This special issue of Etikk i praksis features papers that articulate and discuss approaches and methodology that seek to make normative research activity and research output productive in contexts of ongoing societal and technological decision-making. The articles in various ways and to a varying degree exemplify and reflect on the methodology of the study of normativity in innovation.

Habermas claims that the concept of ?communicative action? can be explained by illocutionary acts alone. It appears tó me that his explanation collapses into a sort of intentional theory (2[i]). Habermas maintains further that a speech act consists of three components which are ?correlated? to three worlds and to three validity claims. However, he also seems to mean that all worlds and validity claims are correlated to just one; the so?called propositional component. One consequence is that the propositional content, not (...) the illocutionary act, determines the main mode of at least some speech acts. Another is that the T as used in an expressive speech act will occur in the propositional part of the act and not, as claimed by Habermas, in the performative sentence (2[iii]). In 2(ii) two other problems concerning Habermas's view on the concept of ?I? ('the subject') are discussed. (shrink)

I discuss three recent counterexamples to the transitivity of grounding due to Jonathan Schaffer. I argue that the counterexamples don’t work and draw some conclusions about the relationship between grounding and explanation.

Three nature images influence the environmental policies of major American corporations. Successively they are images of the (1) unfouled nest, (2) protected habitat, and (3) uncontaminated environment. Each contains unexpected surprises for its corporation, however. Polaroid, for example, does not foul its company precincts, but is now a Superfund Potentially Responsible Party for its deposited wastes in its home and neighboring states. This anomaly thus extends its unfouled-nest image to its dumpsites and beyond, but also implodes upon its workplace. Parallel (...) extensions and inversions affect Martin Marietta's favored image of the protected habitat and Union Carbide's of the uncontaminated environment. These are shown with references to Kant and to Aristotle, but a concluding moral compares further neglect of the full consequences of such images to Dante's allegorical Circles 4 and 5 of Hell. (shrink)

Most authors on metaphysical grounding have taken full grounding to be an internal relation in the sense that it's necessary that if the grounds and the grounded both obtain, then the grounds ground the grounded. The negative part of this essay exploits empirical and provably nonparadoxical self-reference to prove conclusively that even immediate full grounding isn't an internal relation in this sense. The positive, second part of this essay uses the notion of a “completely satisfactory explanation” to shed light on (...) the logic of ground in the presence of self-reference. This allows us to develop a satisfactory logic of ground and recover a sense in which grounding is still an internal relation. (shrink)

Profound transformations in the composition, performance and reception of modernist music have taken place in recent decades. This collection brings fresh perspectives to bear upon key questions surrounding the forms that musical modernism takes today, how modern music is performed and heard, and its relationship to earlier music. In sixteen chapters, leading figures in the field and emerging scholars examine modernist music from the inside, in terms of changing practices of composition, musical materials and overarching aesthetic principles, and from the (...) outside, in terms of the changing contextual frameworks in which musical modernism has taken place and been understood. Shaped by a 'rehearing' of modernist music, the picture that emerges redraws the map of musical modernism as a whole and presents a full-scale re-evaluation of what the modernist movement has all been about. (shrink)

A logic of grounding where what is grounded can be a collection of truths is a “many-many” logic of ground. The idea that grounding might be irreducibly many-many has recently been suggested by Dasgupta. In this paper I present a range of novel philosophical and logical reasons for being interested in many-many logics of ground. I then show how Fine’s State-Space semantics for the Pure Logic of Ground can be extended to the many-many case, giving rise to the Pure Logic (...) of Many-Many Ground. In the second, more technical, part of the paper, I do two things. First, I present an alternative formalization of plg; this allows us to simplify Fine’s completeness proof for plg. Second, I formalize plmmg using an infinitary sequent calculus and prove that this formalization is sound and complete. (shrink)

The theme of Darwin's struggle between reason and imagination is perhaps most clearly shown in his efforts in the Origin to conceive of how the eye of the body might have developed through natural selection. Thus he wrote:To arrive, however, at a just conclusion regarding the formation of the eye, with all its marvellous yet not absolutely perfect characters, it is indispensable that the reason * should conquer the imagination; but I have felt the difficulty far too keenly to be (...) surprised at others hesitating to extend the principle of natural selection to so startling a length. (shrink)

Through the twofold meaning of nature for man-rhythmically-of which he is a part and from which he is apart, the situations of psychosis and of ageing "cross over." In both are manifested the imperious sway of that nature of which we are a part: in the earlier half of life-largely-as psychosis, in the latter half of life through ageing. It is in the midst of the life-span, with the transition from predominant instinctuality to awareness of its recession, that psychosis and (...) ageing are disclosed as complementary perspectives, the vanishing point of the former toward the bodily birth of the individual, that of the latter toward the death of the individual body. Together they intimate the possibility of an individuality which can encompass the human meanings of both. In psychosis and ageing alike, the sway of that nature of which we are a part is coupled with a heightened awareness of our own nature as apart, in the former instance passively, with an accent on one's helplessness as mechanical mind, in the latter with the realization of one's own active part over and apart from the body. In psychosis the self is overwhelmed by that nature of which its body is a part as the latter's complexion is mediated by the world. In ageing the presence of the self stands out more clearly from the ebbing instinctuality with which it was earlier alloyed. To the negative defusion of instinctuality and individuality in psychosis corresponds the possibility of a positive separation in ageing. If in psychosis, "uprightness" , "eccentricity" , "being in the world over and beyond the world" , has been early flawed, ageing enables individuality to emerge in relief from the detritus of imperfect projects. "When gods die they become men, when men die they become gods." . While bodily membership in nature pervades emerging individuality in the first half of life, self-assumption of responsibility emerges with the discovery of ebbing instinctuality in the middle of life. The body as a hinge between nature of which we are a part and nature from which we are apart, and whose ambiguity is rhythmically reflective of the world and of self, now becomes apparent. With this the possibility of a "depth psychology" is reached, that is, a reopening of the archives of one's history for a commemorative rereading . This moment of discovery, traditionally conveyed in the analogical imagery of late summer and the Mediterranean experience of noon and afternoon, recurs throughout the opus of Freud, from his "Gradiva" essay , through "The Uncanny" to his "A Disturbance of Memory on the Acropolis" , with undertones both of psychotic derealization and of the purifying ordeal of ageing. (shrink)

ABSTRACTDepression is marked by rigid thinking and the inability to generate different and more positive views on the self. The current study conceptualises this a perspective-taking deficit, which is defined as a deficit in the ability to overcome one’s egocentrism. Previous research has demonstrated that individuals with depression are impaired in Theory of Mind reasoning and empathy – two social cognitions that involve cognitive and affective perspective-taking. Here, it was investigated whether these deficits generalise to visuo-spatial perspective-taking. To test this, (...) a convenience sample completed a test-battery including measures of cognitive and visuo-spatial perspective-taking and closely matched cognitive and visuo-spatial control tasks. The results showed that individuals exhibiting high levels of depressive symptoms were specifically impaired on both perspective-taking tasks but performed equally well on the cont... (shrink)

A truthmaker for a proposition P is exact if it contains nothing irrelevant to P. What are the exact truthmakers for necessitated propositions? This paper makes progress on this issue by showing how to extend Fine’s truthmaker semantics for intuitionistic logic to an exact truthmaker semantics for intuitionistic modal logic. The project is of interest also to the classical logician: while all distinctively classical theorems may be true, they differ from the intuitionistic ones in how they are made true. This (...) sheds new light on the status of the T and B axioms. (shrink)