Classical philosophical analyses seek to explain knowledge as deriving from more basic notions. The influential “knowledge first” program in epistemology reverses this tradition, taking knowledge as its starting point. From the perspective of epistemic logic, however, this is not so much a reversal as it is the default—the field arguably begins with the specialization of “necessity” to “epistemic necessity”—that is, it begins with knowledge. In this context, putting knowledge second would be the reversal. This article motivates, develops, and explores such (...) a “knowledge second” approach in epistemic logic, founded on distinguishing what a body of evidence actually entails from what it is (merely) believed to entail. We import a logical framework that captures exactly this distinction, use it to define formal notions of (internal and external) justification and knowledge, and investigate applications to the KK principle, the “strong belief” postulate, and the regress problem. (shrink)

This paper proposes new semantics for propositional dynamic logic (PDL), replacing the standard relational semantics. Under these new semantics, program execution is represented as fundamentally deterministic (i.e., functional), while nondeterminism emerges as an epistemic relationship between the agent and the system: intuitively, the nondeterministic outcomes of a given process are precisely those that cannot be ruled out in advance. We formalize these notions using topology and the framework of dynamic topological logic (DTL) (Kremer and Mints in Ann Pure Appl Logic (...) 131:133–158, 2005). We show that DTL can be used to interpret the language of PDL in a manner that captures the intuition above, and moreover that continuous functions in this setting correspond exactly to deterministic processes. We also prove that certain axiomatizations of PDL remain sound and complete with respect to the corresponding classes of dynamic topological models. Finally, we extend the framework to incorporate knowledge using the machinery of subset space logic (Dabrowski et al. in Ann Pure Appl Logic 78:73–110, 1996), and show that the topological interpretation of public announcements as given in Bjorndahl (in: van Ditmarsch and Sandu (eds) Jaakko Hintikka on knowledge and game theoretical semantics, outstanding contributions to Logic, vol 12, Springer, 2018) coincides exactly with a natural interpretation of test programs. (shrink)

In recent work, Stalnaker proposes a logical framework in which belief is realized as a weakened form of knowledge. Building on Stalnaker’s core insights, we employ topological tools to refine and, we argue, improve on this analysis. The structure of topological subset spaces allows for a natural distinction between what is known and what is knowable; we argue that the foundational axioms of Stalnaker’s system rely intuitively on both of these notions. More precisely, we argue that the plausibility of the (...) principles Stalnaker proposes relating knowledge and belief relies on a subtle equivocation between an “evidence-in-hand” conception of knowledge and a weaker “evidence-out-there” notion of what could come to be known. Our analysis leads to a trimodal logic of knowledge, knowability, and belief interpreted in topological subset spaces in which belief is definable in terms of knowledge and knowability. We provide a sound and complete axiomatization for this logic as well as its uni-modal belief fragment. We then consider weaker logics that preserve suitable translations of Stalnaker’s postulates, yet do not allow for any reduction of belief. We propose novel topological semantics for these irreducible notions of belief, generalizing our previous semantics, and provide sound and complete axiomatizations for the corresponding logics. (shrink)

We reformulate a key definition given by Wáng and Ågotnes to provide semantics for public announcements in subset spaces. More precisely, we interpret the precondition for a public announcement of ???? to be the “local truth” of ????, semantically rendered via an interior operator. This is closely related to the notion of ???? being “knowable”. We argue that these revised semantics improve on the original and offer several motivating examples to this effect. A key insight that emerges is the crucial (...) role of topological structure in this setting. Finally, we provide a simple axiomatization of the resulting logic and prove completeness. (shrink)

This lively and accessible textbook provides a comprehensive and unified introduction to classical and modal logics, treating them with the same level of rigour and detail and showing how they fit together. A fully self-contained learning resource, it will be ideal for upper-level university courses.

