Three Applications of an Austin/Wittgenstein Ontological Insight

On the first page of How to do Things with Words, Austin claims that `making a statement" is primary, and `statement" derivative – a `logical construction", as he calls it, out of the makings of statements. Wittgenstein, in similar vein, takes `explaining the meaning" to be primary with `meaning" a derivative notion. He says that `[m]eaning is what an explanation of meaning explains (Wittgenstein 1974, 68). Part of Wittgenstein"s point is that giving explanations of meaning is, like the making of statements, a perfectly common, everyday occurrence, but asking what meaning is is a perverse question of the sort that gives philosophy a bad name – Austin makes the same point in his paper `The Meaning of a Word" (Austin 1961, 23-43). Wittgenstein"s diagnosis of why philosophers are misled is very simple: the mistake lies in supposing that, for every noun there is an object named (unum nomen, unum nominatum) and so coming to believe that there is something – some thing – named by the noun `meaning". He says that he wants to cure us of the temptation to look about us for some object which you might call `the meaning" (Wittgenstein 1958, 1). This is hardly a new insight. Kant famously argued, in the Transcendental Aesthetic, that the noun `time" does not name a thing and one consequence of this conclusion is that talk of the Big Bang as marking the beginning of time is nonsensical. Are there some comparably important conclusions that can be drawn from the thesis that the nouns `meaning" and `statement" do not name objects? The answer, as I hope to demonstrate, is `Yes"

The distribution of oportunities: a normative theory

In this paper, we consider the problem of ranking protiles of opportunity sets. First, we take each agent's preferences over (individual) opportunity sets as given. Then, rather than discriminate among possibly competing evaluative criteria, we consider minimal standards for any such ranking. We impose four normative principies, in each case limiting the conditions under which ethical conclusions might be drawn to only those cases that are unambiguous. The first three principles are subrestrictions of the Pareto criterion; they require that Pareto improvements unambiguously enhance social welfare only when they do not conflict with other social objectives. The fourth principle is a minimal equity condition. It requires that if an agent can be identified as being the worst-off, then a necessary condition for social welfare to unambiguously increase when sorne agents gain is that this agent gains as well, however slightly. We then study the properties of social optima under these restrictions. We show that while optima need not be Pareto efficient, they must be envy-free. Thus, accepting these principies requires commitment to a world in which no agent envies the opportunities available to another

Equality and the Mantra of Diversity

This essay is part of a symposium on affirmative action that took place at the University of Cincinnati with the distinguished legal scholar Ronald Dworkin. I argue against affirmative action. And I discuss at length the votes of Justice Sandra Day O'Connor and the dissent of Justice Clarence Thomas. I develop the idea of idiosyncratic excellence; and I argue that diversity is a weakness insofar as it (a) an excuse for social myopia and (b)an impediment to individuals seeing beyond their differences and affirming the excellences that they witness. The expected publication date, Univ of Cinn Law Review, is March 2004

Dr. Laura: Ruminations from a Listener

This essay is a discussion of the radio talk show host Dr. Laura Schlessinger. It is an assessment of the moral advice that she dispenses her radio show, and kinds of criticisms to which she has been subjected

Equitable opportunities in economic environments

In this paper, we extend the axiomatic analysis of equitable opportunities developed in Kranich [6] from finite to continuous opportunity sets. This extended framework is amenable to economic applications. The main results establish conditions under which an ordinal ranking of profiles of opportunity sets can be represented by a cardinal advantage function which describes both the extent of inequality and the distribution of advantage among the agents

BNL Future Plans

I discuss the prospects for a fixed target physics program at the AGS in the RHIC era.Comment: 18 pages, LaTeX, 12 Postscript figures. To be published in the proceedings of the Workshop on Kaon, Muon, Neutrino Physics and Future, KEK, 31 Oct. - 1 Nov 199