In this remarkably clear and original study of the Tractatus Peter Carruthers has two principal aims. He seeks to make sense of Wittgenstein's metaphysical doctrines, showing how powerful arguments may be deployed in their support. He also aims to locate the crux of the conflict between Wittgenstein's early and late philosophies. This is shown to arise from his earlier commitment to the objectivity of logic and logical relations, which is the true target of attack of his later discussion of (...) rule-following. Within this general framework Dr Carruthers explores a number of themes, including the early Wittgenstein's doctrine of the priority of logic over metaphysics, the nature and purpose of his programme of analysis for ordinary language and the various possible arguments supporting the existence of Simples. He offers many original interpretations and defends them with considerable attention to textual detail, yet the book's clarity and directness will make it accessible to anyone acquainted with the Tractatus. It will be required reading for all serious students of Wittgenstein's philosophy. (shrink)

In this paper we argue that awareness comes in degrees, and we propose a novel multi-factor account that spans both subjective experiences and perceptual representations. At the subjective level, we argue that conscious experiences can be degraded by being fragmented, less salient, too generic, or flash-like. At the representational level, we identify corresponding features of perceptual representations—their availability for working memory, intensity, precision, and stability—and argue that the mechanisms that affect these features are what ultimately modulate the degree of awareness. (...) We conclude the paper by demonstrating why the original interpretations of certain empirical findings that apparently pose problems for our account are, in fact, flawed. (shrink)

Stimulating introduction to the most central and interesting issues in the philosophy of mind. Topics covered include dualism versus the various forms of materialism, personal identity and survival, and the problem of other minds.

Many technology ethicists hold that the time has come to articulate _neurorights_: our normative claims vis-à-vis our brains and minds. One such claim is the right to _mental integrity_ (‘MI’). I begin by considering some paradigmatic threats to MI (§1) and how the dominant autonomy-based conception (‘ABC’) of MI attempts to make sense of them (§2). I next consider the objection that the ABC is _overbroad_ in its understanding of what threatens MI and suggest a friendly revision to the ABC (...) that addresses the objection (§3). I then consider a second objection: that the ABC cannot make sense of the MI of the _non-autonomous_. This objection appears fatal even to the revised ABC (§4). On that basis, I develop an alternative conception on which MI is grounded in a plurality of simpler capacities, namely, those for _affect_, _cognition_, and _volition_. Each of these more basic capacities grounds a set of fundamental interests, and they are for that reason worthy of protection even when they do not rise to the level of complexity necessary for autonomy (§5). This yields a fully general theory of MI that accounts for its manifestations in both the autonomous and the non-autonomous. (shrink)

Shows that the dialogue in Plato's Phaedo is primarily devoted to presenting Socrates' final defense of the philosophical life against the theoretical and political challenge of religion.

I criticize some arguments against the causal interpretability of population genetics put forward by Denis Walsh ([2007], [2010]). In particular, I seek to undermine the contention that population genetics exhibits frame of reference relativity or subjectivity with respect to its formal representations. I also show that classical population genetics does not fall foul of some criteria for causal representation put forward by James Woodward ([2003]), although those criteria do undermine some causalist stances. 1 Introduction2 Modularity3 The Crucially Important Point4 The (...) Gillespie Case: Density-Dependent Selection5 Conclusion. (shrink)

Realists and supporters of ‘democratic underlabouring’ have recently challenged the traditional separation between political theory and practice. Although both attack Jürgen Habermas for being an idealist whose philosophy is too removed from politics, I argue that this interpretation is inaccurate. While Habermas’s social and political theory is indeed oriented to truth and understanding, he has sought realize his communicative conception of democracy by increasing the quality of political debate as a public intellectual. Building on his approach, I argue that giving (...) the theorist a direct role in public policy undermines theory as an enterprise oriented towards truth while overlooking the contingency, participatory nature and complicated internal logics of social and political practice. My basic thesis is that Habermas’s understanding of the relationship between theory and practice overcomes these difficulties by providing an account of theory that is independent but simultaneously also allows philosophers to participate in politics as public intellectuals. (shrink)

