Zájem současné sociologie a dalších společenských věd o výzkumy spokojenosti a štěstí zatemňuje skutečnost, že původně právě sociologie chtěla „štěstí" poskytovat a nahrazovat tak náboženské přístupy ke světu. Tento implicitně nábo- ženský charakter je patrný i v rané české sociologii v dílech prvních propagátorů sociologie, jako byl především Emanuel Makovička, a později u některých následovníků a epigonů T. G. Masaryka, v meziválečném období zejména u Ladislava Kunteho, R. I. Malého, Alexandra Sommera-Batěka, Jindřicha Fleischnera a Jana Duška. Z hlediska vývoje (...) české sociologie šlo o zcela okrajové postavy, ačkoli mnohé z nich vynikly v jiných oblastech, jako celek jsou nicméně vyjádřením jednoho z aspektů dobových teoretických úvah o společnosti, jejím uspořádání a vývoji, na který by nemělo být zapomínáno. Zatímco T. G. Masaryka a pozdější akademické sociology „omezoval" vědecký charakter jejich práce, a i pokud směřovali k sociálnímu reformismu, oddělovali jej od teoretické sociologie, „sociologie vedoucí ke štěstí" nalezla plné uplatnění ve vizích a ambiciózních projek- tech těchto amatérských takésociologů - třebaže skončily faktickými nezdary nebo ani nedošly praktického naplnění, ostatně stejně jako v případě jejich pravzoru, Comtova pozitivistického apoštolátu. (shrink)

There is, in some quarters, concern about high–level machine intelligence and superintelligent AI coming up in a few decades, bringing with it significant risks for humanity. In other quarters, these issues are ignored or considered science fiction. We wanted to clarify what the distribution of opinions actually is, what probability the best experts currently assign to high–level machine intelligence coming up within a particular time–frame, which risks they see with that development, and how fast they see these developing. We thus (...) designed a brief questionnaire and distributed it to four groups of experts in 2012/2013. The median estimate of respondents was for a one in two chance that high-level machine intelligence will be developed around 2040-2050, rising to a nine in ten chance by 2075. Experts expect that systems will move on to superintelligence in less than 30 years thereafter. They estimate the chance is about one in three that this development turns out to be ‘bad’ or ‘extremely bad’ for humanity. (shrink)

What sort of logic do we get if we adopt a supervaluational semantics for vagueness? As it turns out, the answer depends crucially on how the standard notion of validity as truth preservation is recasted. There are several ways of doing that within a supervaluational framework, the main alternative being between “global” construals (e.g., an argument is valid iff it preserves truth-under-all-precisifications) and “local” construals (an argument is valid iff, under all precisifications, it preserves truth). The former alternative is by (...) far more popular, but I argue in favor of the latter, for (i) it does not suffer from a number of serious objections, and (ii) it makes it possible to restore global validity as a defined notion. (shrink)

I focus on three mereological principles: the Extensionality of Parthood (EP), the Uniqueness of Composition (UC), and the Extensionality of Composition (EC). These principles are not equivalent. Nonetheless, they are closely related (and often equated) as they all reflect the basic nominalistic dictum, No difference without a difference maker. And each one of them—individually or collectively—has been challenged on philosophical grounds. In the first part I argue that such challenges do not quite threaten EP insofar as they are either self-defeating (...) or unsupported. In the second part I argue that they hardly undermine the tenability of EC and UC as well. (shrink)

This book aims to develop certain aspects of Gottlob Frege’s theory of meaning, especially those relevant to intensional logic. It offers a new interpretation of the nature of senses, and attempts to devise a logical calculus for the theory of sense and reference that captures as closely as possible the views of the historical Frege. (The approach is contrasted with the less historically-minded Logic of Sense and Denotation of Alonzo Church.) Comparisons of Frege’s theory with those of Russell and others (...) are given. It is in the end shown that developing Frege’s theory in these ways reveals serious problems hitherto largely unnoticed, including those possibly rendering a Fregean intensional logic inconsistent even if his naïve class theory is excluded. (shrink)

Cognitive penetration of perception is the idea that what we see is influenced by such states as beliefs, expectations, and so on. A perceptual belief that results from cognitive penetration may be less justified than a nonpenetrated one. Inferentialism is a kind of internalist view that tries to account for this by claiming that some experiences are epistemically evaluable, on the basis of why the perceiver has that experience, and the familiar canons of good inference provide the appropriate standards by (...) which experiences are evaluated. I examine recent defenses of inferentialism by Susanna Siegel, Peter Markie, and Matthew McGrath and argue that the prospects for inferentialism are dim. (shrink)

