The best-system account of scientific law proposes that laws and chances are to be defined in terms of systematic interpretation of all occurrences: L is a law and the chance of X is p just in case L and the chance p of X are consequences of the ideal axiom system for the totality of events. So, what seem to be further facts beyond the occurrences are just matters of the best way to interpret the totality of physical events. This (...) paper proposes treating mentalistic concepts in a similar fashion: humans have consciousness in virtue of the fact that their brains’ best selfmonitoring, first-person interpretation of events involves consciousness. Apparent “further facts” about the mental realm are just matters of the brain’s native way to interpret itself. On this view, a philosopher’s “zombie” is just a normal human interpreted in a non-mentalistic way. (shrink)

In this uplifting book, David Halpin suggests ways of putting the hope back into education, exploring the value of and need for utopian thinking in discussions of the purpose of education and school policy.

An acceptable empiricist account of laws of nature would havesignificant implications for a number of philosophical projects. For example, such an account may vitiate argumentsthat the fundamental constants of nature are divinelydesigned so that laws produce a life permittinguniverse. On an empiricist account, laws do not produce the universe but are designed by us to systematize theevents of a universe which does in fact contain life; so any ``fine tuning'' of natural law has a naturalistic explanation.But there are problems for (...) the empiricist project. This paper develops a ``perspectival'' version of the Humean bestsystem approach and argues that this version solves the standard problems faced by the empiricist project.Furthermore, the paper argues, this version is best able to answer the proponents of divine design while leaving scientificlaw a suitably objective matter.[I]t is possible tocondense the enormous mass of results to a large extent – that is to find laws which summarize...Richard Feynman It has become fashionable in some circles to argue thatscience is ultimately a sham, that we scientists read order into nature, not out of nature, and that the laws of physicsare our laws, not nature's. I believe this is arrant nonsense. You would be hard-pressed to convince a physicist thatNewton's inverse square law of gravitation is a purely cultural concoction. The laws of physics, I submit, reallyexist in the world out there, and the job of the scientist is to uncover them, not invent them. True, at any giventime, the laws you find in the textbooks are tentative and approximate, but they mirror, albeit imperfectly, a reallyexisting order in the physical world. Of course, many scientists do not recognize that in accepting the reality of anorder in nature-the existence of laws `out there' – they are adopting a theological world view. P. C. W. Davies. (shrink)

In this article, I analyze weaponized subordination, wherein men strategically use their perceived subordinate masculine status to legitimate their degradation of women. I draw on a qualitative analysis of 9,062 comments made on a popular involuntary celibate discussion board. Incels are an online community of men who define themselves by their inability to participate in heterosexual sex/relationships. Incel forums are characterized by self-loathing, anger, and misogyny, with several incels having committed murders. I first detail the type of subordination incels argue (...) they experience—a social bias in favor of attractive people they call lookism. Next, I explain how incels perceive themselves as permanently subordinated “failed men.” I then demonstrate how incels weaponize their subordination, using their perceived subordinate status to justify their misogyny. Findings are discussed in relation to hybrid masculinity and conceptualizations of subordinate masculinities. (shrink)

This is the first interdisciplinary exploration of the philosophical foundations of the Web, a new area of inquiry that has important implications across a range of domains. -/- Contains twelve essays that bridge the fields of philosophy, cognitive science, and phenomenology Tackles questions such as the impact of Google on intelligence and epistemology, the philosophical status of digital objects, ethics on the Web, semantic and ontological changes caused by the Web, and the potential of the Web to serve as a (...) genuine cognitive extension Brings together insightful new scholarship from well-known analytic and continental philosophers, such as Andy Clark and Bernard Stiegler, as well as rising scholars in "digital native" philosophy and engineering Includes an interview with Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the Web. (shrink)

