The evidential problem of evil involves a rarely discussed challenge, namely the challenge of defending theism against the hypothesis of a morally indifferent creator. Our argument uses a Bayesian framework and it starts by showing that if the only alternative to classical theism is naturalistic atheism, then fine-tuning can render theism virtually certain, even in the face of evil. But if the alternatives include the hypothesis of a morally indifferent creator, theism is defeated even if the fine-tuning premise is accepted. (...) The resulting version of the evidential problem is unsolvable using the tools that are currently deployed by theists against evil. (shrink)

The principle of sufficient reason threatens modal collapse. Some have suggested that by appealing to the indefinite extensibility of contingent truth, the threat is neutralized. This paper argues that this is not so. If the indefinite extensibility of contingent truth is developed in an analogous fashion to the most promising models of the indefinite extensibility of the concept set, plausible principles permit the derivation of modal collapse.

A central dispute in social ontology concerns the existence of group minds and actions. I argue that some authors in this dispute rely on rival views of existence without sufficiently acknowledging this divergence. I proceed in three steps in arguing for this claim. First, I define the phenomenon as an implicit higher-order disagreement by drawing on an analysis of verbal disputes. Second, I distinguish two theories of existence—the theory-commitments view and the truthmaker view—in both their eliminativist and their constructivist variants. (...) Third, I examine individual contributions to the dispute about the existence of group minds and actions to argue that these contributions have an implicit higher-order disagreement. This paper serves two purposes. First, it is a study to apply recent advances in meta-ontology. Second, it contributes to the debate on social ontology by illustrating how meta-ontology matters for social ontology. (shrink)

Stanley and Williamson :411–444, 2001) argue for intellectualism—the thesis that knowing how is a type of knowing that—in part by defending a thesis about the semantics of English ascriptions of knowing how. But ascriptions of practical knowledge seem to exhibit significant crosslinguistic variation. This observation has been invoked to argue that S&W’s analysis reflects a quirk of English rather than a general feature of the concept of knowledge. I argue that the type of argument employed by both S&W and their (...) critics presupposes that the categories of denotational semantics correspond to those of the theory of mental content. But the relation between the semantic theory and the theory of content is more complex than this. Specifically, a closer look at ascriptions of practical knowledge and other obligatory control constructions in various languages shows that semantic theory needs distinctions that are redundant from the perspective of the theory of content, and that important distinctions in the theory of content may fail to correspond to any distinctions in semantic theory. It follows that we may not be able to read off as much about mental states as S&W and their critics try to from the structure of their ascriptions. (shrink)

We investigate the concepts of past, present, and future that build upon a modal distinction between a settled past and an open future. The concepts are defined in terms of a pre-causal ordering that is determined by the qualitative differences between alternative possible histories. We look what an event’s past, present, and future look like in the so-called Minkowskian Branching Structures, one in which histories are isomorphic to Minkowski space-time.

According to some philosophers, the Liar paradox arises because of a mistaken theory of truth. Its lesson is that we must reject some instances of the naive propositional truth-schema \It is true that \ if and only if \\. In this paper, I construct a novel semantic paradox in which no principle even analogous to the truth-schema plays any role. I argue that this undermines the claim that we ought to respond to the Liar by revising our theory of truth.

Social contract theorists often take the ideal contract to be the agreement or bargain individuals would make in some privileged choice situation. Recently, experimental philosophers have explored this kind of decision-making in the lab. One rather robust finding is that the exact circumstances of choice significantly affect the kinds of social arrangements experimental subjects unanimously endorse. Yet prior work has largely ignored the question of which of the many competing descriptions of the original position subjects find most compelling. This paper (...) aims to address this gap, exploring how attractive experimental subjects find various characterizations of these circumstances of choice. We find evidence suggesting that no one choice situation can fulfill the role that social contract theorists have hoped it would play. We also find that, contrary to what some prominent social contract theorists have expected, there is no robust relationship between an individual’s ranking of distributive principles and their ranking of various descriptions of the original position. In conclusion, we discuss the broader implications of these results for political philosophy. (shrink)

