Concepts stand at the centre of human cognition. We use concepts in categorizing objects and events in the world, in reasoning and action, and in social interaction. It is therefore not surprising that the study of concepts constitutes a central area of research in philosophy and psychology, yet only recently have the two disciplines developed greater interaction. Recent experiments in psychology that test the role of concepts in categorizing and reasoning have found a great deal of variation, across individuals and (...) cultures, in categorization behaviour. Meanwhile, philosophers of language and mind have investigated the semantic properties of concepts, and how concepts are related to linguistic meaning and linguistic communication. A key motivation behind this was the idea that concepts must be shared across individuals and cultures. With the dawn of experimental philosophy, the proposal that the experimental data from psychology lacks relevance to semantics is increasingly difficult to defend. -/- This volume brings together leading psychologists and philosophers to advance the interdisciplinary debate on the role of concepts in categorizing and reasoning, the relationship between concepts and linguistic meaning and communication, the challenges conceptual variation poses to communication, and the social and political effects of conceptual change. (shrink)

Source attributions based on positive versus negative valence were examined in four experiments. The two sources were individuals who were depicted positively or negatively, and the content of their statements was similarly valenced. When valenced information about the sources was provided after learning the statements, test biases to attribute positive statements to the positive source and negative statements to the negative source were strongly present. Providing the same information prior to learning improved memory, but did not entirely eliminate test biases (...) based on valence. Signal detection analysis suggests that these “halo effect” biases are criterion-based and not memory-based. Therefore, the results are more consistent with descriptions of source-monitoring processes that can benefit from familiarity-based partial information as opposed to descriptions in which source monitoring is primarily recollection-based. (shrink)

Logical pluralism is the view that there is more than one correct logic. In this article, I explore what logical pluralism is, and what it entails, by: (i) distinguishing clearly between relativism about a particular domain and pluralism about that domain; (ii) distinguishing between a number of forms logical pluralism might take; (iii) attempting to distinguish between those versions of pluralism that are clearly true and those that are might be controversial; and (iv) surveying three prominent attempts to argue for (...) logical pluralism and evaluating them along the criteria provided by (ii) and (iii). (shrink)

Belief polarization is said to occur when two people respond to the same evidence by updating their beliefs in opposite directions. This response is considered to be “irrational” because it involves contrary updating, a form of belief updating that appears to violate normatively optimal responding, as for example dictated by Bayes' theorem. In light of much evidence that people are capable of normatively optimal behavior, belief polarization presents a puzzling exception. We show that Bayesian networks, or Bayes nets, can simulate (...) rational belief updating. When fit to experimental data, Bayes nets can help identify the factors that contribute to polarization. We present a study into belief updating concerning the reality of climate change in response to information about the scientific consensus on anthropogenic global warming. The study used representative samples of Australian and U.S. participants. Among Australians, consensus information partially neutralized the influence of worldview, with free-market supporters showing a greater increase in acceptance of human-caused global warming relative to free-market opponents. In contrast, while consensus information overall had a positive effect on perceived consensus among U.S. participants, there was a reduction in perceived consensus and acceptance of human-caused global warming for strong supporters of unregulated free markets. Fitting a Bayes net model to the data indicated that under a Bayesian framework, free-market support is a significant driver of beliefs about climate change and trust in climate scientists. Further, active distrust of climate scientists among a small number of U.S. conservatives drives contrary updating in response to consensus information among this particular group. (shrink)

Logical pluralism is the view that there is more than one formal logic that correctly (or best, or legitimately) codifies the logical consequence relation in natural language. This essay provides a taxonomy of different variations on the logical pluralist theme based on a five-part structure, and then identifies an unoccupied position in this taxonomy: perspectival logical pluralism. Perspectival pluralism provides an attractive position from which to formulate a philosophy of logic from a feminist perspective (and from other, identity-based perspectives, such (...) as critical race theory). An example of how such an account might be developed is sketched. The essay concludes by defusing an obvious objection to the perspectival approach: the claim that the correct logic (or logics), in virtue of the formal nature of logic, should be independent of considerations regarding the identity of the reasoner. (shrink)

The scholars who defend or dispute moral relativism, the idea that a moral principle cannot be applied to people whose culture does not accept it, have concerned themselves with either the philosophical or anthropological aspects of relativism. This study, shows that in order to arrive at a definitive appraisal of moral relativism, it is necessary to understand and investigate both its anthropological and philosophical aspects. Carefully examining the arguments for and against moral relativism, Cook exposes not only that anthropologists (...) have failed in their attempt to support relativism with evidence of cultural differences, but that moral absolutists have been equally unsuccessful in their attempts to refute it. He argues that these conflicting positions are both guilty of an artificial and unrealistic view of morality and proposes a more subtle and complex account of morality. (shrink)

Relatively few articles discuss the ethical issues that accompany healthcare in rural areas. This article presents and discusses the key findings obtained from multi-method research studies conducted over a 9-year period of time in a multi-state rural area. It challenges the efficacy of current models for bioethics, shows what kinds of ethical issues develop in rural communities, and offers a framework for envisioning resources and approaches that may be more appropriate.