We examine a crucial question for the World Wide Web: What does a Uniform Resource Identifier (URI) mean? Crucial for the next-generation Semantic Web, can it refer to things outside web-pages? The Web is a universal information space for naming and accessing information via URIs. However, the classical philosophical problems of meaning and reference that have been the source of debate within the philosophy of language return when the Web is given as the foundation for a knowledge representation with the (...) Semantic Web. Debates on the Semantic Web about the meaning and referential status of a URI are explored as analogues to debates about the meaning and reference of names in the philosophy of language. Three main positions are inspected: the logical position, as exemplified by the descriptivist theory of reference, the direct reference position, as exemplified by Putnam and Kripke’s causal theory of reference, and a Wittgensteinian position that views URIs as a public language, as exemplified by Web search engines. These positions show that debates within the philosophy of language are alive and well on the Web, and so in the philosophy of computer science. (shrink)

character. So, we have learned from early on that laws are meant to portray a sort of necessity in nature. The comings and goings described by law are not merely contingently related. Rather, it is part of the concept of law that these events are connected in some significant way: "nomically" connected. One important desideratum for an account of law, then, is that it respect and perhaps explain this modal character.

August 16, 1997 David Lewis2 has long defended an account of scientific law acceptable even to an empiricist with significant metaphysical scruples. On this account, the laws are defined to be the consequences of the best system for axiomitizing all occurrent fact. Here "best system" means the set of sentences which yields the best combination of strength of descriptive content 3 with simplicity of exposition. And occurrent facts, the facts to be systematized, are roughly the particular facts about a localized (...) space-time region that are non-modal, non-dispositional, and non-causal. Scientists providing or attempting to provide laws are plausibly seen as giving general principles that unify a body of data. Thus they organize or systematize the arrangement of occurrences. For this reason, Lewis's account has the important merits of providing contact with actual scientific practice while making sense of the standard philosophical conception that laws should be general but more than mere accidental generalizations. However, Lewis has long known about a potential problem with this account, a problem involving chance and credence.4 In a recent series of articles he, Michael Thau, and Ned Hall have developed a new formulation of the relationship between chance and credence which solves the problem. However, I will argue that these articles leave untouched and even exacerbate a closely related and more fundamental problem with the best system account, the problem of nomic necessity. Laws are supposed to be more than true; in some sense they must be true. Yet a principle's membership in the best systematization for one world seems to say nothing about its necessity, i.e., its truth at other worlds. I close by briefly describing how an alternative empiricist account may remove both problems. (shrink)

The nature of quantum mechanical probability has often seemed mysterious. To shed some light on this topic, the present paper analyzes the logical form of probability assignment in quantum mechanics. To begin the paper, I set out and criticize several attempts to analyze the form. I go on to propose a new form which utilizes a novel, probabilistic conditional and argue that this proposal is, overall, the best rendering of the quantum mechanical probability assignments. Finally, quantum mechanics aside, the discussion (...) here has consequences for counterfactual logic, conditional probability, and epistemic probability. (shrink)

This essay explores the detailed argument of the Coase Theorem, as found in Ronald Coase’s “The Problem of Social Cost” and subsequently defended by Coase in The Firm, the Market, and the Law. Fascination with the Coase Theorem arises over its apparently unassailable counterintuitive conclusion that the imposition of legal liability has no effect on which of two competing uses of land prevails, and also over the general difficulty in tying down an unqualified statement of the theorem. Instead of entering (...) the debate over what exactly the theorem holds, this article suggests that the core of Coase’s reasoning is flawed and to the extent that any version of the theorem relies upon this reasoning it can be disproved. It is further suggested that a version of the theorem which avoided the need for Coase’s core argument by focusing on “the efficiency thesis” at the expense of “the invariance thesis” would be insufficiently significant to merit the status of a theorem; and that, in any event, Coase’s reasoning does not sustain an efficient outcome. The heart of the essay comprises the allegation of an error made by Coase when he transferred his core argument to the context of economic rents. The essay commences by considering and modelling the nature of the counter-intuitive thrust to the Coase Theorem, which is used to trace the development of Coase’s reasoning, and ultimately to expose the flaw it contains. Ancillary observations are made on the relationship between the Coasean analysis of characteristically legal problems and the conditions of general market equilibrium, and the theoretical status of law-and-economics. (shrink)

'At the beginning, with Thomas More, utopia sets out an agenda for the modern world. Today, five hundred years later, what are the uses of utopia?'. This paper provides an answer to this question by examining More's utopian 'method' which, it is suggested, offers a model way of thinking imaginatively and prospectively about the form and content of social reform in general and educational change in particular.

