School of Historical and Philosophical Studies - Theses
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ItemThe self and political theory( 1999)This thesis is an attempt to analyse some of the connections of political ontology to normative political thought. Part one consists of an interpretation and defence of three pieces of political ontology generated by the later work of Michel Foucault: power, agency and autonomy. Chapter one clarifies Foucault's account of power and argues that the most interesting feature of this account for political philosophy is his account of power as influence. Chapter two discusses the first of two major objections to Foucault's work - his lack of an adequate conception of agency - and argues that Foucault's account of the subject is able to deal with this objection. In chapter three I develop a conception of autonomy from Foucault's later work that is able to answer the second major objection to Foucault's work, that it is 'normatively confused'. In part two I apply Foucault's conception of power and autonomy to three central areas of political, thought: communitarianism, Rawlsian political liberalism and equality of condition. In chapter four I analyse and reject the communitarian account of embeddedness in favour of a Foucaultian account. Chapter five discusses Rawls' autonomy based political liberalism and argues that his idea of public reason is too narrow to address the types of constraint to autonomy outlined in part one. On the basis of these conclusions I argue for the first of two theses of justice - the principle of political autonomy, which expands the scope of public reason. Chapter six is a discussion of competing metrics of equality of condition. I argue that the account of equality that is compatible with the principle of political autonomy and with the ontology of part one, is 'capability equality', which focuses on the capabilities that a person is able to attain. I conclude with a discussion of what a theory of justice that incorporated these ontological and normative insights might be like.
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ItemThe self and communicative theory : a transcendental perspective( 1996)This thesis aims to contribute to the development of communicative theory by advancing a theory of the self sufficient to support intersubjectivity and meet the conditions required for communicative rationality, communicative ethics and communicative reason. The conclusion, which follows a transformed transcendental approach, supports the theories of intersubjectivity advanced by Jurgen Habermas, Karl-Otto Apel and Ludwig Wittgenstein evaluated against the background of a detailed analysis of the theories of Immanuel Kant. The exposition commences with a discussion of the origins of communicative theory in the writings of Kant and Charles Sanders Peirce and an outline of the development of the theory by Apel and Habermas. In this discussion the central issue of the thesis is identified as the failure of communicative theory to produce an adequate theory of the self as the subject of communicative transactions. Then follows a discussion of the development of the self in the transcendental theory of Kant, first by outlining the modern sense- of the self from the "synthetic unity of apperception" from the Critique of Pure Reason, and then from - the assertion of transcendental freedom from the Critique of Practical Reason. Apel is then discussed as a major proponent of communicative theory, with special attention paid to his linguistic transformation of transcendental philosophy. It is argued that Ape's moves are successful in providing the basis for a linguistically structured intersubjectivity, but that his failure to free himself from a residual transcendental idealism means that his project is ultimately unsuccessful. In order to advance the discussion towards a successful communicative theory incorporating intersubjectivity Apel and Habermas are discussed in relation to George Herbert lead. It is argued that both Mead's view, and his interpretation by Habermas, fail to fully establish intersubjectivity as they retain elements of a Cartesian introspective subjectivity. An alternative approach developed by Charles Taylor is then discussed. Taylor proposes an expressivist view of the self based on inwardness and an orientation to the good. Such a view fails to overcome the incoherence of Cartesian subjectivity, but does establish the importance of the expressive dimension as a key element. of the self. The concluding chapters propose a non-Cartesian self based on a discussion of the late works of Kant, including the Critique of Judgement and the little known Opus Postumum, and the late works of Wittgenstein. The essential elements identified here are communicability - as a transcendental condition for cognition, and the relationship between language and inner experience. -Finally, it is argued that freedom and - imagination, understood in the context of Kant and the late Wittgenstein, are the key elements to a self capable of supporting the intersubjectivity required by communicative theory.
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ItemLogical principles of scientific inference( 1972)In this essay my aim is to explicate and vindicate the method of ampliative inference which constitutes the basis of scientific and, indeed, of all critical and disciplined reasoning.