One logic or many? I say—many. Or rather, I say there is one logic for each way of specifying the class of all possible circumstances, or models, i.e., all ways of interpreting a given language. But because there is no unique way of doing this, I say there is no unique logic except in a relative sense. Indeed, given any two competing logical theories T1 and T2 (in the same language) one could always consider their common core, T, and settle (...) on that theory. So, given any language L, one could settle on the minimal logic T0 corresponding to the common core shared by all competitors. That would be a way of resisting relativism, as long as one is willing to redraw the bounds of logic accordingly. However, such a minimal theory T0 may be empty if the syntax of L contains no special ingredients the interpretation of which is independent of the specification of the relevant L-models. And generally—I argue—this is indeed the case. (shrink)

Outside of philosophy, ‘intuition’ means something like ‘knowing without knowing how you know’. Intuition in this broad sense is an important epistemological category. I distinguish intuition from perception and perception from perceptual experience, in order to discuss the distinctive psychological and epistemological status of evaluative property attributions. Although it is doubtful that we perceptually experience many evaluative properties and also somewhat unlikely that we perceive many evaluative properties, it is highly plausible that we intuit many instances of evaluative properties as (...) such. The resulting epistemological status of evaluative property attributions is very much like it would be if we literally perceived such properties. (shrink)

In general, epistemic internalists hold that an individual’s justification for a belief is exhausted by her reflectively accessible reasons for thinking that the contents of her beliefs are true. Applying this to the epistemology of testimony, a hearer’s justification for beliefs acquired through testimony is exhausted by her reflectively accessible reasons to think that the contents of the speaker’s testimony is true. A consequence of internalism is that subjects that are alike with respect to their reflectively accessible reasons are alike (...) with respect to what they have justification to believe. Testimony should be thought no different: hearers that are alike with respect to reflectively accessible reasons to think that a speaker’s testimony is true are alike with respect to their justification for beliefs based upon that testimony. But it has been recently argued that this view faces powerful counterexamples. So the central question is this: assuming that a hearer can acquire justification to believe a proposition through the testimony of a speaker, can epistemic internalism provide the resources to explain how such justification is possible? My aim in this paper is to address these counterexamples, and in so doing, defend epistemic internalist accounts of testimony. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to propose a systematic classification of emotions which can also characterize their nature. The first challenge we address is the submission of clear criteria for a theory of emotions that determine which mental phenomena are emotions and which are not. We suggest that emotions as a subclass of mental states are determined by their functional roles. The second and main challenge is the presentation of a classification and theory of emotions that can account for (...) all existing varieties. We argue that we must classify emotions according to four developmental stages: 1. pre-emotions as unfocussed expressive emotion states, 2. basic emotions, 3. primary cognitive emotions, and 4. secondary cognitive emotions. We suggest four types of basic emotions (fear, anger, joy and sadness) which are systematically differentiated into a diversity of more complex emotions during emotional development. The classification distinguishes between basic and non-basic emotions and our multi-factorial account considers cognitive, experiential, physiological and behavioral parameters as relevant for constituting an emotion. However, each emotion type is constituted by a typical pattern according to which some features may be more significant than others. Emotions differ strongly where these patterns of features are concerned, while their essential functional roles are the same. We argue that emotions form a unified ontological category that is coherent and can be well defined by their characteristic functional roles. Our account of emotions is supported by data from developmental psychology, neurobiology, evolutionary biology and sociology. (shrink)

In the first section, I characterize skeptical theism more fully. This is necessary in order to address some important misconceptions and mischaracterizations that appear in the essays by Maitzen, Wilks, and O’Connor. In the second section, I describe the most important objections they raise and group them into four “families” so as to facilitate an orderly series of responses. In the four sections that follow, I respond to the objections.

The theory that all processes in the universe are computational is attractive in its promise to provide an understandable theory of everything. I want to suggest here that this pancomputationalism is not sufficiently clear on which problem it is trying to solve, and how. I propose two interpretations of pancomputationalism as a theory: I) the world is a computer and II) the world can be described as a computer. The first implies a thesis of supervenience of the physical over computation (...) and is thus reduced ad absurdum. The second is underdetermined by the world, and thus equally unsuccessful as theory. Finally, I suggest that pancomputationalism as metaphor can be useful. – At the Paderborn workshop in 2008, this paper was presented as a commentary to the relevant paper by Gordana Dodig-Crnkovic " Info-Computationalism and Philosophical Aspects of Research in Information Sciences". (shrink)

