Dass wir alle in einer gemeinsamen Wirklichkeit leben, setzen wir meist unhinterfragt voraus. Sehen Andere die Welt dann doch einmal anders, mag es uns scheinen, als sähen sie diese einfach nicht so, wie sie wirklich ist. Schwerer fällt uns anzuerkennen, dass andere zuweilen in ganz anderen Wirklichkeiten unterwegs sind als wir selbst. - Tom Poljansek zeigt, wie sich die Vorstellung einer Pluralität menschlicher Wirklichkeiten mit der Annahme einer wahrnehmungsunabhängigen Realität vereinbaren lässt, ohne sich in einen Relativismus der vielen Wirklichkeiten zu (...) verlaufen. In Auseinandersetzung mit »kontinentalen« und »analytischen« Ansätzen legt er eine elegante Theorie menschlicher Wirklichkeiten vor, die konstruktivistische und realistische, phänomenologische und naturalistische Motive unerwartet miteinander verbindet. (shrink)

Though the divide between reason-based and causal-explanatory approaches in psychiatry and psychopathology is old and deeply rooted, current trends involving multi-factorial explanatory models and evidence-based approaches to interpersonal psychotherapy, show that it has already been implicitly bridged. These trends require a philosophical reconsideration of how reasons can be causes. This paper contributes to that trajectory by arguing that Donald Davidson’s classic paradigm of 1963 is still a valid option.

The term ‘intelligence’ as used in this paper refers to items of knowledge collected for the sake of assessing and maintaining national security. The intelligence community (IC) of the United States (US) is a community of organizations that collaborate in collecting and processing intelligence for the US. The IC relies on human-machine-based analytic strategies that 1) access and integrate vast amounts of information from disparate sources, 2) continuously process this information, so that, 3) a maximally comprehensive understanding of world actors (...) and their behaviors can be developed and updated. Herein we describe an approach to utilizing outcomes-based learning (OBL) to support these efforts that is based on an ontology of the cognitive processes performed by intelligence analysts. Of particular importance to the Cognitive Process Ontology is the class Representation that is Warranted. Such a representation is descriptive in nature and deserving of trust in its veridicality. The latter is because a Representation that is Warranted is always produced by a process that was vetted (or successfully designed) to reliably produce veridical representations. As such, Representations that are Warranted are what in other contexts we might refer to as ‘items of knowledge’. (shrink)

The use of the three labels to denote the three foundational schools of the early twentieth century are now part of literature. Yet, neither their number nor the...

Meinong’s thought has been rediscovered in recent times by analytic philosophy: his object theory has significant consequences in formal ontology, and especially his account of impossible objects has proved itself to be decisive in a wide range of fields, from logic up to ontology of fiction. Rejecting the traditional ‘prejudice in favour of the real’, Meinong investigates what there is not: a peculiar non-existing object is precisely the fictional object, which exemplifies a number of properties without existing in the same (...) way as flesh-and-blood detectives do. Fictional objects are in some sense incomplete objects, whose core of constituent properties is not completely determined. Now, what does it imply to hold that a fictional object may also occur in true statements? We shall deal with the objections raised by Russell and Quine against Meinong’s view, pointing out limits and advantages of both perspectives. (shrink)

Both through his own work and that of his students, Franz Clemens Brentano had an often underappreciated influence on the course of 20 th - and 21 st -century philosophy. _The Routledge Handbook of Franz Brentano and the Brentano School_ offers full coverage of Brentano’s philosophy and his influence. It contains 38 brand-new essays from an international team of experts that offer a comprehensive view of Brentano’s central research areas—philosophy of mind, metaphysics, and value theory—as well as of the principal (...) figures shaped by Brentano’s school of thought. A General Introduction serves as an overview of Brentano and the contents of the volume and three separate bibliographies point students and researchers on to further avenues of inquiry. Systematic and detailed, _The Routledge Handbook of Franz Brentano and the Brentano School_ provides readers with a valuable reference to Brentano’s work, and to his lasting importance in the history of philosophy and in contemporary debates. (shrink)

In this entry I present one of the most hotly debated issues in contemporary analytic philosophy regarding the nature of fictional entities and the motivations that might be adduced for and against positing them into our ontology. The entry is divided in two parts. In the first part I offer an overview of the main accounts of the metaphysics of fictional entities according to three standard realist views, fictional Meinongianism, fictional possibilism and fictional creationism. In the second part I describe (...) two main kinds of arguments for or against positing fictional entities into our ontology. The first kind is traditionally inspired by the linguistic data coming from our talk about fictional characters. The second kind is more recent and it builds on genuine ontological considerations. (shrink)

This paper adjudicates the debate between Russell and Meinong on the tenability of Meinong's theory of objects. The conclusion is that while Russell did not adequately reply to ueinong's defence of the theory, The defence is nonetheless, unsuccessful. The contemporary interest in Meinong's theory, the controversial features of the theory, Russell's objections, and Meinong's replies are discussed.

