Language is highly dynamic: It unfolds over time, and we can use it to achieve a wide variety of communicative goals, from telling a story to trying to persuade another person. One aspect of language that has gained increasing popularity among researchers in the last several decades is the individual language style (LS) represented by an individual’s use of function words (e.g., pronouns, articles). Previous approaches to LS mostly focus on LS of one individual in isolation, paying less attention to (...) the fact that language emerges from interaction with others. The aim of this paper is twofold: First, we integrate LS into a dynamical theoretical framework and present an innovative methodological approach. Second, this paper aims to address how interactive conversation—as an aspect of the communicative setting—changes an individual’s LS. We use recurrence quantification analysis to look at structure in patterns of LS in monologs and conversations of 118 participants. Our results showed that LS significantly differs from monolog to conversation, and post hoc analyses further revealed that the change in LS is greater for conflict than for friendly conversations. The difference between monologs and conversations is reflected more strongly in the dynamics (i.e., structure and complexity) of LS than the proportion of function words used. Theoretical implications and directions for future studies are discussed. (shrink)

In their article, Mehr et al. conclude that the design features of music are consistent with adaptations for credible signaling. Although appealing to design may seem like a plausible basis for identifying adaptations, probing adaptive theories of music must be done at the genomic level and will require a functional understanding of the genomic, phenotypic, and fitness properties of music.

Traditionally, consistency is the only criterion for the quality of a theory in logic-based approaches to reasoning about actions. This work goes beyond that and contributes to the metatheory of actions by investigating what other properties a good domain description should have. We state some metatheoretical postulates concerning this sore spot. When all postulates are satisfied we call the action theory modular. Besides being easier to understand and more elaboration tolerant in McCarthy’s sense, modular theories have interesting properties. We (...) point out the problems that arise when the postulates about modularity are violated, and propose algorithmic checks that can help the designer of an action theory to overcome them. (shrink)

Samir Okasha argues that clade selection is an incoherent concept, because the relation that constitutes clades is such that it renders parent-offspring (reproduction) relations between clades impossible. He reasons that since clades cannot reproduce, it is not coherent to speak of natural selection operating at the clade level. We argue, however, that when species-level lineages and clade-level lineages are treated consistently according to standard cladist commitments, clade reproduction is indeed possible and clade selection is coherent if certain conditions obtain. Despite (...) clade selection's logical coherence, however, we share some of Okasha's pessimism. Whether or not clades are a unit of selection is ultimately a question of empirical support and theoretical import. (shrink)

Many contemporary ethicists use case-based reasoning to reach consistent beliefs about ethical matters. The idea is that particular cases elicit moral intuitions, which provide defeasible reasons to believe in their content. However, most proponents of case-based moral reasoning are not very explicit about how they resolve inconsistencies and how they abstract principles from judgments about particular cases. The aim of this article is to outline a methodology—called Consistency Reasoning Casuistry—for case-based reasoning in ethics. This methodology draws on Richmond Campbell (...) and Victor Kumar’s naturalistic model for the resolution of inconsistencies between the content of intuitions about particular cases. I argue that reasons similar to those that motivate their model also support a more abstract form of moral reasoning that goes beyond mere resolutions of inconsistencies between case judgments and demands the formulation of more abstract moral norms. Consistency Reasoning Casuistry, it is argued, is a good candidate for a methodology for case-based moral reasoning that is in harmony with paradigms of contemporary moral psychology and that can accommodate the methodology implicit in the work of many contemporary ethicists. (shrink)

The 70th anniversary of Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac (1949) approaches. For philosophers—environmental ethicists in particular—this text has been highly influential, especially the ‘Land Ethic’ essay contained therein. Given philosophers’ acumen for identifying and critiquing arguments, one might reasonably think a firm grasp of Leopold’s ideas to have emerged from such attention. I argue that this is not the case. Specifically, Leopold’s main interpreter and systematiser, philosopher J. Baird Callicott, has shoehorned Aldo Leopold’s ideas into differing monistic moral theories (...) that ill-serve a proper understanding. Against Callicott, my paper argues that Aldo Leopold embraces a robust moral pluralism, one that goes beyond mere pragmatics, and he does so while seeking a consistency maximisation of values. A new, improved understanding of Leopold’s ideas thus emerges. (shrink)

NOTE TO THE READER - December, 2021 ●●●●● -/- After a long period of time devoted to research in other areas, the author returned to the subject of this paper in a book-length study, CRITIQUE OF IMPURE REASON: Horizons of Possibility and Meaning. In this book (Chapter 11, “The Metalogic of Meaning”), the position developed in the 1982 paper, "Referential Consistency as a Criterion of Meaning", has been substantively revised and several important corrections made. It is recommended that readers read (...) the revised and corrected version that appears in the book, CRITIQUE OF IMPURE REASON. ●●●●● -/- The book is available in a printed edition, ISBN 978-0-578-88646-6, from online booksellers such as Barnes & Noble, Amazon, and through independent bookstores. The book is also available as a freely downloadable _corrected second edition_ eBook, DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.5458352, through PhilSci, PhilPapers, HAL, and other online archives. ●●●●● -/- In addition to the above-mentioned book, readers may find "A Primer on Bartlett's CRITIQUE OF IMPURE REASON" to be useful as a guide to the nearly 900-page CRITIQUE. The primer is available as a free download through PhilPapers. ●●●●● -/- "Referential Consistency as a Criterion of Meaning" describes a logically compelling criterion of meaning — that is, a necessary condition of meaning, one which is non-arbitrary and compelling. One cannot _not_ accept the proposed criterion without self-referential inconsistency. This “metalogical” variety of self-referential inconsistency is new, opening a third category beyond semantical and pragmatical forms of self-referential inconsistency. ●●●●● -/- It is argued that such a criterion of meaning can serve as an instrument of internal criticism for any theoretical framework that permits reference to a class of objects. The paper combines the concern of the logical empiricists to formulate a rigorous meaning criterion, with the analytical interest in identifying and eliminating self-defeating statements through an analysis of the referential structure of theories. ●●●●● -/- The paper is followed by a list of other publications by the author that further develop and extend the ideas presented here. (shrink)

