Suchergebnisse

Professor VanDeVeer has given a scrupulously fair account of my defense of noncognitivism (N), and has raised questions which are both searching and stimulating.His most basic criticism is that I fail to demonstrate N—the thesis that the utterance of a moral principle expresses the speaker's moral commitment, but does not affirm or deny that something is the case, and therefore does not result in a statement which is true or false. To provide adequate positive support for N would involve me—so he claims—in complicated problems of the theory of meaning. My reply is that I do, and can, rely on the very theory of meaning which, as Hempel states it, is generally accepted by contemporary philosophers of science, namely that… a sentence makes a cognitively significant assertion, and thus can be said to be either true or false, if and only if either (1) it is analytic or contradictory—in which case it is said to have purely logical meaning or significance—or else (2) if it is capable, at least potentially, of test by experiential evidence—in which case it can be said to have empirical meaning or significance.Given this basic principle (which Hempel says [p. 101] "is not peculiar to empiricism alone"), and given my demonstration that moral principles are neither analytic nor empirical, it follows that they are not cognitively either true or false.

ARE there any connections between epistemological theories and JTXpolitical doctrines? This question is of more than theoretical interest. If such links exist, it follows that concrete political events are influenced, not only directly by political ideologies, but also, at least indirectly, by abstract philosophical beliefs.

Comment: A philosopher clarifies some usages in the Jacob-Flink work on Values and Decisions, and a lawyer-psychologist offers his experience to illuminate Touster's article on Law and Psychology.

Basic concepts in political science have been used in a purely classificatory way ever since Aristotle established the sixfold classification of the forms of government: monarchy, aristocracy, constitutional government, and their respective "perversions": tyranny, oligarchy, democracy. Similarly, a modern writer distinguishes among four types of political systems: the Anglo-American, the Continental European, the pre-industrial (or partially industrial), and the totalitarian. All these are categorical concepts; a political system is either monarchical or not, either of the Anglo-American or of another type. Such key terms as influence, control, authority, power, and freedom also tend to function categorically: one actor either has or lacks power over some activity of another actor; with respect to one actor, another is either free or unfree to act in a certain way.However, concrete political situations exhibit such characteristics to different degrees. Just as the substances we encounter in nature have varying degrees of hardness (rather than being either hard or soft), so a given political system is more, or less, totalitarian (or of the Anglo-American or of the pre-industrial type) than another. The United States and Soviet Russia have at present more power than any other country, and both are perhaps about equally powerful. Soldiers in general have less freedom than civilians, but they have more than prisoners. There can (or there cannot) be equal freedom for all.Since we do make such assertions, the question arises whether it is possible to give them precise empirical meaning. To do so, we must replace such categorical concepts as power and freedom by the corresponding comparative concepts, e.g., "more power than," "as much freedom as," and provide operational definitions for these expressions.

Concrete pol'al situations exhibit such characteristics as power & freedom to diff degrees. It therefore becomes necessary to provide operational definitions for the corresponding comparative concepts: `more power than', `as much freedom as'. The relative extent of actor Y's power action (mean - average) of actor (mean - average) & of X's freedom in this respect is a function of the probability that Y prevents (mean - average) from doing (mean - average) or penalizes him if he does, the degree of X's deprivation in such cases, the scope of X's actions (mean - average) over which Y has power or which Y leaves (mean - average) free to do, & the number of actors (mean - average) over whom Y has power or whose freedom Y limits. Though these diff components vary independently, it is possible under certain conditions to draw them together & to speak of the extent of an actor's total power & total freedom within a group & even of the net amount of his total power (but not of his total freedom). On the other hand, to say that democracy `maximizes freedom' & constitutes the prototype of a `free society' is to use this concept in a normative rather than in a descriptive sense. AA-IPSA.