Arthur Pap’s work played an important role in the development of the analytic tradition. This role goes beyond the merely historical fact that Pap’s views of dispositional and modal concepts were influential. As a sympathetic critic of logical empiricism, Pap, like Quine, saw a deep tension in logical empiricism at its very best in the work of Carnap. But Pap’s critique of Carnap is quite different from Quine’s, and represents the discovery of limits beyond which empiricism cannot go, where there (...) lies nothing other than intuitive knowledge of logic itself. Pap’s arguments for this intuitive knowledge anticipate Etchemendy’s recent critique of the model-theoretic account of logical consequence. Pap’s work also anticipates prominent developments in the contemporary neo-Fregean philosophy of mathematics championed by Wright and Hale. Finally, Pap’s major philosophical preoccupation, the concepts of necessity and possibility, provides distinctive solutions and perspectives on issues of contemporary concern in the metaphysics of modality. In particular, Pap’s account of modality allows us to see the significance of Kripke’s well-known arguments on necessity and apriority in a new light. (shrink)

This essay evaluates the epistemic potential of the scientific method of 'thought experiments', i.e. how far one can progress in science by just thinking about experimental situations without doing real empirical research. The analysis of many episodes from the history of science suggests that thought experiments play an essential role in the formation of new conceptual and normative frames during phases of revolutionary theory change. Thought experiments do not tell us, how things are, but how they might be explained, thus (...) allowing us to reflect the intentional components within scientific theories. The author later wrote a Dr.-phil.-thesis on this subject: "Die Methode des Gedankenexperiments. Untersuchung zur Rationalität naturwissenschaftlicher Theoriereformen." (Bremen University, submitted October 5th 2001, summa cum laude) an abridged version of which has been published in the book: Ulrich Kühne, Die Methode des Gedankenexperiments. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag 2005. 410 pages, ISBN: 978-3-518-29342-3. (shrink)

In this article, I shed some light on Meinong’s motivations for the theory of objects. I argue that one of its basic principles, the principle of indifference, is driven by an intuition common to many Austrian philosophers, which is that something must first be somehow pre-given in order to simply address the issue of its being or non-being. Meinong’s way of spelling out this intuition, I suggest, is to show that there are homeless objects, that is, objects that are not (...) dealt with by any of the existing sciences. Therefore, the indispensability of the theory of objects lies in the plausibility of the thesis that there are such homeless objects. I analyse and evaluate two Meinongian arguments supporting this thesis, I explain how Meinong came to believe that they support the indispensability of the theory of objects, and I stress some advantages of this account over Brentano’s intentionality thesis. (shrink)

En este artículo nos proponemos analizar, desde una perspectiva lógica y ontológica, la noción de una “cuarta persona de la Trinidad”, tal como aparece en el De fide orthodoxa y De imaginibus de Juan de Damasco. Sostendremos que esta “cuarta persona” pone en cuestión la lógica de la teología trinitaria. En la medida en que es irreductible a lo divino y a lo humano, así como a la materia y al espíritu, la cuarta persona posee una naturaleza extra-ontológica que exige (...) para expresarse, consecuentemente, una cuarta persona extra-gramatical más allá de la sintaxis. (shrink)

Once one draws a distinction between loyal non-existent items, which do not exist in a non-universal sense of the first-order existence predicate, and non-items, which fail to exist in a universal sense of that predicate, one may allow for the former but not for the latter in the overall ontological domain, so as to adopt a form of soft Parmenideanism. There are both theoretical and empirical reasons for this distinction.

The notion of alternative possibilities plays a key role in the contemporary debate on free will; yet, depending on the author’s perspective, it may be interpreted in deeply conflicting ways. Specifically, libertarians understand it as a genuine possibility, to be exerted in the actual world and in the present moment, while compatibilists project it into an alternate reality, where a given action has different antecedents. Using a geometric metaphor, we could refer to a divergent paradigm of possibility versus a parallel (...) one. Though legitimate from a formal point of view, the compatibilist reading is at odds with our intuitive self-perception as free agents, which involves a feeling of causal openness of our actions – not those I might perform under different circumstances, but those I perform here and now. The divergent paradigm is confronted in turn by some serious conceptual problems, and ultimately results either in a paralysis of the will, or in the activity of some mysterious entity such as Fate or Fortune. As a response, in the last part of the paper I outline a different paradigm, which I call circular, where an act and its rational explanation are linked by a mutual entailment: in this context, alternative possibilities are instantiated by setting up from the beginning a different explanatory circle. (shrink)