Complete URL to this document: http://srsc.ulb.ac.be/axcWWW/93-Principles.html.

Axel Stern; VI—Truth—A New Approach, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 65, Issue 1, 1 June 1965, Pages 99–122, https://doi.org/10.1093/aristotelia.

https://revistes.uab.cat/enrahonar/article/view/v27-honneth.

In the literature we have found correspondence of several significant traits of Jewish mysticism with traits of Buddhism and other systems of Indian religion-philosophy. Among the corresponding traits is the fundamental idea of emptiness or nothingness, shuunyataa in Sanskrit, ayin in Hebrew. Also corresponding are attempts to harmonize the idea and experience of emptiness with fullness, and with the experience of the secular world with its many things and concepts. We list eight significant traits of Jewish mysticism, which we find (...) correspond with traits of Indian religion-philosophies. We also discuss some important relations of these Indian and Jewish belief systems with modern science. We contend, that natural science is built on spontaneous sensory experiences; on this basis concepts and theories are constructed. Likewise we think, that spiritual experiences occur spontaneously and contribute to the basis of religious, mystic and some philosophical belief systems. We thus think, there are important parallels between scientific and spiritual cognition. Key words: Comparative religion; Emptiness/fullness; nothingness; God; compassion; reincarnation; cognition, scientific spiritual; spiritual experiences; Buddhism. (shrink)

The first book since Coady's 1992 'Testimony: A Philosophical Study' to offer a thorough survey and a philosophical introduction to testimony and its epistemological problems, while at the same time advancing a novel view that proposes independent justificatory pathways for the acceptance and rejection of testimony, respectively. // Table of Contents: // Introduction / 1. What is Testimony? / 2. The Testimonial Conundrum / 3. Testimony, Perception, Memory, and Inference / 4. Testimony and Evidence / 5. Reductionism and Anti-Reductionism / (...) 6. Hybrid Theories of Testimony / 7. Testimonial Knowledge: Transmission and Generation / 8. Trust and Assurance / 9. Expert Testimony / 10. Pathologies of Testimony / 11. Testimony and the Value of Knowledge / Glossary / Bibliography / Index. (shrink)

Over the last 30 years, representationalist and dynamicist positions in the philosophy of cognitive science have argued over whether neurocognitive processes should be viewed as representational or not. Major scientific and technological developments over the years have furnished both parties with ever more sophisticated conceptual weaponry. In recent years, an enactive generalization of predictive processing – known as active inference – has been proposed as a unifying theory of brain functions. Since then, active inference has fueled both representationalist and dynamicist (...) campaigns. However, we believe that when diving into the formal details of active inference, one should be able to find a solution to the war; if not a peace treaty, surely an armistice of a sort. Based on an analysis of these formal details, this paper shows how both representationalist and dynamicist sensibilities can peacefully coexist within the new territory of active inference. (shrink)

Should the current members of a community compensate the victims of their ancestor’s emissions of greenhouse gases? I argue that the previous generation of polluters may not have been morally responsible for the harms they caused.I also accept the view that the polluters’ descendants cannot be morally responsible for their ancestor’s harmful emissions. However, I show that, while granting this, a suitably defined notion of moral free-riding may still account for the moral obligation of the polluters’ descendants to compensate the (...) current victims of their ancestors’ actions. A concept of transgenerational free-riding is defined. Objections to the idea of using free-riding as part of a theory of justice are rejected. Two different views of moral free-riding are contrasted, with consequences for the amount of compensation to be exigible from the polluters’ descendants. Some final considerations are devoted to the possible relevance of this free-riding-based view for other issues of historical injustice. (shrink)

Despite the fact that the sociological notion ‘individualization’ contains the most heterogeneous phenomena, the article develops an interpretation of the fate of individualization in Western capitalism today. After having differentiated three different meanings of that notion with the help of Georg Simmel, the position is defended that the claims to individual self-realization, which have rapidly multiplied in the Western societies of thirty or forty years ago, have become so much a feature of the institutionalized expectations inherent in social reproduction that (...) the particular goals of such claims are lost and they are transmuted into a support of the system’s legitimacy. The result of this paradoxical reversal, where the processes which once promised an increase of qualitative freedom are henceforth altered into an ideology of de-institutionalization, is the emergence in individuals of a number of symptoms of inner emptiness, of feeling oneself to be superfluous, and of absence of purpose. (shrink)

