power should ideally be the basis for government. Edicts and punishment can at best secure behavioural conform- ity but, if a ruler has approximated the ideal, he will care about and provide for the people, who will be attracted to him and be inspired to reform themselves. k l.s. *Confucianism; Chinese philosophy. Confucius: The Analects, tr. D. C. Lau (Harmondsworth, 1979). conjunction. A proposition (P and Q) is a conjunction where P and Q are each propositions. The English connect- ive ‘and’ conjoining propositions is sometimes ambigu- ous. For example, temporal succession may or may not be implicit in ‘Sally arrived late and Jane scolded her’. In the *propositional calculus a conjunction (P·Q) is true if and only if each conjunct is true. Alternative nota- tions for ‘·’ are ‘&’, ‘ ’, and juxtaposition. The inference of (P·Q) from premiss P and premiss Q is known as the rule of conjunction. r.b.m. *truth-function. W. V. Quine, Methods of Logic, 4th edn. (Cambridge, Mass., 1982). connectionism. An approach in *artificial intelligence and *cognitive science aimed at producing biologically realis- tic models of the brain and of mental processing; some- times called PDP (*parallel distributed processing). In ‘old-fashioned’ (or cognitivist) accounts, the brain is viewed as a symbol manipulator. In PDP (or connection- ist) accounts, the brain is viewed as a complex weave of multilayered networks. The units of a network (which may be compared to the brain’s neurons) are simple processors, and the connections between them, of which there are massively many, have different strengths. Infor- mation-processing is parallel, i.e. much is carried on simul- taneously; and it is distributed, i.e. any individual connection participates in the storage of many different items of information. There is controversy about the exact significance of this new approach, and about its repercussions for debates in the philosophy of mind. j.horn. K. Plunkett, ‘Connectionism Today’, Synthese, 129/2 (2001). William Ramsey, Stephen P. Stich, and David E. Rumelhart (eds.), Philosophy and Connectionist Theory (Hillsdale, NJ, 1991). connective. A word or sequence of words which forms a complex indicative sentence when joined with an indica- tive sentence or sentences. For example, the English con- nective ‘and’ joins two sentences to make a more complex sentence. Connectives are classified according to the num- ber of sentences with which they combine: ‘it is not the case that’ is a one-place connective and ‘and’ is two-place. Connectives also divide into the truth-functional and non- truth-functional. A connective is truth-functional if the truth-value(s) of the sentence(s) with which the connect- ive combines completely determines the truth-value of the sentence formed through the combination; otherwise it is non-truth-functional. The ‘&’ of the propositional calculus is truth-functional: ‘p & q’ is true if and only if p and q are both true. a.d.o. *truth-function. R. M. Sainsbury, Logical Forms (Oxford, 1991), ch. 2. connotation: see denotation. conscience. By ‘conscience’ is meant the sense of *right and wrong in an individual; described variously by philosophers as a reflection of the voice of God, as a human faculty, as the voice of reason, or as a special *moral sense. The most famous modern discussion is in the work of Joseph Butler, who insisted on conscience’s claim to ‘authority’ over other sources of motivation. In moral epistemology Butler combined the rationalist and moral sense theories of the eighteenth century, describing conscience as ‘a sentiment of the understanding or a per- ception of the heart’. He underestimated the moral prob- lem of the erring conscience, treated explicitly in Aquinas’s Summa Theologiae (1a. 2ae, Q. 19, arts. 5 and 6). Aquinas pointed out that one acts badly in doing what is in fact bad, but also in going against conscience; so that unless he ‘put away his error’ someone of evil conscience cannot act well. p.r.f. Charles A. Baylis, ‘Conscience’, in Paul Edwards (ed.), The Ency- clopedia of Philosophy (New York, 1967). consciousness exists, but it resists definition. There are some criteria for saying of some organism or state that it is conscious. Consciousness involves experience or awareness. Human mental life has a phenomenal side, a subjective side that the most sophisticated information- processing system might lack. To paraphrase Thomas Nagel, there is something it is like to be in a conscious *mental state, something it is like for the organism itself. Conscious mental states are heterogeneous in phenom- enal kind. Sensations, moods, emotions, dreams, propos- itional thought, self-awareness all occur consciously— perhaps some of these states only occur consciously. For Descartes, all thinking is conscious; conscious thought is the essence of mind; humans have privileged and incorrigible access to their own conscious states; and the mind is a non-physical substance. The modern nat- uralistic consensus is that only some mental processes are conscious and that all mental events and processes are physical. That is, all mental states have neural *realiza- tions in Homo sapiens. The best way to think about con- sciousness involves as a first step thinking in terms of conscious mental states and not in terms of consciousness as a unified faculty. Despite the widespread but by no means unanimous commitment to a naturalistic meta- physic of consciousness, there is heated debate over what exactly consciousness is; whether, and if so how, it can be studied; what if anything its causal role is; and whether, despite the fact that it is so far always realized in biological systems, it must be so realized. The fact that conscious- ness has a subjective, uniquely first-personal side has led ∨ 160 Confucius some to maintain allegiance to the Cartesian view that consciousness is as consciousness seems. On this view, first-person phenomenology is the method for studying consciousness. The problem with this sort of view is that while it may be true that there is direct and privileged access to one’s own conscious states, it does not follow that this access is incorrigible. First, even first-person phe- nomenology is ambivalent about the claim that we are always in perfect touch with whatever conscious state(s) we are in. Furthermore, even if we do have privileged and incorrigible access, the latter being stronger than the for- mer, to the subjective aspects of consciousness, it does not follow that we have either sort of access to all the aspects of consciousness. If, as most naturalists think, conscious- ness has depth and hidden structure, then first-person phe- nomenology will hardly be capable of yielding a complete theory of consciousness. *Naturalism implies that con- scious mental states supervene on certain neural states. What neural state my experience of red supervenes on is something to which there is no first-personal access. Some philosophers are pessimistic about joining the subjective and objective sides of the story. Others are hopeful that we can yoke together the phenomenological, psychological, and neural analyses of conscious mental life to yield a more complete theory, a theory that gives the way things seem its due and which at the same time deepens our understanding of how conscious mental events are realized and what causal roles they play. The question of causal role is pressing. There is at present no widely accepted theory of why consciousness evolved. It seems to many that a merely informationally sensitive sys- tem, such as a community of ants and bees, may be, or could be, as well adapted as equivalent experientially sen- sitive systems. There is no doubt that we are conscious, but because the adaptive value of being