The question whether AI systems have agency is gaining increasing importance in discussions of responsibility for AI behavior. This paper argues that an approach to artificial agency needs to be teleological, and consider the role of human goals in particular if it is to adequately address the issue of responsibility. I will defend the view that while AI systems can be viewed as autonomous in the sense of identifying or pursuing goals, they rely on human goals and other values incorporated (...) into their design, and are, as such, dependent on human agents. As a consequence, AI systems cannot be held morally responsible, and responsibility attributions should take into account normative and social aspects involved in the design and deployment of the said AI. My argument falls in line with approaches critical of attributing moral agency to artificial agents, but draws from the philosophy of action, highlighting further philosophical underpinnings of current debates on artificial agency. (shrink)

Approaching mental health on a global scale with particular reference to low- and mid-income countries raises issues concerning the disregard of the local context and values and the imposition of values characteristic of the Global North. Seeking a philosophical viewpoint to surmount these problems, the present paper argues for a value-laden framework for psychiatry with the specific incorporation of value pluralism, particularly in relation to the Global South context, while also emphasizing personal values such as the choice of treatment. In (...) sketching out this framework, the paper aims to overcome the clash between universalism and relativism about psychiatric categories by focusing on how overlaps between cultures can contribute to ontology-building. A case study analyzing ethnopsychiatric research in the context of South India will illustrate the proposed view, while also pointing out avenues for further research on the causal efficacy of local shared beliefs about mental disorder. If approaches across different traditions and theoretical frames are shown to work in treating similar ailments, causal connections appear to cut across the different ontologies. Ethnopsychiatry would play a central role in such research, namely in disclosing the variables and mechanisms at work within the local approaches. (shrink)

This paper investigates the concept of behavioral autonomy in Artificial Life by drawing a parallel to the use of teleological notions in the study of biological life. Contrary to one of the leading assumptions in Artificial Life research, I argue that there is a significant difference in how autonomous behavior is understood in artificial and biological life forms: the former is underlain by human goals in a way that the latter is not. While behavioral traits can be explained in relation (...) to evolutionary history in biological organisms, in synthetic life forms behavior depends on a design driven by a research agenda, further shaped by broader human goals. This point will be illustrated with a case study on a synthetic life form. Consequently, the putative epistemic benefit of reaching a better understanding of behavioral autonomy in biological organisms by synthesizing artificial life forms is subject to doubt: the autonomy observed in such artificial organisms may be a mere projection of human agency. Further questions arise in relation to the need to spell out the relevant human aims when addressing potential social or ethical implications of synthesizing artificial life forms. (shrink)

This paper takes a critical stance on Tallis’s separation of causation and agency. While his critique of the causal theory of action and the assumptions about causation underlying different versions of determinism, including the one based on neuroscience is right, his rejection of causation (of all sorts) has implausible consequences. Denying the link between action and causation amounts to overlooking the role action plays in causal inference and in the origin of causal concepts. I suggest that a weaker version of (...) Tallis’ claim, compatible with causation understood as agency, would work better. (shrink)

This article provides a conceptual account of causal understanding by connecting current psychological research on time and causality with philosophical debates on the causal asymmetry. I argue that causal relations are viewed as asymmetric because they are understood in temporal terms. I investigate evidence from causal learning and reasoning in both children and adults: causal perception, the temporal priority principle, and the use of temporal cues for causal inference. While this account does not suffice for correct inferences of causal structure, (...) I show it to serve as a preliminary understanding of causal concepts as asymmetric, that later incorporates other types of evidence. This approach supplies causal models with an asymmetric concept of causation that underlies hypotheses about causal structure, as I will illustrate from the framework of the knowledge-based causal induction model. I further argue for an integrating perspective, showing how the understanding of causes as preceding their effects underlies both psychological models and philosophical debates over time and the causal asymmetry, particularly regarding problem cases such as simultaneous causation or backwards causation, and the conceptual connection between causation and action. (shrink)

Ganeri's [2018] discussion of mental time travel and the self focuses on remembering the past, but has less to say with respect to the status of future-oriented mental time travel. This paper aims to disambiguate the relation between prospection and the self from the framework of Ganeri's interpretation of three Buddhist views—by Buddhaghosa, Vasubandhu, and Dignaga. Is the scope of Ganeri's discussion confined to the past, or is there a stronger assumption that future thought always entails self-representation? I argue that (...) if mental time travel towards the past and towards the future are continuous, both past and future thought should be possible independently of self-representation. An assumption of discontinuity however would enable the employment of the self as one of the defining differences between remembering the past and imagining the future. The two options can be further contrasted on the basis of distinct ways of constructing past/future scenarios (field vs. observer perspective), modes of experiencing time (known vs. lived), and the origin of mental time travel (episodic vs. semantic memory). I further assess the compatibility of future-oriented thought with the three Buddhist views on the basis of these coordinates. (shrink)

