This 1994 book constitutes a sustained, comprehensive, and rigorous critique of contemporary Hobbesian contractarianism as expounded in the work of Jean Hampton, Gregory Kavka, and David Gauthier. Professor Kraus argues that the attempts by these three philosophers to use Hobbes to answer current political and moral questions fail. The reasons why they fail are related to fundamental problems intrinsic to Hobbesian contractarianism: first, the problem of collective action arising out of the tension in Hobbes's theory between individual and collective rationality; (...) second, the classical problem of explaining the normative force of hypothetical action, a problem that can be traced to the conflicting strategies of hypothetical justification found in Rawls's and Hobbes's theories. Given the deep interest in Hobbesian contractarianism among philosophers, political theorists, game theorists in economics and political science, and legal theorists, this book is likely to attract wide attention and infuse life into the contractarian debate. (shrink)

In his classic monograph, The Death of Contract, Grant Gilmore argued that Christopher Columbus Langdell, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and Samuel Williston trumped up the legal credentials for their classical bargain theory of contract law. Gilmore's analysis has been subjected to extensive criticism, but its specific, sustained, and fundamental charge that the bargain theory was based on a fraudulent misrepresentation of precedential authority has never been questioned. In this Essay, I argue that Gilmore's case against the classical theorists rests on the (...) suppressed premise that the precedential authority of cases resides in the express judicial reasoning used to decide them. In contrast, I argue that the classical theorists implicitly presuppose that the precedential authority of cases consists in the best theory that explains their outcomes, even if that theory is inconsistent with the case's express judicial reasoning. The classical view of precedential authority completely defuses Gilmore's charge of fraud. In Gilmore's view, merely demonstrating the inconsistency between the proposition for which the classical theorists cited a case and the express reasoning in that case suffices as proof of misrepresentation. But in the classical theorists' view, the express reasoning in a case is simply a theory of its precedential authority, which, like any theory, can be wrong. Thus, the classical theorists simply reject Gilmore's claim that a case cannot properly be cited for a proposition inconsistent with its express reasoning. The real dispute, then, between Gilmore and the classical theorists is over the nature of precedential authority and not the content of contract law. Having reframed the classic death-of-contract debate, I then trace these competing conceptions of precedential authority through the major schools of contemporary contract theory. I argue that a contract theory's embrace of one view instead of the other can be explained by the relative priority it accords to each of the two components in a conception of adjudicative legitimacy. A conception of adjudicative legitimacy consists in a theory of what it means for a decision to be based on law and a theory of what is required for law to be justified. I explain why theories according priority to the former tend to subscribe to the precedents-as-outcomes view, while theories according priority to the latter tend to favor the express reasoning view. The Essay concludes by arguing that the economic analysis of contract law subscribes to the precedents-as-outcomes view and therefore is the contemporary jurisprudential successor to the late nineteenth-century classical theorists. (shrink)

Explanatory economic analysis of the common law has long been subject to deep philosophical skepticism for two reasons. First, common law decisions appear to be cast in the language of deontic morality, not the consequentialist language of efficiency. For this reason, philosophers have claimed that explanatory economic analysis cannot satisfy the transparency criterion, which holds that a legal theory's explanation must provide a plausible account of the relationship between the reasoning it claims judges actually use to decide cases and the (...) express reasoning judges provide in their opinions. Philosophers have doubted that the economic analysis has a plausible account of why judges would use deontic moral terms to explain cases they decide using consequentialist economic reasoning, arguing instead that only a deontic moral account of judicial reasoning can be squared with the judicial use of deontic moral language. Second, the common law has a bilateral structure, in which a plaintiff's right to recover and a defendant's duty to compensate are treated as correlative. Philosophers have observed that this structure seems custom tailored to retrospective moral rights adjudication and ill suited to prospective efficient regulation. Recently, two philosophers, Jules L. Coleman and Stephen A. Smith, have developed these ideas into a full-scale assault on the explanatory credentials of the economic analysis. I defend the economic analysis by arguing that the bilateral structure of the common law either constitutes a "second best" approach to providing incentives for efficient behavior, as economic analysts have maintained, or that it is the vestigial remnant of the common law's originally deontic conception. I also claim that the economic analysis satisfies the transparency criterion by arguing that terms with a deontic plain meaning have acquired a consequentialist contextual meaning within the common law. Although this "contextualist convergence" thesis is counterintuitive, I build on Coleman's semantic theory to explain how it is possible. To demonstrate that it is plausible as well, I argue that evolutionary forces would have naturally led to this result over the course of the common law's development. In particular, I claim that the substantial indeterminacy of deontic moral theory, and the superior determinacy of the economic analysis, explains why judges would be intuitively attracted to reasoning that is best reconstructed in economic terms, notwithstanding the superior normative force of deontic moral theory. Thus, the core of my defense of explanatory economic analysis is that its critics overlook the central theoretical and practical role determinacy plays in explanation and justification generally, and in the explanation of judicial reasoning in particular, where determinacy is prized, if not above all else, no less than any other virtue. (shrink)

