Overweight and obesity among children and adolescents are global problems of our time. Due to their authority and role modeling, parents play an essential part in the efficacy of prevention and intervention programs. This study assessed the barriers that parents of overweight/obese children face in preventive and interventional health care utilization. Sixteen parents were qualitatively interviewed. A content analysis was performed, and barriers to change were allocated to their stage of change according to the transtheoretical model. Among the main barriers (...) is the underestimation of health risks caused by overweight/obesity in association with diminished problem awareness. Parents seem not necessarily in need of theoretical knowledge for prevention and interventions. They do however need support in evaluating the weight status of their child and the knowledge of whom to turn to for help as well as specific and hands-on possibilities for change. The results extend past studies by adding specific barriers to change that parents commonly experience. Possibilities to address these barriers, e.g., through trainings at the pediatric practice or adoption of conversation techniques, are discussed. Future studies might identify subgroups experiencing specific barriers and thus be able to address these in an individualized way. (shrink)

Intuitively, we lack the standing to blame others in light of moral norms that we ourselves don't take seriously: if Adam is unrepentantly aggressive, say, he lacks the standing to blame Celia for her aggressiveness. But why does blame have this feature? Existing proposals try to explain this by reference to specific principles of normative ethics – e.g. to rule‐consequentialist considerations, to the wrongness of hypocritical blame, or principles of rights‐forfeiture based on this wrongness. In this paper, I suggest a (...) fundamentally different approach. Employing Timothy Williamson's idea of ‘constitutive rules’ of speech acts, I argue that this feature of blame is simply constitutive of any essentially moral form of disapproval. So if Adam had the standing to disapprove of Celia's aggressiveness in some form, necessarily, this disapproval couldn't be blame. If I'm right, this proposal thus not only answers our main question, but also sheds an interesting novel light on the very nature of blame. If we didn't have a form of disapproval with that feature, we wouldn't have our practice of holding each other to moral norms. (shrink)

How ought you to evaluate your options if you're uncertain about what's fundamentally valuable? A prominent response is Expected Value Maximisation (EVM)—the view that under axiological uncertainty, an option is better than another if and only if it has the greater expected value across axiologies. But the expected value of an option depends on quantitative probability and value facts, and in particular on value comparisons across axiologies. We need to explain what it is for such facts to hold. Also, EVM (...) is by no means self-evident. We need an argument to defend that it’s true. This book introduces an axiomatic approach to answer these worries. It provides an explication of what EVM means by use of representation theorems: intertheoretic comparisons can be understood in terms of facts about which options are better than which, and mutatis mutandis for intratheoretic comparisons and axiological probabilities. And it provides a systematic argument to the effect that EVM is true: the theory can be vindicated through simple axioms. The result is a formally cogent and philosophically compelling extension of standard decision theory, and original take on the problem of axiological or normative uncertainty. (shrink)

Users of sociotechnical systems often have no way to independently verify whether the system output which they use to make decisions is correct; they are epistemically dependent on the system. We argue that this leads to problems when the system is wrong, namely to bad decisions and violations of the norm of practical reasoning. To prevent this from occurring we suggest the implementation of defeaters: information that a system is unreliable in a specific case (undercutting defeat) or independent information that (...) the output is wrong (rebutting defeat). Practically, we suggest to design defeaters based on the different ways in which a system might produce erroneous outputs, and analyse this suggestion with a case study of the risk classification algorithm used by the Dutch tax agency. (shrink)

Process reliabilist accounts claim that a belief is justified when it is the result of a reliable belief-forming process. Yet over what range of possible token processes is this reliability calculated? I argue against the idea that _all_ possible token processes (in the actual world, or some other subset of possible worlds) are to be considered using the case of a user acquiring beliefs based on the output of an AI system, which is typically reliable for a substantial local range (...) but unreliable when all possible inputs are considered. I show that existing solutions to the generality problem imply that these cases cannot be solved by a more fine-grained typing of the belief-forming process. Instead, I suggest that reliability is evaluated over a range restricted by the content of the actual belief and by the similarity of the input to the actual input. (shrink)

