Book Description
Gilbert Harman presents a selection of fifteen interconnected essays on fundamental issues at the centre of analytic philosophy. The book opens with a group of four essays discussing basic principles of reasoning and rationality. The next three essays argue against the idea that certain claims are true by virtue of meaning and knowable by virtue of meaning.In the third group of essays Harman sets out his own view of meaning, arguing that it depends upon the functioning of concepts in reasoning, perception, and action, by which these concepts are related to the world. He also examines the relation between language and thought. The final three essays investigate the nature of mind, developing further the themes already set out. Reasoning, Meaning, and Mind offers an integrated presentation of this rich and influential body of work. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

Harman's book
It was o.k.Some of the issues he discusses just seemed a little trivial and semantical in nature.I liked the section on rationality a lot better than for example, the one on meaning.

Gil, you RULE
In Gil's official portrait, found on the jacket of the book, he looks not unlike Rudy Giuliani. I printed a large copy of this portrait off his web page and hung it in my office -- every time I looked up at it, I'd hear Gilsaying "so, you're going to hand your dissertation in next week,right?" This was very inspirational. Anyway, there is plenty ofawesome fodder in the book. Sometimes when I need a philosophical intuitionconfirmed, I look in the book, and lo and behold, there is some tersestatement that indicates that Gil had thought the idea up 30 years ago. IQEis a fine article on experience; very thought-provoking and worth intensivestudy. Wide Functionalism is also a fine piece of work. Kieran says thatPractical Reasoning is a classic, and although I don't work on that stuff Ifound it very impressive. ... Read more

Book Description
Change in View offers an entirely original approach to the philosophical study of reasoning by identifying principles of reasoning with principles for revising one's beliefs and intentions and not with principles of logic. This crucial observation leads to a number of important and interesting consequences that impinge on psychology and artificial intelligence as well as on various branches of philosophy, from epistemology to ethics and action theory.

Gilbert Harman is Professor of Philosophy at Princeton University. A Bradford Book. ... Read more

Book Description
Explaining Value is a selection of the best of Gilbert Harman's shorter writings in moral philosophy.The thirteen essays, originally published between 1967 and 1999, are divided into four sections, which focus in turn on moral relativism, values and valuing, character traits and virtue ethics, and ways of explaining aspects of morality. An indication of the breadth of interest of the book can be given by mentioning a few of the compelling questions which Harman discusses: What accounts for the existence of basic moral disagreements? Why do most people think it is worse to injure someone than to fail to save them from injury? Why do many people think it is morally permissible to treat animals in ways we would not treat people? What is it to value something and what is it to value something intrinsically? How much of morality can or should be explained in terms of human flourishing, or the possession of virtuous character traits? How do people come to be moral? Harman's distinctive approach to moral philosophy has provoked much interest; this volume offers a fascinating conspectus of his most important work in the area. ... Read more

Book Description
In Reliable Reasoning, Gilbert Harman and Sanjeev Kulkarni--a philosopher and an engineer--argue that philosophy and cognitive science can benefit from statistical learning theory (SLT), the theory that lies behind recent advances in machine learning. The philosophical problem of induction, for example, is in part about the reliability of inductive reasoning, where the reliability of a method is measured by its statistically expected percentage of errors--a central topic in SLT.

After discussing philosophical attempts to evade the problem of induction, Harman and Kulkarni provide an admirably clear account of the basic framework of SLT and its implications for inductive reasoning. They explain the Vapnik-Chervonenkis (VC) dimension of a set of hypotheses and distinguish two kinds of inductive reasoning, describing fundamental results about the power and limits of those methods in terms of the VC-dimension of the hypotheses being considered. The VC-dimension is found to be superior to a related measure proposed by Karl Popper, and shown not to correspond exactly to ordinary notions of simplicity. The authors discuss various topics in machine learning, including nearest-neighbor methods, neural networks, and support vector machines. Finally, they describe transductive reasoning and suggest possible new models of human reasoning suggested by developments in SLT. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

A great little book
I had the great priviledge of taking the class upon which this book was based last semester at Princeton University under professors Harman and Kulkarni. It is a fascinating little book, which manages to distill decades of debate and research into concise, readable chapters that carry the presentation forward. The authors' approach is original but commonsensical and they clearly demonstrate the value of interdisciplinary work in their twin fields of philosophy and electrical engineering!

The book is not without its flaws, however. The first chapter seems to take off 'in medias res' expecting the reader to be fully caught up with the latest discussion on the problem of induction, and it is not always clear exactly what a 'process of reasoning' might be compared to deductive arguments. The discussion could have benefited from incorporating material from the other draft textbook we used in class, on "The Nature and Limits of Learning", and even from the lecture handouts. The discussion of simplicity, as well, could have been clarified, especially with regard to Goodman's new riddle of induction and Karl Popper's philosophy of science.

