In Grundgesetze der Arithmetik, Frege tried to show that arithmetic is logical by giving gap-free proofs from what he took to be purely logical basic laws. But how do we come to judge these laws as true, and to recognize them as logical? The answer must involve giving an account of the apparent arguments Frege provides for his axioms. Following Sanford Shieh, I take these apparent arguments to instead be exhibitions: the exercise of a logical capacity in order to bring (...) us into a state of judgement. I provide an account of what sort of inferential capacities are at play in such exhibitions, and explain how they lead us to judge that Frege’s primitive laws are general and undeniable. I will also situate my account with respect to other rival interpretations, particularly the elucidatory interpretations of Joan Weiner and Thomas Ricketts. (shrink)

This paper addresses responses to news about the imposing of a local lockdown in a UK city. The opposition to the measure shows it to be controversial as does the associated rejection of the grounds for taking action against covid more generally, which comes alongside the devaluing of expertise, resistance to public health responses, a proliferation of conspiracy theories and misinformation and the harm that can be caused by focussing on non-adherence to covid measure. The research question for this analysis (...) is therefore: how are arguments about the local lockdown discursively formulated in online discussions? Discursive analysis of online discussions following four newspaper articles identified six arguments used that range from scepticism to conspiratorial: scepticism over (1) the prevalence and; (2) severity of covid; (3) lockdowns generally do not work and (4) the specific city lockdown will not work; (5) lockdowns are overly risk averse; and (6) there are hidden political motives for lockdowns. The discussion shows how both the ‘conspiratorial’ and non-conspiratorial arguments are potentially harmful from a public health perspective. (shrink)

Part I: The Life of Cognitive Science:. William Bechtel, Adele Abrahamsen, and George Graham. Part II: Areas of Study in Cognitive Science:. 1. Analogy: Dedre Gentner. 2. Animal Cognition: Herbert L. Roitblat. 3. Attention: A.H.C. Van Der Heijden. 4. Brain Mapping: Jennifer Mundale. 5. Cognitive Anthropology: Charles W. Nuckolls. 6. Cognitive and Linguistic Development: Adele Abrahamsen. 7. Conceptual Change: Nancy J. Nersessian. 8. Conceptual Organization: Douglas Medin and Sandra R. Waxman. 9. Consciousness: Owen Flanagan. 10. Decision Making: J. Frank (...) class='Hi'>Yates and Paul A. Estin. 11. Emotions: Paul E. Griffiths. 12. Imagery and Spatial Representation: Rita E. Anderson. 13. Language Evolution and Neuromechanisms: Terrence W. Deacon. 14. Language Processing: Kathryn Bock and Susan M. Garnsey. 15. Linguistics Theory: D. Terence Langendoen. 16. Machine Learning: Paul Thagard. 17. Memory: Henry L. Roediger III and Lyn M. Goff. 18. Perception: Cees Van Leeuwen. 19. Perception: Color: Austen Clark. 20. Problem Solving: Kevin Dunbar. 21. Reasoning: Lance J. Rips. 22. Social Cognition: Alan J. Lambert and Alison L. Chasteen. 23. Unconscious Intelligence: Rhianon Allen and Arthur S. Reber. 24. Understanding Texts: Art Graesser and Pam Tipping. 25. Word Meaning: Barbara C. Malt. Part III: Methodologies of Cognitive Science:. 26. Artificial Intelligence: Ron Sun. 27. Behavioral Experimentation: Alexander Pollatsek and Keith Rayner. 28. Cognitive Ethology: Marc Bekoff. 29. Deficits and Pathologies: Christopher D. Frith. 30. Ethnomethodology: Barry Saferstein. 31. Functional Analysis: Brian Macwhinney. 32. Neuroimaging: Randy L. Buckner and Steven E. Petersen. 33. Protocal Analysis: K. Anders Ericsson. 34. Single Neuron Electrophysiology: B. E. Stein, M.T. Wallace, and T.R. Stanford. 35. Structural Analysis: Robert Frank. Part IV: Stances in Cognitive Science:. 36. Case-based Reasoning: David B. Leake. 37. Cognitive Linguistics: Michael Tomasello. 38. Connectionism, Artificial Life, and Dynamical Systems: Jeffrey L. Elman. 39. Embodied, Situated, and Distributed Cognition: Andy Clark. 40. Mediated Action: James V. Wertsch. 41. Neurobiological Modeling: P. Read Montague and Peter Dayan. 42. Production Systems: Christian D. Schunn and David Klahr. Part V: Controversies in Cognitive Science:. 43. The Binding Problem: Valerie Gray Hardcastle. 44. Heuristics and Satisficing: Robert C. Richardson. 45. Innate Knowledge: Barbara Landau. 46. Innateness and Emergentism: Elizabeth Bates, Jeffrey L. Elman, Mark H. Johnson, Annette Karmiloff-Smith, Domenico Parisi, and Kim Plunkett. 47. Intentionality: Gilbert Harman. 48. Levels of Explanation and Cognition Architectures: Robert N. McCauley. 49. Modularity: Irene Appelbaum. 50. Representation and Computation: Robert S. Stufflebeam. 51. Representations: Dorrit Billman. 52. Rules: Terence Horgan and John Tienson. 53. Stage Theories Refuted: Donald G. Mackay. Part VI: Cognitive Science in the Real World:. 54. Education: John T. Bruer. 55. Ethics: Mark L. Johnson. 56. Everyday Life Environments: Alex Kirlik. 57. Institutions and Economics: Douglass C. North. 58. Legal Reasoning: Edwina L. Rissland. 59. Mental Retardation: Norman W. Bray, Kevin D. Reilly, Lisa F. Huffman, Lisa A. Grupe, Mark F. Villa, Kathryn L. Fletcher, and Vivek Anumolu. 60. Science: William F. Brewer and Punyashloke Mishra. Selective Biographies of Major Contributors to Cognitive Science: William Bechtel and Tadeusz Zawidzki. (shrink)

