BREVES PONDERAÇÕES ACERCA DO INSTITUTO DA DELAÇÃO PREMIADA APÓS A LEI Nº 12.850/2013.

Humans and organizations have limitations of computational capacity and information management. Such constraints are synonymous with bounded rationality. Therefore, in order to extend the human and organizational boundaries to more advanced models of cognition, this research proposes concepts of cognitive machines in organizations. From a micro point of view, what makes this research distinct is that, beyond people, it includes in the list of participants of the organization the cognitive machines. From a macro point of view, this paper relies on (...) the premise that cognitive machines can improve the cognitive abilities of the organization. From such perspectives, it presents rationale and principles of a class of cognitive machines with capabilities to carry out complex cognitive tasks in organizations. It also introduces analyses of the cognitive machines in organizations through theories of bounded rationality, economic decision-making, and conflict resolution. The analyses indicate that these machines can solve or reduce intra-individual and group dysfunctional conflicts which arise from decision-making processes in the organization, and thus they can improve the degree of organizational cognition. From all these backgrounds, this research outlines implications of cognitive machines for organizations. (shrink)

Ideology and self-interest are often in tension. If positive political theorists assume broad self-interest as the standard of human behaviour, they can accommodate people’s ideological motivation to act for the common good. Yet, their theories may become tautological and empirically untestable. Conversely, if these theorists assume narrow self-interest, they increase testability. But because ideology seems incompatible with narrow self-interest, they often rule ideology out as a motivational driver. Positive political theorists can, however, combine ideology with narrow self-interest by assuming broad (...) egoism. And in so doing, they should assume that ideology motivates political agents until it becomes too costly for these agents’ material interests. (shrink)

Contemporary Information Systems management incorporates the need to make explicit the links between semiotics, meaning-making and the digital age. This focus addresses, at its core, pure rationality, that is, the capacity of human interpretation and of human inscription upon reality. Creating the new real, that is the motto. Humans are intrinsically semiotic creatures. Consequently, semiotics is not a choice or an option but something that works like a second skin, establishing limits and permeable linkages between: human thought and human's infinite (...) world of imagination; and human action, with its correspondent infinite world of intentionality, of desire and of unexplored possibilities. Two instances are contrasted as two reading lenses of current business reality: IS governance and industry 4.0. These phenomena correspond to the need to take accountability, transparency and responsibility into account, when designing IS and when using such systems through the ecology of connectivity, Big Data and the Internet of Things. Political, social and cultural dimensions are brought into the equation, when addressing the question of the relevance and adequateness of IS theory and practice to respond to contemporary challenges. The message is that what has already been achieved is but a shadow, a pale vision, of what might be achieved in the age of the new Renaissance. (shrink)

El presente artículo tiene como objetivo aclarar algunos conceptos sobre desarrollo local a escala humana, a través una revisión bibliográfica. Para este propósito el trabajo está conformado de dos partes: conceptos sobre desarrollo local, y desarrollo local y su semántica. En la primera parte se aborda el desarrollo local en sentido etimológico, semántico, de espacio, de territorio, de comunidad, lugar y paisaje. En la segunda parte se presentan los supuestos y datos históricos, variaciones semánticas, factores endógenos y exógenos y el (...) sentido de sustentabilidad. El estudio sobre escala humana está sometido a las demás partes. (shrink)

Concepts stand at the centre of human cognition. We use concepts in categorizing objects and events in the world, in reasoning and action, and in social interaction. It is therefore not surprising that the study of concepts constitutes a central area of research in philosophy and psychology, yet only recently have the two disciplines developed greater interaction. Recent experiments in psychology that test the role of concepts in categorizing and reasoning have found a great deal of variation, across individuals and (...) cultures, in categorization behaviour. Meanwhile, philosophers of language and mind have investigated the semantic properties of concepts, and how concepts are related to linguistic meaning and linguistic communication. A key motivation behind this was the idea that concepts must be shared across individuals and cultures. With the dawn of experimental philosophy, the proposal that the experimental data from psychology lacks relevance to semantics is increasingly difficult to defend. -/- This volume brings together leading psychologists and philosophers to advance the interdisciplinary debate on the role of concepts in categorizing and reasoning, the relationship between concepts and linguistic meaning and communication, the challenges conceptual variation poses to communication, and the social and political effects of conceptual change. (shrink)