This paper discusses von Wright's theory of causation from Explanation and Understanding and Causality and Determinism in contemporary context. I argue that there are two important common points that von Wright's view shares with the version of manipulability currently supported by Woodward: the analysis of causal relations in a system modelled on controlled experiments, and the explanation of manipulability through counterfactuals - with focus on the counterfactual account of unmanipulable causes. These points also mark von Wright's departure from previous action-based (...) theories of causation. Owing to these two features, I argue that, upon classifying different versions of manipulability theories, von Wright's view should be placed closer to the interventionist approach than to the agency theory, where it currently stands. Furthermore, given its relevance in contemporary context, which this paper aims to establish, I claim that von Wright's theory can be employed to solve present problems connected to manipulability approaches to causation. (shrink)

This article examines how specific realist and projectivist versions of manipulability theories of causation deal with the problem of objectivity. Does an agent-dependent concept of manipulability imply that conflicting causal claims made by agents with different capacities can come out as true? In defence of the projectivist stance taken by the agency view, I argue that if the agent’s perspective is shown to be uniform across different agents, then the truth-values of causal claims do not vary arbitrarily and, thus, reach (...) a satisfactory level of objectivity. My argument connects Price’s considerations on the situation of deliberation, whose structure, common to all agents, is the same with respect to both decision making and causal claims on a concept inspired by Douglas’s classification of objectivity of thought processes: the perspective of the detached agent. I further argue that, despite his agent-independent concept of intervention, Woodward’s claim of a stronger objectivity standard cannot be achieved, as the relativity of causal concepts to a variable set brings about the issue of the agent’s choice of variables. Consequently, a more permissive objectivity standard applies to both views. (shrink)

This paper discusses Simone de Beauvoir’s views on the meaning of life as presented in The Ethics of Ambiguity. I argue that Beauvoir’s view matches contemporary hybrid views on the meaning of life, incorporating both subjective and objective elements, while connecting them in a distinct way—through the tension between self and other. I then analyze the meaning of excessively competitive projects through Beauvoir’s ethics and conclude that success that amounts to denying other people’s access to the things one values is (...) absurd. I use the case of contemporary academia as an illustration of extreme competition, then employ Beauvoir’s views to suggest a shift towards more meaningful practices. (shrink)

This paper argues that there are notable similarities between Collingwood’s method of investigating absolute presuppositions and contemporary strands of pragmatism, focusing on two areas - the critique of realism and causation. It is first argued that there are methodological similarities between Collingwood’s argument against realism and his Kantian-inspired critique of metaphysics, and Putnam’s critique of externalism. Regarding causation, it is argued that Collingwood’s view and Price’s pragmatist approach have a common method – investigating causation in the context of specific human (...) practices. Both authors place causation in the framework of scientific inquiry as opposed to making it the subject of the inquiry itself. Thus, Collingwood’s work proves to be in line with current metaphilosophical debates, particularly in the philosophy of science. (shrink)

This paper investigates how an introductory philosophy course influences the moral and political development of undergraduate students in a Liberal Arts university in Central Asia. Within a context of rapid changes characteristic of transitional societies—reflected in the organization of higher education—philosophy provides students with the means to reason about moral and political values in a way that overcomes the old ideological tenets as well as contemporary reluctance to theoretical inquiry. Studying philosophy provides a remedy for deficiencies in both secondary and (...) higher education, by improving general reading and reasoning skills, that enable the development of moral reasoning. Furthermore, familiarity with major works of moral and political philosophy can help students comprehend the patterns of social change, as well as surmount the issue of unsatisfactory theoretical foundations for social science. (shrink)

This paper examines philosophical debates about concepts of biodiversity, making the case for conceptual pluralism. Taking a pragmatist perspective, I argue that normative concepts of biodiversity and eco-centric concepts of biodiversity can serve different purposes. The former would help stress the values of local communities, which have often been neglected by both early scientific approaches to conservation, and by policy makers prioritizing the political or economic interests of specific groups. The latter would help build local research programs independent of pressures (...) from economic or political actors. I employ a case study on environmental research on walnut forests in Kyrgyzstan in support of my argument. Against tendencies to frame different understandings of biodiversity in terms of geographical areas, I propose an interpretation drawing on the philosophy of ecology. Adherence to environmental pragmatism enables a sufficiently complex picture of developing environmental research in the area, capturing issues about scientific framings and local understandings. (shrink)

R&D collaborations between industry, government, civil society, and research ) have recently gained attention from R&D theorists and practitioners. In aiming to come to grips with their complexity, past models have generally taken a stakeholder-analytical approach based on stakeholder types. Yet stakeholder types are difficult to operationalise. We therefore argue that a processual model is more suited for studying the interaction in QHCs because it eschews matters of titles and identities. We develop such a model in which the QHC is (...) represented as a process of generating four types of value: research value, market value, political value, and societal value. We then apply this processual model in analysing real-life cases of friction in QHCs. Friction is seen, not as an interpersonal clash, but as a discrepancy between two or more value-creation processes that compete for limited resources. (shrink)