Through a series of examples, we illustrate some important drawbacks that the action model logic framework suffers from in its ability to represent the dynamics of information updates. We argue that these problems stem from the fact that the action model, a central construct designed to encode agents’ uncertainty about actions, is itself effectively common knowledge amongst the agents. In response to these difficulties, we motivate and propose an alternative semantics that avoids them by endogenizing the action model. We discuss (...) the relationship between this new framework and action model logic, and provide a sound and complete axiomatization of several new logics that naturally arise. (shrink)

The idea that there is a fundamental difference in value between persons and things, and that respecting this difference is an important moral requirement, has strong intuitive appeal. Kantian ethics is unique in placing this requirement at the center of a moral system and in explicating the conditions for complying with it. Unlike challenges to Kantian ethics that focus on tragic cases that pit respect for one person against respect for another, this paper focuses on the question of how we (...) can respect the value distinction between persons and things under conditions of uncertainty. After exploring why decision making under uncertainty is a neglected topic among Kantians and demonstrating how uncertainty challenges our ability to comply with this norm, we propose a notion of morally insignificant risk within a framework that allows agents to navigate real-world decisions involving material benefit and some risk to dignity without violating the Kantian’s core commitments. We conclude by exploring some of the challenges facing this approach. (shrink)

Recently, there has been an increased interest in folk intuitions about freedom and moral responsibility from both philosophers and psychologists. We aim to extend our understanding of folk intuitions about freedom and moral responsibility using an individual differences approach. Building off previous research suggesting that there are systematic differences in folks’ philosophically relevant intuitions, we present new data indicating that the personality trait extraversion predicts, to a significant extent, those who have compatibilist versus incompatibilist intuitions. We argue that identifying groups (...) of people who have specific and diverse intuitions about freedom and moral responsibility offers the possibility for theoretical advancement in philosophy and psychology, and may in part explain why some perennial philosophical debates have proven intractable. (shrink)

Although it is argued that social justice is a core concern for the discipline, nursing has not generally played a leadership role in the responses to many of the greatest social problems of our time. These include the accelerated rate of climate change, pandemic threats, systemic racism, growing health and social inequities, and the regulation of new technologies to ensure an equitable future ‘for all.’ In nursing codes of ethics, administration, education, policies, and practice, social justice is often claimed to (...) be a core value, yet it is rarely contextualized by philosophical or theoretical underpinnings. It appears that nurses’ commitment to social justice may stem more from a penchant for ‘doing good’ than an attempt to explore, understand, and enact what is meant by social justice from an ontological, epistemological, and methodological perspective. We contend that the dominance of a human science perspective in nursing contributes to a narrow definition of health and relegates many issues central to social justice to the margins of nurses’ care. In this article, we explore how the focus on ‘the human’ in the human science perspective may not only be limiting the capacity of nurses to develop strategies to adequately address social injustice, but in some instances, direct nurses to contribute to their very reproduction. We suggest that a critical interrogation of this human‐centric hegemony can identify avenues of rupture and introduce posthumanism as an additional philosophical perspective for consideration to help bridge the human‐social divide. (shrink)

By examining an exemplar sample of mental health nursing educational policies and related legislation, in this article, we trace the discursive production of madness as an “othered” identity category. We engage in a critical discourse analysis of mental health nursing education in Canada, drawing on provincial and federal policies and legislation as the main sources of data. Theoretically framed by critical posthumanism and mad studies, this article outlines how the mad subjectivity becomes decontextualized out of its identity‐based understanding and recontextualized (...) as an inferior category of “the human,” circulating within discourses of pedagogy, economics, law, and psychiatry. The article maps the intertextual nexus of the discourse of mental health nursing education, making visible the complex, the arbitrary, and the sometimes‐contradictory nature of the discipline's grappling with identity‐based mental health concepts. We close with several implications for nursing policy, education, and practice. (shrink)