Philosophers of language and metaethicists are concerned with persistent normative and evaluative disagreements – how can we explain persistent intelligible disagreements in spite of agreement over the described facts? Tim Sundell recently argued that evaluative aesthetic and personal taste disputes could be explained as metalinguistic negotiations – conversations where interlocutors negotiate how best to use a word relative to a context. I argue here that metalinguistic negotiations are neither necessary nor sufficient for genuine evaluative and normative disputes to occur. A (...) comprehensive account of value talk requires stronger metanormative commitments than metalinguistic negotiations afford. (shrink)

Este artigo apresenta, em primeiro lugar, uma reconstrução conceitual das razões que levam Leibniz, em sua correspondência com Arnauld, a introduzir o conceito de decretos divinos possíveis. Em um segundo momento, o artigo desenvolve alguns argumentos para demonstrar que a introdução desse conceito torna inconsistente a arquitetônica global da metafísica leibniziana.

Recently, researchers on organization theory and behavior were challenged by the introduction of cognitive machines in the list of the organization’s participants. Researchers in this field advocated that cognitive machines contribute to improve cognitive abilities in the organization by extending people’s rationality and decision-making capacity and by reducing intra-individual and group dysfunctional conflicts. This paper supports these findings and extends their results to upper layers at managerial and organizational levels of application by proposing the concept of new industrial organizations with (...) structure and processes of Computational Organization Management Networks. In such a new organization type, cognitive machines and cognitive information systems are prominent actors of governance, automation, and control of the whole enterprise. (shrink)

Our ability to attend selectively to our surroundings - noticing things that matter, ignoring those that don't - is crucial if we are to negotiate the world around us. This is the first book in years to explore just how our attention can be influenced by time, and how our own perception of time can be influenced by what we attend to.

The article discusses the process of “conceptual borrowing”, according to which, when a new discipline emerges, it develops its technical vocabulary also by appropriating terms from other neighbouring disciplines. The phenomenon is likened to Carl Schmitt’s observation that modern political concepts have theological roots. The authors argue that, through extensive conceptual borrowing, AI has ended up describing computers anthropomorphically, as computational brains with psychological properties, while brain and cognitive sciences have ended up describing brains and minds computationally and informationally, as (...) biological computers. The crosswiring between the technical languages of these disciplines is not merely metaphorical but can lead to confusion, and damaging assumptions and consequences. The article ends on an optimistic note about the self-adjusting nature of technical meanings in language and the ability to leave misleading conceptual baggage behind when confronted with advancement in understanding and factual knowledge. (shrink)

This paper argues for contextualism about predicates of personal taste and evaluative predicates in general, and offers a proposal of how apparently resilient disagreements are to be explained. The present proposal is complementary to others that have been made in the recent literature. Several authors, for instance (López de Sa, 2008; Sundell, 2011; Huvenes, 2012; Marques and García-Carpintero, 2014; Marques, 2014a), have recently defended semantic contextualism for those kinds of predicates from the accusation that it faces the problem (...) of lost disagreement. These authors have proposed that a proper account of the resilient disagreement in the cases studied is to be achieved by an appeal to pragmatic processes, and to conflicting non-doxastic attitudes. It is argued here that the existing contextualist solutions are incomplete as they stand, and are subject to objections because of this. A supplementation of contextualism is offered, together with an explanation of why failed presuppositions of commonality (López de Sa), disputes over the appropriateness of a contextually salient standard (Sundell), and differences in non-doxastic attitudes (Sundell, Huvenes, Marques, and García-Carpintero) give rise to conflicts. This paper claims that conflicts of attitudes are the reason why people still have impressions of disagreement in spite of failed commonality presuppositions, that those conflicts drive metalinguistic disputes over the selection of appropriate standards, and hence conflicting non-doxastic attitudes demand an explanation that is independent of those context dependent pragmatic processes. The paper further argues that the missing explanation is 2-fold: first, disagreement prevails where the properties expressed by taste and value predicates are response-dependent properties, and, secondly, it prevails where those response-dependent properties are involved in evolved systems of coordination that respond to evolutionarily recurrent situations. (shrink)

