Dec 2017 Flashcards
race
The biological, physiological, or genetic classification of humans according to distinctive features of physical appearance such as skin colour, shape of face, hair colour, body morphology. It is generally used in a binary fashion to identify both a superior race and an inferior race. Throughout history, but especially since the rise of the African slave trade, the concept of race has been of concern to western political thinkers, who use it to justify and legitimate the invasive, exploitative, and predatory actions of their governments. In critical theory, race is thus treated as a problematic term whose history is instructive because it shows how power and ideology combine to facilitate the unjust and unequal treatment of others by hegemonic powers. Recent scholarship in postcolonial studies has demonstrated that race is an important issue for non-western political philosophy as well. Because of its associations with colonialism, eugenics, and slavery, race has not been used in an affirmative sense in critical theory since the 1970s, when affirmative terms such as négritude began to lose their currency. It has been replaced by ethnicity in this regard.
real
reel
One of the three ‘orders’ structuring human existence, according to French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan (the other two are the imaginary and the symbolic). The real is that which resists representation absolutely. It is in this sense impossible to imagine for itself (if we could imagine it, we could represent it). As such, it is impossible to integrate into the symbolic order, which means—somewhat paradoxically—that the real is in fact opposed to reality. Therefore our encounter with the real is always traumatic.
syncretism
A movement aimed at establishing a harmony between apparently opposing positions in philosophy or theology.
Saussure, Ferdinand de
Swiss linguist, one of the founders of semiotics and a crucial influence on the development of structuralism. Born in Geneva, Saussure studied in Leipzig, Berlin, and Geneva. He taught in Paris for several years, before taking the chair of linguistics at the University of Geneva. He only published one work in his lifetime, a massive study of the vowel system in Indo-European languages, which appeared in 1878. However, it is the lecture courses he gave between 1906 and 1911, assembled from student notes by his former students and published posthumously as Cours de linguistique générale (1916), translated as Course in General Linguistics (1959), which brought him lasting fame. Saussure and his students are sometimes referred to as the Geneva School. Although trained as a philologist, Saussure realized that the history or etymology of particular words does not explain either their actual origin or their contemporary meaning. This observation gave rise to two crucial hypotheses: first, that the association of a particular sound and a particular word and its meaning is arbitrary (there is no intrinsic reason that the word for the object we call a bat should either be bat or sound like ‘bat’); second, these arbitrary choices are governed by a general system of meaning-making that is universal(i.e. common to every language). This distinction between language as it is used (parole) and its rules of use (langue) underpins the entire so-called structuralist revolution. Taking this langue/parole distinction a step further, Saussure argued that the spoken word has to be considered a sign comprising two elements—signifier and signified—which, in a famous phrase, he said were like opposite sides of a single sheet of paper. The signifier is the actual acoustic sound, e.g. ‘bat’, which must be distinguishable from other sounds and repeatable, while the signified is the concept we arbitrarily associate with that sound (bearing in mind that different languages can associate different concepts with ostensibly the same sounds). What is important to note here is that Saussure does not define the signifier as pointing to a thing in the world (referent). Structuralism was born from the intuitive leap made by people like Claude Lévi-Strauss (in anthropology) and Jacques Lacan (in psychoanalysis) that other human constructed systems—kinship, the unconscious, films, and so on—could be seen to behave ‘like a language’ in this respect.
Further Reading:
