The Oxford Companion to Philosophy Part 11 potx

regarding *God and God’s transcendence. He had been
sickened by the course of theology and New Testament
study in the nineteenth century. To Barth, it reduced God
and his self-revelation in Christ to the merely human, the
narrowly rational, the comfortably liberal. Barth saw him-
self as standing in the tradition of Kierkegaard, Luther,
Calvin, Paul, and Jeremiah, prophetic figures for whom
‘man is made to serve God and not God man’. Religion
and piety were castigated by Barth along with natural
theo-logy as misguided, as attempts on the part of fallen
man to tame the otherness of God and to ‘bolt and bar
himself against revelation’.
God, for Barth, is wholly other, inaccessible to human
thought and reason, who yet in Christ broke into the
human world ‘vertically from above’. It is at this point that
philosophers will want to press Barth. How is it that with-
out some natural theology or initial inkling of God on our
part we can recognize Christ’s revelation as divine? And
how, in any case, could the Wholly Other express himself
in the human person who lived in Galilee two millennia
ago? Barth’s own logic forbids a direct answer to these
questions. He appeals rather to the Pauline doctrine of
election by grace: that through divine grace and not
through any effort of ours some are brought (correctly) to
see the Word of God in the New Testament. He calls this
the humiliation of the Gospel; it might equally be called
the humiliation of reason.
Barth’s searching critique of *Enlightenment rational-
ism is refreshing, and not only in the theological field; but
it was followers of Barth who later went on to proclaim
the death of God from within the theological world.

a.o’h.
*God is dead.
H. Hartwell, The Theology of Karl Barth: An Introduction (London,
1964).
T. F. Torrance, Karl Barth: An Introduction to his Early Theology
1910–1931 (London, 1962).
J. Webster (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Karl Barth (Cam-
bridge, 2000).
Barthes, Roland (1915–1980). French literary and cultural
critic, elected chair of literary semiology at the Collège de
France in 1976, he appropriated and destabilized the crit-
ical methodologies of the linguist Ferdinand de Saussure
and the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan in the course of his
systematic investigation of signs and signifying systems.
For him, language (and culture) is structured, but ‘off-
centred without closure’, since signs are not mere denot-
ative units but polysemous, operating in a moving play of
signifiers that can generate meaning in relation to other
signifiers. The text is then no static work but a rich,
dynamic field of explosive scraps of code capable of ‘the
infinite deferment of the signified’. Reading, then is, not
reductive deciphering but a productive activity analogous
to playing from a musical score. This eliminates the pos-
sibility of any privileged interpretation, authorial or crit-
ical, but makes it possible to participate in a ‘hedonistic
textuality’, a paradoxical jouissance, where the psychically
split reader is at once lost and merged within a sea of
cross-pollinating signs. b.t.
Roland Barthes, S/Z (Paris, 1970).
—— Image–Music–Text, tr. Stephen Heath (New York, 1977).

Michael Payne, Reading Knowledge: An Introduction to Barthes, Fou-
cault and Althusser (Oxford, 1997).
base and superstructure. According to the *historical
materialism of Marx and Engels, the social ‘base’ is the
ensemble of social relations or the economic structure of
society; politics, law, morality, religion, and art constitute
the social ‘superstructure’. In some writings, the term
‘superstructure’ is used to refer solely to people’s thoughts
about their social relations (*‘ideology’), while in others it
refers also to non-economic social institutions. The pri-
mary relation asserted in Marxian theory between the
base and the superstructure is one of explanatory depend-
ence: ‘superstructural’ phenomena are to be explained
materialistically through their dependence on the eco-
nomic base. According to Marx, phenomena in the base
can be understood with scientific precision, whereas
superstructural phenomena are comparatively contin-
gent, and admit of rigorous treatment only to the degree
that they exhibit dependence on the economic base.
There is no coherent history of politics, law, religion, or
art as such; people’s real history is economic.
The reasoning behind these Marxian claims, and even
their meaning, has been a matter of dispute among Marx-
ian scholars and Marxian theorists. One reading, usually
proposed by critics rather than proponents of Marxism,
takes what is ‘superstructural’ to be ‘epiphenomenal’; that
is, superstructural phenomena exhibit causal dependence
on eco-nomic facts, but exercise no causal influence on the
economic realm. This implausible interpretation of histor-
ical materialism was rejected by Engels, who insisted that

although the dependent spheres of life ‘react’ on the eco-
nomic realm, it is always the economic ‘driving forces’
which are determining ‘in the last instance’. But this leaves
unexplained why economic forces should be thought
always to be decisively determining in causal interactions
which are admittedly reciprocal.
The Marxian theory is perhaps best understood if we
take the primacy of the economic to be an assertion not
about causal influences but about historical tendencies.
The Marxian theory holds that human history makes the
most sense if we understand it in terms of certain funda-
mental tendencies, operating at the economic level: the
tendency of productive powers to grow over time and of
the economic structure of society to adjust so as to facili-
tate new productive powers. The claim that forces of pro-
duction are primary amounts to the claim that history
makes most sense if we proceed from a pattern of explan-
ation proceeding from the tendency to growth in pro-
ductive forces; the explanations in question are functional
or *teleological, not causal, in form, though they do
involve causal mechanisms through which the basic ten-
dencies operate: the tendency of productive forces to
grow and the tendency of production relations (and, along
80 Barth, Karl
with them, superstructural phenomena) to adjust to that
growth.
The mechanism of such adjustments is the *class strug-
gle; that class is victorious whose ascendancy is most con-
ducive to the employment and further development of the
growing powers of production. Superstructural phenom-

ena are then to be explained functionally by the way in
which they serve the prevailing economic structure, or the
interests of contending classes. Clearly they could not serve
this function or these interests without exercising some
influence on the economic realm, and so they cannot be
merely ‘epiphenomenal’. Their historical development,
however, is best understood in relation to the fundamental
tendencies of human society, which are economic.
a.w.w.
G. A. Cohen, Karl Marx’s Theory of History (Princeton, NJ, 1978).
Jon Elster, Making Sense of Marx (Cambridge, 1985).
Ted Honderich, ‘Against Teleological Historical Materialism’,
Inquiry (1982).
basic action. An idea introduced in the philosophy of
action. A person may do one thing by doing another, e.g.
vote by raising her arm. Then raising her arm is said to be
more basic (or primitive) than voting. That than which noth-
ing is more basic—i.e. that which is not done by doing
something else—is the basic thing. Variants on this idea
have been introduced, sometimes to protect accounts of
action from regress, sometimes to cast light on different
kinds of relation between different things agents do.
If an action is a particular (an event such as Jane’s raising
of her arm at time t), and such particulars are coarsely indi-
viduated, then ‘more basic than’ and ‘basic’ do not really
apply to actions themselves: they apply to things done
when there are actions, things such as raising the arm or
voting (which are sometimes called acts). j.horn.
*action.
Jennifer Hornsby, Actions (London, 1980), chs. 5 and 6.