While the study of implicit learning is nothing new, the field as a whole has come to embody — over the last decade or so — ongoing questioning about three of the most fundamental debates in the cognitive sciences: The nature of consciousness, the nature of mental representation (in particular the difficult issue of abstraction), and the role of experience in shaping the cognitive system. Our main goal in this chapter is to offer a framework that attempts to integrate current (...) thinking about these three issues in a way that specifically links consciousness with adaptation and learning. Our assumptions about this relationship are rooted in further assumptions about the nature of processing and of representation in cognitive systems. When considered together, we believe that these assumptions offer a new perspective on the relationships between conscious and unconscious processing and on the function of consciousness in cognitive systems. (shrink)

I put forward an externalist theory of social understanding. On this view, psychological sense making takes place in environments that contain both agent and interpreter. The spatial structure of such environments is social, in the sense that its occupants locate its objects by an exercise in triangulation relative to each of their standpoints. This triangulation is achieved in intersubjective interaction and gives rise to a triadic model of the social mind. This model can then be used to make sense of (...) others’ observed actions. Its possession plays a vital role in the development of the capacity for false belief reasoning. The view offers an integrated account of the development of social cognition from primary intersubjectivity to level-2 perspective taking. It incorporates insights from interactionism and mindreading theories of social cognition and thus offers a way out of the stalemate between defenders of the two views. Because psychological sense making is perspectival, the frame problem does not arise for social reasoners: the perspective they bring to bear on the action that is to be interpreted constrains the information they can select to make sense of what others do. (shrink)

I argue that joint attention solves the “base problem” as it arises for Schiffer’s and Lewis’s theories of common knowledge. The problem is that an account is needed of the perceptual base of some forms of common knowledge that gets by without itself invoking common knowledge. The paper solves the problem by developing a theory of joint attention as consisting in the exercise of joint know-how involving particular and sometimes distal targets and arguing that certain joint perceivers can always have (...) a minimal form of propositional common knowledge about the location of these targets. On such a view, perceptual common knowledge is based on the experience of a process that is maintained by way of perceivers’ exercise of an object-involving form of joint know-how. Some reductive theories of collective intentionality require that agents’ intentions and subplans are common knowledge (or “out in the open”) between them. For these theories the base problem arises again. The enacted theory of joint attention can solve the problem. The argument is exactly parallel to the common knowledge case. The openness of joint agents’ intentions and meshing subplans is explained by appeal to their practical knowledge of how to maintain the process by way of which they pursue the collective intention. They can then make this knowledge explicit by linguistic communication. When they succeed in communicating knowledge of their meshing subplans as pursued in a joint action context, they necessarily have this knowledge in common. For theories of collective intentionality that include a common knowledge condition, the experience of participating in a perceptually constituted joint action provides the base that renders harmless the regress that otherwise threatens reductive analyses. (shrink)

Over the past few years numerous proposals have appeared that attempt to characterize consciousness in terms of what could be called its computational correlates: Principles of information processing with which to characterize the differences between conscious and unconscious processing. Proposed computational correlates include architectural specialization (such as the involvement of specific regions of the brain in conscious processing), properties of representations (such as their stability in time or their strength), and properties of specific processes (such as resonance, synchrony, interactivity, or (...) information integration). In exactly the same way as one can engage in a search for the neural correlates of consciousness, one can thus search for the computational correlates of consciousness. The most direct way of doing is to contrast models of conscious versus unconscious information processing. In this paper, I review these developments and illustrate how computational modeling of specific cognitive processes can be useful in exploring and in formulating putative computational principles through which to capture the differences between conscious and unconscious cognition. What can be gained from such approaches to the problem of consciousness is an understanding of the function it plays in information processing and of the mechanisms that subtend it. Here, I suggest that the central function of consciousness is to make it possible for cognitive agents to exert ?exible, adaptive control over behavior. From this perspective, consciousness is best characterized as involving (1) a graded continuum de?ned over quality of representation, such that availability to consciousness and to cognitive control correlates with properties of representation, and (2) the implication of systems of meta-representations. (shrink)

