In Situations and Individuals, Paul Elbourne argues that the natural language expressions that have been taken to refer to individuals — pronouns, proper names, and definite descriptions — have a common syntax and semantics, roughly that of definite descriptions as construed in the tradition of Frege. In the course of his argument, Elbourne shows that proper names have previously undetected donkey anaphoric readings.This is contrary to previous theorizing and, if true, would undermine what philosophers call the direct reference (...) theory (which holds that the sole contribution of a proper name to the truth conditions of a sentence is an individual) as well as the related doctrine that proper names are rigid designators. Elbourne begins by addressing donkey anaphora, relating other concerns about pronouns to the solution of this notorious problem. His subsequent argumentation provides a unified semantics for the donkey anaphoric and bound and referential uses of pronouns and discusses the prospect of unifying the syntax and semantics of pronouns with the syntax and semantics of normal definite descriptions. Elbourne's aim is not only to advance his proposal of a unified syntax and semantics but also to urge linguists and philosophers dealing with pronoun interpretation to consider a wider range of theories than they do at present, and to test the competing claims of description-based theories and dynamic semantics against the data. (shrink)

Modal realism -- Time, space, world -- Existence -- Actuality -- Modal realism and modal tense -- Transworld individuals and their identity -- Existensionalism -- Impossibility -- Proposition and relief -- Fictional worlds -- Epistemology.

In models of multi-level selection, the property of Darwinian fitness is attributed to entities at more than one level of the biological hierarchy, e.g. individuals and groups. However, the relation between individual and group fitness is a controversial matter. Theorists disagree about whether group fitness should always, or ever, be defined as total (or average) individual fitness. This paper tries to shed light on the issue by drawing on work in social choice theory, and pursuing an analogy between fitness (...) and utility. Social choice theorists have long been interested in the relation between individual and social utility, and have identified conditions under which social utility equals total (or average) individual utility. These ideas are used to shed light on the biological problem. (shrink)

This experimental study examines individuals’ legitimacy judgments. We develop a model that demonstrates the role of attributed motives and corporate credibility for the evaluation of organizational legitimacy and test this model with an experimental vignette study. Our results show that when a corporate activity creates benefits for the firm—in addition to social benefits—individuals attribute more extrinsic motives. Extrinsic motives are ascribed when a corporation is perceived as being driven by external rewards as opposed to an altruistic commitment to (...) a social cause. Extrinsic motives negatively affect corporate credibility and organizational legitimacy judgments. This article contributes to a better understanding of the complex process of organizational legitimacy judgment by shedding light on the individual’s perspective and expounding the relationship between attributed motives, corporate credibility, and organizational legitimacy. (shrink)

My discussion in this paper is divided into three parts. In section I, I discuss some fairly familiar lines of approach to the question how moral considerations may be shown to have rational appeal. In section II, I suggest how our existence as constituents in collective entities might also influence our practical thinking. In section III, I entertain the idea that identification with collectives might displace moral thinking to some degree, and I offer Marx's class theory as a sample of (...) collective identification for the purposes of practical deliberation. (shrink)

Consideration of the counting and reidentification of particulars leads naturally enough to the orthodox doctrine that, “on pain of indefiniteness,” an identity statement in some way involves or presupposes a general term or “covering concept”: i.e., that the principium individuationis or criterion of identity implied depends upon the kind of thing in question. Thus it is said that an auditor understands the question whether A is the same as B only in so far as he knows, however informally or implicitly, (...) the answer to the supplementary question, “The same what?”. (shrink)

Cognitive Science, Volume 45, Issue 11, November 2021.

