Background
Chisholm, Roderick Milton was born in November 1916 in 27, North Attleborough, Massachusetts, United States.
metaphysician Philosopher of mind
Chisholm, Roderick Milton was born in November 1916 in 27, North Attleborough, Massachusetts, United States.
Taught at University of Pennsylvania. 1946-1947; thereafter at Brown University. Andrew W. Mellon Professor of the Humanities, 1972.
Visiting Professor at many universities, notably Graz in Austria. Editor of Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 1980.
Chisholm stands firmly in the main AngloAmerican tradition of analytic philosophy, in a broad sense, but he is unusual in the breadth of the influences that he has brought to bear upon it, ranging from the ancient Greeks through Fichte, brentano and IVleinong to Cardinal Mercier and Ws own teacher C. J. Ducasse, as well as the standard sources. His earliest publications include ntany reviews, on topics covering, as well as central philosophy, symbolic logic, aesthetics, dhics and psychology—his war service was as a clinical psychologist. He has edited and contributed to the translation of works by Fichte, brentano and Meinong. Chisholm presents his own work in a direct nononsense style, using sets of definitions. These are built up gradually and form the skeleton for the ntain ideas. Despite this rather formal approach be eschews the technicalities of formal logic in his ntain works and writes in plain English. Apart from commentaries on writers like Brcntano and Meinong his work mainly falls under epistemol- °8y, philosophy of mind, metaphysics and ethics. A key motif throughout Chisholm’s philosophy, and one heavily influenced by Brentano and the phenomenologists, is his emphasis on consciousness and on how things appear to one. Among his central concepts is one he develops from Brentano, that of evidence, and one of the central problems he sees for epistemology is that of the criterion for when we have adequate evidence f°r something. He distinguishes what is directly evident from what is indirectly evident, and the problem of the criterion concerns the passage from the indirectly evident to the directly evident. The directly evident is the ‘self-presenting’, or what we have when: ‘What justifies ute in counting it as evident that a is Fis simply the *act that a is F. The indirectly evident can then hopefully be reached from this by applying certain epistemic rules or principles. Chapter 3 of The Poundations of Knowing uses an elaboration of fhese ideas to defend a view of knowledge as Justified true belief in the face of ‘Gettier’ counterexamples suggesting that such a belief may fail to be knowledge because its truth and the basis of its justification for the believer in question are irrelevant to each other (cf. chapter 10 of the third edition (1989) of Theory of Knowledge). All this forms part of the foundationalism, in the general tradition of Descartes, to which Chisholm adheres (Foundations, chapter 1; cf. Bogdan 1986, p. 43). He is an ‘internalist’ rather than an ‘externalist’, claiming that justification must be ‘epistemic’ and rejecting various other kinds of justification. The third edition of Theory of Knowledge repeats or develops many of these points. A further effect of Chisholm's foundationalism is his distinction between ‘particularists’ and ‘methodists’. Particularists, of whom Chisholm is one, start from the question ‘What do we know?' and only then go on to the question ‘How can we decide whether we know?’ Methodists do the reverse, while sceptics claim that neither question can be answered without first answering the other. Empiricism is one type of methodism. and can take two forms, a genetic doctrine about how we actually come by our knowledge, and a doctrine of justification. Chisholm rejects both of these in Perceiving (1957), but he shares something with them in that he accepts incorrigible states of mind, as a foundationalist perhaps must. These, however, are not sense-datum statements, but statements that one is in a certain state of mind, or is being appeared to in a certain way. Later, however, he rejected the view that there are firstperson propositions, since this view cannot distinguish 'X believes X is F from ‘X believes he himself is F. Instead he develops a theory of intentional states in terms of direct and indirect attribution, taking the ‘he himself’ locution as basic (The First Person, 1981, chapters 3 and 4; see also Boer’s summary in Bogdan 1986, p. 87). Chisholm secs a strong analogy between epistemology and ethics. The first part of Perceiving borrows its title from W, K. Clifford: ‘The ethics of belief’ (cf. also Theory of Knowledge, 1989, pp. 57-60). Belief, or its withholding, is ‘required’ of us in certain circumstances, and he is sympathetic to the view that requirements is the central concept of ethics. Brentano and Intrinsic Value (1986) develops the ethics of Brentano along lines paralleling his own epistemology: we have incorrigible knowledge of our own valuings, and these are prima facie evidence for correct valuings—for emotions, like judgements, can be correct or incorrect. This is then applied to a detailed development of Moore’s notion of ‘organic unities’. Throughout Chisholm assumes, in Moorean fashion, that "whatever we are justified in assuming, when we are not doing philosophy, we are also justified in assuming when we are doing philosophy’. On the nature and existence of the self Chisholm rejects Hume’s ‘bundle of perceptions’ view. Hume says that in seeking himself he always stumbles on some perception, but bundles don’t stumble on their own contents; experiences need a subject just as qualities need a substance. But Kant too goes wrong in saying we can never know the self, since this is like saying we can never know the substance of an object as something distinct from the qualities which give us access to it. We know the self in knowing states of it, i.e. in having experiences, although later he rejected the view that we have an individuating concept of ourselves, (1981, pp. 16-17, 86-90; but cf. Sosa 1979, pp. 324 -5). This same self is the cause of its own actions by ‘immanent’ as against ‘transeunt’ causation, a medieval distinction he revives between causation by agents and causation by events. He hopes thus to transcend the determinism-indeterminism impasse, each limb of which seems to make responsibility an illusion. The objection that attributing actions to an agent as cause is empty and tells us nothing beyond the mere sequence of events he dismisses as applying equally to transeunt causation: what does talk of ‘causing’ add there either? One might wonder, however, if this is fair: believers in transeunt causation need not be mere Humeans, and the question arises how agents manage to decide one way or the other. (Chisholm takes his view further in Bogdan 1986: sec especially pp. 214-15, 223.) An important contribution to the philosophy of mind is Chisholm’s revival of Brentano’s idea of intentionality as a mark of the mental, enabling him to maintain ‘the primacy of the intentional’ over the semantic. Chisholm started a debate on the criteria for intentionality, offering three in the Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 1955-1956. Later (in his entry on intentionality in P. Edwards, Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 1967), he added two more, but admitted that together they only provided sufficient conditions and not necessary ones (cf. also Bogdan 1987, pp. 36-7, 232. For all his adherence to Moorean common sense Chisholm is ready to distinguish, with Joseph Butler, ‘strict and philosophical’ from ‘loose and popular’ speech, especially when defending mereological essentialism, which he claims is really congenial to common sense. The self, however, is a continuant, and is immune to Lockean transfers from one substance to another, but none of this commits us to a doctrine of temporal parts. Perhaps Chisholm’s most lasting influence lies in his revival of the ideas of the earlier Austrian philosophers, especially in the area of intentionality. His foundationalism is perhaps less in tune with modern views, although they would mostly agree with his rejection of substantial appearances and sense data. His apparatus of direct and indirect evidence, and his epistemic principles, have been criticized as inadequate. The externalism-internalism debate is still in full swing. His views on agent causality have had some influence, and mereological essentialism is a currently debated topic, as are the ontological questions to which he has contributed.