Rights have become,in recent years, a significant concern of legal theorists, as well as of those involved in moral and political philosophy. This new book seeks to move a number of debates forward by developing the analysis of rights and focusing upon more general theoretical considerations relating to rights. The book is divided into five parts. The first includes an explanation of the part played by conceptual analysis within jurisprudence, while the second conducts a re-examination of Hohfeld’s analysis of rights. (...) This part deals with the arguments advanced by a number of modern theorists including Hart, White and MacCormick. The third part contains the author’s own framework for discussing rights, including examples drawn from tort, constitutional law and international law, together with an analysis of Unger’s theory of rights. Part four centres on the perceived conflict between Dworkin, Rawls and Nozick as the defenders of a rights approach, and Bentham as the champion of utilitarianism and concludes that neither deals with the fundamental concerns of morality on which their theories are based. The fifth part consists of a conclusion which reflects on the key themes and considers the role of rights within general theory. For students, particularly helpful features of the book are the overt consideration of jurisprudential methodology and the opportunity to examine a number of key theorists linked by their divergent views on the subject of rights. (shrink)

The ontological presupposition of artificial intelligence (AI) is the liberal autonomous human subject of Locke and Kant, and the ideology of AI is the automation of this particular conception of intelligence. This is demonstrated in detail in classical AI by the work of Simon, who explicitly connected his work on AI to a wider programme in cognitive science, economics, and politics to perfect capitalism. Although Dreyfus produced a powerful Heideggerian critique of classical AI, work on neural networks in AI was (...) ultimately based on the individual as the locus of intelligence. Yet this conception of AI both fails to grasp the essence of large language models, which are a statistical model of human language on the Web. The training data that enables AI is the surveillance and capture of data, where the data creates a model to approximate the entire world. However, there is a more hidden ideology inherent in AI where the goal is not to perfect a model but to control the world. As prompted by an argument between Mead and Bateson, social change is prevented by the application of cybernetics to society as a whole. The goal of AI is not just to replace human beings, but to manage humans to preserve existing power relations. As the source of intelligence in AI is distributed cognition between humans and machines, the alternative to AI is collective intelligence. As theorized by Licklider and Engelbart at the dawn of the Internet, collective intelligence explains how computers weave together both human and non-human intelligence. Rather than replace human intelligence, this produces ever more complex collective forms of intelligence. Rather than meta-stabilize a society of control, collective intelligence can go outside individualist capitalist ontology by incorporating the open world of the pluriverse, as theorized by Escobar. Collective intelligence then stands as an alternative ontological path for AI which puts intelligence at the service of humanity and the world rather than a technocratic elite. (shrink)

Does the centralization of the Web change both the diffusion of knowledge and the philosophical definition of knowledge itself? By exploring the origins of the Semantic Web in the philosophy of Carnap and of Google’s machine learning approach in Heidegger, we demonstrate that competing philosophical schools are deeply embedded in artificial intelligence and its evolution in the Web. Finally, we conclude that a decentralized approach to knowledge is necessary in order to bring the Web to its full potential as project (...) for the spread of human autonomy. (shrink)

One of the major events that has caused a resurgence in the use of formal ontologies is the advent of the Semantic Web, which seeks to do for knowledge representation what the Web did for hypertext...

This paper offers an analysis of the nature of hope and explicates its significance for and relation to education. This entails distinguishing initially two kinds of hope - absolute and ultimate hope. While absolute hope is an orientation of the spirit which sets no conditions or limits on what is achievable and has no particular ends in view, ultimate hope is an 'aimed hope ', that is to say a form of hopefulness that entails identifying and struggling to realise in (...) the here and now particular improved states of affairs - for oneself, for others and for society generally. To that extent, ultimate hope, despite efforts to undermine it prompted by despair, relativism, cynicism and fatalism, is a crucial aspect of the educational process. On the other hand, absolute hope, combined with a 'larger love' of teaching, provides those educators who have it with a significant personal resource in coping better with the special demands of their work. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Is Philosophy Part of Web Science?; Representations and the Web; Enactive Search; Cognitive Extension and Cognitive Intelligence; From the Extended Mind to the Web; and the Web as Collective Intelligence.

