David Schmidtz's reconstruction of morality advances Hart-type recognition rules for a “personal” and an “interpersonal” strand of morality. I argue that his view does not succeed for reasons owed both to the way in which Schmidtz construes of the task of reconstructing morality and the content of the moral recognition rules that he proposes. For Schmidtz, this task must be approached from a Hart-type “internal” perspective, but this leaves his reconstruction with an unresolved problem of parochiality. He reconstructs (...) morality as a pursuit of the aim of the flourishing of individuals as reflectively rational agents. However, while it is plausible to see reflective rationality as a good, it does not seem to be a morally fundamental good. Ways to instantiate or pursue it depend for their moral value on other, more fundamental moral values that are beyond the normative space mapped by Schmidtz's moral recognition rules. (shrink)

The proliferation of work by autistic writers continues apace, defying a long and multidisciplinary tradition of constructing autistic people as lacking the capacity for narration. To study neurodivergent literature, then, is to witness the refusal of these exclusionary narrative conventions, and to register the ideological presuppositions that underpin pathologization. In this article, I engage with recent insights from Neurodiversity Studies (especially the work of Justine Egner, Erin Manning, Julia Miele Rodas, Nick Walker, and Remi Yergeau) to explore the connections between (...) narrative neuronormativity and other discourses of oppression, especially those that have generated racialized, gendered, and colonial narratives of desubjectification. Focusing on the neuroqueer movement – an emergent practice of disidentification that refuses the interpellations of neuronormativity, ableism, heteronormativity, and cisnormativity – I discuss the concept of allism, arguing that this satirical critique of pathologization harbors a deconstructive force that denaturalizes the dialectic of recognition. Neuroqueer work on allism reveals this dialectic to be the hegemonic form of relationality that marks neurodivergence as asocial and intersubjectively non-reciprocal in order to secure a non- autistic identity. The dialectic of recognition thus instrumentalizes neurodivergence to confer normalcy and neutrality upon subjects that meet its criteria. Pursuing the discursive context and theoretical implications of this critique, I provide a short genealogy of narrative neuronormativity, connecting the operation of the dialectic in the early novel to the clinical texts of child psychology. To demonstrate the neuroqueer subversion of this tradition, I then read An Unkindness of Ghosts, by Rivers Solomon, a text that stages a disidentification with storytelling. Aster, the novel’s protagonist, is neurodivergent as well as Black, enslaved, and gender non-conforming. As she struggles against an authoritarian regime, Aster also declines to comply with the rules that would allow her to narrate her own story. Aster’s neuroqueer refusal reveals a similarity between the construction of Blackness as an ontological foil for whiteness, and the construction of autism as a standard of disordered sociality that neuronorms can be measured against. In both cases, the colonizing term articulates its supremacy via a comparison with that which it denigrates, while disavowing this dependence at all costs, dependency being inimical to free subjectivity in the liberal humanism that has shaped these procedures. My reading of Unkindness suggests that the extant techniques of literary narratorship are political instruments that, unless repurposed, will continue to disseminate these dispossessive dialectics. (shrink)

I outline an account of perceptual knowledge and assess the extent to which it can be employed in a defence of perceptual accounts of emotion and value recognition. I argue that considerations ruling out lucky knowledge give us some reason to doubt its prospects in the case of value recognition. I also discuss recent empirical work on cultural and contextual influences on emotional expression, arguing that a perceptual account of value recognition is consistent with current evidence.