Online technologies enable vast amounts of data to outlive their producers online, thereby giving rise to a new, digital form of afterlife presence. Although researchers have begun investigating the nature of such presence, academic literature has until now failed to acknowledge the role of commercial interests in shaping it. The goal of this paper is to analyse what those interests are and what ethical consequences they may have. This goal is pursued in three steps. First, we introduce the concept of (...) the Digital Afterlife Industry, and define it as an object of study. Second, we identify the politico-economic interests of the DAI. For this purpose, we develop an analytical approach based on an informational interpretation of Marxian economics. Third, we explain the practical manifestations of the interests using four real life cases. The findings expose the incentives of the DAI to alter what is referred to as the “informational bodies” of the dead, which in turn is to be seen as a violation of the principle of human dignity. To prevent such consequences, we argue that the ethical conventions that guide trade with remains of organic bodies may serve as a good model for future regulation of DAI. (shrink)

This paper addresses the mereological problem of the unity of structured propositions. The problem is how to make multiple parts interact such that they form a whole that is ultimately related to truth and falsity. The solution I propose is based on a Platonist variant of procedural semantics. I think of procedures as abstract entities that detail a logical path from input to output. Procedures are modeled on a function/argument logic, but are not functions. Instead they are higher-order, fine-grained structures. (...) I identify propositions with particular kinds of molecular procedures containing multiple sub-procedures as parts. Procedures are among the basic entities of my ontology, while propositions are derived entities. The core of a structured proposition is the procedure of predication, which is an instance of the procedure of functional application. The main thesis I defend is that procedurally conceived propositions are their own unifiers detailing how their parts interact so as to form a unit. They are not unified by one of their constituents, e.g., a relation or a sub-procedure, on pain of regress. The relevant procedural semantics is Transparent Intensional Logic, a hyperintensional, typed λ-calculus, whose λ-terms express four different kinds of procedures. While demonstrating how the theory works, I place my solution in a wider historical and systematic context. (shrink)

Many people who claim that evolution and theism are in tension assume that God, being omnipotent, could create life in different ways. For instance, Paul Draper has argued that the fact that life evolved on earth supports naturalism over theism. However, for there to be a probabilistic tension between naturalism and theism, because of the fact of evolution, a certain background assumption must be true, namely, that God could have made biological organisms and species through an act of Genesis-style special (...) creation, or some combination of evolution and special creation. But that background assumption is potentially faulty. Why? Because special creation presupposes that biological organisms and species are spatiotemporally unrestricted entities, and if the dominant paradigm in biology, and philosophy of biology, on the ontological status of organisms and species is correct, then they are spatiotemporally restricted entities. (shrink)

It is an ongoing controversy whether natural selection is a cause of population change, or a mere statistical description of how individual births and deaths accumulate. In this paper I restate the problem in terms of the reference class problem, and propose how the structure of stable equilibrium can provide a solution in continuity with biological practice. Insofar natural selection can be understood as a tendency towards equilibrium, key statisticalist criticisms are avoided. Further, in a modification of the Newtonian-force analogy, (...) it can be suggested that a better metaphor for natural selection is that of an emergent force, similar in nature to entropic forces: with magnitude and direction, but lacking a spatiotemporal origin or point of application. (shrink)

Recently I posted a paper entitled “External observer reflections on QBism”. As any external observer, I was not able to reflect all features of QBism properly. The comments I received from one of QBism’s creators, C. A. Fuchs, were very valuable to me in better understanding the views of QBists. Some of QBism’s features are very delicate and extracting them from articles of QBists is not a simple task. Therefore, I hope that the second portion of my reflections on QBism (...) might be interesting and useful for other experts in quantum foundations and quantum information theory. In the present paper I correct some of my earlier posted critical comments on QBism. At the same time, other critical comments gained new validation through my recent deeper understanding of QBists views on a number of problems. (shrink)

The handicap principle stipulates that signal reliability can be maintained if signals are costly to produce. Yet empirical biologists are typically unable to directly measure evolutionary costs, and instead appeal to expenditure as a sensible proxy. However the link between expenditure and cost is not always as straightforward as proponents of HP assume. We consider signaling interactions where whether the expenditure associated with signaling is converted into an evolutionary cost is in some sense dependent on the behavior of the intended (...) recipient of the signal. We illustrate this with a few empirical examples and demonstrate that on this alternative expenditure to cost mapping the traditional predictions of HP no longer hold. Instead of full information transfer, a partially informative communication system like those uncovered by Wagner :163–181, 2013) and Zollman et al. is possible. (shrink)

The ‘phenotypic gambit,’ the assumption that we can ignore genetics and look at the fitness of phenotypes to determine the expected evolutionary dynamics of a population, is often used in evolutionary game theory. However, as this paper will show, an overlooked genotype to phenotype map can qualitatively affect evolution in ways the phenotypic approach cannot predict or explain. This gives us reason to believe that, even in the long-term, correspondences between phenotypic predictions and dynamical outcomes are not robust for all (...) plausible assumptions regarding the underlying genetics of traits. This paper shows important ways in which the phenotypic gambit can fail and how to proceed with evolutionary game theoretic modeling when it does. (shrink)