This dissertation is about prejudice. In particular, it examines the theoretical and ethical questions raised by research on implicit social biases. Social biases are termed "implicit" when they are not reported, though they lie just beneath the surface of consciousness. Such biases are easy to adopt but very difficult to introspect and control. Despite this difficulty, I argue that we are personally responsible for our biases and obligated to overcome them if they can bring harm to ourselves or to others. (...) My dissertation addresses the terms of their removal. It is grounded in a comprehensive examination of empirical research and, as such, is a contribution to social psychology. Although implicit social biases significantly influence our judgment and action, they are not reducible to beliefs or desires. Rather, they constitute a class of their own. Understanding their particular character is vital to determining how to replace them with more preferable habits of mind. I argue for a model of interpersonal fluency, a kind of ethical expertise that requires transforming our underlying dispositions of thought, feeling, and action. (shrink)

Salience-sensitivity is a form of anti-intellectualism that says the following: whether a true belief amounts to knowledge depends on which error-possibilities are salient to the believer. I will investigate whether salience-sensitivity can be motivated by appeal to bank case intuitions. I will suggest that so-called third-person bank cases threaten to sever the connection between bank case intuitions and salience-sensitivity. I will go on to argue that salience-sensitivists can overcome this worry if they appeal to egocentric bias, a general tendency to (...) project our own mental states onto others. I will then suggest that a similar strategy is unavailable to stakes-sensitivists, who hold that whether a true belief amounts to knowledge depends on what is at stake for the believer. Bank case intuitions motivate salience- but not stakes-sensitivity. (shrink)

