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OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 06/19/2017, SPi
Philosophy Within
Its Proper Bounds
Edouard Machery
1
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 06/19/2017, SPi
3
Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP,
United Kingdom
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© Edouard Machery 2017
The moral rights of the author have been asserted
First Edition published in 2017
Impression: 1
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and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer
Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press
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OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 06/19/2017, SPi
A mes parents,
Pierre et Dominique Machery
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 06/19/2017, SPi
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 06/19/2017, SPi
Contents
Acknowledgments ix
List of Figures xi
List of Tables xiii
Introduction1
1. The Method of Cases 11
2. The Empirical Findings 45
3. Fooled by Cognitive Artifacts 90
4. Enshrining Our Prejudices 126
5. Eight Defenses of the Method of Cases: Amateur Psychology,
Reflection, Expertise, Limited Influence, Fallibility, Reform,
Mischaracterization, and Overgeneralization 149
6. Modal Ignorance and the Limits of Philosophy 185
7. Conceptual Analysis Rebooted 208
Postscript245
Bibliography 247
Index 268
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 06/19/2017, SPi
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 06/19/2017, SPi
Acknowledgments
This won’t surprise you if you’re already an author: It takes a village to write a book,
and authors take on so many debts that it may be more convenient to pretend to be an
intellectual island. But I won’t travel that path, acknowledging instead my many debts.
The impetus for this book comes from an invitation by Michael Strevens and David
Chalmers to present some work in the Mind and Language seminar they organized at
NYU in 2013. The shortcomings of my presentation convinced me of the need to write
a book on the topic. I thought the book would be sweet and short, but sometimes reality
bites, and a longer, more detailed treatment ended up being necessary.
Many philosophers have generously taken the time to comment on older versions of
this book, and I have extensively benefited from their generosity. Students, colleagues,
and visitors at Pitt suffered through the first version of the manuscript in a reading
group at the end of 2014, and their feedback was extraordinary: Thanks to Mikio
Akagi, Joshua Alexander, Jim Bogen, David Colaço, Matteo Colombo, Taku Iwatsuki,
Joe McCaffrey, Jasmin Özel, Alison Springle, and Zina Ward. Many thanks too to the
participants to the reading group at Washington University during my semester-long
visit in the winter of 2015: Mike Dacey, Eric Hochstein, Anya Plutynski, Felipe Romero,
Rick Shang, Brian Talbot, and Tomek Wisocky. I am particularly grateful to Brian
Talbot, who raised challenging objections for each of the chapters. Mark Sprevak
organized a seminar meeting on a version of Chapter 3 during my visit at Edinburgh
in 2014 and, again, a reading group on the whole book in 2016. The discussion of
Chapter 3 with Mikkel Gerken, Michela Massimi, Andrea Polionoli, Stephen Ryan,
and Mark Sprevak led me to rewrite this chapter entirely (thanks guys!). I have also
been thinking about, and sometimes struggling with, the comments from the 2016
reading group for months: Thanks to Ian Bisset, Jesper Kallestrup, Stephen Ryan, Rick
Sendelbeck, Mark Sprevak, Orestis Spyridon, and Annie Webster. Sascha Benjamin
Fink organized a wonderful one-day workshop on the book manuscript at the Berlin
School of Brain and Mind during the fall of 2015. Thanks to all the participants: in add-
ition to Sascha Benjamin Fink himself, Raphael Becker, Dimitri Coelho Mollo, Matthijs
Endt, Ramiro Glauer, Markus Hoffmann, Rhea Holzer, Joachim Horvath, Lena Kästner,
Juan R. Loaiza, Stephan Pohl, and Lara Pourabdolrahim. Corinne Bloch Mullins
organized a reading group at Marquette and sent me some comments resulting from
the participants’ discussion. Thanks to the participants to this reading group, including
Yoon Choi, Anthony Peressini, and Margaret Walker. Wesley Buckwalter wrote some
detailed feedback on Chapter 4 and Joe Milburn on Chapters 1 and 3; Jennifer Nagel
made some helpful remarks about Chapter 1. Stefano Cossara read the near final
version of the whole book and helped me reformulate some key claims. Thanks
for the detailed, sympathetic feedback from the two anonymous reviewers for
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x Acknowledgments
Oxford University Press: One only wishes all reviewers were as smart and understanding.