How do we get out knowledge of the natural numbers? Various philosophical accounts exist, but there has been comparatively little attention to psychological data on how the learning process actually takes place. I work through the psychological literature on number acquisition with the aim of characterising the acquisition stages in formal terms. In doing so, I argue that we need a combination of current neologicist accounts and accounts such as that of Parsons. In particular, I argue that we learn the (...) initial segment of the natural numbers on the basis of the Fregean definitions, but do not learn the natural number structure as a whole on the basis of Hume's principle. Therefore, we need to account for some of the consistency of our number concepts with the Dedekind-Peano axioms in other terms. (shrink)

I argue for an account of know‐how as a capacity for practical judgment—a view I derive from Gilbert Ryle. I begin by offering an interpretation of Ryle and by correcting a number of widespread misconceptions about his views in the current debate. I then identify some problems with Ryle's account and finally present my own view which, I argue, retains Ryle's insights while avoiding his mistakes.

By using the notions of exact truth and exact falsity, one can give 16 distinct definitions of classical consequence. This paper studies the class of relations that results from these definitions in settings that are paracomplete, paraconsistent or both and that are governed by the Strong Kleene schema. Besides familiar logics such as Strong Kleene logic, the Logic of Paradox and First Degree Entailment, the resulting class of all Strong Kleene generalizations of classical logic also contains a host of unfamiliar (...) logics. We first study the members of our class semantically, after which we present a uniform sequent calculus that is sound and complete with respect to all of them. Two further sequent calculi and \ calculus) will be considered, which serve the same purpose and which are obtained by applying general methods to construct sequent calculi for many-valued logics. Rules and proofs in the SK calculus are much simpler and shorter than those of the \ and the \ calculus, which is one of the reasons to prefer the SK calculus over the latter two. Besides favourably comparing the SK calculus to both the \ and the \ calculus, we also hint at its philosophical significance. (shrink)

In the past few decades, a growth in ethical consumerism has led brands to increasingly develop conscientiousness and depict ethical image at a corporate level. However, most of the research studying business ethics in the field of corporate brand management is either conceptual or has been empirically conducted in relation to goods/products contexts. This is surprising because corporate brands are more relevant in services contexts, because of the distinct nature of services and the key role that employees have in the (...) services sector. Accordingly, this article aims at empirically examining the effects of customer perceived ethicality in the context of corporate services brands. Based on data collected for eight service categories using a panel of 2179 customers, the hypothesized structural model is tested using path analysis. The results show that, in addition to a direct effect, customer perceived ethicality has a positive and indirect effect on customer loyalty, through the mediators of customer affective commitment and customer perceived quality. Further, employee empathy positively influences the impact of customer perceived ethicality on customer affective commitment, and customer loyalty positively impacts customer positive word-of-mouth. The first implication of these results is that corporate brand strategy needs to be aligned with human resources policies and practices if brands want to turn ethical strategies into employee behavior. Second, corporate brands should build more authentic communications grounded in their ethical beliefs and supported by evidence from actual employees. (shrink)

According to an increasingly popular view among philosophers of science, both causal and non-causal explanations can be accounted for by a single theory: the counterfactual theory of explanation. A kind of non-causal explanation that has gained much attention recently but that this theory seems unable to account for are grounding explanations. Reutlinger :239-256, 2017) has argued that, despite these appearances to the contrary, such explanations are covered by his version of the counterfactual theory. His idea is supported by recent work (...) on grounding by Schaffer and Wilson who claim there to be a tight connection between grounding and counterfactual dependence. The present paper evaluates the prospects of the idea. We show that there is only a weak sense in which grounding explanations convey information about counterfactual dependencies, and that this fact cannot plausibly be taken to reveal a distinctive feature that grounding explanations share with other kinds of explanations. (shrink)