When a technology is seen as the right solution to a recognized problem, the development of alternative technologies comes under threat. To secure much-needed resources, proponents of alternative technologies must, in these conditions, restart societal discussion on the status quo, a process at once technological and discursive known as ‘path creation’. In this article, we investigate discussion-restarting strategies employed by supporters of emerging technologies in the field of solar fuels, particularly the advocates of a technology referred to as ‘artificial photosynthesis’. (...) For illustrative purposes we explore four such strategies: revisiting weak spots, resizing the problem, redefining the game, and renegotiating labels. We conclude with a methodological reflection on the empirical study of discursive strategies in a socio-technical system. We further suggest a more systematic application of discourse-analytical and argumentation-theoretical insights that can complement current scholarship on path dependence and path creation. (shrink)

We think and speak in figures. This is key to our creativity. We re-imagine one thing as another, pretend ourself to be another, do one thing in order to achieve another, or say one thing to mean another. This comes easily because of our abilities both to work out meaning in context and re-purpose words. Figures of speech are tools for this re-purposing. Whether we use metaphor, simile, irony, hyperbole, and litotes individually, or as compound figures, the uses are all (...) rooted in literal meanings. These uses invite us to explore the context to find new meanings, new purposes, beyond the literal. -/- This special issue of Philosophical Studies brings together eight papers on various aspects and applications of figurative speech including: David Hills, Mitch Green, Liz Camp, Ofra Magidor, Larry Horn, Ken Walton, Stephen Barker, and Mihaela Popa-Wyatt. (shrink)

Reclamation is the phenomenon of an oppressed group repurposing language to its own ends. A case study is reclamation of slur words. Popa-Wyatt and Wyatt (2018) argued that a slurring utterance is a speech act which performs a discourse role assignment. It assigns a subordinate role to the target, while the speaker assumes a dominant role. This pair of role assignments is used to oppress the target. Here I focus on how reclamation works and under what conditions its benefits (...) can stabilise. I start by reviewing the data and describing preconditions and motivations for reclamation. Can reclamation be explained in the same basic framework as regular slurring utterances? I argue that it can. I also identify some features that must be a prediction of any theory of reclamation. I conclude that reclamation is an instance of a much broader class of acts we do with words to change the distribution of power: it begets power, but it also requires it. (shrink)

Compound figures are a rich, and under-explored area for tackling fundamental issues in philosophy of language. This paper explores new ideas about how to explain some features of such figures. We start with an observation from Stern that in ironic-metaphor, metaphor is logically prior to irony in the structure of what is communicated. Call this thesis Logical-MPT. We argue that a speech-act-based explanation of Logical-MPT is to be preferred to a content-based explanation. To create this explanation we draw on Barker’s (...) expressivist speech-act theory, in which speech-acts build on other speech-acts to achieve the desired communicative effects. In particular, we show how Barker’s general ideas explain metaphor as an assertive-act, and irony as a ridiculing-act. We use Barker’s notion of proto-illocutionary-acts to show how metaphorical-acts and ironic-acts can build one on the other. Finally, we show that while an ironic-act can build on a metaphorical-act, a metaphorical-act cannot build on an ironic-act. This restriction on how they can be composed establishes Logical-MPT via a different route. (shrink)

Slurring is a kind of hate speech that has various effects. Notable among these is variable offence. Slurs vary in offence across words, uses, and the reactions of audience members. Patterns of offence aren’t adequately explained by current theories. We propose an explanation based on the unjust power imbalance that a slur seeks to achieve. Our starting observation is that in discourse participants take on discourse roles. These are typically inherited from social roles, but only exist during a discourse. A (...) slurring act is a speech-act that alters the discourse roles of the target and speaker. By assigning discourse roles the speaker unjustly changes the power balance in the dialogue. This has a variety of effects on the target and audience. We show how these notions explain all three types of offence variation. We also briefly sketch how a role and power theory can help explain silencing and appropriation. Explanatory power lies in the fact that offence is correlated with the perceived unjustness of the power imbalance created. (shrink)

Two rival accounts of irony claim, respectively, that pretence and echo are independently sufficient to explain central cases. After highlighting the strengths and weaknesses of these accounts, I argue that an account in which both pretence and echo play an essential role better explains these cases and serves to explain peripheral cases as well. I distinguish between “weak” and “strong” hybrid theories, and advocate an “integrated strong hybrid” account in which elements of both pretence and echo are seen as complementary (...) in a unified mechanism. I argue that the allegedly mutually exclusive elements of pretence and echo are in fact complementary aspects enriching a core structure as follows: by pretending to have a perspective/thought F, an ironic speaker U echoes a perspective/thought G. F is merely pretended, perhaps caricaturised or exaggerated, while G is real/possible. (shrink)

