The aim of this paper is twofold: (i) to introduce the framework of update semantics and to explain what kind of semantic phenomena may successfully be analysed in it: (ii) to give a detailed analysis of one such phenomenon: default reasoning.

Frank A. Lewis presents a close study of book Zeta of Aristotle's Metaphysics, one of his most dense and controversial texts, commonly understood to contain his deepest thoughts on the definition of substance and related metaphysical issues. Lewis argues that Aristotle returns to the causal view of primary substance from his Posterior Analytics.

Suppose that two geysers, about one mile apart, erupt at irregular intervals, but usually erupt almost exactly at the same time. One would suspect that they come from a common source, or at least that there is a common cause of their eruptions. And this common cause surely acts before both eruptions take place. This idea, that simultaneous correlated events must have prior common causes, was first made precise by Hans Reichenbach (Reichenbach 1956). It can be used to infer the (...) existence of unobserved and unobservable events, and to infer causal relations from statistical relations. Unfortunately it does not appear to be universally valid, nor is there agreement as to the circumstances in which it is valid. (shrink)

Moral puzzles about actions which bring about very small or what are said to be imperceptible harms or benefits for each of a large number of people are well known. Less well known is an argument by Warren Quinn that standard theories of rationality can lead an agent to end up torturing himself or herself in a completely foreseeable way, and that this shows that standard theories of rationality need to be revised. We show where Quinn's argument goes wrong, and (...) apply this to the moral puzzles. (shrink)

" In the generations since, its influence has grown-today it is accepted as a classic of general jurisprudence.The work is a bold and persuasive attack on the ...

Kochen has suggested an interpretation of quantum mechanics in which he denies that wavepackets ever collapse, while affirming that measurements have definite results. In this paper I attempt to show that his interpretation is untenable. I then suggest ways in which to construct similar, but more satisfactory, hidden variable interpretations.

The topic of homonymy, especially the variety of homonymy that has gone under the title, “focal meaning,” is of fundamental importance to large portions of Aristotle’s work-not to mention its central place in the ongoing controversies between Aristotle and Plato. It is quite astonishing, therefore, that the topic should have gone so long without a book-length treatment. And it is all the more gratifying that the new book on homonymy by Christopher Shields should be so comprehensive, and of such uniformly (...) high quality.’ Everyone who cares about Aristotle will be in his debt. Shields’s book falls into two parts. In the first, he is concerned to lay out the basic structure of Aristotle’s views about homonymy; in the second part, we are led through the various applications of the idea, to the analysis of friendship, for example, the homonymy of the body, the account of goodness and, not least, the homonymy of being. Shields’s book brings out well how the topic of homonymy weaves in and out of the fabric of Aristotle’s thinking in a variety of areas. I will resist the temptation to follow Shields through these various subject-matters, and instead take up essentially two topics. First, (I), the basic outline of Aristotle’s notion of homonymy, more or less independently of its different applications (here, I follow Shields’s example in the first half of his book). Thereafter, I discuss a single application: the homonymy of being (this is the subject of Shields’s last and longest chapter). Here, I will be interested (II) in how homonymy relates to the theory of the categories; and (III) in the application of homonymy to the analysis of substance in the Metaphysics. (shrink)

The false attribution of autonomy and related concepts to artificial agents that lack the attributed levels of the respective characteristic is problematic in many ways. In this article, we contrast this view with a positive viewpoint that emphasizes the potential role of such false attributions in the context of robotic language acquisition. By adding emotional displays and congruent body behaviors to a child-like humanoid robot’s behavioral repertoire, we were able to bring naïve human tutors to engage in so called intent (...) interpretations. In developmental psychology, intent interpretations can be hypothesized to play a central role in the acquisition of emotion, volition, and similar autonomy-related words. The aforementioned experiments originally targeted the acquisition of linguistic negation. However, participants produced other affect- and motivation-related words with high frequencies too and, as a consequence, these entered the robot’s active vocabulary. We will analyze participants’ non-negative emotional and volitional speech and contrast it with participants’ speech in a non-affective baseline scenario. Implications of these findings for robotic language acquisition in particular and artificial intelligence and robotics more generally will also be discussed. (shrink)