Kurt Gödel, mathematician and logician, was one of the most influential thinkers of the twentieth century. Gödel fled Nazi Germany, fearing for his Jewish wife and fed up with Nazi interference in the affairs of the mathematics institute at the University of Göttingen. In 1933 he settled at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, where he joined the group of world-famous mathematicians who made up its original faculty. His 1940 book, better known by its short title, The Consistency of (...) the Continuum Hypothesis, is a classic of modern mathematics. The continuum hypothesis, introduced by mathematician George Cantor in 1877, states that there is no set of numbers between the integers and real numbers. It was later included as the first of mathematician David Hilbert's twenty-three unsolved math problems, famously delivered as a manifesto to the field of mathematics at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Paris in 1900. In The Consistency of the Continuum Hypothesis Gödel set forth his proof for this problem. In 1999, Time magazine ranked him higher than fellow scientists Edwin Hubble, Enrico Fermi, John Maynard Keynes, James Watson, Francis Crick, and Jonas Salk. He is most renowned for his proof in 1931 of the 'incompleteness theorem,' in which he demonstrated that there are problems that cannot be solved by any set of rules or procedures. His proof wrought fruitful havoc in mathematics, logic, and beyond. (shrink)

We can distinguish the evil person in two ways. One is to pick out some trait, or narrow cluster of traits, and argue that individuals are evil if they possess those traits to a sufficiently extreme degree. Call theories that characterize evil in this manner extremity views. The second method takes evil to consist in being vicious, not just in one respect, but thoroughly or consistently. Call this the consistency approach. Thus understood, evil persons lack any significant moral virtues, having (...) no “good side.” According to stronger versions of the consistency theory, evil persons lack morally redeeming qualities of even the most modest sort. They are moved and motivated little or not at all, or even perversely, by morality and the good. In this chapter I will defend such a view of evil character. Naturally, even consistency theories grant that evil involves a kind of extreme viciousness. But this is not the sort of extremity that requires having particular traits to an extraordinary degree, beyond those needed to lack virtues or redeeming qualities. Consistency theorists could require extreme vices in addition to those implied by the consistency requirement, but I will not do so. What about extremity views? Extremity of vice in the present sense concerns the degree to which someone possesses a given vice. If a person’s viciousness consists in cruelty, then that individual earns the title of evil by having cruel propensities to the highest degree: tending to perform many cruel acts, and tending to perform the cruelest acts. The extremity method appears to be the standard approach among commentators in this area. For example, Laurence Thomas claims that to have an evil character is to be “often enough prone to do evil acts” (1993, p. 82). Someone commits an evil act if the individual “delights in performing a harmful act that has a certain moral gravity to it . . . and if the person is not animated by understandable considerations” (p. 77). Similarly, John Kekes has argued that evil persons are those who are.... (shrink)

In a recent paper— The disvalue of death in the global burden of disease 1—we question the commensurability of the two components of the disability-adjusted life year (DALY)— years lived with disability (YLDs) and years of life lost (YLLs)—and offer a tentative solution to this problem. In an exciting and constructive reply— Is consistency overrated? 2—philosopher S Andrew Schroeder argues that our concern about the DALY may be missing the mark by accepting the DALY as what he refers to as (...) an index reflecting nothing ‘beyond the importance we place in each (DALY component)’. According to Schroeder, our consistency requirement is then made redundant. Recall our main argument: the DALY is the arithmetical sum of two components, YLDs and YLLs. The YLDs represents the individual disease burden that occurs while we are alive, while YLLs represents the individual disease burden resulting from our death. ‘Death’, in this context, is not the process of dying, which happens within life and which is captured by YLDs, but rather the incidence in which the life of a person has ended. Understood this way, the DALY is the aggregate of life and death, and we argue that these are incommensurables. Why are YLDs and YLLs incommensurables? In our article, we present several reasons for this. Briefly, YLDs measure disease burden that happens to an individual, whether it be painful experiences or loss of function. YLDs have a duration and are usually something we experience, such as pain. YLLs, on the other hand, are instantly generated when the life of that individual has expired. We do not experience YLLs, and they happen where we are not. When YLLs are generated, the life in question has already ended. On a secular account, death is the irreversible cessation of the mind and the senses, and …. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis article pursues the question of the essence of Europe. It does not lie in the religious, cultural and geographical demarcations, but in the openness towards the other. The particular contribution of religion in this could lay in its apocalyptic tradition. This must not be understood as a violent end of history beset by fear. Rather it means the end of all virtual images and identities which serve to mask the fundamental vulnerability of man.