Religious belief and behavior raises the following two questions: (Q1) Does God, or any other being or state that is integral to various religious traditions, exist? (Q2) Why do humans have religious beliefs and engage in religious behavior? How one answers (Q2) can affect how reasonable individuals can be in accepting a particular answer to (Q1). My aim in this chapter is to carefully distinguish the various ways in which an answer to Q2 might affect the rationality of believing in (...) God. A literature has sprouted around this exact issue, but it has heretofore focused almost exclusively on one way in which a genealogy for p can affect the rationality of believing p – namely, by the genealogy functioning within a debunking argument. However, there are other ways a genealogy can affect the rationality of a belief. I suggest that we should be interested in whether genealogies more broadly cast doubt on religious beliefs. My main goal is: (i) to argue that CSR does not cast doubt on theistic belief in a few of the primary ways that propositions can cast doubt on other propositions, including via a debunking argument; and (ii) to suggest that one plausible way in which CSR might cast doubt on theistic belief is by undermining various traditional theistic reasons, and to illustrate how this might work with one example of a traditional theistic reason – religious experience. (shrink)

Floridi and Taddeo propose a condition of “zero semantic commitment” for solutions to the grounding problem, and a solution to it. I argue briefly that their condition cannot be fulfilled, not even by their own solution. After a look at Luc Steels' very different competing suggestion, I suggest that we need to re-think what the problem is and what role the ‘goals’ in a system play in formulating the problem. On the basis of a proper understanding of computing, I come (...) to the conclusion that the only sensible ground-ing problem is how we can explain and re-produce the behavioral ability and function of meaning in artificial computational agents. (shrink)

Pierre-Henri Castel provides a short but richly argued precis of his recently published two-volume 1,000-page masterwork on the history of obsessive-compulsive disorder. Having not read the as-yet-untranslated books, I write this commentary from Plato’s cave, trying to infer the reality of Castel’s analysis from expository shadows. I am unlikely to be more successful than Plato’s poor troglodytes, so I apologize ahead of time for any misunderstandings. Moreover, I cannot assess Castel’s detailed evidential case for his substantive theses.1 I thus focus (...) on some key philosophical issues that impinge on an area of my concern, the concept of mental disorder. Castel is a rare breed of French.. (shrink)

This is the editorial for a special volume of JETAI, featuring papers by Omohundro, Armstrong/Sotala/O’Heigeartaigh, T Goertzel, Brundage, Yampolskiy, B. Goertzel, Potapov/Rodinov, Kornai and Sandberg. - If the general intelligence of artificial systems were to surpass that of humans significantly, this would constitute a significant risk for humanity – so even if we estimate the probability of this event to be fairly low, it is necessary to think about it now. We need to estimate what progress we can expect, what (...) the impact of superintelligent machines might be, how we might design safe and controllable systems, and whether there are directions of research that should best be avoided or strengthened. (shrink)

In this paper I explore a position on which it is possible to eliminate the need for postulating abstract objects through abstraction principles by treating terms for abstracta as ‘incomplete symbols’, using Russell's no-classes theory as a template from which to generalize. I defend views of this stripe against objections, most notably Richard Heck's charge that syntactic forms of nominalism cannot correctly deal with non-first-orderizable quantifcation over apparent abstracta. I further discuss how number theory may be developed in a system (...) treating apparent terms for numbers using these definitions. (shrink)

There is much discussion about whether the human mind is a computer, whether the human brain could be emulated on a computer, and whether at all physical entities are computers (pancomputationalism). These discussions, and others, require criteria for what is digital. I propose that a state is digital if and only if it is a token of a type that serves a particular function - typically a representational function for the system. This proposal is made on a syntactic level, assuming (...) three levels of description (physical, syntactic, semantic). It suggests that being digital is a matter of discovery or rather a matter of how we wish to describe the world, if a functional description can be assumed. Given the criterion provided and the necessary empirical research, we should be in a position to decide on a given system (e.g. the human brain) whether it is a digital system and can thus be reproduced in a different digital system (since digital systems allow multiple realization). (shrink)

If the intelligence of artificial systems were to surpass that of humans significantly, this would constitute a significant risk for humanity. Time has come to consider these issues, and this consideration must include progress in AI as much as insights from the theory of AI. The papers in this volume try to make cautious headway in setting the problem, evaluating predictions on the future of AI, proposing ways to ensure that AI systems will be beneficial to humans – and critically (...) evaluating such proposals. (shrink)

It is uncontroversial that something goes wrong with the blaming practices of hypocrites. However, it is more difficult to pinpoint exactly what is objectionable about their blaming practices. I contend that, just as epistemologists have recently done with blame, we can constructively treat hypocrisy as admitting of an epistemic species. This paper has two objectives: first, to identify the epistemic fault in epistemically hypocritical blame, and second, to explain why epistemically hypocritical blamers lose their standing to epistemically blame. I tackle (...) the first problem by appealing to an epistemic norm of consistency. I address the second by arguing that the epistemically hypocritical blamer commits to an opting-out of the set of shared epistemic standards that importantly underlies our standing to epistemically blame. I argue further that being epistemically hypocritical undermines a blamer’s standing even to judge epistemically blameworthy. (shrink)