Individuality is an important concept in biology, yet there are many non-equivalent criteria of individuality expressed in different kinds of biological individuals. This article evaluates these different kinds in terms of their capacity to support explanatory generalizations over the systems they individuate. Viewing the problem of individuality from this perspective promotes a splitting strategy in which different kinds make different epistemic trade-offs that suit them for different explanatory roles. I argue that evolutionary individuals, interpreted as forming a functional (...) kind, face difficulties of individuation and explanatory power that are mitigated by relying on more structurally based properties and non-evolutionary kinds. 1Introduction2Kinds of Biological Individuals3Evolutionary Individuals and Functional Kinds4Evolutionary versus Non-evolutionary Kinds of Individuals 4.1Physiological individuality4.2Ecological individuality4.3Developmental individuality5Conclusion. (shrink)

Effective and specifically targeted social and therapeutic responses for antisocial personality disorders and psychopathy are scarce. Some authors maintain that this scarcity should be overcome by revising current syndrome - based classifications of these conditions and devising better biocognitive classifications of antisocial individuals. The inspiration for the latter classifications has been embedded in the Research domain criteria approach (RDoC). RDoC - type approaches to psychiatric research aim at transforming diagnosis, provide valid measures of disorders, aid clinical practice, and improve (...) health outcomes by integrating the data on the genetic, neural, cognitive, and affective systems underlying psychiatric conditions. In the first part of the paper, we discuss the benefits of such approaches in comparison to the dominant syndrome-based ones and review recent attempts at building biocognitive classifications of antisocial individuals. Other researchers, how ever, have objected that biocognitive approaches in psychiatry are committed to an untenable form of explanatory. (shrink)

Many individuals who have mental disorders often report negative experiences of a distinctively epistemic sort, such as not being listened to, not being taken seriously, or not being considered credible because of their psychiatric conditions. In an attempt to articulate and interpret these reports we present Fricker’s concepts of epistemic injustice (Fricker, 2007, p. 1) and then focus on testimonial injustice and hermeneutic injustice as it applies to individuals with mental disorders. The clinical impact of these concepts on (...) quality of care is discussed. Within the clinical domain, we contrast epistemic injustice with epistemic privilege and authority. We then argue that testimonial and hermeneutic injustices also affect individuals with mental disorders not only when communicating with their caregivers but also in the social context as they attempt to reintegrate into the general society and assume responsibilities as productive citizens. Following the trend of the movement of mental health care to the community, the testimonies of people with mental disorders should not be restricted to issues involving their own personal mental states. (shrink)

According to a widespread contention, individuals are among the basic building blocks of the world. The contention, however, raises a perennial problem. If individuals are basic, they cannot be fully accounted for in terms of their empirically detectable qualities. But then, how can we detect, or know, or identify, individuals? Shamik Dasgupta has influentially argued that considerations along these lines, together with a lesson from the history of physics, should make us reject any picture on which (...) class='Hi'>individuals are basic constituents of reality. In this paper, I defend such a picture against Dasgupta’s argument. (shrink)

Many aspects of biology, such as population genetics and senescence, are predicated on identifying individuals and generations. Conventional demarcations of individuals and generations, such as physiological autonomy, unicellular bottlenecks, and alternation of generation, are rife with problems. Do physically separated cuttings or plant ramets constitute separate individuals or generations? Are chimaeras one or more individuals? To resolve these problems, Clarke : 321–361, 2012) proposed that individuals are circumscribed by mechanisms that constrain heritable variance in fitness. (...) Simultaneously, Gorelick and Heng : 1088–1098 2011) showed that sex constrains heritable variance Therefore, for eukaryotes, meiosis and karyogamy provide a consistent way to demarcate individuals and generations. Epigenetic reset associated with meiosis and karyogamy rejuvenates the next generation, but not the parent that engaged in the sex act. Wholesale epigenetic resets that probably only occur with meiosis and karyogamy imply that monozygotic twins are two different individuals, but apomictic progeny are diffuse parts of one disaggregated individual. Mitotic heritability circumscribes an individual, whereas meiotic heritability demarcates new individuals and generations. (shrink)

