Review: [untitled]Author(s): Tomis KapitanReviewed work(s):

A Critical Study of Hector-Neri Castañeda. by James E. TomberlinSource: Noûs, Vol. 24, No. 3 (Jun., 1990), pp. 473-486Published by: Blackwell PublishingStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2215776Accessed: 16/10/2009 13:08

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REVIEWS

A Critical Study of Hector-Neri Castafieda, Volume 6 of the Profiles Series, Edited by James E. Tomberlin (D. Reidel, 1986) $69.00.

TOMIS KAPITAN

EAST CAROLINA UNIVERSITY

I. INTRODUCTION

This book, the sixth of Reidel's Profiles volumes on contemporary philosophers and logicians, is a timely and welcome addition to the series. While well-known for his work on indexical reference and practical think- ing, Hector-Neri Castafieda has developed a systematic perspective on a wide array of philosophic issues which has not always shared a similar exposure and appreciation. In part, this may be due to his advocacy of various unfashionable views, his general antipathy towards nominalistic reductions, and his sometimes difficult and taxing prose. But the recent attention given his work, typified by this volume, indicates that these bar- riers may well be fading and the initial neglect reversed.'

The volume follows the familiar Profiles format: it opens with a lengthy autobiographical statement focusing upon intellectual development, followed by a series of critical studies by various contemporaries coupled with the philosopher's replies. Castafieda's self-profile is divided into two parts, labeled respectively 'De Re' and 'De Dicto'. The former contains an enter- taining account of the experiences of a young philosopher in his home country of Guatemala, Costa Rica, the United States, and England. Of particular interest is his description of an "existential crisis" upon return- ing to a Guatemala politically transformed through a CIA-engineered coup in 1954 (48-52-all pages references to the text). He writes of facing the question: whether to be a Guatemalan or a philosopher. His choice of the latter was foreshadowed in an encounter some 12 years earlier when an ardent Marxist, urging pursuit of a life of political leadership, failed to dissuade him from a career as a philosopher. One might wonder whether these disjuncts are mutually exclusive, and it is somewhat disturbing to learn that the gain to philosophy in the United States was, at the same time, a loss to unfortunate Guatemala. The De Re portion concludes with a lively description of Castafieda's tenure as Dean of Latino Affairs at Indiana University, an episode which vividly recalls a Platonic theme that

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attempts to establish philosophic leadership in less than ideal communities are unlikely to meet an enthusiastic response.

The De Dicto portion is an overview of his philosophical concerns, divided between a short chronological description of his philosophical development and a more lengthy account of some of the problems, ideas and theses with which he has been concerned. It is a reasonably com- prehensive preview of some of his main achievements, with emphasis on indexical reference, but lacking a concise summary of his major metaphysical contributions. In particular, the Theory of Guises is only briefly discussed, though those familiar with his work can see it lurking everywhere beneath the surface. Very little space is devoted to his in- disputably original account of practical reasoning, and almost nothing is said about his study of normative systems and morality. While clearly written, it does not contain the qualifications and arguments typical of an essay that initially defends a point, but this is the luxury that an honorary volume affords. For more rigorous justification, one must go patiently through the large corpus of writings in which his major theories have taken shape.

In terms of their value as expository guides to Castafieda's main ideas, all the critical studies receive high marks, as Castafieda indicates in his replies, and in this regard the editor's selection is to be commended. I found Esa Saarinen's "Castanieda's Philosophy of Language," which centers on indexicality, and Bruce Aune's "Castafieda's Theory of Moral- ity" especially valuable. Of the other essays, Jay Rosenberg's, David Woodruff Smith's, and Jeffrey Sicha's are concerned with aspects of Castalieda's metaphysics, Frank McGuinness's and James E. Tomberlin's with practical reasoning and deontic logic respectively, David Wong's with deontic meaning and truth, and Steven Boer's and William Lycan's with Castafieda's epistemology. While each raises significant questions and points to the need for further refinements or explanations, the last-mentioned is the most significant from a critical point of view. Apart from it, this volume cannot compare in critical value with the earlier Tomberlin volume whose discussions spawn several modifications in reply.2

II. THE BALLOON AND THE TRANSCENDENTAL PREFIX

The De Dicto portion of the Self-Profile contains both an historical glimpse of intellectual development as well as some on-line philosophizing. The major portion, entitled "Self, Thinking and Reality," (91-133), begins with a synopsis of his views on the Private Language Argument and its relation to skepticism. He concedes that if one is searching for logical cer- tainty, then "radical scepticisms always win," at least with respect to knowledge of empirical matters (92). The proper response is to drop the assumption that the world one encounters through experience has a mind- independent reality and, instead, to philosophize from a perspective of transcendental idealism, or what he prefers to call, metaphysical internalism (93). While there is no doubting my own existence, nor the fact that I

