Many contributors of the debate about knowledge by testimony concentrate on the problem of justification. In my paper I will stress a different point – the concept of testimony itself. As a starting point I will use the definitional proposal of Jennifer Lackey. She holds that the concept of testimony should be regarded as entailing two aspects – one corresponding to the speaker, the other one to the hearer. I will adopt the assumption that we need to deal with both (...) aspects. Nevertheless, I will show that her concept – which suggests regarding testimony as an act of communication conveying information – is too broad and, therefore, I will end up with a different twofold definition. (shrink)

History is narrated, as any good storyteller knows, and narration depends for its effects on our notions and metaphors. In their 2002 introduction to 'The Ways That Never Parted', Annette Yoshiko Reed and Adam H. Becker write “The notion of an early and absolute split between Judaism and Christianity, but also the 'master narrative' about Jewish and Christian history that pivots on this notion is being called into question”. In this thesis, by bringing the philosopher Jean-François Lyotard’s 'The Hyphen' into (...) dialogue with both the “parting of the ways” and many other voices from within Jewish and Christian studies, I continue this calling into question. This dismantling does not leave us bereft of notions, narratives, and concepts but with the beginnings of new ones; as Judith Lieu has claimed “a more flexible 'map' [is] required”, as are “different models to answer different questions or maintain different interpretations”. In a series of chapters, Lyotard’s concepts of “designators”, “idioms”, “obligation” and “differends”, are offered as some potential new models, and their interactions clarified. As well as conveying the, often implicit, sense these concepts had for Lyotard, further distinctions are layered in that he left unsaid. By way of this, a new conceptual schema for discussing religious “phrases” – encompassing both linguistic and other acts – is outlined and the areas for further elaboration within it are indicated. In each chapter, this schema is applied to specific texts from within Jewish and Christian studies, to see what new light it can cast on these debates, as well as to refine and test it. All of this is offered in support of a second level argument, that a renewed dialogue between Lyotard’s writings and Jewish and Christian studies could generate ways out of the impasses in each of their paths ahead. (shrink)

In this short paper, I am going to discuss an often neglected aspect of Davidson's philosophy, his metaphilosophy. Metaphilosophy is traditionally defined as the philosophy of philosophy. This definition, however, is not illuminating. I think metaphilosophy aims at a disclosure of the nature of philosophical questions, what they are and how to approach them. ...

The guiding question for this essay is: who is the learner? The aim is to examine and criticize one answer to this question, sometimes referred to as the theory of the learning brain, which suggests that the explanation of human learning can be reduced to the transmitting and storing of information in the brain’s formal and representational architecture, i.e., that the brain is the learner. This essay will argue that this answer is misleading, because it cannot account for the way (...) people strive to learn in an attempt to lead a good life as it misrepresents the intentional life of the mind, which results in its counting ourselves out of the picture when it attempts to provide a scientific theory of the learning process. To criticize the theory of the learning brain, this essay will investigate its philosophical foundation, a theory of mind called cognitivism, which is the basis for the cognitive sciences. Cognitivism is itself built on three main tenets: mentalism, the mind-brain identity theory and the computer analogy. Each of these tenets will be criticized in turn, before the essay turns to criticize the theory of the learning brain itself. The focus of this essay is, in other words, mainly negative. The hope is that this criticism will lay the groundwork for an alternative view of mind, one that is better equipped to give meaningful answers to the important questions we have about what it means to learn, i.e., what we learn, how we do it and why. This alternative will emphasize the holistic and intentional character of the human mind, and consider the learning process as an intentional activity performed, not by isolated brains, but by people with minds that are extended, embodied, enacted and embedded in a sociocultural and physical context. (shrink)

Von Wright’s philosophy is seldom seen as original when compared to that of his master, Ludwig Wittgenstein. Contrary to that orientation, this work seeks to establish the opposition of von Wright to Wittgenstein in relation to the question of whether ethics is an area where logic can legitimately extend. For Wittgenstein, logic deals with what is necessarily true. On the basis of this characterization of logic, Wittgenstein thinks that logic cannot legitimately help to capture ethics for the reason that the (...) referents of ethical discourse are not in the world. Only the referents of scientific discourse are there. For Wittgenstein, therefore, we must adopt a mystical position in ethics both by giving it the greatest importance but also by applying the greatest silence. Von Wright admits, following Wittgenstein, the varieties of goodness. However, he stresses that the varieties of goodness do not leave room for absolute relativism. Norms have both a prescriptive dimension that can be relative to a culture, and a descriptive dimension that makes them assessable to logical standards. (shrink)

The purpose of the present paper is to demonstrate the inconsistencies between ethical theory and legal practice of animal treatment. Specifically, we discuss contemporary legal solutions, based on three case studies – Serbian, German and UK positive law, and point out the inconsistencies in them. Moreover, we show that the main cause of these inconsistencies is anthropocentric view of moral relevance. Finally, when it comes to the different treatment of animals living in the wild and domestic animals, we show that (...) the current theoretical explanations are unsatisfactory. (shrink)