Most decision-making research in economics focuses on individual decisions. Yet, we know, from psychological research in particular, that individual preferences can be sensitive to social pressures. In this paper, we study the impact of a group environment on individual preferences for risky and ambiguous prospects. In our experiment, each participant was invited to make a series of lottery-choice decisions in two different conditions. In the Alone condition, individuals made private choices, whereas in the Group condition, individuals belonged to (...) a three-person group and group members’ choices were aggregated according to either a majority or unanimity rule. This design allows us to study the impact of a group environment on individuals’ attitude towards both risky and ambiguous prospects, while controlling for the decision rule used in the group. Our experimental results show that when individuals are in the Group condition, they tend to be less risk averse and more ambiguity averse than when they are not part of a group. Our experiment also suggests that the decision rule matters as it shows that these two trends tend to be stronger when the group implements a unanimity rule. Specifically, we found that individuals who belong to a group implementing a unanimity rule are significantly less risk averse than individuals who belong to a group that relies on the majority rule. We obtained a similar—but non-significant—result under ambiguity. (shrink)

BackgroundHumanitarian crises and emergencies, events often marked by high mortality, have until recently excluded palliative care—a specialty focusing on supporting people with serious or terminal illness or those nearing death. In the COVID-19 pandemic, palliative care has received unprecedented levels of societal attention. Unfortunately, this has not been enough to prevent patients dying alone, relatives not being able to say goodbye and palliative care being used instead of intensive care due to resource limitations. Yet global guidance was available. In 2018, (...) the WHO released a guide on‘Integrating palliative care and symptom relief into the response to humanitarian emergencies and crises’—the first guidance on the topic by an international body.AimsThis paper argues that while a landmark document, the WHO guide took a narrowly clinical bioethics perspective and missed crucial moral dilemmas. We argue for adding a population-level bioethics lens, which draws forth complex moral dilemmas arising from the fact that groups having differential innate and acquired resources in the context of social and historical determinants of health. We discuss dilemmas concerning: limitations of material and human resources; patient prioritisation; euthanasia; and legacy inequalities, discrimination and power imbalances.ImplicationsIn parts of the world where opportunity for preparation still exists, and as countries emerge from COVID-19, planners must consider care for the dying. Immediate steps to support better resolutions to ethical dilemmas of the provision of palliative care in humanitarian and emergency contexts will require honest debate; concerted research effort; and international, national and local ethical guidance. (shrink)

The German tradition of considering species, and higher taxonomic entities, as individuals begins with the temporalization of natural history, thus pre-dating Darwin’s ‘Origin’ of 1859. In the tradition of German Naturphilosophie as developed by Friedrich Schelling, species came to be seen as parts of a complex whole that encompasses all (living) nature. Species were comprehended as dynamic entities that earn individuality by virtue of their irreversible passage through time. Species individuality was conceived in terms of species taxa forming a (...) spatiotemporally located relational system (complex whole), a conception of species that was easily assimilated to an evolutionary world view. However, the dynamics of an evolutionary process driven by variation and natural selection created a tension between continuity in nature as opposed to the discreteness and relative stasis of species. As a consequence, some authors such as Ernst Haeckel and Karl August Möbius denied the reality of species, while others explicitly linked the reality and individuality of species to their temporal duration. The mature conception of species as individuals, as formulated by Ludwig von Bertalanffy and adopted by Willi Hennig, is one of an historically conditioned, spatiotemporally located, causally integrated, dynamic yet transiently homeostatically stabilized relational system. (shrink)

This text is an excerpt from the introduction to Uncontrollable Societies of Disaffected Individuals: Disbelief and Discredit (Vol. 2) by Bernard Stiegler, translated into English by Daniel Ross © Polity Press, Cambridge 2012.

