Various causal factors have been offered to explain the motives behind the Al-Qaeda terrorist attacs on 9/11 and at various other times and places throughout the world. Quite often the reasons or purposes are said to include political, economic, religious and ethnic factors. Often historical factors, such as colonialism and neo-colonialism, as well as nationalism, poverty, class divisions and modernization, are included. But some scholars and political figures, quite inconsistently at times, assert that there is no discernable purpose or purposes (...) in these attacks. It is argued, for example, that the sheer magnitude of the death and carnage in the 9/11 attacks suggests no rational purpose in the minds of the perpetrators. The implication is that the Al-Qaeda attacks are allegedly purely irrational. In contrast, I argue that there are flaws and inconsistencies with this No Purpose Theory, and that oil, moreover, shouldn’t be omitted from any plausible broad explanation of the complex mix of causal factors. Needless to say, to suggest that Al-Qaeda had reasons is not to suggest that the reasons were necessarily good or morally justifiable. Then again, among these reasons it is necessary to sort out the goals from the violent tactics so as to discover why, in particular, many Arabs and Muslims sympathize with some of the goals.This whole issue is important because, among other things, if the No Purpose Theory is assumed to be accurate, it would, at least for the problem at hand, eliminate from serious consideration in one fell swoop literally all of the other possible factors. This would be so in spite of the initial reasonableness of the notion that many of these factors have at least some weight or other. But if, contrary to what the No Purpose Theory says, items such as oil are shown to be actually causally important, and are consequently on the table for more extended and open discussion, then there at least would be a better opportunity for more successfully tackling these problems and ameliorating the risk of future terrorist attacks. At least so I will argue. (shrink)

It is common to think of medical and ethical modes of thought as different in kind. In such terms, some clinical situations are made more complicated by an additional ethical component. Against this picture, we propose that medical and ethical modes of thought are not different in kind, but merely different aspects of what it means to be human. We further propose that clinicians are uniquely positioned to synthesise these two aspects without prior knowledge of philosophical ethics.

The COVID-19 pandemic has created unusually challenging and dangerous workplace conditions for key workers. This has prompted calls for key workers to receive a variety of special benefits over and above their normal pay. Here, we consider whether two such benefits are justified: a no-fault compensation scheme for harm caused by an epidemic and hazard pay for the risks and burdens of working during an epidemic. Both forms of benefit are often made available to members of the armed forces for (...) the harms, risks and burdens that come with military service. We argue from analogy that these benefits also ought to be provided to key workers during an epidemic because, like the military, key workers face unavoidable harms, risks and burdens in providing essential public good. The amount of compensation should be proportional to the harm suffered and the amount of hazard pay should be proportional to the risk and burden endured. Therefore, key workers should receive the same amount of compensation and hazard pay as the military where the harms, risks and burdens are equivalent. In the UK, a form of no-fault compensation has recently been made available to the surviving families of key workers who suffer fatal COVID-19 infections. According to our argument, however, it is insufficient because it offers less to key workers than is made available to the families of armed services personnel killed on duty. (shrink)

This article integrates (1) research in the historical dynamics of state societies relating group solidarity and group expansion to cultural frontiers, (2) comparative research in anthropology relating matrilocality to a particular variety of internal politics and a particular form of warfare, and (3) interdisciplinary reconstructions of large-scale “demic expansions” and associated kinship systems in prehistory. The argument is that “metaethnic frontiers,” where very different cultures clash, are centers for the formation of larger, more enduring, and more militarily effective groups. In (...) small-scale non-state societies, the major path toward the formation of such groups is the establishment of cross-cutting ties among men. This often involves the adoption of matrilocal norms. The current distribution of matrilocality and matrilineality around the world may be partly a residue of major demic expansions in prehistory involving matrilocal tribes. This hypothesis is evaluated with a range of evidence, including information regarding the spread of two language families, Bantu and Austronesian. (shrink)

