The fundamental problem proponents of truth conditional semantics must face is to specify what role a truth theory is supposed to play within a meaning theory. The most detailed proposal for tackling this problem is the account developed by Ernest Lepore and Kirk Ludwig. However, as I will show in this paper, theories along the lines of Lepore and Ludwig do not suffice to put someone into the position to understand the objectlanguage. The fundamental problem of truth conditional semantics thus (...) remains unsolved. (shrink)

This paper is concerned with the semantics of bare plural I-generics such as ‘Tigers are striped’, ‘Chickens lay eggs’, and ‘Kangaroos live in Australia’. In a series of recent papers, Bernhard Nickel has developed a comprehensive view of a certain class of bare plural I-generics, which he calls characterizing sentences :629–648, 2009. doi:10.1007/s10988-008-9049-7; Linguist Philos 33:479–512, 2010a. doi:10.1007/s10988-011-9087-4; Philos Impr 10:1–25, 2010b). Nickel’s ambitious proposal includes a detailed account of their truth-conditions, an account of certain pragmatic phenomena that they give (...) rise to, a metaphysical picture of their truth-makers in terms of mechanisms, and an epistemological story connecting characterizing sentences to such concepts as induction and explanation. This paper offers an extended critique of the central truth-conditional component of Nickel’s proposal. In a nutshell, his account has it that ‘Tigers are striped’ is true iff, for tigers, there is a way of being normal with respect to fur-pattern such that all tigers that are normal that way are striped. I begin by explaining what characterizing sentences are and distinguish several readings that are available for sentences with bare plurals in subject position. I then introduce Nickel’s account and discuss some of its predictions which, in my view, seem highly problematic. Moreover, I argue that Nickel’s principle of Homogeneity does not go together well with his proposed truth-conditions, and that his truth-conditional account violates a plausible principle about the logic of generics, a principle I call generic non-contradiction. (shrink)

Selected papers from the sections of the eighth international conference organized by the Society for Analytic Philosophy (GAP), Constance, Germany, September 17-20, 2012. The overall theme of the conference was "What may we believe? What ought we to do?", but the papers published here address a wide variety of questions from many fields of philosophy.

Philosophers of mathematics commonly distinguish between explanatory and non-explanatory proofs. An important subclass of mathematical proofs are proofs by induction. Are they explanatory? This paper addresses the question, based on general principles about explanation. First, a recent argument for a negative answer is discussed and rebutted. Second, a case is made for a qualified positive take on the issue.

Donald Davidson contributed to the discussion of logical form in two ways. On the one hand, he made several influential suggestions on how to give the logical forms of certain constructions of natural language. His account of adverbial modification and so called action-sentences is nowadays, in some form or other, widely employed in linguistics (Harman (forthcoming) calls it "the standard view"). Davidson's approaches to indirect discourse and quotation, while not as influential, also still attract attention today. On the other hand, (...) Davidson provided a general account of what logical form is. This paper is concerned with this general account. Its foremost aim is to give a faithful and detailed picture of what, according to Davidson, it means to give the logical form of a sentence. The structure of the paper is as follows. (1) I will first informally introduce a notion of logical form as the form that matters in certain kinds of entailments, and indicate why philosophers have taken an interest in such a notion. (2) The second section develops constraints that we should arguably abide by in giving an account of logical form. (3) I then turn to Davidson’s view of what is involved in giving such an account. To this end, I will try to reconstruct Davidson’s view of the connection between an assignment of logical forms, a truth theory and a meaning theory. (4) Finally, I will briefly discuss possible problems of Davidson’s account as developed in this paper. (shrink)

Donald Davidson has claimed that for every logical truth 5 of a language L, a theory of meaning for L will entail that S is a logical truth of L. Jim Edwards has argued (2002) that this claim is false if we take 'entails' to mean 'has as a logical consequence. In this paper, I first show that, pace Edwards, Davidson's claim is correct even under this strong reading. I then discuss the argument given by Edwards and offer a diagnosis (...) of where he went wrong. (shrink)

Donald Davidson suggested that, in attempting to give meaning theories, we should proceed via giving truth theories. For the programme of truth-theoretic semantics to be successful, two tasks need to be accomplished. First, it has to be shown that natural languages are actually amendable to truth theoretic treatment. The second task is to show how we can bridge the gap between a truth theory and a genuine meaning theory. This second task is necessitated by the simple fact that truth theories (...) by themselves are too weak to satisfy the central desideratum for a meaning theory. In a recent paper, Greg Ray suggests that the goal of giving meaning theories can easily be achieved, not by supplementing the truth-theoretic apparatus, but by doing away with it altogether. In particular, he proposes that what he calls means-that theories meet all the desiderata on meaning theories, and that ‘anyone with basically Davidsonian commitments must accept the means-that approach as viable and that it has certain evident virtues’. This paper argues that theories along Ray's lines do not satisfy the central desideratum for meaning theories. Ray's belief to the contrary rests on a common misunderstanding of what this desideratum amounts to. As I indicate in the final section of the paper, there perhaps is a way of substantially amending Ray's approach in order to meet the central desideratum. However, in an ironic twist, this will require giving a full-fledged truth theory for the metalanguage, including its intensional constructions like ‘means that’ – precisely the project Ray attempted to avoid. (shrink)