The Approximate Number System (ANS) is a system that allows us to distinguish between collections based on the number of items, though only if the ratio between numbers is high enough. One of the questions that has been raised is what the representations involved in this system represent. I point to two important constraints for any account: (a) it doesn’t involve numbers, and (b) it can account for the approximate nature of the ANS. Furthermore, I argue that representations of pure (...) magnitude with vehicles that have an imprecision in the value of the unit of measurement (further clarified through a formal model from measurement theory) fit both these requirements. (shrink)

This paper is devoted to Bolzano’s theory of grounding (Abfolge) in his Wissenschaftslehre. Bolzanian grounding is an explanatory consequence relation that is frequently considered an ancestor of the notion of metaphysical grounding. The paper focuses on two principles that concern grounding in the realm of conceptual sciences and relate to traditionally widespread ideas on explanations: the principles, namely, that grounding orders conceptual truths from simple to more complex ones (Simplicity), and that it comes along with a certain theoretical economy among (...) them (Economy). Being spelled out on the basis of Bolzano’s notion of deducibility (Ableitbarkeit), these principles are revealing for the question to what extent grounding can be considered a formal relation. (shrink)

For Aristotle, a just political community has to find similarity in difference and foster habits of reciprocity. Conventionally, speech and law have been seen to fulfill this role. This article reconstructs Aristotle’s conception of currency ( nomisma) as a political institution of reciprocal justice. By placing Aristotle’s treatment of reciprocity in the context of the ancient politics of money, currency emerges not merely as a medium of economic exchange but also potentially as a bond of civic reciprocity, a measure of (...) justice, and an institution of ethical deliberation. Reconstructing this account of currency ( nomisma) in analogy to law ( nomos) recovers the hopes Aristotle placed in currency as a necessary institution particular to the polis as a self-governing political community striving for justice. If currency was a foundational institution, it was also always insufficient, likely imperfect, and possibly tragic. Turned into a tool for the accumulation of wealth for its own sake, currency becomes unjust and a serious threat to any political community. Aristotelian currency can fail precisely because it contains an important moment of ethical deliberation. This political significance of currency challenges accounts of the ancient world as bifurcated between oikos and polis and encourages contemporary political theorists to think of money as a constitutional project that can play an important role in improving reciprocity across society. (shrink)

It is widely recognized that the innate versus acquired distinction is a false dichotomy. Yet many scientists continue to describe certain traits as “innate” and take this to imply that those traits are not acquired, or “unlearned.” This article asks what cognitive role, if any, the concept of innateness should play in the psychological and behavioural sciences. I consider three arguments for eliminating innateness from scientific discourse. First, the classification of a trait as innate is thought to discourage empirical research (...) into its developmental origin. Second, this concept lumps together a number of different biological properties that ought to be treated as distinct. Third, innateness is associated with the outmoded folk biological theory of essentialism. In response to these objections, I consider two attempts to revise the concept of innateness which aim to make it more suitable for scientific explanation and research. One proposal is that innateness can be defined in terms of the biological property of environmental canalization. On this view, a trait is innate to the extent that it is developmentally buffered against a range of different environments. Another proposal is that innateness serves as an explanatory primitive for cognitive science. This view holds that there exist a sharp boundary between psychological and biological explanations and that to identify a trait as innate means that it falls into the latter explanatory domain. This essay ends with some questions for future research. (shrink)

ABSTRACT:The notion of “democracy” has become a much-debated concept in scholarship on business ethics, management, and organization studies. The strategy of this paper is to distinguish between a principle of organization that fosters participation (type I democracy) and a principle of legitimation that draws on consent (type II democracy). Based on this distinction, we highlight conceptual shortcomings of the literature on stakeholder democracy. We demonstrate that parts of the literature tend to confound ends with means. Many approaches employ type I (...) democracy notions of participation and often take for granted that this also improves type II democratic legitimation. We hold this to be a mistake. We provide examples of the ambiguity of organizational procedures and show that under some circumstances a decrease in the degree of participation may actually increase legitimation because a governance structure that results in higher productivity can provide higher benefits for all parties involved, serve their interests and therefore meet their agreement. Less type I democracy may mean more type II democracy. We believe this to be an important insight for judging (and further improving) the legitimacy of both capitalistic firms and competitive markets. (shrink)

