In this issue we include contributions from the individuals presiding at the panel All in a Jurnal's Work: A BABEL Wayzgoose, convened at the second Biennial Meeting of the BABEL Working Group. Sadly, the contributions of Daniel Remein, chief rogue at the Organism for Poetic Research as well as editor at Whiskey & Fox , were not able to appear in this version of the proceedings. -/- From the program : 2ND BIENNUAL MEETING OF THE BABEL WORKING GROUP CONFERENCE “CRUISING (...) IN THE RUINS: THE QUESTION OF DISCIPLINARITY IN THE POST/MEDIEVAL UNIVERSITY” SEPTEMBER 21ST, 2012: SESSION 13 MCLEOD C.322, CURRY STUDENT CENTER NORTHEASTERN UNIVERSITY, BOSTON, MA. -/- Traditionally, a wayzgoose was a celebration at the end of a printer’s year, a night off in the late fall before the work began of printing by candlelight. According to the OED, the Master Printer would make for the journeymen “a good Feast, and not only entertains them at his own House, but besides, gives them Money to spend at the Ale-house or Tavern at Night.” Following in this line, continent. proposes in its publication(s) a night out and a good Feast, away from the noxious fumes of the Academy and into a night of revelry which begins, but does not end, at the alehouse or Tavern. continent. proposes that the thinking of the Academy be freed to be thought elsewhere, in the alleys and doorways of the village and cities, encountered not in the strictly defined spaces of the classroom and blackboard (now white) but anticipated and found where thinking occurs. Historically, academic journals have served a different purpose than the Academy itself. Journals (from the Anglo-Fr. jurnal , "a day," from O.Fr. jornel , "day, time; day's work," hence the journalist as writer of the news of the day ) have served as privileged sites for the articulation and concretization of specific modes of knowledge and control (insemination of those ideas has been formalized in the classroom, in seminar). In contrast, the academic journal is post-partum and has been an old-boys club, an insider trading network in which truths are (re)circulated against themselves, forming a Maginot Line against whatever is new, or the distinctly challenging. All in a Jurnal’s Work will discuss (in part) the ramifications of cheap start-up publications that are challenging the traditional ensconced-in-ivory academic journals and their supporting infrastructures. The panel will be seeking a questioning (as a challenging) towards the discipline of knowledge production/fabrication (of truth[s]) and the event of the Academy (and its publications) as it has evolved and continues to (d)evolve. Issues to be discussed will revolve around the power of academic publishing and its origins, hierarchical versus horizontal academic modules (is there a place for the General Assembly in academia?) and the evolving idea of the Multiversity as a site(s) of a (BABELing) multivocality in the wake of the University of Disaster. (shrink)

