This article focuses on the role of unions and their influence on economic inequality. Section 2 reviews the literature regarding the union effect on wages and wage inequality. Section 3 considers the separate contributions of union power, membership composition, bargaining coordination, and wage policy. Section 4 introduces the distinction between membership and coverage, while the following two sections discuss the impact of union power on earnings inequality when coverage is either exclusive or inclusive. Section 7 discusses the rationale for unions (...) aiming for wage compression while Section 8 estimates how the presence of trade unions has influenced the extent and dynamics of earnings inequality across advanced economies during the 1980s and 1990s. For this purpose indicators have been developed for trends in equality and union presence from different sources. Section 9 concludes. (shrink)

In this paper, we argue for a theoretical separation of the free-energy principle from Helmholtzian accounts of the predictive brain. The free-energy principle is a theoretical framework capturing the imperative for biological self-organization in information-theoretic terms. The free-energy principle has typically been connected with a Bayesian theory of predictive coding, and the latter is often taken to support a Helmholtzian theory of perception as unconscious inference. If our interpretation is right, however, a Helmholtzian view of perception is incompatible with Bayesian (...) predictive coding under the free-energy principle. We argue that the free energy principle and the ecological and enactive approach to mind and life make for a much happier marriage of ideas. We make our argument based on three points. First we argue that the free energy principle applies to the whole animal–environment system, and not only to the brain. Second, we show that active inference, as understood by the free-energy principle, is incompatible with unconscious inference understood as analagous to scientific hypothesis-testing, the main tenet of a Helmholtzian view of perception. Third, we argue that the notion of inference at work in Bayesian predictive coding under the free-energy principle is too weak to support a Helmholtzian theory of perception. Taken together these points imply that the free energy principle is best understood in ecological and enactive terms set out in this paper. (shrink)

The free energy principle, an influential framework in computational neuroscience and theoretical neurobiology, starts from the assumption that living systems ensure adaptive exchanges with their environment by minimizing the objective function of variational free energy. Following this premise, it claims to deliver a promising integration of the life sciences. In recent work, Markov blankets, one of the central constructs of the free energy principle, have been applied to resolve debates central to philosophy (such as demarcating the boundaries of the mind). (...) The aim of this paper is twofold. First, we trace the development of Markov blankets starting from their standard application in Bayesian networks, via variational inference, to their use in the literature on active inference. We then identify a persistent confusion in the literature between the formal use of Markov blankets as an epistemic tool for Bayesian inference, and their novel metaphysical use in the free energy framework to demarcate the physical boundary between an agent and its environment. Consequently, we propose to distinguish between “Pearl blankets” to refer to the original epistemic use of Markov blankets and “Friston blankets” to refer to the new metaphysical construct. Second, we use this distinction to critically assess claims resting on the application of Markov blankets to philosophical problems. We suggest that this literature would do well in differentiating between two different research programmes: “inference with a model” and “inference within a model.” Only the latter is capable of doing metaphysical work with Markov blankets, but requires additional philosophical premises and cannot be justified by an appeal to the success of the mathematical framework alone. (shrink)

In this paper, we address the question of how an agent can guide its behavior with respect to aspects of the sociomaterial environment that are not sensorily present. A simple example is how an animal can relate to a food source while only sensing a pheromone, or how an agent can relate to beer, while only the refrigerator is directly sensorily present. Certain cases in which something is absent have been characterized by others as requiring ‘higher’ cognition. An example of (...) this is how during the design process architects can let themselves be guided by the future behavior of visitors to an exhibit they are planning. The main question is what the sociomaterial environment and the skilled agent are like, such that they can relate to each other in these ways. We argue that this requires an account of the regularities in the environment. Introducing the notion of general ecological information, we will give an account of these regularities in terms of constraints, information and the form of life or ecological niche. In the first part of the paper, we will introduce the skilled intentionality framework as conceptualizing a special case of an animal’s informational coupling with the environment namely skilled action. We will show how skilled agents can pick up on the regularities in the environment and let their behavior be guided by the practices in the form of life. This conceptual framework is important for radical embodied and enactive cognitive science, because it allows these increasingly influential paradigms to extend their reach to forms of ‘higher’ cognition such as long-term planning and imagination. (shrink)