conscious is not well understood, epiphenomenalism, the view that con- sciousness is a side-effect of more causally significant processes, remains a live, and much discussed, possibility in contemporary philosophy of mind and cognitive sci- ence. Another area of lively research and debate is on the relation of conscious states and intentional states. The dominant view is that many conscious states are not inten- tional. Some conscious states, such as moods, do not appear to be ‘of’ or ‘about’ anything. Relatedly, there is the question of whether unconscious mental states exist. If there are unconscious mental states, then the door is open for unconscious intentional states, for example, Freudian beliefs and desires. John Searle, despite advocating *‘biological naturalism’, thinks that Descartes was right in thinking that all bona fide mental states are conscious. On Searle’s view there are no *unconscious mental states at all: all mental states are conscious states; beyond that there are just non-conscious neural states, events, and processes. o.f. *consciousness, its irreducibility; mind, syntax, and semantics; for-itself and in-itself; Honderich; intention- ality; dualism; content of consciousness zombies. D. Chalmers, The Conscious Mind (New York, 1996). Daniel C. Dennett, Consciousness Explained (New York, 1991). Owen Flanagan, Consciousness Reconsidered (Cambridge, Mass., 1992). Thomas Nagel, ‘What is it Like to Be a Bat?’, in Mortal Questions (Cambridge, 1979). John Searle, The Rediscovery of Mind (Cambridge, Mass., 1992). Q. Smith and A. Jokic (eds.), Consciousness: New Philosophical Perspectives (Oxford, 2003). consciousness, false: see false consciousness. consciousness, its irreducibility. Many efforts have been made to identify consciousness with some other feature such as behaviour, functional states, or neurobiological states described solely in third-person neurobiological terms. All of these fail because consciousness has an irre- ducible subjective character which is not identical with any third-person objective features. Consciousness is irre- ducibly subjective in the sense that conscious states are experienced by and accessible to the individual who has them in a way that they are not experienced by or access- ible to other individuals. To understand this point it is essential to distinguish between the epistemic sense of the distinction between objectivity and *subjectivity and the ontological sense. In the epistemic sense, objectivity is a matter of propositions being ascertainable by any compe- tent observer as opposed to subjective matters which are relative to individual tastes and preferences. But in the ontological sense of the objective–subjective distinction, there are certain phenomena which are intrinsically sub- jective and other phenomena which are intrinsically objective. Such matters as mass, force, and gravitational attraction are ontologically objective, but, in this sense, consciousness is ontologically subjective. Subjectivity in this case is not a matter of the epistemology by way of which we find out about consciousness but a matter of its ontological status. The objection, then, to any form of *reductionism is that it is bound to fail because the onto- logically subjective cannot be reduced to the ontologically objective. j.r.s. *behaviourism; artificial intelligence; cognition; func- tionalism; cognitive science. F. Jackson, ‘Epiphenomenal Qualia’, Philosophical Quarterly (1982). T. Nagel, ‘What is it Like to Be a Bat?’, in Mortal Questions (Cam- bridge, 1979). J. R. Searle, The Rediscovery of the Mind (Cambridge, Mass., 1992). consciousness, neural correlates of. Activities, states, or parts of central nervous systems which are directly related to the occurrence of conscious perceptions, feelings, thoughts, and intentions, maybe under certain environ- mental or bodily conditions. A central philosophical and also scientific question is whether the correlates are suffi- cient or just necessary for consciousness, and whether this is a matter of nomic connection or something else. How explanatory or predictive are they? Correlation, at least consciousness, neural correlates of 161 until more is said, is consistent with both dualistic theories of causal connection between mind and brain and also mind–brain identity theories. In fact, the existence of neural correlates is compatible with most of the different philosophical theories of mind–body relationship. When correlates are taken as being only necessary conditions for consciousness, they are compatible with the doctrine of externalism, to the effect that conscious states depend on extra-cranial facts. Still, the ongoing discovery of correla- tions has strengthened naturalistic views of the mind rather than any others. r.v. T. Metzinger (ed.), Neural Correlates of Consciousness (Cambridge, 2000). consciousness, stream of: see stream of consciousness. consent. The standard way of establishing *political obliga- tion, and so binding citizens to obey the laws of the state, in liberal thought and, putatively at least, in liberal prac- tice. Consent in the political realm is modelled on the pri- vate promise and subject to the same qualifications: it is morally binding only in so far as it is voluntary, under- taken with full knowledge, after deliberation. (The only exception to this rule is the act of surrender in war, where the implicit or explicit commitment not to renew the combat, made under extreme duress, is morally binding none the less.) The pre-liberal practice of exacting oaths of allegiance to new rulers (especially usurpers and con- querors, who had reason to worry about their legitimacy) suggests that the idea of consent has practical as well as theoretical value. As obviously or mysteriously as the promise, political consent generates a strong sense of being bound. Hence it provides a foundation for the claims made on individuals by established regimes and for the charge of criminal disobedience, rebellion, or treason if these claims are ignored or refused. But explicit consent is relatively rare in political life. Oaths are commonly demanded only from notables, office-holders, and aliens in the process of naturalization. Or, they are ritually recited (as American schoolchildren recite the Pledge of Allegiance) under conditions that don’t meet the requirements of rational agreement. In order to save the theory of obligation by consent, two dif- ferent strategies have been adopted. The first is embodied in the idea of the social *contract as an act of hypothetical consent by imaginary men and women negotiating with one another (or engaged in solitary deliberation) in the artificial conditions of the *State of nature or the *original position. Real men and women are invited to recognize themselves in their imaginary fellows and to accept the conclusions they reach. The second strategy involves the redescription of certain ordinary acts and omissions as signs of tacit consent to the established form of political rule. These strategies might appear to cripple consent and render it unable to play any sort of foundational role, and yet they are compatible with radical claims: hence Hobbes’s suggestion that rebels and traitors have con- sented to their own punishment—either because as rational individuals they must have consented, or because as actual citizens they have tacitly consented, to the authority of the sovereign. The leading candidates for strategic redescription are, in ascending order of plausibility, the failure to leave the country upon coming of age, the acceptance of whatever benefits the regime or, more generally, the ongoing sys- tem of political co-operation provides, and the decision to participate in certain political practices (voting, campaign- ing, protesting governmental policies). It is an interesting question whether redescription ‘works’ by virtue of being plausible, so that reasonable people ought to acknow- ledge its force, or only by virtue of being widely accepted as plausible, acknowledged in fact by actual people. The second view might well require the conclusion that con- sent doesn’t ‘work’ at all, not at least in the way liberal writers hoped it would, since most people, if asked, would not be able to recognize their own putative agreements. They would probably declare themselves bound none the less, loyal and obedient citizens, but that kind of inward consent is as real in authoritarian as in liberal regimes. Perhaps the strongest grounds for taking consent as the foundation of liberal democracy is the guaranteed right of dissent. If avenues of political protest and oppositional politics are genuinely open and widely used in particular cases, then the survival of the organized system of political co-operation might be a sign that people really value it and in that sense consent to its continuation. m.walz. *democracy; liberalism. John Dunn, ‘Consent in the Political Theory of John Locke’, in Political Obligation in its Historical Context (Cambridge, 1980). P. H. Partridge, Consent and Consensus (New York, 1971). J. P. Plamenatz, Consent, Freedom and Political Obligation, 2nd edn. (Oxford, 1968). consequentialism determines the rightness or wrong- ness of an act, either solely by comparing the act’s consequences with the consequences of alternative acts, or solely by comparing the consequences of rules or practices or motives that allow the act with the conse- quences of rules or practices or motives that prohibit the act. The term ‘consequentialism’ first appeared in Elizabeth Anscombe’s article ‘Modern Moral Philosophy’ (Philoso- phy, 1958). Anscombe espoused a kind of moral *abso- lutism according to which some kinds of act (e.g. intentionally killing the innocent) are wrong in any cir- cumstances, i.e. no matter how bad the consequences would be of not doing the act. She used the term ‘conse- quentialism’ to refer to any moral theory that rejected such absolutism. On the meaning Anscombe gave to ‘con- sequentialism’, the simple view that only consequences matter qualifies as a kind of consequentialism. But so does the view (espoused by many *moral pluralists) that, while consequences are only one among a plurality of moral fac- tors, consequences are a factor of sufficient importance to make it the case that any kind of act can be morally right if it has good enough consequences or avoids bad enough 162 consciousness, neural correlates of consequences. Few philosophers now use ‘consequential- ism’ so broadly. There is controversy, however, over whether the term ‘consequentialism’ should or should not extend so far as to allow the goodness of consequences to be *agent-relative. If each agent is required to produce the best available set of consequences, but the goodness of consequences is rela- tive to the agent who produces them, then different agents will be required to produce different sets of conse- quences. An extreme example of agent-relative conse- quentialism is the kind of egoism that claims an act is right if and only if it produces the best available consequences for the agent. This kind of egoism can reach different con- clusions about the rightness of an act that makes Jill worse off but produces the best available consequences for Jack. If Jack did this act, this kind of egoism judges the action to be right. If instead Jill did this act, this kind of egoism judges it to be wrong. Another controversy over how broadly to take the term ‘consequentialism’ concerns the relation between acts and consequences. Perhaps the most natural reading of ‘consequences’ assumes that, apart from exceptional cases, an act is not part of its consequences. (This is not to deny that some of an act’s consequences may be part of the act: killing Jones necessarily has the consequence that Jones goes from alive to dead. Perhaps in the special case of an act that produces the best consequences, all of the act’s consequences are part of the act. But we can think that an act is not part of its consequences even if we admit that some or all of the act’s consequences are part of the act.) If an act is not part of its consequences, then any intrinsic value in the act itself will not be included in the value of the consequences. So, if an act is not part of its consequences, and if consequentialism evaluates an act by its consequences, then consequentialist evaluation of acts ignores any intrinsic value in the act itself. Examples of acts that have been thought to contain intrinsic value are acts of promise keeping, of loyalty to friends and family, of gratitude, of reparation to those whom one has wronged, and acts of developing one’s own talents and capacities. Examples of acts that have been thought to contain intrinsic disvalue are acts of harming the innocent, of stealing, of promise breaking, of disloyalty, of threatening to infringe others’ rights, of lying, and acts of taking pleasure in the misfortune or suffering of others. However, whether these or any other acts have intrinsic value or disvalue is controversial. So is whether to use the term ‘consequentialism’ so broadly as to include theories that attribute intrinsic value or disvalue to acts. Also controversial is the question of how much a con- sequentialist theory can take facts about the past to be morally pivotal. It might seem that, if acts or rules or prac- tices or motives are evaluated solely in terms of their con- sequences, this evaluation ignores any relation an outcome might have with the past. However, many who have called themselves consequentialists ascribe intrinsic value to equal distributions among currently existing people over their whole lives (as opposed to during each time slice). Since currently existing lives are partly in the past, this kind of egalitarianism takes that past to be morally relevant. Another group who think of themselves as consequentialists evaluate outcomes wholly or partly in terms of whether agents get what they deserve. This approach also takes facts about the past to be morally piv- otal, since what people deserve presumably depends on their past. So some philosophers use the term ‘consequentialism’ broadly enough to allow for the inclusion of agent- relativity. Some use ‘consequentialism’ broadly enough to allow for inclusion of whatever intrinsic value or disvalue acts have. And some use ‘consequentialism’ broadly enough to allow facts about the past to be morally relevant. However, if the borders of ‘consequentialism’ are pushed out so far in all three directions, then ‘conse- quentialism’ acquires such a wide meaning that virtually every moral theory could be formulated as a kind of con- sequentialism. The term ‘consequentialism’ should not be stretched so far as to trivialize it. Moreover, there is a good reason for consequentialists specifically not to allow agent-relativity into the founda- tional level of their theory. This reason derives from the very close association of morality with *impartiality. Much of the appeal of the most philosophically prominent forms of consequentialism derives from their aspiration to substantive impartiality at the foundational level of their theory. There is also a good reason for consequentialists not to allow intrinsic value for acts, intrinsic disvalue for acts, or desert into the foundational level of their theory. What a theory assumes, it does not explain. So if consequential- ism starts by assuming that such-and-such kinds of behav- iour deserve reward and so-and-so kinds of behaviour deserve punishment, then