A comprehensive introduction to current research on the psychology of concept formation and use.

This important book provides a theory about the nature of fiction, and about the relation between the author, the reader and the fictional text. The approach is philosophical: that is to say, the author offers an account of key concepts such as fictional truth, fictional characters, and fiction itself. The book argues that the concept of fiction can be explained partly in terms of communicative intentions, partly in terms of a condition which excludes relations of counterfactual dependence between the world (...) and the text. This communicative model is then applied to the following problems: how can something be 'true in the story' without being explicitly stated in the text? In what ways does interpreting a fictional story depend upon grasping its author's intentions? Is there always a unique best interpretation of a fictional text? What is the correct semantics for fictional names? What is the nature of our emotional response to a fictional work? In answering these questions the author explores the complex interaction between author, reader, and text. This interaction requires the reader to construct a 'fictional author' - a character in the story whose personality, beliefs and emotional states must be interpreted if the reader is to grasp the meaning of the work. (shrink)

Frege's Grundgesetze der Arithmetik offers a conception of cpLogic as the study of functions. Among functions are included those that are concepts, i.e. characteristic functions whose values are the logical objects that are the True/the False. What, in Frege's view, are the objects the True/the False? Frege's stroke functions are themselves concepts. His stipulation introducing his negation stroke mentions that it yields [...]. But curiously no accommodating axiom is given, and there is no such theorem. Why is it that some (...) of Frege's informal stipulations never made appearances as axioms? I offer an explanation that sheds new light on the Grundgesetze. No axioms should over-determination the True as a logical object. Perhaps the True = 0, as would be common in the mathematics of characteristic functions. But the logical objects that are cardinal numbers are value ranges correlated with second-level numerical concepts by a non-homogeneous second-level value-range function [...]. The existence of concepts would be ontologically circular if the True is itself a number. We find this circularity perfectly agreeable to Frege, and suggest that he had accepted that the existence of functions that are concepts in his cpLogic may well be ontologically inseparable from the existence of his value-range function. His cpLogic itself stands or falls with the viability of some value-range function. (shrink)

Social media offers a platform for diffused stakeholders to interact with firms—alternatively praising, questioning, and chastising businesses for their CSR performance and seeking to engage in two-way dialogue. In 2014, 163,402 public messages were sent to Fortune 200 firms’ CSR-focused Twitter accounts, each of which was either shared, replied to, “liked,” or ignored by the targeted firm. This paper examines firm reactions to these messages, building a model of firm response to stakeholders that combines the notions of CSR communication and (...) stakeholder salience. Our findings show that firm response to a stakeholder on social media is positively and most significantly associated with what we refer to as the stakeholder’s connective power but negatively associated with the firm’s own connective power. To a lesser extent, firm response is positively associated with the stakeholder’s normative power but negatively associated with the firm’s own normative power. Firm response is also shown to be positively associated with stakeholder urgency in terms of both the originality of a stakeholder message and the expression of positive sentiment. (shrink)

While he was in the employ of the Elector of Mainz, between 1668 and 1671, Leibniz produced a series of important studies in natural law. One of these, dated between 1670 and 1671, is especially noteworthy since it contains Leibniz's earliest sustained attempt to develop an account of justice. Central to this account is the notion of what Leibniz would later come to call `disinterested love', a notion that remained essentially unchanged in Leibniz's work from this period to the end (...) of his life. Through his notion of disinterested love, Leibniz sought to resolve the supposed conflict between self- and other-regarding motives. For a variety of reasons, many commentators have failed to understand the basis of Leibniz's proposed resolution. My purpose in the present paper is to clarify the terms in which Leibniz effected this resolution, as well as to point out important developments in his later thought concerning the relation between pleasure, good, and happiness. (shrink)

This volume examines the diversity of new scientific theories of religion, by outlining the logical and causal relationships between these enterprises.