Healthcare systems around the world are struggling to maintain a sufficient workforce to provide adequate care during the COVID-19 pandemic. Staffing problems have been exacerbated by healthcare workers (HCWs) refusing to work out of concern for their families. I sketch a deontological framework for assessing when it is morally permissible for HCWs to abstain from work to protect their families from infection and when it is a dereliction of duty to patients. I argue that it is morally permissible for HCWs (...) to abstain from work when their duty to treat is outweighed by the combined risks and burdens of that work. For HCWs who live with their families, the obligation to protect one’s family from infection contributes significantly to those burdens. There are, however, a range of complicating factors including the strength of duty to treat which varies according to the HCW’s role, the vulnerability of family members to the disease, the willingness of family members to risk infection and the resources available to the HCW to protect their family. In many cases, HCWs in ‘frontline’ roles with a weak duty to treat and families at home will be morally permitted to abstain from work given the risks posed by COVID-19; therefore, society should provide additional incentives to maintain sufficient staff in these roles. (shrink)

The article focuses on the temporal and epistemic economy connected to the transatlantic travels of the categorical triad of ‘race-class-gender’. It looks at conditions and forces that have fuelled the dynamics of the discourse on differences and inequality among women and analyses feminist discourse and its aporias as a particular environment for the travels of theories. Furthermore, it follows the changes the triad of ‘race-class-gender’ undergoes on its transatlantic route from the United States to a German-speaking context and it outlines (...) the theoretical challenges connected to an intersectional perspective that aims to overcome a theoretical stagnation that itself finds symptomatic expression in the ritual citing of ‘race-class-gender’. (shrink)

Harold Shapiro, the former president of Princeton, ventured to say that theology had been divorced from the liberal. Professor Doug Dix's book is about arranging a remarriage. His analysis suggests the divorce goes deeper than Shapiro may have realized. Love has been divorced from learning because money has replaced truth as the object of affection. Now students learn to earn. Natural Literacy strives to motivate students and faculty to instead learn to love.

On one hand, it is commonly accepted that clinicians should not deceive their patients, yet on the other there are many instances in which deception could be in a patient’s best interest. In this paper, I propose that this conflict is in part driven by a narrow conception of deception as contingent on belief. I argue that we cannot equate non-deceptive care solely with introducing or sustaining a patient’s true belief about their condition or treatment, because there are many instances (...) of clinical care which are non-doxastic and non-deceptive. Inasmuch as this is true, better understanding of non-doxastic attitudes, such as hope and pretence, could improve our understanding of deception in clinical practice. (shrink)

O’Donohue has identified 37 criticisms of the American Psychological Association’s Ethical Principles of Psychologists and Code of Conduct (Ethics Code), although many of his criticisms go far beyond what is found written in the APA Ethics Code, to include the process of adjudicating ethics complaints by the American Psychological Association Ethics Committee, and the process by which the Ethics Code was developed. The authors claim that a major shortcoming of O’Donohue’s article is that he adopted an unrealistically expansive role for (...) the Ethics Code that was not clearly linked to furthering the goals of the ethics code revision. (shrink)

We conducted and analyzed qualitative interviews with 12 persons working on the Healthy Public Housing Initiative in Boston, Massachusetts in 2001. Our goal was to generate ideas and themes related to the ethics of the community-based participatory research in which they were engaged. Specifically, we wanted to see if we found themes that differed from conventional research that is based on an individualistic ethics. There were clearly distinct ethical issues raised with respect to projects and individuals who engage in community-based (...) collaborations. The differences that arose from the interviews were seeking equality between the partners, the need for the community partner to defend the community, dealing with unflattering data, meeting community expectations and producing tangible benefits to the community. (shrink)

Daniel Sulmasy has recently argued that good medicine depends on physicians having a wide discretionary space in which they can act on their consciences. The only constraints Sulmasy believes we should place on physicians’ discretionary space are those defined by a form of tolerance he derives from Locke whereby people can publicly act in accordance with their personal religious and moral beliefs as long as their actions are not destructive to society. Sulmasy also claims that those who would reject physicians’ (...) right to conscientious objection eliminate discretionary space thus undermining good medicine and unnecessarily limiting religious freedom. I argue that, although Sulmasy is correct that some discretionary space is necessary for good medicine, he is wrong in thinking that proscribing conscientious objection entails eliminating discretionary space. I illustrate this using Julian Savulescu and Udo Schuklenk’s system for restricting conscientious objections as a counter-example. I then argue that a narrow discretionary space constrained by professional ideals will promote good medicine better than Sulmasy’s wider discretionary space constrained by his conception of tolerance. Sulmasy’s version of discretionary space would have us tolerate actions that are at odds with aspects of good medicine, including aspects that Sulmasy himself explicitly values, such as fiduciary duty. Therefore, if we want the degree of religious freedom in the public sphere that Sulmasy favours then we must decide whether it is worth the cost to the healthcare system. (shrink)