Austrian economist Ludwig Mises’s central role in the socialist calculation debates has been consensually acknowledged since the early 1920s. Yet, only recently Nemeth, O’Neill, Uebel, and others have drawn particular attention to Mises’s encounter with logical empiricist Otto Neurath. Despite several surprising agreements, Neurath and Mises certainly provide different answers to the questions “what is meant by rational economic theory” (Neurath) and whether “socialism is the abolition of rational economy” (Mises). Previous accounts and evaluations of the exchange between Neurath and (...) Mises suffer from attaching little regard to their idiosyncratic uses of the term “rational.” The paper at hand reconstructs and critically compares the different conceptions of rationality defended by Neurath and Mises. The author presents two different resolutions to a detected tension in Mises’s deliberations on rationality: the first is implicit in Neurath’s, O’Neill’s, and Salerno’s reading of Mises and faces several interpretational problems; the author proposes a divergent interpretation. Based on the reconstructions of Neurath’s and Mises’s conceptions of rationality, the author suggests some implications with respect to Viennese Late Enlightenment and the socialist calculation debates. (shrink)

One of the problems that Bayesian regularity, the thesis that all contingent propositions should be given probabilities strictly between zero and one, faces is the possibility of random processes that randomly and uniformly choose a number between zero and one. According to classical probability theory, the probability that such a process picks a particular number in the range is zero, but of course any number in the range can indeed be picked. There is a solution to this particular problem on (...) the books: a measure that assigns the same infinitesimal probability to each number between zero and one. I will show that such a measure, while mathematically interesting, is pathological for use in confirmation theory, for the same reason that a measure that assigns an infinitesimal probability to each possible outcome in a countably infinite lottery is pathological. The pathology is that one can force someone to assign a probability within an infinitesimal of one to an unlikely event. (shrink)

This paper responds to the contributions by Alexander Bird, Nathan Wildman, David Yates, Jennifer McKitrick, Giacomo Giannini & Matthew Tugby, and Jennifer Wang. I react to their comments on my 2015 book Potentiality: From Dispositions to Modality, and in doing so expands on some of the arguments and ideas of the book.

Shocking. There seems no other response to the Fox findings. The bioethics community has been working for decades to improve the quality of, and access to, competent healthcare ethics consultation....

Ann M. Blair -- Lorraine Daston -- Benjamin Elman -- Anthony Grafton -- Jill Kraye -- Peter N. Miller -- Jean-Louis Quantin -- Quentin Skinner.

An account, based principally on Ferguson's Essay on the History of Civil Society, of his concept of enlightened governance, and of the relation between that concept and his concept of human nature.

This essay examines the provenance of a single, curious term that William James often used in connection with his own pragmatism. The term is Denkmittel, an uncommon German contraction of Denk and Mittel. James’s Central European sources for this now forgotten bit of philosophical jargon provide a small illustration of a bigger historical point that too often gets obscured. Pragmatism—James’s pragmatism, at least—was both allied with and inspired by a broader sweep of scientific instrumentalism that was already flourishing in fin (...) de siècle European philosophy. (shrink)

Journal of Political Philosophy, Volume 30, Issue 1, Page 48-69, March 2022.

Brain states, which correlate with specific motor, cognitive, and emotional states, may be monitored with noninvasive techniques such as electroencephalography and magnetoencephalography that measure macroscopic cortical activity manifested as oscillatory network dynamics. These rhythmic cortical signatures provide insight into the neuronal activity used to identify pathological cortical function in numerous neurological and psychiatric conditions. Sensory and transcranial stimulation, entraining the brain with specific brain rhythms, can effectively induce desired brain states correlated with such cortical rhythms. Because brain states have distinct (...) neural correlates, it may be possible to induce a desired brain state by replicating these neural correlates through stimulation. To do so, we propose recording brain waves from a “donor” in a particular brain state using EEG/MEG to extract cortical signatures of the brain state. These cortical signatures would then be inverted and used to entrain the brain of a “recipient” via sensory or transcranial stimulation. We propose that brain states may thus be transferred between people by acquiring an associated cortical signature from a donor, which, following processing, may be applied to a recipient through sensory or transcranial stimulation. This technique may provide a novel and effective neuromodulation approach to the noninvasive, non-pharmacological treatment of a variety of psychiatric and neurological disorders for which current treatments are mostly limited to pharmacotherapeutic interventions. (shrink)

