James Ross

(? - 2010)

Knowledge through what others tell us not only forms a large part of the body of our knowledge but also originates the patterns of appraisal according to which we add beliefs to our present store of knowledge.1 I do not mean merely that what we add is often accepted from persons who have already contributed to our knowledge; beyond that, we have acquired habits of thought, tendencies to suspect and tendencies to approve both other-person-reports and purported perceptions, from our testimonial relationships with others. For instance, who would not hesitate to say he saw a particular acquaintance (John Doe) at a visual distance of half a block, after he had just been told by someone he trusted and someone who ought to have known (e.g., John Doe’s wife) that John Doe had just telephoned from a store two hours travel time away? Yet apart from that report, one might have considered it evident that John Doe was half a block away, just because (ceteris paribus) it looked enough like John Doe; the evidence of our senses can be defeated by the authority we accord to the evidence of testimony.

Mackie examines "the arguments for and against the existence of God carefully and in some detail, taking account both of the traditional concept of God and of the traditional 'proofs' of his existence and of more recent interpretations and approaches". He is fairly comprehensive even though, in my opinion, he misses the best versions of some of the best arguments. He does not, as one would hope, give many arguments that God does not exist, beyond considerations from evil and an implicit one from the supposed human origins of religion.

The attention of philosophers. linguists and literary theorists has been converging on the diverse and intriguing phenomena of analogy of meaning:the different though related meanings of the same word, running from simple equivocation to paronymy, metaphor and figurative language. So far, however, their attempts at explanation have been piecemeal and inconclusive and no new and comprehensive theory of analogy has emerged. This is what James Ross offers here. In the first full treatment of the subject since the fifteenth century, he argues that analogy is a systematic and universal feature of natural languages, with identifiable and law-like characteristics which explain how the meanings of words in a sentence are interdependent. Throughout he contrasts his with classical and medieval views.

Mistakes about necessity, possibility, counterpossibility and impossibility distort the notions of being and creation.1 Recently such errors cluster in the understanding of quantified modal logic (QML), a device that was for a while thought especially promising for metaphysics.2 Time has told a different story. The underlying modal platonism is gratuitous, without explanatory force and conflicts with the religion it is often used to explain. There are things to consider here that go beyond diagnosing mistakes.3..

The notion of rational certainty[1] had developed a long way in four decades. Many now recognize that even to do science we characteristically claim rational certainty where we lack supporting proof of our own, have not engaged in some balancing of evidence, and have not even undertaken any articulate inquiry. Many further recognize that rational reliance is notably voluntary[2]and that our feelings, especially refined feelings, have indispensable roles in determining our willing reliances and in sustaining them. Scientists, and ordinary people, judiciously sidestep the Lockean principle that one`s degree of commitment ought not exceed the evidence one has for it, realizing that Locke's idea supposed a social system of knowing that does not exist even science, much less in the rest of life and around the most important beliefs of life.

Scotus’ natural theology has distinctive claims: (i) that we can reason demonstratively to the necessary existence and nature of God from what is actually so; but not from imagined situations, or from conceivability-to-us; rather, only from the possibility logically required for what we know actually to be so; (ii) that there is a univocal transcendental notion of being; (iii) that there are disjunctive transcendental notions that apply exclusively to everything, like ‘contingent/necessary,’ and such that the inferior cannot have a case unless the superior does; (iv) that an a priori demonstration of the existence of God is impossible because there is nothing explanatorily prior to the divine being, and so, reasoning must be a posteriori, from the real dependences among things we perceive to the possibility of an absolutely First Being (The First Principle); (v) that such a being cannot be possible without existing necessarily; and (vi) that the First Being (God) is simple, omni-intelligent, free (spontaneous), omnipotent and, positively infinite;[1] and moreover, (vii) that there is a formal distinction, that is more than a distinction within our concepts or definitions, among the divine attributes. He makes that first point obvious throughout his several treatments, that one cannot reliably reason from conceptual consistency for us to the real and formal possibility or necessity of something; one must reason only to those necessities that are conditions of the possibility of what is known to be actual. The schema of the reasoning is, in a word, that “only the existence of God can make an effect even possible”[2]. Thus, it is explicitly incorrect to classify him along with St Anselm, Descartes and Leibniz, among those who reason a priori to the being of God[3]. He characteristically and deftly argues by indirect proof. He supposes the opposite of his intended conclusion and deduces a contradiction between that supposition and certain self-evident, or previously proved propositions, thus, getting his own conclusion by using the principle that whatever entails the denial of what is already known to be so, is false and its opposite is true,[4] “si negatur negatio, ponitur affirmatio.”[5] He also uses the argument form, “ if ‘p’ is not necessary, then ‘not-p’ is possible”..

This paper enlarges the analogy of meaning doctrine to show that it is a general, law-like linguistic phenomenon, and not peculiar to philosophy. The theory of forms, considered as active, repeatable, intelligible structures of things (accessible as such to intelligent beings alone), is basic to ground the sciences of nature and to an account of knowledge. Aquinas’s accounts of real natures, universals, natural and angelic things, causation, abstraction, knowledge, etc. are grounded in the theory of forms. The theory of forms can be adapted to discern and even invent intelligible structures; thus we can account for real and common natures. Structures that are explanatory of the behavior of things, and are not themselves reductively explicable in terms of their own material components, are the constitutive structures of things and processes. There are real common natures of both things and processes, but ‘being common’ is the resultant of the physicalmultiplication of repeatable (because receivable) intelligible structure. Thus the commonness of a nature, like being human or being a chicken, is not antecedentto the individuals, as Plato thought, but consequent upon them.