The principle of semantic compositionality, as Jerry Fodor and Ernie Lepore have emphasized, imposes constraints on theories of meaning that it is hard to meet with psychological or epistemic accounts. Here, I argue that this general tendency is exemplified in Michael Dummett's account of meaning. On that account, the so-called manifestability requirement has the effect that the speaker who understands a sentence s must be able to tell whether or not s satisfies central semantic conditions. This requirement is not met (...) by truth-conditional accounts of meaning. On Dummett's view, it is met by a proof conditional account: understanding amounts to knowledge of what counts as a proof of a sentence. A speaker is supposed always to be capable of deciding whether or not a given object is a proof of a given sentence she understands. This requirement comes into conflict with compositionality. If meaning is compositionally determined, then all you need for understanding a sentence is what you get from combining your understanding of the parts according to the mode of composition. But that knowledge is not always sufficient for recognizing any proof at all of a given sentence. Dummett's proof-theoretic argument to the contrary is mistaken. (shrink)

Generic statements play a crucial role in concept learning, communication and education. Despite many efforts, the semantics of generics remain a controversial issue, as they do not seem to fit our standard theories of meaning. In this article, we attempt to shed light on this problem by focusing on how these sentences function in reasoning. Drawing on a distinction between property and diagnostic generics, we defend three theses: First, property generics are not about facts but express relations between concepts. Second, (...) generics play an important role in everyday reasoning by interacting with our expectations about the world. Third, diagnostic generics emphasise properties that separate the category in the generics from other categories in the same contrast class. We use the theory of conceptual spaces to advance measures of typicality and diagnosticity capable of modelling different aspects of generics and apply them to the modifier effect and the inverse conjunction fallacy. Finally, we discuss the pragmatics of generics. (shrink)

Following Manne (1966, Insider Trading and the Stock Market (New York, Free Press)) we introduce a distinction between insider trading and market manipulation on the one hand and corporate insiders versus misappropriators on the other hand. This gives rise to four types of alleged inside transactions. We argue that the literature on insider trading has often targeted inside transactions type II, III and IV but that these arguments do not necessarily hold for type I transactions. We look for consequentionalist as (...) well as non-consequentionalist arguments against type I transactions and demonstrate that these are hard to find. Throughout the article we refer extensively to the economic literature on insider trading in order to overcome a relative divide between the economic, legal, and philosophical discussion on insider trading. (shrink)

Fictional truth is commonly analyzed in terms of the speech acts or propositional attitudes of a teller. In this paper, I investigate Lewis’s counterfactual analysis in terms of felicitous narrator assertion, Currie’s analysis in terms of fictional author belief, and Byrne’s analysis in terms of ideal author invitations to make-believe—and find them all lacking. I propose instead an analysis in terms of the revelations of an infelicitous narrator.

PETER GILMOUR Introduction Although the nine philosophers in this volume can be described as Enlightenment philosophers (or, at least, as philosophers who ...

The so called Ramsey test is a semantic recipe for determining whether a conditional proposition is acceptable in a given state of belief. Informally, it can be formulated as follows: (RT) Accept a proposition of the form "if A, then C" in a state of belief K, if and only if the minimal change of K needed to accept A also requires accepting C. In Gärdenfors (1986) it was shown that the Ramsey test is, in the context of some other (...) weak conditions, on pain of triviality incompatible with the following principle, which was there called the preservation criterion: (P) If a proposition B is accepted in a given state of belief K and the proposition A is consistent with the beliefs in K, then B is still accepted in the minimal change of K needed to accept A. (RT) provides a necessary and sufficient criterion for when a 'positive' conditional should be included in a belief state, but it does not say anything about when the negation of a conditional sentence should be accepted. A very natural candidate for this purpose is the following negative Ramsey test: (NRT) Accept the negation of a proposition of the form "if A, then C" in a consistent state of belief K, if and only if the minimal change of K needed to accept A does not require accepting C. This note shows that (NRT) leads to triviality results even in the absence of additional conditions like (P). (shrink)

Contrary to common belief, IT systems often disappoint the expectations to increase productivity and flexibility of work and value creation processes. Moreover, most IT design and implementation projects still fail or burst time and cost budgets to a high extent. After presenting significant empirical evidence for these phenomena, the paper reflects on the reasons for their persistence by developing a semiotic perspective on the processes of dealing with computer artifacts in organisations. This semiotic view allows understanding the processes of designing, (...) implementing and using IT systems as efforts of structuring social practices in organisations. A typical case of enterprise resource planning system implementation illustrates this. Finally, a number of guidelines for an improved practice of designing and appropriating IT systems for effective use in organisations are derived from the theoretical reflections. (shrink)

This two-part article includes the following: (1) excerpts from Peter H. Plesch’s essay originally published in Journal of Polymer Science, Part A (2004) 42, 7: 1537-1546 which reflects on Plesch’s research with Polanyi; (2) Plesch’s short account titled “Michael Polanyi and the Paranormal” which complements his original article’s discussion of his work with Polanyi. Together these two pieces provide interesting insights into P'olanyi’s work as a research scientist as weIl as reflections on the nature of scientific discovery.