Finally, many thanks to John Doris, who met with me on a weekly basis over breakfast
to discuss each chapter during my semester-long visit at Washington University: These
meetings were one of the intellectual (and gastronomical) highlights of my visit!
Other philosophers have given me feedback on particular claims or arguments in
the book. I consulted with Eric Hatleback, Peter Machamer, Paolo Palmieri, and Elay
Shech for the history-of-science examples discussed in Chapter 3. My colleagues in the
Department of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Pittsburgh also
responded to my request for examples of scientific instruments lacking calibration
and hopefulness. Facebook hivemind was put to contribution for issues related to the
literature on disagreement discussed in Chapter 4: Thanks to Endre Begby, Carlo Martini,
Andrés Páez, Darrell Rowbottom, and Greg Wheeler for answering my questions.
My email exchange with John Turri helped me better understand his criticisms of the
Gettier cases written by philosophers. Michael Strevens had searching questions about
Chapter 7 and its relation with Doing without Concepts.
I have given many talks based on the materials of this book. I’d like to single out an
early lecture as well as an informal seminar meeting at Syracuse generously organized
by Kevan Edwards and the keynote lecture at the UK conference in experimental
philosophy in Nottingham during the summer of 2015.
Steve Stich’s fingerprints are all over this book, as will be apparent to many. I am
delighted to have yet another occasion to acknowledge my intellectual debts! My
family was a source of joy and sorrow while writing this book: My father, Pierre, passed
away, and my daughter, Uliana, was born. I dedicate this book to my parents, Pierre and
Dominique Machery.
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 06/19/2017, SPi
List of Figures
List of Tables
Introduction
There are people around who have Very Strong Views (“modal intuitions,” these
views are called) about whether there could be cats in a world in which all the
domestic felines are Martian robots, and whether there could be Homer in a
world where nobody wrote the Odyssey or the Iliad. Ducky for them; their
epistemic condition is enviable, but I don’t myself aspire to it.
(Fodor, Psychosemantics, p. 16)
The aim of Philosophy Within Its Proper Bounds is simple, albeit ambitious, arrogant
some may say: curbing philosophers’ flights of fancy and reorienting philosophy
toward more humble, but ultimately more important intellectual endeavors. I argue
that resolving many traditional and contemporary philosophical issues is beyond our
epistemic reach: We cannot know whether dualism is true (supposing that actual
psychological events happen to be physical events), whether pain is identical to some
complicated neural state (supposing that actual pains are identical to neural states),
what knowledge really is, what makes an action morally permissible, whether caus-
ation just is some relation of counterfactual dependence between events, whether I
remain the same person because of the continuity of the self, and whether necessarily
an action is free only if the agent could have acted otherwise. These philosophical
issues and similar ones should be dismissed, I conclude.
This conclusion may seem dire, and I expect serious pushback from philosophers,
but it is in fact cause for rejoicing: There are important issues in the neighborhood of
most of the dismissed philosophical issues, and these are within our epistemic reach.
Even if we cannot know whether pain is identical to some neural state, supposing facts
about the actual world do not settle the issue, we can still learn whether according to
our best science pain is identical to a neural state. Even if we cannot know whether
causation can be identified with a relation of counterfactual dependence, we can still
understand the properties that are characteristic of causal relations in a large range of
actual systems, and we can understand why scientists proceed as they do to establish
causal claims. Equally important, the dismissal of such philosophical issues would free
time and resources for bringing back to prominence a once-central intellectual
endeavor: conceptual analysis. In recent years, conceptual analysis has unfortunately
been associated with the search for analytic truths and a priori knowledge, but this
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2 Introduction
conception is too narrow, and overlooks the traditional goals of conceptual analysis:
clarifying and assessing ideas.
Introduction 3
The reader will need to follow me through an extensive detour to reach this
modal skepticism. Much of the book assesses the main philosophical method for
identifying the modal facts bearing on modally immodest philosophical views:
the method of cases. Philosophers rely on the method of cases when they consider
actual or hypothetical situations (described by cases) and determine what facts
hold in these situations. These facts then bear, more or less directly, on competing
philosophical views.