consequentialism is not explaining why there should be practices of reward and punishment. Likewise, if consequentialism starts by assuming that such-and-such kinds of act have intrinsic value and so-and-so kinds have intrinsic disvalue, then consequentialism is positing rather than explaining the value of such acts. Theories become less interesting the more they posit rather than try to explain. Many conse- quentialists have thus eschewed assumptions about desert and the intrinsic value or intrinsic disvalue of acts. The most philosophically prominent form of conse- quentialism has been the combination of the commitment to impartiality with the commitment to pleasure as the single intrinsic value. The classic *utilitarians—Jeremy Bentham, J. S. Mill, and Henry Sidgwick—held that the consequences that matter ultimately are increases or decreases in aggregate *happiness, which they took to consist in pleasure. In the twentieth century, however, many philosophers and economists were persuaded that what people rationally want for themselves can extend beyond pleasure and indeed beyond any other introspect- ively discernible state. In the name of preference auton- omy, many philosophers moved from thinking that the consequentialism 163 fundamental value is pleasure or happiness to thinking that it is more broadly the fulfilment of people’s desires. Other consequentialists have been impressed by the thought that people can desire things for themselves that are in fact worthless. Some of these consequentialists have held that a good life for us is one in which we both get or achieve certain things and desire these things. Examples of what these things might be are autonomy, knowledge, friendship, achievement, beauty, and the perfection of our natures (intellectual and physical). But there is disagree- ment among consequentialists (as well as among other philosophers) whether, in addition to pleasure, these other things have intrinsic value. There is also disagreement among consequentialists about what view of distribution to take. The classical util- itarians held that what matters is the amount of aggregate good, where this is calculated by impartially adding together everyone’s good (i.e. with equal weighting). Later consequentialists held that it matters not only how much aggregate good is produced but also how equally this good is distributed. *Equality as an aim in distribution has come under attack because of its acceptance of ‘level- ling down’. Instead of aiming for equality, many conse- quentialists have advocated *prioritarianism, the view that gains in the well-being of the worse off are morally more important than the same size gains for the better off. Whether such priority for the worst off is compatible with substantive impartiality, however, is uncertain. A more general dispute between consequentialists con- cerns the common sort of situation where consequences cannot be known with certainty in advance. Some conse- quentialists frame their theory in terms of actual value: that is, the value of the outcome that would in fact result. Other consequentialists frame their theory in terms of the expected value. Expected value is calculated by multiplying the values of each possible outcome by the probability of that outcome’s occurring and then adding together the products of these multiplications. Especially since the 1950s, consequentialists have taken a variety of views about the connection between (actual or expected) good and moral rightness. Three of the most prominent consequentialist views have been maximizing act-consequentialism, satisficing act-consequentialism, and rule-consequentialism. Maximizing act-consequentialism holds that an act is morally right if and only if that particular act maximizes (expected) impartial value. This is a view about morally right action. It is not the view that the agent’s standard decision procedure should consist of trying to calculate the expected values of the alternative possible actions and then choosing the one with the highest expected value. Very few (if any) maximizing act-consequentialists think agents should have such a decision procedure. Agents fre- quently lack the information needed to calculate the expected good. Even if they had the information, they would frequently miscalculate. Even if they didn’t miscal- culate, there is the cost in time and attention of doing the calculations. Furthermore, there are ‘expectation effects’. If people could not confidently predict that others would behave in certain ways (e.g. not attack others, not steal, not break their promises, not lie, etc.) without having to wait for the endorsement of consequentialist calculations, there would be a disastrous breakdown of trust in society. For these and other reasons, most maximizing act- consequentialists hold that the decision procedure that agents should have for day-to-day moral thinking is made up of rules such as ‘Don’t harm others’, ‘Don’t steal’, ‘Keep your promises’, ‘Tell the truth’, ‘Look out for the welfare of your friends and family’, and so on. Maximizing act- consequentialism therefore agrees to a considerable extent with agent-relative moralities and *deontological ethics about how agents should decide what to do. But opponents of maximizing act-consequentialism hold that acts of inten- tionally injuring others, stealing, promise breaking, and other infringements of moral rights can be morally wrong even when the acts maximize impartial good. Impartial maximizing act-consequentialism is also per- sistently attacked for unreasonably making relentless demands on ordinary people to sacrifice their own good in order to help needy strangers. A version of consequential- ism that tries to accommodate that objection is satisficing act-consequentialism, a theory developed by Michael Slote. According to this theory, an act is morally permissible if and only if its consequences are good enough. Obvi- ously, satisficing act-consequentialism may have difficulty specifying what counts as ‘good enough’. Tim Mulgan’s Demands of Consequentialism (2001) put forward other dev- astating objections to satisficing act-consequentialism. One is that satisficing act-consequentialism is even more permissive with respect to acts of intentionally injuring others, stealing, promise breaking, and so on than maxi- mizing act-consequentialism is. The other objection is that, where the cost to the agent and others of producing the best consequences is no more than that of producing less good consequences, satisficing act-consequentialism seems mistaken to allow the agent to choose the less good consequences. Rule-consequentialism calls for the code of rules whose general acceptance has the greatest expected value, impar- tially considered. The theory then judges the rightness or wrongness of acts by that code. No kind of impartial act- consequentialism does as well as rule-consequentialism at agreeing with agent-relative moralities and deontological ethics about which acts are right and which wrong. But rule-consequentialism disagrees with agent-relative moralities and deontological ethics (and of course with every other rival theory) over the fundamental explan- ation of why certain acts are right and others wrong. Since the 1960s, rule-consequentialism has repeatedly been attacked as an unstable or incoherent compromise between deontology and act-consequentialism. b.h. *absolutism, moral; agent-relative moralities; deonto- logical ethics; unlikely philosophical propositions. F. Feldman, Utilitarianism, Hedonism, and Desert (New York, 1997). 