PLEASE NOTE: This is the corrected 2nd eBook edition, 2021. ●●●●● _Critique of Impure Reason_ has now also been published in a printed edition. To reduce the otherwise high price of this scholarly, technical book of nearly 900 pages and make it more widely available beyond university libraries to individual readers, the non-profit publisher and the author have agreed to issue the printed edition at cost. ●●●●● The printed edition was released on September 1, 2021 and is now available through (...) all booksellers, including Barnes & Noble, Amazon, and brick-and-mortar bookstores under ISBN 978-0-578-88646-6. ●●●●● In light of the length of this book, readers who would like to have a more detailed description of the book's objectives and method may find it helpful to read the detailed and clearly written Wikipedia entry about this work: From the Wikipedia search page, use the search phrase "Critique of Impure Reason". At least at the time of this writing (11/29/2021), the Wikipedia entry is well-researched and accurate. ●●●●● In addition, a "Primer on Bartlett's CRITIQUE OF IMPURE REASON" has been made available by the author. It is available under its title through PhilPapers and other philosophy online archives. ●●●●● COMMENDATIONS OF THIS WORK, from the back cover of the published edition: ●●●●● “I admire its range of philosophical vision.” – Nicholas Rescher, Distinguished University Professor of Philosophy, University of Pittsburgh, author of more than 100 books. ●●●●● “Bartlett’s _Critique of Impure Reason_ is an impressive, bold, and ambitious work. Careful scholarship is balanced by original analyses that lead the reader to recognize the limits of meaning, knowledge, and conceptual possibility. The work addresses a host of traditional philosophical problems, among them the nature of space, time, causality, consciousness, the self, other minds, ontology, free will and determinism, and others. The book culminates in a fascinating and profound new understanding of relativity physics and quantum theory.” – Gerhard Preyer, Professor of Philosophy, Goethe-University, Frankfurt am Main, Germany, author of many books including _Concepts of Meaning_, _Beyond Semantics and Pragmatics_, _Intention and Practical Thought_, and _Contextualism in Philosophy_. ●●●●● “[This work’s] goal is of a unique and difficult species: Dr. Bartlett seeks to develop a formal logical calculus on the basis of transcendental philosophical arguments; in fact, he hopes that this calculus will be the formal expression of the transcendental foundation of knowledge.... I consider Dr. Bartlett’s work soundly conceived and executed with great skill.” – C. F. von Weizsäcker, philosopher and physicist, former Director, Max-Planck-Institute, Starnberg, Germany. ●●●●● “Bartlett has written an American “Prolegomena to All Future Metaphysics.” He aims rigorously to eliminate meaningless assertions, reach bedrock, and place philosophy on a firm foundation that will enable it, like science and mathematics, to produce lasting results that generations to come can build on. This is a great book, the fruit of a lifetime of research and reflection, and it deserves serious attention.” — Martin X. Moleski, former Professor, Canisius College, Buffalo, NY, studies of scientific method, the presuppositions of thought, and the self-referential nature of epistemology. ●●●●● “Bartlett has written a book on what might be called the underpinnings of philosophy. It has fascinating depth and breadth, and is all the more striking due to its unifying perspective based on the concepts of reference and self-reference.” – Don Perlis, Professor of Computer Science, University of Maryland, author of numerous publications on self-adjusting autonomous systems and philosophical issues concerning self-reference, mind, and consciousness. ●●●●● ●●●●● The _Critique of Impure Reason: Horizons of Possibility and Meaning_ comprises a major and important contribution to philosophy. Thanks to the generosity of its publisher, this massive 885-page volume has been published as a free open access eBook (3.75MB) as well as an open access printed edition. It inaugurates a revolutionary paradigm shift in philosophical thought by providing compelling and long-sought-for solutions to a wide range of philosophical problems. In the process, the work fundamentally transforms the way in which the concepts of reference, meaning, and possibility are understood. The book includes a Foreword by the celebrated German philosopher and physicist Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker. ●●●●● In Kant’s _Critique of Pure Reason_ we find an analysis of the preconditions of experience and of knowledge. In contrast, but yet in parallel, the new _Critique_ focuses upon the ways—unfortunately very widespread and often unselfconsciously habitual—in which many of the concepts that we employ _conflict_ with the very preconditions of meaning and of knowledge. ●●●●● This is a book about the boundaries of frameworks and about the unrecognized conceptual confusions in which we become entangled when we attempt to transgress beyond the limits of the possible and meaningful. We tend either not to recognize or not to accept that we all-too-often attempt to trespass beyond the boundaries of the frameworks that make knowledge possible and the world meaningful. ●●●●● The _Critique of Impure Reason_ proposes a bold, ground-breaking, and startling thesis: that a great many of the major philosophical problems of the past can be solved through the recognition of a viciously deceptive form of thinking to which philosophers as well as non-philosophers commonly fall victim. For the first time, the book advances and justifies the criticism that a substantial number of the questions that have occupied philosophers fall into the category of “impure reason,” violating the very conditions of their possible meaningfulness. ●●●●● The purpose of the study is twofold: first, to enable us to recognize the boundaries of what is referentially forbidden—the limits beyond which reference becomes meaningless—and second, to avoid falling victims to a certain broad class of conceptual confusions that lie at the heart of many major philosophical problems. As a consequence, the boundaries of _possible meaning_ are determined. ●●●●● Bartlett, the author or editor of more than 20 books, is responsible for identifying this widespread and delusion-inducing variety of error, _metalogical projection_. It is a previously unrecognized and insidious form of erroneous thinking that undermines its own possibility of meaning. It comes about as a result of the pervasive human compulsion to seek to transcend the limits of possible reference and meaning. ●●●●● Based on original research and rigorous analysis combined with extensive scholarship, the _Critique of Impure Reason_ develops a self-validating method that makes it possible to recognize, correct, and eliminate this major and pervasive form of fallacious thinking. In so doing, the book provides at last provable and constructive solutions to a wide range of major philosophical problems. ●●●●● CONTENTS AT A GLANCE ▪▪▪▪▪ Preface ▪▪▪▪▪ Foreword by Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker ▪▪▪▪▪ Acknowledgments ▪▪▪▪▪ Avant-propos: A philosopher’s rallying call ▪▪▪▪▪ Introduction ▪▪▪▪▪ A note to the reader ▪▪▪▪▪ A note on conventions ▪▪▪▪▪ ▪▪▪▪▪ ▪▪▪▪▪ PART I ▪▪▪▪▪ ▪▪▪▪▪ WHY PHILOSOPHY HAS MADE NO PROGRESS AND HOW IT CAN ▪▪▪▪▪ 1 Philosophical-psychological prelude ▪▪▪▪▪ 2 Putting belief in its place: Its psychology and a needed polemic ▪▪▪▪▪ 3 Turning away from the linguistic turn: From theory of reference to metalogic of reference ▪▪▪▪▪ 4 The stepladder to maximum theoretical generality ▪▪▪▪▪ ▪▪▪▪▪ ▪▪▪▪▪ PART II ▪▪▪▪▪ THE METALOGIC OF REFERENCE ▪▪▪▪▪ A New Approach to Deductive, Transcendental Philosophy ▪▪▪▪▪ 5 Reference, identity, and identification ▪▪▪▪▪ 6 Self-referential argument and the metalogic of reference ▪▪▪▪▪ 7 Possibility theory ▪▪▪▪▪ 8 Presupposition logic, reference, and identification ▪▪▪▪▪ 9 Transcendental argumentation and the metalogic of reference ▪▪▪▪▪ 10 Framework relativity ▪▪▪▪▪ 11 The metalogic of meaning ▪▪▪▪▪ 12 The problem of putative meaning and the logic of meaninglessness ▪▪▪▪▪ 13 Projection ▪▪▪▪▪ 14 Horizons ▪▪▪▪▪ 15 De-projection ▪▪▪▪▪ 16 Self-validation ▪▪▪▪▪ 17 Rationality: Rules of admissibility ▪▪▪▪▪ ▪▪▪▪▪ ▪▪▪▪▪ PART III ▪▪▪▪▪ PHILOSOPHICAL APPLICATIONS OF THE METALOGIC OF REFERENCE ▪▪▪▪▪ Major Problems and Questions of Philosophy and the Philosophy of Science ▪▪▪▪▪ 18 Ontology and the metalogic of reference ▪▪▪▪▪ 19 Discovery or invention in general problem-solving, mathematics, and physics ▪▪▪▪▪ 20 The conceptually unreachable: “The far side” ▪▪▪▪▪ 21 The projections of the external world, things-in-themselves, other minds, realism, and idealism ▪▪▪▪▪ 22 The projections of time, space, and space-time ▪▪▪▪▪ 23 The projections of causality, determinism, and free will ▪▪▪▪▪ 24 Projections of the self and of solipsism ▪▪▪▪▪ 25 Non-relational, agentless reference and referential fields ▪▪▪▪▪ 26 Relativity physics as seen through the lens of the metalogic of reference ▪▪▪▪▪ 27 Quantum theory as seen through the lens of the metalogic of reference ▪▪▪▪▪ 28 Epistemological lessons learned from and applicable to relativity physics and quantum theory ▪▪▪▪▪ ▪▪▪▪▪ PART IV ▪▪▪▪▪ HORIZONS ▪▪▪▪▪ 29 Beyond belief ▪▪▪▪▪ 30 _Critique of Impure Reason_: Its results in retrospect ▪▪▪▪▪ ▪▪▪▪▪ SUPPLEMENT ▪▪▪▪▪ The Formal Structure of the Metalogic of Reference ▪▪▪▪▪ APPENDIX I ▪▪▪▪▪ The Concept of Horizon in the Work of Other Philosophers ▪▪▪▪▪ APPENDIX II ▪▪▪▪▪ Epistemological Intelligence ▪▪▪▪▪ References ▪▪▪▪▪ Index ▪▪▪▪▪ About the author. (shrink)

A legal system’s ‘official story’ is its shared account of the law’s structure and sources, which members of its legal community publicly advance and defend. In some societies, however, officials pay lip service to this shared account, while privately adhering to their own unofficial story instead. If the officials enforce some novel legal code while claiming fidelity to older doctrines, then which set of rules—if either—is the law? We defend the legal relevance of the official story, on largely Hartian grounds. (...) Hart saw legal rules as determined by social rules accepted by a particular community. We argue that this acceptance requires no genuine normative commitment; agreement or compliance with the rules might even be feigned. And this community need not be limited to an official class, but includes all who jointly accept the rules. Having rejected these artificial limits, one can take the official story at its word. (shrink)

In Legality Scott Shapiro seeks to provide the motivation for the development of his own elaborate account of law by undertaking a critique of H.L.A. Hart's jurisprudential theory. Hart maintained that every legal system is underlain by a rule of recognition through which officials of the system identify the norms that belong to the system as laws. Shapiro argues that Hart's remarks on the rule of recognition are confused and that his model of lawis consequently untenable. (...) Shapiro contends that a new approach is vital for progress in the philosophy of law and, with his lengthy presentation of his own Planning Theory of Law, he aspires to pioneer just such an approach. Except for a very terse observation in the final main section, this article does not directly assess the strengths and shortcomings of Shapiro's piquant planning theory. Instead, I defend Hart against Shapiro's charges and thereby undermine the motivation for the development of the planning theory. (shrink)