Participants of low and high hypnotic susceptibility were tested on a temporal order judgement task, both with and without hypnosis. Judgements were made of the order of presentation of light flashes appearing in first one hemi-field then the other. There were differences in the inter-stimulus intervals required accurately to report the order, depending upon which hemi-field led. This asymmetry was most marked in hypnotically susceptible participants and reversed when they were hypnotised. This implies not only that brain activity changes in (...) hypnosis, but also that there is a difference in brain function between people of low and high hypnotic susceptibility. The latter exhibited a faster-acting left hemisphere in the waking state, but faster right when hypnotised. (shrink)

This book looks at how scientists investigate the nature of the mind and the brain, providing answers to these important questions.

Besides pure declarative arguments, whose premises and conclusions are declaratives (“you sinned shamelessly; so you sinned”), and pure imperative arguments, whose premises and conclusions are imperatives (“repent quickly; so repent”), there are mixed-premise arguments, whose premises include both imperatives and declaratives (“if you sinned, repent; you sinned; so repent”), and cross-species arguments, whose premises are declaratives and whose conclusions are imperatives (“you must repent; so repent”) or vice versa (“repent; so you can repent”). I propose a general definition of argument (...) validity: an argument is valid exactly if, necessarily, every fact that sustains its premises also sustains its conclusion, where a fact sustains an imperative exactly if it favors the satisfaction over the violation of the imperative, and a fact sustains a declarative exactly if, necessarily, the declarative is true if the fact exists. I argue that this definition yields as special cases the standard definition of validity for pure declarative arguments and my previously defended definition of validity for pure imperative arguments, and that it yields intuitively acceptable results for mixed-premise and cross-species arguments. (shrink)

While “meaning negotiation” has become an ubiquitous term, its use is often confusing. A negotiation problem implies not only a convenience to agree, but also diverging interest on what to agree upon. It implies agreement but also the possibility of disagreement. In this chapter, we look at meaning negotiation as the process through which agents starting from different preferred conceptual representations of an object, an event or a more complex entity, converge to an agreement through some communication medium. We shortly (...) sketch the outline of a geometric view of meaning negotiation, based on conceptual spaces. We show that such view can inherit important structural elements from game theoretic models of bargaining – in particular, in the case when the protagonists have overlapping negotiation regions, we emphasize a parallel to the Nash solution in cooperative game theory. When acceptable solution regions of the protagonists are disjoint, we present several types of processes: changes in the salience of dimensions, dimensional projections and metaphorical space transformations. None of the latter processes are motivated by normative or rationality considerations, but presented as argumentation tools that we believe are used in actual situations of conceptual disagreement. (shrink)

Hai, Peter NV Lay people have always played a vital role in the life and mission of the church but it is only after the Second Vatican Council that the question of the laity has come into focus in a new way in Catholic theological reflection. Indeed, in the wake of Vatican II, the council that introduced a Copernican shift in the Catholic understanding of the laity, lay people have become the theme of a Synod of Bishops, the subject (...) of an Apostolic Exhortation, and the topic of several pastoral statements of national conferences of bishops. This paper begins with a review of the state of the question highlighting the need for a comparative investigation of the theologies of the laity according to John Paul II, the Federation of Asian Bishops' Conferences, and the Vietnamese Episcopal Conference. It then highlights the differences and convergences in these theologies. As all three theologies draw their inspiration from the teachings of Vatican II, and a prominent element of the council's concerns was the emphasis on the universal call to holiness, we will also provide a detailed comparison of this notable aspect across these theological systems. Our argument is that while some minor points of divergence and disagreement remain there is a greater convergence and agreement between these theologies of the laity. (shrink)

Green and Shapiro's argument that rational choice theory is too inattentive to substantive matters is well taken. However, their suggestions for future research are unlikely to generate what they seek: an empirically relevant, coherent theory of political processes and a rational choice paradigm that accommodates other perspectives. To achieve this end, we require a clearer understanding of the practical objectives of our discipline and of the difference between modelling and theorizing about politics, and between science and engineering. Until the ?engineering? (...) component of the discipline assumes a more central role, research?whether theoretical, empirical, or any combination of the two?will continue to generate an incoherent accumulation of theorems, lemmas, correlations, and ?facts.? (shrink)