Grant Gillett

Truth and knowledge are conceptually related and there is a way of construing both that implies that they cannot be solely derived from a description that restricts itself to a set of scientific facts. In the first section of this essay, I analyse truth as a relation between a praxis, ways of knowing, and the world. In the second section, I invoke the third thing—the objective reality on which we triangulate as knowing subjects for the purpose of complex scientific endeavours like medical science and clinical care. Such praxes develop robust methods of “keeping in touch” with disease and illness. An analysis drawing on philosophical semantics motivates the needed account of meaning and truth and underpins the following argument: the formulation and dissemination of knowledge rests on language; language is selective in what it represents in any given situation; the praxes of a given culture are based on this selectivity; but human health and illness involve whole human beings in a human life-world; therefore, medical knowledge should reflectively transcend, where required, biomedical science towards a more inclusive view. Parts three and four argue that a post-structuralist account of the human subject can avoid both scientism and idealism or unconstrained relativism

In European philosophical psychology, the work of Jacques Lacan has exerted a great deal of influence but it has received little attention from analytic philosophers. He is famous for the view that the unconscious is a repository of influences arising from language and the meanings it captures, but the presentation of his ideas is sometimes perplexing and impenetrable and its conceptual links with analytic philosophers like Frege and Wittgenstein are not easily discerned. In fact, there are a number of such links and they are worth pursuing for those interested in language, mind, and the unconscious. If we explore Lacan's claim about the link between signification and the tuchè (the encounter with the real) we find that the mental content of the subject is essentially tied to the external world both causally and linguistically. The means of tying the two together arise in the context of human interactions and therefore are charged with personal and emotive content as well as the semantic content with which we are normally concerned in philosophy of language. When we pursue the implications of his view it becomes plausible both that the unconscious is structured like a language and that language borrows much of its meaning and significance to a subject from the interpersonal medium through which it has been inscribed on that subject. His approach is therefore illuminating both for linguistics (especially psycholinguistics) and for the psychology of the unconscious.

The Snark is an intentional object. I examine the general philosophical characteristics of thoughts of objects from the perspective of Husserl’s, hyle, noesis, and noema and show how this meets constraints of opacity, normativity, and possible existence as generated by a sensitive theory of intentionality. Husserl introduces terms which indicate the normative features of intentional content and attempts to forge a direct relationship between the norms he generates and the actual world object which a thought intends. I then attempt to relate Husserl’s account to Fregean insights about the sense and reference of a term. Neither Husserl nor Frege suggest plausible routes to a naturalistic account of intentionality and I turn to Wittgenstein to provide a naturalistic reading of the crucial terms involved in the analysis of intentional content. His account is normative in a way required by both Husserl and Frege and yet manages a kind of Aristotelian naturalism which avoids crude biologism.