© The Author 2017. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Analysis Trust. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: [email protected] volume collects nine of Mark Schroeder’s essays on expressivism, two of which are previously unpublished, along with a substantial introduction that helpfully ties them all together.1 The essays work very nicely as a collection. They are mutually illuminating, and together they make a ‘cumulative case’ for a particular conclusion – namely, that expressivist theories are best understood in (...) terms of their ‘surprising and novel views’ about the nature of propositions and propositional attitudes. As Schroeder sees things, the most promising way for expressivists to develop their view is for them to ‘get over’ their hesitation about propositions and to embrace an expressivist-friendly account of what propositions are. This requires going beyond the ‘merely deflationary talk about propositions’ that is typically endorsed... (shrink)

The theory of sexual selection suggests several possible explanations for the development of standards of physical attractiveness in humans. Asymmetry and departures from average proportions may be markers of the breakdown of developmental stability. Supernormal traits may present age- and sex-typical features in exaggerated form. Evidence from social psychology suggests that both average proportions and (in females) “neotenous” facial traits are indeed more attractive. Using facial photographs from three populations (United States, Brazil, Paraguayan Indians), rated by members of the same (...) three populations, plus Russians and Venezuelan Indians, we show that age, average features, and (in females) feminine/neotenous features all play a role in facial attractiveness. (shrink)

In this essay, I investigate the longstanding philosophical problem of whether we have control over our actions in a deterministic world. In working through a range of everyday situations in which this problem could arise, I come to the realisation that determinism has no bearing on whether we have control over our actions, because having control over our actions and determinism only make sense under different aspects.

All people are vulnerable to having their self-concepts shaped by others. This article investigates that vulnerability using a theory of narrative self-constitution. According to narrative self-constitution, people depend on others to develop and maintain skills of self-narration and they are vulnerable to having the content of their self-narratives co-authored by others. This theoretical framework highlights how vulnerability to co-authoring is essential to developing a self-narrative and, thus, the possibility of autonomy. However, this vulnerability equally entails that co-authors can undermine autonomy (...) by contributing disvalued content to the agent’s self-narrative and undermining her authorial skills. I illustrate these processes with the first-hand reports of several women who survived sexual abuse as children. Their narratives of survival and healing reveal the challenges involved in developing the skills required to manage vulnerability to co-authoring and how others can help in this process. Finally, I discuss some of the implications of co-authoring for the healthcare professional and the therapeutic relationship. (shrink)

Does the decision to relax by taking a drive rather than by taking a walk cause harm? In particular, do the additional carbon emissions caused by such a decision make anyone worse off? Recently several philosophers have argued that the answer is no, and on this basis have gone on to claim that act-consequentialism cannot provide a moral reason for individuals to voluntarily reduce their emissions. The reasoning typically consists of two steps. First, the effect of individual emissions on the (...) weather is miniscule: the planet’s meteorological system is so large, and the size of individual emissions so tiny, that whatever impact an individual emission has on the weather must be vanishingly small. Second, vanishingly small impacts aren’t morally relevant because no one could possibly tell the difference between such an impact occurring and it not occurring. In this paper, we show why both steps are mistaken, and hence why act-consequentialism implies that each of us has an individual obligation to do what we can to stop damaging the climate, including by refraining from, or perhaps by purchasing offsets against, our own individual luxury carbon emissions. (shrink)

The 2023 doctors’ strikes in the UK have elicited a familiar moral outcry that such strikes are morally wrong. We consider five arguments that might be thought to show doctors’ strikes are morally impermissible but show that they all fail. The most we can conclude from such arguments is that doctors’ strikes are morally permissible in a narrower range of circumstances than strikes in other sectors.We then outline two independent but compatible justifications for doctors’ strikes, one that appeals to doctors’ (...) interests in fair pay and working conditions and one that appeals to doctors’ duty to protect public health. We also suggest that doctors’ strikes can be supererogatory when they aim to correct a government failing in its own duty to protect public health. Finally, we assess the 2023 UK doctors’ strikes. We conclude that they are justified and there is a case for considering them supererogatory. (shrink)