basic statements. A statement, P, is a basic statement if and
only if P’s truth-value determines that of at least one further
statement, Q, but there is no statement R such that R deter-
mines the truth-value of P.
Paradigmatically, but not essentially, if P is a basic state-
ment then P’s truth-value is determined by the obtaining
or non-obtaining of some empirical state of affairs.
*Empiricism about meanings logically entails the exist-
ence of basic statements but not vice versa.
Neurath’s *protocol statements (Protokollsätze),
Wittgenstein’s elementary propositions (Elementarsätze),
and Russell’s atomic propositions are basic statements, but
we owe the expression ‘basic statement’ to Ayer. s.p.
A. J. Ayer, Philosophical Essays (London, 1959).
bat, what it is like to be a: see Nagel, Thomas.
Baudrillard, Jean (1929– ). French social theorist who
came to prominence in the early 1980s. Baudrillard, whose
message is that the subject is dominated by the object,
sees consumption as the prime mover in the social order,
and takes our behaviour, language, and perceptual experi-
ence to be increasingly formed by media-propagated
ideals and images. As a result, we live in a world of signs
removed from any external reality that might help us to
keep account of what we take to be signified. In this
‘hyper-reality’ the real and the ‘televisual’ merge, and fan-
tasy institutionally replaces reality. Since the historical and
causal contexts are lost to view too, the real distinctions,
social, economic, etc., that the images might represent
also disappear, and political life with them. Baudrillard’s
perspective owes much to his Continental predecessors

from Marx onwards, with debts to J. K. Galbraith and
Marshall McLuhan. He marches under the same anti-
meta-narrative banner as *Lyotard, but, nevertheless,
consistently with his thought-provoking (or, as he might
claim, thought-liberating) reversals of established ideas,
denies that he is a *post-modernist. a.h.
J. Baudrillard, Fatal Strategies, tr. P. Beitchman and W. G. J. Nieslu-
chowski (London, 1990).
M. Poster (ed.), Jean Baudrillard: Selected Writings (Stanford, Calif.,
1988).
Bauer, Bruno (1809–82). German theologian, philoso-
pher, and historian, who was a leading Left Hegelian. He
attended Hegel’s lectures on religion, and contributed his
notes for the posthumous edition of the lectures. He
began his career with a Right Hegelian attack on D. F.
Strauss’s Life of Jesus (1835–6), which saw the Gospels as
myth rather than history. But in 1842 his conversion to
religious radicalism lost him his professorship at Bonn. He
now argued that Christ was a fiction, and interpreted
Hegel as an atheist and revolutionary, who deified human
self-consciousness, notably that of the enlightened critic in
contrast to the docile masses—a view more akin to the
pre-Hegelian romanticism of Friedrich Schlegel than to
Hegel himself. Marx contested this and other doctrines of
Bauer in The Holy Family (1845). m.j.i.
*Hegelianism; Romanticism.
L. S. Stepelevich (ed.), The Young Hegelians: An Anthology (Cam-
bridge, 1983).
Bayesian confirmation theory. The most influential
attempt in the logical positivist tradition to provide a uni-

form, general account of scientific knowledge. Bayesians
identify the epistemic support *evidence confers on a
hypothesis with *probability, usually understood in terms
of dispositions to take risks whose outcome would depend
on the correctness of the hypothesis of interest. They sup-
pose that background beliefs and expectations which may
vary among investigators determine the extent to which
any given evidence supports a hypothesis. Someone who
evaluates a hypothesis (H) on the basis of evidence (E)
brings to its assessment (1) a prior degree of confidence in
H, (2) prior expectations concerning whether E should
occur if H is correct, and (3) a prior degree of confidence
Bayesian confirmation theory 81
that E should (or shouldn’t) occur regardless of whether H
is true. If B are the investigator’s background beliefs which
determine these expectations, Bayes’s theorem says the
probability of H, given E, should vary directly with (1) and
(2), and inversely with (3). In symbols,
Pr(H|E & B) [the probability of H, given B and E ]
= Pr(E|H & B) × Pr(H|B)
Pr(E|B)
where Pr(H|B) corresponds to (1), Pr(E|H & B) corres-
ponds to (2), and Pr(E|B) corresponds to (3).
Bayesianism has its attractions: it avoids technical diffi-
culties which beset its rivals; it treats epistemic support
quantitatively; it seems to shed light on disagreements
(emphasized by Kuhn) among scientists over the epi-
stemic bearing of evidence. It applies to reasoning from
uncertain evidence.
The following are among Bayesianism’s problems: its

applications to real world cases are clouded by the appar-
ent arbitrariness of its assignments of numbers to prior
degrees of confidence (1, 2, and 3 above). And it has trouble
explaining how a theory can be tested against old evidence
already accepted with certainty. For such evidence,
priors (1) and (3) above are identical to 1 (complete confi-
dence) and therefore, by Bayes’s theorem, the probability
of the hypothesis, given the evidence, can be no different
from its prior probability. What makes this a problem is
that old evidence can have great epistemic significance,
as illustrated by the support the general theory of rela-
tivity received from facts about Mercury’s perihelion
that were firmly established before Einstein proposed
the theory. j.b.b.
*Logical Positivism.
L. Bovens and S. Hartmann, Bayesian Epistemology (Oxford, 2003).
John Earman, Bayes or Bust? (Cambridge, Mass., 1992) thoroughly
examines strengths and weaknesses.
Alan Franklin, Experiment, Right or Wrong (Cambridge, 1990)
applies Bayesianism to examples from physics.
Colin Howson and Peter Urbach, Scientific Reasoning:
The Bayesian Approach (La Salle, Ill., 1989) is the standard expo-
sition.
Bayle, Pierre (1647–1706). French scholar and controver-
sialist, best known for his Historical and Critical Dictionary
(1697). Through painstaking research into the lives and
thought of hundreds of biblical and historical figures,
Bayle subjected countless philosophical and religious doc-
trines to critical scrutiny, and demonstrated, with scathing
wit and dialectical virtuosity, that none of them had any