From a European perspective the US debate about gun control is puzzling because we have no such debate: It seems obvious to us that dangerous weapons need tight control and that ‘guns’ fall under that category. I suggest that this difference occurs due to different habits that generate different attitudes and support this explanation with an analogy to the habits about knives. I conclude that it is plausible that individual knife-people or gun-people do not want tight regulatory legislation—but tight knife (...) and gun legislation is morally obligatory anyway. We need to give up our habits for the greater good. (shrink)

Epistemic theories of truth, such as those presumed to be typical for anti-realism, can be characterised as saying that what is true can be known in principle: p → ◊Kp. However, with statements of the form “p & ¬Kp”, a contradiction arises if they are both true and known. Analysis of the nature of the paradox shows that such statements refute epistemic theories of truth only if the the anti-realist motivation for epistemic theories of truth is not taken into account. (...) The motivation in a link of understandability ans meaningful- ness suggests to change the above principle and to restrict the theory to logically simple sentences, in which case the paradox does not arise. This suggestion also allows to see the deep philosophical problems for anti-realism those counterexamples are pointing at. (shrink)

This paper offers a defense of ‘publishing without belief’ (PWB) – the view that authors are not required to believe what they publish. I address objections to the view ranging from outright denial and advocacy of a belief norm for publication, to a modified version that allows for some cases of PWB but not others. I reject these modifications. In doing so, I offer both an alternative story about the motivations for PWB and a diagnosis of the disagreement over its (...) permissibility. The original defense focused on consequentialist reasons for allowing PWB, offering mostly defensive arguments against potential criticisms. But I argue that once we shift our focus to the reasons why authors might be prone to PWB, we see a difference in two types of motivation: whereas I imagine PWB as arising from underconfident agents, critics point to cagey or nefarious authorial practices, or authors’ failure to clarify their own degrees of belief. Underlying the debate over norms of philosophical publishing, we find two different conceptions of philosophy itself. (shrink)

In this commentary, I suggest expanding the deliberative aspects of critical care policy development in two ways. First, critical-care policy development should expand the scope of deliberation by leaving fewer issues up to expertise or private choice. For instance. it should allow deliberation about the relevance of age, disability, social position, and psychological well-being to allocation decisions. Second, it should broaden both the set of costs considered and the set of stakeholders represented in the deliberative process. In particular, it should (...) consider efforts to reduce the cost of end-of-life care and to redirect resources away from the provision of costly interventions, and should expand the set of individuals included in deliberation to include stakeholders outside the health-care system. (shrink)

The thesis of this paper is that utopianism is a theoretical necessity—we couldn’t, for example, engage in normative political philosophy without it—and, further, that in consciously embracing utopianism we will consequently experience an enrichment of our political lives. Thus, the title of my paper has a double meaning: it highlights the fact that utopianism always plays a normative role in political philosophy, as its concern is inevitably the promotion of a certain vision of the good life; and secondly it suggests (...) that there normatively ‘ought to be’ a recognized and respectable role for utopianism within political philosophy. The first meaning, I believe, is self-explanatory. Regarding the second, it expresses my hope to— in short— take what is old, and through a modest process of rehabilitation, make it new again. (shrink)

While theories of animal rights maintain that nonhuman animals possess prima facie rights, such as the right to life, the dominant philosophies of animal rights permit the killing of nonhuman animals for reasons of self-defense. I argue that the animal rights discourse on defensive killing is problematic because it seems to entail that any nonhuman animal who poses a threat to human beings can be justifiably harmed without question. To avoid this human-privileged conclusion, I argue that the animal rights position (...) needs to both (1) deploy a new criterion of liability to defensive harm, and (2) seriously consider whether human beings themselves are liable to defensive harm in human-animal conflicts. By shifting the focus to whether humans are liable to defensive harm, we will find that in many situations of human-animal conflict, human beings are actually the ones liable to be harmed because they are often culpable or, to some degree, morally responsible for posing an unjust threat to nonhuman animals. (shrink)

Bibliography of the writings by Hilary Putnam: 16 books, 198 articles, 10 translations into German (up to 1994).

