What is the relationship between the world and logic, between intuition and language, between objects and their quantitative determinations? Rationalists, on the one hand, hold that the world is structured in a rational way. Representationalists, on the other hand, assume that language, logic, and mathematics are only the means to order and describe the intuitively given world. In World and Logic, Jens Lemanski takes up three surprising arguments from Arthur Schopenhauer’s hitherto undiscovered Berlin Lectures, which concern the philosophy of (...) language, logic, and mathematics. Based on these arguments, Lemanski develops a new position entitled ‘rational representationalism’: the world is always structured by human beings according to linguistic, logical, and mathematical principles, but the basic vocabulary of these structural descriptions already contains metaphors taken from the world around us. (shrink)

Advanced AI systems are rapidly making their way into medical research and practice, and, arguably, it is only a matter of time before they will surpass human practitioners in terms of accuracy, reliability, and knowledge. If this is true, practitioners will have a prima facie epistemic and professional obligation to align their medical verdicts with those of advanced AI systems. However, in light of their complexity, these AI systems will often function as black boxes: the details of their contents, calculations, (...) and procedures cannot be meaningfully understood by human practitioners. When AI systems reach this level of complexity, we can also speak of black-box medicine. In this paper, we want to argue that black-box medicine conflicts with core ideals of patient-centered medicine. In particular, we claim, black-box medicine is not conducive for supporting informed decision-making based on shared information, shared deliberation, and shared mind between practitioner and patient. (shrink)

In this paper, we present and defend an analysis of harm that we call the Negative Influence on Well-Being Account (NIWA). We argue that NIWA has a number of significant advantages compared to its two main rivals, the Counterfactual Comparative Account (CCA) and the Causal Account (CA), and that it also helps explain why those views go wrong. In addition, we defend NIWA against a class of likely objections, and consider its implications for several questions about harm and its role (...) in normative theorizing. (shrink)

The essays in this volume investigate the question of where, and in what sense, the bounds of intelligible thought, knowledge, and speech are to be drawn. Is there a way in which we are limited in what we think, know, and say? And if so, does this mean that we are constrained—that there is something beyond the ken of human intelligibility of which we fall short? Or is there another way to think about these limits of intelligibility—namely, as conditions of (...) our meaning and knowing anything, beyond which there is no specifiable thing we cannot do? -/- These issues feature prominently in the writings of Kant and Wittgenstein who each engaged with them in unique and striking ways. Their thoughts on the matter remain provocative and stimulating, and accordingly the contributions to this volume address the issues surrounding the limits of intelligibility both exegetically and systematically: they examine how they figure in Kant’s and Wittgenstein’s most significant works and put them in touch with contemporary debates that are shaped by their legacy. These debates concern, inter alia, logically and morally alien thought, the semantics and philosophy of negation, disjunctivism in philosophy of perception and ethics, paraconsistent approaches to contradiction, and the relation between art, literature, and philosophy. The book is divided into four parts: Part I gives a first assessment of the issues, Part II examines limits as they feature in Kant, Part III as they feature in Wittgenstein, and Part IV suggests some ways in which the questions at issue might be reconsidered, drawing upon ideas in phenomenology, dialetheism, metamathematics, and the works of other influential authors. -/- Limits of Intelligibility provides insight into a theme that is central to the thought of two of the most important figures in modern philosophy, as well as to recent metaphysics, philosophy of language, philosophy of logic, epistemology, and ethics. (shrink)

The traditional Lewis–Stalnaker semantics treats all counterfactuals with an impossible antecedent as trivially or vacuously true. Many have regarded this as a serious defect of the semantics. For intuitively, it seems, counterfactuals with impossible antecedents—counterpossibles—can be non-trivially true and non-trivially false. Whereas the counterpossible "If Hobbes had squared the circle, then the mathematical community at the time would have been surprised" seems true, "If Hobbes had squared the circle, then sick children in the mountains of Afghanistan at the time would (...) have been thrilled" seems false. Many have proposed to extend the Lewis–Stalnaker semantics with impossible worlds to make room for a non-trivial or non-vacuous treatment of counterpossibles. Roughly, on the extended Lewis–Stalnaker semantics, we evaluate a counterfactual of the form "If A had been true, then C would have been true" by going to closest world—whether possible or impossible—in which A is true and check whether C is also true in that world. If the answer is "yes", the counterfactual is true; otherwise it is false. Since there are impossible worlds in which the mathematically impossible happens, there are impossible worlds in which Hobbes manages to square the circle. And intuitively, in the closest such impossible worlds, sick children in the mountains of Afghanistan are not thrilled—they remain sick and unmoved by the mathematical developments in Europe. If so, the counterpossible "If Hobbes had squared the circle, then sick children in the mountains of Afghanistan at the time would have been thrilled" comes out false, as desired. In this paper, I will critically investigate the extended Lewis–Stalnaker semantics for counterpossibles. I will argue that the standard version of the extended semantics, in which impossible worlds correspond to maximal, logically inconsistent entities, fails to give the correct semantic verdicts for many counterpossibles. In light of the negative arguments, I will then outline a new version of the extended Lewis–Stalnaker semantics that can avoid these problems. (shrink)

