When people combine concepts these are often characterised as “hybrid”, “impossible”, or “humorous”. However, when simply considering them in terms of extensional logic, the novel concepts understood as a conjunctive concept will often lack meaning having an empty extension (consider “a tooth that is a chair”, “a pet flower”, etc.). Still, people use different strategies to produce new non-empty concepts: additive or integrative combination of features, alignment of features, instantiation, etc. All these strategies involve the ability to deal with (...) conflicting attributes and the creation of new (combinations of) properties. We here consider in particular the case where a Head concept has superior ‘asymmetric’ control over steering the resulting concept combination (or hybridisation) with a Modifier concept. Specifically, we propose a dialogical approach to concept combination and discuss an implementation based on axiom weakening, which models the cognitive and logical mechanics of this asymmetric form of hybridisation. (shrink)

The recent resurgence of extreme-right movements and the nationalist turn of many governments across the world have reignited the relevance of discussions within educational philosophy about the teaching of national identity in schools. However, the conceptualisation of national identity in previous iterations of these debates have been largely Western and Eurocentric, making the past theoretical literature about these questions less relevant for post-colonial settings. In this paper, I imagine a new approach for teaching national identity in post-colonial contexts, founded on (...) postcolonial conceptions of identity and in particular, the concept of hybridity. I first develop a postcolonial account of national identity by drawing on Homi Bhabha’s thinking about cultural identity, drawing on his concepts of liminality, splitting, and ambivalence. Then, building on Bhabha's notion of hybridity, I propose a distinction between national identity portrayals as either fixed or malleable. Finally, I demonstrate the implications of such a conceptual distinction on the way that national identity is taught in post-colonial schools; by way of an example, I envision a concrete approach to teaching national identity that views national identity as malleable rather than fixed, set in a hypothetical postcolonial school in the Philippines. By beginning from postcolonial assumptions about national identity, I hope to indicate new directions that the debates about the teaching of national identity in schools might proceed. (shrink)

The transgressive ontological character of hybrids—entities crossing the ontological binarism of naturalness and artificiality, e.g., biomimetic projects—calls for pondering the question of their ethical status, since metaphysical and moral ideas are often inextricably linked. The example of it is the concept of “moral considerability” and related to it the idea of “intrinsic value” understood as a non-instrumentality of a being. Such an approach excludes hybrids from moral considerations due to their instrumental character. In the paper, we revisit the boundaries of (...) moral considerability by reexamining the legitimacy of identifying intrinsic value with a non-instrumental one. We offer the concept of “functional value,” which we define as a simultaneous contribution to the common good of the ecosystem and the possibility to disclose the full variety of aspects of a being’s identity. We argue that such a value of hybrids allows us to include them into the scope of moral considerability. (shrink)

The transgressive ontological character of hybrids—entities crossing the ontological binarism of naturalness and artificiality, e.g., biomimetic projects—calls for pondering the question of their ethical status, since metaphysical and moral ideas are often inextricably linked. The example of it is the concept of “moral considerability” and related to it the idea of “intrinsic value” understood as a non-instrumentality of a being. Such an approach excludes hybrids from moral considerations due to their instrumental character. In the paper, we revisit the boundaries of (...) moral considerability by reexamining the legitimacy of identifying intrinsic value with a non-instrumental one. We offer the concept of “functional value,” which we define as a simultaneous contribution to the common good of the ecosystem and the possibility to disclose the full variety of aspects of a being’s identity. We argue that such a value of hybrids allows us to include them into the scope of moral considerability. (shrink)

The conception of rationality as Reasons Responsiveness (RR) has seen a revival in the literature. However, RR faces the indeterminacy problem: an agent may be instrumentally irrational even without failing to respond correctly to reasons. Reasons do not conclusively determine choice, but this should not be possible on RR. Hybrid Voluntarism (HV), which is supposed to apply particularly to cases where “reasons run out”, may be a solution. According to Ruth Chang, we can create will-based reasons through commitment (...) if the given reasons balance. HV is attractive since it seems to explain instrumental irrationality and preserve RR’s distinctive appeal. In this paper, I argue that HV fails to save RR in the face of indeterminacy. I first suggest that we distinguish between overdetermination and underdetermination and then show that while RR may solve the former, it fails with the latter. Therefore, we are still left with a case of irrationality without a failure to respond correctly to reasons. (shrink)

This paper defends a conception of epistemic value that I call the “Simpliciter Conception.” On it, epistemic value is a kind of value simpliciter and being of epistemic value implies being of value simpliciter. I defend this conception by criticizing two others, what I call the Formal Conception and the Hybrid Conception. While those conceptions may be popular among epistemologists, I argue that they fail to explain why anyone should care that things are of (...) epistemic value and naturally undercuts disputes about what is of epistemic value. I end by sketching and locating my conception within some increasingly popular views in meta-normativity. (shrink)

This essay characterizes the perception of the visual hybrid as nonconceptual, introducing the terminology of nonconceptual content theory to aesthetics. The visual hybrid possesses a radical but nonetheless exemplary aesthetic composition and is well established in culture, art, and even design. The essay supplies a philosophical analysis of the results of cross-cultural experiments, showing that while categorization or conceptual hierarchization kicks in when the visual hybrids are juxtaposed with linguistic descriptions, no conceptual scheme takes effect when participants are (...) presented with mere visual hybrids. In isolation, the hybrids do not lend themselves to classification. I draw four conclusions from these experimental outcomes: 1. The perception of visual hybrids follows the structure of a nonconceptual mental content, because the original categories or concepts of the hybrids’ components are not combined into one, and their properties are not applied to one another, therefore none of the components reconstructs the other such that it is introduced to a new category. 2. Language freezes the hybridity of the visual hybrid into conceptuality. 3. Given that language has a freezing effect in the case of an extreme visual phenomenon such as the hybrid, it is all the more restraining in moderate artistic compositions, such as visual metaphors, in which properties of one component (the source) are applied to the other (the target). In those, nonconceptuality emerges from relatively organized compositions, forms, and relations, and from the dependence of objects and their properties on perceptual context. 4. Thus, the nonconceptualist terminology is suitable for the analysis of aesthetic perception in general and aesthetic perception’s relation to language. Keywords aesthetics, perception, nonconceptual content, hybrids, visual metaphors. (shrink)