In his recent book, Recognition: A Chapter in the History of European ideas (2021), Honneth has explained how he understands the French concept of recognition. This article places Honneth's latest interpretation in the context of his long-standing and evolving engagement with French theory over several decades. Honneth acknowledges his significant debt to a French tendency to view recognition as a problem for self-realisation (and not an opportunity). Bourdieu's and Boltanski's account of how ambitions become limited by the availability of capital (...) and the internalisation of class was a major breakthrough in Honneth's intellectual development. Other formative French influences included the articulation of denigration in existentialist phenomenology, and the idea of regulative power in Foucault, with “deconstructive” asymmetrical care presented as productive but comparatively less important. The discussion also reveals why Honneth presents the “German” concept of recognition as having basic explanatory force (as an opportunity for self-realisation), and why he resists what he views as a French-influenced tendency (also present in some contemporary German critical theory) to depict recognition as ambivalent. The discussion reveals, on one hand, how working across perceived divides can be immensely productive, and, on the other hand, why a French-German divide remains entrenched in contemporary thinking. (shrink)

This chapter explores the specificities, strengths, and weaknesses of the idea of reciprocity as a basis for intergenerational obligations. Three models are presented: descending, ascending, and double reciprocity. Each of these three models is tested against three objections. The first objection asks why having received something from someone would necessarily entail the obligation to give back. The second objection questions the ability of each model to justify the direction of reciprocation. A final objection looks at the extent to which reciprocity-based (...) views adjust the content of our obligation to the fluctuations in population size. (shrink)

The first debate in this article has to do with the very possibility of intergenerational justice beyond our obligations towards members of other generations while they coexist with us. Here, we ask ourselves whether we owe anything to people who either have died already, or are not yet born. Differences in temporal location mean that people may not exist at the same time — be it only during part of their life — which raises special ethical challenges. It is one (...) thing to decide whether we owe anything to the next generation(s). It is another to define what we owe them. Most standard theories of justice have tried to answer this difficult question. This article focuses on a comparison between a reciprocity-based and an egalitarian account of justice between generations. It then turns, on the one hand, to a brief discussion of alternative theories and, on the other hand, to implementation issues. (shrink)

This Introduction tells the story of intergerational justice and how it has influenced philosophers and political thinkers throughout history. The Introduction goes on to discuss the aims of the book, which is to offer a sustained discussion of intergenerational justice as seen by practical philosophers. The first part of the book focuses on the way in which various schools of thought in moral and political philosophy approach the domain of intergenerational justice, while the second part focuses on more specific aspects, (...) such as how these theories address the question of motivation, how they deal with demographic fluctuations, or how they can be applied to real-world issues such as climate change. (shrink)

Moral-theoretical categories have almost disappeared from the theoretical vocabulary of sociology. Neither perceptions of legitimacy nor perceptions of injustice, neither moral argument nor normative consensus now play a significant role in explaining the social order. Instead the object of sociological inquiry is understood either according to the pattern of anonymous self-organization processes or as the result of cooperation among strategically-oriented actors; accordingly, the disciplinary role models are biology or economics, whose conceptual models appear suited to explain such a complex process (...) as the reproduction of societies. One may easily get the impression that current sociology wishes to finally bid farewell to the generation of its founding fathers; since from Weber and Durkheim to Talcott Parsons, it was a settled matter that an adequate basic conception of the social world could only be derived using the concepts, models, or hypotheses of moral theory – practical philosophy was, so to speak, the foundation and guiding discipline for classical sociology. After the “Theory of Communicative Action”– the last grand sketch of a complete social theory based on the sources of practical philosophy – all this seems to have been forgotten. In any event, it could until recently appear that with Habermas’ book the tradition of a normatively oriented sociology has come to an end. It is mostly due to the efforts of a small group of researchers in France – which assembled around Luc Boltanski and Laurent Thévenot – that there continues to be a strand within social theory that employs sources of moral philosophy. Having emerged from an internal critique of Pierre Bourdieu's sociology, the works of this highly productive circle, probing ever new directions, seek to explain the integration of our societies through the interplay of different moral convictions.1 The foundational text of this sociological school is the study On Justification, originally published in 1991.2 This book, which has meanwhile also been published in German,3 deserves careful consideration not least because it represents the most interesting attempt of the more recent past to give sociology a basis in moral philosophy. (shrink)

