Chisholm Roderick Milton (1916–99), influential American philosopher whose publications spanned the field, including ethics and the history of philosophy. He is mainly known as an epistemologist, metaphysician, and philosopher of mind. In early opposition to powerful forms of reductionism, such as phenomenalism, extensionalism, and physicalism, Chisholm developed an original philosophy of his own. Educated at Brown and Harvard (Ph.D., 1942), he spent nearly his entire career at Brown.
He is known chiefly for the following contributions. (a) Together with his teacher and later his colleague at Brown, C. J. Ducasse, he developed and long defended an adverbial account of sensory experience, set against the sense-datum act-object account then dominant. (b) Based on deeply probing analysis of the free will problematic, he defended a libertarian position, again in opposition to the compatibilism long orthodox in analytic circles. His libertarianism had, moreover, an unusual account of agency, based on distinguishing transeunt (event) causation from immanent (agent) causation. (c) In opposition to the celebrated linguistic turn of linguistic philosophy, he defended the primacy of intentionality, a defense made famous not only through important papers, but also through his extensive and eventually published correspondence with Wilfrid Sellars. (d) Quick to recognize the importance and distinctiveness of the de se, he welcomed it as a basis for much de re thought. (e) His realist ontology is developed through an intentional concept of ‘entailment,’ used to define key concepts of his system, and to provide criteria of identity for occupants of fundamental categories. (f) In epistemology, he famously defended forms of foundationalism and internalism, and offered a delicately argued (dis)solution of the ancient problem of the criterion.
The principles of Chisholm’s epistemology and metaphysics are not laid down antecedently as hard-and-fast axioms. Lacking any inviolable antecedent privilege, they must pass muster in the light of their consequences and by comparison with whatever else we may find plausible. In this regard he sharply contrasts with such epistemologists as Popper, with the skepticism of justification attendant on his deductivism, and Quine, whose stranded naturalism drives so much of his radical epistemology and metaphysics. By contrast, Chisholm has no antecedently set epistemic or metaphysical principles. His philosophical views develop rather dialectically, with sensitivity to whatever considerations, examples, or counterexamples reflection may reveal as relevant. This makes for a demanding complexity of elaboration, relieved, however, by a powerful drive for ontological and conceptual economy.
See also EPISTEMOLOGY, FOUNDATIONAL- ISM , FREE WILL PROBLEM , KNOWLEDGE DE SE , PROBLEM OF THE CRITERION , SKEPTICIS.
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