Originating in the field of biology, the concept of the hybrid has proved to be influential and effective in historical studies, too. Until now, however, the idea of hybrid knowledge has not been fully explored in the historiography of pre-modern science. This article examines the history of pre-Copernican astronomy and focuses on three case studies—Alexandria in the second century CE; Baghdad in the ninth century; and Constantinople in the fourteenth century—in which hybridization played a crucial role in the (...) development of astronomical knowledge and in philosophical controversies about the status of astronomy and astrology in scholarly and/or institutional settings. By establishing a comparative framework, this analysis of hybrid knowledge highlights different facets of hybridization and shows how processes of hybridization shaped scientific controversies. (shrink)

In a very general sense, hybrid can be understood to be any organism that is the product of two (or more) organisms where each parent belongs to a different kind. For example; the offspring from two or more parent organisms, each belonging to a separate species (or genera), is called a “hybrid”. “Hybridity” refers to the phenomenal character of being a hybrid. And “hybridization ” refers to both natural and artificial processes of generating hybrids. These processes include (...) mechanisms of selective cross-breeding and cross-fertilization of parents of different species for the purpose of producing hybrid offspring. In addition to these processes, “hybridization ” also refers to natural and artificial processes of whole genome duplication that result in the doubling or trebling of the sets of chromosomes of the organism. This entry provides an overview of the impact of hybridity on agriculture. It begins with an historical sketch that traces the early horticulturalists’ and naturalists’ investigations of hybrids. This starts with the observations of Thomas Fairchild and Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon; and leads to the explanation of its mechanism by Gregor Mendel, James Watson and Francis Crick, and Ernst Mayr; and the eventual manipulation of hybrids and hybridization by Barbara McClintock. Following this, the reader is introduced to a number of key terms and concepts in use within current research as well as highlighting diverse ethical concerns that center on hybridization. Recent research that attempts to ascertain the role of hybridization in adaptive change will be introduced. This will include research on the evolution of crop species, increased biodiversity, and the use of hybrids to manipulate phenotypically desirable traits in agricultural crops. The focus of the discussion is on a particularly significant type of naturally occurring hybridization, polyploidy hybridization. Polyploids are organisms which have more than two complete genomes in each cell. This kind of hybridization is ubiquitous among crop plants. The role of polyploidy in plant evolution and the affects of polyploidy on plants and animals will be reviewed. A critical discussion of its agricultural value in the production of fertile polyploid hybrids highlights key epistemological, ontological, and ethical issues. These are illuminated with reference to the distinct processes of artificial and natural hybridization. A survey of these different kinds of hybridization includes the ethical and economic impacts of hybridity on global nutrition, the environment, and considerations of some practical implications for the agricultural industry. Tracking the role of hybrids, the process of hybridization, and the current impacts of it for agriculture requires knowledge of the history of its early conceptualization, understanding, and use. This is the topic of the following section. (shrink)

The concept of a hypersoft membership function is introduced in the extension of a soft set known as a hypersoft set, permitting it to handle complicated and uncertain information in a more powerful and flexible manner. Many academics have already become fascinated with this new area of study, leading to the development of a number of hybrid structures. This chapter develops some new hybrid hypersoft set structures by taking into account multiple fuzzy set-like settings and possibility degree-based settings (...) collectively. Additionally, numerical examples are included to clarify the concept of these structures. Researchers can utilize this work to better understand and apply a variety of mathematical ideas. (shrink)

Grasping the identity of hybrids, that is beings which cross the binarism of nature and technology (e.g. genetically-modified organisms (GMOs), syn-bio inventions, biomimetic projects), is problematic since it is still guided by self-evident dualistic categories, either as artefacts or as natural entities. To move beyond the limitations of such a one-sided understanding of hybrids, we suggest turning towards the categories of affordances and the juxtaposition of needs and patterns of proper use, as inspired by the Heideggerian version of phenomenology. Drawing (...) upon selected concepts by Heidegger, we argue that hybrids can be conceptualised as a regenerative design and use to serve the planet. We argue that the ideal type of non-exploitative account of hybrids consists of the adaptive approach to the environment, which does not, however, exclude the possibility of designing and constructing new beings. We also point out that hybrids undermine the divide of being destructive/regenerative which marks the boundaries of nature and technology. (shrink)

The paper develops two related thought experiments exploring variations on an ‘animat’ theme. Animats are hybrid devices with both artificial and biological components. Traditionally, ‘components’ have been construed in concrete terms, as physical parts or constituent material structures. Many fascinating issues arise within this context of hybrid physical organization. However, within the context of functional/computational theories of mentality, demarcations based purely on material structure are unduly narrow. It is abstract functional structure which does the key work in characterizing (...) the respective ‘components’ of thinking systems, while the ‘stuff’ of material implementation is of secondary importance. Thus the paper extends the received animat paradigm, and investigates some intriguing consequences of expanding the conception of bio-machine hybrids to include abstract functional and semantic structure. In particular, the thought experiments consider cases of mind-machine merger where there is no physical Brain-Machine Interface: indeed, the material human body and brain have been removed from the picture altogether. The first experiment illustrates some intrinsic theoretical difficulties in attempting to replicate the human mind in an alternative material medium, while the second reveals some deep conceptual problems in attempting to create a form of truly Artificial General Intelligence. (shrink)