J. Culler Ferdinand de Saussure (1986).
risk society
Risikogesellschaft
German sociologist Ulrich Beck’s term for the present situation (which in Beck’s view began to take shape in the aftermath of World War II), which in his view is defined by the expansion of uncontrollable risks, i.e. risks which have no straightforward or direct cause and therefore no obvious or easy means of attenuation (climate change is the best-known example of such a risk). Beck is particularly concerned with new types of risk that have arisen—or may arise in the future—as a consequence of human action. The issue is not so much that the world has become inherently more dangerous than it used to be, although that is in fact one of the implications of Beck’s thesis, but rather that the nature of the threats we face now has changed—they have become, in Beck’s terms, ‘de-bounded’ in spatial, temporal, and social terms: risks are no longer bound by regional or even national boundaries, but are frequently global in scope; risks may have long latency periods such that the actual cause of particular threats may lie in the distant past or as is the case with nuclear material may stay with us for thousands of years; and because of these spatial and temporal unboundings it has become difficult to assign responsibility in a legally relevant fashion. Although global in scope, risks plainly do not affect everyone and every part of the world equally—e.g. as catastrophic as Hurricane Katrina was for New Orleans in 2005, it caused nowhere near as much misery as hurricanes routinely cause in much poorer countries like Haiti, which lack the resources to defend against natural disaster, and what damage it did cause was the fault of failed human-made structures rather than nature. As the case of Hurricane Katrina made abundantly clear, the real problem with respect to risk is that decisions affecting the types of threat we face and the possible responses that might be made to address them have become ‘sub-political’, consigned to the essentially unaccountable realms of bureaucracy and business where the people most affected by these decisions are unable to have any direct input.
Further Reading:
U. Beck Risikogesellschaft: Auf dem Weg in eine andere Moderne (1986), translated as Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity (1992).
repressive tolerance
The passive acceptance of social and governmental practices, policies and actions which restrict freedom in an absolute sense. The Frankfurt School theorist Herbert Marcuse coined the term in an essay of that title for a book co-written with Robert Wolff and Barrington Moore, Critique of Pure Tolerance (1965). Repressive tolerance, Marcuse argues, takes two main forms: (i) the unthinking acceptance of entrenched attitudes and ideas, even when these are obviously damaging to other people, or indeed the environment (the painfully slow response to warnings about climate change and environmental degradation might be seen as an example of this); and (ii) the vocal endorsement of actions that are manifestly aggressive towards other people (the popular support in the US and the UK in the aftermath of 9/11 and 7/7 for the respective government’s attempts to override or limit habeas corpus is a clear example of this). Genuine tolerance, Marcuse argues, can only exist in a situation of intolerance for these limits on real freedom. Slavoj Žižek’s books Violence (2008) and In Defence of Lost Causes (2008) continue and update this line of thought.
Reich, Wilhelm
1897-1957
Austrianpsychoanalyst whose combination of Marxism and psychoanalysis influenced a generation of political activists and writers in Europe and the US. In later life, he became an extremely controversial figure because of his rather eccentric views. He was prosecuted by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in the US and died in prison.
Reich was born in Dobrzanica, which is now in the Ukraine but was then an outer satellite of the Austro-Hungarian empire. His family were wealthy farmers (a fact that he would later credit with sparking his interest in the study of sex), and although of Jewish descent they disavowed their cultural heritage. Reich was home-schooled by a private tutor until he was 12, when his mother committed suicide. He was then sent to a boys’ school. After the outbreak of World War I, when the Russians invaded in 1915 Reich and his brother fled to Vienna, losing everything. He joined the army in 1915 and served until the end of the war. He then studied medicine at the University of Vienna, where he met Sigmund Freud who invited him to join his Psychoanalytic Association while he was still a student.
He set up private practice as an analyst in 1922. Over the next few years he wrote what is probably his best known and arguably his most important work, Die Funktion des Orgasmus: Zur Psychopathologie und zur Soziologie des Geschlechslebens (1929), translated as The Function of the Orgasm: Sex-Economic Problems of Biological Energy (1968). It was this work, perhaps not surprisingly, that caught the attention of writers like William Burroughs and Norman Mailer who, in their turn, popularized Reich’s work for the counter-culture generation.
