Advice
- Posted by Andrew Bailey on Thursday, November 30, 2006 at 7:49 AM
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In this short interview [HT], Peter van Inwagen opines:
I think it's better for people to read only genre fiction like science fiction any murder mysteries (if those are the only books they really enjoy) than for them to try to slog through The Divine Comedy because they think they should — and then give up halfway through the Inferno and turn the television set on. One hopes that a person who has developed the habit of reading a lot and who has started with genre fiction will one day move on to Dante (or Plato or Tolstoy or T. S. Eliot). But for someone who is prepared to “move on” I have no particular advice about authors or titles. I'd say to them, “Don't worry about it. If you are dissatisfied with the kinds of books you have been reading, if you are looking for “something more,” the books you are looking for will find you.”
This is good advice, I think. van Inwagen offers much more advice in this paper; while most of it pertains specifically to working in free will, I found this bit particularly sound:
Here’s a second piece of advice about framing definitions: define sentences, not terms. Do not, for example, define ‘cause’ or ‘causation’ or ‘causality’; rather, define ‘x is the cause of y’ or ‘x is a cause of y’ or ‘x causes y’. Do not define ‘knowledge’; rather, define ‘x knows that p’. And a definition of, e.g., ‘x causes y’ should take this form: a sentence that can replace ‘x causes y’ at all its occurrences, a sentence in which ‘x’ and ‘y’ and no other variables are free, together with a specification of the kinds of object over which ‘x’ and ‘y’ range. A definition of ‘x knows that p’ should contain the free variable ‘x’ and the schematic sentence-letter ‘p’ and no other free variables or schematic letters.
This stern requirement—the “Chisholm requirement” so to call it—can be softened in one way: it is permissible to define nouns and noun-phrases (“terms” in the proper sense of the word) if they are the names of theses or propositions. Thus, a proper definition can consist of the phrase, ‘Ethical naturalism is the thesis that’ followed by a declarative sentence, or a series of them, that spells out what the philosopher offering the definition takes to be the content of the thesis called ‘ethical naturalism’. This is a softening of the Chisholm requirement, and not a contradiction of it, because, like the pristine Chisholm requirement, it demands a definition whose definiens contains a complete declarative sentence (or a series of them). Why, you may ask, do I “privilege” declarative sentence over the many other syntactic categories in this way? Because the declarative sentence is the natural unit of clear statement; because (as philosophers have known at least since Frege) words have meaning only in the context of a sentence.