The renewed interest in concepts and their role in psychological theorizing is partially motivated by Machery’s claim that concepts are so heterogeneous that they have no explanatory role. Against this, pluralism argues that there is multiplicity of different concepts for any given category, while hybridism argues that a concept is constituted by a rich common representation. This article aims to advance the understanding of the hybrid view of concepts. First, we examine the main arguments against hybrid concepts and (...) conclude that, even if not successful, they challenge hybridism to find a robust criterion for concept individuation and to show an explanatory advantage for hybrid concepts. Then we propose such a criterion of individuation, which we will call ‘functional stable coactivation’. Finally, we examine the prospects of hybridism to understand what is involved in recent approaches to categorization and meaning extraction. 1 The Heterogeneity of Conceptual Representations2 Two Challenges for Hybrid Concepts: Individuation and Explanation2.1 The coordination criterion2.2 Concepts as constituents of thoughts3 Individuating Hybrids: Functional Stable Coactivation4 The Explanatory Power of Hybrid Concepts4.1 Categorization4.2 Meaning extraction4.2.1 Linguistic comprehension and rich lexical entries4.2.2 Polysemy and hybrid concepts5 Conclusion. (shrink)

The paper discusses a posthuman reading of Merleau-Ponty’s later works and an application of the concept of flesh to the digital dimension. Whereas, in the Phenomenology of Perception, the world and other beings are seen from an egological and human perspective, in The Visible and the Invisible this perspective is reshaped. Human body is made of the same stuff of other bodies, and they constitute a common being, the flesh of the world. Merleau-Ponty sets out a path through flat ontology (...) and posthumanism, opposing human perspective as a privileged one. His posthuman turn passes through the concepts of reversibility and divergence. Humans are made of the same stuff as non-humans, so they reverse into one another, but, on the other hand, they are not reduced to an undifferentiated entity, because of their divergence. Merleau-Ponty’s problematizing perspective is here actualized and applied to the hybridization between human bodies and digital protheses. (shrink)

We have been accustomed at least since Kant and mainstream history of philosophy to distinguish between the ‘mechanical’ and the ‘teleological’; between a fully mechanistic, quantitative science of Nature exemplified by Newton and a teleological, qualitative approach to living beings ultimately expressed in the concept of ‘organism’ – a purposive entity, or at least an entity possessed of functions. The beauty of this distinction is that it seems to make intuitive sense and to map onto historical and conceptual constellations in (...) medicine, physiology and the related natural -philosophical discussions on the status of the body versus that of the machine. In this presentation I argue that the distinction between mechanism and teleology is imprecise and flawed, on the basis of a series of examples: the presence of ‘functional’ or ‘purposive’ features even in Cartesian physiology; work such as that of Richard Lower’s on animal respiration; the fact that the model of the ‘body-machine’ is not at all a mechanistic reduction of organismic properties to basic physical properties but on the contrary a way of emphasizing the uniqueness of organic life; and the concept of ‘animal economy’ in vitalist medical theory, which I present as a kind of ‘teleo-mechanistic’ concept of organism – neither mechanical nor teleological. (shrink)

In this paper, we defend what we call the ‘Hybrid View’ of privacy. According to this view, an individual has privacy if, and only if, no one else forms an epistemically warranted belief about the individual’s personal matters, nor perceives them. We contrast the Hybrid View with what seems to be the most common view of what it means to access someone’s personal matters, namely the Belief-Based View. We offer a range of examples that demonstrate why the (...) class='Hi'>Hybrid View is more plausible than the Belief-Based View. Finally, we show how the Hybrid View generates a more plausible fit between the concept of privacy, and a (morally objectionable) violation of privacy. (shrink)

The organism is neither a discovery like the circulation of the blood or the glycogenic function of the liver, nor a particular biological theory like epigenesis or preformationism. It is rather a concept which plays a series of roles – sometimes overt, sometimes masked – throughout the history of biology, and frequently in very normative ways, also shifting between the biological and the social. Indeed, it has often been presented as a key-concept in life science and the ‘theorization’ of Life, (...) but conversely has also been the target of influential rejections: as just an instrument of transmission for the selfish gene, but also, historiographically, as part of an outdated ‘vitalism’. Indeed, the organism, perhaps because it is experientially closer to the ‘body’ than to the ‘molecule’, is often the object of quasi-affective theoretical investments presenting it as essential, sometimes even as the pivot of a science or a particular approach to nature, while other approaches reject or attack it with equal force, assimilating it to a mysterious ‘vitalist’ ontology of extra-causal forces, or other pseudo-scientific doctrines. This paper does not seek to adjudicate between these debates, either in terms of scientific validity or historical coherence; nor does it return to the well-studied issue of the organism-mechanism tension in biology. Recent scholarship has begun to focus on the emergence and transformation of the concept of organism, but has not emphasized so much the way in which organism is a shifting, ‘go-between’ concept – invoked as ‘natural’ by some thinkers to justify their metaphysics, but then presented as value-laden by others, over and against the natural world. The organism as go-between concept is also a hybrid, a boundary concept or an epistemic limit case, all of which partly overlap with the idea of ‘nomadic concepts’. Thereby the concept of organism continues to function in different contexts – as a heuristic, an explanatory challenge, a model of order, of regulation, etc. – despite having frequently been pronounced irrelevant and reduced to molecules or genes. Yet this perpetuation is far removed from any ‘metaphysics of organism’, or organismic biology. (shrink)