La présente contribution vise à offrir au lecteur une présentation de la doctrine suffisantiste de la justice, de ses justifications générales et spécifiques et de son articulation possible avec d’autres théories de la justice. Elle explore certains aspects plus particuliers tels que la place de la responsabilité en son sein, son applicabilité au domaine intergénérationnel ou son positionnement par rapport à la question des « vies-complètes ». Elle montre aussi en quoi, quelles que soient les faiblesses possibles de cette doctrine, (...) elle présente des caractéristiques la rendant non redondante, en particulier par rapport à l’égalitarisme du leximin.This paper aims at presenting sufficientarianism, its justifications, specificities and the ways in which it can be combined with other theories of justice. We also explore more specific dimensions such as the place of responsibility-sensitivity, the doctrine’s application to the intergenerational realm or its interest for « complete-life » questions. We show to what extent, despite some weaknesses, it is not redundant when compared to or combined with leximin egalitarianism. (shrink)

Comparing the relative sensitivity of direct and indirect measures of learning is proposed as the best way to provide evidence for unconscious learning when both conceptual and operative definitions of awareness are lacking. This approach was first proposed by Reingold & Merikle (1988) in the context of subliminal perception. In this paper, we apply it to a choice reaction time task in which the material is generated based on a probabilistic finite-state grammar (Cleeremans, 1993). We show (1) that participants progressively (...) learn about the statistical structure of the stimulus material over training with the choice reaction time task, and (2) that they can use some of this knowledge to predict the location of the next stimulus in a subsequent “generation” task. However, detailed partial correlational analyses of the correspondence between performance during the reaction time task and the statistical structure of the training material showed that large effects remained even when controlling for explicit knowledge as assessed by the generation task. Hence we conclude (1) that at least some of the knowledge expressed through reaction time performance can not be characterized as conscious, and (2) that even when associations are found at a global level of analysis, dissociations can still be obtained when more detailed analyses are conducted. Finally, we also show that participants are limited in the depth of the contingencies they can learn about, and that these limitations are shared by the Simple Recurrent Network model of Cleeremans & McClelland (1991). (shrink)

Academic interest in the phenomenon of joint attention -- the capacity to attend to an object together with another creature -- has increased rapidly over the past two decades. Yet it isn't easy to spell out in detail what joint attention is, how it ought to be characterized, and what exactly its significance consists in. The writers for this volume address these and related questions by drawing on a variety of disciplines, including developmental and comparative psychology, philosophy of mind, and (...) social neuroscience. The volume organizes their contributions along three main themes: definitional concerns, such as the question of whether or not joint attention should be understood as an irreducibly basic state of mind; processes and mechanisms obtaining on both the neural and behavioral levels; and the functional significance of joint attention, in particular the role it plays in comprehending spatial perspectives and understanding other minds. The collected papers present new work by leading researchers on one of the key issues in social cognition. They demonstrate that an adequate theory of joint attention is indispensable for a comprehensive account of mind. (shrink)

What Makes Age Discrimination Special? A Philosophical Look at the ECJ Case Law This paper provides an account of what makes age discrimination special, going through a set of possible justifications. In the end, it turns out that a full understanding of the specialness of age-based differential treatment requires that we consider together the ‘reliable proxy,’ the ‘complete-life neutrality,’ the ‘sequence efficiency’ and the ‘affirmative egalitarian’ accounts. Depending on the specific age criteria, all four accounts may apply or only some (...) of them. This is the first key message of this paper. The second message of the paper has to do with the age group/birth cohort distinction. All measures that have a differential impact on different cohorts also tend to have a differential impact on various age groups during the transition. The paper points at the practical implications of anti-age-discrimination law for differential treatment between birth cohorts. The whole argument is confronted all along with ECJ cases. (shrink)

This paper argues that the problem of expertise calls for a rapprochement between social epistemology and argumentation theory. Social epistemology has tended to emphasise the role of expert testimony, neglecting the argumentative function of appeals to expert opinion by non-experts. The first half of the paper discusses parallels and contrasts between the two cases of direct expert testimony and appeals to expert opinion by our epistemic peers, respectively. Importantly, appeals to expert opinion need to be advertised as such, if they (...) are to sway an epistemic peer. The second half of the paper sketches a theoretical framework for thinking about assessments of expertise in a unified way, via a ‘default and challenge’ model that emphasises the need for a version of conversational scorekeeping. It is through such scorekeeping that interlocutors can track and coordinate their differences in epistemic outlook. The paper concludes with a genealogical perspective on the function of (attributions of) expertise: acceptance of another’s appeal to expert opinion may be construed as tacit agreement that inquiry, for now, has been taken far enough. (shrink)