This essay considers the growing interest in the methodology of jurisprudence in the context of a broader examination of the relationship between legal theory and the practice of law. Attention is drawn to the particular puzzles of how theory can both be independent of and yet inform practice, and how methodology can take a similar stance towards theory. Through a detailed analysis of the methodological positions adopted by Dworkin, Raz, and Coleman and Simchen, the conclusion is reached that methodology is (...) not a resource capable of offering an independent assessment of the merits of competing theories.Mainstream jurisprudential discussion is traced through the Hart-Dworkin debate to assumptions on the relationship between theory and practice initially adopted by Hart and sustained by subsequent contributors. The morbid condition of a prominent part of contemporary jurisprudence is identified with an unwarranted elevation of theory over practice. A more fruitful role for theory is suggested, in expounding the controversies met in the practice of law and considering the potential that exists for resolving them. It is suggested that this approach breaks down an artificial divide between descriptive and normative jurisprudence.A number of ancillary matters are discussed in the essay including: semantic approaches to legal theory, Dworkin’s semantic sting, the distinction between methodological and theoretical elements of Law’s Empire, Dickson on the ‘indirectly evaluative approach’, the position of Hart in his Postscript, and Raz’s split theory of legal reasoning and law. (shrink)

(1991). Grant‐maintained schools: Making a difference without being really different 1 . British Journal of Educational Studies: Vol. 39, No. 4, pp. 409-424.

In his (1981) paper, Stalnaker has revised his old theory of conditionals and has given the revision an interesting defense. Indeed, Stalnaker shows that this new theory meets the standard objections put to the old. However, I argue that the revision runs into difficulties in the context of quantum mechanics: If Stalnaker's theory of the conditional is assumed, then from plausible assumptions certain Bell-like conflicts with experiment can be derived. This result, I go on to argue, is a good reason (...) to reject Stalnaker's theory, at least for the quantum mechanical context. (shrink)

When we seek a fuller understanding of individual liberty including its relational character, we confront a conundrum. The evident advantages of a single individual possessing liberty cannot be simply transferred to a greater number of beneficiaries. This conundrum is confronted with the resources of Hohfeld's analytical framework, developed specifically to elucidate the practical outworkings of interpersonal relations within the law. Attention is also paid to concerns expressed by von Wright over a representation of liberty (permission) within the resources of standard (...) deontic logic which fails to address its social aspect. The aggregate level of the Hohfeldian scheme is employed to represent a complete picture of liberty, but one that cannot guarantee benefits for a plurality of holders. The conclusion is reached that in order to extend the advantages of individual liberty to all, something other than liberty is required. (shrink)

This article examines the anxiety expressed by von Wright over the status of the deontic permission, P, as an independent normative category, given the interdefinability between P and O at the foundation of deontic logic. Two concerns are noted: the reducibility of P to O, and the inadequacy of P to convey a full permission in a social setting. Drawing on resources from the Hohfeldian analytical framework, the relational and aggregate features of permission are explored, and an aggregate conception of (...) permission, P, is recognized. With the assistance of insights from Demey and Smessaert on duals, Hansson on formalization, and Soames on interdefinability, it is concluded that the interdefinability thesis can be defended without threatening the independent status of P. Additional grounds for reaching this conclusion are provided from a detailed analysis of the relationship between P and P. Some implications of the more expansive notion of permission, P, are considered with regard to the resources of deontic logic and their application. (shrink)

