This article analyzes how five leading Hungarian postdissident liberal thinkers conceptually constructed their view of liberalism in the early years of postcommunism. Studying Beszélő, the most signi cant liberal journal during the early years of representative democracy, it shows how they did so through references to political “threats” and the idea of a “liberal minimum” (János Kis), local liberal and democratic traditions and “progressive patriotism” (Miklós Szabó), the ongoing “liberal-conservative revolution” and the creation of a “new political community” (Gáspár Miklós (...) Tamás), antipolitics and “expertise” (György Konrád), and the “complete catalog of human rights” and the agenda of “modernization” (István Eörsi), respectively. Next to its conceptual analysis of heavily influential individual thinkers, the article discusses the ambition of postdissident Hungarian liberals to harmonize liberal and democratic tenets. Last but not least, it elaborates on the left-wing origins of many of their central concepts that, as suggested here, ultimately hindered liberalism's assumption of a central position in the new political system. (shrink)

Color adjectives have played a central role in work on language typology and variation, but there has been relatively little investigation of their meanings by researchers in formal semantics. This is surprising given the fact that color terms have been at the center of debates in the philosophy of language over foundational questions, in particular whether the idea of a compositional, truth-conditional theory of natural language semantics is even coherent. The challenge presented by color terms is articulated in detail in (...) the work of Charles Travis. Travis argues that structurally isomorphic sentences containing color adjectives can shift truth value from context to context depending on how they are used and in the absence of effects of vagueness or ambiguity/polysemy, and concludes that a deterministic mapping from structures to truth conditions is impossible. The goal of this paper is to provide a linguistic perspective on this issue, which we believe defuses Travis’ challenge. We provide empirical arguments that color adjectives are in fact ambiguous between gradable and nongradable interpretations, and that this simple ambiguity, together with independently motivated options concerning scalar dimension within the gradable reading accounts for the Travis facts in a simpler, more constrained, and thus ultimately more successful fashion than recent contextualist analyses such as those in Szabó (Perspectives on semantics, pragmatics and discourse: A festschrift for Ferenc Kiefer, 2001) or Rothschild and Segal (Mind Lang, 2009). (shrink)

I will argue that the Peres-Mermin square does not necessarily rule out a value-definite (deterministic) noncontextual hidden variable model if the operators are not given a physical interpretation satisfying the following two requirements: (i) each operator is uniquely realized by a single physical measurement; (ii) commuting operators are realized by simultaneous measurements. To underpin this claim, I will construct three hidden variable models for three different physical realizations of the Peres-Mermin square: one violating (i), another violating (ii), and a third (...) one violating both (i) and (ii). (shrink)

This book presents the psychological basis, methodology, and application of Marton's phenomenographic approach to the theory of learning.

Felicitous underspecification—apparently flawless use of context-sensitive words in contexts where they cannot be assigned unique semantic values—is rather common in ordinary speech. King presents a hypothesis about the mechanism conversational participants employ handling felicitous underspecification, one that fits the rich data he surveys well. I will begin by illustrating how King’s account could be put to use in making sense of what happens in a real life conversation. Then I will point out certain shortcomings of the explanation and offer suggestions (...) about how they might be overcome. (shrink)

On one standard reading, Plato's works contain at least two distinct views about the structure of the human soul. According to the first, there is a crucial unity to human psychology: there is a dominant faculty that is capable of controlling attention and behaviour in a way that not only produces right action, but also ‘silences’ inclinations to the contrary—at least in idealized circumstances. According to the second, the human soul contains multiple autonomous parts, and although one of them, reason, (...) normatively dominates the others, it may fail to do so descriptively: even in the face of full, explicit, well‐reasoned, conscious awareness of the truth of a claim, a person may continue to feel residual inclinations towards disavowed, inappropriate and misguided experiences and courses of action. In this paper, I will argue that even the second of these views does not fully capture the ways in which reflective commitment fails to guide human action. Whereas the traditional multi‐part soul view is well suited to explaining phenomena that involve a cognitive conflict between our reflective attitudes and our non‐reflective endorsements, it falls short when we turn to the full array of human patterns of response, because it neglects a further source of challenge to reason's rule, namely, the mediation of associative and heuristic processes. These processes introduce complications for which the simple faculty psychology view cannot adequately account. Because they produce challenges to reason's rule that are phenomenologically invisible, traditional strategies for self‐regulation cannot be straightforwardly applied to their management. (shrink)

