The formula A (it is noncontingent whether A) is true at a point in a Kripke model just in case all points accessible to that point agree on the truth-value of A. We can think of -based modal logic as a special case of what we call the general modal logic of agreement, interpreted with the aid of models supporting a ternary relation, S, say, with OA (which we write instead of A to emphasize the generalization involved) true at a (...) point w just in case for all points x, y, with Swxy, x and y agree on the truth-value of A. The noncontingency interpretation is the special case in which Swxy if and only if Rwx and Rwy, where R is a traditional binary accessibility relation. Another application, related to work of Lewis and von Kutschera, allows us to think of OA as saying that A is entirely about a certain subject matter. (shrink)

This text aims to convey some of the interest and charm of modal logic, and to put a reader new to the subject in a position to have an informed opinion as to its applicability to each of several areas of philosophical concern in which the merits of a modal approach' have been controversial. he main focus, for these purposes, is on normal modal logics, though some attention is given to the non-normal side of the picture.

What conception of negation a dialetheist might have, in holding that a statement and its negation can both be true, has been the subject to considerable debate. Several of the issues in play in this area—such as the unique characterization of negation, and the interplay between contrariety and subcontrariety—are broached here by considering some positions taken on them by Graham Priest and assorted critics. Some of the more intricate points, as well as detailed discussions of commentators on Priest are handled (...) in explicitly labelled Digressions and in two Appendices. (shrink)

From a twenty-first century partnership between bioethics and neuroscience, the modern field of neuroethics is emerging, and technologies enabling functional neuroimaging with unprecedented sensitivity have brought new ethical, social and legal issues to the forefront. Some issues, akin to those surrounding modern genetics, raise critical questions regarding prediction of disease, privacy and identity. However, with new and still-evolving insights into our neurobiology and previously unquantifiable features of profoundly personal behaviors such as social attitude, value and moral agency, the difficulty of (...) carefully and properly interpreting the relationship between brain findings and our own self-concept is unprecedented. Therefore, while the ethics of genetics provides a legitimate starting point - even a backbone - for tackling ethical issues in neuroimaging, they do not suffice. Drawing on recent neuroimaging findings and their plausible real-world applications, we argue that interpretation of neuroimaging data is a key epistemological and ethical challenge. This challenge is two-fold. First, at the scientific level, the sheer complexity of neuroscience research poses challenges for integration of knowledge and meaningful interpretation of data. Second, at the social and cultural level, we find that interpretations of imaging studies are bound by cultural and anthropological frameworks. In particular, the introduction of concepts of self and personhood in neuroimaging illustrates the interaction of interpretation levels and is a major reason why ethical reflection on genetics will only partially help settle neuroethical issues. Indeed, ethical interpretation of such findings will necessitate not only traditional bioethical input but also a wider perspective on the construction of scientific knowledge. (shrink)

This article explores how the shift from print to electronic calendars materializes and exacerbates a distinctively quantitative, “spreadsheet” orientation to time. Drawing on interviews with engineers, I argue that calendaring systems are emblematic of a larger design rationale in Silicon Valley to mechanize human thought and action in order to make them more efficient and reliable. The belief that technology can be profitably employed to control and manage time has a long history and continues to animate contemporary sociotechnical imaginaries of (...) what automation will deliver. In the current moment we live in the age of the algorithm and machine learning, so it is no wonder, then, that the contemporary design of digital calendars is driven by a vision of intelligent time management. As I go on to show in the second part of the article, this vision is increasingly realized in the form of intelligent digital assistants whose tracking capacities and behavioral algorithms aim to solve life’s existential problem—how best to organize the time of our lives. This article contributes to STS scholarship on the role of technological artifacts in generating new temporalities that shape people’s perception of time, how they act in the world, and how they understand themselves. (shrink)

Business and society researchers, as well as practitioners, have been critiqued for ignoring those with less voice and power often referred to as “fringe stakeholders.” Existing methods used in B&S research often fail to address issues of meaningful participation, voice and power, especially in developing countries. In this article, we stress the utility of visual participatory research methods in B&S research to fill this gap. Through a case study on engaging Ghanaian cocoa farmers on gender inequality issues, we explore how (...) VPR methods may be used by researchers to achieve more inclusive, and thus more credible, stakeholder research that can improve decision making within businesses. Furthermore, we argue that ingrained social and environmental problems tackled by B&S research and the unique context in which they occur may open up new opportunities to develop participatory visual methods for social change. (shrink)