According to most contemporary theorists, free riding on the cooperative contributions of others is unfair. At the same time, obligations to contribute to cooperative schemes can compel conformity with conventional practices, and can do so to a degree that poses a real threat to individuality. This paper exposes this tension between fairness and individuality, and proposes a way to resolve it. The resolution depends on an alternative approach to understanding fairness—one that appeals to the relational goods fairness is meant to (...) maintain. In particular, norms of fairness protect against the interactions within a relationship becoming disrespectful. Many instances of free riding are indeed disrespectful and hence unfair. But this is not always so: one can choose to live a lifestyle that fails to return the benefits their community provides without disrespecting one's fellows. It is thus possible to free ride without being unfair, and so duties of fairness need not add to those already formidable forces that threaten to extinguish valuable individuality. (shrink)

The target article proposes a theory uniting the anthropological study of kin terminology with recent developments in linguistics and cognitive science. The response to comments reaches two broad conclusions. First, the theory may be relevant to several current areas of research, including (a) the nature and scope of the regular, side of language, (b) the organization of different domains of conceptual structure, including parallels across domains, their taxonomic distribution and implications for evolution, and (c) the influence of conceptual structure on (...) social structure. Second, the theory compares favorably with alternatives, including (a) the theory that kin terminology is not really that complicated, (b) the theory that kin terms mirror social categories, (c) componential analysis, and (d) kinship algebra. If further research in anthropology, linguistics, and other fields supports the theory, and confirms the psychological reality of proposed mechanisms, then kinship may emerge as a model system for the study of important issues in cognition and social organization. (shrink)

I want to show that Leibnizian mode to thinking is based in a kind of logic of concepts. As an example, his first attempt to sum infinite series is analyzed. The question concerning the justification of the Leibnizian syllogism leads to the analysis of the fundamental definition. A conclusion obtained by “real-definitions” (“Realdefinitionen”) is logically justified. It is classified as a "Vernunftwahrheit". A conclusion obtained by paradoxical definitions (paradoxe Definitionen) is classified as a “Tatsachenwahrheit”. According to Leibniz it has validity (...) by contingency. A conclusion obtained by “impossible definitions” is logically unjustified. (shrink)

This ten chapter text is designed to be used as a stand-alone text or in conjunction with a set of primary readings in a twelve week course on modern social theory or the second half of a full-year course on sociological theory. It examines the most important theoretical approaches of the 20th and 21st centuries, balancing concise coverage with appropriate depth of analysis. It avoids rehashing classical theory while still placing recent theorists in a historical context. It takes into account (...) developments in social theory over the last twenty years and highlights Canadian theorists (such as Innis, McLuhan, and Grant) and context (for example, communications, technology, and nature). It includes sometimes overlooked subject areas such as situationism and postmodernism, as well as European theorists not covered by many texts. (shrink)

Chrisoula Andreou argues that even if our happiness is determined by our material standard of living, our standard of living could be lowered without lowering our happiness. In this response, I show how this claim can be challenged on both conceptual and empirical grounds. Conceptually, how justified we are in believing her claim depends on how we conceive of the 'we' it refers to. Empirically, there is economic evidence in tension with each of the several interpretations her position admits of. (...) I conclude that Andreou has not provided an argument that can reasonably persuade committed materialists that reducing their standard of living will not reduce their happiness. And I suggest that the search for such an argument ought to include attempts to articulate and defend a theory of well-being that shows how tenuous the connection between material luxury and quality of life really is. (shrink)

Since materially opulent lifestyles are a significant cause of environmental degradation, environmentalists often call for us to live more simply. This call is typically focused on consumption. But our environmental footprint is a function of our paid work as well as our purchases. Consequently, environmentalists should also urge us to work less. Defending this claim is the project of this paper. Reducing our economic productivity, I argue, can often be expected to make both the world and our characters better. And, (...) contrary to what some have suggested, working less than is normal needn’t involve unfairly free-riding on the productive efforts of others. (shrink)