It is shown that, given any finite set of pairs of random events in a Boolean algebra which are correlated with respect to a fixed probability measure on the algebra, the algebra can be extended in such a way that the extension contains events that can be regarded as common causes of the correlations in the sense of Reichenbach's definition of common cause. It is shown, further, that, given any quantum probability space and any set of commuting events in it (...) which are correlated with respect to a fixed quantum state, the quantum probability space can be extended in such a way that the extension contains common causes of all the selected correlations, where common cause is again taken in the sense of Reichenbach's definition. It is argued that these results very strongly restrict the possible ways of disproving Reichenbach's Common Cause Principle. (shrink)

Leading scholars in the philosophy of language and theoretical linguistics present brand-new papers on a major topic at the intersection of the two fields, the distinction between semantics and pragmatics. Anyone engaged with this issue in either discipline will find much to reward their attention here. Contributors: Kent Bach, Herman Cappelen, Michael Glanzberg, Jeffrey C. King, Ernie Lepore, Stephen Neale, F. Recanati, Nathan Salmon, Mandy Simons, Scott Soames, Robert J. Stainton, Jason Stanley, Zoltan Gendler Szabo.

Many firms are striving to improve their environmental positions by presenting their environmental efforts to the public. To do so, they are applying green marketing strategies to help gain competitive advantage and appeal to ecologically conscious consumers. However, not all green marketing claims accurately reflect firms’ environmental conduct, and can be viewed as ‘greenwashing’. Greenwashing may not only affect a company’s profitability, but more importantly, result in ethical harm. Therefore, this research extends past greenwashing studies by examining additional influences on (...) and outcomes of perceived greenwashing. To do so, we conducted two studies, an interview study with consumer product and consulting firms, as well as an experiment examining consumers interacting with a company website. For these studies, we used multiple methods, including interviews, questionnaires, and neurophysiological techniques. We found that perceived greenwashing relates not only to environmental and product perceptions, but also to consumers’ happiness while interacting with the website. We also found that website interactivity relates to perceived greenwashing, environmental and product perceptions, and to the amount of interaction with the website. We conclude by discussing managerial and ethical implications for research and practice. (shrink)

Standard derivations of the Bell inequalities assume a common-commoncause-system that is a common screener-off for all correlations and some additional assumptions concerning locality and no-conspiracy. In a recent paper Graßhoff et al., "The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science", 56, 663–680 ) Bell inequalities have been derived via separate common causes assuming perfect correlations between the events. In the paper it will be shown that the assumptions of this separate-common-cause-type derivation of the Bell inequalities in the case of perfect (...) correlations can be reduced to the assumptions of a common-common-cause-system-type derivation. However, in the case of non-perfect correlations a non-reducible separate-common-cause-type derivation of some Bell-like inequalities can be given. The violation of these Bell-like inequalities proves Szabo's ) conjecture concerning the non-existence of a local, non-conspiratorial, separate-common-cause-model for a δ-neighborhood of perfect EPR correlations. (shrink)

First we prove that the set of countable linear orders of the form I + I form a complete analytic set. As a consequence of this we improve a result of Humke and Laczkovich, who showed in [HL] that the set of functions of the form f ⚬ f form a true analytic set in C[0, 1]. We show that these functions form a complete analytic set, solving a problem mentioned on p. 215 of [K1] and on p. 4 of (...) [B]. (shrink)

This essay has two main claims about EPR’s Reality Criterion. First, we claim that the application of the Reality Criterion makes an essential difference between the EPR argument and Einstein’s later arguments against quantum mechanics. We show that while the EPR argument, making use of the Reality Criterion, does derive that certain interpretations of quantum mechanics are incomplete, Einstein’s later arguments, making no use of the Reality Criterion, do not prove incompleteness, but rather point to the inadequacy of the Copenhagen (...) interpretation. We take this fact as an indication that the Reality Criterion is a crucial, indispensable component of the incompleteness argument(s). The second claim is more substantive. We argue that the Reality Criterion is a special case of the Common Cause Principle. Finally, we relate this proposal to Tim Maudlin’s recent assertion that the Reality Criterion is an analytic truth. (shrink)

