Meaning and communication -- Mighty dead: Kant and Hegel -- Scorekeeping -- Sentence meaning, term meaning, Anaphora -- Empirical content and empirical knowledge -- Logical discourse -- Representation and communication -- Objectivity and phenomenalism about norms.

In recent years, several systematic theories of linguistic meaning have been offered that give pride of place to linguistic practice, or the process of linguistic communication. Often these theories are referred to as neo-pragmatist or new pragmatist; I call them 'practice-based'. According to practice-based theories of meaning, the process of linguistic communication is somehow constitutive of, or otherwise essential for the existence of, propositional linguistic meaning. Moreover, these theories disavow, or downplay, the semantic importance of inflationary notions of representation. I (...) introduce the basic ideas and motives behind some practice-based theories of meaning, and offer some reasons why an eliminativist, non-quietist, epistemic practice-based approach to meaning that 1) disavows any explanatory role for the linguistic community as such, 2) prioritizes sentence meaning over word meaning, and 3) may , in the end, be naturalistic, should be favored over its practice-based competitors. (shrink)

I outline Brandom’s theory of de re and de dicto belief ascriptions, which plays a central role in Brandom’s overall theory of linguistic communication, and show that this theory offers a surprising, new response to Burge’s (Midwest Stud 6:73–121, 1979) argument for social externalism. However, while this response is in principle available from the perspective of Brandom’s theory of belief ascription in abstraction from his wider theoretical enterprise, it ceases to be available from this perspective in the wider context of (...) his inferential role semantics and his doctrines of scorekeeping and of the expressive role of belief ascriptions in discourse. In this wider context, Brandom’s theory of belief ascriptions implies that Burge’s argument trivially fails to have the disquieting implications for psychological explanations that it is widely taken to have. Yet since this is not trivially so, Brandom’s theory apparently provides a false picture of our practice of interpreting belief ascriptions. I then argue that Brandom might as well accept the alternative picture of interpreting belief ascriptions that Burge’s argument presupposes: even in the context of his overall project, Brandom’s take on our practice of interpreting them does not afford belief ascriptions with the discursive significance Brandom claims they have. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Metaphysics of Practice: Writings on Action, Community, and Obligation by Wilfrid SellarsRonald LoefflerSELLARS, Wilfrid. The Metaphysics of Practice: Writings on Action, Community, and Obligation. Edited by Kyle Ferguson and Jeremy Randel Koons. New York: Oxford University Press, 2023. 745 pp. Cloth, $115.00Wilfrid Sellars thought deeply about ethics, practical reasoning, and intentional agency throughout his career and published extensively on these issues, with much additional unpublished material housed (...) in the Archives of Scientific Philosophy at the University of Pittsburgh. In prominent places Sellars indicates that he regards his ethics as the key to his overarching project of reconciling our manifest nature as norm-governed rational beings with his nominalistic scientific naturalism. Yet with a few noteworthy exceptions, Sellars scholars have only very recently begun to seriously grapple with Sellars’s practical philosophy. No one has done more to initiate this recent trend than Jeremy Koons, who, together with Kyle Ferguson, collects in this volume virtually all of Sellars’s practical philosophical works, including approximately 200 pages of hitherto unpublished material—mostly correspondences with R. M. Hare, Robert Binkley, Hector-Neri Castañeda, Bruce Aune, and David Solomon.Sellars’s published practical philosophical writings are grouped thematically into four parts. A fifth part is dedicated to the unpublished writings. The editors also provide a sixty-page introduction, which offers a synopsis of Sellars’s overall vision of us as practically rational moral [End Page 728] agents, followed by summaries of each of the nineteen essays and the correspondences published in this volume.Sellars thinks of moral ought-judgments as simultaneously motivationally internalistic (with traditional emotivism) and as truth-apt and more or less rational (with traditional cognitivism). His key idea to combine these seemingly incongruent commitments is to regard moral ought-judgments as a species of we-intentions. Since intentions generally are “conceptually tied” to practice, in the sense that (absent interferences or defeaters) they determine proper action in accordance with norms of practical reasoning, we get, in this sense, a version of motivational internalism. Sellars models these normative connections in terms of a nuanced logic of practical reasoning—basically a logic of means–ends reasoning—that is largely parasitic on the logic of theoretical reasoning. This logic is cast in terms of shall-statements, which are linguistic expressions of intentions of the forms “Shall-be [p]” and “Shall [I do A if in C],” where the “Shall-be”s and “Shall”s express the states of intending and the square-bracketed portions the intended contents. Logically proper practical reasoning bottoms out in intentions that immediately give rise to actions (volitions), to be expressed by shall-statements of the form “Shall [I do A now].” Sellars makes the case for the truth-aptness of moral ought-judgments by treating them as a species of we-intentions. Such moral we-intentions are expressed by statements of the form “Shall(we) [We, any of us, do A if in C],” where both the “we” in the content expression and the “we” indexed to the “shall” are maximally inclusive, comprising every rational being at all. This appears to be what today we would call a combined mode and content account of moral we-intentions, where firs-tperson plural elements are built both into the mode of moral we-intending and the content of moral we-intentions. The truth-aptness of moral we-intentions, Sellars thinks, is secured by the fact that the first-person plural elements of the intention include every rational being at all. Sellars maintains that, due to this maximal inclusion, moral we-intentions are apt to yield genuine interpersonal agreement or disagreement (contra I-intentions) and they ground, via what seems to be a transcendental argument, Sellars’s fundamental principle of morality, expressed as “Shall(we) [We, any of us, maximize our general welfare]).” This principle provides the standard of objective moral correctness for any other moral judgment.Part 1 of the volume includes six essays in which Sellars offers comprehensive articulations of this overall picture, culminating in “Objectivity, Intersubjectivity, and the Moral Point of View” (OIM), the stand-alone seventh chapter of Science and Metaphysics, based on Sellars’s 1965–66 John Locke Lectures... (shrink)

