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Snowdon, P. 1990. Persons, animals and ourselves. In The Person and the Human, ed.C. Gill, 83–107. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Totton, A. 1965. A Synopsis of the Siphonophora. London: British Museum.

van Inwagen, P. 1992. Material Beings. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

Reality deflated and minimalized

LLOYD REINHARDT

Truth has been – of course, not without controversy – deflated or minima-lized by the claim that:

P is true if and only if P

says all that we need to know about what truth consists in. Gloss this assaying: there is no more and no less to asserting that a proposition is truethan there is to asserting the proposition. It is not damaging to this claim thatthere is a use of ‘That’s true’ via which one avows agreement with somethingsaid. Deflation suggests as a riposte to those who claim to find difficulties orneed deeper understanding (or what??) with regard to truth: Look here! Youcannot have a difficulty about truth unless you have a difficulty about what itis to assert something. And then you must have a difficulty about what it is toask something, or even to suggest anything. And as John McEnroe often saidto tennis referees: You can’t be serious!!!!!!!!!

Truth and reality are sufficiently cousinly that it should be plausible todeflate and minimalize reality in parallel fashion by holding that:

x is a real F if and only if x is F.

For merely linguistic reasons, one might want to put this more clumsily, by

x is (a real)(real) (really) F if and only if x is F.

In English, this seems natural because of differences among a duck, silk,courage and stumbling. The linguistic nuance that needs to be observed canbe left to the reader. We are inclined (in English) to exploit all three indicatedways of countering claims that something is a decoy, synthetic, bravado ormimed. There are languages, ancient Greek one, Arabic another, with noindefinite article. Moreover, I am told, Greek does not have the subtletiesof adjective versus adverb. Donald Davidson, some years ago, providedreason to treat adverbs as adjectives anyway.

Nuances aside, the gist is that, as Austin (1962: 70) said years ago, with‘real’ the negative ‘wears the trousers’; which means, as suggested, that to saysomething is a real x, really x or really xing is not to attribute any quality

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to an item which the term replacing ‘x’ has not already provided; rather it

is to deny that something under discussion is a toy or a decoy, synthetic orartificial, bravado or rashness and miming or pretence.

Negative trousers come in different styles; they are tailored differentlydepending on x; not all ways of being ‘not a real’, ‘not real’ or ‘not really’

are comfortable on the same legs. Austin noted this when he observed that

while he could find a toy stove and a toy frying pan for his daughter, he couldhardly have found toy gas for the toy stove. When it is claimed or suggested

that some item is dubious as to its reality, one may just say it is not real F, not

really an F or not really F, but typically we go in for specific styles of trousers.Here is a list; it can be left to the reader to note the variations of nouns that

can follow the word which replaces ‘not a real . . . ’, ‘not real . . . ’ or ‘not

really . . . ’:

synthetic____ artificial____ false____ fake____ toy___ decoy____ coun-terfeit____ miming____ pretending to be_____only looks like_____

stuffed______ masquerading as____ phony____ not a proper______

forged______ simulacrum of_______ simulates____ imitation_____ illu-sion of_____ after image of_____ holograph of______ picture of______

statue of________ etc., etc.

It is a nice exercise to construct contrasts such as a stuffed duck and a

counterfeit coin, but not a stuffed coin and a counterfeit duck; a false loverand a forged Picasso, but not a forged lover and false Picasso; a doll house

and false teeth, but not doll teeth and a false house, false pride and a tin

soldier, but not tin pride and a false soldier.It should also be noticed that there are cases where the thing that is so-

liciting us to call it, say, courage, generosity or loyalty but is not really such,has a distinct name or phrase, ‘bravado’, ‘purchasing of affection’ or ‘servil-

ity’. As Aristotle (and probably Plato before him) recognized, bad traits of

character gain much of their repugnancy by masquerading as virtues.Practical wisdom includes, as a vital ingredient, the ability to see that a

piece of conduct is indeed the virtuous mean between two not so virtuous

extremes. An extreme can appear to be virtuous; the outward behaviour offoolhardiness may resemble that of courage; the outward behaviour of ser-

vility may resemble that of loyalty.Rebutting someone’s claim made with such words and phrases can be

done, and probably mostly is done, by saying that the item in question is a

real F, really is Fing or is real F. But such rebuttal can just as well be effectedby simply: ‘You’re mistaken; it (he) is (a, an) F(ing)’. Emphasis on ‘is’ does the

job as well as using ‘real’ or ‘really’. There alone lies some reason to endorse

my minimalist claim.A problem remains however. There is a use of ‘real’ that seems not to be

covered by the considerations so far adduced. I allude to possible remarks or

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claims such as

That’s a real woman (man)That’s real (proper) coffee (not instant)That’s real (proper) tea (not bags)Etc., . . .

I am especially fond of: ‘A frying pan is not a proper popcorn popper’.This use of ‘real’ is linked to ideals or to perfection. It probably stems from

medieval theology, but has reached us in the homely forms just indicated. It

still carries the link with perfection, but nobody thinks that there must be aperfect woman or cup of coffee just because I can think of one. ‘Real’ is here

an honorific, a term of approval, of applause. It is not used to rebut a claim to

some kind of lapse in reality. In such rebuttals, as indicated above, ‘real’ doesnot attribute to its object any property or quality. But even here, in these uses

that praise or applaud something, the job can as well be done with an em-

phatic ‘is’ or with an emphatic ‘that’s a . . .’ or ‘Now that’s . . .’. So even herereality seems not to be a property, like its other cousin existence.

