488 Book Reviews
plicity in the determination of prior probability (which most scientists and others would give) and the very simple character of theism, P(h|E) is going to have a significant value. I then deployed my Principle of Credulity that (roughly), if it seems to you that you perceive (or experience) that something is so, then probably it is—unless it is initially quite improbable for other reasons. Having shows that theism is not initially quite improbable for other reasons, the evidence of the millions of people who claim an awareness of God makes it probable that he exists. All that is there in my book; but, to read Sobel’s account of it, you would not know it. He does not even mention my use of the criterion of simplicity to measure prior probability, let alone discuss it. And yet my whole claim about the P-inductive force of the arguments taken together turns on it. Nor does he mention the crucial last stage of my argument. Oriel College Oxford OX1 4EW UK
richard swinburne
doi:10.1093/mind/fzl481
A Brief History of the Paradox, by Roy Sorensen. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. Pp. xv + 394. H/b $26.00. Graham Greene used to call some of his novels entertainments, and one might perhaps think of Sorensen’s book as a philosophical entertainment. There is a place for philosophical entertainments. Jaegwon Kim used to contrast undergraduate and graduate education by saying that at least half of teaching undergraduates is motivating them. When Horace says that poetry should amuse and instruct, the two functions are not just pasted together willy-nilly; the amusement sustains the reader through the instruction. That is the sort of motivation Kim had in mind, and it is a proper function to be served by philosophical entertainments. The more abstract, subtle, or even mathematical the material one is teaching, the more students appreciate digressions. They especially enjoy anecdotes about the authors of the material they are learning, and Sorensen’s book is chock full of such anecdotes. More than once he draws on Clifton Fadiman’s The Little, Brown Book of Anecdotes. Sorensen comes across as a bit of a raconteur, and maybe even a stand-up comic. It might not be too surprising if his book were consulted by teachers preparing their lectures and looking for comic relief. The book consists of twenty-six chapters, most of them pretty short. That is enough for each chapter to be background for a lecture in a class with two lectures a week during a thirteen-week term, and those numbers fit pretty well with the practice at many universities. There certainly could be an attractive critical thinking course, or even an introductory course in metaphysics and epistemology, organized entirely around seminal paradoxes in the history of Mind, Vol. 115 . 458 . April 2006
© Mind Association 2006
Book Reviews 489
philosophy. It is a shame that Sorensen does not tell us in his preface how he came to write his brief history, or whether he has used the material in his own teaching, but he does remark that ‘philosophy teachers use paradoxes to stimulate class discussion’ (p. 168). A good account of the nature of paradoxes should explain why we expect them especially to stimulate discussion, and the nature of paradoxes is a recurrent theme in Sorensen’s book. A paradox is not a mere contradiction since a contradiction is just a particularly obvious sort of falsehood, and what could be less stimulating than an obvious falsehood? Sorensen thinks that paradoxes are riddles. Since we do not have an articulate and settled body of lore about riddles, it is not clear just what it would come to for paradoxes to be riddles. Moreover, one might wonder whether riddles are not somehow more artificial than paradoxes. One suspects that the Sphinx designed her riddle (What goes on four legs in the morning, two at midday, and three in the evening?) backward to shroud the answer (a man) from which she began her design. When Carroll designs the Mad Hatter’s riddle (Why is a raven like a writing desk?) without a clever answer, perhaps that void is itself the joke (or a symptom of the Hatter’s madness). But some paradoxes (like those of set theory) can at least seem like occasions of real discovery (about the shape of the world of sets). John Mackie construed paradoxes as arguments; Mark Sainsbury and Webster’s Collegiate note the relevance of arguments to paradoxes. At first blush, a paradox is an apparently valid argument from apparently true premisses to an apparently false conclusion. It seems perfectly plain why anyone (except perhaps a person browbeaten into repressing our natural love for the play of ideas) would be stimulated by a paradox thus construed. If an inference in a paradox is dubious, we can add as a new premiss the conditional whose antecedent is the conjunction of the premisses of the dubious inference and whose consequent is its conclusion. If the original conclusion of the paradox is merely dubious, we can add its denial as a new premiss. By thus adding extra premisses, we can always convert a paradox at first blush into a genuinely valid argument to a genuinely false conclusion from apparently true premisses. Then it becomes clear what solving a paradox, if possible, is going to be; it gets converted into a reductio ad absurdum of at least one of its premisses. Since the premisses appeared to be true, this account explains how solving a paradox can be an occasion of genuine, and surprising, discovery. Even if, as Sorensen argues, there are some counter-examples to the argument story of paradoxes, its theoretical appeal seems likely to keep it alive. Even if we are not quite sure how to analyse paradox, we can usually recognize one when it bites us. In his twenty-six chapters, Sorensen presents a large number of paradoxes and paradox mongers. He discusses figures ranging from the presocratics through a substantial number of medievals up to Quine. This is rather a larger gallery of figures than most scholars would claim as their own. Sorensen’s discussions of these figures are not much encumbered by Mind, Vol. 115 . 458 . April 2006