This essay explores the process and issues related to community collaborative research that involves Native Americans generally, and specifically examines the Navajo Nation’s efforts to regulate research within its jurisdiction. Researchers need to account for both the experience of Native Americans and their own preconceptions about Native Americans when conducting research about Native Americans. The Navajo Nation institutionalized an approach to protecting members of the nation when it took over Institutional Review Board (IRB) responsibilities from the US Indian Health Service (...) (IHS) in 1996. While written regulations for the Navajo Nation IRB are not dissimilar, and in some ways are less detailed than those of the IHS IRB, in practice the Navajo Nation allows less flexibility. Primary examples of this include not allowing expedited review and requiring prepublication review of all manuscripts. Because of its broad mandate, the Navajo Nation IRB may also require review of some projects that would not normally be subject to IRB approval, including investigative journalism and secondary research about Navajo People that does not involve direct data collection from human subjects. (shrink)

In Keeping Your Ethical Edge Sharp, Doug Sherman and Bill Hendricks discuss the critical issues that confront us in the workplace--possibly our most strategic sphere of influence today. They point put the obstacles that often keep our lights from shining in the darkness, and they present six principles we must be mindful of if we're to keep our ethical edge sharp and our witness distinctive.

Guided by the APA Ethics Code and social justice, this book helps psychologists solve ethical dilemmas while empowering those impacted by their work.

Sometimes healthcare professionals conscientiously refuse to treat patients despite the patient requesting legal, medically indicated treatments within the professionals’ remit. Recently, there has been a proliferation of views using the concept of public reason to specify which conscientious refusals of treatment should be accommodated. Four such views are critically assessed, namely, those of Robert Card, Massimo Reichlin, David Scott, and Doug McConnell. This paper argues that McConnell’s view has advantages over the other approaches because it combines the requirement that (...) healthcare professionals publicly justify the grounds of their conscientious refusals of treatment with the requirement that those grounds align with minimally decent healthcare. This relatively restrictive approach accommodates conscientious refusals from minimally decent healthcare professionals while still protecting good healthcare, the independence of the healthcare professions, and the fiduciary relationships. (shrink)

Philosophical Investigations, Volume 45, Issue 4, Page 414-429, October 2022.

Research in anthropology has shown that kin terminologies have a complex combinatorial structure and vary systematically across cultures. This article argues that universals and variation in kin terminology result from the interaction of (1) an innate conceptual structure of kinship, homologous with conceptual structure in other domains, and (2) principles of optimal, “grammatical” communication active in language in general. Kin terms from two languages, English and Seneca, show how terminologies that look very different on the surface may result from variation (...) in the rankings of a universal set of constraints. Constraints on kin terms form a system: some are concerned with absolute features of kin (sex), others with the position (distance and direction) of kin in “kinship space,” others with groups and group boundaries (matrilines, patrilines, generations, etc.). Also, kin terms sometimes extend indefinitely via recursion, and recursion in kin terminology has parallels with recursion in other areas of language. Thus the study of kinship sheds light on two areas of cognition, and their phylogeny. The conceptual structure of kinship seems to borrow its organization from the conceptual structure of space, while being specialized for representing genealogy. And the grammar of kinship looks like the product of an evolved grammar faculty, opportunistically active across traditional domains of semantics, syntax, and phonology. Grammar is best understood as an offshoot of a uniquely human capacity for playing coordination games. (shrink)

ABSTRACT‘Self-ambiguity’, we suggest, is best understood as an uncertainty about how strongly a given feature reflects who one truly is. When this understanding of self-ambiguity is applied to a view of the self as having both essential and shapable components, self-ambiguity can be seen to have two aspects: (1) uncertainty about one's essential or relatively unchangeable characteristics, e.g. one's sexuality, and (2) uncertainty about how to shape oneself, e.g. which values to commit to, actions to pursue, or essential features to (...) identify with. We explain how a narrative account of agency can accommodate these forms of self-ambiguity and argue that such an account also reveals another kind of self-ambiguity, namely, (3) uncertainty about whether one's established self-narrative represents who one really is. We illustrate this third form of self-ambiguity in the context of addiction where people's established addiction self-narratives make it difficult to identify with recovery. We argue that recovery will require embracing, especially, our third form of self-ambiguity as a chance for positive self-transformation. Treatment for addiction should, therefore, support people in going through and ultimately narratively resolving the inevitable self-ambiguities of the recovery process. (shrink)

