The essays in this collection explore the spiritual underpinnings of our Jewish commitment to justice, using Jewish text and tradition, as well as contemporary sources and models. Among the topics covered are women's health, LGBTQ rights, healthcare, racial justice, speaking truth to power, and community organizing.

This article introduces and defends a probabilistic measure of the explanatory power that a particular explanans has over its explanandum. To this end, we propose several intuitive, formal conditions of adequacy for an account of explanatory power. Then, we show that these conditions are uniquely satisfied by one particular probabilistic function. We proceed to strengthen the case for this measure of explanatory power by proving several theorems, all of which show that this measure neatly corresponds to our explanatory intuitions. Finally, (...) we briefly describe some promising future projects inspired by our account. (shrink)

I show that the two most devastating objections to Shogenji's formal account of coherence necessarily involve information sets of cardinality . Given this, I surmise that the problem with Shogenji's measure has more to do with his means of generalizing the measure than with the measure itself. I defend this claim by offering an alternative generalization of Shogenji's measure. This alternative retains the intuitive merits of the original measure while avoiding both of the relevant problems that befall it. In the (...) light of all of this, I suggest that there is new hope for Shogenji's analysis: Shogenji's early and influential attempt at measuring coherence, when generalized in a subset-sensitive way, is able to clear its most troubling objections. (shrink)

This book explores the Bayesian approach to the logic and epistemology of scientific reasoning. Section 1 introduces the probability calculus as an appealing generalization of classical logic for uncertain reasoning. Section 2 explores some of the vast terrain of Bayesian epistemology. Three epistemological postulates suggested by Thomas Bayes in his seminal work guide the exploration. This section discusses modern developments and defenses of these postulates as well as some important criticisms and complications that lie in wait for the Bayesian epistemologist. (...) Section 3 applies the formal tools and principles of the first two sections to a handful of topics in the epistemology of scientific reasoning: confirmation, explanatory reasoning, evidential diversity and robustness analysis, hypothesis competition, and Ockham's Razor. (shrink)

The success of Bovens and Hartmann’s recent “impossibility result” against Bayesian Coherentism relies upon the adoption of a specific set of ceteris paribus conditions. In this paper, I argue that these conditions are not clearly appropriate; certain proposed coherence measures motivate different such conditions and also call for the rejection of at least one of Bovens and Hartmann’s conditions. I show that there exist sets of intuitively plausible ceteris paribus conditions that allow one to sidestep the impossibility result. This shifts (...) the debate from the merits of the impossibility result itself to the underlying choice of ceteris paribus conditions. (shrink)

Competition between scientific hypotheses is not always a matter of mutual exclusivity. Consistent hypotheses can compete to varying degrees either directly or indirectly via a body of evidence. We motivate and defend a particular account of hypothesis competition by showing how it captures these features. Computer simulations of Bayesian inference are used to highlight the limitations of adopting mutual exclusivity as a simplifying assumption to model scientific reasoning, particularly due to the exclusion of hypotheses that may be true. We end (...) with a case study demonstrating the subtleties involved in hypothesis competition in scientific practice. (shrink)

The question whether corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiatives can be transferred to firm performance to achieve sustainable development goals (SDGs) prompted this study to investigate how CSR strategies influence both SDGs and financial performance. A mediated moderating model based on the organizational alignment theory was developed to examine the mediating and moderating roles of organizational structure and corporate governance, respectively. By analyzing the three-year panel data of 1,480 firm-year observations from publicly listed companies in Taiwan, we find that organizational structure (...) mediates the relationship between a firm’s CSR strategy and firm performance consisting of SDG disclosures, sales revenue, net profit, and return on equity. Corporate governance plays a moderating role in the relationship between organizational structure and firm performance. Our objective financial data provide evidence supporting “doing well by doing good.” The proposed organizational alignment model and empirical results enhance the theoretical understanding of the CSR research field. The research findings have several practical implications for business executives to improve a firm’s social and financial performance. (shrink)

The first edition of the Handbook of Philosophical Logic (four volumes) was published in the period 1983-1989 and has proven to be an invaluable reference work ...