The last three decades have seen a renaissance in Anglo-American philosophy of efforts to think of human reasoning as constitutively social and, indeed, discursive. This approach does not see reaso...

I argue that there are good reasons to assume that Quine’s theory of reference and ontology is incompatible with reductive statements – such as ‘Heat is molecular motion’ or ‘Rabbits are conglomerations of cells’. Apparently, reductive statements imply certain intertheoretical identities, yet Quine’s theory of reference and ontology seems incompatible with intertheoretical identities. I argued that treating, for the sake of reconciliation, reductive statements along the lines of Quine’s theory of an ontological reduction (which does not imply intertheoretical identity) fails. (...) Then I discussed two alternative strategies on behalf of Quine to handle reductive statements: the Holistic Strategy (which appeals to Quine’s notion of an all-encompassing background theory) and the Individuative Strategy (which draws on Quine’s notion of an apparatus of individuation). I argue that the Individuative Strategy promises to succeed. However, the Individuative Strategy obliges to revising Quine’s theory of an ontological reduction – a revision that, as I argue, can and should be implemented. (shrink)

Volume 28, Issue 1, February 2020, Page 114-127.

This dissertation defends an account of linguistic meaning and propositional mental content in terms of linguistic practice. In other words, it clarifies and defends the counterintuitive claim that linguistic communication is prior, rather than posterior, in the order of explanation to the semantic features of thought and talk. The project's point of departure is Robert Brandom's comprehensive recent theory of linguistic practice. Two core theses characterize Brandom's theory. First, meaning and content are to be understood in terms of the norms (...) of inference relating the sentences of a natural language to each other. Second norms of inference are to be explained in terms of certain normative attitudes that speakers take towards each other implicitly in linguistic practice. In the sense of the second explanatory thesis, linguistic practice explains meaning and content qua norms of inference, according to Brandom. ;For the sake of my project I agree with both theses. However, I take issue with Brandom's efforts to substantiate the second, explanatory thesis. The negative parts of my project argue that Brandom's specific account of meaning and content in terms of implicit normative attitudes is in some respects underdeveloped and in other respects problem laden. It therefore needs both elaboration and revision. The positive parts of my project offer an alternative account of meaning and content in terms of implicit non-native attitudes---an account that avoids the shortcomings of Brandom's approach. The heart of this alternative account is the notion of a we-attitude, borrowed from Wilfrid Sellars' theory of moral judgments. I argue that if speakers take such we-attitudes towards the linguistic performances they exchange, they both take certain implicit normative attitudes towards each other and recognize themselves as bound by the corresponding norms. And normative attitudes thus conceived suffice, I argue, to explain norms of inference themselves, hence meaning and content. Central themes of this project are, among other, the objectivity of semantic norms, the possibility to reduce semantic norms to normative attitudes, and the holistic character of meaning. (shrink)