This paper argues, first, that the information problem poses a foundational challenge to mainstream semantics. It proposes, second, to address this problem by drawing on notions from Kit Fine’s essentialist framework. More specifically, it claims that the information problem can be avoided by strengthening standard truth theories, employing an operator expressing the notion of a relative constitutive semantic requirement. As a result, the paper proposes to construe semantic theories as theories of semantic requirements, and semantic knowledge as knowledge of such (...) requirements. (shrink)

The empirical relationship between a firm’s social performance and its financial performance is still not well established in the literature. Despite more than 30 years of research and more than 100 empirical studies on the issue, the results are still mixed. We argue that the heterogeneous results found in previous studies are not due exclusively to problems related with the measurement instruments or the samples used. Instead, we posit that a more fundamental problem related with the endogeneity of social strategic (...) decisions could be driving most of the empirical findings. We show that, using a panel data of 658 firms from 1991 to 2005, how some of the results found in previous research change, and some are even reversed when endogeneity is properly taken into account. (shrink)

La noción ilustrada de opinión pública apelaba a un circuito de comunicación racional que enlazaba a los actores (de la esfera pública burguesa primero, de la sociedad civil después), con las normas vinculantes emanadas de las instancias formales de creación y aplicación de la ley. Este enlace entra en crisis en el siglo XIX, y parece abandonarse definitivamente con el advenimiento de la sociedad de masas, la expansión de los medios y la autonomización del sistema político. Sin embargo, en la (...) teoría política más contemporánea encontramos una nueva reivindicación de la opinión pública. Este trabajo analiza, en primer lugar, la recuperación de la opinión pública como mecanismo articulador entre sociedad civil y sistema político. Luego se expone la caracterización de la opinión pública como filtro y selección de un campo de sentido para la decisión política. La intención es mostrar que, funcionalmente adaptadas a la realidad de las sociedades complejas, ambas caracterizaciones siguen afirmando una relación fuerte entre opinión pública y decisión política legítima. (shrink)

Este artículo examina la concepción del espacio infinito y del tiempo en Hasdai Crescas, Gianfrancesco Pico della Mirandola y Giordano Bruno. Si la presencia de Crescas es explícita en el _Examen vanitatis_ (1520) de Pico, su recepción por Bruno, que nunca lo menciona, fue postulada por Harry A. Wolfson en 1929. Más recientemente, David Harari y Mauro Zonta han afirmado el papel intermediario de un autor judío desconocido. Sin embargo, una comparación de la crítica de Aristóteles efectuada por Crescas y (...) Bruno pone de manifiesto que, excepto dos puntos, Bruno pudo alcanzar sus posiciones con independencia de Crescas, a partir de su propia lectura crítica de Aristóteles y de su conocimiento de los desarrollos de la escolástica medieval y del concepto neoplatónico del tiempo. La significativa calificación por Crescas del espacio y del tiempo como atributos de Dios en un sentido puramente metafórico, una cuestión que Pico deja a un lado, deja paso en Bruno a la calificación del espacio infinito, de la duración y también de la materia como atributos reales de Dios, que es a la vez mente e intelecto, espacio y materia, en tanto que unidad indiferente de los opuestos. (shrink)

The philosophy of the geosciences is an emerging subfield in philosophy of science. Although past and present geoscientific disciplines differ substantially, we argue that they frequently face common epistemological and ethical problems. We survey several of these problems that have already attracted sustained philosophical interest, related to the use of measurements, data, and models to study relatively inaccessible target phenomena, responses to (epistemic) injustices, and the management of epistemic risks.

Con ocasión de la refutación de una interpretación reciente del pensamiento de Anthony Collins, fundada en presupuestos metodológicos erráticos y tributarios, en definitiva, de la concepción propia de los apologistas en tiempos de las Luces, este trabajo denuncia los abusos en la historiografía de los tiempos modernos de una mal llamada lectura entre líneas, que implica no el examen detenido del texto en su complejidad, sino el menosprecio de la letra, y propone criterios que faciliten un tratamiento en clave propiamente (...) histórica de categorías como deísmo, panteísmo y ateísmo, lejos de la pretensión de una determinada filosofía de trabajar sobre «conceptos rigurosos y perfectamente definidos», portadores de esencias. (shrink)