I turn now to what I think is the relevance of all this to exegesis and criticismof Plato’s theory of Forms and of what knowledge of them consists in. I focus

on a passage in The Republic (Book V, 479b–c) where, I am going to suggest,

Plato (via Socrates of course) seems to me to fall into deep error about whatand how much is known by knowing the Forms. His error is, I shall suggest,

an (if not the) error corrected (I hope once and for all) by Wittgenstein in his

later work (e.g. 91–2 of Philosophical Investigations (1968), but pervasivelyin that work). The connection with the first part of this discussion lies in

Book V where, when telling of the nature of knowledge, belief and ignorance,

Socrates speaks of a popular riddle and its answer. The riddle:

A man not a man throws a stone not a stone at a bird not a bird sittingon a branch not a branch.

Answer:

A eunuch throws a piece of pumice at a bat sitting on a rafter.

The riddle is trotted out in (rather puzzling) elucidation of the field of

belief, the field of everyday things. The field of knowledge was the Forms

and to have knowledge (it is widely, though of course not unanimously held)is to:

Know what is to be (an) F.

And this knowledge is of a field in which an F is fully, really, truly and

altogether F. The model seems to be geometry, where The Sphere in no way

deviates from perfect sphericity, does not even a tiny bit drift towards theovoid. Everyday spheres, marbles, globes, soccer balls and the like, on the

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other hand, cannot be perfectly spherical, will be only to some extent so andto some extent not. And the same goes for any general term.

Everyday things, men, stones, bats and branches, all have their ways offailing to be unqualifiedly, undeviatingly, what we roughly readily take themfor. Eunuchs, pieces of pumice, bats and rafters are all instances of not reallybeing what they can, more or less easily, be taken for. Using the Platonicnotion of participation, we might say that everyday Fs are more or less, butnever fully F. Knowledge of what it is to be an F will provide the knower withthe ability to spot manners of appearing Fly for any F where he has graspedwhat it is (really and fully) to be an F. This knowledge, to link the discussionfurther to the first part of this article, will also provide the ability to tell whatvarying styles of trousers everyday things can stroll about in, when they(more or less trickily) are other then what they appear to be or can betaken for.

To put the matter more contemporarily, Plato may be said to be holdingthat if you know what it is to be (an) F, you will be in position to recognizethe various ways things other than Fs may be taken for Fs, and also inposition to spot Fs which are deviantly or not fully and properly Fs.A knower of what it is to be F will be able to cope with the vicissitudes ofworldly encounters and experiences of Fs and their (more or less) fraudulentcompanions.

But this has only to be suggested to provoke the question: How could therebe such knowledge given the vicissitudes of nature and socio/industrial life?Let me explain briefly. Nature gave us two significantly different stuffs wecall ‘jade’, nephrite and jadeite. So ‘jade’, from starting life as a decent naturalkind term slips into specifying only a cluster of manifest qualities. Someonemight have insisted that nephrite was only ‘fool’s jade’ but the linguisticstruggle came out otherwise. Social life gave us generosity and philanthropy,with the latter problematic as to whether it is real (though massive) generos-ity as opposed to buying public approval or atoning for the sins of exploit-ation. Industry is more prolific in this dimension, as can be seen by simplynoting words such as ‘synthetic’, ‘artificial’, ‘toy’ and ‘plastic’, all indicatingnovel ways of failing to be something or other. Nature and culture collabor-ate to give us cases such as ‘vegetable’ and ‘fruit’ which, because they haveboth culinary and botanical uses, yield up an issue as to whether a tomato isreally a vegetable or a fruit, not to mention the artichoke, which is the bud ofa flower and so not really(?) a vegetable.

University of Sydney, [email protected]

References

Austin, J.L. 1962. Sense and Sensibilia. Oxford: OUP.

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Plato. 1973. The Republic, 7th edn. (eds. E. Hamilton and H. Cairns), Princeton:Princeton University Press.

Wittgenstein, L. 1968. Philosophical Investigations. New York: Macmillan Company.

Fischer against the dilemma defence: the defenceprevails

DAVID WIDERKER AND STEWART GOETZ

1. Introduction

In his article ‘The Frankfurt cases: the moral of the stories’ (2010), JohnFischer revisits the debate over the Principle of Alternative Possibilities:

(PAP) An agent is morally responsible for choosing at time t to performaction A, only if he or she could have chosen otherwise at t.

Fischer asks us to consider the following updated version of HarryFrankfurt’s counterexample (FSC) to that principle:

Because he dares to hope that the Democrats finally have a good chanceof winning the White House, the benevolent but elderly neurosurgeon,Black, has come out of retirement to participate in yet another philosoph-ical example . . . . He has secretly inserted a chip in Jones’s brain whichenables Black to monitor and control Jones’s activities. Black can exercisethis control through a sophisticated computer that he has programmed sothat, among other things, it monitors Jones’s voting behavior. If Joneswere to show any inclination to vote for McCain (or, let us say, anyoneother than Obama), then the computer through the chip in Jones’s brain,would intervene to assure that he actually decides to vote for Obama anddoes so vote. But if Jones decides on his own to vote for Obama (as Black,the old progressive, would prefer), the computer does nothing but con-tinue to monitor—without affecting—goings-on in Jones’s head.

Now suppose that Jones decides to vote for Obama on his own, justas he would have if Black had not inserted the chip in his head. It seems,upon first thinking about this case, that Jones can be held morally re-sponsible for this choice and act of voting for Obama, although hecould not have chosen otherwise and he could not have done otherwise(Fischer 2010: 316).

Fischer argues that if this or another FSC is successful, it is good news for thecompatibilist. It is good news, because if an agent need not be free to dootherwise (need not have alternative possibilities) to be morally responsible,

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