Holism

Any view which emphasizes the whole of something as distinct from its parts. In particular, this doctrine says that the whole in question cannot be predicted from or explained in terms of its parts (also see emergence theories); or else that the whole is more important than its parts (as in, for example, collectivist political

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Holistic explanation

EXPLANATION OF A KIND CLAIMED TO BE ESPECIALLY REQUIRED IN THE SPHERES OF PERCEPTUAL EXPERIENCE AND THE ACTIONS OF A RATIONAL AGENT, WHERE EXPLANATIONS CANNOT BE GIVEN IN TERMS OF SINGLE FACTORS (BELIEFS, DESIRES, AND SO ON) BUT ONLY IN TERMS OF WHOLE SYSTEMS OF SUCH FACTORS INTERRELATED IN COMPLEX WAYS. However, the elaboration

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Principle of humanity

PRINCIPLE NAMED BY RICHARD E GRANDY IN 1973 AS A SUPPLEMENT TO THE PRINCIPLE OF CHARITY. It says that when interpreting another speaker we must assume not simply that he is intelligent and so on, but that his beliefs and desires are connected to each other and to reality in a way that makes him

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Hume’s law

DERIVED FROM THE SCOTTISH PHILOSOPHER DAVID HUME (1711-1776), AN INFORMAL NAME FOR A DISTINCTION (RATHER LIKE THE FACT/VALUE DISTINCTION) BETWEEN STATEMENTS OF FACT AND UTTERANCES WITH AN ‘OUGHT’ IN THEM. In his Treatise of Human Nature (1739-40), Hume claimed (as usually interpreted) that the latter could never be logically derived from the former, and this

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Hylozoism

TREATMENT OF MATTER, OR PARTS OF THE MATERIAL WORLD, AS INTRINSICALLY ALIVE. Where animism tends to view the life as taking the form of discrete spirits, and panpsychism tends to refer to strictly philosophical views like that of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716), hylozoism refers largely to views such as those of the earliest Greek philosophers (6th and 5th centuries BC).

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Hypothetico-deductive method

Scientific method whereby science should set up testable hypotheses and then try to falsify them, rather than trying to confirm them directly by accumulating favourable evidence. Introduced by the English scholar William Whewell (1794-1866) and developed especially by the Austrian philosopher Karl Raimund Popper (1902-1994). Those hypotheses which – despite severe tests – survive unfalsified are

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Idealism

Any view saying that reality is in some way mental, or depends intrinsically – and not just causally – on mind (not necessarily the human mind). The term may also apply to features of some philosophy, but is connected for philosophers with ‘idea’ rather than, as in popular usage, with ‘ideal’ in the sense

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Ideal utilitarianism

Version of utilitarianism which (in contrast to hedonistic utilitarianism) does not take pleasure to be the only, or even necessarily the main, value. The version of English empiricist George Edward Moore (1873-1958) emphasized aesthetic values and certain personal relationships, and was especially influential on the Bloomsbury Set during the early 20th century. Also see: falsificationism, inductivism, deductivism, improbabilism Source: G E Moore, Principia

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Ideational theories of meaning

Theories which say that words have meaning by standing for ideas, thoughts or concepts, and so on. Such theories are found in Aristotle’s (4th century BC) early work De Interpretatione (On Interpretation), especially chapters 1-4; and in the writing of English philosopher John Locke (1632-1704). They have the advantage over naming theories of meaning in that they provide a

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Law of identity

One of the traditional three laws of thought, the other two being the laws of contradiction and excluded middle. ‘Everything is what it is and not another thing’, or (where ‘P’ is any proposition) ‘If P then P’. The English empiricist George Edward Moore (1873-1958) took the first quotation above as the motto for his book Principia Ethica (1903), attributing

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Identity of indiscernibles

One part of Leibniz’s law, saying that if what appear to be two or more things have all their properties in common they are identical and so only one thing. In its widest and weakest form, the properties concerned include relational properties such as spatiotemporal ones and self-identity. A stronger version limits the properties to

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Identity theory of mind

Theory, coming primarily from Australia in the 1950s, that various mental phenomena are identical with certain cerebral or neuro-physiological phenomena. (The names ‘brain process theory’ and ‘central state materialism’ are sometimes used for these two alternatives, respectively; more generally, the theory is called simply materialism or pysicalism, though both these terms have other uses too.)

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Identity theory of predication

Theory that subject/predicate statements are really identity statements, so that ‘X is red’ means ‘X is identical with some red thing’. This is in effect the same as the theory Geach traces back to Aristotle (384-322 BC), but which is criticized even earlier by Plato (c.427-c.347 BC) in the Sophist, and treats predation in terms of a two-term

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Identity theory of truth

Named by STEWART CANDLISH (in Mind, 1989) and recently attributed to the idealist philosopher Francis Herbert Bradley (1846-1924). It is also seen as having strong affinities with the views of George Edward Moore (1873-1958) and Bertrand Russell (1872-1970) at one period in the development of their respective philosophies, and possibly with that of Gottlob Frege (1848-1925). The theory says that the truth

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Immanuel Kant

Ideas – Although all knoqledge begins with experience, it does not all arise out of experience. – Knowledge of an orderly world is made possible through the complementary activities of the senses and the mind. – The matter of our experience is due to our senses and its form is contributed by the mind.

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Immaterialism

Name coined by George Berkeley (1685-1753) for his own philosophy, now more usually called subjective idealism. Berkeley’s choice of the term was to emphasize his own view that matter does not exist, but in calling his opponents (Rene Descartes (1596-1650), John Locke (1632-1704), and so on) materialists he was using ‘materialist’ in an unusually weak sense. Descartes and others did indeed

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Principle of the impossibility of a gambling system

Principle that a properly defined collective (see frequency theory of probability) will be random in a sense that makes it impossible to construct a system for predicting results with any greater probability than would be possible without the system. The principle was named by the German mathematician and philosopher Richard von Mises(1883-1953). The key condition is

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Improbabilism

Somewhat bizarre name occasionally given to the view that the scientist should look for the most improbable hypothesis, because it will be the easiest to refute, if false, but the most significant to accept if it survives testing. Improbabilism is associated especially with Karl Raimund Popper (1902-1994). For him, the only way a hypothesis can be

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Indeterminacy of reference and translation

Willard Van Orman Quine (1908-2000), the American mathematical logician, has claimed that when translating an alien language we construct hypotheses as to what is being said, or what items the words refer to; however, except in a few basic cases, it is impossible in principle to decide conclusively between different hypotheses which differ in ways

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Indeterminism

The contradictory of determinism; that is, the theory that at least some events have no cause. An alternative formulation is that some event could, or might, have been different even if everything in the universe up to the time of its occurrence had been the same. (Here there are problems about the interpretation of ‘could’

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