From the Nuremberg Trials to contemporary human rights, Jews have long played prominent roles in the making of international law. But the actual ties between Jewish heritage and legal thought remain a subject of mystery and conjecture even among specialists. This volume of biographical studies takes a unique interdisciplinary approach, pairing historians and legal scholars to explore how their Jewish identities and experiences shaped their legal thought and activism. Using newly-discovered sources and sophisticated interpretative methods, this book offers an alternative (...) history of twentieth-century international legal profession – and a new model to the emerging field of international legal biography. (shrink)

The major theoretical framework relative to the perception of illusory figures is reviewed and discussed in the attempt to provide a unifying explanatory account for these phenomena.

Following the pioneering studies of the receptive field (RF), the concept gained further significance for visual perception by the discovery of input effects from beyond the classical RF. These studies demonstrated that neuronal responses could be modulated by stimuli outside their RFs, consistent with the perception of induced brightness, color, orientation, and motion. Lesion scotomata are similarly modulated perceptually from the surround by RFs that have migrated from the interior to the outer edge of the scotoma and in this way (...) provide filling-in of the void. Large RFs are advantageous to this task. In higher visual areas, such as the middle temporal and inferotemporal lobe, RFs increase in size and lose most of their retinotopic organization while encoding increasingly complex features. Whereas lowerlevel RFs mediate perceptual filling-in, contour integration, and figure–ground segregation, RFs at higher levels serve the perception of grouping by common fate, biological motion, and other biologically relevant stimuli, such as faces. Studies in alert monkeys while freely viewing natural scenes showed that classical and nonclassical RFs cooperate in forming representations of the visual world. Today, our understanding of the mechanisms underlying the RF is undergoing a quantum leap. What had started out as a hierarchical feedforward concept for simple stimuli, such as spots, lines, and bars, now refers to mechanisms involving ascending, descending, and lateral signal flow. By extension of the bottom-up paradigm, RFs are nowadays understood as adaptive processors, enabling the predictive coding of complex scenes. Top-down effects guiding attention and tuned to task-relevant information complement the bottom-up analysis. (shrink)

IntroductionYounger age at diagnosis is a risk factor for poor health-related quality of life in long-term breast cancer survivors. However, few studies have specifically addressed HRQOL in young adults with breast cancer, nor have early changes in HRQOL been fully characterized.MethodsEligible female patients with breast cancer were identified through our local cancer center. To establish HRQOL, patients completed the Functional Assessment of Cancer Therapy-Breast around diagnosis and 12 months later. Sociodemographic factors, genetic susceptibility to cancer, tumor- and treatment-related factors, and (...) comorbidities were abstracted from medical records and the local oncology registry. Mixed-effects models were used to identify changes in FACT-B scores during the first year of treatment and to determine whether any demographic/treatment-related factors modulated changes in scores.ResultsHealth-related quality of life in young patients with breast cancer was within normal limits at baseline, with a FACT-B overall well-being score of 108.5. Participants reported slight improvements over a 12-month period: FACT-B overall well-being scores increased 6.6 points, functional well-being improved 3.0 points, emotional well-being improved 1.9 points, and physical well-being improved 1.5 points, on average. Participants with anxiety/depression at baseline reported greater improvements in FACT-B overall well-being and functional well-being than participants who did not have anxiety/depression at baseline. Marital status, reconstructive surgery, and baseline clinical staging were also significantly associated with changes in aspects of HRQOL, although their impact on change was relatively minimal.ConclusionYoung women with breast cancer do not report HRQOL concerns during the first year of treatment. Improvements in HRQOL during the first year of treatment may be attributable to a sense of relief that the cancer is being treated, which, in the short run, may outweigh the negative late effects of treatment. (shrink)