legitimate claim to the status of final truth. He argued, in
direct opposition to the rationalist philosophers, that
reason was too feeble an instrument to be relied upon
in the pursuit of truth, but that religious faith, while cru-
cial to our support, had need of constraint and modesty in
advancing its own claims. Bayle exerted a powerful
influence upon the eighteenth-century *philosophes, who
admired his intellectual courage, the rigour of his
scholarly methods, and his passionate commitment to the
cause of religious toleration. p.f.j.
Elisabeth Labrousse, Bayle, tr. Denys Potts (Oxford, 1983).
‘be’: see ‘to be’, the verb.
beatitude’s kiss: see Aurobindo, Ghose.
beauty. Despite its ancient aura as one of the supreme val-
ues in human life and in the cosmos, some philosophers
give beauty short shrift. They remind us that discussions
of aesthetic matters often do not use the words ‘beauty’ or
‘beautiful’, and that, on the other hand, discussions
involving these words are often not aesthetic. If we call a
person beautiful, is that always an aesthetic judgement?
Presumably not, if desires towards the person are material
to the judgement. So beauty is and is not something aes-
thetic. It can seem merely a vague way of praising some-
thing: whether we have a beautiful time at a wonderful
party, or vice versa, makes little difference.
Philosophical aesthetics has tried to rescue the concept
of beauty, suggesting that it is the best general concept of
*aesthetic value. The idea is that beauty applies to any
kind of thing, whether an artefact or a part of nature, and
that to judge anything beautiful is always the highest form

of aesthetic praise. If ethics is an investigation of the good
(despite the vagaries of the word ‘good’), then aesthetics is
an investigation of the beautiful. However, are not some
great works of art ugly? We must be careful here. A work
which depicts scenes that are gruesome and harrowing,
such as the blinding of Gloucester in King Lear, may
loosely be said to be ugly. But whether the play depicts
pleasant and beautiful things, and whether it succeeds aes-
thetically, are obviously questions at two different levels.
A similar point could apply to a piece of music which was
discordant and unsettling to listen to. Though not beauti-
ful by conventional standards, such works acquire this epi-
thet according to the theory that aesthetic worth is
beauty.
Aquinas’s definition of beauty as ‘that which pleases in
the very apprehension of it’ still commands some
respect—provided that we can expand a little on what
‘pleases’ and ‘apprehension’ mean. Taking pleasure in the
perception of visible forms and colours, or combinations
of sound, are the most obvious candidates. Beauty that is
not perceptible is harder to accept, although this raises
doubts about ‘a beautiful idea’ or ‘a beautiful mathemat-
ical proof’. To rule these out as expressions of approval
which are not proper cases of aesthetic judgement seems
an unhappy solution. Are grasping the structure of a math-
ematical proof and the structure of a piece of music in
sonata form so vastly different that one must be ‘aesthetic
beauty’ while the other is not?
Another problem is what to say about the case of litera-
ture, whose form is not strictly perceptible. If literature

may be aesthetically good (whatever point may ultim-
ately attach to judging it so), and if ‘beauty’ is the term
for aesthetic value, then we have to acknowledge that a
82 Bayesian confirmation theory
novel or short story can be beautiful, however strange
that may sound outside aesthetic theory. Few would deny
that art of any form can be beautiful, but the idea that art
should be prized especially for its beauty, or that a purely
aesthetic way of regarding it is somehow privileged, may
be questioned. Surely we care not only about beauty, but
also about such matters as whether a work has integrity,
whether it presents a view of the world that is honest or
enlightening rather than trivializing or lazy. The view that
beauty alone matters in art is apt to be derided as an
assumption of *aestheticism. On the other hand, if
absolutely any value that an artwork can have is included
in its being beautiful, then beauty really becomes a vacu-
ous idea for philosophical purposes. c.j.
*ugliness.
I. Kant, Critique of Judgement, tr. J. C. Meredith (Oxford, 1969).
M. Mothersill, Beauty Restored (Oxford, 1984).
Plato, Symposium, tr. W. Hamilton (Harmondsworth, 1972).
beauty above beauty: see Plotinus.
Beauvoir, Simone de: see de Beauvoir, Simone.
becoming: see change; process; time.
Bedeutung
: see sense and reference; Frege.
beetle in the box. An example in Wittgenstein’s Philo-
sophical Investigations, § 293. If one wrongly construes the
grammar of sensation words on the model of name and

designated object, then the sensation drops out as irrele-
vant. It would be like an object called ‘beetle’ in a private
box, which no one else could ever see, and hence could
play no role in explaining what the word means. Instead,
Wittgenstein argued that to say that ‘S’ is the name of a
sensation is to say that the utterance ‘I have S’ is the expres-
sion of a sensation. The logical grammar of sensation
words is fundamentally different from that of names of
objects or perceptual properties. p.m.s.h.
*Grammar, autonomy of.
P. M. S. Hacker, An Analytical Commentary on the Philosophical
Investigations, iii: Wittgenstein: Meaning and Mind (Oxford,
1990), 206–8.
begging the question, or
petitio principii
. Literally,
requesting what is sought, or at issue. So, requesting an
opponent to grant what the opponent seeks a proof of. So,
by extension, assuming what is to be proved. A traditional
*fallacy. Assuming has to be distinguished from entailing,
or all valid proofs would beg the question (as J. S. Mill
thought). But the boundary is sometimes hazy: for
example, does an argument of the form ‘Even if not P, Q;
so at any rate Q’ assume ‘Q’? (The expression is sometimes
misused: it does not mean ‘raise the question’, or ‘assume
without argument’.) c.a.k.
J. S. Mill, A System of Logic (London, 1843), ii. iii.
behaviourism. A family of doctrines united by metaphys-
ical worries about dualism and epistemic worries about
the status of mental terms (even when not undergirded by

a dualistic metaphysic). *Operationalism, *positivism,
and behaviourism were mutually inspiring doctrines
designed, in the case of psychology, to make it scientific-
ally respectable. Psychology, traditionally conceived as
the science of mind, became conceived as the science of
behaviour, where behaviour was understood to include
only the ‘observable’ activities of an organism, or, in the
version B. F. Skinner dubbed ‘radical behaviourism’,
where behaviour was conceived of expansively so that
‘private events’ like thinking, feeling, and so on, although
not directly observable were taken to be kinds of behav-
iour subject to the same laws as more public, conspicuous
behaviour. Every type of behaviourism involved some
sort of challenge to ‘mental realism’, to our ordinary
way(s) of thinking of mind and mentality. Some of the
more interesting behaviouristic doctrines include the
following:
Operationalistic behaviourism. The meaning of a mental
term is exhausted by the observable operations that deter-
mine its use. So ‘P is thirsty’ means P says she is thirsty if
asked, drinks water if given the chance, and so on.
Logical behaviourism. Mental terms are disposition
terms. To say that ‘P is thirsty’ is to imply, among other
things, that P will probably say she is thirsty if asked, will
drink if given the chance, and so on. The difference
between the first and second doctrine is that the first
denies any ‘surplus meaning’ to the concept of ‘thirst’
beyond that entailed by the observations used in the deter-
mination to use it; whereas the second allows that the
concept of ‘thirst’ is only partially reduced to the observ-