Lethal Autonomous Weapon Systems are here. Technological development will see them become widespread in the near future. This is in a matter of years rather than decades. When the UN Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons meets on 10-14th November 2014, well-considered guidance for a decision on the general policy direction for LAWS is clearly needed. While there is widespread opposition to LAWS—or ‘killer robots’, as they are popularly called—and a growing campaign advocates banning them outright, we argue the opposite. LAWS (...) may very well reduce suffering and death in war. Rather than banning them, they should be regulated, to ensure both compliance with international humanitarian law, and that this positive outcome occurs. This policy memo sets out the basic structure and content of the regulation required. (shrink)

Hilary Putnams Biographie und philosophische Entwicklung spiegeln die Geschichte der angelsächsischen Philosophie in den letzten 40 Jahren. Beinahe ebenso lange hat Putnam diese Geschichte wesentlich beeinflußt und so kann John Passmore über Putnam schreiben: «Er ist die Geschichte der gegenwärtigen Philosophie im Umriß»1. In der vorliegenden Einleitung soll vor allem der Kontext dargestellt werden, in dem Putnam steht und aus dem heraus verständlich wird, was er philosophisch zu sagen hat. Dieser Kontext ist sicherlich ein Grund dafür, daß Putnam hierzulande noch (...) relativ wenig bekannt ist, während er in den USA häufig für den bedeutendsten aktiven Philosophen gehalten wird. Im Rahmen einer Skizze von Putnams philosophischer Entwicklung soll zudem eine vorläufige philosophiehistorische Einordnung versucht werden, auch wenn hier nicht der Ort für eine umfassende Kritik oder Darstellung sein kann: Die Einleitung muß auf recht elementarem Niveau bleiben und kann eine Lektüre der Texte natürlich nicht ersetzen. Da Putnams Werk sicherlich Teil einer Annäherung von ‹analytischer› und ‹kontinentaler› Philosophie ist, soll bei der Einführung in die hier übersetzten Texte schließlich deutlich werden, was Putnam nicht analytisch orientierten Lesern zu bieten hat. (shrink)

Tailoring the design of robot bodies for control purposes is implicitly performed by engineers, however, a methodology or set of tools is largely absent and optimization of morphology (shape, material properties of robot bodies, etc.) is lag- ging behind the development of controllers. This has become even more prominent with the advent of compliant, deformable or "soft" bodies. These carry substantial potential regarding their exploitation for control – sometimes referred to as "mor- phological computation" in the sense of offloading computation (...) needed for control to the body. Here, we will argue in favor of a dynamical systems rather than com- putational perspective on the problem. Then, we will look at the pros and cons of simple vs. complex bodies, critically reviewing the attractive notion of “soft” bodies automatically taking over control tasks. We will address another key dimension of the design space – whether model-based control should be used and to what extent it is feasible to develop faithful models for different morphologies. ----- This paper was also published in the 2014 AISB proceedings http://aisb50.org/representation-of-reality-humans-animals-and-machines/ - http://doc.gold.ac.uk/aisb50/. (shrink)

I want to suggest that the major influence of classical arguments for embodiment like "The Embodied Mind" by Varela, Thomson & Rosch (1991) has been a changing of positions rather than a refutation: Cognitivism has found ways to retreat and regroup at positions that have better fortification, especially when it concerns theses about artificial intelligence or artificial cognitive systems. For example: a) Agent-based cognitivism' that understands humans as taking in representations of the world, doing rule-based processing and then acting on (...) them (sense-plan-act) is often limited to conscious decision processes; and b) Purely syntactic cognition is compatible with embodiment, or supplemented by embodiment (e.g. for 'grounding'). While the empirical thesis of embodied cognition ('embodied cognitive science') is true and the practical engineering thesis ('morphological computation', 'cheap design') is often true, the conceptual thesis ('embodiment is necessary for cognition') is likely false - syntax is often enough for cognition, unless grounding is really necessary. I conclude that it has become more sensible to integrate embodiment with traditional approaches rather than "fight for embodiment" or "against cognitivism". (shrink)

This Note offers a normative critique of cost-benefit analysis, one informed by deontological moral theory, in the context of the debate over whether tort litigation or a non-tort approach is the appropriate response to mass harm. The first Part argues that the difference between lay and expert intuitions about risk and harm often reflects a difference in normative judgments about the existing facts, rather than a difference in belief about what facts exist, which makes the lay intuitions more defensible. The (...) second Part considers how tort has dealt with this divergence between lay and expert perspectives. It also evaluates how tort's approach has differed from that of public law approaches to accident law, such as legislative compensation and risk regulation by administrative agencies. Ultimately, tort's ability to recognize the value of lay intuitions supports retaining the tort perspective as part of our societal arsenal of responses to risk and harm. This ability can also support a pro-tort perspective in two practical debates in the arena of tort law: that over preemption of tort law by administrative agency judgments, and that over access to tort recovery as part of a no-fault system. (shrink)

