Metaphysical Commitments Research Articles

Mental Illness, Metaphysics, Facts and Values

A number of prominent writers on the concept of mental illness/disease are committed to accounts which involve rejecting certain plausible widely held beliefs, namely: that it is part of the meaning of illness that it is bad for its possessor, so the concept of illness is essentially evaluative; that if a person has a mental illness, that is a fact about him; and that the same concept of illness is applicable in the case of mental illness as in that of physical illness. Methodologically this is unattractive. We should seek accounts of concepts which preserve our pre-theoretical beliefs so far as is possible. In this paper I argue that these writers are driven to this pass because they accept certain underlying metaphysical commitments including, in particular, the fact-value distinction. I then claim that there is an alternative account of mental illness (defended more fully elsewhere) which preserves our pre-theoretical beliefs, and that this account can be further buttressed because it coheres with a metaphysical picture which does not involve the metaphysical assumptions which led to the unattractive results noted above. The metaphysical picture and the account of mental illness are thus mutually supportive and suggest that there is good reason to reject the supposed fact-value distinction.

The Folk Probably Don't Think What You Think They Think: Experiments on Causation by Absence

Folk theories—untutored people’s (often implicit) theories about various features of the world—have been fashionable objects of inquiry in psychology for almost two decades now (e.g., Hirschfeld and Gelman 1994), and more recently they have been of interest in experimental philosophy (Nichols 2004). Folk theories of psychology, physics, biology, and ethics have all come under investigation. Folk metaphysics, however, has not been as extensively studied. That so little is known about folk metaphysics is unfortunate for (at least) two reasons. First, folk metaphysics is almost certainly implicit, and it is likely to be our default way of thinking about metaphysical problems. Moreover, one’s metaphysical commitments can have profound consequences—in scientific, religious, and ethical contexts, for example. Thus, folk metaphysics ought to be dragged out into the open and exposed to criticism. As Peirce eloquently remarked (1994, 1.129; see also 1994, 7.579),

Plato's Introduction of Forms (review)

Reviewed by: Platon’s Introduction of Forms Christine J. Thomas R. M. Dancy . Plato’s Introduction of Forms. Cambridge-New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Pp. xii + 348. Cloth, $75.00.. Russell Dancy's recent book could easily bear the title, 'A Socratic Theory of Definition'. The first two-thirds of the text extract and examine various tenets of a "theory of definition" operative in a variety of Socratic dialogues. The bulk of the theory is captured in three conditions on adequacy for a definition (80–81): (i) the definiens must be substitutable salve veritate for the definiendum; (ii) the definiens must give a paradigm or standard by comparison with which cases of the definiendum may be determined; and (iii) the definiens must explain the application of the definiendum. According to Dancy, any existential admissions Socrates and his interlocutors might make as they test and reject candidate definitions of individual virtues serve only to fix a topic for discussion; it is not until "stage two" of Plato's theorizing that Socratic definitional presuppositions become invested with metaphysical significance. Still, the initial theory of definition does not develop in a philosophical vacuum. Socrates is concerned most of all with ethical matters. Given his Intellectualist Assumption ("to know that . . . F—, one must be able to say what the F, or F-ness, is"), Socrates believes that definitions of ethical terms are required in order to determine how one ought to live. An account of the pious is required in order to determine whether or not Euthyphro's particular course of action is pious. Socrates' quest for definitions is subordinate to his ethical interests. Dancy's developmental thesis is that the journey from mere definition to a metaphysics of separate forms travels through, among other places, the Phaedo. Like the early Socrates, the Socrates of the Phaedo requires that someone who knows F be able to define F. According to the dialogue's theory of recollection, definition and knowledge are possible only because human inquirers encounter objects of knowledge before birth. Preexisting, bodiless souls enjoy cognitive access to imperceptible, intelligible forms. Support for the imperceptible status of the objects of definition comes from the "Argument from Relativity." In bare outline (18): (P1) There is such a thing as the F. (P2) Any ordinary F is also contrary to F. (P3) The F is never contrary to F. (C) Therefore, the F is not the same as any ordinary F. The Socratic dialogues set the stage for the argument without, in fact, realizing its broadest consequences. According to Dancy, the devices Socrates had for showing that the beautiful is not a beautiful girl or gold or a long and satisfying life are generalizable to show that the beautiful is nothing on earth. The generalization is the Argument from Relativity and the conclusion of the Argument from Relativity is the Theory of Forms. (283) In the Phaedo, Plato proposes that perceptibles suffer flux insofar as each perceptible F is also contrary to F. Every perceptible fails the no-relativity requirement of (P3), so no perceptible [End Page 485] can serve as an object of definition. The thesis that the things about which Socrates has been asking "What is it?" are not perceptible is Plato's stage-two innovation (247). A brief review cannot do justice to Dancy's detailed argumentation or take up many of the questions his provocative proposals raise. I mention only one issue worth further consideration: the relationship between the theory of definition and metaphysics. Dancy frequently remarks that Socratic dialogues depict "ordinary Greek" language use with no commitments to particular metaphysical theories. Socrates seeks definitions and explanations "by content." But there is a fair bit of space fit for occupation on the spectrum between a fully, explicitly articulated theory of forms (Platonic or otherwise) and bare existential admissions; and it is unclear just how metaphysically neutral Socrates' theory of definition can remain (as perhaps Dancy allows in chapter 7, when the theory is revealed to incorporate some form of self-predication and elements of a transmission theory of causality). The details of the relationships between epistemological and metaphysical commitments become important in coming to understand Plato's reasons for separating his...