able events that justify its use, and thus that it maintains a
legitimate surplus meaning referring to a ‘state’ inside the
organism, the qualitative state, say, of ‘being thirsty’.
Methodological behaviourism. Despite the fact that there
are private psychological events, ‘psychology’, conceived
as the science of behaviour, can avoid talking about them,
and thereby retain its scientific credentials. The basic idea
was pointed out by B. F. Skinner in Science and Human
Behavior (1953) and was picked up and elaborated on by
Carl Hempel, who called it the ‘Theoretician’s Dilemma’.
Assuming that unobservable private events serve to link
stimuli and responses in lawlike ways, we can, for pur-
poses of psychology, treat the mind as a black box, observ-
ing the effects of the environment on behaviour, and
predicting and explaining behaviour on that basis.
Radical behaviourism. The doctrine that behaviour can
be observable or unobservable (from the third-person
point of view) but that both can be analysed within the
substantive framework of behaviouristic psychology. In
‘Behaviorism at 50’ (1964), Skinner writes: ‘It is especially
important that a science of behavior face the problem of
privacy. It may do so without abandoning the basic pos-
ition of behaviorism. Science often talks about things it
cannot see or measure . . . The skin is not that important a
boundary.’ With the advent of radical behaviourism, one
behaviourism 83
sees the attempt on Skinner’s part to argue for the thesis
that all behaviour, public or private, is governed by the
laws of classical conditioning (as articulated by Pavlov and
Watson) or operant conditioning (as articulated by

Thorndike and himself ). Skinner argued that thinking,
choosing, and deciding—things about which more dra-
conian forms of behaviourism vowed silence—could be
analysed as private behaviours with characteristic causal
relations to overt behaviour and as subject to the basic
principles of operant conditioning. Despite this expansive-
ness, Skinner remained unimpressed until his dying day
with the rising tide of cognitive psychology, thinking it
lacked epistemic discipline and was rudely ignorant of the
contributions of the substantive doctrines of classical and
operant behaviourism. Although no version of behav-
iourism is a live position within the philosophy of mind,
most philosophers still think that mental terms typically
get at least part of their meaning from links to observable
causes and effects. o.f.
*functionalism; psychology and philosophy.
Gilbert Ryle, The Concept of Mind (London, 1949).
B. F. Skinner, Science and Human Behavior (New York, 1953).
—— About Behaviorism (New York, 1974).
L. D. Smith, Behaviorism and Logical Positivism (Stanford, Calif.,
1986).
being is the subject matter of *ontology. According to
long tradition, there are kinds of being and modes of being.
The kinds of being may be subdivided in various ways: for
instance, into *universals and particulars and into con-
crete beings and abstract beings. Another term for ‘being’
in this sense is ‘entity’ or *‘thing’. In a second sense, being
is what all real entities possess—in other words, *exist-
ence. Being in this second sense has various modes. Thus
the being of concrete physical objects is spatio-temporal

while that of abstract mathematical entities like numbers
is eternal and non-spatial. Again, the being of some
entities (for instance, qualities) is logically dependent
upon that of others, whereas the being of substances is
logically independent.
Connected with some of these traditional categorial
distinctions are certain grammatical distinctions con-
cerning the verb ‘to be’. The use of ‘is’ as a copula may be
interpreted in a variety of ways. ‘This ring is yellow’
features the ‘is’ of attribution, since it ascribes a quality to a
substantial particular. ‘This ring is golden’ involves the ‘is’
of constitution, as it states what kind of material that
particular is made of. ‘This ring is my grandmother’s
wedding-ring’ features the ‘is’ of identity. Finally, ‘This
object is a ring’ involves the ‘is’ of instantiation, since it
states what kind of thing the object in question is an
instance of. Thus, although being yellow, being golden,
being my grandmother’s wedding-ring, and being a ring are
all properties of this ring, they are properties of very different
natures. Moreover, none of these properties constitutes the
being of this ring, in the sense of constituting its exist-ence.
‘This ring is (exists)’ apparently involves a sense of ‘is’
distinct from any in which ‘is’ functions merely as a copula.
What is it to be a being or entity? Here we must distin-
guish between the question what it is for an entity of any
given kind to exist and the question what is the distin-
guishing feature of entityhood. The famous dictum of
W. V. Quine, To be is to be the value of a variable, is
potentially confusing on this score. It might be better
phrased, ‘To be accounted amongst the entities recognized

as existing by a given theory is to belong to the domain
assigned to the variables of quantification of that theory
according to its standard interpretation’. But another well-
known dictum of Quine’s, ‘No entity without identity’,
goes nearer to the heart of our second question, suggest-
ing that the crucial feature of entityhood is the possession
of determinate identity-conditions.
In a special, restricted sense the term ‘being’ is com-
monly used to denote a subject of consciousness (or self),
and thus a kind of entity to be contrasted with mere
‘objects’. Such entities are often supposed to enjoy a spe-
cial mode of being inasmuch as they are conscious of their
own existence and possess a capacity freely to determine
its course—a view elaborated in the existentialist doctrine
that, for such entities, ‘existence precedes essence’ (Sartre).
The contrast between being (in the sense of existence)
and *essence is itself an ancient one, rooted in the distinc-
tion between accidental and essential properties. Trad-
itionally, God is an entity whose essence includes existence,
making God a necessary being, and indeed the only such
being in the restricted sense in which this signifies a subject
as opposed to an object. But this doctrine seems to require
one to think of existence as a property of individual
beings, contrary to the now dominant view of existence
developed by Frege and Russell. e.j.l.
*necessary and contingent existence; ‘to be’, the verb.
E. J. Lowe, Kinds of Being (Oxford, 1989).
W. V. Quine, Ontological Relativity and Other Essays (New York,
1969).
J P. Sartre, Being and Nothingness, tr. H. Barnes (London,