Humans ought to do much more in order to remedy the severe harm caused by climate change. While there seems to be an overall consensus that governments and other national and international political agents need to resolve the problem, there is no agreement yet on the role and responsibility of individuals in this process. In this paper, I suggest an argument of integrity that offers strong pro tanto moral reasons for individuals to reduce their personal greenhouse gas emissions. (...) Hourdequin (2010) has presented an argument of integrity to justify a corresponding obligation. In this paper, I argue that even though Hourdequin’s argument is appealing, it has important limitations. I advance the argument in light of the current literature so that it is not subject to these limitations and establishes an overall more comprehensive justification for why individuals ought to reduce their personal emissions. (shrink)

The species category is defined as thesmallest historical individual within which there is a parental pattern of ancestry and descent. The use of historical individual in this definition is consistent with the prevailing notion that speciesper se are not involved in processes — they are effects, not effectors. Reproductive isolation distinguishes biparental historical species from their parts, and it provides a basis for understanding the nature of the evidence used to discover historical individuals.

PhD thesis published with Amsterdam University Press. -/- ***Back cover: -/- In this time of mass communication, rich people like us know very well the horrible conditions in which many poor people must live. Therefore, the question of what should we do about poverty, which is the central question of this study, readily arises. This book also asks more specific questions such as: How much money should wealthy individuals like us spend on fighting poverty? and, What restrictions should we (...) place on the extent and orientation of our expenditure in the light of poverty? The question of what rich individuals like us should do morally about poverty, first of all requires clarity about some relatively general issues: Must we always do whatever does the most good, or should we only do the most good possible while avoiding great cost to ourselves? Or, do we only need to do our fair share in a cooperative scheme which would eradicate poverty if everyone else also does their share? A large part of this study focuses on such issues. The book argues that if we can do great good at little cost to ourselves, we ought to do so – and perhaps we ought to do great good even if the cost to ourselves of doing so, is not small. Also, it is argued that rich individuals like us can often, at little cost to ourselves, undertake a number of concrete actions which help to fight poverty, and that we are morally obligated to undertake acs such as giving tithes, living within our ecological footprint, and frequently buying fair trade products. (shrink)

According to the biological definition of death, a human body that has not lost the capacity to holistically organize itself is the body of a living human individual. Reasonable doubt against the conclusion that it has lost the capacity exists when the body appears to express it and no evidence to the contrary is sufficient to rule out reasonable doubt against the conclusion that the apparent expression is a true expression. This essay argues that the evidence and arguments against the (...) conclusion that the signs of complex bodily integration exhibited in ventilated brain dead bodies are true expressions of somatic integration are unpersuasive; that is, they are not adequate to exclude reasonable doubt against the conclusion that BD bodies are dead. Since we should not treat as corpses what for all we know might be living human beings, it follows that we have an obligation to treat BD individuals as if they were living human beings. (shrink)

Social anxiety may disrupt the empathic process, and well-regulated empathy is critical for navigating the social world. Two studies aimed to further understand empathy in the context of social anxiety. Study 1 compared individuals with elevated or normative social anxiety on a measure assessing cognitive and affective empathy for positive and negative emotions conveyed by other people (“targets”), completed under social threat. Relative to individuals with normative social anxiety, individuals with elevated social anxiety had greater cognitive empathy (...) and no differences in affective empathy, regardless of emotion type. As greater cognitive empathy can be maladaptive, Study 2 tested whether this could be down-regulated. Individuals with elevated social anxiety underwent emotional working memory training (eWMT) for negative emotional information, or control training (CT). Effects on an empathy measure completed under social threat were assessed. Cognitive empathy for negative emotions decreased following eWMT but not CT, and this was only evident for those with higher pre-training working memory capacity. Cognitive empathy for positive emotions and affective empathy were not affected. Overall, social anxiety is associated with aberrant elevated cognitive empathy for negative and positive emotions, and the deviation in cognitive empathy for negative emotions can be regulated with eWMT for certain individuals.Trial registration: Australian New Zealand Clinical Trials Registry identifier: ACTRN12618001196235.. (shrink)

My goal in this paper is to account for the value of species in terms of the value of individual organisms that make them up. Many authors have pointed to an apparent conflict between a species preservationist ethic and moral theories that place value on individuals. I argue for an account of the worth of individual organisms grounded in the representational goals of those organisms. I claim thatthis account leads to an acceptably extensive species preservationist ethic.