The method of cases has a long, prestigious history, and it is arguably already used
by Plato: The Ring of Gyges story in The Republic is a plausible example. It is so import-
ant in contemporary philosophy that I could probably fill a whole book by quoting
philosophical cases (e.g., Tittle, 2005), and even if I limited myself to the most famous
and influential cases, I could perhaps cite a few dozen cases. Admittedly, it is used
more often in some areas of philosophy than others. As a first approximation, the more
naturalistic the research area, the less frequently it is used. It is rarely used in the
philosophy of biology or in the philosophy of cognitive science, and it is uncommon
(though occasionally used) in the philosophy of science. It is commonly used in
epistemology, in some areas of the philosophy of language, and in ethics.
Consider Gettier’s (1963) classic article, which describes several cases in order to
undermine the Justified-True-Belief analysis of knowledge he claims to find in Plato.
“Case I” reads as follows (1963, 122):
Suppose that Smith and Jones have applied for a certain job. And suppose that Smith has strong
evidence for the following conjunctive proposition:
(d) Jones is the man who will get the job, and Jones has ten coins in his pocket.
Smith’s evidence for (d) might be that the president of the company assured him that Jones
would in the end be selected, and that he, Smith, had counted the coins in Jones’s pocket ten
minutes ago.
Proposition (d) entails:
(e) The man who will get the job has ten coins in his pocket.
Let us suppose that Smith sees the entailment from (d) to (e), and accepts (e) on the grounds
of (d), for which he has strong evidence. In this case, Smith is clearly justified in believing that
(e) is true. But imagine, further, that unknown to Smith, he himself, not Jones, will get the job.
And, also, unknown to Smith, he himself has ten coins in his pocket. Proposition (e) is then
true, though proposition (d), from which Smith inferred (e), is false. In our example, then, all
of the following are true: (i) (e) is true, (ii) Smith believes that (e) is true, and (iii) Smith is
justified in believing that (e) is true. But it is equally clear that Smith does not know that (e) is
true; for (e) is true in virtue of the number of coins in Smith’s pocket, while Smith does not
know how many coins are in Smith’s pocket, and bases his belief in (e) on a count of the coins
in Jones’s pocket, whom he falsely believes to be the man who will get the job.
Gettier concludes that it is not the case that necessarily someone knows that p if and
only if she has a justified true belief that p.
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4 Introduction
Dretske’s cleverly disguised zebra case plays an important role in the assessment of
the closure of knowledge under known entailment. He describes the case as follows
(1970, 105–6):
Let me give you another example—a silly one, but no more silly than a great number of skeptical
arguments with which we are all familiar. You take your son to the zoo, see several zebras, and,
when questioned by your son, tell him they are zebras. Do you know they are zebras? Well, most
of us would have little hesitation in saying that we did know this. We know what zebras look like,
and, besides, this is the city zoo and the animals are in a pen clearly marked “Zebras.” Yet, some-
thing’s being a zebra implies that it is not a mule and, in particular, not a mule cleverly disguised
by the zoo authorities to look like a zebra. Do you know that these animals are not mules cleverly
disguised by the zoo authorities to look like zebras? If you are tempted to say “Yes” to this ques-
tion, think a moment about what reasons you have, what evidence you can produce in favor of
this claim. The evidence you had for thinking them zebras has been effectively neutralized, since
it does not count toward their not being mules cleverly disguised to look like zebras. Have you
checked with the zoo authorities? Did you examine the animals closely enough to detect such a
fraud? You might do this, of course, but in most cases you do nothing of the kind. You have some
general uniformities on which you rely, regularities to which you give expression by such
remarks as, “That isn’t very likely” or “Why should the zoo authorities do that?” Granted, the
hypothesis (if we may call it that) is not very plausible, given what we know about people and
zoos. But the question here is not whether this alternative is plausible, not whether it is more or
less plausible than that there are real zebras in the pen, but whether you know that this alterna-
tive hypothesis is false. I don’t think you do. In this, I agree with the skeptic.
But since according to Dretske we would know in this situation that zebras are in
the cage, knowledge is not closed under known entailment: It is not the case that
necessarily if I know that p and that p entails q, then I know that q.
To show that someone’s right to life does not necessarily trump someone else’s
right “to decide what happens in and to her body,” Thomson describes the famous
society of music lovers case (1971, 49):
[N]ow let me ask you to imagine this. You wake up in the morning and find yourself back to
back in bed with an unconscious violinist. A famous unconscious violinist. He has been found
to have a fatal kidney ailment, and the Society of Music Lovers has canvassed all the available
medical records and found that you alone have the right blood type to help. They have therefore
kidnapped you, and last night the violinist’s circulatory system was plugged into yours, so that
your kidneys can be used to extract poisons from his blood as well as your own. The director of
the hospital now tells you, “Look, we’re sorry the Society of Music Lovers did this to you—we
would never have permitted it if we had known. But still, they did it, and the violinist now is
plugged into you. To unplug you would be to kill him. But never mind, it’s only for nine months.