continent. 2.2 (2012): 155–158 Michel Serres. Biogea . Trans. Randolph Burks. Minneapolis: Univocal Publishing. 2012. 200 pp. | ISBN 9781937561086 | $22.95 Conveying to potential readers the significance of a book puts me at risk of glad handing. It’s not in my interest to laud the undeserving, especially on the pages of this journal. This is not a sales pitch, but rather an affirmation of a necessary work on very troubled terms: human, earth, nature, and the problematic world we made. (...) It is this world that aspirates the silence (so to speak), and therefore the subject which, along with the development of the “made world” exports the excess augmentation of the cosmically missing, this silence of the natural, et cetera. Had we learned from Locke that lesson of “labor,” to consume what we need… but perhaps we need more than what matters? Serres’ Biogea has several functions on this manner, if it is indeed a book to be consumed. First, readers searching for novelistic entertainment have a place to dwell. Biogea deserves a place in your back pocket; biographical generosity and poetic fluidity should satisfy most textual fetishes. For lay philosophers who want to refresh their acumen, Biogea deserves a place on the book shelf, one already reads a sorely needed postmodern tune-up here. Serres’ style is clearly French; he leaves few cheese crumbs on his words, rather preciseness and breathing in the work give way to a sweeping manner that breaks the narrative line of sight. A circular narrative and anachronistic fragmentation of terms allows an abyssal atmosphere to swell, if only to pump into the book the externality of its broader text. Biogea aspires to a higher standard and the book, at times, is thinking this negentropic problem too. Univocal, the publisher, has crafted a book appropriate for the hands to hold and the translations are an achievement of an otherwise difficult writer to translate. Terms are the conditions of a broader text. It is important to note that Serres’ content is as much a thinking of terminal ports. There is a regard for the transportation technology of the written word. For me, this is the mark of genius, a craftiness that tells of a book device that I may trust. Serres is an accomplished thinker and a necessary voice to check the putative trendiness of anti-postmodernist and market-driven theory of endless cultural liquidation. Offering interventions on subjectivity as an open system we are given a chance to affirm the human, not merely to discard it, but to engage its poetic image emotion, the calibratory silent sense of the analogic world; the terms on which we base our efforts. 1 The human is the center of its own negation, constantly mediating it. Something deeper at stake appears in the work then, and it is quite obvious from the onset. Certainly, a book is an intensification of possible text and those who brought this actual book into existence have captured a rarity in regards to the subject matter and artistic accomplishment. I mentioned terms as conditions, so let us understand Biogea as bio-yea, a yes to bios . An affirmation of living and accepting presence for all of its defiance of images, words, and things temporal. Therefore Serres’ existence and its existants plays parts; out of linearity and still like a porous bone pumping blood it manufactures into the fleshy life it becomes. Starting from a man named silence chaos emerges, or the man “Old Taciturn” takes up a journey anticipating a great flood. In other words, a development akin to the one in Genesis. In dealing with this ancestral occupation, fusing Genesis with contemporary philosophical terms, Serres initiates this anachronistic fragmentation under the forming subjectivity of his own autobiography. This mutation in the open system is precisely one of Serres’ terms. There an abyss is at work, stated, but also measured by heels on the ground—the abyss dispatching earthen tensions, that which plays our tunes, that which we abide by and recognize in volcanoes, rivers, oceans, earthquakes and weaponry in the battles of the world. Set in later stages of the book, such tensions are harnessed through scientific principles in an attempt to unify the terms of natural force if only to terminate the world. Thus the elevation of the earth into the world is clearly set forth. Here already, and few pages in, a resonance is set forth under appellations such as the river Garonne, a subjectivity as much as it is inhuman, the river is the inhuman that makes us human. I get the sense that Serres is taking up a challenge issued by Wallace Stevens; namely, that the great poems of heaven and hell have been written, but that only the poem of the earth has resisted composition. 2 On this level we cannot avoid the killing factor of silence, given that our cognition blocks its pure, radical obliteration. Thus a silence of attunement to the earth is in a novel dialectic of the rithmic and rhythm. A technological world, a triumph of termination is set forth. If a text imposes its will given the reader who authorizes it, it is made to convey or convect a presupposition to a reader or its inhabitant(s). Text is therefore both, in-content, contenting, contentedness, and in reading it, a way to navigate self-destruction (dis-content). Here then would one note that the “inhuman” reveals itself, “an aperiodic rhythm of lovers and beloved…the sea as our friend…but as our enemy…maternal vivifying sea.” The sea is an open book, or vaginal birth canal, where the engagement of text comes forth: “…woman sea, open vulva.” One sees like the sea, but only after it, when the uninhabitable truth of inhabiting it switches the polarity of the sailors soul: “I was seeing like the sea” (9-11). In other words, we are invited to embrace the nonsense of the visible. At this point I am taken to Jean-François Lyotard’s work The Inhuman , specifically the first entry on negentropy that would be congruent with Serres’ thematic. 3 The human being exports, deports, or transplants its relation through text, through the system— and this is its sense or relation to silence, to music. Unaware of Serres’ proximity to this work, the concept of gender interrelation as regards a solar catastrophe runs clear. It would be, on this basis, that Serres references his peers, the other texts that, as mentioned above, are discarded in philosophy today. For students of philosophy what we have here is perhaps a gift, a needed project. If silence and death are at work, there is a political valence to deal with, and here, much like the domain of the text and the dominion of the reader, we confront the world of natural, fluid violence. The anti-postmodernist critique is in part based on a weak idea that the loss of ideology, of a world vision, motivates the “correlationist” project. 4 Serres seems to offer another way to view this when he notes that whereas persons “sometimes kill,” it is clearly “the collective” that “always kills” (17). What is the collective today, if not an organizing function we never see yet acts in its favor in the name of truth? One feels a sense of enigma here, if only to link to what Stevens remarked of communism as a “grubby faith,” providing this applies for capitalism as well, namely any ideology of progress overly interested in absolutes. Here we get the sense that the inhuman, silence, this type of killing, always killing, could not be matched by human-made, political dynamos. Or that if it comes to an equilibrium, a catastrophe is never too far from us to read with our heels. We are left to note that the forces of nature presuppose and permeate political systems, the more these systems obtain force, the more the system takes upon itself the proper name of nature that motivates its dissemination, albeit falsely. This note, that in an age of ecocide and technological captivity (sustainability and transparency) political regimes won’t grow our soul-learning ears any larger than our tongues, stands clear to us. The promise of technological desubjectification is here pushed aside. Regarding politics, Serres illustrates this fact: Where did this corpse come from? Who was it? Who killed it? I don’t know. I won’t try to find out. I refuse to get vengeance for it. And I only see Garonne. For our victims, today, are the rivers, too. Their waters have irrigated my life, enchanted my thought, invigorated my body; I’ve known them to be threatening, untamable, as dangerous as the sea when it rages. Yes, murderous. They decided to control their courses; dams, sometimes senseless, destroying sites and valleys, reduced entire populations to servile displacements; programs for the irrigation of thirsty farmland, often beneficial of course, completed their drying up.