In experimental cognitive psychology, objects of inquiry are typically operationalized with psychological tasks. When interpreting results from such tasks, we focus primarily on behavioral measures such as reaction times and accuracy rather than experiences – i.e., phenomenology – associated with the task, and posit that the tasks elicit the desired cognitive phenomenon. Evaluating whether the tasks indeed elicit the desired phenomenon can be facilitated by understanding the experience during task performance. In this paper we explore the breadth of experiences that (...) are elicited by and accompany task performance using in-depth phenomenological and qualitative methodology to gather subjective reports during the performance of a visuo-spatial change detection task. Thirty-one participants (18 females) were asked to remember either colors, orientations or positions of the presented stimuli and recall them after a short delay. Qualitative reports revealed rich experiential landscapes associated with the task-performance, suggesting a distinction between two broad classes of experience: phenomena at the front of consciousness and background feelings. The former includes cognitive strategies and aspects of metacognition, whereas the latter include more difficult-to-detect aspects of experience that comprise the overall sense of experience (e.g., bodily feelings, emotional atmosphere, mood). We focus primarily on the background feelings, since strategies of task-performance to a large extent map onto previously identified cognitive processes and discuss the methodological implications of our findings. (shrink)

What are biological species? Aristotelians and Lockeans agree that they are natural kinds; but, evolutionary theory shows that neither traditional philosophical approach is truly adequate. Recently, Michael Ghiselin and David Hull have argued that species are individuals. This claim is shown to be against the spirit of much modern biology. It is concluded that species are natural kinds of a sort, and that any 'objectivity' they possess comes from their being at the focus of a consilience of inductions.

In this study, we investigated the relationships between judgments of intentionality and moral evaluation in individuals with High Functioning Autism (HFA) or Asperger Syndrome (AS). HFA or AS are neurodevelopmental disorders characterised by severe deficits in communication and social functioning. Impairments in Theory of Mind (ToM), i.e., the ability to attribute mental states to oneself and to others, are thought to be the core features of autism. Of all mental states, the concept of ‘intentional action’ is particularly important. People (...) normally distinguish between actions that are performed intentionally and those that are performed unintentionally and this distinction plays a crucial role in social understanding and moral judgment. Recently, Knobe (Analysis 63: 190–193, 2003a ), (Philosophical Psychology 16: 309–324, 2003b ) showed that people’s moral evaluations might serve as input to the process by which people intuitively arrive at the intentionality judgments. Here, by using two pairs of vignettes, the Knobe’s Harm/Help cases and Murder/Bull’s-eye cases, we showed that, as already observed in typical population, in individuals with HFA/AS judgment of intentional action is informed by the moral appreciation of the action outcome. However, the two groups differed on praise judgments and moral justifications, suggesting that these processes were poorly influenced by the agent’s psychological states. We concluded that, although under certain circumstances, individuals with HFA/AS and people with typical development have similar intuitive judgments of intentionality, over-assignment of praise judgments and the reduced use of folk-psychological concepts in moral judgment likely reflect difficulties using intentionality information for moral reasoning. (shrink)

This study investigates the ability of individuals with psychopathy to perform passive avoidance learning and whether this ability is modulated by level of reinforcement/punishment. Nineteen psychopathic and 21 comparison individuals, as defined by the Hare Psychopathy Checklist Revised (Hare, 1991), were given a passive avoidance task with a graded reinforcement schedule. Response to each rewarding number gained a point reward specific to that number (i.e., 1, 700, 1400 or 2000 points). Response to each punishing number lost a point (...) punishment specific to that number (i.e., the loss of 1, 700, 1400 or 2000 points). In line with predictions, individuals with psychopathy made more passive avoidance errors than the comparison individuals. In addition, while the performance of both groups was modulated by level of reward, only the performance of the comparison population was modulated by level of punishment. The results are interpreted with reference to a computational account of the emotional learning impairment in individuals with psychopathy. (shrink)