In 1930 he moved to Berlin and joined the Communist Party of Germany (KPD). He was witness to the rise of Nazism in Germany, which he theorized in Die Massenpsychologie des Faschismus (1933), translated as The Mass Psychology of Fascism (1980), by asking the question: why did the masses turn towards an authoritarian party even though it was manifestly not in their interest to do so? His somewhat simplistic, but nevertheless suggestive answer was that sexual suppression in childhood prepared people for authoritarian rule in later life. Reich was expelled from the KPD for this book, as a liability to their cause, and when the Nazis came into power it was immediately banned and he was forced to flee the country. He moved to Scandinavia, but was forced to move again, this time to the US, when World War II broke out.
In the US he extended the work begun in Norway, namely his search for the origins of life. He claimed to discover an observable energy he called ‘orgone’, which he said was the source of life itself. Although his scientific methods and procedures were questioned in his lifetime by scientists as eminent as Albert Einstein, Reich was unshakeable in his conviction that he had discovered the beginnings of life itself. He created ‘orgone accumulators’ designed to collect and concentrate this ‘cosmic’ energy so that it could be used to such beneficial ends as healing the sick. Unfortunately for him, Reich sold ‘orgone accumulators’ to mail-order customers and this attracted the attention of the FDA. An injunction was taken out in 1954 to prevent him from shipping his apparatuses across state lines, but he refused to comply with the order. And though he sent the judge presiding over his case copies of his books, he was found to be in contempt and given a two-year sentence.
Further Reading:
R. Corrington Wilhelm Reich: Psychoanalyst and Radical Naturalist (2003).
semantic field
A group of words that are interrelated because of their common point of reference. For example, ‘object’, ‘desire’, ‘drive’, and ‘lack’, are all words belonging to the semantic field of Lacanian psychoanalysis.
Philo of Alexandria
Philo Judaeus
(c. 20 BC-C. AD 50)
Hellenistic philosopher. Philo was a member of a prominent Jewish family of Alexandria, and inaugurated the Islamic, Jewish, and subsequent Christian traditions of reconciling scripture with the teaching of the classical Greek philosophers. In particular, he believed that the early books of the Old Testament, properly interpreted, were allegories which wrapped essential philosophical truths in their tales of gross human happenings. His guiding principle was that Moses was a great Middle Platonist philosopher.
Justinian
ad 482–565
Roman emperor from 527 until his death. Justinian’s philosophical problems centred on the monophysite heresy, although his wife, the ex-actress Theodora, was a monophysite and Justinian eventually became one. He is remembered more for the great codification of Roman law, the million-word Codex Justinianus, first promulgated in 529.
environmental ethics
Most ethics deals with problems of human desires and needs: the achievement of happiness, or the distribution of goods. The central problem specific to thinking about the environment, is the independent value to place on such things as preservation of species, or protection of the wilderness. Such protection can be supported as a means to ordinary human ends, for instance when animals are regarded as future sources of medicines or other benefits. But many would want to claim a non-utilitarian, absolute value for the existence of wild things and wild places; it is in their very independence of human lives that their value consists. They put us in our proper place, and failure to appreciate this value is not only an aesthetic failure but one of due humility and reverence, a moral disability. The problem is one of expressing this value, and mobilizing it against utilitarian arguments for developing natural areas and exterminating species more or less at will. See also nature, sublime.
sublime
A concept deeply embedded in 18th-century aesthetics, but deriving from the 1st century rhetorical treatise On the Sublime by Longinus. The sublime is great, fearful, noble, calculated to arouse sentiments of pride and majesty, as well as awe and sometimes terror. According to Alexander Gerard, writing in 1759, ‘When a large object is presented, the mind expands itself to the extent of that object, and is filled with one grand sensation, which totally possessing it, composes it into a solemn sedateness and strikes it with deep silent wonder and admiration: it finds such a difficulty in spreading itself to the dimensions of its object, as enlivens and invigorates its frame: and having overcome the opposition which this occasions, it sometimes imagines itself present in every part of the scene which it contemplates; and from the sense of this immensity, feels a noble pride, and entertains a lofty conception of its own capacity.’ In Kant’s aesthetic theory the sublime ‘raises the soul above the height of vulgar commonplace’. We experience the vast spectacles of nature as ‘absolutely great’ and of irresistible might and power. This perception is fearful, but by conquering this fear, and by regarding as small ‘those things of which we are wont to be solicitous’ we quicken our sense of moral freedom. So we turn the experience of frailty and impotence into one of our true, inward moral freedom as the mind triumphs over nature, and it is this triumph of reason that is truly sublime. Kant thus paradoxically places our sense of the sublime in an awareness of ourselves as transcending nature, rather than in an awareness of ourselves as a frail and insignificant part of it. Most mountaineers and sailors disagree. See also environmental ethics.