1 Οι Αρχές - 2 Η δοκιμασία του Turing - 3 Η κλασική τεχνητή νοημοσύνη - 4 Η τεχνητή νοημοσύνη σήμερα - 5 Η τεχνητή νοημοσύνη του μέλλοντος - Με τις τεχνολογίες του παρόντος μάλλον θα δυσκολευτούμε να φτάσουμε στην κατασκευή μηχανών με τεχνητή νοημοσύνη. Κατά την γνώμη μου, θα δούμε άλλες τεχνικές λύσεις με την κλασική τεχνητή νοημοσύνη και μέθοδο «από κάτω προς τα πάνω», αλλά δεν περιμένω να υπάρξει ριζοσπαστική πρόοδος πριν μάθουμε πολλά παραπάνω για τον εγκέφαλό μας. (...) Υπάρχουν πολύ καλοί λόγοι για να λέμε ότι το μυαλό μας δεν είναι υπολογιστής και δεν περιμένω να μπορούμε να φτιάχνουμε νόηση μόνο με υπολογιστή. Αλλά θα μπορούσαμε με άλλα μηχανήματα, γιατί όχι;. (shrink)

In this paper we address the issue of grounding for experiential concepts. Given that perceptual demonstratives are a basic form of such concepts, we examine ways of fixing the referents of such demonstratives. To avoid ‘encodingism’, that is, relating representations to representations, we postulate that the process of reference fixing must be bottom-up and nonconceptual, so that it can break the circle of conceptual content and touch the world. For that purpose, an appropriate causal relation between representations and the world (...) is needed. We claim that this relation is provided by spatial and object-centered attention that leads to the formation of object files through the function of deictic acts. This entire causal process takes place at a pre-conceptual level, meeting the requirement for a solution to the grounding problem. Finally we claim that our account captures fundamental insights in Putnam’s and Kripke’s work on “new” reference. (shrink)

This essay explicates the primary interpretative import of B1: 31-32 in Parmenides poem (On Nature)—lines which have radical implications for the overall argument, and which the traditional arrangement forces into an irreconcilable dilemma. I argue that the “negative” reading of lines 31-32 is preferable, even on the traditional arrangement. This negative reading denies that a third thing is to be taught to the reader by the goddess—a positive account of how the apparent world is to be “acceptably” understood. I then (...) suggest that a rearrangement of the fragments would make more sense overall, while further supporting the “negative” reading as more natural and coherent. In particular, the rearrangement dispels the objection that, “if mortal opinions were not true, why would Parmenides include such a lengthy false account of the apparent world--an account which explicitly denies the conclusions of the earlier section, Truth?”. (shrink)

Einleitung - 1 Erklärung und Referenz (1973) - 2 Sprache und Wirklichkeit (1975) - 3 Was ist ‹Realismus›? (1975) - 4 Modelle und Wirklichkeit (1980) - 5 Referenz und Wahrheit (1980) - 6 Wie man zugleich interner Realist und transzendentaler Idealist sein kann (1980) - 7 Warum es keine Fertigwelt gibt (1982) - 8 Wozu die Philosophen? (1986) - 9 Realismus mit menschlichem Antlitz (1988/90) - 10 Irrealismus und Dekonstruktion (1992) - -/- Bibliographie der Schriften von Hilary Putnam - -/- (...) Literaturverzeichnis - Register -. (shrink)

Proceedings of the papers presented at the Symposium on "Revisiting Turing and his Test: Comprehensiveness, Qualia, and the Real World" at the 2012 AISB and IACAP Symposium that was held in the Turing year 2012, 2–6 July at the University of Birmingham, UK. Ten papers. - http://www.pt-ai.org/turing-test --- Daniel Devatman Hromada: From Taxonomy of Turing Test-Consistent Scenarios Towards Attribution of Legal Status to Meta-modular Artificial Autonomous Agents - Michael Zillich: My Robot is Smarter than Your Robot: On the Need for (...) a Total Turing Test for Robots - Adam Linson, Chris Dobbyn and Robin Laney: Interactive Intelligence: Behaviour-based AI, Musical HCI and the Turing Test - Javier Insa, Jose Hernandez-Orallo, Sergio España - David Dowe and M.Victoria Hernandez-Lloreda: The anYnt Project Intelligence Test (Demo) - Jose Hernandez-Orallo, Javier Insa, David Dowe and Bill Hibbard: Turing Machines and Recursive Turing Tests — Francesco Bianchini and Domenica Bruni: What Language for Turing Test in the Age of Qualia? - Paul Schweizer: Could there be a Turing Test for Qualia? - Antonio Chella and Riccardo Manzotti: Jazz and Machine Consciousness: Towards a New Turing Test - William York and Jerry Swan: Taking Turing Seriously (But Not Literally) - Hajo Greif: Laws of Form and the Force of Function: Variations on the Turing Test. (shrink)

