Christopher Hookway

After describing some of the ways in which pragmatist philosophers have employed different views about how to do philosophy, this paper explains how their different philosophical goals determine how they actually do philosoophy. We explain and discuss two aspects of Peirce’s work that are relevant to the ways in which he does philosophy: his remarks about the use of “literary prose” in philosophy and his valuable discussion of the “ethics of notation.” This is grounded in view of how philosophical writing should be carried out. We then discuss Peirce’s reasons for revising the model of representation that he adopted: he began by formulating philosophical issues about representation in terms of belief, but changed (around 1903) to give a central role to, first, judgment and, then, assertion. The paper concludes by discussing how these developments affected the development of his pragmatism.

: T.L. Short's book argues that Peirce's early theory of signs was flawed, and that the development of his mature theories required a new start and the rejection of some fundamental doctrines from the earlier view. While agreeing that Peirce's view of signs changed and agreeing on the new developments that were of most significance, I express some doubts about Short's diagnosis of why such changes were required. I argue that the changes were required, not by internal inconsistencies in the earlier position, but rather by the need to come up with an adequate account of the role of experience in cognition

The paper offers an explanation of what reasons for belief are, following Paul Grice in focusing on the roles of reasons in the goal-directed activity of reasoning. Reasons are particularly salient considerations that we use as indicators of the truth of beliefs and candidates for belief. Reasons are distinguished from enabling conditions by being things that we should be able to attend to in the course of our reasoning, and in assessing how well our beliefs are supported. The final section argues that epistemic virtues have a role in enabling us to identify reasons and explores this by reference to the example of being observant.

This volume, derived from the Royal Institute of Philosophy 1992 conference, brings together some of the leading figures in the burgeoning field of cognitive science to explore current and potential advances in the philosophical understanding of mind and cognition. Drawing on work in psychology, computer science and artificial intelligence, linguistics and philosophy, the papers tackle such issues as concept acquisition, blindsight, rationality and related questions as well as contributing to the lively debates about connectionism and neural networks. The collection as a whole reflects the theoretical and methodological dynamism of this interdisciplinary field.