This fifth volume on Advances and Applications of DSmT for Information Fusion collects theoretical and applied contributions of researchers working in different fields of applications and in mathematics, and is available in open-access. The collected contributions of this volume have either been published or presented after disseminating the fourth volume in 2015 in international conferences, seminars, workshops and journals, or they are new. The contributions of each part of this volume are chronologically ordered. First Part of this book presents some (...) theoretical advances on DSmT, dealing mainly with modified Proportional Conflict Redistribution Rules (PCR) of combination with degree of intersection, coarsening techniques, interval calculus for PCR thanks to set inversion via interval analysis (SIVIA), rough set classifiers, canonical decomposition of dichotomous belief functions, fast PCR fusion, fast inter-criteria analysis with PCR, and improved PCR5 and PCR6 rules preserving the (quasi-)neutrality of (quasi-)vacuous belief assignment in the fusion of sources of evidence with their Matlab codes. Because more applications of DSmT have emerged in the past years since the apparition of the fourth book of DSmT in 2015, the second part of this volume is about selected applications of DSmT mainly in building change detection, object recognition, quality of data association in tracking, perception in robotics, risk assessment for torrent protection and multi-criteria decision-making, multi-modal image fusion, coarsening techniques, recommender system, levee characterization and assessment, human heading perception, trust assessment, robotics, biometrics, failure detection, GPS systems, inter-criteria analysis, group decision, human activity recognition, storm prediction, data association for autonomous vehicles, identification of maritime vessels, fusion of support vector machines (SVM), Silx-Furtif RUST code library for information fusion including PCR rules, and network for ship classification. Finally, the third part presents interesting contributions related to belief functions in general published or presented along the years since 2015. These contributions are related with decision-making under uncertainty, belief approximations, probability transformations, new distances between belief functions, non-classical multi-criteria decision-making problems with belief functions, generalization of Bayes theorem, image processing, data association, entropy and cross-entropy measures, fuzzy evidence numbers, negator of belief mass, human activity recognition, information fusion for breast cancer therapy, imbalanced data classification, and hybrid techniques mixing deep learning with belief functions as well. (shrink)

Law is traditionally related to the practice of command and hierarchy. It seems that a legal rule should immediately establish a relation between a superior and an inferior. This hierarchical and authoritharian view might however be challenged once the phenomenology of the rule is considered from the internal point of view, that is, from the stance of those that can be said to “use” rather than to “suffer” the rules themselves. A practice oriented approach could in this way (...) open up a more liberal, and also somehow less parochial and ideological, road for legal theory. This is – it is argued in the paper – the programme, or better, the promise we can find in Herbert Hart’s main work, The Concept of Law. The article tries to render this promise more transparent while, nonetheless, not eschewing the blind sides of its narrative and argumentative strategy. (shrink)

Axel Honneth reconstructs Hegel’s social and political philosophy on the basis of the concept of recognition. For Honneth, recognition is a constitutive relation between individuals that is in principle symmetrical. By conceiving recognition through symmetry, Honneth effectively bans the inclusion of power within recognitive relation. He thus regards the relations of power as cases of non-recognition or misrecognition. In this paper, I develop an alternative theory of the constitutive relation between individuals for Hegel, one that is (...) based on the asymmetrical relation of power. To this aim, I focus on the chapter of “determinations of reflection” in the Science of Logic. Through a close analysis of Hegel’s Logic, I argue that the most fundamental form of relation between individuals is the relation of opposition, that individuals are solely constituted in and through the relation of opposition, and that the relation of opposition is essentially asymmetrical. Together, these claims establish... (shrink)

In the middle of the 20th century, it was a common Wittgenstein-inspired idea in philosophy that for a linguistic expression to have a meaning is for it to be governed by a rule of use. In other words, it was widely believed that meanings are to be identified with use-conditions. However, as things stand, this idea is widely taken to be vague and mysterious, inconsistent with “truth-conditional semantics”, and subject to the Frege-Geach problem. In this paper I reinvigorate the (...) ideas that meaningfulness is a matter of being governed by rules of use and that meanings are best thought of in terms of use-conditions. I will do this by sketching the Rule-Governance view of the nature of linguistic meaningfulness, showing that the view isn’t by itself subject to the two problems, and explain why the idea has had a lasting appeal to philosophers from Strawson to Kaplan and why we should find it continually attractive. (shrink)

Tschumi believes that the quality of architecture depends on the theoretical factor it contains. Such a view led to the creation of architecture that would achieve visibility and comprehensibility only after its interpretation. On his way to creating such an architecture he took on a purely philosophical reflection on the basic building block of architecture, which is space. In 1975, he wrote an essay entitled Questions of Space, in which he included several dozen questions about the nature of space. The (...) questions he formulated could be regarded as analogous to the situation in the philosophy of the time, in which the interest in questioning the most obvious forms of understanding the world and intellectual categories increased. The research on space is an area common to many fields of natural sciences, humanities and artistic creation, but it also deals with other problems, such as issues of experience. The concept of space-time continuum proposed by Hermann Minkowski drew attention to the identity of time and space with the events taking place. Probably regardless of the postulates of physicists commenting on Einstein’s discoveries, also in philosophy it increased the importance of the concept of the event which became dominant in Heidegger’s latest work Contributions of Philosophy. Of the event. Furthermore, Tschumi’s reflections on space entered into relation with the problem of experience, which aroused the interest of a group of French philosophers trying to assimilate Georges Bataille’s concept of “inner experience”. Both Tschumi and Derrida referred to Bataille because his views could be used not only to modify the concept of the subject, but also to change the understanding of what constitutes the area of architecture. The discussion on experience has led to the recognition that the subject is not sovereign, but actually a form of what is on their outside. Such insights make it possible to treat the area of the Parc de La Villette as existing mainly when it is organised by its users. The decisive features of the Park are its assumptions, according to which it is a variety of active void that leads to agreeing new social relations with it. The park does not force to participate in already existing moral or political communities, but tries to move into an unknown future in which the scope of free functioning of individuals will be increased. Doubts about the principles of functioning of the individual self and its discovery as a whole composed of non-coherent parts, as well as its dependence on its own depth full of disordered forces, influenced the understanding of architecture as a set of contradictions whose source is a fundamental void anticipating the empty phenomenal space. The use of this phenomenal void in architecture, as well as the rejection of the whole and unity, had a specific political purpose and drew its inspiration from political analyses. In the Parc de La Villette, metaphysics and politics were brought closer together because the philosophy of void was used to create new conditions for community action. It can be argued that the source of this philosophy was the perception of errors in existing societies dependent on the shortcomings of traditional metaphysics. Spacing (espacement) was one of the key terms in Derrida’s philosophy, which was also combined with the concepts of différance and chôra. The study of the nature of space, especially its transition from the level of pure possibility to the level of sensual phenomenon, also contributes to understanding how well designed space can have an impact on its audience. This explanation is based on Tschumi’s assumption that the space of the Parc de La Villette contradicts the integrating approaches and instead exposes contradictions, but it does so in a way that combines incompatible properties into a single piece of architecture. The specificity of such integration is similar to the invention of a musical phrase, which is an ideological message: moral and political. Such a thesis may raise doubts, however, if both the clearly adopted assumptions and those deduced from the work allow for their ↪Quart Nr 2(52)/2019 logically ordered presentation then to a limited extent it may be assumed that the work has achieved a connection between a specific philosophy of space and its practical application. Derrida combined the problem of spatiality with the problem of transcendental imagination in Kant’s philosophy, who in the first version of Critique of Pure Reason assumed that pure imagination precedes the appearance of time and space, even in their transcendental forms. The imagination in such a situation can be described as a factor activating time and space, which indicates what function is played by movement in this activity. This leads us to recognize that the ultra originary source of pure forms of sensual intuition is movement, which in early Greek philosophy was identified with void and its lack of resistance to phenomena occurring in it. Derrida’s philosophy in search of a certain super-transcendental source of time and space pointed to différance which, like void or the chôra, does not have material features or even any other form of being. Différance is the primary cause of the disruption of motionlessness and the introduction of activity into motionless time and space, thus its activity can be described as spacing (espacement). Derrida’s discoveries in this respect are not entirely original, because Hegel already pointed out when examining the present that it is primarily a differential relation (differente Beziehung), which, being seemingly neutral, influences the present with supernatural force and makes it unidentifiable with itself. Differente Beziehung must similarly influence the originary space, negating its initial character by multiplying its divisions and expanding its boundaries. Différance acts by revealing contradictions wherever there is apparent undifferentiation. Tschumi, composing the Parc de La Villette as a variety of void and a set of incompatible layers, followed the rules of différance or the chôra: he made void visible together with its saturation with contradictions. If space can be considered to be the result of the activity of difference, such activity has a certain regularity, which influences the behaviour of its observers. Differences or contradictions fall into a certain rhythm, which can be considered a manifestation of transcendent order. The problem is that what can be considered the source of such order, namely the logos or God, is partly disorder and error. According to descriptions contained in Timaeus, the world is a combination of forces that drive to order with forces of erroneous necessity that resounds in every order and forces it to return to disorder. Derrida denied the possibility of understanding différance as a theological value, even if it were a negative or apophatic theology, but no categorical denial could be perfect. The assumption that différance or the chôra are not endowed with any substance properties cannot deny their activity, and thus a certain force. Already since Democritus, philosophy has multiplied the names of such a force and the contradictory variety of its manifestations, never forgetting also the necessity for reason to withdraw from the possibility of giving its correct characteristics. Such a withdrawal may be interpreted as an expression of respect and, in certain situations, as a cult of the force that precedes reasonableness. The Parc de La Villette, which is an artistic divagation about the contradictions and forces behind them, can be considered as a place of their sublimation, and therefore as a variation of the temple of what differs from order and disorder. (shrink)