In this paper we study essential hereditary undecidability. Theories with this property are a convenient tool to prove undecidability of other theories. The paper develops the basic facts concerning essentially hereditary undecidability and provides salient examples, like a construction of essentially hereditarily undecidable theories due to Hanf and an example of a rather natural essentially hereditarily undecidable theory strictly below. We discuss the (non-)interaction of essential hereditary undecidability with recursive boolean isomorphism. We develop a reduction relation essential tolerance, or, in (...) the converse direction, lax interpretability that interacts in a good way with essential hereditary undecidability. We introduce the class of $$\Sigma ^0_1$$ Σ 1 0 -friendly theories and show that $$\Sigma ^0_1$$ Σ 1 0 -friendliness is sufficient but not necessary for essential hereditary undecidability. Finally, we adapt an argument due to Pakhomov, Murwanashyaka and Visser to show that there is no interpretability minimal essentially hereditarily undecidable theory. (shrink)

This paper deals with the question of agency and intentionality in the context of the free-energy principle. The free-energy principle is a system-theoretic framework for understanding living self-organizing systems and how they relate to their environments. I will first sketch the main philosophical positions in the literature: a rationalist Helmholtzian interpretation (Hohwy 2013; Clark 2013), a cybernetic interpretation (Seth 2015b) and the enactive affordance-based interpretation (Bruineberg and Rietveld 2014; Bruineberg et al. 2016) and will then show how agency and intentionality (...) are construed differently on these different philosophical interpretations. I will then argue that a purely Helmholtzian is limited, in that it can account only account for agency in the context of perceptual inference. The cybernetic account cannot give a full account of action, since purposiveness is accounted for only to the extent that it pertains to the control of homeostatic essential variables. I will then argue that the enactive affordance-based account attempts to provide broader account of purposive action without presupposing goals and intentions coming from outside of the theory. In the second part of the paper, I will discuss how each of these three interpretations conceives of the sense agency and intentionality in different ways. (shrink)

In everyday situations, and particularly in some sport and working contexts, humans face an inherently unpredictable and uncertain environment. All sorts of unpredictable and unexpected things happen but typically people are able to skillfully adapt. In this paper, we address two key questions in cognitive science. First, how is an agent able to bring its previously learned skill to bear on a novel situation? Second, how can an agent be both sensitive to the particularity of a given situation, while remaining (...) flexibly poised for many other possibilities for action? We will argue that both the sensitivity to novel situations and the sensitivity to a multiplicity of action possibilities are enabled by the property of skilled agency that we will call metastable attunement. We characterize a skilled agent’s flexible interactions with a dynamically changing environment in terms of metastable dynamics in agent-environment systems. What we find in metastability is the realization of two competing tendencies: the tendency of the agent to express their intrinsic dynamics and the tendency to search for new possibilities. Metastably attuned agents are ready to engage with a multiplicity of affordances, allowing for a balance between stability and flexibility. On the one hand, agents are able to exploit affordances they are attuned to, while at the same time being ready to flexibly explore for other affordances. Metastable attunement allows agents to smoothly transition between these possible configurations so as to adapt their behaviour to what the particular situation requires. We go on to describe the role metastability plays in learning of new skills, and in skilful behaviour more generally. Finally, drawing upon work in art, architecture and sports science, we develop a number of perspectives on how to investigate metastable attunement in real life situations. (shrink)

In this paper we study 1. the frame-theory of certain bimodal provability logics involving the reflection principle and we study2. certain specific bimodal logics with a provability predicate for a subtheory of Peano arithmetic axiomatized by a non-standardly finite number of axioms.

In this paper we introduce Dynamic Epistemic Logic, which is alogic for reasoning about information change in a multi-agent system. Theinformation structures we use are based on non-well-founded sets, and canbe conceived as bisimulation classes of Kripke models. On these structures,we define a notion of information change that is inspired by UpdateSemantics (Veltman, 1996). We give a sound and complete axiomatization ofthe resulting logic, and we discuss applications to the puzzle of the dirtychildren, and to knowledge programs.

In this paper, we set out to develop a theoretical and conceptual framework for the new field of Radical Embodied Cognitive Neuroscience. This framework should be able to integrate insights from several relevant disciplines: theory on embodied cognition, ecological psychology, phenomenology, dynamical systems theory, and neurodynamics. We suggest that the main task of Radical Embodied Cognitive Neuroscience is to investigate the phenomenon of skilled intentionality from the perspective of the self-organization of the brain-body-environment system, while doing justice to the phenomenology (...) of skilled action. In previous work, we have characterized skilled intentionality as the organism's tendency toward an optimal grip on multiple relevant affordances simultaneously. Affordances are possibilities for action provided by the environment. In the first part of this paper, we introduce the notion of skilled intentionality and the phenomenon of responsiveness to a field of relevant affordances. Second, we use Friston's work on neurodynamics, but embed a very minimal version of his Free Energy Principle in the ecological niche of the animal. Thus amended, this principle is helpful for understanding the embeddedness of neurodynamics within the dynamics of the system “brain-body-landscape of affordances.” Next, we show how we can use this adjusted principle to understand the neurodynamics of selective openness to the environment: interacting action-readiness patterns at multiple timescales contribute to the organism's selective openness to relevant affordances. In the final part of the paper, we emphasize the important role of metastable dynamics in both the brain and the brain-body-environment system for adequate affordance-responsiveness. We exemplify our integrative approach by presenting research on the impact of Deep Brain Stimulation on affordance responsiveness of OCD patients. (shrink)