1957).
being-in-the-world (In-der-Welt-sein) is, for Heidegger,
the ‘determining character’ or ‘basic state’ of *Dasein (the
kind of being which humans have). The hyphens signal
that it is a ‘unitary phenomenon’, for world (human)
being and the relation of ‘being-in’ are only ‘provisionally’
distinguishable. Human beings cannot be understood
apart from a world that, in turn, is intelligible only as what
they are ‘in’. The world, in this ‘primary’ sense, is not the
spatio-temporal one of physics, but a ‘totality of signifi-
cance’ which we are ‘in’, not as peas in a pod, but as mean-
ingfully and practically engaged with. (Compare ‘He’s in
the world of motor-racing’.) Heidegger’s characterization
of our being challenges the view held by Descartes and
many later philosophers that we are, in essence, ‘thinking
things’ logically independent of a world of material, spa-
tial substances. It registers the conviction, shared by other
*phenomenologists such as Merleau-Ponty, that human
beings must be ‘primordially’ seen as immersed, through
their meaning-giving ‘projects’, in a world whose
84 behaviourism
contours and articulation are themselves a function of
those projects. d.e.c.
H. L. Dreyfus, Being-in-the-World: Commentary on Heidegger’s
Being and Time, Division I (Cambridge, Mass., 1991).
M. Heidegger, Being and Time, tr. J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson
(Oxford, 1962).
belief. A mental state, representational in character, tak-
ing a proposition (either true or false) as its content and
involved, together with motivational factors, in the direc-

tion and control of voluntary behaviour. (*Thinking;
*propositional attitude; *representation.) Belief (thought)
is often (especially in the philosophy of mind) taken to be
the primary cognitive state; other cognitive and conative
states (e.g. knowledge, perception, memory, intention)
being some combination of belief and other factors (such
as truth and justification in the case of knowledge).
In referring to beliefs—to Ted’s belief that snow is
white, for instance—one may be referring to either a par-
ticular mental state occurring in the believer (a state that
has content) or the propositional content itself—some-
thing more like a meaning that is not locatable in the
believer. In the first case, Ted’s belief that snow is white is
not the same as Tom’s belief that snow is white. They
occur in different heads. In the second sense, they are the
same belief: that snow is white. What Ted and Tom believe
(i.e. the propositional content of their belief ) is the same.
Beliefs involve the deployment of *concepts: one can-
not believe that something is a cow unless one under-
stands what a cow is and, in this sense, has the concept
cow (one needn’t, of course, understand the word ‘cow’).
One can, to be sure, have beliefs about cows (these are
called *de re or demonstrative beliefs) without knowing
what a cow is. One can, for instance, believe that that ani-
mal, the one you see, is spotted. If that animal happens to
be a cow, one believes of the cow that it is spotted and,
thus, has a belief about a cow. But one cannot believe of
the cow (or of anything else for that matter) that it is a cow
(the word ‘cow’ here appears in what is called an oblique
or referentially opaque position) without understanding

what a cow is. Since concepts can remain distinct even
when their reference is the same, belief descriptions are
*intensional in character.
Some beliefs (called ‘core’ beliefs) are at the forefront of
consciousness—things one is, at the moment, actually
thinking about. Others are not. Even if you thought about
it once (when you learned geography), you were not con-
sciously thinking, a moment ago, that San Francisco is in
California. None the less, it seems correct to say that you
believed it even when you weren’t actively thinking about
it. Other beliefs seem even more remote from conscious-
ness, even more part of the background. Even if you never
consciously thought about whether turtles wear pyjamas,
it seems right to say that you none the less believed they
did not wear pyjamas before your attention was ever
called to the fact.
Beliefs, together with other mental states (desires,
fears, intentions) function as *reasons for action. Thus,
beliefs are to be distinguished from a variety of other
internal representations that control reflexes and other
non-intentional behaviours. There is a difference between
closing your eyes as a reflexive response to a sudden
movement (a response that is controlled by an internal
representation of nearby events) and closing your eyes
purposely, because you have certain desires (to avoid eye
injury) and beliefs (that someone’s finger is headed for
your eye).
There are two broadly contrasting views about the
nature of belief content. Individualists (sometimes called
solipsists) maintain that the content of belief (what it is we

believe when we believe something) supervenes on the
neurobiology of the believer. If two individuals are phys-
ically indistinguishable, then they are psychologically indis-
tinguishable. They must, therefore, have the same beliefs.
Non-individualists, on the other hand, hold that belief con-
tent is, at least in part, determined by the believer’s
environment. Two individuals that are physically identical
could have different beliefs. A version of non-individualism
maintains that a person’s social—including linguistic—
context helps fix the content of what they believe. f.d.
*belief and desire; judgement; mental causation; norms,
epistemic;.virtues, doxastic.
L. R. Baker, Saving Belief (Princeton, NJ, 1987).
A. Phillips Griffiths (ed.), Knowledge and Belief (Oxford, 1967).
A. Woodfield (ed.), Thought and Object (Oxford, 1982).
belief, ethics of. A set of rules used in evaluating doxastic
states (beliefs, doubts, etc.) in ways similar to the evalu-
ation of acts (murder, lying, etc.) by ordinary moral rules.
An assumption is made that doxastic states are voluntary
in at least a weak sense. Proponents of the ethics of belief
are of two types: (1) epistemicists, who hold that the rules
should refer only to epistemic considerations (sensory evi-
dence, logical consistency, etc.), and (2) pragmatists, who
hold that non-epistemic considerations (e.g. saving a per-
son’s life) are also relevant. Among epistemicists, W. K.
Clifford holds the extreme view that we never have a right
to believe a proposition without adequate evidence.
Among moderate epistemicists, R. M. Chisholm holds
that we have a right to believe a proposition unless its con-
tradictory is evident.

Pragmatists also advocate more or less moderate
views. Pragmatic considerations should: (1) determine
belief choice only when epistemic considerations are bal-
anced pro and con or evidence is lacking, or (2) sometimes
override a preponderance of evidence. W. James
defended both types of pragmatic ethics of belief on differ-
ent occasions. p.h.h.
*norms, epistemic; virtue, doxastic.
R. Chisholm, The Foundations of Knowing (Minneapolis, 1982).
W. Clifford, The Ethics of Belief and Other Essays, ed. T. Madigan
(Amherst, NY, 1999).
belief and desire. Familiar states of mind that do much
theoretical work in some philosophical spheres and are
belief and desire 85
topics of philosophical analysis. A popular way of under-
standing belief, desire, and the differences between them
features the notion of direction of fit. It is said that the
defining aim of belief is to fit the world, whereas that of
desire is to get the world to fit it. According to a notion of
satisfaction and a notion of content that apply to beliefs
and desires, a belief that p and a desire that p have the same
satisfaction condition—its being the case that p—and the
same content, p. Philosophers who favour these notions
see beliefs and desires as differing in their respective orien-
tations toward their content. Whereas many desires are
functionally fit to contribute to their own satisfaction,
relatively few beliefs are: potentially self-fulfilling beliefs
are the exception, not the norm. Philosophers often distin-
guish occurrent from dispositional beliefs and desires.
Where is New York City? Now that the issue has been

