Essays by Jurgen Habermas on truth, objectivity, normativity, naturalism, and realism after the linguistic turn.

The prototypes of definiteness and indefiniteness in English are the definite article the and the indefinite article a/an, and singular noun phrases (NPs)1 determined by them. That being the case it is not to be predicted that the concepts, whatever their content, will extend satisfactorily to other determiners or NP types. However it has become standard to extend these notions. Of the two categories definites have received rather more attention, and more than one researcher has characterized the category of definite (...) NPs by enumerating NP types. Westerståhl (1985), who is concerned only with determiners in the paper cited, gives a very short list: demonstrative NPs, possessive NPs, and definite descriptions. Prince (1992) lists proper names and personal pronouns, as well as NPs with the, a demonstrative, or a possessive NP as determiner. She notes, in addition, that “certain quantifiers (e.g. all, every) have been argued to be definite” (Prince 1992: 299). This list, with the quantifiers added, agrees with that given by Birner & Ward (1998, 114). Ariel (1988, 1990) adds null anaphoric NPs. (shrink)

The word ‘social’ is used in many different contexts, in each of which the word has a general root meaning, common to all contexts in which it is found. But in addition, there are other specific meanings, peculiar to each context, which are intended by the user of the term. Frequently, these other meanings of the term are not made explicit, and hence ambiguities arise.The root meaning of the term involves some sort of relationship among two or more people. ‘Social’ (...) is derived from the Latin socius, meaning ‘companion’. At least two people are involved here: 1) the person having the companion, and 2) the companion. Nothing is intended as to the nature of the relationship between the two or more people. In each context in which the term ‘social’ is used it has this root meaning. This paper is concerned, however, with those other aspects of the meanings of the term which are intended to specify more precisely the nature of this relationship among two or more people, and therefore are different in different contexts. The contexts will be isolated, and the more specific meanings of the term in these different contexts will be distinguished and made explicit. (shrink)

The controversies related to John Taurek’s rescue case concern the importance of numbers in deciding about whom to help in situations in which there is a shortage of means. Taurek thinks that the number of the needy does not matter; we can save one person rather than many people. Since both common sense and the duty to responsibly administer help make us approve the decision to help those who are more in number, Taurek’s thesis seems counterintuitive. The majority of authors (...) discussing Taurek’s thesis defend the importance of numbers in such decisions, and few are inclined to accept some of his intuitions, recognizing the counting of people who need help as morally problematic. However, the authors who defend the importance of numbers reject a simple utilitarian approach and try to justify the claim that the majority should have priority in such a way that no person involved in the conflict of distribution could charge the rescuer with not having taken his or her claims into account. (shrink)

This collection breaks new ground in four key areas of feminist social thought: the sex/gender debates; challenges to liberalism/equality; feminist ethics; and feminist perspectives on global ethics and politics in the 21st century. Altogether, the essays provide an innovative look at feminist philosophy while making substantive contributions to current debates in gender theory, ethics, and political thought.

Is it possible to find an ethical and generative way to speak about the ‘work’ of Indigenous art? Regardless of what prohibitions exist to protect sacred knowledge from the gaze of Western eyes, Indigenous work is circulating; it is being read, misread, interpreted, misinterpreted and otherwise known. How can a non-Indigenous person ‘speak’ about Indigenous art without reducing it to the diagram, collapsing it into Western modes of knowing, or intruding into the domain of restricted cultural information? Given the lessons (...) of the Indigenous cultural practices, I propose that the work of art is performative and not merely representational. Through attention to the operation of rhythm in Kathleen Petyarre’s paintings, I propose to reconfigure contemporary understandings of performativity. In this formulation I will argue that in the dynamic productivity of the performative act, the world intrudes into practice, and in a double movement, practice casts its effects back towards the world. In this way I suggest that just as life gets into images, so imaging also produces reality. This mutual reflection is the work of art. (shrink)

I think that the international movement of doing philosophy with children consists of two main lines: the first line aims at elementary and seconday school philosophy and the second line aims at philosophy as an after-school enrichment. I'm mainly engaged in doing philosophy with children outside school.