164 consequentialism B. Hooker, Ideal Code, Real World: A Rule-Consequentialist Theory of Morality (Oxford, 2000). D. McNaughton and P. Rawling, ‘On Defending Deontology’, Ratio (1998). D. Parfit, Reasons and Persons, part 2 (Oxford, 1984). P. Pettit, ‘The Consequentialist Perspective’, in M. Baron, P. Pettit, and M. Slote (eds.), Three Methods of Ethics (Oxford, 1997). S. Scheffler, Consequentialism and its Critics (Oxford, 1988). conservatism. An approach to political and social ques- tions which was mapped out initially by Burke, though drawing on earlier lines of thought dating back to Hobbes and even to Aristotle, and subsequently developed by many writers, including, notably, Oakeshott and, in his later years, Hayek. The conservative approach is empiri- cal as opposed to rationalistic, cautiously sceptical rather than dogmatic, and, in certain circumstances, seeks to pre- serve the status quo rather than engage in wholesale revo- lution or overthrow existing institutions. It is a matter of judgement how far so-called conservative political parties are conservative in the wider, philosophical sense. Nor would a philosophical conservative seek to preserve an apparently orderly political set-up simply for the sake of preserving order if that set-up were based on principles antithetical to conservatism (as was the case in Eastern Europe during the Cold War). Recognizably conservative thinkers have held a large variety of views on such matters as religion, ethics, and the concept of *human nature. But, unlike liberals and social- ists, they have all possessed a keen sense of the darker, more egoistic sides of human beings. For the conserva- tive, the main defence against the Hobbesian war of all against all is not the naked might of the sovereign. Naked power over others, whether vested in a hereditary tyrant, a central party committee, or an elected legislature, would actually be a form of the war of all against all. Life in such a society, as in Eastern Europe under communism, would be characterized by mutual fear and suspicion. For the conservative, egoism, power, and mutual suspi- cion need what Burke referred to as ‘the decent drapery of life’, ‘pleasing illusions . . . to make power gentle, and obe- dience liberal’. Without institutions and forms to temper and channel the energy and rapacity of the strong, and to commend the allegiance of the ruled, we will have a soci- ety which is dominated either by terror or by continual litigiousness, and neither state is conducive to peace or enjoyment. Where, though, are civilizing and allegiance-provoking institutions and forms to come from? Here again the con- servative differs significantly from liberals and socialists. F. H. Bradley echoes Hegel in saying that ‘the man into whose essence his community with others does not enter, who does not include relations to others in his very being, is a fiction’; the individual is who he is because of the rela- tionships and the *society into which he is born. Individu- ality being situated in this way implies the existence of duties and roles not chosen by the individual, binding on him and constitutive of his identity. His relationship to his society and its institutions is not first and foremost a con- tractual one, as liberals would maintain. Whether, in prac- tice, the relationship is oppressive or genial will depend on the decency or indecency of the drapery of particular societies. Ideally, for a conservative each society’s forms and institutions will have evolved steadily over generations. Such steady evolution will have two beneficial conse- quences. First, it will enable today’s individuals to see themselves as linked to earlier centuries, reinforcing their own sense of identity and culture. Secondly, in evolving over time, institutions will be shaped in accordance with the demands made on them; their defects and unintended consequences will become apparent and, under pressure for reform, reshaped. Far from being opposed to *reform, a principle of reform is central to conservatism. For conservatives are sceptical of the ability of planners to know the conse- quences of policies or, indeed, of anyone to be able to sur- vey everything going on in a large society. Rulers must legislate, but there must be means of counterbalancing and ameliorating the effects of their policies. In the end, by trial and error, institutions and forms develop, often in ways undreamt of by their founders but often in ways which do serve the needs of those involved in them. They thus embody a kind of tacit wisdom. Because of his admit- ted ignorance about the ways in which things work and about the effects of change, the conservative, though open to reform, will be cautious about large-scale disturb- ance of things which are running reasonably well. He will also seek to uncover the wisdom latent in ancient institu- tions and traditions. Our ignorance of the effects of policies and of the nature of society makes the conservative favour limited govern- ment, autonomous institutions (such as the family, the army, churches, and schools), and individual *freedom. Conservatism, with its hesitations about human per- fectibility and its sense of the corrupting effect of power, would prefer government to focus on its basic tasks of upholding security and a framework of law in which indi- vidual decisions and transactions can be made. Despite what is sometimes claimed, there is, in fact, no conflict between conservatism and the free *market, once mar- kets are understood as simply the most efficient way we know of enabling individuals to pursue their own ends, and once it is realized that markets depend for their proper running on an antecedent framework of law and morality. Those who see the state of their society as riddled with defects and inequities are likely to be impatient with con- servatism for what appears to be its complacency. Surely, it will be urged, and not only by those moved by what con- servatives would call the *hermeneutics of suspicion, we must be able to reorganize things in a new and better way, so as to eliminate whatever serious social and political problems we are confronted with. Conservatism, then, looks like little more than self- interest without the support of moral principle. More- over, the conservative stress on human ignorance, the conservatism 165 concomitant hostility to reason in political planning, and the counterbalancing appeal to the wisdom of generations is not just depressing of human endeavour and good intention; it would, its critics say, not be given a hearing in any other sphere, particularly not in the scientific, where such principles would doubtless license creationism and flat-earthism. Is conservatism based on nothing more than self- interest bolstered up by a fine-sounding but ultimately shifty obscurantism? It is true that conservatism, as exemplified by Burke, say, will in certain circumstances tend to uphold hierarchies and distinctions in a society. To that extent, it is a position which, from a functional point of view, is acting in the interests of those hierarchies, and will doubtless earn for the conservative the disapproval of moralists such as Matthew Arnold. What the moralist needs to ask himself, though, is whether (in Maurice Cowling’s words) ‘the freedom, discipline and social solidarity of modern societies’ would be possible at all without ‘the inequalities, sufferings and alienations consequent upon ideological hegemony’. Burke’s point would, of course, be that the inequalities etc. consequent upon the French and Russian Revolutions were certainly no less than those of before, while the freedoms were a great deal less. And as far as socialism or its opposite are concerned in basically democratic societies, the right balance between inequality and freedom is always a difficult one to find. Experience at least has shown that it cannot be assumed that centralized attempts either to increase freedom