A measure of coherence is said to be reliability conducive if and only if a higher degree of coherence (as measured) among testimonies implies a higher probability that the witnesses are reliable. Recently, it has been proved that several coherence measures proposed in the literature are reliability conducive in scenarios of equivalent testimonies (Olsson and Schubert 2007; Schubert, to appear). My aim is to investigate which coherence measures turn out to be reliability conducive in the more general scenario where the (...) testimonies do not have to be equivalent. It is shown that four measures are reliability conducive in the present scenario, all of which are ordinally equivalent to the Shogenji measure. I take that to be an argument for the Shogenji measure being a fruitful explication of coherence. (shrink)

Within evolutionary biology, life-history theory is used to explain cross-species differences in allocation strategies regarding reproduction, maturation, and survival. Behavioral scientists have recently begun to conceptualize such strategies as a within-species individual characteristic that is predictive of behavior. Although life history theory provides an important framework for behavioral scientists, the psychometric approach to life-history strategy measurement—as operationalized by K-factors—involves conceptual entanglements. We argue that current psychometric approaches attempting to identify K-factors are based on an unwarranted conflation of functional descriptions and (...) proximate mechanisms—a conceptual mix-up that may generate unviable hypotheses and invites misinterpretation of empirical findings. The assumptions underlying generic psychometric methodology do not allow measurement of functionally defined variables; rather these methods are confined to Mayr’s proximate causal realm. We therefore conclude that K-factor scales lack validity, and that life history strategy cannot be identified with psychometrics as usual. To align theory with methodology, suggestions for alternative methods and new avenues are proposed. (shrink)

ABSTRACT How do non-experts single out numbers for reference? Linnebo has argued that they do so using a criterion of identity based on the ordinal properties of numerals. Neo-logicists, on the other hand, claim that cardinal properties are the basis of individuation, when they invoke Hume’s Principle. I discuss empirical data from cognitive science and linguistics to answer how non-experts individuate numbers better in practice. I use those findings to develop an alternative account that mixes ordinal and cardinal properties to (...) provide a detailed answer to the question: how do we in fact semantically individuate numbers? (shrink)

We show that under the assumption of the existence of the canonical inner model with one Woodin cardinal$M_1$, there is a model of$\mathsf {ZFC}$in which$\mbox {NS}_{\omega _{1}}$is$\aleph _2$-saturated and${\Delta }_{1}$-definable with$\omega _1$as a parameter which answers a question of S. D. Friedman and L. Wu. We also show that starting from an arbitrary universe with a Woodin cardinal, there is a model with$\mbox {NS}_{\omega _{1}}$saturated and${\Delta }_{1}$-definable with a ladder system$\vec {C}$and a full Suslin treeTas parameters. Both results rely on (...) a new coding technique whose presentation is the main goal of this article. (shrink)

The recent explosion of interest in epigenetics is often portrayed as the dawning of a scientific revolution that promises to transform biomedical science along with developmental and evolutionary biology. Much of this enthusiasm surrounds what we call the epigenetic switch hypothesis, which regards certain examples of epigenetic inheritance as an adaptive organismal response to environmental change. This interpretation overlooks an alternative explanation in terms of coevolutionary dynamics between parasitic transposons and the host genome. This raises a question about whether epigenetics (...) researchers tend to overlook transposon dynamics more generally. To address this question, we surveyed a large sample of scientific publications on the topics of epigenetics and transposons over the past fifty years. We found that enthusiasm for epigenetics is often inversely related to interest in transposon dynamics across the four disciplines we examined. Most surprising was a declining interest in transposons within biomedical science and cellular and molecular biology over the past two decades. Also notable was a delayed and relatively muted enthusiasm for epigenetics within evolutionary biology. An analysis of scientific abstracts from the past twenty-five years further reveals systematic differences among disciplines in their uses of the term epigenetic, especially with respect to heritability commitments and functional interpretations. Taken together, these results paint a nuanced picture of the rise of epigenetics and the possible neglect of transposon dynamics, especially among biomedical scientists. (shrink)