El presente artículo se propone mostrar la versatilidad de la concepción hegeliana sobre la “positividad” del derecho y, a través de ella, su pretensión de lograr una mediación filosófica entre las concepciones éticas y políticas enfrentadas en la modernidad. Es muy revelador que Hegel haya empleado dicha expresión en un doble sentido: no sólo para cuestionar la pura normatividad de las teorías modernas de la libertad racional, sino igualmente para criticar las formas anquilosadas de realización institucional de las formas de (...) vida ética en la historia. Analizaremos esta doble vertiente de la concepción de la positividad en Hegel, en primer lugar, tomando como referencia su polémica con la Escuela histórica del derecho y, en segundo lugar, evocando su cuestionamiento de las teorías modernas del derecho natural. Creemos que hay allí una lección perdurable acerca de la necesidad de buscar formas de mediación entre normatividad y realismo en la filosofía política. (shrink)

We study the $\kappa $ -Borel-reducibility of isomorphism relations of complete first-order theories by using coloured trees. Under some cardinality assumptions, we show the following: For all theories T and T’, if T is classifiable and T’ is unsuperstable, then the isomorphism of models of T’ is strictly above the isomorphism of models of T with respect to $\kappa $ -Borel-reducibility.

The doctrine that all living beings originate from the sea, upheld in the Telliamed, is based on the scientific knowledges of the early 18th century. Maillet also assimilates the errores of the sciences. On the other hand, Maillet uses unreliable stories and testimonies to support his theory, but he applies the rules of a strict criticism to them. The spirit of the author of Telliamed also shows him to be a man of his time : a great many highly estimed (...) contemporary philosophers have believed the existence of seamen. The roots of this theory are found in the conviction that we ignore the mecanism and the laws which regulate the productions of nature. (shrink)

Most studies investigating the relationship between cultural constructs and ethical perception have focused on individual- and societal-level values without much attention to other type of cultural constructs such as social beliefs. In addition, we need to better understand how social beliefs are linked to ethical perception and the level of analysis at which social beliefs may best predict ethical perceptions. This research contributes to the cross-cultural ethical perception literature by examining the relationship of individual-level social cynicism belief, one of five (...) universally endorsed social beliefs, together with individual social dominance orientation and the perception of unethical behavior. By means of two studies, we examine these relationships across societies that significantly differ on societal-level social cynicism belief. Using 371 business students from Russia and the U.S. in Study 1 and 268 professionals from Portugal and the U.S. in Study 2, we found that individual-level social cynicism belief was positively associated with social dominance orientation. Social dominance orientation, in turn, mediated the relationship between individual social cynicism belief and the perception of unethical behavior. Although we found significant societal-level differences in social cynicism belief in both studies, the relationships between individual-level social cynicism belief, social dominance orientation, and the perception of unethical behavior were structurally equivalent across societies in both studies, suggesting that societal-level differences did not significantly affect these relationships. Implications for cross-cultural business ethics research and practice are discussed. (shrink)

En este trabajo se propone una revisión de la fenomenología de la vida de Michel Henry y su relación con la intencionalidad, tal como esta es pensada en y por Husserl. Se pasa revista al modo en el que el fundador del método fenomenológico se ocupa de cuestiones centrales de la fenomenología de la vida, así como de la forma en la que Henry habla de la vida, la autodonación, la autorevelación, la verdad, el cuerpo originario o absoluto, etc. La (...) tesis es que en el fenomenólogo francés no se trata, en sentido propio, de una inversión de la intencionalidad, sino de una “absorción en sí misma”. (shrink)

En este artículo se explora, a través de las películas _Érase una vez en Euskadi _(2021) y _Belfast_ (2021), la perspectiva de la violencia política desde la visión de la infancia. Para ello se traza un análisis comparativo entre ambos largometrajes abordando las principales diferencias y semejanzas entre los conflictos que se vivieron en el Ulster y en el País Vasco; en el tratamiento de la violencia política a través de los personajes principales de ambas cintas, contextualizándolo con el espacio (...) geográfico y temporal; y abordando las problemáticas del cine en los enfoques del terrorismo. (shrink)

This article discusses the ways in which nineteenth-century geodesists reflected on precision as an epistemic virtue in their measurement practice. Physical geodesy is often understood as a quintessential nineteenth-century precision science, stimulating advances in instrument making and statistics, and generating incredible quantities of data. Throughout most of the nineteenth century, geodesists indeed pursued their most prestigious research problem – the exact determination of the earth’s polar flattening – along those lines. Treating measurement errors as random, they assumed that remaining discordances (...) could be overcome by manufacturing better instruments and extending statistical analysis to a larger amount of data. In the second half of the nineteenth century, however, several German geodesists developed sophisticated methodological critiques of their discipline, in which they diagnosed a too-narrow focus on precision among their peers. On their account, geodesists urgently needed to identify and anticipate the causes of the remaining measurement errors that arose from the earth’s little understood interior constitution. While mostly overlooked in the literature, these critiques paved the way for many empirical successes in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century geodesy, including the first convergent measurements of the earth’s polar flattening. (shrink)