Possible-worlds accounts of mental or linguistic content are often criticized for being too coarse-grained. To make room for more fine-grained distinctions among contents, several authors have recently proposed extending the space of possible worlds by "impossible worlds". We argue that this strategy comes with serious costs: we would effectively have to abandon most of the features that make the possible-worlds framework attractive. More generally, we argue that while there are intuitive and theoretical considerations against overly coarse-grained notions of content, the (...) same kinds of considerations also prohibit an overly fine-grained individuation of content. An adequate notion of content, it seems, should have intermediate granularity. However, it is hard to construe a notion of content that meets these demands. Any notion of content, we suggest, must be either implausibly coarse-grained or implausibly fine-grained (or both). (shrink)

According to the standard version of the counterfactual comparative account of harm, an event is overall harmful for an individual if and only if she would have been on balance better off if it had not occurred. This view faces the “preemption problem.” In the recent literature, there are various ingenious attempts to deal with this problem, some of which involve slight additions to, or modifications of, the counterfactual comparative account. We argue, however, that none of these attempts work, and (...) that the preemption problem continues to haunt the counterfactual comparative account. (shrink)

This paper analyses a hitherto unknown technique of using logic diagrams to create argument maps in eristic dialectics. The method was invented in the 1810s and -20s by Arthur Schopenhauer, who is considered the originator of modern eristic. This technique of Schopenhauer could be interesting for several branches of research in the field of argumentation: Firstly, for the field of argument mapping, since here a hitherto unknown diagrammatic technique is shown in order to visualise possible situations of arguments in a (...) dialogical controversy. Secondly, the art of controversy or eristic, since the diagrams do not analyse the truth of judgements and the validity of inferences, but the persuasiveness of arguments in a dialogue. (shrink)

Eristic has been studied more and more intensively in recent years in philosophy, law, communication theory, logic, proof theory, and A.I. Nevertheless, the modern origins of eristic, which almost all current researchers see in the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, are considered to be a theory of the illegitimate use of logical and rhetorical devices. Thus, eristic seems to violate the norms of discourse ethics. In this paper, I argue that this interpretation of eristic is based on prejudices that contradict the original (...) intention of modern eristic. Eristic is not an art of being right or winning an argument, but an art of protecting oneself from the one who deliberately violates norms of discourse ethics to gain argumentative acceptance. For this reason, eristic must be seen as a discipline of Enlightenment philosophy and a correlate of discourse ethics. Especially in the age of alternative facts and post-factual politics, this makes eristic a valuable discipline. (shrink)

In this paper, I investigate whether we can use a world-involving framework to model the epistemic states of non-ideal agents. The standard possible-world framework falters in this respect because of a commitment to logical omniscience. A familiar attempt to overcome this problem centers around the use of impossible worlds where the truths of logic can be false. As we shall see, if we admit impossible worlds where “anything goes” in modal space, it is easy to model extremely non-ideal agents that (...) are incapable of performing even the most elementary logical deductions. A much harder, and considerably less investigated challenge is to ensure that the resulting modal space can also be used to model moderately ideal agents that are not logically omniscient but nevertheless logically competent. Intuitively, while such agents may fail to rule out subtly impossible worlds that verify complex logical falsehoods, they are nevertheless able to rule out blatantly impossible worlds that verify obvious logical falsehoods. To model moderately ideal agents, I argue, the job is to construct a modal space that contains only possible and non-trivially impossible worlds where it is not the case that “anything goes”. But I prove that it is impossible to develop an impossible-world framework that can do this job and that satisfies certain standard conditions. Effectively, I show that attempts to model moderately ideal agents in a world-involving framework collapse to modeling either logical omniscient agents, or extremely non-ideal agents. (shrink)

