Agnosticism

Any view claiming that knowledge is unobtainable in a given area, whether merely in practice or (and more usually) in principle too. Term invented by Thomas Henry Huxley (1825-1895) in 1869. In religious matters, agnosticism should be distinguished from atheism (the view that there is no god), though it sometimes includes the view that sentences like ‘There is

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Voluntarism

Any of a number of doctrines emphasizing the existence, nature, or role of the will; whether a cosmic will, as with Artur Schopenhauer (1788-1860), or (more commonly, and also including Schopenhauer) the human will. Such doctrines may emphasize the role of the will in our thinking or acquisition of knowledge, or the reality of

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Vitalism (17TH-19TH CENTURIES)

Any of various views insisting, in contrast to mechanism, that life involves a special principle and cannot be explained in terms of physical and chemical properties alone. The theory has its origins in the classification of compounds in 1675 by the French chemist Nicolas Lemery (1645-1715). He considered them as animal, vegetable or mineral according

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Vienna circle

Properly Der Wiener Kreis, a group of philosophers working in Vienna in the 1920s who originated logical positivism. Its leading members included: Moritz Schlick (1882-1936), Rudolf Carnap (1891-1970), Otto Neurath (1882-1945), Herbert Feigl (1902-1988), Kurt Godel (1906-1978), Friedrich Waismann (1896-1959); with Carl Gustav Hempel (1905-1997) and Hans Reichenbach (1891-1953) as associates in Berlin and Alfred Jules Ayer (1910-1989) in England, and Karl Raimund Popper (1902-1994)

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Vicious circle principle

Principle introduced by Bertrand Russell (1872-1970) as a basis for the ramified theory of types. It reads: ‘Whatever involves all of a collection must not be one of that collection’; or ‘If, provided a certain collection had a total, it would have members only definable in terms of that total, then the said collection has no total.’

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Verifiability (or verification) principle

Principle that to be meaningful a sentence or proposition must be either verifiable by means of the five senses or a tautology of logic. The verifiability might be required in practice or (more usually) in principle, and might need to be conclusive (strong verifiability) or could be merely partial (weak verifiability). Mathematical sentences are

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Utilitarianism

Any of a variety of views all of which are consequentialist or teleological, being distinguished from other forms of consequentialism (if any) by saying that the consequence to be pursued is the maximization of good. This maximization may refer to the greatest total good or the greatest average good, but the slogan ‘greatest good of the

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Use theories of meaning

Theories springing mainly from Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951), that the meaning of a word or sentence is to be sought in its use, not in its correspondence to some entity (as naming and correspondence theories of meaning in general imply). The use in question normally means actual usage, but may also refer to an alleged correct usage; or the meaning of

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Universalism

Term used -usually in its adjectival forms: universalist(ic) – as a contrast term to egoism and altruism when referring to utilitarianism and similar topics. It is summed up in the slogan of Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832), ‘Everyone to count for one and no-one for more than one’. Philosophy Universality Main article: Universality (philosophy) In philosophy, universality is the notion that universal facts can be

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Principle of the uniformity of nature

A claim that may be offered as a grounding for the INDUCTIVE PRINCIPLE, though it is not always distinguished from the principle itself. It may be crudely formulated as ‘Nature is uniform’, or ‘The future will resemble the past’, or – in a more refined version like that given under inductive principle – with

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Simple theory of types

Theory developed by Bertrand Russell (1872-1970) to deal with paradoxes like his paradox of classes: is the class of all classes that are not members of themselves a member of itself? If yes, no; if no, yes. Russell said there is no such class. Classes (and also properties) cannot all be lumped together, but form a hierarchy.

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Ramified theory of types

For the simple theory, which Frank Plumpton Ramsey (1903-1930) separated out from the ramified theory, properties of objects are of type one, properties of type one properties are of type two, and so on. The ramified theory further classifies properties of each type into orders. A first-order type n+1 property is a property of things of type

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Theory of truth (1935)

Semantic concept formalized by the Polish-American mathematician and logician Alfred Tarski (1902-1983), although other thinkers had previously discussed the idea. Truth theory concerns the truth-values of sentence structures in various formal logical languages. Tarski suggested a table by which these values could be determined (although he was less sure about whether the same rules

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Theory of tropisms (C. 1912)

Proposed by Jacques Loeb (1859-1924), a physiologist and physician who was associated with the Rockefeller Institute in New York. The concept that all the activities of animals and humans are determined by tropisms, just as plant movements are determined by tropisms. Loeb believed that matters of the mind and inner life will ultimately be

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Tristram Shandy paradox (1759)

Named after a fictional character created by English author Lawrence Sterne (1713-1768). Shandy finds that in two years of writing he has covered two days of his autobiography and doubts whether he will ever complete the work. However, even at that poor rate he could finish the work provided that he had an infinite

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Trialism

Term introduced by John Cottingham for an alternative to the usual interpretation of Rene Descartes (1596-1650) as a dualist of mind of body for whom all phenomena involving thought or consciousness belong to mind and all those involving extension belong to body. The trialist interpretation keeps the two substances of mind and body, but introduces a

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Transcendental idealism

Form of idealism espoused by Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), who called himself a transcendental idealist but an empirical realist. He meant, roughly, that what we experience can only be representations, not things in themselves, of which we can know nothing except that they must exist in order to ground the representations. The idealism is ‘transcendental’ because we are forced

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Trace theory of memory

Theory that if we are correctly said to remember some fact or event (as against relearning it, guessing it, and so on) there must be some physiologically identifiable trace in the brain which carried the information in question right through from the time when we first learnt it. The trace need not be a

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Three laws of thought

Traditional name for the laws of identity, contradiction and excluded middle, regarded as being particularly basic to thinking. The three laws are no longer singled out in quite this way. The law of excluded middle is subject to dispute (and also to a variant form, the law of bivalence), and even the law of contradiction has received

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Third man argument

One of a group of arguments presented by Plato (c.427-c.347 BC) in his dialogue Parmenides (p.131e-3a) in apparent criticism of Plato’s theory of forms. Briefly, the argument might be put as follows. If a man is made to be what he is by participating in a Platonic Form (though Greek did not distinguish small and capital letters), then another

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