Recent studies have shown that deductive reasoning skills are related to mathematical abilities. Nevertheless, so far the links between mathematical abilities and these two forms of deductive inference have not been investigated in a single study. It is also unclear whether these inference forms are related to both basic maths skills and mathematical reasoning, and whether these relationships still hold if the effects of fluid intelligence are controlled. We conducted a study with 87 adult participants. The results showed that transitive (...) reasoning skills were related to performance on a number line task, and conditional inferences were related to arithmetic skills. Additionally, both types of deductive inference were related to mathematical reasoning skills, although transitive and conditional reasoning ability were unrelated. Our results also highlighted the important role that ordering abilities play in mathematical reasoning, extending findings regarding the role of ordering abilities in basic maths skills. These results have implications for the theories of mathematical and deductive reasoning, and they could inspire the development of novel educational interventions. (shrink)

Drawing on psychological and philosophical materials as well as the analysis of specific musical examples, Cook here defines the difference between music...

The Canadian Truth and Reconciliation Commission has been mandated to collect testimonies from survivors of the Indian Residential Schools system. The TRC demands survivors of the residential school system to share their personal narratives under the assumption that the sharing of narratives will inform the Canadian public of the residential school legacy and will motivate a transformation of settler identity. I contend, however, that the TRC provides a concrete example of how a politics of recognition fails to transform relationships between (...) Native and settler Canadians not only because it enacts an internalization of colonial recognition, but because it fails to account for what I call “settler ignorance.” Work in epistemologies of ignorance and epistemic oppression gives language to explain sustained denial and provide tools to further understand how settler denial is sustained, and how it can be made visible, and so challenged. For this task, Mills’s articulation of white ignorance should be expanded to a consideration of white settler ignorance. Over and above an account of white ignorance, such an account will have to consider the underlying logics of settler colonialism. This characterization of settler ignorance will show that the denial of past and ongoing violence against Indigenous peoples, through the reconstruction of the past to assert the primacy of settlers, is not explainable in terms of a lack of recognition but is rather structural ignorance. (shrink)

What kind of duty do we have to try to stop other people doing wrong? The question is intelligible in just about any culture, but few of them seek to answer it in a rigourous fashion. The most striking exception is found in the Islamic tradition, where 'commanding right' and 'forbidding wrong' is a central moral tenet already mentioned in the Koran. As an historian of Islam whose research has ranged widely over space and time, Michael Cook is well (...) placed to interpret this complex subject. His book represents the first sustained attempt to map the history of Islamic reflection on this obligation. It covers the origins of Muslim thinking about 'forbidding wrong', the relevant doctrinal developments over the centuries, and its significance in Sunni and Shi'ite thought today. In this way the book contributes to the understanding of Islamic thought, its relevance to contemporary Islamic politics and ideology, and raises fundamental questions for the comparative study of ethics. (shrink)

This paper applies concepts Deleuze developed in his ‘Postscript on the Societies of Control’, especially those relating to modulatory power, dividuation and control, to aspects of Australian schooling to explore how this transition is manifesting itself. Two modulatory machines of assessment, NAPLAN and My Schools, are examined as a means to better understand how the disciplinary institution is changing as a result of modulation. This transition from discipline to modulation is visible in the declining importance of the disciplinary teacher–student relationship (...) as a measure of the success of the educative process. The transition occurs through seduction because that which purports to measure classroom quality is in fact a serpent of modulation that produces simulacra of the disciplinary classroom. The effect is to sever what happens in the disciplinary space from its representations in a luminiferous ether that overlays the classroom. (shrink)

Debates about new technologies, such as crop and food genetic modification, raise pressing questions about the ways ‘experts’ and ‘ nonexperts’ communicate. These debates are dynamic, characterized by many voices contesting numerous storylines. The discoursal features, including language choices and communication strategies, of the GM debate are in some ways taken for granted and in others actively manipulated by participants. Although there are many voices, some have more influence than others. This study makes use of 50 hours of in-depth interviews (...) with GM scientists, nonexperts, and other stakeholders in the GM debate to examine this phenomenon. We uncover rhetorical devices used by scientists to characterize and ultimately undermine participation by non-experts in areas including rationality, knowledge, understanding and objectivity. Scientists engage with ‘the public’ from their own linguistic and social domain, without reflexive confirmation of their own status as part of the public and the citizenry. This raises a number of interesting ironies and contradictions, which are explored in the article. As such, it provides valuable insights into an increasingly important type of discourse. (shrink)

Although military personnel are required to follow all legal orders, morally the traditional contract between soldier and state rests on shared assumptions about the purposes for which national militaries will and will not be used.