The idea that legal theories seek not only to explain but to evaluate the moral justification of particular areas of law is quite familiar. Yet little attention has been paid to the minimal criteria of adequacy for justificatory legal theories. Whereas many theories claim to identify the moral grounds that justify a particular area of law, such as contracts or torts, none of them explains how its justification determines the outcomes of adjudication governed by the law in that area. In (...) this brief Essay for the William and Mary Law Review Symposium on Law and Morality, I argue that a particular area of law can be justified only by identifying moral reasons that fully determine the results of adjudication. No matter how compelling the moral reasons a legal theory identifies, and how tight the fit between those reasons and the structure and content of the legal rules governing a judicial decision, a legal theory fails to justify a particular area of law if the reasoning it identifies falls short of fully determining the results in the judicial decisions governed by that law. Though this bold claim may seem unrealistic, I argue that legal theories can satisfy this determinacy requirement by identifying determinate but inconclusive reasoning that explains outcomes in adjudication. While such reasoning may prove to be erroneous, that does not undermine its justificatory force. (shrink)

This book, first published in 2000, is a collection of essays by prominent scholars writing in commercial law theory.

Tim Crane characterizes the cognitive role of singular thought via singular mental files: the application of such files to more than one object is senseless. As many do, he thus stresses the contrast between ‘singular’ and ‘general’. I give a counterexample, plurally-directed singular thought, and I offer alternative characterizations of singular thought—better described as ‘objects-directed thought’—initially in terms of the defeasibility of the descriptions associated with one's thinking of an object, and then more broadly in terms of whether descriptions of (...) the object or description-independent epistemic routes to the object are primarily operative in an agent's thinking. (shrink)

In this book Jody Azzouni challenges existing epistemological conventions about knowledge: what it means to know something, who or what is seen as knowing, and how we talk about it. He argues that the classic restrictive conditions philosophers routinely place on knowers only hold in special cases, and suggests that knowledge can be equally attributed to children, sophisticated animals, unsophisticated animals, and machinery or devices. Through this perspective and a close examination of its relation to linguistics and psychology, Azzouni (...) freshly approaches longstanding epistemological puzzles including the dogmatism paradox, Gettier puzzles, Agrippa's trilemma, and the surprise-exam paradox. (shrink)

Research clearly shows that increasing the number of women in leadership positions yields financial benefits for the organization. Despite this, there has been limited upward movement in the percentage of women in senior leadership positions. Few studies have examined the linkage between masculine culture and the implications for men. Using a mixed methods approach with two studies, this research focused on four aspects of masculine contest cultural norms and how they impact male identity and perceptions of career advancement. Study 1 (...) used a qualitative interview study of 10 male executives and found that masculine contest culture norms were evident but were being perpetuated and reinforced by organizational culture instead of individual masculine identities. In addition, Study 1 demonstrated a shift in masculine contest culture norms reducing the emphasis on the strong male archetype. Study 2 examines the relationship between masculine contest culture attributes impacting perceived opportunities for career development and promotion. We evaluated these relationships through a large‐scale survey study and found that at higher levels of masculine contest culture norms, men's perceptions of procedural justice for career development and promotion were lower compared with women. Broadly, the findings suggest that masculine archetypes of leadership negatively affect men and women. (shrink)

Our experience of objects is very rich. We perceive objects as possessing individuation conditions. This, however, is a projection of our senses and thinking. Azzouni shows the resulting austere metaphysics tames many ancient philosophical problems about constitution, as well as contemporary puzzles about reductionism.