Metaphysics and learning

Is it possible to learn and simultaneously articulate the metaphysical basis of that learning? In my contribution to the forum I tell of how I came to recognise that bilingual Yoruba children could articulate the contrasting metaphysical fra- mings of Yoruba and English numbering. The story introduces an arena I call 'ontics' that recognises the contingencies of metaphysical commitments in the present. My claim is that learning to recognise and strategically articulate ontics as enacted metaphysical commitments in the present is useful in cross-cultural and transdisci- plinary learning and crucial in inquiring into learning.

Method and metaphysics in Clements’s and Gleason’s ecological explanations

To generate explanatory theory, ecologists must wrestle with how to represent the extremely many, diverse causes behind phenomena in their domain. Early twentieth-century plant ecologists Frederic E. Clements and Henry A. Gleason provide a textbook example of different approaches to explaining vegetation, with Clements allegedly committed, despite abundant exceptions, to a law of vegetation, and Gleason denying the law in favor of less organized phenomena. However, examining Clements’s approach to explanation reveals him not to be expressing a law, and instead to be developing an explanatory structure without laws, capable of progressively integrating causal complexity. Moreover, Clements and Gleason largely agree on the causes of vegetation; but, since causal understanding here underdetermines representation, they differ on how to integrate recognized causes into general theory—that is, in their methodologies. Observers of the case may have mistakenly assumed that scientific representation across the disciplines typically aims at laws like Newton’s, and that representations always reveal scientists’ metaphysical commitments. Ironically, in the present case, this assumption seems to have been made even by observers who regard Clements as naı¨ve for his alleged commitment to an ecological law.