In this paper I discuss how, given the complexity of biological systems, reliance on theoretical models in the development and testing of biological theories leads to an uncomfortable form of anti-realism. I locate the source of this discomfort in the uniqueness and hence diversity of biological phenomena, in contrast with the simplicity and uniformity of the subject matter of physics. I have argued elsewhere that the use of theoretical models creates an unresolvable tension between the explanatory strength and predictive power (...) of hypotheses, and I review this argument again here. My discussion parallels that of Nancy Cartwright, who claims that the use of ceteris paribus laws in physics creates an antagonism between truth and explanation that requires theoretical models to figure centrally in scientific explanation, thereby precluding realism. I argue instead that in biology it is the use of theoretical models that creates this conflict, and conclude that adequate biological explanation cannot rely on the modeling approach alone. Finally, I claim that if we accept the semantic view of theories, which makes theoretical models an integral part of our conception of theories, we must accept anti-realism as well. (shrink)

In a provocative book, Andrew Carstairs- McCarthy argues that the apparently universal distinction in human languages between sentences and noun phrases cannot be assumed to be inevitable for languages with the expressive power of human languages, but needs explaining. His work suggests, but does not explicitly state, that there is also no conceptual necessity for the distinction between basic types e and t, a distinction argued for by Frege and carried into formal semantics through the work of Montague. Pragmatic distinctions (...) among various kinds of speech acts, including asserting, questioning, commanding, and pointing things out are assumed in Carstairs- McCarthy ’s work, as are expressions of functional types; what is questioned is whether a syntacticized sentence-NP distinction is essential. (shrink)

Many characterizations of definiteness in natural language have been given. However a number of them converge on a single idea involving uniqueness of applicability of a property. This paper will attempt to do two things. One is to try to unify some of these current views of definiteness, seeing them as drawing out Gricean conversational implicatures of the uniqueness concept, and the other is to try a more articulated approach to dealing with some recalcitrant counterexamples. I will focus primarily, but (...) not entirely, on definite descriptions in English. (shrink)

This paper has two main goals: first, it reconstructs Aristotle’s account of measurement in his Metaphysics and shows how it connects to modern notions of measurement. Second, it demonstrates that Aristotle’s notion of measurement only works for simple measures, but leads him into a dilemma once it comes to measuring complex phenomena, like mo-tion, where two or more different aspects, such as time and space, have to be taken into account. This is shown with the help of Aristotle’s reaction to (...) one of the problems Zeno’s dichotomy paradox raises: Aristotle implicitly employs a complex measure of motion when solving this problem, while he explicitly characterizes the measure of motion as a simple measure in his Physics. (shrink)

Background Citizen science and models for public participation in health research share normative ideals of participation, inclusion, and public and patient engagement. Academic researchers collaborate in research with members of the public involved in an issue, maximizing all involved assets, competencies, and knowledge. In citizen science new ethical issues arise, such as who decides, who participates, who is excluded, what it means to share power equally, or whose knowledge counts. This article aims to present an ethics framework that offers a (...) lens of understanding and heuristic guidelines to deal with ethical issues in citizen science. -/- Methods We conducted seven case studies between 2015 and 2021 to attune and validate the ethics framework for the context of citizen science. The cases related to studies with older adults, people with a psychiatric vulnerability, people dependent on community care, people who are unemployed or living in poverty or both, and young adults with respiratory disease. -/- Results Ethics in citizen science reaches beyond the ethical issues in traditional biomedical and health research. It entails more than following procedures about informed consent and privacy and submitting a proposal to a Medical Research Ethics Committee. Ethics in citizen science relates to everyday ethical issues during the study, including relational and moral complexities concerning collaboration, sharing power, and democratic decision-making. Dealing with these issues requires ethics work of researchers. This entails seeing ethically salient issues and reflecting on everyday ethical issues. Ethics work consists of seven features: framing work, role work, emotion work, identity work, reason work, relationship work, and performance work. All are relevant for researchers in citizen science. -/- Conclusions Ethical issues in citizen science often relate to power differentials, partnership, and collaboration between academics and non-academics. The ethics framework prepares researchers for the work needed in citizen science to act responsibly and offers a heuristic guide to reflect on ethics. Reflection on ethics is a pathway towards ethical citizen science, especially if researchers collaboratively reflect in partnership with non-academics who are subject to the moral issue. (shrink)