All sides in the recent debates over the Quine‐Putnam Indispensability thesis presuppose Quine's criterion for determining what a discourse is ontologically committed to. I subject the criterion to scrutiny, especially in regard to the available competitor‐criteria, asking what means of evaluation there are for comparing alternative criteria against each other. Finding none, the paper concludes that ontological questions, in a certain sense, are philosophically indeterminate.

There are several epistemic distinctions among truths that I have argued for in this paper. First, there are those truths which holdof every rationally accessible conceptual scheme (class A truths). Second, there are those truths which holdin every rationally accessible conceptual scheme (class B truths). And finally, there are those truths whose truthvalue status isindependent of the empirical sciences (class C truths). The last category broadly includes statementsabout systems and the statements they contain, as well as statements true by virtue (...) of the rules of language itself.At the risk of anachronism, I'll describe the positions of Carnap (1956); Quine (1980); Grice et al. (1956); the various Putnam's and myself in terms of the above distinctions: both Carnap and Quine (pretty much) think there are no class A or class B truths. Both Putnam (1975) and Putnam (1983c) think there are class A and class B truths, and that these classes overlap. I deny there are class B truths but affirm the existence of class A truths (although I haven't given explicit examples of the latter here). Finally, everyone here but Quine (1980) thinks there are class C truths (of one sort or another). Putnam (1975) attempts to show that certain class C truths are simultaneously class A and class B truths. Grice et al. (1956) take pains to distinguish the claim that there are class C truths from the claim that there are class A truths, and claim (against Quine, 1980) that no argument showing there are no class A truths shows there are no class C truths.On my interpretation of Quine (1980) he thinks that the nonexistence of class A truths shows there are no class C truths-given the extra bit of argument that a notion of ‘true by convention’ or ‘true by virtue of meaning’ without epistemic content, is a distinction without significance. But that issue, which is the one Grice et al. (1956) are concerned with, has not been the focus in this paper-and so in a sense I have shifted the terms of the original debate.Here I have been primarily concerned to distinguish epistemic notions and sort out how and in what ways they relate to each other. A primary tool in this exercise has been the explicit recognition that formal models of truth make universality an unlikely property of our conceptual schemes. If I have not convinced anyone that the epistemic notions sort out the way I think they do, I hope at least that some burden-shifting has occurred: that philosophers do not either take it for granted that certain notionsmust be expressible in any conceptual scheme or treat the fact that conceptual schemes must be (in some sense) limited as of little (philosophical) moment.On the other hand, if I am right about the epistemology, it follows that previous attempts to mark out the necessary structures in rationally accessible conceptual schemes via a priori truths is hopeless. What I think must replace their role, what I call globally incorrigible sets of sentences, is a topic for another time. (shrink)

Starting-point epistemology (SPE) is a new position that, coupled with agent-centered rationality, is the key to resolving philosophical scepticism. SPE acknowledges that metacognitively-sophisticated agents know that they know things and know (something) about the methods by which this happens. Agent-centered rationality implies that a metacognitively-sophisticated agent should only desert a knowledge claim because of a challenge they recognize to be fatal to that claim. Scepticism is metacognitive pathology: Except in those rare cases when an individual is cognitively damaged, sceptical arguments (...) should fail. This book studies the various ways the cognitively healthy can protect themselves from prematurely distrusting what they take themselves to know. A sceptical position results from an agent's failure to correctly monitor their own processes of knowledge-gathering. (shrink)