East Asia’s economy is leading the world into the new Asian century. While meritocratic practices in the educational and private sectors are often considered pivotal conditions for East Asia’s economic success, experts have pointed out that the path ahead requires new approaches to ensure social cohesion and stability, which depend on the quality of relations across social divides. These considerations raise multiple questions for philosophers: What forms of social meritocracy are necessary to sustain social cohesion? Moreover, how can the detrimental (...) effects of meritocratic practices be contained? Is it possible to utilise some of the intellectual resources indigenous to East Asia to generate innovative solutions? This paper argues that the answers to these questions lie in the indigenous Confucian conceptual resources. Confucian ideas can inspire a more desirable societal ideal for the future of East Asia. In particular, the Confucian emphasis on cultivating reciprocal harmonious human relationships and others’ morality can guide new approaches to fostering social cohesion. As Confucian personal cultivation through harmonious relations is a process of social cohesion, these ideas inspire a) a multiple approach to policymaking that is not only grounded in economic redistribution, b) a richer understanding of societal progress, and c) a democratic approach to fostering social cohesion. Unlike Confucian meritocrats and scholars who defend the Confucian roots of East Asian forms of political and social meritocracy, this paper proves that Confucian conceptual resources can help formulate a societal vision that strengthens cohesion and mitigates the adverse effects of meritocratic practices. (shrink)

Slurs are typically defined as conveying contempt based on group-membership. However, here I argue that they are not a unitary group. First, I describe two dimensions of variation among derogatives: how targets are identified, and how offensive the term is. This supports the typical definition of slurs as opposed to other derogatives. I then highlight problems with this definition, mainly caused by variable offence across slur words. In the process I discuss how major theories of slurs can account for variable (...) offence, and conclude that contempt based on group-membership doesn’t cover all the data. I finish by noting that the most offensive slurs are those that target oppressed groups. I claim it is oppression that underpins most offence, and that beyond this offensive property, some slurs are actively used to oppress. (shrink)

Traditional approaches to conflict are oriented towards establishing consensus, either in the form of a resolution of the conflict or in the form of an ‘agree-to-disagree’ standstill between the stakeholders. In this paper, we criticize these traditional approaches, each for specific reasons, and we propose and develop the agonistic approach to conflict. Based on Chantal Mouffe’s agonistic democratic theory, the agonistic approach to conflict is more welcoming of dissensus, replacing discussion stoppers with discussion starters and replacing standstills with contestation. We (...) illustrate such replacements and develop this approach, we analyse technological conflicts in a concrete R&D setting: the global hydrogen economy. From this context, we focus on the conflict between the proponents of blue hydrogen and those of green hydrogen. We conclude by highlighting the advantage of the agonistic approach but also drawing attention to its own specific risk, namely, antagonism. (shrink)

Phenomenological critique attempts to retrieve the lived experience of a human community alienated from its truthful condition and immersed in historical crises brought by processes of objectification and estrangement. This introductory article challenges two methodological assumptions that are largely shared in North American Critical Phenomenology: the definition of phenomenology as a first person approach of experience and the rejection of transcendental eidetics. While reflecting on the importance of otherness and community for phenomenology’s critical orientation, we reconsider the importance of eidetics (...) from the standpoint of Husserl’s genetic phenomenology, highlighting its historical and contingent character. Contrary to the received view of Husserl’s classical phenomenology as an idealistic and rigid undertaking, we show that his genetic phenomenology is interested in the material formation of meaning (Sinnbildung), offering resources for a phenomenological approach to a materialist social theory. Keywords: critical phenomenology, critical theory, genetic phenomenology, community, normativity. (shrink)

This paper argues that we need to re-think the semantics/pragmatics distinction in the light of new evidence from embedding of irony. This raises a new version of the old problem of ‘embedded implicatures’. I argue that embedded irony isn’t fully explained by solutions proposed for other embedded implicatures. I first consider two strategies: weak pragmatics and strong pragmatics. These explain embedded irony as truth-conditional content. However, by trying to shoehorn irony into said-content, they raise problems of their own. I conclude (...) by considering how a modified Gricean model can explain that irony embeds qua implicature. This leads us to prefer a local implicature model. This has important consequences for how we draw the semantics/pragmatics distinction. (shrink)