This monograph discusses the question of what it is to be a reason – mainly in practical ethics – and proposes an original contribution to metaethics.It critically examines theories of metaethical realism, constructivism and error theory and identifies several misunderstandings or unclarities in contemporary debates. Based on this examination, the book suggests a distinction between a conceptual question, that can be answered by pure first-personal thinking, and a material question, that targets responses to reasons as a natural phenomenon in space (...) and time and that can be answered by help of the sciences. While this book defends a sharp distinction between these approaches, it also argues that the insights gained by the distinct approaches can be fruitfully integrated into a comprehensive picture.The comprehensive picture promoted in this book, based on both philosophical analysis and resources from psychology and cognitive science, is a picture of reasons as items in a collective archive of mind – reconfiguring the “domain of reasons” as a collectively established and socially cultivated fund of considerations with normative weight. The developed Collective Archive View combines Reasons Fundamentalism as an answer to the conceptual question, with a social ontological proposal, similar to Haslanger’s critical realism, as an answer to the material question.Thereby, it introduces central ideas from the field of social metaphysics into metaethics. At the same time, it offers a way of settling some controversies within metaethics, going on between proponents of Reasons Fundamentalism and Constitutivism, realism and constructivism, as well as proponents of mind-dependence and mind-independence of normative facts. Finally, the proposal enables us to envision and conceptualize genuine normative change within a metaethical theory. (shrink)

This text has already been published, in La Deleuziana – online journal of philosophy – n. 10 / 2019 – rhythm, chaos and nonpulsed man.: I propose in this text a rhythmic theory of signs drawn from the thought of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. I name this theory a semiorhythmology. I suggest that the theory of rhythm developed in A Thousand Plateaus can be understood, in part, as the culmination of the diverse set of inquiries into signs that both (...) Deleuze and Guattari - Philosophie – Nouvel article. (shrink)

Vocation is a polysemous term and common in the literature on professional formation. However, conceptual definitions are lacking and it is customary to declare a religious origin. The objective of this work was to deepen in the religious origin of the term vocation and to warn the implication of its use in the studies on the professions. Intersecting the pragmatics of Wittgenstenian and the historical hermeneutical method, different uses of the term vocation in the Christian religion were reviewed. Also, it (...) was described how the vocation reached the pedagogical discourse in the first centuries of the Christian era when Clement of Alexandria used it as an evangelizing resource before the Hellenization discourse. Finally, a lay explanation of the vocation, based on choice and working life, is proposed as a tale of professional ethical self-realization. (shrink)

Traditional Chinese Medicine has been criticized for being unscientific because the theory on which it is based involves entities like qi and ’meridians’ that appear ambiguous and because the internal ‘organs’ like the kidney and the spleen are very different from those of modern anatomy and physiology. Even more so, TCM methods of therapy based on the yin-yang principle, the model of the five elements, and the classification of illnesses according to standard constellations of symptoms are largely unproven by the (...) protocols of modern evidence-based medicine. This dissertation attempts to reconstruct TCM theory by: providing explanations of TCM entities as abstractions and constructs that relate to observable body functions and illness symptoms and interpreting TCM theory as comprising heuristic models that were constructed from clinical experience to fit empirical observations of illnesses and their treatments with herbal medications and acupuncture. It suggests that scientists should be less concerned with the ontological status of TCM entities and the epistemic credentials of TCM models than with the ability of these concepts and models to guide physicians in therapy. More importantly, it makes the argument that these models are testable using the methods of evidence-based medicine. There are methodological difficulties associated with randomized controlled trials partly because TCM treatments tend to be individualized and syndromes are dynamic in nature; observational trials may be more appropriate in some situations. It is also possible that, for patients who are more culturally attuned to TCM, the placebo effect is strongly at play and may render the real effects of TCM treatments harder to tease out in clinical trials. The dissertation concludes that the main postulates of TCM should be put to rigorous test. The result may be a leaner but more robust theory, with parts that do not stand up to the test being rejected or modified, and a possible acceptance of its more modest therapeutic claims for a limited range of pathological conditions like pain and chronic illnesses. (shrink)

The possibility of autonomous artificially intelligent systems has awaken a well-known worry in the scientific community as well as in popular imaginary: the possibility that beings which have gained autonomous intelligence either turn against their creators or at least make the moral and ethical superiority of creators with respect to the created questionable. The present paper argues that such worries are wrong-headed. Specifically, if AAIs raise a worry about human ways of life or human value it is a worry for (...) a certain human way of thinking about what it is to be human. What is threatened is a way of thinking about what it is to be human, not human ways of life or human value. (shrink)

By a seemingly strange twist of fate, the formalist approach to language became popular after Hilbert’s project of providing a formalist foundation for mathematics foundered on G¨odel’s famous incompleteness theorems. Even in September 1930, during the congress in K¨onigsberg, where G¨odel presented his results for the first time, Carnap still defended logicism against the intuitionist and formalist views on the foundations of mathematics. Furthermore in linguistics, the formalist approach to syntactic issues had only become disseminated in the 1930s, due to (...) the distributionists of Bloomfield’s school, and found its paramount expression in Hjelmslev’s Prolegomena to a Theory of Language : according to Hjelmslev, both the linguistic theory and the grammar of a given language are nothing more than a calculus. (shrink)

The paper aims at providing an argument for a deflationary treatment of the notion of public language meaning. The argument is based on the notion of standards of correctness; I will try to show that as correctness assessments are context-involving, the notion of public language meaning cannot be treated as an explanatory one. An elaboration of the argument, using the notion of ground is provided. Finally, I will consider some limitations of the reasoning presented.