Guided by an account of the norms governing justificatory conversations, I propose that person-level epistemic justification is a matter of possessing a certain ability: the ability to provide objectively good reasons for one's belief by drawing upon considerations which one responsibly and correctly takes there to be no reason to doubt. On this view, justification requires responsible belief and is also objectively truth-conducive. The foundationalist doctrine of immediately justified beliefs is rejected, but so too is the thought that coherence in (...) one's total belief system is sufficient, or indeed necessary, for justification. The problem of the regress is solved by exploiting the 'localist' idea that in order to possess the ability to justify any given belief, one only needs to be in a position to draw upon appropriate justified background beliefs to provide good reasons for holding the belief; one needn't be able to defend the relevant background beliefs, and so on, all at one sitting. (shrink)

Unamuno believes that longing for immortality is what motivates nearly all of human behavior. Unfortunately, in a world in which many people despair of ever achieving true personal immortality, we increasingly turn to what he calls mere “shadows of immortality” for comforting ideas about how our names, energy, or basic material substance will carry on in our absence. Unamuno advocates fighting against such despair, staying out of the shadows, and longing for personal immortality even when it seems impossible. Unamuno’s approach (...) to this issue resembles, in a few significant ways, Kierkegaard’s struggle for the cultivation of subjective selfhood. At the same time, it also runs afoul of Nietzsche’s derisive claims about immortality-seekers. Whereas Nietzsche sees longing for immortality as a sign of being too weak to make the most of mortal life, the more Kierkegaardian Unamuno counters that it is a sign of strong appreciation for life to demand, without surrender, that there be more of it. Given the proper understanding of Nietzsche’s claims about the eternal recurrence, I think he and Unamuno might not be quite as far apart as it initially seems. However, exploring the latter’s critique of the former suggests an intriguing way of seeing the contemporary analytic debate about the desirability of immortality. Building on Unamuno’s position, one could argue that pessimism about the value of immortality is actually indicative of a flawed character and an impoverished relationship with life. (shrink)

In a 1642 letter to Regius, Descartes elaborates several reasons for rejecting Aristotelian substantial forms including that (1) they are explanatorily impotent, (2) they are explanatorily unnecessary, and (3) they threaten the incorporeality and immortality of the human soul. Various ideas have already been proposed as to why Descartes thought Aristotelian substantial forms are susceptible to these criticisms. Here I suggest one further such idea, centered on the ways Descartes and medieval scholastics thought substantial forms—and souls in particular—are related to (...) their powers. (shrink)

This paper aims to establish a distinction and relationship between two types of noise – active noise and passive noise – while giving emphasis to the latter. Active noise is the discourse of negativity and violence that some theorists associate with noise’s materiality, an association particularly pronounced in engagements with Japanoise. The problem with this discourse is that it relies on a culturally normative understanding of noise as well as novelty. This narrative inevitably leads to a dead end. Noise, and (...) artistic practices like Japanoise that draw on noise sounds, have a short lifespan if their entire purpose is one of shock and disturbance. However, Japanoise is not dead: it persists both as a genre and as a sonic idea/gesture. This article suggests that noise persists, and Japanoise remains relevant, because it comes from a region not exhausted by categories of negativity and violence. This article will show how underneath active noise there resounds a deeper, more profound a-cultural noise. Drawing on Maurice Blanchot’s account of passivity, which names the anarchic region of absence in his thought, this noise will be described as passive noise. In this context, passivity must be understood differently from the conventional sense as something opposed to activity. Likewise, passive noise does not refer to background noise. Instead, passive noise will be described as the interiority of excess that manifests as a breach in the closure of active noise. This breach will be shown to be consistent with Blanchot’s view of the inexhaustibility of art and will be described, specifically in the context of Japanoise, as the intimacy of excess that is the lifeblood of maximalist forms of noise-making. This will also amount to a reconsideration of the idea of transgression by reframing Japanoise in terms of inertia. (shrink)

More than thirty years ago, Amari and colleagues proposed a statistical framework for identifying structurally stable macrostates of neural networks from observations of their microstates. We compare their stochastic stability criterion with a deterministic stability criterion based on the ergodic theory of dynamical systems, recently proposed for the scheme of contextual emergence and applied to particular inter-level relations in neuroscience. Stochastic and deterministic..