The normative mechanics of promising seem complex. The strength and content of promissory obligations, and the residual duties they entail upon being violated, have various prima facie surprising features. We give an account to explain these features. Promises have a point. The point of a promise to φ is a promise-independent reason to φ for the promisee’s sake. A promise turns this reason into a duty. This explains the mechanics of promises. And it grounds a nuanced picture of immoral promises, (...) an argument against promissory bare wrongings, and a constraint on theories of why we have promissory obligations at all. (shrink)

Landgrebe and Smith provide an argument for the impossibility of Artificial General Intelligence based on the limits of simulating complex systems. However, their argument presupposes a very contemporary vision of artificial intelligence as a model trained on data to produce an algorithm executable in a modern digital computing system. The present contribution explores what it means to be artificial. Current artificial intelligence approaches on modern computing systems are not the only conceivable way in which artificial intelligence technology might be created. (...) If there are conceivable routes by which an artificial intelligence might be developed that are not constrained in the same way as the current generation of artificial neural networks, then these might be plausible routes towards the engineered generation of artificial general intelligence that are not precluded by the Landgrebe and Smith argument against the possibility of artificial general intelligence. (shrink)

Journal of Mathematical Logic, Volume 22, Issue 02, August 2022. We generically construct a model in which the [math]-separation property is true, i.e. every pair of disjoint [math]-sets can be separated by a [math]-definable set. This answers an old question from the problem list “Surrealist landscape with figures” by A. Mathias from 1968. We also construct a model in which the (lightface) [math]-separation property is true.

Recent examples of rapid evolution under natural selection seem to require that the disciplines of ecology and evolution become better integrated. This inference makes sense only if one’s understanding of these disciplines is based on Hutchinson’s two-speed model of the ecological theater and the evolutionary play. Instead, these disciplines are more accurately viewed as occupying distinct “epistemic niches.” When so understood, we see that rapid evolution under selection, even if it is generally true, does not imply that evolutionary explanations are (...) improved by the inclusion of ecological details. Nor are ecological explanations necessarily improved by the inclusion of information about trait variation, heritability, effective population size, or other standard evolutionary factors. To illustrate, I develop a version of Kitcher’s “gory details” argument to show that, even for some trait that is under strong directional selection, a dynamically sufficient explanation of its ecological relationships should ignore most of the information explaining why that trait is evolving. The wholesale integration of ecology and evolution looks even less appealing when empirical sufficiency, a purely practical requirement, is taken into account. As a way forward, I propose an eco-evo partitioning framework. This strategy enables researchers to estimate the empirical sufficiency of a purely ecological, a purely evolutionary, or a combined eco-evo approach. (shrink)

I am focusing here on the main counterarguments that were raised against a thesis I put forward in my article “Nietzsche, the Overhuman, and Transhumanism” (2009), namely that significant similarities can be found on a fundamental level between the concept of the posthuman, as put forward by some transhumanists, and Nietzsche’s concept of the overhuman. The articles with the counterarguments were published in the recent “Nietzsche and European Posthumanisms” issue of The Journal of Evolution and Technology (January-July 2010). As several (...) commentators referred to identical issues, I decided that it would be appropriate not to respond to each of the articles individually, but to focus on the central arguments and to deal with the counterarguments mentioned in the various replies. I am concerned with each topic in a separate section. The sections are entitled as follows: 1. Technology and evolution; 2. Overcoming nihilism; 3. Politics and liberalism; 4. Utilitarianism or virtue ethics?; 5. The good Life; 6. Creativity and the will to power; 7. Immortality and longevity; 8. Logocentrism; 9. The Third Reich. When dealing with the various topics, I am not merely responding to counterarguments; I also raise questions concerning transhumanism and put forward my own views concerning some of the questions I am dealing with. (shrink)