In this essay, we suggest practical ways to shift the framing of crisis standards of care toward disability justice. We elaborate on the vision statement provided in the 2010 Institute of Medicine (National Academy of Medicine) “Summary of Guidance for Establishing Crisis Standards of Care for Use in Disaster Situations,” which emphasizes fairness; equitable processes; community and provider engagement, education, and communication; and the rule of law. We argue that interpreting these elements through disability justice entails a commitment to (...) both distributive and recognitive justice. The disability rights movement's demand “Nothing about us, without us” requires substantive inclusion of disabled people in decision‐making related to their interests, including in crisis planning before, during, and after a pandemic like Covid‐19. (shrink)

In the theory of meaning, it is common to contrast truth-conditional theories of meaning with theories which identify the meaning of an expression with its use. One rather exact version of the somewhat vague use-theoretic picture is the view that the standard rules of inference determine the meanings of logical constants. Often this idea also functions as a paradigm for more general use-theoretic approaches to meaning. In particular, the idea plays a key role in the anti-realist program of Dummett and (...) his followers. In the theory of truth, a key distinction now is made between substantial theories and minimalist or deflationist views. According to the former, truth is a genuine substantial property of the truth-bearers, whereas according to the latter, truth does not have any deeper essence, but all that can be said about truth is contained in T-sentences (sentences having the form: ‘P’ is true if and only if P). There is no necessary analytic connection between the above theories of meaning and truth, but they have nevertheless some connections. Realists often favour some kind of truth-conditional theory of meaning and a substantial theory of truth (in particular, the correspondence theory). Minimalists and deflationists on truth characteristically advocate the use theory of meaning (e.g. Horwich). Semantical anti-realism (e.g. Dummett, Prawitz) forms an interesting middle case: its starting point is the use theory of meaning, but it usually accepts a substantial view on truth, namely that truth is to be equated with verifiability or warranted assertability. When truth is so understood, it is also possible to accept the idea that meaning is closely related to truth-conditions, and hence the conflict between use theories and truth-conditional theories in a sense disappears in this view. (shrink)

This Paper addresses the problem of statelessness, a problem which remains despite treaties and judicial decisions elaborating distinct rules to protect stateless persons. I explain why this has been so. Drawing from the work of Bernhard Waldenfels, I argue that international and domestic courts have presupposed a territorial sense of space, a territorial knowledge and the founding date for the territorial structure of a state-centric international legal community. I then focus upon the idea that an impartial third party can resolve (...) a dispute involving stateless persons by deferring to a universal rule. I call the third party the ‘rule of law third’. Such a rule, I argue, presupposes a presupposed knowledge over stateless persons. The Third takes for granted the territorial boundary of a legal structure, a boundary which excludes the recognition of outsiders to the boundary. (shrink)

This paper describes and defends a novel and distinctively egalitarian conception of the rule of law. Official behavior is to be governed by preexisting, public rules that do not draw irrelevant distinctions between the subjects of law. If these demands are satisfied, a state achieves vertical equality between officials and ordinary people and horizontal legal equality among ordinary people.

Undeniably, the greatest way for a Moslem to be closer to Allah, is recitation of Holy-Quran approves with the method conveyed from Messenger of Allah Mohammed from the feature of speech points of letters and the intrinsic and fleeting characteristics of the letters, So, there is a persistent need to teach all Moslems the science of Tajweed Al-Quran. ITS (Intelligent Tutoring System) is computer software that supplies direct and tailored training or response to students without human teacher interfering. The main (...) target of ITS is smoothing the learning process using the wide-ranging facilities of computer. The proposed system will be implemented using the ITSB Authoring tool. In this thesis, the researcher presents an intelligent tutoring system for teaching Reciting Al-Quran "Tajweed" with Rewaya: Hafs from ‘Aasem by the way of Shatebiyyah. It was a novel idea that the researcher combined the science of Tajweed Al-Quran and the science of artificial intelligence in his thesis. The researcher arranged the material into chapters, lessons, examples then, added all these to the proposed system. He also added questions, right answers and the level of difficulty for each lesson. He prepared an exam for each chapter and a final exam to test the knowledge of the learner in the whole material. The system was evaluated by teachers and students in reciting science and the outcome of the assessment was encouraging and promising. (shrink)

