Douglas Odegard

Locke and Mind-Body Dualism

The word ‘dualism’ can be used to pick out at least four different theories concerning the relationship between mind and body. (1) A mind and a body are two different entities and each is “had” by a man. A man is thus a composite being with two components, one “inner”, the other “outer”. You, for example, are a man and your mind is “inner” in the sense that you alone can reflectively experience yourself thinking, or feeling pain, or seeing colours (or at least that you alone can reflectively experience your own thoughts, feelings and visual experiences). I can in a sense observe you thinking, but only by observing you use your body in certain ways—e.g. to make certain sounds, write certain things, look at the pages of an open book and frown. My “experience” of you thinking (or of your thoughts) is thus not a reflective experience. Your body is “outer”, on the other hand, in the sense that you cannot experience it or its (non-relational) properties in any exclusive way. That is, in whatever sense you can be said to experience your body, someone else can equally be said to experience it.

Two Types of Scepticism

Suppose that a jury in a murder trial brings in a verdict of guilty and one of the jurors still wonders whether the verdict is a good one, although he is not inclined to try to have it reversed. Is his attitude coherent?

Locke as a Fallibilist

Could John Locke defend his view that the knowledge we acquire in intuition and demonstration is infallible, and should he try to defend it? Peter Schouls thinks the project is unviable, and I think Schouls is right. But I also think Locke should not even bother trying. I shall elaborate on the argument that he could not defend the view, indicate why I think he should abandon infallibility, given his other views, and then investigate what he might usefully say about knowledge and certainty if he were persuaded to abandon it.

Morality and Reason

The thirteen papers in Morality, Reason and Truth address various dimensions of the complex relationship between morality and rationality. Most of the papers are new and they are generally at the cutting edge of current research. The collection is a substantial and important contribution to metaethics. The following are the views I found most challenging. Although they do not exhaust the books contents, they are a good sample of its unity, range, and instructive power.

Ignorance and Equiprobability

Keynes introduces three different principles under the single title “the principle of indifference”. The first is Bernoullis princple of non-sufficient reason. If there is no known reason for predicating of our subject one rather than another of several alternatives, then relatively to such knowledge the assertions of each of these alternatives have an equal probability. Thus equal probabilities must be assigned to each of several arguments, if there is an absence of positive ground for assigning unequal ones.

Can a justified Belief Be False

Edmund Gettier objects to analysing knowledge as justified true belief (JTB) on the ground that someone can justifiably infer a true conclusion from a justified false premise and hence not know the conclusions truth, although the conclusion is justified. For instance, someone can justifiably deduce a true pv r from a justified but false p, where he has no justification for the true r.1 Gettiers objection draws on two assumptions: first, that a justified belief can be false; second, that a premise can justify a conclusion even though the premise is false. Some JTB advocates grant the first assumption but deny the second.2 They usually concede the first assumption to protect the respectability of non-deductive inference. The argument is that if evidence e can nondeductively justify the conclusion c, then it must be possible for c to be justified and yet false, since e does not entail c.3 Although the assumption is sound, the argument as it stands fails to show it. But let us set this point aside for the moment.

Anscombe, Sensation and Intentional Objects

Let us use ‘sensation’ such that we can talk about ‘visual sensation’ and ‘auditory sensation’, and such that ‘sensation’ cannot readily be pluralized (cf. ‘intelligence’, ‘imagination’). It then makes sense to talk about the “objects” involved in sensation. For example, if someone sees red, where his seeing red is a case of sensation, then there is an “object” involved in the situation in the sense that we can talk about “what” he sees. One of the enduring problems in philosophy is to try to determine the status of such objects.

Locke and Substance

Two uses of the word “substance” are relevant in connection with John Locke, although he makes no effort to distinguish them. One use is such that a man, a cherry and (a piece of) lead all necessarily count as kinds of substances. That is, “A man is a substance” and “A cherry is a substance” are necessarily true simply in virtue of how “substance” is used. Given that “a man” is used in an ordinary way, the claim that a man is a substance is no more contentious than the claim that a man is human or that a red substance is a substance.