Rational drug design is a method for developing new pharmaceuticals that typically involves the elucidation of fundamental physiological mechanisms. It thus combines the quest for a scientific understanding of natural phenomena with the design of useful technology and hence integrates epistemic and practical aims of research and development. Case studies of the rational design of the cardiovascular drugs propranolol, captopril and losartan provide insights into characteristics and conditions of this integration. Rational drug design became possible in the 1950s when theoretical (...) knowledge of drug-target interaction and experimental drug testing could interlock in cycles of mutual advancement. The integration does not, however, diminish the importance of basic research for pharmaceutical development. Rather, it can be shown that still in the 1990s, linear processes of innovation and the close combination of practical and epistemic work were interdependent. (shrink)

This paper offers a novel interpretation of the nature and role of logical argumentation in Aristotle’s natural philosophy. In contrast to the standard domain interpretation, which makes logikôs argumentation the contrary of phusikôs, relying on principles drawn from outside the domain of natural science, I propose that the essential or defining feature of logikôs argumentation is the use of principles that are general relative to the question under investigation. My interpretation is developed and illustrated with a close textual analysis of (...) Aristotle’s explanation of mule sterility in Generation of Animals II 8. (shrink)

What is life and what does it mean to be in the living political universe of entitiness without rhyme or reason? Flappy exudate, a bag in a bag, corpuscles of corporeality, worms (or flesh tubes) with appendages, even the cult of first involution – these are our body pods and the hunger and thirst of being-in. How can the situation of anatomical form be analysed without the illusion of instrumentalized reflection? Perhaps by amalgamating the categories and their issues. The issuance (...) of taxonomy is the actual fine muck of excrement, which every brick of ordered life leaks as exudence and decay. Deep thoughts leave a mucal snail trail of what was tabular-seeming about our bodily situation, our environs, our friends, our experiments and our nourishment. Especially in this current age of 露 露 and 娜娜 (Lulu and Nana), our first officially public transgenic kindred, the question becomes, ‘who are these free-living divergences and what does it mean to be the uber-ding beyond geoengineering’s capabilities?’. (shrink)

Innes’s “control signals” provides a semiotic perspective for explaining how acts of social control send “signals” about the effectiveness of security mechanisms. A cross-cutting theme infers that “culture and situation matter” in the reception of signals. However, the control signals concept does not explicitly consider the influence that prior experiences may have on present interpretations. Drawing on qualitative research into how members of a residential community perceived control measures within their everyday environment for Glasgow’s 2014 Commonwealth Games, this article outlines (...) the importance of the “pre-signalling” context in influencing how control signals are received. Goffman’s “frame analysis” is used as part of a semiotic framing approach to demonstrate that control signals are framed (or pre-signalled) by the history of relations between sender and receiver of the signal (for example, police and residents). (shrink)

This essay argues for the conceptual connection of legitimacy, resistance and ‘the people’ within liberal theories of public justification by making two primary claims: that legitimacy and resistance are mutually constitutive of one another and that together legitimacy and resistance are constitutive of an aspirational conception of ‘the people’. These claims revolve around the idea that the legitimacy of democratic regimes necessarily entails the questioning of that legitimacy through resistance, which concerns demands that say something about the makeup of ‘the (...) people’. The concern is conceptual, examples of resistance showing how the conceptual connection manifests itself. (shrink)