This paper continues a conversation about Wittgenstein’s picture of language and meaning and its potential applications for educational theorising. It takes the form of a response to Wolff-Michael Roth’s earlier paper “Heeding Wittgenstein on “understanding” and “meaning”: A pragmatist and concrete human psychological approach in/for education,” in which Roth problematizes the use of the terms “understanding” and “meaning” in education discourse and proposes their abandonment. Whilst we agree with Roth about a series of central points, at the same time we (...) maintain that he has taken his argument in directions antithetical to our reading of Wittgenstein’s work. We offer four points of departure, exploring themes of: appropriate questioning; eliminativism; language-games and grammar; and productivity, explanation, and a science of learning. We conclude by discussing ways consistent with Wittgenstein’s thought to go on in thinking about education. (shrink)

The first part of this thesis articulates and defends the Subjectivist View of the Mental. According to this view, my mental states are essentially different from the mental states of everyone else, but the fact that they are is a subjective fact, rather than an objective one. Chapter 1 explains what it takes for a fact to be subjective, what kind of difference holds between my mental states and everyone else's mental states and what kind of intuitions lead me to (...) believe that there is such a difference. Chapter 2 defends the Subjectivist View of the Mental from objections and discusses some of its most significant implications. In the second part of the thesis, I explore the advantages that the Subjectivist View of the Mental offers when it comes to accounting for three basic features of our knowledge of the mental. Chapter 3 deals with the asymmetry between self-knowledge and knowledge of other minds. It is argued that, if the Subjectivist View of the Mental is true, we can explain why this asymmetry holds without assuming that self-knowledge and knowledge of other minds are involved with substantially different ways of knowing. Chapter 4 focuses on the immunity to error through misidentification of mental self-ascriptions. I show that, while there has been a temptation to explain this phenomenon by following Lichtenberg and Wittgenstein in taking the content of mental self-ascriptions to be general rather than particular, this proposal cannot be made to work unless something like the Subjectivist View of the Mental is true. Chapter 5 is concerned with experiential knowledge. I argue that, if experiential truths are taken to be objective truths, it is not easy to see why experiential knowledge should have the peculiar 'first-hand' character it has. The problem disappears if experiential truths are regarded as subjective rather than objective. (shrink)

What if education were not about becoming something, making something of yourself, becoming some thing? What if we were to consider education as becoming-world? These questions are posed against the background of the current populist nationalist backlash against the consequences of globalization, along with growing anti-intellectualism and anti-democratic sentiment. How can education contribute locally and globally to fostering and safeguarding the very possibility of democratic practices against the neoliberal consecration of reified social relations? Becoming Things, Becoming-world contributes to contemporary discussions (...) in philosophy of education by developing a vision of a critical educational cosmopolitanism founded upon a renewed critique of reification. While cosmopolitan education has often been articulated in terms of an ethical and political response to globalization, this thesis proposes a different outlook. I argue that the idea of cosmopolitan education predates the onset of what we now term globalization, and that it provides a meaningful conception of education beyond the present socio-political condition. Moreover, I propose to rethink cosmopolitan education as a critique of reification, i.e. a critique of social relations taking on the character of mere things. The critique of reification helps to foreground aspects that have previously been neglected and marginalized in educational cosmopolitanism, such as its economic-material dimensions. At the same time, a critical cosmopolitan perspective is needed for a timely de-centering of critical social theory. Re-assessing the Cynic tradition and drawing on critical theorists such as Gerard Delanty and Axel Honneth as well as on New Wittgensteinian philosophers as Alice Crary, I advance a post-universalist understanding of cosmopolitanism. This is based on dynamic social relations and a broad understanding of rationality which includes imaginary aspects as well as the education of our sensitivities. Cosmopolitanism is understood as a lived practice which critically challenges reified social and cultural relations, including the strictures of particular socio-economic structures. The notion of reification is distinguished from other forms of alienation, objectification and instrumentalization and is deployed to characterize lasting distortions of our relations to each other, to the world and to ourselves. Against any idealizing take on communicative practice, I show that language, knowledge, and education do not necessarily counter-act reifying tendencies. Indeed, they themselves can become sources for enhancing processes of reification. A fresh look at the critique of reification allows us adequately to describe and understand the interrelation between contemporary capitalism, the forms of subjectivity it produces and the possibilities of democratic education and education towards democracy. Such an understanding is needed in face of the apparent impossibility of imagining a society, and envisioning an education, beyond the conditions formulated by contemporary neoliberal policies. Education as becoming-world maintains a hopeful outlook on the possibilities of our globalizing and pluralizing social reality as well as a keen focus on the tensions and challenges that this poses for contemporary educational endeavors on individual as well as structural levels. (shrink)