or reduce inequality will actually have the desired effects. The conservative tendency will always be to defend the tolerable and even the tolerably bad against what he fears will be immeasurably worse. In any case, the Burkian conservative would not defend any sort of hierarchy just because it is hierarchical. In par- ticular, he would not defend a hierarchical society in which all important institutions are in the hands of the state. As part of his ignorance thesis, the conservative must support autonomous institutions and the freedom of indi- viduals to make their own way through life and to form and develop their own little platoons. He will also deny, in distinction to natural science, that there are any special experts in morality or politics, asserting that the experi- ence of the whole of mankind over time is the main source of moral knowledge, against which should be balanced the pretensions of any particular set of people to moral expert- ise, however intelligent they are in particular fields. Upholding the right of individuals to make their own way through life and to benefit (or not) from the results of their efforts, as the conservative does, is to say that indi- viduals are the best judges of their own interests. It is not to say, as critics claim the conservative is saying, that individuals should be motivated only by selfishness. The conservative, indeed, stresses the importance of the trad- itional *virtues of individuals providing for their depend- ants and also of charity, and would emphasize the problems, social and individual, which arise when all such matters are placed in the hands of the state. While the conservative does not find *inequality per se objectionable, and will claim that there is no reason beyond resentment why anyone should, the value the conservative puts on both social cohesion and individual self-reliance must push him some way in the direction of economic redistribution, in order to ensure that no one starts so far behind the rest as to be unable to make his or her own way through life. The conservative is neither an anarchist nor a laissez-faire liberal. In practice, in democratic societies the difference over redistribution between ‘one nation’ conservatives and welfarist socialists will tend to be one of degree. The con- servative, though, will be more resistant to centralized controls and blueprints than his opponents on the left. This resistance arises not out of sheer obscurantism nor out of failure to recognize the need for limited social inter- ventions. It is rather because the conservative is more sen- sitive than his opponents to the unintended consequences of such plans, to their potential for bureaucratic bossiness and interference, to the self-serving characteristic of bureaucracies, and to the way centralized planning cramps individual initiative, undermining the intuitive sense individuals have of their right to keep the rewards of their efforts, talents, and luck. Attacking this intuition by a policy of bureaucratic egalitarianism will seem to the con- servative likely to sap whatever enterprise or energy exists in a society, and it cannot be said that history has shown him to be wrong. The issue between conservatism and political rational- ism, whether of a liberal or a socialist cast, is in the end an empirical one. Have those societies which have had autonomous traditions and unplanned institutions done better socially and economically than those in which rad- ical and centralizing planning have been attempted? And, in the developing world, have countries which have mod- elled themselves and their institutions on a conservative free-market model proved more successful than those governed by rationalistic attempts to impose new types of order on their peoples? If the facts of history suggest that a conservative approach to politics produces greater *liberty and *well-being for individuals than rationalist approaches, conservatives can rebut the charge that they are merely advocating self-interest, and that their scepti- cism about politics is sheerly oscurantist. With their emphasis on learning from experience and their mistrust of a priori reasoning in social and political matters, conservatives might welcome a broadly empiri- cal approach to these questions. They would, though, do well to temper any triumphalism the answers might tempt them to. No country in the modern world has as limited a government as, in their different ways Burke, Hayek, or Oakeshott would see as compatible with true conservatism. a.o’h. *anti-communism; liberalism; socialism; Marxism; Marxist philosophy. E. Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790). F. A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit (London, 1988). 166 conservatism G. W. F. Hegel, The Philosophy of Right (1833). T. Honderich, Conservatism (London, 1990). M. Oakeshott, Rationalism in Politics (London, 1962). R. Scruton, The Meaning of Conservatism (London, 1980). conservatism and Romanticism. Romanticism was a reaction against *Enlightenment rationalism, stressing the importance of non-rational or even irrational aspects of human nature. Conservatism, too, is critical of what it takes as the shallowness of rationalism. Not surprisingly, therefore, some important conservative thinkers manifest Romantic tendencies, and vice versa. Examples would be the defence of the wisdom contained in spontaneous cus- tom and tradition in Edmund Burke, the cultural organ- icism of J. G. Herder, the mystical attitude to authority and monarchy of Louis de Bonald and Joseph de Maistre, and Thomas Carlyle’s exaltation of the hero as genius and type. However, following strains of thought in Rousseau, the predominant tendency of the Romantic Movement emphasized the natural, the free, and the unconventional. If you suspect the workings of *reason, one possible response will be to replace the rational and the conven- tional with the spontaneous and the *natural, and, even, like the German Romantics, to attempt to break down all existing categories of thought and language. The conserva- tive, though, schooled in Hobbes and in history, is too aware of the destination of unconstrained freedom, and relies rather on a strong social and cultural order, but- tressed by tradition. Thus, Burke, Bonald, and de Maistre, though certainly anti-Enlightenment Romantics in their attitude to tradition and to authority, would have none of the free-booting insouciance of a Byron, nor of the anti- nomianism of a Novalis or an E. T. A. Hoffmann. a.o’h. I. Berlin, The Crooked Timber of Humanity (London, 1992). A. O. Lovejoy, Essays in the History of Ideas (Baltimore, 1948). consilience. According to Whewell, consilience occurs when inductive explanations of two or more different kinds of phenomena are discovered separately, but unex- pectedly lead scientists to the same underlying cause. For example, universal gravitation explained both the perturb- ations of the planets and the precession of the equinoxes. Such discoveries corroborate one another in proportion to the number of explanations thus connected, as do inde- pendent testimonies to the same fact in a legal trial. l.j.c. *induction. W. Whewell, The Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences (London, 1847), ii. 65–8. consistency proofs. A set of *axioms is said to be consistent if no contradiction can be derived from the set by logical reasoning. This notion is best confined to axioms in a pre- cisely defined formal language with given rules of infer- ence; otherwise the logical *paradoxes might make any set of axioms inconsistent. By the *completeness theorem, a set of first-order axioms is consistent if and only if some interpretation makes it true. Hilbert’s programme proposed a goal for the