raised, you have an occurrent belief that NYC is in the
USA; before the issue was raised, you had a dispositional
belief that it is. The same distinction applies to desires.
‘Sam desires a career in philosophy’ is true even while he is
wholly absorbed in a tennis match or dreamlessly sleeping.
When Sam’s supervisor, Sue, finds herself about to tell a
prospective employer that he definitely desires a career in
philosophy, she need not phone Sam to see whether he is
awake before she can be confident that she will be speak-
ing truly. The quoted sentence is also true when Sam is
writing a cover letter for his job applications. In the latter
case, but not the former, Sam has an occurrent desire for a
career in philosophy. Beliefs come with degrees of confi-
dence, and desires with degrees of strength. Both Sam and
Sue believe that he will get a philosophy job this year, but
she is more confident about that than he; and Sam’s desire
for a career in philosophy is much stronger than his desire
to eat the sandwich he is holding. a.r.m.
*simulation.
J. Searle, Intentionality (Cambridge, 1983).
belief-in. There are two main varieties of ‘belief-in’, nei-
ther of which is translatable in terms of ‘belief-that’. In the
first, ‘belief-in’ has a commendatory function (we do not,
save ironically, believe in someone’s incompetence, disloy-
alty, etc.). In the case of entities (though not of abstrac-
tions such as ideal states) this use of ‘believe in’ requires
the existence of the believed-in entity. In the second,
‘believe in’ simultaneously notes and rejects a claim to
existence: ‘Children often believe in Santa Claus’, ‘James I
believed in witches’, etc. Religion apart, first-person uses

of this sense of ‘believe in’ are rare, and carry with them an
acceptance of the need to justify the embedded existence-
claim. The very terminology in which *belief in God
is claimed seems to reveal the need for a justification of
the belief. j.j.m.
H. H. Price, Belief (London, 1969).
believe, will to: see will to believe.
Belnap: see Anderson and Belnap.
Bell’s theorem. Quantum mechanics (QM) predicts
that various correlations will be observed between the
outcomes of measurements on special types of two-
component systems. Bell’s theorem shows that these cor-
relations are incompatible with a particular type of deter-
ministic theory, one that seeks to explain the outcomes of
the measurements in terms of local causal mechanisms.
The theorem also rules out local indeterministic theories.
The typical experimental set-up involves a physical sys-
tem that consists of two, spatially separated subsystems,
A and B. One is to measure some property of subsystem
A and simultaneously to measure some property of
subsystem B. If the system is deterministic, the (possibly
unknown) state of the total system before the experiment
will determine the result of every such joint measure-
ment. Locality is the assumption that, given the state of
the total system, the outcome of the measurement of a
particular property of subsystem A does not depend on
which property of B is measured, or on the outcome of the
measurement on B.
In 1964 John Bell showed that the assumptions of deter-
minism and locality together imply that various inequal-

ities should hold between the probabilities of certain
outcomes of various joint measurements. The probabil-
ities predicted by QM violate these inequalities. It follows
that any deterministic theory that recovers the statistical
predictions of QM will violate locality and will thus
involve ‘action at a distance’. (Bohm’s ‘hidden-variable’
interpretation of QM is an example of such a non-local
deterministic theory.) Bell and others later generalized the
result to show that indeterministic theories (so-called sto-
chastic hidden-variable theories) that satisfy an appropri-
ate locality condition are equally incompatible with the
predictions of QM. These predictions have since been
verified, most famously by Alain Aspect and collaborators
in 1982. Whether this shows that nature itself is non-local
remains controversial. o.p.
*Einstein, Podolsky, and Rosen paradox; quantum the-
ory and philosophy.
J. S. Bell, Speakable and Unspeakable in Quantum Mechanics (Cam-
bridge, 1987).
J. T. Cushing and E. McMullin (eds.), Philosophical Consequences of
Quantum Theory (Notre Dame, Ind., 1989).
benevolence. To be benevolent is to be possessed by a
desire for the good of others and a willingness to forward
that good actively. Since the good of others takes many
different forms it requires a range of different responses.
Benevolence, therefore, may take the form of compas-
sion, mercy, kindness, or generosity.
While benevolence is quite properly understood as a
general attitude of goodwill towards others and as the spe-
cific forms such goodwill might take, the term has also

come to be used more recently in a much narrower sense,
to refer to acts of charity. An act of charity occurs when
some benefit is freely bestowed by one individual with a
surplus on another who is in need. This narrowing of the
86 belief and desire
meaning of benevolence means what was initially a term
used to describe an uncontroversially desirable attitude to
others has come to be used, perhaps, to put a good face on
the largess of the better-off to the worse-off. It thereby
introduces doubts about the moral value of benevolence.
The question of the moral importance of benevolence
is often addressed by way of a comparison with the alter-
native major ‘other-regarding’ virtue, *justice. Benevo-
lence is said to depend, for instance, on the agent’s feeling
concern for others, while the demands of justice are rec-
ognized by reason and are thus independent of the
vagaries of individual emotional capacity. This particular
contrast owes a great deal to Hume’s influential account
of benevolence as a natural and essentially sentiment-
based virtue, which has led some to conclude that it is
inadequate to meet the demands of morality because it is
neither impartial nor, ultimately, open to rational assess-
ment. There are, however, other conceptions of benevo-
lence which evade these criticisms. *Utilitarianism, for
example, may be described as a theory of universal benevo-
lence, which refuses any necessary connection between
feeling and right action. Neverthless, its highly stipulative
definition of benevolence is challenged by the Humean
recommendation that we ought to assess and be critical of
our moral relationships from the point of view of senti-

ment. A second possible contrast between justice and
benevolence consists in the assertion that, because it is by
definition concerned with what is strictly due to others,
justice marks the boundaries of what we are morally
obliged to do, while benevolence consists in morally desir-
able, but in the final analysis optional, actions. However,
this view merely reflects the largely unargued assertion
that justice is of overriding moral importance.
To conceive of justice and benevolence as independent
and mutually exclusive in this way may be mistaken: the
two notions seem rather to be logically correlative and,
therefore, they cannot be explicated independently of
each other. And if they are logically correlative, i.e. related
not only at the level of certain particular conceptions of
each, but in all and any full and coherent conceptions of
either, then fully to understand a conception, or to
achieve a proper conception, of either justice or benevo-
lence requires making explicit the conception of the other
that it implies and from which it partly derives. p.w.
D. Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, ii.
T. A. Roberts, The Concept of Benevolence (London, 1973).
Benjamin, Walter (1892–1940). German philosopher and
literary and social critic, who was a member of the *Frank-
furt School. He went into exile in Paris when the Nazis
came to power in 1933. After the fall of France he headed
for Spain, but was denied entry and killed himself.
His cryptic, ambiguous, ironical writings owe as much
to messianic and kabbalistic Judaism as to Marxism and
surrealism. Art serves theological, philosophical, and
political ends. His essay ‘The Work of Art in the Age of

