 'schnee ist weiss' both express the proposition that snow is white. A common assumption among philosophers who use this jargon is that propositions, properly speaking, are what are true or false (what bear truth values). So if an ethical sentence does express a proposition, then the sentence expresses something that can be true or false.

To get a better idea of what it means to express a proposition, compare this to something that does not express a proposition. Suppose someone minding a convenience store sees a thief pick up a candy bar and run. The storekeeper manages to exclaim, "Hey!" In this case, "Hey!" does not express a proposition. Among the things that the ejaculation does not express are, "that's a thief there"; "that thief is getting away"; or "that thief really annoys me." The storekeeper isn't saying anything at all, really, at least nothing that can be true or false. So it is not a proposition that the storekeeper is expressing. Perhaps it is an emotional state that is being expressed. The storekeeper is surprised and angered, and expresses those emotions by saying, "Hey!"

It is an essential part of ethical naturalism that ethical sentences do express propositions. They are not just emotional outbursts, as though we were saying, "Hey!" or "Yay for Mary!" They are actually expressing propositions that can be true or false. Derivatively, the naturalist would say that ethical sentences themselves are either true or false.

For example, an ethical naturalist might hold that it can be true or false that Mary is a good person; it can be true or false that stealing and lying are always wrong. On the other hand, if one believes the sentence, "Mary is a good person," cannot be either true or false, then one is not a naturalist.

Notice, too, that if we say that ethical sentences merely express emotions (they "do" no more than that: see speech act), as though they were just exclamations like "Hey!" and "Yay for Mary!", then we cannot also think that ethical sentences are true or false. It would be nonsense to say, "It's true that 'Hey!'" or "It's false that 'Yay for Mary!'" Mere expressions of emotion might be appropriate ("apt" is the jargon bandied here) or inappropriate, but not true or false.

Victor Cousin

Victor Cousin (November 28, 1792 - January 13, 1867) was a French philosopher.

The son of a watchmaker, he was born in Paris, in the Quartier Saint-Antoine. At the age of ten he was sent to the local grammar school, the Lycée Charlemagne, where he studied until he was eighteen. The lycée had a connection with the university, and when Cousin left the secondary school he was "crowned" in the ancient hall of the Sorbonne for the Latin oration delivered by him there, in the general concourse of his school competitors. The classical training of the lycée strongly disposed him to literature. He was already known among his compeers for his knowledge of Greek. From the lycée he passed to the Normal School of Paris, where Pierre Laromiguière was then lecturing on philosophy. In the second preface to the Fragmens philosophiques, in which he candidly states the varied philosophical influences of his life, Cousin speaks of the grateful emotion excited by the memory of the day in 18.., when he heard Laromiguière for the first time. "That day decided my whole life." Laromiguière taught the philosophy of John Locke and Etienne Bonnot de Condillac, happily modified on some points, with a clearness and grace which in appearance at least removed difficulties, and with a charm of spiritual bonhomie which penetrated and subdued."

Cousin wanted to lecture on philosophy, and quickly obtained the position of master of conferences (maître de conférences) in the school. The second great philosophical impulse of his life was the teaching of Pierre Paul Royer-Collard. This teacher, he tells us, "by the severity of his logic, the gravity and weight of his words, turned me by degrees, and not without resistance, from the beaten path of Condillac into the way which has since become so easy, but which was then painful and unfrequented, that of the Scottish philosophy." In 1815-1816 Cousin attained the position of suppliant (assistant) to Royer-Collard in the history of modern philosophy chair of the faculty of letters. Another thinker who influenced him at this early period was Maine de Biran, whom Cousin regarded as the unequalled psychological observer of his time in France.

These men strongly influenced Cousin's philosophical thought. To Laromiguière he attributes the lesson of decomposing thought, even though the reduction of it to sensation was inadequate. Royer-Collard taught him that even sensation is subject to certain internal laws and principles which it does not itself explain, which are superior to analysis and the natural patrimony of the mind. De Biran made a special study of the phenomena of the will. He taught him to distinguish in all cognitions, and especially in the simplest facts of consciousness, the voluntary activity in which our personality is truly revealed. It was through this "triple discipline" that Cousin's philosophical thought was first developed, and that in 1815 he began the public teaching of philosophy in the Normal School and in the faculty of letters.

He then took up the study of German, worked at Immanuel Kant and Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi, and sought to master the Philosophy of Nature of Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling, which at first greatly attracted him. The influence of Schelling may be observed very markedly in the earlier form of his philosophy. He sympathized with the principle of faith of Jacobi, but regarded it as arbitrary so long as it was not recognized as grounded in reason. In 1817 he went to Germany, and met Georg Hegel at Heidelberg. Hegel's Encyclopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften appeared the same year, and Cousin had one of the earliest copies. He thought Hegel not particularly amiable, but the two became friends. The following year Cousin went to Munich, where he met Schelling for the first time, and spent a month with him and Jacobi, obtaining a deeper insight into the Philosophy of Nature.

France's political troubles interfered for a time with his career. In the events of 1814-1815 he took the royalist side. He adopted the views of the party known as doctrinaire, of which Royer-Collard was the philosophical leader. He seems to have gone further, and to have approached the extreme Left. Then came a reaction against liberalism, and in 1821-1822 Cousin was deprived of his offices in the faculty of letters and in the Normal School. The Normal School was swept away, and Cousin shared the fate of Guizot, who was ejected from the chair of history. This enforced abandonment of public teaching was a mixed blessing: he set out for Germany with a view to further philosophical study. While at Berlin in 1824-1825 he was thrown into prison, either on some ill-defined political charge at the instance of the French police, or as a result of an indiscreet conversation. Freed after six months, he remained under the suspicion of the French government for three years. It was during this period that he developed what is distinctive in his philosophical doctrine. His eclecticism, his ontology and his philosophy of history were declared in principle and in most of their salient details in the Fragmens philosophiques (Paris, 1826). The preface to the second edition (1833) and the third (1838) aimed at a vindication of his principles against contemporary criticism. Even the best of his later books, the Philosophie écossaise, the Du vrai, du beau, et du bien, and the Philosophie de Locke, were simply matured revisions of his lectures during the period from 1815 to 1820. The lectures on Locke were first sketched in 1819, and fully developed in the course of 1829.

During the seven years when he was prevented from teaching, he produced, besides the Fragmens, the edition of the works of Proclus (6 vols., 1820-1827), and the works of René Descartes (II vols., 1826). He also commenced his Translation of Plato (13 vols.), which occupied his leisure time from 1825 to 1840. We see in the Fragmens very distinctly the fusion of the different philosophical influences by which his opinions were finally matured. For Cousin was as eclectic in thought and habit of mind as he was in philosophical principle and system. It is with the publication of the Fragmens of 1826 that the first great widening of his reputation is associated. In 1827 followed the Cours de I'histoire de la philosophie.

In 1828, de Vatimesnil, minister of public instruction in Martignac's ministry, recalled Cousin and Guizot to their professorial positions in the university. The three years which followed were the period of Cousin's greatest triumph as a lecturer. His return to the chair was the symbol of the triumph of constitutional ideas and was greeted with enthusiasm. The hall of the Sorbonne was crowded as the hall of no philosophical teacher in Paris had been since the days of Pierre Abélard. The lecturer's eloquence mingled with speculative exposition, and he possessed a singular power of rhetorical climax. His philosophy showed strikingly the generalizing tendency of the French intellect, and its logical need of grouping details round central principles.

There was a moral elevation in Cousin's spiritual philosophy which touched the hearts of his listeners, and seemed to be the basis for higher development in national literature and art, and even in politics, than the traditional philosophy of France. His lectures produced more ardent disciples than those of any other contemporary professor of philosophy. Judged on his teaching influence, Cousin occupies a foremost place in the rank of professors of philosophy, who like Jacobi, Schelling and Dugald Stewart have united the gifts of speculative, expository and imaginative power. The taste for philosophy--especially its history--was revived in France to an extent unknown since the 17th century. Among those influenced by Cousin were Théodore Simon Jouffroy, Jean Philibert Damiron, Garnier, Jules Barthelemy Saint-Hilaire, Felix Ravaisson-Mollien, Charles de Rémusat, Jules Simon and Adolphe Franck--Jouffroy and Damiron were first fellow-followers. students and then disciples. Jouffroy always kept firm to the early--the French and Scottish--impulses of Cousin's teaching. Cousin continued to lecture for two and a half years after his return to the chair. Sympathizing with the revolution of July, he was at once recognized by the new government as a friend of national liberty. Writing in June 1833 he explains both his philosophical and his political position:-

"I had the advantage of holding united against me for many years both the sensational and the theological school. In 1830 both schools descended into the arena of politics. The sensational school quite naturally produced the demagogic party, and the theological school became quite as naturally absolutism, safe to borrow from time to time the mask of the demagogue in order the better to reach its ends, as in philosophy it is by scepticism that it undertakes to restore theocracy. On the other hand, he who combated any exclusive principle in science was bound to reject also any exclusive principle in the state, and to defend representative government."

The government was quick to honour him. The ministry of which his friend Guizot was head made him a member of the council of public instruction and counsellor of state, and in 1832 he was made a peer of France. He ceased to lecture, but retained the title of professor of philosophy. Finally, he accepted the position of minister of public instruction in 1840 under Adolphe Thiers. He was director of the Normal School and virtual head of the university, and from 1840 a member of the Institute (Academy of Moral and Political Sciences). His character and his official position gave him great power in the university and in the educational arrangements of the country. In fact, during the seventeen and a half years of the reign of Louis Philippe, Cousin mainly moulded the philosophical and even the literary tendencies of the cultivated class in France.

The most important work he accomplished during this period was the organization of primary instruction. It was to the efforts of Cousin that France owed her advance, in gelation to primary education, between 1830 and 1848. Prussia primary and Saxony had set the national example, and France was guided into it by Cousin. Forgetful of national calamity and of personal wrong, he looked to Prussia as affording the best example of an organized system of national education; and he was persuaded that "to carry back the education of Prussia into France afforded a nobler (if a bloodless) triumph than the trophies of Austerlitz and Jena." In the summer of 1831, commissioned by the government, he visited Frankfort and Saxony, and spent some time in Berlin. The result was a series of reports to the minister, afterwards published as Rapport sur Vital de I'instruction puUique dans quelques pays de V Allemagne et particulierement en Prusse (Compare also De l'instruction publique en Hollands, 1837) His views were readily accepted on his return to France, and soon afterwards through his influence there was passed the law of primary instruction. (See his Exposé des motifs et projet de loi sur I'instruction primaire, présentes a la chambre des deputes, seance du 2 janvier 1837.)

In the words of the Edinburgh Review (July 1833), these documents "mark an epoch in the progress of national education, and are directly conducive to results important not only to France but to Europe." The Report was translated into English by Mrs Sarah Austin in 1834. The translation was frequently reprinted in the United States of America. The legislatures of New Jersey and Massachusetts distributed it in the schools at the expense of the states. Cousin remarks that, among all the literary distinctions which he had received, "None has touched me more than the title of foreign member of the American Institute for Education." To the enlightened views of the ministries of François Guizot and Adolphe Thiers under the citizen-king, and to the zeal and ability of Cousin in the work of organization, France owes what is best in her system of primary education,--a national interest which had been neglected under the French Revolution, the Empire and the Restoration (see Expose, p. 17). In the first two years of the reign of Louis Philippe more was done for the education of the people than had been either sought or accomplished in all the history of France. In defence of university studies he stood manfully forth in the chamber of peers in 1844, against the clerical party on the one hand and the levelling or Philistine party on the other. His speeches on this occasion were published in a tractate Defense de I'universite et de la philosophie (1844 and 1845).