Research on patients with damage to ventromedial frontal cortices suggests a key role for emotions in practical decision making. This field of investigation is often associated with Antonio Damasio’s Somatic Marker Hypothesis—a putative account of the mechanism through which autonomic tags guide decision making in typical individuals. Here we discuss two questionable assumptions—or ‘myths’—surrounding the direction and interpretation of this research. First, it is often assumed that there is a single somatic marker hypothesis. As others have noted, however, Damasio’s ‘hypothesis’ (...) admits of multiple interpretations (Dunn et al. [2006]; Colombetti [2008]). Our analysis builds upon this point by characterizing decision making as a multi-stage process and identifying the various potential roles for somatic markers. The second myth is that the available evidence suggests a role for somatic markers in the core stages of decision making, that is, during the generation, deliberation, or evaluation of candidate options. On the contrary, we suggest that somatic markers most likely have a peripheral role, in the recognition of decision points, or in the motivation of action. This conclusion is based on an examination of the past twenty-five years of research conducted by Damasio and colleagues, focusing in particular on some early experiments that have been largely neglected by the critical literature. 1 Introduction2 What is the Somatic Marker Model?3 Multiple Somatic Marker Hypotheses3.1 Are somatic markers necessary for practical decision making?3.2 Speed, accuracy, or both?3.3 At which of the five stages of decision making are somatic markers engaged?4 Anecdotal Evidence Suggests a Peripheral Role for Somatic Markers4.1 Chronic indecisiveness4.2 Extreme impulsiveness4.3 Enhanced decision making in the lab4.4 Lack of motivation. 5 Early Experiments Suggest that VMF Damage Leaves Core Processes Intact5.1 The evocative images study5.2 Five problem solving tasks6 Recent Experiments Fail to Discriminate among Alternate Versions of SMH7 Conclusion. (shrink)

Most accounts of our knowledge of the successor axiom claim that this is based on the procedure of adding one. While they usually don’t claim to provide an account of how children actually acquire this knowledge, one may well think that this is how they get that knowledge. I argue that when we look at children’s responses in interviews, the time when they learn the successor axiom and the intermediate learning stages they find themselves in, that there is an empirically (...) viable alternative. I argue that they could also learn it on the basis of a method that has to do with the structure of the numeral system. Specifically, that they (1) use the syntactic structure of the numeral system and (2) attend to the leftmost digits, the one with the highest place-value. Children can learn that this is a reliable method of forming larger numbers by combining two elements. First, a grasp of the syntactic structure of the numeral system. That way they know that the leftmost digit receives the highest value. Second, an interpretation of numerals as designating cardinal values, so that they also realise that increasing or adding digits on the lefthand side of a numeral produces a larger number. There are thus two, currently equally well-supported, ways in which children might learn that there are infinitely many natural numbers. (shrink)

Why should governments or individuals invest time and resources in conserving biodiversity? A popular answer is that biodiversity has both instrumental value for humans and intrinsic value in its own right. Defending Biodiversity critically evaluates familiar arguments for these claims and finds that, at best, they provide good reasons for conserving particular species or regions. However, they fail to provide a strong justification for conserving biodiversity per se. Hence, either environmentalists must develop more compelling arguments for conserving biodiversity or else (...) they should modify their agenda. This short precis is an overview of the central findings of our book. (shrink)

Business Ethics, the Environment &Responsibility, Volume 32, Issue 2, Page 415-418, April 2023.