monophysite
The doctrine that in the person of Jesus Christ there was but one, divine, nature, rather than two natures, divine and human. A point of dispute between the Coptic and Abyssinian churches, which accept the doctrine, and Roman Catholicism, which denies it in favour of the opposing, dyophysite doctrine of two natures.
nature
An indefinitely mutable term, changing as our scientific conception of the world changes, and often best seen as signifying a contrast with something considered not part of nature. The term applies both to individual species (it is the nature of gold to be dense or of dogs to be friendly), and also to the natural world as a whole. The sense in which it applies to species quickly links up with ethical and aesthetic ideals: a thing ought to realize its nature; what is natural is what it is good for a thing to become; it is natural for humans to be healthy or two-legged, and departure from this is a misfortune or deformity. The association of what is natural with what it is good to become is visible in Plato, and is the central idea of Aristotle’s philosophy of nature. Unfortunately the pinnacle of nature in this sense is the mature adult male citizen, with the rest of what we would call the natural world, including women, slaves, children, and other species, not quite making it.
Nature in general can, however, function as a foil to any ideal as much as a source of ideals: in this sense fallen nature is contrasted with a supposed celestial realization of the forms. The Galilean world view might have been expected to drain nature of its ethical content, but the term seldom loses its normative force, and the belief in universal natural laws provided its own set of ideals. In the 18th century, for example, a painter or writer could be praised as natural, where the qualities expected would include normal (‘universal’) topics treated with simplicity, economy, regularity, and harmony. Later on, nature becomes an equally potent emblem of irregularity, wildness, and fertile diversity, but also associated with progress and transformation (see absolute idealism, Romanticism). Contrasts with nature may include
(i) that which is deformed or grotesque, or fails to achieve its proper form or function, or just the statistically uncommon or unfamiliar;
(ii) the supernatural, or the world of gods and invisible agencies;
(iii) the world of rationality and intelligence, conceived of as distinct from the biological and physical order;
(iv) that which is manufactured and artificial, or the product of human intervention;
(v) related to that, the world of convention and artifice.
Different conceptions of nature continue to have ethical overtones: for example, the conception of ‘nature red in tooth and claw’ often provides a justification for aggressive personal and political relations, or the idea that it is women’s nature to be one thing or another is taken to be a justification for differential social expectations. Here the term functions as a fig-leaf for a particular set of stereotypes, and is a proper target of much feminist writing. See also Darwinism, environmental ethics, natural law, Naturphilosophie, sociobiology.
Lacan, Jacques
1901-81
French psychoanalyst and founder of École Freudienne de Paris. Undoubtedly the most influential psychoanalyst after Freud, Lacan combined psychoanalysis with semiotics to produce a powerful theoretical synthesis that had an enormous influence over almost the whole field of the human and social sciences, though nowhere more so than in film studies where it became a virtual doctrine. Today, Lacan’s work continues to exert a strong influence thanks to the tireless efforts of followers, particularly Slavoj Žižek.
The son of a wealthy merchant family, Lacan was raised a Catholic and educated at the same school as future French President Charles de Gaulle. He studied medicine and psychiatry at university but took an active interest in the arts as well. As a student, he met the SurrealistsAndré Breton and Philippe Soupault and he heard James Joyce give readings of Ulysses (1922) at the famous Paris bookshop Shakespeare and Co. He read Nietzsche in the original German and in 1923, at the tender age of 22, he encountered Freud’s theories.