Social constructionist claims are surprising and interesting when they entail that presumably natural kinds are in fact socially constructed. The claims are interesting because of their theoretical and political importance. Authors like Díaz-León argue that constitutive social construction is more relevant for achieving social justice than causal social construction. This paper challenges this claim. Assuming there are socially salient groups that are discriminated against, the paper presents a dilemma: if there were no constitutively constructed social kinds, the causes of the (...) discrimination of existing social groups would have to be addressed, and understanding causal social construction would be relevant to achieve social justice. On the other hand, not all possible constitutively socially constructed kinds are actual social kinds. If an existing social group is constitutively constructed as a social kind K, the fact that it actually exists as a K has social causes. Again, causal social construction is relevant. The paper argues that (i) for any actual social kind X, if X is constitutively socially constructed as K, then it is also causally socially constructed; and (ii) causal social construction is at least as relevant as constitutive social construction for concerns of social justice. For illustration, I draw upon two phenomena that are presumed to contribute towards the discrimination of women: (i) the poor performance effects of stereotype threat, and (ii) the silencing effects of gendered language use. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that hate speech expresses hate, and answer some objections to expressivist views. First, I briefly comment on some limitations of pragmatic accounts of harmful speech. I then present an expressive-normative view of derogatory discourse according to which it is expressive of an affective state by presupposing it. A linguistic act expressive of an affective state inherits the normativity that is constitutive of that state, as directed to its intentional object. If the act is successful, it (...) updates the conversational context with the normative appraisal conditions of the affective state presupposed. I argue that this model can be applied to hate speech. I rely on current research on the psychology of hate to identify the appraisal conditions, action tendencies, and motivational goals characteristic of hate. The account supplements other pragmatic accounts of hate speech. (shrink)

During the last three decades, there have been great advances in our understanding of the neural mechanisms of selective attention, at the network as well as the cellular level. The Oxford Handbook of Attention brings together the different research areas that make up contemporary attention research into one comprehensive and authoritative volume.

This paper gives experimental evidence against the claim that speakers’ intuitions support semantic relativism about assertions of epistemic modal sentences and uses this evidence as part of a broader argument against assessment relativism. It follows other papers that reach similar conclusions, such as that of Knobe and Yalcin (Semant Pragmat 7:1–21, 2014). Its results were achieved simultaneously and independently of the more recent work of Kneer (Perspectives on taste. Aesthetics, language, metaphysics, and experimental philosophy. Routledge, 2022). The experimental data in (...) this paper supports two claims. The first is that, as Knobe and Yalcin (Semant Pragmat 7:1–21, 2014) also found, speakers diverge in their judgments about the truth-values and about the appropriate retraction of epistemic modal claims. The second is that speakers diverge in their judgments about when a retraction is appropriate and when it is required. This divergence was not tested by Knobe and Yalcin (Semant Pragmat 7:1–21, 2014) but aligns with the results independently reached by Kneer ((Kneer, Synthese 199(3–4): 6455–6471; Perspectives on taste. Aesthetics, language, metaphysics, and experimental philosophy. Routledge, 2022), and supports the arguments previously developed by Marques (Synthese 199(3–4): 6455–6471). The present studies tested the intuitions of both North American English speakers and of peninsular Spanish speakers, whose judgements on the topic had never been tested. The broader argument involves the relation between required retractions and falsity. (shrink)

This paper presents reasons against semantic relativism. Semantic relativism is motivated by intuitions that are presumed to raise problems for traditional or contextualist semantics in contested domains of discourse. Intuition-based arguments are those based on competent speakers’ putative intuitions about seeming faultless disagreement, eavesdropper, and retraction cases. I will organize the discussion in three parts. First, I shall provide a brief introduction to the intuition-based arguments offered in favor of semantic relativism. Second, I shall indicate that there are ways for (...) contextualism to explain the (appearance of) intuitions that support semantic relativism. Third, I shall review some experimental results and independent arguments that put into question the appeal of semantic relativism. (shrink)

O artigo aborda o tema da estilização do caráter no pensamento de Friedrich Nietzsche, através da apropriação de alguns dos temas centrais da sua filosofia, tais como a crítica avaliativa da modernidade ocidental, o pensamento do ‘eterno retorno’ e o sentido da ‘extemporaneidade’ [unzeitgemässe]. Através de um percurso pelo conjunto da sua obra e pelos textos de alguns dos seus comentadores, procura-se estabelecer uma interpretação do significado da sabedoria ativa através do desenvolvimento e embaralhamento, ao mesmo tempo livre e cuidadoso, (...) dos temas referidos acima. (shrink)