Duality has often been described as a means of extending our knowledge with a minimal additional outlay of investigative resources. I consider possible arguments for this view. Major elements of this argument are out of keeping with certain widely held views concerning the nature of axiomatic theories (both in projective geometry and elsewhere). They also require a special form of consistency requirement.

It is argued that suitably trained neural language models exhibit key properties of epistemic agency: they hold probabilistically coherent and logically consistent degrees of belief, which they can rationally revise in the face of novel evidence. To this purpose, we conduct computational experiments with rankers: T5 models [Raffel et al. 2020] that are pretrained on carefully designed synthetic corpora. Moreover, we introduce a procedure for eliciting a model’s degrees of belief, and define numerical metrics that measure the extent to (...) which given degrees of belief violate (probabilistic, logical, and Bayesian) rationality constraints. While pretrained rankers are found to suffer from global inconsistency (in agreement with, e.g., [Jang et al. 2021]), we observe that subsequent self-training on auto-generated texts allows rankers to gradually obtain a probabilistically coherent belief system that is aligned with logical constraints. In addition, such self-training is found to have a pivotal role in rational evidential learning, too, for it seems to enable rankers to propagate a novel evidence item through their belief systems, successively re-adjusting individual degrees of belief. All this, we conclude, confirms the Rationality Hypothesis, i.e., the claim that suitable trained NLMs may exhibit advanced rational skills. We suggest that this hypothesis has empirical, yet also normative and conceptual ramifications far beyond the practical linguistic problems NLMs have originally been designed to solve. (shrink)

The possibility of time travel, as permitted in General Relativity, is responsible for constraining physical fields beyond what laws of nature would otherwise require. In the special case where time travel is limited to a single object returning to the past and interacting with itself, consistency constraints can be avoided if the dynamics is continuous and the object's state space satisfies a certain topological requirement: that all null-homotopic mappings from the state-space to itself have some fixed point. Where consistency (...) constraints do exist, no new physics is needed to enforce them. One needs only to accept certain global topological constraints as laws, something that is reasonable in any case. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:55. FURTHER REMARKS ON THE CONSISTENCY OF HUME'S ACCOUNT OF THE SELF Philosophers no longer discuss Hume's account of the self solely in order to attack it. In separate comments prompted by my paper "Is Hume's Self Consistent?" Biro and Beauchamp join the camp of the defenders of Hume's view. As another member of this group, I share their desire to give a sympathetic interpretation of Hume's discussion (...) of the self and personal identity. This general agreement notwithstanding, there are some substantial points concerning the nature of Hume's problems with his account of the self and his method of resolving them about which we do not agree. These disagreements will be the focal point of this paper. I wish to emphasize, however, that they occur within a broader framework of agreement that Hume's account of the self does not suffer from the defects that are so frequently attributed to it. Discussions of personal identity frequently focus on the role played by memory in personal identity. The view that personal identity is based on memory (that is, that memory creates the connections between various sets of experiences that make them the experiences of one person) has been the subject of much criticism. Happily, it is no longer naively assumed that accounts of personal identity based on memory must be circular, but the problems of developing an adequate account of personal identity based en memory are not minor ones. It is for this reason that I am uneasy about Biro's attempt to solve Hume's problems about personal identity by an appeal to the function of memory in personal identity. Biro contends that my reconstruction of the bundle theory of persons, which involves a partial overlap of non-identical bundles, is unnecessary. He argues that the intentionality of memory is sufficient to explain the connections that give a person the imperfect identity that it possesses through time. But I believe that Biro is 56. mistaken, and that considerations of a basic sort about the relationship between memory and personal identity suggest that a non-circular Humean account of personal identity based on memory would not be possible apart from my reconstruction of the bundle theory, or something like it. I will begin by presenting this argument, after which I will clarify some points about my own view. However, I must immediately point out, as Biro does not, that Biro is not in disagreement with me when he argues for the view that Hume's theory of the self can be made consistent without going beyond the view that the self is a bundle of perceptions. We agree that Hume's apparent references to a "non-Newtonian" type of association are not basic, and can be eliminated. We disagree on the question of how this can be done. Biro states, It is memory, or, to be more specific, the presence of memory perceptions among the series of collections of perceptions, that, on Hume's view, i£ the mind or self, which makes it possible for such a series to be a self, a single entity which can be individuated and of which I can be aware. and, The intentionality of memories (as well as that of anticipations) is, I have argued, just the bond required for cementing perceptions without the aid of an additional agency such as a mind whose perceptions, on the alternative model, they would be said to be. On Biro's account, therefore, memory, in virtue of its intentionality, creates a self out of distinct perceptions. Memories point to, (or represent, or refer to) impressions of past events, creating a bond between the bundle in which the memory occurs and the bundle in which the original impression occurred. No further link is necessary, and my "overlap theory" (as Biro calls it) is at best redundant. What problems would arise for Hume, if this were his view? Accounts of personal identity based on memory face 57. the following difficulty. If we restrict the term 'memory' to a person's representations of his past experiences, then memory presupposes personal identity and an account of personal identity based on memory would be circular. It might... (shrink)