It has recently been argued that a sensitivity theory of knowledge cannot account for intuitively appealing instances of higher-order knowledge. In this paper, we argue that it can once careful attention is paid to the methods or processes by which we typically form higher-order beliefs. We base our argument on what we take to be a well-motivated and commonsensical view on how higher-order knowledge is typically acquired, and we show how higher-order knowledge is possible in a sensitivity theory once this (...) view is adopted. (shrink)

The mechanistic view of computation contends that computational explanations are mechanistic explanations. Mechanists, however, disagree about the precise role that the environment – or the so-called “contextual level” – plays for computational explanations. We advance here two claims: Contextual factors essentially determine the computational identity of a computing system ; this means that specifying the “intrinsic” mechanism is not sufficient to fix the computational identity of the system. It is not necessary to specify the causal-mechanistic interaction between the system and (...) its context in order to offer a complete and adequate computational explanation. While the first claim has been discussed before, the second has been practically ignored. After supporting these claims, we discuss the implications of our contextualist view for the mechanistic view of computational explanation. Our aim is to show that some versions of the mechanistic view are consistent with the contextualist view, whilst others are not. (shrink)

This paper discusses the constitution relation within the framework of the mechanistic approach to neurobiological explanation. It develops a regularity theory of constitution as an alternative to the manipulationist theory of constitution advocated by some of the proponents of the mechanistic approach. After the main problems of the manipulationist account of constitution have been reviewed, the regularity account is developed based on the notion of a minimal type relevance theory. A minimal type relevance theory expresses a minimally necessary condition of (...) a given type that consists of a disjunction of minimally sufficient conditions of that type. Afterwards, the attained definition is successfully applied in an analysis of the logical structure of the explanation of spatial learning and memory in rats as a paradigm neurobiological explanation. The overall result is a more robust and more precise version of the mechanistic approach to neurobiological explanations. (shrink)

The chapters in this timely volume aim to answer the growing interest in Arthur Schopenhauer’s logic, mathematics, and philosophy of language by comprehensively exploring his work on mathematical evidence, logic diagrams, and problems of semantics. Thus, this work addresses the lack of research on these subjects in the context of Schopenhauer’s oeuvre by exposing their links to modern research areas, such as the “proof without words” movement, analytic philosophy and diagrammatic reasoning, demonstrating its continued relevance to current discourse on logic. (...) -/- Beginning with Schopenhauer’s philosophy of language, the chapters examine the individual aspects of his semantics, semiotics, translation theory, language criticism, and communication theory. Additionally, Schopenhauer’s anticipation of modern contextualism is analyzed. The second section then addresses his logic, examining proof theory, metalogic, system of natural deduction, conversion theory, logical geometry, and the history of logic. Special focus is given to the role of the Euler diagrams used frequently in his lectures and their significance to broader context of his logic. In the final section, chapters discuss Schopenhauer’s philosophy of mathematics while synthesizing all topics from the previous sections, emphasizing the relationship between intuition and concept. -/- Aimed at a variety of academics, including researchers of Schopenhauer, philosophers, historians, logicians, mathematicians, and linguists, this title serves as a unique and vital resource for those interested in expanding their knowledge of Schopenhauer’s work as it relates to modern mathematical and logical study. (shrink)

IntroductionIf we were to identify the beginning of the study of visual argumentation, we would have to choose 1996 as the starting point. This was the year that Leo Groarke published “Logic, art and argument” in Informal logic, and it was the year that he and David Birdsell co-edited a special double issue of Argumentation and Advocacy on visual argumentation . Among other papers, the issue included Anthony Blair’s “The possibility and actuality of visual arguments”. It was also the year (...) that Gail J. Chryslee, Sonja K. Foss and Arthur L. Ranney published their short text on “The construction of claims in visual argumentation” , stating that even though theorists may know a great deal about the process of argumentation, “virtually none of this knowledge is applicable to visual argumentation […] because of the properties that distinguish visual imagery from discursive symbols” .Texts on visual rhetoric have been written as far back as the early 1980s, .. (shrink)

