Roderick Chisholm

For other people named Roderick Chisholm, see Roderick Chisholm (disambiguation).

Roderick Chisholm
Born	Roderick Milton Chisholm (1916-11-27)November 27, 1916 North Attleboro, Massachusetts, U.S.
Died	January 19, 1999(1999-01-19) (aged 82) Providence, Rhode Island, U.S.
Nationality	American
Education
Alma mater	Brown University Harvard University
Thesis	The Basic Propositions of the Theory of Knowledge (1942)
Doctoral advisor	C. I. Lewis, D. C. Williams
Philosophical work
Era	20th-century philosophy
Region	Western philosophy
School	Analytic philosophy
Institutions	Brown University
Doctoral students	Richard Cartwright, Dale Jacquette, Charles Taliaferro, Dean Zimmerman, Richard Taylor
Main interests	Epistemology Metaphysics
Notable ideas	Direct attribution theory of reference, contrary-to-fact conditional, latitudinarianism

Roderick Milton Chisholm (/ˈtʃɪzəm/; November 27, 1916 – January 19, 1999) was an American philosopher known for his work on epistemology, metaphysics, free will, value theory, and the philosophy of perception.

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy remarks that he "is widely regarded as one of the most creative, productive, and influential American philosophers of the 20th Century."

Life and career

Chisholm graduated from Brown University in 1938 and received his Ph.D. at Harvard University in 1942 under Clarence Irving Lewis and D. C. Williams. He was drafted into the United States Army in July 1942 and did basic training at Fort McClellan in Alabama. Chisholm administered psychological tests in Boston and New Haven. In 1943 he married Eleanor Parker, whom he had met as an undergraduate at Brown. He spent his academic career at Brown University and served as president of the Metaphysical Society of America in 1973.

He was editor of Philosophy and Phenomenological Research from 1980 until 1986.

Chisholm trained many distinguished philosophers, including Selmer Bringsjord, Fred Feldman, Keith Lehrer, James Francis Ross, Richard Taylor, and Dean Zimmerman. He also had a significant influence on many colleagues, including Jaegwon Kim and Ernest Sosa.

Philosophical work

Chisholm's first major work was Perceiving (1957). His epistemological views were summed up in a popular text, Theory of Knowledge, which appeared in three very different editions (1966, 1977, and 1989). His masterwork was Person and Object, its title deliberately contrasting with W. V. O. Quine's Word and Object. Chisholm was a metaphysical Platonist in the tradition of Bertrand Russell, and a rationalist in the tradition of Russell, G. E. Moore, and Franz Brentano; he objected to Quine's anti-realism, behaviorism, and relativism.

Chisholm defended the possibility of empirical knowledge by appeal to a priori epistemic principles whose consequences include that it is more reasonable to trust your senses and memory in most situations than to doubt them. His theory of knowledge was also famously "foundationalist" in character: all justified beliefs are either "directly evident" or supported by chains of justified beliefs that ultimately lead to beliefs that are directly evident. He also defended a controversial theory of volition called "agent causation" much like that of Thomas Reid. He argued that free will is incompatible with determinism, and believed that we do act freely; this combination of views is known as libertarianism.

He developed a highly original theory of first person thought according to which the things we believe are properties, and believing them is a matter of self-attributing them. (A similar view was developed independently by David Kellogg Lewis, and enjoys considerable popularity, although it is now known mainly through Lewis's work.) Chisholm was also famous for defending the possibility of robust self-knowledge (against the skeptical arguments of David Hume), and an objective ethics of requirements similar to that of W. D. Ross. Chisholm's other books include The Problem of the Criterion, Perceiving, The First Person and A Realist Theory of the Categories, though his numerous journal articles are probably better known than any of these.

Chisholm read widely in the history of philosophy, and frequently referred to the work of Ancient, Medieval, Modern, and even Continental philosophers (although the use he made of this material has sometimes been challenged). Nonetheless, he greatly respected the history of philosophy, in the face of a prevailing indifference among Analytic philosophers. Chisholm translated some work by Brentano and by Husserl, and contributed to the post-1970 renaissance of mereology.

Direct attribution theory of reference

Chisholm argued for the primacy of the mental over linguistic intentionality, as suggested in the title of Person and Object (1976) that was deliberately contrasted with Quine's Word and Object (1960). In this regard, he defended the direct attribution theory of reference in The First Person (1981). He argues that we refer to things other than ourselves by indirectly attributing properties to them, and that we indirectly or relatively attribute properties to them by directly attributing properties to ourselves. Suppose the following bed scene:

(1) a man M is in bed B with a woman W, namely, M-B-W, or

(2) a woman W is in bed B with a man M, namely, W-B-M.

If I were M and "U" were W, then I could directly attribute to myself the property (1) or M-B-W, while indirectly to "U" the property (2) or W-B-M, thereby referring to "U". That is, to say (1) is relatively to say (2), or to explicate M-B-W is to implicate W-B-M.

His idea of indirect attribution (1981) is relevant to John Searle's "indirect speech act" (1975) and Paul Grice's "implicature" (1975), in addition to entailment.