5 ERSTER TEIL Forschungsprobleme der Semantik 1. Sprachwissenschaft 10 11. Logik 27 III. Die semantische Philosophie 55 1. Die sogenannte «Wende der Philosophi- die Sprache als einziger Gegenstand der Forschung 60 2. Die Sprache als Schöpfung der arbiträren Konvention 75 IV. Die allgemeine Semantik (General Semantics) 88 ZWEITER TEIL Ausgewählte Kategorien der Semantik 1. Der philosophische Aspekt des Kommunikationsprozesses 108 1. Das Wesen des Problems der Kommunikation 112 2. Der Streit der transzendentalen mit der naturalistischen Konzeption 123 3. Grundlagen einer (...) marxistischen Betrachtung des Problems 131 11. Das Zeichen -Analyse und Typologie 145 1. Der Kommunikationsprozeß als Ausgangspunkt bei der Analyse des Zeichens 145 2. Die Zeichentypologie von Husserl 152 3. Die Definition des Zeichens 162 4. Allgemeine Grundlagen der Zeichentypologie 164 5. Die Spezifik der Wortzeichen 180 III. Die Bedeutungen von «Bedeutung» 196 1. über die Zeichensituation 199 2. Die Bedeutung als realer oder ideeller Gegenstand 210 3. Die Bedeutung als eine Beziehung (1) 226 4. Die Bedeutung als eine Beziehung (2) 241 5. Die linguistische Auffassung des Problems der Bedeutung 276 IV. Die kommunikative Funktion der Sprache 285 1. Sprache und «Sprachen» 286 2. Sprache und Wirklichkeit 294 3. Die Sprache und die effektive Verständigung 321 Nachwort zur deutschen Ausgabe von Georg Klaus 334 über den Verfasser 341 Anhang Fremdsprachige Zitate in Originalfassung 344 Bibliographie 358 Personenregister 374 Vorwort Das Vorwort des Verfassers entspringt oft der Konvention und stellt dann ein Zugeständnis dem überlieferten Brauch gegenüber dar. (shrink)

The aim of the article is to answer the four following questions concerning a proof of Church's Thesis (CT). (1) Can CT be treated as a synthetic definition? (2) How should CT not be understood? (3) How can one understand the expression proof by CT? (4) Is any proof of CT possible at all?

The article critiques Ricoeur’s theorizing of amnesty amnesia and political forms of memory through consideration of the Cold War commemoration and forgetting of the Nazi massacres at Tulle and Oradour.

(1998). Harmony, polyphony, ornamentation: Musical rhetoric in jonson's hymenaei and crashaw's “musicks duell”. Angelaki: Vol. 3, The love of music, pp. 119-132.

James Adam was a Scottish classics scholar who taught at Emmanuel College, Cambridge. A strong defender of the importance of Greek philosophy in a well-rounded education, Adam published a number of Plato's works including Protagoras and Crito. This two-volume critical edition of the Republic was another major contribution to the field. Though his preface claims 'an editor cannot pretend to have exhausted its significance by means of a commentary,' Adam's depth of knowledge and erudite analysis of the (...) Greek text ensured that his edition remained the standard reference for decades to follow, and it remains a thought-provoking evaluation of one of the great works of Western thought. Volume 1 is devoted to Books 1–5, which discuss justice and the ideal society, while Volume 2 presents Books 6–10, on the place of the philosopher and questions of governance. (shrink)

James Adam was a Scottish classics scholar who taught at Emmanuel College, Cambridge. A strong defender of the importance of Greek philosophy in a well-rounded education, Adam published a number of Plato's works including Protagoras and Crito. This two-volume critical edition of the Republic was another major contribution to the field. Though his preface claims 'an editor cannot pretend to have exhausted its significance by means of a commentary,' Adam's depth of knowledge and erudite analysis of the (...) Greek text ensured that his edition remained the standard reference for decades to follow, and it remains a thought-provoking evaluation of one of the great works of Western thought. Volume 1 is devoted to Books 1–5, which discuss justice and the ideal society. (shrink)

In reflection concerning the study of literature, both categories, memory and forgiveness, are quite frequently contrasted. Literature, which activates memory, is perceived as a tool of settling the past. In this perspective, it takes the position opposite to that of forgiveness, which requires that 'one does not seek redress'. Using the example of the film bearing the title of The Tale, the author attempts to consider the conflict between a writer's duty to remember and the Christian appeal for forgiving. If (...) literature is the reservoir of memory, the very act of writing is purifying, and involves leaving the limits of own existence towards another human being, namely a reader. Reaching beyond the limits of own ego is not unlike the attitude of forgiveness, which requires reaching beyond the borders of personal pain. (shrink)