We can evaluate laws as better or worse relative to different normative standards. One might lament the fact that a law violates human rights or, in a different register, marvel at its ease of application. A question in legal philosophy is whether some standards for evaluating laws are fixed by—or grounded in—the very nature of law. I take Raz’s discussion of the distinctively legal virtues, those that fall under the rubric of the “Rule of Law” such as clarity, generality, (...) and non-retroactivity, as my starting point for exploring a very general puzzle about the relationship between law’s essence and its virtue. -/- The claim that there are some virtues that laws have qua laws invites a comparison between law and other “goodness-fixing kinds.” A kind is goodness-fixing if what it is to be a member of the kind fixes a standard for evaluating instances as better or worse. For example, if an object belongs to the kind CLOCK, whether it keeps time accurately provides a basis for evaluating it as better or worse as a clock. Furthermore, the relevant normative fact—if a clock does not keep time accurately, it is a bad clock—is at least partly explainable in terms of the nature of clocks (clocks are things that are supposed to be keep time accurately). Hence, for any goodness-fixing kind, K, that sets a standard, S, for evaluating Ks as Ks, we can ask: (1) How does the nature of Ks explain S? (2) Does being a K depend on meeting a minimum threshold of S-relative goodness? In the case of law and its constitutive standard defined by the Rule-of-Law virtues, these questions lack settled answers. Although Raz offers some discussion, I argue that his answers have the surprising upshot of rendering law sui generis relative to other goodness-fixing kinds, and that preserving continuity with other goodness-fixing kinds involves revising the general picture. (shrink)

In this paper, the relationship between the e-value of a complex hypothesis, H, and those of its constituent elementary hypotheses, Hj, j = 1… k, is analyzed, in the independent setup. The e-value of a hypothesis H, ev, is a Bayesian epistemic, credibility or truth value defined under the Full Bayesian Significance Testing mathematical apparatus. The questions addressed concern the important issue of how the truth value of H, and the truth function of the corresponding FBST structure M, relate to (...) the truth values of its elementary constituents, Hj, and to the truth functions of their corresponding FBST structures Mj, respectively. (shrink)

This self-contained one page paper produces one valid two-premise premise-conclusion argument that is a counterexample to the entire three traditional rules of distribution. These three rules were previously thought to be generally applicable criteria for invalidity of premise-conclusion arguments. No longer can a three-term argument be dismissed as invalid simply on the ground that its middle is undistributed, for example. The following question seems never to have been raised: how does having an undistributed middle show that an argument's conclusion does (...) not follow from its premises? This result does nothing to vitiate the theories of distribution developed over the period beginning in medieval times. What it does vitiate is many if not all attempts to use distribution in tests of invalidity outside of the standard two-premise categorical arguments—where they were verified on a case-by-case basis without further theoretical grounding. In addition it shows that there was no theoretical basis for many if not all claims of fundamental status of rules of distribution. These results are further support for approaching historical texts using mathematical archeology. (shrink)

This article seeks to justify the claim that Thomas Aquinas proposed a concept of natural law which is immune to the argument against the recognition of an objective grounding of the good formulated by a well-known representative of the liberal tradition, Isaiah Berlin, in his famous essay “Two Concepts of Freedom.” I argue that Aquinas’s concept of freedom takes into account the very same values and goals that Berlin set out to defend when he composed his critique of natural (...) law. In particular, the article suggests that Aquinas recognizes freedom as a greater perfection of man than rationality, and that this freedom is realized, among other things, through the co-construction of the good that gives a goal and a shape to human action and to the whole of a person’s life. I argue that the co-construction of such a good involves the co-construction of natural law in the strict sense of the term. Indeed, the content of natural law can be understood as a set of goods which are goals that inform human action. From a human perspective, natural law is not a pre-existing recipe which has merely to be “read.” Defining the concrete content of natural law is an ongoing process. The process of defining natural law’s content takes humanly knowable, objective elements into account, and so draws on knowledge. Yet free choice also plays an important part in this process. When speaking of the process of defining the content of natural law, therefore, and in determining what here-and-now is to be done, it is reasonable to describe man as a creator of the natural law, or as a legislator, just as the members of a parliament are the creators of civil law — bearing in mind that only a just law is truly law and therefore the creation of both civil and natural law reaches only as far is the scope of just actions directed by these laws. From the perspective of human action, we may speak of each person’s free choice to establish a given good as the end of a specific act, and in so doing to declare that action proper under natural law in the strict sense of the term (which differs from the rules of natural law). An appreciation of what is particular and individual (particulare et individuum), and an appreciation of free choice that goes hand-in-hand with this, is deeply embedded in Thomas’s system of thought. Particularity and individuality has its basis in an especially excellent way of human existence. (shrink)

Proponents of the rule of law argue about whether that ideal should be conceived formalistically or in terms of substantive values. Formalistically, the rule of law is associated with principles like generality, clarity, prospectivity, consistency, etc. Substantively, it is associated with market values, with constitutional rights, and with freedom and human dignity. In this paper, I argue for a third layer of complexity: the procedural aspect of the rule of law; the aspects of rule-of-law requirements that (...) have to do with "natural Justice" or "procedural due process." These I believe have been neglected in the jurisprudential literature devoted specifically to the idea of the rule of law and they deserve much greater emphasis. Moreover procedural values go beyond elementary principles like the guarantee of an unbiased tribunal or the opportunity to present and confront evidence. They include the right to argue in a court about what the law is and what its bearing should be on one's situation. The provision that law makes for argument is necessarily unsettling, and so this emphasis on the procedural aspect highlights the point predictability should not be regarded as the be-all and end-all of the rule of law. (shrink)

The article considers the problem of the system model of family counseling, in particular, the analysis of the family as a social system, as a complex of elements and their properties, which are in dynamic connections and relationships. The analysis of the theory of systems and the description of the principles of family counseling is carried out. Particular attention is paid to highlighting the main provisions of the individual (“adlerian”) psychology in counseling the family. -/- Currently among specialists there is (...) a high interest in the provision of psychological assistance to a family in crisis. This is largely due to the fact that over the past decades, the institution of the family in this country is experiencing an increase in destructive tendencies. This is evidenced by an increase in the number of appeals to school psychologists, psychological counseling, psychological services and centers from both the individual members of the family and families in general. -/- The psychological help to the family is positioned as a relatively new field of practice for a psychologist. The practice of counseling, including family, is largely determined by the theoretical skills of the counselor, primarily as (s)he understands the personality, determination of behavior, the source of family problems, and the possibility of change. Today, practitioners prefer the integrative method, which is a system approach. -/- The purpose of this article is to analyze the theory of systems as the basis of family counseling. The system model of family counseling is considered to be one of the youngest and most widespread models that received their recognition at the end of the twentieth century. (shrink)