Like Spanish moss on a live oak tree, the scientific study of meaning in language has expanded in the last 100 years, and continues to expand steadily. In this essay I want to chart some central themes in that expansion, including their histories and their important figures. Our attention will be directed toward what is called 'formal semantics', which is the adaptation to natural language of analytical techniques from logic.[1] The first, background, section of the paper will survey the changing (...) attitudes of linguists toward semantics into the last third of the century. The second and third sections will examine current formal approaches to meaning. In the final section I will summarize some of the common assumptions of the approaches examined in the middle sections of the paper, sketch a few alternatives, and make some daring predictions. (shrink)

The paper addresses charges of risk and loss aversion as well as of irrationality directed against the precautionary principle, by providing an epistemic analysis of its specific role in the safety law system. In particular, I contend that: 1) risk aversion is not a form of irrational or biased behaviour; 2) both risk and loss aversion regard the form of the utility function, whereas PP rather regards the information on which to base the decision; 3) thus PP has formally nothing (...) to do with risk or loss aversion but rather with risk awareness; 4) PP removes a fictional construct in the legal system, according to which any hazard should be ignored and denied until it is scientifically proven; 5) the quandary originates in the tension between current methods of evidence evaluation, and the logic underlying PP which demands for a probabilistic epistemology. (shrink)

Tematem wiodącym jest kwestia prawa do życia. Punkt wyjścia stanowi art. 3. Powszechnej Deklaracji Praw Człowieka, który przypisuje to prawo wszystkim ludziom. Problem zaczyna się jednak, kiedy trzeba uściślić, czy w tekście Deklaracji chodzi o pojęcie "istoty ludzkiej", którego desygnatem jest istota ludzka w sensie czysto biologicznym, czy też chodzi raczej o pojęcie "osoby", a więc termin odnoszący się do sfery moralności. Współczesna definicja "osoby ludzkiej", jakiej używa bioetyka wywodzi się z filozofii nowożytnej: ta zaś za cechę konstytutywną ludzi uznaje (...) świadomość. Rozumowanie w tych kategoriach nieuchronnie oznacza kłopoty ze zdefiniowaniem moralnego statusu, a co za tym idzie, pozwala na zgłaszanie wątpliwości co do prawa do życia w przypadku embrionów i osób nieuleczalnie chorych, w stosunku do których rozważana bywa możliwość zastosowania eutanazji. Zagadnienie, które jest dyskutowane w niniejszym artykule, w kontekście prawa do życia dotyczy aborcji, a więc odnosi się do pierwszej z grup istot ludzkich, których osobowy status bywa podważony. Tytułowa dla artykułu moralna niepewność nie dotyczy częstokroć w kontekście dyskusji nad dopuszczalnością aborcji normy "nie zabijaj". Zwolennicy aborcji nie przeczą, że zabijanie ludzkich osób jest złem, wątpią jednak w możliwość uznania prenatalnych faz rozwojowych człowieka za fazy, w których mamy do czynienia z pełnoprawną ludzką osobą. Wątpliwość ta ma charakter moralny, a nie jedynie teoretyczny, decydując o aborcji nie ryzykujemy zatem błędnego sądu o charakterze teoretycznym, lecz spełnienie moralnie niesłusznego czynu. Jakkolwiek niepewność i ryzyko są nieodłącznymi elementami ludzkiego działania, to w przypadku gdy przedmiotem ryzyka jest moralnie doniosłe dobro, a takim jest ludzkie życie, stawiamy ryzyku granice: nie ryzykujemy życia drugich. W tradycyjnej teologii moralnej przywoływano tutaj zasadę tutioryzmu, nakazującą w przypadkach wątpliwych zawsze zachować odnośne prawo, czyli w dyskutowanym tu przypadku normę "nie zabijaj". Podobna intuicja towarzyszy współczesnemu kanadyjskiemu filozofowi, T. Lockhartowi. Autor zastrzega, że nie chce rozstrzygać, czy ludzki płód już jest, czy też jeszcze nie jest osobą wraz z przysługującym jej prawem do życia, przyjmuje jednak zasady działania w sytuacji niepewności, z których wynika, że niezależnie od przyjmowanych przez nas tutaj przekonań. wyborem racjonalnym jest zaniechanie aborcji. (shrink)