This dissertation argues that a proper understanding of Aristotle's theory of the virtues and vices requires us to understand how practical science presupposes theoretical science, more particularly the science of the nature of the morally-developed person. It argues that by using the canons of the Posterior Analytics we can prove why the virtues are causally necessary for the morally-developed person. Further, by seeing the virtues and vices in the context of the Physics, we can see how the development of these (...) character traits might constitute the substrate principle which explains why different people respond to the world in the forms they do. ;Treating the virtues and vices as character traits and as the substrate principle underlying people's responses to the world points the way to treating them as the principle around which psychology, ethics and politics can all be integrated. The ethical virtues are rooted in the psychology of character while politics is a matter of organizing institutions so as to promote the development of determinate forms of character in given populations. Virtuous politics is taken to be that which organizes institutional structures and processes around the goal of human development. ;Throughout the dissertation I related Aristotelian insights to contemporary work in the realist philosophy of science, psychoanalysis, developmental psychology and Marx. ;This is a speculative work which, though inspired by Aristotle, is not presented as an exegesis of Greek texts. (shrink)

Recent discussions of Geach sentences by Braun and Salmon are reprised. It is shown that the intractability of providing semantics for Geach sentences (using standard logical tools) is due to the assumption that quantifiers are ontologically committing. Representing the content of these statements is easy using neutral quantifiers. An important concern is consistent identity conditions for nonreferring terms. It may be thought that Meinongian-object approaches handle this better than Azzouni's no-objects-in-any-sense-at-all approach. This is shown to be false. How our truth-inducing (...) practices determine truth values for empty-term statements is indicated—in particular, it is argued that our identification and distinguishing practices with “fictional entities” are parasitic on our practices with entities we take to be real. Examples from Austin—white dots on the horizon and specks—are among the test cases for the views developed here. (shrink)

Jody Azzouni argues that we involuntarily experience certain physical items, certain products of human actions, and certain human actions themselves as having meaning-properties. We understand these items as possessing meaning or as having truth values. For example, a sign on a door reading "Drinks Inside" strikes native English speakers as referring to liquids in the room behind the door. The sign has a truth value--if no drinks are found in the room, the sign is misleading. Someone pointing in a (...) direction has the same effect: we experience her gesture as significant. Azzouni does not suggest that we don't recognize the expectations or intentions of speakers ; we do recognize that the person pointing in a certain direction intends for us to understand her gesture's significance. Nevertheless, Azzouni asserts that we experience that gesture as having significance independent of her intentions. The gesture is meaningful on its own. The same is true of language, both spoken and written. We experience the meanings of language artifacts as independent of their makers' intentions in the same way that we experience an object's shape as a property independent of the object's color. There is a distinctive phenomenology to the experience of understanding language, and Semantic Perception shows how this phenomenology can be brought to bear as evidence for and against competing theories of language. (shrink)

Base of the pyramid ventures seek to create “mutual value” for themselves and poor communities, but often use business models unadapted for the BoP context, and have been less successful than hoped. Sustainable business models’ multi-stakeholder lens offers a promising alternative path to mutual value, but BoP-based SBM studies are scarce. This single case study explores whether and how SBM characteristics manifest in the business model and value outcomes of Habi, a Manila footwear company successfully creating mutual value with BoP (...) suppliers. We find SBM characteristics underpin Habi’s dual-structure business model and success in four ways: viewing profits as a tool for community development resulted in designing both product and business model around community strengths; understanding communities as systems helped Habi address the complexities of poverty; balancing short-term business needs with a long-term, slow-growth approach led to their choice of investors; and implementing community value capture mechanisms ensured enduring community benefit. (shrink)

This monograph presents Azzouni’s new approach to the rule-following paradox. His solution leaves intact an isolated individual’s capacity to follow rules, and it simultaneously avoids replacing the truth conditions for meaning-talk with mere assertability conditions for that talk. Kripke’s influential version of Wittgenstein’s rule-following paradox—and Wittgenstein’s views more generally—on the contrary, make rule-following practices and assertions about those practices subject to community norms without which they lose their cogency. Azzouni summarizes and develops Kripke’s original version of Wittgenstein’s rule-following paradox to (...) make salient the linchpin assumptions of the paradox. By doing so, Azzouni reveals how compelling Kripke’s earlier work on the paradox was. Objections raised over the years by Fodor, Forbes Ginsborg, Goldfarb, Tait, Wright, and many others, are all shown to fail. No straight solution can be made to work. Azzouni illustrates this in detail by showing that a popular family of straight solutions due to Lewis and refined by Williams, “reference magnetism,” fail as well. And yet an overlooked sceptical solution is still available in logical space. Azzouni describes a series of “disposition-meaning” private languages that he shows can be successfully used by a population of speakers to communicate with one another despite their ideolectical character. The same sorts of languages enable solitary “Robinson Crusoes” to survive and flourish in their island habitats. These languages—sufficiently refined—have the same properties normal human languages have; and this is the key to solving the rule-following paradox without sacrificing the individual’s authority over her self-imposed rules or her ability to follow those rules. Azzouni concludes this unusual monograph by uncovering a striking resemblance between the rule-following paradox and Hume’s problem of induction: he shows the rule-following paradox to be a corollary of Hume’s problem that arises when the problem of induction is applied to an individual’s own abilities to follow rules. (shrink)