A number of formal constraints on acceptable abstraction principles have been proposed, including conservativeness and irenicity. Hume’s Principle, of course, satisfies these constraints. Here, variants of Hume’s Principle that allow us to count concepts instead of objects are examined. It is argued that, prima facie, these principles ought to be no more problematic than HP itself. But, as is shown here, these principles only enjoy the formal properties that have been suggested as indicative of acceptability if certain constraints on the (...) size of the continuum hold. As a result, whether or not these higher-order versions of Hume’s Principle are acceptable seems to be independent of standard (ZFC) set theory. This places the abstractionist in an uncomfortable dilemma: Either there is some inherent difference between counting objects and counting concepts, or new criteria for acceptability will need to be found. It is argued that neither horn looks promising. (shrink)

This article discusses works of two artists—Marina Abramović and Elżbieta Jabłońska —who explore a clash between heroism and everydayness in the kitchen space. Everyday routine inexorably demands being performed. Its uncompromising decrees spare neither mystics nor the free souls of artists. Even the most spiritual people must eat and drink. To solve the conflict of matter and spirit, these artists draw on different traditions that transcend reality: mysticism and the superheroes of popular culture, respectively. Abramović enters the kitchen as St. (...) Teresa of Avila while Jabłońska dons Superman’s cap. Does one have to rise above the ground to feel that cooking, cleaning, and washing up are not beyond the powers of an average woman? Are the body and the soul doomed to fight each other permanently? Each artist’s work suggests different answers and solutions. (shrink)

Saul Kripke’s theory of truth suffers from expressive limitations – in particular, there are no extensional operators within that framework that allow one to characterize those sentences that fail to receive a truth value within the framework. Especially worrisome is the fact that there is no operator that outputs true on exactly the paradoxical sentences. In this paper I extend Kripke’s approach via the addition of extensional operators, which allows us to characterize many (but not all) such sentences, including the (...) paradoxical ones. (shrink)

It is sometimes suggested that impure sets are spatially co-located with their members (and hence are located in space). Sets, however, are in important respects like numbers. In particular, sets are connected to concepts in much the same manner as numbers are connected to concepts—in both cases, they are fundamentally abstracts of (or corresponding to) concepts. This parallel between the structure of sets and the structure of numbers suggests that the metaphysics of sets and the metaphysics of numbers should parallel (...) each other in relevant ways. This entails, in turn, that impure sets are not co-located with their members (nor are they located in space). (shrink)

For Martin, the right to free higher education may be claimed only by those ready and willing pursue autonomy supporting higher education. The unready and unwilling, among whom may be counted carers, disabled, and devout, are excluded. This is unjust. I argue that this injustice follows from a tension between three elements of Martin’s argument: (1) a universal right to autonomy supporting higher education; (2) qualifications on entitlements to access this right in order to preserve the value of higher educational (...) goods; (3) luck egalitarian motivations in Martin’s distributive ethics. I consider options for avoiding such injustices and their implications for Martin’s argument. (shrink)

In Vermont, approximately 1000–1200 migrant workers from Latin America are helping to sustain the state’s dairy industry. These dairy workers, the majority of whom are from Mexico and Guatemala, experience significant mental health impacts stemming from a combination of stressors due to leaving their home of origin and challenges related to working in rural Vermont. This article employs a framework of structural violence and structural vulnerability to situate the lived experiences and health concerns of migrant farmworkers in Vermont’s dairy industry. (...) It presents two case studies of applied projects that have been utilized to address these health concerns, a gardening project called Huertas that addresses issues of food insecurity and barriers in access to fresh and culturally familiar produce, and a participatory comics project called El Viaje Más Caro that aims to address mental health concerns through engaged storytelling and comics production. The authors of this article have designed and carried out these projects with the goal of interrupting the forms of structural violence and structural vulnerability that negatively impact the wellbeing of farmworkers in the state’s dairy industry. This article describes the successes and limitations of these projects with the hope they can be adapted and replicated for other farmworker communities facing similar health barriers. (shrink)