By then he will have recovered from his ailment, and can safely be unplugged from you.” Is it
morally incumbent on you to accede to this situation? No doubt it would be very nice of you if
you did, a great kindness. But do you have to accede to it? What if it were not nine months, but
nine years? Or longer still? What if the director of the hospital says, “Tough luck, I agree, but
you’ve now got to stay in bed, with the violinist plugged into you, for the rest of your life.
Because remember this. All persons have a right to life, and violinists are persons. Granted you
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 06/15/2017, SPi
Introduction 5
have a right to decide what happens in and to your body, but a person’s right to life outweighs
your right to decide what happens in and to your body. So you cannot ever be unplugged from
him.” I imagine you would regard this as outrageous, which suggests that something really is
wrong with that plausible-sounding argument I mentioned a moment ago.
Some doubt that the method of cases really plays a central role in philosophy. We
will see in Chapter 6 that there is really no alternative to this method for assessing
philosophically immodest theories, but for the time being I’d like to show that, as a
matter of fact, philosophers do rely on the method of cases.
Cases play a central role in many classic articles. To give only a few examples in
epistemology, applied and normative ethics, action theory, philosophy of language, and
philosophy of mind, all the following classics include cases (with their citation numbers
in parentheses1): Gettier’s “Is justified true belief knowledge?” (2453), Goldman’s
“Discrimination and perceptual knowledge” (899), BonJour’s “Externalist theories of
empirical knowledge” (318), Dretske’s “Epistemic operators” (805), Thomson’s “A
defense of abortion” (1363), Thomson’s “Double effect, triple effect and the trolley
problem: Squaring the circle in looping cases” (586), Frankfurt’s “Alternate possibil-
ities and moral responsibility” (1265), Evans’s “The causal theory of names” (543),
Block’s “Troubles with functionalism” (1361), Jackson’s “What Mary didn’t know”
(967), and Searle’s “Minds, brains, and programs” (4667). Furthermore, not only do
these influential articles include cases, the facts assumed to hold in the situations
described by these cases also play a central role in the arguments they develop.
Relatedly, cases guide the historical development of the relevant areas of philosophy.
Gettier’s (1963) cases gave rise to the introduction of new conditions on justification
and to the search for a fourth necessary condition in the analysis of knowledge.
Proposals were assessed, and rejected, by means of further cases (for review, see
Shope, 1983). BonJour’s clairvoyant case and Lehrer’s Truetemp case fi gure promin-
ently in the d iscussion of reliabilism, as Goldman’s (2008) entry in the Stanford
Encyclopedia of Philosophy shows:
The second objection is that reliability isn’t sufficient for justification. The principal example of
this kind is due to Laurence BonJour (1980). . . . If someone disagrees with BonJour about the
Norman case, there are other examples with similar contours in the literature that may be more
persuasive. Keith Lehrer (1990) gives the case of Mr. Truetemp . . .
Foot’s and Thomson’s trolley cases have framed the debate about the nature of moral
permissibility. Searle’s Chinese room case is the basis of a classic objection against
Strong AI.
Cases do seem to play an important role in philosophical argumentation; why,
then, are some philosophers inclined to deny it? Some philosophers may confuse the
proposed importance of the method of cases in philosophy with the claims that cases
1
From Google Scholar (August 12, 2015).
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 06/15/2017, SPi
6 Introduction
elicit “intuitions” and that these intuitions, however understood, are what ultimately
justify philosophical views. However, the intuition-based characterization of the method
of cases is one of the mischaracterizations I take on at the beginning of this book.
Generally, the minimalist characterization of the method of cases I will offer has no
truck with intuitions, epistemic or metaphysical analyticity, or conceptual competence.
Some philosophers may respond that, if cases play a role in philosophy, it is a small
one. In a sense, their role is indeed limited. The facts assumed to hold in the situations
described by cases must be brought to bear on philosophical conclusions (about free
will, meaning, moral permissibility, or causation), and doing this often requires long
chains of reasoning. Much of philosophers’ ingenuity goes into developing these long
chains of reasoning. Acknowledging this point is, however, consistent with the claim
that, if we did not know which facts hold in the situations described by philosophical
cases, we would not be able to draw the philosophical conclusions we hope to draw.