_Knowledge and Reference in Empirical Science_ is a fascinating study of the bounds between science and language: in what sense, and of what, does science provide knowledge? Is science an instrument only distantly related to what's real? Can the language of science be used to adequately describe the truth? In this book, Jodi Azziouni investigates the technology of science - the actual forging and exploiting of causal links, between ourselves and what we endeavor to know and understand.

Unrealistic therapeutic beliefs are very common—the majority of patient-subjects (up to 94%) enrol in phase 1 trials seeking and expecting significant medical benefit, even though the likelihood of such benefit has historically proven very low. The high prevalence of therapeutic misestimation and unrealistic optimism in particular has stimulated debate about whether unrealistic therapeutic beliefs in early-phase clinical trials preclude adequate informed consent. We seek here to help resolve this controversy by showing that a crucial determination of when such therapeutic beliefs (...) are ethically problematic turns on whether they are causally linked and instrumental to the motivation to participate in the trial. Thus, in practice, it is ethically incumbent on researchers to determine which understanding and beliefs lead to the participant’s primary motivation for enrolling, not to simply assess understanding, beliefs and motivations independently. We further contend that assessing patient-subjects’ appreciation as a component of informed consent—it is already an established component of decision-making capacity assessments—can help elucidate the link between understanding-beliefs and motivation; appreciation refers to an individual’s understanding of the personal significance of both the medical facts and the experience of trial participation. Therefore, we recommend that: (1) in addition to the usual question, ‘Why do you want to participate in this trial?’, all potential participants should be asked the question: ‘What are you giving up by participating in this trial?’ and (2) researchers should consider the settings in which it may be possible and practical to obtain ‘two-point consent’. (shrink)

Bradley Armour-Garb and James A. Woodbridge, in Pretense and Pathology, make an ambitious and far-ranging case that philosophical fictionalism (particularly the pretence variety that they favour) illuminates several long-standing philosophical puzzles posed by words in ordinary language, such as ‘exist’, ‘true’ and ‘means that’, as well as the more technical, ‘refers to’, ‘proposition’ and ‘satisfies’. Along the way, Armour-Garb and Woodbridge discuss topics in the philosophy of language, philosophical logic, ontology, epistemology and more. An important aspect of their project is (...) its nominalist aspiration: by showing (if they do) that pretence is involved when we use the foregoing terms, they hope to show that it’s false that these uses induce ontological commitments (to, e.g., propositions or properties). In this respect, their pretence approach is yet another attempt to undercut the family of indispensability arguments (pioneered by W.V.O. Quine) that prima facie force ontological commitments by means of indispensable language usage. (shrink)

What do the airplane, the escalator, the vacuum cleaner, and the Polaroid camera have in common? It took many, many attempts to perfect these inventions. But the people who invented them persevered and did not give up on their ideas. With TIME For Kids content, this nonfiction book will engage students in reading about inventions as they build their comprehension, vocabulary, and literacy skills. The Reader's Guide and culminating activity direct students back to the text as they develop their higher-order (...) thinking skills. Check It Out! provides resources for additional reading and learning. With text features such as a glossary, index, and table of contents, this book aligns with national and state standards and will keep students engaged in reading. (shrink)

We have conducted a home-based study of children′s dream reports in which parents used open-ended interviewing styles to collect 88 dream reports from their 4- to 10-year-old children in the comfortable and supportive environment of their own homes. Particular attention was paid to formal properties including characters , settings, self-representation, and bizarreness. In contrast to previous studies, our data indicate that young children are able to give long, detailed reports of their dreams that share many formal characteristics with adult dream (...) reports. Because this wide range of dream mentation is only revealed to trusted confidants in a familiar and comfortable environment, an important implication is that the sleep laboratory may not be the best source of naturalistic dream data. (shrink)