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have the experiences I do, the claim that what I experience is "really real" must be relinquished (99). From this perspective of "internal realism," Castalieda iterates his concern with describing the world from inside ex- perience, especially by reflecting upon our descriptive language. His deep- seated Kantianism is revealed here, and few thinkers within the contem- porary Anglo-American scene exhibit as firm an entrenchment in this tradi- tion as he.

A measure of transcendental realism soon emerges, however; with Descartes, skeptical doubts are confined to the contents of belief-to the totality of one's beliefs, which Castafieda labels The Balloon-but the "I think" emerges unscathed. Thus, with both the I and thinking we reach "metaphysical rock bottom" (100), and, while The Balloon might itself be "illusory" or a "metaphysical fiction," that I exist thinking The Balloon is not a fiction at all. The latter is the doctrine of minimal transcendental realism. According to it, the elements in the "transcendental prefix," the I think-subsequently, the extended prefix, I think here now-are transcendentlly real, but the contents of The Balloon may have no reality beyond my thought. The commitment to realism is furthered by a move from "minimal" to a "modest" transcendental realism, according to which The Balloon has a "dimension of transcendence" in "pointing to" a transcendent noumenal reality within its component beliefs, particularly those regarded as veridical (103).3 The Balloon is "hierarchical" in having dif- ferent layers of reality, including not only a world of ordinary objects as well as the world of natural science, but also that of fictions and illusions (101). Despite this, the objects constituting any of these layers might be transcendently unreal, i.e., fail to "point" accurately.

No items within The Balloon point more directly to a transcendent reality than the referents of the first-person indexicals. These Is have a transcendental character of their own, granted that they are in some sense the same as both the thinking Is of the transcendental prefix and the transcendent self (105-8). But what are the Is, whether in the Balloon or in the prefix, and what is the relation of sameness that unites the two sorts? These questions take us deeper into Castafieda's phenomenological metaphysics, and require a more thorough probe of his contributions to ontology and the philosophy of language.

III. INDEXICAL REFERENCE

Indexicals are at the apex of a thinker's encounter with the world; all perception, reference and practical thought ultimately rests upon episodes of indexical thinking (117-127), and thus, indexicality emerges as one of the more significant elements in Castafieda's overall philosophical pro- gram. It is crucial to understand that we think objects via mediating at- tributes, that thought itself is indexical and, thus, that indexicality within language is anchored in the indexicality of thinking. Reference by means of indexicals is experiential reference, with each indexical reference possess- ing an "executive" function of locating items within experience (111). In-

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sofar as locating is spatio-temporal in character, the executive function is clear for indexicals like here, there, then, now, etc., and only slightly less obvious for I, you, that, this, and the like. Castanieda does not write that locating is always spatio-temporal, however, and he allows indexical reference to abstract. Demonstratives are never mere labels for their referents, but instead, present items through the mediation of identifying attributes (114-5), attributes which themselves are indexical, a point not sufficiently emphasized in Saarinen's otherwise informative essay. We think in terms of thises, thats, Is, yous, etc., implying not only that items so characterized are "before the mind" (consciousness) but are thought qua objects of experience. The perspectivalism inherent in this approach to in- dexical reference and, to that extent, its subjectivity, is nicely brought out by Saarinen (203-8), who conveniently compares Castafieda's work with that of Husserl's and Sartre's.

Talk about referring to items in the field of consciousness, leads Castafieda to distinguish between thinking semantics and doxastic semantics-a distinction that he has only lately emphasized in those terms.5 Language is a means for thinking, among other things, and a preeminent semantical interest concerns what language provides for immediate presen- tational consciousness, hence, the need for "thinking" semantics. On the other hand, language also codifies our beliefs about macro objects in the world, so, embodies references to items that occupy a position within the network of our beliefs about the world, our doxastic referents, even though these items may not be themselves the immediate thinking referents. Con- sequently, there is also a need for a doxastic semantics.