Business schools are the “nurseries” of the corporate world. This article offers an empirical analysis of the business student ethos on the basis of research conducted at three Dutch universities. A theoretical framework in the tradition of virtue ethics and dubbed “moral ethology” is used to identify the values business schools convey to their students. The central research question is: What types of ethos do Dutch business students have? Forty‐three undergraduate students participated in Q‐methodological research, a mixed qualitative–quantitative small‐sample method. (...) Five different types of ethos were generated: Do‐Good Managers, Market Managers, Searching Managers, Balancing Managers, and Radical Market Managers. Some general characteristics that apply to all the types of ethos were identified, such as the search for efficiency. It is argued that business schools should pay much more attention to the values that are endorsed in both life and business and should help students to address situations in which values are neglected. (shrink)

Argument schemes are abstractions substantiating the inferential connection between premise(s) and conclusion in argumentative communication. Identifying such conventional patterns of reasoning is essential to the interpretation and evaluation of argumentation. Whether studying argumentation from a theory-driven or data-driven perspective, insight into the actual use of argumentation in communicative practice is essential. Large and reliably annotated corpora of argumentative discourse to quantitatively provide such insight are few and far between. This is all the more true for argument scheme corpora, which tend (...) to suffer from a combination of limited size, poor validation, and the use of ad hoc restricted typologies. In the current paper, we describe the annotation of schemes on the basis of two distinct classifications: Walton’s taxonomy of argument schemes, and Wagemans’ Periodic Table of Arguments. We describe the annotation procedure for each, and the quantitative characteristics of the resulting annotated text corpora. In doing so, we extend the annotation of the preexisting US2016 corpus of televised election debates, resulting in, to the best of our knowledge, the two largest consistently annotated corpora of schemes in argumentative dialogue publicly available. Based on evaluation in terms of inter-annotator agreement, we propose further improvements to the guidelines for annotating schemes: the argument scheme key, and the Argument Type Identification Procedure. (shrink)

Smartphone use plays an increasingly important role in our daily lives. Philosophical research that has used first wave or second wave theories of extended cognition in order to understand our engagement with digital technologies has focused on the contribution of these technologies to the completion of specific cognitive tasks (e.g., remembering, reasoning, problem-solving, navigation).However, in a considerable number of cases, everyday smartphone use is task-unrelated. In psychological research, these cases have been captured by notions such as absent-minded smart-phone use (Marty-Dugas (...) et al., 2018) or smartphone-related inattentiveness (Liebherr et al., 2020).Given the prevalence of these cases, we develop a conceptual framework that can accommodate the functional and phenomenological characteristics of task-unrelated smartphone use. To this end, we will integrate research on second wave extended cognition with mind-wandering research and introduce the concept of ‘extended mind-wandering’. Elaborating the family resemblances approach to mind-wandering (Seli, Kane, Smallwood, et al., 2018), we will argue that task-unrelated smartphone use shares many characteristics with mind-wandering. We will suggest that an empirically informed conceptual analysis of cases of extended mind-wandering can enrich current work on digitally extended cognition by specifying the influence of the attention economy on our cognitive dynamics. (shrink)

We investigate the covering numbers of some ideals on $${^{\omega }}{2}{}$$ ω 2 associated with tree forcings. We prove that the covering of the Sacks ideal remains small in the Silver and uniform Sacks model, respectively, and that the coverings of the uniform Sacks ideal and the Mycielski ideal, $${\mathfrak {C}_{2}}$$ C 2, remain small in the Sacks model.

In this paper we study proofs of some general forms of the Second Incompleteness Theorem. These forms conform to the Feferman format, where the proof predicate is fixed and the representation of the set of axioms varies. We extend the Feferman framework in one important point: we allow the interpretation of number theory to vary.