This period of official life from 1830 to 1848 was spent, so far as philosophical study was concerned, in revising his former lectures and writings, in maturing them for publication or reissue, and in research into certain periods of the sophical history of philosophy. In 1835 appeared De la writings. Metaphysique d'Aristote, suivi d'un essai de traduction des deux premiers times; in 1836, Cours de philosophie professe a la faculte des lettres pendant I'annee 1818, and Œvres inedits a Abelard. This Cours de philosophie appeared later in 1854 as Du vrai, du beau, et du bien. From 1825 to 1840 appeared Cours de I'histoire de la philosophic, in 1829 Manuel de I'histoire de la philosophic de Tennemann, translated from the German. In 1840-1841 we have Cours d'histoire de la philosophic morale au XVIII' siècle (5 vols.). In 1841 appeared his edition of the Œvres philosophiques de Maine-de-Biran; in 1842, Lessons de philosophie sur Kant (Eng. trans. AG Henderson, 1854), and in the same year Des Pensées de Pascal. The Nouveaux fragments were gathered together and republished in 1847. Later, in 1859, appeared Petri Abaelardi Opera.

During this period Cousin seems to have turned with fresh interest to those literary studies which he had abandoned for speculation under the influence of Laromiguière and Royer-Collard. To this renewed interest we owe his studies of men and women of note in France in the 17th century. As the results of his work in this line, we have, besides the Des Pensées de Pascal, 1842, Audes sur les femmes et la societe du XVII' siècle 1853. He has sketched Jacqueline Pascal (1844), Madame de Longueville (1853), the marquise de Sable (1854), the duchesse de Chevreuse (1856), Madame de Hautefort (1856).

When the reign of Louis Philippe came to a close through the opposition of his ministry, with Guizot at its head, to the demand for electoral reform and through the policy of the Spanish marriages, Cousin, who was opposed to the government on these points, lent his sympathy to Cavaignac and the Provisional government. He published a pamphlet entitled Justice et charite, the purport of which showed the moderation of his political views. It was markedly anti-socialistic. But from this period he passed almost entirely from public life, and ceased to wield the personal influence which he had done during the preceding years. After the coup d'état of December 2, he was deprived of his position as permanent member of the superior council of public instruction. From Napoleon and the Empire he stood aloof. A decree of 1852 placed him along with Guizot and Villemain in the rank of honorary professors. His sympathies were apparently with the monarchy, under certain constitutional safeguards. Speaking in 1853 of the political issues of the spiritual philosophy which he had taught during his lifetime, he says,--"It conducts human societies to the true republic, that dream of all generous souls, which in our time can be realized in Europe only by constitutional monarchy."

During the last years of his life he occupied a suite of rooms in the Sorbonne, where he lived simply and unostentatiously. The chief feature of the rooms was his noble library, the cherished collection of a lifetime. He died at Cannes on the 13th of January 1867, in his sixty-fifth year. In the front of the Sorbonne, below the lecture rooms of the faculty of letters, a tablet records an extract from his will, in which he bequeaths his noble and cherished library to the halls of his professorial work and triumphs.

Philosophy

There are three distinctive points in Cousin's philosophy. These are his method, the results of his method, and the application of the method and its results to history,--especially to the history of philosophy. It is usual to speak of his philosophy as eclecticism. It is eclectic only in a secondary and subordinate sense. All eclecticism that is not self-condemned and inoperative implies a system of doctrine as its basis,--in fact, a criterion of truth. Otherwise, as Cousin himself remarks, it is simply a blind and useless syncretism. And Cousin saw and proclaimed from an early period in his philosophical teaching the necessity of a system on which to base his eclecticism. This is indeed advanced as an illustration or confirmation of the truth of his system,--as a proof that the facts of history correspond to his analysis of consciousness. These three points--the method, the results, and the philosophy of history--are with him intimately connected; they are developments in a natural order.of sequence. They become in practice Psychology, Ontology and Eclecticism in history.

Cousin strongly insisted on the importance of method in philosophy. That which he adopts is the ordinary one of observation, analysis and induction. This observational method Cousin regards as that of the 18th century--the method which Descartes began and abandoned, and which Locke and Condillac applied, though imperfectly, and which Thomas Reid and Kant used with more success. He insists that this is the true method of philosophy as applied to consciousness, in which alone the facts of experience appear. But the proper condition of the application of the method is that it shall not through prejudice of system omit a single fact of consciousness. If the authority of consciousness is good in one instance, it is good in all. If not to be trusted in one, it is not to be trusted in any. Previous systems have erred in not presenting the facts of consciousness.

The observational method applied to consciousness gives us the science of psychology. This is the basis and the only proper basis of ontology or metaphysics--the science of being--and of the philosophy of history. To the observation of consciousness Cousin adds induction as the complement of his method, by which he means inference as to reality necessitated by the data of consciousness, and regulated by certain laws found in consciousness, those of reason. By his method of observation and induction as thus explained, his philosophy will be found to be marked ofi very clearly, on the one hand from the deductive construction of notions of an absolute system, as represented either by Schelling or Hegel, which Cousin regards as based simply on hypothesis and abstraction, illegitimately obtained; and on the other, from that of Kant, and in a sense, of Sir W Hamilton, both of which in the view of Cousin are limited to psychology, and merely relative or phenomenal knowledge, and issue in scepticism so far as the great realities of ontology are concerned. What Cousin finds psychologically in the individual consciousness, he finds also spontaneously expressed in the common sense or universal experience of humanity. In fact, it is with him the function of philosophy to classify and explain universal convictions and beliefs; but common-sense is not with him philosophy, nor is it the instrument of philosophy; it is simply the material on which the philosophical method works, and in harmony with which its results must ultimately be found.

The three great results of psychological observation are Sensibility, Activity or Liberty, and Reason. These three facts are different in character, but are not found apart in consciousness. Sensations, or the facts of the sensibility, are necessary. The facts of reason are also necessary, and reason is no less independent of the will than the sensibility. Voluntary facts alone have the characters of imputability and personality. The will alone is the person or Me. The me is the centre of the intellectual sphere without which consciousness is impossible. We find ourselves in a strange world, between two orders of phenomena which do not belong to us, which we apprehend only on the condition of our distinguishing ourselves from them. Further, we apprehend by means of a light which does not come from ourselves. All light comes from the reason, and it is the reason which apprehends both itself and the sensibility which envelops it, and the will which it obliges but does not constrain. Consciousness, then, is composed of these three integrant and inseparable elements. But Reason is the immediate ground of knowledge and of consciousness itself.

But there is a peculiarity in Cousin's doctrine of activity or freedom, and in his doctrine of reason, which enters deeply into his system. This is the element of spontaneity in volition and in reason. This is the heart of what is taaett new alike in his doctrine of knowledge and being. in will. Liberty or freedom is a generic term which means a cause or being endowed with self-activity. This is to itself and its own development its own ultimate cause. Free-will is so, although it is preceded by deliberation and determination, i.e. reflection, for we are always conscious that even after determination we are free to will or not to will. But there is a primary kind of volition which has not reflection for its condition, which is yet free and spontaneous. We must have willed thus spontaneously first, otherwise we could not know, before our reflective volition, that we could will and act. Spontaneous volition is free as reflective, but it is the prior act of the two. This view of liberty of will is the only one in accordance with the facts of humanity; it excludes reflective volition, and explains the enthusiasm of the poet and the artist in the act of creation; it explains also the ordinary actions of mankind, which are done as a rule spontaneously and not after reflective deliberation.

But it is in his doctrine of the Reason that the distinctive principle of the philosophy of Cousin lies. The reason given to us by psychological observation, the reason of our consciousness, is impersonal in its nature. We do not make it; its character is precisely the opposite of individuality; it is universal and necessary. The recognition of universal and necessary principles in knowledge is the essential point in psychology; it ought to be put first and emphasized to the last that these exist and that they are wholly impersonal or absolute. The number of these principles, their enumeration and classification, is an important point, but it is secondary to that of the recognition of their true nature. This was the point which Kant missed in his analysis, and this is the fundamental truth which Cousin thinks he has restored to the integrity of philosophy by the method of the observation of consciousness. And how is this impersonality or absoluteness of the conditions of knowledge to be established ? The answer is in substance that Kant went wrong in putting necessity first as the criterion of those laws. This brought them within the sphere of reflection, and gave as their guarantee the impossibility of thinking them reversed; and led to their being regarded as wholly relative to human intelligence, restricted to the sphere of the phenomenal, incapable of revealing to us substantial reality--necessary, yet subjective. But this test of necessity is a wholly secondary one; these laws are not thus guaranteed to us; they are each and all given to us, given to our consciousness, in an act of spontaneous apperception or' apprehension, immediately, instantaneously, in a sphere above the reflective consciousness, yet within the reach of knowledge. And " all subjectivity with all reflection expires in the spontaneity of apperception. The reason becomes subjective by relation to the voluntary and free self; but in itself it is impersonal; it belongs not to this or to that self inhumanity; it belongs not even to humanity. We may say with truth that nature and humanity belong to it, for without its laws both would perish."

But what is the number of those laws? Kant reviewing the enterprise of Aristotle in modern times has given a complete list of the laws of thought, but it is arbitrary in classification and may be legitimately reduced. According to Cousin, there are but two primary laws of thought, that of causality and that of substance. From these flow naturally all the others. In the order of nature, that of substance is the first and causality second. In the order of acquisition of our knowledge, causality precedes substance, or rather both are given us in each other, and are contemporaneous in consciousness.

These principles of reason, cause and substance, given thus psychologically, enable us to pass beyond the limits of the relative and subjective to objective and absolute reality,--enable us, in a word, to pass from psychology, or the science of knowledge, to ontology or the science of being. These laws are inextricably mixed in consciousness with the data of volition and sensation, with free activity and fatal action or impression, and they guide us in rising to a personal being, a self or free cause, and to an impersonal reality, a not-me--nature, the world of force--lying out of us, and modifying us. As I refer to myself the act of attention and volition, so I cannot but refer the sensation to some cause, necessarily other than myself, that is, to an external cause, whose existence is as certain for me as my own existence, since the phenomenon which suggests it to me is as certain as the phenomenon which had suggested my reality, and both are given in each other. I thus reach an objective impersonal world of forces which corresponds to the variety of my sensations. The'relation of these forces or causes to each other is the order of the universe.

But these two forces, the me and the not-me, are reciprocally limitative. As reason has apprehended these two simultaneous phenomena, attention and sensation, and led us immediately to conceive the two sorts of distinct absolute, causes, correlative and reciprocally finite, to which they are related, so, from the notion of this limitation, we find it impossible under the same guide not to conceive a supreme cause, absolute and infinite, itself the first and last cause of all. This is relatively to self and not-self what these are to their proper effects. This cause is self-sufficient, and is sufficient for the reason. This is God; he must be conceived under the notion of cause, related to humanity and the world. He is absolute substance only in so far as he is absolute cause, of philosophy and his essence lies precisely in his creative power. He thus creates, and he creates necessarily.