Perhaps by saying that cases play at best a small role in philosophy, some philosophers
mean that other methods are available to reach the same conclusions. I’ll challenge this
idea toward the end of this book (Chapter 6).
In any case, the first five chapters of Philosophy Within Its Proper Bounds examine
whether we know or can come to know which facts hold in the situations described by
philosophical cases. Can we really assume that Smith does not know that “the man who
will get the job has ten coins in his pocket” in the situation described by Gettier’s Case
I? That Truetemp does not know that “the temperature is 104 degrees” in the situation
described by Lehrer’s case? That it is really impermissible to push the large person in
the situation described by Thomson’s footbridge version of the trolley case? That
Frankfurt cases describe free actions? The present book makes a case for a negative
answer. We are not entitled to assume that it is really impermissible to push the large
person in the situation described by Thomson’s case and that Truetemp does not know
the temperature, and we should not bring the alleged facts to bear on philosophical
views: Our theory of knowledge cannot be built on the facts often assumed to hold in
Gettier cases or in the Truetemp case, and a theory of moral permissibility cannot be
built on the facts often assumed to hold in the situations described by trolley cases. And
so on, I argue, for most philosophical cases.
Fifteen years of experimental research on the judgments elicited by philosophical
cases show that these are often “cognitive artifacts”: They reflect the flaws of our “cognitive
instruments,” exactly as experimental artifacts reflect the flaws of scientific instruments.
Philosophical cases also tend to elicit different responses: If these responses are a
genuine sign of disagreement, we ought to take stock of this disagreement by suspending
judgment; if these responses indicate instead that people are speaking at cross purposes,
then we should reorient our research priorities and at least for the time being stop
theorizing about justice, permissibility, causation, or personal identity.
Philosophers have of course sometimes expressed concerns about the judgments
elicited by philosophical cases. Some cases, for instance, have long been known to
elicit contradictory judgments when framed differently. Williams (1970) created two
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 06/15/2017, SPi
Introduction 7
cases that elicit contradictory judgments about personal identity and concluded
(1970, 168–9),
[T]he whole question [personal identity] seems now to be totally mysterious. For what we have
just been through is of course merely one side, differently represented, of the transaction which
we considered before; and it represents it as a perfectly hateful prospect, while the previous
considerations represented it as something one should rationally, perhaps even cheerfully,
choose out of the options there presented. It is differently presented, of course, and in two
notable respects; but when we look at these two differences of presentation, can we really
convince ourselves that the second presentation is wrong or misleading, thus leaving the road
open to the first version which at the time seemed so convincing? Surely not.
Lewis (1986, 203) identified a pair of cases that could not be used to constrain philo-
sophical theorizing about causation because they were “far-fetched”; rather, the theories
developed in part on the basis of other cases would determine what to think about the
cases: “I do not worry about either of these far-fetched cases. They both go against what
we take to be the ways of this world; they violate the presuppositions of our habits of
thought; it would be no surprise if our commonsense judgments about them went
astray—spoils to the victor!” More recently, Gendler and Hawthorne (2005) have also
noted that different formulations of the fake-barn case lead to different judgments.2
Philosophers have typically limited their concerns to specific cases, but similar con-
cerns apply in fact much more widely. And if one is convinced by Williams’s discussion
of personal identity or Gendler and Hawthorne’s discussion of fake-barn cases, one
should have concerns about most philosophical cases.
I conclude from the discussion of the method of cases that we should suspend
judgment in response to most philosophical cases. This radical conclusion is at odds
with a more common view among critics of the method of cases: moderate restriction-
ism (Alexander & Weinberg, 2007; Weinberg, 2007; Alexander, 2012). A moderate
restrictionist “advocates not the root and branch removal of all intuitions, but just
the pruning away of some of the more poisoned philosophical branches” (Alexander
& Weinberg, 2007, 16). Moderate restrictionists hold that a substantial number of
cases elicit reliable judgments and they are hopeful that, perhaps with the help of experi-
mental philosophy, we may be able to identify the class of safe-for-thinking cases. By
contrast, according to the radical restrictionism defended in Philosophy Within Its Proper
Bounds, we ought to suspend judgment in response to not only most current philo-
sophical cases, but also the type of actual and possible cases that would be most useful
for philosophizing about modally immodest philosophical issues.