The nature of vagueness is investigated via a preliminary definition and a discussion of the classical sorites paradox ; this is carried further by asking for the origins of vagueness and a critique of several attempts to remove it from language. It is shown that such attempts are ill motivated and doomed for failure since vagueness is not just a matter of ignorance but firmly grounded in epistemic and metaphysical facts. Finally, the philosophical interest of real vagueness is illustrated by (...) the concept of “natural kind”, which is essential to realism/anti-realism debates. (shrink)

The central argument of this article is that the standard conception of character given in virtue theory, as exemplified in the work of Rosalind Hursthouse, is seriously flawed. Partially, this is because looking behind a moral action for a ‘character’ is suspiciously akin to looking behind an object for an ‘essence’, and is susceptible to the same interpretive errors as an epistemic strategy. Alternately, a character—once inducted and projected upon a moral agent—is supposed to be a more or less permanent (...) property of that individual; a schema which leaves little room for the real possibility of personal transformation. I argue here that what is often referred to in virtue literature as ‘character’ can be productively re-described as the aggregate of all moral actions performed by any one moral agent: nothing more, and nothing less. My hope is that this interpretive strategy will result in broader and more coherent readings of moral actions, and thus also clarify moral confusion resulting from the current lack of the same. (shrink)

Die gegenwärtig unter dem Titel ›Realismus‹ geführten Debatten in der Philosophie befinden sich nach allgemeiner Ansicht in einem Zustand größter Verwirrung, so daß es nützlich erscheint, ein wenig Ordnung in die theoretischen Optionen zu bringen bevor man für die eine oder andere Auffassung Partei ergreift. In der vorliegenden Arbeit wird dafür argumentiert, daß sich ein systematisch zusammenhängendes Zentrum dieser Debatten mit Hilfe des Begriffes der Referenz ordnen läßt. Nach der Analyse einiger klassischer Positionen soll ein Rahmen erstellt werden, innerhalb dessen (...) die Positionen eingeordnet und die zentralen Probleme fruchtbar diskutiert werden können. Zu diesem Zwecke ist es erforderlich, für die Einordnung der Positionen theoretische Kriterien zu benennen, die sich an den Problemen orientieren von denen hier argumentiert wird, das sie zentral seien. Sehr knapp ausgedrückt wird hier die Auffassung vertreten, Realismus sei als metaphysische These aufzufassen, welche eine von menschlichen epistemischen und semantischen Möglichkeiten unabhängige Existenz behauptet; in den gegenwärtigen Debatten typischerweise die Existenz einer Art von Dingen, nicht die eines individuellen Gegenstandes. Diese metaphysische These wird jedoch in der gegenwärtigen Debatte mit semantischen Argumenten untermauert, bzw. angegriffen und jene semantischen Argumente wiederum verwenden epistemische Erwägungen – die Frage betreffend, was man wissen kann und was nicht. Der Beginn der gegenwärtigen Realismusdebatten mit der soeben skizzierten zentralen Stellung semantischer Argumente ist, der hier vertretenen Auffassung zufolge, die Kritik am traditionellen Fregeschen Referenzbegriff durch Kripke und den frühen Putnam um 1970 (Kap. 2). Aus dieser neu zu bewertenden Kritik und der von den Autoren daraus entwickelten externalistischen realistischen Semantik für Artausdrücke läßt sich das erste Kriterium für eine Position in einer Realismusdebatte ableiten und klären (Kap. 3): Hält man die fragliche Art für eine natürliche Art und meint also, sie habe ihren ›Zusammenhalt‹ von Natur aus? Wenn ja, dann ist die fragliche Position eine realistische (das Kriterium ist dank des engen Zusammenhangs von Realismus und Externalismus sowohl hinreichend als auch notwendig). Hält man die Art nicht für eine natürliche Art, ist man Antirealist. Damit geht jeweils not- wendig eine bestimmte Semantik für den auf die Art referierenden Ausdruck einher. Es zeigt sich zugleich, daß es zwei Varianten des Realismus zu unterscheiden gilt, die hier als klassischer bzw. als moderater Realismus bezeichnet werden. Im folgenden (Kap. 4.1) wird argumentiert, daß der Begriff der Wahrheit nicht eigentlich der zentrale Punkt in den in Frage stehenden Realismusdebatten sein sollte, wie vielfach behauptet wurde, sondern seine Brisanz vielmehr aus zugrundeliegenden semantischen Fragen gewinnt die also in der weiteren Aufdeckung der Kriterien die zentrale Rolle spielen müssen. In der Analyse der Kritik an der in Kap. 3 entwickelten Position des ›klassischen Realismus‹ läßt sich ein zweites unterscheidendes Kriterium für Positionen in Realismusdebatten entwickeln: begriffliche Relativität. Nach der Ablehnung von Putnams Auffassungen zu diesem Thema, werden zwei Varianten vorgeschlagen, starke und schwache begriffliche Relativität (Kap. 4.2). Die Anwendung dieses Merkmals zwingt, so wird argumentiert, in einigen Fällen zu einer Kombination einer realistischen Auffassung von Arten als natürliche mit begrifflicher Relativität. Diese mittlere Position zwischen klassischem Realismus und Antirealismus wird als »moderater Realismus« bezeichnet. Der im ersten Kriterium verwendete Begriff der natürlichen Art, und damit die Optionen in den Debatten, wird schließlich mittels einer Dis- kussion des Phänomens der Vagheit noch weiter verdeutlicht (Kap. 4.3). Ab- schließend werden die drei Optionen zusammenfassend dargestellt und ein Versuch unternommen, ihre Fruchtbarkeit für diverse Realismusdebatten anzudeuten. (shrink)

