“Ich liebe dich 3” the swains in mountain valleys of Austria inscribe on their presents to those to whom they plight their troth. The pun is a rare one in German. Only in remote valleys does the word for ‘three’ rhyme with joy; and the word for ‘true’ is usually ‘wahr’ not ‘treu’ ‘Wahr’ is more propositional, less evaluative than our ‘true’. So too in Latin and the romance languages ‘verum’, ‘Vrai’ ‘vera’ ‘verdadero’ carry a lighter load of feeling. Only the Hebrews resembled us in giving their word for ‘true’ strong moral overtones, and using the same or some cognate word to praise him who had used no deceitfulness to his neighbour as to recommend some statement as being meet to be believed.

Of the many possible, and no doubt actual, forms of incoherence covered by my title, I shall be concerned with only one, and must begin by dismissing the others. The incoherence I shall speak of is not any alleged inconsistency between deterministic and indeterministic physical theories, such as between classical particle mechanics and quantum theory. It is an inconsistency internal to determinism. Not, that is, internal to any deterministic theory; but to the general claims put forward by determinists—whether scientists, philosophers, or laymen. Still another qualification—it is ‘hard’ determinism I shall be concerned with—‘hard’ in the sense in which William James distinguished between hard and soft determinism. Soft determinism James himself ridiculed as glaringly incoherent, and in any case I shall not be specially concerned with determinism as regards human conduct—with the problem of free will and responsibility.

In this paper I want to examine a view of the Darwinian theory of evolution which was put forward fairly recently by A. R. Manser. His approach is of interest not only in itself, but also because it may be expanded to raise some fundamental questions about the nature of the science of biology in general. I shall not consider these further implications here, but shall concentrate on an examination of his thesis in the context in which it is raised. My paper falls into two sections. In the first I shall state Manser's thesis and some of the arguments with which he supports it, and shall try to show how a series of objections raised by A. G. N. Flew and K. Connolly may be answered. In the second I shall offer on my own account a positive argument to provide a possible basis for his point of view, with the aim of indicating why the theory should be of the kind he suggests, and what form the study of evolution must take.

I want to explore the possibility of an a posteriori approach to the elucidation of certain moral notions. These are: (a) the notion of a duty, some specific thing which it is incumbent on me to do, and (b) the notion of something that is a good thing for me to do. I want to consider these notions, so far as I can, independently of rules. There is a certain sense in which having a duty to do this or that is a function of circumstances, and in which this or that's being a good thing to do is likewise a function of circumstances. I shall suggest specific examples in which this is a conspicuous feature of ‘my duty’ or of what I can, beneficially, do. In these examples what I ought to do, and what it is good to do, can be represented as special ways in which what I am to do presents itself.

The problem of necessity is fundamentally a problem of knowledge: how can we know not just that something is so but that it must be so, not just that a statement is true but that it must be true? The problem arises the moment we make two fairly familiar assumptions: that all knowledge comes, in the end, from experience; and that experience can tell us only that something is so and not that it must be so. From these it follows immediately that there can be no knowledge of necessary truths. Yet obviously we do have such knowledge: we know that bachelors must be unmarried and that the angles of a Euclidean triangle must total 180°. It seems equally obvious that we do not learn such facts from experience, from observing bachelors and triangles, so it seems clear which of the assumptions is mistaken. Whatever may be the success of Locke's attack on innate knowledge, it seems undeniable that we do have knowledge which does not come from experience. We do possess some a priori knowledge, viz. knowledge of necessary truths.

Popper Proposed the criterion of falsifiability as a solution to the problem of demarcation i.e. of distinguishing science from pseudo-science and not, as many of his contemporaries in the Vienna Circle mistook it to be, a solution to the quite different problem with which they themselves were preoccupied, viz. of providing a criterion of meaning to distinguish the meaningful from the meaningless. While the positivists were concerned to damn metaphysics and exalt science, by identifying the empirically verifiable with the meaningful, Popper was concerned to separate science from scientism, to damn astrology and to extol astronomy. In other words his preoccupation belongs not to the philosophy of language but to the philosophy of science.