Pluralism in the Thought of William James

Pluralism in the Thought of William James Eric MacGilvray (bio) One of the distinctive features of Richard Flathman's book Pluralism and Liberal Democracy,1 especially when it is considered as a book by a distinguished political theorist, is that it provides a detailed discussion of the "bases" of pluralism—of the psychological, epistemological and metaphysical commitments upon which it rests and to which it gives rise—but only a rather "diffident" consideration of its "limits and values"; that is, of its ethical and political entailments (e.g.p.6). In this respect Flathman not only follows the lead of the thinkers whom he analyzes, he remains true to the spirit of pluralism itself. One of the implications of pluralism is, after all, that among the possibilities that the world will admit are at least some with which we are not in sympathy, and perhaps even some that we find abhorrent—just as there are some attractive possibilities that it will not admit at all. To accept pluralism is therefore also to accept the finitude, the fragility, and (or) the fallibility of one's own ideals. I agree with Flathman in thinking that there is something about this sensibility that is congenial to the liberal project—or, to speak pluralistically, to some among the several liberal projects. I also agree that there is something about the radical contingency of the pluralistic worldview that can have a corrosive effect on liberal ideals, precisely because it requires that we defend them, and treat them as entailments of plura-lism, only with some "diffidence." Much, perhaps everything, depends here on the spirit in which we approach a pluralistic world: on the tempera-ment from which our metaphysical commitments spring, and the will that we apply in testing and modifying them in the crucible of experience. And few thinkers have done as much to explore the relationship between will and temperament, and between metaphysics and experience, as William James, to whom Flathman devotes the first substantive chapter of his book. Among the thinkers that Flathman engages James is the one with whom I am in greatest sympathy, and so I approached this chapter with particular interest. It is, like the companion chapters on Arendt, Hampshire and Oakeshott, an exemplary discussion; it succeeds in seeing James's work whole—no small accomplishment in itself—and in treating him without undue reverence or condescension. The three ideas for which James is best-known today are his pragmatism, his radical empiricism, and his pluralism.2 Although the antecedents of all three positions can be traced back to his earliest writings, they became central to his thought—and, in the case of pragmatism and radical empiricism, acquired their proper names—only relatively late in his career, in the later 1890s, when he turned his attention decisively toward philosophical questions. What I would like to focus on in this essay is not Flathman's representation of these ideas themselves, with which I have no quarrel, but rather on what we might call the question of priority among them; the question of the relationship in which they stand with respect to one another. I want to argue in particular that there are two ways in which we might place pluralism within the constellation of James's thought: one in which it appears as the point of departure for a philosophical project that ultimately encompassed, as Flathman says, "cosmological, metaphysical, epistemological, moral, aesthetic, and religious" concerns (19), and another in which it appears as the tentative fruits of a laborious exercise in epistemological reconstruction. We can read James, in other words, as a pluralist first and a pragmatist and (radical) empiricist second, or we can read him the other way around. The former approach is the one adopted by Flathman and by many other distinguished commentators, and I do not wish to call either its plausibility or its utility into question. I believe, however, that we learn something important about James, about pluralism, and also—though this is beyond the scope of the present essay—about liberalism, if we add the latter point of view to our exegetical repertoire. In order to pursue this line of inquiry we must turn to...

Traditions of Pragmatism and the Myth of the Emersonian Democrat

Beginning with Emerson's turn from his pulpit, many argue that American philosophy has rigorously held forth against supernaturalism and metaphysics. While most read self-reliance as a call for individualism, I argue that self-reliance is application of moral sentiment to source of existence Emerson calls Over-soul. Figures like George Kateb, Stanley Cavell, and Jeffrey Stout have presented a very different picture of American pragmatism. Stout, in particular, is responsible for building up what I call the myth of Emersonian democrat. We find that a few philosophical positions generally constitute this myth. The Emersonian democrat is secular, sceptical, relativist, anti-realist, and anti-metaphysical. In fact, on my reading of strand of pragmatism running from Emerson through James to Dewey, pluralism of Emersonian democrat depends on certain metaphysical commitments. The traditional reading of Emerson as anti-religion, and by extension, anti-religious, impedes a better understanding of self-reliance and obfuscates some of Emersonian inheritances in James and Dewey.

Bacteria, Sex, and Systematics

Philosophical discussions of species have focused on multicellular, sexual animals and have often neglected to consider unicellular organisms like bacteria. This article begins to fill this gap by considering what species concepts, if any, apply neatly to the bacterial world. First, I argue that the biological species concept cannot be applied to bacteria because of the variable rates of genetic transfer between populations, depending in part on which gene type is prioritized. Second, I present a critique of phylogenetic bacterial species, arguing that phylogenetic bacterial classification requires a questionable metaphysical commitment to the existence of essential genes. I conclude by considering how microbiologists have dealt with these biological complexities by using more pragmatic and not exclusively evolutionary accounts of species. I argue that this pragmatism is not borne of laziness but rather of the substantial conceptual problems in classifying bacteria based on any evolutionary standard.

On the Difference Between Social Justice and Christian Charity

The notion of justice implies that what is given is owed to the recipient; charity, on the other hand, acknowledges the reality of a free gift that is not owed to the recipient. This difference is obscured in contemporary liberal societies where, because of the absence of transcendent metaphysical commitments, the demands of social justice replace charity. A Thomistic analysis, however, recognizes a metaphysical order as the basis for justice. This order limits the sphere of justice and so allows for acts of charity motivated by love for God. If we do not recognize this distinction, we reduce all charitable acts to acts of justice and therefore ignore the most important debt of all: the debt humans owe to God that can only be repaid by loving Him and our neighbor.