The aim of science is the explanation of complicated systems by reducing it to simple subsystems. According to a millennia-old imagination this will be attained by dividing matter into smaller and smaller pieces of it. The popular superstition that smallness implies simplicity seems to be ineradicable. However, since the beginning of quantum theory it would be possible to realize that the circumstances in nature are exactly the other way round. The idea “smaller becomes simpler” is useful only down to the (...) atoms of chemistry. Planck’s formula shows that smaller extensions are related to larger energies. That more and more energy should result in simpler and simpler structures, this does not only sound absurd, it is absurd. A reduction to really simple structures leads one to smallest energies and, thus, to utmost extended quantum systems. The simplest quantum structure, referred to as quantum bit, has a two-dimensional state space, and it establishes a cosmological structure. Taking many of such quantum bits allows also for the construction of localized particles. The non-localized fraction of quantum bits can appear as “dark matter”. (shrink)

Single-premise epistemic closure is the principle that: if one is in an evidential position to know that P where P entails Q, then one is in an evidential position to know that Q. In this paper, I defend the viability of opposition to closure. A key task for such an opponent is to precisely formulate a restricted closure principle that remains true to the motivations for abandoning unrestricted closure but does not endorse particularly egregious instances of closure violation. I focus (...) on two brands of epistemic theory that naturally incorporate closure restrictions. The first type holds that the truth value of a knowledge ascription is relative to a relevant question. The second holds that the truth value of a knowledge ascription is relative to a relevant topic. For each approach, I offer a formalization of a leading theory from the literature and use this formalization to evaluate the theory’s adequacy in terms of a precise set of desiderata. I conclude that neither theory succeeds in meeting these desiderata, casting doubt on the viability of the underlying approaches. Finally, I offer a novel variant of the topic-sensitive approach that fares better. (shrink)

A comprehensive and practical study tool, introducing Kant's thought and key works and exploring his continuing influence.

Against the backdrop of the English reception of Locke’s Essay, stands a little-known philosophical dispute between two seventeenth-century women writers: Mary Astell (1666-1731) and Damaris Cudworth Masham (1659-1708). On the basis of their brief but heated exchange, Astell and Masham are typically regarded as philosophical adversaries: Astell a disciple of the occasionalist John Norris, and Masham a devout Lockean. In this paper, I argue that although there are many respects in which Astell and Masham are radically opposed, the two women (...) also have a surprising amount in common. Rather than interpret their ideas solely in relation to the ‘canonical’ philosophies of the time – Lockean empiricism and Malebranchean occasionalism – I examine the ways in which Astell and Masham are influenced by the metaphysical theories of the Cambridge Platonists, Ralph Cudworth and Henry More. On this basis, I argue that a remarkably similar theological approach underlies the metaphysical and feminist arguments of Astell and Masham. (shrink)

Ernst Mayr’s classical work on the nature of causation in biology has had a huge influence on biologists as well as philosophers. Although his distinction between proximate and ultimate causation recently came under criticism from those who emphasize the role of development in evolutionary processes, the formal relationship between these two notions remains elusive. Using causal graph theory, this paper offers a unified framework to systematically translate a given “proximate” causal structure into an “ultimate” evolutionary response, and illustrates evolutionary implications (...) of various kinds of causal mechanisms including epigenetic inheritance, maternal effects, and niche construction. These results not only reveal the essential interplay between proximate and ultimate causation in the study of evolution, but also provide a formal method to evaluate or discover non-standard or yet unknown evolutionary phenomena. (shrink)

Design ethics has been offered as a course in undergraduate design programs in Taiwan for over a decade, but research on teaching design ethics and the results of teaching these courses is scant. We conducted two tests to examine the effect of an ethics course, and the differences among the effects of design department, gender, and study year on student opinions regarding ethical design standards at the National Yunlin University of Science and Technology in Taiwan. The participants comprised 934 undergraduates (...) from the five design departments at YunTech’s College of Design from Years 1–4. The results confirmed the effect of an ethics course on student EDS opinions. In addition, we observed significant variations among students according to design departments, suggesting that the characteristics of the design departments also affected students’ EDS opinions. The results indicated that gender did not significantly affect design students’ EDS opinions; however, students in their early years of study produced higher scores than those in their advanced years of study did, based on the six EDS opinions. The implications of these results for teaching design ethics and future research are discussed in this paper. (shrink)