Mechanical Reproduction’ (1936) defends photography
and cinema, as a way of ‘politicizing’ aesthetics, against
the ‘aura’ of traditional art—to the annoyance of Adorno,
who saw greater critical power in autonomous art than in
the mass media. Benjamin championed the revolutionary
epic theatre of his friend Brecht. He was a practitioner of
‘immanent criticism’: theoretical principles are to emerge
from the work studied, not brought to it from outside. He
despised Heidegger, but such pieces as ‘On Language as
Such and on the Language of Man’ and ‘Fate and Charac-
ter’, in One-Way Street (1928; tr. London, 1979), have a Hei-
deggerian rather than a Marxian flavour: ‘The
enslavement of language in prattle is joined by the
enslavement of things in folly’ and ‘Fate is the guilt con-
text of the living’. m.j.i.
W. Benjamin, Illuminations (New York, 1969).
—— Reflections (New York, 1986).
G. Smith (ed.), Benjamin: Philosophy, Aesthetics, History (Chicago,
1989).
Bennett, Jonathan F. (1930– ). Historian of philosophy,
philosopher of language, and metaphysician, noted for his
work on Kant, Spinoza, and the British Empiricists, as well
as on rationality, linguistic convention, conditionals, and
the ontology of actions and events. He rejects the widely
assumed distinction between subjunctive and indicative
*conditionals and has challenged aspects of David Lewis’s
work on counterfactuals. He criticizes Davidson’s
account of the individuation of actions and events and
defends a role for both events and facts as admissible relata
of causal relations. His work on the act–omission distinc-

tion has had an important impact on the debate over
active versus passive *euthanasia and the distinction
between *killing and letting die. Bennett is perhaps most
renowned for his highly individual interpretations of
major early modern philosophers, which have sometimes
provoked controversy on account of his ahistorical
approach to classic texts. e.j.l.
J. Bennett, Events and their Names (Oxford, 1988).
—— Learning from Six Philosophers: Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz,
Locke, Berkeley, Hume, 2 vols. (Oxford, 2001).
—— A Philosophical Guide to Conditionals (Oxford, 2003).
Bentham, Jeremy (1748–1832). English philosopher who
dreamed at a young age of founding a sect of philosophers
called utilitarians and who lived to see his dream fulfilled.
He also planned that his body when he died should be
made into what he called an ‘auto-icon’ (that is, a repre-
sentation of itself ) so that it could be used as a monument
to the founder of the sect. This intention was also fulfilled,
so that to this day meetings of Benthamites sometimes
take place in the actual presence of Bentham himself (who
spends the rest of his time sitting in a glass box in Univer-
sity College London).
Bentham was the son and grandson of lawyers working
in the City of London and was intended by his father to fol-
low and surpass them as a practising lawyer. However,
while following his legal studies, Bentham became dis-
gusted with the current state of English law and so, rather
than making money by the practice of the law as it is, he
Bentham, Jeremy 87
turned instead to a study of what the law might be. This

study formed the centre of his long life, during which he
wrote an enormous amount of manuscript material on
law, economics, politics, and the philosophy which nat-
urally arises from these subjects.
In his earlier years Bentham turned some of this manu-
script into books, such as his Fragment on Government of
1776, or his Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legis-
lation of 1789 (although, as the titles indicate, both of these
were in fact only parts of projected works). Later on, even
the fragments tended not to be published by him and were
left for others to edit. In this manner, the first work which
made his name was produced in French and published in
Paris by his disciple Étienne Dumont of Geneva (the
Traités de législation civile et pénale of 1802). Dumont subse-
quently edited other works; these were translated into
English by disciples, who also edited others directly.
Therefore much of the published text of Bentham has
passed through the hands of others, and also sometimes
been translated or retranslated prior to its publication. In
fact, Bentham’s greatest work on the philosophy of law
was not published until the present century (in its latest
version, edited by H. L. A. Hart, under the title Of Laws in
General).
Bentham’s grand project was for legislation: the explor-
ation and theoretical foundations of a perfect system of
law and government. For this he needed a measure of per-
fection, or of value; and this for Bentham was the principle
of *utility, otherwise known as the *greatest happiness
principle. In his already mentioned Introduction to the sub-
ject, Bentham starts chapter 1 with the rousing declaration

that ‘Nature has placed mankind under the governance of
two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure.’ This first para-
graph ends with the statement that ‘the principle of utility
recognises this subjection, and assumes it for the founda-
tion of that system, the object of which is to rear the fabric
of felicity by the hands of reason and of law’. Bentham’s
aim is to produce felicity, happiness. The means to be
employed are ‘reason and law’: the right law will produce
happiness, and the right law is one in accordance with rea-
son. This means one in accordance with the principle of
utility. In Bentham’s draft codes of law, each particular
law was attached to a ‘commentary of reasons on this
law’. The commentary demonstrated its value and also,
Bentham hoped, improved its effect. For, as he says else-
where, ‘power gives reason to law for the moment, but it
is upon reason that it must depend for its stability’.
Bentham explicitly says in the Introduction that by ‘util-
ity’ he means ‘that property in any object, whereby it
tends to produce benefit, advantage, pleasure, good, or
happiness . . . or . . . to prevent the happening of mischief,
pain, evil, or unhappiness’. The rightness of actions
depends on their utility; and the utility is measured by the
consequences which the actions tend to produce. Of all
these varying terms describing the consequences, the
most important for Bentham are the ones with which he
began the Introduction, pleasure and pain. For Bentham
thinks that these are clear, easily understandable terms,
which can therefore be used to give precise sense to the
others. So the good, for Bentham, is the maximization of
pleasure and the minimization of pain. Otherwise, as he

puts it in the Introduction, we would be dealing ‘in sounds
instead of sense, in caprice instead of reason, in darkness
instead of light’. For Bentham the principle of utility,
interpreted in terms of pleasure and pain, is the only
appropriate measure of value because it is the only
comprehensible one.
Bentham’s aim of increasing happiness is a practical
one; and he had many purely practical proposals, such as
for trains of carts between London and Edinburgh, or a
Panama canal, or the freezing of peas. But the most
famous and important of these particular practical pro-
posals was for a prison which he called the ‘panopticon’. It
was to be circular so that the warders could sit in the cen-
tre and observe all the prisoners. It was also going to be
privately run, by contract management with Bentham as
its manager. Bentham therefore not only intended to pro-
duce what he called a ‘mill for grinding rogues honest’ but
also to make money in the process. In fact, blocked by the
interests of the landowners whose property abutted the
site of the proposed prison (now occupied by the Tate
Britain Gallery on Millbank in London), he lost both
money and time until, after twenty years’ struggle, he was
compensated by Parliament. Bentham took his winnings,
rented a house in Devon, and instead of grinding rogues
chopped logic, producing his most profound work on the
philosophy of language.
In his more general theory of government, just as in his
more particular prison proposals, Bentham needed to rely
on a psychology. This is that people tend to act in their
own interests, where these are again understood in terms

