Eli Hirsch

In Eli Hirsch’s clever and careful Dividing Reality he asks us to consider several strange languages. For example, in the Gricular language there is no word that applies to all and only green things and none that applies to all and only circular things, but there are the three words “gricular,” which applies to anything that is either green or circular, “grincular,” which applies to anything that is either green or not circular, and “ngricular,” which applies to anything that is either circular or not green. Griculese is but one of the strange languages Hirsch explores, but they are all alike in having the same descriptive content as English—anything that can be said in English can be said in the strange languages, and vice versa. For instance, to say that something is green, we can say “it is both gricular and grincular.” Our strong intuition is that these languages are strange—irrational or worse. The challenge is to ground this intuition in some particular feature of the language that makes it defective. The problem is that there seems no good response to this challenge. Hirsch examines many proposals, and rejects every one. Thus he finds himself reaching a conclusion even he finds it difficult to accept. The disturbing conclusion, division relativism by title, is that our strong intuition is misguided—the “strange” languages are just as reasonable as English.

The central topic of this book is the importance of the first-person perspective to a normal human level of rational thought and behavior. It is argued that an “I-blind” being, a being who lacks the capacity to employ the first-person pronoun self-referentially, could not possibly be fully rational; nor could she acquire normal knowledge of physical reality. The meaning of the first-person pronoun is shown to have a special bearing in the anomalous context of split-brain patients and generalizations of that context. Parfit’s suggestion that a better language might eliminate or revise the concept of personal identity and the use of the first-person pronoun is criticized on the grounds that the first-person perspective must remain as it is, because the capacity to employ the first person is a necessary condition for a language to be suitable for rational beings. It is argued further that, contrary to Lewis and Sider, it may be difficult to find any other necessary condition for a language to be suitable for rational beings. The book then moves into a discussion of the self’s perspective on other selves and advances the rather bold claim that the self’s first-person perspective must necessarily include the belief that there are other selves, this belief constituting a (metaphysically) necessary condition for sanity, that is, for being a full-fledged person. This claim opens up a number of issues related to skepticism about other selves, and the final chapter explores a connection between facing skepticism and facing death.

The main topic of this paper is the connection between facing death and a special kind of solitariness. Heidegger talks about the kind of anxiety, the feeling of uncanniness, of _Unheimlichkeit_ (not-at-homeness), that must attend coming to grips with mortality. At one point Heidegger refers to this feeling as “existential solipsism,” which is evidently an allusion to a special kind of solitariness. When Heidegger uses this expression, he puts “solipsism” in scare quotes. He implies that there is a distinctive kind of uncanny solitariness that attends the facing of death, but he does not suggest that facing death implicates literal solipsism, that is, the denial or doubt that there is a reality external to consciousness. One claim in the present paper is that the notion of existential solipsism can be associated with a phenomenon that can be called a “shift to subjectivity,” in which one’s focus is on one’s representations rather than on what is represented. But can there actually be a connection between literal solipsism and facing death? Two philosophers who credit such a connection are Thomas Nagel and J. J. Valberg. The present paper also attempts to explain the views of these philosophers.

In previous work the author suggested that many ontological disputes can be viewed as merely verbal, in that each side can be charitably interpreted as speaking the truth in its own language. Critics have objected that it is more plausible to view the disputants as speaking the same language, perhaps even a special philosophy-room language, sometimes called Ontologese. This chapter suggests a different kind of deflationary move, in a way more extreme (possibly more Carnapian) than the author’s previous suggestion. The chapter supposes we encounter an ontological dispute between two sides, the A-side and the B-side, and we assume that they are speaking the same language so that (at least) one of them is mistaken (perhaps the common language is Ontologese). The author’s suggestion is that we can introduce by stipulation two languages, one for each side, such that in speaking the A-side stipulated language we capture whatever facts might be expressed in the A-side’s position, and in speaking the B-side stipulated language we capture whatever facts might be expressed in the B-side’s position. In this way we get whatever facts there might be in this ontological area without risking falsehood. A further part of the argument consists in explaining why the stipulation maneuver applies to questions of ontology but not to questions of mathematics (such as the Goldbach conjecture). One basic point is that mathematics has application to contingencies in a way that ontology doesn’t.