Quine, in his 1980 forward to From a Logical Point of View wrote: ‘The time for revision is past. The book is dated, and its dates are 1953 and 1961’ (p. viii). Quine wrote modestly about himself, as he almost always did. His point—not stated loudly—was that the book was now an important historical document, and so its author had lost the right to tamper with it. -/- The book I’m reviewing may seem different. Although Kripke’s Locke Lectures were given (...) in 1973, the book has appeared in print forty years later. Kripke writes: ‘… the transcript has been available at the Oxford University library for many years … and it has had, since then, a modest life of its own, passed on among members of the profession, sometimes even being discussed and criticized in print’ (pp. xi-xii). -/- Kripke understates the transcript’s impact. It influenced everyone in the profession who wrote on these topics, if only because it was read carefully and absorbed by so many philosophers working in this area. Thomasson, on a back-blurb, writes: ‘For decades getting a copy of these lectures has been a holy grail for philosophers working on fiction’. And in the Oxford advertising, included with my review copy of the book, I read: ‘At last in print—the most famous unpublished philosophy manuscript of recent decades’. (shrink)

Kant discovered a philosophical problem with mathematical proof. Despite being a priori , its methodology involves more than analytic truth. But what else is involved? This problem is widely taken to have been solved by Frege’s extension of logic beyond its restricted (and largely Aristotelian) form. Nevertheless, a successor problem remains: both traditional and contemporary (classical) mathematical proofs, although conforming to the norms of contemporary (classical) logic, never were, and still aren’t, executed by mathematicians in a way that transparently reveals (...) why these proofs—written in the vernacular to this very day—succeed in conforming to those norms. (shrink)

Mistaken reasons for thinking diagrammatic proofs aren't rigorous are explored. The main result is that a confusion between the contents of a proof procedure (what's expressed by the referential elements in a proof procedure) and the unarticulated mathematical aspects of a proof procedure (how that proof procedure is enabled) gives the impression that diagrammatic proofs are less rigorous than language proofs. An additional (and independent) factor is treating the impossibility of naturally generalizing a diagrammatic proof procedure as an indication of (...) lack of rigor. (shrink)

Benacerraf’s problem is justly famous. It’s had a major influence on the philosophy of mathematics right from its initial appearance, an influence that continues up through the present moment.

Justin Clarke-Doane offers what purports to be a stand-alone argument, relying on Gödel’s second incompleteness theorem, that if we hold that PA + Con(PA) and PA + ~ Con(PA) are equally true of their intended subjects, then there is no objective fact as to whether PA is consistent. It is shown that the argument is fallacious, although illuminating: The fallaciousness of the argument arises from a 20th-century shift in our understanding of interpreted languages from the view—derived from our experience of (...) language—of sentences as intrinsically interpreted to one which sharply distinguishes syntax and semantics, and treats uninterpreted syntactic forms as endowed with interpretations by models. It is shown that this syntax/semantic distinction, because it is “unintuitive” induces fallacies such as the one that Clarke-Doane’s argument exemplifies. (shrink)

As part of the Securities and Exchange Commission’s revision of Regulation S–K, which lays out reporting requirements for publicly-listed companies, many investors proposed the mandatory disclosure of sustainability information in the form of environmental, social and governance data. However, progress is contingent on collecting evidence regarding which sustainability disclosures are financially material. To inform this issue, we examine materiality standards developed by the Sustainability Accounting Standards Board. Firms voluntarily disclosing more SASB-identified sustainability information exhibit greater price informativeness, while the disclosure (...) of non-SASB information does not relate to informativeness. The results are robust to a changes analysis and a difference-in-differences analysis that exploits the staggered release of SASB standards across different industries over time. We also document stronger results for firms with higher exposure to sustainability issues, poorer sustainability ratings, greater institutional and socially responsible investment fund ownership, and coverage from analysts with lower portfolio complexity. (shrink)