Also rather disappointing in class was the discovery that Harman and Kulkarni's method do not warrant going beyond instrumentalism in scientific theorizing. I was hoping for something a little more robust. In any case, this book should be read by anyone interested in the issues they raise. It sure got me thinking and I will definitely refer to it later on as my research in philosophy brings me in contact again with the issues they discuss. ... Read more

Book Description
Contains an overall account of morality in its philosophical format particularly with regard to problems of observation, evidence, and truth. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

Good Book on Moral Philosophy

This is an introductory book on ethics which provides a marked advance of discussion of the nature of morality.

The book is unique in its focus on the basic philosophical problem about morality and its apparent immunity from observational testing. The author considers a number of possible responses to the apparent fact that ethics is cut off from observational testing in a way that science is not.

The author divides the book into five parts. Part I discusses the problem with ethics; Part II is on Emotivism; Part III is on Moral Law; Part IV on Reasons and Conventions whilst Part V is on Oneself and Others.

This is recommended reading for those embarking on the study of moral philosophy.

Nice Introduction to Meta-Ethics, and to Harman's Relativism
First, a point of clarification:this is basically a book about meta-ethics, not normative ethics.(Indeed, judging by his statements in the Preface, Harman thinks the properly philosophical part of thought about morality is exhausted by meta-ethics.)What is meta-ethics?The study of the metaphysics, semantics, epistemology, and psychology of morality.

This isn't a textbook on ethics; it's an original work of philosophy written in such a way that it is accessible to those without a substantial philosophical background.Still, Harman does a pretty good job of introducing readers to many of the issues in meta-ethics while developing his own naturalistic account of morality, an account that ends up being a form of moral relativism.Harman does discuss positions other than those he favors, but they are discussed only insofar as they have some role to play in the progress in his own argument.And he does refer to historically important thinkers (e.g., Hume, Kant, Moore, and Hare), primarily using their work as a foil to his own or as a source of insights he can use in formulating his own theory.

So this isn't a book for someone looking for comprehensive coverage of the positions in meta-ethics or an introduction to historical work on this subject.(If you're looking for a textbook on meta-ethics, you might try Stephen Darwall's Philosophical Ethics or Alexander Miller's recent An Introduction to Contemporary Meta-Ethics.Both of those works present and criticize most of the important positions in contemporary meta-ethics.)

The book begins with a seminal, albeit frustrating, argument that Harman thinks poses a problem for the objectivity of ethics.Harman argues that a fundamental problem with putative moral facts, whose existence would be necessary for morality to be objective, is that it appears they cannot be tested against observation.He then presents an account of the nature of observation according to which this problem boils down to the fact that it appears moral facts cannot be fit into the explanatory framework provided by our scientific conception of the world.In particular, it seems we cannot understand how moral facts could causally interact with anything in the world in such a way that could ultimately cause our having experiences of them.Consequently, we cannot have observational evidence for or against claims about putative moral facts.

The rest of the book can be understood as Harman's response to the worry presented in this chapter.First, Harman considers whether this argument ought to lead us directly to moral nihilism, the doctrine that there are no moral facts.He thinks not.In chapters 2-4 he scrutinizes some possible responses to this worry, including reductive naturalism, emotivism, and the ideal observer theory.This is followed by the long central section of the book in which he develops his own response to the worries about moral facts formulated in the first chapter.Harman ends up arguing that there may be moral facts, and that, if there are, these facts can be fit into a naturalistic worldview.However, he claims that these moral facts are relative ones.That is, he argues for a form of moral relativism.

He begins with analysis of what it means to claim that someone morally ought to do something, and here he argues for a form of reasons internalism.More specifically, he argues that if it is true that person P ought to do action A, then P has reason to A.He then argues for a relativistic theory of reasons.According to Harman, a person has a reason to A only if there is some process of reasoning that would lead the person to do A (or at least to be motivated to do A).How do we determine what reasoning might lead a person to do?Harman suggests that we can find a clue to answering this question if we focus on the social nature of morality.He presents a view according to which morality has developed through certain social conventions accepted within groups.Moral reasons ultimately depend on these conventions; they apply only to those who have, at least implicitly, accepted the conventions of a group. So a person's moral reasons are supplied by her commitment to the conventional rules of that group.