An account of desire as a species of belief may owe its appeal to the details of its proposal as to precisely what sort of beliefs desires are to be identified with, and its downfall may be due to those details it does provide. For example, it may be proposed that the desire that α is in fact the belief that it ought to be that α, or is morally good or desirable that it should be the case that α. (...) Here the appeal might be that of forging a link between the holding of a moral belief and the acknowledgment that one has a reason for acting a certain way; and the shortcoming of the suggestion is its evident implausibility: even if the ‘necessity’ direction could be established, having a desire hardly seems sufficient for the holding of any such belief. Again: it might be proposed, perhaps simply to bring some order into the realm of propositional attitudes by reducing some to others, that the belief with which we should identify a’s desire that α is a’s belief that he will or would be happy if α. This proposed identification can be seen to be incorrect by consideration of examples such as the following, due to J. Gosling. An aging and ailing parent might forego numerous pleasures in order that his children should reap the benefits of his saving and have a good start in life – perhaps by receiving an expensive education – after his impending death. Oearly he may want that they should so benefit even if he does not believe in an after-death existence in which he might come to know of, and so take pleasure in, his children’s subsequent well-being. So his wanting that they should prosper cannot consist in his believing that he will be happy if/when they do, since he has no expectation of even being in existence in that eventuality. As Gosling puts it, there is a clear difference between thinking that something’s coming about will bring one pleasure, on the one hand, and viewing the prospect of its coming about with pleasure, on the other. (shrink)

This study draws on Kohlberg''s Cognitive Moral Development Theory and Hofstede''s Culture Theory to examine whether cultural differences are associated with variations in ethical reasoning. Ethical reasoning levels for auditors from Australia and China are expected to be different since auditors from China and Australia are also different in terms of the cultural dimensions of long term orientation, power distance, uncertainty avoidance and individualism. The Defining Issues Tests measuring ethical reasoning P scores were distributed to auditors from Australia and China (...) including Hong Kong and The Chinese Mainland. Results show that auditors from Australia have higher ethical reasoning scores than those from China, consistent with Hofstede''s Culture Theory predictions. (shrink)

For the claim that the satisfaction of certain conditions is sufficient for the application of some concept to serve as part of the (`reductive') analysis of that concept, we require the conditions to be specified without employing that very concept. An account of the application conditions of a concept not meeting this requirement, we call analytically circular. For such a claim to be usable in determining the extension of the concept, however, such circularity may not matter, since if the concept (...) figures in a certain kind of intensional context in the specification of the conditions, the satisfaction of those conditions may not itself depend on the extension of the concept. We put this by saying that although analytically circular, the account may yet not be inferentially circular. (shrink)

We consider the modal logic of non-contingency in a general setting, without making special assumptions about the accessibility relation. The basic logic in this setting is axiomatized, and some of its extensions are discussed, with special attention to the expressive weakness of the language whose sole modal primitive is non-contingency , by comparison with the usual language based on necessity.

It will be an essential resource for philosophers, mathematicians, computer scientists, linguists, or any scholar who finds connectives, and the conceptual issues surrounding them, to be a source of interest.This landmark work offers both ...

A notable early result of David Makinson establishes that every monotone modal logic can be extended to LI, LV, or LF, and every antitone logic can be extended to LN, LV, or LF, where LI, LN, LV, and LF are logics axiomatized, respectively, by the schemas □α↔α, □α↔¬α, □α↔⊤, and □α↔⊥. We investigate logics that are both monotone and antitone (hereafter amphitone). There are exactly three: LV, LF, and the minimum amphitone logic AM axiomatized by the schema □α→□β. These logics, (...) along with LI, LN, and a wider class of “extensional” logics, bear close affinities to classical propositional logic. Characterizing those affinities reveals differences among several accounts of equivalence between logics. Some results about amphitone logics do not carry over when logics are construed as consequence or generalized (“multiple-conclusion”) consequence relations on languages that may lack some or all of the nonmodal connectives. We close by discussing these divergences and conditions under which our results do carry over. (shrink)

The phrase ‘autoepistemic logic’ was introduced in Moore [1985] to refer to a study inspired in large part by criticisms in Stalnaker [1980] of a particular nonmonotonic logic proposed by McDermott and Doyle.1 Very informative discussions for those who have not encountered this area are provided by Moore [1988] and the wide-ranging survey article Konolige [1994], and the scant remarks in the present introductory section do not pretend to serve in place of those treatments as summaries of the field. A (...) good deal of the material omitted here pertains to the specifically nonmonotonic nature of autoepistemic logic as standardly developed, but as we shall urge, there is from one point of view nothing distinctively nonmonotonic about the basic motivating ideas of the subject. (shrink)

On the morning of Friday, June 24, 2022, over half of the population of the United States was stripped of a fundamental constitutional right. And, within minutes, the reverberations of the Supreme...