Who's afraid of Martin Heidegger? Some friendly comments on the paper by Professor Matthew Johnson

I am in general agreement with Professor Johnson's main points. To his and the editor's question, ‘is there archaeological theory?’, His answer is ‘yes and no’. This ambiguous but accurate answer can be divided variously. The first category would be archaeological theory per se, which would encompass the work and thought from that of Nicholas Steno in the 17th century to that of Michael Schiffer (2002) today. It would be about the natural transformations of ‘deposits’. Next there would be theories about the transformation of natural materials into the more or less durable remains that comprise archaeological ‘data’ – the stuff of everyday lives. Again, work of Michael Schiffer (2001) and Daniel Miller (1998) comes to mind. They and a long list of contemporary archaeologists deploy theory on behalf of the understanding of the creation of things that build the human habitat. Broader use of theory comes with the deployment of frameworks from demography to demonology and ecology to ethics that are used to structure historical and anthropological questions that might be answered with archaeological remains. Each selection of a theoretical position entails one or another metaphysical commitment about what comprises ‘data’ and ‘evidence’ and what constitutes a proper explanation. In this regard Professor Johnson asks, does archaeology indiscriminately adopt and apply various philosophical positions without proper regard for their extent, implications and conditions for application? His answer is yes, certainly, and to our disadvantage. As Christopher Chippindale and I have noted on several occasions, archaeology treats philosophical traditions a bit like a Chinese menu or perhaps the contents of a supermarket: the archaeologist takes one from column A and another from column B, and a whole bunch of stuff from the dairy aisle and more from the fruits and vegetables section. Not only is this not kosher – one does not mix dairy and Derrida – but the selections are radically contradictory and sometimes even incoherent.

Descartes and Leibniz on Human Free-Will and the Ability to Do Otherwise

Both Descartes and Leibniz are on record as maintaining that acting freely requires that the agent ‘could have done otherwise.’ However, it is not clear how they could maintain this, given their other metaphysical commitments. In Leibniz's case, the arguments connected with this are well-rehearsed: it is argued, for example, that Leibnizian doctrines such as the Principle of Sufficient Reason and the thesis that God must will the best possible world preclude that the human could ever do other than she did. The question of whether Descartes can maintain that the agent is able to do otherwise in the face of his wider metaphysical commitments has received comparatively little attention. However, Chappell has recently noted that Descartes's thesis that God is the ‘total cause’ of everything seems to preclude the possibility of human freedom (where this includes the ability to do otherwise).

Lewis's Late Ethics

phy of C. I. Lewis is doubly welcome. It is welcome first because, although Lewis is the most important American philosopher of the second quarter of the twentieth century, there are no book-length treatments of his thought as a whole. Indeed, the standard up until now has been the chapter on Lewis in A History of Philosophy in America, by Murphey and Elizabeth Flower. The last decade has seen a major flowering of American philosophy studies generally and pragmatism in particular, but Lewis has been curiously left out of its curriculum. It is something of a scandal that a philosopher of his standing and ability should have suffered such eclipse. The publication of Murphey’s book will do much to rectify matters. It is an exhaustive and detailed treatment of the development of Lewis’s thought and will be an essential resource for Lewis scholars, indeed the essential resource, for many years to come. It is welcome secondly, because it definitively reinserts Lewis into the pragmatic tradition. Lewis’s neglect has been at least partly due to a widespread misremembering of his work as an obsolete position in epistemology involving analyticity and foundationalism, and to the view that a philosopher so influential among logical empiricist and analytic philosophers couldn’t really be a pragmatist. Murphey’s discussion of Lewis’s early years makes abundantly visible the emergence of Lewis’s thought in the debates between James and Royce, his early idealism and struggles against the metaphysical commitments of Royce’s logic, and his reassessment of James and Peirce in that period of intense creative development which was to culminate in the conceptual pragmatism of his brilliant Mind and the World Order (MWO). Murphey amply discusses Lewis’s contributions to logic, his conversation and gradual disillusionment with positivism, Lewis’s Late Ethics

The Self and Strong Legal Theory: A Heideggerian Alternative to Fish’s Scepticism

This essay concerns the question of whether it is possible to have an account of what judges ought to do when they decide cases if one accepts Stanley Fish’s thesis that man is a socially constructed creature, who can only see the world around him in terms of the practice that he is involved in. It puts forward the view that such a position is defensible, provided that one makes different metaphysical commitments to the ones made by Fish. It is argued that Fish is best understood as a metaphysical idealist. The essay seeks to demonstrate that Martin Heidegger’s conception of the self and interpretation are similar to those of Fish, but that, when understood as involving a commitment to metaphysical realism, Heidegger’s philosophy can hold the possibility of strong legal theory open in a way that Fish’s cannot. Michael S. Moore’s natural law position is used in order to articulate what such a position might be. Moore’s example of what a judge ought to do if called upon to define ‘death’ as a concept is used to illustrate the difference between Fish and Heidegger when it comes to metaphysics and strong legal theory, despite their similarities when it comes to an account of interpretation and of the self.