In the course of our educational life we are introduced to various subject areas, each with its specific way of representing knowledge. The challenge for the learner is to be able to think in ways that are supported by, and match, the representational format. A fundamental question for the science of learning concerns how this is achieved. In this thesis, it will be argued that by observing individuals collaboratively constructing their own graphic representations in a subject area that is new (...) to them, it is possible to gain insight into this process. In the LUMES Master program, students are introduced to systems thinking and the method of creating Causal Loop Diagrams and interactive computer models for analyzing and solving complex problems. They learn how to use the terminology, symbols and methods of a specific semiotic domain. The research questions guiding the analysis of the empirical data concern how interacting with systems thinking tools affect students in the process of collaboratively analyzing and modeling complex problems, and how cognitive and semiotic resources are used in this process. The study provides a conceptual lens with which to discuss and perceive the complexity of learning to express knowledge with new representational tools: both its visual and spatial formalism and the related terminology. Three theoretical perspectives are applied: the socio-cultural perspective, the social semiotic, and the constructivist perspective. The sociocultural perspective is applied to emphasize the use of tools as a part of human learning. It puts focus on the mediating roles of language and other tools in a social context, which is in many ways connected to the social semiotic perspective. To view systems thinking and System Dynamics as a semiotic domain accentuates the use of specific terminology, symbols and gestures to express understanding. Furthermore, the constructivist perspective is used to put focus on the role of individual cognitive abilities and prior knowledge. Three empirical studies provide detailed analyses of video-recorded collaborative work in System Dynamics education. The case studies show how individual cognitive abilities together with language, gesture and the visual representations are used as integrated resources to express understanding of a problem and its solution. (shrink)

In Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind Sellars introduces the image of the space of reasons, and delineates a non-traditional empiricism, uncontaminated by the Myth of the Given. Brandom takes Sellars’s drift to be against empiricism as such, against the very idea that something deserving to be called “experience” could be relevant to the acquisition of empirical knowledge in any way except merely causally. In this paper I attack Brandom’s idea that we anyway need a concession to externalism for non-inferential (...) knowledge and suggest that in the space of reasons Sellars’s, the experience play a more than merely causal role in a fully internalist epistemology of observation. (shrink)

Music theory has to reinvent itself. Century-long paradigms have to be revisited, and recent terminologies and concepts coming from other fields of music have to find room within the traditional frameworks, particularly in connection with electronic music. In this work, I make an attempt at depicting a framework that might turn useful to further advancements in music theory, by representing the relation between electroacoustic and traditional musics within a scenario dominated by the Philosophy of Language. The Philosophy of Language is (...) herein proposed as a possible philosophical asset to counterbalance some limits of Phenomenology, which has dominated the field of electroacoustic music since its appearance. Within this scenario, the work suggests the notions of "mimesis" and "cadence" as two valid terms to help creating a common ground between the two genres, discussing them in detail and proposing new interpretations for both concepts. (shrink)

In this paper I approach the debate over non-human animals’ concepts from a metaphilosophical perspective. I compare exemplars of a full-fledged and an austere view of concepts and concept possession. A deflationist response to these views main- tains that the austere and the full-fledged theorist each makes claims that are true when they, respectively, assert and deny ‘nonhuman animals have concepts’. I will argue that the deflationist response is misplaced, using an analogy with the debate over the putative non-conceptual content (...) of perceptual experience. The argument turns on the type of intentional explanation that the austere view on concept posses- sion can support. For the deflationist response to be sustainable, adherents of the aus- tere view would need to have substantially weaker commitments to the explanatory power of their account of concepts and concept possession than, in fact, they do. (shrink)

This thesis offers a teleosemantic account of moral discourse and judgment. It develops a number of views about the function and content of moral judgments and the nature of moral discourse based on Ruth Millikan’s theory of intentional content and the functions of intentional attitudes. Non-cognitivists in meta-ethics have argued that moral judgments are more akin to desires and other motivational attitudes than to descriptive beliefs. I argue that teleosemantics allows us to assign descriptive content to motivational attitudes and hence (...) that even if the non-cognitivist is correct, moral judgments can be said to describe the world. Moreover, given further teleosemantic assumptions, this conclusion has consequences that are both surprising and interesting. First of all, while moral judgments have descriptive content, moral statements do not. The purpose of moral discourse is not to convey beliefs that are true simpliciter, but to convey attitudes that are descriptively correct when tokened by the addressee. Consequently, moral discourse requires speakers to adapt to hearers in order to secure their assent and bring them into "community of judgment" with themselves. Secondly, the descriptive content of a motivational attitude is partly a matter of the subject’s own preferences and circumstances. In particular, the descriptive correctness of a moral judgment is partly a function of the degree to which it is shared with others. Since a moral judgment also motivates the subject to spread it, it has the ability to, in a certain sense, make itself true. If regular descriptive beliefs are supposed to adapt the subject to the world, a moral judgment also has the capacity to adapt the world to the subject. (shrink)