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College of Medicine, University of South Alabama Mobile, AL 36688-0002, USA wbp501{at}jaguar1.usouthal.edu ' + u + '@' + d + ' '//--> Abstract Recent work in viral genomics has shown that bacteriophages exhibit a high degree of mosaicism, which is most likely due to a long history of prolific horizontal gene transfer (HGT). Given these findings, we argue that each of the most plausible attempts to properly classify bacteriophages into distinct species fail. Mayr's biological species concept fails because there is (...) no useful viral analog to sexual reproduction. Phenetic species concepts fail because they obscure the mosaicism and the rich reticulated viral histories. Phylogenetic species concepts, even when extended to take into account reticulation, fail because there is no non-arbitrary distinction between recombination events that create a new viral species and those that do not. There is good reason to think that bacteriophages, arguably the Earth's most abundant biological agent, evolve without forming species. Introduction The Biology of Viruses 2.1 Bacteriophage life cycles 2.2 Mechanisms of HGT The Species Problem and Species Concepts 3.1 Phenetic species concepts 3.2 The biological species concept 3.3 Phylogenetic species concepts 3.4 The ecological species concept 3.5 Homeostatic property cluster species Viruses and Species Taxonomy Reticular Phylogenies Conclusion CiteULike Connotea Del.icio.us What's this? (shrink)

Ratio Juris, Volume 35, Issue 1, Page 3-20, March 2022.

This paper explores the thesis that de re quantification into propositional attitudes has been wrongly conceived. One must never bind an individual variable in the context of a propositional attitude. Such quantification fails to respect the quantificational scaffolding of discursive thinking. This is the lesson of the Meinong–Russell debate over whether there are objects of thought about which it is true to say they are not. Respecting it helps to see how to solve contingent Liar paradoxes of propositional attitudes such (...) as Kripke’s Nixon–Jones. (shrink)

Scholars of many stripes will profit from Helen McCabe’s John Stuart Mill, Socialist: not only specialists in Mill or the nineteenth century, but all who are interested in considering perennial que...

Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz 2013. 314 S., geb., € 42,00. ISBN 978‐3‐447‐10006‐9. Daniel Stolzenberg,­ Egyptian Oedipus: Athanasius Kircher and the Secrets of Antiquity, Chicago/London: University of Chicago Press 2013. XI, 307 S., Ill., $ 50,00. ISBN 978‐0‐226‐92414‐4.

SUMMARYSchleiermacher's doctrine of the Trinity is constituted not only by his Glaubenslehre but also in Über den Gegensatz zwischen der Sabellianischen und der Athanasianischen Vorstellung von der Trinität . Schleiermacher can be seen to construe the persons of the Trinity as the circumscription of divinity. This point leads to consideration of divine wisdom as the ground of both the immanent and economic Trinity.

Catholic Social Teaching, in considering economic and patient justice, calls for “participating in patient care.” Corporations often are accused of not paying their fair share, which in turn has led to demands for government regulation to lower drug prices in the United States. Meanwhile, the millions of dollars spent by pharmaceutical foundations to help lower-income patients is not seen as corporations’ taking such responsibility to assist patients. The view that CST demands lower costs for prescription pharmaceuticals from corporations that make (...) excess profits misapplies CST principles and does not consider the pricing structure for drugs on a global scale. While a preferential option for the poor is needed, there needs to be a better definition of the poor. This paper looks to broaden the view of CST in regard to corporations and the preferential option for the poor when applied to the current cost of pharmaceuticals. (shrink)

In this paper, I offer a new defense of scientific realism, tailored for the Akaikean paradigm of statistical hypothesis testing. After proposing definitions of verisimilitude and predictive success, I use computer simulations to show how the latter depends on the former, even in the kind of case featured in a recent argument for instrumentalism.

This collection highlights such issues as how the nature of time is relevant to the question of whether God is temporal and how God's other attributes are ...

[The war for a ring through the eyes of philosophers].

In this volume, the author argues that mediaeval thinkers had a way of calling humankind natural without implying that humans are bound by a universal, a historical essence. He seeks to show that in the Middle Ages nature and history were not regarded polar opposites. Using Boccaccio's theory of poiesis as a focal point, he offers fresh interpretations of the works covered, particularly of Boccaccio's writings.