The current study used both Ajzen’s theory of planned behavior (TPB) and Bandura’s social cognitive theory (SCT) to examine the intentions of business undergraduate students toward taking elective ethics courses and investigated the role of self-identity in this process. The study was prospective in design; data on predictors and intentions were obtained during the first collection of data, whereas the actual behavior was assessed 10 days later. Our results indicated that the TPB was a better predictor of behavioral intentions than (...) was SCT. As expected, self-identity served as a moderator in the relationship between perceived behavioral control and behavioral intentions posited by the TPB and in the relationship between outcome expectancy and behavioral intentions posited by SCT. Self-identity was a crucial factor in predicting actual behavior within both theoretical frameworks. (shrink)

Zelizer’s work may be read as an attack on the central Polanyian thesis: that the market system threatens social life by the undue prominence it lends the economy in the organization of modern society. The recent publication of Viviana Zelizer’s The Purchase of Intimacy (2005a) is therefore an excellent opportunity to review the general trend of her work Zelizer 1979, 1985, 1994, and contrast her leading ideas to the central thesis that gives Polanyi’s work its particular flavor: the danger encapsulated (...) in the use of modern money and the functioning of the market system. (shrink)

How should an agent revise her epistemic state in the light of doxastic disagreement? The problems associated with answering this question arise under the assumption that an agent’s epistemic state is best represented by her degree of belief function alone. We argue that for modeling cases of doxastic disagreement an agent’s epistemic state is best represented by her confirmation commitments and the evidence available to her. Finally, we argue that given this position it is possible to provide an adequate answer (...) to the question of how to rationally revise one’s epistemic state in the light of disagreement. (shrink)

Kotarbiński is one of the leading figures in the Lvov-Warsaw school of Polish philosophy. We summarize the development of Kotarbiński’s thought from his early nominalism and ‘pansomatistic reism’ to the later doctrine of ‘temporal phases’. We show that the surface clarity and simplicity of Kotarbiński’s writings mask a number of profound philosophical difficulties, connected above all with the problem of giving an adequate account of the truth of contingent (tensed) predications. The paper will examine in particular the attempts to resolve (...) these difficulties on the part of Leśniewski. It will continue with an account of the relations of Kotarbińskian reism to the ontology of things or entia realia defended by the later Brentano. Kotarbiński’s identification of Brentano as a precursor of reism is, it will be suggested, at least questionable, and the paper will conclude with a more careful attempt to situate the Brentanian and Kotarbińskian ontologies within the spectrum of competing ontological views. (shrink)

We explore one aspect of the structure of a codified legal system at the national level using a new type of representation to understand the strong or weak dependencies between the various fields of law. In Part I of this study, we analyze the graph associated with the network in which each French legal code is a vertex and an edge is produced between two vertices when a code cites another code at least one time. We show that this network (...) distinguishes from many other real networks from a high density, giving it a particular structure that we call concentrated world and that differentiates a national legal system (as considered with a resolution at the code level) from small-world graphs identified in many social networks. Our analysis then shows that a few communities (groups of highly wired vertices) of codes covering large domains of regulation are structuring the whole system. Indeed we mainly find a central group of influent codes, a group of codes related to social issues and a group of codes dealing with territories and natural resources. The study of this codified legal system is also of interest in the field of the analysis of real networks. In particular we examine the impact of the high density on the structural characteristics of the graph and on the ways communities are searched for. Finally we provide an original visualization of this graph on an hemicyle-like plot, this representation being based on a statistical reduction of dissimilarity measures between vertices. In Part II (a following paper) we show how the consideration of the weights attributed to each edge in the network in proportion to the number of citations between two vertices (codes) allows deepening the analysis of the French legal system. (shrink)

This study represents an improvement in the ethics scales inventory published in a 1988 Journal of Business Ethics article. The article presents the distillation and validation process whereby the original 33 item inventory was reduced to eight items. These eight items comprise the following ethical dimensions: a moral equity dimension, a relativism dimension, and a contractualism dimension. The multidimensional ethics scale demonstrates significant predictive ability.