© Mind Association 2006
490 Book Reviews
scholarly apparatus; he does not much go in for detailed presentations of the various sides of controversies about these figures. Indeed, his sketches often feel like the potted versions of history so familiar to a philosopher who has gone decades since struggling to master the relevant sources. The sad thing about potted history is that it is so much less interesting and mysterious than the real thing. I have done a little work on Russell, though I would not dare to present myself as an expert. Here are a few things that bothered me in Sorensen’s little chapter on Russell. On p. 319, Sorensen tells us that Peano had axiomatized arithmetic. The canard of Peano’s postulates has long been seen as such, and the effort by experts to give Dedekind the credit due him for axiomatizing elementary number theory should continue. On p. 322, Sorensen draws a version of the diagram that is the heart of Cantor’s lovely proof that the positive fractions are countable, that is, can all be counted off without repetitions using 1, 2, … . This diagram is all Sorensen gives of Cantor’s proof. But in it, he draws all the arrows backward. This makes it look as if instead of counting the fractions off in 1, 2, 3, … order, we are to do it in the reverse of that order. That can only flummox the novices and irritate the experts. On p. 326, Sorensen writes, ‘Like the editors who turned down the diagonal argument for publication, Russell noticed that the antidiagonal argument resembled the liar paradox’. The first clause of this sentence seems to hint at a good anecdote about, probably, Cantor, but I could not recall one from the preceding pages. The index gives only pp. 323–7 for the diagonal argument. But reviewing these pages I could find no story about editors rejecting the original diagonal argument. I bet this sentence will perplex Sorensen’s readers. On p. 332, Sorensen adds an extra ‘l’ to Zermelo’s name, which will set novices up for embarrassment. A single, and not very intense, reading of the sixteen pages of Sorensen’s chapter on Russell thus reveals four infelicities, and that points toward a rate of one every four pages. That rate makes one worry about how much to trust the chapters on material with which one has little prior familiarity. Perhaps a frank raconteur should warn his audience that he does not let truth spoil a good story. There are two arithmetic blunders in the chapter on Quine that should be pointed out. On p. 353, we need to raise 365 to the nth power, not multiply 365 by n. On p. 362, we need to subtract one not from the n in the exponent of two to the nth, but rather from two to the nth itself. If we do it the way Sorensen has written it, we do not get an odd number (unless n is one), and that spoils John Robison’s argument. These are the sort of errors only the author, not a professional proofreader, can be expected to correct. Sorensen calls his book a brief history of the paradox. What he actually gives us are expositions of many paradoxes, and many anecdotes about their discoverers. He tells us a good deal less about the various efforts at solutions these paradoxes have attracted, and the disputes between the proponents of these putative solutions. It is rather as if a history of disease gave us the symptoms of lots of diseases, and some stories about early patients with those diseases, but Mind, Vol. 115 . 458 . April 2006
© Mind Association 2006
Book Reviews 491
told us much less about attempts to diagnose and treat them. Such a history might omit germs and sanitation. Such a history would be seriously deformed. Had Augustus de Morgan not already used the title, Sorensen might better have called his book A Budget of Paradoxes. Does every paradox have a solution? Many philosophers look to act as if they believe so, and surely it is a natural working hypothesis for a philosopher trying to solve a particular paradox that this paradox has a solution. But one also wishes that someone would look seriously into the notion that an enduring paradox just plain has no solution whatsoever. Could we nonetheless get a glimmer of what it might mean if, say, the liar paradox were utterly and absolutely unsolvable? Might the message trying to make its way through to us be the thought that thought is ultimately hopeless? Such a nihilism might be a good articulation of the Zeitgeist, and confirmed by its self-destruction in paradox. Department of Philosophy/MC 267 University of Illinois at Chicago 1421 University Hall 601 South Morgan Street Chicago, IL 60607-7114 USA
[email protected]
w. d. hart
doi:10.1093/mind/fzl488
Interpretive Reasoning, by Laurent Stern. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005. Pp. xiv + 214. H/b $39.95.
This book revises and enlarges upon the author’s previously published articles, developing a Kant-inspired conception of the epistemology of ‘the interpreting activity’. Stern assumes, quite plausibly, that the goal of many interpretative projects is to understand what someone has said or done. He further assumes, rather more controversially, that ‘meanings are not grounds for the adequacy of translations and interpretations’ (p. 145). Meaning is instead the product of an interpretation, the result of the interpreter’s sense-making activity. Given this assumption, which this reviewer does not share, Stern asks what evaluative standards for interpretations can be identified. He gives very good reasons for rejecting answers based on consensus or the ‘interpretive community’ or ‘institution’, and he also raises cogent objections against relativism and permissive, ‘anything goes’ approaches. Some interpretations are not just off the mark; they are, in Stern’s words, ‘off the wall’. His example is commentary by Heidegger and Derrida on a Van Gogh picture of a pair of shoes. Interpretations cannot be assessed using ‘any sort of litmus test’ (p. 1), and Stern assumes that this observation entails that norms or principles must be developed in terms of interpreters’ beliefs and responses. He draws an analogy Mind, Vol. 115 . 458 . April 2006
© Mind Association 2006