When I began to study philosophy sense-data were in the fashion; everybody had some. Nowadays talking about sense-data, like distinguishing between “shall” and “will”, is apt to be regarded as an indication that one has stopped moving with the times. Before abandoning this old habit, I want to consider whether there may not after all be something in a doctrine adopted by so many leading philosophers in pre-war England.

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century the name of Adam Smith was popularly associated with the sort of ‘laissez faire’ policy that is expounded with all the fervour of a religious faith. Smith, so the story ran, in his eagerness to combat the excessive mercantilist government intervention of his day, had resorted to supra-natural claims in his general onslaught against central control and planning by governments. Such intervention was ‘unnatural’ and conflicted with Deistic Design. Only through private actions could mankind reach satisfying and ‘natural’ fulfillment. Action through private self-interest was twice blessed; it. blessed him who profited and his fellows who were ‘profited from’. True there was a kind of central planning that was of supreme importance; but it had a divine origin and it worked not through governments but through individual free trade. Private actions in fact were directed by an Invisible Hand which brought society into a grand and spontaneous Natural Harmony.

It may be as well to begin from the locus classicus, Engels to Mehring, July 14th, 1893: “Ideology is a process accomplished by the so-called thinker consciously, it is true, but with a false consciousness. The real motive forces impelling him remain unknown to him; otherwise it simply would not be an ideological process”.

We are accustomed to the claim that appropriate backing must be available if criticism is to be justifiable. For example, if someone criticises a film he must be prepared to cite the criteria he is using and to show how they are or are not satisfied by the film. Such processes of evaluation have frequently been investigated: what has been less thoroughly sexplored is the right to criticise itself. Certainly, questions of the appropriate backing for critical utterances have bearing on the right to criticise (as I shall show), for one way of denying that a person has that right is to deny that he can provide the appropriate backing for his criticism. But the question of his right is a wider one, since the attempt to criticise may be blocked before the question of backing can arise at all. It is therefore worthwhile to explore the right to criticise with a view to discovering in what circum-stances it is defeasible. I shall be concerned mainly with the moral right to criticise as investigation of the legal right would raise issues for specialists in the laws of libel and slander.

What is the connection between a representation, such as a painting, statue or engraving, and its subject? For example, what makes a painting a painting of McX? The problem is not how to paint McX, which belongs to art experts. So the answer is not, for example, ‘The painter starts at the top with an egg-shape for the head …” The question is rather: what makes the results of such efforts a painting of McX? What conditions must a painting satisfy to warrant such a description? What is the force or meaning of the word ‘of’ in phrases like ‘painting of McX’?

Are philosophers of history—or, are some philosophers of history—sufficiently interested in questions of the details of historical research? This is intended as a real as well as a rhetorical question. I may simply have failed to find discussions that are available; but in the material I have been able to consider there is little treatment of matters of preliminary detail, and this seems to me a neglect that needs to be remedied.

At first sight there doesn't seem to be any problem about killing. Most people would say that it is wrong to kill and that's all there is to it. The same opinion is proclaimed by many members of the Christian religion. They say that ‘Thou shalt not kill’ is an absolute command. But there are several issues involving the morality of killing where ordinary men, secular and religious alike, make judgements or evince perplexity which reveals that common sense morality is less clear about killing than it at first appears.

The central purpose of this paper is to sketch the logic of being a democrat. That is, what is involved in being a democrat will be defined and delineated. I shall proceed by first examining Richard Wollheim's alleged paradox of democratic theory. Wollheim's solution to the paradox will then be shown to be unsatisfactory. Next, the concept of being a democrat will be clarified. The stage will then be set for showing that Wollheim's alleged paradox of democratic theory dissolves upon discerning what a democrat qua democrat is committed to believe. In the process of clarifying what is involved in being a democrat and dissolving the alleged paradox of democratic theory, it will become evident that one popular argument often levelled against resistance to democratic law is without foundation. This is the argument that any democrat who conscientiously disobeys valid democratic law is necessarily behaving inconsistently with his democratic principles; and, therefore, if someone does conscientiously disobey valid democratic law, it proves he is not ‘really’ a democrat after all.