A prominent objection to the counterfactual comparative account of harm is that it classifies as harmful some events that are, intuitively, mere failures to benefit. In an attempt to solve this problem, Duncan Purves has recently proposed a novel version of the counterfactual comparative account, which relies on a distinction between making upshots happen and allowing upshots to happen. In this response, we argue that Purves’s account is unsuccessful. It fails in cases where an action makes the subject occupy a (...) high well-being level though one of the available alternatives would have made it even higher. In fact, it fails even in some cases where each of the available alternatives to the action that was actually performed would have made the subject’s well-being level lower. (shrink)

When a proposition might be the case, for all an agent knows, we can say that the proposition is epistemically possible for the agent. In the standard possible worlds framework, we analyze modal claims using quantification over possible worlds. It is natural to expect that something similar can be done for modal claims involving epistemic possibility. The main aim of this paper is to investigate the prospects of constructing a space of worlds—epistemic space—that allows us to model what is epistemically (...) possible for ordinary, non-ideally rational agents like you and me. I will argue that the prospects look dim for successfully constructing such a space. In turn, this will make a case for the claim that we cannot use the standard possible worlds framework to model what is epistemically possible for ordinary agents. (shrink)

The Oxford Handbook of Carl Schmitt collects thirty original chapters on the diverse oeuvre of one of the most controversial thinkers of the twentieth century. Carl Schmitt was a German theorist whose anti-liberalism continues to inspire scholars and practitioners on both the Left and the Right. Despite Schmitt's rabid anti-semitism and partisan legal practice in Nazi Germany, the appeal of his trenchant critiques of, among other things, aestheticism, representative democracy, and international law as well as of his theoretical justifications of (...) dictatorship and rule by exception is undiminished. Uniquely located at the intersection of law, the social sciences, and the humanities, this volume brings together sophisticated yet accessible interpretations of Schmitt's sprawling thought and complicated biography. The contributors hail from diverse disciplines, including art, law, literature, philosophy, political science, and history. In addition to opening up exciting new avenues of research, The Oxford Handbook of Carl Schmitt provides the intellectual foundations for an improved understanding of the political, legal, and cultural thought of this most infamous of German theorists. A substantial introduction places the trinity of Schmitt's thought in a broad context. (shrink)

I raise two objections against Christian List and Peter Menzies' influential account of high-level causation. Improving upon some of Stephen Yablo's earlier work, I develop an alternative theory which evades both objections. The discussion calls into question List and Menzies' main contention, namely, that the exclusion principle, applied to difference-making, is false.

Logicians have often suggested that the use of Euler-type diagrams has influenced the idea of the quantification of the predicate. This is mainly due to the fact that Euler-type diagrams display more information than is required in traditional syllogistics. The paper supports this argument and extends it by a further step: Euler-type diagrams not only illustrate the quantification of the predicate, but also solve problems of traditional proof theory, which prevented an overall quantification of the predicate. Thus, Euler-type diagrams can (...) be called the natural basis of syllogistic reasoning and can even go beyond. In the paper, these arguments are presented in connection with the book Nucleus Logicae Weisaniae by Johann Christian Lange from 1712. (shrink)

Reism or concretism are the labels for a position in ontology and semantics that is represented by various philosophers. As Kazimierz Ajdukiewicz and Jan Woleński have shown, there are two dimensions with which the abstract expression of reism can be made concrete: The ontological dimension of reism says that only things exist; the semantic dimension of reism says that all concepts must be reduced to concrete terms in order to be meaningful. In this paper we argue for the following two (...) theses: (1) Arthur Schopenhauer has advocated a reistic philosophy of language which says that all concepts must ultimately be based on concrete intuition in order to be meaningful. (2) In his semantics, Schopenhauer developed a theory of logic diagrams that can be interpreted by modern means in order to concretize the abstract position of reism. Thus we are not only enhancing Jan Woleński’s list of well-known reists, but we are also adding a diagrammatic dimension to concretism, represented by Schopenhauer. (shrink)

According to epistemic two-dimensionalism, or simply two-dimensionalism, linguistic expressions are associated with two intensions, one of which represents an expression’s a priori implications. The author investigates the prospects of conceptual analysis on the basis of a two-dimensionalist theory of meaning. He discusses a number of arguments for and against two-dimensional semantics and argues that properly construed, two-dimensionalism provides a potent and plausible account of meaning. Against the background of this account, the author then goes on to assess the value of (...) conceptual analysis in philosophical practice, outlining its goals, its promises, but also its limitations. (shrink)