Various early modern philosophers affirm the traditional distinction between ‘things above reason’ and ‘things contrary to reason.’ However, it is Robert Boyle who goes furthest to rework and defend the division, and to explore its ramifications in detail. My aim here is to examine the logical structure of Boyle’s version of the distinction, and his concomitant account of the sphere of truths beyond human understanding. I also weigh the philosophical merits of the account and clarify the relationship between Boyle’s characterization (...) of things above reason and his alleged dialethism. (shrink)

In "Exploring 'Atlas Shrugged': Ayn Rand’s Magnum Opus (2021)," Edward W. Younkins has compiled several of his essays on Ayn Rand's novel "Atlas Shrugged." The volume leads with an “Introduction” that contextualizes the importance of "Atlas Shrugged" and provides a detailed overview of each chapter. Chapter 1 gives a synopsis of the novel. Chapter 2 examines "Atlas Shrugged" as both philosophy and literature. In Chapter 3, Younkins looks at it as a treatise on economics before turning in Chapter 4 to (...) consider it as a story about business. Chapter 5 discusses it as a novel about and a blueprint for social change. In the “Appendix,” Younkins provides an overview of the philosophy of Objectivism. "Exploring 'Atlas Shrugged': Ayn Rand’s Magnum Opus" is a significant contribution and highly recommended for instructors, students, and the general reader. Younkins’s volume can serve as an instructor’s resource for those teaching "Atlas Shrugged," as a companion text for students in those courses, or as a stand-alone book for readers who are familiar with the book and are interested in a fresh examination of this timeless novel from a thematic, structural, and character-development point of view. (shrink)

The essay emphasizes the unsolvable tension between activity and passivity implied in Kierkegaard’s reduplication as an author of authors. To characterize the different approaches to pseudonymity, I will use the term Halvbefaren [the inexperienced seaman] to refer to a reading that appeals only to Kierkegaard’s or to the pseudonyms’ authority over the authorship, and Helbefaren [the experienced seaman] to refer to another interpretation that recognizes that unsolvable tension between them. Recurring to the sailing metaphor implicit in these terms that appear (...) in Climacus’ Postscript, I defend the thesis that the pseudonyms open the authorship from within, overcoming Kierkegaard as a usual author, as the only captain of the entire authorship. The mutiny performed by the pseudonyms cannot be resolved by simply transferring the authority to the pseudonyms themselves, and it creates a subjective space in the authorship so it becomes a matter of the experience of the reader. (shrink)

According to the PCCP thesis, the probability of a conditional A → C is the conditional probability P. This claim is undermined by Lewis’ triviality results, which purport to show that apart from trivial cases, PCCP is not true. In the present article we show that the only rational, “Dutch Book-resistant” extension of the agent’s beliefs concerning non-conditional sentences A and C to the conditional A → C is by assuming that P = P. In other cases a diachronic Dutch (...) Book against the agent can be constructed. There is a tension between our findings and Lewis’ results, which needs to be explained. Therefore, we present a probability space which corresponds in a natural way to the diachronic Dutch Book—and which allows the conditional A → C to be interpreted as an event in a mathematically sound way. It also allows to formalize the notion of conditionalizing A → C on ¬C which plays a crucial role in Lewis’ proof. Our conclusion is that Lewis’ proof is circular, so it cannot be considered to be a sound argument against PCCP. (shrink)

This essay critiques the return to objects posited by certain new materialisms, most specifically the speculative realism of Harman, Meillassoux and Brassier. It argues that their “non-relational” and “autonomous” ontology represents a neo-positivist conception of reality. In place of such an atomistic ontology, I will suggest that the new materialisms develop a more productive, “non-reductive materialism”—a term drawn from analytic philosophy of mind. I will interpret Merleau-Ponty and Jean-Luc Nancy as crucial examples of such a materialism on the continental side. (...) Rather than being based on the non-relational innerness of an object, this position instead takes into account matter’s fundamentally extended nature. Confirmed by examples such as the growing evidence for neuroplasticity, the externalist, non-reductive view advances the new materialist argument that matter is “agentive” and “active” rather than “mechanic” and “passive,” without slipping into an anti-social-constructionist biologism or behaviorism. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThe incorrect conceptualization and evaluation of reparations for colonial slave trade and slavery within the legal, as opposed to the political, domain, produces an interpretation of the demands in France that views them as morally absurd and politically deleterious. I’ll use Iris Marion Young’s distinction between a liability model and a social connection model of responsibility to suggest that the moral claim according to which we can be held responsible today for redressing the structural injustices inherited from slave trade and (...) slavery is not irrational, nor motivated by a political will to divide the body politic between blamed perpetrators and innocent victims. I’ll first analyze the difficulties posed by the liability model by focusing on a specific legal case, MIR and CMDP vs. French state. Then I’ll argue that using a political model of responsibility solves conceptual and normative issues and allows us to understand why, and to what extent, we are responsible for redressing the structural racial injustice that endures in French society. (shrink)