The idea of cultural evolution, coined by Daniel Dennett, suggests we might be able to formulate a Darwinian type of explanation for the adaptive 'tricks' we learn as human beings. The proposed explanation makes use of the idea of memes. That idea is examined and related to semantic units linked to the terms in a natural language. It is agreed with Dennett that these are of pivotal significance in understanding the structure of human cognition. The alternative is then explored to the chaos of worddemons that Dennett appeals to in explaining why and how we think and enter into discursive relations. Beginning with certain thoughts about language games the essay moves on to consider the relations of power and knowledge that shape discursive reality and explain our subjectivities and actions. This leads to a sketch of Foucaultian theory as an advance in the philosophy of mind required to move beyond fairly gestural accounts of psychological explanation to be found in the standard biologically motivated approaches.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology 9.2 (2002) 123-125 [Access article in PDF] The Self as Relatum in Life and Language Grant Gillett THE STUDY REPORTED by van Staden is extremely interesting to any psychological theorist influenced by Jacques Lacan because of Lacan's insistence that the unconscious is not only structured like a language but actually reflects and is produced by linguistic interactions between the subject and others.The distinction he draws, on the basis of Frege's analysis of logical and grammatical structure, is not straightforwardly evident on a superficial inspection of the sentences concerned. It is also less clear than the agent-patient or subject-object distinction that one might look for on the basis of considering the action being performed. van Staden makes both of these points in the course of illustrating the relevant deep grammatical property on which the study turns. In doing so he engages with the subtle work on subject and object by Strawson (1959) who was one of the first, in the "descriptive metaphysics" of Individuals, to explore the resonance between what we might call (after Frege) "logical grammar" and the deep metaphysical structure of our thought. Strawson noted that the position of grammatical subject in a sentence was typically occupied by a particular or individual substance rather than the accident or property of a substance so that the subject predicate structure of language reflects a basic feature of our world picture whereby the world is seen to be populated by particular objects that instance universal features.Chomsky is the other player whose thought is important in this area in that he argues that we have an innate sense of deep structure, which allows us to disambiguate any sentence so as to reveal the state of affairs that is being represented. Thus we discern that what is denoted by "John loves Mary" is the same thought as that conveyed by "Mary is loved by John." van Staden focuses on something more general—the deep structure that expresses semantic relations or positions. This is not the same as the agent or the simply grammatical subject and van Staden calls it the owner of the relation involved as distinct from the accident of that relation. The terms are well chosen because ownership is a term a la mode in postmodern thought to express the relationship of a human being to the events and attributes associated with him or her. When we look at this subtle grammatological or semantic feature of language we see that the linguistic feature in question is the kind of thing that could easily be overlooked were it not for a post-Fregean analysis of the type van Staden offers.The content that van Staden identifies in relation to what is signified or represented by an utterance is difficult to characterize. It is not what Frege would call logical content in that it does not contribute to the truth value of any of the propositions concerned. It is also problematic to call it psychological content because it is not part of the conscious message conveyed by the utterance. Nevertheless, the study concerned raises [End Page 123] the possibility that it is psychic in a very significant way, which is best approached by considering the relationships between language and the unconscious.Chomsky is regarded as having defined a number of linguistic operations that take propositional or meaningful content and transform it into the form in which it is uttered. The relevant cognitive operations are usually regarded as being performed by the cognitive unconscious, which in some sense applies the rules of grammar to yield well-formed utterances on the basis of speaker intentions. In any event, nobody would seriously question the idea that there are unconscious operations that underpin the production of grammatically structured utterances.If we add to this the possibility that a more dynamic aspect to the unconscious has a role to play in the semantic content of our utterances, then a fruitful line of thought begins to emerge. The dynamic unconscious has to do with self-image and those influences that form the psyche...

The aim of this paper was to explore the issue of consent when considering the use of a life saving but not necessarily restorative surgical intervention for severe traumatic brain injury. A previous study has investigated the issue amongst 500 healthcare workers by using a two-part structured interview to assess opinion regarding decompressive craniectomy for three patients with varying injury severity. A visual analogue scale was used to assess the strengths of their opinions both before and after being shown objective outcome data. Opinions were assessed in a number of scenarios, one of which was that the participants themselves were the injured party. The implication, which was clearly stated, was whether they would provide consent for the procedure to be performed. The study demonstrated that participants were relatively risk aversive in regards to survival with severe disability especially when the injury was severe and there was high probability of that outcome occurring. This finding was not however universal and a minority of participants would provide consent even when the possibility of survival with severe disability was very high. The obvious difficulty comes when considering consent in patients who are unable to express their wishes. In order to address this issue we propose a model of consent based on a balance of the various factors that seem to be of material relevance. These include the severity of the injury, the willingness or otherwise to accept survival with severe disability and the willingness to “risk” the possibility of an unacceptable outcome in order to achieve an acceptable outcome

Euripides’ Alcestis (1959) raises the issue of ethical duties within families and exposes the romantic postures and rhetoric that can dominate such discussions. Should anybody be asked to sacrifice themselves or even undergo significant health risks for members of their own family? (An issue that is also relevant in considering our duties to future generations in terms of the earth we leave to them.) The issue that is dramatized to a heroic level in Alcestis arises in live organ and tissue donation within a family and challenges the idea that families should be trusted to sort out solutions that they can all live with. Alcestis intensifies the debate because the sacrifice of one life for another is its topic but, in doing so, it exposes many traps lying in wait for ethicists and medical jurists who boldly enter such debates (where emotions create shifting ground on which angels fear to tread).