Bilimin ne olduğunun tespit edilmesi ve bilimi sözde bilimlerden ya da bilimsel olmayan alanlardan ayırt edecek ölçütün ne olması gerektiğine yönelik tartışma, bilim felsefesinde sınır çizme sorunu olarak ele alınmaktadır. Bu makalede, öncelikle söz konusu soruna yönelik geleneksel yaklaşımlar incelenmiş ve ardından bu yaklaşımların bilimsel toplulukların doğasına ilişkin özellikleri göz ardı ettiği ortaya konmuştur. Daha önce yapılan çalışmalar bilimi daha çok önermeler, ifadeler ya da salt epistemik bir sistem olarak ele almakta ve bilimsel akıl yürütmenin biçimi ile bilimsel kuramların özelliklerine (...) odaklanmaktadır. Bu tespit çerçevesinde, sunulan çalışmada, bilimsel bir disiplinin asgari olarak iki özellik (yapısal ve kanıta dayalı olması) üzerine kurulması gerektiği vurgulanarak, sınır çizme sorununun çözümüne yönelik önerilen alternatif ölçüt bilimin sosyal yönüne dikkat çekmektedir. Bu bakımdan, makalenin asıl ilgisi, sınır çizme sorununu alternatif bir yolla ele alabilmek amacıyla bilimin ve onun uygulayıcılarının sosyal özelliklerine yönelik tespitleri, sözde bilimin uygulayıcıları ile kıyaslayarak aktarmaktır. Makale, bir disiplinin sözde bilim olarak nitelendirilebilmesi için öncelikle o disiplinin bilimsellik iddiasında bulunması, daha sonra bilimsel topluluk tarafından sürdürülen bir araştırma geleneğine kabul edilmemiş ya da bu araştırma geleneği tarafından terk edilmiş olması gerektiği düşüncesi ile sonuçlandırılmıştır. (shrink)

When working with garden archaeology and garden archaeobotany, the plant material is of great importance. It is important to be able to identify which plants have grown in a particular garden and which have not, which of the plants you find in the garden today that are newly introduced or have established themselves on their own, and which plants that may be remnants of earlier cultivation. During the past two years, my colleagues and I have been involved in a project (...) that deals with the latter kind of plants, that is, plants that were once actively cultivated and that have survived in their original place of cultivation until the present time(Persson, Ansebo & Solberg, this volume). When we started the project we simply called the plants we worked with ‘relict plants’. This is also the term that has been used unofficially in this field of research for some time. It was in no way an official term, however, and as it turned out, the term already had a different meaning in botany that was both older and better established. We were therefore in need of a better name for the plants we worked with. To single out the plants we were working with, we used the following working definition: “Plants that were once, but are no longer cultivated in a certain area, and where a part of the population still exists even though it is no longer actively maintained”. Although we still think this is a decent approximation, we have realized that there are several complicating factors we have had to think more about. We thus needed both a better name and a better definition. Both these tasks became important parts of the project. (shrink)

This essay is an inquiry into John McDowell’s thinking on ‘subjectivity.’ The project consists in two parts. On the one hand, I will discuss how McDowell understands and responds to the various issues he is tackling; on the other, I will approach relevant issues concerning subjectivity by considering different aspects of it: a subject as a perceiver, knower, thinker, speaker, agent, person and (self-) conscious being in the world. The inquiry begins by identifying and resolving a tension generated by the (...) very idea of ‘rational animal’: human beings are at the same time natural and rational. Later the inquiry proceeds by considering how McDowell’s notion of ‘second nature’ enables us to be human subjects with many faces. By going through the diagnoses and responses of McDowell, two central problems in modern and contemporary philosophy – the narrow conception of nature and the Cartesian inner space model – are identified and repelled. In Episode N I first urge that we should leave room for a certain notion of ‘world.’ I further argue that mentality has many aspects, and to understand those aspects is to understand the many faces of human subject. In Episode Ⅰ the Aristotelian notion of ‘second nature’ is discussed in order to resolve the tension in the very idea of ‘rational animal.’ Later I reply to some worries about this maneuver, including the objection from Crispin Wright. Hans-Georg Gadamer’s distinction between world and environment is introduced and related to McDowell’s thinking. Episode Ⅱ discusses perception and knowledge; McDowell’s main target – the Cartesian inner space – is introduced and criticized. Barry Stroud’s and Simon Blackburn’s positions are evaluated. Later I connect the main theme of Mind and World to the present context; in particular, I discuss McDowell’s invocation of Donald Davidson and Immanuel Kant. And then I discuss a common accusation of idealism, and Robert Brandom’s accusation of ‘residual individualism.’ Episode Ⅲ concentrates on Saul Kripke’s Wittgenstein, arguing that the master thesis behind the rule-following paradox is a version of the inner space model, and that Kripke’s Wittgenstein is not Wittgenstein. Martin Kusch’s objections are answered; Michael Dummett’s demand of reductionism is rebutted. After this, I turn to Davidson’s ‘no language’ claim, and discuss to what extent McDowell agrees with him. In Episode Ⅳ I evaluate objections from Hubert Dreyfus concerning action and agency. I discuss how Dreyfus and Maurice Merleau-Ponty commit ‘the Myth of the Disembodied Intellect’ identified by McDowell. I answer Michael Ayer’s charge of intellectualism in passing. Later I bring in McDowell’s objections to Derek Parfit on personhood and to Davidson on the mind-body relation. In Episode Ⅴ I focus on consciousness and self-consciousness. McDowell applies his argument against Parfit to Kant, but Maximilian de Gaynesford dissents. I reply to his objections on McDowell’s behalf. I further connect this to McDowell’s attacks on the dualism of scheme and content. This leads to my McDowellian rejection to the existence of qualia, and further brings me to the debate between intentionalism and disjunctivism in the context of the argument from illusion. I argue against Tim Crane’s ways of conceiving issues about intentionalism and the argument from illusion. Varieties of disjunctivism are also discussed. In my Epilogue, I express my worry about McDowell’s notion of ‘self-determining subjectivity.’ According to McDowell, human freedom consists in causations in the space of reason, but as Richard Gaskin points out, a satisfying story of it is yet to be provided. I close this essay with some rough ideas about how to fill in the details of the McDowellian picture. (shrink)