Many physics parameters need to be precisely set in order for life to exist in our universe. Or so says the fine-tuning argument. That the actual values are just right for life, the argument concludes, is a fact in need of deep physical or metaphysical explanation. Perhaps, the story goes, the parameter values settings are a matter of divine design. Or perhaps they result from a selection effect given our place in the “multiverse”. However, a very different approach to the (...) problem is possible. One may argue that the fine-tuning is an artefact of theorizing: it is explicable as the precise balancing act necessary for compact, systematic representation in science. Given such an explanation and drawing on earlier work from a number of sources, this essay shows how fine-tuning is best understood as evidence for a non-governing conception of laws rather than for design or multiverse. (shrink)

This article considers the role of conceptual analysis in jurisprudence. In responding to the earlier article of Brian Bix, Conceptual Questions and Jurisprudence , 1 Legal Theory 465 , it is agreed that the purpose of the theorist must be identified in order to evaluate the merits of the practice of conceptual analysis, but the approach taken here differs from that proposed by Bix. In particular, it is suggested that Bix is wrong to limit stipulation within conceptual analysis to a (...) default option, and Bix's suggestion that jurisprudential analysis lacks an empirical basis is challenged. The approach developed in this article relies on a clarification of the relationships among terms, concepts, and fields of enquiry. It explores the different relationships that can exist between concepts. Seven general principles of the practice of conceptual analysis are expounded, and the proper scope of an evaluative element within conceptual analysis is considered. A final section briefly examines some of the wider implications of the approach to conceptual analysis proposed in the article. (shrink)

Although the French Renaissance sceptic Michel de Montaigne is a much-admired thinker among many literary historians and some philosophical ones, his oeuvre hardly features in critical surveys of ideas in education. This is strange given that Montaigne offers modern educators an exemplary form of communicative discourse which anticipates contemporary education theory's emphasis on the importance of reflective practice and learning from experience. While each of these themes is capable of being rendered as repetitious slogans, sound-bites even, Montaigne, through his emphasis (...) on free thinking and self-study, helps to rescue them from such a fate, identifying a dialectical method called ‘essaying’ which has genuine purchase on practice and its improvement. (shrink)

Built upon the foundations of the Internet, the World Wide Web has been the most significant technological development within recent history, sparking a reformulation of both capitalism and resistance. The Web is defined as a « universal information space » by its inventor Tim Berners-Lee of the W3C, reflecting the universal scope of politics and struggle today. Yet while its effects have been scrutinized, the Web itself has received little inquiry. The composition of the governing networks that control the infrastructure (...) of the Web have only recently been engaged with by activists with the ICANN affair and WSIS protests. The Web is governed by a network that is composed of an « immaterial aristocracy » of radical democratic « hackers », corporations such as Google and Microsoft, and non-governmental organizations such as the Internet Engineering Task Force and World Wide Web Consortium. These networks continually negotiate between the needs of global capitalism and the desires of immaterial labour on the Web. (shrink)

Rachel Briggs’ critique of “antirealist” accounts of scientific law— including my own perspectivalist best-system account—is part of a project meant to show that Humean conceptions of scientific law are more problematic than has been commonly realized. Indeed, her argument provides a new challenge to the Humean, a thoroughly epistemic version of David Lewis’ “big, bad bug” for Humeanism. Still, I will argue, the antirealist (perspectivalist and expressivist) accounts she criticizes have the resources to withstand the challenge and come out stronger (...) for it. Attention to epistemic possibilities, I argue, shows a number of advantages to a perspectivalist account of scientific law. (shrink)

This article offers a comparative study of the approaches of Dworkin and Aristotle to money and the market. For Dworkin the importance of this subject lies in the use he makes of the device of a hypothetical auction to provide the basis of a conception of equality of resources, compatible with liberty, and sustained by his view of ethical individualism. The technical adequacy of Dworkin's auction is considered with the assistance of an insight taken from Aristotle's comments on money, which (...) brings to light the secondary conceptual status of money. Dworkin's attempts to produce a metric of equality of resources are found wanting. It is suggested that Aristotle's insight has repercussions for Dworkin's broader project, as well as implication for any attempt to use the market to provide a sense of value in human affairs. (shrink)