In 1948, Bertrand Russell and Frederick Copleston entertained us with a radiophonic debate, on the BBC, concerning the rational proofs of God’s existence. This debate is primarily a product of Authors’ mindset. In this sense, every argument on each side presupposes a universal reason from which human intellect can grasp a certain degree of truth. Therefore, we would expect that the debate 75 years old to be outdated. Or maybe, Russell’s agnostic position could, at first sight, seem to be more (...) aligned with a contemporary post-modern mindset than Copleston’s theism. However, we disagree with the aforementioned thesis. We will not argue that Copleston won the debate by means of reason alone. We will rather show that both positions emerge from different ontologies. And these ones are intertwined with specific narratives and its respective ways of life. For that matter, the Russell-Copleston debate substantiates the thesis of Radical Orthodoxy. Deep down, John Milbank’s “ontology of peace,” as opposed to the Nietzschean nihilism, emerges from this debate. In this sense, while Copleston’s argumentation grounds this narrative on an ontology of peace, Russell tends to follow in a nihilism capable of destroying the communion between different persons. In this sense, the debate is still up to date. (shrink)

Neste ensaio observamos que a biodiversidade é a multiplicidade de recursos existentes no contexto da vida da natureza do planeta Terra. Ela implica também a presença do elemento humano e sua condição étnica que é também, no mundo globalizado, étnico racial. A vida humana a partir das ancestralidades étnicas nos indicam que o caminho para um futuro sustentável sempre foi protagonizado por populações indígenas, povos das florestas, tradicionais e quilombolas. Estas civilizações humanas, indígenas, ribeirinhos, população do campo e da floresta, (...) negros e quilombolas fornecem tecnologias milenares capazes de salvaguardar o planeta e possibilitar a permanência da vida e da espécie humana na Terra. A despeito disto, o argumento tecnológico e sustentável dos gestores públicos e empresariado capitalista é reducionista. Em sua demanda, a agenda 2030 para implementação dos 17 objetivos do desenvolvimento sustentável (ODS) estão atrelados ao desenvolvimento econômico e social. Em nossa compreensão, isto visa encapsular a todos na lógica das cidades, territórios do consumo e das trocas econômicas. Valores éticos opostos a existência do indígena, do negro e das populações do campo e da floresta. Neste sentido, a ancestralidade indígena e negra em sua ontologia, produz uma ética humana inalienável e insubmissa. (shrink)

We present in this article a discussion about gestures produced from the childhood entry in the interface with the experience of school time. It is a discussion woven inside the center for studies and research in education in particular, the times group of the faculty of education of the federal university of Juiz de Fora/MG. Throughout history, time has been discussed in various ways and still is, as well as childhood, conceptually constructed as a result of social, political, religious, and (...) cultural influences. In the attempt to "start thinking", we ask ourselves about what theoretical formulations have been based on childhood at the interface with school time in the field of education? We defend the central thesis that childhood, in a western cut, has been presented in productions still as social time. It is a recent movement to consider childhood as an event, experience, as opposed to the idea of childhood as the stage of life. As a result, considering infancy related to the tension between social time and time as intensity of the present, implies the need for pedagogical gestures that think this tension and, thus, consider the children of the current, narrowing their relations with the school, with knowledge and with life. To enlighten the issues sewn from our concerns, we chose authors such as Agamben, Leal, Bakhtin/Volochinov, Kohan, Vieira, Bento and Meneghel, Kramer, Borba, who focused on childhood and education. In order to problematize the time category, we dialogued with St. Augustine, Oliveira, Marques C. and Marques L, Skliar. The reading of our interlocutors and our listening with/to the school could subsidize the thought that we can invent ways not only imagined as possible with the perspective of reflecting time, childhood, experience and school on other bases. The interrogation, not the conviction, enables the sense of knowledge in the materiality of our practices, produced inside/outside the university. These are underprivileged subjects in curriculum matrices and disciplines that address the issue of children, their childhoods and temporalities. (shrink)

Scott Soames proposes in his book Understanding Truth (1999) a motivation to reject bivalence. It is his claim that if bivalence is assumed to apply to liar sentences, contradictions will follow. However, contradictions will equally follow if bivalence is denied of liar sentences (in fact, of any truth-bearers). Soames avoids contradictions by treating truth as a partially defined predicate: for certain sentences, truth is not defined to apply or not to apply. Liar sentences are some of such cases. However, there (...) are several problems with Soames’s proposal. Liar sentences also pose a problem for the disquotational schema (T). Soames only avoids this problem by changing the meaning of the biconditional in schema (T), and this will be shown to be an unsatisfactory move. Furthermore, we should only regard liar sentences as possible counterexamples to bivalence provided they are regarded as proper truth-bearers. Soames takes truth-bearers to be sentences that express propositions. However, it is questionable that liar sentences, such as the example considered, can count as proper truth-bearers. Soames imposes on truth a condition I will call the priority requirement: that the status of the claim that some sentence S is true (or not true) depends on the prior status of S itself, hence on the status of sentences not containing the truth-predicate. Soames regards the cases where the truth-predicate cannot be eliminated as cases of truth-value gaps. I will argue that the priority requirement means that liar sentences fail to express propositions: for liar sentences, there is no prior sentence S on whose truth or falsity the liar case would turn. Nothing is said constraining a possible way for things to be, so nothing said to call true or false. Sentences that do not say anything are neither true nor false without contradiction. (shrink)