While indexical references are always the speaker's (130), we attribute indexical reference to others by means of quasi-indicators. Saarinen does a fine job explicating the difference, and in setting forth Castafieda's thesis on the ineliminability of quasi-indicators. This is at one with the ir- reducibility of indexical reference, most noticeable in the case of first- personal reference where reference to oneself qua oneself cannot be ac- complished through any third-person mode. (195-6) The importance of this irreducibility thesis has not been widely appreciated. If correct, it spells doom for any philosophical theory which includes various ways of eliminating indexicality, including Hintikka's epistemic logic-as Saarinen points out (206)-Kaplan's direct reference account of indexical reference (116-117, 207-210) and, perhaps, the claims of strong Artificial Intelligence.6

Saarinen neglects the referential role of quasi-indicators that Castafieda in later years has come to acknowledge. In,

(a) The Editor of Soul believes that he himself is wise.

the quasi-indicator 'he himself' is cross-referential with its antecedent, for we cannot attribute a reference to another without ourselves making a coinciding reference. That is, with 'he himself' we are also representing the Editor of Soul, not indexically nor in the manner by which we initially represent the Editor, but through the mode of being self-aware. This is not

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the same mode by which the Editor thinks himself, i.e., the mode whose genus is expressed by 'being aware of oneself qua self,' for we cannot think the perspectival "oneself" portion. It is then misleading to say that (a) reveals exactly the proposition that the Editor of Soul would believe were it true, i.e., that it is fully "prepositionally transparent. "8 The latter is not attributed, though we can classify it by recourse to the generic mode of presentation. We can know the manner in which the Editor thinks himself without ourselves thinking him in exactly this way. Thus, Castanieda has rightly rejected the idea that (a) has the form,

(b) x believes that x is wise.

for this not only omits the user's mode of presentation conveyed by 'he himself,' but may falsely attribute to the agent a mode of presentation he himself does not use, e.g., being the Editor of Soul. Nontheless, the user is still referring to the Editor with the quasi-indicator. Thus, if 'y' is an unrestricted variable then (a) has the form,

(c) x believes that y is wise.

But not this alone.9 A restriction on the variable inside the scope of 'believes' more accurately reveals what is attributed to x. Let 'SELF' repre- sent the generic sortal of being a self and 'SELF-z' represent a species of this sortal that only z can exemplify. Where brackets inside the scope of 'believes' segregate the user's mode of presentation from that of the agent's, let the restricted variable 'y (SELF-[x])' range over all and only agents that are aware of themselves qua selves; then, a more accurate form of (a) would seem to be,

(d) x believes that y (SELF-[x]) is wise.

The irreducibility of the quasi-indicator, and of indexicals in general, is due to the fact that replacing the indexical mode with a non-indexical mode yields a different proposition from the one we began with. The former is a particularized self concept which only the Editor of Soul can think, thus, a component of his first-person proposition,

(e) I am wise.

But the proposition he expresses by means of (e) is not something we can apprehend; at best, we can apprehend some of its forms, e.g., (d).

It is less obvious that 'he himself' and 'she herself' are unique among the quasi-indicators, as Saarinen suggests (200-2). He correctly observes that words like 'then' and 'there' have both an indexical and quasi-indexical use within attitudinal scope, rendering ambiguous the sentence,

(f) At 5pm. in the park Margarita thought that she herself would find Carlos there then.

But Saarinen argues that because 'she herself' can only be read quasi- indexically, the first-personal quasi-indicators are more fundamental and, consequently, consciousness of self is the most fundamental mode of in-

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dexical consciousness (203), and he chastizes Castafieda for not emphasiz- ing this. But he is making too great a philosophical claim on too thin a syntactical basis. Reflexive pronouns also have an emphatic use, and there is no bar to attributing emphasis to others by means of an oratio obliqua construction, as with,

(g) Watching her move nervously about, Mary wondered whether it wasn't Alice herself who stole the money.

Suppose we now shift the order of the 'Alice' and the correlated anaphor, perhaps with tU intention of conveying that Mary's reference to Alice was also indexical;

(h) Watching Alice move nervously about, Mary wondered whether it wasn't she herself who stole the money.

This is grammatical, albeit inelegant. I submit that 'she herself' in (h) is every bit as ambiguous as 'then' in (f), thus, that Saarinen's claims for the uniqueness of the first-person quasi-indicators are not adequately supported.

IV. GUISES AND PROPOSITIONS

The irreducibility of indexical reference requires irreducibly indexical referents. Granting that indexical reference is experiential, indexical referents must be given in experience, hence, "graspable by thought." But such grasping demands finitude of content, and it immediately follows that in- dexical referents cannot be massive physical objects with their many physical parts and infinitely many properties. The same holds for non- indexical "thinking" referents. In other words, thinking referents must be manageable, thinkable, and appropriately thin, and it is precisely here that a Guise-Theoretic analysis of the presented shows its merit. Thus, there are many distinct individual guises which serve as the thinking referents for each indexical use of 'I', 'now', 'you', etc., as well as for other vehicles for singular reference.