The individual right of access to one’s own data is a crucial privacy protection long recognized in U.S. federal privacy laws. Mobile health devices and research software used in citizen science often fall outside the HIPAA Privacy Rule, leaving participants without HIPAA’s right of access to one’s own data. Absent state laws requiring access, the law of contract, as reflected in end-user agreements and terms of service, governs individuals’ ability to find out how much data is being stored and how (...) it might be shared with third parties. Efforts to address this problem by establishing norms of individual access to data from mobile health research unfortunately can run afoul of the FDA’s investigational device exemption requirements. (shrink)

Within the relevant semantics and pragmatics literature the terms “presupposition” and “conventional implicature” are used in a variety of different, but frequently overlapping, ways. The overlaps are perhaps not surprising, given that the two categories of conveyed meaning share the property of remaining constant in the scope of other operators—the property usefully characterize as projectivity. One of my purposes in this paper will be to try to clarify these different usages. In addition to that we will explore two additional properties (...) which are shared by some of these projective contents—strong contextual felicity, and neutralizability. The idea is to try to explain all three properties by taking into account information packaging. (shrink)

Bioethics education now takes place outside universities as well as within them. How should clinicians, ethics committee members, and policymakers be taught the ethics they need, and how may their progress best be evaluated?

Donkey pronouns (e.g., it in Every farmer who owns a donkey beats it) are argued to have an interpretation more similar to a demonstrative phrase (e.g., . . . beats that donkey) than to any of the other alternatives generally considered (e.g., . . . the donkey(s) he owns, . . . a donkey he owns). Like the demonstrative phrase, the pronoun is not equivalent to Evans' E-type paraphrase, nor to either the weak or the strong reading sometimes claimed for (...) donkey sentences. A consequence is to narrow the range of formal analyses. (shrink)

Los conceptos de democracia y de gobierno representativo están inevitablemente conectados y vinculados entre ellos, y uno de los principios fundamentales de la democracia representativa es el principio de mayoría. Este articulo es una aproximación a la teoría de John Stuart Mill sobre el gobierno representativo en relación con el principio de mayoría y bajo su perspectiva elitista. Mill consideró el sistema representativo el modelo político más eficaz, aunque quiso subrayar los puntos críticos y los posibles desvíos negativos de la (...) democracia y, en particular, el riesgo de una dictadura de la mayoría y el contextual aislamiento político de las minorías. El filósofo inglés propuso un ideal de democracia basado sobre el mandato representativo que supone la independencia del representante si bien una independencia restringida y condicionada. Por otra parte, insistió sobre la importancia de que cada ciudadano fuese educado en la conciencia pública y se dejase influenciar por los hombres más cultos y iluminados de la comunidad. (shrink)

This article reports on a replication study of “Childless by choice? Attributions and attitudes concerning family size”, research published in Social Behavior and Personality and carried out by Valerie LaMastro in 2001. In the study presented in this paper the author examined the personality characteristics ascribed by naive perceivers to people with families of varying sizes. Students read one of twenty-four paragraphs describing a heterosexual couple who varied in the number of children they had and in male and female employment (...) status. Targets were rated on 28 personality characteristics and seven relationship quality statements concerning the level of family happiness. The results obtained indicated that a childless pair was viewed as less happy than those with children. Parents of any size family were, however, perceived similarly. (shrink)