The closing chapters of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics x are regularly described as “puzzling,” “extremely abrupt,” “awkward,” or “surprising” to readers. Whereas the previous nine books described—sometimes in lavish detail—the multifold ethical virtues of an embodied person situated within communities of family, friends, and fellow-citizens, NE x 6-8 extol the rarified, god-like and solitary existence of a sophos or sage (1179a32). The ethical virtues that take up approximately the first half of the Ethics describe moral exempla who experience fear fighting for (...) their communities, are sensitive to the esteem and recognition of others, and feel love for a desire to live together with a wide variety of kinds of friends. Such good people take pleasure in prudently expending sums to improve their communities—communities in which they exchange goods and participate in ruling and being ruled in a cooperative fashion. The exemplum of x 7-8, by contrast, is a person whose activity consists almost entirely in exercising his or her mind (nous)—a part of one’s soul that Aristotle explicitly notes is disconnected from human emotions and that can be exercised, insofar as one as wise, in a wholly solitary fashion (1178a15-16, a19-20; 1177a33-34). Although Aristotle’s claim that a “life in accord with the mind” is best and most pleasant (1178a6-7) may jar the intuitions of many people—he himself endorses Anaxagoras’ claim that the happy person will appear as “someone who is absurd” (atopos, 1179a15) to most people—it is false to claim that his conclusions in NE x 6-8 are unexpected or unanticipated, or that the text is in any way discontinuous with what precedes it. The Nicomachean Ethics exhibits aspects of ring-composition both within the work as a whole and within book 10. In NE i 5 Aristotle introduces his rendition of a trope that he inherits (most immediately) from Plato, viz. that the problem of the good can be considered like a contest between three different kinds of life—the life of enjoyment (apolaustikos), the life of politics (politikos), and the life of contemplation (theôrêtikos). NE x 6-8 returns to that contest, rendering a verdict about which life takes first, second, and third place. As the opening lines of NE x 6 note, that verdict presupposes central claims articulated between the first and last books of the Ethics, specifically about the nature of the virtues, the nature of friendship, and the nature of pleasure. NE i 5 and x 6-8 thus serve as “bookends” which encase arguments and proposition located between them. Book 10 exhibits a similar ring-composition. NE x opens with methodological reflection on the gap between the theoretical positions that thinkers articulate and the way they live their lives (especially in the case of scolds who simultaneously criticize pleasure on a scientific level but seek it on a practical level [1172a33-b8]). Chapter 8 concludes with an explicit reiteration of the methodological point, a reiteration that underscores how Aristotle’s treatment of the contest of lives incorporates central aspects of the discussion of pleasure in NE x 1-5. Aristotle’s reiteration of the problem of a gap between theory and practice also draws attention to the centrality of his treatment of pleasure in his adjudication of the three lives. Although the life of pleasure takes a distant third in the contest of lives, the contemplative life wins the contest in part because it itself is the most pleasant form of life. The central philosophical problem looming behind Aristotle’s treatment of the contest of lives concerns the relationship between the notion of activity (energeia) and the notion of a way of life (bios). In the last four decades, much of the scholarship on NE x 6-8 has sought to address the question of what activities a certain way of life includes or excludes. “Monistic” or “dominant” end interpretations of the best life have viewed it as including only contemplative activities whereas “inclusivist” end interpretations of the best life have viewed it as including non-contemplative activities. Although this chapter largely side-steps this debate—partially because there are ample recent first-rate introductory treatments of the debate, partially because I have addressed the question elsewhere in my own writing —I argue that focusing solely on the contest between the two best ways of life overshadows the way that Aristotle incorporates insights from the third way of life into the best way of life. Although the notion of a contest among different kinds of lives presupposes that the lives are mutually exclusive, Aristotle has no problem saying that the contemplative life trumps the life of pleasure because the contemplative life is more pleasant. I proceed in two parts. In the first part I examine what I will call the “outer” ring of the Ethics, namely the relationship between the contest of lives proposed in NE i 5 and its overall resolution in x 6-8. I show how i 5 and x 6 establish the framework for the contest, how x 7 adjudicates that contest in large part by relying upon premises articulated in the interim between books 1 and 10, and how x 6 and x 8 determine the second and third place positions in the contest. In the second part I focus on what I will call the “inner” ring of NE x. More than half of NE x struggles with the nature of pleasure, its role in a happy life, and the methodological problems of examining pleasure within a practical science. I show how x 1 and x 8 are “bookends” that underscore the methodological problem of examining pleasure and how the contest of lives draws upon the proximate conclusions concerning the nature of pleasure in NE x 1-5. (shrink)

The level of enjoyment in participating in sports activities is one component that causes young athletes to decide to stop or become more motivated to pursue sports activities. Practicing and participating in competitions are the main activities in sports coaching interactions towards optimal performance. This study aims to determine the effect of modifying the match rules implemented in youth soccer competitions on the level of enjoyment of players. Using an experimental method with 20 soccer schools participating in a competition with (...) modified game rules. Players registered by his team amounted to an average of 13.8 players aged 9-12 years. The number of players who are willing to fill out the pleasure level questionnaire is 238 players. Each player was asked to fill out a questionnaire before and after the competition, the questionnaire was analyzed using the mean and percentage test technique. The results of data analysis showed the average score before participating in the competition was 4.10 while after participating in the competition it was 4.47, which means an increase of 8.88%. The results showed that the level of enjoyment of the players increased after participating in the competition. Modification of the rule of the game in competition affects the level of enjoyment of players in the interaction of youth soccer coaching. Coaches, administrators, and match organizers are expected to have a positive paradigm of thinking and policy making towards the organization of competitions for young soccer players. (shrink)

Kantian ethics today is dominated followers of Rawls, many of them his former students. Following Rawls they interpret Kant as a moral constructivist who defines the good in terms of the reasonable. Such readings give priority to the first formulation of the categorical imperative and argue that the other two formulations are (ontologically or definitionally) dependent upon it. In contrast the aim of my paper will be to show that Kant should be interpreted firstly as a moral idealist and secondly (...) as, it least in a certain sense a particularist who takes morality to involve the exercise of recognitional capacities rather than following principles or rules. In claiming that Kant is a moral idealist we won’t mean to imply that he is an anti-realist, indeed we believe that he is a realist. Instead, by ‘moral idealism’ it is meant the position that maintains that to be moral is to instantiate an ideal. And so understood moral idealism can be seen as offering an alternative to both constructivism and utilitarianism. (shrink)

Free trade agreements are about reducing tariffs, market access in services, protection of intellectual property rights, streamlining customs procedures, trade remedy measures, and dispute settlement mechanism. Equally important if not even more important than these provisions is the designation of rules of origin. Many benefits can be lost if restrictive rules of origin are incorporated. Rules of origin are supposed to be straightforward and easy-to-follow methods used to determine origin of imported goods. The policy question that arises is how to (...) improve trade integration among Arab countries through more effective rules of origin. (shrink)

Mental content normativists hold that the mind’s conceptual contents are essentially normative. Many hold the view because they think that facts of the form “subject S possesses concept c” imply that S is enjoined by rules concerning the application of c in theoretical judgments. Some opponents independently raise an intuitive objection: even if there are such rules, S’s possession of the concept is not the source of the enjoinment. Hence, these rules do not support mental content normativism. Call this the (...) “Source Objection.” This paper refutes the Source Objection, outlining a key strand of the relationship between judgments and their contents in the process. Theoretical judgment and mental conceptual content are equally the source of enjoinment; norms for judging with contents do not derive from one at the expense of the other. (shrink)

Originally published in 1975, this is the concluding section of E.P. Thompson's study of the 18th century English legislation known as "the Black Act." Thompson, a Marxist historian, here embraces and defends the notion of the rule of law, famously calling it "an unqualified human good" (p. 208).