(22) Serres enters into his idea concerning the captivity of language from the natural into a world system: For thousands of years, we have been licking things with our tongues, covering and daubing them so as to appropriate things for ourselves. If language boils down to a convention, this convention took place between the speakers without consulting the thing named, become as a result the property of those who covered it in this way with their drawn or voiced productions. Malfeasance analyzes these acts of appropriation. Thus every inert object, every living thing as well, sleeps under the covers of signs, a little in the way that, today, a thousand posters shouting messages and ugly riots of color drown, with their filthy flood, the landscapes, or better, exclude them from perception because the meaning, almost nil, of this false language and these base images forms an irresistible source of attraction to our neurons and eyes. This appropriation covers the world’s beauty with ugliness. (38-39) Technological concealment coming to bear, we begin to get a sense of another commentary on the condition of sensing, driving home the necessity of a text dealing with such subject matter to be what its terms insist. Thus toward new openings: The new opening. As low beneath our feet as you like, the Biogea opens us to another space, high enough for us to be able to acquire a wisdom there, that of redeveloping this same place differently from our fathers, this place that’s still politically cut up by old hatreds, beneath the flood of tears and blood that we call history. Without this soft place, spiritually very old, but newly conceived in this way, without the juridical construction of a common good, opposed to our filthy ownership, I don’t see how our planet, hard, will survive. Hardness that depends on a softness, material belonging that depends on this temporary rented location (51). Serres enters into a summit on the content and the structure of his work. Archimedes is brought in with the concept of three volcanoes. Meaning fire, but as well earth, water, air. For it was Archimedes’ war machines that sought to lift the earth, thus bringing in the question of principles of science: “can a principle be invented while controlling its consequences?” (66-7). May the earth be put in a sentence, terminated by terminology, appellations, gone wild? By means of these element-dominating laws, this old physicist began to tear nature away from the ancient myths; by a strange return, today we’re plunging our successes back into the anxieties and terrors from which that ancient physics was born. Yes, our new history of science and technology is plunging, today, as though in a loop, into the fundamental human myths from which Empedocles’ first laws came. A major progression and a regression on the nether side of the origins. Consequently, the contemporary time requires that we try to return to that unity in which the principles of hate and love are at the same time human, living, inert and global. We will never attain a deontology of our knowledge and actions without thinking the subjective, the objective, the collective, and the cognitive all together simultaneously. Here, hate and love are the result of these four components.(71) Working then on the concept of fire-starting mirrors to the atomic annihilation of the Second War, Serres works into the subjectivity in question on the matter of rhythm—say rithmic— precisely at that point: Knowledge is changing today. The all-political is dying; the monarchy of the sciences said to be hard is coming to a close. The science of the things of the world will have to communicate just as much as the things of the world do, which do it much better than humans do, who don’t always want to do it. Let’s celebrate two changes this morning. The first one strikes a new blow to our narcissism. No, knowledge and the world don’t resemble our analytical enjoyments of refined cutting up, of endless debates and of exclusions full of hate. They, on the contrary, form a bloc and a sum, alliance and alloys. Uniting the fields of knowledge among themselves the way the things are connected among themselves, the second newness puts into place sets united by interlacing, webs and simplexes that combine with the things of the world, themselves combined, the combined knowledge that understands them.(130-1) Biogea closes on its opening flood thematic, approaching the initial telos of Genesis. Here the trees are brought into a position with atmosphere, the opaque abyssal reservoir, the tomb of the sun, sea in the polarity of the earthen heaven and hell. The poem of the earth then is silent but deadly, indeed, as funny as that phrase is, mainly a tomb gas. The meaning of the living and the non-meaning of things converge in the muteness of the world; this meaning and non-meaning plunge there and come out, the ultimate eddy. Mundus patet: through a fissure, through an opening, a fault, a cleft come noises, calls as small as these apertures. I’m listening, attentive, I’m translating, I’m advancing in the scaled-down meaning and science. Mundus patet: should the world open greatly, it will launch me into its silence. The totality remains silent. Knowledge expanded in elation. White origin of meaning, fountain of joy. (198) Final Remarks One test of a review is the long term trajectory the referee thinks the book will have. I see Serres’ text lending greatly into the vision of Biogea . In fact, in the vision of the novel inquiries of Stephen Jay Gould’s work there is something to be thought on the level of the individual and the species; namely, that humanity and its uniqueness is in its deferral, its thinking and naming, a thinking surrounded by silence that filters into everything, that pulls us through the world, the kinetic pulse we recognize, and all of that we cleave away in the base philosophical maxim of difference itself. Unique individuals are spatial creatures: we dwell, and we ought to get good at it. Yet this is an imaginative space that, if you are crazy enough to believe it, de-term-ine the conditions of its own terms. That is why we are not merely creating spaces on the acceleration of time, or so this ignoramus thinks, to accidentally transcend. Imagination already has this insatiable silence that we drink up and fail to manifest. Space is timeless. The imagination itself, shared by humans for themselves, their objects, and the species as a whole, is a non-defined space of relation; a whole human trajectory as part of nature, and part of worlds that are the other side of thinking nature, the consequence of it, at least our attempt to do so. Our survival is based on our deliberation, our caution, our natural deconstructive sense toward this silence that is already part of the song, sung, singing of this century without end. Good books will let us inhabit this space and recognize a form of life. Serres’ text moves toward dwelling, as noted, in masterful and accessible ways. The pitched battles are the falling replays of anemic and dead politics. As soon as we realize there is humanity, we may be able to enjoy the end of it, our inhuman capability of listening to silence. NOTES 1. See Michel Serres. The Parasite . Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 2007. 2. Wallace Stevens, “Imagination as Value” [ca. 1945], in Collected Poetry and Prose . New York: The Library of America. 1997. 724-39. 3. Jean-François Lyotard. The Inhuman: Reflections on Time . Trans. Geoffrey Bennington & Rachel Bowlby. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. 1992. 4. See the introduction: Quentin Melliassoux. After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency . Trans. Ray Brassier. New York: Continuum. 2008. EDITOR'S NOTE: This review was updated on August 8, 2012. Substantial edits include block quotes from the book under review as well as the inclusion of comments from the author. (shrink)