This volume investigates what is beyond the Principle of Non-Contradiction. It features 14 papers on the foundations of reasoning, including logical systems and philosophical considerations. Coverage brings together a cluster of issues centered upon the variety of meanings of consistency, contradiction, and related notions. Most of the papers, but not all, are developed around the subtle distinctions between consistency and non-contradiction, as well as among contradiction, inconsistency, and triviality, and concern one of the above mentioned threads of the broadly (...) understood non-contradiction principle and the related principle of explosion. Some others take a perspective that is not too far away from such themes, but with the freedom to tread new paths. Readers should understand the title of this book in a broad way,because it is not so obvious to deal with notions like contradictions, consistency, inconsistency, and triviality. The papers collected here present groundbreaking ideas related to consistency and inconsistency. (shrink)

Vaccine hesitancy is a growing threat to public health. The reasons are complex but linked inextricably to a lack of trust in vaccines, expertise and traditional sources of authority. Efforts to increase immunization uptake in children in many countries that have seen a fall in vaccination rates are two-fold: addressing hesitancy by improving healthcare professional-parent exchange and information provision in the clinic; and, secondly, public health strategies that can override parental concerns and values with coercive measures such as mandatory and (...) presumptive vaccination. It is argued that such conflicting, parallel approaches seriously risk undermining trust that is crucial for sustaining herd immunity. Although public health strategies can be ethically justified in limiting freedoms, a parent-centered approach seldom acknowledges how it is impacted by contemporaneous coercive measures. In addition, the clinical encounter is not well suited to helping parents consider the public dimensions of vaccination, despite these being important for trust formation and informed decision-making. Efforts to address vaccine hesitancy require more consistent engagement of parental and citizen views. Along with evidence-based information, debates need to be informed by ethical support that equips parents and professionals to respond to the private and public dimensions of vaccination in a more even-handed, transparent manner. Efforts to address vaccine hesitancy need to avoid simple reliance on either parental values or coercive public policies. To do this effectively requires increasing citizen engagement on vaccination to help inform a parent-centered approach and legitimize public policy measures. In addition, cultivating a more ethically consistent strategy means moving beyond the current silos of health ethics - clinical and public health ethics. (shrink)

In recent analytic philosophy, there is a growing interest in the project of conceptual engineering. This paper examines two ways this project might be applied to scientific research, specifically anthropological research. It argues that both of them are harmful to this research. Specifically, it argues that a reliance on the axiological standards of analytic philosophy conflicts with the goal of empirical adequacy. Section one proffers two forms that the engineering project might take when applied to the science. Section two proffers (...) a case study drawn from anthropology. Specifically, it lays out Evans-Pritchard’s Witchcraft, Oracles, and Magic Among the Azande, paying particular attention to the inconsistency he discovered in Azande witchcraft. Sections three and four argue that attempting to remove this inconsistency via the two forms of engineering disable critical features of emic research and discard empirical findings. Finally, I close by noting how the conflict between axiological standards and empirical adequacy might generalize beyond anthropology. (shrink)

The egalitarian ethos, as formulated by G.A. Cohen, and the unconditional basic income are two proposals that a priori may seem incompatible. The reason is that Cohen’s ethos – aimed at reducing inequality without sacrificing efficiency or freedom- requires that individuals work hard in socially useful occupations without asking for any inequality-generating incentives. On the contrary, the UBI, as conceived by Van Parijs and van der Veen, consists of an income paid by the government to every full member of society (...) regardless of their willingness to contribute to society in the form of work. In short, the ethos includes a productive requirement while the UBI has an unconditional character. However, if we introduce an absolute level of affluence above what occupational autonomy takes precedence over efficiency and if we broaden the range of socially useful contributions beyond formal employment, the tension between the egalitarian ethos and UBI will be alleviated. (shrink)

This article partly develops and partly goes beyond Roberto Loss (2022). Like other scholars, Loss (2022) makes use of identity formulas of the form t = tt in the context of plural logic. We focus on the conjunction of two conditions Loss introduces to express ontological innocence as a novelty without any additional commitment. We highlight an unnoticed logical consequence of these conditions, that is, that an entity is not one of itself. Then, we take into account the consistency (...) of Loss' conditions under various aspects. In particular, we prove their inconsistency with a weakened plural comprehension and the unrestricted thesis of composition as identity without resorting to the extensionality of pluralities. Finally, by adopting a more general approach, we reconsider the problem of the satisfiability of Loss' conditions from a formal point of view and we emphasise that the neutral language of Loss' conditions appears to allow even non‐intended non‐mereological interpretations. (shrink)

Transnational legal communication seeks to identify transnational legal regimes and attempts to establish channels and technics for comprehensible communication of the legal information to specified groups of recipients. It also strives to conclude about possible inconsistencies in law. The approach is based on the cooperation of scientists within the area of law and applied linguistics and the coordination of their efforts, in order to conduct research from various perspectives, share conclusions and develop more complete approaches as well as achieve and (...) mutually use more multilateral research results. It strives to reconcile legal research and linguistics research despite of their very different paradigms. The paper aims to explain the nature of legal communication and to establish its general research questions and objectives. The study is going to find an answer to the question what methods are to be used to communicate law comprehensively to its recipients and to draw conclusions on the consistency of legal regimes to be communicated. It accentuates that the solidarity necessary to achieve the objective of comprehensible and consistent law goes beyond the particular interests of individual sciences and is the foundation of the existence of the transnational legal communication community, non-depending on the place of living and the scope of practical knowledge. (shrink)