En «What Makes a Transnational Rule of Law? Understanding the Logos and Values of Human Action in Transnational Law», Verónica Rodríguez-Blanco explora la posibilidad –y oportunidad– de la existencia de un Rule of Law (en adelante, ROL) a nivel transnacional. El objetivo de este trabajo es discutir brevemente algunos puntos relativos a diferentes facetas de la propuesta de Rodríguez-Blanco: la pregunta correcta acerca del ROL y su visión particular acerca de la acción humana (sección 2); el tipo de (...) explicación acerca de las reglas, estándares, reglamentos y principios (sección 3); las definiciones de ROL, coerción, y libertad (sección 4); las partes de la relación relevante y la noción de derecho transnacional (sección 5), y la estructura de las relaciones relevantes en contextos nacionales y transnacionales (sección 6). Intentaré, por una parte, mostrar cómo estos puntos pueden presentarse como relativamente problemáticos y por tanto debilitar la integridad de la propuesta de Rodriguez-Blanco; y, por otra parte, ofrecer algunas alternativas acerca de cómo estos problemas podrían ser resueltos para fortalecerla. A través de esos comentarios intentaré también mostrar cuáles serían, en mi opinión, los puntos importantes a considerar para cualquier discurso o propuesta sólida relacionada con éstos. Finalmente, concluiré con algunos comentarios finales (sección 7). (shrink)

In “What Makes a Transnational Rule of Law? Understanding the Logos and Values of Human Action in Transnational Law”, Veronica Rodriguez-Blanco explores the possibility—and opportunity—of the existence of a Rule of Law (from now on, RoL) on a transnational level. The aim of this paper is to briefly discuss some points related to various facets of Rodriguez-Blanco’s proposal: the correct question about the RoL and her particular view of human action (section 2); the type of explanation about rules, (...) standards, regulations and principles (section 3); the definitions of RoL, coercion, and freedom (section 4); the parties of the relevant relationship and the notion of transnational law (section 5); and the structure of relevant relationships in national and transnational contexts (section 6). I will try, on the one hand, to show how these points could appear quite problematic and thus seem to undermine the integrity of Rodriguez-Blanco’s proposal, and on the other hand, to offer some suggestions as to how these problems could be solved to strengthen her proposal. With these comments, I will also try to indicate what I think are the most important points that should be considered in any sound discourse or proposal on these subjects. I will then conclude with some final remarks (section 7). (shrink)

In this paper I examine the sixth century ’Rule of St. Benedict’, and argue that the authority structure of Benedictine communities as described in that document satisfies well-known principles of authority defended by Joseph Raz. This should lead us to doubt the common assumption that premodern models of authority violate the modern ideal of the autonomy of the self. I suggest that what distinguishes modern liberal authority from Benedictine authority is not the principles that justify it, but rather the (...) first-order beliefs for the sake of which authority is sought by the individual, and the degree of trust between the authority and the subject. (shrink)

Those in the Gricean tradition take it that successful human communication features an audience who not only arrives at the intended content of the signal, but also recognizes the speaker’s intention that they do so. Some in this tradition have also argued that there are yet further conditions on communicative success, which rule out the possibility of communicating by luck. Supposing that both intention-recognition and some sort of anti-luck condition are correctly included in an analysis of human communication, (...) this article asks what the value of events satisfying these conditions is. I present a puzzle concerning the value of intention-recognition which is analogous to the Meno Problem in epistemology, but ultimately argue that this puzzle is solveable: the signaling-relevant value of intention recognition can be vindicated. However, I argue that the version of this puzzle that concerns the further proposed luck-proofing conditions on communication can not be answered. I argue therefore that communication, as analyzed by many, is no more valuable qua signal than a proper subset of its conditions. Human communication is thennot a uniquely valuable signaling event. (shrink)

What is dignity? My starting point is that dignity is one of those philosophical primitives that admit of no informative analysis. Nonetheless, I suggest, dignity might yield to indirect illumination when we consider the kind of experience we have (or rather find it fitting to have) in its presence. This experience, I claim, is what is sometimes known as recognition-respect. Through an examination of a neglected aspect of the phenomenology of recognition-respect, I argue that the possession of inner (...) consciousness is a precondition for the possession of dignity. The reason for this, I suggest, is that the ultimate privacy of the contents of our consciousness grounds a kind of inviolability characteristic of dignity. (shrink)

I criticize Yamada's account of rule-following. Yamada's conditions are not necessary. And he misses the deepest level of the rule-following considerations: how meaning rules come about.

In Tractatus 5.132 Wittgenstein argues that inferential justification depends solely on the understanding of the premises and conclusion, and is not mediated by any further act. On this basis he argues that Frege’s and Russell’s rules of inference are “senseless” and “superfluous”. This line of argument is puzzling, since it is unclear that there could be any viable account of inference according to which no such mediation takes place. I show that Wittgenstein’s rejection of rules of inference can be motivated (...) by taking account of his holistic construal of the relation between inference and understanding. (shrink)

At the core of republican thought, on Philip Pettit’s account, lies the conception of freedom as non-domination, as opposed to freedom as noninterference in the liberal sense. I revisit the distinction between liberal and republican freedom and argue that republican freedom incorporates a particular rule-of-law requirement, whereas liberal freedom does not. Liberals may also endorse such a requirement, but not as part of their conception of freedom itself. I offer a formal analysis of this rule-of-law requirement and compare (...) liberal and republican freedom on its basis. While I agree with Pettit that republican freedom has broader implications than liberal freedom, I conclude that we face a trade-off between two dimensions of freedom (scope and robustness) and that it is harder for republicans to solve that trade-off than it is for liberals. Key Words: freedom • republicanism • liberalism • noninterference • non-domination • rule of law • robustness • liberal paradox. (shrink)

What is the American rule of law? Is it a paradigm case of the strong constitutionalism concept of the rule of law or has it fallen short of its rule of law ambitions? -/- This open access book traces the promise and paradox of the American rule of law in three interwoven ways. -/- It focuses on explicating the ideals of the American rule of law by asking: how do we interpret its history and the (...) goals of its constitutional framers to see the rule of law ambitions its foundational institutions express? -/- It considers those constitutional institutions as inextricable from the problem of race in the United States and the tensions between the rule of law as a protector of property rights and the rule of law as a restrictor on arbitrary power and a guarantor of legal equality. In that context, it explores the distinctive role of Black liberation movements in developing the American rule of law. -/- Finally, it considers the extent to which the American rule of law is compromised at its frontiers, and the extent that those compromises undermine legal protections Americans enjoy in the interior. It asks how America reflects the legal contradictions of capitalism and empire outside its borders, and the impact of those contradictions on its external goals. (shrink)

This paper examines theories of first person authority proposed by Dorit Bar-On (2004), Crispin Wright (1989a) and Sydney Shoemaker (1988). What all three accounts have in common is that they attempt to explain first person authority by reference to the way our language works. Bar-On claims that in our language self-ascriptions of mental states are regarded as expressive of those states; Wright says that in our language such self-ascriptions are treated as true by default; and Shoemaker suggests that they might (...) arise from our capacity to avoid Moore-paradoxical utterances. I argue that Bar-On’s expressivism and Wright’s constitutive theory suffer from a similar problem: They fail to explain how it is possible for us to instantiate the language structures that supposedly bring about first person authority. Shoemaker’s account does not suffer from this problem. But it is unclear whether the capacity to avoid Moore-paradoxical utterances really yields self-knowledge. Also, it might be that self-knowledge explains why we have this capacity rather than vice versa. (shrink)