Perception is, at least sometimes, something we do. This paper is concerned with how to account for perceptual agency (i.e., the active aspect of perception). Eilan divides accounts of perceptual agency up into two camps: enactivist theories hold that perceptual agency is accounted for by the involvement of bodily action, while mental theories hold that perceptual agency is accounted for by the involvement of mental action in perception. In Structuring Mind (2017), Sebastian Watzl aligns his ‘activity view’ with the mental (...) action route and develops the view that the mental activity of attending infuses perceptual experience with agency. Moreover, Watzl claims that his view can accommodate enactivist intuitions, while rejecting their claims about embodiment.In this paper, we scrutinize the relevant notion of mental action involved in the mental action route. We analyze the involvement of the body in overt acts of attention (like sniffing and smelling) and argue that a constitutively embodied account of mental action provides a better analysis of overt attention than a conjunctive account in which overt attention involves a bodily and a (separate) mental action. Furthermore, we argue that the standard cases of covert attention (such as the Posner paradigm) involve the body in multiple ways.In closing, we discuss the relevance of our analysis for the debate on perceptual agency and the embodied mind thesis. We conclude that the embodied mental action route to theorizing perceptual agency provides the best analysis of perceptual agency but comes with significant commitments about the embodiment of attention. (shrink)

The reason of faith -- Thought and language -- Truth -- The Monologion arguments for the existence of God -- The Proslogion argument for the existence of God -- The divine attributes -- Thinking and speaking about God -- Creation and the word -- The Trinity -- Modality -- Freedom -- Morality -- Incarnation and atonement -- Original sin, grace, and salvation.

In this paper we introduce a notion of context for Groenendijk & Stokhof's Dynamic Predicate Logic DPL. We use these contexts to give a characterization of the relations on assignments that can be generated by composition from tests and random resettings in the case that we are working over an infinite domain. These relations are precisely the ones expressible in DPL if we allow ourselves arbitrary tests as a starting point. We discuss some possible extensions of DPL and the way (...) these extensions interact with our notion of context. (shrink)

The concept of affordances is rapidly gaining traction in the philosophy of mind and cognitive sciences. Affordances are opportunities for action provided by the environment. An important open question is whether affordances can be used to explain mental action such as attention, counting, and imagination. In this paper, we critically discuss McClelland’s (‘The Mental Affordance Hypothesis’, 2020, Mind, 129(514), pp. 401–427) mental affordance hypothesis. While we agree that the affordance concept can be fruitfully employed to explain mental action, we argue (...) that McClelland’s mental affordance hypothesis contain remnants of a Cartesian understanding of the mind. By discussing the theoretical framework of the affordance competition hypothesis, we sketch an alternative research program based on the principles of embodied cognition that evades the Cartesian worries. We show how paradigmatic mental acts, such as imagination, counting, and arithmetic, are dependent on sensorimotor interaction with an affording environment. Rather than make a clear distinction between bodily and mental action, the mental affordances highlight the embodied nature of our mental action. We think that in developing our alternative research program on mental affordances, we can maintain many of the excellent insights of McClelland’s account without reintroducing the very distinctions that affordances were supposed to overcome. (shrink)

This paper studies a propositional logic which is obtained by interpreting implication as formal provability. It is also the logic of finite irreflexive Kripke Models.A Kripke Model completeness theorem is given and several completeness theorems for interpretations into Provability Logic and Peano Arithmetic.

In this paper we examine various requirements on the formalisation choices under which self-reference can be adequately formalised in arithmetic. In particular, we study self-referential numberings, which immediately provide a strong notion of self-reference even for expressively weak languages. The results of this paper suggest that the question whether truly self-referential reasoning can be formalised in arithmetic is more sensitive to the underlying coding apparatus than usually believed. As a case study, we show how this sensitivity affects the formal study (...) of certain principles of self-referential truth. (shrink)

The 35 commentaries cover a wide range of topics and take many different stances on the issues explored by the target article. We have organised our response to the commentaries around three central questions: Are Friston blankets just Pearl blankets? What ontological and metaphysical commitments are implied by the use of Friston blankets? What kind of explanatory work are Friston blankets capable of? We conclude our reply with a short critical reflection on the indiscriminate use of both Markov blankets and (...) the free energy principle. (shrink)

The central result of this paper is the small‐is‐very‐small principle for restricted sequential theories. The principle says roughly that whenever the given theory shows that a definable property has a small witness, i.e., a witness in a sufficiently small definable cut, then it shows that the property has a very small witness: i.e., a witness below a given standard number. Which cuts are sufficiently small will depend on the complexity of the formula defining the property. We draw various consequences from (...) the central result. E.g., roughly speaking, (i) every restricted, recursively enumerable sequential theory has a finitely axiomatized extension that is conservative with respect to formulas of complexity ; (ii) every sequential model has, for any n, an extension that is elementary for formulas of complexity, in which the intersection of all definable cuts is the natural numbers; (iii) we have reflection for ‐sentences with sufficiently small witness in any consistent restricted theory U; (iv) suppose U is recursively enumerable and sequential. Suppose further that every recursively enumerable and sequential V that locally inteprets U, globally interprets U. Then, U is mutually globally interpretable with a finitely axiomatized sequential theory. The paper contains some careful groundwork developing partial satisfaction predicates in sequential theories for the complexity measure depth of quantifier alternations. (shrink)