This is the first volume devoted exclusively to the practical philosophy of Wilfrid Sellars. It features original essays by leading Sellars scholars that examine his ethical theory, his theory of practical reasoning, and his theory of intentional agency. While most scholarship on Sellars's philosophy has focused on his epistemology, metaphysics, or philosophy of language and mind, Sellars himself regarded his practical philosophy as central to his overall project of situating rational beings within the natural order. The chapters in this volume (...) address this neglected area of Sellars's philosophy. The chapters are divided into thematic sections covering Sellars's theory of we-intentions - influential in contemporary debates on collective intentionality - naturalism and the manifest image, and the moral point of view. Together, they demonstrate how Sellars's practical philosophy contributes to important debates in contemporary philosophy regarding, for example, expressivist approaches to moral thought and group agency in the collective intentionality literature. Ethics, Practical Reasoning, Agency: Wilfrid Sellars's Practical Philosophy will appeal to scholars and advanced students interested in Wilfrid Sellars, American philosophy, and ethics. (shrink)

The following conjecture is due to Shelah–Hasson: Any infinite strongly NIP field is either real closed, algebraically closed, or admits a non‐trivial definable henselian valuation, in the language of rings. We specialise this conjecture to ordered fields in the language of ordered rings, which leads towards a systematic study of the class of strongly NIP almost real closed fields. As a result, we obtain a complete characterisation of this class.

This major work covers almost all that has been learned about the acoustics of stringed instruments from Helmholtz's 19th-century theoretical elaborations to recent electroacoustic and holographic measurements.Many of the results presented here were uncovered by the author himself over a 20-year period of research on the physics of instruments in the violin family. Lothar Cremer is one of the world's most respected authorities on architectural acoustics and, not incidentally, an avid avocational violinist and violist.The book - which was published (...) in German in 1981 - first of all meets the rigorous technical standards of specialists in musical acoustics. But it also serves the needs and interests of two broader groups: makers and players of stringed instruments are expressly addressed, since the implications of the mathematical formulations are fully outlined and explained; and acousticians in general will find that the work represents a textbook illustration of the application of fundamental principles and up-to-date techniques to a specific problem.The first - and longest - of the book's three parts investigates the oscillatory responses of bowed strings. The natural nonlinearities that derive from considerations of string torsion and bending stiffness are deftly handled and concisely modeled.The second part deals with the body of the instrument. Special attention is given to the bridge, which transmits the oscillations of the strings to the wooden body and its air cavity. In this case, linear modeling proves serviceable for the most part - a simplification that would not be possible with lute - like instruments such as the guitar.The radiation of sound from the body into the listener's space, which is treated as an extension of the instrument itself, is the subject of the book's final part.Lothar Cremer is Professor Emeritus at the Technical University of Berlin, where he served as director of the Institute for Acoustical Engineering. (shrink)

Gilt das Verbot der Tötung Unschuldiger absolut oder darf selbst diese fundamentale Moralnorm unter Ausnahmebedingungen verletzt werden? Wir leben in einer Welt voller Gefahren. Das Leben von Menschen wird bedroht durch verbrecherische Diktaturen, terroristische Anschläge, technische Havarien und Katastrophen verschiedener Art. Dürfen solche Gefahren notfalls auch dann bekämpft werden, wenn dabei Unschuldige getötet werden oder ihr Tod in Kauf genommen werden muss? Das Buch gibt eine moralphilosophische Antwort auf diese politisch, ethisch und rechtlich umstrittene Frage. Lothar Fritze analysiert das (...) Rechtsdogma der Nichtabwägungsfähigkeit menschlichen Lebens und fragt, wie sich das Verbot der Tötung Unschuldiger mit der verbreiteten moralischen Intuition vereinbaren lässt, wonach in Extremfällen durchaus einige wenige unschuldige Menschen geopfert werden dürfen, um sehr viele andere Unschuldige zu retten. (shrink)