The phenomenon of technological hazards, whose existence is only revealed many years after they were initially produced, shows that the question of our responsibilities toward future generations is of urgent importance. However, the nature of technological societies means that they are caught in a condition of structural irresponsibility: the tools they use to know the future cannot encompass the temporal reach of their actions. This article explores how dominant legal and moral concepts are equally deficient for helping us understand what (...) future-oriented responsibility requires. An alternative understanding of responsibility is needed, one which can be developed from phenomenological and feminist concepts of care. Care, by opening up for us an understanding of the diversity of values that are constitutive of a worthwhile life, also connects us to the future as the future of care. As such, it provides us with ethical resources that can guide us in the face of uncertainty. (shrink)

Motivated by problems that arise in computing degrees of belief, we consider the problem of computing asymptotic conditional probabilities for first-order sentences. Given first-order sentences φ and θ, we consider the structures with domain {1,..., N} that satisfy θ, and compute the fraction of them in which φ is true. We then consider what happens to this fraction as N gets large. This extends the work on 0-1 laws that considers the limiting probability of first-order sentences, by considering asymptotic conditional (...) probabilities. As shown by Liogon'kii [24], if there is a non-unary predicate symbol in the vocabulary, asymptotic conditional probabilities do not always exist. We extend this result to show that asymptotic conditional probabilities do not always exist for any reasonable notion of limit. Liogon'kii also showed that the problem of deciding whether the limit exists is undecidable. We analyze the complexity of three problems with respect to this limit: deciding whether it is well-defined, whether it exists, and whether it lies in some nontrivial interval. Matching upper and lower bounds are given for all three problems, showing them to be highly undecidable. (shrink)

Is the United States "the land of equal opportunity" or is the playing field tilted in favor of those whose parents are wealthy, well educated, and white? If family background is important in getting ahead, why? And if the processes that transmit economic status from parent to child are unfair, could public policy address the problem? Unequal Chances provides new answers to these questions by leading economists, sociologists, biologists, behavioral geneticists, and philosophers.New estimates show that intergenerational inequality in the United (...) States is far greater than was previously thought. Moreover, while the inheritance of wealth and the better schooling typically enjoyed by the children of the well-to-do contribute to this process, these two standard explanations fail to explain the extent of intergenerational status transmission. The genetic inheritance of IQ is even less important. Instead, parent-offspring similarities in personality and behavior may play an important role. Race contributes to the process, and the intergenerational mobility patterns of African Americans and European Americans differ substantially.Following the editors' introduction are chapters by Greg Duncan, Ariel Kalil, Susan E. Mayer, Robin Tepper, and Monique R. Payne; Bhashkar Mazumder; David J. Harding, Christopher Jencks, Leonard M. Lopoo, and Susan E. Mayer; Anders Björklund, Markus Jäntti, and Gary Solon; Tom Hertz; John C. Loehlin; Melissa Osborne Groves; Marcus W. Feldman, Shuzhuo Li, Nan Li, Shripad Tuljapurkar, and Xiaoyi Jin; and Adam Swift. (shrink)

In earlier papers (Lindström & Rabinowicz, 1989. 1990), we proposed a generalization of the AGM approach to belief revision. Our proposal was to view belief revision as a relation rather thanas a function on theories (or belief sets). The idea was to allow for there being several equally reasonable revisions of a theory with a given proposition. In the present paper, we show that the relational approach is the natural result of generalizing in a certain way an approach to belief (...) revision due to Adam Grove. In his (1988) paper, Grove presents two closely related modelings of functional belief revision, one in terms of a family of "spheres" around the agent's theory G and the other in terms of an epistemic entrenchment ordering of propositions. The "sphere"-terminology is natural when one looks upon theories and propositions as being represented by sets of possible worlds. Grove's spheres may be thought of as possible "fallback" theories relative to the agent's original theory: theories that he may reach by deleting propositions that are not "sufficiently" entrenched (according to standards of sufficient entrenchment of varying stringency). To put it differently, fallbacks are theories that are closed upwards under entrenchment The entrenchment ordering can be recovered from the family of fallbacks by the definition: A is at least as entrenched as B iff A belongs to every fallback to which B belongs. To revise a theory T with a proposition A, we go to the smallest sphere that contain A-worlds and intersect it with A. The relational notion of belief revision that we are interested in, results from weakening epistemic entrenchment by not assuming it to be connected. I.e., we want to allow that some propositions may be incomparable with respect to epistemic entrenchment. As a result, the family of fallbacks around a given theory will no longer have to be nested. This change opens up the possibility for several different ways of revising a theory with a given proposition. (shrink)

This is a short version of Lindström & Rabinowicz 1991.In earlier papers, we proposed a generalization of the AGM approach to belief revision. The proposal was to view belief revision as a relation rather than as a function on theories (or belief sets). Going relational means that one allows for several equally reasonable revisions of a theory with a given proposition. In the present paper, we show that the relational approach is the natural result of generalizing in a certain way (...) an approach to belief revision due to Adam Grove. In his (1988) paper, Grove presented two closely related modelings of functional belief revision, one in terms of a family of "spheres" around the agent's theory G and the other in terms of an epistemic entrenchment ordering of propositions. The "sphere"-terminology is natural when one looks upon theories and propositions as sets of possible worlds. Grove's spheres may be thought of as possible "fallback" theories relative to the agent's original theory: theories that he may reach by deleting propositions that are not "sufficiently" entrenched (according to standards of sufficient entrenchment of varying stringency). The entrenchment ordering can be recovered from the family of fallbacks by the definition: A is at least as entrenched as B iff A belongs to every fallback to which B belongs. To revise a theory T with a proposition A, we go to the smallest sphere that contain A-worlds and intersect it with A. The relational notion of belief revision that we are interested in, results if one allows that some propositions may be incomparable with respect to epistemic entrenchment. As a result, the family of fallbacks around a given theory will no longer have to be nested. This change opens up the possibility for several different ways of revising a theory with a given proposition. (shrink)