Crupi et al. (2008) offer a confirmation-theoretic, Bayesian account of the conjunction fallacy—an error in reasoning that occurs when subjects judge that Pr( h 1 & h 2 | e ) > Pr( h 1 | e ). They introduce three formal conditions that are satisfied by classical conjunction fallacy cases, and they show that these same conditions imply that h 1 & h 2 is confirmed by e to a greater extent than is h 1 alone. Consequently, they suggest (...) that people are tracking this confirmation relation when they commit conjunction fallacies. I offer three experiments testing the merits of Crupi et al.’s account specifically and confirmation-theoretic accounts of the conjunction fallacy more generally. The results of Experiment 1 show that, although Crupi et al.’s conditions do seem to be causally linked to the conjunction fallacy, they are not necessary for it; there exist cases that do not meet their three conditions in which subjects still tend to commit the fallacy. The results of Experiments 2 and 3 show that Crupi et al.’s conditions, and those offered by other confirmation-theoretic accounts of the fallacy, are not sufficient for the fallacy either; there exist cases that meet all three of CFT’s conditions in which subjects do not tend to commit the fallacy. Additionally, these latter experiments show that such confirmation-theoretic conditions are at best only weakly causally relevant to the presence of the conjunction fallacy. Given these findings, CFT’s account specifically, and any general confirmation-theoretic account more broadly, falls short of offering a satisfying explanation of the presence of the conjunction fallacy. (shrink)

The present collection of essays honours John Woods on the occasion of his eightieth birthday from contributors who wish to pay homage to this remarkable researcher whom they see not only as a scholar of prodigious energy and insight, but as a friend, colleague, collaborator, or former teacher. All of the essays touch upon topics Woods has taken a direct or indirect interest in, ranging from technical problems of mathematical logic and applications of formal methods through philosophical logic, philosophy of (...) language, epistemology and history of ancient and modern logic. The sections themselves of the book cover relevance, paradoxes, inconsistency, fallacies, abduction, fictions, logic naturalized, law, argumentation and narratives, and many other topics: and represent the main research areas which have profited from Woods' reflections. (shrink)

Liberal and republican conceptions of freedom differ as to whether freedom consists in noninterference or non-domination. Pettit defends the republican non-domination conception on the grounds that one can be unfree without being interfered with if one is dominated, and that one can be interfered with yet free if not dominated. I show that these claims mistake the scope of actual interference. In particular, I show that cases said to involve unfreedom without interference do involve interference, and that cases said to (...) involve freedom despite interference— in particular, cases involving government regulations—are cases in which some interference is outweighed by protection from even greater interference. The liberal noninterference conception of freedom, therefore, can account for what Pettit claims can only be accounted for by freedom as non-domination. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that van Fraassen's "bad lot objection" against Inference to the Best Explanation [IBE] severely misses its mark. First, I show that the objection holds no special relevance to IBE; if the bad lot objection poses a serious problem for IBE, then it poses a serious problem for any inference form whatever. Second, I argue that, thankfully, it does not pose a serious threat to any inference form. Rather, the objection misguidedly blames a form of inference (...) for not achieving what it never set out to achieve in the first place. (shrink)

Gilbert Ryle is most famous for accusing the Cartesian dualist of committing a category mistake. Yet the nature of this accusation, and the idea of a category mistake more generally, remains woefully misunderstood. The aim of this paper is to rectify this misunderstanding. I show that Ryle does not conceive of category mistakes as mistakes of predication, as is so widely believed. Instead I show category mistakes are mistakes of conjunction and quantification. This thesis uniquely unifies and explains the wide (...) variety of Ryle’s remarks, judgments, and arguments. (shrink)