This theodicy of Cousin laid him open obviously enough to the charge of pantheism. This he repels, and his answer may be summed up as follows. Pantheism is properly the deification of the law of phenomena, the universe God. But I distinguish the two finite causes self and not-self from each other and from the infinite cause. They are not mere modifications of this cause or properties, as with Spinoza,--they are free forces having" their power or spring of action in themselves, and this is sufficient for our idea of independent finite reality. I hold this, and I hold the relation of these as effects to the one supreme cause. The God I plead for is neither the deity of Pantheism, nor the absolute unity of the Eleatics, a being divorced from all possibility of creation or plurality, a mere metaphysical abstraction. The deity I maintain is creative, and necessarily creative. The deity of Spinoza and the Eleatics is a mere substance, not a cause in any sense. As to the necessity under which Deity exists of acting or creating, this is the highest form of liberty, it is the freedom of spontaneity, activity without deliberation. His action is not the result of a struggle between passion and virtue. He is free in an unlimited manner the purest spontaneity in man is but the shadow of the freedom of God. He acts freely but not arbitrarily, and with the consciousness of being able to choose the opposite part. He cannot deliberate or will as we do. His spontaneous action excludes at once the efforts and the miseries of will and the mechanical operation of necessity.

The elements found in consciousness are also to be found in the history of humanity and in the history of philosophy. In external nature there are expansion and contraction which correspond to spontaneity and reflection. Ex- History ternal nature again in contrast with humanity expresses spontaneity; humanity expresses reflection. In human history the East represents the spontaneous stage; the Pagan and Christian world represent stages of reflection. . This was afterwards modified, expp.nded and more fully expressed by saying that humanity in its universal development has three principal moments. First, in the spontaneous stage, where reflection is not yet developed, and art is imperfect, humanity has thought only of the immensity around it. It is preoccupied by the infinite. Secondly, in the reflective stage, mind has become an object to itself. It thus knows itself explicitly or reflectively. Its own individuality is now the only or at least the supreme thing. This is the moment of the finite. Thirdly, there comes an epoch in which the self or me is subordinated. Mind realizes another power in the universe. The finite and the infinite become two real correlatives in the relation of cause and product. This is the third and highest stage of development, the relation of the finite and the infinite. As philosophy is but the highest expression of humanity, these three moments will be represented in its history. The East typifies the infinite, Greece the finite or reflective epoch, the modern era the stage of relation or correlation of infinite and finite. In theology, the dominant philosophical idea of each of these epochs results in pantheism, polytheism, theism. In politics we have in correspondence also with the idea, monarchy, democracy, constitutionalism.

Eclecticism thus means the application of the psychological method to the history of philosophy. Confronting the various systems co-ordinated as sensualism, idealism, seep-ticism, mysticism, with the facts of consciousness, the clsm result was reached " that each system expresses an order of phenomena and ideas, which is in truth very real, but which is not alone in consciousness, and which at the same time holds an almost exclusive place in the system; whence it follows that each system is not false but incomplete, and that in re-uniting all incomplete systems, we should have a complete philosophy, adequate to the totality of consciousness." Philosophy, as thus perfected, would not be a mere aggregation of systems, as is ignorantly supposed, but an integration of the truth in each system after the false or incomplete is discarded.

Such is the system in outline. The historical position of the system lies in its relations to Kant, Schelling and Hegel. Cousin was opposed to Kant in asserting that the unconditioned in the form of infinite or absolute cause is but Schelling a mere unrealizable tentative or effort on the part of and something different from a mere negation, yet not equivalent to a positive thought. With Cousin the absolute as the ground of being is grasped positively by the intelligence, and it renders all else intelligible; it is not as with Kant a certain hypothetioal or regulative need.

With Schelling again Cousin agrees in regarding this supreme ground of all as positively apprehended, and as a source of development, but he utterly repudiates Schelling's method. The intellectual intuition either falls under the eye of consciousness, or it does not. If not, how do you know it and its object which are identical? If it does, it comes within the sphere of psychology; and the objections to it as thus a relative, made by Schelling himself, are to be dealt with. Schelling's intellectual intuition is the mere negation of knowledge.

Again the pure being of Hegel is a mere abstraction,--a hypothesis illegitimately assumed, which he has nowhere sought to vindicate. The very point to be established is the possibility of reaching being per se or pure being; yet in the Hegelian system this is the very thing assumed as a starting-point. Besides this, of course, objections might be made to the method of development, as not only subverting the principle of contradiction, but as galvanizing negation into a means of advancing or developing the whole body of human knowledge and reality. The intellectual intuition of Schelling, as above consciousness, the pure being of Hegel, as an empty abstraction, unvindicated, illegitimately assumed, and arbitrarily'developed, are equally useless as bases of metaphysics. This led Cousin, still holding by essential knowledge of being, to ground it in an analysis of consciousness,--in psychology.

The absolute or infinite--the unconditioned ground and source of all reality--is yet apprehended by us as an immediate datum or reality; and it is apprehended in consciousness--under its condition, that, to wit, of distinguishing subject and object, knower and known. The doctrine of Cousin was criticized by Sir W Hamilton in the Edinburgh Review of 1829, and it was animadverted upon about the same time by Schelling. Hamilton's objections are as follows. The correlation of the ideas of infinite and finite does not necessarily imply their correality, as Cousin supposes; on the contrary, it is a presumption that finite is simply positive and infinite negative of the same--that the finite and infinite are simply contradictory relatives. Of these " the positive alone is real, the negative is only an abstraction of the other, and in the highest generality even an abstraction of thought itself." A study of the few sentences under this head might have obviated the trifling criticism of Hamilton's objection which has been set afloat recently, that the denial of a knowledge of the absolute or infinite implies a foregone knowledge of it. How can you deny the reality of that which you do not know? The answer to this is that in the case of contradictory statements--A and not A--the latter is a mere negation of the former, and posits nothing; and the negation of a notion with positive attributes, as the finite, does not extend beyond abolishing the given attributes as an object of thought. The infinite or non-finite is not necessarily known, ere the finite is negated, or in order to negate it; all that needs be known is the finite itself; and the contradictory negation of it implies no positive. Non-organized may or may not correspond to a positive--i.e. an object or notion with qualities contradictory of the organized; but the mere sublation of the organized does npt posit it, or suppose that it is known beforehand, or that anything exists corresponding to it. This is one among many flaws in the Hegelian dialectic, and it paralyzes the whole of the Logic. Secondly, the conditions of intelligence, which Cousin allows, necessarily exclude the possibility of knowledge of the absolute--they are held to be incompatible with its unity. Here Schelling and Hamilton argue that Cousin's absolute is a mere relative. Thirdly, it is objected that in order to deduce the conditioned, Cousin makes his absolute a relative; for he makes it an absolute cause, i.e. a cause existing absolutely under relation. As such it is necessarily inferior to the sum total of its effects, and dependent for reality on these--in a word, a mere potence or becoming. Further, as a theory of creation, it makes creation a necessity, and destroys the notion of the divine. Cousin made no reply to Hamilton's criticism beyond alleging that Hamilton's doctrine necessarily restricted human knowledge and certainty to psychology and logic, and destroyed metaphysics by introducing nescience and uncertainty into its highest sphere--theodicy.

The attempt to render the laws of reason or thought impersonal by professing to find them in the sphere of spontaneous apperception, and above reflective necessity, is unsuccessful. Cause, substance, time, space, are given us as realized in a particular form. In no single act of affirmation of cause or substance, much less in such a primitive act, do we affirm the universality of their application. There may be particular instances or cases of these laws, but we could never get the laws themselves in their universality, far less absolute impersonality. No amount of individual instances of the application of any of them by us would give it a true universality. The only sure test we have of their universality in our experience is the test of their reflective necessity. We thus after all fall back on reflection as our ground for their universal application; mere spontaneity of apprehension is futile; their universality is grounded in their necessity, not their necessity in their universality. How far and in what sense this ground of necessity renders them personal are of course questions still to be solved.

But if these three correlative facts are immediately given, it seems to be thought possible by Cousin to vindicate them in reflective consciousness. He seeks to trace the steps which the reason has spontaneously and consciously, but irreflectively, followed. And here the question arises--Can we vindicate in a reflective or mediate process this spontaneous apprehension of reality?

The self is found to be a cause of force, free in its action, on the ground that we are obliged to relate the volition of consciousness to the self as its cause, and its ultimate cause. It is not clear from the analysis whether the self is immediately observed as an acting or originating cause, or whether reflection working on the principle of causality is compelled to infer its existence and character. If self is actually so given, we do not need the principle of causality to infer it; if it is not so given, causality could never give us either the notion or the fact of self as a cause or force, far less as an ultimate one. All that it could do would be to warrant a cause of some sort, but not this or that reality as the cause. And further, the principle of causality, if fairly carried out, as universal and necessary, would not allow us to stop at personality or will as the ultimate cause of its effect--volition. Once applied to the facts at all, it would drive us beyond the first antecedent or term of antecedents of volition to a still further cause or ground--in fact, land us in an infinite regress of causes.

The same criticism is even more emphatically applicable to the influence of a not-self, or world of forces, corresponding to our sensations, and the cause of them. Starting from sensation as our basis, causality could never give us this, even though it be allowed that sensation is impersonal to the extent of being independent of our volition. Causality might tell us that a cause there is of sensation somewhere and of some sort; but that this cause is a force or sum of forces, existing in space, independently of us, and corresponding to our sensations, it could never tell us, for the simple reason that such a notion is not supposed to exist in our consciousness. Causality cannot add to the number of our notions,--cannot add to the number of realities we know. All it can do is to necessitate us to think that a cause there is of a given change, but what that cause is it cannot of itself inform us, or even suggest to us, beyond implying that it must be to the effect. Sensation might arise, for aught we know, so far as causality leads us, not from a world of forces at all, but from a will like our own, though infinitely more powerful, acting upon us, partly furthering and partly thwarting us. And indeed such a supposition is, with the principle of causality at work, within the limits of probability, as we are already supposed to know such a reality--a will--in our own consciousness. When Cousin thus set himself to vindicate those points by reflection, he gave up the obvious advantage of his other position that the realities in question are given us in immediate and spontaneous apprehension. The same criticism applies equally to the inference of an absolute cause from the two limited forces which he names self and not-self. Immediate spontaneous apperception may seize this supreme reality; but to vindicate it by reflection as an inference on the principle of causality is impossible. This is a mere paralogism; we can never infer either absolute or infinite from relative or finite.

The truth is that Cousin's doctrine of the spontaneous apperception of impersonal truth amounts to little more than a presentment in philosophical language of the ordinary convictions and beliefs of man.kind. This is important as a preliminary stage, but philosophy properly begins when it attempts to coordinate or systematize those convictions in harmony, to conciliate apparent contradiction and opposition, as between the correlative notions of finite and infinite, the apparently conflicting notions of personality and infinitude, self and not-self; in a word, to reconcile the various sides of consciousness with each other. And whether the laws of our reason are the laws of all intelligence and being--whether and how we are to relate our fundamental, intellectual and moral conceptions to what is beyond our experience, or to an infinite being--are problems which Cousin cannot be regarded as having solved. These are in truth the outstanding problems of modern philosophy.