Importantly, persons outside the relevant group, i.e. persons not committed to the relevant conventions, do not have such reasons.And since Harman has argued that one ought not to act a certain way only if one has reasons not to do so, it is not true that those outside the relevant conventions ought not to act as they do.Even if those people act in a way that violates the conventions of our group, we cannot truly say that they ought not to have acted that way.This is perhaps most clear if we consider an example Harman himself uses.Hitler, he tells us, was clearly outside our moral conventions, conventions that rule out slaughtering millions for our political goals.So, while it is true that we who are committed to such conventions (and thus have reason not to act in this way) ought not to do such thing, Hitler had no such reasons and so it was not true that he ought not to have done what he did.Given his psychology and his lack of commitment to any such conventions, there was no reason for him not to have ordered and overseen the Holocaust.And since he ought not to do have done so only if he had such reasons, it's not the case that he ought not to have ordered the Holocaust.We cannot apply our standards to Hitler, who is outside our group, and truly judge that he ought not to have done what he did.Harman thinks that a sort of criticism of Hitler is possible, however--but it isn't possible to correctly claim that he ought not to have done what he did.Harman claims this view is consistent with our normal usage of 'ought' and our intuitions about how it ought to be applied in such cases.We think that we cannot apply our moral standards to a person like Hitler, that he is "beyond the pale."

So, on Harman's account of morality, there do end up being moral facts; they are psychological facts about the reasons people have to behave in certain ways.Nevertheless, these facts are relative and not universal. ... Read more

Book Description
This volume is a direct result of a conference held at Princeton University to honor George A. Miller, an extraordinary psychologist. A distinguished panel of speakers from various disciplines -- psychology, philosophy, neuroscience and artificial intelligence -- were challenged to respond to Dr. Miller's query:

"What has happened to cognition? In other words, what has the past 30 years contributed to our understanding of the mind? Do we really know anything that wasn't already clear to William James?"

Each participant tried to stand back a little from his or her most recent work, but to address the general question from his or her particular standpoint. The chapters in the present volume derive from that occasion.
... Read more

Book Description
Do moral questions have objective answers? In this great debate, Gilbert Harman explains and argues for relativism, emotivism, and moral scepticism. In his view, moral disagreements are like disagreements about what to pay for a house; there are no correct answers ahead of time, except in relation to one or another moral framework. Independently, Judith Jarvis Thomson examines what she takes to be the case against moral objectivity, and rejects it; she argues that it is possible to find out the correct answers to some moral questions. In her view, some moral disagreements are like disagreements about whether the house has a ghost. Harman and Thomson then reply to each other. This important, lively accessible exchange will be invaluable to all students of moral theory and meta-ethics. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

Definitely worth reading
Moral Relativism and Moral Objectivity is both thought provoking and profound. The authors of the book present their ideas in tremendous depth, yet the language is very accessible. Harman writes with incredibleintuitive appeal, and Thomson writes with rigorous and astounding clarity.The book is absolutely captivating. The authors cover everything fromphilosophy of language to epistemology. Unfortunately, at the end of theday, it is difficult to decide who 'the winner' is. While this might beregrettable, one shouldn't always expect to `find the answers' when readingphilosophy. Rather, one should feel like one has gained simply by deepeningone's own thoughtful reflections.

Part of the reason that it isdifficult, with this book, to decide who the winner of the debate is, hasto do with the structure of the debate itself. The authors wrote theiressays independently of each other; they framed the issues quitedifferently from each other, and when responding to each other, theyreframed their opponent's position to meet their own frameworks. Forexample, Harman claims that moral statements are only true or false inrelation to various moral frameworks. Moral Relativism is the position thatthere are many moral frameworks, none of which is more privileged than anyother. Moral Objectivity, as Harman maintains, is the claim that there isonly one moral framework. However, Thomson believes that "moral assessmentis pointless unless it can be found out about some moral sentences thatthey are true", this she takes to be what is at the heart of MoralObjectivity. Moral Skepticism she defines as the claim that "it is notpossible to find out about any moral sentence that it is true." In herreply to Harman's essay, Thomson reformulates Harman's position as claimingthat moral sentences are incomplete; she considers Harman a Moral Skeptic.Thomson sees the issue as primarily epistemic. It is easy to see how thismight confuse some people. However, such is the nature of debate andphilosophy in general. The hardest part of philosophy is to define theissues concretely. In this sense, the book is enlightening. MoralRelativism and Moral Objectivity is definitely worth reading; the authorsintroduce two drastically different perspectives on a very importantsubject.

Disappointing mush from two greats
Harman is unclear.Thomson, in her half of the book, writes that she cannot understand him.As best I can tell, he's saying that moral debate is just a power struggle.That's what he's got to say in order to upholdhis view that moral judgments are just emotings devoid of truth value.Ofcourse, if you believe something false, you'll probably have to strain toaccept other false things, too, but if you write unclearly enough, so thateven your coauthor admittedly cannot understand you, perhaps you can hideyour false beliefs from view.For her part Thomson says that after thebook was commissioned, she realized that what she was going to write wasfalse, but, since it was too late by then, she'd tell it to us anyway.Thewhole thing is unconscienable.There are so many bad philosophers aroundthat, if the good ones go bad, we'll be in deep trouble. ... Read more