Mark Greenberg has made a transcendental attack on a metaphysical position that some notable legal positivists have held -- namely, that law is ultimately grounded in social facts. He has also pressed legal positivism at a point of perceived vulnerability – the failure of such positivists to develop and defend a compelling theory of legal content. Moreover, in his Moral Impact Theory of law, he preserves a necessary connection between legal obligations and good reasons for action that is absent in (...) legal positivism. One of his arguments against legal positivism relies heavily on what he calls "the bindingness hypothesis"—namely, the claim that it is part of the “nature of law” that it is “supposed to operate” so as to “arrange matters” to “reliably ensure” that its legal obligations are genuinely, all-things-considered, binding. I argue that Greenberg’s defense of the bindingness hypothesis fails, and with it, one of his defenses of his Moral Impact Theory of Law. I attack two other defenses: the assertion that the Moral Impact Theory makes it easy to account for our concern with law, with the implication that legal positivism cannot so easily account for that concern; and the claim that his Moral Impact Theory fits appellate practice better than some views. I show that these the arguments for the Moral Impact Theory are inadequate. In response to Greenberg’s further argument that the Moral Impact Theory rescues the idea of legal obligation as genuine obligation, I argue that the Moral Impact Theory does so at a very steep price – one that is not worth paying. (shrink)

William Ernest Hocking was an American philosopher as comfortable with the categories of fact and experience as with those of reason and idea; one optimistic and self-reliant as his Midwest background suggests who also both in travel and spirit was at home in India and the East. In fact, he believed that an adequate metaphysics or theory of knowledge would be one that contained, as did his own, elements of Eastern mysticism and Western realism. His conception of the self also (...) contains elements of both traditions. Because of this combination of elements and also because of the manner in which he combined them, his position deserves more consideration than it is generally accorded. In various of his writings Hocking described three different but interrelated conceptions of the self. In his own terminology, the self is a “field of fields,” a “reflective-excursive system,” and a “will to reality.” The aim of this paper, then, will be to summarize and relate these conceptions, with a view also to making visible certain realistic and mystic, certain Western and Eastern, elements in these conceptions. (shrink)

Com a filosofia de Simone Weil, o presente estudo discute em que medida o elo espiritual entre ser e mundo encontra a experiência atencional que resguarda (e é resguardada por) uma dinâmica educativa – autoeducativa. Desenvolve a hipótese da correlação entre experiência atencional e espiritual como frente crítica ao sem-sentido mundo moderno e, portanto, como condição à atitude educativa constitutiva do engajamento ético-político do ser no mundo. Com o recorte das atividades e experiências escolares, destaca a forma da relação com (...) o estudo capaz de congregar aspectos intelectuais e intuitivos, éticos e morais, em dinâmicas que encontram no aporte espiritual a afirmação da pluralidade. (shrink)

This paper aims to investigate the relationship between Italian teachers’ well-being, socio-demographic characteristics and professional background. Using data from the 2015 wave of the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) we considered information collected by the questionnaire completed by a total of 6,491 teachers in the sampled schools. Moving from existing literature on teachers’ well-being, we investigate several aspects related to the teachers’ working environment, career motivation and investment, and job satisfaction. We assess the variability in the observed outcomes attributable (...) to school factors and heterogeneity between disciplines. Measurement models are combined in a multilevel setting in order to define teachers’ well-being on a broad perspective while accounting for the multiple sources of heterogeneity due to several factors (e.g., discipline, teacher professional background, and individual differences) occurring at different levels of the data structure. In general, results show that the teachers’ positive perception of the working environment in terms of availability of adequate human and physical resources, and professional development opportunities, provide a substantial state of well-being at work, and are related to teachers’ job satisfaction. Moreover, results highlight the key role of transformational leadership in defining a teacher’s well-being. Findings and implications are discussed. (shrink)