To Quantize or Not to Quantize: Fact and Folklore in Quantum Gravity

Does the need to find a quantum theory of gravity imply that the gravitational field must be quantized? Physicists working in quantum gravity routinely assume an affirmative answer, often without being aware of the metaphysical commitments that tend to underlie this assumption. The ambition of this article is to probe these commitments and to analyze some recently adduced physical—as opposed to metaphysical—arguments pertinent to the issue of quantization. While there exist good reasons to quantize gravity, as this analysis will show, alternative approaches to gravity challenge the received wisdom. These renegade approaches do not regard gravity as a fundamental force, but rather as effective, i.e., as merely supervening on fundamental physics. I will urge that these alternative accounts at least prove the tenability of an opposition to quantization.

SCIENTIFIC REALISM AND METAPHYSICS

The tendency to take scientific realism to be a richer metaphysical view than it ought to be stems from the fact that there are two ways in which we can conceive of reality. The first is to conceive of reality as comprising all facts and the other is to conceive of it as comprising all and only fundamental facts. I argue that scientific realism should be committed to the factualist view of reality and not, in the first instance, to the fundamentalist. An anti-fundamentalist conception of reality acts as a constraint on scientific realism, but it is a further and (conceptually) separate issue whether or not a scientific realist should come to adopt a fundamentalist view of reality. I argue that scientific realism is independent of physicalism and non-Humeanism and that the concept of truth is required for a sensible understanding of the metaphysical commitments of scientific realism.

Review: Time, Tense, and Reference

Among the many branches of philosophy, the philosophy of time and the philosophy of language are more intimately interconnected than most, yet their practitioners have long pursued independent paths. This book helps to bridge the gap between the two groups. As it makes clear, it is increasingly difficult to do philosophy of language without any metaphysical commitments as to the nature of time, and it is equally difficult to resolve the metaphysical question of whether time is tensed or tenseless independently of the philosophy of language. Indeed, one is tempted to see philosophy of language and metaphysics as a continuum with no sharp boundary.The essays, which were written expressly for this book by leading philosophers of language and philosophers of time, discuss the philosophy of language and its implications for the philosophy of time and vice versa. The intention is not only to further dialogue between philosophers of language and of time but also to present new theories to advance the state of knowledge in the two fields. The essays are organized in two sections--one on the philosophy of tensed language, the other on the metaphysics of time.

Towards a cognitive foundation for knowledge representation

Abstract. Knowledge engineering, knowledge management and conceptual modelling are concerned with representing knowledge of business and organizational domains. These research areas use ontologies for knowledge representation. Ontologies are understood either in the philosophical sense as firm metaphysical commitments or in the looser sense of dictionaries or taxonomies.This paper critically examines the understanding and use of ontologies and knowledge representation languages in information systems (IS) research and application. As ontologies are intended to be conceptualizations of a perceived reality, they should reflect the empirically observed reality. This motivates proposing psychology of language as a reference discipline for knowledge engineering and knowledge management. Natural language is argued to reflect the cognitive concepts we use to think about and perceive the world around us. These cognitive concepts are the relevant terms with which to structure and represent knowledge about the world.Psychology of language can provide empirical justification for a particular set of concepts to represent knowledge. This paper draws on psycho‐linguistic research to develop a proposal for a system of cognitive structures. This is argued to provide the relevant concepts on which to found knowledge representation schemata for knowledge engineering, knowledge management and conceptual modelling.

Choice, circumstance, and the value of equality

Many recent political philosophers have attempted to demonstrate that choice and responsibility can be incorporated into the framework of an egalitarian theory of distributive justice. This article argues, however, that the project of developing a responsibility-based conception of egalitarian justice is misconceived. The project represents an attempt to defuse conservative criticism of the welfare state and of egalitarian liberalism more generally. But by mimicking the conservative’s emphasis on choice and responsibility, advocates of responsibility-based egalitarianism unwittingly inherit the conservative’s unsustainable justificatory ambitions, unattractive moralism, and questionable metaphysical commitments. More importantly, they misrepresent the nature of our concern with equality as a value.