Consequential historical decisions that shaped transportation systems and their influence on society have many valuable lessons. The decisions we learn from and choose to make going forward will play a key role in shaping the mobility landscape of the future. This is especially pertinent as artificial intelligence (AI) becomes more prevalent in the form of autonomous vehicles (AVs). Throughout urban history, there have been cyclical transport oppressions of previous-generation transportation methods to make way for novel transport methods. These cyclical oppressions (...) can be identified in the baroque and modernist periods, and a third oppression may occur in the contemporary period. To explore the idea of a third oppression, we focus on the bicycle and outline the history of cycling to understand how historical mode oppression unfolded. We then present several social and political factors that contributed to the oppression of cycling and share recommendations for how to avoid future oppressions including political, social, and design actions for researchers and policymakers to take. This paper argues that priorities for AI-enabled mobility and cyclist needs be advanced in proportion to the extent that they contribute to societal goals of urban containment, public realm, and proximal cities. Additionally, future mobility evolutions should prioritise mobility justice and mode choice over inducing a singular transportation method. (shrink)

Casini, Illari, Russo, and Williamson (2011) suggest to model mechanisms by means of recursive Bayesian networks (RBNs) and Clarke, Leuridan, and Williamson (2014) extend their modelling approach to mechanisms featuring causal feedback. One of the main selling points of the RBN approach should be that it provides answers to questions concerning manipulation and control. In this paper I demonstrate that the method to compute the effects of interventions the authors mentioned endorse leads to absurd results under the additional assumption of (...) faithfulness, which can be expected to hold for many RBN models of mechanisms. (shrink)

Five decades ago, Henry Knowles Beecher, a renowned professor of research anesthesiology, sought to solve a problem created by modern medicine. The solution proposed by Beecher and his colleagues on the Ad Hoc Committee of the Harvard Medical School to Examine the Definition of Brain Death proved very influential.1 Indeed, other contemporaneous medical developments magnified its significance yet also made the solution it offered somewhat problematic. As we mark this fiftieth anniversary, at a time when concerns about the conceptual model (...) on which its recommendations rested are being voiced by critics from medicine as well as philosophy, it is worthwhile to view the committee's report in relation to the problem that prompted its existence as well as the one to which it was quickly applied. (shrink)

For two million years, members of Homo sapiens (and the species from which it emerged) have shaped to their purpose almost everything they found in nature. Yet we are still reproducing by sex. This is a poor method of conceiving human beings, because it surrenders many of the future child’s characteristics to luck. Both parents and children are better off the more parents control their children’s genotypes. The emerging technologies that enable this do not reduce free will and will not (...) eliminate human characteristics (such as certain forms of “mental illness”) that are worth preserving; rather, they will match types of children to parents who can appreciate them. Technological reproduction, not reproduction by sex, should be regarded as truly human. It is the application of the power of thought to human reproduction, and, like the application of that power to external objects and to memes, it will enhance our capacities. (shrink)

Bonaventure’s De reductione artium ad theologiam is a classic of medieval literature that every student of medieval philosophy or theology is likely to have read during his or her career. Given the scholarly attention the work has attracted, one might, therefore, be tempted to consider that there remains little to add to its interpretation. Yet, as Joshua C. Benson has shown in a series of articles, this is clearly a fallacy. In his inquiries concerning the literary genre of the De (...) reductione, Benson has put forward strong arguments suggesting that the text in question formed part of Bonaventure’s principium, that is, his inception ceremony as a master of theology.1While it is true that the principia express... (shrink)

Gerard of Abbeville's inception speech, which he delivered during the 1250s as a graduating master in theology at the University of Paris, stands out among the extant principia. While many thirteenth-century inception speeches drew clear distinctions between philosophy and theology, and metaphysics and revealed theology in particular, Gerard - who was the foremost secular master of his day - adopted a different strategy in order to establish the preeminence of theology with regard to all other sciences. Consciously avoiding to pit (...) theology against philosophy, he proposed to redefine the relations between both within the conceptual frame of sapiential knowledge. The article analyses how Gerard argues in favor of a supreme wisdom, capable of accommodating Aristotle's first philosophy and Christian theology. Showing that Gerard's approach did not remain uncontested, it traces the remarkable influence of his principium. (shrink)