This accessible book gives a new, detailed and elementary explanation of the Gödel incompleteness theorems and presents the Chaitin results and their relation to the da Costa-Doria results, which are given in full, but with no ...

In the first section of this paper I discuss what Leibniz meant by a miracle and why Leibniz’s definition of the best of all possible worlds implies that it is a world in which miracles are minimized. In the second part of the paper I argue that human happiness within the best of all possible worlds also requires, on Leibniz’s principles, that miracles must there be minimized. In the third section of the paper I consider what, if any, miracles actually (...) remain possible for Leibniz within the best of all possible worlds. In the final section I discuss one important kind of event upon which Leibniz vacillated whether it required miraculous intervention -- namely, the elevation of the sensitive soul to rationality -- and some speculation about the cause of this vacillation in Leibniz is offered. (shrink)

Cas9/guide RNA (gRNA)‐based gene drive systems are expected to play a transformative role in malaria elimination efforts., whether through population modification, in which the drive system contains parasite‐refractory genes, or population suppression, in which the drive system induces a severe fitness load resulting in population decline or extinction. DNA sequence polymorphisms representing alternate alleles at gRNA target sites may confer a drive‐resistant phenotype in individuals carrying them. Modeling predicts that, for observed levels of SGV at potential target sites and observed (...) rates of de novo DRA formation, population modification strategies are uniquely resilient to DRAs. We conclude that gene drives can succeed when fitness costs incurred by drive‐carrying mosquitoes are low enough to prevent strong positive selection for DRAs produced de novo or as part of the SGV and that population modification strategies are less prone to failure due to drive resistance. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Vasconcelos and Essentialist Conceptions of Mestizaje Gloria Anzaldúa: The New Mestizaje María Lugones: Mestizaje and Hybridity The New Mestizaje and Race Mestizaje and Pan‐Hispanic Identity References Further Reading.

Patients can be harmed by a religiously motivated surrogate decision maker whose decisions are contrary to the standard of care; therefore, surrogate decision making should be held to a high standard. Stewart Eskew and Christopher Meyers proposed a two-part rule for deciding which religiously based decisions to honor: (1) a secular reason condition and (2) a rationality condition. The second condition is based on a coherence theory of rationality, which they claim is accessible, generous, and culturally sensitive. In this article, (...) I will propose strengthening the rationality condition by grounding it in a theory of intellectual virtue, which is both rigorous and culturally sensitive. (shrink)

The book explores the theological understanding of the human person. It does so by placing the theology of person in Karl Rahner's writings in dialogue with the philosophy of the relational person in the works of John Macmurray. It is through the method of dialogue that new insights into the theology of person arise.

This paper argues that, while the existence of strong moral dilemmas is notoriously controversial, a case can be made for the existence of mild dilemmas. It is common for people to feel that they are caught in some type of moral dilemma. If mild dilemmas are a genuine feature of the moral terrain, perceptions by ordinary people that they are caught in a moral dilemma are to some extent vindicated.

The doctrine of double effect (DDE) can have two different functions, permissive and restrictive. According to the first function, agents are exculpated from the negative consequences of their actions, consequences that would be deemed illicit were they intentionally chosen. According to the second, agents are reminded that they are responsible, albeit in a distinctive manner, for the foreseeable damages that flow from their chosen actions. Aquinas has standardly been credited with a permissive version of DDE. I argue by contrast (drawing (...) on the treatment of this issue in my Thomas Aquinas on War and Peace, Cambridge University Press, 2017) that the permissive version results from a misreading of Sum. theol. II-II, q. 64, a. 7. Other texts in the same work indicate that he embraced a restrictive version of DDE. (shrink)

An attempt to argue that the introduction of the category of the absurd into Kierkegaard's discussion of truth as subjectivity in the Postscript is an altogether rigorous and logical move.