In this paper, I am concerned with persons' capacity for joint action. I start by suggesting that approaches which seek to account for that capacity in terms of collective intentionality face a problem: there are actions that clearly seem to qualify as collective even though the involved persons cannot be said to entertain an overarching 'We'-intention (however one characterizes this notion). I then go on to develop an alternative account of action that loosely draws on Elizabeth Anscombe's action theory and (...) show how this alternative account can be applied to joint action. In so doing, I stress the importance of the phenomenal dimension of agency. (shrink)

According to Unconscious Thought Theory (Dijksterhuis & Nordgren, 2006), complex decisions are best made after a period of distraction assumed to elicit “unconscious thought”. Here, we suggest instead that the superiority of decisions made after distraction results from the fact that conscious deliberation can deteriorate impressions formed online during information acquisition. We found that participants instructed to form an impression made better decisions after distraction than after deliberation, thereby replicating earlier findings. However, decisions made immediately were just as good as (...) decisions made after distraction, which suggests (1) that people had already made their decision during information acquisition, (2) that deliberation-without-attention does not occur during distraction, and (3) that ruminating about one's first impression can deteriorate decision quality. Strikingly, in another condition that should have favored unconscious thought even more, deliberated decisions were better than immediate or distracted decisions. These findings were replicated in a field study. (shrink)

Peter Strawson holds that on a proper conception of personhood, the problem of Other Minds does not arise. I suggest that the viability of his proposal depends on a particular account of person perception. I argue that neither the theory theory nor the simulation theory of mindreading constitutes a suitable basis for this account. I then go on to defend Peter Hobson's notion of 'feeling perception' as an intersubjectivist alternative that, if properly developed, delivers a basis for a viable account (...) of person perception. In developing that alternative, I draw on John Campbell's suggestion that self-understanding is constituted, in part, by an understanding of oneself as a cause of many events. (shrink)

In Sweden, palliative care has, over the past decades, been object to policies and guidelines with focus on how to achieve “good palliative care”. The aim of this study has been to analyse how experts make sense of the development and the current state of palliative care. Departing from this aim, focus has been on identifying how personal experiences of ‘the self’ are intertwined with culturally available meta-level concepts and how experts contribute to construct new scripts on palliative care. Twelve (...) qualitative interviews were conducted. Four scripts were identified after analysing the empirical material: 1. script of paths towards working within palliative care; 2. script of desirable and deterrent reference points; 3. script of tensions between improvement and bureaucracy; and 4. script of low status and uncertain definitions. The findings of this study illustrate how experts in complex ways intertwine experiences of ‘the self’ with meta-levels concepts in order to make sense of the field of palliative care. The participants did not endorse one “right way” of “good” deaths. Instead, palliative care was considered to be located in a complex state where the historical development, consisting of both desirable ideals, death denials and lack of guidelines, and more recent developments of strives towards universal concepts, “improvement” and increased bureaucracy altogether played a significant role for how palliative care has developed and is organised and conducted today. (shrink)

Over the past decade, sequence learning has gradually become a central paradigm through which to study implicit learning. In this chapter, we start by briefly summarizing the results obtained with different variants of the sequence learning paradigm. We distinguish three subparadigms in terms of whether the stimulus material is generated either by following a fixed and repeating sequence (e.g., Nissen & Bullemer, 1987), by relying on a complex set of rules from which one can produce several alternative deterministic sequences (e.g., (...) Lewicki, Hill & Bizot, 1988; Stadler, 1989), or by following the output of a probabilistic set of rules such as instantiated by noisy finite-state grammars (Cleeremans & McClelland, 1991; Jiménez, Mendéz & Cleeremans, 1996). Next, we focus on the processes involved in sequence representation and acquisition. We suggest that the sensitivity to the sequential structure observed in the probabilistic subparadigm can only be a result of the acquisition of a representation of the statistical constraints of the material, and that this sensitivity emerges through the operation of mechanisms that are well instantiated by connectionist models such as the Simple Recurrent Network (Elman, 1990; Cleeremans, 1993b). We present new simulation work meant to explore to what extent the model can also account for specific data obtained in a paradigmatic instance of deterministic, rule-based sequence learning task: Lewicki et al. (1988)'s situation. Finally, we report on the results of an experiment that compares learning on otherwise similar deterministic and probabilistic structures, and we show that learning of both types of structures is equivalent only under conditions that maximally hinder explicit acquisition. Taken together, these simulation and experimental data lend support to the claim that implicit learning in all three sequence learning subparadigms can amount to a form of statistical sequence learning. They also suggest that distinguishing among several theories of sequence representation and acquisition may require us to analize the data in great detail. Hopefully, however, some truth can be found in such details.. (shrink)