It is important to be crystal clear about the content of radical restrictionism. It is
not a skepticism about judgment in general or, more narrowly, about the judgments
concerning the topics of philosophical interest—e.g., knowledge, causation, permissi-
bility, or personal identity. We are pretty good at distinguishing ignoramuses from
2
See also Unger (1996, e.g., on Trolley cases pp. 88ff.); Gendler (2007); Norcross (2008).
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 06/15/2017, SPi
8 Introduction
people who know what they are talking about; we often have no trouble recognizing
causes; and we typically know which actions are morally permissible and which are
not. Nor is radical restrictionism a skepticism about judgments elicited by texts: We
do not need to meet politicians to know that many of them do not know what they
are talking about—reading about them is often enough—and moral judgments about
war crimes read in the New York Times are not under suspicion. Radical restrictionism
has a narrower scope: It focuses on judgments elicited by a particular kind of text,
namely the kind of case philosophers tend to use to support modally immodest
philosophical views. Judgments elicited by other texts are not under suspicion, and
indeed I’ll be using a few cases of this second type in the book.
Also radical restrictionism isn’t a form of eliminativism about the use of cases in
philosophy. Cases are used for very different purposes in philosophy (Chapter 1), many
of which are perfectly acceptable and will not be the focus of this book. Some of the
uses that are discussed in the coming chapters are also beyond criticism: In particular,
I will defend a version of conceptual analysis (Chapter 7), recommending the use of
judgments about a particular type of case to study concepts of philosophical interest.
Even the use of cases to answer questions such as, What is knowledge? or What does
causation reduce to?, which will be the focus of much of this book, can be appropriate
in some restricted circumstances. Judgments about everyday cases will not be
impugned, although it is not clear how much philosophical mileage one can gain from
them (Chapter 3). Finally, philosophical cases that are known to elicit consensual,
unbiased judgments, if there are any, can remain in our toolbox for philosophizing.
End of the detour: Radical restrictionism undercuts modally immodest philo-
sophical views. These views assume that we have epistemic access to the facts that
hold in the situations described by cases, but we don’t. We should thus abandon the
hope of resolving modally immodest philosophical issues; we are unable to determine
what knowledge, moral permissibility, and causation essentially are; if facts about the
world do not settle the question of dualism, then we are not in a position to know
whether dualism is true.
We are now free to redirect our attention toward issues that do not require some
epistemic access we can’t have. Of prime importance is the descriptive and prescriptive
analysis of concepts. Conceptual analysis has bad press in contemporary philosophy,
including among naturalistic philosophers whose work is most congenial to mine,
but it is time to reassess its prospects. The vices of some particular, though influen-
tial conceptions of conceptual analysis do not generalize to the naturalized conceptual
analysis defended in Philosophy Within Its Proper Bounds. And this form of concep-
tual analysis is philosophically important. It allows us to better understand ourselves
and to improve the inferences we are prone to draw, and it enables us to square the
world of common sense with that of science.
Finally, some may suspect that philosophizing about philosophy is a sign of
philosophy’s loss of vigor: Only declining fields become introspective. This suspicion
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Das Naturschutzgebiet »Pfaueninsel«
bei Potsdam
Von Kurt Hueck, Berlin
Naturschutzgebiet Pfaueninsel
Auf Grund des Gesetzes vom 8. Juli 1920 (G.S. S. 437), betreffend
Abänderung des § 34 des Feld- und Forstpolizeigesetzes vom 1. April
1880 (G.S. S. 230) in Verbindung mit § 136 des Gesetzes über die
allgemeine Landesverwaltung vom 30. Juli 1883 (G.S. S. 195) wird
die im Stadtbezirk Berlin gelegene Pfaueninsel bei Potsdam zum
Naturschutzgebiet erklärt.
Diese Anordnung tritt mit der Veröffentlichung im Amtsblatt für den
Regierungsbezirk Potsdam und die Stadt Berlin in Kraft. U. IV 7873.
Berlin, den 28. Februar 1924.
Die Preuß. Minister für Wissenschaft, Kunst und Volksbildung, für
Landwirtschaft,
Domänen und Forsten.
Amtsbl. Stck. 13 vom 29. März 1924, S. 111.