This paper reviews evidence concerning the nature of grouping in music and language and their interactions with other linguistic and musical systems. I present brief typological surveys of the relationship between constituency and acoustic parameters in language and music, drawing from a wide variety of languages and musical genres. The two domains both involve correspondence between auditory discontinuities and group boundaries, reflecting the Gestalt principles of proximity and similarity, as well as a nested, hierarchical organization of constituents. Typically, computational-level theories (...) of musical grouping take the form of a function from acoustic properties through grouping representations to syntactic or interpretive constituents. Linguistic theories tend to be cast as functions in the opposite direction. This study argues that the difference in orientation is not grounded in principled differences in information flow between the two domains, and that reconceptualizing one or both theories allows for gains in analytical understanding. There are also obvious differences between musical and linguistic grouping. Grappling with those differences requires one to think in detail about modularity, information flow, levels of description, and the functional nature of cognitive domains. (shrink)

Two recently popular metaphilosophical movements, formal philosophy and experimental philosophy, promote what seem to be conflicting methodologies. Nonetheless, I argue that the two can be mutually supportive. I propose an experimentally-informed variation on explication, a powerful formal philosophical tool introduced by Carnap. The resulting method, which I call “experimental explication,” provides the formalist with a means of responding to explication's gravest criticism. Moreover, this method introduces a philosophically salient, positive role for survey-style experiments while steering clear of several objections that (...) critics of “positive experimental philosophy” raise. Thus, it provides the experimentalist with a more defensible example of how empirical work can have positive philosophical import. For these reasons, experimental explication should appeal to experimental philosophers and formal philosophers alike. (shrink)

Recently, in attempting to account for explanatory reasoning in probabilistic terms, Bayesians have proposed several measures of the degree to which a hypothesis explains a given set of facts. These candidate measures of "explanatory power" are shown to have interesting normative interpretations and consequences. What has not yet been investigated, however, is whether any of these measures are also descriptive of people’s actual explanatory judgments. Here, I present my own experimental work investigating this question. I argue that one measure in (...) particular is an accurate descriptor of explanatory judgments. Then, I discuss some interesting implications of this result for both the epistemology and the psychology of explanatory reasoning. (shrink)

Despite decades of focused philosophical investigation, Inference to the Best Explanation still lacks a precise articulation and compelling defense. The primary reason for this is that it is not at all clear what it means for a hypothesis to be the best available explanation of the evidence. This paper first seeks to rectify this problem by developing a formal explication of the explanatory virtue of power. A resulting account of IBE is then evaluated as a form of uncertain inference. Overall, (...) this paper offers a precise account and novel defense of one important version of IBE. (shrink)

On the grounds that there are no mereological composites, mereological nihilists deny that ordinary objects exist. Even if nihilism is true, however, I argue that tables and chairs exist anyway: for I deny that ordinary objects are the mereological sums the nihilist rejects. Instead, I argue, ordinary objects have a different nature; they are arrangements, not composites. My argument runs as follows. First, I defend realism about ordinary objects by showing that there is something that plays the role of ordinary (...) objects in perception and discourse, and that ordinary objects are whatever plays this role. Next, I argue that it is arrangements that play this role. It follows that ordinary objects exist- even if mereological nihilism is true. (shrink)

Philosophers and psychologists are increasingly investigating the conditions under which multiple explanations are better in conjunction than they are individually. This book brings together leading scholars to provide an interdisciplinary and unified discussion of such "conjunctive explanations." The book starts with an introductory chapter expounding the notion of conjunctive explanation and motivating a multifaceted approach to its study. The remaining chapters are divided into three parts. Part I includes chapters on "The Nature of Conjunctive Explanations." Each chapter illustrates distinct ways (...) in which explanatory multiplicity is motivated by a careful study of the nature and concept of explanation. The second part ("Reasoning about Conjunctive Explanations") includes chapters on the epistemology and logic of conjunctive explanations. Here the contributors propose and evaluate various norms for reasoning correctly about and to conjunctive explanations. Part III concerns "The Psychology of Conjunctive Explanations," with contributions discussing conditions under which humans entertain and hold multiple explanations of single explananda simultaneously and the cognitive limitations and capacities for doing so. Conjunctive Explanations will be of interest to researchers and advanced students working on explanation in philosophy of science, epistemology, philosophical logic, and cognitive psychology. (shrink)