It took several years, however, for Freud to become the focal point of Lacan’s interests. It was his reading of the Spanish Surrealist Salvador Dalí’s provocative essay ‘L’Âne pourri’ (The Rotten Donkey) that paved the way by suggesting a new way of thinking about the connection between the mind and language and shifting his focus of attention from hysteria to psychosis. Dalí argued that paranoid delusions are not errors of perception, but creative interpretations of reality that have their own distinctive logic. While Dalí developed this thesis into a method he termed critical paranoia, Lacan set about rethinking what paranoia meant in clinical terms. The first fruit of this labour was his PhD thesis, De la psychose paranoïaque dans ses rapports avec la personnalité (Paranoid psychosis and its relation to personality), defended in 1932. Although Lacan scrupulously avoided any mention of his Surrealist inspiration in his thesis so as not to put off the medical establishment, it was the Surrealists rather than the psychiatric community who first recognized its brilliance.
For the next four years, as part of his training as a psychoanalyst Lacan underwent analysis with the Jewish-Polish exile Rudolph Loewenstein, during which time he wrote very little. In 1936 he began attending the seminars of the Russian émigré philosopher Alexandre Kojève who together with his countryman Alexandre Koyré introduced Hegel’s thought to an entire generation of French scholars. Following Kojève Lacan recognized the distinction between an ‘I’ that thinks and an ‘I’ that wants, and this became the basis of his renovation of psychoanalysis as a philosophy of desire. Lacan’s first major statement to this effect, which after a stumbling start was to be his entrée to the world stage as a major psychoanalyst, occurred in 1936 at the International Psychoanalytical Association (IPA) congress in Marienbad. Lacan presented the first version of his paper on the mirror stage, arguing that the child’s sense of self is based upon a misrecognition (‘méconnaissance’). The child sees the image of itself in a mirror and says ‘that’s me!’ even though in actuality it is merely a reflection. By this means the child attains an imaginary mastery over self. This insight would later be taken up by the French Marxist Louis Althusser in his rethinking of the concept of ideology.
During World War II, Lacan worked as a military psychiatrist, writing nothing for the duration of hostilities. He maintained his hand in the field by corresponding with Melanie Klein, Michael Balint, D. W. Winnicott, and others, but increasingly found himself at odds with them. After the war, Lacan’s profound disagreements with his peers in France and abroad over theoretical issues as well as his refusal to desist from his controversial practice of shortening analytic sessions to as little as 10 minutes instead of the IPA prescribed 60 minutes resulted in his being ostracized by a large proportion of the professional psychoanalytic community. In 1964, he founded his own group, École Freudienne de Paris (The Freudian School of Paris), and broke definitively with both the national and international psychoanalytic statutory bodies. The membership list of this new school reads as a virtual who’s who of French theory—it includes such as figures as Michel de Certeau, Félix Guattari, and Luce Irigaray. Shortly before his death Lacan unilaterally dissolved the École Freudienne de Paris.
Lacan’s published output in his own lifetime was comparatively small. He never wrote a straightforward or complete account of his theory. He developed it in a peripatetic fashion through interventions at conferences and his weekly seminars. In 1966 a large collection of his conference papers running to some 900 pages was published under the bland title of Écrits (the English translation is published under the same title). In spite of its unwieldy size it sold 5,000 copies in two weeks, which is unheard of for such an abstruse work. In the main, however, Lacan’s thought has been disseminated via the haphazard publication of his seminars edited by his son-in-law Jacques-Alain Miller. The product of transcriptions of Lacan’s actual seminars and subject to variable editorial control, these books are both stimulating and frustrating, as rich in ideas as they are elusive in their explanations of those ideas. Sadly, less than half of the seminars are available in this form, but bootleg versions abound. Lacan’s writing is notoriously difficult and it is probably best to approach his work via an expert guidebook.