Cousin's doctrine of spontaneity in volition can hardly be said to be more successful than his impersonality of the reason through Volition spontaneous apperception. Sudden, unpremeditated volition may be the earliest and the most artistic, but it is not the best. Volition is essentially a free choice between alternatives, and that is best which is most deliberate, because it is most rational. Aristotle touched this point in his distinction between $oi~X~-ns and srpoatpecric. The sudden and unpremeditated wish represented by the former is wholly inferior in character to the free choice of the latter, guided and illumined by intelligence. In this we can deliberately resolve upon what is in our power; in that we are subject to the vain impulse of wishing the impossible. Spontaneity is pleasing, sometimes beautiful, but it is not in this instance the highest quality of the thing to be obtained. That is to be found in a guiding and illumining reflective activity.

Eclecticism is not open to the superficial objection of proceeding without a system or test in determining the complete or incomplete. But it is open to objection, assuming that a particular analysis of consciousness has reached all the possible elements in humanity and in history, and all their combinations. It may be asked, Can history have that which is not in the individual consciousness? In a sense not; but our analysis may not give all that is there, and we ought not at once to impose that analysis or any formula on history. History is as likely to reveal to us in the first place true and original elements, and combinations of elements in man, as a study of consciousness. Besides, the tendency of applying a formula of this sort to history is to assume that the elements are developed in a certain regular or necessary order, whereas this may not at all be the case; but we may find at any epoch the whole mixed, either crossing or co-operative, as in the consciousness of the individual himself. Further, the question as to how these elements may possibly have grown up in the general consciousness of mankind is assumed to be nonexistent or impossible.

It was the tendency of the philosophy of Cousin to outline things and to fill up the details in an artistic and imaginative interest. He was observational and generalizing rather than analytic and discriminating. His search into principles was not profound, and his power of rigorous consecutive development was limited. He left no distinctive permanent principle of philosophy, but he left very interesting psychological analyses, and several new, just, and true expositions of philosophical systems, especially that of Locke and the philosophers of Scotland. He was at the same time a man of impressive power, of rare and wide culture, and of lofty aim,--far above priestly conception and Philistine narrowness. He was familiar with the broad lines of most systems of philosophy. His eclecticism was proof of a reverential sympathy with the struggles of human thought to attain to certainty in the highest problems of speculation. It was a doctrine of comprehension and toleration, forming a marked and valuable contrast to the arrogance of absolutism, to the dogmatism of sensationalism, and to the doctrine of church authority, preached by the theological school of his day. His spirit saved the youth of France from these other influences. As an educational reformer and a man of learning, who greatly influenced others, Cousin stands out among the memorable Frenchmen of the 19th century.

Sir W Hamilton (Discussions, p. 541), one of his most resolute opponents, described Cousin as "A profound and original thinker, a lucid and eloquent writer, a scholar equally at home in ancient and in modern learning, a philosopher superior to all prejudices of age or country, party or profession, and whose lofty eclecticism, seeking truth under every form of opinion, traces its unity even. through the most hostile systems."

Bibliography

J. Barthélemy St Hilaire, V. Cousin, sa vie et sa correspondence (3 vols., Paris, 1895); H Hoffding, Hist. of Mod. Phil. ii. 311 (Eng. trans., 1900); CE Fuchs, Die Philosophie Victor Cousins (Berlin, 1847); J Alaux, La Flubs. de M. Cousin (Paris, 1864); P Janet, Victor Cousin et son œuvre (Paris, 1885); Jules Simon, V. Cousin (1887); Adolphe Franck, Moralistes et phibosophes (1872); JP Damiron, Souvenirs de vingt ans d'enseignement (Paris, 1859); H Tame in Les Philosophes (Paris, 1868), pp. 79-202.

This article incorporates text from the public domain 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica.

Stoicism

Stoicism is a school of philosophy commonly associated with such Greek philosophers as Zeno of Citium, Cleanthes, or Chrysippus and with such later Romans as Cicero, Seneca, Marcus Aurelius, and Epictetus. Organized at Athens in 310 BC by Zeno of Citium and Chrysippus, the Stoics provided a unified account of the world that comprised formal logic, materialistic physics, and naturalistic ethics. Later Roman Stoics emphasized more exclusively the development of recommendations for living in harmony with a natural world over which one has no direct control. Their group would meet upon the porch of the market at Athens, the stoa poecile. The name stoicism derives from the Greek stoa, meaning porch.

The Stoic philosophy developed from that of the Cynics whose founder, Antisthenes, had been a disciple of Socrates. The Stoics emphasized ethics as the main field of knowledge, but they also developed theories of logic and natural science to support their ethical doctrines.

Holding a somewhat materialistic conception of nature they followed Heraclitus in believing the primary substance to be fire. They also embraced his concept of Logos which they identified with the energy, law, reason, and providence found throughout nature.

They held Logos to be the animating or 'active principle' of all reality. The Logos was conceived as a rational divine power that orders and directs the universe; it was identified with God, nature, and fate. Human reason and the human soul were both considered part of the divine Logos, and therefore immortal.

The foundation of Stoic ethics is the principle, proclaimed earlier by the Cynics, that good lies in the state of the soul itself, in wisdom and restraint. Stoic ethics stressed the rule "Follow where Reason leads"; one must therefore strive to be free of the passions—love, hate, fear, pain, and pleasure.

Living according to nature or reason, they held, is living in conformity with the divine order of the universe. The four cardinal virtues of the Stoic philosophy are wisdom, courage, justice, and temperance, a classification derived from the teachings of Plato.

A distinctive feature of Stoicism is its cosmopolitanism. All people are manifestations of the one universal spirit and should, according to the Stoics, live in brotherly love and readily help one another. They held that external differences such as rank and wealth are of no importance in social relationships. Thus, before the rise of Christianity, Stoics recognized and advocated the brotherhood of humanity and the natural equality of all human beings. Stoicism became the most influential school of the Greco-Roman world and produced a number of remarkable writers and personalities.

External links

• "Stoicism," Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/stoicism/)
• Stoics on the passions (http://www.wku.edu/~jan.garrett/stoa/seddon2.htm)
• The Stoic Hearth of the Rational Good Life (http://www.myspot.org/stoic/)

Common sense

For the American independence advocacy pamphlet by Thomas Paine, see Common Sense.

The term common sense (or as an adjective, commonsense) describes beliefs or propositions that seem, to most people, to be prudent and of sound judgment, without dependence upon esoteric knowledge. These beliefs and propositions are sometimes developed without having studied empirical research.

Among philosophers, the issue of what common sense is is vexing; this leads many of them to shun the word altogether. Whatever it does mean, it does not mean homespun (and sometimes dubious) truths such as "Chicken soup is good for colds." Nonetheless, common sense is a perennial topic in epistemology and widely used or referred to, in one form or another, by very many philosophers. Some related concepts include intuitions, pre-theoretic belief, ordinary language, foundational beliefs, endoxa, and axioms.

Commonsense ideas tend to relate to events within human experience, and thus commensurate with human scale. Thus there is no commonsense intuition of, for example, the behavior of the universe at subatomic distances or speeds approaching the speed of light.

Contents [showhide]

1 Philosophy and common sense 2 Other uses 3 Projects to collect common sense 4 See also

Philosophy and common sense

There are two general meanings to the term "common sense" in philosophy. One is a sense that is common to the others, and the other meaning is a sense of things that is common to humanity.

The first meaning is proposed by John Locke in his Human Understanding. Each of the senses gives input, and then these must be integrated into a single impression. This is the common sense, the sense of things in common between disparate impressions. It is therefore allied with "fancy", and it is opposed to "judgment", or the capacity to divide like things into separates. Each of the empiricist philosophers approach the problem of the unification of sense data in one's own way, giving various names to the operation. However, all believe that there is a sense in the human understanding that sees commonality and does the combining. This is the "common sense".

Two philosophers are most famous for advocating the other meaning of "common sense", the view (to state it imprecisely) that common sense beliefs are true and form a foundation for philosophical inquiry: Thomas Reid, G. E. Moore.

The Scottish philosopher Thomas Reid, a contemporary of Hume and the founder of the so-called Scottish School of Common Sense, devotes considerable space in his Inquiry and the Intellectual Powers developing a theory of common sense. While he never gives a definition, per se, he does offer a number of so-called "earmarks" of common sense (which he sometimes calls "principles of common sense"), such as

• principles of common sense are believed universally (with the apparent exceptions of some philosophers and the insane);
• it is appropriate to ridicule the denial of common sense;
• the denial of principles of common sense leads to contradictions.

Of course, each of these is stated and explained by Reid much more carefully than is done here.

The British philosopher G. E. Moore, who did important work in epistemology, ethics, and other fields near the beginning of the twentieth century, is famous for a programmatic essay, "A Defence of Common Sense". This essay had a profound effect on the methodology of much twentieth-century Anglo-American philosophy. In this essay, Moore lists several seemingly very obvious truths, such as "There exists at this time a living human body which is my body.", "My body has existed continuously on or near the earth, at various distances from or in contact with other existing things, including other living human beings.", and many other such platitudes. He argues (as Reid did before him) that these propositions are much more obviously true than the premises of many philosophical claims which entail their falsehood (such as the claim that time does not exist, a claim of A. N. Whitehead's).

Both Reid and Moore, individually, are famous for appealing to common sense to refute skepticism.

Appeal to common sense is characteristic of a general epistemological orientation called epistemological particularism (The appelation comes from Roderick Chisholm.), which orientation is contrasted with epistemological methodism. The particularist gathers a list of propositions that seem obvious and unassailable and then requires consistency with this set of propositions as a condition of adequacy for any abstract philosophical theory. (An entry on the list, however, may be eventually rejected for inconsistency with other, seemingly more secure, entries.) Methodists, on the other hand, begin with a theory of cognition or justification and then apply it to see which of our pre-theoretical beliefs survive. Reid and Moore are paradigmatic particularists, while Descartes and Hume are paradigmatic methodists. Methodist methodology tends toward skepticism, as the rules for acceptable or rational belief tend to be very restrictive (for instance, being incapable of doubt for Descartes, or being constructible entirely from impressions and ideas for Hume). Particularist methodology, on the other hand, tends toward a kind of conservatism, granting perhaps an undue privilege to beliefs we happen to be confident about.

An interesting question is whether the methodologies can be mixed. For instance, it seems impossible to do logic, metaphysics and epistemology without beginning with some assumptions of common sense. However, particularism applied to ethics and politics often seems simply to entrench prejudice and other contingent products of social inculcation. Is there a way to provide a principled distinction between areas of inquiry where reliance on the dictates of common sense is legitimate (because necessary) and areas where it is illegitimate because it is an obstruction to intellectual and practical progress?