"Chisholming"

Stylistically, Chisholm was known for formulating definitions and subsequently revising them in the light of counterexamples. This led to a joke definition of a new verb:

chisholm, v. To make repeated small alterations in a definition or example. "He started with definition (d.8) and kept chisholming away at it until he ended up with (d.8′′′′′′′′)."

— Daniel Dennett and Asbjørn Steglich-Petersen, The Philosophical Lexicon, 2008

While intended as a joke, the term has found some use in serious philosophical papers (for example, Kevin Meeker's "Chisholming away at Plantinga's critique of epistemic deontology").

Persistence and Identity

In his article "Identity Through Time," Chisholm endorses a mereological essentialism for everyday objects such as tables and chairs. He distinguishes two ways of thinking about identity of such objects and the way in which they may lose or gain parts over time: a "strict philosophical sense" and a "loose sense." In a strict philosophical sense, we must say that everyday vulgar objects do not persist through even the slightest change. This is a strict mereological essentialist view. If any part of such a everyday or 'vulgar' object lose or gain parts over time, they would cease to exist. (See Chisholm's Stanford Encyclopedia entry for more about vulgar objects) The object that was before us is now a new and different one. Chisholm argues that these vulgar objects persist through time only in a philosophically loose sense. If we consider these objects carefully, they are better understood as merely feigning identity, what Chisholm calls "ontological parasites." If we consider a table in which we change out individual parts each day for a week, we may at the end of the week say there has only been one table in front of us; however, this is the loose way of talking. The single 'table' we are referring to in that sentence is really only (Chisholm borrowing a phrase from Hume) a 'succession of related objects.' The single "table" we refer to plays loose with identity. In a strict philosophical sense, if the table has had seven changes to its parts, there have been seven different tables. We may innocently discuss much of the world around us as persisting through change in the loose sense, but when we consider strict philosophical puzzles, we must not be fooled by ontological parasites.

Chisholm applies this theory to the famous philosophical puzzle of The Ship of Theseus. Once a single plank of the ship is removed, the ship has become a different object. We may continue to talk about the Ship of Theseus as if it persisted, but this would only be in the loose sense discussed above. Chisholm solves the puzzle by saying that, in the strict and philosophical sense, there is no persistence between the mereologically different objects. Note the possible implication for the "reconstructed ship" that is often a part of the thought experiment. If every single part of the original ship were saved perfectly, so that they were materially identical, and rebuilt next to the new ship, Chisholm's mereological essentialism may lead him to agree that this is the original Ship of Theseus.

Chisholm's mereological essentialism does not extend to persons. Persons, unlike everyday vulgar material objects like ships and tables, persist in the strict and philosophical sense, even when they change their parts. This runs completely counter to his mereological essentialism in vulgar objects. He provides various arguments for why there is such a dividing line between the two and why persons are special. His first argument is from the first hand expereince of the unity of consciousness.

Bibliography

• Perceiving: A Philosophical Study (Ithaca: Cornell University Press), 1957.
• Realism and the Background of Phenomenology (Free Press), 1960.
• Person and Object: A Metaphysical Study (London: G. Allen & Unwin), 1976.
• Essays on the Philosophy of Roderick M. Chisholm (ed. R.M. Chisholm and Ernest Sosa. Amsterdam: Rodopi), 1979.
• The First Person: An Essay on Reference and Intentionality (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press), 1981.
• The Foundations of Knowing (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press), 1982.
• Brentano and Meinong Studies (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press), 1982.
• Brentano and Intrinsic Value (New York: Cambridge University Press), 1986.
• Roderick M. Chisholm (ed. Radu J. Bogdan. Boston: D. Reidel Publishing Company), 1986.
• On Metaphysics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press), 1989.
• Theory of knowledge (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall), 1st ed. 1966, 2nd ed. 1977, 3rd ed. 1989.
• "The Nature of Epistemic Principles," Noûs 24: 209–16, 1990.
• "On the Simplicity of the Soul," Philosophical Perspectives 5: 157–81, 1991.
• "Agents, Causes, and Events: The Problem of Free Will" in: Timothy O'Connor, ed. Agents, Causes, and Events: Essays on Indeterminism and Free Will (New York: Oxford University Press): 95-100, 1995.
• A Realistic Theory of Categories: An Essay on Ontology (New York: Cambridge University Press), 1996.

See also

• American philosophy
• List of American philosophers

References

• Hahn, L. E., ed., 1997. The Philosophy of Roderick Chisholm (The Library of Living Philosophers). Open Court. Includes an autobiographical essay and a complete bibliography.
• "Roderick M. Chisholm" (Dean Zimmerman, Richard Foley), in Companion to Analytic Philosophy, ed. by David Sosa and Al Martinich (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 2001), pp. 281–295

External links

• Feldman, Richard; Feldman, Fred. "Roderick Chisholm". In Zalta, Edward N. (ed.). Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
• Information Philosopher on Roderick Chisholm on Free Will
• "On Roderick M. Chisholm" by Matthew Davidson (preprint of article published in Philosophy Now]
• "CHISHOLM, RODERICK M." by Richard Foley (preprint of entry in the Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Cabanis - Destutt de Tracy)