I demonstrate that a "speech act" theory of meaning for imperatives is—contra a dominant position in philosophy and linguistics—theoretically desirable. A speech act-theoretic account of the meaning of an imperative !φ is characterized, broadly, by the following claims. -/- LINGUISTIC MEANING AS USE !φ’s meaning is a matter of the speech act an utterance of it conventionally functions to express—what a speaker conventionally uses it to do (its conventional discourse function, CDF). -/- IMPERATIVE USE AS PRACTICAL !φ's CDF is to (...) express a practical (non-representational) state of mind—one concerning an agent's preferences and plans, rather than her beliefs. -/- Opposed to speech act accounts is a preponderance of views which deny that a sentence's linguistic meaning is a matter of what speech act it is used to perform, or its CDF. On such accounts, meaning is, instead, a matter of "static" properties of the sentence—e.g., how it depicts the world as being (or, more neutrally, the properties of a model-theoretic object with which the semantic value of the sentence co-varies). On one version of a static account, an imperative 'shut the window!' might, for instance, depict the world as being such that the window must be shut. -/- Static accounts are traditionally motivated against speech act-theoretic accounts by appeal to supposedly irremediable explanatory deficiencies in the latter. Whatever a static account loses in saying (prima facie counterintuitively) that an imperative conventionally represents, or expresses a picture of the world, is said to be offset by its ability to explain a variety of phenomena for which speech act-theoretic accounts are said to lack good explanations (even, in many cases, the bare ability to offer something that might meet basic criteria on what a good explanation should be like). -/- I aim to turn the tables on static accounts. I do this by showing that speech act accounts are capable of giving explanations of phenomena which fans of static accounts have alleged them unable to give. Indeed, for a variety of absolutely fundamental phenomena having to do with the conventional meaning of imperatives (and other types of practical language), speech act accounts provide natural and theoretically satisfying explanations, where a representational account provides none. (shrink)

Uncertainty, insufficient information or information of poor quality, limited cognitive capacity and time, along with value conflicts and ethical considerations, are all aspects thatmake risk managementand riskcommunication difficult. This paper provides a review of different risk concepts and describes how these influence risk management, communication and planning in relation to forest ecosystem services. Based on the review and results of empirical studies, we suggest that personal assessment of risk is decisive in the management of forest ecosystem services. The results are (...) used together with a reviewof different principles of the distribution of risk to propose an approach to risk communication that is effective aswell as ethically sound. Knowledge of heuristics and mutual information on both beliefs and desires are important in the proposed risk communication approach. Such knowledge provides an opportunity for relevant information exchange, so that gaps in personal knowledge maps can be filled in and effective risk communication can be promoted. (shrink)

The article develops and justifies, on the basis of the epistemological argumentation theory, two central pieces of the theory of evaluative argumentation interpretation: 1. criteria for recognizing argument types and 2. rules for adding reasons to create ideal arguments. Ad 1: The criteria for identifying argument types are a selection of essential elements from the definitions of the respective argument types. Ad 2: After presenting the general principles for adding reasons (benevolence, authenticity, immanence, optimization), heuristics are proposed for finding missing (...) reasons, for deductive arguments, e.g., semantic tableaux are suggested. (shrink)

The paper outlines the model of controversy spaces. The model of controversy spaces integrates two different elements of the dialectical tradition. On the one hand, dialectics in its ancient meaning: the practice of controversial dialogue. On the other hand, the model incorporates dialectics understood as a pattern of change in intellectual history, based on the confrontation between opposite standpoints. I will be argued in this paper, the dialectical tradition was almost completely left aside in modernity and substituted by a monolectic (...) approach. The model that will be outlined below aims at overcoming this view by focusing on the emergence, development and transformation of controversy spaces. (shrink)

Analytic philosophers have a tendency to forget that they are human beings, and one of the reasons that P. F. Strawson’s 1962 essay, “Freedom and Resentment”, has been so influential is that it promises to bring discussions of moral responsibility back down to earth. Strawson encouraged us to “keep before our minds...what it is actually like to be involved in ordinary interpersonal relationships”, which is, after all, the context in which questions about responsibility arise in the first place. In this (...) essay I explore what we can learn about ordinary interpersonal relationships from three works of literature – Shakespeare’s King Lear, Jane Austen’s Persuasion, and Graham Greene’s The End of the Affair. My intention is to try to heed Strawson’s advice without imposing upon the data any particular theoretical agenda, and my hope is that the data collected will prove useful for future theorizing about responsibility. (shrink)

It is commonly held that Bradley’s regress has a solution within a trope ontology. This seems to happen when a bundle is understood as constituted by non-transferable tropes. It also seems to happen when a bundle is understood as constituted by transferable tropes related by a relational trope of compresence whose existence specifically depends on those relata. In this article I demonstrate that these proposals fail in addressing the essential question that underlies the regress, incurring in a question-begging response already (...) anticipated by Bradley. (shrink)