The effect of similarities in the personality traits of romantic partners on their relationship satisfaction ( RS ) has often been studied, albeit with mixed results. Beyond the main effects of personality traits, incremental validity was often completely missing, or at least very low. In contrast, our five studies, three cross-sectional – including one study on leader–follower dyads to secure generalizability – and two longitudinal, show that, in predicting RS, the beta-coefficients of distance (where distance is defined as the (...) average across items of absolute differences between the two partners’ self-ratings) or positivity (where positivity is defined as the frequency of extremely positive self-ratings) increase when either the positivity of the profiles or the distance between the profiles is added as second predictor. Thus, positivity and distance seem to function as reciprocal suppressor variables that allow controlling for irrelevant components of the predictors. Consequently, when combined with positivity, distance proved to be a consistently better predictor of RS than has been reported in most previous studies. Combining profile distance with profile positivity appears to be promising well beyond research on RS, in that an individual profile of traits can be matched with a profile of a specific environment’s offers and demands when person-environment fit is the focus of interest. (shrink)

Gerhard Gentzen has been described as logic’s lost genius, whom Gödel called a better logician than himself. This work comprises articles by leading proof theorists, attesting to Gentzen’s enduring legacy to mathematical logic and beyond. The contributions range from philosophical reflections and re-evaluations of Gentzen’s original consistency proofs to the most recent developments in proof theory. Gentzen founded modern proof theory. His sequent calculus and natural deduction system beautifully explain the deep symmetries of logic. They underlie modern developments in (...) computer science such as automated theorem proving and type theory. (shrink)

Lately, an increased interest in formal devices has led to an attempt on the part of some mathematicians to do without those aspects of mathematics which require intuition. One consequence of this movement has been a new conception of pure mathematics as a science of axiomatic systems. According to this conception, there is no reality beyond an axiomatic system which the statements of mathematics are about; the fact that a statement is a theorem in the system is all that (...) is of interest. This is a sort of nominalist position, since the contrary position seems to be committed to a belief in the existence of a domain of mathematical entities, which are just as suspect as the universale commonly discussed in metaphysical treatises. More often it is called formalism. (shrink)

The variety of existentialist thought show existentialism to be a flexible denotation, one that can be shared by believers and atheists alike. When approaching such a loosely defined term as “existentialism” a few questions arise. What are the boundaries for inclusion or exclusion? Are there more authentic forms of existentialism than others? The former question is usually dealt with by showing the history of existentialism—from Kierkegaard to Nietzsche, Heidegger to Sartre—along with noting some common strands amongst their writings . The (...) latter question is much harder to deal with. It asks for a value judgement as to which kind of existentialism is more authentic than others. It relates to the former because the person answering such a question has to have an idea of what existentialism ought to look like, but it goes beyond it by asking a deliberately evaluative question. This article is going to take both questions into account by examining the concepts and content of existentialist authors, their strengths and weaknesses, and is going to explain why I think atheistic existentialism is more authentic than religious existentialism. (shrink)

Beyond the Centaur questions the accuracy and usefulness of the virtually unquestioned ancient consensus that persons are composed of unequally valued, hierarchically stacked antagonistic components, usually soul or mind and body. Part I explores the gradual historical development of this notion of person. Part II consists of a thought experiment, examining an understanding of persons, not as stacked components, but as intelligent bodies -- one entity. It explores how a new understanding of persons can affect in important and fruitful (...) ways how we live: how we move, feel, think, believe, and die. (shrink)

Beyond Peaceful Coexistence: The Emergence of Space, Time and Quantum brings together leading academics in mathematics and physics to address going beyond the 'peaceful coexistence' of space-time descriptions (local and continuous ones) and quantum events (discrete and non-commutative ones). Formidable challenges waiting beyond the Standard Model require a new semantic consistency within the theories in order to build new ways of understanding, working and relating to them. The original A. Shimony meaning of the peaceful coexistence (the collapse (...) postulate and non-locality) appear to be just the tip of the iceberg in relation to more serious fundamental issues across physics as a whole. Chapters in this book present perspectives on emergent, discrete, geometrodynamic and topological approaches, as well as a new interpretative spectrum of quantum theories after Copenhagen, discrete time theories, time-less approaches and 'super-fluid' pictures of space-time. As well as stimulating further research among established theoretical physicists, the book can also be used in courses on the philosophy and mathematics of theoretical physics. (shrink)