Logicians commonly speak in a relatively undifferentiated way about pre-euler diagrams. The thesis of this paper, however, is that there were three periods in the early modern era in which euler-type diagrams (line diagrams as well as circle diagrams) were expansively used. Expansive periods are characterized by continuity, and regressive periods by discontinuity: While on the one hand an ongoing awareness of the use of euler-type diagrams occurred within an expansive period, after a subsequent phase of regression the entire knowledge (...) about the systematic application and the history of euler-type diagrams was lost. I will argue that the first expansive period lasted from Vives (1531) to Alsted (1614). The second period began around 1660 with Weigel and ended in 1712 with lange. The third period of expansion started around 1760 with the works of Ploucquet, euler and lambert. Finally, it is shown that euler-type diagrams became popular in the debate about intuition which took place in the 1790s between leibnizians and Kantians. The article is thus limited to the historical periodization between 1530 and 1800. (shrink)

In a recent article, I criticized Anthony L. Brueckner and John Martin Fischer’s influential argument—appealing to the rationality of our asymmetric attitudes towards past and future pleasures—against the Lucretian claim that death and prenatal non-existence are relevantly similar. Brueckner and Fischer have replied, however, that my critique involves an unjustified shift in temporal perspectives. In this paper, I respond to this charge and also argue that even if it were correct, it would fail to defend Brueckner and Fischer’s proposal against (...) my critique. (shrink)

Some forms of argumentation are best performed through words. However, there are also some forms of argumentation that may be best presented visually. Thus, this paper examines the virtues of visual argumentation. What makes visual argumentation distinct from verbal argumentation? What aspects of visual argumentation may be considered especially beneficial?

This article defends three claims. First, that collection and division in the Phaedrus are described as procedures that underlie human speaking and thinking in general, as well as philosophical inquiry, and are not identified with either. Second, that what sets the dialectical use of these procedures apart from their ordinary use are philosophical suppositions independent of the procedures of collection and division themselves; for that reason, collection and division cannot be identified with dialectic as such. Third, that the second part (...) of the Phaedrus is concerned with the broader question how noble or beautiful speaking, in general, may be said to depend on dialectic as much as it is concerned with the question how rhetoric, as a kind of expertise, is related to dialectic. (shrink)

Pluralistic ignorance is a socio-psychological phenomenon that involves a systematic discrepancy between people’s private beliefs and public behavior in certain social contexts. Recently, pluralistic ignorance has gained increased attention in formal and social epistemology. But to get clear on what precisely a formal and social epistemological account of pluralistic ignorance should look like, we need answers to at least the following two questions: What exactly is the phenomenon of pluralistic ignorance? And can the phenomenon arise among perfectly rational agents? In (...) this paper, we propose answers to both these questions. First, we characterize different versions of pluralistic ignorance and define the version that we claim most adequately captures the examples cited as paradigmatic cases of pluralistic ignorance in the literature. In doing so, we will stress certain key epistemic and social interactive aspects of the phenomenon. Second, given our characterization of pluralistic ignorance, we argue that the phenomenon can indeed arise in groups of perfectly rational agents. This, in turn, ensures that the tools of formal epistemology can be fully utilized to reason about pluralistic ignorance. (shrink)

Derek Parfit famously defends a number of surprising views about "fission." One is that, in such a scenario, it is indeterminate whether I have survived or not. Another is that the fission case shows that it does not matter, in itself, whether I survive or not. Most critics of the first view contend that fission makes me cease to exist. Most opponents of the second view contend that fission does not preserve everything that matters in ordinary survival. In this paper (...) I shall provide a critique that does not rely on either of these contentions. There are other, interrelated reasons to reject Parfit's defense of the two theses. In particular, the availability of the following view creates trouble for Parfit: I determinately survive fission, but it is indeterminate which fission product I am. (shrink)