of pleasure and pain. People are understood to be seekers
after pleasure and avoiders of pain. Given this knowledge
of people’s psychology, the benign legislator can so
arrange his system of law that people, seeking only their
own interests, will in fact be led into doing what they are
meant to do, which is to promote the general interest (or
the greatest happiness for all).
From this follows the Benthamite theory of *punish-
ment. It is a deterrent account. The proper aim of punish-
ment, as of anything else, is to produce pleasure and
prevent pain. Now all punishment is in itself a pain. There-
fore, for Bentham, all punishment is in itself a harm.
Therefore it can only be justified if this particular pain is
outbalanced by the reduction in pain (or increase of
pleasure) it causes. If people are deterred by punishment
from doing things which would produce more pain (such,
for example, as rape, theft, or murder), then the punish-
ment will be justified. If not, not: there is no point in pun-
ishment or retribution for its own sake. This defence of
punishment not only justifies punishment but also enables
in principle the precise calculation of how much punish-
ment is appropriate. It is that amount whose pain is out-
weighed by the pains of the actions it deters.
Bentham’s general account of law and punishment and
his use of the principle of utility as a means of providing
88 Bentham, Jeremy
reasons for his particular codes of law is constant through
his life. However, his ideas about the particular political
system which should be the source of this law developed.
At the start he thought that he only needed to appeal to

enlightened governments for such obviously beneficial
arrangements to be put into effect. When he found that
this did not happen (or that he was blocked in his own pro-
posals, such as that for the panopticon), he became a sup-
porter of democracy. Not just the law had to be changed
but also the system of government. He was accordingly
active in the movement for the extension of the parlia-
mentary franchise, which finally came into effect in the
year he died (although Bentham wanted something con-
siderably more radical than the extension which actually
happened: he wanted one man, one vote; and a secret
ballot).
Such democratic proposals were in any case much
more in accord with his general theories. If, according to
the psychological theory, everyone acts in their own inter-
ests, so also do governments or governors. The classic
eighteenth-century figure of the benevolent, semi-divine
legislator has to be dispensed with. Dictators (supposedly
enlightened or otherwise), kings, oligarchies can not be
trusted. The appropriate end of government, popularly
sloganized by Bentham as ‘the greatest happiness of the
greatest number’, is only safe in the hands of the greatest
number themselves. If the people as a whole are granted
political power, they will, merely by following their own
interests, promote what is also the appropriate end. Just
as in the right system of law, so in the right system of pol-
itics or government, actual and appropriate action will
coincide.
It can be seen that Bentham’s project was centrally a
project of clarification. He wanted to clarify values, to

show at what we ought to aim. He wanted to clarify
psychology, to show at what people actually do aim. He
wanted to devise the appropriate systems of government,
law, or punishment so that these two things could be
placed in step. However, his interest in clarification went
further. He also wanted to clarify the very idea of law;
both as a whole and also in its central terms. It was in this
project that he was led into his most original thought.
Understanding the law involves understanding such
things as *rights and duties. In the empiricist tradition, to
which Bentham was loosely attached, understanding is
provided by perception. Locke and, following him, Hume
made a distinction between simple and complex ideas
which allowed them to understand things which were not
directly perceived. Complex ideas, such as that of a golden
mountain, can be understood because they can be
analysed into their simple constituents, of which we have
experience. However, this technique does not work for
the terms which Bentham wished to analyse, such as
obligation or right. So here he was forced into a wholly
new technique, which he called ‘paraphrasis’.
This technique anticipates twentieth-century methods
of analysis as does Bentham’s related claim that the pri-
mary unit of significance is a sentence rather than a word.
His idea in paraphrasis is not to translate the problematic
word into other words. Rather, ‘some whole sentence of
which it forms a part is translated into another sentence’.
So in the analysis of what Bentham called ‘fictional entities’
(such as right, duty, property, obligation, immunity,
privilege—the whole language of the law), he uses his

technique of paraphrasis to place these terms in sentences
for which he then gives substitute sentences not con-
taining the offending term. For example, sentences about
rights are explained by Bentham in terms of sentences
about duties. A particular right is for him the benefit which
is conferred on someone by the imposition of duties on
others. With duties we still, of course, have fictional entities.
But these, in turn, can be placed in sentences which are
translated into sentences about the threat of punishment.
Punishment is, for Bentham, the threat of the imposition
of pain. So here, at last, we reach what Bentham calls real
entities. We reach clear, simple ideas, which can be
directly understood by perception. As Bentham says in the
Fragment on Government, ‘pain and pleasure at least are
words which a man has no need, we may hope, to go to a
Lawyer to know the meaning of ’. With them the law can
be clarified; for lawyers and others. The ultimate clarifier
of value, of what the law should be, will also work as a
clarifier of what the law actually is.
These projects are projects for change: current condi-
tions are criticized. However, although Bentham’s goals
were the same as many of the contemporary movements
for change, his foundations were not. Bentham was on the
side not just of the struggle for reform of the franchise in
England but also of the American and French Revolu-
tions. The central contemporary justification for these
revolutions was in terms of natural rights. However, Ben-
tham was consistently opposed to the use of natural rights
and he therefore criticized the rhetorical justification of
both of these revolutions.

Bentham thinks that a *natural right is a ‘contradiction
in terms’. He thinks that they are ‘nonsense’, fictitious
entities. However, as has been seen, Bentham produced a
new engine of analysis in his technique of paraphrasis pre-
cisely to make sense of fictitious entities. So it might be
thought that he could make sense in the same way of nat-
ural rights. However, comparing a natural right with a
legal right exposes the difference. Both can be analysed in
terms of corresponding duties. However, as seen, Ben-
tham analyses a legal duty in terms of the law (or threat of
punishment) which creates it. There is no corresponding
law, he holds, with respect to supposed natural duties.
Hence he holds that natural rights are just imaginary
rights by contrast with the real rights produced by actually
existing systems of law. As he puts it, ‘from real law come
real rights . . . from imaginary laws come imaginary ones’.
The so-called rights of man are in fact merely ‘counterfeit
rights’.
Bentham’s most famous slogan expressing this view is
*‘nonsense on stilts’. This comes from his critical analysis
of the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen
in a work usually known as Anarchical Fallacies (which, in
Bentham, Jeremy 89