Lacan’s version of psychoanalysis is distinctive for its emphasis on the concept of lack (‘manque’). According to Lacan, having is never sufficient by itself to extinguish wanting, therefore desire must be thought of as the gap between the two. Even when we have what we want, it doesn’t stop us from wanting more, so in theory we never really have what we want. Desire is in this sense impossible to fulfil.
Lacan was a prodigious inventor of concepts, many of which have passed into the standard idiom of critical theory, e.g. floating signifier, imaginary, phallus, objet (petit) a, symbolic, and real. Perhaps his most famous statement was his rallying cry that we must return to Freud. He meant two things by this—firstly, and obviously, that we should read Freud’s texts (and not those of his followers), preferably in the original German; secondly, and much more importantly, he meant that we should focus on the analytic situation, namely the relation between analyst and analysand, which is where psychoanalysis first took form. See also psychoanalysis; semiotics; structuralism.
Further Reading:
E. Grosz Jacques Lacan: A Feminist Introduction (1990).
S. Homer Jacques Lacan (2005).
J. Rose Sexuality in the Field of Vision (1986).
E. Roudinesco Jacques Lacan (1997).
S. Turkle Psychoanalytic Politics: Jacques Lacan and Freud’s French Revolution (1992).
S. Žižek Looking Awry (1991).
langue and parole
A binary pair introduced by Ferdinand de Saussure distinguishing between, on the one hand, the set of possible ways of making meaning contained by any one language and, on the other hand, its various specific, concrete instantiations. In learning another language, our primary goal must be to gain an appreciation of its langue because only then will we be able to make sense of it, which for Saussure would mean being able to manipulate it and create new meanings. If we simply build up a vocabulary of foreign words we will never understand a language in the way a native speaker of that particular language does because we lack an appreciation of the rules of combination of those words that comprise that language’s langue. The terms are generally left in the original French because of the difficulty of their translation; where they are translated they are rendered as ‘language’ and ‘speech’ which is misleading to the extent that it obscures the fact that for Saussure langue refers to the internal structure of a language, not language itself, for which he used the term langage. For Saussure, langue is the system or machine of language developed in the collective unconscious of a specific community of language users. In contrast, parole is the event of language. This distinction is one of the cornerstones of structuralism.
Further Reading:
F. Jameson The Prison-house of Language: A Critical Account of Structuralism and Russian Formalism (1972).
J. Sturrock Structuralism (1986).
sign
The basic unit of interest for semiotics. It is perhaps best apprehended as a unit of meaning whose principal point of distinction is the fact that it is not meaningful in itself, but is only ever a sign of (or pointer to) a theoretically ‘full’ meaning that lies elsewhere. Although the two principal ‘fathers’ of semiotics, Ferdinand de Saussure and Charles Sanders Peirce, did not agree on whether the sign is a binary or tertiary construct, their independently arrived at conceptions of the sign nonetheless share a number of key features. The sign is composed of two or three inter-related and interactive parts which are distinct from one another but inseparable. For Saussure, the sign consists of a signifier and a signified—the former is the distinctive acoustic image (the ‘c’ sound in ‘cat’, for instance, which sounds very different from the ‘t’ sound in the same word), while the latter is the mental concept we arbitrarily associate with that sound (i.e. not an actual cat, but the idea of a cat). For Peirce, the sign consists of the representamen, the interpretant, and the object—the representamen is the perceptible object (or what is also known as the sign vehicle), the interpretant is the meaning or the effect of the sign, while the object is that which the sign represents. In both cases, too, the sign is greater than its constituent material vehicle (e.g. the colour red in a traffic light is only one part of the semiotic signal drivers use to know when to stop); it is not identical with its material vehicle (i.e. the colour red is not in and of itself a sign); nor is it identical with its elements (i.e. the colour red is only one part of the sign).