In this thesis I argue that the psychological study of concepts and categorisation, and the philosophical study of reference are deeply intertwined. I propose that semantic intuitions are a variety of categorisation judgements, determined by concepts, and that because of this, concepts determine reference. I defend a dual theory of natural kind concepts, according to which natural kind concepts have distinct semantic cores and non-semantic identification procedures. Drawing on psychological essentialism, I suggest that the cores consist of externalistic placeholder essence (...) beliefs. The identification procedures, in turn, consist of prototypes, sets of exemplars, or possibly also theory-structured beliefs. I argue that the dual theory is motivated both by experimental data and theoretical considerations. The thesis consists of three interrelated articles. Article I examines philosophical causal and description theories of natural kind term reference, and argues that they involve, or need to involve, certain psychological elements. I propose a unified theory of natural kind term reference, built on the psychology of concepts. Article II presents two semantic adaptations of psychological essentialism, one of which is a strict externalistic Kripkean-Putnamian theory, while the other is a hybrid account, according to which natural kind terms are ambiguous between internalistic and externalistic senses. We present two experiments, the results of which support the strict externalistic theory. Article III examines Fodor’s influential atomistic theory of concepts, according to which no psychological capacities associated with concepts constitute them, or are necessary for reference. I argue, contra Fodor, that the psychological mechanisms are necessary for reference. (shrink)

Concept representation is still an open problem in the field of ontology engineering and, more generally, of knowledge representation. In particular, the issue of representing “non classical” concepts, i.e. concepts that cannot be defined in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions, remains unresolved. In this paper we review empirical evidence from cognitive psychology, according to which concept representation is not a unitary phenomenon. On this basis, we sketch some proposals for concept representation, taking into account suggestions from psychological research. In (...) particular, it seems that human beings employ both prototype-based and exemplar-based representations in order to represent non classical concepts. We suggest that a similar, hybrid prototype-exemplar based approach could also prove useful in the field of knowledge representation technology. Finally, we propose conceptual spaces as a suitable framework for developing some aspects of this proposal. (shrink)

Developments in biological technology in the last few decades highlight the surprising and ever-expanding practical benefits of stem cells. With this progress, the possibility of combining human and nonhuman organisms is a reality, with ethical boundaries that are not readily obvious. These inter-species hybrids are of a larger class of biological entities called “chimeras.” As the concept of a human-nonhuman creature is conjured in our minds, either incredulous wonder or grotesque horror is likely to follow. This paper seeks to mitigate (...) those worries and demotivate reasonable concerns raised against chimera research, all the while pressing current ethical positions toward their plausible conclusions. -/- In service of this overall aim, first, I intend to show that chimeras are far less foreign and fantastic in light of recent research in the lab; second, I intend to show that anti-realist (so-called “constructivist”) commitments regarding species ontology render the species distinction (i.e., the divide between human and nonhuman) superfluous as a basis for ethical practice; and third, I discuss some prevailing dignity accounts regarding the practical ethics of the creation, research, and treatment of chimeras. Consequently I intend to show that the adoption of this particular set of views (constructivist ontology, capacity-based ethics) in conjunction with recent research ought to justify a parallel with what we accord to humans persons, and that trajectory allows for cases of moral permissibility. (shrink)

Beck presents an outline of the procedure of bootstrapping of integer concepts, with the purpose of explicating the account of Carey. According to that theory, integer concepts are acquired through a process of inductive and analogous reasoning based on the object tracking system, which allows individuating objects in a parallel fashion. Discussing the bootstrapping theory, Beck dismisses what he calls the "deviant-interpretation challenge"—the possibility that the bootstrapped integer sequence does not follow a linear progression after some point—as being general to (...) any account of inductive learning. While the account of Carey and Beck focuses on the OTS, in this paper I want to reconsider the importance of another empirically well-established cognitive core system for treating numerosities, namely the approximate number system. Since the ANS-based account offers a potential alternative for integer concept acquisition, I show that it provides a good reason to revisit the deviant-interpretation challenge. Finally, I will present a hybrid OTS-ANS model as the foundation of integer concept acquisition and the framework of enculturation as a solution to the challenge. (shrink)

In Pietroski ( 2018 ) a simple representation language called SMPL is introduced, construed as a hypothesis about core conceptual structure. The present work is a study of this system from a logical perspective. In addition to establishing a completeness result and a complexity characterization for reasoning in the system, we also pinpoint its expressive limits, in particular showing that the fourth corner in the square of opposition (“ Some_not ”) eludes expression. We then study a seemingly small extension, called (...) SMPL +, which allows for a minimal predicate-binding operator. Perhaps surprisingly, the resulting system is shown to encode precisely the concepts expressible in first-order logic. However, unlike the latter class, the class of SMPL + expressions admits a simple procedural (context-free) characterization. Our contribution brings together research strands in logic—including natural logic, modal logic, description logic, and hybrid logic—with recent advances in semantics and philosophy of language. (shrink)

Mallon and Kelly claim that hybrid constructionism predicts, at least, that (1) racial representations are stable over time and (2) that racial representations should vary more in mixed-race cultures than in cultures where there is less racial mixing. I argue that hybrid constructionism’s predictions do not obtain and thus hybrid constructionism requires further evidence. I argue that the historical record is inconsistent with hybrid constructionism, and I suggest that humans may not be innately disposed to categorize (...) people by race even though we are likely disposed to categorize people into in and out groups. So, in this paper, I show that there is an evidence set that is inconsistent with hybrid constructionism. (shrink)

Naturalistic accounts of mental disorder aim to identify an objective basis for attributions of mental disorder. This goal is important for demarcating genuine mental disorders from artificial or socially constructed disorders. The articulation of a demarcation criterion provides a means for assuring that attributions of 'mental disorder' are not merely pathologizing different forms of social deviance. The most influential naturalistic and hybrid definitions of mental disorder identify biological dysfunction as the objective basis of mental disorders: genuine mental...