Robert Card’s “Reasonability View” is a significant contribution to the debate over the place of conscientious objection in health care. In his view, conscientious objections can only be accommodated if the grounds for the objection meet a reasonability standard. I identify inconsistencies in Card’s description of the reasonability standard and argue that each version he specifies is unsatisfactory. The criteria for reasonability that Card sets out most frequently have no clear underpinning principle and are too permissive of immoral objections. Card (...) has also claimed that petitioners must justify their positions with Rawlsian public reason. I argue that, although the resulting reasonability standard is principled, it is overly restrictive. I also show that a reasonability standard built on Rawls’ more lenient conception of reasonableness would be overly permissive of objections at odds with professional healthcare standards. Finally, I argue for my favored solution, which bases the reasonability standard on minimal professional standards. (shrink)

Psychiatric involvement in patient morality is controversial. If psychiatrists are tasked with shaping patient morality, the coercive potential of psychiatry is increased, treatment may be unfairly administered on the basis of patients’ moral beliefs rather than medical need, moral disputes could damage the therapeutic relationship and, in any case, we are often uncertain or conflicted about what is morally right. Yet, there is also a strong case for the view that psychiatry often works through improving patient morality and, therefore, should (...) aim to do so. Our goal is to offer a practical and ethical path through this conflict. We argue that the default psychiatric approach to patient morality should be procedural, whereby patients are helped to express their own moral beliefs. Such a procedural approach avoids the brunt of objections to psychiatric involvement in patient morality. However, in a small subset of cases where patients’ moral beliefs are sufficiently distorted or underdeveloped, we claim that psychiatrists should move to a substantive approach and shape thecontentof those beliefs when they are relevant to psychiatric outcomes. The substantive approach is prone to the above objections but we argue it is nevertheless justified in this subset of cases. (shrink)

Many different versions of cultural studies have emerged in the past decades. While during its dramatic period of global expansion in the 1980s and 1990s, cultural studies was often identified with...

This paper deals with problems that vagueness raises for choices involving evaluative tradeoffs. I focus on a species of such choices, which I call ‘qualitative barrier cases.’ These are cases in which a qualitatively significant tradeoff in one evaluative dimension for a given improvement in another dimension could not make an option better all things considered, but a merely quantitative tradeoff for the given improvement might. Trouble arises, however, when one of the options constitutes a borderline case of an evaluative (...) kind. I argue that in such cases we can neither affirm nor deny that trading off losses in one evaluative dimension for gains in another yields a better outcome. Theoretically, this result provides a way to defuse an argument that has been presented by both Larry Temkin and Stuart Rachels that purports to show that the ‘better than’ relation is intransitive. Practically, it allows us to undermine the claim that rational agents are better off withholding their contribution to a public good in certain instances of the free-rider problem, and thus to take an important step towards solving these problems. (shrink)

Understanding disgustingness is philosophically important partly because claims about disgustingness play a prominent role in moral discourse and practice. It is also important because disgustingness has been used to illustrate the promise of "neo-sentimentalism." Recently developed by moral philosophers such as David Wiggins, John McDowell, Simon Blackburn, Justin D'Arms and Dan Jacobson, neo-sentimentalism holds that for a thing to be disgusting is for it to be "appropriate" to respond to it with disgust. In this paper, I argue that from what (...) we currently know about the disgust response, these accounts are mistaken. Instead, disgustingness is best understood as a descriptive property: fundamentally, things that are disgusting-for-S are things that possess triggers for S's disgust mechanism. Theoretically, my account puts pressure on neo-sentimentalists to show that the responses they appeal to can anchor normative properties. Practically, my account shows that we must abandon authoritative claims that certain things really are--or are not--disgusting. (shrink)

The Stoics claim that the sage is free from emotions, experiencing instead εὐπάθειαι (‘good feelings’). It is, however, unclear whether the sage experiences εὐπάθειαι about virtue/vice only, indifferents only, or both. Here, I argue that εὐπάθειαι are exclusively about virtue/vice by showing that this reading alone accommodates the Stoic claim that there is not a εὐπάθειαι corresponding to emotional pain. I close by considering the consequences of this view for the coherence and viability of Stoic ethics.

In this paper, we explicate the method of Investigative Ordinary Language Philosophy (IOLP). The term was coined by John Cook to describe the unique philosophical approach of Frank Ebersole. We argue that (i) IOLP is an overlooked yet valuable philosophical method grounded in our everyday experiences and concerns; and (ii) as such, Frank Ebersole is an important but neglected figure in the history of ordinary language philosophy.