Harmful and dangerous language is frequent in social media, in particular in spaces which are considered anonymous and/or allow free participation. In this paper, we analyse the language in a Telegram channel populated by followers of Donald Trump, in order to identify the ways in which harmful language is used to create a specific narrative in a group of mostly like-minded discussants. Our research has several aims. First, we create an extended taxonomy of potentially harmful language that includes not only (...) hate speech and direct insults, but also more indirect ways of poisoning online discourse, such as divisive speech and the glorification of violence. We apply this taxonomy to a large portion of the corpus. Our data gives empirical evidence for harmful speech such as in/out-group divisive language and the use of codes within certain communities which have not often been investigated before. Second, we compare our manual annotations to several automatic methods of classifying hate speech and offensive language, namely list based and machine learning based approaches. We find that the Telegram data set still poses particular challenges for these automatic methods. Finally, we argue for the value of studying such naturally occurring, coherent data sets for research on online harm and how to address it in linguistics and philosophy. (shrink)

Responsible innovation is centered around the ideal that societal stakeholders are entitled to participate in scientific and technological decision-making by voicing their needs and worries. Individuals who believe in science conspiracies (referred to here as ‘science conspiracists’) pose a challenge to implementing this ideal because it is not clear under what conditions their inclusion in responsible innovation exercises is possible and advisable. Yet precisely because of this uncertain status, science conspiracists constitute an instructive case in point to travel towards the (...) edges of inclusion and understand how we draw the line between ‘includables' and ‘unincludables’. In this paper, we seek to explore this relationship between responsible innovation and science conspiracism by using the method of thought experimentaiton. We test four possible exclusion criteria for science conspiracists. We conclude by revisiting the relationship between conspiracism and responsible innovation and sketching a novel perspective on the ideal of stakeholder inclusion. (shrink)

Hyperbole is traditionally understood as exaggeration. Instead, in this paper, we shall define it not just in terms of its form, but in terms of its effects and its purpose. Specifically, we characterize its form as a shift of magnitude along a scale of measurement. In terms of its effect, it uses this magnitude shift to make the target property more salient. The purpose of hyperbole is to express with colour and force that the target property is either greater or (...) lesser than expected or desired. This purpose is well suited to hyperbolic expression. This because hyperbole naturally draws a contrast between two points: how things are versus how they were expected to be. We also consider compound figures involving hyperbole. When it combines with other figures hyperbole operates by magnifying the specific effects of the figure it operates on. We shall see that sometimes hyperbole works as an input for irony; and at other times it builds on a metaphor to increase the effects of that metaphor. (shrink)

This essay frames systemic patterns of mental abuse against women of color and Indigenous women on Turtle Island (North America) in terms of larger design-of-distribution strategies in settler colonial societies, as these societies use various forms of social power to distribute, reproduce, and automate social inequalities (including public health precarities and mortality disadvantages) that skew socio-economic gain continuously toward white settler populations and their descendants. It departs from traditional studies in gender-based violence research that frame mental abuses such as gaslighting--commonly (...) understood as mental manipulation through lying or deceit--stochastically, as chance-driven interpersonal phenomena. Building on structural analyses of knowledge in political epistemology (Dotson 2012, Berenstain 2016), political theory (Davis and Ernst 2017), and Indigenous social theory (Tuck and Yang 2012), I develop the notion of cultural gaslighting to refer to the social and historical infrastructural support mechanisms that disproportionately produce abusive mental ambients in settler colonial cultures in order to further the ends of cultural genocide and dispossession. I conclude by proposing a social epidemiological account of gaslighting that a) highlights the public health harms of abusive ambients for minority populations, b) illuminates the hidden rules of social structure in settler colonial societies, and c) amplifies the corresponding need for structural reparations. (shrink)

It’s natural for hyperbole to mix with metaphor and irony, and other figures of speech. How do they mix together and what kind of compound, if any, arises out of the mixing? In tackling this question, I shall argue that thinking of hyperbolic figures along the lines familiar from ironic metaphor compounds is a temptation we should resist. Looking in particular at hyperbolic metaphor and hyperbolic irony, I argue, they don’t yield a new encompassing compound figure with one figure building (...) on another. Instead, what we have is one dominant figure colored with hyperbolic tinges. So what does hyperbole bring to the mixing pot? I suggest we should think of hyperbole in hyperbolic figures as being an interpretive effect, modulating the working of the partner figure and thus rendering more emphatic. (shrink)

The enactive approach to cognition distinctively emphasizes autonomy, adaptivity, agency, meaning, experience, and interaction. Taken together, these principles can provide the new sciences of language with a comprehensive philosophical framework: languaging as adaptive social sense-making. This is a refinement and advancement on Maturana’s idea of languaging as a manner of living. Overcoming limitations in Maturana’s initial formulation of languaging is one of three motivations for this paper. Another is to give a response to skeptics who challenge enactivism to connect “lower-level” (...) sense-making with “higher-order” sophisticated moves like those commonly ascribed to language. Our primary goal is to contribute a positive story developed from the enactive account of social cognition, participatory sense-making. This concept is put into play in two different philosophical models, which respectively chronicle the logical and ontogenetic development of languaging as a particular form of social agency. Languaging emerges from the interplay of coordination and exploration inherent in the primordial tensions of participatory sense-making between individual and interactive norms; it is a practice that transcends the self-other boundary and enables agents to regulate self and other as well as interaction couplings. Linguistic sense-makers are those who negotiate interactive and internalized ways of meta-regulating the moment-to-moment activities of living and cognizing. Sense-makers in enlanguaged environments incorporate sensitivities, roles, and powers into their unique yet intelligible linguistic bodies. We dissolve the problematic dichotomies of high/low, online/offline, and linguistic/nonlinguistic cognition, and we provide new boundary criteria for specifying languaging as a prevalent kind of human social sense-making. (shrink)