Despite recent breakthroughs in the field of artificial intelligence (AI) – or more specifically machine learning (ML) algorithms for object recognition and natural language processing – it seems to be the majority view that current AI approaches are still no real match for natural intelligence (NI). More importantly, philosophers have collected a long catalogue of features which imply that NI works differently from current AI not only in a gradual sense, but in a more substantial way: NI is closely (...) related to consciousness, intentionality and experiential features like qualia (the subjective contents of mental states)1 and allows for understanding (e.g., taking insight into causal relationships instead of ‘blindly’ relying on correlations), as well as aesthetical and ethical judgement beyond what we can put into (explicit or data-induced implicit) rules to program machines with. Additionally, Psychologists find NI to range from unconscious psychological processes to focused information processing, and from embodied and implicit cognition to ‘true’ agency and creativity. NI thus seems to transcend any neurobiological functionalism by operating on ‘bits of meaning’ instead of information in the sense of data, quite unlike both the ‘good old fashioned’, symbolic AI of the past, as well as the current wave of deep neural network based, ‘sub-symbolic’ AI, which both share the idea of thinking as (only) information processing: In symbolic AI, the name explicitly references to its formal system based, i.e. essentially rule-based, nature, but also sub-symbolic AI is (implicitly) rule-based, only now via globally parametrized, nested functions. In the following I propose an alternative view of NI as information processing plus ‘bundle pushing’, discuss an example which illustrates how bundle pushing can cut information processing short,and suggest first ideas for scientific experiments in neuro-biology and information theory as further investigations. (shrink)

The claim that ―concepts serve as rules for the synthesis of representations‖ is understood by the mainstream of Kant‘s scholarship as if categories and concepts, in general, are conditions for the constitution of objects out of the manifold of sensations devoid of reference. That is the claim that I wish to question here. The claim comes in different flavors and formulations. Still, none of them are relevant here. I aim to provide an alternative account for the claim that ―the representation (...) makes the object possible.‖ I argue that the traditional view represents a solution to what I call the pseudo-problem of intentionality, namely to account for how a representation of something emerges out of a manifold of sensations devoid of reference. Yet, the intentionality problem is a misunderstanding of what I call the recognition thesis: the role of concepts is to provide the rules for the (mind-dependent) recognition (Erkenntnis) of the mind-independent existence of transcendental objects (noumena). ―The representation makes the object possible in the relevant sense that only by means of concepts can we recognize that what is sense-dependently represented actually exists mind-independently as transcendental objects or noumena in the negative sense. My view is embedded in the framework of what today is called ―Kantian Nonceptualism‖. Still, my view is neither a simple re-statement of Kantian Nonconceptualism nor depends on it. It is independently grounded on what Kant calls ―Erkenntnis‖. (shrink)

This chapter explores the suggestion that early attachment underpins the human capacity for empathy, and that empathy, in turn, is a condition of moral competence. We are disposed by nature to seek intimacy with our human conspecifics: the securely attached child learns that, whatever perils the world may hold, his well-being is shielded within the private sphere of personal intimacy. But why should secure attachment also favour—as it does—recognition of moral obligations towards those with whom we have no special (...) standing and share no personal destiny—recognition that the claims of persons as such merit our attention and regard? One answer to this question looks beyond the fact of secure attachment to a further psychological capacity, our capacity for empathy: secure attachment promotes susceptibility to empathy, and an appropriate susceptibility to empathy is a condition of basic moral competence. The chapter proposes that the deeper and more persisting significance of empathy to morality can be understood from a developmental perspective. Looking to mentalization-based attachment theory allows us to understand how empathic mirroring enters into our earliest intimate, interactions with other persons, securing our default commitment to recognizing their reality as bound up with our own. In this way, empathy constitutes one of the natural foundations on which the more complex architecture of moral experience is constructed. Attachment theory helps us to understand the indispensable role empathy plays at the beginning of the circuitous road to virtue. (shrink)

In this paper, I suggest that for some proposed solutions to global justice problems, incompatibility with the necessary features of international law is a reason to reject them. I illustrate this by discussing the problem raised by the case of unjust combatants, that is, combatants lacking a just cause for war. I argue that the principle of inequality of combatants, which suggests that we ought to prohibit those without a just cause for war from fighting, is not only a bad (...) international legal principle, but also a bad principle of global justice. (shrink)

n this article I address the idea that recognition is fundamentally ambivalent: not only can there be bad forms of recognition – misrecognition, nonrecognition, disrespect – but that even the good or adequate forms of recognition may in some ways be detrimental to the recipient or sustain societal domination (Ikäheimo, Lepold, Stahl 2021). One version of the challenge is that social movements do better by focusing on other concepts than recognition, for their progressive aims. I will (...) discuss the non-consequentialist nature of adequacy of recognition, value pluralism, the rewards of submissiveness, dialectical progression to adequate recognition, and “ambivalence of being” as providing partial explanations for the ambivalence of recognition, while arguing that adequate recognition is only contingently ambivalent. By discussing these challenges, I continue to articulate a conception of mutual recognition and misrecognition that I have developed earlier (Laitinen 2002, 2003, 2010, 2012, Ikäheimo & Laitinen 2007). (shrink)

The legal progression in China is portrayed negatively by western scholars who often argue that the state institutions in China are subordinate to the control of Chinese Communist Party’s leadership which makes these institutions politically insignificant. We consider that the legal progression in China has an instrumental role in achieving “Harmonious Socialist Society.” The purpose of this thesis is to provide an analytical literature review of scholastic work to explain the legality of rule of law in China and to (...) elaborate the outcomes of China’s recent legal developments. This paper has two main subjects. First, it examines the nature of law and rule of law in China through the prism of different legal theories. Secondly, by arguing from different political theories, it explains the necessity of customized legal system in China for establishing a Harmonious Socialist Society. By giving different examples from contemporary China, this thesis argues that the legality of the rule of law in China ought to be understood in the context of China’s economic and social progression rather than the western legal scholarship. China’s economic progress demands a customized legal system. In our thesis, we claim that the regular upgradation of laws and introduction of constitutional amendments in China, should be recognized as important achievement which is required for the institutional innovation. Legal progression in China during last decade perfectly fit into the framework of “Socialism with Chinese Characteristics” and is very crucial for building a harmonious socialist society. It is vivid from China’s economic growth and developed international relations. Finally, this paper suggests that the Chinese legal progression can be taken as successful example of legal experimentalism. (shrink)

The demands of rationality are linked both to our subjective normative perspective (given that rationality is a person-level concept) and to objective reasons or favoring relations (given that rationality is non-contingently authoritative for us). In this paper, I propose a new way of reconciling the tension between these two aspects: roughly, what rationality requires of us is having the attitudes that correspond to our take on reasons in the light of our evidence, but only if it is competent. I show (...) how this view can account for structural rationality on the assumption that intentions and beliefs as such involve competent perceptions of downstream reasons, and explore various implications of the account. (shrink)

Roger Swyneshed, in his treatise on insolubles (logical paradoxes), dating from the early 1330s, drew three notorious corollaries of his solution. The third states that there is a contradictory pair of propositions both of which are false. This appears to contradict the Rule of Contradictory Pairs, which requires that in every such pair, one must be true and the other false. Looking back at Aristotle's treatise De Interpretatione, we find that Aristotle himself, immediately after defining the notion of a (...) contradictory pair, gave counterexamples to the rule. Thus Swyneshed's solution to the logical paradoxes is not contrary to Aristotle's teaching, as many of Swyneshed's contemporaries claimed. Dialetheism, the contemporary claim that some propositions are both true and false, is wedded to the Rule, and in consequence divorces denial from the assertion of the contradictory negation. (shrink)