La philosophie analytique de l'action se réclame du langage ordinaire de l'action comme une des sources de ses data philosophiques. Elle se propose d'en examiner le fonctionnement, d'en extraire les concepts clés, de caractériser les formes de propositions dans lesquelles s'expriment nos actions et notre façon spontanée de les comprendre, d'examiner l'articulation propre aux stratégies d'action et au discours qui les justifie, et de faire des « proposals » pour la construction d'une théorie de l'action. En somme, il s'agit d'ériger le langage ordinaire en instance de contrôle aussi bien sur le plan du traitement de problèmes philosophiques que sur celui de la construction de méta-théories des sciences de l'homme. Ce travail sur le langage de l'action peut revêtir plusieurs fonctions: fonction de clarification ou de détection de confusions, fonction thérapeutique pour guérir le langage de maladies philosophiques, c'est-à-dire des pseudo-problèmes, fonction heuristique pour prescrire une diète appropriée au traitement des perplexités philosophiques qui surgissent « quand le langage tourne à vide, non quand il travaille », pour employer le mot de Wittgenstein (1953, #138).

Je me sens en très grande sympathie avec la démarche de mon collègue Kaufmann, mais je ne puis en partager toutes les conclusions et j'essaierai de dire brièvement pourquoi. Plus précisément: je partage l'ascriptivisme de Kaufmann, mais je ne crois pas que soit irrémédiablement compromise toute utilisation nomologique ou empirique du langage de l'action. Un tel langage peut être employé pour la production d'énoncés partiellement empiriques dont certains peuvent très bien avoir la forme de lois générales. Soit par exemple le schéma suivant:

ceux qui posent habituellement des actions de type A1 dans des circonstances C1 ont tendance à poser des actions de type A2 dans des circonstances C2.

It seems to be a part of the oral and written tradition of contemporary philosophy that Saul Kripke and Hilary Putnam have resurrected a kind of Aristotelianism about natural kinds by reference to purely semantic ideas. Thus in a recent issue of the Journal of Philosophy, M. R. Ayers writes that according to Kripke and Putnam: “The names ‘gold’, ‘tiger’ etc. have their meaning … by being the name of, or, more technically, by ‘rigidly designating’, a natural kind.” And in the immediately following pages he suggests that the view Kripke and Putnam arrive at is “not at all unlike Aristotelian doctrine”, but arrived at from “the rather special point of view of a concern with modal logic, and against the background of Russell's theory of descriptions, the modern obsession with proper names, and so forth”. Presumably what Ayers is alleging here is that something like the Aristotelian position on substance, species, essential properties and so forth is or is intended to be the outcome of the Kripke-Putnam investigations.

Kripke, Putnam and others have proposed what is often called The New Theory of Reference. Professor Matthen thinks that this theory needs to be modified in various ways: (1) so as to avert misunderstandings about the New Theory's commitment to essentialism; (2) so as to clarify the semantic function of what he calls “nonconnoting terms”; (3) so as to answer Quinean doubts about the determinacy of ostension; (4) so as to correct Putnam's “simplistic” account of ostension; (5) so as to solve Kripke's puzzle about the seemingly inconsistent beliefs of the bilingual Pierre; and (6) so as to show how many ordinary names, contra Kripke and Putnam, can be treated as “equivalent” to definite descriptions. No doubt many of the other things he says in his paper are clever, and perhaps even true. But as to the six modifications I have listed, I have run into difficulties. To the extent that I am able to understand them, I have been forced to conclude that they are neither needed nor helpful.

A main point of my article, as I see it, is that we can solve Putnam's problem, as articulated in the first paragraph of section three, without recourse to the definition of “natural-kind term” as “rigid designator of a natural kind”. I had three main objections to this definition:

(a) It makes the classification of a term as a natural-kind term dependent on one's metaphysics, i.e., on the status given to natural kinds. However, Putnam's argument seems to be independent of such metaphysical considerations, and the sort of natural kinds it establishes (if any) should be “read off its face”, not set down in advance (section 2).

(b) It permits the derivation of “exotic necessary truths” such as “If water is H20 then necessarily water is H20” (sections 9 and 10).

(c) Putnam's main point appears to be about the independence of a term's extension from a linguistic community's beliefs. Why should this point affect the theory of designation? Kripke's argument about names establishes the non-descriptiveness of names while leaving undisturbed the classical conception of names designating individuals. Why should we not take his and Putnam's parallel arguments as establishing the non-descriptiveness (non-connotation) of natural-kind terms while leaving undisturbed the classical conception of general terms designating classes (section 10)?

Le long débat sur le « problème de la transformation », qui a marqué si profondément le développement de la pensée marxiste depuis cent ans, est probablement l'un des plus étranges mais peut-être aussi Fun des plus instructifs parmi ceux que l'histoire encore jeune des sciences sociales peut offrir à l'attention croissante que lui porte l'analyse épistémologique.

In this paper I shall first expose a weakness shared by several philosophical discussions of self-deception: I shall show that these discussions have failed to give it a complete analysis. The apparent phenomenon of self-deception is all too familiar, and yet its adequate characterization in general terms is wanting. More exactly, I shall argue that to understand self-deception statically, as these accounts have done, has been—and must be—to fail to give a characterization of it as a state of mind, sufficient to distinguish it from other mental states not born of self-deception.

One reason why religious intolerance is so widespread, according to Newman, is that many people do not understand what tolerance means. Thus, “many intolerant people actually think that they are tolerant, and liberal people usually have trouble explaining to them why they are wrong” (147). Newman therefore begins his book with an analysis of the concept of tolerance. “Tolerance involves tolerating, that is, accepting, enduring, bearing, putting up with; it involves acceptance in the sense of refraining from any strong reaction to the thing in question; it is half hearted, an attitude towards something that is not liked, loved, respected, or approved of; and it is often, though not always, understood as a praiseworthy act or virtue” (6).