According to David Miller, immigration is not a human right. Conversely, Kieran Oberman makes a case for immigration as a human right. We agree with the latter view, but we show that its starting point is mistaken. Indeed, both Miller and Oberman discuss the right to immigration within the liberal paradigm: it is a right or not depending on the correct balance between the interests of the citizens of a given national state and the interests of the immigrants. Instead, we (...) claim that public justification can underpin immigration as a human right. That said, the public justification of the right to immigration has several counterarguments to rebut. Before we deal with that issue, relying on Jürgen Habermas’s social theory, we examine the legal structures that could support the right to immigration in practice. To be sure, this does not provide the normative justification needed, instead it shows the framework that allows the institutional realization of this right. Then, through a combination of civic and cosmopolitan forms of solidarity, the article discusses the formation of a public sphere, which could provide the justification of the right to immigration. (shrink)

Mental causation is notoriously threatened by the causal exclusion argument. A prominent strategy to save mental causation from causal exclusion consists in subscribing to an interventionist account of causation. This move has, however, recently been challenged by several authors. In this paper, we do two things: We (i) develop what we consider to be the strongest version of the interventionist causal exclusion argument currently on the market and (ii) propose a new way how it can in principle be overcome. In (...) particular, we propose to replace strict supervenience in the assumption that the mental supervenes on the physical by probabilistic supervenience and show how this move has the potential to license the inference to mental causation. Finally, we argue that probabilistic supervenience captures some of the most important intuitions that strict supervenience captures and discuss possible objections to weakening strict supervenience in the way we suggest. (shrink)

Gleichzeitig reformuliert er die Erbsundenlehre der christlichen Tradition, wenn er den Menschen als radikal bose bezeichnet. Heit zeigt, dass Kant die Spannung zwischen Freiheit und Sunde nur durch religiosen Vollzug fur uberwindbar halt.

Carl Mengers Grundsätze der Volkswirthschaftslehre erscheinen 1871 und markieren die Geburtsstunde der Österreichischen Schule der Nationalökonomie. 150 Jahre später kennen mehr Menschen in mehr Ländern die Österreichische Schule als je zuvor. -/- Carl Menger, Ludwig Mises und Friedrich Hayek werden verteufelt oder wie Popstars verehrt. Ihre Köpfe zieren Poster und T-Shirts in aller Welt. -/- Die Wurzeln der heutigen Neo-Austrian School liegen aber in Wien, wo zwischen 1871 und 1934 Wissenschaft, Philosophie, Kunst und Kaffeehauskultur einander zu Höchstleistungen inspirieren. Von diesen (...) interdisziplinären und vielfältigen Wiener Ursprüngen und ihren globalen Folgen handelt dieses Buch. -/- Möge es als Fußnote zur glorreichen Wiener Spätaufklärung Wissen vermitteln, Ideen stiften, zum Nachdenken und tolerant-kritischen Diskutieren anregen – und hoffentlich auch ein wenig unterhalten! (shrink)

It is commonly assumed that classical logic is the embodiment of a realist ontology. In “Sets and Semantics”, however, Jonathan Lear challenged this assumption in the particular case of set theory, arguing that even if one is a set-theoretic Platonist, due attention to a special feature of set theory leads to the conclusion that the correct logic for it is intuitionistic. The feature of set theory Lear appeals to is the open-endedness of the concept of set. This article advances reasons (...) internal to Lear’s account to show that his argument for intuitionistic set theory is unsuccessful. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Introduction Necessity and Essence Naming and Reference Rules and Meaning Conclusion References.

The tides of change constantly surface new currents in the world of business. No longer is it sufficient to seek the static positional advantage offered by classical Porterian analysis. This article explores the emerging direction of business strategy as expressed by the concept of evolutionary advantage. It examines first the major forms of business knowledge over the last century, then considers mainstream frameworks for strategic analysis, and offers, as a compelling alternative, the emerging notions of evolutionary development and evolutionary learning. (...) Through application of Evolutionary Systems Design, it is shown how an organization may cultivate strategies for sustainable success. (shrink)