Modern computing is generally taken to consist primarily of symbol manipulation. But symbols are abstract, and computers are physical. How can a physical device manipulate abstract symbols? Neither Church nor Turing considered this question. My answer is that the bit, as a hardware-implemented abstract data type, serves as a bridge between materiality and abstraction. Computing also relies on three other primitive—but more straightforward—abstractions: Sequentiality, State, and Transition. These physically-implemented abstractions define the borderline between hardware and software and between physicality and (...) abstraction. At a deeper level, asking how a physical device can interact with abstract symbols is the wrong question. The relationship between symbols and physical devices begins with the realization that human beings already know what it means to manipulate symbols. We build and program computers to do what we understand to be symbol manipulation. To understand what that means, consider a light switch. A light switch doesn’t turn a light on or off. Those are abstractions. Light switches don’t operate with abstractions. We build light switches, so that when flipped, the world is changed in such a way that we understand the light to be on or off. Similarly, we build computers to perform operations that we understand as manipulating symbols. (shrink)

One of John Rawls’s major aims, when he wrote A Theory of Justice, was to present a superior alternative to utilitarianism. Rawls’s worry was that utilitarianism may fail to protect the fundamental rights and liberties of persons in its attempt to maximize total social welfare. Rawls’s main argument against utilitarianism was that, for such reasons, the representative parties in the original position will not choose utilitarianism, but will rather choose his justice as fairness, which he believed would securely protect the (...) worth of everybody’s basic rights and liberties. In this paper, I will argue that, under close formal examination, Rawls’s argument against utilitarianism is self-defeating. That is, I will argue that Rawls’s own reasons, assumptions, and the many theoretical devices he employs demonstrably imply that the representative parties in the original position will choose utilitarianism instead of justice as fairness. (shrink)

Science is a social epistemic enterprise. The complexity of research requires the division of cognitive labor. As a consequence, scientists have to present results and incorporate the results of others into their body of knowledge. This creates the possibility of strategic behavior, leading to phenomena such as publication bias. To analyze the dynamics of strategic behavior in epistemic communities, agent-based modeling suggests itself as a method. The phenomena generated by the developed agent-based simulation model reveal a diverse set of possible (...) dynamics in strategically heterogeneous groups and support the claim that there is a trade-off between a behavioral rule’s efficacy to generate accurate beliefs under optimal conditions and its robustness to variation in the composition of the epistemic environment. (shrink)

The conflict of narrowness and precision in direct inference occurs if a body of evidence contains estimates for frequencies in a certain reference class and less precise estimates for frequencies in a narrower reference class. To develop a solution to this conflict, I draw on ideas developed by Paul Thorn and John Pollock. First, I argue that Kyburg and Teng’s solution to the conflict of narrowness and precision leads to unreasonable direct inference probabilities. I then show that Thorn’s recent solution (...) to the conflict leads to unreasonable direct inference probabilities. Based on my analysis of Thorn’s approach, I propose a natural distribution for a Bayesian analysis of the data directly obtained from studying members of the narrowest reference class. (shrink)

We apply Benacerraf’s distinction between mathematical ontology and mathematical practice to examine contrasting interpretations of infinitesimal mathematics of the seventeenth and eighteenth century, in the work of Bos, Ferraro, Laugwitz, and others. We detect Weierstrass’s ghost behind some of the received historiography on Euler’s infinitesimal mathematics, as when Ferraro proposes to understand Euler in terms of a Weierstrassian notion of limit and Fraser declares classical analysis to be a “primary point of reference for understanding the eighteenth-century theories.” Meanwhile, scholars like (...) Bos and Laugwitz seek to explore Eulerian methodology, practice, and procedures in a way more faithful to Euler’s own. Euler’s use of infinite integers and the associated infinite products are analyzed in the context of his infinite product decomposition for the sine function. Euler’s principle of cancellation is compared to the Leibnizian transcendental law of homogeneity. The Leibnizian law of continuity similarly finds echoes in Euler. We argue that Ferraro’s assumption that Euler worked with a classical notion of quantity is symptomatic of a post-Weierstrassian placement of Euler in the Archimedean track for the development of analysis, as well as a blurring of the distinction between the dual tracks noted by Bos. Interpreting Euler in an Archimedean conceptual framework obscures important aspects of Euler’s work. Such a framework is profitably replaced by a syntactically more versatile modern infinitesimal framework that provides better proxies for his inferential moves. (shrink)