The topic of common sense raises interesting and important questions in a field closely related to epistemology and philosophy of language called "meta-philosophy". Various questions might be raised in a meta-philosophical discussion of common sense: What is common sense? Supposing that a precise characterization of it cannot be given, does that mean appeal to common sense is off-limits in philosophy? Why should we care whether a belief is a matter of common sense or not? Under what circumstances, if any, is it permissible to advocate a view that seems to run contrary to common sense? Should considerations of common sense play any decisive role in philosophy? If not common sense, then should any other similar concept such as "intuition" play such a role? In general, are there "philosophical starting points", and if so, how might we characterize them? Supposing that there are no beliefs we are willing to hold come what may, are there some we ought to hold more stubbornly at least?

Other uses

Common sense is sometimes regarded as an impediment to abstract and even logical thinking. This is especially the case in mathematics and physics, where human intuition often conflicts with provably correct or experimentally verified results. A definition attributed to Albert Einstein states: "Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen."

Common sense is sometimes appealed to in political debates, particularly when other arguments have been exhausted. Civil rights for African Americans, women's suffrage, and homosexuality—to name just a few—have all been attacked as being contrary to common sense. Similarly, common sense has been invoked in opposition to many scientific and technological advancements. Such misuse of the notion of common sense is fallacious, being a form of the argumentum ad populum (appeal to the masses) fallacy.

Projects to collect common sense

The Cyc project is an attempt to provide a basis of commonsense knowledge for artificial intelligence systems. The Open Mind Common Sense project is similar except, like other on-line collaborative projects like Wikipedia, was built from the contributions of thousands of individuals across the Web.

See also

• common sense and the Diallelus
• John Ralston Saul
• frame problem
• appeal to tradition
• common sense conservative

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations by or about Common sense.

Induction (disambiguation)

(Redirected from Inductive reasoning)

The term induction has more than one meaning in the English language. Please see:

• Induction in the field of philosophy
• Mathematical induction in the field of mathematics
  • Transfinite induction is a special case of the above
  • Structural induction is a generalization of mathematical induction
• Electromagnetic induction in physics and engineering (see also: radio frequency induction, Sunyaev-Zeldovich effect)
• Electrostatic induction
• Induction of childbirth
• Induction period related to the Atkins diet

Tradition

(Redirected from Traditionalism)

A tradition is a story or a custom that is memorized and passed down from generation to generation, originally without the need for a writing system. Tools to aid this process include poetic devices such as rhyme and alliteration. The stories thus preserved are also referred to as tradition, or as part of an oral tradition. For example, it is now a tradition to have a Christmas tree to celebrate Christmas.

Although traditions are often presumed to be ancient, unalterable, and deeply important, they are often much less "natural" than is often presumed. Many traditions have been deliberately invented for one reason or another, often to highlight or enhance the importance of a certain institution. Traditions are also frequently changed to suit the needs of the day, and the changes quickly become accepted as a part of the ancient tradition. A famous book on the subject is, The Invention of Tradition, edited by Eric Hobsbawm and Terrence Ranger.

Some examples include "the invention of tradition" in African and other colonial holdings by the occupying forces. Requiring legitimacy, the colonial power would often "invent" a "tradition" which they could use to legitimize their own position. For example, a certain succession to a chiefdom might be recognized by a colonial power as traditional in order to favour their own favourite candidates for the job. Often these inventions were based in some form of tradition, but were grossly exaggerated, distorted, or biased toward a particular interpretation.

Other traditions that have been altered through the years include various religious celebrations, for example Christmas. The actual date of Jesus' birth does not coincide with December 25 as in the Western Church. This was a convenient day for it to be held on so as to capitalize on the popularity of traditional solstice celebrations.

In the Roman Catholic Church, traditionalism is the doctrine that tradition holds equal authority to holy scripture. In the Orthodox Church, scripture itself is considered a part of the larger tradition. These are often condemned as heretical by Protestant churches.

Traditionalism is at its best a desire to protect useful and hard-won traditions, and at worst a form of chauvinism for the past based on nostalgia.

Traditionalism may also refer to the concept of a fundamental human Tradition present in all orthodox religions and traditional forms of society. This view is put forward by the Traditionalist School.

See also:

• Conservatism
• Time immemorial
• Traditional Chinese character

---

In archaeology a tradition refers to a series of cultures or industries which appear to develop on from one another over a period of time. The term is especially common in the study of American archaeology.

Links

Article on the "authenticity" of tradition (http://www.polity.co.uk/giddens/pdfs/Tradition.pdf)

This article is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it (http://en.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Tradition&action=edit).

Common sense conservative

A common sense conservative is an advocate of conservative politics who adopts the rhetoric of "common sense" to frame his arguments. The term is almost always used to apply to domestic and fiscal policy. See the term neoconservative for a related movement that mostly focuses on foreign policy initiatives.

"Common sense" conservatives can be either quite right wing, or more moderate. They are usually spawned in opposition to the policies of liberal politicians and parties. Left-wing policy-makers, they argue, are mired in fantasy, striving for an unachievable utopian society. "Common sense" conservatives believe that rather than governing based on what "should work," politicians should govern based on established precedents and norms, or as they might say "what has worked." This, they say, is the "common sense" approach.

At times this rhetoric falls to claims of access to absolute truth or what is "self-evident". Obviously, what is "obvious" to one person is not necessarily obvious to another, which is what makes this ideology so controversial.

"Common sense" conservative movements are mostly confined to the United States, United Kingdom, Canada and Australia, but have spread to Latin America and other regions with evangelical Christian movements which emphasize moral rules, rigid conformity, financial success, and retributive justice. In each country the political agenda is different, but it has economic themes in common:

• tax cuts to promote economic growth, sometimes at the expense of public infrastructure or government services
• support for neoliberalism, monetarism, capitalism and free trade
• privatization of some infrastructure and government services on the belief (described by critics as a market theology) that the private sector is not only more efficient but more effective at providing such services
• streamlining government and reducing regulation, usually in an effort to reduce barriers to business

Critics have accused "common sense" conservatives of deliberately stirring conflict among opposing groups to clear the way for their reforms, which they say are often simple reactionary moves to eliminate prior regimes of regulation.

Often, these objectives and strategies cross national boundaries. Margaret Thatcher can be said to have brought the above trends into the mainstream, but the subsequent application of these beliefs by Ronald Reagan in the US was much more ideologically rigid in character. A second generation of regional politicians such as Ontario Premier Mike Harris, often using the slogan "Common Sense Revolution" (used in New Jersey, Ontario and Australia), continued the trend in the 1990s - along with a very similarly-styled Texas Governor, George W. Bush.

External links

The Common Sense Bill of Rights

Heuristic

(Redirected from Heuristics)

For heuristics in computer science, see Heuristic (computer science)

Heuristic is the art and science of discovery and invention. The word comes from the same Greek root (`ευρισκω) as "eureka," meaning "to find". A heuristic for a given problem is a way of directing your attention fruitfully to a solution. It is different from an algorithm in that it merely serves as a rule of thumb or guideline, as opposed to an invariant procedure. Heuristics may not always achieve the desired outcome, but can be extremely valuable to problem-solving processes. Good heuristics can dramatically reduce the time required to solve a problem by eliminating the need to consider unlikely possibilities or irrelevant states.

The mathematician George Polya popularised heuristics in the twentieth century in his book How to Solve It. He was motivated by his experiences in Mathematics education where students are taught mathematical proofs, without learning techniques to formulate proofs themselves. How to Solve It is a collection of ideas about heuristics that he taught to math students: ways of looking at problems and casting about for solutions that often give results very quickly.

Contents [showhide]

1 Psychology 1.1 Theorized psychological heuristics 2 Philosophy 3 Law 4 Computer Science 5 See also 6 External links 7 Further reading

Psychology

In psychology, heuristics are simple, efficient rules of thumb which have been proposed to explain how people make decisions, come to judgments and solve problems, typically when facing complex problems or incomplete information. These rules work well under most circumstances, but in certain cases lead to systematic cognitive biases.

For instance, people may tend to perceive more expensive beers as tasting better than inexpensive ones. This finding holds even when prices and brands are switched; putting the high price on the normally relatively inexpensive brand is enough to lead experimental participants to perceive that beer as tasting better than the beer that is normally relatively expensive. One might call this "price implies quality" bias.

Much of the work of discovering heuristics in human decision makers was ignited by Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman, who shared an important influence on behavioral finance. Critics led by Gerd Gigerenzer focus on how heuristics can be used to make principally accurate judgments rather than producing cognitive biases — heuristics that are "fast and frugal".

Theorized psychological heuristics

Well-known:

• anchoring and adjustment
• availability heuristic
• representativeness heuristic

Lesser-known:

• affect heuristic
• contagion heuristic
• effort heuristic
• familiarity heuristic
• fluency heuristic
• peak-end rule
• recognition heuristic
• scarcity heuristic
• similarity heuristic
• simulation heuristic
• social proof

Philosophy

In philosophy, especially in its Continental European kind, the adjective "heuristic" (or the designation "heuristic device") is used when an entity X is there to understand or to find out about some other entity Y, with which X is not identical. A good example is a model, which, as it is never identical with whatever it models, is a heuristic device to understand the latter. Stories, metaphors, etc., can also be termed heuristics in that sense. A classic example is the notion of utopia as described in Plato's best-known work, Politeia.This means that the purpose of the "ideal city" as depicted in the Politeia is not to be pursued or to present an orientation-point for development, but rather, that it shows how things would have to be connected, and how one thing would lead to another - often with highly problematic results, if one would opt for certain principles and carry them through rigorously.

Law

In legal theory, especially that of law and economics, heuristics are used in the law when case-by-case analysis would be impractical.

For instance, in the United States the legal drinking age is 21, because it is argued that people need to be mature enough to make decisions involving the risks of alcohol consumption. However, assuming people mature at different rates, the specific age of 21 would be too late for some and too early for others. In this case, the somewhat arbitrary deadline is used because it is impossible or impractical to tell whether one individual is mature enough that society can trust them with that kind of responsibility.

The same reasoning applies to patent law. Patents are justified on the grounds that inventors need to be protected in order to have incentive to invent (or else suffer the tragedy of the commons if anyone could use their idea). So, it is argued that it is in the best interest of society to issue inventors a temporary government-granted monopoly on their product so they can recoup their investment costs and make economic profit for a limited period of time. In the United States the length of this temporary monopoly is 20 years plus the amount of time the patent pending entailed. However, like the drinking age problem above, the specific length of time would need to be different for every product in order to be efficient, but the 20-year number is used because it is difficult to tell what the number should be for any individual patent. More recently, some including Lawrence Lessig have argued that patents in different kinds of industries such as software patents should be protected for different lengths of time.

Computer Science

Main article Heuristic (computer science)

In computer science, a heuristic is a technique designed to solve a problem that ignores whether the solution is provably correct, but which usually produces a good solution or solves a simpler problem that contains or intersects with the solution of the more complex problem.

Heuristics are intended to gain computational performance or conceptual simplicity potentially at the cost of accuracy or precision.

See also

• problem solving

External links

• http://greenlightwiki.com/heuristic A wiki devoted to heuristic.