From the Scientific Revolution to the present era, the natural sciences have developed remarkably and recorded colossal success in different areas such as genetic engineering, cloning, hybrid technology, health and food technologies, space travel, audio-visual technology, among others. These evidences are indications of the growth of scientific knowledge. Accordingly, this paper raises the question of what is responsible for the growth of scientific knowledge. Inherent in this question is the pool of diverse conceptions of what the nature and method (...) of science is. Consequently, some significant contours in the construct of the problem of demarcation will be imported into this discourse as a means of assembling some pivotal conceptions of the growth of scientific knowledge. With this, the paper aims to consider Karl Popper’s fundamental conception of the growth of scientific knowledge and its associated criticisms, and from it, attempt to respond to the question of what is responsible for the growth of scientific knowledge. This will help to eliminate the confusion and complications surrounding the growth of scientific knowledge. (shrink)

A classic debate concerns whether reasonableness should be understood statistically (e.g., reasonableness is what is common) or prescriptively (e.g., reasonableness is what is good). This Article elaborates and defends a third possibility. Reasonableness is a partly statistical and partly prescriptive “hybrid,” reflecting both statistical and prescriptive considerations. Experiments reveal that people apply reasonableness as a hybrid concept, and the Article argues that a hybrid account offers the best general theory of reasonableness. -/- First, the Article investigates how (...) ordinary people judge what is reasonable. Reasonableness sits at the core of countless legal standards, yet little work has investigated how ordinary people (i.e., potential jurors) actually make reasonableness judgments. Experiments reveal that judgments of reasonableness are systematically intermediate between judgments of the relevant average and ideal across numerous legal domains. For example, participants’ mean judgment of the legally reasonable number of weeks’ delay before a criminal trial (ten weeks) falls between the judged average (seventeen weeks) and ideal (seven weeks). So too for the reasonable num- ber of days to accept a contract offer, the reasonable rate of attorneys’ fees, the reasonable loan interest rate, and the reasonable annual number of loud events on a football field in a residential neighborhood. Judgment of reasonableness is better predicted by both statistical and prescriptive factors than by either factor alone. -/- This Article uses this experimental discovery to develop a normative view of reasonableness. It elaborates an account of reasonableness as a hybrid standard, arguing that this view offers the best general theory of reasonableness, one that applies correctly across multiple legal domains. Moreover, this hybrid feature is the historical essence of legal reasonableness: the original use of the “reasonable person” and the “man on the Clapham omnibus” aimed to reflect both statistical and prescriptive considerations. Empirically, reasonableness is a hybrid judgment. And normatively, reasonableness should be applied as a hybrid standard. (shrink)

This paper explicates a conception of injury as right-violation, which allows us to distinguish between setbacks to interests that should, and should not, be the concern of theories of justice. It begins by introducing a hybrid theory of rights, grounded in (a) the mobilisation of our moral equality to (b) protect our most important interests, and shows how violations of rights are the concern of justice, while setbacks where one of the twin grounds of rights is defeated are (...) not. It then looks more closely at the substantive moral components of injury, namely harm—damage to one’s interests—and wrong—disrespect for one’s moral equality. It argues that, on the hybrid conception of rights, harm and wrong are individually necessary and jointly sufficient components of injury, and the disvalue of neither is reducible to the other—in particular, it is a mistake to construe the disrespect identified by wrong as another damaged interest. Finally, it distinguishes between the public and private dimensions of harm and wrong, and makes some preliminary suggestions as to whether the remedy for these different dimensions should lie in criminal, distributive, or corrective justice. (shrink)

In this paper I explain Wittgenstein’s ambivalent remarks on the music of Gustav Mahler in their proper musico-philosophical context. I argue that these remarks are connected to Wittgenstein’s hybrid conception of musical decline and to his tripartite scheme of modern music. I also argue that Mahler’s conundrum was indicative of Wittgenstein’s grappling with his own predicament as a philosopher, and that this gives concrete sense to Wittgenstein’s admission that music was so important to him that without it he (...) was sure to be misunderstood. (shrink)

Since J. McTaggart’s paper on “The Unreality of Time” the opposition of “A-theorists” and “B-theorists” establishes a focal point in the modern debate on the metaphysics of time: While “A-theorists” claim the existence of an objective present, moving along time positions, “B-theorists” maintain that time is just a set of ontologically equivalent coordinates, “now” being merely the indexical of the speaker’s position. Contemporary attempts to resolve the issue by resorting to the analysis of language or to the theory of science (...) seem to deliver no definite results. By contrast, practical and existential aspects of the two models promise to be more univocal guides in deciding between them. Particularly, C. D. Broad’s hybrid conception of a “growing block theory” attains special attractiveness in this regard. (shrink)

Could the concept of 'evil' apply to AI? Drawing on PF Strawson's framework of reactive attitudes, this paper argues that we can understand evil as involving agents who are neither fully inside nor fully outside our moral practices. It involves agents whose abilities and capacities are enough to make them morally responsible for their actions, but whose behaviour is far enough outside of the norms of our moral practices to be labelled 'evil'. Understood as such, the paper argues that, when (...) it comes to AI and evil, we have more to fear from semi-autonomous, hybrid agents: agents who have enough of a capacity to operate within a minimal form of human practices of participation and responsibility, yet remain partially outside of it, capable of acting from outside the parameters of ordinary interactions in certain circumstances, perhaps sometimes for reasons unknown. (shrink)

Logical analysis of the applicability of nominals (which are introduced by hybrid logic) in the formal descriptions of the world (within modern knowledge representation and semantics-based systems) is very important because nominals, as second sorts of propositional symbols, can support logical identification of the described world at specific [temporal and/or spacial] states. This paper will focus on answering the philosophical-logical question of ‘how a fundamental world description in description logic (DL) and a nominal can be related to each other?’. (...) Based on my assumption that nominals can support more adequate identification of the world in DL, this paper will deal with the concept of ‘world identification’. Accordingly, based on a logical-terminological analysis of nominals, the paper will analyse hybridised fundamental world descriptions. The research will finally reach the idea that we can have a hybrid description logic based on the analysed concepts. (shrink)