Hume concludes Book II of his Treatise of Human Nature with a section on the passion of curiosity, ‘that love of truth, which was the first source of all our enquiries’. At first sight, this characterisation of curiosity – as the motivating factor in that specifically human activity that is the pursuit of knowledge – may seem unoriginal. However, when Hume speaks of the ‘source of all our enquiries’, he is referring both to the universal human pursuit of knowledge and (...) to his own philosophical project. Seen in this light, his discussion of curiosity takes on a new significance, as it weaves together elements of his systematic account of human nature – notably, his theory of cognition and motivation – with observations about the pursuit of philosophy as well as the progress of the arts and sciences. In the present paper, I offer a reconstruction of Hume’s view on curiosity and its role in cognition and inquiry. (shrink)

In this article, we analyze both M. J. Wainwright and E. M. Reingold's view of the process dissociation measurement models presented by A. Buchner, E. Erdfelder, and B. Vaterrodt-Plunnecke and their suggestions on that topic. This analysis reveals a number of problems in Wainwright and Reingold's approach. Some of these problems are more subtle than others, but they are nevertheless consequential. Thus, researchers working with the process dissociation procedure should be aware of these problems.

Pronpongo una nueva manera de concebir la aceptación de proposiciones y su relación con la creencia y la inferencia. Argumento además que adoptar esta propuesta nos permite resolver de manera relativamente sencilla algunas paradojas aparentemente tan disímbolas cómo la del prefacio, la lotería y el sorites. Según esta propuesta, el error detrás de la paradoja sorítica es pensar que quién cree que hay una línea divisoria entre lo que cae dentro de la extensión de un término y lo que cae (...) fuera de él debe creer también de algún lugar que ahí se encuentra dicha línea divisoria. Espero convencerlos de que no es así, y que por lo tanto, nuestros juicios de sentido común no nos llevan a ninguna contradicción. (shrink)

This paper develops a theory of joint attention as based on, and explicable in terms of, the exercise of a minimal kind of perceptual joint know-how. On the action-based view I shall be developing, joint forms of perception are object-involving processes constituted by perceivers’ skillfully co-ordinated motor movements in social space. Joint experience can then be understood as presenting the process to the involved perceivers and joint attention as perceivers’ focus on the object of this process. This theory reconciles at (...) least some primitivist and reductionist intuitions about joint attention. (shrink)

This is a two tiered investigation. On the one hand, the author presents a systematic account of the philosophy of Hilary Putnam. Being the first comprehensive account to be published in the German-speaking world, the author traces the development of Putnam's realism and philosophy of language and their connections from the early 1950's to 2000. Contrary to the popular view of the discontinuity of Putnam's philosophy, he demonstrates that Putnam maintains certain semantic, pragmatic and epistemological foundations for the rational confirmability, (...) fallibility and self-corrigibility of theoretical knowledge in the empirical sciences as a constant around which many other philosophical assumptions are allowed to vary under critical examination. The resulting view of Putnam's philosophical "position" is decidedly "anti-metaphysical" (contrary to the common association of his philosophy of language with e.g. Kripke's understanding of realism), but not fully "deflationary" (contrary to the reclamation of his criticism of realist metaphysics as Quinean or Rortyan skepticism). On the other hand, the author generalizes, in the second and third parts of the book, Putnam's now famous theory of meaning and reference to develop a framework for the pragmatics of semantic continuity and discontinuity, as well as conceptual change within general terms in empirical settings, like natural kind terms, theoretical terms in natural sciences and commonsense classifications. The third part presents, develops and defends the basic normative premisses as a pragmatic alternative to both, metaphysical (Kripke, Devitt) and sceptical approaches (Quine, Kuhn). The main result here is that many (if not all) preconditions for the semantic bahvior of 'rigid' general terms are not, as usually assumed, ontological in nature, but can be usefully framed as part of the pragmatics of general terms in epistemic practices counting with rational revisability. (shrink)