In this, the first book devoted to Peter Achinstein's influential work in philosophy of science, twenty distinguished philosophers, including four Lakatos award winners, address various aspects of Achinstein's influential views on the nature of scientific evidence, scientific explanation, and scientific realism. It includes short essays by Steve Gimbel and Jeff Maynes, Nancy Cartwright, Jordi Cat, Victor DiFate, Jerry Doppelt, Adam Goldstein, Philip Kitcher, Fred Kronz, Deborah Mayo, Greg Morgan, Helen Longino, John Norton, Michael Ruse, Bas van Fraassen, Stathis Psillos, (...) Larry Laudan, Richard Richards, Kent Staley, and Jim Woodward with replies to each contributor from Peter Achinstein. Readers will come away with an understanding of the current debate in multiple areas of philosophy of science and how various contemporary issues are connected. (shrink)

In this paper I propose an account of representation for scientific models based on Kendall Walton’s ‘make-believe’ theory of representation in art. I first set out the problem of scientific representation and respond to a recent argument due to Craig Callender and Jonathan Cohen, which aims to show that the problem may be easily dismissed. I then introduce my account of models as props in games of make-believe and show how it offers a solution to the problem. Finally, I demonstrate (...) an important advantage my account has over other theories of scientific representation. All existing theories analyse scientific representation in terms of relations, such as similarity or denotation. By contrast, my account does not take representation in modelling to be essentially relational. For this reason, it can accommodate a group of models often ignored in discussions of scientific representation, namely models which are representational but which represent no actual object. (shrink)

In the free will literature, some compatibilists and some incompatibilists claim that their views best capture ordinary intuitions concerning free will and moral responsibility. One goal of researchers working in the field of experimental philosophy has been to probe ordinary intuitions in a controlled and systematic way to help resolve these kinds of intuitional stalemates. We contribute to this debate by presenting new data about folk intuitions concerning freedom and responsibility that correct for some of the shortcomings of previous studies. (...) These studies also illustrate some problems that pertain to all of the studies that have been run thus far. (shrink)

The Philosophical Quarterly, Volume 63, Issue 253, Page 843-846, October 2013.

An assertion of high conditional probability or, more briefly, an HCP assertion is a statement of the type: The conditional probability of B given A is close to one. The goal of this paper is to construct logics of HCP assertions whose conclusions are highly likely to be correct rather than certain to be correct. Such logics would allow useful conclusions to be drawn when the premises are not strong enough to allow conclusions to be reached with certainty. This goal (...) is achieved by taking Adams' (1966) logic, changing its intended application from conditionals to HCP assertions, and then weakening its criterion for entailment. According to the weakened entailment criterion, called the Criterion of Near Surety and which may be loosely interpreted as a Bayesian criterion, a conclusion is entailed if and only if nearly every model of the premises is a model of the conclusion. The resulting logic, called NSL, is nonmonotonic. Entailment in this logic, although not as strict as entailment in Adams' logic, is more strict than entailment in the propositional logic of material conditionals. Next, NSL was modified by requiring that each HCP assertion be scaled; this means that to each HCP assertion was associated a bound on the deviation from 1 of the conditional probability that is the subject of the assertion. Scaling of HCP assertions is useful for breaking entailment deadlocks. For example, it it is known that the conditional probabilities of C given A and of - C given B are both close to one but the bound on the former's deviation from 1 is much smaller than the latter's, then it may be concluded that in all likelihood the conditional probability of C given A ∧ B is close to one. The resulting logic, called NSL-S, is also nonmonotonic. Despite great differences in their definitions of entailment, entailment in NSL is equivalent to Lehmann and Magidor's rational closure and, disregarding minor differences concerning which premise sets are considered consistent, entailment in NSL-S is equivalent to entailment in Goldszmidt and Pearl's System-Z⁺. Bacchus, Grove, Halpern, and Koller proposed two methods of developing a predicate calculus based on the Criterion of Near Surety. In their randomstructures method, which assumed a prior distribution similar to that of NSL, it appears possible to define an entailment relation equivalent to that of NSL. In their random-worlds method, which assumed a prior distribution dramatically different from that of NSL, it is known that the entailment relation is different from that of NSL. (shrink)

Organizations that believe they should "give something back" to the society have embraced the concept of corporate social responsibility (CSR). Although the theoretical underpinnings of CSR have been frequently debated, empirical studies often involve only limited aspects, implying that theory may not be congruent with actual practices and may impede understanding and further development of CSR. The authors investigate actual CSR practices related to five different stakeholder groups, develop an instrument to measure those CSR practices, and apply it to a (...) survey of 401 U.S. organizations. Four different clusters of organizations emerge, depending on the CSR practice focus. The distinctive features of each cluster relate to organizational demographics, perceived influence of stakeholders, managers' perceptions of the influence of CSR on performance, and organizational performance. (shrink)

The problems that surround iterated contractions and expansions of beliefs are approached by studying hypertheories, a generalisation of Adam Grove's notion of systems of spheres. By using a language with dynamic and doxastic operators different ideas about the basic nature of belief change are axiomatised. It is shown that by imposing quite natural constraints on how hypertheories may change, the basic logics for belief change can be strengthened considerably to bring one closer to a theory of iterated belief change. (...) It is then argued that the logic of expansion, in particular, cannot without loss of generality be strengthened any further to allow for a full logic of iterated belief change. To remedy this situation a notion of directed expansion is introduced that allows for a full logic of iterated belief change. The new operation is given an axiomatisation that is complete for linear hypertheories. (shrink)