The concept of distributed moral responsibility (DMR) has a long history. When it is understood as being entirely reducible to the sum of (some) human, individual and already morally loaded actions, then the allocation of DMR, and hence of praise and reward or blame and punishment, may be pragmatically difficult, but not conceptually problematic. However, in distributed environments, it is increasingly possible that a network of agents, some human, some artificial (e.g. a program) and some hybrid (e.g. a group (...) of people working as a team thanks to a software platform), may cause distributed moral actions (DMAs). These are morally good or evil (i.e. morally loaded) actions caused by local interactions that are in themselves neither good nor evil (morally neutral). In this article, I analyse DMRs that are due to DMAs, and argue in favour of the allocation, by default and overridably, of full moral responsibility (faultless responsibility) to all the nodes/agents in the network causally relevant for bringing about the DMA in question, independently of intentionality. The mechanism proposed is inspired by, and adapts, three concepts: back propagation from network theory, strict liability from jurisprudence and common knowledge from epistemic logic. (shrink)

The paper aims to add contextual dependence to the new directival theory of meaning, a functional role semantics based on Kazimierz Ajdukiewicz’s directival theory of meaning. We show that the original formulation of the theory does not have a straight answer on how the meaning of indexicals and demonstratives is established. We illustrate it in the example of some problematic axiomatic and inferential directives containing indexicals. We show that the main reason why developing the new directival theory of meaning in (...) this direction is difficult is that the theory focuses on the notion of a sentence (and not the notion of an utterance). To add the latter notion to the theory, we introduce the idea of admissible contextual distribution being an interpretation of the hybrid expression view on indexicals and demonstratives. We argue that this idea introduces a small but important modification to the concept of language matrix and gives way to define two distinct concepts of meaning: for an expression type and for a use of an expression type. (shrink)

It is often said that normative properties are “just too different” to reduce to other kinds of properties. This suggests that many philosophers find it difficult to believe reductive theses in ethics. I argue that the distinctiveness of the normative concepts we use in thinking about reductive theses offers a more promising explanation of this psychological phenomenon than the falsity of Reductive Realism. To identify the distinctiveness of normative concepts, I use resources from familiar Hybrid views of normative language (...) and thought to develop a Hybrid view of normative concepts. In addition to using this new Hybrid view to explain why reductive theses are difficult to believe, I show how to preserve several patterns of inference involving normative concepts that, intuitively, it is possible to make, and hence answer an important recent challenge to Hybrid views from Mark Schroeder. (shrink)

Abstract for Descent and Logic in Biosystematics: An Essay AUTHOR: THOMAS MCCABE PUBLISHER: PERSEVERANT PUBLISHING Descent and Logic in Biosystematics: An Essay is a short book about biological systematics and taxonomy. Some of the subjects con- sidered in it are philosophical: taxonomic theory, species concepts, speciation models, and evolutionary theories. Yet the book also covers matters not philosophical, such as taxonomic operations, experi- mental taxonomy, and a new suggested taxonomic method with worked examples. The author finds relationships among these topics. (...) The book is addressed to biosystematists, practicing biological tax- onomists, and philosophers of biology. It will also interest others who draw on biological taxonomy and biosystematics in their work. Descent and Logic in Biosystematics: An Essay goes into some old topics such as traditional biological identifying, classifying, and nomenclature; some recent, such as cladistic analysis, phylogenetics, and phylogenomics; and a few new, such as the logic of mutually exclusive taxon definitions, and techniques for using directly obser- ved reproductive events and pedigree analysis to untangle certain taxonomic dilemmas. There is a chapter about minimizing am- biguities when defining biological taxa, a chapter on the relevance of human biology to biosystematics, chapters addressing some biosys- tematic problems associated with the phenomenon of hybridization, a chapter on the relationship of biological taxonomy to conservation biology, and a chapter about the scientificity of evolutionary theories. Descent and Logic in Biosystematics: An Essay is published with a glossary, twelve black and white line figures, a dynamic table of contents, linked cross references, linked bibliographic citations, and a detailed index in the print and PDF versions. Descent and Logic in Biosystematics: An Essay, is available from the publisher in print and PDF formats, and from distributors and retailers as an ebook. It should be considered for academic libraries, research libraries, natural history museum libraries, the libraries of conservation organizations, and some private libraries. (shrink)

While current doctrines try to separate conflicts within two distinct categories – conventional versus irregular, there are, however, a series of contemporary conflicts that challenge this western view on war showing that the disjunctive manner of classification in ‘big and conventional’ versus ‘small and irregular’ is limited and simplistic. The military strategists as well as the academics used a series of concepts in order to describe the main shifts in the character of war – from the Fourth Generation Warfare (4GW) (...) and ‘new wars’ to hybrid wars. This article aims to identify these mutations in war evolution in the new, post-Cold War international context. The traditional image we have on this well-known ‘labor division’ within the military field no longer reflects reality. (shrink)