This volume features a collection of essays on consciousness, which has become one of the hot topics at the crossroads between neuroscience, philosophy, and religious studies. Is consciousness something the brain produces? How can we study it? Is there just one type of consciousness or are there different states that can be discriminated? Are so called "higher states of consciousness" that some people report during meditation pointing towards a new understanding of consciousness? Meditation research is a new discipline that shows (...) new inroads into the study of consciousness. If a meditative practice changes brain structure itself this is direct proof of the causal influence of consciousness onto its substrate. If different states of consciousness can be linked with properties and states of the brain this can be used to study consciousness more directly. If the sense of self is modifiable through meditative techniques and this can be objectively shown through neuro-imaging, this has profound implications for our understanding of who we are. Can consciousness, in deep states of meditative absorption, actually access some aspect of reality which we normally don't? Meditation research can potentially foster us with a new access to the phenomenological method in general. This has even been branded with a new catch-phrase: Contemplative Science. It brings together the most modern neuroscientific approach and the most advanced phenomenological methodology of studying the mind from within, through highly skilled self-observation that has gone through many thousand hours of honing the capacity to look carefully, without distraction. This book addresses these issues by bringing together some of the leading researchers and thinkers in the field. The scope of the volume reaches from first person neuroscience to Indian philosophy, from pedagogic applications to epistemological aspects and from compassion meditation to the study of brain activity. (shrink)

Lawton’s contingency thesis states that there are no useful generalizations at the level of ecological communities because these systems are especially prone to contingent historical events. I argue that this influential thesis has been grounded on the wrong kind of evidence. CT is best understood in Woodward’s terms as a claim about the instability of certain causal dependencies across different background conditions. A recent distinction between evolution and ecology reveals what an adequate test of Lawton’s thesis would look like. To (...) date, CT remains untested. But developments in genome and molecular ecology point in a promising direction. (shrink)

The study of human-human communication and the development of computational models for human-agent communication have diverged significantly throughout the last decade. Yet, despite frequently made claims of “super-human performance” in, e.g., speech recognition or image processing, so far, no system is able to lead a half-decent coherent conversation with a human. In this paper, we argue that we must start to re-consider the hallmarks of cooperative communication and the core capabilities that we have developed for it, and which conversational agents (...) need to be equipped with: incremental joint co-construction and mentalizing. We base our argument on a vast body of work on human-human communication and its psychological processes that we reason to be relevant and necessary to take into account when modeling human-agent communication. We contrast those with current conceptualizations of human-agent interaction and formulate suggestions for the development of future systems. (shrink)

RésuméLes modernistes arabes et les humanistes occidentaux considèrent souvent le philosophe musulman Averroès comme l’un des premiers précurseurs de Kant et des Lumières européennes. Contrairement à cette réputation, cet article soutient que ce sont les critiqueurs de Kant, Herder et Tiedemann, qui ont redécouvert Averroès. Tiedemann a été le premier historiographe allemand à donner un compte rendu précis de la pensée d’Averroès. Cela s’est accompagné d’une réévaluation d’Averroès par Herder dans ses Lettres sur les progrès de l’humanité, dans lesquelles il (...) reconnaît la similitude entre son propre concept de l’esprit du temps en tant que raison historique – son alternative au concept des Lumières d’une raison universelle et anhistorique – et le concept d’Averroès d’un intellect matériel unique pour tous les esprits humains individuels. Enfin, l’article expose les liens possibles entre l’interprétation d’Averroès de l’intellect d’Aristote et le concept de raison historique de Hegel. (shrink)

In this paper we introduce a Gentzen calculus for (a functionally complete variant of) Belnap's logic in which establishing the provability of a sequent in general requires \emph{two} proof trees, one establishing that whenever all premises are true some conclusion is true and one that guarantees the falsity of at least one premise if all conclusions are false. The calculus can also be put to use in proving that one statement \emph{necessarily approximates} another, where necessary approximation is a natural dual (...) of entailment. The calculus, and its tableau variant, not only capture the classical connectives, but also the `information' connectives of four-valued Belnap logics. This answers a question by Avron. (shrink)

In their recent paper Bi-facial truth: a case for generalized truth values Zaitsev and Shramko [7] distinguish between an ontological and an epistemic interpretation of classical truth values. By taking the Cartesian product of the two disjoint sets of values thus obtained, they arrive at four generalized truth values and consider two “semi-classical negations” on them. The resulting semantics is used to define three novel logics which are closely related to Belnap’s well-known four valued logic. A syntactic characterization of these (...) logics is left for further work. In this paper, based on our previous work on a functionally complete extension of Belnap’s logic, we present a sound and complete tableau calculus for these logics. It crucially exploits the Cartesian nature of the four values, which is reflected in the fact that each proof consists of two tableaux. The bi-facial notion of truth of Z&S is thus augmented with a bi-facial notion of proof. We also provide translations between the logics for semi-classical negation and classical logic and show that an argument is valid in a logic for semi-classical negation just in case its translation is valid in classical logic. (shrink)