In § 35 of Sein und Zeit Heidegger’s denunciation of Gerede, idle talk, is confident and scathing. It sounds so sinister and threatening. What could Heidegger be talking about? One could cite numerous fictional characters (e.g., Pecksniff, Mrs. Gamp, Skimpole, Podsnap – all in Dickens), characters whose speech is very nearly an idiolect of bad faith. And yet there is something so fascinating and creative in their speech, an exuberance in their dissimulation, that one wouldn’t want to miss them. Could (...) idle talk in Heidegger’s sense contribute to the theoretization of Bakhtin's idea of the dialogic and heteroglossia and to the notion of discours as it has been developed by Benveniste, Barthes, and Genette? In prose fiction language is valorized (often implicitly) in terms of meaning/nonsense, serious/non-serious, full/empty. When in fiction language that is deemed low, formulaic, or “empty”-- gossip, chatter, prattle, idiotismes – comes to the fore the narrative elements falters, “nothing much” is said. But a kind of speech as act and process is foregrounded. It is this kind of inadvertence in language, its “idling” state, that Gerede points to. (shrink)

The present paper opens this topical issue on translation techniques by drawing a theoretical basis for the discussion of translational issues in a linguistic perspective. In order to forward an audience- oriented definition of translation, I will describe different forms of linguistic variability, highlighting how they present different difficulties to translators, with an emphasis on the semantic and communicative complexity that a source text can exhibit. The problem is then further discussed through a comparison between Quine's radically holistic position and (...) the translatability principle supported by such semanticists as Katz. General translatability — at the expense of additional complexity — is eventually proposed as a possible synthesis of this debate. In describing the meaningfulness levels of source texts through Hjelmslevian semiotics, and his semiotic hierarchy in particular, the paper attempts to go beyond denotative semiotic, and reframe some translational issues in a connotative semiotic and metasemiotic perspective. (shrink)

Philosophy of religion, approached from a comparative perspective, can be a valuable tool for advancing inter-religious dialogue. Unfortunately, “comparative religion” today is usually characterised by two extreme positions: 1) Comparing religions in order to come to the conclusion that one's own religion is superior 2) Arguing for a type of “religious pluralism” that relativises all religious truth claims. -/- The former approach reduces religion to a confrontational form of apologetics, theatrical “debates” and polemics, while the latter reduces religion to a (...) mere acceptance of pragmatically useful perspectivist narratives devoid of absolute reality or truth. -/- Inter-religious dialogue should follow a middle path between these two extremes by engaging with underlying philosophical themes that are common to all religious traditions instead of emphasising the comparison of theological and soteriological arguments that may depend on justifications that are exclusive to a particular religious practice. The philosophical theme explored here is that of dissatisfaction and existential suffering in an imperfect world, a theme found in all “world religions”. Indeed, the diagnosis of this existential predicament and the hope that religious practice may allow one to overcome it appears to be universal, while its causes and the prescribed remedies differ considerably among religious traditions. Nevertheless, inter-religious dialogue beginning from a conviction that all religious practitioners strive for truth and salvation in response to a common existential experience may lead to a more compassionate and productive dialogue between religious communities. This type of inter-religious dialogue avoids accusations of falling into religious syncretism or relativism while encouraging diverse religious communities to address contemporary issues from areas of philosophical common ground. This allows for a more fruitful type of inter-religious dialogue and comparative study of religion that can be pursued while maintaining one's own distinct religious identities and particular religious truths. (shrink)

In Natural propositions (2014), Stjernfelt contends that the interpretation of a proposition or dicisign requires the joint action of two kinds of signs. A proposition must contain a sign that conveys a general quality. This function can be served by a similarity-based icon or code-based symbol. In addition, a proposition must situate or apply this general quality, so that the predication can become liable of being true or false. This function is served by an index. Stjernfelt rightly considers the co-localization (...) of these two parts to be a primitive phenomenon. Although this primitive character would seem to bar any further analysis, I endeavor to clarify the degree of proximity sufficient to enable co-localization. Siding with Pietarinen (2014), who argues that the whole issue should not be construed in metric terms, I conclude that one cannot make sense of propositional co-localization without appealing to some form of first-person perspective. (shrink)

This paper has two purposes: the first is to critically examine Kripke’s well-known arguments against Descriptivism and suggest that they are not as decisive as many have thought; the second is to argue that proper names do encode descriptive information of various kinds, that such information may be truth-conditionally significant, and hence that a name’s truth-conditional contribution is not limited to its referent.