The concept of self has preeminently been asserted (in its many versions) as a core component of anti-reductionist, antinaturalistic philosophical positions, from Descartes to Husserl and beyond, with the exception of some hybrid or intermediate positions which declare rather glibly that, since we are biological entities which fully belong to the natural world, and we are conscious of ourselves as 'selves', therefore the self belongs to the natural world (this is characteristic e.g. of embodied phenomenology and enactivism). Nevertheless, from (...) Cudworth and More’s attacks on materialism all the way through twentieth-century argument against naturalism, the gulf between selfhood and the world of Nature appears unbridgeable. In contrast, my goal in this paper is to show that early modern materialism could yield a theory of the self according to which (1) the self belongs to the world of external relations (Spinoza), such that no one fact, including supposedly private facts, is only accessible to a single person; (2) the self can be reconstructed as a sense of “organic unity” which could be a condition for biological individuality (a central text here is Diderot’s 1769 Rêve de D’Alembert); yet this should not lead us to espouse a Romantic concept of organism as foundational or even ineffable subjectivity (a dimension present in Leibniz and made explicit in German idealism); (3) what we call 'self' might simply be a dynamic process of interpretive activity undertaken by the brain. This materialist theory of the self should not neglect the nature of experience, but it should also not have to take at face value the recurring invocations of a better, deeper “first-person perspective” or “first-person science.”. (shrink)

The concept of 'social brain‘ is a hybrid, located somewhere in between politically motivated philosophical speculation about the mind and its place in the social world, and recently emerged inquiries into cognition, selfhood, development, etc., returning to some of the founding insights of social psychology but embedding them in a neuroscientific framework. In this paper I try to reconstruct a philosophical tradition for the social brain, a ‗Spinozist‘ tradition which locates the brain within the broader network of relations, including (...) social relations. This tradition runs from Spinoza to Lev Vygotsky in the early 20th century, and on to Gilles Deleuze, Toni Negri and Paolo Virno in recent European philosophy, as a new perspective on the brain. The concept of social brain that is articulated in this reconstruction – some early-20th century Soviet neuropsychologists spoke of socialism and the cortex as being ―on the same path‖ – overcomes distinctions between Continental thought and the philosophy of mind, and possibly gives a new metaphysical framework for social cognition. (shrink)

Ethicists struggle to take reductive views seriously. They also have trouble conceiving of some supervenience failures. Understanding why provides further evidence for a kind of hybrid view of normative concept use.

This paper explores the concept of moral expertise in the contemporary philosophical debate, with a focus on three accounts discussed across moral epistemology, bioethics, and virtue ethics: an epistemic authority account, a skilled agent account, and a hybrid model sharing key features of the two. It is argued that there are no convincing reasons to defend a monistic approach that reduces moral expertise to only one of these models. A pluralist view is outlined in the attempt to reorient the (...) discussion about moral expertise. (shrink)

This paper examines the concepts of borderlands, borderscapes, and bordermemories as cultural discursive practices that have been extensively presented and analyzed in an increasing number of theoretical works in Border Studies. Contemporary American Ukrainian writers have made attempts to introduce their hybrid experience and include it into American culture. One of them is Alexander J. Motyl, whose novel Fall River (2014) is analyzed as an example of border writing. The novel is based on the author’s narrative memory, rooted in (...) his mother’s stories about Ukraine and their family members’ crossings of borders in the interwar period and belonging to two cultures, Ukrainian and American, that shaped their identities. (shrink)

Since Boorse [Philos Sci 44(4):542–573, 1977] published his paper “Health as a theoretical concept” one of the most lively debates within philosophy of medicine has been on the question of whether health and disease are in some sense ‘objective’ and ‘value-free’ or ‘subjective’ and ‘value-laden’. Due to the apparent ‘failure’ of pure naturalist, constructivist, or normativist accounts, much in the recent literature has appealed to more conciliatory approaches or so-called ‘hybrid accounts’ of health and disease. A recent paper by (...) Matthewson and Griffiths [J Med Philos 42(4):447–466, 2017], however, may bear the seeds for the revival of purely naturalist approach to health and disease. In this paper, I defend their idea of Biological Normativity against recent criticism by Schwartz [J Med Philos Forum Bioethics Philos Med 42(4):485–502, 2017] and hope to help it flower into a revival of naturalist approaches in the philosophy of medicine. (shrink)

As it emerged from philosophical analyses and cognitive research, most concepts exhibit typicality effects, and resist to the efforts of defining them in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions. This holds also in the case of many medical concepts. This is a problem for the design of computer science ontologies, since knowledge representation formalisms commonly adopted in this field do not allow for the representation of concepts in terms of typical traits. However, the need of representing concepts in terms of (...) typical traits concerns almost every domain of real world knowledge, including medical domains. In particular, in this article we take into account the domain of mental disorders, starting from the DSM-5 descriptions of some specific mental disorders. On this respect, we favor a hybrid approach to the representation of psychiatric concepts, in which ontology oriented formalisms are combined to a geometric representation of knowledge based on conceptual spaces. (shrink)

We propose the concepts of philomatics and psychomatics as hybrid combinations of philosophy and psychology with mathematics. We explain four motivations for this combination which are fulfilling the desire of analytical philosophy, proposing science of philosophy, justifying mathematical algorithms by philosophy, and abstraction in both philosophy and mathematics. We enumerate various examples for philomatics and psychomatics, some of which are explained in more depth. The first example is the analysis of relation between the context principle, semantic holism, and the (...) usage theory of meaning with the attention mechanism in mathematics. The other example is on the relations of Plato's theory of forms in philosophy with the holographic principle in string theory, object-oriented programming, and machine learning. Finally, the relation between Wittgenstein's family resemblance and clustering in mathematics is explained. This paper opens the door of research for combining philosophy and psychology with mathematics. (shrink)

The reasonable person standard is key to both Criminal Law and Torts. What does and does not count as reasonable behavior and decision-making is frequently deter- mined by lay jurors. Hence, laypeople’s understanding of the term must be considered, especially whether they use it predominately in an evaluative fashion. In this corpus study based on supervised machine learning models, we investigate whether laypeople use the expression ‘reasonable’ mainly as a descriptive, an evaluative, or merely a value-associated term. We find that (...) ‘reasonable’ is predicted to be an evaluative term in the majority of cases. This supports prescriptive accounts, and challenges descriptive and hybrid accounts of the term—at least given the way we operationalize the latter. Interestingly, other expressions often used interchangeably in jury instructions (e.g. ‘careful,’ ‘ordinary,’ ‘prudent,’ etc), however, are predicted to be descriptive. This indicates a discrepancy between the intended use of the term ‘reasonable’ and the understanding lay jurors might bring into the court room. (shrink)