This discussion explores the possibility of distinguishing a tighter notion of contrariety evident in the Square of Opposition, especially in its modal incarnations, than as that binary relation holding statements that cannot both be true, with or without the added rider ‘though can both be false’. More than one theorist has voiced the intuition that the paradigmatic contraries of the traditional Square are related in some such tighter way—involving the specific role played by negation in contrasting them—that distinguishes them from (...) other pairs of incompatible statements constructed from the same conceptual materials. Prominent among examples, these other nonstandard pairs are the ‘new contraries’ presented by Robert Blanché’s hexagon(s) of opposition. With special, though not exclusive, attention to these cases, we investigate whether contrariety in the distinguished sense can be captured by adding to the incompatibility condition the further demand that the pair of statements concerned can be represented as the results of applying some sentence operator to the content in its scope, for one of the pair, and, for the other, the application of that same operator to the negation of that content. For one of the two cases, a Blanché case, of nonstandard contrariety singled out for attention, the question of whether such a representation is available is settled at the end of Section 4, and then in a more satisfying way in Section 5, though for the other case, noticed by Peter Simons, the question remains open, after some tentative discussion in one subsection, 6.2, of an Appendix (Section 6). (shrink)

We investigate, for several modal logics but concentrating on KT, KD45, S4 and S5, the set of formulas B for which ${\square B}$ is provably equivalent to ${\square A}$ for a selected formula A (such as p, a sentence letter). In the exceptional case in which a modal logic is closed under the (‘cancellation’) rule taking us from ${\square C \leftrightarrow \square D}$ to ${C \leftrightarrow D}$ , there is only one formula B, to within equivalence, in this inverse image, (...) as we shall call it, of ${\square A}$ (relative to the logic concerned); for logics for which the intended reading of “ ${\square}$ ” is epistemic or doxastic, failure to be closed under this rule indicates that from the proposition expressed by a knowledge- or belief-attribution, the propositional object of the attitude in question cannot be recovered: arguably, a somewhat disconcerting situation. More generally, the inverse image of ${\square A}$ may comprise a range of non-equivalent formulas, all those provably implied by one fixed formula and provably implying another—though we shall see that for several choices of logic and of the formula A, there is not even such an ‘interval characterization’ of the inverse image (of ${\square A}$ ) to be found. (shrink)

By a consequence relation on a set L of formulas we understand a relation I — c p(L) x L satisfying the conditions called 'Overlap', 'Dilution', and 'Cut for Sets' at p.15 of [25]; we do not repeat the conditions here since we are simply fixing notation and the concept of a consequence relation is well known in any case. (The characterization in [25] amounts to that familiar from Tarski's work, except that there is no 'finitariness' restriction to the effect (...) that when I I — A, for I c L, A c L, we must have I o I — A for some finite I o c I . The presence or absence of this condition makes no difference to anything that follows.) Each language L to be considered will be a sentential language whose formulas are built in the usual way by application of it-ary (primitive) connectives to it simpler formulas, starting with the simplest formulas — the propositional variables (or 'sentence letters') — not constructed with the aid of connectives. We assume, as usual, that there are countably many such variables, and they will be denoted by p, q, r, ... possibly with numerical subscripts. A consequence relation I- on such an L has the Unrestricted Interpolation Property when for any A, C c L with A I — C, there exists B c L with A I — B and B I — C, such that C is constructed only out of such propositional variables as occur both in A and in C. (Such a B is called an interpolant for A and C.) Note that we take the usual notational liberties here, writing "A I — C" (and the like) for "iAi I — C", "I, A I — C" to mean "I u iAi I — C", and "I — C" to mean "8 I — C". Further, we sometimes abbreviate the claim that A I — B and B I — C to "A I — B I — C", and when C is A itself, we always write this simply as "A — II— B".. (shrink)

Am(B m B). Specifically I was wondering whether for every BCI-provable formula A there is a B for which the inset formula was provable. If you want to read about this issue, which I..