This essay explores the importance of Donner le temps II within the context of Derrida’s writings on Heidegger and the gift. In the first section of the essay, I situate the publication of the latter half of Derrida’s 1978–79 seminar against his writings on the gift generally, beginning in 1968 and ending in 2000. In the second section, I explain how the second volume of Donner le temps relates to the first. In the final three sections of the paper, I (...) focus on three prominent topics of the seminar, so as to show how they impact our previous understanding of major aspects of Derrida’s thought: first, the Heideggerian thinking of the es gibt, as it relates to the gift’s unconditionality. Second, the problematic of the Kunstwerk, as it informs Derrida’s thinking of récit. Third, the problem of Dichtung, as it is linked to the poématique. (shrink)

With massive corruption uncovered in numerous recent corporate scandals, investigating psychological processes underlying unethical behavior among employees has become a critical area of research for organizational scientists. This article seeks to explain why people engage in deceptive and fraudulent activities by focusing on the use of moral-disengagement tactics or rationalizations to justify egregious actions at work. In addition, participation in goal-setting is argued to attenuate the relationship between moral disengagement and unethical behavior. Across two studies, a lab simulation and field (...) survey, a measure of moral disengagement was developed for use with working adults. The hypothesized main and interactive effects of moral disengagement, participation, and unethical behavior were tested and largely confirmed. (shrink)

Industrial drug design methodology has undergone remarkable changes in the recent history. Up to the 1970s, the screening of large numbers of randomly selected substances in biological test system was often a crucial step in the development of novel drugs. From the early 1980s, such ‘blind’ screening was increasingly rejected by many pharmaceutical researchers and gave way to ‘rational drug design’, a method that grounds the design of new drugs on a detailed mechanistic understanding of the drug action. Surprisingly, however, (...) the chance-based method of random screening returned to center stage of industrial drug development in the 1990s in the form of ‘high-throughput screening’ (HTS). I will argue in this paper that this to-and-fro in the prominence of random screening comes with fundamental changes in the epistemic significance of chance experiments in pharmaceutical development. While up to the 1970s, random screening used to be chosen as an empirical search strategy primarily because suffi- cient knowledge of the mechanistic basis of drug action was lacking, it has turned with high-throughput screening into an experimental method that employs chance variation and testing to illuminate this mechanistic basis. As a consequence, research into the underlying mechanisms of drug action and the development of new drugs have become closely integrated. The rise of HTS therefore not only shows how chance experiments have assumed a new epistemic role in drug development. It also allows for a detailed study of the much debated emergence of a new relationship between scientific understanding and the development of technological artifacts. (shrink)

George Bealer argues that intuitions are not only reliable indicators of truth, they are necessary to the philosophical endeavor. Specifically, he thinks that intuitions are essential sources of evidence for epistemic justification. I argue that Bealer's defense of intuitions either (1) is insufficient to show that actual human beings are in a position to use intuitions for epistemic justification, or (2) begs the question. The growing empirical data about our intuitions support the view that humans are not creatures appropriately positioned (...) to use intuitions for epistemic justification in the way Bealer suggests. Without the appropriate empirical evidence that humans are beings so positioned, his view begs the question against those who think that intuitions are not reliable guides to truth. (shrink)

This article develops an analogy proposed by Stachel between general relativity (GR) and quantum mechanics (QM) as regards permutation invariance. Our main idea is to overcome Pooley's criticism of the analogy by appeal to paraparticles. In GR, the equations are (the solution space is) invariant under diffeomorphisms permuting spacetime points. Similarly, in QM the equations are invariant under particle permutations. Stachel argued that this feature—a theory's ‘not caring which point, or particle, is which’—supported a structuralist ontology. Pooley criticizes this analogy: (...) in QM the (anti-)symmetrization of fermions and bosons implies that each individual state (solution) is fixed by each permutation, while in GR a diffeomorphism yields in general a distinct, albeit isomorphic, solution. We define various versions of structuralism, and go on to formulate Stachel's and Pooley's positions, admittedly in our own terms. We then reply to Pooley. Though he is right about fermions and bosons, QM equally allows more general types of particle symmetry, in which states (vectors, rays, or density operators) are not fixed by all permutations (called ‘paraparticle states’). Thus Stachel's analogy is revived. (shrink)

"Fans largely regard sports as an escapist pursuit-something that provides distraction from the cares and concerns of "real life". This book pushes back against the fully escapist account of sports fandom and argues that we understand the value of fandom in terms of the ability of sports to prompt fans to reflect meaningfully on the notion of the good life. Even if we are not engaged in high-level athletics ourselves, it is possible to learn a great deal from those who (...) are: about what sacrifices are required to achieve our goals; about how to persevere through failure and disappointment; and about teamwork and the rewards of accomplishing things together. Moreover, partisan fandom, which has been criticized from various quarters, can teach us valuable lessons about love and what it means to be invested in things over which we have no control. If our reflection on the efforts of individual athletes helps us reflect on our own pursuit of the good life, our attachments to teams can help us to cultivate a certain kind of humility and openness to all that life has to offer. The Ethics of Sports Fandom is an accessible resource for researchers and students interested in the ethics and philosophy of sport that offers an analysis of several different aspects of contemporary fandom: fantasy sports, the ways that fans interact with athletes on social media, violent sports, women's sports, and the support for our countries' national teams. In all these areas, reflecting on what it means to respect athletes as individual human beings engaged in their own pursuit of the good life requires that fans consider their sports-related behavior in a new light"--. (shrink)