foundations of mathematics, namely to prove the consistency of axioms for arithmetic, using only finitary methods. *Gödel’s incompleteness the- orem showed that this is impossible if ‘finitary methods’ consist of syntactic operations on finite strings of symbols (as Hilbert probably intended); but Gödel also gave a con- sistency proof for first-order Peano arithmetic, using only finite mental constructions. w.a.h. G. T. Kneebone, Mathematical Logic and the Foundations of Mathe- matics (London, 1963), chs. 7 and 8. constant. In the *propositional calculus, a constant is a truth-functional operator, such as ‘not’, ‘and’, or ‘or’. The truth-value of ‘p and q’, for instance, is a function of the truth-values of ‘p’ and ‘q’: it’s true if they are both true, false if either is false. ‘Variable’ was originally applied, by contrast, to sentence-letters ‘p’, ‘q’, etc. The specific role of a constant can be given by a *truth-table, or by its intro- duction and elimination rules (the basic rules governing its involvement in logical inferences). Beyond the confines of the propositional calculus, other symbols with fixed meanings can also be called constants, e.g. the symbols for ‘all’, ‘some’, and ‘is the same as’ (in predicate logic), and for ‘necessarily’ and ‘possibly’ (in *modal logic). r.p.l.t. W. Hodges, Logic (Harmondsworth, 1977), sect. 17. constant conjunction. Term used by Hume to describe the relation between two events one of which invariably accompanies the other. If catching influenza is always fol- lowed by fever, these events are ‘constantly conjoined’; if there is no smoke without fire, there is a constant con- junction between the production of smoke and burning. Hume regarded our experience of constant conjunctions as the principal source of our idea of *causality. Many interpreters have held that he also proposed an analysis of causality in terms of constant conjunction. p.j.m. D. Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature (1739), ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge and P. H. Nidditch (Oxford, 1978), i. iii. 6 and 15. Constant de Rebecque, Henri Benjamin (1767–1830). Although Swiss-born, Constant came to play a leading role in the politics and development of liberal ideology in France. His *liberalism grew out of a critique of the ideas of his compatriot Rousseau that was sparked off by their employment by the Jacobins during the French Revolu- tion. Drawing on the arguments of the Scottish *Enlight- enment, which he had picked up during a brief period at the University of Edinburgh, he contended that the advent of commercial society had radically changed the character of *liberty and the political mechanisms needed to secure it. In the ancient republics that inspired Rousseau’s works, freedom had been understood primar- ily in collective terms and had involved participation in the life of the polity in order to secure it. Within modern societies, in contrast, liberty was essentially individualistic in nature. The division of labour had destroyed any notion of a common good or *general will. The public welfare Constant, Benjamin 167 could only be promoted by protecting the ability of indi- viduals to pursue their private ends and accumulate prop- erty by freely contracting and exchanging with each other in the *market. This goal was best achieved not through direct forms of participatory democracy, since unre- stricted popular sovereignty could prove as tyrannous as an unrestricted monarch, but via liberal constitutional mechanisms such as representative democracy, the separ- ation of powers, and a bill of rights. r.p.b. *conservatism. B. Constant, Political Writings, tr. and ed. Biancamaria Fontana (Cambridge, 1988). S. Holmes, Benjamin Constant and the Making of Modern Liberalism (New Haven, Conn., 1984). constatives. Class of ‘fact-stating’ utterances considered in the work of J. L. Austin. He initially distinguished con- stative uses of speech, where a speaker states something, from performative uses, where a speaker does something. But he came to doubt his own distinction, realizing that stating is a species of doing, and that stating, like other speech-acts that may use performative formulas, should be classified as *illocutionary. j.horn. *linguistic acts. J. L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words (Oxford, 1961). constitutionalism relates to both the foundation and the regulation of governments. As a foundationalist doctrine, it finds expression in the constitutional conventions that have not only served to establish new political regimes, as occurred in many European states after the Second World War, but have also led to the formation of states, as in the case of the United States. As a regulative doctrine, it con- sists of formal conventions, rules, and procedures, such as voting by majority rule, and more substantive norms, such as those embodied in written bills of rights or assumed prerogatives and entitlements, which serve to define legitimate political activity. Whilst conservatives have generally interpreted constitutionalism in terms of the practices that have evolved over time and favour the unwritten constitution of tradition and custom, liberals associate it with the limitation of government and usually favour a written constitution. Constitutionalism harbours a paradox, however, that is particularly problematic for the liberal view. For in both its foundationalist and regula- tive guises it seeks to lie outside politics, providing its grounding and framework, and yet can only achieve these ends by political means. As a result, constitutions come to be objects of political debate and consequently are within the very politics they claim to create and control. r.p.b. *conservatism; liberalism. S. Elkin and K. E. Soltan (eds.), A New Constitutionalism: Designing Political Institutions for a Good Society (Chicago, 1993). C. H. McIlwain, Constitutionalism Ancient and Modern (New York, 1940). constructivism. The thesis of the programme is that an assertion that there exists a mathematical object (such as a number) with a given property is an assertion that one knows how to find, or construct, such an object. Philo- sophical opponents of constructivism include realists, who hold that since mathematical objects exist independ- ent of the mind of the mathematician, one can establish the existence of an object without showing how to find it. Most constructivists hold that principles of reasoning con- cerning ordinary, finite domains do not apply to math- ematics. For example, if one proves that not all natural numbers lack a certain property, one cannot conclude that there is a number that has the property, because the indi- cated proof need not provide a method for constructing such a number. Similarly, the laws of *excluded middle and double negation are also rejected. The technique of *reductio ad absurdum can only be used to establish a nega- tive formula. Constructivism can result from reflection either on the nature of mathematics (Brouwer) or on the learnability of mathematical language (Dummett). s.s. *intuitionism; intuitionistic logic; mathematics, prob- lems of the philosophy of; mathematics, history of the philosophy of. C. Chihara, Constructibility and Mathematical Existence (Oxford, 1990). Erret Bishop, Foundations of Constructive Analysis (New York, 1967). constructivism in ethics. The term ‘constructivism’ was first applied to ethical theories by *John Rawls. The basic idea is that a system of moral obligations can be con- structed using an uncontroversial procedure, and starting from uncontroversial premisses about human nature. Thus the constructivist approach is supposed to yield a moral theory that has no odd metaphysical commitments, and is demonstrably