This paper offers a new way to make sense of disagreement expansion from a polylogical perspective by incorporating various places in addition to players and positions into the analysis. The concepts build on prior implicit ideas about disagreement space by suggesting how to more fully account for argumentative context, and its construction, in large-scale complex controversies. As a basis for our polylogical analysis, we use a New York Times news story reporting on an oil train explosion—a significant point in the (...) broader controversy over producing oil and gas via hydraulic fracturing. (shrink)

Within a given conversation or information exchange, do privacy expectations change based on the technology used? Firms regularly require users, customers, and employees to shift existing relationships onto new information technology, yet little is known as about how technology impacts established privacy expectations and norms. Coworkers are asked to use new information technology, users of gmail are asked to use GoogleBuzz, patients and doctors are asked to record health records online, etc. Understanding how privacy expectations change, if at all, and (...) the mechanisms by which such a variance is produced will help organizations make such transitions. This paper examines whether and how privacy expectations change based on the technological platform of an information exchange. The results suggest that privacy expectations are significantly distinct when the information exchange is located on a novel technology as compared to a more established technology. Furthermore, this difference is best explained when modeled by a shift in privacy expectations rather than fully technology-specific privacy norms. These results suggest that privacy expectations online are connected to privacy offline with a different base privacy expectation. Surprisingly, out of the five locations tested, respondents consistently assign information on email the greatest privacy protection. In addition, while undergraduate students differ from non-undergraduates when assessing a social networking site, no difference is found when judging an exchange on email. In sum, the findings suggest that novel technology may introduce temporary conceptual muddles rather than permanent privacy vacuums. The results reported here challenge conventional views about how privacy expectations differ online versus offline. Traditionally, management scholarship examines privacy online or with a specific new technology platform in isolation and without reference to the same information exchange offline. However, in the present study, individuals appear to have a shift in their privacy expectations but retain similar factors and their relative importance—the privacy equation by which they form judgments—across technologies. These findings suggest that privacy scholarship should make use of existing privacy norms within contexts when analyzing and studying privacy in a new technological platform. (shrink)

In this paper it is shown that Heyting and Co-Heyting mereological systems provide a convenient conceptual framework for spatial reasoning, in which spatial concepts such as connectedness, interior parts, (exterior) contact, and boundary can be defined in a natural and intuitively appealing way. This fact refutes the wide-spread contention that mereology cannot deal with the more advanced aspects of spatial reasoning and therefore has to be enhanced by further non-mereological concepts to overcome its congenital limitations. The allegedly unmereological concept of (...) boundary is treated in detail and shown to be essentially affected by mereological considerations. More precisely, the concept of boundary turns out to be realizable in a variety of different mereologically grounded versions. In particular, every part K of a Heyting algebra H gives rise to a well-behaved K-relative boundary operator. (shrink)

Kriegel has revived adverbialism as a theory of consciousness. But recent attacks have shed doubt on the viability of the theory. To save adverbialism, I propose that the adverbialist take a stance on the nature of adverbial modification. On one leading theory, adverbial modification turns on the instantiation by a substance of a psychological type. But the resulting formulation of adverbialism turns out to be a mere notational variant on the relationalist approaches against which Kriegel dialectically situates adverbialism. By contrast, (...) I argue that the way to be an adverbialist is to adopt an event ontology, emphasizing the active contribution of the mind to the phenomenology of experience. My close examination of the semantics of adverbial modification throws this metaphysical distinction into sharp relief. The event-based semantics overcomes recent objections in a way superior to the methods that would have been obviously available in the absence of a sophisticated semantics. (shrink)

Gene–environment covariance is the phenomenon whereby genetic differences bias variation in developmental environment, and is particularly problematic for assigning genetic and environmental causation in a heritability analysis. The interpretation of these cases has differed amongst biologists and philosophers, leading some to reject the utility of heritability estimates altogether. This paper examines the factors that influence causal reasoning when G–E covariance is present, leading to interpretive disagreement between scholars. It argues that the causal intuitions elicited are influenced by concepts of agency (...) and blame-worthiness, and are intimately tied with the conceptual understanding of the phenotype under investigation. By considering a phenotype-specific approach, I provide an account as to why causal ascriptions can differ depending on the interpreter. Phenotypes like intelligence, which have been the primary focus of this debate, are more likely to spark disagreement for the interpretation of G–E covariance cases because the concept and ideas about its ‘normal development’ relatively ill-defined and are a subject of debate. I contend that philosophical disagreement about causal attributions in G–E covariance cases are in essence disagreements regarding how a phenotype should be defined and understood. This moves the debate from one of an ontological flavour concerning objective causal claims, to one concerning the conceptual, normative and semantic dependencies. (shrink)