De acordo com o Princípio da Continuidade, adotado por Leibniz, toda mudança ocorre gradativamente, havendo sempre um grau intermediário entre dois estados quaisquer. Esse princípio parece ser, contudo, incompatível com a doutrina leibniziana acerca da natureza da autoconsciência, uma vez que Leibniz, ao menos prima facie, sustenta haver uma diferença de natureza – e não apenas de grau – entre percepções inconscientes e conscientes, fornecendo esta distinção a base para a diferenciação ontológica das mônadas entre puras enteléquias, almas e espíritos. (...) O objetivo principal do presente texto é sugerir uma forma de compatibilização do Princípio da Continuidade com a doutrina leibniziana da autoconsciência. (shrink)

The focus on this article is to analyze the concept of beauty in Kierkegaard’s thought, starting from some questions that I try to answer in these pages: How does Kierkegaard understand beauty? What role does beauty play in the inner constitutive process? All this to argue that, as regards beauty, Kierkegaard recovers the Greek concept of kalokagathia to give it a modern interpretation; thus, distancing himself from the modern understanding of beauty as a mere object of study of aesthetics or (...) the mere contemplation of an ideal; beauty is defined as the telos of the inner self and is related to freedom and choice. It is, therefore, as I will argue, an ethical beauty, rather than an aesthetic one. (shrink)

The debate about moral responsibility for one’s actions often revolves around whether the agent had the ability to do otherwise. An alternative account of moral responsibility, however, focuses on the actual sequence that produces the agent’s action and which criteria it must fulfil for the agent to be considered morally responsible for her action. Mental Time Travel allows the agent to simulate a possible future scenario; therefore, it is relevant for the selection of a course of action. I will argue (...) that implicit prospection is a rudimentary form of Mental Time Travel and that the role that implicit prospection, or non-rudimentary forms of Mental Time Travel, plays in the production of intentional actions helps explain guidance control and, hence, moral responsibility. Keywords: implicit prospection, guidance control, feeling the future, plan, intention. (shrink)

Morality can be adaptive or maladaptive. From this fact come polarizing disputes on the meta-ethical status of moral adaptation. The realist tracking account of morality claims that it is possible to track objective moral truths and that these truths correspond to moral rules that are adaptive. In contrast, evolutionary anti-realism rejects the existence of moral objectivity and thus asserts that adaptive moral rules cannot represent objective moral truths, since those truths do not exist. This article develops a novel evolutionary view (...) of natural law to defend the realist tracking account. It argues that we can identify objective moral truths through cultural group selection and that adaptive moral rules are likely to reflect such truths. (shrink)

The paper confronts the disagreement argument for relativism about matters of taste, defending a specific form of contextualism. It is first considered whether the disagreement data might manifest an inviariantist attitude speakers pre-reflectively have. Semantic and ontological enlightenment should then make the impressions of disagreement vanish, or at least leave them as lingering ineffectual Müller-Lyer-like illusions; but it is granted to relativists that this does not fully happen. López de Sa’s appeal to presuppositions of commonality and Sundell’s appeal to metalinguistic (...) disagreement are discussed, and it is argued that, although they help to clarify the issues, they do not fully explain why such impressions remain under enlightenment. To do it, the paper develops a suggestion that other writers have made, that the lingering impression of disagreement is a consequence of a practical conflict, appealing to dispositions to practical coordination that come together with presuppositions of commonality in axiological matters. (shrink)

Traz depoimentos dirigidos de filósofos brasileiros sobre temas clássicos e contemporâneos da filosofia, processos de formação intelectual e a vida cultural brasileira. Ao final, apresenta breve biografia do depoente e lista das suas principais publicações.