I revisit my earlier arguments for the (trivial) inconsistency of natural languages, and take up the objection that no such argument can be established on the basis of surface usage. I respond with the evidential centrality of surface usage: the ways it can and can't be undercut by linguistic science. Then some important ramifications of having an inconsistent natural language are explored: (1) the temptation to engage in illegitimate reductio reasoning, (2) the breakdown of the knowledge idiom (because its facticity (...) isn't comfortable with every sentence being true and false). Restoring the utility of the knowledge idiom motivates regimentation - the consistentist reinterpretation of natural language inferences (as they occur in real time). It's then sketched how to give the semantics of a natural language despite its inconsistency: Necessary and sufficient truth conditions are dropped in favor of necessary truth conditions and sufficient truth conditions. (shrink)

An oft misattributed piece of folk-wisdom goes: “Insanity is doing the same thing, over and over again, but expecting different results.” In many cases, we don’t just do things repeatedly but think over the same topics repeatedly. People who ruminate are not often diagnosed as insane—most of us ruminate at some point in our lives—but it is a common behaviour underlying both depression and anxiety :504, 2000). If rumination is something we all do at some time, what is it about (...) ruminative thought that makes it ‘sticky’ and difficult to stop for the worst sufferers? In order to answer this question, I will present a plausible account of how ruminative behaviour becomes entrenched to the point where sufferers of anxiety and depression simply cannot make meaning from the world except in terms of the kinds of behaviours, actions and thoughts they have become reliant on. I develop my account from Barrett’s theory of constructed emotion using the work of Merleau-Ponty, ProQuest Ebook Central, 2012. https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ed/detail.action?docID=1433878. Accessed 29 Dec 2020) in order to bridge the gap between the explicit thought we experience—an important part of the lived experience of rumination. To conclude, I will apply my account to Wu and Dunning’s :25–35, 2018; Hypocognitive mind: How lack of conceptual knowledge confines what people see and remember, 2019. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/29ryz) theory of hypocognition to further illuminate the particular cognitive qualities that can be experienced by ruminators, i.e. a prohibited access to particular emotion concepts. (shrink)

A normative constraint on theories about objects which we take to be real is explored: such theories are required to track the properties of the objects which they are theories of. Epistemic views in which observation (and generalizations of it) play a central role, and holist views which see epistemic virtues as applicable only to whole theories, are contrasted in the light of this constraint. It's argued that global-style epistemic virtues can't meet the constraint, although (certain) epistemic views within which (...) observation (and, more generally, thick epistemic access) are centralized do meet it. (shrink)

Corporate volunteering is known to be an effective employee engagement initiative. However, despite the prominence of corporate social responsibility in academia and practice, research is yet to investigate whether and how CV may influence consumer perceptions of CSR image and subsequent consumer behaviour. Data collected using an online survey in Australia show perceived familiarity with a company’s CV programme to positively impact CSR image and firm image, partially mediated by others-centred attributions. CSR image, in turn, strengthens affective and cognitive loyalty (...) as well as word-of-mouth. Further analysis reveals the moderating effect of perceived leveraging of the corporate volunteering programme, customer status and the value individuals place on CSR. The paper concludes with theoretical and managerial implications, as well as an agenda for future research. (shrink)

The ramifications are explored of taking physical theories to commit their advocates only to ‘physically real’ entities, where ‘physically real’ means ‘causally efficacious’ (e.g., actual particles moving through space, such as dust motes), the ‘physically significant’ (e.g., centers of mass), and the merely mathematical—despite the fact that, in ordinary physical theory, all three sorts of posits are quantified over. It's argued that when such theories are regimented, existential quantification, even when interpreted ‘objectually’ (that is, in terms of satisfaction via variables, (...) rather than by substitution-instances) need not imply any ontological commitments. (shrink)