What does it mean to look? How does looking relate to damage? These are the fundamental questions addressed in Overlooking Damage. From the Roman triumph to the iconoclasm of ISIS and the Taliban to the aerial views of looted landscapes and destroyed temples visible on Google, the relationship between beauty and violence is far more intimate than we sometimes acknowledge. Jonah Siegel makes the daring argument that a thoughtful reaction to images of damage need not stop at melancholy, but (...) can lead us to a new reckoning. Would the objects we admire be more beautiful if they were not injured or displaced, if they did not remind us of unbearable violence? Siegel takes up writers from the time of the French Revolution to today who have reacted to the depredations of revolutionary iconoclasm, colonial looting, and industrial capitalism, and proposes that in these authors we may find resources with which to navigate our contemporary situation. Deftly bringing the methods of literary studies to bear on important debates in the study of heritage, archaeology, and visual culture, Overlooking Damage reflects on the ways in which concepts of beauty intersect with periods of epochal violence in an attempt to resist the separation of broken things from the worlds in which they have come to be embedded. (shrink)

From the point of view of non-classical logics, Heyting's implication is the smallest implication for which the deduction theorem holds. This book studies properties of logical systems having some of the classical connectives and implication in the neighbourhood of Heyt ing's implication. I have not included anything on entailment, al though it belongs to this neighbourhood, mainly because of the appearance of the Anderson-Belnap book on entailment. In the later chapters of this book, I have included material that might be (...) of interest to the intuitionist mathematician. Originally, I intended to include more material in that spirit but I decided against it. There is no coherent body of material to include that builds naturally on the present book. There are some serious results on topological models, second order Beth and Kripke models, theories of types, etc., but it would require further research to be able to present a general theory, possibly using sheaves. That would have postponed pUblication for too long. I would like to dedicate this book to my colleagues, Professors G. Kreisel, M.O. Rabin and D. Scott. I have benefited greatly from Professor Kreisel's criticism and suggestions. Professor Rabin's fun damental results on decidability and undecidability provided the powerful tools used in obtaining the majority of the results reported in this book. Professor Scott's approach to non-classical logics and especially his analysis of the Scott consequence relation makes it possible to present Heyting's logic as a beautiful, integral part of non-classical logics. (shrink)

In this paper I aim to defend David Rosenthal's higher-order thought theory of consciousness against a prominent objection. The central claim of HOT theory is that a mental state is conscious only if one has the HOT that one is in that state. In broad outline, the objection is that HOT theory is unable to account for cases where the relevant HOTs are false. I consider two variants of the objection, corresponding to two kinds of false HOT: those that merely (...) misrepresent their targets, and those which lack targets altogether. I argue that a satisfactory response to the objection involving the latter, targetless, kind of HOTs, is to deny that one is in any conscious state in virtue of such HOTs. I show how this response is superior to Rosenthal's own response, and defend it against objections. I also argue that my account of targetless HOT cases may be generalized to cover cases of misrepresenting HOTs. (shrink)

Abstract. Could a person or mind be uploaded—transmitted to a computer or network—and thereby survive bodily death? I argue ‘mind uploading’ is possible only if a mind is an abstract object rather than a concrete particular. Two implications are notable. One, if someone can be uploaded someone can be multiply-instantiated, such that there could be as many instances of a person as copies of a book. Second, mind uploading’s possibility is incompatible with the leading theories of personal identity, insofar as (...) these assume the mind is a concrete particular. Moreover, because David Chalmers (2010; 2012; 2014) defends mind uploading without construing minds as abstract, I show Chalmers’ argument to be unsound. (shrink)