The point of this paper is to reveal a dogma in the ordinary conception of sensory imagination, and to suggest another way forward. The dogma springs from two main sources: a too close comparison of mental imagery to perceptual experience, and a too strong division between mental imagery and the traditional propositional attitudes (such as belief and desire). The result is an unworkable conception of the correctness conditions of sensory imaginings—one lacking any link between the conditions under which (...) an imagining aids human action and inference and the conditions under which it is veridical. The proposed solution is, first, to posit a variety of imaginative attitudes—akin to the traditional propositional attitudes—which have different associated correctness (or satisfaction) conditions. The second part of the solution is to allow for imaginings with “hybrid” contents, in the sense that both mental images and representations with language-like constituent structure contribute to the content of imaginings. (shrink)

Kant posits the schema as a hybrid bridging the generality of pure concepts and the particularity of sensible intuitions. However, I argue that countenancing such schemata leads to a third-man regress. Siding with those who think that the mid-way posit of the Critique of Pure Reason's schematism section is untenable, my diagnosis is that Kant's transcendental inquiry goes awry because it attempts to analyse a form/matter union that is primitive. I therefore sketch a nonrepresentational stance aimed at respecting this (...) primitivity. (shrink)

Emphasizing the human body in all of its forms, Beauty Unlimited expands the boundaries of what is meant by beauty both geographically and aesthetically. Peg Zeglin Brand and an international group of contributors interrogate the body and the meaning of physical beauty in this multidisciplinary volume. This striking and provocative book explores the history of bodily beautification; the physicality of socially or culturally determined choices of beautification; the interplay of gender, race, class, age, sexuality, and ethnicity within and on the (...) body; and the aesthetic meaning of the concept of beauty in an increasingly globalized world. Foreward by Carolyn Korsmeyer. Authors include Noel Carroll, Gregory Velazco Y Trianosky, Monique Roelofs, Whitney Davis, Eleanor Heartney, Diana Tietjens Meyers, Phoebe M. Farris, Mary Devereaux, Jo Ellen Jacobs, Karina L. Cespedes-Cortes and Paul C. Taylor, Fedwa Malti-Douglas, Stephen Davies, Jane Duran, Valerie Sullivan Fuchs, Keith Lehrer, Allen Douglas, Cynthia Freeland, Eva Kit Wah Man, Mary Bittner Wiseman, and Peg Brand's essay, "ORLAN Revisited: Disembodied Virtual Hybrid Beauty.". (shrink)

Moral reasoning traditionally distinguishes two types of evil:moral (ME) and natural (NE). The standard view is that ME is the product of human agency and so includes phenomena such as war,torture and psychological cruelty; that NE is the product of nonhuman agency, and so includes natural disasters such as earthquakes, floods, disease and famine; and finally, that more complex cases are appropriately analysed as a combination of ME and NE. Recently, as a result of developments in autonomous agents in cyberspace, (...) a new class of interesting and important examples of hybrid evil has come to light. In this paper, it is called artificial evil (AE) and a case is made for considering it to complement ME and NE to produce a more adequate taxonomy. By isolating the features that have led to the appearance of AE, cyberspace is characterised as a self-contained environment that forms the essential component in any foundation of the emerging field of Computer Ethics (CE). It is argued that this goes someway towards providing a methodological explanation of why cyberspace is central to so many of CE's concerns; and it is shown how notions of good and evil can be formulated in cyberspace. Of considerable interest is how the propensity for an agent's action to be morally good or evil can be determined even in the absence of biologically sentient participants and thus allows artificial agents not only to perpetrate evil (and fort that matter good) but conversely to `receive' or `suffer from' it. The thesis defended is that the notion of entropy structure, which encapsulates human value judgement concerning cyberspace in a formal mathematical definition, is sufficient to achieve this purpose and, moreover, that the concept of AE can be determined formally, by mathematical methods. A consequence of this approach is that the debate on whether CE should be considered unique, and hence developed as a Macroethics, may be viewed, constructively,in an alternative manner. The case is made that whilst CE issues are not uncontroversially unique, they are sufficiently novel to render inadequate the approach of standard Macroethics such as Utilitarianism and Deontologism and hence to prompt the search for a robust ethical theory that can deal with them successfully. The name Information Ethics (IE) is proposed for that theory. Itis argued that the uniqueness of IE is justified by its being non-biologically biased and patient-oriented: IE is an Environmental Macroethics based on the concept of data entity rather than life. It follows that the novelty of CE issues such as AE can be appreciated properly because IE provides a new perspective (though not vice versa). In light of the discussion provided in this paper, it is concluded that Computer Ethics is worthy of independent study because it requires its own application-specific knowledge and is capable of supporting a methodological foundation, Information Ethics. (shrink)

While those who take a "structuralist" approach to racial justice issues are right to call attention to the importance of social practices, laws, etc., they sometimes go too far by suggesting that antiracist efforts ought to focus on changing unjust social systems rather than changing individuals’ minds. We argue that while the “either/or” thinking implied by this framing is intuitive and pervasive, it is misleading and self-undermining. We instead advocate for a “both/and” approach to antiracist moral education that explicitly teaches (...) how social structures influence ideas about race and how ideas about race shape, sustain, and transform social structures. Ideally, antiracist moral education will help people see how social change and moral progress depend on the symbiotic relations between individuals and structures. We articulate a conception of “structure-facing virtue” that exemplifies this hybrid approach to illuminate the pivotal role moral education plays in the fight for racial justice. (shrink)