An exponential $\exp $ on an ordered field $$. The structure $$ is then called an ordered exponential field. A linearly ordered structure $$ is called o-minimal if every parametrically definable subset of M is a finite union of points and open intervals of M.The main subject of this thesis is the algebraic and model theoretic examination of o-minimal exponential fields $$ whose exponential satisfies the differential equation $\exp ' = \exp $ with initial condition $\exp = 1$. This study (...) is mainly motivated by the Transfer Conjecture, which states as follows:Any o-minimal exponential field $$ whose exponential satisfies the differential equation $\exp ' = \exp $ with initial condition $\exp =1$ is elementarily equivalent to $\mathbb {R}_{\exp }$.Here, $\mathbb {R}_{\exp }$ denotes the real exponential field $$, where $\exp $ denotes the standard exponential $x \mapsto \mathrm {e}^x$ on $\mathbb {R}$. Moreover, elementary equivalence means that any first-order sentence in the language $\mathcal {L}_{\exp } = \{+,-,\cdot,0,1, <,\exp \}$ holds for $$ if and only if it holds for $\mathbb {R}_{\exp }$.The Transfer Conjecture, and thus the study of o-minimal exponential fields, is of particular interest in the light of the decidability of $\mathbb {R}_{\exp }$. To the date, it is not known if $\mathbb {R}_{\exp }$ is decidable, i.e., whether there exists a procedure determining for a given first-order $\mathcal {L}_{\exp }$ -sentence whether it is true or false in $\mathbb {R}_{\exp }$. However, under the assumption of Schanuel’s Conjecture—a famous open conjecture from Transcendental Number Theory—a decision procedure for $\mathbb {R}_{\exp }$ exists. Also a positive answer to the Transfer Conjecture would result in the decidability of $\mathbb {R}_{\exp }$. Thus, we study o-minimal exponential fields with regard to the Transfer Conjecture, Schanuel’s Conjecture, and the decidability question of $\mathbb {R}_{\exp }$.Overall, we shed light on the valuation theoretic invariants of o-minimal exponential fields—the residue field and the value group—with additional induced structure. Moreover, we explore elementary substructures and extensions of o-minimal exponential fields to the maximal ends—the smallest elementary substructures being prime models and the maximal elementary extensions being contained in the surreal numbers. Further, we draw connections to models of Peano Arithmetic, integer parts, density in real closure, definable Henselian valuations, and strongly NIP ordered fields.Parts of this thesis were published in [2–5].Abstract prepared by Lothar Sebastian KrappE-mail: [email protected]: https://d-nb.info/1202012558/34. (shrink)

Rudolf Carnap gilt unbestritten als einer der eminentesten Vertreter des logischen Empirismus. Im Band 2 der Reihe "Texte zur Wissenschaftlichen Weltauffassung" werden alle wesentlichen Aspekte seiner Philosophie zusammenhAngend dargestellt und kritisch analysiert. Lothar Krauth beurteilt dabei Carnaps Bedeutung vor einem breiten, philosophiehistorischen Hintergrund. Nicht nur sein EinfluA und seine Vordenkerrolle im Wiener Kreis werden diskutiert, sondern auch die mehrfache Wandlung in Carnaps Denken. So erklArt sich manche allzu groAe Vereinfachung, mancher Radikalismus als erster Ansatz, der spAter A1/4berarbeitet, zu einem (...) tragfAhigen Bestandteil kommender analytischer Sprachtheorie ausgebaut wurde. (shrink)

Alongside the 'critical theory' of the Frankfurt School, West Germany was also home to another influential Marxist current known as the Marburg School. In this volume, Marburg disciple Lothar Peter traces the school's history and situates it in the political discourse and developments of its time. The renowned political scientist Wolfgang Abendroth plays a large role, but unlike most histories of the Marburg School Peter also takes the sociologists Werner Hofmann and Heinz Maus into account as well as their (...) many students and successors. They were united by the conviction that teaching and scholarship must necessarily be tied to the practical goal of transforming society - an approach that met with considerable opposition in the harshly anti-Communist atmosphere of the period. (shrink)