Rosenberg's essay supplies a thorough introduction to the main claims of Guise Theory, but while it poses a few good questions, it does not develop any objections which Castafieda cannot answer. The reader is exposed to some unexpected intellectual autobiography (163-4), but those acquainted with Rosenberg's work may find the comparison with Castafieda's views instructive. He does place his finger upon one source of dissatisfaction with Guise Theory, namely, the insufficiently clarified operator expressed by "c. " Rosenberg is quite right to label it a concretizer rather than an individuator (158), but he is struck by its apparent "redun- dancy." This is a bit unfair, for the problem is not, as he thinks, that the operator is "structurally idle" (160); it is crucial in differentiating sets from concrete individuals, the latter differing from the former both in ex- istence conditions and in potentiality for being elements within the causal order (334-5). Thus, while the concretizer does not do anything-the operator is not an agent-it certainly makes a difference. But how exactly

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does a concrete individual differ from a set of properties (= an abstract individual) in internal structure; what does the concretizer add to the set of properties making up the guise core? Moreover, what is the phenomenological difference between concrete and abstract individuals? Were all concrete individuals spatio-temporal entities we might have answers to these questions in terms of spatio-temporal relations among the properties making up the guise core. This is not available for Castafieda since he acknowledges that many concrete individuals are non-existent. So, though we have some understanding of the differences between abstract and concrete individuals, we are left questioning what it is for a set of properties to be "concretized."

Smith's concerns are of a different order. He finds it an "important failing" that Castafieda makes no provision for the grasping of physical objects, arguing that the result runs "against our experience" (174). If thinking reference is confined to guises, then we cannot explain our singular de re thoughts of objects, e.g., that expressed by "Leibniz was ingenious" (175), nor how our perceptual consciousness can reach physical objects existing in public space and time (177). He concludes that Castafieda fails to account for the intuitive "phenomenological datum" that perception grasps physical objects themselves (180), and suggests that the deficiency stems from the Guise-theoretic denial of individual substrates together with Castafieda's view that properties are the primary contents of consciousness. The problem of the concretizer is lurking beneath this concern; what is an individual beyond its properties, how are the properties bundled, and what in addition to properties do we grasp when we think an individual guise?

But Smith leaves himself wide open for a decisive rejoinder. Nowhere does Guise Theory deny the datum, in fact, Guise Theory arises partly as an attempt to explain this very datum (341). In the course of a few pages (342-355), Castafieda explains how physical objects are "grasped" both in immediate thinking and doxastically, without the intrusion of a substrate in the perceptual field. The account might be unsatisfactory; but then the objection must focus upon why this is so, not that there is no account at all.

Sicha's "Castalieda on Plato, Leibniz, and Kant" raises points about methodology in the history of philosophy, while presenting some interesting comparisons of Castafieda's views to that of his [Castafieda's] favorite philosophical predecessors. Castalieda's replies to Sicha's critical observa- tions concerning his handling of Leibniz and the Phaedo theory of rela- tions are adequate. But Sicha does raise a concern that Castafieda does not sufficiently appreciate, and which is bound to be echoed by others who would occupy themselves with Castalieda's writings, namely, the on- tological status of thinking. He notes that Castafieda must not only regard thinking as relating mind to propositions, but also as relating an I-guise to other guises within the phenomenological field. What is this relation? When confronted by the reply that thinking is analyzable in terms of a pair of relational properties along the lines of Castaiieda's Phaedo theory

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of relations, Sicha complains that this does not provide an explication of these relational properties themselves (329-31). Castafieda does not under- stand Sicha's dissatisfaction here (388), and finds that what he has said about thinking in terms of the relations of consubstantiation and consocia- tion, plus the equivalence between the relational and modal perspectives on thinking, to supply such explication.