true (or at the very least, reasonable). Rawls’s own view developed over his lifetime, but remained broadly constructivist in its form: if a group of people situated in a certain way would choose a set of prin- ciples, then those principles are legitimate. When Rawls introduced the term, he intended it in a fairly narrow sense: to apply to views that, like his, started from pre- misses about choices that rational beings would make in certain circumstances. These days the term is used more broadly, to include views such as Korsgaard’s that start from premisses about our nature more generally. e.j.m. consumerist ethics. The ethics of consumerism partly derives from the *rights-based approach to morality which was a marked feature of the second half of the twentieth century, and partly has been encouraged by those who advocate belief in the efficacy and essential righteousness of a free-market economy. The main con- cepts in consumer ethics are access to, choice of, and inform- ation about goods and services, competition beween suppliers, safety regulations, and redress in the event of faulty goods or services. Consumerism can be seen as a specific outcome of nineteenth-century laissez-faire 168 Constant, Benjamin individualism, and it is therefore opposed to any form of paternalism and to professional perceptions of social need in the supply of goods and services. r.s.d. P. N. Stearms, Consumerism in World History: The Global Transform- ation of Desire (London, 2001). content, non-conceptual. Theorists of non-conceptual mental content hold that some mental states can repre- sent the world and be true or false even though the bearer of those mental states does not possess the *concepts required to specify how they represent the world (to spec- ify their content). This basic idea has been used to try to do justice to the differences between how the world is repre- sented in perceptual experience and how it is represented in belief, as well as to elucidate the representational con- tent of subpersonal computational states, such as those appealed to in information-processing accounts of vision. On some accounts of what it is to possess a concept, the representational states of non-linguistic creatures such as human infants and non-human animals have non- conceptual content. Not all of these developments and applications are consistent with each other, but each offers a challenge to the widely held view that the way in which a creature can represent the world is determined by its conceptual capacities. j.ber. *cognition; perception. Y. H. Gunther (ed.), Essays on Nonconceptual Content (Cambridge, Mass., 2003). content of consciousness. That which one is, or seems to be, conscious of. The content of *consciousness is to be contrasted with one’s consciousness of it. The conscious- ness is always mental, the content may (e.g. a toothache) or may not (a sunset) be mental. Contents come in two distinct flavours: sensory and propositional. In seeing (or hallucinating) a spotted cow, the content of sensory con- sciousness is either the spotted cow, if there is one, or (on some theories of perception) a mental image (*percept, *sense-datum, appearance) of a spotted cow. In either case, spottedness is a feature of the content, of what one is conscious of. The content of propositional awareness, on the other hand, is a *proposition, what it is one con- sciously knows or believes, judges or thinks. Believing that there are spotted cows, for example, is a mental state that has as its content the (possibly false) proposition that there are spotted cows or that one is seeing a spotted cow. Propositions, even propositions about spotted cows, are not themselves spotted. f.d. C. McGinn, Mental Content (Oxford, 1989). C. Peacocke, Sense and Content (Oxford, 1983). contextual definition. Definition of an expression by explaining systematically how to paraphrase all sentences in which the expression is to be used. It is far more widely applicable than direct definition, which paraphrases the expression in isolation. It supports the view that sentences rather than words are the basic vehicles of meaning. In 1813 Bentham propounded contextual definition, or ‘definition by paraphrasis’, as a way of accommodating convenient expressions without commitment to fictitious objects to which they seem to refer. Thirty years later Boole applied the idea in mathematics, instituting a so- called method of operators. Familiar operators are the minus sign, the square-root sign, the prefix ‘log’ for loga- rithm, the ‘sin’ and ‘cos’ of trigonometry. Boole simulated multiplication, as if ‘–x’, ‘√x’, ‘log x’, and the rest were numerical products like ‘5x’, subject to the usual algebraic manipulations. He applied the idea to operators in the dif- ferential and integral calculus, where it became standard procedure. Russell’s account (1905) of singular *descriptions as ‘incomplete symbols’ is a celebrated contextual definition, prompted, he wrote, by the method of operators. He wanted to make sense of ‘the object x such that Fx’, sym- bolically ‘(i x)Fx’, irrespective of there being such a unique object. Where ‘G(i x)Fx’ represents an innermost context of ‘(i x)Fx’, hence an innermost sentence about that pur- ported object, Russell defined ‘G(i x)Fx’ as There is something y such that Gy and such that any- thing x is identical with y if and only if Fx. w.v.q. Bertrand Russell, ‘On Denoting’, Mind (1905); repr. in R. C. Marsh (ed.), Bertrand Russell: Logic and Knowledge (London, 1965). contextualism. The dependence of important features of language (or thought) on the surroundings in language or reality; also called token-reflexiveness, of which egocen- tricity is one species. Any linguistic expression can be used many times—e.g. there is only one English word ‘mother’ (the word-type), and one sentence ‘Today is her birthday’ (the sentence-type), but many utterances of them (word- tokens and sentence-tokens). The *referents of singular terms, the truth-values of sentences, and the illocutionary force of an utterance often depend on the context of use. Who ‘she’ refers to depends on the linguistic or perceptual context of utterance, who ‘my mother’ refers to depends on who is speaking; the truth of ‘Today is her birthday’ depends on the date, and the point of saying this (e.g. as an excuse for rejecting an invitation) will depend on other features of the context. The meaning of an ambiguous word or sentence is also context-dependent (e.g. ‘He went to the bank’, ‘Flying planes can be dangerous’). According to some theorists such as Charles Travis, some kind of contextualism, occasion-sensitivity, or *externalism affects all language use. A contextualist theory of *mean- ing would try to make all this explicit, giving rules by which meaning, reference, truth-value, and linguistic act can be determined from sentence-type and context of use. l.f.s. *egocentric particulars. R. M. Gale, ‘Indexical Reference, Egocentric Particulars, and Token-Reflexive Words’, in P. Edwards (ed.), Encyclopedia of Philosophy (New York, 1967). G. Preyer (ed.), Contextualism in Philosophy (Oxford, 2005). contextualism 169 . are in the hands of the state. As part of his ignorance thesis, the conservative must support autonomous institutions and the freedom of indi- viduals to make their own way through life and to form and. *concepts required to specify how they represent the world (to spec- ify their content). This basic idea has been used to try to do justice to the differences between how the world is repre- sented. multiplying the values of each possible outcome by the probability of that outcome’s occurring and then adding together the products of these multiplications. Especially since the 195 0s, consequentialists