“It Seems natural to suppose”, wrote Mill, “that rules of action must take their whole character … from the end to which they are subservient”. Many moralists have agreed. If we could establish the Summum Bonum, the foundation of morality, the rational basis of moral thinking, this would constitute a criterion, a rule, by means of which men could actually make good practical judgments. This view is radically mistaken. I first try to show this by means of an a priori argument, and then urge the replacement of the “rational model” of practical thinking embodied in this view by an “empirical model”, which should take account of man's actual capacities and limitations. This has important consequences for morality, some of which I investigate.

In ‘A Plea For Excuses’ Austin observes that there are many situations in which a person accused of doing an action A wishes to protest that it is not altogether accurate or fair to say that he did A. The person may wish to excuse himself from an accusation of doing A on the grounds that what happened was inadvertent, or the result of an accident, or done by mistake etc. etc. Moreover if he really has an excuse, then it will no longer be possible simply to say that he did A, because it will be seen that either it is not true that he did anything at all, or that whatever he did it was not A but something else, or that he did A in such a manner that simply to say that he did it would be misleading in the extreme.

The first solid bit of argumentation you get in Plato's Phaedo goes something like this: Whatever comes to be, comes to be from its opposite (cf. 70e, sqq.). If at a certain time t a given thing a begins to be F, before that time t it must have been non-F. Wherever a pair of predicates, F and G, are genuine contradictories; where, that is, they stand to each other in the same relation as F stands in to non-F; it is necessarily true that if a began to be F at t before then a was G. The only trouble comes from the difficulty of finding substitutes for F and G that people will allow to be genuine contradictories. It the butter began to be soft at four o'clock, we may suggest, before four it was hard. A tiresome opponent will retort that there is a state in which butter cannot properly be called either hard or soft. We try again: If Ann began to be asleep at eight, before eight she was awake; if my shirt became dirty on Tuesday, before Tuesday it was clean; if Bonzo died last week, before last week he was alive. And when the advocate of the borderline state reminds us of the various twilight areas of consciousness or cleanliness, we are reduced to legislation: “asleep” shall henceforth apply to every mental state short of complete wakefulness, “alive” to every condition of the body before the onset of putrefaction, “clean” to every shirt incapable of producing a certain measurable discoloration in the water in which it is washed. “Let F and G be contradictories”, we still guardedly maintain: “then if a comes to be F at time t, before time t a was G”.

In his paper ‘Pretending’ J. L. Austin says that (a) philosophers have exaggerated the scope and distorted the meaning of pretending, and (b) the clarification of this notion has a place in the ‘long-term project of classifying and clarifying all possible ways and varieties of not exactly doing things, which has to be carried through if we are ever to understand properly what doing things is.’

The so-called Picture Theory of Meaning of the Tractatus (‘the PT’, for short) offers interesting parallels with two earlier theories of judgment, given by Moore in Mind, 1899, and Russell in Philosophical Essays, 1910, and The Problems of Philosophy, 1912. Indeed, it may be a combination of them, although this is not entirely obvious, because it is not quite certain what the PT says about the constituents of elementary propositions (EPs) or about their logical character. A further limitation is imposed by the weakness of the Russellian concept of ‘order’ whose role is very like one of the roles of ‘logical form’ in the Tractatus.

In his book The Retreat to Commitment Professor Bartley raised an important problem: can rationalism (meaning by this something that contrasts, not with empiricism, but with irrationalism) can rationalism be held in a rational way, that is, in a way that complies with its own requirements? Or is there bound to be something irrational in the rationalist's position?

Briefly, Hartley's answer was that an element of irrationalism is involved in extant versions of rationalism; however, Bartley proposed a new version of rationalism that can, he claimed, be held in a way that is rational according to its own account of rationality. Bartley called this ‘Comprehensively Critical Rationalism’. (Being a bit of a mouthful, this is often abbreviated to ‘CCR’, a practice I will follow.)