Individual Qua Research Articles

Health of organisms and health of persons: an embedded instrumentalist approach.

In a time when we as a society are in the process of deciding what our basic rights to health care are, it is critically important for us to have a full and complete understanding of what constitutes health. We argue for an analysis of health according to which certain states are healthy not in themselves but because they allow an individual to reach actual goals. Recognizing that the goals of an individual considered from the point of view of biology and the goals of the same individual considered as an agent in the world might be different, we introduce a distinction between the health of an individual qua organism and the health of an individual qua person. We then argue that this distinction characterizes the evaluations made by patients and healthcare providers better than the widely discussed distinction between disease and illness.

Individual and Social Aspects of Learning

Social learning is in the air. Daily observations and experiences as well as recent scholarly traditions suggest that a certain amount of learning takes place beyond the confines of the individual mind. Learning appears to involve social aspects. Scenarios ranging from a group of children collaboratively trying to solve the question of how to construct a kite to a university professor writing a research paper with a colleague advance the case for a social side to learning. But impressions do not make social learning an obvious category. Are there any theoretical and empirical grounds to justify social learning as a distinctive phenomenon? Is there anything qualitatively different in this kind of learning to distinguish it from the familiar individual conception of learning? Can one make the case that social learning is more than an epiphenomenon or individual learning multiplied, that the social aspects of learning are anything more than the kind of secondary help a learner might get from audiovisual displays, bookmarks, and road signs? If we can raise the question of whether social learning is a valid and viable phenomenon, the opposite question might equally well be raised: Is it not possible that solo learning is simply a figment of the traditional laboratory-based psychology, on the one hand, and of a socially shared respect for the individual qua individual, on the other? The idea of social learning is not really new, having been an important part of early developments of the science of psychology (folkspsychology, as formulated, for example, by Munsterberg [1914, cited in Cole & Engestrom, 1993]). This branch of psychology fell into neglect because of its Gestalt-like nature and thus its alleged lack of rigor, its central phenomena left to anthropology and sociology to handle. It was distinguished from the more rigorous laboratory-based, experimentally oriented, and far more prestigious psychology of Ebbinghouse. Social learning has thus continued to be largely ignored by psychologists over the years, relegated at best to the study of background context, not really on a par with the learning of the individual (Gardner, 1985). This relative neglect now appears to have been corrected. With the growing interest in Vygotsky's theory, retrospective examinations of the role of social inter-

The Practice of Philosophy

Words and Life (= WL) is a bulky collection of 29 essays, edited and introduced by James Conant. Pragmatism: An Open Question (= P) is a much thinner collection, dedicated to Conant, of just three lectures. Taken together, the two books constitute an argument for pragmatism as a viable option in contemporary philosophy, and a new (pragmatic) basis for what remains viable in the philosophical and political ideals of the Enlightenment. As in a previous collection of essays (Putnam 1990), Conant’s role appears to be more than just editorial. In his own lengthy introductions, he gives Putnam’s work an interpretive ‘spin’, of which Putnam, for his part, seems to approve. Together, Putnam and Conant develop a strain of pragmatism which is well worth looking into. Putnam’s pragmatism is best captured by the quote from Cavell (1979: p. 125) which appears as the motto on the title page of the 1994 collection, and from which its title – ‘Words and Life’ – is derived. It is the view that although philosophy is an open ended practice of reflection, rather than a purely contemplative theory of one kind or another, the practice in question is at one and the same time a part of culture (immanence) and a step beyond it (transcendence). In Cavell’s language, the task of such reflection (‘philosophizing’) is ‘to confront culture with itself, along the lines in which it meets in me’, where the self in question – the individual qua philosopher – appears to be engulfed by culture even as he is confronting it from the outside. On this interpretation, Putnam’s appeal to practice in philosophy is part of an attempt to keep its transcendent, or critical, dimension alive, even while recognizing philosophy’s radical embeddedness in culture and tradition, and the futility of seeking some God’s-eye view from which reality as such is to be viewed. The question is whether, and how, these two perspectives can be held together. If our standards of rational criticism transcend any particular culture in terms of their scope and authority, how can they also be embedded in culture and immanent to it? Can pragmatism offer a coherent synthesis of these two dimensions?

Are Workers Forced to Work?

G. A. Cohen, in his ‘The Structure of Proletarian Unfreedom,’ addresses the classical Marxist claim that workers are forced to sell their labour power under capitalism. This claim has been the object of much debate and controversy. Cohen brings his very considerable analytical skills to bear on this question with the result that he supports, in distinctive but non-conflicting ways, both sides of the controversy. On Cohen’s analysis this claim is ambiguous, i.e., the term ‘proletariat’ has two importantly different senses. In the distributive sense, workers need not be coerced, but in the collective sense, they are coerced, i.e., each individual worker is free to leave the working class, but the class of workers' as a whole does not possess a similar freedom. In this paper, I will argue that Cohen’s argument does not establish that the proletariat qua individuals are not forced to sell their labour power. It will also be argued that, in fac;t, there is no definite answer to the question of whether or not workers are forced to sell their labour power. Freedom and coercion are matters of degree, for the relevant range of cases, and, hence, it is not appropriate to ask whether or not the workers are coerced. I will, however, attempt to show that, contrary to the spirit of Cohen’s thesis, proletariat as individuals suffer from a diminished degree of freedom in the sale of their labour power.

Art and Generality

In every work of art we find a kind of mnystery; perhaps in some sense it is bound to remain so. Yet we need not make things more mysterious than they are. The philosophers whom I would accuse of that perversity are Mr. Hampshire in his 'Logic and Appreciation' published long ago; and Professor Strawson more recently and bleakly in an article called 'Aesthetic Appraisal'.1 Both belong, though with no very clear sign of appreciating the fact, to a tradition deriving ultimately from Kant-indeed Hampshire does speak expressly of 'disinterestedness' and Strawson disclaims originality -and stretching through Hegel, to Croce and ultimately Collingwood. It is Collingwood who makes the point most explicitly: in art what we see is unique, we know the individual qua individual. Works of art in Speculum Menltis were earlier described as 'monadic'. The Principles of Art spells out, indeed is almost built around, the contrast in question. In craft and technology we generalize, and generality is seen as essential to themi; which contradistinguishes them from art. Already for Kant, of course, it served as a central principle that aesthetic judgements, value judgements, are not arrived at by any ordinary process of argument, specifically not by argument using determinate concepts. (One might also name Bergson, for whom, and for his many 'aesthete' followers, art cut through the network of intellection, to show us reality in itself. But Gombrich's work, one would have thought, has settled that.) Some such theme, broadly speaking, is common to the two writers I have named among our contemporaries. Let me look at their articles in turn (though in fact my main interest is in Strawson's). But to begin with Hampshire: he characterizes the 'aesthete' as follows: 'Precisely his refusal to generalize,' he tells us, 'would be the inark of his aestheticism' and again, 'A copy