prisoner’s dilemma
The classic problem in game theory. Two prisoners jointly charged with a crime are held apart, and each is given the option of confessing, or not confessing. If each confesses, he convicts them both, and they will serve six years each. If neither confesses, the prosecutor will find a lesser charge, and each will serve two years. If A confesses and B does not, A is released and B serves an aggravated ten years. If B confesses and A does not, B is released, and A serves an aggravated ten years. The matrix is shown in the figure:
The surprising truth about the game is that whatever the other prisoner does a prisoner does better by confessing (if A confesses, B does better for himself by confessing, and if A does not confess, B does better for himself by confessing; and conversely for A if B confesses or does not confess). Confessing dominates not confessing. Yet the social result in which each of A and B follows this reasoning is the worst of all (12 person-prison years) and together they would have done much better by sitting tight (4 person-prison years). Many political situations (e.g. whether to vote when there is a cost to doing so, whether to refrain from wagebargaining, whether to be a good citizen and turn off one’s hose during a water shortage) can be modelled as prisoners’ dilemmas. The structure shows that it is not always the case that the social good is furthered efficiently by each person doing what is in his or her own best interests: as well as an ‘invisible hand’ whereby unbridled self-interest elevates everybody’s position, there can be an invisible boot whereby it diminishes it (see Smith).
An iterated prisoners’ dilemma is a sequence of such situations, of either finite or infinite length. In an interesting study (The Evolution of Cooperation, 1984) Robert Axelrod showed that an efficient policy in such a situation is ‘tit for tat’: you start off co-operating (not confessing) until faced with a play on which the opponent ‘rats’, and then you rat (confess) once in retaliation, but then, if the opponent mends his ways, you go back to not confessing until the same thing happens again. As well as being an efficient strategy ‘tit for tat’ has some intuitive moral justification. However, the strategy is sensitive to the ratio of rewards and penalties that are in play, and cannot be said to be the single best strategy for all circumstances. See also assurance game; chicken; commons, tragedy of.
Web Link: http://www.univie.ac.at/virtuallabs/Introduction/pd.html An online tutorial on the prisoners’ dilemma
Web Link: http://www.gametheory.net/applets/prisoners.html Simulations of the prisoners’ dilemma
truth function
A truth function of a number of propositions or sentences is a function of them that has a definite truth value, dependent only on the truth values of the constituents. Thus (p & q) is a combination whose truthvalue is true when p is true and q is true, and false otherwise. ¬p is a truth function of p, false when p is true and true when p is false. The way in which the value of the whole is determined by the combinations of values of constituents is presented in a truth table.
The propositional calculus is the standard treatment of truth-functional combinations. Its constants, &, ∨, ¬, → and ↔, are all truth-functors, i.e. expressions standing for truth functions.
social formation
A term used by structuralist Marxist scholars like Louis Althusser to differentiate between different types of societies in terms of their operation and structure, or more specifically their mode of production.
semantic paradoxes
Following Ramsey and the Italian mathematician G. Peano (1858–1932) it has been customary to distinguish logical paradoxes that depend upon a notion of reference or truth (semantic notions), such as those of the Liar family, Berry, Richards, etc., from the purely logical paradoxes in which no such notions are involved, such as Russell’s paradox, or those of Cantor and Burali-Forti. Paradoxes of the first type seem to depend upon an element of self-reference, in which a sentence talks about itself, or in which a phrase refers to something defined by a set of phrases of which it is itself one. It is easy to feel that this element is responsible for the contradictions, although self-reference itself is often benign (for instance, the sentence ‘All English sentences should have a verb’ includes itself happily in the domain of sentences it is talking about), so the difficulty lies in forming a condition that excludes only pathological self-reference. Paradoxes of the second kind then need a different treatment. Whilst the distinction is convenient, in allowing set theory to proceed by circumventing the latter paradoxes by technical means, even when there is no solution to the semantic paradoxes, it may be a way of ignoring the similarities between the two families. There is still the possibility that while there is no agreed solution to the semantic paradoxes, our understanding of Russell’s paradox may be imperfect as well.
logical paradoxes
Paradoxes such as Russell’s paradox, in which there is no use of semantic terms, are sometimes described as purely logical, in contrast to the semantic paradoxes.