Mathematical cognition has become an interesting case study for wider theories of cognition. Menary :1–20, 2015) argues that arithmetical cognition not only shows that internalist theories of cognition are wrong, but that it also shows that the Hypothesis of Extended Cognition is right. I examine this argument in more detail, to see if arithmetical cognition can support such conclusions. Specifically, I look at how the use of numerals extends our arithmetical abilities from quantity-related innate systems to systems that can deal (...) with exact numbers of arbitrary size. I then argue that the system underlying our grasp of small numbers is an unhelpful case study for Menary; it doesn’t support an argument for externalism over internalism. The system for large numbers, on the other hand, clearly displays important interactions between public numeral systems and our cognitive processes. I argue that the large number system supports an argument against internalist theories of arithmetical cognition, but that one cannot conclude that the Hypothesis of Extended Cognition is correct. In other words, the large number case doesn’t decide between the Hypothesis of Extended Cognition and the Hypothesis of EMbedded Cognition. (shrink)

This paper discusses the Indirect Duties View implying that, when our actions have no negative effects on humans, we can treat animals any way we wish. I offer several criticisms of this view. Subsequently, I explore some implications of rejecting this view that rise in the contexts of animal research and veterinarian ethics.

Let us by ‘first-order beliefs’ mean beliefs about the world, such as the belief that it will rain tomorrow, and by ‘second-order beliefs’ let us mean beliefs about the reliability of first-order, belief-forming processes. In formal epistemology, coherence has been studied, with much ingenuity and precision, for sets of first-order beliefs. However, to the best of our knowledge, sets including second-order beliefs have not yet received serious attention in that literature. In informal epistemology, by contrast, sets of the latter kind (...) play an important role in some respectable coherence theories of knowledge and justification. In this paper, we extend the formal treatment of coherence to second-order beliefs. Our main conclusion is that while extending the framework to second-order beliefs sheds doubt on the generality of the notorious impossibility results for coherentism, another problem crops up that might be no less damaging to the coherentist project: facts of coherence turn out to be epistemically accessible only to agents who have a good deal of insight into matters external to their own belief states. (shrink)

Wenn Klassiker in der Philosophie die Funktion haben, Medien der Diskussion zu sein, so ist Cassirers Status als philosophischer Klassiker in besonderer Weise gerechtfertigt: Seine Philosophie ist strukturell auf kritische Vermittlung ausgelegt, und zwar sowohl im Sinn eines Theoriemediums, das eine Terminologie und Methode anbietet, wie auch als Mediator im Sinne der Integration unterschiedlicher, teils widerstrebender Positionen als Problemzusammenhänge. Um diese kritisch-kommunikative Bedeutung Cassirers deutlich und zugleich nutzbar zu machen, stellen die Beiträge des Bandes jeweils Aspekte seiner Philosophie in Beziehung (...) zu anderen philosophischen und wissenschaftlichen Projekten. Hierzu gehören analytische Metaphysik, Archäologie des Wissens, neuere psychiatrische und wahrnehmungsphilosophische Ansätze, kritische Theorie, philosophische Anthropologie, Pragmatismus, Leibphänomenologie, die Pittsburgh Schule u.v.m. Der Band versteht sich dabei nicht nur als ein Beitrag zur Cassirer-Forschung, sondern will allgemeiner für die kritisch-kommunikative Haltung eintreten, die sich an Cassirer lernen lässt, um sie in die Praxis der Philosophie insgesamt zu tragen. (shrink)

The dissertation provides a reconstruction of Bernard Bolzano's theory of grounding (both in early and late works) against the background of a classical conception of science and scientific explanation.