Experimental philosophy is a new approach to philosophy that incorporates the experimental methodologies of psychology, behavioral economics, and sociology. Experimental philosophers generally maintain that, in addition to traditional philosophical practices, these ways of gathering evidence can be instrumental in shedding light on philosophically important issues. Rather than relying on their own intuitions about specific cases, experimental philosophers perform systematic experiments to determine what intuitions people have about those cases. These intuitions are then used as evidence. In this context, four main (...) approaches to experimental philosophy are introduced, a sample of experimental philosophy’s results is offered, and some of the philosophical importance of those results is explained. (shrink)

Precision testing of the quantum electrodynamics (QED) and the standard model provides some of the most secure knowledge in the history of physics. These tests can also be used to constrain and search for new physics going beyond the standard model. We examine the evidential structure of relationships between theoretical predictions from QED, precision measurements of these phenomena, and the indirect determination of the fine structure constant. We argue that "pure QED" is no longer sufficient to predict the electron's anomalous (...) magnetic moment, and that standard model effects are needed. The details relevant to low-energy QED are robust against future theory change. (shrink)

In 1985 Alchourrón, Gärdenfors and Makinson presented their now classic theory of theory change . In 1988 Adam Grove, generalizing David Lewis's theory of counterfactuals, presented a model theory suitable for the AGM theory. Although AGM and Grove mentioned object languages, neither used them. But recently, Maarten de Rijke has shown how object languages can be brought into the picture. In the present paper we take de Rijke's idea further, addressing the question whether there is a particular doxastic or (...) epistemic logic implicit in AGM. (shrink)

It is commonly claimed that fully virtuous individuals cannot be ignorant and that everyday intuitions support this fact. Others maintain that there are virtues of ignorance and most people recognize them. Both views cannot be correct. We report evidence from three experiments suggesting that ignorance does not rule out folk attributions of virtue. Additionally, results show that many of these judgments can be predicted by one’s emotional stability—a heritable personality trait. We argue that these results are philosophically important for the (...) study of virtue and we discuss some of the ways individual differences may inform and facilitate current debates in ethics. We close with a cautionary argument detailing the risks of discounting some intuitions simply because they are associated with seemingly less desirable personality traits. (shrink)

In this paper we develop a new methodology for normative theorising, which we call Directed Reflective Equilibrium. Directed Reflective Equilibrium is based on a taxonomy that distinguishes between a number of different functions of hypothetical cases, including two dimensions that we call representation and elicitation. Like its predecessor, Directed Reflective Equilibrium accepts that neither intuitions nor basic principles are immune to revision and that our commitments on various levels of philosophical enquiry should be brought into equilibrium. However, it also offers (...) guidance about how different types of cases ought to be sequenced to achieve this result. We argue that this ‘directional’ approach improves, in various ways, upon the non-directional approach of traditional Reflective Equilibrium. (shrink)

Evaluational internalism holds that only features internal to agency (e.g., motivation) are relevant to attributions of virtue [Slote, M. (2001). Morals from motives. Oxford: Oxford University Press]. Evaluational externalism holds that only features external to agency (e.g., consequences) are relevant to attributions of virtue [Driver, J. (2001). Uneasy virtue. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press]. Many evaluational externalists and internalists claim that their view best accords with philosophically naïve (i.e., folk) intuitions, and that accordance provides argumentative support for their view. Evaluational internalism (...) and externalism are incompatible views and therefore it is impossible that both views are supported by most folk intuitions. In four experiments, we present evidence that neither pure evaluational internalism nor pure evaluational externalism accurately capture some relevant folk intuitions about virtue. However, our experiments suggest external factors are vastly more important than internal factors for folk attributions of virtue. While these data do not entail that evaluational internalism and externalism about virtue are false, they situate important argumentative burdens, constrain philosophical theory about virtue, and illustrate a valuable method that could foster more efficient progress in ethics. (shrink)

Non-cognitivists claim that thick concepts can be disentangled into distinct descriptive and evaluative components and that since thick concepts have descriptive shape they can be mastered independently of evaluation. In Non-Cognitivism and Rule-Following, John McDowell uses Wittgenstein’s rule-following considerations to show that such a non-cognitivist view is untenable. In this paper I do several things. I describe the non-cognitivist position in its various forms and explain its driving motivations. I then explain McDowell’s argument against non-cognitivism and the Wittgensteinian considerations upon (...) which it relies, because this has been sufficiently misunderstood by critics and rarely articulated by commentators. After clarifying McDowell’s argument against non-cognitivism, I extend the analysis to show that commentators of McDowell have failed to appreciate his argument and that critical responses have been weak. I argue against three challenges posed to McDowell, and show that the case of thick concepts should lead us to reject non-cognitivism. (shrink)

Sogdian Epigraphy of Central Asia and Semirech’e. By Vladimir A. Livshits, translated by Tom Stableford and edited by Nicholas Sims-Williams. Corpus Inscriptionum Iranicarum, pt. II: Inscriptions of the Seleucid and Parthian periods of Eastern Iran and Central Asia, vol. III: Sogdian IV. London: School of Oriental and African Studies, 2015. Pp. 315. £60.