This paper aims to defend the common-sense view that we exempt compulsive agents from responsibility to the extent that they are unable to choose what they do and hence they cannot control their actions by their choices. This view has been challenged in a seminal paper by Gary Watson, who claimed that akratic agents lack control in the same sense but they are responsible nonetheless. In the first part of the paper, I critically examine the arguments Watson advances for this (...) claim first in his original paper and then in some more recent works. I conclude that his account is based on the widely held assumption that both compulsive behavior and weakness of the will must be understood as a direct result of some inner motivational conflict. In the second part, I argue for an alternative understanding of the difference between weakness and compulsion. My claim is that compulsion is a cognitive rather than a motivational deficiency, since the compulsive, unlike the weak-willed, does not desire to perform the action which she actually performs. Furthermore, I argue that compulsive agents cannot control their actions by their choices because they have a distorted view of their own actional abilities. In the final part of the paper, I discuss a consequence of this account to the conditional analysis of free will as a condition of responsibility. (shrink)

Das Cognitive Enhancement, die Steigerung der geistigen Leistungsfähigkeit gesunder Menschen durch Psychopharmaka und andere Interventionen, ist in jüngster Zeit verstärkt in den Fokus sowohl der Ethik als auch der breiteren Öffentlichkeit geraten. In kontrafaktischer Abstrahierung vom gegenwärtig noch sehr bescheidenen Stand der Technik wird dabei unter anderem erörtert, was grundsätzlich für und was gegen den Einsatz von markant wirksamem Cognitive Enhancement sprechen würde. Der vorliegende Beitrag gibt einen Überblick über die einschlägige Diskussion. Zunächst wird der recht uneinheitlich verwendete Begriff des (...) Cognitive Enhancement näher bestimmt; danach folgt eine systematische Übersicht über die verschiedenen Pro- und Kontra-Argumente. Besprochen werden Per-se-Bewertungen des Cognitive Enhancement, etwaige Folgen für die „verbesserten“ Individuen selbst sowie die Konsequenzen, die ein großflächiger Einsatz von Cognitive Enhancement für die Gesellschaft als Ganzes zeitigen könnte. Ein besonderes Augenmerk wird auf die Frage gelegt, was für einen Einfluss der Einsatz von Cognitive Enhancement auf unser Menschenbild und auf andere Teile des epistemischen Fundaments unserer Kultur haben könnte. (shrink)

The paper sets out to offer an alternative to the function/argument approach to the most essential aspects of natural language meanings. That is, we question the assumption that semantic completeness (of, e.g., propositions) or incompleteness (of, e.g., predicates) exactly replicate the corresponding grammatical concepts (of, e.g., sentences and verbs, respectively). We argue that even if one gives up this assumption, it is still possible to keep the compositionality of the semantic interpretation of simple predicate/argument structures. In our opinion, compositionality presupposes (...) that we are able to compare arbitrary meanings in term of information content. This is why our proposal relies on an ‘intrinsically’ type free algebraic semantic theory. The basic entities in our models are neither individuals, nor eventualities, nor their properties, but ‘pieces of evidence’ for believing in the ‘truth’ or ‘existence’ or ‘identity’ of any kind of phenomenon. Our formal language contains a single binary non-associative constructor used for creating structured complex terms representing arbitrary phenomena. We give a finite Hilbert-style axiomatisation and a decision algorithm for the entailment problem of the suggested system. (shrink)

This paper provides a short overview of how Oakeshott identifies the functions and limits of government, with reliance primarily on two texts. The first one from “Lectures on the History of Political” thought distinguishes nomocratic and teleocratic ways of governing. Oakeshott describes the two forms in a detached fashion, and indirectly hints at his preference for nomocratic rule. The second text is Oakeshott’s essay “On Being Conservative”, where Oakeshott gives a sceptical and critical description of human nature. The paper argues (...) that this account of human nature should be seen as the basis, on which a nomocratic rule can be defended. It will be argued, that the two texts should be read together, if we want to get a reasoned overview of Oakeshott’s criticism of contemporary forms of government, and of his reasons to choose nomocratic rule instead of the teleocratic one. It will be argued that a complex political philosophy based on these two pillars will be provided by Oakeshott’s late book On Human Conduct. (shrink)