In his 1982 book Wittgenstein On Rules and Private Language, Saul Kripke maintains that Wittgenstein´s rule following considerations land us with a skeptical argument about meaning. This essay contains a short exposition of Kripke´s argument. In addition, I hold, both on textual grounds and by an appeal to some select secondary literature, that Wittgenstein offered no such skeptical argument in the Philosophical Investigations . Although Wittgenstein certainly repudiates a view of meaning based on temporally located mental states, it does not (...) follow that there can be no meaning-grounding facts of other sorts. Although it is true that mental states, viewed atomistically, offer no sure foundation for meaning, I argue that it need not follow, pace Kripke, that no facts about an individual´s past mental life can ever make it clear that he meant ‘plus’ rather than ‘quus’ while performing any addition. For the individual´s past mental life is indeed relevant to meaning when considered in its unfolding in time. The essay further contains explorations on the very nature of the practice of following a rule and ends with a discussion of the solitary rule follower. (shrink)

resumo Focado num trecho de “Position de L’inconscient”, este artigo faz a descrição gramatical das figuras de sujeito e de linguagem ali empregadas. A intenção é exclusivamente terapêutica – não se trata de propor novas teses, mas provocar o olhar para aspectos negligenciados da prática psicanalítica. palavras-chave Lacan - Wittgenstein - Linguagem - Subjetividade.

This work is an investigation into philosophical method and rational argument in moral philosophy. It makes an original contribution to human understanding, by taking some of the tools and techniques that Gordon Baker identifies in the later work of Wittgenstein, and using them as a way of fending for oneself in an area of philosophy that neither Baker, nor Wittgenstein, wrote on. More specifically, a discussion of some different aspects of the contemporary literature on Dancy’s moral particularism is used as (...) a vehicle for illustrating how Baker’s therapeutic conception of philosophy offers alternative possibilities for how we can do philosophy, and what counts as rational argument in moral philosophy. I maintain that, by considering some indicative ways in which Baker’s therapeutic approach to philosophy can dissolve, rather than solve, the kinds of perplexities found in the existing literature on Dancy’s moral particularism, we can liberate ourselves from the traditional/theoretical view of how we ought to do philosophy, and an understanding of rational argument in moral philosophy, to which we need not be committed. (shrink)

This thesis will address the question of whether there are any situated cognition concepts of memory functioning as investigative kinds in the sciences of memory. Situated cognition is an umbrella term, subsuming extended, embedded, embodied, enacted and distributed cognition. I will be looking closely at case studies of investigations into memory where such concepts seem prima facie most likely to be found in order to establish a) whether the researchers in question are in fact employing such concepts, and b) whether (...) the concepts are functioning well – functioning as investigative kinds – and should therefore continue to be employed, or whether something has gone wrong in the practice of the science and they should employ a different kind of concept. An historically situated approach to the case studies will allow me to answer part b) here. -/- Along the way, I will argue for a way of construing scientific research that I call the dynamic framework account, an account of (im)maturity for science, a variety of conceptual role semantics with respect to scientific concepts, and the historically situated case study-based method I will employ in answering the central question. My conclusions, and the way I reach them, constitute contributions to debates about situated cognition particularly, and to philosophy of science more generally, as well as recommendations for scientific practice. (shrink)

In this paper, I examine two versions of the so-called “hierarchical” approach to personal autonomy, based on the notion of “second-order desires”. My primary concern will be with the question of whether these approaches provide an adequate basis for understanding the dynamics of autonomy-ascription. I begin by distinguishing two versions of the hierarchical approach, each representing a different response to the oft-discussed “regress” objection. I then argue that both “structural hierarchicalism” (e.g., Frankfurt, Bratman) and “procedural hierarchicalism” (e.g., Dworkin, Christman, Mele) (...) have difficulties accommodating the dynamics of how the attribution of autonomy to persons is claimed, disputed, and resolved. Although they differ in details, both shortcomings can be traced to viewing autonomy as a metaphysical rather than a normative, practical matter. I conclude by suggesting that these difficulties underscore the advantages of a more constructivist and pragmatist. (shrink)

I argue that there are analytic claims that, if true, can be known a priori, but which also can turn out to be false: they are expressive of merely default instructions from the language faculty to the conceptual system, which may be overridden by pragmatic or scientific considerations, in which case, of course, they would not be known at all, a priori or otherwise. More surprisingly, I also argue that they might not be, strictly speaking, conceptual: concepts may be importantly (...) different from the meaning instructions for the words we use to express them. I will press all this in the context of a general Quinean “naturalism,” where the epistemology that interests me is “a chapter of natural science,” but where the science won't be Quine's behaviorism, but a Chomskyan theory of the “I-semantics” of “I-language.” But, relying on a distinction I draw between an explanatory and a working epistemology, I will be pressing it largely as an explanatory claim, not one that will have serious consequences for on-going philosophical practice, neither with regard to the world, nor, more surprisingly, even with regard to armchair “conceptual analysis.” As Putnam observed, there may be analytic truths, but they don't cut much philosophical ice. (shrink)

A central feature in contemporary discussions of selfknowledge concerns the epistemic status of mental selfascriptions, such as “I have toothache” or “I believe that p”. The overall project of such discussions is to provide an account of the special status of mental self-ascriptions vis-à-vis other knowledge-claims, including ascriptions of mental states to others. In this respect, two approaches have gained currency in contemporary philosophy. Some authors have focused on the notion of expression, stressing that self-ascriptions are expressions of one’s mental (...) life; whereas others have singled out the notion of transparency as crucial, since self-knowledge involves self-beliefs, and the latter are transparent to one’s available evidence. This critical notice explores one instance of each approach, in order to assess their prospects of success. It concludes that both approaches fail to articulate an account that satisfactorily accommodates the first-person component in the notion of self-knowledge. (shrink)