Decision and the Condition of Man (review)

194 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY brief summary, I shall present some points made in the treatment of the doctrine of internal relations which furnish clues about the philosophical perspective from which Khatehadourian makes his analysis. Some relations (such as identity and difference) are in fact external, and this in itself makes the doctrine of internal relations untenable (p. 43). The possibility of knowledge does not necessitate the doctrine of internal relations. If some relations are internal, this is sufficient to account for the passage from a knowledge of one thing to a knowledge of another to which the first is related (p. 44). Lying behind this position is the assumption that sense perception as such gives us some knowledge, however meager, of the world (p. 45). Here, of course, Khatchadourian departs from the Kantian principle (First Critique, second edition) held by the coherence philosophers whose views he is considering, that percepts cannot be known independently of concepts, and that an a priori element is indispensable to the constitution of knowledge. The position thus assumed leads to the assertion that simple relations exist as such and not merely as abstractions of the mind. It is also held that some relations exist prior to and discrete from others. Since Khatchadourian's purpose is criticism and not construction, these suppositions go with no more than the suggestion of a justification, as does the supposition that there exists a plurality of mutually independent simple entities in the world between which relations obtain. This would be understandable enough, though it seems not quite compatible with Khatchadourian's intention to confront the same questions to which the coherence theory was addressed. Khatchadourian's "refutations," supported by an impressive list of argument~, several of which are developed in cogent detail, might have been more impressive, had the philosophical position from which he makes them been made a bit more explicit. As the work stands, it is so exclusively devoted to criticism that he often seems to stand in a sanctuary. It is doubtful whether he is actually as completely immune as he seems to suppose to the skepticism that is a strand in the thought of the philosophers with whom he is chiefly concerned. For these philosophers, a certain relativity clings not only to sense data but to the most inchisive and coherent concepts grasped by the mind. There is no cognizance of this. In the case of the Hegelians, Bradley, and Bosanquet, this is particularly unfortunate. In this reviewer's opinion, this work more adequately reflects concern with problems posed by the coherence philosophers than it reflects concern with the questions these philosophers were attempting to resolve. Had Khatchadourian viewed the latter and himself in clearer historical perspective, he might have shown more cognizance of the difference between the questions which dominate their inquiry and his own. Partly because this difference remains unspecified, and partly owing to the fact that the "refutations" are based upon logical and empirical grounds which are supposed to be intuitively obvious and without alternative, but which are not uniformly so, he has fallen somewhat short of his declared objectives. Nevertheless, he has provided the informed reader with an often stimulating and sometimes astute attempt at dialogue between philosophical perspectives rooted in very different presuppositions. I find his carefully detailed treatment of the doctrine of internal relations of particular interest and value. DARREL E. CHRISTENSEN Wo]]ord College Decision and the Condition o] Man. By Paul Kurtz. (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1965. Pp. x T 314. $6.75.) This impressive volume is a critical analysis of the subject matters and methods of the behavioral sciences. It puts into systematic and philosophical perspectives the results and implications of the Current Appraisal o] the Behavioral Sciences that Rollo Handy and Paul Kurtz undertook for the Behavioral Research Council and published in 1964. The central theme is the theory of "coduction" (as distinguished from both "reduction" and "induction"), BOOK t~Eu 195 that is, the correlation in the sciences of man, of causal explanation, and of "teleonomic" or purposive analysis. This involves the interaction of mechanism and motivation, of needs and goals, of explanation and justification, of descriptive and prescriptive sentences. Such an analysis is...