Bekanntlich ging Fichte von der Philosophie Kants aus und zwar von der praktischen Philosophie Kants und ihrer Deklaration des Prinzips der menschlichen Freiheit. Fichte war nämlich der Ansicht, daß die theoretische Philosophie Kants trotz ihrer guten Tendenzen keine zureichende Basis für die Erklärung der menschlichen Freiheit biete, da Kant die richtige Tendenz nicht konsequent weiterverfolgt habe. Fichte war deshalb anfangs der Meinung - und bis zu einem gewissen Grade zu Recht - daß das, was er tat, einfach die folgerichtige Ausgestaltung (...) der Philosophie Kants sei; übrigens hat auch Hegel in seinen die Wissenschaft der Philosophiegeschichte sozusagen allererst begründenden denkwürdigen Vorträgen[...] die historische Stellung der Philosophie Fichtes so eingeschätzt. Ursprüngliches Ziel Fichtes ist also ein »echter, durchgeführter Kritizismus«, die Realisierung einer Philosophie, die die Prinzipien Kants sowohl vom formellen als auch inhaltlichen Gesichtspunkt her gleichermaßen konsequent verfolgt: »Kant hat nach meiner Überzeugung das System nicht dargestellt, aber er hat es im Besitz« - schreibt Fichte in einem seiner Briefe. (shrink)

In a recent book, Logical Form: between Logic and Natural Language, Andrea Iacona argues that semantic form and logical form are distinct. The semantic form of a sentence is something that (together with the meanings of its parts) determines what it means; the logical from of a sentence is something that (all by itself) determines whether it is a logical truth. Semantic form does not depend on context but logical form does: for example, whether ‘This is this’ is a logical (...) truth depends on whether the two occurrences of ‘this’ are used to demonstrate the same individual. I respond by claiming that logical form is indifferent to reference and is sensitive only to obligatory co-reference. When the speaker intends both occurrences of ‘this’ to be interpreted the same way the logical from of ‘This is this’ is a=a, while in a context where the speaker has no such intention it is a=b. This proposal allows a much more conservative revision of the traditional picture than the one suggested by Iacona. Instead of identifying the logical form of a natural language sentence by seeking a formalization in an artificial language, we obtain it through abstraction from its syntactic analysis: replacing the non-logical expressions by schematic letters, making sure that we use identical ones if and only if the speaker intended co-reference. (shrink)

This is the first systematic survey of modern nominalistic reconstructions of mathematics, and for this reason alone it should be read by everyone interested in the philosophy of mathematics and, more generally, in questions concerning abstract entities. In the bulk of the book, the authors sketch a common formal framework for nominalistic reconstructions, outline three major strategies such reconstructions can follow, and locate proposals in the literature with respect to these strategies. The discussion is presented with admirable precision and clarity, (...) and should be accessible even to readers with only minimal background in logic and mathematics. There will be many who will turn directly to these pages and use them as a brief manual on the state of the art of nominalism in mathematics. But the most intriguing parts of this elegant book—at least in my view—are the introduction and the conclusion, where the authors examine the significance of reconstructive nominalism. (shrink)

Agents have no control over the formation of their own zygote. Others may do. According to a well-known argument, the so-called Zygote Argument for incompatibilism, these facts, together with a prima facie plausible further assumption, are sufficient to prove that human agents cannot be responsible for their actions if they live in a deterministic universe. This paper argues that the lack of agents’ control over the constitution of their own zygote can undermine their responsibility only in exceptional conditions and that (...) the occurrence or non-occurrence of those conditions has nothing to do with the truth or falsity of determinism. What undermines agents’ responsibility in the situations described by the Zygote Argument is the occurrence of some specific initial conditions which may render the manipulation of agents’ behaviour possible, and not the truth of determinism. (shrink)