This paper explores two non-standard supermajority rules in the context of judgment aggregation over multiple logically connected issues. These rules set the supermajority threshold in a local, context sensitive way—partly as a function of the input profile of opinions. To motivate the interest of these rules, I prove two results. First, I characterize each rule in terms of a condition I call ‘Block Preservation’. Block preservation says that if a majority of group members accept a judgment set, then so should (...) the group. Second, I show that one of these rules is, in a precise sense, a judgment aggregation analogue of a rule for connecting qualitative and quantitative belief that has been recently defended by Hannes Leitgeb. The structural analogy is due to the fact that Leitgeb sets thresholds for qualitative beliefs in a local, context sensitive way—partly as a function of the given credence function. (shrink)

There has been an ongoing conflict regarding whether reality is fundamentally digital or analogue. Recently, Floridi has argued that this dichotomy is misapplied. For any attempt to analyse noumenal reality independently of any level of abstraction at which the analysis is conducted is mistaken. In the pars destruens of this paper, we argue that Floridi does not establish that it is only levels of abstraction that are analogue or digital, rather than noumenal reality. In the pars construens of this paper, (...) we reject a classification of noumenal reality as a deterministic discrete computational system. We show, based on considerations from classical physics, why a deterministic computational view of the universe faces problems (e.g., a reversible computational universe cannot be strictly deterministic). (shrink)

Immanuel Kant’s essay on Perpetual Peace contains a rejection of the idea of a world government. In connexion with a substantial argument for cosmopolitan rights based on the human body and its need for a space on the surface of the Earth, Kant presents the most rigorous philosophical formulation ever given of the limitations of the cosmopolitan law. In this contribution, Kant’s essay is analysed and the reasons he gives for these restrictions discussed in relation to his main focus: to (...) project a realistic path to perpetual peace. (shrink)

Anderson-like ontological proofs, studied in this paper, employ contingent identity, free principles of quantification of the 1st order variables and classical principles of quantification of the 2nd order variables. All these theories are strongly complete wrt. classes of modal structures containing families of world-varying objectual domains of the 1st order and constant conceptual domains of the 2nd order. In such structures, terms of the 1st order receive only rigid extensions, which are elements of the union of all 1st order domains. (...) Terms of the 2nd order receive extensions and intensions. Given a family of preselected world-varying objectual domains of the 2nd order, non-rigid extensions of the 2nd order terms belong always to a preselected domain connected with a given world. Rigid intensions of the 2nd order terms are chosen from among members of a conceptual domain of the 2nd order, which is the set of all functions from the set of worlds to the union of all 2nd order preselected domains such that values of these functions at a given world belong to a preselected domain connected with this world. (shrink)

How does rationality bind the agnostic, that is, the one who suspends judgment about whether a given proposition is true? In this paper I explore two alternative ways of establishing what the rational requirements of agnosticism are: the Lockean–Bayesian framework and the doxastic logic framework. Each of these proposals faces strong objections. Fortunately, however, there is a rich kernel of requirements of agnosticism that are vindicated by both of them. One can then endorse the requirements that belong to that kernel (...) without thereby committing oneself to the problematic implications that stem from either of the aforementioned proposals. (shrink)

Whilst considerable research exists on determining consumer responses to pre-determined statements within numerous ad ethics contexts, our understanding of consumer thoughts regarding ad ethics in general remains lacking. The purpose of our study therefore is to provide a first illustration of an emic and informant-based derivation of perceived ad ethics. The authors use multi-dimensional scaling as an approach enabling the emic, or locally derived deconstruction of perceived ad ethics. Given recent calls to develop our understanding of ad ethics in different (...) cultural contexts, and in particular within the Middle East and North Africa region, we use Lebanon—the most ethically charged advertising environment within MENA—as an illustrative context for our study. Results confirm the multi-faceted and pluralistic nature of ad ethics as comprising a number of dimensional themes already salient in the existing literature but in addition, we also find evidence for a bipolar relationship between individual themes. The specific pattern of inductively derived relationships is culturally bound. Implications of the findings are discussed, followed by limitations of the study and recommendations for further research. (shrink)