Fair enough, but questions about the ontological status of thinking and the contents remain. Castafieda writes that the I and the think of the transcendental prefix "deliver transcendent reality," albeit blindly, i.e., without determination (102). This can be interpreted to mean that think- ing has a transcendent dimension, as do the here and now of the extended prefix, a puzzling result given the claim that the noumenon is an undif- ferentiated indivisible whole (102). What could such thinking be? A Guise- Theoretic relational analysis of thinking within the prefix would require the transcendental I to be a guise, and Castafieda is committed to this in places (106-110). But there are no grounds for applying this description to transcendent reality, since a guise analysis is appropriate only if the transcendental prefix is represented, and this lifts it out of the noumenon. Were a guise analysis applicable to the unrepresented noumenal self, all entities would be wholly constituted by abstract, and Castafieda nowhere suggests this.

Since the noumenal self is the transcendent source to which the Balloon owes its being, and since the ultimate components in the Balloon are abstract, this leaves open the possibility that thinking-qua component of the transcendental prefix- "delivers" a connectedness between a seeming concretum, the transcendent SELF, and abstract entities. Then thinking, in its transcendence, is a mode whereby the concrete "participates" in the abstract and, so, comes to be very similar to a copula.

If this is so, then Rosenberg is not far from wrong in taking the rela- tional view of thinking to be "the key presupposition" of Castafieda's ontology (163). But other questions arise. What determines membership in the Balloon, i.e., under what conditions does a proposition, a property, or a guise have a place in some thinker's Balloon? Must they actually be thought, or is it enough that they be merely thinkable? And thinkable by everyone, or only by individuals having the appropriate mental abilities? Are complicated propositions of nuclear physics part of the shepherd's Balloon? Does every color have a place in the Balloon of the colorblind, or the present King of France in that of the Amazon Indian who has never heard of France? Is everyone's Balloon closed under conflation? What com- prehension principles govern the admission of properties and individual guises within the Balloon?

No doubt Castafieda has ready answers to these questions, and here it is important to realize that he does not confine thought to episodes of occurrent thinking, indeed, the latter are but the apex of mental life. One remaining point, however, is that if thinking has a transcendent dimen- sion, and is the mode whereby the transcendent I is connected to The Balloon, why not allow the contents of the latter to be transcendently real

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as well? What is implied by being transcendently real after all, beyond the negative factor of not being within The Balloon? Here a comparison with Whitehead's metaphysics may be fruitful, for Whitehead also pur- sues a phenomenological ontology of the presented-though he counts the presented among the furniture of the Universe. He therefore does without a Kantian hiatus between the noumenally real and the merely phenomenally real, a distinction which tends to demeen the latter and forever supply fuel to reductionistic attempts to rid ourselves of the phenomena altogether. " I

V. QUESTIONS AND EPISTEMIC POWERS

Holding to what he calls an "indexical" theory of knowledge, Castafieda emphasizes that every instance of knowing is relativized to a given con- text of normality-not a novel notion, but one that needs elaboration, or so claim Boer and Lycan (221). Castafieda also adds an "internal" twist by stating that everyone who knows any proposition implicitly assumes that circumstances are "normal, a claim he takes to be confirmed by the relativity of knowledge to questions. In (Powers 1978) it was pointed out that one might not know (P) "there is a four letter word ending in EE, EN, and WHY," relative to the question, (Q) "Is there (in English) a four-letter word ending in EE, EN and WHY?" whereas one may very well know it with respect to (R) "Is 'deny' a four-letter (English) word ending in EE, EN and WHY?" Boer and Lycan doubt that the example shows the relativity of knowledge to questions, but Castafieda is careful to offer it as a datum, not a proof of his theory-a point they seem not to fully appreciate, despite familiarity with Castafieda's reply to Keith Lehrer's article in (Tomberlin 1983) where the same thing is said.

While Boer and Lycan concede that knowledge may be characterized by a type of "information-retrieval" system, they are less convinced that question-hierarchies provide the canonical catalogue of addresses for unlock- ing the various strata within one's knowledge system, noting the common use of mnemonic coding instead (230). They offer an "equally plausible competing interpretation" in terms of the question relativity of belief. Moreover, they find it odd to say that knowledge ascriptions are systematically ambiguous, assuming that Castafieda's indexical theory im- plies this, or that there are senses in which one does not know even trivial truths like a =a, for given a, since one may not be able to respond with this truth relative to certain questions of which it is an answer.