There has recently been a revived interest in temporal justice among political philosophers. For example, lone mothers have, on average, 30 h less free time per week than people in couples without children. Recent work has focussed on free time as a distinct distributive good, but this paper argues that it would be a mistake for a theory of temporal justice to focus only on shares of free time. First, I argue that the concept of free time does not succeed (...) in tracking discretionary control over time. All of time is a resource, and the particular moral relevance of free time must be established otherwise. Second, hours of time differ in use value, and we cannot fully track our concerns about the allocation of time, whether free or necessary, without taking this into account. We care about free time but also about ‘quality time’. To explain this observation, I develop an account of the value of time as a resource. The value of time periods differs with the prospects for which a time period can be used, that is, what we can do and be with it. What we are allocating when we are allocating time is not just hours; it is hours of time with a certain value. Finally, I argue that a concern for the value of time is compatible with a resourcist theory of temporal justice. (shrink)

This paper is concerned with the notions of supervenience and mechanistic constitution as they have been discussed in the philosophy of neuroscience. Since both notions essentially involve specific dependence and determination relations among properties and sets of properties, the question arises whether the notions are systematically connected and how they connect to science. In a first step, some definitions of supervenience and mechanistic constitution are presented and tested for logical independence. Afterwards, certain assumptions fundamental to neuroscientific inquiry are made explicit (...) in order to show that the presented definitions of supervenience are virtually uninteresting for theory construction in this field. In a third step, a new formulation of supervenience is developed that makes explicit reference to the notion of constitution and that bridges the gap between the philosophical concepts and explanatory practice in neuroscience. (shrink)

This paper critically examines Timothy Williamson’s claim that knowledge figures essentially in explanations of behavior. Since this claim implies that knowledge is causally efficacious in bringing about actions, it plays a key role in Williamson’s case for knowledge being a mental state. I first discuss a central example of Williamson, in which a burglar ransacks a house. I dispute Williamson’s claim that the best explanation of the burglar’s behavior invokes the burglar’s state of knowledge as he enters the house, by (...) arguing that there is a better explanation that only mentions the burglar’s beliefs. Since the reasons that explain the superiority of my proposed explanation generalize, I conclude that one does not have to invoke a subject’s state of knowledge to explain behavior. Nevertheless, Williamson’s explanation is superior to belief-based explanations if one only considers facts that obtain before the action takes place. In the final part of the paper, I argue that this fact does not help Williamson’s case for considering knowledge as a mental state. (shrink)

One increasingly popular approach to personal identity is called ‘animalism.’ Unfortunately, it is unclear just what the doctrine says. In this paper, I criticise several different ways of stating animalism, and put forward one formulation that I find more promising.

In this paper, we analyze and discuss Schopenhauer’s n-term diagrams for eristic dialectics from a graph-theoretical perspective. Unlike logic, eristic dialectics does not examine the validity of an isolated argument, but the progression and persuasiveness of an argument in the context of a dialogue or even controversy. To represent these dialogue situations, Schopenhauer created large maps with concepts and Euler-type diagrams, which from today’s perspective are a specific form of graphs. We first present the original method with Euler-type diagrams, then (...) give the most important graph-theoretical definitions, then discuss Schopenhauer’s diagrams graph-theoretically and finally give an example of how the graphs or diagrams can be used to analyze dialogues. (shrink)

The counterfactual comparative account of harm (cca) faces well-known problems concerning preemption and omission. In a recent article in this journal, Daniel Immerman proposes a novel variant of cca, which he calls the worse than nothing account (wtna). According to Immerman, wtna nicely handles the preemption and omission problems. We seek to show, however, that wtna is not an acceptable account of harm. In particular, while wtna deals better than cca with some cases that involve preemption and omission, it has (...) implausible implications in other similar cases – cases that, moreover, pose no problems for cca. (shrink)