This paper examines the mechanisms involved in the interpretation of utterances that are both metaphorical and ironical. For example, when uttering 'He's a real number-cruncher' about a total illiterate in maths, the speaker uses a metaphor with an ironic intent. I argue that in such cases both logically and psychologically, the metaphor is prior to irony. I hold that the phenomenon is then one of ironic metaphor, which puts a metaphorical meaning to ironic use, rather than an irony used metaphorically (...) (§1). This result is then used to argue for the claim that in metaphor, it is metaphorical, not literal, meaning that determines the utterance‘s truth conditions. Gricean accounts, which exclude metaphorical meaning from truth conditional content and rely entirely on conversational implicature, are seen to be unsatisfactory. Five contextualist arguments are briefly discussed to the conclusion that metaphorical content is part of truth-conditional content, rather than implicated (§2). (shrink)

The collective monograph "Ontology of Stative Situations - Linguistic Modeling. A Contrastive Bulgarian-Russian Study" includes research carried out within the project of the same name "Ontology of stative situations – linguistic modeling. A contrastive Bulgarian-Russian study", supported by the "Scientific Research" Fund of the Ministry of Education and Science in Bulgaria (№ КП-06-РУСИЯ / 23) and from the Russian Fund for Fundamental Research (No. 20-512-18005).

This paper discusses methodological similarities between Collingwood's approach to causation and contemporary manipulability-based views. Firstly, I argue that on both approaches there is a preoccupation with the origin of causal concepts which further connects to the aim of establishing the priority of a certain concept/sense of causation as more fundamental. The significant difference lies in Collingwood's focus on the logical and historical priority (Collingwood's sense I) while in more recent theories the focus has been on psychology (i.e., on different philosophical (...) concepts of causation tested in psychological setting-- Woodward, Waskan, Gijsbers & de Bruin). Secondly, I argue that on both Collingwood's views and contemporary approaches (especially Menzies & Price, Price, but also Woodward) there is an important connection between causation and the agent's perspective. This can be subsumed under what Collingwood identifies as the main presupposition underlying causal thought: the relation between the agent's perceived situation and the agent's desired situation/ goal. More broadly, the recent views on causation under discussion share Collingwood's aim of elucidating the problem of causation through investigating causal knowledge and thus can be integrated with his wider project of addressing metaphysical issues through the means of epistemology. (shrink)

We provide a new text corpus from the social medium Telegram, which is rich in indirect forms of divisive speech. We scraped all messages from one channel of supporters of Donald Trump, covering a large part of his presidency from late 2016 until January 2021. The discussion among the group members over this long time period includes the spread of disinformation, disparaging of out-group members, and other forms of offensive speech. To encourage research into such practices of poisoning public political (...) discourse, we added automatic annotations of offensive language to all messages. We further added manual annotations of harmful language to a portion of the posts in order to enable the analysis of more implicit forms of online harm. (shrink)

We propose the use of discussion structures as tools for analyzing policy debates in a way that enables the increased participation of lay stakeholders. Discussion structures are argumentation-theoretical tools that can be employed to tackle three barriers that separate lay stakeholders from policy debates: difficulty, magnitude, and complexity. We exemplify the use of these tools on a debate in research policy on the question of responsibility. By making use of discussion structures, we focus on the argumentative moves performed by the (...) parties involved in this debate. We conclude by discussing advantages and limitations of discussion structures and we trace several opportunities for further research on these instruments. (shrink)

R&D collaborations between industry, government, civil society, and research (also known as ‘quadruple helix collaborations’ (QHCs)) have recently gained attention from R&D theorists and practitioners. In aiming to come to grips with their complexity, past models have generally taken a stakeholder-analytical approach based on stakeholder types. Yet stakeholder types are difficult to operationalise. We therefore argue that a processual model is more suited for studying the interaction in QHCs because it eschews matters of titles and identities. We develop such a (...) model in which the QHC is represented as a process of generating four types of value: research value, market value, political value, and societal value. We then apply this processual model in analysing reallife cases of friction in QHCs. Friction is seen, not as an interpersonal clash, but as a discrepancy between two or more value-creation processes that compete for limited resources (some overperforming while others under-performing). (shrink)