This article reports the findings of a one-year project examining British press coverage of the genetically modified food debate during the first half of 2003, and both expert and non-expert reactions to that coverage. Two pro-GM newspapers and two anti-GM newspapers were selected for analysis, and all articles mentioning GM during the period in question were stored in a machine readable database. This was then analyzed using corpus linguistic and discourse analytic techniques to reveal recurrent wording, themes and content. This (...) text analysis was complemented by 12 interviews with experts involved in the communication of GM issues, and 12 focus-group sessions in which members of the public reacted to selected newspaper texts and other GM material. Both in the press and in public reaction, the issue of GM was found to be intimately associated with other political events of the time, notably the invasion of Iraq. Except among experts, there was little awareness of the official national debate and issues were approached in more general terms. Pro-GM characterization of the issues as primarily scientific, both by newspapers and experts, was rejected by the anti-GM press and campaigners, and by the focus-group participants. They assessed the issues in a more global frame, rejecting scientists and companies as unreliable. In addition, they linked both US and British GM policy to the invasion of Iraq, and, by analogy, rejected pro-GM arguments as untrustworthy. (shrink)

Leibniz beschäftigte sich nicht nur in seiner Philosophie, sondern auch in seinen Arbeiten als Jurist, als Bibliothekar, als theologischer Ökumeniker und nicht zuletzt in seinem Alltagsleben in der Residenz Hannover immer wieder mit Juden und mit Judentum. Dennoch wurde bisher in der Forschung seine Einstellung zum Judentum kaum durchleuchtet - etwa zur jüdischen Religion, zur Kabbala, zur hebräischen Bibel und rabbinischen Tradition oder zu seinen jüdischen Zeitgenossen selbst, ihren Werken und ihrer Rechtsstellung. Hier blieb die Analyse von Leibniz' persönlicher Haltung (...) und theoretischer Reflexion ein Desiderat. Diese Forschungslücke schließt der vorliegende Band. Er präsentiert die Ergebnisse einer internationalen Konferenz in Potsdam, auf der ausgewiesene Leibniz-Forscher dessen Verhältnis zu Judentum und Juden diskutierten und aus unterschiedlichen Perspektiven in den Blick nahmen. (shrink)

Monte Cook - Robert Desgabets's Representation Principle - Journal of the History of Philosophy 40:2 Journal of the History of Philosophy 40.2 189-200 Robert Desgabets's Representation Principle Monte Cook THE CARTESIAN PHILOSOPHER ROBERT DESGABETS'S only philosophical publication is his Critique de la Critique de la Recherche de la vérité , in which he criticizes Simon Foucher's criticism of Malebranche's Search After Truth. This work has never been republished and is now available only in rare book collections. Desgabets also (...) wrote several unpublished works that were widely circulated during his lifetime and in which he developed a unique philosophical system of his own. Fortunately, these were published in 1983 as Robert Desgabets, Oeuvres philosophiques inédites. Drawing particularly on this volume and especially on the longest work in this volume, Supplément à la philosophie de Monsieur Descartes , I give a glimpse of Desgabets's system. I do so by discussing the surprising view of intentionality central to Desgabets's proof of the external world and to Desgabets's system in general. I note some interesting similarities and differences between Desgabets's position and the positions of Descartes and seventeenth-century Cartesians Malebranche and Arnauld. But mainly I clarify and give some needed structure to Desgabets's argument for his view of intentionality. This argument is interesting in itself as a sustained argument.. (shrink)

Together with the volume “Inquiries in philosophical pragmatics: Theoretical developments,” this book collects selected contributions to the conference Pragmasophia II held in Lisbon in 2018. The eleven essays of this volume focus on how a linguistic structure or expression manifests a pragmatic phenomenon, and are ordered considering their relationship with the specificity of the context. The first three papers, devoted to the topics of prototype-based generalizations, scalar implicatures, and temporal ordering, propose new insights into pragmatic phenomena considering linguistic behavior independent (...) of the social activity in which it is placed. In the last papers, the analytical and empirical goal becomes predominant. Here, the theoretical advances are considered as instruments for analyzing specific texts, such as marketplace interactions, courtroom speech, schizophrenic discourse, narratives of literary texts for children or deception in movies. In between, three papers devoted to emotive or loaded words bridge the passage from more theoretical to more empirical and context-oriented works. (shrink)

An Interview with Ana-Teresa Tymieniecka by Yvanka B. Raynova realized in December 1994 at the World Phenomenology Institute. It was published firstly in Bulgarian, and thereafter in English, on the homepage of the World Phenomenology Institute.