What should maximin egalitarians think about seniority privileges? We contrast a good-specific and an all-things-considered perspective. As to the former, inertia and erasing effects of a seniority-based allocation of benefits from employment are identified, allowing us to spot the categories of workers and job-seekers made involuntarily worse off by such a practice. What matters however is to find out whether abolishing seniority privileges will bring about a society in which the all-things-considered worst off people are better off than in the (...) seniority rule's presence. An assessment of the latter's cost-reduction potential is thus needed, enabling us to bridge a practice taking place within a firm with its impact on who the least well off members of society are likely to be. Three accounts of the profitability of seniority privileges are discussed: the “(firm specific) human capital”, the “deferred compensation” and the “knowledge transfer” ones. The respective relevance of “good-specific” and “all-things-considered” analysis is discussed. It turns out that under certain circumstances, a maximin egalitarian case for seniority privileges could be made. Senior: Do you know that they are planning layoffs? Of course, it is only fair that they lay-off the newcomers first! After all, I have been loyal to the company for many years. Junior: Did I choose to be a newcomer? Footnotes1 Many thanks to two anonymous referees, to P.-M. Boulanger, B. Cockx, C. Fabre, L. Jacquet, E. Lazear, I. Robeyns, G. Vallée, Y. Vanderborght, Ph. Van Parijs, V. Vansteenberghe and J. de Wispelaere for their help and critical comments. Earlier versions of this paper were presented in Louvain-la-Neuve, Ghent, Montevideo and London. I am very grateful to these audiences. Special thanks to G. Brennan for his extensive and extremely valuable comments on earlier drafts of this paper. The usual disclaimers apply. (shrink)

How are changes in the social order of recognition to be evaluated normatively? We argue that the conventional means of liberal philosophical theories of justice are insufficient to answer this question. This is for three reasons: First, relations of recognition are neither basic rights nor distributable goods, but rather constitutive for the meaning of those rights and goods which constitute the object domain of distributive theories of justice. Second, relations of recognition provide the framework for many questions of justice, outside (...) of which they make no sense. Third, the focus of contemporary theories of justice on basic rights risks supporting colonialization tendencies of purely legal forms of recognition. As an alternative, we discuss hermeneutic theories of justice and a conception of social freedom as inclusion and individualization. (shrink)

Change blindness—our inability to detect changes in a stimulus—occurs even when the change takes place gradually, without disruption (Simons et al., 2000). Such gradual changes are more difficult to detect than changes that involve a disruption. In this experiment, we extend previous findings to the domain of facial expressions of emotions occurring in the context of a realistic scene. Even with changes occurring in central, highly relevant stimuli such as faces, gradual changes still produced high levels of change blindness: Detection (...) rates were three times lower for gradual changes than for displays involving disruption, with only 15% of the observers perceiving the gradual change within a single trial. However, despite this high rate of change blindness, changes on faces were significantly better detected than color changes occurring on non facial objects in the same scene. (shrink)

Die Studie widmet sich der Frage nach der Bedeutung und Funktion von Textualität und Darstellungsform für die Philosophie im Allgemeinen und Nietzsches Denken im Besonderen. Im Mittelpunkt steht die Lektüre ausgewählter Kapitel der Götzen-Dämmerung. Die Konsequenzen der Schriftlichkeit von Philosophie werden herausgearbeitet. Dabei wird auch die in Nietzsches Nachlass umfangreich dokumentierte Genese des Werkes in ihrer Überlieferungsform berücksichtigt. Durch die Anknüpfung an die Nietzsche-Forschung, an aktuelle text- und editionstheoretische sowie an philosophische Debatten wie die Frage nach Formen nichtpropositionalen Wissens zeichnet (...) die Studie die philosophisch-kognitive Valenz der textuellen Darstellungsformen der Götzen-Dämmerung nach. Dabei werden insbesondere die Rolle von Selbstbezüglichkeitsfiguren sowie der von diesen häufig katalysierten ästhetischen oder intratextuellen Autosubversionen freigelegt. (shrink)

Nietzsche s writings cannot be truly understood without examining their specific representational forms and complex textual stagings. In this volume, an international group of scholars consider how form and content are interrelated in Nietzsche s Beyond Good and Evil. The volume includes important new essays on stylistics, rhetoric, history of philosophy, and history of editions.".