This paper contributes to the clarification of the concept of “typicality” discussed in contemporary philosophy of physics by conceiving the nomological status of a typical behaviour such as that expressed in the Second Law of Thermodynamics as a “minutis rectis law”. A brief sketch of the discovery of “typicality” shows that there were ideas of typical behaviour not only in physics but also in sociology. On this basis and in analogy to the Second Law of Thermodynamics, it is shown that (...) the nomological status of sociological laws such as Gresham’s Law can also be conceived as “minutis rectis laws”. (shrink)

Emotion Review, Volume 14, Issue 1, Page 31-42, January 2022. This paper distinguishes collective emotions from other phenomena pertaining to the social and interactive nature of emotion and proposes a taxonomy of different types of collective emotion. First, it emphasizes the distinction between collective emotions as affective experiences and underpinning mechanisms. Second, it elaborates on other types of affective experience, namely the social sharing of emotion, group-based emotions, and joint emotions. Then, it proposes a working definition of collective emotion via (...) a minimal threshold and four structural features. Finally, it develops a taxonomy of five types of collective emotion: emotional sharing, emotional contagion, emotional matching, emotional segregation, and emotional fusion. (shrink)

Normic Laws and the Significance of Nonmonotonic Reasoning for Philosophy of Science. Normic laws have the form ‘if A then normally B’. They have been discovered in the explanation debate, but were considered as empirically vacuous (§1). I argue that the prototypical (or ideal) normality of normic laws implies statistical normality (§2), whence normic laws have empirical content. In §3–4 I explain why reasoning from normic laws is nonmonotonic, and why the understanding of the individual case is so important here. (...) After sketching some foundations of nonmonotonic reasoning as developed by AI-researchers (§5), Iargue that normic laws are also the best way to understand ceteris paribus laws (§6). §7 deals with the difference between physical and non-physical disciplines and §9 with the difference between normicity and approximation. In §8 it is shown how nonmonotonic reasoning provides a new understanding of the protection of theories against falsification by auxiliary hypotheses. §10, finally, gives a system- and evolution-theoretical explanation of the deeper reason for the omnipresence of normic laws in practice and science, and forthe connection between ideal and statistical normality. (shrink)

During a conference entitled “_Un logicien consciencieux. La philosophie de Evert Willem Beth_,” held in Nancy in 1998 and published in this journal, volume 3, cahier 4 [Barth, Heinzmann _et al._ 1998-1999], the participants regretted that a reasoned biography of Beth was not available. In view of the efforts made since then in this direction, in particular by Paul van Ulsen in his PhD thesis in Dutch [2000], this article attempts to provide an overview of Beth’s work for a broader (...) community of philosophers of science. However, my focus is not so much on Beth’s widely discussed and important contributions to mathematical logic, where his most creative merits reside. My aim is to emphasize Beth’s philosophical and cultural background. Both are also discussed in the first two chapters of Ulsen’s thesis, which globally focuses on Beth’s work in logic. Of course, philosophical and scientific aspects cannot be systematically separated, but Beth’s influence on the philosophy of mathematics be... (shrink)

Kontextualistische Wissenstheorien wurden bisher hauptsächlich zur Auseinandersetzung mit dem Skeptiker entwickelt. Meines Erachtens sind sie dabei wenig erfolgreich, bieten aber einen vielversprechenden Ansatz zur Auflösung des bekannten Gettier-Problems. In diesem Aufsatz setze ich mich vor allem mit einer Überlegung Stewart Cohens auseinander, die zu zeigen scheint, dass auch der Kontextualist eine vom Wissenszuschreiber unabhängige „anti-Gettier-Bedingung“ braucht. Hätte er damit recht, so wäre vom Kontextualismus kein Fortschritt bei der traditionellen Wissensanalyse zu erwarten. Zur Widerlegung seines Arguments schlage ich zunächst eine Wissensdefinition (...) vor, die als „radikal kontextualistisch“ bezeichnet werden kann, insofern darin allein Faktoren, die dem Kontext des Wissenszuschreibers zuzurechnen sind, eine Rolle spielen. Indem ich deutlich mache, wie ich zu meinem radikalen Kontextualismus komme, zeige ich, wie man Cohens Argument entgeht. Bei dieser Überlegung spielt allerdings die enge Verbindung zwischen dem Begriff des Wissens und dem des guten Informanten, gegen die vor allem Ansgar Beckermann argumentiert hat, eine entscheidende Rolle. Auch mit Beckermanns Argumenten setzte ich mich daher auseinander. (shrink)

This work looks at how matter and mind inter-relate. It looks at the subject in terms of the philosophy of science, the philosophy of mind, thermodynamics, mechanistic materialism and psychological SETs. Rationality, relativism and Popper's views are taken into account.