In reply, Castafieda readily embraces the question-relativity of belief, and concedes the Boer-Lycan category of tacit knowledge, but-correctly I think-takes these to complement his analysis (360-1). The concession does not imply that the possession of reasons for what one tacitly believes or knows is not also relative to contexts indexed by questions. The point about ambiguity is easily answered, for the claim that knowledge ascrip- tions are relativized is not to deny a univocal sense to 'know,' and Castafieda here points out his parallel treatment of 'ought' (361-2). He does not address the skepticism about senses in which tautologies like a = a

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are not known, but there is an obvious route he could have taken. If to know a proposition involves being able to relate it to other propositions, qua reason or conclusion, then there is an immediate sense in which talk about species or degrees of knowledge is proper; a person may have no difficulty deriving propositions of the form a =a from others that another person cannot understand. Question-relativity is simply an alternative ex- plication of the familiar idea that to know is to be in a position to relate p to other propositions within a larger framework. To this extent, Boer and Lycan are correct to note a strand of coherentism in Castafieda's epistemology.

A more pressing problem concerns what they take to be Castafieda's "root idea" of question-relativity, namely, ". . . that the context of evalua- tion of the claim that X knows p determines (inter alia) a specific subset Qi of H(p) such that X must have the power to think that p in answer to at least one question in Qi" (222). They point out that this principle causes a problem for Castalieda's own handling of the Powers datum, for strictly speaking, question (R) is not a member of the question hierarchy H(p). While a recasting of the example might avoid this difficulty, they note that many questions like,

(1) Who stole my car?

embody existential presuppositions which, if not satisfied, are appropriately answered with negative existentials,

(2) Nobody stole your car.

But (1) is not a question generated from any form of (2). Whether this is an objection to Castafieda's analysis depends upon the following assumptions:

(a) (2) is an answer to (1). (b) A person might know (2) relative to (1). (c) If X knows p relative to q then X knows q YES p i.e., that p is an

answer to q. (d) If x knows q YES p then p is an answer to q. (e) p is an answer to q only if q e H(p).

There are indications that Castafieda accepts each of (c)-(e) in his initial essay (Castalieda 1980, pp. 216-217, 220-221) in which case the problem posed by the fact that (2) is an answer to (1) is very real indeed. But this is an internal problem, forcing perhaps a modification of the concept of an answer, or of a question, or of the precise manner in which one knows a proposition relative to a question, or even a rejection of (a) or (b). If I read him correctly, Castafieda effectively abandons (e) in his reply when he presents his condition (Op.TG)-a principle which differs from that given the same label in (Castafieda 1980, p. 220). And as I see it, he can readily allow that X knows p relative to question q if there is a proposition r such that q e H(r) and X knows both that r is an answer to q and that r implies p. This permits a solution to the difficulty concern- ing (1) and (2), and is but a minor modification of the general conception

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that knowing a proposition entails being able to offer it as an answer to certain questions.

VI. PRACTICAL THINKING AND MORALITY

The essays by McGuinness, Tomberlin, Wong and Aune focus upon issues within Castalieda's accounts of practical thinking and normative institu- tions. Again, by way of exposition, each essay scores well. McGuinness focuses upon criticisms of Castafieda's theory of intention and deontic truth raised in (Bratman 1983), and attempts to improve upon Castafieda's own replies in that same volume. Tomberlin's essay provides a succinct descrip- tion of Castafieda's system of deontic logic and compares it with the rival systems of van Fraassen, al-Hibri, and Mott. He argues, convincingly, that the latter succumb to the Paradox of the Knower while Castalieda's, with its "unique duality of practitions and propositions," is able to resolve it. Wong writes favorably of Castafieda's account of deontic truth in terms of practitional legitimacy, though is skeptical of the description of deontic concepts as mere "pictorial" representations of the legitimacy values of practitions and, in principle, dispensable. Such a view, he writes, creates an undesirable cleavage between deontic meaning and truth-conditions, and in its place he offers a tentative analysis of the deontic concepts in terms of legitimacy that tightens the meaning/truth-conditions relation- ship, while retaining the intuitionistic insight that the truth of some deontic judgments is not based solely on agents' actual motivational structures.

Castafieda accepts the insight, but finds Wong's analyses to be only equivalences at best, and is unmoved by Wong's efforts to secure a more objective footing for deontic properties. The dispensability claim might seem less distressing if it concerned only dispensability for practical thought (Castalieda 1976, pp. 340-1), for then there would be no implication that deontic statements are not true of the world (or true in virtue of the way the world is, not just how we think it is). But Castafieda's dispensability extends into deeper metaphysical depths, as he himself remarks (377), for deontic properties are "conceptually dependent" in a way that legitimacy values of practitions are not. I find this perplexing, despite his discussion in Chapter 13 of Thinking and Doing. If Castafieda acknowledges Wong's equivalences then how are deontic properties any more dispensable, metaphysically speaking, than legitimacy values, inasmuch as both are anchored in the seemingly de facto ends of agents? Perhaps Castafieda is reminding us that talk of oughts and practitions is internal to The Balloon, and that deontic noemata and properties have a distinct status within the internal structure of The Balloon. I am uncertain, and among all of Castanieda's views, I find the indispensability thesis to be among his more difficult, metaphysically speaking.'2