Der Polizeipräsident von Berlin hat für das Naturschutzgebiet
Pfaueninsel mit Zustimmung des Magistrats von Berlin folgende
Polizeiverordnung erlassen:
§ 1. Innerhalb des Naturschutzgebietes ist das Roden von Bäumen
und das Ausgraben, Ausreißen, Abreißen oder Abschneiden von
Sträuchern und Pflanzen, besonders auch das Pflücken von Blumen
sowie Blüten oder Laubzweigen der Bäume und Sträucher verboten.
Auf die Nutzung von Bäumen, Sträuchern und Pflanzen durch die
Nutzungsberechtigten findet dieses Verbot keine Anwendung.
§ 2. Es ist untersagt, innerhalb des Naturschutzgebietes frei
lebenden Tieren nachzustellen, sie mutwillig zu beunruhigen, zu ihrem
Fang geeignete Vorrichtungen anzubringen, sie zu fangen oder zu
töten. Auch ist verboten, Eier, Nester und sonstige Brutstätten von
Vögeln wegzunehmen oder sie zu beschädigen. Insbesondere ist
untersagt, Insekten in ihren verschiedenen Entwicklungszuständen zu
töten oder sie einzutragen. Auf die notwendigen Maßnahmen der
Verfügungsberechtigten gegen Kulturschädlinge sowie auf die Abwehr
blutsaugender oder sonst lästiger Insekten bezieht sich dieses Verbot
nicht.
§ 3. Das Befahren der Ufergewässer innerhalb des Schilfgürtels,
das Baden, Angeln und Fischen sowie das Anlegen außerhalb der
Fähranlegestelle ist allen Unbefugten verboten; ebenso ist das
unbefugte Einfahren in den an der Westseite der Nordspitze der Insel
gelegenen »Parschenkessel« verboten.
§ 4. Den Besuchern ist das Betreten des Landes außerhalb der
vorhandenen Wege sowie das Lagern auf der Insel untersagt; unter
freiem Himmel darf kein Feuer gemacht oder abgekocht werden.
Hunde dürfen von den Besuchern auf die Insel nicht mitgebracht
werden.
§ 5. Das Wegwerfen von Papier und anderen Abfällen sowie jede
sonstige Verunreinigung des Geländes oder der baulichen Anlagen,
der Bänke oder Bildwerke, insbesondere durch Beschreiben mit
Namen, ist untersagt.
§ 6. Jedes Lärmen und Schreien sowie das Abschießen von
Feuerwaffen ist verboten.
§ 7. Zu wissenschaftlichen Zwecken kann die Krongutsverwaltung
(Berlin C 2, Schloß) im Einvernehmen mit der Staatlichen Stelle für
Naturdenkmalpflege in Preußen (Berlin-Schöneberg,
Grunewaldstraße 6–7) einzelne Personen von der Beachtung der
Vorschriften in den §§ 2, 3 und 4 dieser Polizeiverordnung befreien.
Hierüber sind Ausweise auszustellen, die in der Regel für ein
Kalenderjahr Gültigkeit haben und jederzeit widerruflich sind.
§ 8. Den Anordnungen der auf der Insel anwesenden und sich
durch schriftliche Ermächtigung ausweisenden Personen ist Folge zu
leisten.
§ 9. Übertretungen dieser Verordnung und der auf Grund derselben
ergehenden Anordnungen werden, soweit nicht weitergehende
Strafbestimmungen, insbesondere des § 368 Ziffer 3 und 4 R. St. G.
B. Platz greifen, nach Maßgabe des § 34 des Feld- und
Forstpolizeigesetzes bestraft.
§ 10. Die Polizeiverordnung des Amtsvorstehers der Pfaueninsel
vom 11. Mai 1914 wird hiermit aufgehoben.
§ 11. Die Polizeiverordnung tritt mit dem Tage der Verkündung im
Amtsblatt für den Regierungsbezirk Potsdam und die Stadt Berlin in
Kraft. (J. Nr. Allgem. 18 II e 24.)
Berlin, den 11. März 1924.
Der Polizeipräsident.
Amtsblatt für den Reg.-Bez. Potsdam und die Stadt Berlin. Stck. 13
vom 29. März 1924, S. 117.
Fußnote:
[12] S. Anhang zu diesen Zeilen.
Maßnahmen zum Schutz der Trappe
(Otis tarda)
Von stud. med. Ernst Mayer, Dresden