In a possible world framework, an agent can be said to know a proposition just in case the proposition is true at all worlds that are epistemically possible for the agent. Roughly, a world is epistemically possible for an agent just in case the world is not ruled out by anything the agent knows. If a proposition is true at some epistemically possible world for an agent, the proposition is epistemically possible for the agent. If a proposition is true at (...) all epistemically possible worlds for an agent, the proposition is epistemically necessary for the agent, and as such, the agent knows the proposition. -/- This framework presupposes an underlying space of worlds that we can call epistemic space. Traditionally, worlds in epistemic space are identified with possible worlds, where possible worlds are the kinds of entities that at least verify all logical truths. If so, given that epistemic space consists solely of possible worlds, it follows that any world that may remain epistemically possible for an agent verifies all logical truths. As a result, all logical truths are epistemically necessary for any agent, and the corresponding framework only allows us to model logically omniscient agents. This is a well-known consequence of the standard possible world framework, and it is generally taken to imply that the framework cannot be used to model non-ideal agents that fall short of logical omniscience. -/- A familiar attempt to model non-ideal agents within a broadly world involving framework centers around the use of impossible worlds where the truths of logic can be false. As we shall see, if we admit impossible worlds where “anything goes” in epistemic space, it is easy to avoid logical omniscience. If any logical falsehood is true at some impossible world, then any logical falsehood may remain epistemically possible for some agent. As a result, we can use an impossible world involving framework to model extremely non-ideal agents that do not know any logical truths. -/- A much harder, and considerably less investigated challenge is to ensure that the resulting epistemic space can also be used to model moderately ideal agents that are not logically omniscient but nevertheless logically competent. Intuitively, while such agents may fail to rule out impossible worlds that verify complex logical falsehoods, they are nevertheless able to rule out impossible worlds that verify obvious logical falsehoods. To model such agents, we need a construction of a non-trivial epistemic space that partly consists of impossible worlds where not "anything goes". This involves imposing substantive constraints on impossible worlds to eliminate from epistemic space, say, trivially impossible worlds that verify obvious logical falsehoods. -/- The central aim of this dissertation is to investigate the nature of such non-trivially impossible worlds and the corresponding epistemic spaces. To flag my conclusions, I argue that successful constructions of epistemic spaces that can safely navigate between the Charybdis of logical omniscience and the Scylla of of “anything goes” are hard, if not impossible to find. (shrink)

From the mid-1600s to the beginning of the eighteenth century, there were two main circles of German scholars which focused extensively on diagrammatic reasoning and representation in logic. The first circle was formed around Erhard Weigel in Jena and consists primarily of Johann Christoph Sturm and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz; the second circle developed around Christian Weise in Zittau, with the support of his students, particularly Samuel Grosser and Johann Christian Lange. Each of these scholars developed an original form of using (...) geometric diagrams in logic. In this paper, I will trace the historical notes of John Venn and other modern logicians back to the original works published in the Weigel and Weise circles and describe the development of using geometric figures for logical reasoning and representation in that period of time. (shrink)

This paper is concerned with the connection between the causal exclusion argument and the supervenience argument and, in particular, with two exclusion principles that figure prominently in these arguments. Our aim is, first, to reconstruct the dialectics of the two arguments by formalizing them and by relating them to an anti-physicalist argument by Scott Sturgeon. In a second step, we assess the conclusiveness of the two arguments. We demonstrate that the conclusion of both the causal exclusion argument and the supervenience (...) argument (a negation of the so called ?non-identity premise?) is not tantamount to the claim that all mental events are identical to physical events and that a cause-supervenience exclusion principle is actually required for the validity of the first stage of the supervenience argument. Moreover, we show that this new exclusion principle makes an epiphenomenalism with respect to mental events an impossible position, and that there are good reasons to believe in its falsity, rendering the supervenience argument inconclusive. (shrink)

In this paper we explore the potential bearing of the extended mind thesis—the thesis that the mind extends into the world—on epistemology. We do three things. First, we argue that the combination of the extended mind thesis and reliabilism about knowledge entails that ordinary subjects can easily come to enjoy various forms of restricted omniscience. Second, we discuss the conceptual foundations of the extended mind and knowledge debate. We suggest that the theses of extended mind and extended knowledge lead to (...) a bifurcation with respect to the concepts of belief and knowledge. We suggest that this conceptual bifurcation supports a form of pluralism about these concepts. Third, we discuss whether something similar can be said at the metaphysical level. (shrink)

This paper discusses the role of levels and level-bound theoretical terms in neurobiological explanations under the presupposition of a regularity theory of constitution. After presenting the definitions for the constitution relation and the notion of a mechanistic level in the sense of the regularity theory, the paper develops a set of inference rules that allow to determine whether two mechanisms referred to by one or more accepted explanations belong to the same level, or to different levels. The rules are characterized (...) as underlying level distinctions in neuroscience research. (shrink)