Aune raises a critical point concerning a central element in Castanieda's account of deontic truth, suggesting that it shares a "common defect" with Kant's theory of morality. The Ideal of Morality, for Castanieda, con- sists in the "maximal consistent happiness for everybody," (Castanieda 1974, p. 186), and this involves the self-realization of every individual

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compatible with a similar self-fulfillment in others-self-fulfillment being the core of happiness. The familiar terminology of classical liberalism is evident here; the ends of each must be equally limited to insure the maximal freedom of all (Castalieda, 1974, p. 187), and this Aune calls a "libertarian moral ideal" (305). In discussing a situation in which agents possess wildly diverse ends, Aune writes,

An equal limitation of ends may lead to a 'harmonious' rearrangement, but there is no reason to believe that this outcome will be morally preferable to the original state of conflict, where the good is at least not limited by the bad. (303)

Thus, to harmonize the ends of "moral fanatics" with those of "ordinary people" may require too great a sacrifice of goods for the latter. A sound moral theory, Aune presumes, should discount the "extraordinary" ends of fanatics.

So long as one attends only to degrees of happiness and unhappiness and does not discriminate between allowable and unallowable ends (on grounds other than consistency of hierarchies and the possibility of realization) one cannot resolve this problem at all. (303) [My emphasis]

Castafieda recognizes the force of this point in his reply (381), and admits that "I have not found a wholly satisfying solution to it." He sug- gests, however, that Aune's case overlooks his theory's insistence upon the egalitarian limits of self-sacrifice, as well as the possibility of morally justifying murder of a "clever and knowledgeable evil person" (see also, Castafieda, 1974, pp. 210ff).

Aune detects a disturbing element in Castafieda's account of morality and deontic truth, though the case of extreme gaps in the ends of agents is only one way of developing it. He alludes to a more difficult case of feudal lords who have managed to convince the peasantry to accept their subordinate status as "right and proper," thereby conferring upon the status quo the seal of morality according to Castafieda's theory (303). In so doing he assumes the injustice of the resulting state of affairs. Castafieda does not discuss this case, though he might have responded that the case must be developed more fully before it can be taken as a serious candidate for a counterexample, and in so doing, the formal ideals of morality, e.g., that of maximal freedom of all, must be respected.

I think that this development can be given, and the result challenges not only Castafieda's conception of morality but his account of deontic truth as well. Thus, what one ought to do at any time, everything being considered, is precisely an action which is necessarily legitimate in the (an) absolute context of legitimacy. I have previously argued (see Kapitan 1984a) that since contexts of legitimacy are rooted in defacto ends, nothing prevents legitimization of institutions which embody objectionable inequalities of rights, duties and privileges. All that is required is that their provisions cohere with the ends of all-which, given effective techni- ques of indoctrination, in operation since the birth of the underprivileged,

TOMBERLIN'S CASTANEDA 485

etc., they certainly might. It is not the harmonization of diverse ends that is at issue here, but rather, harmonization of similar ends which conflict with widespread beliefs about social injustice.

In sum, as long as the libertarian ideal is not combined with a distinc- tion of appropriate ends-say, with a doctrine of natural rights, as is typically the case in Classical liberalism-then Castalieda's theory runs up against precisely this objection. I do not know whether it is decisive, and it may rest upon a brand of moral "absolutism" that is foreign to Castalieda's more extensive relativism which tolerates absolutism at a very formal level only.

VII. CONCLUSION

I have focused upon some of the main themes of Castafieda's philosophy and on various problems these engender. It has been impossible to do justice to the richness of his thought, much less to examine whether the difficulties can be resolved within his overall framework, and my hope is that this survey reveals some of the character of Castafieda's philosophical work-work still in progress. It may well be ranked among the best ef- forts in the recent half century of American philosophy, primarily because of its comprehensiveness and systematic unity, and thus, among the more likely to endure, in contrast to many of the more restricted, though fad- dish, developments. At the same time, its ever-present concern for on- tological issues, especially its obvious anti-reductionist and anti-nominalist character, gives it a flavor that many will regard as "old-fashioned." Perhaps this Profiles volume can help to overcome such bias. With it, and the earlier book devoted to Castafieda's philosophy, James E. Tomberlin- and Gregory Landini, with his superbly annotated bibliography of Castafieda's writings-have performed a great service to the philosophical profession.