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ItemWish-fulfilment( 1991)This is an essay in the philosophy of psychoanalysis. It examines the concept of wish-fulfilment, a concept which, according to Freud, threads its way through such otherwise diverse phenomena as dreams, phantasy, hallucinations, delusions, neurotic and psychotic symptoms, art, jokes and religion. The psychoanalytic conception of wish-fulfilment - WFT - is a singular notion quite distinct from what is ordinarily understood by the satisfaction of wish or desire. WFT is distinguished from the ordinary conception and its characteristics are examined. It is necessary to effective WFT that the wish which actuated it be extinguished, that the person wishing comes to believe that the wished for state of affairs obtains, and that that person is, in one of a number of ways, responsible for the generation of the evidence on which the wish-fulfilling beliefs are based. A key contention is that in WFT an agent manufactures evidence in phantasy or symptom or acting out and so on which is then taken to base the wish-fulfilling beliefs. In certain classes of WFT this evidence is manufactured with the intention of gratifying or consoling and, perhaps even of deceiving, oneself. This fact has very significant implications for the structure of mind; it implies, in particular, a splitting or dissociation of mind in which knowledge of one's own agency and beliefs incompatible with the wish-fulfilling beliefs are kept isolated. It is shown that this splitting is closely linked to identification and the impersonation of introjects and that this wish-fulfilling or self-gratifying tendency 0f mind is related to the internalization of maternal, caretaking attitudes. The conditions necessary to effective WFT - including engrossment in, and preoccupation with, the unconscious internal world, primitive belief and the role of intention - are examined in some detail. It is demonstrated that the will cuts very deep indeed and that the maximally intentional cases are the most important and interesting cases of WFT. Several alternative accounts are criticized and WFT is contrasted with self-deception and wishful thinking. WFT is a very important technique for coping with ineluctable desire, but in so far as it constitutes an evasion of life through illusion its consequences are generally baleful.
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ItemThe incommensurability of scientific theories( 1989)Kuhn and Fegerabend argue that successive or rival scientific theories may be incommensurable due to differences in the concepts and language they employ. The terms employed by such theories are unlike in meaning, and even reference, so they may fail to be translatable from one theory into the other. Owing to such semantical differences, statements from one theory neither agree nor disagree with statements from another theory with which it is incommensurable; so the content of such theories cannot be directly compared. As against the incommensurability thesis, the view which will be defended here is that theories are comparable provided they refer to at least some of the same things. In this we follow Scheffler, who notes that statements which vary in meaning may be incompatible if their terms have common reference. But Scheffler adopts a description theory of reference, which leads to excessive referential instability in the transition between conceptually disparate theories. So we follow Putnam instead in adopting a causal theory of reference, which allows stability of reference through conceptual change. However, the causal theory of reference is problematic in its own right, and cannot fully remove the problems raised by the incommensurability thesis. It must be modified to permit the reference of a term to be fixed in more than one way and to allow the possibility of reference change. It must also grant a role to descriptions in fixing the reference of theoretical terms. So while excessive reference change is avoided by adopting a causal theory of reference, the modifications prevent it from ruling out referential variance altogether. In addition, the modified causal theory of reference supports the thesis of translation failure between theories. For it may prove impossible to fix reference within the context of a theory in the same way as the reference of terms used in another theory is fixed. However, failure to translate does not entail content incomparability, for there may be relations of co-reference despite differences in how reference is fixed. Nor does it entail failure to communicate, for the meaning of a term may be understood even if the term cannot be translated into the specific language of a particular theory. The idea of translation failure between theories has been the subject of penetrating criticism by Putnam and Davidson, who argue that the very idea of an untranslatable language is incoherent. We will here defend the notion of translation failure against their arguments. The key elements of this defence are the points that understanding is independent of translation, and that the untranslatability in question is a limited translation failure between theoretical sub-languages within an encompassing background language. At times, the differences between incommensurable theories seem ontological, rather than merely semantical. There is often a hint of the idealist thesis that the world referred to by a theory depends upon the theory itself. It will be shown, however, that the incommensurability thesis is not an idealist rejection of the reality independent of theory. Weaker "constructivist" forms of idealism which grant the existence of a reality independent of theory but take the world referred to by a theory to be a construction will also be criticised.