The emergentist position that R. Keith Sawyer has formulated, nonreductive individualism, contains three propositions. First, that social characteristics must always be realized in individuals; second, that it is nevertheless possible to understand social properties as irreducible; and third, that therefore it is possible to demonstrate how social properties are able to exercise independent causal influences on individuals and their properties. It is demonstrated that Sawyer is not able to meet an objection that Kim has formulated against the analogous position in (...) the philosophy of mind. In his defense of the claim of irreducibility Sawyer refers to Fodor’s argument about multiple realizability, but this line of argument cannot preserve the claim for downward causation because Fodor’s claim for irreducibility rests on assumptions that are not compatible with a systematic formulation of downward causation. The article proposes a reading of Fodor’s argument that is consistent with individualism but not with nonreductive individualism. (shrink)

The concept of the person is widely assumed to be indispensable for making a rights claim. But a survey of the concept's appearance in legal discourse reveals that the concept is stretched to the breaking point. Personhood stands at the center of debates as diverse as the legal status of embryos and animals to the rights and responsibilities of corporations and nations. This Note argues that personhood is a cluster concept with distinct components: the biological concept of the human being, (...) the notion of a rational agent, and unity of consciousness. Use of these component concepts (in lieu of the concept of the person) in legal reasoning would promote greater systematicity and coherence. (shrink)

In early modernity, one can find many spatial logic diagrams whose geometric forms share a family resemblance with religious art and symbols. The family resemblance these diagrams bear in form is often based on a vesica piscis or on a cross: Both logic diagrams and spiritual symbols focus on the intersection or conjunction of two or more entities, e.g. subject and predicate, on the one hand, or god and man, on the other. This paper deals with the development and function (...) of logic diagrams, their analogy to religious art and symbols, and their modern application in artificial intelligence. (shrink)

The paper examines Schopenhauer’s complex diagrams from the Berlin Lectures of the 1820 s, which show certain partitions of classes. Drawing upon ideas and techniques from logical geometry, we show that Schopenhauer’s partition diagrams systematically give rise to a special type of Aristotelian diagrams, viz. (strong) α -structures.

Counterfactual conditionals have been appealed to in various ways to show how the mind can be causally efficacious. However, it has often been overestimated what the truth of certain counterfactuals actually indicates about causation. The paper first identifies four approaches that seem to commit precisely this mistake. The arguments discussed involve erroneous assumptions about the connection of counterfactual dependence and genuine causation, as well as a disregard of the requisite evaluation conditions of counterfactuals. In a second step, the paper uses (...) the insights of the foregoing analyses to formulate a set of counterfactuals-based conditions that are characterized as sufficient to establish singular causal claims. The paper concludes that there are ample reasons to believe that some mental events satisfy all these conditions with respect to certain further events and, hence, that mental events sometimes are causes. (shrink)

Political economy and economic sociology have developed in relative isolation from each other. While political economy focuses largely on macro phenomena, economic sociology focuses on the embeddedness of economic action. The article argues that economic sociology can provide a microfoundation for political economy beyond rational actor theory and behavioral economics. At the same time political economy offers a unifying research framework for economic sociology with its focus on the explanation of capitalist dynamics. The sociological microfoundation for understanding of capitalist dynamics (...) should focus on the expectations actors have regarding future states of the world. Based on a discussion of what I call the four Cs of capitalism, I argue that under conditions of uncertainty, expectations are contingent and should be understood as “fictional expectations.” The capability of humans to imagine future states of the world that can be different from the present is the central basis for a sociological microfoundation of the dynamics of economic macro phenomena. Macroeconomic dynamics are anchored in these “fictional expectations,” which create motifs for engaging in potentially profitable but ultimately incalculable outcomes. This shifts attention to the “management of expectations” as a crucial element of economic activity and to the institutional, political, and cultural foundations of expectations. The reproduction of capitalism is precarious also because of the contingency of expectations conducive to its growth. (shrink)

The paper examines Schopenhauer's logic lectures and the eristic dialectics of the manuscript remains in particular. The content of the logic lectures is briefly presented, then the characteristics are highlighted and finally Schopenhauer’s Euler diagrams are examined. The section on eristic dialectics summarizes the history of the text and its origin and reflects the content and order of the document.

In previous research, Schopenhauer is regarded as a consistent representative of a classical picture theory of language. The paper shows, however, that Schopenhauer does not only present a use theory of meaning in his lectures on logic, but also justifies it with the help of the context principle. Furthermore, it is discussed to what extent Schopenhauer's use theory of meaning is similar to the semantic theory of Ludwig Wittgenstein and his successors.