I describe characteristic phenomena of quantum physics that suggest that reality appears to us in two domains: the open and well-known domain of empirical, material things—the realm of actuality—and a hidden and invisible domain of nonempirical, non-material forms—the realm of potentiality. The nonempirical forms are part of physical reality because they contain the empirical possibilities of the universe and can manifest themselves in the empirical world. Two classes of nonempirical states are discussed: the superposition states of microphysical entities, which are (...) nonempirical because observation destroys them, and the virtual states of material systems, which are nonempirical because they are empty. The non-empirical part to physical reality represents a predetermined and hidden order that exists before it is empirical, and the visible world is an emanation out of it. I discuss consequences for our understanding of human nature, the origin of life, and human values. Reality is an indivisible wholeness that is aware of its processes, like a Cosmic Spirit, and it reveals its awareness in the mindlike properties of elementary processes as well as in the human consciousness. Thus, one is led to G. W. F. Hegel's thesis that the Cosmic Spirit is thinking in us. (shrink)

Die Logik, einst Grundbestand der Philosophie, hat sich in unserem J ahrhundert zu einer selbstandigen Wissenschaft ent 1 wickelt. Sie wird zur Abgrenzung gegeniiber friiheren Gestalten "neue Logik" oder "moderne Logik" genannt; auch sind Be zeichnungen wie "theoretische Logik", "mathematische Logik", "symbolische Logik", "formale Logik", "Logistik" gebrauch 2 lich, urn die Eigenart der grundlegenden Methoden anzudeuten. Die genannten Benennungen werden in dieser Arbeit gleichbe rechtigt gebraucht. Mit 1. M. BOCHENSKI und A. MENNE kann man unter Logistik in weiterem Sinne "die (...) Lehre vom Logikkalkiil, seinen Voraus 3 setzungen und Anwendungen" verstehen. Die Absicht dieser Arbeit ist eine philosophische; sie fragt nach dem, was die Aussage als Aussage zum Element positiver Logik werden laBt. In Frage ist daher die Aussagen- und (ele mentare) Pradikatenlogik, die in formaler Hinsicht "durch den Vollstandigkeitssatz (Go DEL I930) und den Unentscheidbarkeits- 1 Texte zur Geschichte der modernen Logik: I.M. BOCHENSKI, Formale Logik, Freiburg-Miinchen I956, S. 3II-477. 2 s. z.B.: B. JUH6s, Elemente der neuen Logik, Wien I954. G. HASEN]AEGER, Einfuhrung in die Grundbegritfe und Probleme der modernen Logik, Freiburg-Miinchen I962. D. HILBERT und W. ACKERMANN, Grundzi~ge der theoretischm Logik, 3. Aufl., B- lin-Gi:ittingen-Heidelberg I949. H. SCHOLZ und G. HASEN]AEGER, Grundzuge der mathematischen Logik, Berlin 1961. H. HERMES, Einfuhrung in die mathematische Logik, Stuttgart 1963. R. CARNAP, Symbolische Logik, Wien 1954. P. LORENZEN, Formale Logik. I.M. BOCHENSKI, GrundrifJ der Logistik, aus dem Franzi:isischen iibers., neubearb. und erweitert von A. MENNE, 2. erweiterte Auf I., Paderborn 1962. (shrink)

This article is about the post-history of Hobbes’s name for the state and thus about the history of the name ‘Leviathan’ insofar as this name has remained the catchword for the (modern) state to this day (from the late 17th century to the beginning of the 21st century), but above all for that of absolutist-despotic proportions. This story, told here for the first time, is particularly interesting because it ultimately reveals a continuity in the understanding of Hob-bes that suggests that (...) this post-history not only has something to do with Hobbes’s Leviathan itself, but at least as much with its pre-history - with the name ‘Leviathan’, which Hobbes gave the state in reference to the biblical monster of the same name. (shrink)