Pascal’s wager

Argument for adopting a divinely favoured way of life -named after French philosopher, mathematician, physicist and pious gambler Blaise Pascal (1623-1662) who stated it in his Pensees (§233) – but apparently stemming from Islam. One statement of it (not Pascal’s) is this. Let the utility of a policy be the gain it promises multiplied by the

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Principle of perfection

Also called the principle of the best. Principle of German philosopher and mathematician Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716) that the actual world is the best of all possible worlds. Bertrand Russell (1872-1970) argued that Leibniz did not fully distinguish this principle from that of sufficient reason. Source: B Russell, A Critical Exposition of the Philosophy of Leibniz (1900), §§14-15 Term

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Performative (or ditto) theory of truth

Theory developed by English philosopher Peter Frederick Strawson (1919- ) in and after 1949 from Frank Ramsey’s redundancy theory of truth, and in opposition to the correspondence theory. To call something true is to perform the act of agreeing with it, endorsing it, appraising it and so on. Like the emotive theory of truth this is a speech act theory, and like

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Personalism

The view that persons, divine or human, play the primary role in the structure of the universe. Personalism exists in a wide variety of forms, and is closely related to idealism (the term personal idealism is often used) or to theism. What they have in common is that the notion of a person is treated as

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Perspective realism

Form of realism holding that the nature of an object depends on its relations to other objects. For example, a penny not only looks round from one perspective and elliptical from another but is round with respect to one and elliptical with respect to the other, no perspective having any special privilege. This enables us to

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Perspectivism

Theory associated especially with Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (1844-1900), José Ortega y Gasset (1883-1955), who named it, Edward Sapir (1884-1939), BENJAMIN LEE WHORF (1897-1941), Willard Van Orman Quine (1908-2000) and Thomas Samuel Kuhn (1922-1996). Perspectivism says that there can be radically different and incommensurable conceptual schemes (ultimate ways of looking at the world) or perspectives, one of which we must (consciously or unconsciously)

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Psychophysical parallelism

Doctrine that mental and physical events are of entirely different kinds, so that while mental events can cause other mental events and physical events can cause other physical events they cannot cause each other but occur in parallel series. If I touch a hot stove, feel a pain, withdraw my hand, and decide to

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Redundancy theory of truth

Also called the no-truth theory. Influenced by the difficulties in formulating a correspondence theory of truth, Frank Plumpton Ramsey (1903-1930) proposed in 1927 that to call a proposition true is to do no more than assert the proposition. One objection is that this seems too thin a theory to cover all our uses of the notion of

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Regularity theory of causation

Theory – primarily associated with, and originated by, David Hume (1711-1776) – which analyzes causation in terms of nothing but regular sequence (together, in Hume’s case, with priority in time and contiguity in time and, where relevant, space). The basic form of the theory says that one event causes another if it is followed by it

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Relevance logics

Logical systems based on the principle that logical consequence, or entailment, only holds between propositions which are relevant to each other. They were developed, notably by Alan Ross Anderson and Nuel D Belnap (1920- ), as a reaction to the claim of Clarence Irving Lewis and Cooper H. Langford (in Symbolic Logic (1932), chapter

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Theory of relevant alternatives

Theory used in defending fallibilism against the charge that it leads to skepticism. Where P and Q are propositions, P counts for this purpose as an alternative to Q if it is inconsistent with Q, and counts as a relevant alternative if to know that Q we must also know that not-P. Variant formulations exist, but the

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Reliabilism

Theory that a belief can be called justified if it is formed by a process that is reliable, that is normally produces true beliefs. This is an externalist account of justification if it is not insisted that the believer be aware of the method’s reliability. This appeal to reliability may also contribute to an

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Representationalism

Also called representativism or representative theories of perception, memory, thinking, and so on. Any theory holding that these activities (perception is usually meant) involve the existence of mental objects (such as images or ‘sense-data’) which facilitate the activity by representing the external object. We may be said to perceive the representative instead of perceiving

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Resemblance theories of universals

Some nominalists dispense with substantive universals (see Platonism) in treating the one over many principle by saying that what unites a group of objects of the same kind is that they resemble one of their number taken as a standard. Objections to this are that resemblance itself seems to be an eliminable liversal, and so does the

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Retributivism

Theory of punishment whereby all or part of the purpose of punishment is the infliction of pain or disadvantage on an offender which is in some sense commensurate with his offence and which is inflicted independently of reform or deterrence. For a weak theory the commensurate amount need not be inflicted but may be,

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Rule utilitarianism

Also called restricted or indirect utilitarianism. Version of utilitarianism which says (in its main formulation) that our duty is not to aim for that act which will produce in fact the best overall consequences (because of the impossibility or impracticability of predicting these) but to follow that rule which would have the best consequences if generally

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Absence paradox (19TH CENTURY)

A source of humor used in music halls, but possibly ancient. No person is ever present, because he is either not in Vladivostok or alternatively is not in Patagonia, so he must be somewhere else. If he is somewhere else, he certainly is not here. This argument understands a relative adverb as absolute. Employment

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Absolutism

In philosophy, a contrast to relativism in any of its senses. In its political sense, a description (more frequently than justification) of government without constitutional restrictions. The authority to govern cannot be qualified or restricted, because if it is, whatever restricts it is itself the final power. Historically, one form it has taken has been the

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Abstractionism

View that the mind gets some or all of its concepts by abstracting them from concepts it already has or from experience. For example, one might abstract ‘red’ from a set of experiences, each involving red along with other properties; or (differently) abstract the generic concept ‘animal’ from the already possessed concepts of its

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Act utilitarianism

Also called ‘extreme’ or direct utilitarianism. Original, and ‘official’ form of utilitarianism which says that our duty on any occasion is to act in the way which will produce actual overall consequences better than (or at least as good as) those that any other act open to us would produce. Difficulties in predicting consequences, including

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