The Collegium Phaenomenologicum has met in Umbria, Italy every summer since 1976; only COVID made it pause, and hopefully only temporarily. It has been a forum for deep and broad discussion of the phenomenological tradition; it has also been a place where that tradition has itself been broadened and deepened by generations of thinkers who came to study the classical texts and to do phenomenology. In 2019, over the course of three weeks in July, in three lecture courses, several talks (...) by visiting faculty, twelve text seminars sessions, art workshops, and very many informal talks over dinner, on the terrace, and on long walks through the town of Città di Castello and beyond, the Collegium worked on the question of critical phenomenology. (shrink)

We give a general description of a class of contrastive constructions, intended to capture what is common to contrastive knowledge, belief, hope, fear, understanding and other cases where one expresses a propositional attitude in terms of “rather than”. The crucial element is the agent's incapacity to distinguish some possibilities from others. Contrastivity requires a course-graining of the set of possible worlds. As a result, contrastivity will usually cut across logical consequence, so that an agent can have an attitude to p (...) rather than q but not to r rather than q , where r is a logical consequence of p . We relate these ideas to some general issues about thought, such as the question of whether all possibilities that can be distinguished in emotion can be distinguished in belief. (shrink)

Why do people enter devoted relationships when they can continue looking for better partners? The “strategic ignorance” account holds that remaining ignorant about alternative partners is a signal that you are a high‐quality partner. Despite this intuition, the authors show that evolution favors a “look while allowing your partner to look” strategy, unless the costs of being rejected by a looking partner are extremely high. Thus, the origins of love must be found elsewhere.

Behemoth is traditionally read as supporting Hobbes's science from the treatises, but it also goes beyond the strict limitations of Hobbes's science. Understanding how Hobbes expands his approach requires that we examine how A's confidence in institutional reform is met by B's cynicism. Hobbes shifts from an analysis of general inclinations to an analysis of the particular strategies that skilful sovereigns use to acquire and maintain peace. The result is a theory of the state that relies less on> institutional arrangement, (...) and more on effective statesmanship, than we typically see when considering Hobbes's treatises alone. (shrink)

Consider any choice that affects some social policy. A decision that considers evidence will, at its heart, contain some kind of explicit or implicit “because” statement: “We are doing X because the evidence says Y.” But can evidence ever truly speak for itself, in the sense of being reducible to objective utterances that are either correct or in need of correction? Before answering, consider what you'd prefer. Would you rather receive evidence that was free of any value judgments imposed by (...) human actors, that was laden with value judgments that you agree with, or laden with value judgments that you disagree with? The central assertion of this essay is that, throughout policy analysis but especially in assessments of the costs and benefits of regulating versus encouraging new technologies (cost‐benefit analysis, or CBA), the first possibility above is a mirage, and the second and third are self‐contradictory. Instead, we are overwhelmingly confronted with a fourth possibility: we receive evidence that appears to be (or is deliberately touted as) value neutral but is suffused with hidden value judgments.In the second part of this essay, entitled “A Guided Tour through Inevitable Value Judgments,” I identify in a systematic way approximately sixty‐five value judgments that are routinely (in some cases, invariably) made in CBA, but that are kept hidden. For each judgment, I discuss its genesis as it is most commonly invoked in CBA, explain how it is hidden in plain sight, and offer one or more value judgments that could be made instead of or in addition to the conventional one. The alternative judgments highlight the width of the spectrum of reasonable conclusions an analyst could reach merely by substituting other judgments for the ones currently embedded.Bringing hidden value judgments to light is doubly valuable. First, it allows discussion to ensue on a level playing field; instead of conclusory statements about what the evidence says, transparency permits statements taking the form of “when channeled through these value judgments, the evidence says this.” Perhaps more importantly, transparency about value judgments permits participants in the discussions to offer interpretations of evidence contingent on there being different value judgments chosen at one or more points in the analysis, interpretations that may suggest that alternative course(s) of action are preferable to the one being championed. (shrink)

This book on process-relational philosophy of education suggests that the notion of Adventure is foundational for the advancement of knowledge. Learning, teaching, and research are best conceived as rhythmic and relational processes, involving curiosity, imagination, valuation, creativity, and self-realization. Thus construed, contemporary educational practices can be revitalized from pedagogies of information retention and the current overemphasis on analytic precision.

The importance of being ambiguous -- Interlude : ambiguity, order and the deity -- Notation and its limits -- Interlude : the Israelite red heifer and the edge of power in China -- Ritual and the rhythms of ambiguity -- Interlude : crossing the boundaries of empathy -- Shared experience -- Interlude : experience and multiplicity.

Working from Adorno’s notion of negative dialectics, this essay charts a dialectical course of resistance toward a horizon of universal freedom. Rather than propose relations between ideal types of resistance, it emphasizes the ineliminable historical dimensions of not only real-world resistance movements but also the philosophical and political theorizing that attempts to make sense of them. In doing so it brings out certain conceptual relations that emerge or recede as the context of resistance shifts. The first moment considers the dichotomy (...) between reform and revolution, the second moment delves into modes of reform, and the third looks to modes of revolution. Along the way the essay discusses the work of such varied figures and organizations as Rosa Luxemburg, John Rawls, Martin Luther King, Jr., Candice Delmas, Robin Celikates, Kimberlee Brownlee, Emma Goldman, Students for a Democratic Society and the Weather Underground, and the Black Panther Party and the Black Liberation Army. In the end, the essay is written in the service of understanding the stakes and presuppositions of resistance, in theory and practice. (shrink)