Carnapian tolerance is practiced when an issue is viewed as “merely a matter of choosing a language.” This chapter distinguishes between three kinds of cases in which this attitude might show up, and associates these cases with a distinction between three increasingly problematical degrees of tolerance. In the first degree each side has the concepts needed to charitably interpret the other side; in the second degree an expansion of concepts is required; the third degree is verificationism. The chapter defends the first degree, is tentative about the second degree, and is opposed to the third degree.

In this book Eli Hirsch identifies and explores a `new' philosophical problem. Hirsch calls this new problem `the division problem'. This is defined as the problem of explaining why our language divides up reality in one way rather than another, or what the rational basis is for our language to contain certain kinds of general words rather than others. Hirsch shows that a language can be constructed which describes reality in ways we would find absurdly irrational, for example by classifying normally disparate items under the same general term. Having demonstrated that this newly identified problem is in fact a serious one which cannot be easily solved or brushed aside, Hirsch offers his own suggestions for a possible solution.

In this book, Eli Hirsch focuses on identity through time, first with respect to ordinary bodies, then underlying matter, and eventually persons. These are linked at various points with other aspects of identity, such as the spatial unity of things, the unity of kinds, and the unity of groups. He investigates how our identity concept ordinarily operates in these respects. He also asks why this concept is so cental to our thinking and whether we can justify seeing the world in terms of such a concept. This is the revised and updated edition of a hardback published in 1982.

Timothy Williamson has argued that the safety condition on knowledge places certain limits on iterations of knowledge. But at the same time, Williamson claims that interpersonal iterations of knowledge aren’t so restricted as to rule out ordinary cases. The present authors show that Williamson’s discussion misconstrues the challenge to iterated interpersonal knowledge. The proper argument against interpersonal iterations is rather what the authors call a third-person argument that does not share the major weaknesses of the argument Williamson considers. The challenge that the safety condition poses to interpersonal iterations of knowledge therefore seems robust, even in ordinary cases. But the authors also identify an underlying assumption that their argument relies on, and they show that Williamson’s original argument as well as his argument against intrapersonal iterations of knowledge rely on analogous assumptions. In assessing the extent of the clash between safety and iterated knowledge, the focus must be on the viability of these assumptions.

What I call the Similarity Principle says that a word ought to denote a class of things that are more similar to each other than to other things. A closely related formulation, which I’ll here take to be equivalent, is that a word ought to denote a class of things having something in common with each other that they don’t have in common with other things. The Similarity Principle is an example of an intuitively rational constraint on the lexicon of a language. If we imagine such strange words as “gricular” or “carple”, we feel intuitively that there would be something absurd about having such words in our language, and one explanation of this—indeed the explanation that is likely first to come to a person’s mind in some rudimentary form—is that these words violate the Similarity Principle.

In the work of both Matti Eklund and John Hawthorne there is an influential semantic argument for a maximally expansive ontology that is thought to undermine even modest forms of quantifier variance. The crucial premise of the argument holds that it is impossible for an ontologically "smaller" language to give a Tarskian semantics for an ontologically "bigger" language. After explaining the Eklund-Hawthorne argument (in section I), we show this crucial premise to be mistaken (in section II) by developing a Tarskian semantics for a mereological universalist language within a mereological nihilist language (a case which we, and Eklund and Hawthorne, take as representative). After developing this semantics we step back (in section III) to discuss the philosophical motivations behind the Eklund- Hawthorne argument’s demand for a semantics. We ultimately conclude that quantifier variantists can meet any demand for a semantics that might reasonably be imposed upon them.