Feminist Politics and the Human Situation

Alison Jaggar's "ovial" (if I may) 1983 book, Feminist Politics and Human Nature, correlates liberal, Marxist, radical, and socialist feminist theories with their "malestream" counterparts in political theory. She then shows how those theories, in turn, are derived from underlying metaphysical commitments to specific concepts of human nature, that is, to different ideas of what human beings are. Her purpose is to clarify the fundamental differences between feminists in the hope of facilitating more constructive conversations among them. In the introductory chapter of the book, however, she notes that there are other strands of feminist thought, and goes on to explain why they are not incorporated into her analysis. Among these are "religious and existentialist conceptions," which are excluded "primarily because I find them implausible.'" Twenty years later, "postmodern" feminist theory has developed out of the intellectual tradition of which existentialism was a part. Because this strand of feminist thought also includes elements of Freudian and Marxist theory, which are important to Jaggar's socialist feminism, it may be time to reconsider the plausibility of a feminism that draws on the tradition of Simone de Beauvoir and her philosophical allies.2 The problem, of course, is that existentialists and postmodernists offer no theory of human nature. What they offer instead is an account of the human situation. Maurice Merleau-Ponty's account of the human situation, however, has proved quite useful to feminist theorists working on a variety of important philosophical questions. My argument will be that his thought offers important avenues for a postmodern feminist politics as well, both because of the absence of many of the strong markers of masculinist thought in his work,3 and because of his contributions to a political theory of the "noncommunist left"4 that resonates strongly with Jaggar's socialist feminism. Drawing on Merleau-Ponty's work to develop a feminist politics of the human situation, however, is complicated by the fact that both his philosophical views and, more notoriously, his political position evolved considerably between 1945 and his death in 1961.1 discuss the evolution of his political thought elsewhere.5 Here I will trace the development of his understanding of the human situation from Phenomenology of Perception to The Visible and the Invisible, and suggest how that understanding could provide a basis for feminist politics on Jaggar's model.6 I Merleau-Ponty's thought is important for feminists because he understands the human situation as thoroughly embodied, hence the relevance of his work for discussions of the gendered body and feminist epistemology, and as intrinsically intersubjective, hence its relevance for feminist ethics and politics. Still, while both embodiment and intersubjectivity are important elements in all of Merleau-Ponty's work, and he often emphasizes the extent to which they are interrelated, the evolution of his thought after 1945 can be seen as shifting the primary emphasis from embodiment to intersubjectivity, or from perception to language. Another way to trace this development would be to see his guiding image as moving from one in which we stand next to each other to look out on a common scene, to a model in which we look at the others around us to understand how that common scene comes to be shared, a transition with obvious implications for both feminist thought and his political philosophy. Merleau-Ponty begins the chapter on intersubjectivity in Phenomenology of Perception by describing the human situation in traditional existentialist terms: "in short, I am never at one with myself. Such is the lot of a being who is born, that is, who once and for all has been given to himself as something to be understood" (PP 347). But he quickly moves to link this human situation to perception, embodiment and intersubjectivity. "In so far as I have sensory functions, a visual, auditory, and tactile field, I am already in communication with others taken as similar psycho-social subjects" (PP 353). …

On the Conceptual, Psychological, and Moral Status of Zombies, Swamp‐Beings, and Other ‘Behaviourally Indistinguishable’Creatures

In this paper 1 argue that it would be unprincipled to withhold mental predicates from our behavioural duplicates however unlike us they are “on the inside.” My arguments are unusual insofar as they rely neither on an implicit commitment to logical behaviourism in any of its various forms nor to a verificationist theory of meaning. Nor do they depend upon prior metaphysical commitments or to philosophical “intuitions”. Rather, in assembling reminders about how the application of our consciousness and propositional attitude concepts are ordinarily defended, 1 argue on explanatory and moral grounds that they cannot be legitimately withheld from creatures who behave, and who would continue to behave, like us. I urge that we should therefore reject the invitation to revise the application of these concepts in the ways that would be required by recent proposals in the philosophy of mind.