Einleitung 1 -/- Kritik des Positivismus: Realismus «Was kann ich wissen?» 1 Erklärung und Referenz (1973) 1 2 Sprache und Wirklichkeit (1975) 38 3 Was ist ‹Realismus›? (1975) 77 -/- Der dritte Weg: Interer Realismus statt metaphysischem Realismus oder Positivismus 4 Modelle und Wirklichkeit (1980) 112 5 Referenz und Wahrheit (1980) 159 6 Wie man zugleich interner Realist und transzendentaler Idealist sein kann (1980) 191 7 Warum es keine Fertigwelt gibt (1982) 218 -/- Auf des Messers Schneide: Interner Realismus und (...) Relativismus 8 Wozu die Philosophen? (1986) 259 9 Realismus mit menschlichem Antlitz (1988/90) 284 10 Irrealismus und Dekonstruktion (1992) 330 -/- Bibliographie der Schriften von Hilary Putnam 363 I Bücher 363 II Aufsätze, Vorträge und Vorlesungen 365 III Übersetzungen ins Deutsche 385 -/- Literaturverzeichnis 387 Register 413. (shrink)

Ποια είναι η πατρίδα κάποιων; Ας δούμε το θέμα λίγο σαν πρόβλημα της φιλοσοφίας της γλώσσας: για ένα κατηγόρημα «Άγγλος» «Γάλλος», «Πορτογάλος», «Βέλγος», «Φλαμανδός», πώς να αποφασίσουμε ποια αντικείμενα (ποιοι άνθρωποι) εμπίπτουν σε ποιο κατηγόρημα; Έχουν τελικά νόημα αυτά τα κατηγορήματα; Η χρήση και κατάχρηση αυτών των κατηγορημάτων έχει αποτελέσει μια από τις κυριότερες πηγές δυστυχίας στη διάρκεια των δύο τελευταίων αιώνων και συνεχίζει να είναι στην ημερήσια διάταξη. Συνήθως εμφανίζεται στα πλαίσια αγώνων για την απόκτηση «ελευθερίας» σε αντιπαράθεση με (...) την «καταπίεση», και σε παγκόσμιο επίπεδο και κοντύτερα μας: στη Μακεδονία, την Καταλονία, την Ιρλανδία, το Κουρδιστάν ... Νομίζω πώς αρκετά από αυτά βασίζονται σε λάθη. (shrink)

We rely on language to know the minds of others, but does language have a role to play in knowing our own minds? To suppose it does is to look for a connection between mastery of a language and the epistemic relation we bear to our inner lives. What could such a connection consist in? To explore this, I shall examine strategies for explaining self-knowledge in terms of the use we make of language to express and report our mental states. (...) Success in these strategies will depend on the view we take of speakers' understanding of the words they use to speak their minds. The key is to avoid circularity in the account of how they know what they mean; for if knowing what one is saying in speaking a language provides a means of knowing one's own mind, it cannot simply be a part of it. I shall look at ways in which we might proceed here, and examine whether the strategy can make room for a genuinely first-person point of view. But first let me try to motivate the problem of self-knowledge. (shrink)

A standard view in philosophy is that knowledge entails justification. Yet recent research suggests otherwise. We argue that this admirable and striking research suffers from an important limitation: participants were asked about knowledge but not justification. Thus it is possible that people attributed knowledge partly because they thought the belief was justified. Perhaps though, if given the opportunity, people would deny justification while still attributing knowledge. It is also possible that earlier findings were due to perspective taking. This paper reports (...) further research that directly addresses these questions. Our findings support the hypothesis that knowledge entails justification on the ordinary view. (shrink)

We propose and investigate an Analogy Principle in the context of Unary Inductive Logic based on a notion of support by structural similarity which is often employed to motivate scientific conjectures.