Further reading

• How To Solve It: A New Aspect of Mathematical Method, George Polya, Princeton University Press, 1945,1957,1973. ISBN 0-691-02356-5   ISBN 0-691-08097-6
• Judgement under Uncertainty: Heuristics & Biases, ed. Daniel Kahneman, Amos Tversky and Paul Slovic, Cambridge University Press (http://www.cambridge.org/), 1982, ISBN 0521284147
• Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach, S. Russel and P. Norvig, [1] (http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~russell/aima.html), Prentice Hall, 2nd ed., 2002. ISBN 0137903952

Rational ignorance

Rational ignorance is a term most often found in economics, particularly public choice theory, but also used in other disciplines which study rationality and choice, including philosophy (epistemology) and game theory.

Ignorance about an issue is said to be "rational" when the cost of educating oneself about the issue sufficiently to make an informed decision can outweigh any potentential benefit one could reasonably expect to gain from that decision, and so it would be irrational to waste time doing so. This has consequences for the quality of decisions made by large numbers of people, such as general elections, where the probability of any one vote changing the outcome is very small.

This article is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it (http://en.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Rational_ignorance&action=edit).

See also: bounded rationality, satisficing

Bounded rationality

Many models of human behavior in the social sciences assume that humans can be reasonably approximated or described as "rational" entities, especially as conceived by rational choice theory.

Many economics models assume that people are "hyperrational", and would never do anything to violate their preferences.

Herbert Simon, in Models of My Life, points out that most people are only partly rational, and are in fact emotional/irrational in the remaining part of their actions. He gives Albert Einstein as an example of bounded rationality. In other work, he states "boundedly rational agents experience limits in formulating and solving complex problems and in processing (receiving, storing, retrieving, transmitting) information" (Williamson, p. 553, quoting Simon). Simon, who some claim coined the term, describes a number of dimensions along which "classical" models of rationality can be made somewhat more realistic, while sticking within the vein of fairly rigorous formalization. These include:

• limiting what sorts of utility functions there might be.
• recognizing the costs of gathering and processing information.
• the possibility of having a "vector" or "multi-valued" utility function.

Daniel Kahneman proposes bounded rationality as a model to overcome some of the limitations of the rational-agent models in Economic literature.

See also:

• Rational choice theory
• Rational ignorance
• Neoclassical economics
• Behavioral economics
• Homo economicus
• Satisficing
• Altruism
• Utility Maximization Problem

References:

• Simon, Herbert (1957). "A Behavioral Model of Rational Choice", in Models of Man
• Williamson, Oliver (1981). "The Economies of Organization: The Transaction Cost Approach". American Journal of Sociology. Vol 87, pp. 548--577
• Simon, H.A. (1990) A mechanism for social selection and successful altruism, Science 250 (4988): 1665-1668.
• March, James G. (1994). "A primer on decision making: how decisions happen", The Free Press, New York.
• Kahneman, D. (2003) Maps of Bounded Rationality: Psychology for Behavioral Economics." The American Economic Review. 93(5). pp. 1449-1475

Ignorance

Ignorance is a lack of knowledge or a willful lack of desire to improve the efficiency, merit, effectiveness or usefulness of one's actions.

In politics, it is almost always used as a pejorative label, but some political movements have raised it to an ideal, for instance the Know-Nothings of the 19th century United States and some peasant and agrarian movements. This is usually simply a rejection of academia and professions and other power structures that are based on knowledge. A modern expression of this is the so-called "common sense conservative" who celebrates freedom and traditional values despite the ridicule, condescension and arguments of left-wing politics or green politics that are so convoluted they seem like obfuscation rather than rigorously defensible positions.

Despite the admonition in some faiths that ignorance is bliss, some religions are particularly adamant that it does more harm that good. For instance, Islam views ignorance as a particular and unique evil that can and should easily be dispelled: "Seek knowledge, even as far as China." - Muhammad

In a society with a strong hierarchy or caste system, ignorance of the concerns of those one does not work or deal with directly may aid labour specialization, reduce jealousy and dissent, and otherwise serve the interests of social harmony. In such a society, control of any mass media tends to be carefully controlled, and one tends to perform one job for life.

There are few or no ethical traditions today that emphasize plain ignorance as a value. However, certain ideologies persist that find it useful or desirable.

When cultures meet however, ignorance can become particularly dangerous, as one's inability to comprehend the customs of others can lead to offense and thus harm. When Europeans began colonization of North America, there were many incidents in which conflict arose from unintended misunderstandings. There were of course also many bona fide clashes of values and bigotry - a particularly noxious byproduct of ignorance being racism and intolerance.

What is different is by and large seen as dangerous and threatening in animal cognition.

In humans, ignorance of another's lifeways or circumstances, failure to empathize with his or her experience, is cited in political science as one of the most common causes of conflict. Thus to build common experiences, e.g. to plant olive trees in regions where they have been torn up due to conflict, and learn at the same time, is thought to be one of the most effective forms of education and also of peacemaking. Crick's political virtues emphasize this kind of skill and activity where it is difficult or impossible to actually share perspectives.

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations by or about Ignorance.

See also: trust, doubt, truth, secrecy, arrogance, list of ethics topics

Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignorance"

Categories: Core issues in ethics

Know-Nothing movement

(Redirected from Know-Nothing)

The Know-Nothing movement was a nativist American political movement of the 1850s. It grew up as a popular reaction to the large numbers of immigrants—mostly Irish Roman Catholics—entering the United States starting in the late 1840s, and was characterized by calls for a number of measures to maintain the United States as a nation of Anglo-Saxon Protestants.

Contents [showhide]

1 Causes of the Movement 1.1 Distrust of the Pope 1.2 Culture Clash 2 The Political Movement 2.1 History 2.2 Platform 3 See also

Causes of the Movement

Distrust of the Pope

The fact that many of the new immigrants were Roman Catholic sat poorly with much of the United States's largely-Protestant population. In particular, many Protestants viewed with distrust the strong allegiance of Roman Catholics to the Pope; many Protestants saw this allegiance to the Pope as an allegiance to a foreign prince (especially since the Pope was also head of state of the Papal States), and thus dangerous to American independence and possibly even treasonous.

These concerns spawned widely-held conspiracy theories regarding the Pope's purported plans to subjugate the United States through a continuing influx of his followers. The fact that Popes in the past had in fact wielded significant power and entangled themselves in wars and political disputes was frequently pointed to as evidence that the Pope was simply waiting for the right time to regain his lost temporal power, and served to further cement this notion in the minds of many Americans.

Culture Clash

While significant in their own right, the concerns about the Pope largely exacerbated already-present anti-immigrant and anti-Catholic feelings held by many Americans. The newcomers differed culturally from most Americans, so their influx was seen as a threat to maintaining American culture. The immigrants brought with them their strong accents, Irish traditions and culture, and Roman Catholicism, and didn't seem likely to become "Americanized" anytime soon. A vocal minority of American Puritans also protested against the immigrants' alcohol consumption. While alcohol consumption was already quite popular among the general public in the United States (even George Washington had run a distillery), the Puritan elements managed to promote a caricature of the Irish as drunkards, and thus gained some support for their anti-alcohol crusade by painting drinking as foreign and un-American.

The Political Movement

History

The growing anti-immigrant sentiment led to a dissatisfaction with the major parties—the Democrats were seen as too dependent on the votes of immigrants, and the Whigs were seen as ineffectual, and were largely in decline in any case. Thus anti-immigrant activists began splitting off from the major parties and forming secret groups, coordinating their votes and throwing their weight en masse behind candidates sympathetic to their cause (regardless of political party). When asked about these secret organizations, members would reply "I know nothing," which led to them popularly being called Know-Nothings. The Know-Nothings in effect gained control of a large number of local offices, especially in the North, through the early 1850s ("in effect" because the officeholders were still technically either Democrats or Republicans, as the Know-Nothings were not yet an actual party).

In 1854 they won significant victories in Congress and at the State level, again as an unofficial party driven by coordinated votes for sympathetic candidates; the secret societies themselves supplemented by supporting votes from the population at large, once it was made known who was sympathetic to the Know-Nothings' cause. The results of this election were so favorable to the Know-Nothings that they formed officially as a political party, called the American Party, and swallowed many members of the now nearly-defunct Whig party, as well as a significant number of Democrats, especially Northern Democrats.

The height of their success came in the Election of 1856, in which they threw their weight behind Millard Fillmore (a Whig who had been president from 1850 to 1853). Fillmore lost, but won 22% of the popular vote and Maryland's 8 electoral votes. However, by this time the newly-formed party was beginning to be rent by differences over slavery, and greatly declined in strength. Know-Nothings remained strong on the local and state levels in many northern states, but by the Election of 1860, they were no longer a serious national political movement. Most of the anti-slavery Know-Nothings went on to join the new Republican Party.

Platform

The platform of the American Party called for, among other things:

• Severe limits on immigration, especially from Catholic countries.
• Restricting political office to native-born Americans (the United States Constitution only restricts the office of President in this way).
• Mandating a wait of 21 years before an immigrant could gain citizenship.
• Restricting public school teaching to Protestants.
• Mandating daily Bible readings in public schools (from the Protestant version of the Bible).
• Restricting the sale of liquor.

Trust

The term trust has several meanings:

• In sociology, trust is willing acceptance of one person's power to affect another. It is discussed more formally in the articles on social capital, profession and authority. There is much dispute on whether degrees of trust can be measured, or whether it simply exists until there is doubt. See ethics and meta-ethics for more on these abstract questions. There is also much dispute about how lying, blaming and hypocrisy interact with trust. See also distrust
• A trust is a large business entitity that tries to control a market and/or become a monopoly. The term became common in the late 19th century, when a system of trusts controlled much of the economy of the United States. In 1898, President William McKinley launched the 'trust-busting' era when he appointed the U.S. Industrial Commission on trusts, which interrogated Carnegie, Rockefeller, Schwab, and other industrial titans. The report of the Industrial Commission was seized upon by Theodore Roosevelt, who based much of his presidency on "trust-busting". See also: antitrust. William McKinley. U.S. Industrial Commission. Commissioner Andrew L. Harris.
• A Trust company is a near-bank: a financial institution offering banking, investment and estate administration services.
• A trust is a legal arrangement for the control of property on someone's behalf.
• Trust is an important concept in computer security and security engineering. In this sense, a 'trusted' resource is one that you are forced by necessity to trust - that is to say, that its failure will compromise the security or integrity of the system.
• In cryptography, trust is either of two related concepts - how much one trusts another person to introduce keys, and how confident one is that a given key has a given owner. These determinations are often made via a web of trust.
• Trust was a French hard rock band who rose to fame around 1980.
• Trust Company (better known as TRUSTcompany or TRUST*CO) is an American grunge band that started in the early 2000s.

Doubt

Doubt is uncertainty in the context of trust (where it takes the form of distrust), action, decision or faith. It implies challenging some notion of truth in effect, or hesitating to take action on it due to concern that one might be mistaken.

According to some spiritual and ethical traditions, it is a form of fear. According to other traditions, it is wholly rational and causes us to hesitate before acting, and apply more rigorous methods.

The scientific method, and to a degree all of science can be said to be entirely motivated by doubt: rather than accept the existing theories, experiments to test them continue. Technology can be seen as simply the expansion of the experiments to a wider user base, who take real risks with it. Users may no longer doubt the applicability of the theory in play, but there remain doubts about how it interacts with the real world. The process of technology transfer stages exploitation of science to ensure that doubt and danger are minimized.