REFERENCES

Baker, L.R. 1981 "Why Computers Can't Act," American Philosophical Quarterly 18: 157-163.

Castafieda, H-N. 1974 The Structure of Morality (Springfield, Illinois: Charles Thomas). 1976 Thinking and Doing: The Philosophical Foundations of Institutions (Dordrecht: D. Reidel). 1977a "On the Philosophical Foundations of the Theory of Communication: I. Reference,"

Midwest Studies in Philosophy II (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota): 165-186. 1977b "Perception, Belief, and the Structure of Physical Objects and Consciousness," Synthese

35: 285-351. 1980 "Reference, Reality and Perceptual Fields," Proceedings and Addresses of the American

Philosophical Association 53: 763-822. 1981 "The Semiotic Profile of Indexical Reference," Synthese 49: 275-316. 1985/ "Objects, Existence, and Reference: A Prolegomenon to Guise Theory," Grazer 1986 Philosophische Studien 25/26: 3-59.

Thinking Language and Experience (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota) forth-coming. "Knowledge Species and Doxastic and Epistemic Obligations," The Brown University Symposium in honor of Roderick Chisholm, November 1986 forth-coming.

Jacoby, K. and Pape, H. 1988 Semantik und Ontologie (Berlin: Gryuters).

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Kapitan, T. 1984a "Castaiieda's Dystopia," Philosophical Studies 46: 263-270. 1984b "Form and Implication," Logique et Analyse 27: 15-37.

Pape, H. 1982 Sprach und Erfahrung. Texte zu einer neuen Ontologie (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp)

Powers, L. 1978 "Knowledge By Deduction," The Philosophical Review 87: 337-371.

Tomberlin, J. E., ed. 1983 Agent, Language, and the Structure of the World: Essays Presented to Hector-Neri Castafieda,

With his Replies (Indianapolis: Hackett).

Whitehead, A. N. 1929 Process and Reality (New York: Macmillan).

NOTES

'See Tomberlin (1983), Pape (1982), Jacoby and Pape (forthcoming) and Castafieda (forthcoming).

2See Tomberlin (1983). Castafieda's replies to essays by John Perry, Alvin Plantinga, Romane Clark, Michael Bratman, and the correspondence with Robert M. Adams are especially valuable.

3Castafieda follows Kant in the usage of 'transcendent' and 'transcendental.' See Kant's Critique of Pure Reason A12/B25 and A296/B352, where what is transcendental concerns the conditions of knowledge while what is transcendent is that which passes beyond the limits of possible experience. For Castafieda, the extended transcendental prefix is a presupposi- tion of The Balloon, i.e., the ground of its possibility.

4This is emphasized in Castafieda (1977b) and (1981). Saarinen quotes a telling passage from the latter: ". . . all indicators denote in actual speech acts items presented in some experience or involved in a very special way in an experience. For instance, 'now' not merely denotes an interval of time, but an interval of time present in experience." (pp. 284-5).

5See, for example, Castafieda (1985/1986), passim, in addition to the De Dicto portion of the text.

6Baker (1981) has exploited the irreducibility thesis in challenging the attempt to model human thinking on computers.

7See, for example, Tomberlin ed. (1983), p. 301, where Castafieda's reply to R. M. Adams presupposes the referential character of the quasi-indicator, though, of course, it is not itself an indexical.

8The terminology of 'propositionally transparent' and related expressions is introduced in Castafieda (1977a) and Castafieda (1980).

91n Castafieda (1976), chapter 3, there is an unequivocal recognition of the plurality of forms that a single proposition may have. Some of his ideas are developed in Kapitan

(1984b). ?5Castafieda (1976), p. 338.

"See Whitehead (1929) for the fullest expression of Whitehead's metaphysical views. "0n page 339 of Thinking and Doing Castanieda writes: "In Chapter 8, ?2, we analyzed

. . .natural laws." I cannot recall this point about implication being made anywhere else in his writings. What is puzzling is that nature, considered as internal to the Balloon, is con- stituted by propositions and implicational relationships among propositions (inasmuch as nature is law-governed). Normatives are as much a part of nature as any other proposition if whatever is implied by an admittedly "natural" proposition is itself natural. Perhaps Castafieda would deny this and, again, emphasize the different status that normatives have within The Balloon's hierarchy.