Towards the end of Beyond Reduction Horst hypothesizes that ‘it is a general design principle of the cognitive architecture of humans that the mind possesses multiple models for understanding and interacting practically with different aspects of the world’. The suggestion is made following a discussion of recent research in cognitive science. According to Horst, the hypothesis is also consistent with what recent non-reductionist tendencies in the philosophy of science teach us. Taken together, Horst claims these two sets of (...) evidence motivate a new post-reductionist approach to the philosophy of mind. After outlining the route Horst takes to reach this claim, I shall raise a worry I have about the claim and the route taken to it.Beyond Reduction is in three parts. Part one frames the debate. In Chapter 1 Horst notes how naturalism is a view to which nearly all philosophers of mind, some of whom hold quite disparate views, would subscribe. He formulates a schema for naturalism that he thinks most would accept: ‘naturalism about domain D is the view that all features of D are to be accommodated within the framework of nature as it is understood by the natural sciences’. Horst acknowledges that the schema under-describes matters. The notion of ‘accommodation’ may be understood as involving either explanation or metaphysical determination; it is also unclear how we are to understand ‘the …. (shrink)

The construct of wellbeing has been criticised as a neoliberal construction of western individualism that ignores wider systemic issues such as inequality and anthropogenic climate change. Accordingly, there have been increasing calls for a broader conceptualisation of wellbeing. Here we impose an interpretative framework on previously published literature and theory, and present a theoretical framework that brings into focus the multifaceted determinants of wellbeing and their interactions across multiple domains and levels of scale. We define wellbeing as positive psychological experience, (...) promoted by connections to self, community and environment, supported by healthy vagal function, all of which are impacted by socio-contextual factors that lie beyond the control of the individual. By emphasising the factors within and beyond the control of the individual and highlighting how vagal function both affects and are impacted by key domains, the biopsychosocial underpinnings of wellbeing are explicitly linked to a broader context that is consistent with, yet complementary to, multi-levelled ecological systems theory. Reflecting on the reciprocal relationships between multiple domains, levels of scale and related social contextual factors known to impact on wellbeing, our GENIAL framework may provide a foundation for a transdisciplinary science of wellbeing that has the potential to promote the wellbeing of individuals while also playing a key role in tackling major societal challenges. (shrink)

By targeting and critiquing these assumptions, he lays the groundwork for a post-positivist philosophy of science that does not provide aid and comfort to the enemies of reason. This book consists of thirteen essays.

In this study, I explore the challenges that ideological hegemonies of personhood imbibed by nurses and other healthcare workers could pose for the nursing profession, particularly in terms of inhibiting the acknowledgment of difference. Dominant or hegemonic conceptions of personhood in particular spaces often consist of self‐contained ideas and essentialist ontologies and normativity of what it means to be a person, lack of which results in the denial of personhood and the othering as non‐person or sub‐person. The other as the (...) residue of such self‐contained notions of personhood is most often denied the quality of care that the one who fits within such conceptions enjoy. For nurses and other healthcare workers to overcome such exclusionary tendencies in healthcare, they must overcome hegemonies and ideological dominance and be more open to alternative viewpoints and theories of personhood. I develop these lines of thought by focusing on the rich ideological traditions of Continental and African philosophies showing how exclusion takes place within these traditions based on conceptions of personhood and how such exclusion on the basis of difference impacts negatively on healthcare. I conclude by highlighting the need to go beyond hegemonic philosophies of personhood by decolonizing and demasculinizing healthcare, thereby allowing difference to flourish in an ecology of medical knowledge. (shrink)

This paper discusses the issue of legitimacy and, in particular the processes of building, losing, and repairing environmental legitimacy in the context of the Deepwater Horizon case. Following the Deepwater Horizon catastrophe in 2010, BP plc. was accused of having set new records in the degree of divergence between its actual operations and what it had been communicating with regard to corporate responsibility. Its legitimacy crisis is here to be appraised as a case study in the discrepancy between symbolic and (...) substantive strategies in corporate greening and its communication. A narrative analysis of BP’s “beyond petroleum”-rebranding and the “making this right”-campaign issued in response to the Gulf of Mexico disaster discusses their respective implications for corporate change. Further, the question is addressed why BP’s green image endeavors were so widely accepted at first, only to find themselves dismissed as corporate greenwashing now. The study concludes that where a corporation’s “green narrative” consistently evokes established narratives, its legitimacy will be judged against narrative, rather than empirical truth. Thus, the narrative will be more willingly accepted as speaking for the issuing company’s legitimacy, irrespective of whether it reflects substantive greening or not. (shrink)

Following the pioneering studies of the receptive field (RF), the concept gained further significance for visual perception by the discovery of input effects from beyond the classical RF. These studies demonstrated that neuronal responses could be modulated by stimuli outside their RFs, consistent with the perception of induced brightness, color, orientation, and motion. Lesion scotomata are similarly modulated perceptually from the surround by RFs that have migrated from the interior to the outer edge of the scotoma and in (...) this way provide filling-in of the void. Large RFs are advantageous to this task. In higher visual areas, such as the middle temporal and inferotemporal lobe, RFs increase in size and lose most of their retinotopic organization while encoding increasingly complex features. Whereas lowerlevel RFs mediate perceptual filling-in, contour integration, and figure–ground segregation, RFs at higher levels serve the perception of grouping by common fate, biological motion, and other biologically relevant stimuli, such as faces. Studies in alert monkeys while freely viewing natural scenes showed that classical and nonclassical RFs cooperate in forming representations of the visual world. Today, our understanding of the mechanisms underlying the RF is undergoing a quantum leap. What had started out as a hierarchical feedforward concept for simple stimuli, such as spots, lines, and bars, now refers to mechanisms involving ascending, descending, and lateral signal flow. By extension of the bottom-up paradigm, RFs are nowadays understood as adaptive processors, enabling the predictive coding of complex scenes. Top-down effects guiding attention and tuned to task-relevant information complement the bottom-up analysis. (shrink)