Doubt is very often debated in the context of Christianity where it refers to doubt about salvation and eventual redemption in an afterlife. This issue has become particularly important in the Protestant version of this faith, where only acceptance of Jesus Christ as a saviour and intermediary with God is required for a positive outcome. The debate is less important in most other religions and ethical traditions.

In politics, ethics and law, where very important decisions are made that often determine the course of someone's life, doubt is central, and often motivates an elaborate adversarial process to carefully sort through all the evidence to come to a decision.

See also: FUD, skepticism, Doubting Thomas, list of ethics topics

Truth

This article is primarily concerned with truth as it is used in the evaluation of assertions. For example, "The world is a sphere" is true. When used in this way, it is properly contrasted with false. Truth is a concept of primary importance to philosophy, science, law, and religion. See also objectivity.

Contents [showhide]

1 Theories of truth 1.1 Subjective vs. objective 1.2 Relative vs. absolute 2 True testimony 3 Other uses of true 4 Quotations 5 See also 5.1 Truth in logic 5.2 Major philosophers who have proposed theories of truth 6 External link 7 References

Theories of truth

The study of truth is part of philosophical logic and epistemology. Sentences, propositions, statements, ideas, beliefs, and judgments can be true, and are called truth bearers by philosophers.

There are several broad theories about truth that philosophers and logicians have proposed.

• The correspondence theory of truth sees truth as correspondence with objective reality. Thus, a statement is said to be true just in case it expresses a state of affairs in the world.
• The coherence theory sees truth as coherence with some specified set of statements. Usually the set is identified as the statements that make up what is the best justified and most complete description of the world.
• The consensus theory, invented by Charles Sanders Peirce sees truth as something agreed upon by some specified group, such as all competent investigators.
• Pragmatism sees truth as the success of the practical consequences of an idea, i.e. its utility.
• Social constructivism holds that truth is constructed by social processes, and it represents the power struggles within a community.

Each can be interpreted as either a definition of the fundamental nature of truth, or as a criterion for determining truth values. So, for instance, a realist might define truth as correspondence with the facts, and argue that the only valid way to determine the truth of a proposition is to see if it corresponds to the facts. A Coherentist might also define truth as correspondence with mind-independent reality, but also maintain that the truth or falsity of a statement is determined by its cohering with the body of accepted scientific knowledge. Pierce in his later writings thought that truth was defined as correspondence with reality, but held that the truth or falsity of a proposal was determined by the agreement of the relevant experts.

The semantic theory of truth has as its general case for a given language:

'P' is true if and only if P

where 'P' is a reference to the sentence (the sentence's name), and P is just the sentence itself. As its inventor, philosopher-logician Alfred Tarski, acknowledged, the semantic theory cannot be applied to any natural language, such as English. One reason for this is that, when accurately and fully expressed, the semantic theory requires that each predicate in a language must have its satisfaction conditions specified separately. Since natural languages have an infinite number of predicates, a semantic theory of truth can never be actually expressed for a natural language.

Tarski thought of his theory as a species of correspondence theory, in which the term on the right is assumed to correspond to the facts.

Deflationary theories, after Gottlob Frege and F. P. Ramsey, also allege that "truth" is not the name of some property of propositions — some thing about which one could have a theory. The belief that truth is a property is just an illusion caused by the fact that we have the predicate "is true" in our language. Since most predicates name properties, we naturally assume that "is true" does as well. But, they say, statements that seem to predicate truth are actually doing nothing more than signal agreement with the statement. For example, the redundancy theory of truth holds that to assert that a statement is true is just to assert the statement itself. Thus, to say that "It is true that snow is white" is to say nothing more nor less than that show is white. A second example is the performative theory of truth which holds that to say "It is true that snow is white" is to perform the speech act of signalling one's agreement with the claim that snow is white (much like nodding one's head in agreement). The idea that some statements are more actions than communicative statements is not as odd as it may seem. Consider, for example, that when the bride says "I do" at the appropriate time in a wedding, she is performing the act of taking this man to be her lawful wedded husband. She is not describing herself as taking this man. A third type of deflationary theory is the disquotational theory which uses a variant form of Tarski's schema: To say that '"P" is true' is to say that P.

Subjective vs. objective

Subjective truths are those with which we are most intimately acquainted. That I like broccoli or that I have a pain in my foot are both subjectively true. Metaphysical subjectivism holds that all we have are such truths. That is, that all we can know about are, one way or another, our own subjective experiences. This view does not necessarily reject realism. But at the least claims that we cannot have direct knowledge of the real world.

In contrast, Objective truths are supposed in some way to be independent of our subjective beliefs and tastes. Such truths would subsist not in the mind but in the external object.

Relative vs. absolute

Relative truths are statements or propositions that are true only relative to some standard or convention or point-of-view. Usually the standard cited is the tenets of one's own culture. Everyone agrees that the truth or falsity of some statements is relative: That the fork is to the left of the spoon depends on where one stands. But Relativism is the doctrine that all truths within a particular domain (say, morality or aesthetics) are of this form, and Relativism entails that what is true varies across cultures and eras. For example, Moral relativism is the view that moral truths are socially determined. Some logical issues about Relativism are taken up in the article on the relativist fallacy.

Relative truths can be contrasted with absolute truths. The latter are statements or propositions that are taken to be true for all cultures and all eras. For example, for Muslims Allahu Akbar expresses an absolute truth; for the micro economist, that the laws of supply and demand determine the value of any consumable in a market economy is true in all situations; for the Kantian, "act only according to that maxim by which you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law" forms an absolute moral truth. They are statements that are often claimed to emanate from the very nature of the universe, God, or some other ultimate essence or transcendental signifier. But some absolutists claim that the doctines they regard as absolute arise from certain universal facts of human nature.

Absolutism in a particular domain of thought is the view that all statements in that domain are either absolutely true or absolutely false: none is true for some cultures or eras while false for other cultures or eras. For example, Moral Absolutism is the view that moral claims such as "Abortion is wrong" or "Charity is good" are either true for all people in all times or false for all people in all times.

True testimony

Witnesses who swear under oath to testify truthfully in courts of law, are not expected to make infallibly true statements, but to make a good faith attempt to recount an observed event from their memory or provide expert testimony. That what one witness says may differ from true accounts of other witnesses is a commonplace occurrence in the practice of law. Triers-of-fact are then charged with the responsibility to determine the credibility or veracity of a witness' testimony.

[edit

Other uses of true

In addition to its use in reference to propositions, there are other uses of "truth" and "true" in English:

The first is most often applied to people, and is used as a commendation, synonymous with "loyal", as in she is true to her friends. This sense of truth should be contrasted with being fake, insincere, misleading and so on.

Second, "true" can mean "in accordance with a standard or archetype," which is how it is used in "He is a true Englishman."

Third, "true" can be used as a verb meaning "to straighten (the spokes of a bicycle wheel)."

Quotations

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations by or about Truth.

• "To say of what is, that it is, or of what is not, that it is not, is true." — Aristotle in Metaphysics (Book 4)
• "Truth - Something somehow discreditable to someone." — H.L. Mencken
• "Truth exists - only lies are invented." — Georges Braque
• "To me, truth is not some vague, foggy notion. Truth is real. And, at the same time, unreal. Fiction and fact and everything in between, plus some things I can't remember, all rolled into one big 'thing'. This is truth, to me." — Jack Handey
• "Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth." — Sherlock Holmes in "A Scandal in Bohemia" by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
• "What is truth?" — Pontius Pilate, the Gospel of John.
• "I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me." — Jesus Christ — John 14:6 (original Greek is αλ´ηθεια : truth, verity)
• "One of the grand fundamental principles of Mormonism is to receive truth, let it come from whence it may . . . We should gather all the good and true principles in the world and treasure them up, or we shall not come out true Mormons." — Joseph Smith, Jr.
• "What is truth? said jesting Pilate, but would not stay for an answer" — Francis Bacon, Essays 1: Of Truth
• "What then is truth? A movable host of metaphors, metonymies, and; anthropomorphisms: in short, a sum of human relations which have been poetically and rhetorically intensified, transferred, and embellished, and which, after long usage, seem to a people to be fixed, canonical, and binding." — Friedrich Nietzsche, On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense
• "Your [God's] word is truth." Jesus Christ, as recorded in John 17:17 (http://bible.crosswalk.com/OnlineStudyBible/bible.cgi?word=john+17%3A17&section=0&version=nkj&new=1&oq=)

See also

• Belief
• Epistemic theories of truth
• Honesty
• Knowledge
• Liar paradox
• Lie
• Philalethia (love of truth)
• Relativism
• Unity of the proposition
• Quantum indeterminacy
• Objectivity

Truth in logic

• Logic
• Modal logic
• Truth conditions
• Truth function
• Truth table
• Truth value

Major philosophers who have proposed theories of truth

• Aristotle
• J. L. Austin
• Brand Blanshard
• Hartry Field
• Paul Horwich
• William James
• Saul Kripke
• Charles Sanders Peirce
• Karl Popper
• W. V. Quine
• F. P. Ramsey
• Bertrand Russell
• P. F. Strawson
• Alfred Tarski
• C. J. F. Williams
• Ludwig Wittgenstein

External link

• Dictionary of the History of Ideas: (http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/cgi-local/DHI/dhi.cgi?id=dv2-04) Double Truth

References

• Blackburn, S and Simmons K. 1999. Truth. Oxford University Press. A good anthology of classic articles, including papers by James, Russell, Ramsey, Tarski and more recent work.
• Field, H. 2001. Truth and the Absence of Fact. Oxford.
• Horwich, P. Truth. Oxford.
• Habermas, Jürgen. 2003. Truth and Justification. MIT Press.
• Kirkham, Richard 1992: Theories of Truth. Bradford Books. A very good reference book.
• http://www.ditext.com/tarski/tarski.html Tarski's classic 1944 paper on the Semantic Conception of Truth online.
• Williams, Bernard. 2002. Truth & Truthfulness: an essay in genealogy. Princeton University Press

Secrecy

Secrecy is the condition of hiding information from others. That which is kept hidden is known as the secret.

One may have to lie in order to hold a secret, which might lead to psychological repercussions.

The alternative, when asked about something, declining to answer, may suggest the answer and may therefore not always be suitable to keep the secret. Also the other may insist that one answers the question. See also Don't ask, don't tell.

Topics for an article on secrecy

• Animals, including humans (in some cases), generally endeavor to conceal the location of their den or nest from predators. In practice, finding a human is often not difficult, especially with the aid of telephone directories, private eyes, etc.
• Humans attempt to consciously conceal aspects of themselves from others, due to, for example, shame or fear of rejection, loss of acceptance, loss of employment, or other negative repurcussion.
• Humans attempt to conceal aspects of their own self which they are not capable of incorporating psychologically into their conscious being.
• Families maintain "family secrets", a mutually agreed-upon construct (an official family story) to never discuss disagreeable issues concerning the family, either within the family or with those outside the family. Agreement to maintain the secret is often coerced through the use of such tactics as "shaming" and reference to family honour. On occasion, the information may not be disagreeable as such, but may rather be e.g. a recipe
• Governments and corporations often attempt to conceal information about their operations from other governments or corporations.
• Preservation of secrets is one of the goals of information security.
• Secret keys are essential in most cryptography, which in turn has as its goal the hiding of secrets.
• Information hiding is a design principle in much software engineering.
• Keeping one's strategy secret is important in many aspects of game theory
• Secret societies -- why keep membership a secret? why not?