Beginning with Freud’s treatment of identification as an ambivalent process, we explore identification’s polarization between narcissistic idealization and melancholic division. While narcissistic identification can be seen as a strategy adopted by the ego to avoid the educational development of its drives and to maintain itself either in whole or in part in an infantile state, melancholic identification activates a tension between the ego-ideal and the real ego at the expense of the latter. After discussing the ambivalence of identification, we review (...) Freud’s discussion of mass formations as group identifications, arguing that the work of facilitating a productive sublimation of the drives cannot be reduced to a strengthening of the artificial masses represented by social institutions such as the church and the educational system. Instead, the difference between mass formations allowing for collective sublimation and those suffering from narcissistic or melancholic blockages must be found in the productive qualities of the mass itself. In closing, we outline a few ways in which we might begin to understand the political contribution of masses to the maturation of human drives. (shrink)

I argue that a study of the Nicomachean Ethics and of the Parva Naturalia shows that Aristotle had a notion of attention. This notion captures the common aspects of apparently different phenomena like perceiving something vividly, being distracted by a loud sound or by a musical piece, focusing on a geometrical problem. For Aristotle, these phenomena involve a specific selectivity that is the outcome of the competition between different cognitive stimuli. This selectivity is attention. I argue that Aristotle studied the (...) common aspects of the physiological processes at the basis of attention and its connection with pleasure. His notion can explain perceptual attention and intellectual attention as voluntary or involuntary phenomena. In addition, it sheds light on how attention and enjoyment can enhance our cognitive activities. (shrink)

The starting point for this paper is a critical discussion of claims of psychological reality articulated within Borg’s (forth.) minimal semantics and Carpintero’s (2007) character*-semantics. It has been proposed, for independent reasons, that their respective accounts can accommodate, or at least avoid the challenge from psychological evidence. I outline their respective motivations, suggesting various shortcomings in their efforts of preserving the virtues of an uncontaminated semantics in the face of psychological objection (I-II), and try to make the case that, at (...) least for a theory of utterance comprehension, a truth-conditional pragmatic stance is far preferable. An alternative from a relevance-theoretic perspective is offered in terms of mutual adjustment between truth-conditional content and implicature(s), arguing that many “free” pragmatic processes are needed to uncover the truth-conditional content, which can then warrant the expected implicature(s) (III). I finally illustrate the difficulties their accounts have in predicting the correct order of interpretation in cases of ironic metaphor, i.e. metaphor is computed first, as part of truth-conditional content, while irony is inferentially grounded in metaphorical content (IV). (shrink)

Intersectionality is a term that arose within the black feminist intellectual tradition for the purposes of identifying interlocking systems of oppression. As a descriptive term, it refers to the ways human identity is shaped by multiple social vectors and overlapping identity categories (such as sex, race, class) that may not be readily visible in single-axis formulations of identity, but which are taken to be integral to robustly capture the multifaceted nature of human experience. As a diagnostic term, it captures the (...) confluence of power and domination on the social construction of identity in order to remedy concrete harms that result from this convergence. It is not a prescriptive methodology or closed system of analysis, but rather an open-ended hermeneutic lens through which interconnected systems of oppression can come into focus in the fight for social justice. (shrink)

Slurs have become a big topic of discussion both in philosophy and in linguistics. Slurs are usually characterised as pejorative terms, co-extensional with other, neutral, terms referring to ethnic or social groups. However, slurs are not the only ethnic/social words with pejorative senses. Our aim in this paper is to introduce a different kind of pejoratives, which we will call “ethnic/social terms used as insults”, as exemplified in Spanish, though present in many other languages and mostly absent in English. These (...) are ethnic terms like gitano, ‘Romani’, which can have an extensional and neutral use, but also a pejorative meaning building on a negative stereotypical representation of the Romani community. (shrink)

This essay offers an overview of the diversity of women’s prose writing that emerged on the Czech cultural scene in the post-communist era. To that end it briefly characterizes the work of eight Czech women authors who were born within the first two decades after World War II and began to create during the post-1968 era of ‘normalization’. In this broad sense they belong to a single generation. With rare exception their work was not officially published in their homeland until (...) the 1990s. The writers included are: Lenka Procházková, Tereza Boučková, Alexandra Berková, Zuzana Brabcová, Daniela Hodrová, Sylvie Richterová, Iva Pekárková, and Eva Hauserová. The overview is followed by a concise comparative analysis of texts by three very different writers (Procházková, Pekárková, and Hodrová), using a feminist critical approach. There is also an appendix of works by these writers available in English translation. (shrink)