This paper evaluates the recent trend to renounce the similarity approach to counterfactuals in favor of the older metalinguistic theory. I try to show, first, that the metalinguistic theory cannot work in anything like its present form (the form described by many in the last decade who claim to be able to solve Goodman''s old problem of cotenability). This is so, I argue, because the metalinguistic theory requires laws of nature of a sort that we (apparently) do not have: current (...) physical theory cannot underwrite the metalinguistic theory. Second, I draw from the first point a motivation for the similarity approach, a motivation based on theoretical considerations apart from the standard ones of pretheoretical intuition. (shrink)

The Myopic Anthropic Principle: an attempt to show that the popular anthropic reasoning of our time — often taken to show that laws of nature are fine-tuned by a god for us — should be seen merely as an indication of fine-tuning by us. This preference for short-sightedness in this case is shown (shown?) to support the best-system account of scientific law.

Conceptual problems for consciousness are analogous to a Humean’s problem with scientific laws. Just as consciousness is often seen to involve further facts beyond the physical, laws would seem to involve reality beyond the Humean’s occurrent facts1. I will attempt to show that a Lewis-style best-system solution to the problem for laws should be applied to the related problem for consciousness. The leading idea of a best-system account is that law and chance claims are true in virtue of their place (...) in ideal systematic treatment of the totality of occurrent fact. Nomic facts about law and chance, then, are not “further facts” beyond the occurrent; rather they are a matter of idealized scientific theory. (shrink)

Most commentators have focused on ethical dilemmas and the idea that they were core to the actions of and decisions by Jewish doctors in SS concentration camps and ghettos during the Holocaust. While I recognize Jewish doctors did face ethical dilemmas, in this article, I shift my attention to include two other significant factors: choiceless choices, defined by the eminent Holocaust historian Lawrence Langer as “crucial decisions [that] did not reflect options between life and death, but between one form of (...) abnormal response and another, both imposed by a situation that was in no way of the victim’s own choosing,” and the human condition, whereby decisions and actions were triggered by personal traits and past experiences in response to particular situations and circumstances. Inherent in all three factors is the tenaciousness of reality and how the abhorrent conditions, immorality, inhumanity and evilness cast a shadow over every moment of the Jewish doctor’s life. My thesis is that decision-making was not one-dimensional but multi-dimensional. For the Jewish doctor every incident became a source of dread and tragedy. They were often not trained to treat some diseases or perform surgery and lacked experience to work in such conditions and cope emotionally and psychologically. I will attempt to show that how a person responds to an ethical dilemma is based on his or her own experiences and reasoning, and how they reacted to sudden and inexplicable incidents that threatened life or impacted survival induced abnormal actions and decisions. As Jewish doctors they were driven to be healers, to be normal, but they were forced by circumstances to kill or become perpetrators, acting abnormally. Tragically the abnormal became the norm. The Jewish doctors were professionally trained and culturally socialized to continue their roles as doctors. Nevertheless, they were human and were driven by the innate will to live. (shrink)

This article engages with Alan White’s discussion of the relationship between rights and claims and the literature provoked by it, particularly the response of Neil MacCormick. A further challenge is brought against White’s position of maintaining that there is but one kind of right, and that a right to something does not imply (nor is implied by) a claim to that thing. The analysis offered here insists on acknowledging different meanings of claim and different strengths to claims. A core distinction (...) between claim as assertion and claim as justified requirement is advanced, together with an accompaying distinction between making a claim and holding a claim. It is then possible to identify four different claims relating to a particular right as follows. ClaimA: A claims he ought to have the right that B pay him £x ClaimB: A claims he has the right that B pay him £x Right : A has the right that B pay him £x ClaimC: A claims that B pay him £x ClaimD: A claims a remedy for B failing to pay him £x In the relationship between ClaimC and the Right an equivalence can be discerned, without reaching the conclusion that the respective ideas expressed by them are the same. More broadly, this study suggests the importance for any fruitful discussion of rights, of providing a framework within which the different meanings, perspectives, and associated ideas can be approached in an orderly fashion. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: The Emerging Interest in Methodology Particular Arguments Particular Topics A Concluding Overview References.