Can Quine’s criterion for ontological commitment be comparatively applied across different logics? If so, how? Cross-logical evaluations of discourses are central to contemporary philosophy of mathematics and metaphysics. The focus here is on the influential and important arguments of George Boolos and David Lewis that second-order logic and plural quantification don’t incur additional ontological commitments over and above those incurred by first-order quantifiers. These arguments are challenged by the exhibition of a technical tool—the truncation-model construction of notational equivalents—that compares the (...) ontological role and increased expressive strength of non-first-order ideology to first-order ideology. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:On Sharing BreathJody Sperling (bio)My work as choreographer dwells on the inseparability between breath and atmosphere. There are no firm boundaries between the air we breathe in, the air surrounding us, and the air enveloping the planet. This is as true for air as it is for water—there is only one global ocean, although by convention we divide the seas into named regions. When you move through the ocean (...) of air enveloping you, you displace it and create dynamic unseen wakes in your midst.Beginning with my dance, "Turbulence" (2011),1 I sought to visualize such patterns of air disturbance into kinetic sculptural forms. To do so, the six dancers deployed Loie Fuller-style costumes, disquieting the air and materializing its gyrations. An early innovator of performance technology, Fuller danced in robes fashioned from hundreds of yards of silk with embedded wands that extended her body's motion into space. Serendipitously introduced to Fuller's work in 1997, I became seduced by the genre for the way it imbues the doer with an expanded sense of self. Whirling in the Fuller-style garments, I felt, and still feel, integrated into the atmosphere as an eddy or gust.With "Wind Rose" (2019),2 a collaboration with composer Matthew Burtner, I focused on making the connections between breath and wind palpable. Wind is said to be the breath of the planet, a driver of earthly life. A windrose is a meteorological tool that graphically represents wind speed, direction and variability at a particular time and place. I thought, what if I designed choreography with the intention not to create human motion, but in order to create a windrose—an atmospheric snapshot—in the performing space? At the start of "Wind Rose," the five dancers stand shoulder to shoulder and circle the stage so as to forge a human turbine. As the dancers accelerate their cyclonic motion, they push a swelling air wave towards the audience.For another section, I choreographed eight motions, each of which was connected with a sound. The sounds were made either by the dancers whipping their Fuller-style costumes through the air or by the dancers' breathy vocalizations. Matthew took my eight sound-breath-moves and composed a fugue. The dancers perform this music-motion score so that [End Page 155] they stir up a breeze pattern—a fugue that can be felt, as well as seen and heard.Wind has been changing along with climate. Locally, winds are becoming more chaotic. Globally, the high winds are slowing down and the polar jet stream is becoming wonky. But we are not in the habit of listening to the changing winds. One of the root causes of climate inaction has been a deep disconnect between people and their atmosphere. Many among the privileged live out their lives in climate-controlled habitats. Recently, though, even wealthy nations and the elite are starting to feel the heat. These days, no matter how deeply you bury your head in the sand, your butt will still get scorched.As a way of grappling with life in the Anthropocene, I have been formulating an open inquiry called ecokinetics. I conceived ecokinetics as a choreographic corollary to ecoacoustics, an environmental mode of music composition pioneered by Matthew Burtner, my long-time musical collaborator. According to Matthew, "ecoacoustics embeds environmental systems into musical and performance structures using new technologies" (Burtner). Ecokinetics asks, how can we relate human movement to environmental systems? How can choreography (aesthetically patterned human motion) illuminate, echo, expand upon the movement vectors present at a site and help us better understand local ecologies? How can dance entwine with media technologies to embody the processes of natural systems? Ecokinetics is part personal movement practice, part pedagogical tool, and part performance methodology.In its essence, ecokinetics repudiates the separation of humans from nature, a pervasive Colonialist mindset that needs constant undoing. In order to make progress on climate change, we must feel—truly and deeply—that we are part of the planet and not apart from it. This is the opposite of what the billionaires' space club aims to accomplish. Bezos, Branson, and Musk, et al. view distance from Earth as a... (shrink)

Principles are static; narratives move. They show us how people change; they depict character development and moral growth (or decline). They do this by pulling us inside lived time, where we empathize with a character's dilemmas about, and responsibility for, his or her future. This feature of narratives fits well with ethics, for ethics begins with practical questions about what to do or how to be (or even whether to be). Such questions require that one view the future as something (...) one has some freedom to shape. Narrative and principle‐based ethics support each other, and both are necessary, but in this essay I will focus on one side and consider how narrative dynamism enlivens a static bioethical principle, opening up new possibilities for moral action. (shrink)