Introductory essay / Peter Jones -- The usefulness of the arts and the humanities : the case of Descartes / Gábor Boros -- Roads of remembrance : the treatment of imagination and memory in Gerard's Essay on genius / Zsolt Komáromy -- Diderot's untimeliness / László Kisbali ; transl. Márton Dornbach -- Melody vs. harmony : Rousseau, or, The aesthetics of vowels / Mária Ludassy ; transl. Zsolt Komáromy -- Judgement and taste : from Shakespeare to Shaftesbury / Ferenc (...) Hörcher -- Lord Shaftesbury's "aesthetic freedom" / Endre Szécsényi -- Why one should imitate the Greeks : on Winckelmann / Sándor Radnóti ; transl. Márton Dornbach -- Beauty or beast, or, Monstrous regiments? : Robertson and Burke on women and the public scene / László Kontler -- The concept of nature and the theodicy problem in the Malebranche-Arnauld-Leibniz debate / Dániel Schmal -- Lessing's anti-candide : between reason and revelation / Krisztina Utasi ; transl. Márton Dornbach. (shrink)

Withdrawn by the author! The main content of this paper has been moved into "Szabó, László E., Does special relativity theory tell us anything new about space and time? (ID Code:1321)".

A partition $\{C_i\}_{i\in I}$ of a Boolean algebra Ω in a probability measure space (Ω, p) is called a Reichenbachian common cause system for the correlation between a pair A,B of events in Ω if any two elements in the partition behave like a Reichenbachian common cause and its complement; the cardinality of the index set I is called the size of the common cause system. It is shown that given any non-strict correlation in (Ω, p), and given any finite (...) natural number n > 2, the probability space (Ω,p) can be embedded into a larger probability space in such a manner that the larger space contains a Reichenbachian common cause system of size n for the correlation. (shrink)

This paper is the philosopher-friendly version of our more technical work. It aims to give a clear-cut definition of Bell's notion of local causality. Having provided a framework, called local physical theory, which integrates probabilistic and spatiotemporal concepts, we formulate the notion of local causality and relate it to other locality and causality concepts. Then we compare Bell's local causality with Reichenbach's Common Cause Principle and relate both to the Bell inequalities. We find a nice parallelism: both local causality and (...) the Common Cause Principle are more general notions than captured by the Bell inequalities. Namely, Bell inequalities cannot be derived neither from local causality nor from a common cause unless the local physical theory is classical or the common cause is commuting, respectively. (shrink)

Dickie (2020) presents an argument against the traditional, broadly Gricean view of conversation. She argues that speakers must sometimes be more specific than required for sharing knowledge on a topic of common concern. Her proposed solution is to claim that the goal of conversation is not just sharing knowledge but also sharing cognitive focus. In response, I argue that her proposal faces both conceptual and empirical difficulties, and that the traditional view can handle the problem of non-specificity by acknowledging that (...) in order to sustain mutual trust, conversational participants should be less than optimally efficient. (shrink)

A recent analysis by de Barros and Suppes of experimentally realizable GHZ correlations supports the conclusion that these correlations cannot be explained by introducing local hidden variables. We show, nevertheless, that their analysis does not exclude local hidden variable models in which the inefficiency in the experiment is an effect not only of random errors in the detector equipment, but is also the manifestation of a pre-set, hidden property of the particles ("prism models"). Indeed, we present an explicit prism model (...) for the GHZ scenario; that is, a local hidden variable model entirely compatible with recent GHZ experiments. (shrink)

In 2007, a debate took place between Hungarian representatives of the analytic and continental schools of philosophy. Boldizsár Eszes and János T?zsér concluded their article about the history of analytic philosophy by the claim that the only possible method of philosophising is analytic. Answering on behalf of continental philosophers, Tibor Schwendtner approached the topic from the points of view of the sociology of knowledge and academic politics. Tamás Ullmann also defended continental philosophy, emphasizing that it is not vague or unscientific. (...) István Faragó-Szabó, in opposition to the continental position, represented a third, independent point of view. In their answer to Scwendtner, Eszes and T?zsér reject his charges, providing extensive evidence against them. (shrink)