The enduring and consistent rise of the far right has enabled its representatives to affect environmental debates on a larger scale. Although such incursions are often labeled ‘eco-fascist’, the term itself term may be insufficient to account for the complexity of this intersection. Building upon existing attempts to organise such discourses in a coherent sub-ideological set, ‘far-right ecologism’ (FRE) is suggested as an overarching term, deriving its morphology from fascism, conservatism, as well as national-populism. Therefore, values emanating from these (...) strands, such as naturalism, spirituality, mysticism, authority, organicism, autarky, nostalgia and Manicheanism, constitute FRE as a heuristic device. (shrink)

This article aims to examine sociality’s multipolar and intentional structure beyond an inter-subjectivist perspective; beyond the view that the social world consists of only subjects and their interaction. The article is divided into four sections. First, I present Benoist’s critique of mainstream inter-subjectivist accounts of phenomenology. Second, I introduce Husserl’s concept of Gemeingeist and provide a preliminary definition of it as a “substrate of habits.” Third, I focus on the sociological and ontological sources of Benoist’s critique, specifically Descombes’ (...) reassessment of Hartmann’s distinction between objective and objectified mind. Finally, I revise my preliminary Husserlian definition of “common mind” drawing both from the distinction between objective and objectified mind and Benoist’s account of habituation as a two-sided correlative phenomenon. Although he often tends to phrase his account in intersubjectivist terms, Husserl’s phenomenology offers valuable tools to address the multipolar structure of sociality, which does not only consist of subjects in their interactions, but foremost, in the way the human mind is embedded in institutions and extended in a range of objects that bear social meaning and that guide and bind human life to an extent that is unique among social animals. (shrink)

Most theories of affective influences on judgement and choice take a valence-based approach, contrasting the effects of positive versus negative feeling states. These approaches have not specified if and when distinct emotions of the same valence have different effects on judgement. In this article, we propose a model of emotion-specific influences on judgement and choice. We posit that each emotion is defined by a tendency to perceive new events and objects in ways that are consistent with the original cognitive-appraisal (...) dimensions of the emotion. To pit the valence and appraisal-tendency approaches against one another, we present a study that addresses whether two emotions of the same valence but differing appraisals—anger and fear—relate in different ways to risk perception. Consistent with the appraisal-tendency hypothesis, fearful people made pessimistic judgements of future events whereas angry people made optimistic judgements. In the Discussion we expand the proposed model and review evidence supporting two social moderators of appraisal-tendency processes. (shrink)

In this Symposium contribution, I argue that ordinary moral discourse recognizes six categories of morally significant actions: positively obligatory actions ; negatively obligatory actions ; supererogatory actions ; suberogatory actions ; quasi-supererogatory actions ; and amoral or morally neutral actions . As I argue, super-, sub-, and quasi-supererogatory actions paradoxically rely upon the existence of "non-obligatory oughts"--moral injunctions to do what as a moral matter we need not do. The remainder of the article is devoted to developing a theory that (...) makes these non-obligatory oughts coherent. The theory that I advance distinguishes deontic duties from aretaic duties, and derives the oughts of super- and suberogation from our aretaic duties to develop certain dispositions or character traits. As I argue, our aretaic duties require us to perform actions that are deontically supererogatory and to refrain from actions that are deontically suberogatory. Only if we conceive of super- and suberogation as simultaneously governed by deontic permissions and aretaic obligations can we make sense of the dual claims implicit in daily gossip that we are obligated to cultivate such virtues as kindness and generosity, and that kindness and generosity consist in doing what we are not obligated to do. As the title elliptically suggests, the article thus advances the claim that we have duties to go beyond the call of duty. (shrink)

Background Research ethics boards exist for good reason. By setting rules of ethical behaviour, REBs can help mitigate the risk of researchers causing harm to their research participants. However, the current method by which REBs promote ethical behaviour does little more than send researchers into the field with a set of rules to follow. While appropriate for most situations, rule-based approaches are often insufficient, and leave significant gaps where researchers are not provided institutional ethical direction. Results Through a discussion of (...) a recent research project about drinking and driving in South Africa, this article demonstrates that if researchers are provided only with a set of rules for ethical behaviour, at least two kinds of problems can emerge: situations where action is required but there is no ethically good option and situations where the ethical value of an action can only be assessed after the fact. These dilemmas highlight and help to articulate what we already intuit: that a solely rule-based approach to promoting ethical research is not always desirable, possible, effective, or consistent. Conclusions In this article, I argue that to better encourage ethical behaviour in research, there is a need to go beyond the rules and regulations articulated by ethics boards, and focus more specifically on creating and nurturing virtuous researchers. (shrink)