See also

• Concealment device
• Confidentiality
• Conspiracy theory
• Deception
• Espionage
• Military secret
• Secret sharing
• Security classification
• Surprise

References:

• Bruce Schneier, Secrets and Lies

Pride

(Redirected from Arrogance)

In Christian dogma, pride (or vanity) is excessive belief in one's own abilities, that interferes with the individual's recognition of the grace of God. It has been called the sin from which all others arise. Pride is listed as one of the Seven Deadly Sins.

In English, the term "pride" also has a more positive sense referring to self-respect, a refusal to be humiliated (such as in Lesbian and Gay pride) as well as joy in one's accomplishments. In this sense, "pride" is among the most-quoted themes of political and societal discourse of English-speaking nations, especially of the USA. This stands in some contrast to that nation's general image of itself as a mostly Christian society.

Some languages distinguish between the two senses of pride; in French, self-respect is fierté and vanity is orgueuil.

Arrogance is the act of obtaining rights or advantages, including merely rhetorical advantages, through violence or threats of violence, or through verbal violence. Arrogance is as much an aspect of aggression as it is of pretension, which is unwarranted pride. An arrogant person is not merely unjustifiably confident in their own ability and value, but one actively seeking to cow or belittle other "lesser" people, in order to achieve their ends.

See also Narcissism.

List of ethics topics

This list of ethics topics puts articles relevant to well-known ethical (right and wrong, good and bad) debates and decisions in one place - including practical problems long known in philosophy, and the more abstract subjects in law, politics, and some professions and sciences. It lists also those core concepts essential to understanding ethics as applied in various religions, some movements derived from religions, and religions discussed as if they were a theory of ethics making no special claim to divine status.

The list also includes articles on non-ethics topics or fictional works or part of works that include a substantial ethical debate; These are fairly obviously distinguished from ethical concepts by name alone. Inclusion or exclusion of an article is obviously an ethical issue in itself, as different people regard different issues as 'substantial', and different ethical works as influential.

Some simple guidelines to keep this list manageable

• Where a separate article exists regarding only the ethical debate, e.g. medicine, engineering link only to that article, not to the main article.
• Only very basic and influential abstractions from analytic philosophy or game theory, e.g. Prisoner's dilemma, Tit for Tat are included
• Nothing dealing strictly with belief, e.g. propaganda - this has no direct impact on a living body and it does not imply or directly suggest an action by any body
• Anything applicable only to one religion or only of historical interest belongs on the list of religious topics
• Metaphysics and epistemology are covered in the list of philosophical topics instead.
• Political and diplomatic concepts should not be included unless they constitute a profound ethical problem, e.g. choices like the prevention of genocide by violating national sovereignty.
• Business ethics is considered a separate topic - include only those issues large enough to affect the general society and planet
• Legal ethics is a separate topic as well
• Medical ethics is also a separate topic - include only those issues that seem to transcend the doctor-patient relationship
• Concepts specific to economics should be added to the list of economics articles and
• Concepts specific to Islam should be added to the list of Islamic terms in Arabic instead
• names belong on the list of ethicists or the list of philosophers

Why? Any field that makes specific ethical assumptions can be only imperfectly characterized by inclusion in a list such as this. The above concepts are more fairly presented within the frame of assumptions of that profession or religion

A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

A

• A Theory of Justice
• aberration
• abortion, legal and moral issues
• abuse
• abuse of trust - usually considered a core issue
• accounting reform
• aesthetics
• adversarial process
• affection
• alm - one of the list of Islamic terms in Arabic
• anger - sometimes considered a core issue
• animal rights
• anti-psychiatry
• ape genocide
• appeal to authority
• applied ethics
• arbitration
• argument from morality
• arguments for the existence of God
• arrogance
• artificial intelligence
• authority
• avarice - usually considered a sin
• axiology

B

• basis of unity
• belief - a core issue
• biodefense
• bioethics
• biosafety
• biosafety protocol
• biosecurity
• Biosphere Reserve
• biowar
• black market
• blaming - a core issue
• body - inseparable from core issues
• border - sometimes considered a core issue
• (fictional Aldous Huxley) Brave New World
• business ethics

C

• carceral state
• case-based reasoning specifically
  • casuistry
• Categorical Imperative
• civics
• civil law
• civil procedure
• cloning - especially human cloning
• closure - always a core issue
• collective intelligence
• collectivism
• common sense
• common sense conservative
• conceptual metaphor
• Confucianism
• Consequentialism
• consensual crime
• consensus
• consensus decision making
• conservation
• conservation movement
• consent - a core issue
• consumerism
• corporate accountability
• corporate crime
• Cosmist
• courage - sometimes considered a core issue
• cowardice - sometimes considered a core issue
• creative accounting
• criminal justice
  • retributive justice
  • restorative justice
  • equity-restorative justice
  • transformative justice
  • psychiatric imprisonment
• criminal law
• criminal procedure
• cult
• cultural bias
• cynic

D

• debt - sometimes considered a core issue
• debt slavery
• definition of religion
• deliberative democracy
• descriptive ethics
• democracy
• discrediting tactic
• dissent - a core issue
• divine command theory
• doctrine of double effect
• dominator culture
• doubt - always a core issue
• duty - a core issue

E

• Ecological footprint
• education
• education reform
• educational perennialism
• egalitarianism
• election
• engineering
• environmental ethics
• environmental law
• environmental movement
• envy - usually considered a sin
• epistemic community
• equality
• equity - sometimes considered a core issue
• ethical investing
• ethical purchasing
• ethicist
• ethics - an introduction to the basic terminology
• ethical calculus
• ethical code
• ethical naturalism
• ethical non-naturalism
• etiquette - sometimes considered a core issue
• evil - a core issue
• exploratory engineering

F

• faction - sometimes considered a core issue
• family - usually considered a core issue
• family role
• family values
• fair trade
• fairness - always a core issue
• forgiveness - always a core issue
• formal method for evaluating and quantifying ethicality and morality of human actions
• Fundamental Verses of the Middle Way
• fundamentalism

G

• Gaian
• gene therapy
• genetic modification
• genocide
• global
• global debt
• Global Ethic
• gluttony - usually considered a sin
• God & Golem, Inc.: A Comment on Certain Points Where Cybernetics Impinges on Religion
• golf
• goodness - a core issue
• greed - sometimes considered a core issue
• Green movement
• grey area
• group entity
• guilt - sometimes considered a core issue
• (fictional Jonathan Swift) Gulliver's Travels

H

• hate - sometimes considered a core issue
• hedonism
• home
• home schooling
• honesty - a core issue
• human cloning
• human resources

I

• ideological assumption
• ideology
• ideals - a core issue
• ignorance - a core issue
• In vitro fertilisation
• individualism
• instructional technology
• international
• integrity - usually considered a core issue
• international law
• Islamization of knowledge

J

• Jainism
• jealousy - sometimes considered a core issue
• journalist
• journalistic fraud
• Judeo-Christian ethics
• Judeo-Christian-Islamic ethics
• just war
• justice - usually considered a core issue

K

• knowledge
• knowledge society

L

• land ethic - sometimes considered a core issue
• law - usually considered a core issue
• legal code and examples
  • English Common Law
  • Napoleonic Code
  • (fictional Isaac Asimov) Laws of Robotics
  • United States constitutional law
• li - core issue from Confucianism
• liability - sometimes considered a core issue
• logical positivism
• lust - usually considered a sin
• lying - a core issue

M

• mad scientist
• madness
• mediation
• medical ethics
• mercy - always a core issue
• meta-ethics
• miracle
• modern Islamic philosophy
• molecular engineering
• monetary reform
• moral
• moral absolutism
• moral code and examples
  • Golden Rule
  • Noble Eightfold Path
  • Ten Commandments
• moral core - a core issue
• moral community
• moral equivalent
• moral example - a core issue
• moral liability
• moral relativism
• moral skepticism
• moral syndrome
• moral universalism
• morality - a core issue
• morality play
• Mussar Movement (Jewish ethical movement)

N

• national sovereignty
• nationalism
• naturalistic fallacy
• Neuro-linguistic programming
• Nihilism
• Non-cognitivism
• nonviolence
• normative ethics

O

• open space conference
• ownership
• oath

P

• paradox - a core issue
• paradox of hedonism
• particle physics
• partnership
• partnership culture
• passion (emotion)
• Passion play
• peace - sometimes considered a core issue
• peace movement
• peacekeeping
• peacemaking
• personal conduct
• persuasion technology
• philosophical naturalism
• philosophy of law
• philosophy of mathematics?
• philosophy of science?
• plagiarism
• planned obsolescence
• Plato's Republic
• play - sometimes considered a core issue
• political
• political privacy
• political virtues
• politics - see also political science
• poker collusion
• power - a core issue
• The Prince
• psychological pain
• Precautionary Principle
• precedent
• pride - usually considered a sin
• precautionary principle
• Prevention of Disasters Principle
• Prior Informed Consent
• privacy - sometimes considered a core issue
• promise
• public relations
• punishment

Q

• queer studies

R

• race to the bottom
• racism - sometimes considered a core issue
• rational ethics
• reality - inseparable from core issues
• reflective equilibrium
• relativism - inseparable from core issues
• religious law
• ren - core issue from Confucianism
• reproductive technology
• revenge - usually considered a core issue
• the relationship between religion and science
• relationship ethics
• religion - inseparable from core issues
• risk - usually considered a core issue
• Risk Society
• (fictional Star Trek Ferengi) Rules of Acquisition
• Rules Girl
• rural development

S

• safety - a core issue
• satyagraha
• scandal
• scientific misconduct
• scientism
• Seven Deadly Sins
• simple view of ethics and morals
• sin
• situated ethics
• situational ethics
• sloth - usually considered a sin
• social
• social control
• society
• sociology of knowledge
• soundbite
• state (politics)
• stoicism

T

• technology assessment
• telemarketing
• tendency (politics)
• Terran
• terrist
• theory of conduct
• theory of value
• tolerances versus preferences
• transcendental argument for the existence of God
• transhumanism
• triage
• trolley problem
• trust - a core issue
• truth - a core issue

U

• Ubuntu - a South African ethic
• urban economics
• urban secession
• usury - sometimes considered a core issue
• Utilitarian Bioethics
• Utilitarian ethics
• (fictional Thomas More) Utopia

V

• value - a core issue
• value system
• value theory
• value of life
• value of Earth
• values
• vanity - usually considered a sin
• verbal abuse
• virtue - sometimes considered a core issue
• virtue ethics
• vow

W

• (fictional B. F. Skinner) Walden Two
• war
• wealth - usually considered a core issue
• whole purpose
• will (philosophy) - usually considered a core issue
• wisdom - usually considered a core issue
• work - sometimes considered a core issue
• working week
• wrath - usually considered a sin

X

Y

• yi - core issue from Confucianism

Z