This study examines the ethical values of respondents by level in the organizational hierarchy of a single firm. It also explores the possible impacts of gender, education and years of experience on respondents' values as well as their perceptions of how the organization and professional associations influence their personal values. Results showed that, although there were differences in individuals' ethical values by hierarchical level, significantly more differences were observed by the length of tenure with the organization. While respondents, as (...) a whole, were rather ambivalent in their perception of the organization's and professional associations' influence on their values, sales/service persons frequently felt pressured to modify their values in order to achieve company goals. (shrink)

Determining the knowledge that guides human judgments is fundamental to understanding how people reason, make decisions, and form predictions. We use an experimental procedure called ‘‘iterated learning,’’ in which the responses that people give on one trial are used to generate the data they see on the next, to pinpoint the knowledge that informs people's predictions about everyday events (e.g., predicting the total box office gross of a movie from its current take). In particular, we use this method to discriminate (...) between two models of human judgments: a simple Bayesian model (Griffiths & Tenenbaum, 2006) and a recently proposed alternative model that assumes people store only a few instances of each type of event in memory (MinK; Mozer, Pashler, & Homaei, 2008). Although testing these models using standard experimental procedures is difficult due to differences in the number of free parameters and the need to make assumptions about the knowledge of individual learners, we show that the two models make very different predictions about the outcome of iterated learning. The results of an experiment using this methodology provide a rich picture of how much people know about the distributions of everyday quantities, and they are inconsistent with the predictions of the MinK model. The results suggest that accurate predictions about everyday events reflect relatively sophisticated knowledge on the part of individuals. (shrink)

To which ontological category do quantum systems belong? Although we usually speak of particles, it is well known that these peculiar items defy several traditional metaphysical principles. In the present chapter these challenges will be discussed in the light of certain distinctions usually not taken into account in the debate about the ontological nature of quantum systems. On this basis, it will be argued that an ontology of properties without individuals, framed in the algebraic formalism of quantum mechanics, provides (...) adequate answers to the ontological challenges raised by the theory.What kind of item is a quantum system? In the practice of physics it is common to speak of quantum particles, as if they were items of a similar nature to classical items, but obeying different laws of motion. However, as is well known, quantum systems have such peculiar features that they challenge certain ontological principles and categories as understood in traditional metaphysics. In general, these features are analyzed in the context of the so-called problem of indistinguishability, which is a consequence of the particular statistical behavior of quantum systems. But the fact that certain items are “indistinguishable” is not the only difficulty to be overcome in order to elucidate the ontological category of quantum systems. (shrink)

Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, and many more social networking sites are becoming mainstream in the lives of numerous individuals in the United States and around the globe. How these sites could potentially impact one's perception of community, as well as the ability to enhance strong social bonding, is an area of concern for many sociologists and criminologists. Current literature is discussed and framed through the lenses of social disorganization and social control theories as they relate to an individual's propensity to (...) commit crime/indiscretions and then post comments relating to those activities on social networking sites. The result is gained insight into the communal attributes of social networking and a contribution to the discussion of the relationship among the social components of the internet, criminal activity, and one's sense of community. Implications and areas of future research are also addressed. (shrink)

Necessitism about individuals claims that necessarily every individual necessarily exists. An analogous necessitist thesis attributes necessary existence to properties and relations. Both theses have been defended by Williamson. Furthermore, Williamson specifically argues against the hybrid conjunction of first-order contingentism and higher-order necessitism; a combination that would bring about additional drawbacks. I work out a defence of the hybrid combination, including some replies to Williamson’s additional objections. Considerations of ontological parsimony and pre-theoretical intuitions favour the hybrid view over necessitism at (...) all orders. (shrink)

E. J. Lowe; Are the natural numbers individuals or sorts?, Analysis, Volume 53, Issue 3, 1 July 1993, Pages 142–146, https://doi.org/10.1093/analys/53.3.142.