Moral realists often assume that folk intuitions are predominantly realist, and they argue that this places the burden of proof on antirealists. More broadly, appeals to intuition in metaethics typically assume that folk judgments are generally consistent across individuals, such that they are at least predominantly something, if not realist. A substantial body of empirical work on moral objectivism has investigated these assumptions, but findings remain inconclusive due to methodological limitations. Objectivist judgments classify individuals into broad categories of realism (...) and antirealism, but they do not address more specific conflicts in the metaethical literature between different types of realism and antirealism, such as between nonnaturalism and divine command theory, or between noncognitivism and error theory. Further, the data currently show that the folk are objectivists about some moral claims but not others, raising questions that have not been addressed in previous studies about how much of the moral domain is judged to be objective, and about how endorsements of different types of realism and antirealism are distributed among different types of moral claims. Here, I present a new survey that addresses these limitations. The results challenge both of the empirical assumptions identified above, with important implications for metaethical methodology. (shrink)

Game theory is central to modern understandings of how people deal with problems of coordination and cooperation. Yet, ironically, it cannot give a straightforward explanation of some of the simplest forms of human coordination and cooperation--most famously, that people can use the apparently arbitrary features of "focal points" to solve coordination problems, and that people sometimes cooperate in "prisoner's dilemmas." Addressing a wide readership of economists, sociologists, psychologists, and philosophers, Michael Bacharach here proposes a revision of game theory that resolves (...) these long-standing problems. In the classical tradition of game theory, Bacharach models human beings as rational actors, but he revises the standard definition of rationality to incorporate two major new ideas. He enlarges the model of a game so that it includes the ways agents describe to themselves their decision problems. And he allows the possibility that people reason as members of groups, each taking herself to have reason to perform her component of the combination of actions that best achieves the group's common goal. Bacharach shows that certain tendencies for individuals to engage in team reasoning are consistent with recent findings in social psychology and evolutionary biology. As the culmination of Bacharach's long-standing program of pathbreaking work on the foundations of game theory, this book has been eagerly awaited. Following Bacharach's premature death, Natalie Gold and Robert Sugden edited the unfinished work and added two substantial chapters that allow the book to be read as a coherent whole. (shrink)

This paper argues that Jean-Paul Sartre’s discussion of violence from his Notebooks for an ethics constitutes an attempt to go beyond an instrumental view of violence. An “instrumental view of violence” essentially assumes that violent behavior is a form of pragmatic behavior whose distinguishing feature consists in the kind of means one employs for reaching one’s goals (violent behavior resorting to means that are harmful for others, whereas non-violent behavior does not). For his part, Sartre attempts to provide a (...) stronger demarcation between violent and pragmatic behaviors. First, violent behavior is, for Sartre, not necessarily characterized by the use of particular means, but by a particular manner of using means, one that involves a certain “forcing” or “straining” of the means. Second, I argue that, according to Sartre, in contrast with pragmatic behavior, violent behavior involves a modification of one’s attitude towards one’s goals. Three such modified attitudes with respect to one’s goals are detailed here, namely the non-productive attitude (the assumption that the goal is not to be produced or that it is not to be produced by means that are under our control), the counter-productive attitude (the exacerbation of one’s proximate goal at the expense of more distant goals) and the anti-productive attitude (the active refusal of one’s previously set goal). Moreover, I show that Sartre’s view that violence involves the “straining” of one’s means is undergirded by his idea that violent behavior presupposes the modification of one’s attitude with respect to one’s goals. (shrink)

Contemporary metaphysicians have been drawn to a certain attractive picture of the structure of the world. This picture consists in classical mereology, the priority of parts over wholes, and the well-foundedness of metaphysical priority. In this short note, I show that this combination of theses entails superatomism, which is a significant strengthening of mereological atomism. This commitment has been missed in the literature due to certain sorts of models of mereology being overlooked. But the entailment is an important one: we (...) must either accept superatomism or reject one (or other) of the most widespread theses of contemporary metaphysics. (shrink)

There is a strong secular consensus that death terminates subjective consciousness. In this paper I show that this consensus can be meaningfully doubted for entirely secular reasons. After formulating the strongest possible argument which supports this consensus, I argue that it inconsistently excludes Constitutive Russellian Panpsychism (CRP) from consideration. CRP, I maintain, is fully consistent with the possibility of post-thanatological consciousness. To flesh out this account, I develop an account of the Panpsychist Self (PS) that can be axiomatically derived (...) from CRP. I then show that the PS has the right metaphysical structure to ensure that the persistence of consciousness beyond brain death aligns with the persistence of our individual selves. (shrink)

Reading Foucault’s work on power and subjectivity alongside “developmentalist” approaches to evolutionary biology, this article endorses poststructuralist critiques of political ideals grounded in the value of subjective agency. Many political theorists embrace such critiques, of course, but those who do are often skeptical of liberal democracy, and even of normative theory itself. By contrast, those who are left to theorize liberal democracy tend to reject or ignore poststructuralist insights, and have continued to employ dubious ontological assumptions regarding human agents. Against (...) both groups, I argue that Foucault’s poststructuralism must be taken seriously, but that it is ultimately consistent with normative theory and liberal democracy. Linking poststructuralist attempts to transcend the dichotomy between agency and structure with recent efforts by evolutionary theorists to dissolve a similarly stubborn opposition between nature and nurture, I develop an anti-essentialist account of human nature and agency that vindicates poststructuralist criticism while enabling a novel defense of liberal democracy. (shrink)