Words change meaning, usually in unpredictable ways. But some words’ meanings are revised intentionally. Revisionary projects are normally put forward in the service of some purpose – some serve specific goals of inquiry, and others serve ethical, political or social aims. Revisionist projects can ameliorate meanings, but they can also pervert. In this paper, I want to draw attention to the dangers of meaning perversions, and argue that the self-declared goodness of a revisionist project doesn’t suffice to avoid meaning perversions. (...) The road to Hell, or to horrors on Earth, is paved with good intentions. Finally and more importantly, I want to demarcate what meaning perversions are. This, I hope, can help us assess the moral and political legitimacy of revisionary projects. (shrink)

Many authors agree that there is a dimension of conflict expressed through discourse that eludes purely semantic approaches. How and why do conative attitudes conflict? The latter question is the object of this paper. Conflicts of attitudes are typically modelled on one of two models. The first imposes a Subjective Rationality constraint on conflicting attitudes, and the second depends on the impossibility of Joint Satisfaction. This paper assesses whether either of the two conditions can account for conflicting attitudes. First, it (...) argues that Subjective Rationality cannot account for intersubjective conflicts. Second, it presents putative counterexamples to Joint Satisfaction. The counterexamples arise on the assumption that the attitudes are first personal. The paper then explores two alternatives: nihilism about attitudinal conflicts, and dropping the assumption that the relevant attitudes are first-personal states. Embracing nihilism would be devastating for expressivists and other non-cognitivists. But dropping the assumption on which the counterexamples to Satisfaction depend requires a new account of the conative attitudes expressed in value discourse. The paper concludes by pointing to an alternative. (shrink)

Intuitions about retractions have been used to motivate truth relativism about certain types of claims. Among these figure epistemic modals, knowledge attributions, or personal taste claims. On MacFarlane’s prominent relativist proposal, sentences like “the ice cream might be in the freezer” or “Pocoyo is funny” are only assigned a truth-value relative to contexts of utterance and contexts of assessment. Retractions play a crucial role in the argument for assessment-relativism. A retraction of a past assertion is supposed to be mandatory whenever (...) the asserted sentence is not true at the context of use and the context of assessment. If retractions were not obligatory in these conditions, there would be no normative difference between assessment-relativism and contextualism. The main goal of this paper is to undermine the claim that retractions reveal this normative difference. To this effect, the paper offers a review of three important objections to the obligatoriness of retractions. Taken together, these objections make a strong case against the alleged support that retractions give to assessment-relativism. The objections are moreover supported by recent experimental results that are also discussed. This will satisfy a further goal, which is to undermine the idea that there is a constitutive retraction rule. The paper also discusses two ways to understand what such a rule would be constitutive of, and concludes with a discussion of how to describe what retractions are. (shrink)

This paper explores some alternative accounts of doxastic disagreement, and shows what problems each faces. It offers an account of doxastic disagreement that results from the incompatibility of the content of doxastic attitudes, even when that content’s truth is relativized. On the best definition possible, it is argued, neither non-indexical contextualism nor assessment-relativism have an advantage over contextualism. The conclusion is that conflicts that arise from the incompatibility (at the same world) of the content of given doxastic attitudes cannot be (...) accommodated by theoretical positions that allow for the compatibility (at the same world) of the content of different doxastic attitudes. (shrink)

According to Steven Weinberg, it is the goal of elementary particle physics to search for the final laws of physics, i.e. a simple set of principles from which everything we know about physics can be derived. The main criterion that guides the search for such a set of principles is, according to the author, the sense of inevitability of physical theories, which Weinberg conflates with the idea of beauty. The theoretical physicists’ task is, in this sense, to look for constraining (...) principles, such as symmetries and renormalizability, that increase the sense of inevitability of physical laws. It is the goal of this paper to discuss Weinberg’s arguments in favor of reductionism, as well as his conception of final theory and the associated concept of “inevitability.”. (shrink)

Kaplan (1999) argued that a different dimension of expressive meaning (“use-conditional”, as opposed to truth-conditional) is required to characterize the meaning of pejoratives, including slurs and racial epithets. Elaborating on this, writers have argued that the expressive meaning of pejoratives and slurs is either a conventional implicature (Potts 2007) or a presupposition (Macià 2002 and 2014, Schlenker 2007, Cepollaro and Stojanovic 2016). We argue that an expressive presuppositional theory accounts well for the data, but that expressive presuppositions are not just (...) propositions to be added to a common ground. We hold that expressives, including pejoratives and slurs, make requirements on a contextual record governed by sui generis norms specific to affective attitudes and their expressions. (shrink)