If you think you’re funny, buy this book! Whether you dream of becoming a star... A better public speaker... A more effective communicator... A funnier, happier human being... You can learn to leave ‘em laughing! David Letterman learned to do it. Jay Leno learned to do it. Roseanne Barr learned to do it. So can you! Now successful stand-up comic Judy Carter—who went from teaching high school to performing in Las Vegas, Atlantic City, Lake Tahoe, and on over 45 major (...) TV shows—gives you the same hands-on, step-by-step instruction she’s taught to students in her comedy workshops. She shows you how to do it: create an act, perform it, make money with it, or apply it to everyday life. Discover: • The formulas for creating comedy material • How to find your own style • The three steps to putting your act together • Rehearsal do’s and don’ts • What to do if you bomb • Ways to punch up your everyday life with humor. (shrink)

The garish glow of neon was part of what put Las Vegas on the map—quite literally. The city’s most distinctive form of expression, neon signs tell an elaborate story of the history of Las Vegas, from their debut in 1929 at the onset of the Depression, when their seductive tones lured travelers through the Mojave Desert to part with scarce dollars, to today, when their flickering glow is a vanishing facet of the gaudy spectacle that is contemporary Vegas. Established in (...) 1996 to preserve Las Vegas’s underappreciated neon heritage, the Neon Boneyard houses many of the city's historic casino signs on a three-acre site at the edge of the city. The core of the collection of unrestored signage came from the pioneering Young Electric Sign Company, one of the first to produce neon signs in the area; but, in recent years, it has grown through donations from businesses and individuals who appreciate the key role played by neon in the growth of Las Vegas. Through Judy Natal’s photographs, the Neon Boneyard becomes a dynamic archaeological site that brings Vegas’s past to life in startling ways. The towering figure of Mr. O’Lucky becomes a home for the homeless, while the crumpled sign of a wedding chapel reflects the faded dreams of a lost paradise. Through such juxtapositions of success and failure, of past and present, Neon Boneyard: Las Vegas A–Z returns us to an earlier image of Vegas, suffused with the warm, commercial glow of neon, lighting the desert and inventing modern nightlife. (shrink)

The point of the present paper is to draw attention to some interesting similarities, as well as differences, between the approaches to the logic of noncontingency of Evgeni Zolin and of Claudio Pizzi. Though neither of them refers to the work of the other, each is concerned with the definability of a (normally behaving, though not in general truth-implying) notion of necessity in terms of noncontingency, standard boolean connectives and additional but non-modal expressive resources. The notion of definability involved is (...) different in the two cases (‘external’ for Zolin, ‘internal’ for Pizzi), as are the additional resources: infinitary conjunction in the case of Zolin, and for Pizzi, first, propositional quantification, and then, later, most ingeniously, the use of a propositional constant. As well as surveying and comparing of the work of these authors, the discussion includes some some novelties, such as the confirmation of a conjecture of Zolin’s (Theorem 2.7). (shrink)

Corporate community involvement is often regarded as means of development in developing countries. However, CCI is often criticised for patronage and insensitivity both to context and local priorities. A key concern is the extent of 'community participation' in corporate social decision-making. Community participation in CCI offers an opportunity for these criticisms to be addressed. This paper presents findings of research examining community participation in CCI governance undertaken by Magadi Soda Company in Kenya. We draw on socio-political governance and interaction theories (...) to examine the institutionalisation of participatory decision-making and its impact on changing governing roles and social action in CCI over time. (shrink)

A landmark in the scientific literature, the Oxford Handbook of Neuroethics presents a pioneering review of a topic central to the biosciences. It breaks new ground in bringing together leading neuroscientists, philosophers, and lawyers to tackle some of the most significant ethical issues that face us now and will continue to do so.

This paper reports the results of a survey completed by 565 human resource professionals in the Canadian provinces of Alberta and Saskatchewan. The major result suggests that individuals who are more dependent on their employing organizations are more likely to comply with organizational pressures to behave unethically. Factor analysis of our dependent measure of ethical organizational behavior suggested that two distinct constructs were being tapped; furthermore, different variables were found to predict each. The potential for conceptualizing unethical organizational behavior as (...) multidimensional is discussed. (shrink)

Recent advances in the brain sciences have dramatically improved our understanding of brain function. As we find out more and more about what makes us tick, we must stop and consider the ethical implications of this new found knowledge. This ground-breaking book on the emerging field of neuroethics answers many pertinent questions, such as: What makes monitoring and manipulating the human brain so ethically challenging? Will having a new biology of the brain through imaging make us less responsible for our (...) behavior and lose our free will? Should certain brain scan studies be disallowed on the basis of moral grounds? A distinguished group of contributors from a wide range of fields make this an invaluable introduction to neuroethics. (shrink)