There is a growing interest in how people conceptualise the legal domain for the purpose of legal knowledge systems. In this paper we discuss four such conceptualisations (referred to as ontologies): McCarty's language for legal discourse, Stamper's norma formalism, Valente's functional ontology of law, and the ontology of Van Kralingen and Visser. We present criteria for a comparison of the ontologies and discuss the strengths and weaknesses of the ontologies in relation to these criteria. Moreover, we critically review the (...) criteria. (shrink)

Many logical systems today describe intelligent interacting agents over time. Frameworks include Interpreted Systems (IS, Fagin et al. [8]), Epistemic-Temporal Logic (ETL, Parikh & Ramanujam [22]), STIT (Belnap et al. [5]), Process Algebra and Game Semantics (Abramsky [1]). This variety is an asset, as different modeling tools can be fine-tuned to specific applications. But it may also be an obstacle, when barriers between paradigms and schools go up. This paper takes a closer look at one particular interface, between two systems (...) that both address the dynamics of knowledge and information flow in multi-agent systems. One is IS/ETL (IS and ETL are, from a technical point of view, the same up to model transformations, cf. [20]), which uses linear or branching time models with added epistemic structure induced by agents’ different capabilities for observing events. These models provide a Grand Stage where histories of some process unfold constrained by a protocol, and a matching epistemic-temporal language describes what happens. The other framework is Dynamic Epistemic Logic (DEL, [10, 4, 34]) that describes interactive processes in terms of epistemic event models which may occur inside modalities of the language. Temporal evolution is then computed from some initial epistemic model through a process of successive ‘product updates’. It has long been unclear how to best compare IS/ETL and DEL. Various aspects have been investigated in [10, 30, 32], but in this paper, we study the interface in a more systematic way. Often, DEL and ETL are presented as alternative ways of adding dynamics to multi-agent epistemic models. In this paper, we rather focus on how merging the two different modeling choices leads to interesting new questions. Our leading interest here will be a view of informational processes as evolving over time. To see what we mean, consider the simplest version of DEL, viz. the logic of public announcements PAL ([23]) which adds a very specific type of communicative 1 action to epistemic models: a public announcement.. (shrink)

In this paper a dialogue game for critical discussion is developed. The dialogue game is a formalisation of the ideal discussion model that is central to the pragma-dialectical theory of argumentation. The formalisation is intended as a preparatory step to facilitate the development of computational tools to support the pragma-dialectical study of argumentation. An important dimension of the pragma-dialectical discussion model is the role played by speech acts. The central issue addressed in this paper is how the speech act perspective (...) can be accommodated in the formalisation as a dialogue game. The starting point is an existing ‘basic’ dialogue game for critical discussion, in which speech acts are not addressed. The speech act perspective is introduced into the dialogue game by changing the rules that govern the moves that can be made and the commitments that these result in, while the rules for the beginning, for the end, and for the structure of the dialogue game remain unchanged. The revision of the move rules is based on the distribution of speech acts in the pragma-dialectical discussion model. The revision of the commitment rules is based on the felicity conditions that are associated with those speech acts. (shrink)

In this note we derive Robinson???s Arithmetic from Hume???s Principle in the context of very weak theories of classes and relations.

In this paper we describe a framework for the construction of entities that can serve as interpretations of arbitrary contiguous chunks of text. An important part of the paper is devoted to describing stacking cells, or the proposed meanings for bracket-structures.

In this paper I give a characterization of the closed fragment of the provability logic of $I \triangle_0 + \mathrm{EXP}$ with a propositional constant for $\mathrm{EXP}$. In three appendices many details on arithmetization are provided.

This paper is concerned with the logical structure of arithmetical theories. We survey results concerning logics and admissible rules of constructive arithmetical theories. We prove a new theorem: the admissible propositional rules of Heyting Arithmetic are the same as the admissible propositional rules of Intuitionistic Propositional Logic. We provide some further insights concerning predicate logical admissible rules for arithmetical theories.

We show that a consistent, finitely axiomatized, sequential theory cannot prove its own inconsistency on every definable cut. A corollary is that there are at least three degrees of global interpretability of theories equivalent modulo local interpretability to a consistent, finitely axiomatized, sequential theory U.