Libet's experiments, supported by a strict one-to-one identity thesis between brain events and mental events, have prompted the conclusion that physical events precede the mental events to which they correspond. We examine this claim and conclude that it is suspect for several reasons. First, there is a dual assumption that an intention is the kind of thing that causes an action and that can be accurately introspected. Second, there is a real problem with the method of timing the mental events concerned given that Libet himself has found the reports of subjects to be unreliable in this regard. Third, there is a suspect assumption that there are such things as timable and locatable mental and brain events accompanying and causing human behaviour. For all these reasons we reject the claim that physical events are prior to and explain mental events

Bioethical debates such as those surrounding the manipulation of human embryos are often based on metaphysical assumptions that lack a foundation in the natural sciences. In this paper we support a gradualist position whereby the embryo progressively takes on the form and associated ethical significance of a human being. We support this position by introducing a concept of biological structure or form to show how the gradualist position has its metaphysical foundations in modern biology. The conceptual basis for form and structure are outlined and their compatibility with and basis in current empirical biology is demonstrated by some recent advances in our understanding of the processes of development from single cell to organism. We then briefly explore the ethical significance of accepting a form or structure based conception of biology for the status of the early embryo.

Concepts are basic elements of thought. Piaget has a conception of the nature of concepts as informational or computational operations performed in an inner milieu and enabling the child to understand the world in which it lives and acts. Concepts are, however, not merely logico?mathematical but are also conceptually linked to the mastery of language which itself involves the appropriate use of words in social and interpersonal settings. In the light of Vygotsky's work on the social and interactive nature of children's thinking and the nature of language as an essentially public currency of rule?governed signs, we are led to reconstrue conceptual mastery as the acquisition of an interactive and interpersonal repertoire of tools which introduces the child to the world of those who educate it. In this way we come to see the elements of mind as constitutively involving that activity in which the determinants of meaning constrain and direct the child's linguistic development

The total longitudinal form view of human beings is a metaphysical view which aims to locate our moral judgements about human embryos in a broader set of attitudes and characterisations. On this basis it has explanatory power and a real function in that it grounds our ethical discussion of embryos in other discourses. Contra Leavitt, this grounding suggests a broader criterion of relevance for metaphysical discussion than asking 'what comes out of' such a discussion for a particular ethical dilemma

Abstract:What is in the best interests of a child, and could that ever include interventions that we might regard as prima facie detrimental to a child’s physical well-being? This question is raised a fortiori by growth attenuation treatments in children with severe neurological disorders causing extreme developmental delay. I argue that two principles that provide guidance in generating a conception of best interests for each individual child yield the right results in such cases. The principles are as follows: thepotentiality principle, whereby every child should be able to develop its potential and is entitled to receive certain help in doing so, and theprinciple of psychosomatic harmony, whereby every human being is entitled to treatment that is appropriate to or enables a life in which mind and body are in tune with each other. These principles indicate a certain response to what we can call Ashley-type cases and admit certain caveats.

There is a marked disparity between medical intuitions and philosophical argument about euthanasia. In this paper I argue that the following objections can be raised. First, medical intuitions are against it and this is an area in which judgement and sensitivity are required in that death is a unique and complex process and the patient has many needs including the need to know that others have not discounted his or her worth. Also, part of the moral constitution of a good doctor is a devotion to the protection and preservation of life whatever reasons are produced to dissuade her. Finally, we do not know what the final events of a person's life might hold