Ethical decision theory may not be sufficiently well developed to furnish reliable guidelines to people involved in complex decision making that involves conflict between ethical considerations and business imperatives such as making a profit. In conditions of ethical uncertainty hindsight bias may occur, and this study reports on an exploration of hindsight bias effects among participants in continuing education in business programmes. Perceptions of business ethics were found to differ among groups within the sample depending on what they thought had (...) been the outcome of the ethical decision concerned. (shrink)

While the rule of law is surely a very important good, the familiar discussions found in the literature lead many to conclude that it is either a relatively trivial political ideal, or else a redundant one. What is needed is a new and persuasive defense of the rule of law that properly reflects its great significance for human well being. An important step towards building such an argument is to question a widely-shared but often unnoticed assumption that the rule of (...) law should be understood as a virtue of legal systems. The path is then cleared for a republican argument built on two theses: first, the thought that an ideal society would be one in which no one is the master of anyone else, and second, the thought that our freedom from domination is not natural or pre-institutional. (shrink)

This essay focuses on the historical text as a whole. It does so by conceiving of the historical text as representation - in the way the we may say of a photo or a painting that it represents the person depicted on it. It is argued that representation cannot be properly understood by modelling it on true description. So all the central questions asked since the days of Frege with regard to how the true statement relates to the world must (...) be asked anew, if we wish to understand how a historical representation relates to what it is about. Three claims are made. In the first place, representation is not a two-place but a three-place operator: apart from a representation (say, a book on Napoleon) and what the representation represents (Napoleon himself), a representation also indicates an aspect of represented reality (an aspect of Napoleon). The second claim is that this notion of the aspect is crucial for a proper understanding of (historical) representation. Thirdly, it is argued that traditional theories of reference cannot account for the relationship between a representation and the aspect indicated by it. (shrink)

Considerations of social justice pertain to universities with respect to reserved spaces for applicants from disadvantaged groups, targeted hiring, differential student fees or faculty workloads and salaries, and similarly contested matters. This paper displaces debates over what constitutes just allocation of university resources from those over theories of justice in general to those about alternative visions of the proper goal of universities. To this end, educational and democratic theories of John Dewey are drawn on as an alternative to elitist conceptions (...) and the implications of these competing viewpoints for specific justice-related issues are explicated. (shrink)

Indefinite probability statements can be analysed in terms of statements which attribute probability to propositions. Therefore, there is no need to find a special place in probability theory for them; once we have an adequate account of statements that straightforwardly attribute probability to propositions, we will automatically have an adequate account of indefinite probability statements.

I show that for any quantum dynamics and any choice of observables as hidden variables an adequate hidden variable theory always exists. I argue that hidden variable theories have no more problems in reconciling non-locality with relativity than no-hidden-variable theories.

Replying to Theaetetus’ suggestion that knowledge is true opinion at Tht. 200e, Socrates remarks that ‘a whole profession’ testifies against this definition. The orator practises the art of persuasion, not to teach people, but make them believe whatever he wants. If a robbery has taken place, for example, he cannot in a short time teach adequately the truth about what happened to people who were not on the scene.

How does tacit knowledge inscribe itself into cultural and social practices? As the established distinction between tacit and explicit or discursive forms of knowledge does not explain this question, the contributions in this volume reconstruct, describe, and analyze the manifold processes by which the tacit reveals itself: They focus, for example, on metaphors, myths, and visualizations as explications of the tacit as well as on processes of embodiment. Taken together, they demonstrate that the tacit does not constitute a single or (...) unified knowledge complex, but has to be understood in its differentiated and fragmented forms. (shrink)