El artículo ofrece una lectura crítica de los presupuestos conceptuales del Transhumanismo, movimiento cultural, intelectual y científico, que afirma el deber moral de mejorar las capacidades físicas y cognitivas de la especie humana. Tal movimiento, de hecho, se propone re-proyectar la condición humana en modo de evitar la inevitabilidad del proceso de envejecimiento y las limitaciones del intelecto humano , a través de la aplicación de futuras tecnologías.Después de haber recorrido las etapas históricas que han llevado al surgimiento del movimiento (...) transhumanista, aclarando las líneas programáticas y las modalidades concretas a través de las cuales se realiza el paso del humano al post-humano, La autora propone una amplia reflexión crítica en torno a los fundamentos teóricos del Transhumanismo. En particular, se subrayan los límites de los presupuestos conceptuales de los cuales parte el Transhumanismo: una antropología reduccionista, una actitud acrítica en relación con el uso de la tecnología, y un rechazo ideológico de la metafísica que ha llevado a los transhumanistas a formular una confusión del concepto de persona y de dignidad. (shrink)

Achille Varzi è uno dei maggiori metafisici viventi. Nel corso degli anni ha scritto testi fondamentali di logica, metafisica, mereologia, filosofia del linguaggio. Ha sconfinato nella topologia, nella geografia, nella matematica, ha ragionato di mostri e confini, percezione e buchi, viaggi nel tempo, nicchie, eventi e ciambelle; e non ha disdegnato di dialogare con gli abitanti di Flatlandia, con Neo e con Terminator. Tra le sue opere principali: Holes and Other Superficialities e Parts and Places. The Structures of Spatial Representation, (...) entrambi scritti insieme a R. Casati per MIT Press; Il mondo messo a fuoco, Laterza; e il suo libro più recente: Le tribolazioni del filosofare, con C. Calosi, per Laterza. -/- Da una giornata all’Università di Urbino nasce questa conversazione a molte voci sulla e con la filosofia di Achille C. Varzi. In un dialogo critico al quale l’Autore si presta con generosità e onestà intellettuale, Andrea Borghini, Francesco Calemi, Claudio Calosi, Elena Casetta, Valeria Giardino, Pierluigi Graziani, Patrizia Pedrini, Daniele Santoro e Giuliano Torrengo lo interrogano e mettono alla prova sui temi affrontati, nel corso degli anni, in campi diversi. Il risultato è un percorso che si snoda attraverso molti mondi, dalla logica alla metafisica, dalla filosofia del linguaggio alla filosofia della matematica, dalla mereologia alla filosofia del tempo, spingendosi in qualche caso oltre i confini del saggio filosofico. (shrink)

Russians and Westerners access, process and communicate information in different ways. Whilst Westerners favour detailed analysis of subject matter, Russians tend to focus on certain components that are, in their view, significant. This disparity makes it difficult to achieve constructive dialogues between Western and Russian stakeholders contributing to cross-cultural communication problems. The author claims that the difference in the ways Russians and Westerners negotiate information is a significant cultural difference between Russia and West rather than an irritating (and in principle (...) amenable) lack of analytical skills on the Russian partners’ part. Understanding the reasons behind the Russian-specific approaches to dealing with information would be a positive step towards a more effective cross-cultural communication, important in business situations and essential in diplomacy. (shrink)

Frege’s distinction between force and sense is a central pillar of modern thinking about meaning. This is the idea that a self-standing utterance of a sentence S can be divided into two components. One is the proposition P that S’s linguistic meaning and context associates with it. The other is S’s illocutionary force. The force/sense distinction is associated with another thesis, the embedding principle, that implies that the only content that embeds in compound sentences is propositional content. We argue that (...) both the Force/Sense distinction and the principle of embedding are seriously challenged by figurative language, and irony in particular. We conclude that theorists need to go back to the drawing board about the nature of illocutionary acts. (shrink)

Ideal theory in social and political philosophy generally works to hide philosophical theories’ complicity in sustaining the structural violence and maintenance of white supremacy that are foundational to settler colonial societies. While non-ideal theory can provide a corrective to some of ideal theory’s intended omissions, it can also work to conceal the same systems of violence that ideal theory does, especially when framed primarily as a response to ideal theory. This article takes a decolonial approach to exploring the limitations of (...) non-ideal theory in its ability to respond to and redress the continuing harms done to Indigenous peoples by settler colonialism, including by outlining non-ideal theory’s relationship to a colonial politics of recognition. (shrink)

The question of how democracy can deal with cultural diversity has become more central than ever. The increasing flow of people to many Western democratic countries indicates that our societies will become more and more multicultural. But what is the best way for democracy to deal with cultural diversity? It has been argued that, given its communicative core, the Habermasian model of deliberative democracy provides a platform where cultural groups can concur on peaceful agreements. In this paper, I show the (...) limits of this model of democracy in relation to diverse cultural traditions to public interactions. I will discuss the case of societies and ethnic groups of a Confucian heritage and show that Habermas’ account of public deliberation is not a neutral method for facilitating political decision making, but is culturally biased. (shrink)