This much-needed book provides a thorough account of temporal logic, one of the most important areas of logic in computer science today. The book begins with a solid introduction to semantical and axiomatic approaches to temporal logic. It goes on to cover predicate temporal logic, meta-languages, general theories of axiomatization, many dimensional systems, propositional quantifiers, expressive power, Henkin dimension, temporalization of other logics, and decidability results. With its inclusion of cutting-edge results and unifying methodologies, this book is an indispensable reference (...) for both the pure logician and the theoretical computer scientist. (shrink)

Analytic Philosophy, EarlyView. The method of paraphrasing away apparent ontological commitments is a familiar tool for trimming one's ontology. Even so, I argue that aiming to avoid commitment via paraphrase is unjustified. The reason is the standard motivations for paraphrase rest on implicit yet faulty principles regarding ontological categories and categorization- or so I argue. These results also provide indirect support for a permissivist approach to ontology.

We investigate 1 factor that influences the success of ideas or cultural representations by proposing that they have a habitat, that is, a set of environmental cues that encourages people to recall and transmit them. We test 2 hypotheses: (a) fluctuation: the success of an idea will vary over time with fluctuations in its habitat, and (b) competition: ideas with more prevalent habitats will be more successful. Four studies use subject ratings and data from newspapers to provide correlational support for (...) our 2 hypotheses, with a negative factoid, positive rumor, catchphrases, and variants of a proverb. Three additional experimental studies manipulate the topic of actual conversations and find empirical support for our theory, with catchphrases, proverbs, and slang. The discussion examines how habitat prevalence applies to a more extensive class of ideas and suggests how habitats may influence the process by which ideas evolve. (shrink)

When scientists seek further confirmation of their results, they often attempt to duplicate the results using diverse means. To the extent that they are successful in doing so, their results are said to be robust. This paper investigates the logic of such "robustness analysis" [RA]. The most important and challenging question an account of RA can answer is what sense of evidential diversity is involved in RAs. I argue that prevailing formal explications of such diversity are unsatisfactory. I propose a (...) unified, explanatory account of diversity in RAs. The resulting account is, I argue, truer to actual cases of RA in science; moreover, this account affords us a helpful, new foothold on the logic undergirding RAs. (shrink)

This paper responds to Terry Horgan’s recent critique of Bayesian formal epistemology. I argue that each of Horgan’s criticisms misses its mark when Bayesianism is viewed as putting forward an inductive logic of confidences. Along the way, I explore the nature, scope, and limits of a defensible brand of Bayesianism.

There’s something strange about Freud’s _Civilization and its Discontents_ (1930). Biologically, Freud was a Neo-Lamarckian, who believed in both the modification of organisms through need and the inheritance of acquired characteristics. However, in _Civilization_, Freud argued that because human nature is immutable, society has dim odds of improving substantially. Lamarckians, of course, rejected that any species-nature is immutable, as species can always be transformed via the inheritance of acquired characteristics. In fact, many of Freud’s Viennese contemporaries—such as Wilhelm Reich, Julius (...) Tandler, and Paul Kammerer—took their Lamarckism to license precisely the sorts of radical social projects Freud deemed impossible. Thus the Freud of _Civilization_ helped himself to a rigid view of human nature which, given his associated biological views, he seemingly ought to have rejected. In this paper, I explain this apparent inconsistency, and suggest Freud resolved it in the following way: Freud was not merely a Lamarckian, but also a strong and peculiar kind of recapitulationist, who believed stages of psychological development both recapitulate phylogeny, and “remain with us” throughout both individual lives and future species-history. I suggest Freud’s recapitulationism supposed a certain inertia: what occurred in phylogenetic history cannot un-occur, and therefore there are aspects of our nature which we cannot un-acquire. In this way, Freud reached a rigid conception of human nature despite his Lamarckism. (shrink)

This review article gives an overview of the two most influential definitions of antisemit­ism in Europe: the non-legally binding working definition by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) and the so-called Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism. Furthermore, the article explains where the definitions come from and summarises the current debates and discourses on how to define antisemitism in view of the history and politics of Europe. It also gives brief attention to the Nexus Document as a third influential definition, which plays (...) a more important role in the United States. The article ends with a reflection on the definition offered by the historian Helen Fein, which is more action-based, and Amos Morris-Reich’s statement of the importance of reflecting on the role of language and the ability of language to create hate and to hurt. (shrink)

In this paper we propoee a logic programming language which supports hypothetical updates together with integrity constraints. The language makes use of a revision mechanism, which is needed to restore consistency when an update violates some integrity constraint. The revision policy adopted is based on the simple idea that more recent information is preferred to earlier one. We show how this language can be used to represent and perform several types of defeasible reasoning. We develop a logical characterization of the (...) language in a three-valued conditional logic, by introducing a completion construction. We show that the operational semantics is sound and complete with respect to the completion construction. (shrink)

This eighteenth volume of the acclaimed Handbook of Philosophical Logic includes many contributors who are among the most famous leading figures of applied philosophical logic of our time. Coverage includes deontic logic, practical reasoning, homogeneous and heterogeneous logical proportion, and talmudic logic. Overall, it will appeal to students, practitioners, and researchers looking for an authoritative resource in these areas. The contributors first explore models in terms of dynamic logics for information-driven agency. The paradigm they use is dynamic-epistemic logics for knowledge (...) and belief and their current extensions to the statics and dynamics of agents’ preferences. Next, in the presentation of preference based agency, coverage examines a large number of themes, including interactive social agents and scenarios with long term patterns emerging over time. From here, the book moves on to offer an introduction to homogeneous and heterogeneous logical proportions. Readers will also learn more about the general challenge that the problem of formalizing practical reasoning presents to logical theory. The contributors survey the existing resources that might contribute to the development of such a formalization. They conclude that, while a robust, adequate logic of practical reasoning is not yet in place, the materials for developing such a logic are now available. The last chapter explores topics that deal with the logic of Jewish law and the logic of the Talmud. This includes obligations and prohibitions in Talmudic deontic logic, the handling of loops in Talmudic logic, Temporal Talmudic logic, and quantum states and disjunctive attacks in Talmudic logic. The Talmudic logic system presented are also exported to general logic and to Artificial Intelligence. (shrink)

The classic work on repentance and religious conduct. For anyone seeking the true path to repentance and reconnection with G-d, this incisive guide is essential. With vowelized Hebrew and English translation.

Language does not make use of octave-based pitch-collections (scales); music lacks truth-conditional semantics; everyone can talk but not everyone can carry a tune; etc. (Jackendoff 2009).

Until recently, scholars paid relatively little attention to chapter 23 of Leviathan, in which Hobbes discussed “the public ministers of sovereign power.” In the past few years, however, political theorists have used chapter 23 extensively in discussions of Hobbes’ concept of the state. But what was the significance of the chapter in its own time? This article suggests it served two purposes. First, it allowed Hobbes to bolster and elaborate arguments made elsewhere in Leviathan. Second, it responded to 1640s debates (...) between royalists and parliamentarians over the role of subordinate magistrates in a polity. By the time Leviathan was published in 1651 these debates were no longer pressing, which explains the chapter’s rapid descent into obscurity. Nonetheless, recovering this polemical context helps to understand the genesis of this small but significant part of Hobbes’ political thought. (shrink)

In “The Contralife Argument and the Principle of Double Effect” (NCBQ, Spring 2011), Lawrence Masek tries to use the principle of double effect to show that natural family planning (NFP) is morally justified. This essay presents a summary explanation of the principle of double effect. It demonstrates that Masek wrongly applies the principle of double effect to NFP. It presents the teaching of the 1968 papal encyclical Humanae vitae with regard to NFP, and contends that to apply the principle of (...) double effect to the case of NFP is not only incorrect but also contrary to teaching of Humanae vitae. Because Masek implies that NFP involves the (justified) permission of evil, his article also counteracts the efforts of the Catholic Church to promote the practice of NFP. National Catholic Bioethics Quarterly 11.4 (Winter 2011): 661–667. (shrink)